Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood

“All Directions at Once” traces Bob’s song writing in the order in which the songs were written while noting the themes and influences that can be heard in the music.  There is an index to the whole series here.

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After 2002, Bob Dylan wrote just three songs before starting out on the collection that became Modern Times in 2006.

“Can’t Escape,” written after Tell Ol Bill, continued the theme of writing film music, although in this case the movie was never made.  Indeed whoever persuaded Bob to work on the piece must have been incredibly persuasive.  Although since there seems to be very little that is certain about the project, maybe someone just mentioned the idea, Bob quite liked it, and sat down and write his piece.  It finally appeared in 2008 on Tell Tale Signs, and turns out to be a very simple piece indeed.

In fact even although the moving on theme is there, as ever, the lyrics themselves don’t really feel very Bob-like…

Oh the evening train is rolling
All along the homeward way
All my hopes are over the horizon
All my dreams have gone away

The hillside darkly shaded
Stars fall from above
All the joys of earth have faded
The night’s untouched my love

The song has a certain strangeness in it, as with the line “You made love with god-knows-who” where Bob is telling us all the way through the song how wonderful the girl is, and is “full of grace” line stresses, but then we find she sleeps around.

Fair enough, that’s her choice, and I make no moral judgement.  Some people have lots of sexual partners, some don’t, that’s how it goes.  But normally if this is a relevant fact to be mentioned earlier in the song, it might get mentioned earlier, not in verse 15.  Or if verse 15 really is the place to reveal this fact, then it needs to be dealt with thereafter.  Just throwing in the unexpected and leaving us to work it out, doesn’t work for me at all.

If the writing of a song for a film that was never made and no one seems to know much about is odd, the co-composition with Gene Simmons of Kiss is even weirder.  Simmons says he phoned Dylan’s agent, said he wanted to write a song with Bob, and then a while later Bob just turns up at Simmons’ house unannounced and they write, what to me seems a rather uninspiring song, “Waiting for the Morning Light”.

It would have been tragic if that had been the end of Bob’s writing, but of course it wasn’t for then he returned with a bang writing Thunder on the Mountain.

Yes it is a 12 bar blues but the variations within it, the power and drive of the music and the inventiveness of the lyrics together announce that not only is this a really jolly, enjoyable outing, what follows is liable to be pretty enjoyable too.

Perhaps we should also note that not only does Bob make the old blues format really great fun, he is playing with the language once again, not least (as many others have noted) rhyming bitches with orphanages.  It takes real guts to do that – especially when the song, and indeed the album seems to pack in as many references to Ovid (born 43BC) as possible.

The cover version by Wanda Jackson with Jack White on guitar captures the energy that Dylan had now re-found after his prolonged break.

Lord knows I’m wild about you black gal
You ought to be a fool about me

I’m wild about you, gal
You ought to be a fool about me

“Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Said, she keep you worried, troubled all the time

“Don’t you think your girl was li’l and cute like mine
Don’t you wish your girl was li’l and cute like mine
She’s a married woman, but she comes to see me all the time”

by Jochen Markhorst

I           To have and have not

In 2004, out of 22,838 entries from 111 countries, Habseligkeiten is chosen as “German word of the year”. The jury, which included singer/songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer and author Uwe Timm, state that they are touched by the “friendly, pitying undertone”, and at the same time it makes the owner of Habseligkeiten seem “sympathetic and lovable”.

It indeed is a wonderful word. It means more than just “possessions”. Lexically, it connects two areas of life: earthly possessions (haben, “to have, to possess”) and the bliss (Seligkeit, “bliss, benediction”) that is unattainable in earthly life. This tension leads the reader to have positive feelings towards the owner of the Habseligkeiten. The love for the small, in itself perhaps worthless things is understood as a “condition for happiness”.

“In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, only in confinement the master reveals himself”, Goethe asserts, as if to explain why he is making things so difficult for himself, in the 1780s. The by then long world-famous poet escapes his degeneration into a magistrate and the stifling court life in Weimar, takes a sabbatical of three years in Italy (1786-88) and returns born again: back to the Antiques it shall be. With all the restrictions that entails: stripped-down tragedies without scenery, a minimum of action, hardly any supporting actors and endless monologues in Alexandrian lines. Tightly drawn poetry within strictly defined frameworks of fixed rhythm and rhyme. Retellings of material that has existed for centuries (Iphigenia in Tauris, for instance).

Within all these limitations, Goethe says, it takes mastery to be able to move and captivate. And, sure enough, there is something to be said for that. We admire The A-Team, getting locked up in an old shed once again, and then managing to construct a bazooka with the devastating power of a hydrogen bomb only using objets trouvés like rubber bands, rusty drawing pins and chicken wire. Or the unworldly surgeon who performs life-saving emergency surgery on the floor of the airport departure lounge with the help of a straw, a pocketknife and a biro – in der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister.

The genesis of the tight, minimalist masterpiece “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” gives no reason to think that its creation was a deliberate attempt to create a masterpiece within self-imposed limitations. But the rigid frameworks within which Dylan squeezes the song do suggest it.

On Wednesday 12 February 1969, Dylan arrives in Nashville with only half an album of songs in his suitcase. The rest for Nashville Skyline will be either written on the spot or improvised (such as the opening track, “Girl From The North Country” in duet with Johnny Cash). In June, when Jann Wenner interviews him for Rolling Stone, Dylan says:

“The first time I went into the studio I had, I think, four songs. I pulled that instrumental one out… I needed some songs with an instrumental… Then Johnny came in and did a song with me. Then I wrote one in the motel… Then pretty soon the whole album started fillin’ in together and we had an album.”

… but that seems a bit too modest. “To Be Alone With You”, “I Threw It All Away”, “One More Night”, “Lay Lady Lay” and “Western Road” are recorded on Thursday 13 February in a session that, according to the recording sheets, lasts until 12 o’clock in the evening. The next day, “Peggy Day”, “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” and “Country Pie” were also recorded – eight songs, so it seems likely that Dylan arrived with more than four songs, two days ago.

The album, for which Dylan is still considering the title John Wesley Harding Vol. 2, is missing a closing track like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, et voilà: over the weekend, Dylan shakes a song out of his sleeve on the hotel stationery of the Ramada Inn. Which is then recorded after the instrumental album filler “Nashville Skyline Rag” on Monday 17 February, when the working week has started again.

That song, “one I wrote in the motel”, must be “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, which provides a fascinating glimpse into Dylan’s working methods. Apparently, the world’s best songwriter with performance pressure feels comfortable in a tight corset. He chooses quintins in an unusual rhyme scheme: ABCCB. It’s somewhat archaic – an 11th-century archetype of the limerick has such a scheme, William Wordsworth uses it for “The Idiot Boy” (1798), and it provides a somewhat nursery rhyme-like playfulness – but Dylan just uses the same rhyme scheme he chose for “I Threw It All Away”:

I once held her in my arms
She said she would always stay
But I was cruel
I treated her like a fool
I threw it all away

… which he recorded the day before yesterday. In terms of content, obviously, diametrically the opposite of “I Threw It All Away”; the narrator in “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is on the other side of a love’s affair time-line, is still in the very early stage of embracing his happiness of love unconditionally:

Throw my ticket out the window
Throw my suitcase out there, too
Throw my troubles out the door
I don’t need them anymore
’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you

Apart from that remarkable rhyme scheme, the cast-iron, again somewhat old-fashioned metre catches the ear: all verse lines work towards the refrain line with a four-foot trochee (DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da), with a trochaic tetrameter, as the schoolmaster would say. Not necessarily very uncommon in the art of song, but unusual nonetheless. And very classical. Beethoven’s Ninth for instance (“Ode To Joy”, Freude schöner Götterfunken). Wordsworth’s “Song Of Hiawatha”, the Weird Sisters in MacBeth (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air”).

And, again, nursery rhymes. Dr. Seuss’ One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. “Peter Pumpkin Eater” is perhaps the best-known shortcut to identify a trochaic tetrameter (Peter Peter pumpkin eater / Had a wife and couldn’t keep her). And a work that keeps popping up in Dylan’s output, William Blake’s “The Tyger” (Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night).

Attractive, but indeed not very common. The trochee simply clashes with our “natural” sense of rhythm, our sense of language that automatically steers us towards iambic rhythm structures. This may also explain the seemingly lazy opening, the somewhat easy choice to start three times with “throw my … out”. Still, a Goethe would have imposed a limitation like this on himself to demonstrate mastery in the continuation of those restrictive opening words. In which Dylan also succeeds, by the surprising turn from symbolic, but concrete possessions (ticket and suitcase) to immaterial inner stirrings, to the troubles that also go out the door. Habseligkeiten.

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 2: Slut wives cheating

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978

• Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part V)
• Bob  Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part VI)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part VII)
• Bob Dylan And the Dylanvinci Code Part VIII
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IX)

by Larry Fyffe

There is an alternate interpretation of the clues hidden in the Dylavinci Code, a Cubist-like point of view that asserts the relationship of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene has a dark side ~ the sad-eyed Lady Magdalene gets killed.

The Dylavinci Code is a drawn-out ‘Murder Ballad”!

Mary’s a Lilith-like independent Jungian archetype whose husband attempts to exorcise the demonic spirits that possess her body.

All in vain - there's demons inside her Jesus can't get rid of:
And certain women, which had been healed 
Of evil spirits and infirmities
Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils
(Luke 8: 2)

Expressed humorously in the following song lyrics:

Her name was Magill
And she called herself Lil
But everyone knew her as Nancy
(Beatles: Rocky Raccoon ~ Lennon/McCartney)

A dire situation that’s foreseen by a Jewish prophet in the days when Hebrews flee from Northern Israel to Memphis, Egypt; the Assyrian armies are approaching.

Prophesied is that these outsiders will fare badly in Memphis, capital of the land of Isis, Osiris, and Horus; their dead bodies ferried off to the Underworld; leftward to the place of mummies, not right to the Elysian Fierlds:

For, lo, they are gone because of destruction
Egypt shall gather them up
Memphis shall bury them
(Hosea 9:6)

A black-light scenario depicted in the decoded song lyrics below.

Handy Dandy (Devil himself, dressed as if he were the transfigured Jesus) seated with Mary Magdelene (Nancy) in the ‘Garden of Eden’ cabaret, unzippers his “gun”:

Handy Dandy, sitting with a girl named Nancy
In a garden feeling kind of lazy
He says, "You want a gun? I'll give you one"
She says, "Boy, you're talking crazy"
(Bob Dylan: Handy Dandy)

The above song lyrics reference a horn-blowing cabaret musician in Memphis, a city on the American ‘Nile’, the Mississippi River.

He composes a ragtime tune that knock’em all dead:

I went out a-dancing with a Tennessee dear
They had a fellow there named 'Handy'
With a band you should hear
(Memphis Blues ~ William Handy)

Bringing it all back home to a crowd-drawer:

The ragman draws circles
Up and down the block
I'd ask him what the matter was
But I know that he don't talk
(Stuck Inside Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)

This series traces the performances of the Never Ending Tour from 1987 onward.  This is episode 55 in the series, and a full index to the series can be found here.

The previous article in the series (2001 part 1) is Love and fate: acoustic 1

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By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

When Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, addressing the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2021 in New York, used the words ‘How many deaths will it take…’ it is unlikely that she was thinking about Bob Dylan, or ‘Blowing in the Wind’, but she was quoting him anyway.

The full text of her quote is: “How many more deaths must it take before 1.7 billion excess vaccines in the possession of the advanced countries of the world will be shared with those who have simply no access?” In other words:

‘how many deaths will it take 'til he knows
That too many people have died?’

The Barbados PM went on to further reference ‘Blowing in the Wind’.

“How many more times will we then have a situation where we say the same thing over and over and over, to come to naught?” she asked. “My friends, we cannot do that anymore.”

The question, my friends, is how do we escape the dreary, atrocity-filled repetitions of history? The PM’s further comments give us an insight into the intention of that song. “If I used the speech prepared for me to deliver today, it would be a repetition, a repetition of what you have heard from others and also from me.”

How much do we have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice, or over and over again in the endless cycle of times that are always a-changing? The questions posed in ‘Blowing in the Wind’ are aimed, like the PM’s speech, to stir our consciences and to break the cycles of injustice. But this is unlikely to happen.

Of course I can’t know, but I don’t think the Barbados PM was consciously, or even unconsciously, quoting Dylan. Rather she hit upon the same rhetorical device as Dylan for the same purpose. The roots of these rhetorical questions lie in everyday speech: ‘How many times have I told you to….’ With the Barbados MP there is desperation behind her questions, with Dylan a deep-seated fatalism. We can go on asking these questions but we will never get the answers.

That fatalism, or sense of weary resignation in ‘Blowing in the Wind’, doesn’t have its roots in the rising youth and protest movement of the 1960s, is quite at variance with that movement, but rather in ‘the old time religion’ of early gospel music, music that had its origins in the slave plantations of the middle 1800s, just as the melody of that song did.

The sense of approaching apocalypse, so cogently expressed in ‘Hard Rain’, seems to be derived both from the fears of the then young, cold-war baby-boomers, facing nuclear annihilation, and from that older, doom-laden gospel tradition.

We find that tradition in ‘This World Can’t Stand Long’ by Jim Anglin,  Jack Anglin, Johnny Wright, from the 1940s. The song is full of melancholic resignation to God’s will, and the approaching end of the world. Dylan often performed it from 1999 to 2002. I’m starting off this post with it, as it holds the origins of Dylan’s fatalism. (6^th Nov) Nice sharp, clear recording.

This World Can’t Stand Long

The underlying sentiments of this song can be found in Dylan’s earliest songs, like ‘Song to Woody’, one of only two Dylan songs to appear on his first Album Bob Dylan (1962). The song isn’t itself a protest song, but Guthrie was a protest singer, and a particular attitude, that the world’s gone wrong, comes across loud and clear.

‘Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that’s a-coming along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dying and it’s hardly been born’

Guthrie sang about a world that seemed sick and hungry, tired and torn, and so would Dylan. The blues singers that Dylan mentions in the song were protest singers too, in Leadbelly’s case songs from prison, because they were black and poor. Their protest grew directly out of their circumstances. In this very early song we hear Dylan aligning himself with these outsiders and blues journeymen. This one’s from Australia, 23^rd March. He keeps it simple, doesn’t try to fancy up the song at all.

Song to Woody

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), the first album of Dylan songs only, contained three songs that would stay with him for the rest of his career, and which came to epitomise protest songs as such. These are ‘Blowing in the Wind’, ‘Hard Rain’ and ‘Masters of War’.

‘Blowing in the Wind’ became so famous it is almost impossible to see it in context. Is it possible to listen to it again with fresh ears? It’s a frail little ballad with anthemic power. This 2001 performance, with its dead slow tempo, brings out the gentle frailty in the verses with their impossible rhetorical questions and the anthemic power in the chorus. It’s one fearsome wind that blows away all our hopes and aspirations for a better world.

Dylan mixes upsinging and downsinging to great effect here, as he did with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, running the lines on together and so relentlessly piling up the images (See previous NET post). I’ve lost the date of this one, sorry.

Blowing in the Wind

Since ‘John Brown’ was written in October 1962, and Freewheelin’ didn’t come out until May 1963, we have to wonder why this marvellous narrative wasn’t included on the album. It makes a nice fit with ‘Masters of War’. As I’ve written before, what makes this song so great is not the anti-war theme, or even the story of the young soldier who returns maimed and disillusioned from the war, but the dramatic confrontation between mother and son on the train platform when her ‘soldier son’ comes home from the war.

The term ‘cannon ball’ used here and in ‘Blowing in the Wind’ has an oddly antique flavour. By the 20^th Century we had graduated to ‘artillery shells’ or just shells. The term cannon ball takes us back to Civil War and earlier. It might have been that very universality of the term that appealed to Dylan. When listening to this, the Vietnam War comes to mind, and it is prescient in foreseeing the clash of generations that war sparked, but the Vietnam War had not started in 1962, and it could well have been the civil war Dylan had in mind. ‘Buried in the mud’, of ‘Masters of War’ also seems to evoke the Vietnam War, and I’ve seen a pretty good You Tube video that plays the song against a background of scenes from that war, but again it was written too early, and again Dylan may be thinking of the civil war.

This performance of ‘John Brown’ from the Madison Square Gardens, 11^th November concert, is the best I’ve heard, and we heard a pretty good one in 2000. Dylan has tended to forget his lines with this song, but this performance is faultless. If you are used to the rock version from the 1994 MTV Unplugged concert, this slower, more gentle yet more deadly acoustic performance might surprise you. Beautifully underpinned by Garnier’s bow-drawn doublebass, the drums picking up a pattering beat when the train pulls out, the understated acoustic guitar work, all add up to a classic performance.

John Brown

That song leads naturally to ‘Masters of War’, Dylan’s most explicit anti-war song. It locates the villains precisely in the armaments industry, those who ‘fasten the bullets for others to fire’. To fasten a bullet, as I understand it, is to snip it into its cartridge. The phrase, ‘I see through your masks’, also resonates, as in a couple of years Dylan would be seeing through all kinds of masks. Isn’t that what ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ is all about, seeing through the masks of snobbery and hypocrisy? ‘It’s All Right Ma’ could well be the great unmasking song of all time.

Over the past few years Dylan has been developing a slow, syncopated, acoustic version of the song.  It has an ominous feel at the beginning. The war makers are being called to account. This one has Larry on dobro,  twangy and metallic, and some very tasteful guitar work from Charlie and Bob. (Hiroshima concert)

Masters of War (A)

Here’s another performance, a bit harsher with Dylan’s voice up close.

Masters of War (B)

Last but far from least of these Freewheelin’ songs, is ‘Hard Rain’. Lyrically it reached beyond anything else he’d done to that point, but the point is only late 1962, right at the beginning. It went beyond the topical protest of songs like ‘Oxford Town’ in a series of surreal and apocalyptic images. It doesn’t just ‘protest’ about war and racism, it is prophetic and visionary in a spine chilling way. Note that Tony Attwood gives a good account of the song here https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/1550. This is another one from Madison Square Gardens. Dylan slows it down to a gentle movement, and uses his downsinging to great effect. The song seems to suit that style; it has an eerie beauty.

Hard Rain

The Times They Are a-Changin’ came out in January, 1964, and the title track immediately became another Dylan anthem. It seemed like a rallying cry, a call for radical change, and a prophesy that that change was a-coming. But we can see now that the song is more about the wheel of time, and the inevitability of eternal recurrence. The song is heavy with the sense of fate, and takes us back to ‘Blowing in the Wind’. How many times…? That wheel just keeps on turning, though, it’s still in spin.

Over the past few years Dylan had been playing it slow and nostalgic, as a crowd pleaser, everybody remembering the old days when the wheel, we thought, was turning in our direction. This performance (sorry, I’ve lost its date) is cast in the same mould, but because of Dylan’s vigorous and provocative vocals, it becomes something more than bitter-sweet nostalgia, and becomes once more, a challenge. In Dylan’s voice I can hear the voice of fate itself taunting us.

Times they are a-changing

None of all this, however, the protest and the flood of imagery unleashed, prepared us for the full-on broadside against the dangerous falsities of the world, and such a full on declaration of alienation from it all. I’m old enough, dear reader, to remember putting this song on the turntable when it first came out. A group of us university students nearly fell off the floor. We’d never heard anything like it. Not even ‘Hard Rain’ could prepare us for this.

It was a protest song to end all protest songs, and in a sense it did. It was the last and greatest protest song, coming in 1964, and we’re just a step away from ‘Desolation Row’.

By 2001 Dylan was putting a busy beat behind the song. I’m not sure how effective that is, but I have no quarrel with the vocals.

It’s all right Ma

The real signing off song had come earlier in 1964, with ‘My Back Pages’. The moral simplicities on which the protest movement was based crumbled away into relativism and complexity. Dylan’s 2001 downsinging is perfect for the self-mockery of the song. The world’s still sick and hungry, tired and torn, but there are other ways to go than hating hatred, and there might be an escape from the paradox of

Fearing not that I’d become my enemy

In the instant that I preach

My Back Pages

See you next time around, as the wheel spins, I’ll be back soon with electric sounds from 2001.

Kia Ora

by Jochen Markhorst

• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 1: Dear Dr Ralph
• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 2: To live is to be alone
• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 3: He who is alone now, will long so remain
• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 4: Little Boy Lost
• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 5: A very ornate, beautiful box

VI         The cat’s in the stew

Well the fat’s in the fire and the water’s in the tank
The whiskey’s in the jar and the money’s in the bank
I tried to love and protect you because I cared
I’m gonna remember forever the joy that we shared

 But here I am in prison, here I am with a ball and chain…it doesn’t end well, for Captain Farrell’s killer. The money he had stolen from the Captain has not been deposited in the bank, but purloined by that treacherous Molly. In cold irons bound he sits in the cell now, dreaming of Molly’s bedroom, and he sings his refrain once more;

Musha rain dum a doo, dum a da, heh, heh
Whack for my daddy, oh
Whack for my daddy, oh
There’s whiskey in the jar, oh

The indestructible Irish classic “Whiskey In The Jar” is an ancient, irresistible folk monument with dozens of versions in circulation. The rock version by Thin Lizzy (1972) is probably the best known and inspired Metallica to do a Grammy-winning heavy metal cover in 1998. And in between, it sneaks into a Dylan song, into the final verse of “Cold Irons Bound”.

The in itself meaningless phrase steers the narrative of “Cold Irons Bound” down a side path. Down the wrong path, to be more precise, on the path to evil. Suddenly, through that highwayman connotation from the old folksong about a criminal who actually ends up in ball and chains, the poet highlights the possibility that in cold irons bound is meant literally, that the narrator has just murdered the woman he so pitifully longs for, and that he is now being carried off – jogging along in chains, already twenty miles on the way to the penal camp.

It is – of course – not unequivocal. The opening, “the fat’s in the fire”, fits in a bit – it does, after all, mean something like trouble ahead, imminent crisis. Squeezing in, however, is not possible with the other two expressions, “water’s in the tank” and “money’s in the bank”. In themselves, again, without much relation to each other or to the text at all. But strangely enough, the accumulation of the four (quasi-) proverbial expressions does actually suggest, without any substantive basis, something like the die is cast, I crossed the Rubicon.

The accumulation, however, seems mainly the product of an improvising, unleashed poet in the zone. Stylistically, but coincidentally also in terms of content, it resembles the enigmatic word processions that Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson is so fond of producing for the crypto-analytical faction of his fan base. Like in the outtake “Living In These Hard Times”, from a somewhat forgotten, beautiful folky highlight of Jethro Tull’s discography, from 1978’s Heavy Horses:

The bomb's in the china. the fat's in the fire.
There's no turkey left on the table
(…)
Well the fly's in the milk and the cat's in the stew.
Another bun in the oven --- oh, what to do?

… a beautiful song by the way, that is rightly added as a bonus track on the 2003 reissue (and again on the 2018 40th Anniversary New Shoes Deluxe Edition of course). Demonstrating the same playful enjoyment of language: the alienating mixing of existing expressions (fat’s in the fire, bun in the oven) with catachreses, with non-existent word compounds that nevertheless sound familiar (cat’s in the stew, fly’s in the milk). Triggered, no doubt, by a love of antique nursery rhymes, again similar to Dylan’s – for example, Ian Anderson’s fourth verse begins with:

The cow jumped over yesterday's moon
And the lock ran away with the key.

… a not too veiled paraphrase of the age-old “Hey Diddle Diddle” (The Cow jump’d over the Moon / And the Fork ran away with the Spoon). And, to complete the circle, equally inspired by nonsensical refrains like in “Whiskey In The Jar”.

It’s all possible, the nonsensical expressions and the empty metaphors like fly in the milk and water in the tank and whack for my daddy, thanks to the context. “Whiskey in the jar” becomes something like those were the days. Ian Anderson embeds his invented sayings in a portrait of a life full of misfortune, making something like cat’s in the stew suddenly meaningful. And Dylan offers a fitting meaning for his linguistic finds in the lines that follow:

I tried to love and protect you because I cared
I’m gonna remember forever the joy that we shared

So: “our good times are over now and out of reach”, something like that. Like water in a tank, like money in a bank, like whiskey in a jar and like fat in a fire. Maybe not entirely watertight, but what the heck – Dylan shakes the lyrics out of his sleeve in a few minutes, doesn’t feel like polishing them, records it straight away, and above all: it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good (Nobel Lecture, 2017).

VII        Cosmic waste and space debris

Looking at you and I’m on my bended knee
You have no idea what you do to me
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

The sketchy, improvised impression of the last verse is confirmed by the last refrain. I’m gonna remember forever the joy that we shared is a farewell – it fits badly with the subsequent present tense of the chorus lines. But in terms of content, it once again gives food for the thought that “Cold Irons Bound” subcutaneously is a murder ballad: the scene described is a copy of the repentant murderess Frankie from “Frankie And Johnny”;

She said, “Oh, Mrs. Johnson
Oh, forgive me please
Well I killed your lovin' son, Johnny
But I'm down on my bended knees
I shot my man, but he was doin' me wrong, so wrong.”

Dylan uses the image in his adaptation of the song (“Frankie & Albert”, on Good As I Been To You, 1992), but shifts it to an even more dramatic scene:

Frankie got down upon her knees, took Albert into her lap.
Started to hug and kiss him, but there was no bringin' him back.
He was her man but he done her wrong

… the death scene. After which Frankie is taken away – bound in cold irons, no doubt.

Not too far-fetched. “Frankie & Johnny” and its many adaptations (Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Elvis) is somewhere at the front of Dylan’s inner jukebox, and echoes thereof easily seep in, when the songwriter is in a creative daze and has a murder ballad up his sleeve. But who knows – Dylan’s meandering mind may also have led him past Muddy Waters, triggered by the preceding money in the bank (from Muddy’s “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had”: I had money in the bank / I got busted, boys, ain’t that sad?), which then might lead Dylan to Muddy’s ode to his wife, to “Little Geneva” from 1949:

I want to see Geneva so bad, so bad
Right now I'm on my bended knee

Less fitting in a possible murder-context of “Cold Irons Bound”, but on the other hand: almost all bended knees in Dylan’s repertoire and in Dylan’s record collection are of desperate men begging their (living!) wives to stay. George Jones’s “There Ain’t No Grave Deep Enough”, John Lee Hooker’s “Wednesday Evening Blues”, Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine” (which Dylan records for World Gone Wrong in 1993), Little Richard’s “Can’t Believe You Wanna Leave”… no, that record cabinet is filled to the brim with pitiful men on bended knees, but none of them is a murderer – they are all suckers humiliating themselves in front of an apparently dominant, but most of all living woman.

A remorseful murderer or a pathetic sucker – it seems Dylan doesn’t know either at the time of conception. “It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state. Most of my recent songs are like that,” as Dylan says about “I Contain Multitudes” in 2020, and: “They just fall down from space.”

Okay, the latter is perhaps a bit too woolly. It does seem quite likely, after all, that large parts of Dylan’s songs do not so much come from outer space, but rather from his own record collection. Which is a good thing, by the way; falling-out from Dylan’s record cabinet undoubtedly sounds much better than incoming space junk.

And you do want your songs to sound good.

————————–

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978

In this series Aaron Galbraith based in the USA picks out interesting cover versions of Bob Dylan’s songs and Tony Attwood in the UK attempts to write a review of the performance while the song is playing, and without looking stuff up.

There is a list of some of our earlier articles in this series here.

Today we look at “You Angel You”

Aaron: The first cover came in 1974, the same year Dylan released his own version. It was by the New Riders Of The Purple Sage, from the album Brujo.

Tony: Love the illustration above, what a brilliant cover.  One presumes those volcanoes are inactive.

They are taking it quite a bit faster than Bob did on Planet Waves, (I’m saying that from memory, don’t shout at me if I’m wrong) and that gives them a problem, because as I hear it in my head, Bob is able to really give the middle 8 an extra boost, (that “Oh I can’t sleep at night” is really the highlight), but this is all a little lightweight.  They do try their best with that B section, but they are going too fast really to get that much out of it.

They also do the Dylan thing of having an instrumental break without any instrument taking a solo.  Dylan can pull it off, but I am not quite sure this band can.   So overall I find it very pleasant but rather lightweight.

Aaron: In 1976 three members of Bob’s Rolling Thunder Revue band, T Bone Burnett, Steven Soles & David Mansfield formed The Alpha Band. Second album Spark In The Dark contained their cover with a certain Mr Ringo Starr on drums.

Tony: Oh someone help me out, what does that drum rhythm at the very start remind me of.   Is it Sheila by Tommy Roe?  I could be way out but I’ll stay true to the format and not look it up.

And Ringo does have another little extra part in the middle 8, which helps but it all seems rather lightweight.   Once again I miss what Dylan does with his off the beat singing.   “I can’t sleep at night…” does work well, but for me it’s not enough really.

But still good to hear another little burst from Ringo – except he seems to have got rather fixated on it and brings it in too many times.   No, sorry, for me, “lightweight” is the best word.

Aaron: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band released their version in 1979 on Angel Station and as a single.

Tony: This is one of those videos that seems to have regional restrictions, Aaron was listening to the copy below, which in the UK I can’t access, so I’ve added the one above.

Tony: When I saw this was Manfred Mann I hoped for more (and more and more) but it wasn’t there.  Is it really impossible to bring the sort of extra life that Bob got into the song?  All the differences that each band introduces seem trivial, or in this case, horribly unrelated.  What on earth are the guys trying to say with those strange sound effects and variations that basically aren’t variations at all, but completely new musical thoughts?

Very rare for me to say this about the Manfreds, but I thought that was rather horrible.  Shoot the organist.  (Actually I rather like that phrase.  Maybe I could write a song called that.  My previous piece – unheard in the world at large except by a tiny group of friends who have learned to be polite – was “What would Jane Austen say?”  – but enough, back to the matter in hand, as the performance has now finished).

Aaron: Their lead singer Chris Thompson released his own version in 2011.

Tony: So why does Chris have to shout “1 2 3”?   This is a much better rendition than the Manfreds because it has the power and drive that the song really needs.  It’s got a few everyday moments from the band, and in the instrumental break the excellent solo guitar seems quieter than I would like, but maybe that’s my ears in old age.

I like the pause before the “Here we go” and the change of instrumentation.   I’m not saying that this is a great, great rendition, but it is the best of the collection, because Chris has used his profound imagination and only once descended into the obvious with the “more and more and more” at the end.

Not at all bad.

Aaron: The last cover I’d like to present is from 2012 by Eryn Shewell & Pat Ruh.

Tony: That was a good idea to leave the most laid back version til last Aaron.  And as it happens, for me, by far the most enjoyable.   Before I got to this I was thinking Chris Thompson’s version was the best of a modest bunch but this rendition really gets the essence of the song.

It is the voice and style of Eryn Sherwell that carries it through with that relaxed beat.  The opening lines are so seductive even though I have just listened to four versions of the song without being at all impressed.   She carries out the middle 8 perfectly with those delicious harmonies – the “never did get up and walk the floor” now really does mean something.

So it turns out that what we really need is gentleness – and a delicious voice to die for.   Plus a superb guitarist who knows that more doesn’t always mean better.

Lovely voice, excellent lead guitar behind – that’s what this song needs and that’s what she gives.

And now having got here, I just had to hear Bob’s recorded version again.

There are such extraordinary elements in this version – just listen to what he does in the middle 8 compared to the verses, and the way the accompaniment is held in place by the producer, even though everyone is doing their own thing.   The guitar and organ are both vying for attention in the instrumental break, which gives us the real excitement of the final version.  Which is very clever because all the instruments are vying for attention by the end.

Great choice Aaron – really enjoyed that selection.  Oh and leave that final video running, just to show that Bob didn’t know how to get it right at first.

• Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part V)
• Bob  Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part VI)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part VII)
• Bob Dylan And the Dylanvinci Code Part VIII

By Larry Fyffe

Whether ‘The Dylavinci Code’ be considered burlesque, or a valid interpretation of Dylan’s interconnected songs, denied it cannot be that many of his song lyrics emanate sparks of light into the dark, gloomy world of existence.

The Code covers the story of Mary Magdalene – she’s the Holy Ghost of the Unknowable Godhead; she pairs up with her bridegroom Jesus Christ, and together they send light from the Sun, and the light reflected from the Moon, down upon Earth that’s full of bad company.

Mary is the Gnostic-styled personification of Wisdom; she’s bears Sophia- they’re “the most lovely flowers in all of womenhood” (I crossed The Rubicon).

The  Commander-In-Chief, the Father of All, gives the Order, “Get Smart!”:

Get wisdom, get understanding; forget me not
Neither decline from the words of my mouth
Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee
Love her, and she shall keep thee
(Proverbs 4: 5)

Transfigured sometimes into Jesus Christ; at other times into Julius Caesar (Caesar not only crossed the Rubicon, he conquers Egypt in the ‘Battle of the Nile’), Dylan unlocks the secret spider-webbed, wooden door of the Sphinx that leads to Magdalene’s burial chamber.

He turns the key, pulls back the lid of a sepulchre; therein lies the Holy Ghost of Mary; beside hers, another that holds the ghost of her only begotten daughter.

A good Poe-detective deduction is that the “dead-or-alive”Jesus placed both of those bodies there.

So revealed in the deciphered Dylavinci Code:

I feel the Holy Spirit inside
See the light that freedom brings
I believe it's in the reach of 
Every man who lives
It's the darkest 'fore the dawn ... O Lord
I turned the key, broke it off
And I crossed the Rubicon
(Crossing The Rubicon)

There are those among us who claim that the Dylavinci Code is actually a confessional “murder ballad”.

For starters, we don’t know for sure which side of Nero’s “Neptune”Joan Baez sails on.

But, dear reader, I can’t think for you – you’ll have to decide –

was Jesus Christ on God’s side?

by Jochen Markhorst

V          A very ornate, beautiful box

Oh, the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads
Some things last longer than you think they will
There are some kind of things you can never kill

It’s you and you only I been thinking about
But you can’t see in and it’s hard lookin’ out
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

 It is a beautiful, revealing glimpse behind the scenes that scriptwriter Larry Charles (Masked And Anonymous, 2003) gives us, when he describes one of Dylan’s working methods. It turns out that Dylan keeps hundreds of scraps of paper, in a “very ornate, beautiful box”, and on those scraps are hundreds of one-liners, ideas, short rhymes and aphorisms. He turns the box upside down onto the table, and starts shuffling back and forth – rather like William Burroughs is drawing from his Word Hoard, his collection of paragraphs, sentences and fragments of sentences from the pile of paper (about a thousand sheets) that Brother Bill, with the help of among others Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac typed away in Tangier, spring 1957. Burroughs writes his Nova Trilogy in this way, and ever since “Gates Of Eden”, or “Tombstone Blues” (1965) at any rate, Dylan has occasionally used this cut-up technique for some of his songs.

The witness to the making of “Cold Irons Bound”, drummer David Kemper, does not mention a box, but this fourth verse seems to demonstrate that Dylan can also topple that ornate, beautiful box in his head, sitting with his notepad next to the drum kit. The four stanza lines seem to be sorted together like a painter sorts his crayons; the blues to the shades of blues, the greys to the shades of grey. In terms of content, these lines have no clearly recognisable relationship, no epic quality; only the lyricism, the colour, the grey-blue mood of the protagonist, matches.

They are beautiful opening lines, lines from a Nobel Prize-winning poet. Oh, the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds is a skilful anapaestic tetrameter, the four-footed anapaest (da da dum, da da dum, da da dum, da da dum) we know mainly from Dr Seuss, Lord Byron and T.S. Eliot, and for which Dylan also seems to have a soft spot (“Where Are You Tonight?”, for example). And in terms of content, it is a stunningly rich verse that evokes a world in just ten words; it connects the cliché Windy City Chicago with urbane loneliness and despair with an admittedly somewhat showy yet heart-breaking metaphor. With as a bonus the cross-pollination of blues and bluegrass, of a blues cliché like in Bo Diddley’s “Diddley Daddy” (1955), one of the many songs in which a protagonist loses his sweetheart to the temptations of the Windy City;

I got a baby that's oh-so pretty
Diddley-diddley-dum, dum, dum-diddley
I found her right here in the windy city
Diddley-diddley-dum, dum, dum-diddley
Somebody kissed my baby last night
Diddley-diddley-dum, dum, dum-diddley
My pretty baby cried, you know it wasn't right
Diddley-diddley-dum, dum, dum-diddley

…combined with a popular bluegrass metaphor, as in the classic “Maybe You Will Change Your Mind” (1959) by banjo legend Don Reno (The tie that binds our love, sweetheart / Was torn to shreds by you).

The continuation, Reality has always had too many heads, has at best a lyrical resemblance to the state of mind of the man being torn to shreds in Chicago, and may even have fallen out of the inner ornate, beautiful box just for the rhyme word. But the emotion fits, regardless, and it is again a wonderful, loaded image to express the dazed lostness of the protagonist. The choice of words itself is perhaps initially reminiscent of the comic scene from the beginning of Moby-Dick, when Ishmael asks the innkeeper where his as yet unknown roommate is, the stranger with whom he has to share his bed tonight. The innkeeper does not know;

“May be, he can’t sell his head.”
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it here, the market’s overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”

… the comedy-of-errors-like scene in which the innkeeper fails to reveal that Ishmael’s prospective roommate is a tattoed cannibal who sells his balmed New Zealand heads, “and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell tonight.”

Of its comic content – obviously – nothing remains in Dylan’s lament, but for the alienating word combination too many heads the poet finds a splendid function in a oneliner that, in just seven words, contains as much richness as the preceding Chicago line. Reality has always had too many heads has an aphoristic depth that suggests that the narrator has had to learn, at the expense of his happiness, that there is never one truth, that truth lies in the eyes of the beholder. In addition, the personification of Reality has the antique elegance of a medieval allegory, and many heads echoes mythological many-headed horrors such as Hydra, Cerberus and Medusa. A richness, in short, which may not add anything to the plot of “Cold Irons Bound”, but does add to its couleur, to its universal, timeless power.

After these two hits, the poet slows down a little. The following distich still is elegant as well, but

Some things last longer than you think they will
There are some kind of things you can never kill

… hardly has the Nobel Prize-worthy depth of the preceding verses. It seems to be a not too elaborate, Dylanesque improvisation on Kill Your Darlings, as shown by the weakness of settling for some things – twice even. If we are to believe Kemper, the song was recorded immediately after its conception – presumably Dylan would have sharpened these two lines a bit more, if he had let the song mature another day.

The same goes for the following lines of the verse. It’s you and you only I been thinking about elaborates nicely on the things you can never tell and on the things that last longer than you will, but is otherwise rather lazy poetry. Just like the following But you can’t see in and it’s hard lookin’ out; a dime-a-dozen antithesis from the same drawer as, but without the brilliance of poetic antitheses like in through the outdoor or the playfulness of come all without, come all within or the layered quality of I’ve been in and out of happiness and drifting in and out of dreamless sleep.

But then again: who cares. Surrounding those lesser, throwaway lines are those two shining jewels before them and the brilliance of the indestructible chorus line I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound thereafter.

To be continued. Next up: Cold Irons Bound part 6:

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978

By Paul Thompson and Tony Attwood

Paul: Hi Tony.  I’ve been enjoying your Dylan website. I just read your entry on the song “Maybe Someday,” where you wrote this:

“If I could be given something impossible, just once, I would ask for the studio tape of “Maybe Someday”, and the opportunity to remix it. Maybe it is just me, but this is a stunning masterpiece, spoiled (only slightly) by the mix. Oh how I would love to deal with the female chorus. Who did that to the instrumental break? Being first up against the wall when the revolution comes is too good for them.”

Paul: There’s a music editing program that’s been around for about a year called Spleeter. One can use it fairly easily to split a song into various instruments, such as vocals, drums, bass, and so on. I just used it on “Maybe Someday” to remove the backing vocals through the instrumental break, as well as the end.

“I have to agree it sounds a lot better that way. I also lowered the drums and bass, since 1980s production tends to have too much of that.”

So here it is the unique Untold Dylan mix of “Maybe Someday”

Paul: Furthermore, consider the possibilities a program like this opens up! Are there other Dylan songs where you think the production needs improvement? Let me know and I may be able to do it. Or you can get this free program and try tinkering yourself. It’s fairly easy to use.

Tony: Sorry for the delay in replying, I’ve just had to call out the medics to restore me after I collapsed.  I mean this is crazy.  I wrote that original review about nine years ago, and updated it a while later without any thought that it could ever be possible to cut out those singers.

Of course now that has been done I know why the producer (be it Bob or someone else) put the singers over the guitar solo, because it hides some uninspired playing at that point, but even so I’d still sooner have my version.

And the possibilities now are endless.  Find a song and tweak it!

Of course I do appreciate that lots of people might well say this is sacrilege but in fact isn’t this what Bob, and indeed all the cover artists do all the time – they modify the music.  That is a major part of the attraction of Bob’s work.  It is so powerful and varied that it is possible to do something else with the music.  And now it turns out we can do it ourselves.

Paul: And here’s another edit I made today. I think this was due to something I read somewhere on your website, where it was pointed out the Bootleg Series version of “Long Black Veil” went on way too long, due to the fact that the take of the song is basically two versions of it, back to back. So I cut out the first half. I like it better now.

Tony: I think the possibilities here are endless, and I really hope we can follow through on this.  Of course I am sure there are people who much prefer the original – and anyway who are we to mess around with what Dylan feels like releasing?  And for such people I would say fine, don’t listen.

I’ll try and find some other songs I would like to be re-edited.  But if anyone else has suggestions, please either work on the song yourself and send me (Tony@schools.co.uk) the results for publication here, or if you are not technically minded just make the suggestion and maybe Paul will have a go (if he has time!).

But for now this is a unique Dylan recording – on Untold!

I also suggest you do take a look at Paul’s website. It is utterly amazing

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/

Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part VIII)

• Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part V)
• Bob  Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part VI)
• Bob Dylan And the Dylanvinci Code (Part VII)

By Larry Fyffe

So-called ‘Dylanologists’ have yet to realize that many of the songs written and sung by Bob Dylan contain hidden clues to the “Dylavinci Code”, a code that reveals that the American born singer/songwriter/musician has been searching quite some time now for the burial site of Mary Magdalene, and her child by Jesus Christ.

That search is a dangerous undertaking because authorities of the established canon of the Holy Bible want no biological link made that leads back to the Saviour; their positions on the interpretation of the Scriptures would be completely undermined.

Dylavinci clues abound in many lyrics, obviously written by Dylan in a transfigured, time-travelling state of mind.

Below, he’s Jesus speaking, revealing that Mary Magdalene goes off to France after the couple were  tracked down in Durango, Mexico:

Shakespeare, he's in the alley
With his pointed shoes, and his bells
Talking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well
(Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)

Clear it be that Ruth, a guardian of the ‘lagoon’ of biblical lineage,  attempts to divert Dylan-as-Jesus (“discovered beneath the church”) from joining Mary in France, the ‘land of oaks’, encoded, as noted, in another song “Duquesne Whistle’:

When Ruthie says come see'er
In her honky-tonk lagoon
Where I could watch her waltz for free
'Neath the Panamian moon
(Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)

Ruthie marries wealthy Judge Boaz, and their offspring uphold the Jewish Davidian line.

Something fishy is going on.

The Dylavinci Code unfolds.

Roman emperor Nero plays a fiddle as Rome burns, and sets scapegoat Christians on fire (they identified by the symbol of a fish):

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
(Desolation Row)

Fiery Nero tips off Robert Zimmerman that girlfriend Joan Baez, a descendant of Judge Boaz, is not on his side:

The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything's been returned that was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
 (Visions of Johanna)

Things start getting interesting right about now – it’s Memphis in Egypt, near the Great Sphinx, not the city in Tennessee, that’s referred to in the lines below:

Oh mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
 With The Memphis blues again

Apparently, the Sphinx on the Giza Plateau in Egypt holds the secret to the location of Mary Magdalene’s tomb.

This could really be the end to the search!

In this series Aaron Galbraith picks out interesting cover versions of Bob Dylan’s songs and Tony Attwood attempts to write a review of the performance while the song is playing, and without looking stuff up.

There is a list of some of our earlier articles in this series here.

Curtis Stigers

Aaron:  From his 2012 album Let’s Go Out Tonight. I read a review which states “Stigers’ version captures just the right mood for the lyrics”. Let’s find out if Tony agrees.

Tony: I’ve listened to this song so many times (and two of us actually worked out a modern dance routine for it during lockdown – which is a really good way to get to know a song and not a bad way to pass the days when there’s nothing else to do!) so I approach this from the inside.

And when that happens it is the details that get to me – like why put in castanets?  I find that a little annoying, but by and large I enjoy this.   The sax solo certainly does work for me although maybe the beat is a little plodding after a while.  But no, I think I am getting a bit picky.

There is indeed something very laid back here with the instrumentation so that by the time we get to the wheel barrow, there is a really delicious contrast between the broken-downness of putting a body in a wheelbarrow and the way the music moves along works really well.

I just worry for that bass player plodding away with just two notes to play all the way through.

The Persuasions

Aaron: It’s a fairly long song to sing acapella but the Persuasions “boom-boom” their way through the whole song.

Tony: Now this I am looking forward to, simply because of the audacity of the idea, and my goodness this works.  Whoever would have imagined that.  And bringing in the full chorus for the “last train” and the “people are crazy” line – ah … yes this works wonderfully for me.

At least it works first time through, because as the song progresses, I find I have got used to the idea.  It’s still a good listen but would one want to come back and play it again?   Or come to that will I want to pass this on to a few friends and say “you must listen to this”?

Probably not – it is a great sound, but it doesn’t actually add to my understanding of the song.  I think if I didn’t know the song yes of course I would listen all the way through, but now I know it so well… no.   And that is the key thing for those who want to re-work Dylan – the audience will know the song so well that something different needs to happen to the music as it works through, not just as an overall idea.

String Swing

Aaron: Here’s a nice swinging version – will Tony think this is a danceable version?!

Tony: Wow that’s a surprising start instrumentally, and I love the vocals too.  There’s a nice mix of the instrumentation, without everyone trying to get to the fore when it’s not their turn.  I guess I must have told you about working out how to dance to this before, Aaron.   Actually, by a strange coincidence, I was doing a little piece for BBC radio this week and mentioned dancing to this song in that (not that anyone would notice).

Indeed I love the instrumental break – now that does really give me an extra insight into the song.  Suddenly “I used to care but things have changed” means something new; I can walk away from all this with a swing in my step.

And it gets better and better as it goes – which is really what I want from a reworking of a Dylan song I know so well.   The instrumental breaks really work too.  Oh sorry I already said that.

Oh and what a great ending too!  Love it.

Waylon Jennings

Aaron: One of the first to cover the song was the late great Waylon Jenning. He was doing the song in concert as early as September 2000 (It was first released by Dylan in May 2000). It became a regular part of Jenning’s set list throughout his final tours in 2000-2001.

Tony: “You may have not heard it, you maybe have” (or words to that effect).  What kind of an intro is that?   Well, yes given when he way playing it, I can see what he means, so I’ll let that go.

The inter-verse breaks really do work, but I think the vocals are worked too hard to play with the lyrics.  Again it is that problem of a recording made around the time when many listeners won’t know the song too well, but now coming back to it knowing the song so well, it doesn’t always work.

It is that issue of listening to a song we know so well, and focusing on it rather than using it as background – as if it came on the radio while we are doing something else.  But the sudden arrival of the female voice wakes me up and refocuses me.

It’s not earth shattering, but it’s well done – and a damn site better than anything I could ever have done (just to put it in perspective).

by Jochen Markhorst

• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 1: Dear Dr Ralph
• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 2: To live is to be alone
• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 3: He who is alone now, will long so remain

IV         Little Boy Lost

There’s too many people, too many to recall
I thought some of ’m were friends of mine, I was wrong about ’m all
Well, the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud
Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood

I found my world, found my world in you
But your love just hasn’t proved true
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

 Dylan remains in Villon mode for a while, in Où sont les neiges d’antan spheres. Or, to stay close to Paris, in the Georges Moustaki mode. More precisely: in the theme and colour of one of Moustaki’s loveliest songs, “L’Homme Au Coeur Blessé” from 1971, the formidable translation of a song by the Greek legend Mikis Theodorakis. Also, like “Not Dark Yet”, “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”, Rilke’s “Herbsttag” and this “Cold Irons Bound”, the dismal retrospective of a man in the autumn of his life, disillusioned and melancholy. With, as in “Cold Irons Bound”, the depressing image of the man who wonders where the friends of the past have gone;

Les quatre murs de sa maison
N'abritent que l'absence
Où sont partis les compagnons
Avec leurs rires et leurs chansons ?

The four walls of his home
Contain nothing but absence
Where have the companions gone
With their laughter and their songs?

… and whose heart-breaking opening line alone, Jour après jour, les jours s’en vont, laissant la vie à l’abandon (“Day after day, the days go by, leaving life behind”), already has such a strong Time Out Of Mind-vibe, of course.

Just as conventional as the image of the friends dissolved in the mists of time is the subsequent rocky road on which the beaten narrator finds himself – but then the fast-rhyming artist finds his inspiration again. A muddy hillside is already a fresh inversion of the cliché. For centuries, in songs, novels and poems, hillsides have been the backdrop of blooming flowers, of carefree summers in love, the background of a rising or a setting sun, and wild roses often grow there too. Or, quite on the contrary, the sad location of the grave of a loved one – in which case it is usually misty.

Dylan chooses the conventional setting for an unconventional scene: to reinforce the protagonist’s Sisyphean state of being. Not only does he trudge along in cold irons bound, but the road is rocky and the hill he climbs muddy – he is truly not te be envied, this mirror image of Jeff Beck’s insufferably optimistic Hi-Ho Silver Liner (“Going down a bumpy hillside, in your hippy hat”). To be fair, songwriter Scott English later confessed having tried to write “the most unusable, stupid lyric he could think up, about flies in pea soup and beach umbrellas” to scare off Beck’s producer Mickey Most; Scott actually wanted to keep the song himself.

The pitiful scene is spanned by clouds of blood. Like hillside, not necessarily an original décor, but like hillside, alienating here – this time, however, mainly through the choice of words. Red skies in themselves are not all that uncommon in the Arts.

In painting, it is already so commonplace that any artist who paints the sky red risks getting the label “kitsch”. And in songs, it has been around long enough. Usually to express menace. Like in Ry Cooder’s “Poor Man’s Shangri-La” (It’s a red cloud over Chavez Ravine), in “Johnny, Kick A Hole In The Sky” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (The red cloud rains and the black horse rides), in Fisher-Z’s “Red Skies Over Paradise”. Or to frame idyllic scenes, like Tom Petty’s “California” (Sundown, red skies), U2 in “Even Better Than the Real Thing” (We’re free to fly the crimson sky) and like in “Galbraith Street”, Ron Sexsmith’s nostalgic childhood memory.

There are many more examples, and Dylan himself has been using the expressionistic value of a red sky at least once in every decade of his career. The corpse of Emmett Till is disrespectfully rolled away amidst a bloody red rain, the narrator from “Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart” has just returned from a city of flaming red skies, the little boy and the little girl live “under the red sky”, the clouds are turnin’ crimson in “Moonlight”, the protagonist from “Things Have Changed” is looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies, and idyllically meant as well is ‘neath crimson skies in “Beyond The Horizon”. So, in itself not too remarkable, a red sky. But the choice of words is: clouds of blood.

Clouds of blood has an inescapable, lugubrious connotation that seems rather out of place in this song. The overall tenor evokes the image of a washed-out, faded-out man who, like a grey old tusker, is heavily and lonely making his last journey to the elephant graveyard. The fields have turned brown, beginning to hear voices, heart torn away, the fat’s in the fire, torn to shreds… the song lyrics offer an accumulation of images that are ambiguous enough to associate with a farewell to life. None, however, with the fatal, violent implication of clouds of blood, an image that seems to have imposed itself via William Blake.

In interviews during the nineties, Dylan often mentions his renewed fascination with William Blake, even unsolicited. “My latest thing of just reading was back into reading the William Blake poems again,” he says in a telephone interview with Stuart Coupe. “In the last couple of lines, it might just open a door for another song. William Blake could have written that,” he tells Gary Hill in San Diego in October ’93 (on “Love Henry”). Often enough, in any case, to guess that three years later, Dylan, sitting with his draft inspired next to the drumming David Kemper, is incorporating echoes of Blake lecture; The Divine Vision dimly appear’d in clouds of blood weeping, for instance (from “Jerusalem”, in which the bloody clouds drift by every few pages anyway). Or The sound of a trumpet the heavens / Awoke & vast clouds of blood roll’d, from “The Book of Urizen”(1794) – William Blake did like grand, apocalyptic settings. And iron. Iron whips, iron thorns, iron rocks, iron tears, iron arms of love, you name it. And iron chains, obviously. Lots of them. Like on the Little Boy Lost;

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain

… bound him in a cold iron chain, no doubt. Far from his friends with their laughter and their songs.

To be continued. Next up: Cold Irons Bound part 5: A very ornate, beautiful box

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978

This series reviews the Never Ending Tour from its origins in 1987 through to its cancellation with the outbreak of the pandemic.   A full index of the articles is available here,

We’ve now completed 2000: the six articles are

• Never Ending Tour 2000, Part 1 – Master Vocalist: Finding voice
• NET, 2000, Part 2. Master Vocalist – Please heed these words that I speak
• NET 2000 Part 3: Master Vocalist – Rock n roil
• NET 2000 Part 4: Back to Bedrock I
• NET 2000 Part 5: Back to Bedrock II
• Never Ending Tour, 2000, part 6 – Beyond Dylan

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Everybody knows about 9/11. Perhaps the most famous date in modern history, many see it as the true beginning of the 21^st century. Only us Bobcats, however, appreciate the other monumental event that took place that day – the release of a new album by Bob Dylan, “Love and Theft”. It took a while for it to sink in that this could well be Dylan’s most adventurous and lyrically dense album ever. I don’t know if anyone has added them up, but I wouldn’t mind betting that on “Love and Theft” Dylan belts out more words than on any other album (Maybe Street Legal).

It’s tempting to spend this first post jumping right in with the new songs, as I did in 1997 with Time out of Mind. Because the album didn’t come out until late in the year, there has been much focus on the last three months of 2001, during which Dylan performed eleven of the twelve new songs from the album. They were great concerts, but they do tend to overshadow Dylan’s achievements earlier in the year, while the focus on the new songs may be at the expense of appreciating his treatment of his classics even during those last three months.

So I’d like to hold back on this new material to tune into his familiar songs from both before and after the release of the album, to give us a feel for what he sounded like in 2001, and what else was happening in that year.

For a start, interesting things were happening to Dylan’s voice.  It was distinctly rougher than in 2000 and 1999. Dylan always liked to give his voice a tearing edge. (You can hear it on very early recordings like ‘One Kind Favour’.) By 2000 he could make his voice go soft or rough at will. In 2001 we find his voice thicker, less comfortable with the high clear notes found in 2000 in songs like ‘Gates of Eden’ (see NET, 2000, Part 1), but full of power and expression for all that.

I’m going to start with the acoustic Dylan, the Folk Bob, for he is very much alive during 2001. These are the old songs we’re well familiar with. I have called them his ‘core’ songs and his ‘bedrock songs,’ ‘vintage Dylan’ and so on, but to me there is something special about these performances, as this will be the last full year in which Dylan will play the guitar on stage (except for odd occasions), either acoustic or electric. In 2002, Mr Guitar Man will hang up his hat and take to the keyboards, and the distinction between the acoustic and electric sets will be further blurred.

By 2001, Dylan no longer divides the shows into two sets, one acoustic and the other electric, tending to mix them up, but the distinction remains. The band put down their electric guitars, pick up their acoustic guitars, the drums fall silent or go soft, and we have the Folk Bob back with us, singing his old songs – but like never before. So I’m going to follow my practice of previous years, pluck the acoustic tracks out of the concerts and create my own acoustic concert, 2001 style.

His classic ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is a good place to start, as his treatment of the song is radically different from previous versions. The jingle-jangle rhythm of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ gives way to a sound slower and denser. It’s like a different song, with a different chord progression. This performance from later in the year (Madison Square Gardens, 11^th November) is extraordinary in its intensity. By not allowing any pause at the end of each line, but ripping into the next one straight off, Dylan creates a momentum and vehemence unmatched by any previous performance. He discards the dumpty-dum rhythm, slows the tempo as he has learned to do over the past years, and with his newly cracked voice turns the song into an expression of agonised yearning. That yearning is amplified by a wonderfully jagged and insistent harmonica.

Mr Tambourine Man (A)

It’s so good you almost don’t mind him missing out a verse, the ‘skipping reels of rhyme’ verse I’ve always loved because that phrase itself seems to characterise the song.

Before the words ‘best ever performance’ pass your lips, you should listen to this one from earlier in the year (21^st August, Telluride). The arrangement is the same, but the singing is much darker. The way Dylan bends his voice down at the end of each line (downsinging) is more pronounced, and the optimistic bounce of the original 1960’s song is gone. The journey sounds more like a descent into hell than a plea to go tripping.

Mr Tambourine Man (B)

As he has been doing in the last few years, Dylan turns ‘Don’t Think Twice’ into a celebration, playing it up tempo and building it to a rousing conclusion, with, in this case, a stirring harmonica break at the end. This pitiless little song takes on a warmer  feel with the mature Dylan. This one is also from the MSG concert.

Don’t think twice (A)

The song is less than an apology but more than a simple good-bye. It’s an explanation, with some unexpected subtleties for such a simple sounding ditty. Words are in question here. Words are not always what they seem. Words are powerless and deceptive:

‘But I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay’

and

‘Goodbye is too good a word, babe
So I just say, "fare thee well"’

and

‘I once loved a woman
A child I’m told’

and

‘I ain't a-sayin' you treated me unkind’

and

‘We never did too much talking anyway’

It’s what people say or don’t say that determines the fate of a relationship.

This second version may have the edge in terms of vocal performance, but without the harp it feels incomplete to me. (20^th August)

Don’t think twice (B)

We have another double happy coming up now in the form of two performances of that great epic ‘Desolation Row’. The 2000 performances of this song are hard to beat (see NET, 2000, part 4) because of the full-throated power of Dylan’s baritone in that year, but in 2001 we find strong, vigorous performances. A bit rougher but by no means less compelling. The first is from Lancaster and clips along with minimal backing. It’s a wonderful tour through the stranger parts of town.

Desolation Row (A)

These performances both make Desolation Row sound like a gritty rather than a spooky place. The ‘best ever’ 1995 performance has Dylan’s voice smoother and more ghostlike, which makes for a different sounding song. Dylan aims for that more spectral effect in this performance (Sorry, lost the date of this one), and roughens it up as it goes

Desolation Row (B)

‘Girl from the North Country’ always sounds good with a softer treatment. In past posts we have seen some exquisite performances of this tender and sad love song. A song untouched by bitterness but tinged with regret. This performance from Telluride, 20^th August doesn’t disappoint. The rough-voiced Dylan can sing softly and quietly when he wants, with just a little tear in his voice to add to the regret. Beautifully underpinned by Tony Garnier’s bow-drawn double bass. Pity there’s no harp break. Don’t let a couple of idiots in the audience distract you from this fine,  warm-hearted performance.

Girl from the North Country

‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ seems a natural fit here, after ‘Girl from the North Country’, since both songs come from the same poignant bag. Again, there is no bitterness, just the turning screw of regret. It’s all about time. Today…tonight…tomorrow… echoes and reflections…softly poundin’ hearts…a bed that was once yours…

The soft gentleness of this song can get lost on these big, stadium rock audiences; you need a quiet and receptive audience for it, which is exactly what Dylan gets for this performance from Hiroshima (10^th March). Sure, I like to joke about ‘best ever’ performances, because there’s always another one, but I find this performance of ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ hard to match. It’s beautifully balanced and clear, the band sounds as gentle and tender as Dylan, who delivers a restrained and heart-breaking performance.

Tomorrow is a long time

It’s a natural movement from that to ‘One Too Many Mornings’, although this song is darker than the previous two. As he sings in ‘Restless Farewell’, another song from the same era, ‘someone’s eyes must meet the dawn’,  so in ‘One Too Many Mornings’ we find that same ‘restless hungry feeling’.

‘The crossroads of my doorstep’ is an intriguing image as it suggests choices and decisions, to turn back or to go on, but in the end we’re all just ‘one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind’. The song is heavy with the sense of fate. This performance from Seattle, (6^th Oct) does the song full justice. Larry’s steel guitar works like a string section, providing a more lush backdrop to Dylan’s superb vocal.

One too Many Mornings

Where else to go but ‘Mama You’ve Been On My Mind’. ‘She never escaped my mind’, he sings on ‘Tangled up in Blue’, and ‘Gotta get you out of my miserable brain’, he will sing in ‘Ain’t Talkin’. ‘Walkin’ with you in my head’, he sings in ‘Lovesick’.  Someone’s got a hold of his heart and never let go, and, hell, some loves ‘take a long time to die’, as he sings in ‘Cold Irons Bound’ (21^st August, Telluride. Pity the audience was a bit chatty)

Mama you’ve been on my Mind

‘To Ramona’ might seem like it comes from the same bag, but it doesn’t. It could be read as a reproach, but these recent versions with their extreme downsinging give the song quite a nasty edge. Unless you hate the downsinging, this is a great performance.

To Ramona

What better way to finish this round up of these more personal songs than three rousing, best ever performances of ‘Tangled up in Blue’, where time and memory get a shake up and ‘she’ is still around, even after splitting up on a ‘dark sad night’. The past will always be close behind. The outlaw is always only one step ahead of the posse.

But isn’t three performances a bit excessive and indulgent, even if they are best evers? Yes, totally. So let’s indulge. This first one’s from the Hiroshima concert. I love the sound he gets in this concert, and the focus of the audience. Dylan’s vocal performance is hopelessly, wonderfully good. I want to create a new category for it – best-best ever. High and clear and floating. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. Prepare to be entranced and astonished. (Pity about the lack of harp.)

Tangled up in Blue (A)

Speed it up a bit, and roughen it up some more, and it sounds like this:

Tangled up in Blue (B)

That one’s from 18^th March. Now for the indulgence. This one’s from Australia, 23^rd March. A full-bodied sound with a harder, nasal edge. Like good wine, it only gets better.

Tangled up in Blue (C)

Had enough Dylan yet? No? I’ll be back soon with more acoustic sounds from 2001.

Kia Ora

• Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part V)
• Bob  Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part VI)

by Larry Fyffe

Yes, burlesque the ‘Dylavinci Code’ be for the most part, but, nevertheless, there’s some truth in it.

Said it can be that the so-called “code” is a rebuttal, a long footnote, to the biblical writings of Saint Jerome:

You bring it up to St. Peter
You bring it up to Jerome
You can bring it all the way over
Bring it all the way home
(My Own Version Of You)

What the singer/songwriter is bringing all the way back home is the dogma of ‘original sin’. The assertion that Adam’s guilt pervades the whole human race, and that he’s therefore responsible for the mortality of the human race, the narrator intends to kill:

Bring it to the corner where the children play
You bring it to me on a silver tray
I'll bring someone to life, spare no expense
Do it with decency, and common sense
(My Own Version Of You)

The dogma of inherited sin be anathema to most who have a background in the Jewish faith.

Jerome accepts the translation of the New Testament verse given below:

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world
And death passed upon all men
And so death passed upon all men
In whom all have sinned
(Romans 5:12)

More accepted today is the following translation:

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world
And death passed upon all men
And so death passed upon all men
For that all have sinned
(Romans 5:12)

Emanuel Swedenborg, for one, takes the above verse to mean that Adam, a symbol for every man, means that each individual is solely responsible for his own misbehavior, and the guilt that arises therefrom.

The religious Gnostic-like teachings of Swedenborg influence, to varying degees, poets like William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, and Robert Frost.

Saint Augustine picks up the biblical translation accepted by Jerome, and he runs with it.

Augustine rejects the religious view that holds there’s a dualistic conflict between light and dark forces.

Everyone, according to Augustine, is at the very least guilty of original sin, spread it be through Adam’s seed; the belief that Chirst, the Son of God, dies for the sins of everybody is essential for his or her salvation.

In the lyrics below, the narrator, sorrowful though he may be, can be construed as putting the personification of original sin to rest:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed that I was amongst the one
That put him out to death
(I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine)

by Jochen Markhorst

III         He who is alone now, will long so remain

The walls of pride are high and wide
Can’t see over to the other side
It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay
It’s sadder still to feel your heart torn away

One look at you and I’m out of control
Like the universe has swallowed me whole
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

 “The walls of pride” is not too remarkable an image; any given Sunday there must be a preacher somewhere in the world who reads from Ezekiel, Acts or Isaiah and then warns the congregation of the walls of pride. Dylan, as we know, is not necessarily averse to an evangelical connotation either – but in this context, in “Cold Irons Bound”, it is more likely that the slightly worn-out metaphor has surfaced in Dylan’s stream of consciousness via the heartbreaking “No Tomorrow In Sight”.

Willie Nelson – No Tomorrow in Sight:

In our efforts to break through
The thick walls of pride
With harsh words that burned to the core
The walls still remain
But the words broke inside
And strengthened the walls even more

… on The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs from 1967, from the time when Willie still had short hair and at least had one foot firmly planted in the Nashville clay. But also a record that demonstrates from start to finish what Dylan admires so much in Willie: “No one writes a bitter song like Willie Nelson” (Robert Hilburn interview, 1992). There is a line to “Cold Irons Bound” in there too, but still: too generic to put the “influential song” stamp on “No Tomorrow In Sight”.

All the more radiantly, after that clichéd opening, shines the most elegant aphorism of the song, and one of the most poignant of the album at all: It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay / It’s sadder still to feel your heart torn away.

Its perfection suggests that Dylan had the one-liner already up his sleeve. “It was hotel stationary, little scraps like from Norway, and from Belgium and from Brazil, you know places like that. And each little piece of paper had a line,” as Larry Charles reveals in 2014 about Dylan’s working methods in the 1990s.

The isolation of the line within this song seems to confirm this; in terms of content, the first part, the decaying beauty, does not match the emotions that the protagonist conveys. One look at you and I’m out of control he sighs after this, and at the end of the song looking at you and I’m on my bended knee… heartfelt sighs and choice of words that at least suggest that there is no question of decaying beauty, but quite on the contrary, of radiant beauty.

The line must have been inspired by Keats, by the indestructible A thing of beauty is a joy for ever from “Endymion” (1818), and presumably its continuation (its loveliness increases) also triggered Dylan. Keats’ opening line has gained proverbial status and is quoted all over the place – by Willy Wonka, by physicists admiring the elegance of a beautiful formula, in adverts, by Mary Poppins, in songs (ABC’s “Never More Than Now”, for example) and by Woody Harrelson in White Men Can’t Jump… by everyone and everything, actually. In an ironic way, often enough, but just as often to express genuine admiration.

Keats’ figurative meaning is clear, of course. The memory of beauty can provide lasting, for ever, happiness, comfort or poignancy – Keats does know and acknowledge that beauty in itself is impermanent, (as “Ode To A Nightingale”, the poem in which Professor Ricks sees the template for “Not Dark Yet”, demonstrates). In 1882, Oscar Wilde argued pretty much the same thing, in The English Renaissance Of Art (“Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm”), and Wilde was no fool either, obviously. Yet, strictly speaking, all beauty is indeed perishable, indeed does decay – even the stars above eventually fade away, after all. Which is the root of all melancholy, and thus an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

Melancholy is probably, after Love, inspiration No. 1 in the Arts since Homer, and the combination, the melancholy caused by a lost love, has also animated poets and songwriters for centuries. Usually clichéd and superficial (“Bye Bye Love”, “I Still Miss Someone”), as the emotion itself is big and recognisable enough to communicate without much poetic artifice. Exceptional talents, such as Tim Buckley, do manage to deepen it, though…

So tell me darlin' if the feeling's wrong
Don't waste another day
Lord, the saddest thing I've ever known
Was to watch it die away

“Love from Room 109 at the Islander(On Pacific Coast Highway)”, 1969)

But the Very Greats know how to avoid every cliché and avoid all mushiness – and thus still manage to move with melancholy. The template being, obviously, François Villon’s “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (Où sont les neiges d’antan? – “Where are the snows of yesteryear”, 1461). Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” on the same album is another perfect example, John Williams’ film music for Schindler’s List, De Chirico’s paintings, and a poetic masterpiece like Rilke’s “Herbsttag” (1902), with whom Dylan, not for the first time, demonstrates an artistic kinship;

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

(transl. “Autumn Day” – Edward Snow)

… and to that list of extraordinary works of art belongs the sepia-coloured aphorism It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay / It’s sadder still to feel your heart torn away.

The second part of the aphorism, heart torn away, fits in well with the desperate tenor of the song, and is also in line with the famous second, last part of Rilke’s “Herbsttag”. (He who has no home now, will build one never / He who is alone now, will long so remain).

The beauty of Dylan’s aphorism shines through all the more strongly because of the relative weakness of the surrounding lines. The introduction, with its walls of pride, is not very spectacular. And the continuation, the varying “transition lines” to the refrain line I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound, again underpin the credibility of David Kemper’s testimony that Dylan dashes off the lyrics in ten minutes;

One look at you and I’m out of control
Like the universe has swallowed me whole

… first a run-of-the-mill cliché, and then a sonorous, neatly rhymed, but in fact incomprehensible, inconclusive metaphor. Apparently, the poet wants to express something like “struck by lightning” or perhaps “on cloud nine”. The eloquence of “the universe has swallowed me”, however, is rather polluted by its absurdity – you don’t have to be too scientifically literate to realise that we are all already “in the universe”. To understand how you can be swallowed by something you are already in requires an imagination that even a Kafka or a Charlie Kaufman would not dare to presume in the audience.

Well, in his defence: the poet is out of control, after all.

To be continued. Next up: Cold Irons Bound part 4:

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978

An index to some of the earlier articles in this series.

Beautiful Obscurity is an exploration of some of the best or more unusual of Dylan cover versions.  The recordings are selected by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood has the job of writing comments.  But Tony only has the time of playing the recording once to write his commentary – no cheating and going back to play it again.

Oh yes and Aaron and Tony never talk on the phone, what with being on different continents, so Tony only knows what’s coming as he starts to write.   It’s all just a bit of a game, but it keeps us off the streets.

Aaron:  I wonder if you’d like to take a journey across the years via 5 different versions of Chimes Of Freedom? Let’s see what ones you like best!?

10/8/87 – with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Roger McGuinn

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnTVjpzthk

Tony: As mentioned many a time, I’m a great lover of Tom Petty’s work, both with Dylan and independently, and the magic of “Learning to Fly” played in a darkened auditorium with everyone holding up lights will be with me forever.

The problem with the songs I know so well is that, well, I know them so well that new versions have to be radical indeed to grab my attention.  Here, once I’ve got the hang of how they guys are treating the song, then fine, I’ve got it.  Except for the harmonies and oh what I would give for a clearer version to hearing the harmonies properly.  That is fantastic – or at least I think so.

And I have to admit I have hit return a few dozen times to take my writing down the page and get the video out of my view – it is horribly distracting.

But by the third verse (I think) Bob is just calling out the lyrics.  However the harmony based latter part of the verse pulls him back in.   My suggestion is that after you’ve finished reading this you play the video again and turn the screen off, or look the other way.

And maybe wish, like me, we had a better recording of the gig.

Aaron: 12/7/87 – with the Grateful Dead

Tony:  I am not at all sure the introduction adds anything to the song – it just seems to be bits and pieces as if to torment the listener.  But of course once they start we know where we are.

Lovely contrast with the version before.   And this is from the period when I wonder if Bob suffered from repetitive strain injury in his right hand.   Could be an explanation for the strange guitar work that has been commented on a number of times by Mike Johnson in the Never Ending Tour series.  And if so he has my sympathies – I have RSI from the combination of piano playing and typing at the computer, and wear a support that looks quite like that on my left hand when at the computer.   It’s a pain ain’t it Bob?

Not too sure Bob gives us much more in this version but the lead guitar really does – that is what makes this recording worth hearing.   The short instrumental breaks really do add a meaning as fast as Bob’s singing takes it away.   (Sorry that is probably sacrilege and I shall expect the Dylan Police to be knocking on the door within minutes of this being published.)

And there are some lyrics changing too – but oh that lead guitar reworking of the song will stay with me.  I’ll play in on the piano when writing this is over, RSI or not.

But I tell you what, that line “And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing” is one of my all time favourites, from Dylan.

1/17/93 – Bill Clinton’s First Inauguration Concert – apparently 1 million people are in attendance!

Tony:  This shows just how readily Bob has appealed to so many different group.  But what Bob has done here!  The point about the song musically is that it is in 12/8 – a very very unusual time signature for pop or rock or folk.  But in the original it is a slow and stately 12/8 so you could reimagine it as a 3/4 and dance a waltz to it.   Now it goes at full blast and he’s added a modulation in the penultimate line.

To me it is fun, but also more of a musical gimmick than a serious reinterpretation, and I am not quite sure what is amusing the President so much.  Is it Bob’s appearance on the stage, or the choice of the song, or is the President musical enough to realise how Bob has just re-worked the song upside down and inside out?   Or the fact that Bob is playing it so fast that he seems just to want to get it over with?

Clinton did replace Bush, from my recollection, and was seen as a spark of reforming lights – so maybe it was just the compliment of Bob playing for him.

From October 1998 – studio recording with Joan Osbourne – released on the soundtrack CD to the miniseries “The 60s”

Tony: From the very start I am intrigued.  The harmonies work and nothing is rushed – a complete contrast to the version for the President.  (Maybe some idiot told Bob he only had four minutes in that gig!)

I like this because Bob really really sounds like he means it.  The time signature has changed to 4/4 and that allows the song to roll along in a way that suits this type of accompaniment.

But most of all the lyrics stand out.  Every line sounds to me like I have never heard it before – and this is a song which when I first heard it in my childhood / teens transition had me reduced to tears (I am stupidly emotional, and that goes back to my childhood – although it has allowed me to work throughout my life in the arts, which has been very enjoyable).

Lines now stand out – oh this is by far, by far by far the best version so far.  This is the one I will go back and play again.  If I want to have a negative, it is the organ playing – I could have done with out…  I want  to go on but the time is up.   Superb.

10/18/12 – live in San Francisco

Tony: And now it is a waltz!  But it is that style of singing where Bob makes his voice jump an octave at the end of some lines and in other places – for reasons that never become clear to me.   I’m really just waiting for this to play through – I don’t think Bob has ever really mastered the waltz, although trying to do so stayed with him for years; at least up to his multiple attempts to record “Tell Ol’ Bill”, which I covered yesterday (at least I think it was yesterday).

Does this tell me anything new?  Does it entertain me?  Does it give me new insights into these wonderful majestic lyric?   Does it do what the Joan Osborne recording does?

Nope.  I’ll stop here, so I can play that version Osbourne version again while I proof my rambling copy for spelling and grammatical errors.  (That’s allowed isn’t it Aaron?)

Thanks!

Aaron

• Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part V)

by Larry Fyffe

According to the Dylavinci Code uncovered in Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, it’s noted that Jesus, after His ‘crucifixion’ in the Holy Land, sails across the Atlantic to what’s later known as the ‘New World’.

Christ travels with His ‘companion’ Mary Magdalene, though  whether the Christian Saviour be technically alive or dead

Is a point of contention.

Fragmented song lyrics, pulled from the Holy Grail stored at the Archives Department of the Untold Dylan Headquarters, read like this when put back together:

They got Jesus Christ trapped
Out there in Romans Five
Judge says to the High Priest
'I want Him dead or alive
Either one, I don't care"
(High Water Everywhere)

Clues are scattered about, embedded in present-day song lyrics as well, lyrics that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with the history of Jesus.

Before Jesus and Mary head off to what is now Mexico, the two love birds have plans to marry, and settle down in what is now the American State inhabited by lots of Christian-like  ‘Mormons’  – so expresses the Dylanesque clue beneath:

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me "Pa"
That's what it must be all about
(Sign On The Window)

What’s very clear, however, according to the Dylavinci Code, is that Jesus and Mary instead gallop off on horses to Mexico, pursued by a posse that’s been organized by the established Church.

The narrator in the following lyrics  – obviously, Jesus:

Sold my guitar to the baker's son
For a few crumbs, and a place to hide
But I can get another one
And I'll play for Magdalena as we ride
(Romance In Durango)

Another clue dropped in the lyrics below cheekily references the dualistic gnostic metaphoric dark/left, and light/right aspects of the material/spiritual Universe that Mary Magdalene has the task of carrying.

‘Louise’ (Lou) means ‘female warrior’ while ‘Pearl’ harks back to the standard labelling of Queen Maggie as a former whore “with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls”.

The Dylavinci Code clearly places the departed-double Mary as the inhabitant of the right side of the mythological Plutonian underworld where the souls of heroic warriors get to go:

Hello Mary Lou
Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet-footed guides from the underworld 
(False Prophet)

by Tony Attwood

“All Directions at once” is a series that looks at Bob’s songs in the order they were written, rather than the order of release or by themes.   We are now in the final leg of the journey with the songs written in the 21st century.  The most recent posts are…

• All Directions 64: Something borrowed something blue
• All directions at once 65: the time of evolving other people’s ideas

There is a complete index to the series here.

Part 66: Tell Ol Bill

To me, the writing of Tell Ol’ Bill is a key moment in Bob Dylan’s writing, and to understand the song we have to understand Bob’s work  in the 21st century, and I believe that to see what this work is about we have to understand the process and approach of his work from 1997 onward.

1997 was a time of finishing “Time out of mind” ending with three songs that reflected love: “Make you feel my love”, “Till I fell in love with you” and that most downbeat of songs, “Love Sick”.  That was the last song written for the album, the first track on the album.

Then, as had happened in recent times, Bob (to be the best of our knowledge) stopped writing until in 2001 he produced one of his most highly acclaimed songs of all times, “Things have changed”.

And of course we recall that the line “I used to care but things have changed” came from the man who told us to gather round and admit that change has happened and is happening, and that we had better try and keep up with the change, or else we’ll be in trouble.

So quite a few of us swam, and kept swimming, as instructed to do, only to find, as Bob did, that just keeping up might not be enough.  Just as caring might not be enough.   The world changes, no matter what we do.  So what is the point of caring, if we can’t make a difference.

And so the emphasis has changed.  “Times they are a-changin'” is about the very essence of society; society changes because the times in which society endlessly evolves change.  But “Things have changed” is about the individual; the individual who steps aside from that evolution of society, and just looks on, dispassionate, uncaring.  Worried, yes, but primarily worried about who is walking behind him, not about where society is going.

Yet this man in “Things have changed” who steps aside from worrying or being concerned about society, is only one of the examples of people who leave the rat race behind.  What of the man who goes to the other extreme.   The guys who jumped on the freight trains, or who hitched a ride.   Those for whom none of this social push forward was relevant, because they were not interacting with society at all.  All those hung up people in the whole wide universe.  What of them.  The hobos, the tramps, the lost…

For such people the wrongs of the world, the evils done by politicians, being let down by friends – all of this is irrelevant.  The only relevance is a dry place to sleep for the night, and something to eat.

It’s all a bit of a tangle as we consider who we are, what we have done, and what we believe.  So we get to “Honest with Me”.   Bob rather liked it; he played it 739 times in concert.

(The video screen below looks a little like a video that is not available, but it seems to play ok).

Just consider some of these lines

These memories I got, they can strangle a man

Lot of things can get in the way 
          when you’re tryin’ to do what’s right

I’m not sorry for nothin’ I’ve done
I’m glad I fought—I only wish we’d won

When I left my home the sky split open wide
I never wanted to go back there—I’d rather have died

You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price

Some things are too terrible to be true

I’m having a hard time believin’ some people were ever alive

This really is a man who has had it all only to find he couldn’t do it all.  For some of what he has found is just too terrible to  be true.  It was the obvious precursor of “Things have changed,” the only composition of 1999.

So the question is, how can a writer follow up on this position?   What can you say after saying “I used to care but things have changed”?

What Dylan did was take his writing back to the past, drawing inspiration from the music he loved, rather than trying to talk any more about now.   And so by 2001 Bob was able to write “Summer Days” which has the line

She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” 
I say, “You can’t? What do you mean,
you can’t? Of course you can.”

And you do that when you’ve given up on change: you just replay the past.   So in this interregnum as Bob looked back and contemplated his album of songs based on the work of others, he found himself in 2005 with another film commission, and a mind which was focused on the past and how really nothing had changed since he wrote his earliest songs.

So, in writing Tell Old Bill  Bob used from two sources: a compendium of American folk songs by Carl Sandburg from 1927 which gave him the lines Tell Old Bill when he gets home/Leave them downtown gals alone, and the song “I never loved but one” recorded by the Carter Family.  Here’s a modern recording of the traditional “Tell Ol Bill”

This song obviously not the source of Dylan’s composition, but it is the source of the first seven words.  And Bob knew this song well, as he recorded the Sanburg collected song for Self Portrait, (although it wasn’t included).

Thus we have one source for Tell Ol Bill.  The second is the desperately sad, “I never loved but one”  from which the melody and chord sequence of  Dylan’s “Tell Ol’ Bill” is taken and which has the chorus

I look around but cannot trace
One welcome word or smiling face
In gazing crowds I am alone
Because I never loved but one

The music is very similar and there are occasional lyrical touches that Bob has lifted from the Carter family as  “One welcome word or smiling face” and “Until I forget that lasting face” becomes “I tried to find one smiling face”.  Plus “You bent to me and kissed my brow” mutates to “Left the coldest kiss upon my brow.”

But it wasn’t just the Carter Family that Bob knew in writing this.  As Larry pointed out in his article, John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci contains more than a hint of where Bob was going.  (Besides how many other times has Bob used the word “brow” in a song?)

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever-dew
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too

Now you will probably know that at least nine takes of “Tell Ol Bill” were made going through a whole range of styles and approaches – Bob had the lyrics (including the “thunder blasted trees” – a superb image lifted from Edgar Allen Poe’s “To one in paradise”) … but just couldn’t quite find a way to make this jigsaw of inspirational points  work musically.

And then, perhaps because it was a piece of film music, but this time didn’t win any awards, and indeed because it didn’t make it to a mainstream album, it was ignored.

Yet this is the ultimate song of loss, isolation, despair, regret, fear, powerlessness, uncertainty… that’s pretty much the whole collection of human feelings that despite any progress the race might have made, are still there as part of our condition.  In the end we have a song of having tried to step outside human society, and finding that having done this, it is impossible to get anything done, either on a personal or a social level.  We become a drifter.  And the drifter only escapes when the world explodes in chaos.

Is this where it all ends?

The river whispers in my ear
I've hardly a penny to my name
The heavens have never seemed so near
All of my body glows with flame

The tempest struggles in the air
And to myself alone I sing
It could sink me then and there
I can hear those echoes ring

I tried to find one smiling face
To drive the shadows from my head
I'm stranded in this nameless place
Lying restless in a heavy bed

Tell me straight out if you will
Why must you torture me within?
Why must you come down off of your hill?
And throw my fate to the clouds and wind

Far away in a silent land
Secret thoughts are hard to bear
Remember me, you'll understand
Emotions we can never share

You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing more to tell you now

I walk past tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season's dawn awaits
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate

Beneath the thunder blasted trees
The words are ringing off your tongue
The ground is hard at times like these
The stars are cold, the night is young

The rocks are bleak, the trees are bare
Iron clouds are floating by
Snowflakes falling in my hair
Beneath the grey and stormy sky

The evening sun is sinking low
The woods are dark, the town isn't new
They'll drag you down, they'll run the show
They will see you black and blue

Tell ol' Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I'm not alone
And that the hour has come to do or die

All the world I would defy
Let me make it plain as day
I look at you and now I sigh
How could it be any other way?

And from the first moment I heard that I wondered where I had come across this before – this isolation, hopelessness, where all the singer can do is call out to a friend who isn’t there…

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks 
   when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

Visions is set in the room where the heating doesn’t work.  Decades later old Bill is now  stranded in a nameless place.  As Bob concludes, “How could it be any other way?”

Both are songs of hopelessness; of having made decisions which have led to a world that makes no sense and is a trap.  And this is worth contemplating because if these are the alternatives to becoming totally wrapped up within society, that’s not a great choice.

In short, if we step outside of the mainstream, we are liable to find life’s not so good.  Maybe old Bill did start out without any debts to anyone.  After all,

The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed

But he still had to eat, pay for a room for the night, try to keep warm.  Other than being a hunter gatherer there is no escape.

Of course it can be argued that my link between Visions and Tell Ol Bill is fanciful, and that Dylan just liked the song “I never loved but one” and picked up other people’s lines here and there.   But to me, the man giving advice to Old Bill, and telling him anything is worth a try, and Louise, Johanna, Little Boy Lost… none of them found any form of personal salvation.  No one worked out how to get this right.

The entire Tell Ol Bill recording session is also now available

For as the Carter Family sang,

I look around but cannot trace
One welcome word or smiling face
In gazing crowds I am alone
Because I never loved but one

Of course we don’t know who Dylan aimed his thoughts at with the lines

You trampled on me as you passed 
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow 
All my doubts and fears have gone at last 
I've nothing more to tell you now

but we sure can get the message, if we want to listen.  Times change, and I used to care, but now I just accept where I am.  This has been my life.  There’s nothing I can do about that; the past is what it is.

Details of the authors who write for Untold Dylan are given in Untold Writers.  If you’d like to write for Untold, and reach a fairly large worldwide audience, please drop a note to Tony@schools.co.uk either with your idea or an original article.  If you’d like to explore further issues, please do join our Facebook Group.  Just search for “Untold Dylan”

Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part V)

• Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And The DylavincI Code (Part IV)

by Larry Fyffe

Just then a bolt of lightning 
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while everybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape
(Drifter's Escape)

Clues that pop up in the song lyrics of Bob Dylan indicate that the Dylavinci Code (discovered by our intrepid research team at Untold Dylan headquarters) agree with the Christian legend that Mary Magdalene, and her sister Martha, along with Lazarus, journey to southern France, the land of oaks, after Jesus is supposedly crucified:

And as they led Him away
They laid hold of one Simon, a Cyrenian
Coming out of the country
And on him they laid the cross
(Luke 23:26)

According to the legend, Mary, Martha and Lazarus endeavour to convert the French pagans; in symbolic language akin to gnostic writings, Martha is responsible for the killing of a sphinx-like creature similar to the beast featured in Greek mythology.

So encoded in the song lyrics quoted beneath:

Ring them bells Sweet Martha for the poor man's son
Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one
Oh, the shepherd is asleep
Where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled with lost sheep
(Ring Them Bells)

Quickly noticed by our biblical scholars is that the “shepherd” Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, is missing, and that God is not referred to as a Trinity. Nor is there any mention of ‘original sin’ as interpreted by St. Jerome in the Vulgate Bible.

The Christian legend has it that Mary dies in France, but, according to the Dylavinci Code, Jesus and His pregnant wife Mary Magdalene simply split up in France for safety reasons, and the two later meet in Tangier, Morocco.

Gathered from the following Dylanesque clue provided in the song lyrics quoted beneath, Jesus being cast as the narrator therein:

If you see her, say 'Hello'
She might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring
Is living there I hear
(If You See Her Say Hello)

In his typical ‘character sketch’ approach to interpreting Dylan’s  lyrics, David Weir concludes that the narrator of the above song lyrics is “bitter, dominating, false, inconsistent…”

Dear reader, you can tell the sad-eyed lady Mary Magdalene that this isn’t so.

Strawberry Fields await her:

Night speeds by, and we, Aeneas, lose it in lament
Here comes the place where cleaves our way in twain
The road, the right, toward Pluto's dwelling place goes
And leads us to Elysian Fields
And the left hurries us to our doom
(Virgil: The Aeneid, Book VI ~ translated)

The breaking of the Dylavinci Code lies exclusively beyond the locked doors of the Untold Archives Department:

Wisdom, who is called barren, is the mother of angels
The companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene
And He kissed her often on the lips
(Gospel Of Philip)

• Cold Irons Bound (1997) part 1: Dear Dr Ralph

by Jochen Markhorst

II          To live is to be alone

I’m waist deep, waist deep in the mist
It’s almost like, almost like I don’t exist
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound

The Fog (1980) is a low-budget horror film by John Carpenter which, despite poor reviews, was well received at the time and has since become something of a cult classic in the twenty-first century. The story is simple enough: exactly one hundred years after a ship has been lured onto the rocks by evil-doers using false light signals, a strange, luminous fog creeps into a Californian coastal town, and this fog brings with it the vengeful spirits of the drowned sailors. Not too imaginative, but Carpenter is a craftsman who impresses with lighting, music and almost poetic tableaux – such as the sheer iconic image of the ghosts, the non-existent, emerging from the fog: waist deep in the mist, almost like they don’t exist.

Apparently Dylan also recognises its poetic power, and he explores its metaphorical potential for the chorus of “Cold Irons Bound”. Inspired, he sits with his yellow pad of paper next to the drumming David Kemper, echoing in his mind are the songs of Stanley series: Vol. 3, no. 4, and presumably he has already fixed the refrain line I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound;

“In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line. It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state.”

That’s what Dylan says in 2020 about the creation of “I Contain Multitudes”, with the addition most of my recent songs are like that (New York Times interview with Douglas Brinkley). The outpouring seems to apply one-to-one to the creation of “Cold Irons Bound”. The last line, I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound, is probably there before the previous one. Kemper’s drum pattern inspires.

It just so happens that today The Stanley Brothers are buzzing through Dylan’s mind, and via “The Fields Have Turned Brown” and “Handsome Molly” the stream of consciousness flows to “I’ll Fly Away”, to cold iron shackles on my feet, which perhaps awakens in cold irons bound from an obscure variant of “The Banks Of Inverness”.  Strong metaphor, the poet thinks, to express bound-against-your-will, to express the state of mind of his protagonist; an I-person who is love sick, standing  on the doorway, about to hit the dirt road. The musician Dylan’s particular choice of words is then, as so often, sound-driven – not on the road in iron shackles, and not like the worried man in “Worried Man Blues” twenty-one links of chain around my leg on the Rocky Mountain line, but a superior assonant triplet around the ou-sound: out – town – bound.

The bridge to that refrain line is not fixed. The poet is inspired, trusts the richness of the stream-of-consciousness and will choose different images and different words in each of the five refrains to express the loneliness and the quiet desperation of the unhappy protagonist. Here, in this first refrain, is the desolate image of disoriented people wandering through the fog. The symbolic power of this, of course, has been recognised by artists for centuries. Who knows, maybe Dylan has also browsed through the works of fellow Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse:

Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!
Leben ist Einsamsein.
Kein Mensch kennt den andern,
Jeder ist allein.

Strange, to wander in the fog,
To live is to be alone.
No man knows the next man,
Each is alone.

(Hesse, Im Nebel, 1911, transl. In the Fog Scott Horton, 2007)

Hesse reading “Im Nebel”:

Although – on a side note – this cinematic image conveying alienation and sadness probably has never been used in such a goosebumps-inducing way as in the most gorgeous “mist-song” ever, in Gene Clark’s “In A Misty Morning” from 1972;

Running through my thoughts
Were the memories of the days that I had left behind
Way down in my soul were the hopes
That better days were always there to find
The fog rolled in and the lights grew dimmer
And the sound of the city streets seemed amplified
In the misty morning when it had just been pouring
Like the clouds above the storm just had to cry

The unusual repetitions in these two chorus lines give some credence to Kempers’ story that Dylan wrote the lyrics in ten minutes. “Ten minutes” is probably more or less true, but it is likely that Dylan, the compulsive scribbler and note-taker, had already got a few one-liners up his sleeve. A refrain line like I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound and a couplet line like My love for her is taking such a long time to die have a polished perfection that suggests they were already a while in the making, the marble elegance of the coming “decaying beauty” aphorism doesn’t seem to have come out of the blue either.

Still, the atypical repetition in these couplet lines (waist deep, waist deep and almost like, almost like) is the stopgap solution of an inspired poet who does not want to lose his flow, who wants to keep the momentum going and quickly fills in the empty syllables with repetition. Atypical for the eloquent Dylan, but a ten-a-penny style characteristic of The Stanley Brothers;

Everybody I met, everybody I met, seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, no mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name, they knew not my name, 
    and I knew not their faces
I found they were all, I found they were all, rank strangers to me

To be continued. Next up: Cold Irons Bound part 3: He who is alone now, will long so remain

———-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978