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, and the most recent 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

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Between 1999 and 2002 Dylan often started his shows with a traditional folk, blues, gospel or country song, and peppered his setlist with such songs. Dylan has always looked beyond himself to the music of the past for inspiration. His very first album (Bob Dylan, 1962) contained only two Dylan songs, the rest being from the history of popular music. Dylan’s own music grew out of that history, and his early songs were set to traditional melodies.

He returned to these roots in 1970/71 for the songs on Self Portrait, and again in the early nineties, when he wasn’t writing his own songs, with two albums of traditional material, and he would return to that rich field, spectacularly, in 2014/15, with his ‘uncovers’ of songs from what is known as The Great American Songbook.

Just what Dylan was up to in these four years spanning the turn of the century did not become clear until his next album, Love and Theft, appeared in 2001. We’ll be looking at that in my next post.

When I came to the end of my survey in 1999, I added a whole post dedicated to these songs (See NET 1999, part 6), and feel it right to do the same thing for 2000, even though there are many repeats, and not much variation in arrangement and delivery. Writing this feels a bit like a rerun of my 1999 final post, and in a sense it is.

Take the Buddy Holly classic ‘Not Fade Away’. It first appeared for us in 1997 (see NET, 1997, part 2), but the bulk of Dylan’s 138 performances of this song were in 1999. By 2000 the song is beginning to fade away. He’d play it only once in 2001, a few times in 2002, and except for a one-off in 2009, that was pretty much it. Dylan sings it here, the band in full cry with some great harmonies. It’s a good bouncy song to get an audience jumping.

Not Fade Away

‘I Am the Man, Thomas’ by Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys (1971), would fully come into its own in 2002, but we have a dozen performances from 2000. Over the four years, he used it 59 times as a concert opener (See Attwood: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/15113). This one’s from Anaheim.

I am the Man, Thomas

Dylan played the traditional murder ballad, ‘Duncan and Brady’, over 80 times between 1999 and 2002. Wikipedia has an interesting entry for this song:

‘ “Duncan and Brady”, also known as “Been on the Job Too Long”, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”,[2] or simply “Brady”,[3] is a traditional murder ballad about the shooting of a policeman, Brady, by a bartender, Duncan. The song’s lyrics stemmed from actual events, involving the shooting of James Brady in the Charles Starkes Saloon in St. Louis, Missouri. Harry Duncan was convicted of the murder, and later executed.[4] Originally recorded by Wilmer Watts & his Lonely Eagles in 1929, it has been recorded numerous times, most famously by Lead Belly, also by Judy Henske, Dave Van Ronk, The Johnson Mountain Boys, New Riders of the Purple Sage, David Nelson Band, and Bob Dylan.’

You might notice that one of titles of the song, ‘Been on the Job Too Long’ is the last line of ‘Black Rider’, on Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020).

While Dylan no longer writes topical protest songs, he is still singing them. Despite his protestation that ‘things have changed’ from that song, some things it seems don’t change. (6^th Oct London)

Duncan and Brady

Described as one of the building blocks of rock’n’roll, Willie Dixon’s ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ has been recorded by everyone from Muddy Waters to Motörhead. It was first recorded by Muddy Waters, 1954. With slow, heavy beat and bluesy feel, this song was perfectly suited to the rock wave of the 1960s. Dylan plays it straight, just as he might have heard it back in the day.

Hoochie Coochie Man

‘The Newry Highwayman’ is a traditional Irish or British folk song about a criminal’s life, deeds, and death. First sung by Dylan for the NET in 1998. More evidence here, if we needed it, of Dylan’s fascination with outlaws, outsiders and criminals. ‘Joey’ comes to mind. These are songs that tell the story of a whole life, story-telling ballads, and there always was something romantic about a highwayman. Lovely to hear Dylan singing these antique melodies. (6^th Oct, London)

Newry Highway Man

‘She’s About a Mover’ is a 1965 song which was written by Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quintet in 1965 and quickly covered by several other artists. The song has a 12-bar blues structure, and is quite basic and energetic. It’s part of the blues revival of the 1960s, and could have been written a lot earlier. Like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, this song is another reminder of the importance of the blues in Dylan’s development.

She’s about a mover

Of these antique, bluesy songs, ‘House of the Rising Sun’ must be the most famous. The song appeared in America in the 1930s, but is probably derived from a traditional English folk song. Dylan included it on his first album, which would inspire The Animals to do their epic version. For all that, Dylan has only performed the song eight times. Once in the year 2000 – this one from 17^th June, George. Dylan doesn’t do it acoustically, as he originally did it. His version seems more inspired by The Animals’ version, to bring that story in full circle.

House of the Rising Sun

‘Searching for a Soldier’s Grave’ became a firm favourite of Dylan, being performed 111 times over 2000 to 2002. Written by Jim Anglin (1913-1987), although sometimes credited to Hank Williams, it was first recorded and released by the Bailes Brothers in 1946. It’s a patriotic song about someone searching for the grave of a loved one, an American soldier ‘killed in action’. It’s probably from the point of view of a wife or girlfriend. (6^th Oct London)

Searching for a Soldier’s Grave

‘This World Can’t Stand Long’ was written by Jim Anglin, Jack Anglin, Johnny Wright and was first recorded by King’s sacred Quartette in 1947, although I have seen it credited to Roy Acuff. It’s a folk gospel song about how the hate and sin in the world will bring it to an end. It ties in with Dylan’s feel for the apocalypse. (Anaheim). It has a gentle beat and Dylan gives it sensitive treatment.

This world can’t stand long

‘Hallelujah I’m Ready to Go’ is a traditional song, a more upbeat, rousing gospel song than the melancholy ‘This World Can’t Stand Long’. It wouldn’t have sounded out of place during Dylan’s gospel period (1979 -81). Again Dylan uses the band to create some cool harmonies. On a personal note, this song reminds me of when I was a kid going to the local folk club in my home town (Christchurch NZ) to listen to songs like this, songs like ‘Down by the River Side’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.

Hallelujah I’m ready to go

‘Big River’ is a Johnny Cash song from 1958, so its appeal to Dylan needs no explaining. Cash’s use of place names presages Dylan’s:

‘I met her accidentally in St. Paul, Minnesota,
And it tore me up every time I heard her drawl, Southern drawl,
Then I heard my dream was back Downstream cavortin’ in Davenport,
And I followed you, Big River, when you called.’

Is there not a flavour of ‘Tangled up in Blue’ here? (October 5^th London)

Big River

“Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” is a 19th-century American hymn written by Fanny Crosby in 1868, set to music by William H. Doane in 1870. For my 1999, part 6 post on this song I wrote: ‘the song was not performed by Dylan prior to 1999, and would only be performed five times over 1999 and 2000. It’s a country music hymn, an interesting fusion that produced many such songs. Fanny Crosby herself wrote dozens of them. Still a cowboy song, it’s about salvation rather than whisky or love woes. Dylan’s arrangement here is similar to The Stanley Brothers version released in 1960.

‘It’s something of a curiosity in this context, a dark period for Dylan in which his faith is deeply called into question by the Time out of Mind songs. ‘Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer’, he sings on ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’. Perhaps this expression of a simple, old fashioned faith appealed to Dylan during such a time, a crisis of faith if we can call it that. There’s a strong flavour of nostalgia in all of this.

There’s some particularly fine guitar work by Larry Campbell (I assume but don’t know) making his guitar sound like a mandolin – unless I’m making a fool of myself here and it is a mandolin. Whatever, it’s quite irresistible. (London, 5^th Oct)

Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior

Dylan has been performing ‘Roving Gambler’ since 1960. It’s one of those songs that has been in his blood all along. Authorship unknown, one can imagine it just grew out of the taverns and gambling houses of the wild west. It was first recorded and released by Samantha Bumgarner in 1924. This one’s from Dresden, 24^th May.

Roving Gambler

This brings to an end my six part survey of 2000, which must surely be counted as one of the outstanding years of the NET. Put together with 1999 and you have two years of Dylan in top form. We’ve seen Dylan as master vocalist, in full command of a number of styles from soft and spooky (‘Gates of Eden’), to full on baritone (‘Desolation Row’), to rough and gutsy (‘Watching the River Flow’), and dark and sinister (To Ramona). An extraordinary range of expressions.

His guitar playing, while still strangely off key and dissonant has become much more disciplined, and we saw the driving power of his acoustic guitar in ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Tangled up in Blue’. The harmonica did a bit more work than in 1999, but was still kept pretty much in the background. Hard to forget the wicked harp in ‘The Wicked Messenger’.

Dylan was certainly on a roll, whatever he says on ‘Highlands’, and he would keep on rolling right through 2001 with the arrival of his next album, Love and Theft.

Until next time, stay safe and keep dodging lions.

Kia Ora

You can read a little about all our writers in our bibliography files

By Tony Attwood

This series traces Bob Dylan’s composing in the order in which the songs were written.  There is an index to all the episodes here.

In the last episode of “All Directions” (part 64) we got to Floater – and we have seen Bob move into an approach to song writing in which he would take a song from the past that he liked, and then rewrite it or amend it or in other ways play with it.  And this very much continued all the way through this period from 2001 on to 2005.

In fact the very next song after Floater (“Moonlight”) and the last in this sequence of song borrowings (“Tell Ol’ Bill”), were both developed from Carter Family songs.    The difference is the “Meet me by the moonlight” really is a long way from “Moonlight”, whereas with “Tell Ol Bill” the relationship is much closer .

This is not to suggest the songs are not enjoyable – they certainly are – and indeed had anyone else created this collection it would be heralded.  It is just that at the end of the 1990s Bob had created a totally wonderful and as far as I know completely original song for a movie, along with an album that is considered by many to be an utter masterpiece, and maybe we felt he could carry on at that level without evolving songs from the works of others.

But in all work is borrowed and evolved, and most certainly in the works of Shakespeare (to take but one writer of a certain renown) much is “borrowed” from the past.  Indeed even “All the world’s a stage”, perhaps the greatest metaphor in the language,  appeared in Damon and Pythias which was completed by Richard Edwards in the year of Shakespeare’s birth.  “Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage.”

But Bob wasn’t just turning to the Carter Family for inspiration.  For example Po’ Boy uses chords that many of us everyday musicians have to go and look up, and that sequence certainly seems to me to be totally original, but lyrically it seems to be giving a nod to “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” – two children’s books deeply embedded in English culture but musically… well, it’s not very Dylan at all.

As for those chords I am not saying I couldn’t sort out all those chords, but, you know, given that I had people coming round for dinner, it just seemed easier to take Eyolf Østrem’s word for it: Fmaj7, F6, F#m7-5, Bm7-5 etc etc.   It’s not that it is not an original sequence, I am sure it is, but rather it looks and sounds like a way to find  something new to write: a deliberate “I know let’s use some obscure chords” as opposed to pure inspiration (which I take “Things have changed” to be).

What’s more Bob then composed another single chord piece (with a couple of passing chords): “High Water”.  Highly enjoyable but almost as if, since he’s done a song with insanely complex chords, now he’ll do one with the most simple chords.

(And incidentally maybe that is why Barb Jungr’s reinterpretation of it goes in a totally different direction!)

Which is not to say that such decision making is wrong, or makes  the songs any less interesting.  No, what I am trying to say is that at this moment Bob changed his way of writing, making structural decisions about his songs, rather than just letting them emerge.

To put it another way, an example would be that of the poet who sits down and let’s it all pour our of his head, as opposed to one who is reading someone else’s work and thinks, “wow that’s good” and takes his inspiration from that point.  Bob had moved at this time from the former to the latter.

Additionally, listening to the songs in the order they were written does indeed make it seem also as if Dylan was pulling in references to all the blues songs he hasn’t referenced so far in his compositions, and in the end there seem to be so many references, one can get carried away finding them.  But of course it is still important to hear them as what they are: great songs.

And Bob did have a treat in store, which was saved for the end, as he concluded the year’s album writing with Sugar Baby, a really remarkable looking-back song; an insightful piece with thoughts and notions that don’t connect, that can’t co-exist, but within the song absolutely do just that.  A reflection on all the songs that he has written during the year perhaps.

But yes also once more digging into those highly unusual chords, some of which are created by only using five of the six strings on a re-tuned guitar.   Again please turn to Mr Østrem for definitive details, but I can say that although I consider myself not an incompetent guitarist, I wouldn’t fancy playing these anywhere but on the piano (wherein life is much easier with some of these chord inversions).  It’s almost as if Bob is saying to us mere mortals – “Ok guys, now work out what I’m doing here.”

So my point is not that these are not good songs – indeed this commentary ends with what I consider to be one of Bob’s greatest pieces – but rather it is to note that he had changed approaches.  And I would urge you to listen to this.

Sugar Baby, get on down the road
You ain’t got no brains, no how
You went years without me
Might as well keep going now

And indeed for anyone who has lived a lively, varied and interesting life and who really knows what emotions are all about, the line

Some of these memories you can learn to live with 
    and some of them you can’t

really summarises everything.

Finally this year Bob wrote another piece of film music: “Waitin’ for You”.  It is a waltz, and Bob played well over 100 times in concert and which ends with the line “Happiness is but a state of mind.”  OK, I get that, but taking the song as a whole (melody, accompaniment, lyrics) it’s not a song I understand at all – and maybe in all these play-throughs Bob was just celebrating that he had written a waltz.  I am not sure if he had written one before – if you know of one (by which I mean a song in straight 3/4 time) do let me know.

Film music was obviously something Bob was fascinated by at this time, and I imagine he now received a vast number of requests to write something for a movie.   But after the album tracks of 2001 Bob contented himself with just one composition in 2002, “Cross the Green Mountain”, and this most certainly was a song that related to the movie for which it was composed.

The song also marks a major moment in Dylan’s relationship to the work of Henry Timrod, and in doing so he also used a technique he had explored before, as for example with the work of Dylan Thomas, changing “The goat-and-daisy dingles” from Under Milkwood into “The cloak and dagger dangles”.

Before Cross the Green Mountain, Dylan was doing that with the work of Henry Timrod taking

That distant peak which on our vale looks down
And wears the star of evening for a crown

to turn into

My pretty baby, she’s lookin’ around
She wears a multi-thousand dollar gown

Timrod, a civil war poet, confesses that he cannot unravel the unknowable mystery of how and why the Universe exists; indeed, as time passes, the Civil War poet contends that, like a Swedenborgian Creator, God is falling farther and farther back into the vast emptiness of space.

Somehow that seems to fit exactly where Bob had got to by now – indeed one might take from that vision the line “I used to care but things have changed”.

And given that Bob was a figure of world-renown, he had nothing to prove, and so he was perfectly entitled to contemplate any aspect of the world that took his fancy in any way that he liked.  And in doing so he found himself facing a type of darkness that is present in “Things have changed” and indeed in “Sugar Baby”.  It is a pretty awful world and people can behave pretty badly in it.  As I noted before, “God is not dead, he’s just missing.”

Thus overall it seems to me that from 1996 onward Bob was by and large suggesting that it might not be dark yet but it most certainly would be pretty soon.

And then in the midst of all this, Bob came up with something utterly different.   “Tell Ol’ Bill” was made for is “North Country” which the New York Times called “an old-fashioned liberal weepie about truth and justice.”   Like “Green Mountain” it lost money, but it’s losses in terms of film production were modest, and it was fairly highly acclaimed, getting a 63% approval rating as opposed to an 8% approval rating for “Gods and Generals”.

Now, if you have been reading my ramblings for a while you may have noted that I hold one version of Tell Ol’ Bill in very high regard, and I do want to take some time to examine both it, and the Carter Family original from which it evolved, in more depth.  I’ll save that for the next episode.

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

by Larry Fyffe

A dangerous business perhaps, but Bob Dylan leaves lots of clues in his song lyrics that he’s been searching for the hidden tomb of Mary Magdalene, and her daughter by the Christian Messiah.

As we have seen, Bob’s got Mary’s burial site narrowed down to Egypt – like Indiana Jones in the movies, he believes the great Sphinx statue (near the Nile River where Moses was hidden as a baby) has something to do with it, and the discovery of her remains could clarify to one and all what Mary Magdalene be really like.

The singer/songwriter throws down a few red herrings to divert barking religious hound dogs from the trail:

I'm just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones
And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again
(I Contain Multitudes)

Dylan also turns right to the Elysian Fields, not left to Hell, in the song “Key West”:

You stay to the left, and then you lean to the right
Feel the sun on your skin, and the heeling virtues of the wind
Key West, Key West, is the land of light
(Key West)

Known as ‘Horus Of The Nile’, the protective human-headed, lion-bodied Sphinx is equated in Greek mythology to a man-eating beast that has the head of a woman, the wings of a falcon, and the body of a lion.

The Dylavinci Code rejects that dark view, and suggests there’s a secret door that leads to the light and truth about the mother of Christ’s child.

According to an Old Testament Gnostic-like prophet, the throne of God is held up by angels with the face of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle:

As for the likeness of their faces
They four had the face of a man
And the face of a lion, on the right side
And they four had the face of an ox on the left side
They four also had the face of an eagle
(Ezekiel 1:10)

Alluded in the song lyrics below:

Beat a path of retreat
Up them spiral staircases
Pass the tree of smoke
Pass the angel with four faces
Begging God for mercy
(Angelina)

The songwriter struggles with the vision of Mary Magdalene, with the child of Jesus wrapped up in her arms, where she is portrayed by at  least some New Testament Christians as a former prostitute in need of repentance:

Queen Mary, she's my friend
Yes, I believe I'll go and see her again
Nobody has to guess that baby can't be blessed
'Til she finally sees that's that she's like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls
(Just Like A Woman)

Mary Magdalene is Bob Dylan’s friend, and he’s grateful that she’s travelled with him this far, right to the very end.

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Dear Dr. Ralph

“It was a really great band. And I’m sorry not to be in it today. I miss Bob and I miss that band.” Drummer David Kemper does open the doors to his heart, in Uncut’s wonderful interview series surrounding the release of Tell Tale Signs (2008), number 8 in The Bootleg Series. For the thirteen-part interview series, Uncut talks to men like engineer Malcolm Burn, drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Mason Ruffner and producer Daniel Lanois, men who were directly involved in the making of albums like Oh Mercy, Time Out Of Mind and Love And Theft; records Dylan made between 1989 and 2006.

It provides a wealth of amusing anecdotes, inside information, and intimate glimpses into Dylan’s working methods. Like the story of David Kemper, Dylan’s drummer from 1996 to 2003, about the making of “Cold Irons Bound”.  Kemper remembers the recording day, January 1997 at Criteria Studios in Miami. He’s earlier than the appointed time, he’s alone in the studio and starts drumming – a variation on a pattern he heard on his way here, “this disco record with a Cuban beat”.

“So I was playing this drum beat, and then Bob snuck up behind me and said, ‘What are you playing?’ I said, ‘Hey Bob, how are you today?’ He said, ‘No, don’t stop, keep playing, what are you playing?’ I said, ‘It’s a beat, I’m just writing it right now.’ ‘Don’t stop it. Keep doing it.’ And he went and got a yellow pad of paper and sat next to the drums, and he just started writing. And he wrote for maybe ten minutes, and then he said, ‘Will you remember that?’ And I said, yeah, I got it. And then he said, all right, everybody come on in, I want to put this down.”

A “disco record with a Cuban beat” can indeed be heard in it. Miami Sound Machine’s “Bad Boy”, for example. But despite the not-so-subtle addition “I’m just writing it right now”, neither David Kemper nor Gloria Estefan get any credit.

Anyway, Kemper suggests that the drum pattern inspires Dylan so much that he hears a song in it and in ten minutes comes up with the complete lyrics for “Cold Irons Bound”. In line with more anecdotes from other witnesses who tell how amazingly fast Dylan can produce lyrics, anecdotes we’ve heard before, but fascinating it remains still. And, as far as possible, insightful; at the very least, it gives a glimpse into the workings of a Nobel Prize-winning poet’s creative mind.

After the first two lines, it is already clear what the inspired Dylan has in mind today;

I’m beginning to hear voices and there’s no one around
Well, I’m all used up and the fields have turned brown
I went to church on Sunday and she passed by
My love for her is taking such a long time to die

… “The Fields Have Turned Brown” is quite a giveaway. By The Stanley Brothers, Dylan’s bluegrass heroes who we encounter more than once here on Time Out Of Mind (on the highway of regret in “Make You Feel My Love”, for example). This particular song seems to be haunting him – it’s also the song Dylan quotes in the congratulatory telegram he sends to the jubilee Dr Ralph Stanley two months earlier, on 9 November 1996. Dylan is often mentioned in the autobiography Man Of Constant Sorrow (written with Eddie Dean, 2007) – Stanley is, rightly, proud of the fact that Dylan admires him so much. He mentions that telegram from 1996 twice, and the second time he reveals its contents:

“They had a big celebration for me in Nashville in honor of my fiftieth anniversary as a professional musician. There was a fancy reception at the Country Music Hall of Fame, with all kinds of friends from down through the years and former Clinch Mountain Boys there to greet me. Then I played a show with my band at the Grand Ole Opry. During the show, Opry host Del Reeves announced to the crowd he had a telegram “a special fan” had sent from New York City. The telegram said:

“DEAR DR. RALPH.
THE FIELDS HAVE TURNED BROWN.
NOT FOR YOU, THOUGH.
YOU’LL LIVE FOREVER.
BEST WISHES, BOB DYLAN.”

That was something I didn’t expect, and it was a wonderful surprise. I know what Bob meant in his message, and it really touched my heart. I know he meant my music would be around long after I’m dead and gone.”

And just as gladly (also twice), he recalls that “we sang together on Lonesome River for the Clinch Mountain Country album”, and that “Bob Dylan told me it was the highlight of his career when he sang with me on Lonesome River.” That duet was recorded on Sunday, 30 November 1997, ten months after the recording of “Cold Irons Bound”. Remarkably then is the first half of the sound check for the concert in Atlanta, the next day (Monday, December 1):

1.   Unidentified Blues
2.  Cold Irons Bound
3.  The White Dove (Carter Stanley)
4.  The White Dove (Carter Stanley)
5.  Cocaine Blues (trad.)

… apparently Dylan still feels the strong connection of “Cold Irons Bound” with The Stanley Brothers. Which goes beyond “The Fields Have Turned Brown”. The third line, I went to church on Sunday and she passed by, comes almost literally from the Stanley’s version of “Handsome Molly”, the old folksong Dylan himself also played in ’61 and ’62, but back then always skipping this verse:

I'd think of Handsome Molly
Wherever she may be
Well I saw her at church last Sunday
She passed me on by
I knew her mind was changing
By the roving of her eye

… an omission that Dylan makes up for almost forty years later in “Cold Irons Bound”.

All in all: “The Fields Have Turned Brown”, “Handsome Molly”, the theme and tone of Stanley Brothers songs like “If That’s The Way You Feel”, “The Lonesome River” and “The Memory Of Your Smile”… it seems very likely that on his way to the studio Dylan had the compilation album Stanley series: Vol. 3, no. 4 in the CD player. And that the chorus of “I’ll Fly Away” could be buzzing through his head next: No more cold iron shackles on my feet. However, Mark T., an alert Untold reader, recalls an old folk song in which the peculiar expression in cold irons bound is sung verbatim: “The Banks Of Inverness”.

This old folksong has many variants, and this particular line is also sung in many variants. John Healy sings, “For he’s bound in iron chains along a foreign shore”, Julie Mainstone sings “For he’s bound in irons along some distant shore”, and variants such as “For he’s bound in irons strong upon a Turkish shore” and “For he’s bound up in irons strong all on fair Turkey’s shore” can also be found. A recording with the words in cold irons bound cannot be found, but researchers from California State University, Fresno report in their Ballad Index:

“The sailor sees a girl sighing on the banks of the (Inver)ness. He asks her if she is available. She says she is engaged to Willie. He declares that Willie is “in cold irons bound” and will not return. She says she will remain faithful. He reveals himself.”

… which is far too specific to be a coincidence.

By the way, we don’t have to feel too sorry for David Kemper, who misses drumming in Dylan’s band so much. He has an enviable career, playing with all the greats, was in the Jerry Garcia Band for eleven years, drummed in Holland with Focus, in Nashville for ex-Eagle Bernie Leadon, in Malibu with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and in London he recorded perhaps his most beautiful drumming: his session work for Joan Armatrading’s masterpiece Show Some Emotion (1977).

In the many highlights, in masterful songs like “Willow” and the title track, but especially in “Peace Of Mind”, we can hear why an Eagle, a Beach Boy, the supreme Deadhead Jerry Garcia and the living legend Bob Dylan are so charmed by Kemper’s superior drumming; understated, elegant, all-round, tasteful and with that special, mesmerising Mick Fleetwood quality of playing just microseconds behind the beat.

David Kemper will live forever, too.

To be continued. Next up: Cold Irons Bound part 2: To live is to be alone

——–

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

• Dylan Adjacent: Charlie Sexton
• Dylan Adjacent: Bob and Larry Campbell
• Dylan Adjacent: Echo in the Canyon

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

The people we are looking at in this series are artists who have a direct connection to Dylan and his work or life. So they could be from his backing bands, friends from back in the day or even family members.

The research and introductory commentary is by Aaron Galbraith in the USA with further comments added while listening to the recordings, by Tony Attwood in the UK.

Aaron: It’s been awhile since the last one in the Dylan Adjacent series.  Let’s take a quick look at the solo career of one time Dylan co-writer – Helena Springs.

Following her stint with Dylan she became a backing singer of some success. She sings on a couple of early Pet Shop Boys hits including West End Girls and Opportunities in 1986. Prior to that she performed backing vocals for David Bowie including his Live Aid set.

As far as I can tell she only released two solo albums – Helena (1986) followed by New Love (1987). The albums contain a song she co-wrote with the Pet Shop Boys plus one by Genesis’s Mike Rutherford.

Now it’s time for Tony to take a listen to some music and leave us his thoughts on these! Be warned these are so mid-80s I feel like I’m back at my school disco!!

Her first single was I Want You (not the Dylan song – this is a Springs’ original). I tried to find an audio only version but only the music video was available on YouTube.

Tony: A lot of the time I don’t get what some of these video producers are up to at all.  It is as if they believe that the music is merely an accompaniment to their fanciful cut and paste jobs, when surely in most cases the video is only there as an accompaniment to or perhaps occasionally an extension of, the music.

Now this doesn’t matter at all, in situations in which we all know the song so well we can hear it in our heads, and thus are ready to have another medium thrust in on top.  But when listening to a song that one doesn’t know, it is nothing but a distraction unless it adds to the meaning of the music.

It’s a jolly song with a really fine production avoiding all the obvious tricks of engineering that can sometimes be forced upon us poor listeners and viewers, but I am not too sure I really want to hear it again.  I most certainly don’t want  to see the video again.

But then that’s all a bit unfair because it’s not my style of music.  It is just straight heavy production pop, and I don’t really go for that.  I am sure it is very good of its type, but that’s about it.

Interestingly, I couldn’t find the lyrics on line, for I wanted to compare them with Dylan’s “I want you” but couldn’t bear the thought of listening to Helena’s work again and then line by line writing the lyrics down.  No one seems to have them on line; maybe there is nothing there.

Aaron: The second album contained 3 singles, including Midnight Lady, the ballad Be Soft With Me Tonight…

Tony: Sorry but I am annoyed again by the musical accompaniment: that strange combination of a bass playing the same two notes and a melody that goes to unexpected places for no sort of reason while the rest of the accompaniment does the more normal orchestral arrangement behind a pop song.  (I swear those guys have about a couple of dozen arrangements on file, listen to the melody and then say, “ah yes, I think this is an accompaniment number 6” and they find the tape and drop it in.

And since I am in moaning mood there are a couple of jerk modulations in here in which the piece changes key simply by moving up a semi-tone.  It is used as a short hand way of saying, “we are moving up a gear” which the music isn’t at all.  It’s crashing a gear like a learner driver with a manual gearbox.  (Dylan as you may know, never, if ever, changes key in a song).

I don’t know… maybe someone who likes this type of music can find something good to say.  It’s not that it is bad, she’s not singing out of tune or anything, it is just that there is nothing here that hasn’t been done a million times before and will be done a million times after.

Aaron: And finally the self written Prince-esque Paper Money.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oOl50cpiKLY

Tony:  OK, this accompaniment is different but there is nothing really interesting within this.   And why the oh-oh-oh vocal accompaniment?   Besides, why the lyrics “Paper money makes your dream come true.”  No it doesn’t.  It’s unlimited credit that does that – for a little while before everything falls down.

But there is one thing that runs all the way through these songs: the unexpected chord change and jump to another key for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Aaron: I wonder why she didn’t choose to include any of the songs she wrote with Dylan on her two albums. Would have definitely been a major selling point.

Tony: I think she was probably trying to show that she was a songwriter in her own right, and not riding on the back of Dylan (if you will forgive the phrase).

But really listen to the singing of the line, “Paper money makes your dream come true”.  On “true” we get an unexpected chord change – which is one of Dylan’s techniques occasionally, but for Ms Springs it always sounds forced – as if she has remembered Bob doing it, and now thinks it it de rigueur for the inventive composer who is going places.

She is going places, but they are always the same places.  I don’t know if any of these were hits or indeed had any impact on popular culture, but really I just think they are very everyday.

The website on her, from last fm says “In 1986 she signed a solo deal with Arista records and released the singles “I want you” & “Paper Money”. Both were popular in the clubs, but failed to be pop hits. In 1987 she released the album “New Love” which also contained the singles “Midnight Lady” and “Be soft with me tonight.”

And that’s about it, so I guess at that point she stopped working in the music business or the music business stopped working with her.

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

by Larry Fyffe

From the reporting of his time-travelling adventures, our readers can readily see that singer/songerwriter Bob Dylan secretly encodes the story of the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the birth of their daughter, in a number of  song lyrics.

The fragmented manuscripts found by ‘Untold’ in the Holy Grail leaves no doubt that Dylan indeed has the ability to travel back through space and time.

Fear of what mainstream religious authorities could do explains why Bob Dylan does not come right out, and write down what he discovers about the history of the past.

Instead, the singer drops symbolic clues, mostly in lyrics, so that attentive listeners might figure out the story for themselves.

One of the biggest clues is the diagram on the back cover of Dylan’s ‘Blood On The Tracks’ album.

It’s one thing to say Mary has a daughter by Christ; quite another to point out where the bodies of mother Mary Magdalene, and Sophia Sarah, her daughter, are buried.

In the pictorial diagram, two sepulchres are shown enclosed at the bottom of a pyramid, topped by a hard-to-distinguish ‘Eye of Horus’, an Egyptian symbol of regeneration.

Gluing together the fragments of a song stuffed in the Holy Grail demonstrate that the following lyrics, referring to the birth of  Maggie’s daughter, are changed in the modern rendition:

I can hear a sweet voice gently calling
Must be the Mother of our Adored
(Duquesne Whistle)

Spanish-speaking Mary Magdalene apparently travels to France from Mexico – so indicated by the French word ‘duquesne’ which means “of the oaks” in English. ‘Adored’ then refers to Sophia, her child born beneath the oaks of France.

The line later changed from the neutral ‘adored’ to the masculine ‘Lord’ so as to mesh with the biblical story of Joseph and the other Mary that’s told by the orthodox high priests of Christianity.

The revelations of the DylavincI Code indicate that the burial site of Mary Magdalene, later joined there by her daughter, is in Egypt.

The recently written song, quoted below, warns that one must be careful, however.  Beware, on an exceptionally cold and snowy night in Egypt, no bodies are found:

We came to the pyramids all embedded in ice
He said, there's a body I'm trying to find
If I carry it out, it'll bring a good price
'Twas then that I knew what was on his mind

The body to be carried out of the tomb is intended of course to be that of  Dylan himself, murdered by a hired assassin. The killer then paid off by authorities from the established Church should he succeed.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream Part 1: There’s very little that you can’t imagine not happening
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 2 – Blow Boys Blow
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream  part 3: Your waitress: Captain America
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 4: I knew Thomas Jefferson
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 5: Almost like a Buster Keaton or something
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 6: Caput vel cauda
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 7: I’ve never been able to read the damned thing

XIII       The historians’ delight

Well, the last I heard of Arab, he was stuck on a whale
That was married to the deputy sheriff of the jail
But the funniest thing was, when I was leavin' the bay
I saw three ships a-sailin', they were all heading my way
I asked the captain what his name was
And how come he didn't drive a truck
He said his name was Columbus, I just said, "Good luck"

 In August 2021, The Journal of Neuroscience publishes the article “The Music Of Silence” by French researcher Guilhem Marion. It is a fascinating study that explains the effect of  both imagined music and music actually heard, on our mood, (among other things). And it might explain Dylan’s bright mood and infectious burst of laughter on Wednesday, January 13, 1965, when he sets out to record “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” during the first Bringing It All Back Home session.

Marion and his colleagues build on a phenomenon described earlier, the phenomenon that listening to music activates the reward system in the brain. While listening, our brain tries to predict the music, anticipates the course of the melody, and “rewards” this with dopamine. It does not matter whether the prediction is correct; the surprise after an incorrect prediction (for example: the next note is higher than expected) has the same, pleasure-inducing, effect.

The remarkable thing is that the same thing happens when we just imagine music, playing it in our heads; the same brain areas become active, dopamine is released. For Dylan a fairly permanent state of being, if we are to believe his words in the interview with Hilburn (Amsterdam 1984) for the L.A. Times:

“What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it’s a proven fact that it’ll help them relax. I don’t meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

Which song Dylan is playing in his head on that Wednesday in January ’65 is not hard to figure out: his own “Motorpsycho Nitemare”, which he taped seven months earlier in this same studio. Same chords, same melody. He plays the song in his head, “at a certain point, some of the words will change” and Bob’s your uncle. And the by-product is, as explained scientifically in August 2021, feelings of happiness and pleasure – because “imagery induces the same emotions and pleasure felt during musical listening because melodic expectations are encoded similarly in both cases”, after all. Hence the susceptibility to a fit of laughter, as Dylan demonstrates in that first run-up to “115th Dream”. Apparently Dylan starts playing unexpectedly. The band, in any case, doesn’t react – the infectious laughter of Dylan and producer Tom Wilson might be triggered by the startled reactions of the shaken musicians.

Anyway: the song begins, and the first line promises that it will be a kind of “When First Unto This Country”, the song Dylan will perform twice on stage a quarter of a century later. At this point, in January ’65, Joan Baez’s version is probably in the back of his mind (later released as a bonus track on In Concert Part 2, 1963, Baez’s first record to feature Dylan songs). The promise only holds one line, obviously, and thematically “115th Dream” is otherwise incomparable. Yes, one plot twist is similar: in that old folksong, the main character also ends up in prison;

Sheriff's men, they'd followed and overtaken me
They took me away to the penitentiary
They took me to the jailhouse and then they shoved me in
They shaved off my head and they cleared off my chin

Undoubtedly Dylan also knew the song from The New Lost City Ramblers, who performed it regularly in the early 1960s. But the closest thing to it is the adaptation by Phil Ochs, presumably 1963, who turns it into an anti-war song. Like the 115th dream, the protagonist travels in time from 1776 via Napoleon to the 1846 Mexican-American War, to the Civil War, the Spanish-American War of 1898, via the World Wars to Korea. There is a photograph from about 1964, in which it seems that Ochs is playing a song to Dylan – but the assumption that Ochs is playing “When First Unto This Country”, thus sowing the seed for “115th Dream”, is a bit all too romantic, of course.

Ochs’ song perhaps also demonstrates why, despite all his talent and all his skills, he has never achieved the same status as Dylan; Ochs’ “When First Unto This Country” is craftsmanship from a politically inspired idealist. Chronologically correct, inner logic in order, indestructible rhyme scheme, no alienating nonsense like I asked how come he didn’t drive a truck and half-successful one-liners like

And when that war was over there was no one left to fight
So we turned and fought each other--to the historians' delight

… where that arduous, sought-after historians’ delight illustrates the pitfall: humourless and preachy. Jude Quinn, Cate Blanchett’s Dylan character in the remarkable movie I’m Not There (2007), expresses it a bit too sharply at the press conference scene, but the tenor of the criticism gets right to the point:

“There’s… there’s no one out there who’s ever going to be converted by a song. There’s no Phil Ochs song that’s going to keep a movement moving nor the picket line picketing. His songs are acts of personal conscience, like burning a draft card or burning yourself. Doesn’t do a damn thing except disassociate you and your audience from all the evils of the world.”

Which, as if to make Jude Quinn’s/Cate Blanchett’s point, is exactly what the narrator in “115th Dream” does in the last lines. He takes off, minutes before America is discovered – he disassociates himself quite literally from all the evils of the New World and wishes good luck to the unsuspecting suckers who are about to dock.

An act of personal conscience. Still, one that releases enough dopamine to make us all feel 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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In this series we look at some fine, but also less well known, covers of Dylan compositions with Aaron making the selections and Tony playing the game of writing a review while the song is playing.

A list of previous articles in the series is given at the end

Aaron:  Lay Lady Lay has been covered well over 100 times so it’s quite a challenge to pick out 4 or 5 interesting or unusual versions. Here’s my attempt!

First up as a tribute to the late great Don Everly, it’s the Everly Brothers from their brilliant reunion album “EB84”.  As sometimes happens there are regional restrictions on this recording, so we’ve put it in twice.

Tony: We all know it so well that just re-running the song in the style of Dylan isn’t going to do any artist or the audience any good, and here the Brothers with subtlety  change the rhythm of the lyrics (the rhythm being is at the core of the song).  So by and large we get the melody as was but with enough rhythmic change to catch us out each time with every line.

I used to love the music of the Brothers but then the attraction faded as I found there was simply not enough therein to keep me going back to songs.  But it was very refreshing to hear those distinctive harmonies once more.  And to listen to subtle changes that really can refresh a song – simply by changing the way the title line is spread out, leaving a rest on the first half beat of the bar.

Aaron: Duran Duran – from their critically derided 1995 covers album “Thank You”, (Q magazine voted it the worst album of all time!) This was one of the better tracks from that album.

Tony: So what was I doing in the 1980s?  Bringing up three tiny daughters, and setting up my publishing company and ad agency.  Which is probably why Duran Duran didn’t make an impact on me.

Of course I know them now, and I liked this all the way through to the last 20 seconds or so which seems to me like a fill-in because the producer has said, “we need another 20 seconds guys”.

But it’s nice and gentle and unchallenging which is fine for a song we all know by heart. And the way “big brass bed” is extended just slightly does a bit more for grabbing attention, along with the contrast of the two voices.

It’s nice, enjoyable, the orchestration works fine so there must have been something pretty awful in the rest of the album for it to have such bad reviews and reputation.  The think the arranger loses it a bit in the middle 8, trying too hard to make it different, but it’s not the first time that has happened.

Aaron: Pete Drake played with Dylan on the original version. He also played on all three of Bob’s Nashville albums, as well as All Things Must Pass for George Harrison and Beaucoups of Blues for Ringo Starr.

Tony: Wow that guy has a cv and a half, which makes me wonder why he decided to use such a similar percussion background in his instrumental version.  Surely he has enough musical knowledge to take this somewhere else.

Actually I really don’t like the guitar technique in this – it all seems very gimmicky – including making the guitar sound like a voice and vice versa.   What is the point?

This really is my issue with covers: I want cover versions that give me new insight into the original song.  Otherwise it is just like we used to do as a semi-pro band touring the local clubs: playing other people’s hits with just a tiny bit of variation, but mostly trying to sound like the original group.

Not for me this one: I would have expected more.

Aaron: Pete explained how he gets the strange effects on the vocals.

“You play the notes on the guitar and it goes through the amplifier. I have a driver system so that you disconnect the speakers and the sound goes through the driver into a plastic tube. You put the tube in the side of your mouth then form the words with your mouth as you play them. You don’t actually say a word: The guitar is your vocal cords, and your mouth is the amplifier. It’s amplified by a microphone.”

Tony: And was it worth it?

Aaron: Let’s finish up this time with another of Bob’s old Greenwich village buddies. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott from his 1970 album Bull Durham Sacks And Railroad Tracks.

Tony: What gives cover artists a hard time is the opening chord sequence.  It is so very unusual such that I am sure most people would only have to hear the chords to know the song, even if they had no musical knowledge at all.

That sequence is A, C#m, G, Bm.

In fact I don’t know any other song that uses that, and indeed if anyone did compose a song using that sequence, those listening would immediately say “That’s Lay Lady Lay”.  This doesn’t mean that each song has to have its own sequence – and they don’t.  A billion songs have the 12 bar blues sequence of three chords.   No, it is just that I don’t think anyone had written a popular melody around this sequence before, which means we always associate it with this song.

So to do something different is more difficult – especially as the rhythm is so distinctive too.  That’s why I like the Everly’s version.

Here there’s nothing done to change melody or chords or rhythm – everything depends on the voice and that simple guitar accompaniment, and that is very clever and very effective.

And yet this is the one I could play again and again – I know the song inside out and upside down of course, but this is so subtle in its changes, it is beautiful.  It is exquisite, and so suddenly a song I do know inside out is given a new life for me.

The technique is so simple, so clear, and ultimately so downright beautiful, I must hear it again.  He has done the impossible – improved on the original.

Thanks Aaron, not for the first time, I owe you for introducing me to something old in a wonderful new guise.

Previously in this series.

• Abandoned Love
• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• All along the watchtower
• Boots of Spanish Leather
• Blind Willie McTell
• Dignity
• Girl from the north country”
• Every Grain of Sand, worked, re-worked, and worked again 
• Hollis Brown, and why does it all have to be like this?
• The Hour that the ship comes in
• John Brown (but not beautiful)
• Just like a woman
• The man in me
• One more one more one more cup of coffee
• Only a Pawn in their Game: the unique cover versions
• Subterranean Homesick Blues
• Watching the River Flow

And also…

• The album of extraordinary rarities now has its own page.

So far Dylan in 2000 has been covered via

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

A full index to all previous articles in the series is given here.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Bedrock songs are those, mostly written in the 1960s, which Dylan keeps alive in performance. They tend to come and go, and in 1999/2000 they were not performed as often, as the setlists had to make way for Time out of Mind songs and the many cover songs that Dylan did in these years. Some of them are quite rarely performed, such as ‘Song to Woody’, Dylan’s first composition [see footnote], one of only two Dylan songs that appear on his first album Bob Dylan (1962).

We first saw this song performed in 1999, (see NET, 1999, part 4) and here it is again. It is a tribute, not only to Dylan’s mentor, Woody Guthrie, but to the tradition of folk and blues which shaped Dylan as a song writer and singer. This is from Dresden, 25^th May, and to my mind it is a superior recording to the 1999 performance. It feels closer and more intimate.

Song to Woody

Another song which made its first appearance on the NET in 1999 is ‘Fourth Time Around’ (1966), a nasty little tale written to the melody of ‘Norwegian Wood’ by Lennon and McCartney, a song Dylan thought sounded suspiciously like one of his own. It has been understood as a ‘morning after’ song, a fling that ended in rage and violence – ‘She worked on my face before breaking my eyes…’ The sweetness of the melody belies the content. The song, like ‘Ballad in Plain D’, could well be about the stress of lying; a relationship built on sex and lies will tend to end this way, in ignominy and flight.

As with ‘Song to Woody’, Dylan doesn’t mess with the song, playing it pretty much as he first did on Blonde on Blonde. The soft voice, the gently tinkling acoustic guitar, the deadly intent.

Fourth Time Around

If these two songs are rarely performed, ‘She Belongs to Me’ is not. It’s a Dylan favourite, this one. As I’ve said before, the title of the song is deeply ironic. She doesn’t belong to anyone, in fact you might end up belonging to her.

In this performance (Portsmouth), he increases the tempo, provides a richer backing, and cranks up the urgency of the song. Here Dylan is reaching for the kind of pounding beat he will later develop for the song post 2012. Incidentally, Dylan’s genius for concision, putting complex things into a nutshell, is very evident in this song:

‘She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black’

That’s almost Shakespearean in its play of opposites. Or what about this, a character sketch in one line:

‘She wears an Egyptian ring, it sparkles before she speaks.’

She Belongs to Me

If any 1960s song prefigures Dylan’s conversion to Christianity at the end of the 1970s, it would have to be ‘I Shall Be Released’ (1967). It has been seen as an anti-death penalty song, or a song about release from prison. Possibly, but those interpretations seem too literal to me. Dylan uses prison imagery (note ‘Cold Irons Bound’ and ‘Drifters Escape’) to suggest a spiritual incarceration in the prison of our own lies and denial (‘there’s a man who swears he’s not to blame’). But the release referred to may also point to death. The sun shines from the west to the east when it is low in the sky, about to sink.

Although short and to the point, the song lends itself to epic treatment. When the band joins Dylan on the chorus, and we have a rich, countrified backing sound, the song becomes an anthem, and the prospect of release becomes a yearning.

I shall be released

Another epic, even more familiar to us, is the dirge-like ‘Forever Young’. The song is a prayer, a fervent but forlorn hope. In his notes to ‘Biograph’ Dylan says the song was written to ‘one of my boys’ and that ‘The lines came to me, they were done in a minute… the song wrote itself’. Critics have noted how this song slyly references Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn:

‘For ever warm and still to be enjoyed
For ever panting and for ever young’

The sting in the tail is that those figures on the Grecian Urn are not alive, which is why they are not subject to time. W B Yeats too, evokes the same prayer for his daughter (‘Prayer for my daughter’):

‘May she be granted beauty, and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught’

‘Forever Young’ is a dedication to hope infused with melancholy, for such hopes are forlorn. This beautiful performance is from Cardiff. Note how the band joins Dylan on the chorus, just as with ‘I Shall Be Released’ and with similar effect – to create an anthem, in this case to youth.

Forever Young.

‘Rip down all hate, I screamed’, Dylan sings in ‘My Back Pages’, neatly encapsulating the paradox of liberalism. This sentiment, and the song itself, seemed to mark a break with Dylan’s liberal leanings, but the signs are there in other songs too, even his protest songs – ‘While others say don’t hate nothin’ at all/ except hatred’. Dylan saw that one can becomes one’s own enemy by becoming a soldier for liberty and equality:

‘In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach’

However, nothing could be more revolutionary than the notion that we can’t use ‘ideas as our maps’. What can we use as maps, if not ideas? If we take ‘Chimes of Freedom’ as some indicator, then revelation becomes our guiding force. Revelation will always trump ideas.

However, what we are to do with the mongrel dogs is not clear. Of course by 2000 Dylan is so much older than he was then, when he wrote the song, but the stance of youthfulness, if taken to be open-mindedness and not being stuck in an ideology, holds just as true as when he first sang it. In that respect he’s still younger than he was then, despite the cracked voice and the weariness of being just shy of sixty.

This Cardiff performance may well be the best ever. Larry Campbell plays the violin, giving the song a beauty not otherwise obvious. Dylan is in top voice, and there is a sweet harp break at the end to give the performance a touch of bluesy sadness. What a treat!

My Back Pages

Coming at the end of the sixties, ‘Country Pie’ isn’t out to challenge anybody, or tackle the paradoxes of liberal philosophy. As he says in the song,

‘I don’t need much and that ain’t no lie
Ain’t runnin’ any race
Give to me my country pie
I won’t throw it up in anybody’s face’

‘Throw it up’ suggests vomiting as well as confrontation. And it’s such a jolly, happy song, isn’t it? Well yes, it is, and the song comes close to being a nonsense rhyme, but there is a clever play on the word ‘pie’. These lines, from ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ (2006) spring to mind as a comparison:

‘I got the pork chops
she’s got the pie
she ain’t no saint
but neither am I’

Sexual innuendo may well animate the song. Sex is the answer to the paradoxes of life:

‘Saddle me up my big white goose
Tie me on ’er and turn her loose
Oh me, oh my
Love that country pie’

Country Pie

‘Hearts in the Highlands’ (1997) is hardly a bedrock song. I didn’t have room for it in Parts 1 and 2 of this year, so it crops up here as an anomaly, but the themes of alienation, imprisonment and yearning for escape are as bedrock as you can get. The hope for parole expressed in ‘I Shall Be Released’ is not matched in ‘Highlands’. There is no parole from time.

‘Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone'd come and push back the clock for me’

The way out of here (and there must be some way out of here) is not down Highway 61, but to follow your heart up to the Highlands, to Robert Burns country. Dylan begins the song with this line, ‘Well my heart’s in the highlands, gentle and fair…’ Note the archaic tone. Robert Burns begins his poem of the same name this way, ‘My heart’s in the highlands, my heart’s not here’.

Perhaps the song is about the consolation of words, of poetry itself (‘The wind it whispers to the buckeye trees of rhyme’) while the prospect of writing poetry seems lost to the years.

‘The sun is beginnin' to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes, everything looks far away’

It’s a long rambling song, but it does bring us to the edge of mind –  ‘insanity is smashin’ against my soul’, and the hopelessness of regret.

Highlands

So we come to the bedrock of bedrock songs, our old friend ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. The song epitomizes the Dylan of the NET as no other does: its forward movement, its dance beat, its attitude, its ecstasy. It is a song born for the road; there is something eternal about it. You can ‘split up on a dark, sad night’, but she will never escape your mind. You may learn resilience and fortitude, because in the end, no matter what happens, you have to ‘keep on keeping on’. These verses are fragments that celebrate a life on the run. The ‘going back again’ at the end of the song is but futile hope as the past is ‘an illusion’. There is no one to push back the clock for you, and time is always slippin’ away, which is why you remain… tangled up in blue.

Like ‘Highlands’, ‘Tangled’ is a song about the passing of time, but ‘Tangled’ has more bounce, both emotionally and musically.

I have two more ‘best ever’ performances for you here, as I do every year, one with harp and one without. Dylan’s acoustic guitar playing is at its best in this song, (and in Desolation Row, see NET, 2000, part 4). Spare and driving, Mr Guitar Man provides a vital momentum to the song. His insistent but uncluttered picking pushes the band along, as the band in turn pushes him along, and the performances sure do rock.

This first one, with harp, is from Billings, 25^th March, and the audience loves it. The celebratory aspect of the song comes across when you take the band’s performance and the audience’s enthusiasm as a total package. Dylan and the audience both celebrate life on the run because, whether you’re physically running or not, it’s the human condition; it’s time itself that’s running away.

Tangled up in Blue (A)

Much as I love Dylan’s harp, and the gypsy touch it brings to the song, I have to concede that this Cardiff performance, sans harp, has the edge.  It’s Dylan’s vocal that does it. An outstanding vocal performance, and a triumphant note on which to bring the curtain down on this post.

Tangled up in Blue (B)

I’ll be back soon with the final for 2000, Beyond Dylan.

———————

Kia Ora

*Publisher’s footnote.  I make very few changes to the material so kindly provided by writers to Untold, but on this point as to first Dylan composition, elsewhere on this site we’ve taken a different view.  It’s not a particularly important issue, but if you want to see a list of the songs Dylan is thought to have written before Song to Woody, they are detailed in the Songs of the 50s and 60s file.  But as the note on that page says, the exact dates of composition of those 1959/60 songs are uncertain.  Tony.

Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code Part 1

By Larry Fyffe

Some analysts of the songs by Bob Dylan have pointed out that the key to breaking the secret “code” hidden in a number of his lyrics is to realize that the words therein are those spoken by none other than Jesus Christ.

Other ‘Dylanologists’ have disputed this assertion, but Untold researchers have uncovered proof that this ‘theory’ is essentially correct.

The story uncovered be like a movie that stars Humphrey Bogart as Christ and Ingrid Bergman as ‘Spanish’ Mary.

In a cave near the Black Sea is found the Holy Grail which contains fragments of Dylan songs written when he travels back in time.

As we have already noted, these fragmented manuscripts, backed up by recent songs, reveal that Jesus and the pregnant Mary Magdalene escape from Mexico, and make their way to Morocco.

Pursued they are by religious authorities; they separate and decide to meet up in Tangiers.

Part of a song, the fragments thereof pasted back together, shows that the couple have tough times before they are able to settle down quietly in Morocco.

(Some analysts of the song quoted below –  revived later on – relate it to the movie “Bend Of The River” that stars James Stewart, but that just goes to show you how far off an interpretation can be):

Well, I gonna quit this baby talk now
I guess I should have known
I got troubles, I think maybe you got troubles
I think maybe we'd better leave each other alone
(Seeing The Real You At Last)

Troubles indeed – Jesus and Mary’s child creates a biological line of descent for the adherents of the Christian faith to follow.

The traditional foundation ‘rock’ of the established church is shattered all to hell:

And I say unto thee, "That thou are Peter
And upon this rock I will build my church
And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it"
(Matthew 16: 18)

Be that it may, another restored piece of a manuscript that’s  stuffed in the Holy Grail suggests that Jesus is  on his way to Morocco to join Magdalene there:

Pretty Mary
Don't be lonely
Don't be cool
You're my only destination
And I'm coming for you
(Pretty Mary)

A lot of this information about the life of Jesus and Mary is swept under the carpet, never revealed.

But now our readers know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is addressing Mary Magdalene in songs like the one quoted beneath:

Kick your shoes off, do not fear
Bring that bottle over here
I'll be your baby tonight
(I'll Be Your Baby Tonight)

You can find details of some of our recent articles and series on the home page

by Jochen Markhorst

Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream

• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream Part 1: There’s very little that you can’t imagine not happening
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 2 – Blow Boys Blow
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 3: Your waitress: Captain America
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 4: I knew Thomas Jefferson
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 5: Almost like a Buster Keaton or something
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 6: Caput vel cauda

XII        I’ve never been able to read the damned thing

Well, the last I heard of Arab, he was stuck on a whale
That was married to the deputy sheriff of the jail

 It is an image that is engraved in the collective memory: Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, stuck on Moby Dick. Peck himself, though, was hardly satisfied with his role in John Huston’s classic (1956). He did not quite understand why director Huston did not take on the role – partly because he thought himself too young to play the old, bitter Ahab. He still thinks so twenty years later, when Spielberg asks permission to use some scenes in Jaws. Robert Shaw is intended to watch the film and laugh at the inaccuracies. But Peck obstructs it; he is still “uncomfortable with his performance”. Huston thinks differently. A quarter of a century later, looking back in the long interview in American Film (September 1980), he is still full of praise:

“I liked him and I liked the film. Still do. I just saw it again the other day. As a matter of fact, I think that Greg is quite remarkable. He’s not the ranting, raving psychotic of the book.”

We owe the chilling, dramatic death scene to scriptwriter Ray Bradbury. And then probably to his troubles with Melville’s undisputed masterpiece. Moby Dick is his first screenplay, written just before his breakthrough with his pièce de résistance Fahrenheit 451, the immortal dystopia that paved the way for modern science fiction into the literary mainstream, the work that predicts ATMs, earbuds and bluetooth and that has since been filmed three times, rewritten for the stage and made into one of the first interactive computer games (1984).

But John Huston is not yet familiar with that work when he asks Bradbury for his film;

“It all came about because I gave him a copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun in early 1953, little realizing that one story, “The Fog Horn,” read by Huston, would cause him to call me to his hotel in August of that year.”

Bradbury reveals this in his wonderful, semi-autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale (subtitle: “A novel of Ray Bradbury’s adventures making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland”, 2002). He wrote it, as he claims, partly because Katherine Hepburn in her autobiographical account of her experiences with John Huston, The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (1987), is so reticent, talks so little about Huston’s ugly sides:

“They said that they had asked Hepburn to provide more material, but she had refused. Faced with this, after many years I said to myself: Well, I think I know Huston as well as anyone and I will try and do a book which is fair, which presents the Huston that I loved along with the one that I began to fear on occasion.”

Bradbury occasionally clashes with Huston, if his book is to be believed, but both he and the legendary director can appreciate that. In any case, the first encounter is already unorthodox:

“When I arrived at his hotel he put a drink in my hand, sat me down, stood over me, and said, “How would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay for Moby Dick?”

I was stunned. My response was, “I’ve never been able to read the damned thing.”
Huston, in turn, was stunned. He’d never heard anything like that from any screenwriter.”

Huston can appreciate the frankness, gives Bradbury homework, and the young writer struggles through the monumental tome that night. “I read as much as I could and went back the next day and took the job.” This superficial knowledge probably also explains the most impressive scene in the film, Ahab’s death. The oppressive image of the vengeful captain, entangled in the lines, stuck on the whale, does not appear in the book. Well, it does, but in a different context, and not with Ahab:

“Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.”
(Chapter 135. The Chase.—Third Day.)

So, the corpse of Parsee, Ahab’s unlucky harpooner, that is. Ahab himself basically just disappears into the depths without much ado;

“The flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.”

Bradbury actually uses the portrayal of Parsee’s death for Ahab’s film death, and successfully so – in the collective memory, that is what Ahab’s death is; entangled in the lines, stuck on the whale. And, as the opening of the last verse of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” reveals, Dylan too has Ahab’s film death in mind, not the “actual” Melville-death. Presumably, the then 23-year-old Dylan has not yet read the damned thing either. As late as in 1985, when Scott Cohen interviews him extensively for Spin Magazine, he still seems to have the film version, and not the book version, in mind:

“Then you got someone like Herman Melville who writes out of experience–Moby Dick or Confidence Man. I think there’s a certain amount of fantasy in what he wrote. Can you see him riding on the back of a whale? I don’t know.”

… apparently unswervingly convinced that there is an Ahab-on-the-back-of-Moby scene in the book.

Thirty years after that interview, and fifty years after 115th Dream, when he delivers his Nobel Prize speech, Dylan finally has done his homework, with the help of SparkNotes: “Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.” Alright, Ahab is not really “thrown out of his boat”, but pulled out, “shot out of the boat”, as Melville says through Ishmael, but the thrust is right.

“That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs,” Dylan says a little later in the same speech about Melville’s Moby-Dick, by which he obviously means more than a single name-dropping like in “Lo And Behold” from The Basement Tapes (“What’s it to ya, Moby Dick? This is chicken town”). And it’s probably true that themes from the book permeate his songs. But on the other hand: Murders In The Rue Morgue, Juarez, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle and of course Moby Dick … John Huston’s filmography has left more than one mark on the oeuvre of cinephile Dylan as well. And so did Gregory Peck, for that matter; Dylan extensively pays tribute to his Gunfighter in 1985’s “Brownsville Girl”. That damned thing he has seen more than once, obviously.

To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 8: The historians’ delight

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 Tony Attwood

A full index of the articles in this series can be found here.

Our series looking at Dylan’s songs in the order they were written, to try and ascertain his thoughts and the reasons why he wrote these particular songs, has brought us to the end of the 1990s.  The most recent articles were

• All Directions 60: After the interregnum, the compositions of 1996 
• All Directions 61: 1996 part 2
• All Directions 62: Still completing the masterpiece
• All Directions 63: Completing Time out of Mind

In the last couple of articles in this series we have seen Bob write and record the music for “Time out of Mind” through 1996 and 1997.  Having recorded the album, he stopped writing except for one song in 1999: “Things have changed” for the movie “Wonder Boys”.

(PS – leave the video running after the song ends).

It was released in 2000 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Golden Globe Award also for Best Original Song.

When Bob received his Oscar he called it a song that “doesn’t pussyfoot around or turn a blind eye to human nature”.

And indeed, when has Dylan ever pussyfooted around or turned a blind eye?  From the moment that Hollis Brown pulled the trigger , or if you prefer, from the moment the night started playing tricks when you are trying to be so quiet, everything has mostly been falling apart rather than falling into place, within the world of Dylan lyrics.  There have been happy, jolly interludes from “Country Pie” to “Make you Feel my Love” and the like, and the 18 months period of writing songs about Christianity, but they were interludes.  The  feeling I get is that Dylan is at his absolute best when telling us that the world is not how it generally is portrayed, but is in reality something much darker.

And I think it is helpful when contemplating the masterpiece that is “Things have changed”, to remember that the previous compositions were indeed those from that most troubled and troubling album “Time out of mind”.  True Bob had just had another break from writing but the previous compositions could be summarised by the line that “I was all right til I fell in love with you.”  Or if you want the line of the song at the heart of that year’s writing, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Indeed Bob’s vision of the world was very clearly expressed through lines such as

I'm walkin'
Through streets that are dead
Walkin'
Walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin'

Although the feel of “Things have changed” is different from “Love sick” the negative vision of human existence within “Things have changed” continues the theme from the album.   After all you can’t get much more negative than the repeated line, “I used to care but things have changed” (apart of course from, “It’s not dark yet…”)

And if that doesn’t convince you consider…

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

It is not just the lyrics that give us this darkness, but also the way Bob sings the song.  He’s not trying to convince us that his interpretation of reality is right, but rather is simply painting the world as it is.  It is not up for discussion, this is the world, take it or leave it.

And this approach is all the more shocking because here is the man who, whether he agreed with the notion or not, was the voice of a generation who wanted the world changed, who wanted more social justice, who wanted an end not just to war but to the war industry, who was looking forward to dancing on the graves of the manufacturers of the weaponry of war.

Yet in a most curious way we have also gone back to “Don’t think twice it’s all right”.  Because there really wasn’t any use in wondering why things happened as they do, but one was simply to accept the world as it goes along.  Thus caring about the world and the people in it, is pointless.   Did the man within “Don’t think twice” actually care?  Not really.  No more than the man who wrote “Ballad in Plain D” actually care.

Of course this is not to say that just because Dylan writes something in a song he actually believes it; there is after all such a thing as fiction.  But what we do now hear is that he certainly doesn’t care now.  And when he writes an album in which most of the theme is not caring, things really are pretty bleak.

In effect we are once again in the reality in which people come and go, talking but saying nothing. The past has not yet happened yet. The future was yesterday. I am you, you are him, he is not.   Dylan’s subconscious is perhaps one more time taking him back to TS Eliot

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains...

So  we have this dark image of a worried man who used to care but now… well now he’s just worried – and who would not be when (and please excuse the repeated quote, but it is, I feel, the very heart of the song) he is…

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose

This is not the Darkness, it is almost as if one is standing outside the Dark looking in, for somehow in “Things have changed” there is a level of abstraction and removal from the real world which makes the song even more frightening than Not Dark Yet.

As a result of such negative feelings, we might have expected another long pause from Bob the songwriter, but no, in 2001 he wrote the “Love and Theft” an album for which he won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

But in the year of writing that album, and as unpredictable as ever he started out with an instrumental (King of Kings) for Ronnie Wood’s album, when seemingly Wood was expecting Dylan to produce a song with lyrics.

However having got that out of the way, the real songwriting started again and 12 songs followed before the end of the year.  We were back to Bob the songwriter, working away, creating an album.

And interestingly, given the negative thoughts of both the last album collection and “Things have changed”, this was in fact Bob’s most productive spell since 1990 when he wrote the Red Sky songs.

So perhaps it is not too surprising that with “Summer Days” the first of the group to be written we get a straight 12 bar song in the classic format – a return to the roots if ever there was one, and as good a way as any to get going when an old blues man has decided to write another album.

And just to push home the message that the basic musical concept of the blues is good enough to express all that needs to be expressed, that was followed by another three chord piece, “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, taking us into the world of Lewis Carol (although opinion is divided on this).

The website Bob Dylan Song Analysis, for example, says of this piece, “The song deals with doctrine, both Judeo-Christian and Buddhist, while also being in debt to traditional nursery rhyme. The themes are love and theft, as one might expect from the album title, as well as desire, suffering, and redemption.

“Stylised characters and third person narrative initially lull the listener into imagining a comfortable distance between him and the song’s fictional world of bitterness and betrayal.  We perhaps don’t even notice the descriptions which place the protagonists as much in our world as in that of the bible….

“By the end of the song Tweedle Dum has not developed morally. Rather than making up for the sin committed in Eden, he’s presented as compounding it. In Eden they were throwing knives at a tree. Now, in the land of Nod, Tweedle Dee’s innocent use of ‘throw’ in ‘Throw me something …’, reminds us of this.”

The article in Wikipedia says, “The opening track, “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”, includes many references to parades in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where participants are masked, and “determined to go all the way” of the parade route, in spite of being intoxicated.”

So we have those two options, plus numerous others, but, however you perceive the song, the world it portrays seems to have fallen apart.  That negative vision of humanity once expressed in the phrase “the world gone wrong” is still there, overseeing everything

One is a lowdown, sorry old man
The other will stab you where you stand
“I’ve had too much of your company,”
Says Tweedle-dee Dum to Tweedle-dee Dee

The negative themes continued with “Honest with Me” which was written next… a lost love song which has moments of Tom Thumb’s Blues in it; these are songs of disaffection and disorientation.   In short, we are still with “Things have changed”.

But then, having taken characters from Lewis Carrol, for the next composition Bob takes lines from  Leroy Carr’s Blues before Sunrise”, a 1930s classic to create “Lonesome Day Blues.”  And indeed if one wants to portray the world in a negative way, what better a model than the old blues songs?

After that, the notion of borrowing from the past continued, as for “Bye and Bye” Bob borrowed from a Billie Holiday song.    And I feel, when listening to the songs in the order they were written, by now he was certain of what he was doing on this album.   For with “Floater” the next track written, he goes overboard on the borrowing, with music taken directly from “Snuggled On Your Shoulders” by Lombardo/Young and lyrics taken from Junichi Saga’s novel Confessions of a Yakuza (translated by John Bester).  Maybe after his Academy Award he just felt he could do anything he wanted to, and certainly given the list of his songs composed thus far, who could argue with that?

https://youtu.be/T6KDJtgvxaU

I’ll continue looking at this collection of songs in the next article in the series.

There are details of some of our recent articles on the home page, and some of our series in the links below the picture at the top of the page.

by Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan drops a big clue concerning the  real story behind the biblical Jesus in a recent song that he writes:

I searched the world over
For the Holy Grail
I sing songs of love
I sing songs of betrayal
(False Prophet)

We’ve decided it’s the appropriate time for the  Untold Dylan Corporation to open it’s massive vaults, and discuss with  readers some of the fragmented manuscripts of songs penned by time-traveller Bob Dylan.

Our weary and world-wandering archaeologists discover the manuscripts in a cave near the Black Sea.

Now in the Untold vaults be the genuine Holy Grail, and engraved on the goblet are symbols, including the Eye of Horus, that tell the actual story of Jesus Christ and ‘His companion’ Mary Sophia Magdalene.

Inside that Holy Grail stuffed are a number of song lyrics with music notated on parchments that our linguistic and music specialists piece back together.

We are not sure what language that the time-transported Dylan uses, but our experienced experts nevertheless decode the meaning of the words.

The key to deciphering the parchment lyrics is the realization that Jesus is speaking the words written down by Bob Dylan.

One of the songs is very similar to one still sung today, but in the discovered original lyrics the gender of the child is female; the baby’s named Sophia.

Jesus prays to his Father in Heaven to protect the girl that He and Mary produce:

For her age, she's wise
She's got her mother's eyes
There's gladness in her heart
She's young, and she's wild
And my only prayer
Is if I can't be there
Lord, protect my child
(Lord Protect My Child)

It’s quite clear from above lyrics that the guardians of the Christian canon are on Jesus/Dylan’s trail in America, and that their intention is not full of love.

What happens is encoded via allegory within the lyrics of a song written in the present time.

One of the high priests sent out by the established Church to assassinate both Jesus and the pregnant Magdalene is gunned down.

It’s claimed by the shooter that Jesus fires the shot:

Was it me that shot him down in the cantina
Was it my hand that held the gun
Come, let us fly, my Magdalena
The dogs are barking, and what's done is done
(Romance In Durango)

After a short gun battle with a sheriff’s posse, in which Jesus is wounded, the Spanish-speaking cowboy Christ and Magdalene sail off to southern France, and eventually end up together in Morocco.

So it’s for good reason, as recorded by the time-traveller, that Jesus decides to say little about His sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.

A song placed in the Holly Grail that we put back together (what remains of it anyway) reads like this:

'Tis not of me to talk absurd
No rumour do I carry
No, I'll not give you one word
But for the love of Spanish Mary

So far Dylan in 2000 has been covered via

1. Never Ending Tour 2000, Part 1 – Master Vocalist: Finding voice
2. NET, 2000, Part 2. Master Vocalist – Please heed these words that I speak
3. NET 2000 Part 3: Master Vocalist – Rock n roil

A full index to all 50 previous articles in the series is given here.

By Mike Johnson (kiwipoet)

The first three posts covering the year 2000 of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour were focused on the Rock Dylan, and we saw some remarkable vocal performances from the jazzy ‘If Dogs Run Free’ to the ripping rocker like ‘Wicked Messenger.’

Dylan brought that same vocal clout to his acoustic songs, delivering full-throated, powerful performances of his early acoustic work. Gone is the thin, nasal whine of his youth. Bring on the full-throated baritone. Those who think Dylan can’t sing might have problems adjusting to performances such as this ‘Desolation Row’ from London, 6^th October. I’ve never heard him belt out the song like this before. I invite you to listen to the remarkable vocal performance of the ‘superhuman crew’ verse that starts at 5.28 mins. He flings the words out as if from a high pressure jet and is rewarded by an appreciative audience.

Desolation Row (A)

You’d be hard put to find a better performance of the song. Although I do hark back to the 1995 performance in which he sings all the verses, and plays the harp as well, I concede that this one is the most urgent and vocally powerful.

Compare that to this one from Anaheim (10^th March). The performance is softer, not quite so hard-driven, but with a trembling intensity.

Desolation Row (B)

It might be a good idea to pause at this point to notice that I am constantly drawn to the same concerts for my examples. Anaheim is the odd one out, being the first concert of the year in the U.S. The others, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, London are from the European and British leg of the tour. Cardiff gets particularly high praise from the commentators, but I think the two London concerts have more vigorous performances. Of course I’ve had to go beyond those concerts to find some of the songs; George of the second American leg and Dresden from the first European leg.

It’s to Cardiff, however, that we’re headed for the next one, a warm performance of ‘Don’t Think Twice’, another from Dylan’s stable of regulars, songs that never drift too far from his setlists. The Cardiff audience is in a receptive mood, and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ is greeted like an old friend. It’s a sad song with a jaunty rhythm, best played up tempo as Dylan does here.

One of the bonuses of listening to these live, mostly audience recorded performances is being able to tune in to the rapport between the performer and the audience. Dylan is often accused of ignoring his audience, not talking to them and so on, and while there is some truth in that, what we hear in many of these recordings is Dylan playing to, and in response to, audience reactions. The warm bond between audience and performer is a part of the pleasure in listening to the Cardiff recordings. There is a roar of appreciation when he produces the harmonica and respectful quiet for the whimsical solo he plays. The slow, drawn out ending is greeted ecstatically.

 Don’t think twice (A)

That rapport with the audience is not confined to Cardiff, or the other UK concerts. Here’s the same song from George (18^th June) on the second leg of the American tour. It’s very similar to the Cardiff performance, but I’m including it here because, to my mind, the George performance has the edge on the more famous Cardiff one. We can say that Dylan is not just playing the song, he’s playing the audience.

Don’t think twice (B)

‘Blowing in the Wind’ is another regular. Having heard this song many times, and introduced it many times in this series, I’m still struck by the underlying pathos of the song. The questions asked in the song strike at our conscience, but the answers are whirled away by forces seemingly beyond our control. The song became an anthem of the protest movement, but in its sadness, it doesn’t lead any battle charge.

Dylan is well aware of its status as an anthem, as this performance demonstrates. I prefer these more nostalgic versions to the strident performances of 1974 and the Rolling Thunder tour, as they are more in tune with the song’s underlying melancholy. This one, again, is from Cardiff.

Blowing in the wind (A)

The potential of the song to be soft and intimate is evident in this performance from Dresden, 24^th May. It sounds like he’s almost whispering the verses into our ears.

Blowing in the wind (B)

Or he can take it from the soft and intimate to the forthright with an edge of outrage (London, 5^th Oct).

Blowing in the wind (C)

One of the surprises of 2000 was the appearance of ‘Chimes of Freedom’, often thought of as a strong protest song, from The Other Side of Bob Dylan (1964) and rarely performed. It is a protest song in that it is a ringing declaration of sympathy for all those alienated from society one way or another.

‘Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, 
   strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe’

But it is also a song that relates the story of a mystical revelation.

‘Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing’

Dylan’s commitment to freedom does not come from some political ideology or doctrine but from direct revelation.

‘Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder’

Those ‘majestic bells of bolts’ and the ‘mad mystic hammering’ illuminate the soul as well as the human condition: ‘the disrobed faceless forms of no position’.

It’s a grand and ambitious song with a slow tempo and six long verses, no easy song to deliver live. Despite Dylan’s fine singing, this is not the most compelling performance of the song. He fumbles the lyrics at the beginning, leaves out two verses, and only just seems to catch the lyrics in the last verse. This redacted version gives us the flavour of the song, but not the total experience. (West Lafayette, 2^nd Nov)

 Chimes of Freedom

Staying in the protest vein, we come once more to ‘Masters of War’. This has the same arrangement that Dylan evolved in the early 90s, a quieter, more minimal, threatening version, restrained in its anger. I’d like to refer the reader to my discussion of the Dorian Mode in which the song is written in NET, 1999, part 4. This may well be Dylan’s most explicit and unambiguous anti-war song. Another powerful performance, this one from Dresden.

Masters of War

Dylan’s most comprehensive and scathing attack on the world of false appearances remains, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, 1964, a song both complex and dramatic. I’m not sure, however, that the light, skipping beat Dylan developed to carry the song serves it best. These complex images need to flash by. It needs to be fast and overwhelming. It needs to rip along, not bounce. Maybe I’m getting spoiled. I can always go back and listen to the scintillating performance from 1990 (see NET, 1990, Part 1). This one does have its virtues: Garnier’s bowed double bass to provide that dark undertone; the musical restraint during the verses; Dylan’s singing, expressive and powerful; the leap into the chorus with the drums… What am I complaining about? Maybe I just think this is not a song that should tempt the audience into clapping along…

It’s all Right Ma

If ‘It’s All Right Ma’ unhinges us with its destabilizing imagery, ‘Mama You’ve Been on my Mind’ reassures us with its familiarity. We all know what it’s like to have someone on our minds, someone we can’t forget, someone who makes us nostalgic for happy times spent together, happy times that are no more.

The very ordinary nature of the sentiment, and the commonplace phrasing and rhymes, might fool us into thinking that the song is ordinary too, but it’s not. It captures a subtle feeling perfectly, with great precision. It’s not despair, but rather a little niggle, a touch of rueful sadness:

‘Perhaps it is the color of the sun cut flat
An' cov'rin' the crossroads I'm standing at
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind’

Incidentally, Christopher Ricks (Dylan’s Vision of Sin) contrasts what he calls ‘the impassive calm of mind’ in the line ‘the crossroads I’m standing at’ with the more desperate impasse in ‘One Too Many Mornings’:

‘From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they begin to fade’

Sung too slow, the song can drag its heels a bit, get bogged down in nostalgia, but this upbeat performance escapes that. In this case the skipping beat that did not suit ‘It’s All Right Ma,’ suits this song perfectly. I like this version because it skirts the sentimentality inherent in the song and opts for a more resilient emotional posture. We’ve done all our crying and hey! remembering you is kind of fun too. (Dresden)

Mama you’ve been on my mind

It has been suggested that the ‘no, no, no’ of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ was designed as a mocking echo to the Beatles ‘yeah yeah yeah’ of ‘She Loves Me’. I don’t know how true that is, but the song has come to represent not just Dylan’s rejection of the hippie expectations of a lover, but of all who might mistake Dylan for something he is not. I think the song is about projection – the qualities or whatever that people might project onto us. I’m not that ideal person you thought I was. I’m not here.

Because the song is full of imperatives (go away, go lightly, go melt back) I think it is best delivered softly, with more than a touch of tenderness, as in this performance from Dresden (24^th May). Note the gentle, reflective harp solo.

It ain’t me babe (A)

Much as I love Dylan’s sensitive singing on this, I again have problems with giving the song a foot-tapping rhythm, easily turned by an enthusiastic audience into hand-clapping. This second version from Anaheim follows a similar pattern, but you can feel the tension behind the restraint. It’s a little sharper. The harp solo is again reflective but also a little sharper. Two exquisite performances; no complaints.

It ain’t me babe (B)

One more for luck. A lucky last. A decidedly more emphatic version from Horsens, Denmark (21^st May). Again the annoying clapping, but maybe the best harp solo of the lot.

It ain’t me babe (C)

That’s it this time around. Next I’ll clean up what’s left of these bedrock songs. Until then, stay safe and happy.

Kia Ora

Music is such a wonderful thing. It can lift spirits, improve your mood and help to create wonderful memories. Both listening and playing are such amazing things, which is why it is not surprising to see just how many people are fans. With such a widespread interest, it’s easy to see how the world has been graced with such amazing artists. Some of which have created music so inspiring they have defined an era.

A musician that potentially falls into this category is Bob Dylan. The American singer-songwriter is regarded worldwide as one of the best to ever do it. His songwriting ability especially has been one of a kind. If you love music but haven’t listened to Bob Dylan, it’s probably about time you changed that. If you want to start listening to the artist, here are some tips on how to get on your way to becoming a super fan:

Be Active When Listening to His Music

Something that a lot of people will recommend when listening to new music is to be active. If you are just sitting and listening to the music, chances are if you don’t connect with it the first time, you’ll probably be put off. Being busy while listening still gives you the chance to hear and appreciate but in a more casual and easy-going way. One thing you could do while listening to some Bob Dylan music is play online. Casinos online offer great gaming experiences, meaning you will be able to have fun while listening to some great music.

Start off with the Hits

An artist’s most popular songs are usually that way for a reason. Although the hardcore fans usually won’t choose them as their favourite tracks, these are usually the songs that appeal to the most people. This is why it is a good idea when listening to any new artist to look at their more popular stuff. If you like their sound, you can then get into their lesser-known content. For Bob Dylan, you might want to start off with songs such as the following:

• Like a Rolling Stone
• A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
• Tangled up in Blue
• Just Like a Woman
• All Along the Watchtower

Listen with a Friend

Another good way to get into a new artist is to start listening with a friend. This way, you can both compare which songs you like more. The discussion of the artist could be enough to inspire you to listen more. The more and more you both listen as well, the more songs you will be able to recommend to each other. For example, it could be a good idea for each of you to choose an album and listen to it in its entirety. This way, you can let each other know what the best songs off that album are. You can do this until you have established what his best work is. You should just make sure that you and your friend don’t have too dissimilar tastes.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream Part 1: There’s very little that you can’t imagine not happening
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 2 – Blow Boys Blow
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 3: Your waitress: Captain America
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (1965) part 4: I knew Thomas Jefferson
• Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 5: Almost like a Buster Keaton or something

X          Caput vel cauda

Well, by this time I was fed up at tryin' to make a stab
At bringin' back any help for my friends and Captain Arab
I decided to flip a coin, like either heads or tails
Would let me know if I should go back to ship or back to jail
So I hocked my sailor suit and I got a coin to flip
It came up tails, it rhymed with sails, so I made it back to the ship

Chapter 90 of Moby-Dick, “Heads or Tails”, is an amusing digression with cynical undertones. The chapter opens with a Latin quote from the books of the Laws of England: De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam. “From the whale, it is sufficient, if the king does have the head, and the queen has the tail.” Cynical, because the whale has no middle part – everything behind the head is tail. “Much like halving an apple,” as Melville explains, “there is no intermediate remainder.”

After eight stanzas full of hit-and-run, time-travelling jumps, exploding kitchens and assaults on body and soul, it’s time for a breather, for a fermate. After all, we are on our way in a narrative song, and it is about time to bring the story back home. The narrator feels that too. He’s fed up, which is understandable, but that doesn’t make his decision to abandon his friends any less nasty. Some self-justification is therefore welcome; it is not he, but fate that will decide that he turns his back on his friends.

Well, fate does have to be manipulated a bit for that. And a small price must be paid; I hocked my sailor suit, so apparently the narrator will finish the story as a nudist (it is unlikely that he was carrying a set of extra clothes with him all along). The proceeds are a coin, and that coin is needed to provide the narrator with his hypocritical justification. Hypocritical, because the outcome is already determined; whatever it will be, the narrator will save his own skin and go to the harbour. Heads or tails, as for a whaler under English law, shall make no difference. Some inventiveness is still required, though. The coin flip yields tails, which, as lines 3 and 4 demonstrate, neatly rhymes with jail. Any suspense, however, has already been torpedoed by the poet; line 5 ends in flip – we already know that the final verse will end with ship.

XI         Ερυκε

Well, I got back and took the parkin' ticket off the mast
I was ripping it to shreds when this Coast Guard boat went past
They asked me my name and I said, "Captain Kidd"
They believed me but they wanted to know what exactly that I did
I said, for the Pope of Eruke I was employed
They let me go right away, they were very paranoid

In the first song of Side 1, in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” the spiritual father does explicitly warn: watch the parking meters. In vain. By the end of Side 1, in the tenth stanza of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, he has already forgotten. Fortunately, he is a notorious lawbreaker, so he can tear up the parking ticket without any further consequences. Even the Coast Guard bows to Captain Kidd’s reputation; this man is so far outside the law that neither enforcement nor fines will do any good.

The name-dropping in this verse is a gift for the diligent exegete. The eventful life story, the alleged hidden treasure and the tragic end of the pirate/privateer William Kidd inspire dozens of books, references and allusions in three centuries of books, musicals, films, video games and songs, and thus just as many side paths to follow in interpreting the single mention of “Captain Kidd” in this Dylan song. Entertaining but a little too overzealous, all these attempts at interpretation. The first-person narrator lives outside the law, as demonstrated by the careless ripping action, and the associative hopscotch of boat – criminal – New York – Captain Kidd is quite obvious. Long John Silver or Henry Morgan or Blackbeard would also have been possible – but the poet needs to rhyme with “that I did”. Hence: Captain Kidd.

“The Pope of Eruke” causes more headaches, for the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of Dylanology. And despair. Assiduous googlers find that eruke is the Middle English word for a “palmerworm”, some kind of caterpillar. Others believe that the official spelling is wrong and that Dylan actually is singing “Uruk”, the capital city of Gilgamesh. Who or what should then be meant by “the Pope of Uruk”, or “the Pope of the palmerworm”, is of course not answered by these finds. “Meant is King Farouk,” thinks a third faction, also keeping open the option of “Baruch”, a notorious Wall Street financier from the 1920s. And most applause goes to the analyst who discovers that “eruke” is Greek for restrain, curb, hold back. Which doesn’t really help either, of course (“The Pope Of Restraint”?), and is also a bit dubious anyway; restrain is αναχαιτίζω, or συγκρατήστε. “Eruke, ερυκε” does not exist. The Old Greek ἐρυκάνω (restrain, indeed) comes close, but has only the first four letters in common.

In short: much enthusiastic digging, little result. Not surprising, of course – given the nature of the song, being one long, cheerful, nonsensical outburst, it makes little sense to expect too much meaning behind name-droppings like “Captain Arab”, “Guernsey cows”, “Captain Kidd” or “Pope of Eruke”. Filler lyrics is more obvious. At the most, with a little tolerance, you can hear a phonetic distortion of “New York” in “Eruke”. Just like the final line shows a certain rhyme-over-reason attitude. Paranoia, after all, has little to do with the emotion that now overwhelms the intimidated Coast Guard members. On the plus side, this is probably the first song ever to use the word “paranoid” – the beginning of an unstoppable rise of song characters plagued by a biased perception of reality, hostile and persecutory beliefs. Culminating in one of the pillars of heavy metal, Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. In which, appropriately enough, the word “paranoid” does not appear at all – we only believe that Ozzy sings the word.

To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 7: I’ve never been able to read the damned thing

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 Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In the first little venture into the idea of exploring how Bob Dylan can re-write his own songs (to which we gave the adventurous name  Dylan re-writes Dylan) we looked particularly at how the music was changed between one version of “We better talk this over” and another.  In the second it was the lyrics that changed and took us around the block a few times with  Groom’s Still Waiting at the Alter. 

So we enjoyed ourselves with those, even if no one else did, and so we’re carrying on.  Aaron’s still in the USA and Tony’s as ever in the UK.

Aaron: How about taking a look at Dylan’s performance from the Great Music Experience in Japan in 1994?

Let’s start with “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” – I remember hearing this on the Dignity CD single back in the day and been blown away.

Tony: I remember this too and was utterly amazed that Dylan would perform with an orchestra, because it meant that he could no longer re-arrange the song as he went along – which he often seems to do on stage.

There are two elements that utterly, utterly move me in this re-arrangement.  One is the orchestration which could so easily have been overwritten in the hands of a lesser arranger.   However it changes throughout but keeps its place behind Dylan, while dramatically adding to the meaning throughout.  It brings tears to my eyes even today.

But then listen to Bob – totally controlled (because of the need to stay with the agreed and rehearsed arrangement).  Indeed, I don’t believe he ever puts as much into a performance of this song as here.   For me this truly is utterly staggering beyond belief.   I find it so emotional much as I want to play it twice, but I can’t, and have to leave it for later when I’ve finished the writing.

And all the way through remember this is a piece we all know off by heart.   Yet somehow when he tells us about the deepest dark forest and the pellets of poison, for me at least, it is as if I’ve never heard it before.

I can well understand why orchestral performances with Bob did not become a central part of his work in years to come because the level of preparation, and the agreement not to re-write the song the night before, are just not how Bob likes to perform.   But I can say that if I had been there I doubt that I would have been able to take in the rest of the concert, so overwhelming do I find this.

However if you can take it (and I am sure it is just me doing my hyper-emotional thing again) when the piece finishes just go back to the 30 second marker and listen to that first verse again.  It is one of the absolute, overwhelming, extraordinary and compelling performance statements by Bob Dylan in his entire career.

Ring Them Bells 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goADAjQRj_M

Tony:  OK so having got overwhelmed by “Hard Rain” I am more ready for this but it still knocks me out.  I wonder how this worked – did the idea come up and the arrangement was written and then Bob just accepted it and played to it?  Maybe the story of it is in a book somewhere, and I’ve forgotten.  Feel free to remind me – but do remember you are talking to an old timer now, whose memory is not what it was.

Bob still manages to put his own feeling and emotion into this – as one can hear with the final words, “right and wrong”, but somehow the arrangement (although incredibly powerful) feels a little more obvious, a little less revolutionary than with “Hard Rain”.  Perhaps it is because this is more of an obvious song to work with in this context.

By which I mean, to me “Hard Rain” always feels as if it should be an acoustic session with a couple of performers contemplating the end of the world.  I would never have thought this could be done with “Hard Rain” – but with “Ring them bells”, maybe yees.

And I thought I’d just add a little PS with this video of “Ring them Bells” because in the video below it looks to me as if Bob is actually saying to the band, “Let’s do Ring them Bells” – which seems more like the norm of Bob across the years.

The orchestral version is utterly magnificent and I am not trying to suggest that the version above should be compared with the version that follows – it just seems to add to the contrast between the orchestral performance and what the normal Dylan we are used to.

Hope you enjoyed those as much as I did.  That’s Aaron.  Can we do some more?

An index to the full “Cooking Up More Mythologies” series appears at the end of this article.

by Larry Fyffe

Already pointed out, the influence from writers of figurative-laden tracts, that later became described as ‘Gnostic”, shows up in the Old Testament – i.e., the depiction of a masculine God with a feminine side (called ‘Wisdom’ and/or ‘Sophia’):

Say unto wisdom, "Thou art my sister"
And call understanding thy kinswoman
That they may keep thee from the strange woman
From the stranger which flattereth with her words
(Proverbs 7: 4,5)

Quite clearly the biblical verses above leave a mark on the song lyrics below:

Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms
You should not treat me like a stranger
Our father would not like the way that you act
And you must realize the danger
(Bod Dylan: Oh Sister ~ Dylan/Levy)

In Greek/Roman mythology, Apollo, the Sun God, has Artemis, the Moon Goddess, for a sister. In the Gnostic Gospels, while down on Earth, the Christian Messiah, has wise Mary Magdalene as His binary companion:

“The companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene”

(Gospel of Philip)

Much later lore asserts that Mary sails off to southern France to spread the Word after Jesus is crucified; unto other places as well.

Should the narrator in the following song lyrics be taken as Jesus Himself, Magdalene journeys to Morocco:

If you see her, say hello
She might be in Tangier
She left here in early spring
Is living there I hear

(Bob Dylan: If You See Her Say Hello)

Of course, no matter how you look at it, Jesus survives; there’s nothing to stop the two from getting back together again.

Kees deGraaf, for example, claims that the narrator in the song lyrics beneath is Jesus speaking:

I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn't do
Go to the ends of the Earth for you
To make you feel my love
(Bob Dylan: Make You Feel My Love)

Orthodox Christian analysts go to the ends of the Earth to downplay any suggestion that Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene is anything other than ‘spiritual’.

Not included in the Holy Bible, the contents of the Gnostic Gospels let loose all the angels and all the demons from Heaven and Hell.

Even Paul the Apostle’s writing has allegorical Gnostic dualities therein, but missing is a Demiurge who creates a dark material Earth:

There are also celestial bodies
And bodies terrestrial
But the glory of the celestial is one
And the glory of the terrestrial is another
There is one glory of the sun
And another glory of the moon
And another glory of the stars
(I Corinthians 15: 40, 41)

So it is said by some religious authorities that the first verse of the Holy Bible ought to be changed from “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” to read “God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth” to avoid any reversed  Gnostic-like interpretation that something else exists prior to the Judeo-Christian God (i.e., that it’s Heaven and  Earth who create Jehovah)

• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (part I)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part II)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part III)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part V)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More  Mythologies (Part VI)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part VII)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking up more mythologies (Part VIII)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part IX)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part X)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part XI)
• Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part XII)
• Cooking up more mythologies XIII
• Cooking up more mythologies XIV
• Cooking up more mythologies XV

Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream (1965) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

VIII       Almost like a Buster Keaton or something

I ran right outside, I hopped inside a cab
I went out the other door, this Englishman said, "Fab"
As he saw me leap a hot dog stand and a chariot that stood
Parked across from a building advertising brotherhood
I ran right through the front door like a hobo sailor does
But it was just a funeral parlor and the man asked me who I was

The music video for the Oscar winning song “Things Have Changed” (2000) amusingly intercuts footage of Dylan with sequences from the movie it was written for, from Wonder Boys. The video is also directed by the film director himself, Curtis Hanson, and lead actor Michael Douglas has been invited to contribute to the clip as well. Dylan’s acting is easy to characterise: Buster Keaton. Throughout the clip, Dylan keeps his face in the Keaton mode, his body language is almost identical. The resemblance is inescapable in the scenes in the car park before the diner; the straw hat Dylan has put on his head completes the imitation.

It doesn’t come out of the blue. On Wednesday, 5 November 2014, producer and writer Larry Charles is guest at Pete Holmes’ podcast You Made It Weird, and there Charles elaborates on a project Dylan wanted to undertake with him in the late 1990s: a surrealist comedy series for HBO. After an initial joint writing session, Charles dares to take the plunge. Together with Dylan, he pitches the idea on the executive floor of HBO, where it is indeed received enthusiastically. But in the elevator down Dylan has had enough already and says, to Charles’ disappointment: “I don’t wanna do it anymore. It’s too slapstick-y.” Larry can live with it; shortly afterwards he and Dylan write Masked And Anonymous (2003).

In short, Larry Charles is well-informed and has some right to speak when he makes statements about Dylan’s working methods. In the podcast he recalls how Dylan puts “this very ornate, beautiful box” on the table, he opens the box and dumps all these pieces of scrap paper on the table:

“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 […]. I realized, that’s how he writes songs. He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesize into a coherent thing. And that’s how we wound up writing also. We wound up writing in a very ‘cut-up’ technique. We’d take scraps of paper, put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it. And we finally wrote… a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff.”

And Dylan doesn’t just want to write it: “He wanted to star in it, almost like a Buster Keaton or something.” Eventually, Dylan will realise this ambition. Only not in a “surrealist comedy series for HBO”, but in the music video, shortly after this episode.

The love for slapstick, the deadpan presentation of fast-forward sequences of increasingly insane incidents, is distinctive in enough songs. In the Basement songs of course (“Million Dollar Bash”, “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread”, to name but two), in mercurial songs like “On The Road Again”, and also in even older songs like “Motorpsycho Nightmare” or “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”.

“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” belongs to the same category, if only for this seventh verse. The protagonist flees from the restaurant with the exploding kitchen, finds shelter with a nice French girl, but her aggressive boyfriend chases him back onto the street, he gets into a taxi waiting for him and jumps out again on the other side – to continue with a hurdle across a hot dog stand and a chariot. A fast-forward sequence of farcical situations like a Buster Keaton scene, all in all. The weird metaphor “like a hobo sailor does” may be traced to this – both hobo and sailor are two Buster Keaton archetypes. Only the place of refuge, the shelter from the storm, is a Dylan original; there is not a single Keaton film with a funeral parlor as a setting.

IX         What’s so bad about misunderstanding?

I repeated that my friends were all in jail, with a sigh
He gave me his card, he said, "Call me if they die"
I shook his hand and said, "Goodbye", ran out to the street
When a bowling ball came down the road and knocked me off my feet
A pay phone was ringing and it just about blew my mind
When I picked it up and said, "Hello", this foot came through the line

 The 2015 Swedish cult film Kung Fury is a short (31 minutes), derailing homage to the martial art and police films of the 1980s, overflowing with visual gags, deliberately absurd plot holes solved with time travel hassle and an endless series of idiotic side characters like the god Thor, a Tyrannosaurus, whizkid “Hackerman” and Hitler.

Clearly, the script aims at unconventionality, and quirky and imaginative it is, but director and writer David Sandberg, just as often, rightly considers the joke to be more important than originality…

Hitler : Give me ze phone!
[Punk gives Hitler his cell phone. Hitler dials the police precinct. Meanwhile, the Chief is looking at a police report]
Chief : What the hell is this?
[Phone rings]
Chief : Chief McNickles speaking.
Hitler : Is this ze police?
Chief : Yeah, this is the police.
Hitler : Fuck you!
[Hitler shoots through the phone, killing the Chief. He then continues to shoot at the whole precinct through the phone before Kung Fury storms in and shoots down the phone]

It is a classic Looney Toon gag that closes the slapstick interlude. The hurdle via the English taxi, over the hot dog stand and the chariot inspires analysts like Prof. Renza to reflect on “appreciation of his work in England’s rock scene”, and jumping over an American stereotype like the hot dog stand then says something about the “transcending” nature of his art, and “chariot” then signals something with criticism of militarism or something. Well, the importance of being earnest, as Oscar Wilde would say. In any case, its slapstick character is ignored. The continuation gives enough hints, though; the actions and the rebuttal of the undertaker (Call me if they die) and the bowling ball knocking over the protagonist are next, slapstick-y steps towards an increasingly anarchistic, Groucho Marx-like tone, culminating in the foot-through-the-telephone-line-gag.

No, this confetti-like salvo of wild idiosyncrasies seems rather to demonstrate what Larry Charles notices more than thirty years later: “He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that.” In 2014, when Charles recounts this, he is still impressed by Dylan’s response to his cautious criticism. During the joint writing of that slapstick project, Charles remembers, Dylan trots out a scene about a “pig with a wig”.

“I said, Bob, even in this thing, that doesn’t make any sense. No one’s gonna understand that. And he said: what’s so bad about misunderstanding?”

…Dylan reveals his fondness for the next step in comedy; the dry, pointless humour as perfected by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman.

Still, the first love, the love for good old-fashioned slapstick humour with visual gags never dies. Fifty-five years later, in “Murder Most Foul”, Dylan requests: “Play Buster Keaton, play Harold Lloyd.”

To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 6: Caput vel cauda

————

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 Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In the first little venture into a possible series on Dylan re-writes Dylan we looked particularly at how the music was changed between one version of “We better talk this over” and another.

Taking the matter forward Aaron has had a look at “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” which turns matters around the other way.  The music changes in the sense that the lead guitar “commentary” between the lyrics is played by a different virtuoso guitarist, (and isn’t there at all in the version recorded for the album) and so is different in that respect, but otherwise the music stays much the same.  Same key, same tempo, same melody, same chord changes.  No, here, unlike “Talk it over” it is the lyrics that go for a meander.

The first example is the live performance with Carlos Santana on guitar

Now that fascinates me (Tony), because I read so many books about Dylan in which the minutiae of his lyrics are examined and given great meaning.  Their origins are found and the significance considered in depth.  And although it is quite clear that Dylan has read widely and does take inspiration from all sorts of sources, the fact that he can change the lyrics around so much in performance suggests to me that he is, at least on occasion, more interested in the phrases as phrases, rather than as deeply meaningful sets of lyrics.

So in this case we can compare the version above with the last ever performance (selected by Aaron) which has Mike Bloomfield as the guest virtuoso

What I am going to do however is compare the lyrics Dylan often sang, and the lyrics that are published on BobDylan.com which must have been handed over by Dylan to his publishers – most likely for the registration of copyright of the song.

Just consider these two versions of the first verse

Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement,
heard the last moan of a boxer, I seen the massacre of the innocent,
felt around for the light switch, became nauseated.
Just me, an over worked dancer, between walls that had deteriorated.

Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated

So there is this one small change here.  “Just me, an over worked dancer, between…” becomes “She was walking down the hallway while…”

My question is, what difference does that make?  Does the change make any difference to the meaning of the song?  Does it tell us anything new?   My answer is no.  It’s just using one phrase instead of another.  Both are pleasing, each is interesting, and perhaps one was more pleasing to Dylan than the other, but that’s it.  If this were a painting it would be a case of slightly different brush strokes.

Verse 2 has even more changes

Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becomin’ what one was never meant to be

highwaymen on murder charges pushin' women into robbery,
mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery.
Never did get the message, didn't even know one was sent to me
for the madness of becomin', what one was never meant to be.

So the first line changes.   We can have highwaymen on murder charges, or we have have try to be pure at heart.   We might prefer one to the other – I like the highwaymen because it gives me an image as opposed to the abstractness of “pure at heart” but on the other hand the contradiction between “try to be pure at heart” and “they arrest you for robbery” is more stark.

But what do we make of the difference between “Got the message” and “never did get the message” in line three?   It would seem that for the context of the song it doesn’t matter if the message was ever got or not, which is curious, but also fun.

Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know 
    better standin’ around like furniture 
There’s a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it
Tonight you got the power to take it, 
   tomorrow you won’t have the power to keep it


Locked into a time zone, with a high-degree temperature,
worlds coming to an end wise men, 
   fools standin' around like furniture.
There's a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it.
Tonight you got the power to take it, 
   tomorrow you won't even need the power to keep it.

There seems no connection here between “Put your hand on my head” and “Locked in a time zone” – the former is specific and physical, the latter is abstract.

In the next line Dylan expresses what seems the same idea in a different way and thereafter we have the same verse from start to finish.

In the next verse we really do get some changes…

Cities on fire, phones out of order
They’re killing nuns and soldiers, there’s fighting on the border
What can I say about Claudette? Ain’t seen her since January
She could be respectfully married 
   or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires

Wait on a minute, I found the solution,
too rich for my blood and I needed a transfusion.
Don't know what I can say 'bout Claudette? 
    She's in the mountains or the prairies,
she could be respectably married 
     or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires.

There seems no real connection between the “cities on fire” line and the “wait on a minute”, and it looks as if the need for “solution” was to find a rhyme for “transfusion” (or vice verse depending on the order in which the lines were written).

And the “prairies” line does look as if it was introduced to give a rhyme to Buenos Aires, not to add anything to the meaning.

Now, I must stress, none of this is written in any way to demean Bob’s writing or to suggest that in some way it is trivial.  But rather to make a point that I have made elsewhere, that sometimes Bob Dylan uses words to deliver the lyrical equivalent of painted abstract pictures.   Just as we can find the individual flourishes and the overall effect of an abstract painting interesting and pleasing, so I (Tony) personally find the images that tumble out one on top of the other here interesting and pleasing.

One could say, “Hey, Claudette, I don’t know where she went,” but that would of  course be terribly dull, so there are different ways of making this more enjoyable, more interesting, and indeed given the music, more exciting.

In short, to me this playing around with the lyrics of a song, suggests strongly that the actual lyrics and the meaning are not the important thing here: it is the sound and the individual images that Dylan is interested in.  There doesn’t have to be a connection between them; it is the lines of music and lyrics themselves that fascinate him.

Here is the official audio without a guest lead guitarist, and below it the complete set of lyrics

Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar

Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becomin’ what one was never meant to be

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the stage
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar

Don’t know what I can say about Claudette 
   that wouldn’t come back to haunt me 
Finally had to give her up ’bout the time she began to want me
But I know God has mercy on them who are slandered and humiliated
I’d a-done anything for that woman if she didn’t make me feel so obligated

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the cage
Curtain risin’ on a new stage
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar

Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know better 
   standin’ around like furniture 
There’s a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it
Tonight you got the power to take it, 
    tomorrow you won’t have the power to keep it

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the stage
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar

Cities on fire, phones out of order
They’re killing nuns and soldiers, there’s fighting on the border
What can I say about Claudette? Ain’t seen her since January
She could be respectfully married or 
   running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the stage
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar

Different images, each one fascinating and interesting.  Just as the sources are.  But for me the deeper meaning is, as often as no meaning at all, is a figment of the imagination of the critic.