Links to all the cover versions used in this series are given at the end of the article, as well as links to all the previous articles themselves.
by Larry Fyffe
Bob Dylan’s songs considered a whole be a mixture of Gnostic and Hermetic profusion and confusion.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” tells the tale of sickly Roderick Usher whose cracked house contains a library full of books including Emanuel Swedenborg’s “Heaven And Hell”.
Encrypted be ‘Horus’, an Egyptian symbol of regeneration, within the name “Roderick Usher”.
Roderick represents the isolated human mind. Mistakenly believing her dead, he buries his twin sister Madeline alive in the family vault.
Madeline, a variant of ‘Magdalene’, represents the isolated human body.
She breaks out of her tomb, and scares her mind-oriented brother to death.
The deteriorating house surrounding the twins then collapses, entombing both of them beneath the rubble.
The cracking of the Delavinci Code reveals that the obverse story of Jesus and Magdalene found therein is similar in theme to Poe’ short story with the major exception that the couple have a female child who survives.
Thus, the House of Christ does not collapse.
Nevertheless, Lady Magdalene ends up mummified; ‘undead’ in a sepulchre. Nor is it at all clear whether Lord Jesus is alive or dead (it’s after His ‘crucifixion’).
According to the uncovered Code, the following song lyrics indicate that Mary is the narrator’s sister, akin to the twins (‘rational’ Christ and ‘wise’ Sophia) depicted in Gnostic thought (and twins Apollo and Artemis in Greek/Roman mythology).
Anyway, when all is said and done, Jesus and Mary save one another from being captured by the authorities of organized religion who are in pursuit of the duo:
We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died, and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved
(Bob Dylan: Oh Sister ~ Dylan/Levy)
It becomes increasingly evident, thanks to the unravelling of the Dylavinci Code, that many of the time-travelling songs of Bob Dylan about love found and love lost refer to the recurrent archetypical figure of Mary Magdalene.
At times, as below, the narrator feels alone and sickly without Madeline:
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
Just me, and an over-worked dancer, between walls that have deteriorated.
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)
At other times, it’s the memory of raven-haired Mary that haunts the story-teller:
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)
So it might be said that the moon never beams without bringing dreams of the beautiful Maggie Madeline –
wherein, the narrator lies down beside the ‘undead’ Mary in her burial chamber by the Nile River in Egypt:
You turn the tide on me each day, and teach my eyes to see
Just being next to you is a natural thing for me
And I could never let you go, no matter what goes on
'Cause I love you more than ever now the past is gone
(Bob Dylan: Wedding Song)
The Dylavinci Code Index to videos (songs without links are in the article above)
How often have we said? “It would have been terrific to be a fly on the wall to see how that happened”.
Get ready because there is a chance that can happen to you. How would you have liked to have been in the recording studio for the taping session of Bob Dylan’s first album? Yes, it is possible for you to experience Bob Dylan going through the process of recording this seminal album, “Bob Dylan”, the first album, is also referred to as “Hammond’s Folly.” But more about that later.
My dear friend, and human being extraordinaire, is a 70-year-old, artist, sculpturer, civil rights pioneer and currently helping blind individuals defend themselves. Mr. Stephen Handschu, who 95% blind can let you be the fly on the wall.
Sixty years ago, Stephen’s roommate in NYC, was a janitor at the Columbia recording studio. When, after the Bob Dylan’s recording session was over, someone in the production company was ready to throw Master Recordings in the garbage, Mr Handschu’s friend asked if he could have the tapes. The protocol at the time was to scrub the tapes before putting them in the garbage. His friend brought the tapes home and just put them away. Sometime, shortly thereafter, the roommate decided to leave the U.S. and move to British Columbia. Intending to travel light, he offered the tapes to Stephen. Both parties believed they were merely blank tapes.
Now, move the clock to three years ago. Stephen, while living in Detroit, became very friendly with a studio engineer. During a casual conversation, he told the engineer that he had these old Scotch tapes and could they be of any use to him. The engineer said “Yes.” They met again and the engineer needed to rustle up a tape player that would play these ancient tapes. He did and started to play the tapes. They weren’t blank. They were listening to the whole recording session Hammond’s Folly. Carrumba!
At the time of Bob Dylan’s recording, one of the most important agents for talent was John Hammond. He represented the crème de la crème in the singing world. He was taking a bet on Bob Dylan, who at the time was just another young folk singer. We can now hear what went on in the studio. You hear the patter between the singer and the engineers and John Hammond. It’s amazing.
The album was released and it flopped. Only about 5,000 copies were sold. Mr. Hammond wasted his time. Ergo thus got labelled “Hammond’s Folly. What happened after that changed the history of folk music and the incredible influence Bob Dylan has had in the music world and culture in general.
We have to find a way to get Stephen Handshu to share what is on these tapes with the fans of Bob Dylan and music history. Stephen doesn’t know quite what to do with what he has. He is looking for a way for these tapes to be shared with Bob Dylan’s fans. If you would like to be that fly on the wall, let us know.
Links to some of the earlier articles in this series are given at the end of the article
By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood
In this series Aaron in the USA selects videos for Tony in the UK to write about, based around one song of Dylan’s. Just for the hell of doing something different, the rule is that Tony is only allowed as long as the recording lasts, to write his article. So no pontificating, and no looking stuff up.
The Rolling Stones
Aaron: This was a big hit for the Stones in 1995 (UK #12/USA #16). I know Tony usually doesn’t like music videos but I really liked this one (audio only versions are available if you’d rather!)
Tony: It’s not that I don’t like music videos per se but rather that most of them seem to be made by film makers who think that cut and paste is an art form and that context, insight or artistic ability has nothing to do with making a video. (Cue ex-theatrical walking around waving his arms shouting, “I’m an artist darling I can’t possibly work in these conditions”.)
This video (which I can watch as I type, having bothered to learn how to touch type when attempting to make a living as a journalist) is indeed one of the worst in my views as I got the message in the first 20 seconds and the rest is mere repetition.
As for the music, the one thing that stands out for me is the harmonica playing – so very different in style from Dylan’s but still interesting and insightful. The trouble with the music is that it is so close to Dylan’s original in terms of accompaniment and Jagger is Jagger, being as shouty as ever. So not much new to learn here.
Does this add anything to my understanding of the song? No, not at all.
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Aaron: I believe Bunny Wailer is on lead vocals here.
Tony: now from the off I am encouraged because this doesn’t sound remotely like the original, and for the very first time in this long series of articles I actually stopped and wondered if Aaron had made a mistake and sent me over the wrong video.
And this is where our routine is almost going to break down – to do a proper review of this I will need to hear this again. On this one listen while typing I am not even sure that the verse is a verse from Dylan’s original – have they added something new and just used the chorus.
That is really interesting. I won’t cheat and go back, but I do hope you have a good listen to this if you don’t know it. Really interesting. I’ll certainly come back to it when my scribbling of these notes is over.
Mick Ronson (with David Bowie on lead vocals) – from Ronson’s album “Heaven and Hull)
Tony: OK a rock version using the famous chord sequence at full tilt. I am not really overly impressed, although I can see what they are up to. I get the impression that someone just said, “OK let’s see how fast we can do it.”
By the second verse, it is making a bit more sense, but really, I am not at all sure I will want to play this again. It is just Rolling Stone played fast. Even the guitar two-note counter-melody running through the chorus is not very interesting. Nor is the shouting.
OK it improves when the frantic instrumental break ends, but I just get the impression of everyone trying too hard to be too frantic. Indeed why do you have to be so frantic? (to quote Bob himself).
Jimi Hendrix
Tony: I feel a complete outsider now, as I didn’t know this Hendrix version before – and I am sure that as ever, everyone else does. But here we are listening to a master at the height of his game, knowing exactly what he is doing, secure in the knowledge this is going to be a work of substance and insight, even though he hasn’t quite thought it through yet.
And it is. We all know what he can do with the guitar, so that’s not the issue. The issue is simply what is he going to do with the lyrics? Of course, it is different, and he even manages to find a new melody for the first “How does it feel?”
I must admit that as it goes on, it is for me, not the most inspired Hendrix outing, but the way he can knock out the riffs in between the lyrical lines is just so extraordinary.
There is a problem, and I think this is a problem that anyone trying to record this song faces – it is what to do with the “How does it feel” lines of the chorus. I don’t know how many times they turn up in the piece, but it is a lot. In the original Dylan includes them as a relief from the avalanche of lyrics in each verse, and that worked wonderfully because we didn’t yet know every line off by heart. But now we all know all the lyrics inside out, and so “How does it feel” has lost its function. The singer has to give it a new point, and that’s what I feel Hendrix does to some degree – but only some degree. When he was performing this of course it mattered far less, but now, all these years on, it is an issue. For me at least.
Aaron: Lastly, following all the legends of rock mentioned above I wanted to finish off with this one from 1967 :
Sebastian Cabot
Tony: Oh what a scream. Everything about this is wonderful. The musical background, the recitation, the tone colours in the voice. Even the way he says, “Thought they were all kidding you.” This is the first time in goodness knows how many years some of these lines have brought to me a new insight into the lines.
Just listen to “never compromise” and the way he says “vacuum of his eyes”. Oh I do hope that you don’t just listen to a few lines and think, “that’s not right” and turn off. This man brings extra meanings even after all these years. Even the “how does it feel” lines get a new treatment.
This recording, even after hearing the song so many many times, gives me a new feel for the song, by taking out all the rhythm that Dylan put into it and replacing it with something new. That is the one track from this selection I’m going back to play, and almost certainly not just the once – although I do want to hear Bob Marley again, now I come to think of it.
Magic. Thanks Aaron. I owe you for that one.
Beautiful Obscurity – comparing the cover versions
Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 9
by Jochen Markhorst
IX Music from the Big Mushroom
evil charlatans masquerading in pullover vests & tuxedos talking gobbledyook
(Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong, 1993)
The spirit of Bob Dylan hovers throughout the British Charlatans’ oeuvre anyway, and openly and unashamedly comes to the fore on their successful fifth album, Tellin’ Stories (1997). The album is stuffed with references to Dylan songs, like in the answer song to “Like A Rolling Stone”, the more melancholy “Get On It” (no matter how you’re feeling, you’re never on your own), like in The Charlatans’ cheerful answer to “Girl Of The North Country”, the swaggering “North Country Boy” (I threw it all away / I don’t know where I put it / But I miss it all the same) and as in the charming, understated Dylan reverence “You’re A Big Girl Now”, probably the only other song in the world with the word combination “jet pilot eyes”;
See her through jet pilot eyes
Mysterious and thin
Like a raven breakin' free
From the towers they keep you in
… borrowed from the obscure 1965 outtake “Jet Pilot Eyes”, which The Charlatans know from Biograph. That compilation box leaves more traces, by the way. For the intro of “Blue For You” (Up At The Lake, 2004), guitarist Mark Collins boldly incorporates Biograph‘s live version of “Isis”, for instance.
And the box set inspires the October 2021 release of their own Biograph-like box set, A Head Full of Ideas: The Best of Charlatans; “We were all at The Charlatans studio and there was a Bob Dylan box set lying around and it was there shouting at me that we should do one of these,” singer Tim Burgess tells Headliner. That studio of The Charlatans is called Big Mushroom – a nod to the Big Pink. The name of the box set, A Head Full Of Ideas, is a line from their biggest hit “One To Another” (1997), the song whose last verse opens with the familiar words Can you please crawl out your window.
In his 2012 autobiographical book, also titled Tellin’ Stories, Tim Burgess then reveals that Biograph actually marks a kind of beginning for The Charlatans:
“Martin Kelly and I became inseparable at this time. I remember going to his flat in Ladbroke Grove and spending the whole evening talking about Bob Dylan. I was into Dylan, and getting in deeper. Martin pulled out Biograph and asked me whether I had it. I didn’t. He played me ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, a version only available as part of this box set. Martin thought it was the best thing Dylan had ever done. He had two copies of Biograph, a CD and vinyl, and he generously gave me the vinyl. Mates for life!”
(Chapter 4: Garlic Bread and Britpop)
Tellin’ Stories is followed by the somewhat snowed under Us And Us Only (1999), an album with at least as much staying power as its predecessor, and with even more and even stronger traces of Dylan – not only in the lyrics, but now also in the music. Still pleasantly unobtrusive, and still loving.
The Dylan worship starts already in the opening song, in the hypnotic “Forever”. The long, instrumental intro mainly evokes associations with The Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, but when Tim Burgess starts singing after 2’38”, he soon returns to his Bob roots: Love is all there is (from “I Trew It All Away”), I wonder what you people do with your lives (paraphrasing “Tangled Up In Blue”), I see my true love coming, my little bundle of joy (quoting “Down Along The Cove”)… and like this, there are more half and whole references to Dylan’s catalogue. The opening song is followed by a trio of songs that form the most Dylanesque trio in The Charlatans’ output. “Sounds like Bob Dylan and The Band on ecstasy playing at the last night of the Heavenly Social,” as bassist Martin Blunt admits in an interview with New Musical Express (15 June 1999).
“Impossible” is one of the best mercurial-period-Dylan songs not written by Dylan. Every verse seems to come from an unreleased Blonde On Blonde song. From the opening verse onwards;
Impossible raw women
I you know you're all too hard to please
I can help you
If you only ask me kindly
Don't make me get down on my knees
God bless these hungry women
Impossible to ever keep
Your breath has never tasted as sweet
… up to shining Dylanesque put-downs like Y’know he looks like a plastic surgeon and Your new friend he seems to love you / I hope he cries himself to sleep. All framed by acoustic guitar, Al Kooper-like organ playing and Nashville piano. Plus, for dessert, a perfect imitation of Dylan’s harmonica playing.
The song flows smoothly, in many ways, into the next track, “The Blonde Waltz”. Again acoustic guitar, mercurial organ and piano, the title is lovingly stolen from Tarantula (chapter 40, “Subterranean Homesick Blues & the Blonde Waltz”) and the opening line is the biggest giveaway: Oh! my love my darling young son… “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” revisited. After which one subtle hint after another follows (I heard the sound of thunder in the place where all the poets sing, for instance).
And the “Dylan terzet” closes with the beautiful rock song “A House Is Not A Home”. With the most catchy tribute to Dylan: the driving lick is love & theft from “I Don’t Believe You”. The song is again embellished with the by now usual half-quotes and paraphrases (I can’t believe this is the end and blowing on your trumpet from Blonde On Blonde, and I think I used a little too much force from “Tangled Up In Blue”, for example), but that half I Don’t Believe You-lick is the real anchor.
The Dylan storm then seems to die down a bit. In tracks 6, 7 and 8 (“Senses”, “My Beautiful Friend” and “I Don’t Care Where You Live”), one or two modest Dylan references pass by (Our lives are a-changin’, for example), but towards the end of the album, on track 9, the hurricane picks up again. The wonderful “The Blind Stagger” is actually much more than a vehicle for a few sympathetic Dylan references: the song is in fact one big tribute to the great hero of The Charlatans. Take a fragment like
You're invisible, is there something I can give to you
I see my light come shining
There is good on the horizon
Daylight sneaking through my window
I will give you a rainbow and a bucket full of gold
You've been bitten by eleven hungry kittens
Who will go the whole distance while the blind stagger
… which is successively cut and pasted from fragments of “Like A Rolling Stone”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather”, “I Shall Be Released”, “You’re A Big Girl Now”, “Watching The River Flow” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. More subtle is the reverence in the musical setting; the chord progression G-G7-C-G6, on which the song rests, seems to be inspired by Dylan’s most favourite chord scheme – the bard does use the G-G6-G7 figure in combination with the C in dozens of songs. “Percy’s Song”, “With God On Our Side”, “My Back Pages”, “Don’t Think Twice”, “The Times”, “Hattie Carroll”, “Restless Farewell”, “To Ramona”, “I Don’t Believe You”, “Mama You Been On My Mind”… you probably can’t find a chord combination that Dylan uses more often than this one.
The lyrics to the opening couplet of “The Blind Stagger” are no less Dylanesque;
Lord, it's been a long, long time
And people don't you find always leave their troubles at your door
I, I live on my own
I don't need a bitter soul beatin' on about my country anymore
Don't you think your daddy needs you home right away
Your daddy needs you home right away
… the most striking is of course the last line, copied from the early masterpiece “I Was Young When I Left Home”. But almost unnoticed, the “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” reference to throw my troubles out the door slips through. It leads to the only Dylan cover The Charlatans recorded in the studio (2002), to one of the most beautiful “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” covers of the twenty-first century. Borne by the extraordinarily beautiful, driving Hammond organ, larded with elusive Madchester psychedelia, especially in the bridge, and above all: Burgess’ irresistible, weirdly attractive singing, alternating back-and-forth between falsetto and tenor.
The Japanese release of Us And Us Alone, by the way, has two more great bonus tracks. “Your Precious Love”, The Charlatans’ version of “Tombstone Blues”, and “Sleepy Little Sunshine Boy”, in which Burgess wishes the sunshine boy: may you grow up to be righteous. Yes, Dylan staying forever young is also thanks to the love of The Charlatans.
—————
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 10 (final): Smooching with Lisa Bonet
———————-
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:
A while back Aaron came up with an idea for a series in which we might look at a very early performance by Dylan of a song and then what it sounded like around the time when when he played it for the last time.
In keeping with the other writing I’ve done with Aaron I’m going to try and write this straight off, without planning or plotting and re-writing. I did have an email a while back asking why I was doing this, and there is a reason: it seems to me that this is the closest I can get in writing to what Bob does in performing – improvising as he goes along around a theme. It just seems more in keeping with the music I’m writing about.
So let’s see what happened to “‘Til I fell in love with you”. This song comes right at the top of the official website’s list of Dylan songs in alphabetical order because they count the apostrophe at the start of ‘Til as a letter. As such it just comes behind ‘Cross The Green Mountain. OK that’s trivia, let’s get on…
The site gives us 194 performances from October 24, 1997 through to July 12, 2015 – almost 18 years. The links there give you the full set lists in case you are interested.
And we do indeed have what is (or is claimed to be) the world premiere (or “live debut” as they say), thanks to Mr tambourine. (Mr T if you have got a video of the last live, or the nearly last live please do get in touch again. Tony@schools.co.uk as ever).
https://youtu.be/iQtYvx4Y4lM
We can notice the uncertainty of the opening, as if whoever is playing those opening guitar notes (Bob I suspect) can’t quite remember what he is up to. The steel guitar adds and interesting effect on the second chord of this 12 bar blues. By the end of the first first verse everyone has remembered what they agreed to do and it seems smoother.
So now I need a copy from the end of times – and that has turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
Here it is in 1998
The quality is obviously not nearly so clear. And the key has changed it is something like three tones higher and Bob is putting much more expression into the singing.
This contrasts completely with the album recording which is much cleaner, clearer and slower – but then of course it has had the benefit of the producer cutting the sound in and out, and giving the very slightest of echo on Bob’s voice.
But now the project falls down because I can’t find videos from near the end of the round of performances. Worse, one of the things Youtube wants to do all the time is tell us when the video is put up, not when the video was created.
But… there is always the wonderful Mike Johnson (there’s more on Mike in the “About the Authors” section of this site). Mike as I am sure you know, is writing the first ever complete and absolute history of the Never Ending Tour, and we are publishing it week by week. If you’ve not read it, shame on you, it is brilliant. The index is there.
And what do we find: a live rendition from 2001. Here it is, with part of Mike’s notes reprinted by way of introduction…
‘Till I Fell in Love with You’ (1997) brings the blues into the city. Although the backing on this performance is pleasingly minimal, it still derives from big band city blues. What is called Delta Blues migrated to Chicago where blues masters like Buddy Guy created a particular Chicago style. Again, this is not exactly that music, but points us in that direction. I’m also reminded of the versatile Big Joe Turner, the blues ‘shouter’. Dylan has absorbed these influences and come up with his own brand of retro.
“What’s so good about this performance is that the backing does not overwhelm the song. Foregrounding Dylan’s voice provides for the variations needed in a rigidly repetitive song like this. Vocal variations carry it, while the band manage to keep it interesting all the way through, and it never becomes rote, which can be a problem with blues. This would have to be my favourite performance of this song.”
Till I fell in love with you 1997
So I don’t have a first and last performance – at least not at the moment, but I do have an early and later “on stage” version. That key change that was introduced early on has stayed, but the timing is pretty much the same. Different words are emphasised but most of all the sound is a lot cleaner. Oh yes and there is a rather unexpected hammering of the dominant chord at the end of the each verse (which I really don’t quite understand – it seems totally out of context, almost as if Bob is laughing at his own composition), and some other chords added in en route.
In short the essence of the song has stayed the same, but little bits around the edges have been manipulated. It is almost as if it has become too familiar – the band and Bob forgetting that most of us will not have as intimate a knowledge of the song as they do.
So as an experiment “first and last” turned out to be harder than expected – I thought I would be able to find a “last ever live performance video” but no – life’s never that simple.
But I am going to have another go – and if you can help by providing a link to a first or last performance of any song, it would make my life a lot easier. And of course if you want to write the review yourself, wonderful. I’d love to read it.
If you can help, as noted above just email Tony@schools.co.uk and write Untold Dylan in the subject line, and give a link to what I have found. I always try and give credit to anyone who has helped me, so if you don’t want to be mentioned or want to use a nom-de-plume please say very clearly in the email.
And if no one can help, I might bore you stupid with another attempt on my own, in a few days.
There are indexes to many of our series under the picture at the top of the page.
Links to all the cover versions used in this series are given at the end of the article, as well as links to all the previous articles themselves.
By Larry Fyffe
Cracking the Code within the songs of Bob Dylan clearly shows the obverse path that Jesus takes from Ethiopia and then to Egypt where he locks the ‘undead’ body of Mary Magdalene inside a vault of the Sphinx, and there, with some regrets, abandons her.
Matters are not so clear-cut after this, but apparently, Dylan transfigured as Christ, bounds off to Spain.
Time-travelling Dylan/Jesus is obviously still in love with Mary – In the lyrics beneath, the narrator shows remorse at what happened to apostle James the Great, “Big Jim” who’s now the patron saint of Spain (the encoded incident concerning the apostle and “Rosemary” previously revealed):
My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost
He's always off somewhere when I need him most
The Spanish moon is rising on the hill
But my hearts a-telling me I love you still
(Bob Dylan: Abandoned Love)
Noted already – the sexual adventures involving Jesus and Mary (aka Rose Marie) when on the other side of the Atlantic down in Spanish-speaking Mexico:
I'm going down to Rose Marie's
She never does me wrong
She puts it to me plain as day
And gives it to me for a song
(Bob Dylan: Going To Acapulco)
What becomes of daughter Sophia Sarah, or any of her children, is not revealed. Church officials consider any direct biological line of descent from Christ as a dangerous threat to their authority and any thoughts of Mary Magdalene as the Holy Ghost of the Trinity to be “an abomination and a heresy”.
The breaking of the Dylavinci Code demonstrates that other investigations into the matter simply come to the wrong conclusions.
We now realize that Mary and Jesus end up in Morocco with the baby, and so the crazy claim that descendants of the two lovers remain in France is a trough of hogwash.
On the other hand, there is the speculation that Jesus journeys to England at one time, perhaps after a sojourn in Spain, although no clues to that former event actually occurring are uncovered in the Delavinci Code:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen
(William Blake: Jerusalem)
Discovered though is the not-unusual Dylanesque out-of-time clue that Jesus and Maggie once made a brief stop in London, England:
They walked alone by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel, with a neon
burning bright
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)
Contended is that an alternate interpretation of the Code conflates Mary Magdalene with the “Liverpool girl” who’s mentioned in the song lyrics below.
The dispute results in a split within the recently established “Church of Saint Mary Magdalene”:
So it's now I'm leaving London Town, boys
Well, the town I'll soon forget ...
But there's one thing that's for certain
Sure as the sun shines down
I'll never forget that Liverpool gal
Who lived in London Town
(Bob Dylan: Liverpool Gal)
One branch of that church asserts that Jesus was in Libya, living in an oil refinery, at the time when He’s supposed to be in England.
The Dylavinci Code Index to videos(songs without links are in the article above)
Aaron: One of my favorite Dylan tracks from the late 80s has surprisingly few covers, here are just a few for your delectation.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, from In The Hot Seat…there was a rumour Bob plays on this, but I doubt it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q1EFoOs_CU
Tony: It is also a song I’ve always loved, not least for its very unusual (for rock) time signature – 6/8 is normally associated with traditional folk music, and is widely used by classical romantic composers, but not nearly so much in pop and rock. It runs as a quick 1 2 3; 1 2 3 to make up the six beats. Here the strong drum beat emphasises the start of each second group of three, which is really interesting – nothing here is as expected
The intro gives no clue at all as to what is coming up, and if I didn’t know this was going to be Long Black Coat I would have never guessed. Strong singing and great original accompaniment throughout, this is excellent for me and I want to hear it again, after this little session of writing is over.
The way the singing of the lyrics emphasise the distance that is implied throughout the song is brilliant also. I can’t pause here to think of other Dylan songs that relate to this – I am sure there are some obvious examples but they escape me. But for now this is one of the best discoveries of this series of articles.
Mark Lanegan from I’m Not There
Tony: The “I’m not there” soundtrack has always struck me as strange, although this song keeps close to the original, with a new approach to the instrumental backing. This brings across the horror implied of the ghostly element within the lyrics. And indeed the lyrics are so good, it doesn’t really need the music to vary itself very much.
Indeed that middle 8 is one of the most powerful moments in Dylan’s music – it comes as such as surprise.
But there are moments here I don’t quite like – it is as if they have decided to do it “like this” and that is how they do it. The vibrato guitar gets a bit wearing after a while, and it just stops, whereas I have always imagined the man in the clock fading into the distance. That doesn’t mean it has to be a fade-out, but not a quick dead stop either.
Joan Osborne
So vibrato guitar – it is the obvious thing to do, but there is one thing this makes clear – this song is very suited to a female voice; the lyrics might imply a growling man, but the woman’s voice can deliver just as well.
Actually, the sound here is really fascinating, and I want to stop typing this and listen, which is always the most positive sign. But I’ve managed to get it while typing away – what they have done is turned it into three long beats in a bar but subdivided each beat into six. Now that is clever, and it really works.
The other challenge in this song is what to do with the instrumental verse if you have one, and this sailing guitar gets it right for me. Just laid back enough to keep the ghostly feel. But it is the way they play with the beat that really makes it for me. And she does have a really fine voice for this type of song.
A tiny detail, I didn’t think the repeating of the title line over and over at the end helped – I’d got the message by then, and somehow it distracted.
Count To Fire
Tony:Of course the challenge for each new interpreter is to come up with something new while not drifting too far from the original. But the problem is we all know the song well, so a movement away from the original is needed to keep our interest and show why this new version is needed.
Playing a dominant piano part as the lead accompaniment with the guitar way behind it, is an original thought but I am not quite sure it is enough to hold us to the song. And yet the vocals are so good and clear that the lyrics come through so very powerfully, and that is good because apart from the rhythm it is about the lyrics and that very unusual melody, which doesn’t need to be played with at all.
I do like this version, but by removing the pulses between each group of three I beats I feel something is lost. Of course, versions that come later in Aaron’s selection always are at a disadvantage because by the time I get to them I’ve just heard the song three or four or more times, and maybe that’s the problem here. But excellent though the rendition is, I find it a bit of a plod.
Aaron: Steve Hackett – a rare cover from one of my all time favorite artists/ musicians from his excellent album Wild Orchid
Tony:Ah Mr Genesis – still here after all these years. Goodness, I haven’t listened to your music for years.
Of course, there is going to be some dramatic guitar entries and yes at one level this song cries out for them, so this version runs as I expected when I saw who it was. But no, the song doesn’t need the regular virtuoso performance that Steve Hackett can give. But the harmony on lines like “People don’t live or die” is sublime.
The problem is that behind the virtuoso there is a plod plod plod with guitar in between. I know a lot of Genesis fans will hate me for this, but I think this is a case of the musician putting himself first and the composition second. It’s Steve, so Steve has to show off his sublime talent – except no he doesn’t, because we all know what he can do, and what would have been great would have been for him to explore those harmonies a little more and play the guitar at the speed of light a little less.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed this selection, but have the feeling no one has quite got to the very essence of the piece. Maybe there is another version out there that does….
Is it really any wonder Is it really any wonder
The love that a stranger might receive the changes we put on each other’s heads
You cast your spell and I went under You came down on me like rolling thunder
I find it so difficult to leave I left my dreams on the riverbed
The second alienating, radical textual change, after that mattress-slinging village beauty from the opening couplet, is the closing line of the bridge. Of course, almost every line in the 1975 Rolling Thunder version has been radically changed, in the sense that they are all different words, but the tenor is almost the same as the original. Throw my ticket in the wind is not much different from Throw my ticket out the window, and I could have left this town by noon communicates in other words the same as I should have left this town by morning, to name but two examples.
That also applies to the bridge at first. Stranger and changes are related, You cast your spell and I went under has the same emotional charge as You came down on me like rolling thunder – with the wordplay reference to the name of the tour as a bonus (which is appreciated by the audience with slightly exaggerated hilarity).
I left my dreams on the riverbed, however, suddenly takes a turn that is radically different from the message I find it so difficult to leave. The latter is a tender, loving expression of an infatuation; the revision, taken in isolation, expresses a rather bitter resignation – “leaving your dreams” is far from romantic in any case. Riverbed, while somewhat strange, can be understood as an insider’s wink at “a bed in a house by the river” or something like that. Anyhow, riverbed does not have an unambiguous, commonly understood connotation. A vague Western association at most. Dylan himself has used the word once before, not so long ago by the way, in “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”;
Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it's said that
they got off with quite a haul
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts
… Dylan himself seems to have that vague Western association as well: a riverbed is a piece of scenery for a nineteenth-century scene somewhere in the Wild West. Just like Johnny Cash (in “All Around Cowboy”; he’s dry as an old riverbed) or the Irish cowboy Van Morrison in “Moonshine Whiskey” (I just want to lay my feet on a river bed). Or Doug Kershaw’s hit “Louisiana Man” – which somewhere in Dylan’s inner jukebox is sung by Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Ricky Nelson, Jan & Dean, and an array of others. The most beautiful perhaps by the irresistible Bobbie Gentry;
At birth mom and papa called their little boy Ned
Raised him on the banks of a river bed
On a houseboat tied to a big tall tree
A home for my papa and my mama and me
… wherein, however, the emotional charge of riverbed drifts far from the tenor of Dylan’s song. I left my dreams behind has a melancholic, maybe even a bit bitter, overtone. But then again: maybe Dylan just shouts something out of the blue, filler lyrics – at the rehearsal in New York, a month earlier, this line did not yet exist. Dylan sings something partly unintelligible there (I finally …. …. so true, something like that), but nothing about lost dreams and riverbeds, in any case.
The remainder of the revised text, the third stanza, gives no reason either to think that the strange closing line of the bridge was a well-thought-out textual intervention:
I can hear that lonesome whistle blowin'
I hear them semis rolling too
If there's a driver on the road
Better let him have my load
cause tonight I'll be staying here with you
…the meaning of which is pretty much the same a month earlier, in the rehearsal:
I can hear that lonesome whistle blowin'
I can hear those semi-trucks rollin’ too
If there's a cowboy on the plane
then let him have my train
cause tonight I'll be staying here with you
An anecdotal change from train to the Rolling Thunder Revue’s mode of transport, with the resulting disappearance of the stationmaster and the poor boy in favour of a driver or a cowboy… it’s all not too earth-shattering. No hint of a clue, anyway, as to why or which dreams were abandoned in the preceding bridge. Still, Dylan seems to be quite content with that anecdotal shift from train to semi-trucks. The original from ’69 closes with a repeat of the first verse, of the throw my ticket out the window verse. During the first performance of the song at the Rolling Thunder Revue, he decides to repeat this last semi-truck verse.
Maybe because he thinks it’s the first rock song to use the word semi-truck, who knows. Though in fact he is just beaten on that front by Tom Waits and his cover of Red Sovine’s 1967 hit, “Big Joe and Phantom 309” (Nighthawks At The Diner, 1975). Waits is fairly faithful to the lyrics of the original, touching ghost story about the friendly spirit of Big Joe who picks up hitchhikers in his truck Phantom 309, entertaining them with his stories, but Waits changes one small detail:
He pushed her ahead with 10 forward gears
Man that dashboard was lit like the old
Madam La Rue pinball, a serious semi truck
… he turns Red Sovine’s truck into a semi-truck.
In 2003, Johnny Cash writes his last song, the masterful “Like The 309”, which is released only three years after his death (on American V: A Hundred Highways, 2006). Cash borrows “309”, obviously, from “Big Joe and Phantom 309”, but turns the truck back into a train. Johnny wrote his very first song in 1954 about a train journey (“Hey Porter”), and Johnny writes his very last song about a train journey again, fifty years later – about his coffin that will be taken on the 309 to its final resting place. Probably because Johnny Cash, just like Dylan, needs to hear the steam whistle blow:
I hear the sound of a railroad train
The whistle blows and I'm gone again
Hitman, take me higher than a Georgia pine
Stand back children, it's the 309
It's the 309, it's the 309
Put me in my box on the 309
Yep, I can hear that steam whistle blowin’.
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 9: Music from the Big Mushroom
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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:
“All my songs, the styles I work in, were all developed before I was born. When I came into the world, that spirit of things was still very strong. Billie Holiday was still alive. Duke Ellington. All those old blues singers were still alive. And that was the music that was dear to me. I was never really interested in pop music.”
Bob Dylan 2001
“The whole album deals with power. If life teaches us anything, it’s that there’s nothing that men and women won’t do to get power. The album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation – the way I look at it.” Dylan on “Love and Theft.”
When David Kempler, Bob Dylan’s drummer, emerged from a twelve-day recording session in May 2001, he made a very revealing comment: “And when we went in to record Love and Theft it was like, oh my God he’d been teaching us this music, not literally these songs but these styles. As a band, we’re familiar with every one of these.”
This comment provides a clue as to what Dylan had been doing onstage since Time out of Mind in 1997. He had been training the band in this antique music, those old sounds he loved so much. We have noted the number of covers of old songs Dylan performed in 1999 (Honky Tonk Dylan: Despair and sentimentality) and 2000 (Beyond Dylan), and the fifties rock and roll sound he evolved for some of his own songs. There was a strategy to all this; he knew where his music was heading, and he was keen to take the band with him.
“On any given day, Dylan might have played the band members a vintage recording by Holiday or Jimmy Rushing, have them learn that song, and then ask them to adapt that feel and arrangement to his own tune. But after listening back to a take, Dylan would just as often ask the musicians to change their instruments and adapt different keys or tempos for that song.” (Rolling Stone)
The result of all this was an album radically different from anything Dylan had done before. He pushed the boundaries of his music all the way back to the 1920s. This, and lyrics that ranged even further back, to the classical era of Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, enabled Dylan to encompass the despair evident on Time out of Mind within a larger framework, even a comic perspective. The despair didn’t go away, it was subsumed within the expanded borders of his art.
Untold editor Tony Attwood has shown how Dylan worked his way into the album though writing the blues songs first, as the blues is a solid link with Dylan’s previous work, but I would like to start with ‘Floater’ as this song drops us in the middle of these antique sounds.
Following Dylan only through his studio albums, there is nothing there to prepare us for a song like ‘Floater.’ Musically it takes us way back to the beginning of the 20th Century. The lyrics take us back to that era too.
‘I keep listenin' for footsteps
But I ain't hearing any
From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many
A summer breeze is blowing
A squall is settin' in’
Dylan creates a family to exemplify the lifestyles and values of the time. There’s a touch of pastoralism here, a touch of nostalgia, mixed with tougher, more bitter elements:
‘My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves’
This is a wonderfully clear recording from Washington, 15th Nov. Bear in mind that the album was not released until 11th of Sept (the infamous 9/11) so we only have about two months worth of concerts to consider.
Floater
A bouncy, exuberant song, its brilliance as a lyrical composition has been largely overlooked because of barren arguments about Dylan’s ‘plagiarism.’ We should be clear from the outset that a song is not an academic essay; a song doesn’t have footnotes or references. Richard F Thomas (Why Dylan Matters, 2017) has identified twelve references to Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza across five songs on the album. Rather than attacks on the ‘Freestealing’ Bob Dylan, Thomas comments: ‘I was interested in how these lifted passages might work in their new settings. A Japanese gangster’s novel and the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid, side by side, felt like the sort of creative, surrealistic juxtapositions that had roots in Dylan’s songwriting going back to the sixties.’
Dylan is able to weave disparate elements into his compositions to create, in the case of ‘Floater,’ a sparkling collage-like portrait of life pre World War 1. Thomas goes on to say, ‘This method of composition is not to be thought of as mere quotation or citation. Rather it is a creative act involving the “transfiguring” of song and literature going back through Rome to Homer. It is the means by which Dylan imagines and creates the worlds that he then inhabits in his songs and performances.’
The most interesting thing about Dylan’s 21st Century work is its dense intertextuality, how it ranges through time, space and traditions
Also full of melodious buoyancy is ‘Moonlight,’ another song that evokes this earliest era of modern music. The refrain ‘won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone’ is repeated six times, and so the question arises, how much longer must he keep asking? The more often it’s asked, the more it tends to bring the anticipated meeting into question. There’s a melancholy here which suggests that maybe it’s already too late. When the invitation turns to pleading we might suspect that this romance is more wishful thinking than anything else, and the pastoralism of the song reinforces that sense.
The same thing happens when Dylan sings ‘don’t think twice, it’s all right’ four times in that song. The repetition undermines itself, and leads us to suspect that perhaps the underlying instruction is actually to think twice, maybe three or four times.
‘Moonlight’ is an exquisite little song. What is extraordinary about it in terms of Dylan’s oeuvre, is its use of natural imagery. We are far away from stuffy rooms and claustrophobia. We are out there with ‘the earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone’ and where ‘branches cast their shadows over stone.’ The song is a lyrical masterpiece posing as a gentle little filler.
This performance is from 28th October, Milwaukee. A beautifully clear, gentle performance.
Moonlight (A)
This one, from Seattle (6th Sept) is a bit looser, swings a bit more, maybe a little more relaxed. And what a joy it is to hear that whimsical harmonica break at the end. It doesn’t get better than this. By the way, the opening bars on the guitar remind me strongly of the Ink Spots, the singing group from the 1930s and 40s. Try ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’ which you can find on You Tube.
Moonlight (B)
Rolling Stone magazine described Love and Theft as ‘an album steeped in Chicago blues, Tin Pan Alley crooning, jump blues and Western swing.’ Jump blues or jump jazz, described by our old friend Google as ‘A sub-style of swing played by small bands in the late 1930s and 1940s that combined strong rhythms, riff tunes, blues, and pop songs. A precursor to rhythm and blues.’
That last phrase springs to mind when considering ‘Summer Days,’ a brisk jump blues. It’s shot through with sexual innuendo, as that kind of music was, and has a happy, anarchic, celebratory feel. A touch of cheekiness and absurdity. There’s a sting in the tail here and there, but life is to be treated with gay abandon. Good humour reigns. This is the devil-may-care music of the Charleston era. Think of that frantic post WW1 dancing. Kick up your heels!
‘She's looking into my eyes, she's holding my hand
She's looking into my eyes, she's holding my hand
She says, "You can't repeat the past, " I say, "You can't?
What do you mean, you can't, of course you can!"’
This one’s from 19th November, and kicks along just fine. Some fine antique guitar work, with Mr Guitar Man sounding right at home.
Summer Days (A)
Since Dylan didn’t vary the song much at all, I didn’t think it worth putting in a second performance until I heard this one from the Washington concert. Perhaps it’s just better recorded, but everything clicks. Hard to stay still for this one.
Summer Days (B)
It’s little wonder that ‘High Water (for Charley Patton)’ is one of the most popular songs on the album. Patten was a blues singer from the 1920s and 30s, famous for his slide guitar. It’s worthwhile to point out that Dylan’s evocation of this era is just that, an evocation not an imitation. Dylan and his band are modern, sophisticated musicians, masters of many styles, and bring to the music a certain panache the originals lacked.
But ‘High Water’ brings another element to this antique music, a very contemporary concern with environmental destruction and extreme weather events, now commonplace, making the song more relevant with every passing year. The song has its prophetic side, Hurricane Katrina arrived four years later. The spirit of the song, however, like ‘Summer Days’, is anarchic and Devil-may-care (‘throw your panties overboard!’) but with a more desperate aspect.
‘High water risin', six inches 'bove my head
Coffins droppin' in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin' into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm going to do
"Don't reach out for me, " she said
"Can't you see I'm drownin' too?"’
We might suspect that for Dylan the ‘high water’ is as much metaphorical as literal, like ‘hard rain.’ Not his fault if his metaphors turn into physical reality. There’s zaniness, and an exuberance here too that wouldn’t be out of place in his 1965 ‘Tombstone Blues’:
‘They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff
"I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't care"
High Water everywhere’
Again the Washington performance is hard to beat. The song has a good bounce with a brooding guitar riff. Wonderfully sharp recording.
High Water (A)
The backing on this one from Madison Square Gardens however is muted by comparison, Dylan’s voice foregrounded. I couldn’t overlook this one:
High Water (B)
That takes us to about halfway through the songs from Love and Theft that Dylan introduced to the NET in 2001. Performances full of zest, and a sense that the sixty-year-old Dylan is revelling in the expanded musical and lyrical horizons these new songs offer.
I’ll be back soon to complete our account of these new songs in the next post.
An index to past episodes and an index of the cover versions of Dylan songs from this series are given at the end of the article.
———–
The associative Postmodernist Dylavinci Odyssey continues; things get downright interesting.
Mary Magdalenes’s body gets placed in the judgement hall of Christ.
That is, in the Egyptian Sphinx, the ‘way out’ that allows the wayward drifter to escape.
Time traveller Bob Dylan, shape-shifts into Christ (plays a joke on Henry, a Scottish Rastafarian, which fools Queen Mary into committing suicide when Jesus and wife Mary Magdalene vacation in Ethiopia).
Sure enough, Jesus swears to God Almighty that He’ll never again be taken in, never again be enticed, by bright eyes like those of the demonic darling Mary Magdalene.
So beautiful Magdalene be; so like Annabel Lee, a distant cousin of the high-born Scotchman Henry Lee:
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of beautiful Annabel Lee
And so, all the night tide, I lay down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea
In her tomb by the side of the sea
(Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee)
Maggie of Magdala, so like the dead beauty laid out in a hospital that’s named after St. James the Great, one of the twelve apostles, and the patron saint of Spain – aka “Big Jim”:
I went down to St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So cold, so sweet, so fair
(Louis Armstrong: St. James Infirmary ~ traditional)
Everything is delivered by the song lyrics quoted below when the Dylavinci Code therein is unravelled as carefully as a wrapped-up mummy.
With second thoughts, Jesus muses that perhaps there was no need to rush headlong into redemption.
Maybe there’s still time to be enticed yet again into temptation by Mary who lies so sweetly stretched out in her cold sepulchre within the walls of the Sphinx.
But perhaps not:
You're the queen of my flesh, girl
You're my woman, you're my delight
You're the lamp of my soul, and you torch up my life
But there's violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed
On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia
to the judgement hall of Christ
(Bob Dylan: Precious Angel)
According to the Code, Jesus is angry, thinks Mary’s sister can be damned:
Ring them bells Sweet Martha for the poor man's son
Ring them bells so the world will know God is one
(Bob Dylan: Ring Them Bells)
And Saint Jerome, with his ‘original sin’, can be damned too:
You bring it up to Saint Jerome
You can bring it all the way over
Bring it all back home
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)
Which brings us back to the play on words, such as “home”/”Holme”, in the following song about Sin City:
Scarlet Town in the month of May
Sweet William Holme on his deathbed lay
Miss Mary by the side of the bed
Kissing his face, and heaping prayers on his head
So brave, so true, so gentle is he
I'll weep for him as he would weep for me
Little Boy Blue come blow your horn
In Scarlet Town where I was born
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)
https://youtu.be/U3XP-S2Z9xw
The Dylavinci Code Index to videos (songs without links are in the article above)
Aaron: For this one I thought we could take a look at the Dylan covers performed at the Woodstock festival, August 15 to 18 1969. This is going to be a two-parter and we’ll look at the tracks in performance order.
First up from Friday August 15th to Saturday 16th (her set started at 1am!) it’s…
Melanie with Mr Tambourine Man
Tony: This really is a shock. The guitar playing is that of an amateur sitting on the floor at the end of a private party in the 1960s, not what I would expect at a great festival. And the singing could come from such a venue as well.
But there’s an oddity here: the foot tapping. When Dylan (and almost everyone else) performs the song, the emphasis of the beat is on the first beat of each four beat bar as in
Hey Mr Tambourine Man play a song for me
From my memory, that really is how just about everyone – maybe everyone – does the song. The opening “Hey” is the accented first beat of the bar”. But what Melanie is doing (presumably purposely) is tapping her foot in a way that can very clearly be heard, on the second and fourth beat of each bar. Now this is what anyone who understands and knows about swing does – it is was rock and jazz drummers do, but not what Dylan does in this song.
So we get
Hey [tap] Mister Tambourine Man play a song for me
As a result all the unimportant words, parts of words and even once no word (after hey) are accented. It is really strange and rather alluring.
Aaron: Next up and on directly after Melanie (beginning at 1.45am) it’s…
Arlo Guthrie with Walkin’ Down The Line
Hmm, I’m not really that much of a fan of Arlo nor of his way of addressing an audience – if I go to a gig and don’t want to sing, well, that’s up to me.
But as a performance, it certainly is a good rendition of a song that we all know, and he does have a very fine voice. And here’s a thought, he’s now 74 years old. Wow, it seems like only yesterday.
Yep, a jolly performance of a song, and if we didn’t have that admonition of the audience, well, I’d enjoy it much more. Dylan’s original was recorded in 1962 and recorded for Broadside; today it almost feels like a traditional folk song.
Aaron: Directly after Arlo’s set at 3am came…
Joan Baez with the first of (count ‘em) 3 different performances of the song I Shall Be Released throughout the weekend.
Joan Baez
Tony: Another fine and accomplished performance in what must have been difficult circumstances, and a lovely understated accompaniment behind her. And that lovely “Sing it” to encourage the audience participation. I couldn’t hear any, but well, the mics were pointing the other way. She really does tell the audience what the meaning is, and I didn’t feel the slightest bit commanded by her demand for people to join in. Unlike Arlo.
Aaron: Curiously no Dylan tracks are performed throughout the Saturday daytime/Sunday night sets. The next 3 Dylan tracks come courtesy of…
Joe Cockerwho performed his set from 2pm to 3.45pm on Sunday August 17th.
Dear Landlord
Tony: OK problem time. Not all videos that can be seen in the US are available in the UK, and this is one of them. There is also the track on Spotify, but rather unusually that also comes up with the note that it is not available in the UK
So I am left with this 1970 version
Tony: What a fine voice he had – I’d forgotten – but I did remember the hand gestures. Of course I don’t know if this is like the Woodstock version, but hopefully it is not too far off. It’s a fine interpretation with really inventive instrumentation from both piano and guitar, and it makes a great dance track.
I just don’t know if it what he did at Woodstock! But if you are in other parts of the world, you probably will.
Just Like A Woman
Tony: Oh no – it looks like the whole run has been disavowed for UK audiences. Now that’s odd. Here’s a replacement, but not from Woodstock – but I do enjoy this. It is so understated, which is not something I would normally associate with Joe Cocker.
Tony: I know that I am not supposed to be listening to this version, but I do rather enjoy it. It’s the way
Aaron: And lastly the second version of I Shall Be Released
So for once our fun and games of Aaron writing in the US and me writing in the UK has fallen apart. There is an article about Joe Cocker at Woodstock here with a video
But I think the key to the whole thing of vanishing music in the UK, is that there is an album “Live at Woodstock” by Joe Cocker released in 2009 which might not want the copyright of the film reproduced for free in Europe.
So by way of compensation for UK readers here is I shall be released from another time and place
Aaron: In part II we will cover the remaining Dylan covers from the festival plus a bonus surprise performance!!
Tony: Let’s hope they’re available in the UK as well as the USA. Mind you, Aaron, we’ve got away with this game for quite a long time with only a couple of hitches, so we’re not doing too badly!
I should have left this town this morning I could have left this town by noon
But it was more than I could do By tonight I’d been to someplace new Oh, your love comes on so strong But I was feeling a little bit scattered
And I’ve waited all day long And your love was all that mattered
For tonight when I’ll be staying here with you So tonight I’ll be staying here with you
More drastic than any textual change, of course, is the musical turnaround. On Nashville Skyline, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is a melodic mid-tempo country ballad, Dylan using his new crooner voice and singing with the brakes on.
Colour is added by long steel guitar strokes, the piano suggests some debauchery and the only – modest – fireworks come from the electric guitar (Norman Blake, by the sound of it).
But at the Rolling Thunder Revue, six years later, we have Mick Ronson on stage.
Mick Ronson is probably the most famous Hullensian, although a remarkable number of notable people come from the relatively small city of Hull, or rather: Kingston upon Hull (about 260,000 inhabitants). Who then also usually show a kind of regional pride. Songwriter Phillip Goodhand-Tait writes “Lincoln County”, the popular 80s band The Housemartins give their successful debut album the witty title London 0 Hull 4 and Ronson calls his third, posthumously released album Heaven And Hull (1994). On which, by the way, one of the few tolerable covers of “Like A Rolling Stone” can be found, sung by David Bowie.
A cynic might think that Heaven And Hull is not too complimentary, but Ronson means well. And so it is understood; after his death (29 April 1993, liver cancer), the city honours him with a Memorial Stage in Queen’s Gardens, a guitar sculpture in East Park and a wonderful memorial rock show, Turn And Face The Strange, performed 22 times in 2017, 2018 and 2019 to sold-out audiences each time.
It is fitting that Ronson’s musical life should end with Bowie – after all, the Spider From Mars also emerged in the shadow of Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s.
Before Ziggy Stardust, on Bowie’s Hunky Dory, Ronson really shines for the first time. As a child, he learned to play the recorder, piano, harmonium and violin, and that diverse upbringing now pays off. And his talent, of course – a brilliant string arrangement like in “Life On Mars?” requires more than just skill.
The exceptional beauty of “Life On Mars?” is in any case largely due to Ronno. The rough demo recording, with only Bowie on piano, already reveals that it’s a beautiful song, but it only becomes a hors category song because of Ronson’s recorder (second verse), both guitar solos and above all the strings – remarkably his very first string arrangement, which he nervously had written out note for note with sweaty hands for the arrogant studio musicians of the BBC. Especially admirable given the complex chord progression and the widely varying melody lines – it’s not a ten-a-penny song that Ronson arranges so masterfully, so sumptuously.
Van Morrison, Mott The Hoople, Elton John, Morrissey… Ronson’s name as a go-to guy is established. Even more so after he turns out to be able to surpass the high school art of his masterpiece Hunky Dory on Ziggy Stardust (on “Five Years”, piano, autoharp, electric guitar, backing vocals and string arrangement are all his, for instance), and then on Lou Reed’s bestseller Transformer (1973) – yep, that’s Ronno’s piano, recorder and string arrangements again, in again outer category pop songs, in “Perfect Day” and “Satellite Of Love”.
Wonderful, moving arrangements by a classically trained prodigy – but at heart Ronson has always remained a rock ‘n’ roller. We hear that in both the nippy lead guitar parts of Reed’s “Vicious”, in the straightforward sweaty rock of Bowie’s “Hang On To Yourself” and “Suffragette City”, in the neurotic solo on Elton John’s “Madman Across The Water” – and with Dylan, on the stage of the Rolling Thunder Revue.
On a social, personal level, there seems to be no special connection with Dylan, although according to Sam Shepard’s wonderful Rolling Thunder Logbook, Ronson is the “chief instigator of the make-up craze which swept through Rolling Thunder like a brush fire”. But musically, there is all the more of a click – and the reanimated “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is one of the best examples thereof.
“Ronson,” Shepard notes in the same Logbook about the Night Of The Hurricane concert, “really gets off on this monster crowd. Slashing his guitar with huge full-arm uppercuts. Platinum-blond hair spraying in all directions. Then stalking across the stage, stiff-legged, Frankenstein macho strutting, shaking the neck of his guitar with his vicious chord hand as though throttling his weaker brother. All the time, never losing a lick. Through every motion playing genius, inspirational lead lines.”
… genius, inspirational lead lines of his characteristic Gibson Les Paul with that characteristic full-bodied, slightly floating sound. And that inspiring fire also seems to ignite Dylan’s vocals; the difference between Dylan the elderly crooner from Nashville and Dylan the syllable-spitting, splattering rocker from the Rolling Thunder Revue is immense. Debatable, sure, but a significant faction of fans considers Dylan’s singing on this tour a highlight in his long concert history – and there is something to be said for that. Dylan sings “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” with the passion of a smitten, fierce rock god – and that seems to help influence the otherwise insignificant changes in content. Like in this second verse; “I could” sounds more energetic, louder, than the original “I should”, like “leaving by noon” fits a creature of the night more than “leaving by morning”, like “scattered” is a great word to hurl enthusiastically through a wall of guitar violence into the concert hall. Better than “Oh, your love comes on so strong”, anyway.
After the Rolling Thunder tour, Ronson gives his guitar to one of his biggest fans, Mick Rossi from punk rock band Slaughter And The Dogs. An anonymous collector from Manchester gets his hands on it, but thankfully lends it to the temporary exhibition and performance Turn And Face The Strange in Hull.
“Mick’s Rolling Thunder Les Paul,” says the exhibition sign. She is a shining centrepiece.
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 8: On The 309
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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:
The series (which continues two or three times a week on Untold Dylan) contains not only the exposition of the Dylavinic Code but also a series of videos that illuminate the thesis.
Most of these videos are cover versions, and now for the first time, at the foot of this article, we have an index to the (mostly) cover versions of Dylan songs incorporated in the Dylavinci Code series. Just click on any of the links and you will be taken to the article wherein you can click on the video. We’ll be updating this list as the series continues.
But first, today’s article.
by Larry Fyffe
The breaking of the Dylavinci Code shows that Bob Dylan travels way back in time, and takes on the persona of Jesus.
In the song lyrics below, we learn that initially Jesus really loves Mary Magdalene, but resents the interference of her mother Eucharis, and Maggie’s seemingly ‘older’ sister, the more aggressive Martha (a good cook though she be).
Both her sister and mother are concerned about the outcome of Maggie’s relationship with Jesus.
As we have already seen, the Code reveals that the couple eventually end up in Morocco with their girl-child after Jesus and Mary with her brother Lazarus and sister Martha journey to France:
I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze
With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn
I courted her proudly, but now she is gone
Gone as the season she's taken
In a young summer's youth, I stole her away
From her mother and sister, though close did they stay
Each one of them suffering from the failures of their day
With strings of guilt they tried hard to guide us
(Bob Dylan: Ballad In Plain D)
Certainly, a different story than told in the Holy Bible where Jesus is depicted as the sacrificial Lamb:
The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him
And saith, "Behold the Lamb of God
Which taketh away the sin of the world"
(John 1: 29)
So dear reader you have to decide if it be I or the Bible that’s telling the truth … whilst noting that Rosemary sacrifices herself in the song “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts.”
To be perfectly honest, it was with the assistance of my computer ‘Fat Nancy’ that I was able to figure out the Code embedded in Dylan’s song lyrics.
So it’s a tough decision to make, that’s for sure.
Uncovered too is that the following song lyrics be an allegory, the boss is Jesus; the lady, Mary Magdalene:
It was late last night when the boss came home
To a deserted mansion and a desolate throne
Servant said, "Boss, the lady's gone
She left this morning, just 'fore dawn"
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)
The boss tracks down Maggie, but her husband, the Boss, is shot down by Henry Lee, her lover, and she, in turn, stabs Henry; then stabs herself to death.
Poor Henry:
His knees went limp, and he reached for the door
His doom was sealed, he slid to the floor
He whispered into her ear, "This is all your fault
My fighting days have come to a halt"
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)
In the song above, Henry, Mary’s lover, ends up dead, wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay.
Again quite unlike the biblical story told:
Jesus saith unto her
"Woman, why weepest thou
Whom seekest thou?"
She, supposing him to be the gardener
Saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence
Tell me where you have laid him
And I will take him away"
Jesus saith unto her, "Mary"
She turned herself, and saith unto him
"Raboni", which is to say 'Master'
(John 20: 15,16)
It’s clear that Joker Jesus either sends a look-alike Libyan in His place to find Mary, and do the dirty work; or Jesus is simply unkillable.
In any event, Mary is tricked, like mythological Semele by Hera, into killing herself.
One of the great things about having a website that has been running since 2008 (which now seems to me to be an awfully long time ago) is that over that time we have come up with all sorts of ideas, which have amused us for a while, and then run their course, but which upon re-inspection, still seem worthy of dusting down and considering again.
So it is with the “Why does Dylan like” series which to my amazement when I looked up the index has 45 entries in it.
Thus Aaron has come up with the idea of looking at the theme (which is pretty much explained by the title) once again, and suggested we take a look at Easy and Slow to start with. Here’s Bob’s version:
Aaron: Dylan only tried it once, at a rehearsal in 1975 and as you can hear, it’s just him and his guitar. The version was included on the 14 disc Rolling Thunder box.
It had been suggested that Dominic Behan wrote (or maybe he simply “collected”) the verses in the 40s. The Dubliners as well as the Clancy Brothers popularized the song in the late 60s, and that’s probably where Bob knows the song from.
Tony: It is interesting that this is at a rehearsal, in that there is applause at the end. At rehearsals, people don’t normally applaud each other – and the number of people clapping sounds far larger than one would expect to be at a rehearsal. But maybe it was all different with Bob.
Bob clearly knows the song very well – he’s obviously played it through many times, has the lyrics perfect, and the accompaniment sounds like it has been played often. That doesn’t mean it’s particularly complex but rather it has that easy feel of a guitar part that is now an old friend. The harmonica fits in neatly as well.
I am often amazed at Dylan’s recollection of lyrics; he picks them up so quickly and even when he has changed the lyrics between on-stage versions he rarely slips. Believe me, it is much harder than you might think and needs total focus, even when playing a song that one has played 500 times before.
For me this is staggeringly beautiful both in terms of the arrangement and the performance. It is sad it is not better known.
The Dubliners
Tony: I do admire the Dubliners both for their persistence in maintaining the traditions of Irish folk songs. But for me the accompaniment isn’t right – it doesn’t add anything to the performance or the delivery of the vocals. I just don’t have the need to go on listening.
Now of course I know that in the days when the traditional songs were written, each verse was performed in the same way – but then normally without accompaniment so even the slightest extra emphasis here or pause there was important musically. However …
Frank Harte suggests that Dominic Behan was the first to popularise it, and that what he did was take the verses from Sean O’Casey’ play “Red Roses for Me” in the 1940s.
So maybe not as old as it is made to sound.
The Clancy’s
Tony:My opening reaction is “What a silly picture”. Of course that is by the way, but really these guys don’t need something as naff as that.
But, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I am a Dylan fan, maybe it’s because I listened to his version first and then came to these earlier versions, it is the Dylan version that I much prefer.
Indeed in this version, adding the beat just before the three minute mark seems rather like the producer saying “come on guys can’t we have something else in here, it’s getting tedious.” Maybe not, but as a musical arrangement it really does seem false, and the best arrangements are those that instantly sound completely right and natural.
Yes I can see the point of the harp and pennywhistle, and maybe if I hadn’t listened to the earlier versions I would have been more receptive, but once you know the story, it just sounds to me as if they are desperately trying to find a way to keep the song going.
Actually, I can imagine sitting in a folk club where the audience is appreciative, attentive and above all silent, and being drawn into this by the atmosphere of the club and the quality of the singing, but on record, sitting here, looking at the wind blowing the trees in the autumn sunshine, no, it doesn’t quite get there.
This one says on the internet “Easy and slow 1975 – Bob Dylan club Norway – Facebook”. The album says “Seacrest Motel Rehearsals, Falmouth, MA – October 1975”. Probably not Norway then. Or is there a Norway in MA?
My time is almost up on this one, but from listening to each recording once while writing I’d say they are both the same. Can anyone give a definitive source of information?
And so, to end by answering the question, “Why does Dylan like Easy and Slow” – it is a beautifully crafted song, very much reminiscent of past days, and with lyrics that allow the emotions of the song to come through without being overplayed in the performance. It just tells the tale as it was, and the sadness is for us to take or leave. Played as Dylan plays it, it is beautiful. Really, really worth a listen. Forget the other versions.
For the last three posts I have been building towards the arrival on stage of the new songs from Love and Theft, released later in the year. We’re getting there. The next two posts will be dedicated to those songs. In the meantime we’ve got some more old favourites to catch up on, so let’s kick off with the roughest and rowdiest of these songs – ‘The Wicked Messenger’.
I’ve talked myself into a bit of a corner with this song, having extolled the wonders of the 2000 performances, blathered on about peak performances and so on, not leaving me much space to move when it comes to the 2001 performances. Well, they are a bit rougher than the previous year, Dylan’s voice rougher, but I’d pretty much decided that the mythical ‘best ever’ performance of this song was this one, from Seattle (10th June)…
Wicked Messenger (A)
until I heard this next one and decided I’d finally arrived at the definitive electric version of the song with this blistering performance. Wonderfully staged vocal, and some wild guitar and harp work from Bob. You can hear him sing ‘Good News’ rather than just ‘good news’. Puts another slant on the song.
Wicked Messenger (B)
Keeping up the pace, let’s turn to ‘Tough Mama’ from 20th August. The song’s a tribute to a pretty wild woman, by the sounds of it, ‘tough mama… dark goddess… sweet angel’. We don’t know who Jack the Cowboy is, but he might be the Jack of Hearts from a song Dylan is soon to write, none other than the ‘leading player’ himself, Mr D, the ‘perfect stranger’. It might be a bit too easy to see (construe?) the seeds of Blood on the Tracks in these songs from the previous Planet Waves. This is a rowdy, robust love song. But where is Dylan in all this? Oh yes,
‘Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch
I stood alone upon the ridge and all I did was watch
Sweet goddess
It must be time to carve another notch’
Tough Mama
Another notch in his belt perhaps. Another conquest? Here’s a song dedicated to doing just that. ‘Lay Lady Lay’ needs no introduction. It may be Dylan’s most famous song of seduction.
Lay Lady Lay
What a tender, beguiling performance! Dylan uses all the resources of his mature voice, upsinging, downsinging, half talking/pleading, to produce this standout performance.
Of course, once the lady has lain across the bed, complications ensue, especially when we fall in love only to find the lady heading for a door, for ‘somebody’s room’. She’s a big girl now, and you’re bound for heartbreak, singing through your tears.
You’re a big girl now (A)
Another wrenching vocal performance (Larry on steel guitar, 5th Oct, Spokane). These 2001 performances are hard to beat, aren’t they? That was so good, let’s hear the song again, this time from the Hiroshima concert. I’ve got a weakness for this concert, the whole ambience of it. Dylan brings great focus to his performance, and takes the audience with him.
You’re a big girl now (B)
‘Just Like a Woman’ must be the most tender put-down song ever written. While it presents an uncompromising picture of the woman, in all her pretensions, we get an equally uncompromising picture of the man’s vulnerability, his denial and hunger. It’s how these two contrary elements work together that make this such a great song. The mature voice of 2001 Dylan is perfect for the song. Beautiful little heartbreaking harp break at the end of the song too. (15th Nov, Washington)
Just like a woman (A)
That was so nice, let’s hear another one, a little softer. Another consummate performance. This one from 19th Nov, New York
Just like a woman (B)
‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is a put-down song without the tenderness, a song that throws us to the outer edges of existential despair. It’s hard to keep up snobby pretensions when you’re out on the street with the highway blues looking for your next fix, and there’s nowhere to go but down. This is an ‘I told you so’ kind of song. Whether the woman’s downfall is treated with triumph or sorrow, you’ll have to decide. Maybe it’s a mix of both. This one’s from 21st August, Telluride.
Like a Rolling Stone
Let’s return to Blood on the Tracks for a moment to catch our old favourite ‘Shelter from the Storm’. Here love is seen as a salvation from war and chaos. We understand love within this larger, grimmer context:
‘Well, the deputy walks on hard nails
and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much
it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm’
To put it the other way round, in a world of doom, it’s love alone that counts.
This one’s also from 21st August, Telluride, and features Larry on the steel guitar.
Shelter from the Storm
If love may offer some escape from doom and craziness, the drifter in ‘The Drifter’ finds another escape, by sheer luck and maybe a flash of God’s grace. Chaos can cut both ways. It can take us deeper into the madness, as in ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ or offer a door to freedom. The drifter takes the door and the frenetic song is over. The slashing, blistering rock performance fits the song quite perfectly. Interesting that three of the hardest rock songs on Dylan’s setlist come from that quiet, gentle album, John Wesley Harding. (‘Watchtower’, ‘Drifter’s Escape’, ‘Wicked Messenger’)
This performance from Madison Square Gardens comes out on top for me, hard-hitting and sustained harp solo. It rips along.
Drifters Escape (A)
But this one from 10th of May is a strong contender. A little more on the gutsier side, perhaps. It’s a real pleasure trying to decide which is best.
Drifters Escape (B)
There’s no escape, however, from the world of ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’. It’s a world full of strangeness and falsity, it’s Dylan’s circus world, and there’s no back door.
‘And the ladies treat me kindly
And furnish me with tape
But deep inside my heart
Lord, I know I can't escape’
The song is claustrophobic, funny, and maybe a bit scary. Dylan’s 2001 half talking, up and downsinging, use of all his vocal resources fits this song like a glove. True, I’ll never get over the album version, but that won’t stop me from appreciating this masterpiece. Dylan sets an even pace, doesn’t try to hurry the song, and before long we’re away, lost in one of Bob Dylan’s dreams.
Stuck inside of Mobile
Slipping ‘Thing’s Have Changed’ (2000) into these 60s songs creates an odd effect. Some things have not changed; the prospect of escape is as elusive as ever:
‘Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose’
That world would fit easily into ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile.’
A similar paradox arises here to what we find in ‘Watching the River Flow’. In that song the indolence of the lyrics is belied by the vigour of the performance; with ‘Things have Changed’, the more passionately he sings it, the less I believe it. He cares all right, can’t you tell by his voice? A remarkable vocal performance. (MSG)
Things have changed.
There is some sense of escape in ‘This Wheel’s on Fire,’ as this wheel’s rollin’ down the road, but it’s headed for disintegration, the explosion of self. The wheel’s not in control, it has no free will. It’s headed for destruction in most peculiar circumstances involving unspecified ‘favours’. I’m glad Dylan kept this song alive on stage. These later performances are not as spooky as the originals from The Basement Tapes, but we are in the hands of fate nonetheless. Some nice harmonies in the choruses.
This wheel’s on fire
One way out of the conundrums and terrors of life is – death. Dylan is too feisty and robust to yearn for death. Only on his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways do I hear a trace of it.
‘Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war’
But Dylan has been knocking on that door for a long time now, not because of a desire for death, but because there’s not much else you can do when you’re bleeding out and the world’s growing darker. The drifter has to really knock hard on that door, or it’s the other place, the place whose gates are always gaping open wide. That’s why he has to keep on knocking. Eventually somebody might answer. (10th May)
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
However dire things may be, and you may even be knocking on heaven’s door, but you can still ring them bells. Ring out the good news. Or the Good News.
‘Ring them bells for Saint Catherine from the top of the room
Ring them bells from the fortress for the lilies that bloom’
How poignant that second line is. A fortress may be a sanctuary from our enemies, but it may also be the prison. The lilies that bloom seem just within reach. Freedom is theirs. Even in the midst of unending moral war. (3rd August)
The most famous live performance of this song is probably from The Supper Club, 1993, but I rather like this slow, dreamy version. It’s Larry’s steel guitar that gives it that quality.
Ring them Bells
A song Dylan has often used to escape his concerts is ‘All Along the Watchtower’, always a rousing ending to a night of Dylan. There is ‘someway out of here’, it’s the highway to the next concert. Sometimes I wish he might have tried a simple, acoustic approach to the song, but no, the hurricane is upon us. The ghost of Hendrix rides.
This is a good gutsy one from 21st August, Telluride
Watchtower (A)
But if you can take another dose, try this one. It starts with the chords to ‘The Exodus Song’, a stirring anthem about the Jewish return to Palestine after WW2, sung by Pat Boone and family back in 1960. (20th August Telluride)
Watchtower (B)
There is however another way to finish a Dylan concert. A timely reminder that they’ll stone you whatever you do. There is no escape from getting stoned. ‘Stone you when you’re hit by a truck’, he sings here. Stone you and wish you good luck. (MSG)
So I’ll wish you all good luck and see you next time with the Love and Theft songs.
Throw my ticket out the windowThrow my ticket in the wind Throw my suitcase out there, tooThrow my mattress out there too Throw my troubles out the doorDraw my letters in the sand, I don’t need them anymore’cause you got to understand ’cause tonight I’ll be staying here with youthat tonight I’ll be staying here with you
The Rolling Thunder Revue kicks off in late October 1975, and one of the many pleasant surprises is the live debut of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” at the 22nd concert of the tour, on Saturday, November 22 in Waltham, Massachusetts. Surprising, this rehabilitation, but even more remarkable is the complete, sweeping restoration; almost every verse has been changed. And there is a third surprise, which seems to be a present for the steadily growing army of Dylanologists.
The first two more serious Dylan biographies were published in the previous years (Toby Thompson’s Positively Main Street: An unorthodox view of Bob Dylan and Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan, both 1972). And Dylan, of course, has had plenty to contend with, from the likes of A.J. Weberman, the garbage scavenger, to the intrusive fans who think they can invade his privacy, to the remorseless, bootlicking “journalists”, who all think they can distil the most intimate private matters from his song lyrics. Heroin addiction, homosexuality, anarchistic beliefs, messianic qualities, adultery… you name it. Dylan’s image and the misty quality of many of his lyrics unleash a great deal of creativity and obsessiveness, and correspondingly many painfully stupid conclusions about the man’s private life – mostly because a significant faction of Dylanologists stubbornly believes that every “I” in the songs is “I, Bob Dylan”.
As if to trigger that faction, Dylan announces the song twice with a teaser. “The next one is also a true story,” he says 27 November in Bangor, after “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll”. And four days later, in Toronto: “Here’s another true story comin’ up.”
It gives extra weight to the second surprise, to the textual changes. At least, it does suggest that Dylan has deleted the “untrue” elements, and that the text has become “true” because of these corrections. In any case, it is immediately clear that Dylan took the revision seriously. In the first verse, for instance, the metre is corrected – it is still trochaic tetrameters, but each line now has a correctly stressed, masculine, ending. In the original lyrics, the opening line still had an unstressed, feminine ending. It seems to explain the rather meaningless change from “out the window” to “in the wind”.
Less traceable is the utterly radical change of verse two, from “Throw my suitcase out there, too” to “Throw my mattress out there too”. Technically almost identical; same number of syllables, same rhythm, male ending, but for some reason a scratching and rewriting Dylan has changed suitcase to mattress. Stylistically, a minor, insignificant enhancement with a thin alliteration (my mattress), but that debatable enhancement is completely overshadowed by the quite drastic change to the enigmatic command of the I-person, who demands that his apparently strong and muscular mistress throws out his mattress – for otherwise unclear reasons. But, mind you, this is “a true story”. So maybe it was an air mattress. Still, apart from the presumed physical challenge the antagonist is facing here, the symbolism is particularly disturbing: the removal of the lover’s sleeping place does not at all match the love message tonight I’ll be staying here with you.
It is a fairly recent intervention. On CD1 of The Bootleg Series 15 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), we can listen to the rehearsal of the song on 19 October in New York, and here is no mention of a mattress. The line there is, “Throw my troubles out there too”, and no mattress appears in the rest of the lyrics either. The same applies to the equally curious follow-up line, Draw my letters in the sand. This line is not sung in the rehearsal either, and ambiguous it is as well, to say the least. After all, letters in the sand signal transience, brevity, impermanence. In fact, since 1957, since Pat Boone scored a major hit with the time-honoured “Love Letters In The Sand”, an inescapable connotation – and Dylan, who most likely has Gene Austin’s 1931 version on a pedestal, knows that too.
It is, all in all, a somewhat alienating rewriting. In the rest of the lyrics, almost every line has been rewritten too, but those rewritings are all in line with the protagonist’s original state of love. “Your love was all that mattered”, for instance, and ‘You came down on me like rolling thunder”. There is no “leakage” from other songs either, as is sometimes the case with Dylan. The surrounding songs in this show, and during the tour in general, are all mattress-less and sandletter-free. At most, “mattress” recalls 1966’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, recalls the bizarre line “You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine” – apparently, the mere word “mattress” inspires frenzies. And Dylan used it before as an attribute to represent exceptional physical strength of the female counterpart:
“love is gentleness – softness – creaminess” says Phaedra – who is now having a pillow fight – her weapon, a mattress – she stands on a deserted marshmallow,”
…like in his poetic prose explosion Tarantula, in which Phaedra does not, as it should be, swings a pillow during a pillow fight, but the whole mattress.
On the other hand, perhaps Dylan’s mind is again “normally” haunted by Johnny Cash, who recently had a minor hit with the potentially charming, but unfortunately rather overproduced (saccharine violins, terrible ladies’ choir) “Papa Was a Good Man”;
It rained all the way to Cincinnati
With our mattress on top of the car
Us kids were eatin' crackers and baloney
And papa kept on driving never stopped once at a bar
Little in common with “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, that’s true. But that mattress has to come from somewhere.
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 7: A Spider’s Life On Mars
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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:
A list of the earlier articles in this series appears at the foot of this page.
The Dylavinci Code reveals that Jesus has a long-time grudge, other than that he thinks she’s a whore, against Mary ‘Maggie’ Magdalene.
He affectionately calls her Maggie in that she comes from a wealthy farming family that supports Him.
The grudge no doubt explains in part why Mary’s abandoned by Jesus and left lying ‘undead” in a tomb within the Great Sphinx of Egypt.
He also has a grudge against her brother Lazarus whom He raised from the dead:
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more
Well, he hands me a nickel, he has me a dime
He asks me with a grin if you're having a good time
Then he fines you every time you slam the door
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)
A grudge against Mary’s father Cyrus too:
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more
Well, he puts his cigar out in your face just for kicks
His bedroom window, it is made out of bricks
The National Guard stands around his door
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)
And a grudge against Mary’s mother Eucharis as well:
Now I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more
Well, she talks to all the servants about man and God and law
Everybody says she's the brains behind pa
She's sixty-eight, but she says she's fifty-four
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)
But most of all the big grudge is against Magdalene herself:
No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more
Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane
It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)
With Maggie’s sister Martha, who cooks for the poor, Jesus has no problem:
Ring them bells Sweet Martha for the poor man's son
Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one
(Bob Dylan: Ring Them Bells)
The breaking of the Dylavinci Code leaves no doubt that it’s Mary Magdalene that the ‘lone soldier’ Jesus marries.
There’s a big hint an unnatural death awaits her:
And when he saw her loyalty
And Mary so true hearted
He said, "My darling, married we'll be
And nothing but death will part us"
(Bob Dylan: Mary And The Soldier ~ traditional/Brady)
Note the sincerity of Maggie’s loyalty is questioned:
In Scarlet Town in the month of May
Sweet William on his deathbed lay
Mistress Mary by the side of the bed
Kissing his face, heaping prayers on his head
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)
https://youtu.be/U3XP-S2Z9xw
According to the Dylavinci Code, Christ accepts no blame for what transpires:
Sometimes I have a nickel
Sometimes I have a dime
Sometimes I have ten dollars
Just to buy Little Maggie wine
(Bob Dylan: Little Maggie ~ traditional, Stanley Brothers, etc)
Important note: Larry has just told me that some or all of the videos in this article are not available in North America – if you are looking at this article and find that is so, can you do a search and see if anything relating to Tom Jones “Not Dark Yet” is available – and if so send a link and note to Tony@schools.co.uk and I will add that link to the article. Sorry everyone if you are affected by this.
————-
I’ve never actually been to a Tom Jones concert, but I did once go to a BBQ in a friend’s house which backed onto the Northampton County Cricket Club ground, while Sir Tom was playing a concert – and since the garden of my friend’s house backed onto the field we heard the whole thing.
Not exactly my type of music, but some interesting background to an afternoon out. And that is where my level of interest has stayed until Jochen sent me a note asking if I had yet listened to Sir Tom (as he technically is, having been knighted by Her Majesty in 2006) doing Not Dark Yet.
Now if you want the whole story of his making the song (well, no not really but a bit of chit chat) there is an interview with Sir Tom available…
https://youtu.be/OiPc-1OrzWU
The talk about Not Dark Yet starts at 3 minutes 45 seconds.
But if it is the music you are looking for…
I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but my interest was raised at once because this immediately meets my personal criteria – that the cover version does something new, adds an extra dimension or gives a new insight while retaining a musical understanding of what the composer intended.
And of course, this version does that exactly because it turns the song upside down in terms of rhythm and energy – but does keep the essence of the song in place, and so rather amazingly it works, which I never imagined it could (especially as Sir Tom doesn’t quite get what the song is actually called).
Two things really help here: one is that even his advanced age Sir Tom still has an extraordinary voice, and the other is that the energetic accompaniment never once gets carried away. All the instrumentalists are kept under control – and for those of us who know the original there are elements of the Dylan original in the background that are kept in the orchestration – a lovely touch.
That’s exactly right because the change of the tempo is so dramatic that to add any further changes would take us so far away from the song as to lose all contact with it.
And then what happens on the video is that it continues with Rufus Wainwright version – which is a good choice because he too has a brilliant voice. Of course it may not be that you want to listen to Not Dark Yet twice in these new formats, but if you do have the time, do try. Running the Wainwright after the Jones version is a challenge (the normal approach would be to start with the slow and build up to the fast), but I think it is worth it.
The way the piano part develops while still keeping the piece under control, and restraining the vocalists desires to extemporise really does work for me – especially with the piano playing variations on the accompaniment we are so familiar with, coming from the original.
It continues to build with slight additions, but I won’t spoil it for you – please, if you have the time, do let this run all the way through.
There’s more on the video if you want an accompaniment to your day, but I’ll leave you to discover that.
However, to return to Tom Jones, his approach to “One more cup of coffee” is interesting too – I must find out who writes these instrumental arrangements – they really are quite intriguing. It doesn’t lift me as much as the Not Dark Yet version, but is worthy of a listen, in my view.
This is part of the series “All Directions at Once” which aims to consider Bob Dylan’s compositions as a sequence of works, rather than individual pieces or songs that can be understood by being examined line by line.
Bob Dylan had returned to songwriting in 2005 after a three year break with the majestic Tell Ol Bill, and a couple of try outs that didn’t go too far. Tell Ol Bill itself was a derivative song based on earlier works and snatches of lyrics from elsewhere, and as we know from the rehearsal tapes, Bob tried it in many different formats and styles.
Through 2005/6 he used the notion of borrowing extracts of lyrics, chord sequences and melodies from elsewhere while often expressing the notion of a future without too much hope. In the last episode of “All Directions” we got as far as Nettie Moore, where Bob found he could still develop interesting and alluring pieces even when using this model of everyone else’s ideas, phrases and music. Now he rounded the era off.
https://youtu.be/sUO7Lwiw1lI
“The Levee’s Gonna Break” continues the approach being based on “When the Levee Breaks” by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. It is a straight 12 bar blues in B flat without any variations – even the instrumental verses follow the theme. Dylan has a guitar play a two-note signature when he’s not singing (D flat to B flat) which is quite attractive, although must have been the most boring part ever to play. “Here’s your part mate – just play these two notes 32 times. OK?”
And we get a bit of Ovid too. “Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones” probably comes from Ovid’s Tristia, Book 4: “there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones.”
“Aint Talkin” the next song written continues the theme, with more lines from Ovid, and a feeling that he is telling us once and for all that is the situation described in the songs is not made up for the sake of writing a song, but is real. He is not pretending, not playing. His pain is real.
Finally in this year we get to Huck’s Tune where Dylan is in a world where life is a version of death, and even when things seem to be working out they can go wrong. And they do go wrong. He’s carrying a heavy load.
Bob then stopped writing again – and stayed silent on the compositional front until 2008 when he came back with a song that sums up everything that is wrong with the world in, but sticking with just one chord. This really does tell it as it is, and by and large it is pretty much all over.
Indeed “Life is hard” as a title seems to sum up exactly where Bob has got to, using other people’s lyrics and other people’s music (often, it must be said, to great effect) but still knowing, Life is hard.
Life is hard is a straight strophic song – verse, verse, verse, verse, verse, with (as the title suggests) no uplift and nothing to make us want to listen again.
The nature of the song’s construction wouldn’t matter too much if the lyrics grabbed us in the way that Bob has done so often in his writing career but there really is nothing here to make us care, because Bob doesn’t care…
The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will
Can’t tell you where they went
I just know what they meant
I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me
And indeed after that first verse there’s nothing in the accompaniment, the melody or the lyrics to keep us coming back. So there is nothing more to say. As the cover version above shows us, it can be turned into an interesting piece, but I am not sure this takes us to any new ground, which in the past has been Bob’s hallmark.
The friend you used to be
So near and dear to me
You slipped so far away
Where did we go a-stray
I pass the old schoolyard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me
So Bob has told us , now we know. There are no arresting images, no interesting instrumentation, no uncertainties to keep us guessing.
And that was it until through 2008/9 Bob wrote and co-wrote a series of songs starting with “This dream of you” in which we can find perhaps the influence of Doc Pomus who wrote, and a continuation of Bob’s negative themes.
How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on
In an interview at the time Bob spoke of
“…those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed…”
“It’s me who’s singing that, plain and simple. We shouldn’t confuse singers and performers with actors….
“The more you act the further you get away from the truth. And a lot of those singers lose who they are after a while. You sing, ‘I’m a lineman for the county,’ enough times and you start to scamper up poles.”
Thus the song is not about Dylan’s experiences, any more than Jimmy Webb was a Wichita Lineman or repeatedly needed to get to Phoenix. But the brilliant songwriter makes the experiences and emotions of those who are in the song become part of his world through writing and singing the song. We feel the isolation of the Wichita Lineman we feel the isolation of sitting all night in the nowhere café.
Thus he argues that the expression of the opening…
How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on
is not an expression of what happened to Dylan – it is a fictional story that becomes real for us, and indeed for him, through his performances.
This is the only song on “Together through Life” that was written wholly by Bob Dylan, and not with Robert Hunter. The theme thus is regret of what is lost, the power of the memories of the past and the feeling of utter isolation.
The opening lines are utterly evocative…
How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
… I can immediately picture the actual scene. It is the sort of experience that has never happened, will never happen to me, but I can feel it, appreciate it, be part of it, wonder about it.
This is the feeling of the loner, or the drifter, or the man who has run away – that constant theme in Dylan – the man who knows that the next thing that will happen could well turn out to be very bad. Somehow he wants to stop time, but of course can’t. It is as Doc Pomus said…
I keep right on stumblin’
In this no-man’s land out here
Indeed one could argue that if there is a dominant theme throughout Dylan’s entire songwriting career – a theme that no matter how often he leaves it, he comes back to it – it is this loneliness, leaving, isolation, fear, moving on, getting stuck, theme. This inability to escape no matter how hard he tries…
I look away, but I keep seeing it
I don’t want to believe, but I keep believing it
Shadows dance upon the wall
Shadows that seem to know it all
This is indeed, as Bob has confessed, his tribute to Doc Pomus and his own return to his ever-recurring theme – although as a final footnote we might note that “curtained gloom” is a phrase in a line from Dylan’s favourite civil war poet Henry Timrod who in Serenade wrote
And let the zephyrs rise and fall
About her in the curtained gloom,
And then return to tell me all
The silken secrets of the room.
The song has a somewhat peculiar hopscotch career. Dylan writes it quickly on a February weekend to fill up Nashville Skyline, it is recorded on Monday, and that’s that. In August, at the Isle Of Wight concert, it’s not on the setlist – the twin sister of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, the closing song of the previous John Wesley Harding record, “I’ll be Your Baby Tonight”, is preferred. Dylan does not perform any concerts in 1970 or 1971, but remarkably, he now considers “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” a Greatest Hit; the song is selected for the successful Greatest Hits Vol. 2.
Collaborator and confidant Happy Traum, who assisted Dylan recording “Down In The Flood”, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”, “I Shall Be Released” and the outtake “Only a Hobo” in September ’71 especially for the compilation, reveals to Clinton Heylin a selection criterion for the songs: “He felt there were some songs that he had written that had become hits of sorts for other people, that he didn’t actually perform himself, and he wanted to fit those on the record as well.”
Traum is of course referring to the four songs to which he himself contributed, but it seems likely that the same considerations were made for the rest of the track list. After all, songs like “The Mighty Quinn” (Manfred Mann), “All I Really Want To Do” (Cher) and “All Along The Watchtower” (Jimi Hendrix), to name but three examples, were never hits for Dylan either, but rather “hits of sorts for other people”.
“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, however, can hardly be called a hit of sorts. And all too often the song has not been covered either at that time, September 1971.
Cher is the first. For her underrated 3614 Jackson Highway (1969) she records a soulful, brilliant version. Cher acts fast, by the way. Two weeks after the release of Nashville Skyline. And she also records the Skyline songs “Lay, Lady, Lay” (as “Lay, Baby, Lay”; even tough lady Cher prefers to avoid homoerotic connotations) and “I Threw It All Away” for this beautiful album, produced by Jerry Wexler in Muscle Shoals – equally great renditions, sounding even better on the 2000 remaster.
But it’s not a hit – not even a single. About the same time, in May ’69, Esther Phillips records her version. Just as soulful, and even more beautifully sung. This one is released as a single, but does not make any waves. Phillips uses the recording again a few months later, in October ’69, as a B-side for the modest hit “Too Late To Worry, Too Blue To Cry” (#121 Billboard, #35 on the R&B charts). So Dylan has seen some royalties from it. And Esther’s version seems to have some staying power as well; in 2010, 41 years after the recording, her cover is selected for the wonderful compilation How Many Roads: Black America Sings Dylan.
Not a hit either, but blessed with curiosity value and an irresistible dated sheen, is the single by British psychedelic rockers Orange Bicycle, again from 1969 (release 18 July). Orange Bicycle were a charming band that tried to ride along on the psychedelic wave, crafting attractive, Byrds-like songs to go with it. Their “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is in fact a bit of an outlier in their output (the B-side, “Last Cloud Home” is actually nicer), but at the very least it has a nostalgic quality, fifty years later.
The same applies, approximately, to the last pre-Greatest Hits Vol. II cover, legendary Ben E. King’s funky jam session from 1970. Fuzzy guitars, James Brown vibe, soaring Hammond organ and even a gospel-like diminuendo… it is, in short, 1970 – with all its charm and all its clichés.
All in all, none of the covers deserves the qualification hits of sorts for other people. But nevertheless, the song gets the honour of being selected for the double album Greatest Hits Vol. II compilation. As the closing track of Side 2, the same side that opens with her twin sister “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”. And thus displacing hits like “With God On Our Side” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (both a hit for Manfred Mann), and popular, much-covered songs like “Girl From The North Country”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”… to name just a few titles of songs that actually do deserve the qualification “hits of sorts”. So it does appear as if “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” has some special place in Dylan’s heart.
The appearance is deceptive, as appearances usually are. The first concert after the Greatest Hits release (17 November 1971) is two years and two months later, the first concert of the 1974 Tour of America with The Band on 3 January in Chicago. The setlist is dominated by crowd pleasers, Dylan playing plenty of songs from the first and second Greatest Hits compilations, but no “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”.
Notwithstanding the fact that the song’s status has only grown in the meantime. Jeff Beck, in particular, produces an as of now ultimate, heartbreaking cover for his Memphis-based Jeff Beck Group (1972). It is probably mainly thanks to the producer, Booker T. & the M.G.’s guitarist Steve Cropper, that this is one of the most successful exercises in the sound that Beck so desperately seeks in these years, the definitive blend of Memphis soul, Chicago blues and British rock.
Tina Turner operates in the same A-category, and with her debut solo album Tina Turns The Country On! (1974) she tries to tap into a new audience – the Nashville audience, to be precise. With covers of Kristofferson (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”), Hank Snow and Dolly Parton… and two Dylan songs: “He Belongs To Me” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”. It doesn’t really match up, Tina’s excited, scintillating vocals on the one hand and the friendly steel guitar parts, the neat bass lines and conveyor belt drumming on the other, but it does get attention; it earns her a Grammy nomination.
To no avail. Dylan is adamant and cannot be tempted into putting the song on his setlist in January 1974. Indeed, at none of the 40 concerts of that American tour with The Band the song is performed – apparently the promotion of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” to Greatest Hit was just a whim after all. A fling. A one-night stand.
But soon it’ll be 1975, and thunder will be rolling…
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 6: A mattress and sand letters
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:
