Untold Dylan

by Jochen Markhorst

On The Road Again (1965) part I: I don’t know why everyone is so rude

The shitting Pope

Well, I asked for something to eat
I’m hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog
I’ve got a hole
Where my stomach disappeared
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, I gotta think you’re really weird

The sleazebag Jackie Treehorne asks if Jeffrey Lebowski wants another White Russian, and The Dude replies with one of the most beloved malaphors since: “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

It is not a Dude original. The origin of the witty mixture (of the sarcastic retorts is the Pope a Catholic and do bears shit in the woods) is unknown, but in any case arguably older than The Big Lebowski (1998). Jeff Bridges’ stellar starring role while quoting this particular malaphor undoubtedly contributed greatly to its popularity, however.

The popularity of mangled expressions is, of course, centuries old. In the 19th century, the British called it Dundrearyisms, after the side character Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (1858), the play Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated. History does not mention it, but presumably Lincoln also chuckled at Lord Dundreary’s wisecracks like birds of a feather gather no moss and a stitch in time never boils. Even more amusing are the accidental malaphors. Mr. Trump tweeting, “It’s finally sinking through” or Mr. Obama’s wonderfully nerdy “I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks,” mixing up Star Wars‘ Jedi mind trick and Star Trek‘s mind-meld, Mr. Spock’s telepathic communication trick.

Artists love to use it. For the comic effect, especially, or to wake up the listener. Like Jimmy Buffett’s we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it (“Burn That Bridge”, 1984), Charlie Rich’s “Rolling With The Flow” or Shania Twain’s “Party For Two” – which already comes close to corny, wordy malapropisms and spoonerisms like Kirsty MacColl’s Electric Landlady or Elton John’s Rock Of The Westies.

Irresistible for a playful language artist like Dylan, who now, at the beginning of his mercurial years, after four linguistically more “clean-cut” records, is letting go of the reins altogether. Bringing It All Back Home is littered with inversions, puns, spoonerisms and “incorrect” metaphors, including the two malaphors in this stanza; “hungry as a hog” (instead of hungry as a horse and eating like a hog) and the bizarre “I’ve got a hole where my stomach disappeared” (disappear in a hole and empty stomach).

Content-wise, the misery piles up for our poor protagonist. The boy has just got up, has had to endure all the tiresome practical jokes of his in-laws and humiliating encounters with shady fellows from his girlfriend’s secret life, and now he wants his breakfast. And then, to add insult to injury, he is served brown rice with seaweed, a macrobiotic nightmare for which recipes are indeed enthusiastically advertised as a super-healthy organic meal on dozens of sites in the twenty-first century, up to and including New York Times Cooking (“I somehow believe that eating it makes me a better person,” as the enchanting Nigella Lawson says).

And for dessert, a dirty hot dog. Disgusting, but above all a wordy paraphrase of and a nod to the signature song of one of Dylan’s greatest heroes, to “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T For Texas)”, the third track on Side B of Jimmie Rodgers’ My Rough & Rowdy Ways;

I'd rather drink your muddy water, sleep down in a hollow log
Than to be in Atlanta, Georgia, treat me like a dirty dog
(I don't have to go for that)

Oh Give me a T for Texas, give me a T for Tennessee 
Give me a T for Thelma, woman made a fool out of me

… Jimmie also suffers from a woman who makes a fool out of him.

To be continued. Next up: On The Road Again part 3: A handsome Malacca sword-cane

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

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

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

by Larry Fyffe

While the moon sometimes appears in the daytime sky, oddly enough the sun never appears in the sky at night.

According to the Old Testament, hidden baby Moses is found, and looked after by an Egyptian princess.

She’s a follower of Isis, the motherly Goddess of the Moon who restores Osiris, cut up by their jealous brother Set, and he puts Osiris in a coffin ; before Osiris goes off to the Underworld, Isis is able to restore him long enough to get pregnant with a son; names him Horus.

Thus, order is restored to the Cosmos – a story, told in the “Book Of The Dead”  (reminds a bit of the Roman/Greek mythology concerning Apollo, the Sun God, and his sister Artemis, the Moon Goddess):

And when she saw the ark among the flags, 
              she sent her maid to fetch it
And when she had opened it, she saw the child
And, behold, the babe wept
And she had compassion on him, and said
"This is one of the Hebrews' children"
(Exodus 2: 5,6)

Moses eventually  leads the Hebrews out of Egypt into the desert in search of the Promised Land as commanded to do so by their vengeful and jealous God who punishes Moses for taking credit for their survival; Moses dies in view of the Jordan River.

As he often does, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan mixes mythological matters up; in the song lyrics beneath, it could be said the narrator takes on the persona of Osiris, the partially mummified God of the Dead. Take note that Osiris is also a symbol of renewal:

Hello, Mary Lou
Hello, Miss Pearl
My fleet-footed guides from the Underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business, and I do too
(Bob Dylan: False Prophet)

Bob Dylan’s works as whole tend to be interconnected. In the song lyrics below, it might even be construed that the narrator, in a very re-arranged mythology, takes on the persona of Set, who does away with Osiris; Set wants the beautiful Isis for himself:

I picked up his body, and dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole, and put back the cover
I said a quick prayer, and I felt satisfied
Then I rode back to find Isis to tell her that I love her
(Bob Dylan: Isis ~ Dylan/Levy)

https://youtu.be/uk3JsRieJeI

In the following song lyrics it seems that the narrator is once again either Set or Osiris, perhaps a mix of both:

Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door
Don't turn away, you'll create sorrow
Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
(Bob Dylan: Oh Sister ~ Dylan/Levy)

One thing’s for sure, all these verses are about the renewal of art forms – good artists are all versions of the mythological Osiris:

Music bid thy minstrels play
No tunes of grief or sorrow
Let them cheer the living brave today
They may wail the dead tomorrow

(Fitz-Greene Hallack: Young America)

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Beautiful Obscurity is a series in which Aaron in the USA selects a Dylan song and a series of cover versions, and which Tony (in the UK) then listens to and writes his instant reactions, as the music plays.

There is an index to other articles in this series here.

Aaron: At the end of the John Brown piece Tony requested a happy song next time. I thought for awhile about what Dylan’s happiest song might be, and I came up with this one: The Man In Me – probably due to the scene in the Big Lewbowski and the line “but ooh what a wonderful feeling!”

Anyhoo, here’s my selections.

Lonnie Mack from 1971

Tony: I find this rather plodding, which is a shame because the lyrics are far from plodding.  But that instrumental opening just goes plonk plonk plonk so when we get to that most uplifting of Dylan lines “Oh what a wonderful feeling” is just going bomp bomp bomp bomp.

The introduction of the brass also seems inappropriate in the instrumental section.  I just don’t get this arrangement at all.  Sorry Aaron, not this one.  So moving on…

The Persuasions

Tony: I do listen to these tracks and write my ramblings as we go, so in listening to the Lonnie Mack version I had no idea what was coming up next.

But this turns out to be a perfect example of a contrast.  There’s a real lightness in the step here.  It is not the speed that is the issue, it is the liveliness of the approach so that I actually believe the singers are feeling what the song is about.  It has a bounce about it throughout.  Quite uplifting really.

McKendree Spring

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Ek2xv-xVs

This version shows that it is not the tempo that’s the issue but, as I have already insisted, the lightness of touch, and I feel that is ok here, but nothing more.  I wonder, do tracks like this have an arranger who thinks about the song before hand and then works with the performers to achieve that?  Or do they do a Dylan and play it to see what comes out, and then play around with ideas?

The counter melody from the violin is great, but there is simply too much percussion.  Actually I’d love to hear what this sounds like with no percussion at all.  And I’m sure that in the final middle 8 the percussionist is coming in a fraction of a second late.   Maybe that’s deliberate, or maybe it’s just me not hearing straight any more, but it doesn’t feel right to me.

Joe Cocker from 1976

Ah, now this is more like it.  Putting that reggae beat in works… I’m not sure if it is just me (and a white guy commenting on the mechanics of the reggae beat is always dubious at best, downright foolhardy at worst) but that rhythm always feels light and positive.

Apart from where Joe feels he has to do a Joe Cocker voice, it’s great.  Although I could have done without the lady’s couple of lines of scat singing.

I wonder if I could have made it as an arranger / producer?

Aaron: There are plenty other versions of this one out there in many styles, including country, reggae, punk (The Clash & Say Anything). Al Kooper had a go, and Bobby Vee and Emma Swift. There is even a Hebrew version (which as we’ve not had any on these pages before, let’s have a listen)

האחים אריאל – האיש שבי

Tony: the music has the lightness I’m looking for, but less so the singer, but hearing it in a language of which I know nothing, makes it hard to separate the singer from the sounds.  But the bounce is good.

Aaron: But I really wanted to finish with this one, which for me is a wonderful find. Let’s see what Tony thinks!

From 1976 – Matumbi (Aaron’s note: Wow, wow, wow!!)

Tony:  OK another reggae beat to give a gentle relaxed feel, and the vocalist gives us what we need – with the choral effect used sparingly.  Aaron, it doesn’t take me to the wow wow wow level, but it is certainly the most enjoyable of all the versions here.  It’s the one I could come back to listen to again.

But perhaps I may be permitted to enter a version of my own – a version that you actually mentioned in passing but for reasons that are quite beyond me, didn’t put in.  I wish you lived next door mate, so I could pop round, offer my apologies for breaking up the family’s morning, and say, “just listen to this”

If I am being hyper critical, which I probably am, I still think that there is too much emphasis on the beat but her voice … my goodness if a lady ever said or sang those words to me in that voice I’d be on my knees within seconds.  Of course at my age I’d then need helping up off the floor, so that would rather spoil the occasion, but still, old men can dream too.

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

by Jochen Markhorst

Well, I woke up in the morning
There’s frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she’s a-hidin’
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearin’
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?

In The Joker (Tod Phillips, 2019), contrary to what the film title suggests, it is definitely not a prank. It is – quite literally – a chilling scene, the scene where Arthur hides in the fridge. Arthur Fleck, after a long, despondent succession of rejections and humiliations, has just had to endure the ultimate, final rejection. In the luxurious washroom of a fancy establishment, he confronts the man he thinks is his father, Thomas Wayne (indeed, the father of Bruce, the later Batman). Wayne denies – quite believably – that he ever impregnated his former maid, Arthur’s mother, punches the slightly hysterical Arthur in the face with his fist, and the painful scene ends with Arthur alone, bent over the sink.

The opening of the next scene mirrors the closing of the previous one: Arthur is standing in his kitchen bent over the sink. Then, as the phone rings, he suddenly rips open the fridge door, pulls out all the shelves and drawers and hides in the fridge. It is, especially after his previous tirade against Thomas Wayne, an action dripping with symbolism;

Arthur: “I don’t know why everyone is so rude, and I don’t know why you are. I don’t want anything from you. Maybe a little bit of warmth, maybe a hug, DAD! How about just a little bit of fucking decency! What is it with you people!?”

But after the violent rejection, the Joker has no hope for decency, or a little bit of warmth. He opens the fridge door and retreats into darkness and cold. His final, irreversible descent into madness starts here.

For the time being, the protagonist of Dylan’s “On The Road Again” is spared that fate. But his in-laws seem intent on at least trying to drive him to insanity. It starts as soon as he gets up, with a corny, rustic Tom Sawyer-like prank, with frogs in his socks. Then his mother-in-law jumps out of the fridge and, as an encore, his father-in-law, who has apparently just seen the classic Napoleon Bunny-Part (Friz Freleng, 1956) with Bugs Bunny on morning TV (“Hey Pierre, here’s another Napoleon”), makes his entrance as a patient with the stereotypical Napoleon Delusion.

II          Benny Hill?

Well, I go to pet your monkey
I get a face full of claws
I ask who’s in the fireplace
And you tell me Santa Claus
The milkman comes in
He’s wearing a derby hat
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you have to ask me that?

In this household, an unfriendly pet monkey doesn’t really surprise, but it remains awkward. And it opens a side door to a gradual derailment of the already bizarre morning scene. It becomes grotesque. The protagonist is unpleasantly surprised by the presence of a man “in the fireplace”. With a different run-up, say one like in “Gates Of Eden” or “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, a metaphorical interpretation would be obvious – and not too enigmatic either. In the hearth there are usually ashes, burnt remains, so figuratively, the narrator asks about the past of his interlocutor, something like that. A question like Arthur Fleck’s question to his alleged father.

But the answer (“Santa Claus”) and the immediately following scene, the entrance of the milkman with a derby hat, push the colour and atmosphere of the song in another direction; towards a 1950s screwball comedy. A milkman in a derby hat? Benny Hill? Dylan has just been in England, was even in the BBC studios in early May ’64, so who knows. Maybe he did indeed have a look and an involuntary chuckle at the saucy postcard humour, the adolescent puns and sexist double-entendres of the British phenomenon.

The song thus takes a turn for the spicy, corny regions. In the 50s and 60s, the role of the archetypal “milkman” is carved in stone: the secret lover of the adulterous woman, the man who turns every husband into a cuckold. This is not only true for The Benny Hill Show, but equally in the Playboy cartoons, on the funny papers of every newspaper and in every sketch show. It’s a twist to the farcical that Dylan only decides to do during the recording, by the way. In the very first take, there is no milkman to be seen, and the bard sings at that spot in the song:

The room is so cold
I got to wear my hat

… with which the gateway to a more “serious”, metaphorical interpretation of his words is much more open; after those remains in the fireplace, a “cold room” also has a similar symbolic meaning, similar again to the Joker scene in the toilet room – the cold room where Arthur complains about the lack of human warmth.

The clichéd metaphor does not survive first take, the only take of this song on that packed first session day for Bringing It All Back Home (Wednesday 13 January 1965 – Dylan and band record first attempts of twelve songs). The next day, the singing poet scraps that “heavier” cold room image, in favour of the much more light-hearted milkman-with-bulb hat.

It is an intervention that also affects the charge of “Santa Claus”. In the same Playboy cartoons and funny pages of the fifties and sixties, Santa Claus is often assigned the less than honourable side-line function of love competitor. More often in the ultimately innocent oh-la-la variant in which Santa Claus turns out to be the legal spouse (the “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” variant), but oh-la-la it remains.

All in all, the poet now suggests that his girlfriend has joined his in-laws in the pursuit of making a fool out of the I-person. Actually, only the stereotypes “postman” and “butler” are missing to complete the picture of a classic 1950s TV comedy.

To be continued. Next up: On The Road Again part II: The shitting Pope

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

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

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

by Larry Fyffe

Treading in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and William Yeats, singing that eventually dead men we all shall be, songwriter/musician Bob Dylan nevertheless presents a recurrent vision of micro-, and macro-change in a number of his songs –  often symbolized by a ‘curve’ in the road.

It’s a wistful sign of a better world in the lyrics beneath:

But hope's just a word
That maybe you said, or maybe you heard
On some windy corner 'round a wide-angled curve
(Bob Dylan: Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie)

As proffered in the following song lyrics, a sign of fate in an uncaring universe; however, a destiny that can be altered to some degree:

On the rising curve
Where the ways of nature will test every nerve
You won't get anything that you don't deserve
(Bob Dylan: Born In Time)

A sign of possible reconciliation wrought up by empathy as depicted in the lines below:

I've had the Mexico City Blues since the last hairpin curve
I don't want to see you bleed, I know what you need
And it ain't what you deserve
(Bob Dylan: Something's Burning Baby)

In the lines beneath, a sign of sudden sadness due to could-have-been dire consequences:

Tuned to a station
I've never heard
While the moon glimmers
On Dead Man's Curve
(Jeff Kosoff: Tioga Pass ~ Dylan/Hunter/Kosoff)

Sourced from the following ‘teenage tragedy’ song:

Let's come off the line now, at Sunset and Vine
But I'll throw you one better if you've got the nerve
Let's race all the way to Dead Man's Curve
(Jan And Dean: Dead Man's Curve ~ Wilson et. al.)

https://youtu.be/S1Cuekbklkg

The song lyrics of Bob Dylan are never as simple as they first appear; they are not written just to fit in a rhyme, or an assonant off-rhyme.

And, of course, the manner in which the music is played along with the way the lyrics are emoted by the singer makes all the difference how a listener is affected by the whole performance thereof.

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Tony Attwood

Earlier episodes of All Directions are listed here

The last episode in this series, which looks at Bob’s songwriting as a continuum rather than at individual songs in isolation, or albums as a collection, ended with the surprisingly upbeat and bouncy, “God knows.” It is a good, fun song, and suggested maybe Bob was feeling upbeat or at least explorative once more.

And anyone thinking that would not have been disappointed, for the first composition of 1989, turned out to be one of Bob’s absolute sublime masterpieces, “Born in Time.”  And over time we discovered with great joy, this wasn’t a one off.  That break with the Wilbury’s had served a purpose.Bob was back as a unique, original and entertaining composer, big time.

In the hills of mystery,
In the foggy web of destiny,
You can have what's left of me,
Where we were born in time.

You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain

God knows you ain’t pretty
God knows it’s true
God knows there ain’t anybody
Ever gonna take the place of you

God knows that when you see it
God knows you’ve got to weep
God knows the secrets of your heart
He’ll tell them to you when you’re asleep

Bettye LaVette in her reworking of the song certainly emphasises the disconnect that the song stresses, but for once musically seemed to go too far for me.  The lyrics cover a very difficult subject but I am not sure we need to go that far to bring it across.   Roli Frei, however, seems to get it exactly right…

And thus, having got this far, and found himself in such a rich vein of form it is hardly surprising that Bob stayed with the theme that the world is falling apart.  For next came “Everything is Broken” (originally called Broken Days).  And thus the theme continues the feeling of Political World: this world don’t work no more.

The list of what is broken (that opens the song) is overwhelming , or at least would be if it were not sung to such a lively beat.  Whereas on all the personal tracks (ie those which appear to be about an individual, or a unique situation) Dylan sounds like he desperately cares, here he is facing the listener head on saying “this is the world you live in, and this is all you have got – and its your fault for not doing anything about it.”

Ok Bob doesn’t say that last bit, but that is the impression I get.  We are bouncing along in a post-modernist wreck of the world, walking over the ruins of a society that we once had, while those who are left scrabble around in the remains looking for anything to help salvage their lives.  Law and order has all gone and we’re just left jiving toward the world ends.

That feeling which is combined with one of, “well what did you expect?” is amplified by the fact that “Everything is Broken” is a twelve bar blues in construction: pure I, IV, V chords with no exception.  Even the middle eight is reduced to ultimate simplicity as the whole song rocks along.  Only the short intro with the nifty guitar solo and unexpected bongos gives a thought that here there might be something else, but then we are there, as the list of breakages continues as Dylan bounces along telling us there “ain’t no use jiving ain’t no use joking everything is broken.”

This feeling of a need to bounce finally reached its culmination with the live performances (of which there were 284).   And it is a wonderful contrast, for “everything is broken” should lead to a sense of loss, but we are still bouncing along.   This is the world gone wrong and we are having fun at the same time!   Everything is broken because everything is broken, because… well, get used to it and jive along, except there ain’t no use in jiving because everything is broken.

Even with the two different versions that we have: the original version which turned up on Bootleg 8 and the re-working of the song that was released on Oh Mercy we still seem to have the same breach between the brokenness of the world as described and the bounce of the song.

But the live versions have gone on a totally different route…

Everything within the house and within city, and within the society is smashed.  Bottles, plates, switches, gates, dishes, idols, heads, beds, words.  And it gets worse and worse for it seems like every time you stop and turn around something else just hits the ground…

And in the live versions it is so total there is no escape.  The instrumental verse which originally has quite a lively jolly harmonica solo, now becomes more aggressive, and lest we think there is a way out we always go straight back to broken hearts, broken ploughs, broken treaties, broken vows.    There really is nothing left.

Society has gone, and all we have now is the world of the individual, and even here we are running into trouble for as individuals we break the vows we make.  In fact we’re pretty useless at running things.  We need something else.  What could it be?  Oh hang on… but it seems Bob didn’t want to go back to religion here, he just wanted to tell us, it is all finished, and why don’t we  just leave it at that?

As the song says, “Who are you, anyway?”

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Beautiful Obscurity is a series in which Aaron in the USA selects a Dylan song and a series of cover versions, and which Tony (in the UK) then listens to and writes his instant reactions, as the music plays.

There is an index to other articles in this series here.

Aaron: I was listening to the version of John Brown by Heron today, which we wrote about a while ago.   Here’s the track in question:

Suitably inspired I went on a search for more interesting versions.

The Staple Singers from 1967 album Pray On gave a very different version…

Tony: I think that with this song, because by now we all know what happens in the story, everything about the piece becomes spooky, and the repeating guitar part adds to that feeling of horror that certainly I feel every time I hear the piece.  But sitting here, having never been in the military, and having never experienced war in my home country, I wonder how I am going to take four more versions…

James Luther Dickinson from 1972

The feeling of the music reflects what happens in the story, and of course they have a lot to work on.   The lines at the end are so extremely simple yet utterly compelling

As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock
At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand
But as he turned to go, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand

So it’s an interesting re-working of the song, and I admire the work, but I don’t think I’ll add it to my spotify collection.

Eric Anderson from 2005

It is really interesting just how different each of these interpretations are.   And I particularly like this one because it allows the ensemble to make much more of

But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
And I saw that his face looked just like mine

Of course it is not an original thought by Dylan, but it is powerfully put, and it is to express this that the arrangement needs to be carefully considered, in my opinion.  It is not just the fact that the woman’s vision was so self-centred and ignorant of the issues of war but the realisation of what he has found himself doing.  “Just a puppet in a play” indeed.

Aaron: Anderson was part of the early Greenwich Village Folk scene and wrote songs that were subsequently recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, John Denver, Linda Ronstadt and the Grateful Dead. We at Untold Dylan know him as the writer of Thirsty Boots (Bob’s version was included on Another Self Portrait). He also opened for Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue.

Maria Muldaur from her 2008 album Yes We Can

Tony: This works by maintaining the same music approach throughout – which is quite a brave thing to do with a song like this which has no chord changes at all.   I’m not sure this version adds that much – but then I have just listened to each version one after the other.  Maybe if I came across this on its own having not heard the piece for a while I might have a more positive feel for it.

Lastly, State Radio from the much mined Chimes Of Freedom album

“Much mined” indeed Aaron, I have found so much to enjoy in this collection – but…. I am not sure this is a track I have played more than once since finding the album.

It does indeed work, so I think the problem is mine having just listened to all the versions of this horror story.  If I say that I never watch horror movies nor indeed war movies, you can see this isn’t something I’d be attracted to.   But, it really does bring home the meaning of the lyrics in a way that I don’t think anyone else has done.

And in a sense this is the definitive track, because it is musically so inventive while retaining the essence of the song and bringing out the horror at the same time.

So, yes, brilliant.  It is just that having written this little commentary I wouldn’t be able to listen to it again.

Can we do a happy song next time?

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins
• Love minus zero/No limit part VI: Fair is foul
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VIII: A Study Of Provincial Life
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IX: Where little girls say pardon

by Jochen Markhorst

X          The pallid bust of Pallas

My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing

The nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine is one of its godfathers, of the finale that turns all the previous upside down – die ironische Pointe, the ironic punchline. Humorous poems, say Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation Of Sam McGee”, have the surprising twist almost by definition, of course – a punchline is simply a strong weapon – and murder ballads too often only reveal their bloody intent, let the blood spurt, not until the last line.

In his mercurial years, Dylan develops a soft spot for a variant of the punchline and the plot twist. In longer songs such as “Desolation Row”, “Tombstone Blues” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, the songwriter creates seemingly unrelated tableaux which are offered a red thread in the last stanza – usually tilting the gist. Sometimes by suddenly, out of nowhere, introducing a “you”, sometimes by unexpectedly providing a framework that might all of a sudden connect the preceding, seemingly unrelated images, tableaux and scenes. A letter in “Desolation Row”, for example, and alcohol and harder stuff in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”.

“Love Minus Zero” offers a different kind of twist. My love she’s like some raven at my window with a broken wing surprises mainly by its unmistakable negative connotation. The my love as we have come to know her in the previous verses is a soft speaking, flowery laughing, emotionally stable, perhaps detached but still desirable creature. Granted, maybe a tad weird, but predominant is: the first person seems to like her very much.

Up to this final line, that is. When enamoured protagonists compare a loved one to fowl, it usually is a dove, a nightingale, sometimes a bluebird or even a chick, but never a raven. Hair colour, yes: “Her raven hair shining,” Jim Reeves sings about a Mexican beauty (“Drinking Tequila”), the adorable Wildwood Flower has pale cheeks but raven black hair (The Carter Family) and Van Morrison is literally a little creepy in “Spanish Rose”:

In slumber you did sleep,
The window I did creep
And touch your raven hair and sang that song
Again to you

Well alright, there is one song in which a raven actually gets a loving mention: “Rockin’ Robin”, Bobby Day’s greatest hit from 1958;

Well, the pretty little raven at the bird bandstand
Taught him how to do the bop and it was grand
They started going steady and bless my soul
He out-bopped the buzzard and the oriole

… without too much meaningful depth, of course. The song is above all a declaration of love to the irresistible singing of a rockin’ robin, and how the whole aviary, from the buzzard and the crow to the oriole and the owl, and indeed the raven too, is delighted with this remarkable robin.

But comparing a lady to a raven is hardly a compliment. Ravens, through all ages and in every art form, are dark and sinister, symbolising death and the fleeting of life, are hellish, or at least devilish birds. Dylan knows that too. Dylan has, for example, undoubtedly put Judy Collins #3 (1963) on his turntable more than once. That’s the record that opens with “Anathea”, which Dylan will transform into “Seven Curses”, with “Deportee”, “The Bells Of Rhymney”, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Come Away Melinda”, with songs that Dylan will add to his own repertoire or that echo paraphrased in his own songs. And above all, the record which the young Dylan will have heard with glowing ears because of Collins’ covers of his own “Farewell” and “Masters Of War”, with which Judy Blue Eyes propels Dylan to the top of Great Songwriters.

Amongst all that beauty, Collins also sings Ewan MacColl’s “The Dove”, in which the dove depicts a desirable young lass keen on marrying, contrasting sharply with the raven:

Come all you young fellows take warning by me
Don't go for a soldier, don't join no army
For the dove she will leave you, the raven will come
And death will come marching at the beat of a drum

Of course, Dylan is familiar with the ominous symbolism of the black-feathered creep way before he hears “The Dove”. Poe’s unrelenting masterpiece “The Raven” has been in the Top 10 of the canon for over a century, and has prefigured any artist’s association with death since. In fact, Poe’s “The Raven” is so inescapable that many analysts classify the mere mention of a raven in “Love Minus Zero” as a “Poe reference”. Or at least: many analysts parrot each other and point to Edgar Allan.

This is not elaborated on anywhere. Hardly surprising; in terms of content, there is no common ground with Dylan’s song anyway. It makes the label “Poe reference” rather thin – with equal force one could argue that the mere mention of “silence” in line 1 is a reference to Simon & Garfunkel, or to John Cage’s 4’33”-, and catalogue roses as wink to Shakespeare, or Rilke, or Blake. Which is nonsense, obviously.

Stylistically, at most, there are some superficial similarities. Poe’s breath-taking masterpiece demonstrates a similar mastery of rhyme and rhythm as Dylan’s best works, and Dylan shares with Poe a love of internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration – the stylistic devices that Poe applies in extremis in “The Raven”. Leading to irresistible, meandering gems like

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.

… wordy arabesques like those we know from songs like “To Ramona” and “Where Are You Tonight?” and, to some extent, also from “Love Minus Zero”. What the Poe fans still miss is the presumably coincidental, but nevertheless funny similarity: this one line with the supposed Poe reference, My love she’s like some raven at my window with a broken wing, is the only song line from “Love Minus Zero” that is, like The Raven‘s poem lines, an octameter; eight feet, each foot having one stressed and one unstressed syllable (Poe trochaic, Dylan iambic).

However, the stylistic and technical similarities, coincidental or not, do not compensate for the major difference with Poe; Poe’s metaphorical use of the raven is classic. With Poe, the raven visits a narrator who is mourning the death of his beloved, suggesting wisdom by sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber, driving the narrator to despair and insanity with his repeated nevermore.

The symbolism of the raven in Dylan’s song is completely unclear, and the description and meaning of the bird clash with the gist of the previous lines. “My love” is suddenly compared to a hellbird sitting outside the window, in the cold and rainy night, with a broken wing too. The same my love who just a moment ago spoke softly, winked and laughed floridly… no, the analysts will just have to accept that the poet is probably incorporating an irreducible insider wink here, less reducible than Middlemarch and gephyrophobia, anyway. Or that, even more likely, Dylan turns out to be a kindred spirit of Edgar Allan Poe in a third respect as well:

“The bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.”
(Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846)

“The sonorousness of the word”… exactly the same motivation that Dylan brings forward in 1978, when Ron Rosenbaum has him elaborate on the importance of the right sound: “It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They – they – punctuate it.”

Years later, Dylan himself (or his entourage) stokes up the fire again, teasingly winking at the code crackers’ “Poe conclusion”. In 2012, fans can pre-order tickets for the Summer Tour via bobdylan.com. To do so, you need to enter a password. Someone in the Dylan firm has chosen as passwords: dirges, Gilead quaint, lattice, Leonore, methought, morrow, nepenthe, obeisance, Pallas, radiant and seraphim… yes, every word is taken from The Raven.

“The pallid busted phallus just above my chamber door,” as Oxford don William Archibald Spooner probably would say to that.

———-

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

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

by ram-tam-bam

(Article written on June 23-24, when there was very little specific information regarding this event. More specific and trustworthy updates might come along the way (not from me though, read the article to understand what I mean).

This article will hopefully help you tell a difference between reliable and unreliable sources, and hopefully the article gets some prediction right so it wouldn’t be a total waste. I wouldn’t mind being completely wrong if we get something really good and unexpected, of course. Also, please don’t consider me as a trustworthy source! I’m just a fan like many of you, and when I was writing this, I just tried to use logic, or in the sense of Dylan, illogic, knowing him and how unpredictable he can be. Although he is unpredictable, I have had a track record of getting some of my predictions right in the past. That’s the only reason I have confidence to do this now. Hopefully, you enjoy reading it.)

On July 18, 2021, the world will be introduced to Dylan’s first ever virtual concert or stream.

Even though one of the greatest tours of all time, The Never-Ending Tour, got cancelled (at least temporarily) because of the global pandemic, the time away might not have been so bad after all, either for Bob or his fans.

Veeps.com, which is broadcasting this event, has only revealed that Dylan will go over his wide repertoire of songs in a very intimate setting and in arrangements that were just created for this very event.

As always, there’s a lot of mystique surrounding this, which is not new for any new release that’s associated with Bob Dylan.

Now, the question is: what can we expect from this?

So many rumours have surfaced around, without any evidence backing it up, that Bob fans seem to swallow as facts immediately without even thinking it through, and also, a lot of guesses from fans, based on previous Bob history, and most of all – wishlists or bucket lists or whatever you want to call them…

Tons of stuff. Tons of dust in the wind, a wind that we don’t even know if it blows. Even if it does, it carries the dust to all kinds of places. If it’s not dust, then we have mist. And that’s all we have. Nothing more than that.

So let’s stop for a moment and just start from scratch. I, as a writer of this, will help you in that process, if you’re willing to help me by giving me a chance to go through everything that we can go through at this very moment.

What I will do is I will go through all kinds of rumours I have heard so far, and all kinds of different opinions I’ve heard so far and try to find a middle ground. I will also at some point give my take on what I think could happen.

I’ll try to be as objective as possible while writing this.

So, let’s begin.

First of all, we have to get back to the only information given so far regarding this. And we need to stick to it.

“Songs from his entire career or body of work in an intimate setting”. I’m obviously paraphrasing but this is basically what Veeps has told us so far.

That’s the only source we should trust so far.

The only other source(s) worth trusting other than Veeps with a lot of certainty is anything that’s “official Bob Dylan”. Official is the key word.

Anything that could come from THE REAL Bob Dylan camp.

I’m tired of people falling for stories from all kinds of people who are not part of the official Bob Dylan… something. Whether if it’s his YouTube channel, his Twitter or Facebook Page… As long as it’s official and as long as we know it’s coming from people that are close to the real Bob Dylan, that should be trustworthy.

So what do we know so far?

The name Shadow Kingdom and the intimate setting. That’s all, for now.

The first question that came to mind to many is: Is it pre-recorded or is it going to be live on July 18?

It’s hard to tell. Let me first ask this: does it matter if it’s live or pre-recorded? What difference would it make? Obviously, there could be differences, for sure, but.. both situations would have their advantages and disadvantages.

At the end of the day, it won’t matter.

What we do know is that, the show can be streamed for a few days. Which means you can watch it over and over, right? That might mean it’s pre-recorded.

What probably scares some people with pre-recorded is the fact that probably the whole thing is scripted. People probably want Bob to be live, in the moment, spontaneous…

Just because it’s pre-recorded, which probably means it’s scripted, doesn’t mean it can take any spontaneous spirit of it away.

It’s not “scripted” that I’m personally afraid of with Bob, ever… Never have been. The only thing I ever feared about Bob for the time I have listened to him is the possibility of something being over-rehearsed.

This has happened to him in his career and it’s one of the biggest flaws of his live shows in general.

That shouldn’t be a problem now.

We have heard some rumours that this was recorded in May, at a still unknown venue or even city.

If that is true, then it’s certainly scripted and worked out into perfection.

Will it fall into the trouble of being over-rehearsed? Highly unlikely in that case.

My assumption, based on all of this I’ve mentioned (if true) is:

Bob was seen in public in Los Angeles about a week before his birthday. It was reported that he was seen in public (and photographed) for the first time in 10 years in that very city.

I knew something was fishy about that since Bob doesn’t just go to LA for nothing.

Especially since you know Bob’s recorded his latest studio album “Rough And Rowdy Ways” right there in January and February of 2020.

Knowing Bob is usually at home for his birthday, which I assume was at Malibu this year, being also in California just like LA is (distance-wise), I can’t see Bob being in Los Angeles after May 23.

I knew Bob had to be recording something in LA that one week before his B-day.

I wasn’t expecting something like Shadow Kingdom, though. But, I sure take it!

So , with all that in mind, Bob for all we know was in Los Angeles for a week or less. That is the most logical explanation so far. Which means, there’s no chance the arrangements and the songs could be over-rehearsed. You can’t over-rehearse anything in a week or less even if you tried. Especially if you’re Bob Dylan

The only way this could be even possible is if Bob already practised these songs and arrangements before, ever since the pandemic started, which might be possible, but I highly doubt that.

We don’t know too much about what Bob was up to ever since the pandemic began. We knew he did the Theme Time Radio Hour for the first time after 11 years last year and that’s the last we’ve heard of him.

Having sold his entire catalogue at the end of last year as I recall, Bob has secured himself financially for a long time, which was a very smart move looking at how modern touring is affected by the pandemic. It gave him an opportunity not to rush through anything.

So I believe Bob was doing stuff in the last several months, but he was trying to enjoy it. And to enjoy something, you have to be patient with it and not rush it.

Bob probably was planning this event for several months.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he was reading over his old lyrics.

Who’s to say he wasn’t using Untold Dylan for assistance here as well? (This is more a joke, but if it really was the case, then that makes it “epic”…)

The bottom line is: I think it’s pre-recorded, but I’m not worried about it being “too scripted” or “overrehearsed”.

The only similar thing I can compare this to is MTV Unplugged, recorded in late 1994 and officially released in 1995. We know the collection of MTV Unplugged that Bob ended up recording was great.

That whole thing was done in four days. Two days of rehearsals and two days of live concert in front of an audience. Then, they selected what they felt were the highlights of the two days of live concert and that ended up being released.

I don’t know about Shadow Kingdom, but I expect a similar concept. Maybe even a few more days of recording. 5-6 maybe…

Anyway, even though this will be only streamed on Veeps, I don’t expect it to end there.

First of all, someone is certainly going to rip it and put it up for download on numerous download sites. I don’t doubt that. But that’s a separate story.

We might get an official release later of Shadow Kingdom as a live album.

We might also later get a bootleg with possible rehearsals and even outtakes.

Let me shortly get back to more stories I’ve heard: he’ll only do old songs in new arrangements and with new band members.

I do not trust this one bit. Doesn’t mean it won’t be the case.

Some people were also worried he might do covers. Even though Veeps said that Bob will do HIS songs. But okay…

Band members? Young band members? I read this as a possibility that, along with his usual band, which is the only band I see him playing with and the only band he’s comfortable with, unless he is solo on something, either guitar or piano, there could be additions of Blake Mills and Fiona Apple, who are certainly younger than his regular band members. Oh, but no… Someone’s now gonna tell me that if that’s the case, then they’re gonna do Rough And Rowdy Ways songs since these two musicians had their parts on that album. But that doesn’t fit with the “old songs, new arrangements” description… Oh no… (That was sarcasm, for people who have a hard time understanding it).

Ultimately, the question is:

What can we expect from Shadow Kingdom?

The answer is simply: nothing.

The less we overthink, the less we analyze or wish for, the better. Especially if it’s pre-recorded. Then there’s no hope to give a request to Bob.

But I will tell you this…

The Shadow Kingdom name is very interesting. No Dylan song features that lyric.

That might mean it could be a new song under that name?

That new song might also be one of many new songs that might be released if the reception of this concert skyrockets?

Let’s also consider that, this might just be the last Dylan concert we ever get to see.

Well…

Certainly in this kind of setting. Where it’s broadcasted and all that…

I don’t think we’ll get another luxury like that.

If Bob wants this to be his last concert, he wouldn’t tell us about it.

But it might be his last.

He can be in good health and spirit, that doesn’t guarantee that one day out of the blue he cannot get sick and not recover.

And he has earned enough money that he doesn’t have to tour anymore, especially after the catalogue sale. Especially when we consider how dangerous it is to tour now.

Of course, I’m not saying this to make things even more shadowy than the event itself might be, but just to give all the more reasons to watch it and be a part of it.

I think this is a prequel to something. Whether it’s an album or a Fall Tour, something is on the way.

Either that, or we get a concious last live performance of Bob Dylan in his illustrious career.

Make of it what you wish…

“The Setlist Dilemma”

I do not believe in the “old songs, new arrangements” description, given by some people considered to be close to the Dylan camp and usually very trustworthy although they weren’t a part of the project at all.

“Shadow Kingdom” might suggest a new song under that name or a new song that contains that lyric, that will be included in the setlist.

It might even be an old song with a lyric change that contains the lyric “Shadow Kingdom”.

Just like in 1975 the song “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” had the lyric “Rolling Thunder” (“you came down on me like rolling thunder”, or something like that, which was one of many lyric changes to that song specifically that year) that was also the name of the entire tour, in both 1975 and 1976, even though that song did not contain that lyric in its original form on Nashville Skyline.

Either that, or it might just be a random name that doesn’t get mentioned in any of the songs played that night, but just a name to suggest the general atmosphere of the performance.

Even if the rumour “old songs, new arrangements” is true, that means it’s gonna be an entire career coverage. Even the most recent album “Rough And Rowdy Ways” feels like it’s been recorded a lifetime ago. A year ago in Bob terms is a long time. He’s moved away from it far and beyond, from “Rough And Rowdy Ways” already.

He already did that in his Theme Time Radio Hour episode of last year where he didn’t even mention the album.

This is a new chapter, and as always, we don’t know what it’s gonna be until we hear it.

We won’t even probably know what it is after we hear it. We might discuss it 50 years from now, depending on the quality of it.

I do expect some Rough And Rowdy Ways songs included but not too many. Even if there aren’t any included I certainly wouldn’t be disappointed, despite having strong feelings for the album.

I do not expect anything.

But…

If I must say something, I’m gonna give logical guesses. Logic doesn’t have to mean something will happen for sure.

My guess is a 90 minute performance, maybe longer. Maybe 100 minutes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Bob was half-inspired by fellow songwriter Nick Cave, who did a stream performance last year in 2020 all by himself.

I can see Bob being solo on acoustic guitar for one or two songs, I can see Bob also being solo on the piano for a song or two.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if Bob did a recitation of one of his songs. I haven’t seen anybody mention this as a possibility yet, but I can definitely see it happening. It would be very relaxing I’m sure listening to Bob reading one of his songs.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Bob explained the story behind some of the songs he plays that night.

Just because he’s never done that, doesn’t mean he won’t do it now for the very first time.

I think Bob has been more open in the last year or so since the pandemic: the announcement of Murder Most Foul and the message to his fans, the letter to Little Richard after his death, the “Rough And Rowdy Ways” interview, The Time Radio episode etc.

He seems like he’s opening up more than he usually does, probably aware that his life could end soon and taking every chance he gets to reveal some pieces that could be important for his legacy and never quite getting rid of the mystique that surrounds him.

I also can see Bob being all over the place. Somewhere on piano, somewhere on electric guitar, somewhere on acoustic.

I would love that because I think younger generations need to see that, what music is really about.

So I expect a very intimate but electrifying presence of Bob that will continue to influence new musicians or artists in general to keep contributing to the world.

Possible setlist:

1. Intro or reading of one of his songs, some song from his catalogue that can be easily read, with no instruments, complete darkness on the stage with maybe lyrics on screen, or at least a tiny glow so that we could at least see something
2. Bob solo on acoustic guitar in complete darkness
3. Bob on acoustic guitar with a backing band
4. Bob solo on piano with the spotlight on him
5. Bob on piano with a backing band
6. Bob on piano with a backing band
7. Bob on electric guitar with a backing band
8. Bob on electric guitar with a backing band
9. Bob center stage with a backing band
10. Bob center stage with a backing band
11. Bob reading the lyrics to one of his songs with a backing band providing background music while he reads
12. Bob introducing one of his songs and playing it on piano alone
13. Bob introducing one of his songs and playing it on piano with a backing band
14. Bob introducing one of his songs and plays it on his acoustic guitar solo
15. Bob introducing one of his songs and plays it on acoustic guitar with the band
16. Bob introduces one of his songs and plays it on electric guitar and then introduces his band
17. Bob introduces one of his songs in final speech of the night, starts center stage, then plays harp, then plays acoustic, then plays electric guitar and then plays piano all in one performance and ends it right there.

Publisher’s note: I’ve had a technical fault (or alternatively a publisher cock up) on the site and this article which was showing as being published is now showing as not being published.  I have seriously reprimanded myself, and am now publishing it again (or for the first time).   1999 part 2 will follow shortly.

Previous articles are still on line and available for viewing.   The full index to the tour is here as is the 1998 section…

• NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• 1998 Part 2: Friends and other strangers
• The Never Ending Tour 1998, part 3, What’s a Protest Song?
• Never ending tour, 1998, Part 4. You won’t regret it

Tony (quite possibly soon to be replaced publisher).

————————————————

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘Touring is something you either love or hate doing. I’ve experienced both. I try to keep an open mind about it. Right now, I’m enjoying it. The crowds make the show. Going onstage, seeing different people every night in a combustible way, that’s a thrill. There’s nothing in ordinary life that even comes close to that.’
– Bob Dylan (Edna Gundersen interview for USA Today – April 1999)

At this point in our headlong dash through the NET, it is time to pause and take stock. The NET has completed its first decade, we are entering its eleventh year, we are on the brink of a new millennium, and it is fair to say that Dylan and his band have never sounded better.

When I began this series I observed that some commentators are tempted to see the NET as a work of art in itself. That would imply, however, some intentionality or deliberate structuring, and I certainly don’t see that. That doesn’t mean that the NET doesn’t have some kind of shape or movement, but having said that, no two commentators see the same thing. Everybody who looks at the NET creates their own narrative, and I’m no exception.

One commentator claims that the NET’s finest hour was the performance of ‘Ring Them Bells’ at the Supper Club in 1993. Another claims that 1997 was the strongest year of the NET. The same claim is made for 1998, suggesting that the San Jose concert of that year was the best NET concert ever. Another claims that 1994 was the peak year for the NET, with a distinct falling off in 1995. Still others (me included) see the Prague concerts of 1995 as a high point of the NET. And so it goes on.

Rather than a work of art, it seems, the NET is more like a Rorschach test with everybody reading their own narrative into it, creating their own version of Bob Dylan as they go. With over a thousand concerts for the decade and about fourteen songs per concert we have an incredible 14,000 plus performances, enough raw material for all sorts of constructions.

I have spoken of a ‘rising curve’, (from the song ‘Born in Time’) which I see moving from 1991, a low point generally, to 1995 and the outstanding Prague concerts. 1996 saw something of a falling off (but a fine concert in Berlin that year), with a strong comeback in 1997, and a new rising curve that takes us through 1999 to 2000.

‘One of the peaks of the Never-Ending Tour, 1999 may be one of Dylan’s finest years on-stage. After years of building credibility throughout the 1990s, the performances exploded at the turn of the century.’ (CS at A Thousand Highways)

Egil, at AllDylan, comments: ‘Every N.E.T. junkie seems to agree that 1999 was a wonderful Dylan year. Strong performances in all 5 legs.’

I have to agree with these assessments. Dylan finishes the decade, and the century, with a bang. Other than the galvanising effect of the success of Time Out of Mind, we have other factors to consider. First, there was another shake up in the band’s line up. Bucky Baxter, who joined Dylan is 1992 playing steel guitar and dobro, leaves the band. But rather than simply replacing him, Dylan brings in Charlie Sexton, a guitar all-rounder, who will often play dual lead with Larry Campbell. Sexton would leave Dylan’s band in 2002 and rejoin it in 2009.

Both Sexton and Campbell are superior guitarists, weave a wonderful web of sound around Dylan’s voice, and at the same time provide an expanded context for Dylan’s own lead guitar playing. Mr Guitar Man’s insistent hammering at one or two notes during a guitar break sounds a lot better with these two ace guitarists backing him. To my mind, and I have to say I’m no expert, Sexton is easily a match for Eric Clapton. Clapton has a commanding grasp of the blues, and a rapid, fluid style.  But Sexton is more adventurous, sharper and more passionate.

But it’s not only the backing, it’s Dylan’s voice, his major instrument, which puts the icing on the cake for 1999. Dylan makes his voice as rough as any roadhouse blues singer, but can also sing softly and smoothly when the song calls for it. And power. There’s little that is thin and reedy here, unless he wants it to be. His voice is full of power and expression. I have to go back to 1995 to catch him singing like this. Now, however, his voice is richer and fuller than it was in the mid nineties. The origins of Dylan’s later crooning voice might be found here, although we could push that right back to Nashville Skyline(1969) and the Johnny Cash sessions.

My problem as your tour guide is that there is just such a surfeit of high quality material. Looking at the past three years, I have been able to hone in on two or three ‘best’ concerts, but that’s not so obvious for 1999. The concert at Tramps, New York, is highly regarded, but most of the 117 concerts he did that year are good. I can’t organise a post around three or four concerts. Furthermore, I suspect that technology took a jump around the end of the century, as the quality of the audience recordings is very high, better than we’ve ever heard, I think. There is a cornucopia of material.

While in 1997 and 1998 the setlists were pretty consistent, with essentially the same concert being delivered night after night with variations and wild cards thrown in, in 1999, particularly in the latter part of the year, Dylan throws the setlists wide open, singing a wide variety of his songs and cover songs.

So where do I start and, more urgently, what do I leave out? For 1996 and 1997, I began with new songs being drip fed from Time out of Mind, and we will certainly cover those songs, but I’m sorely tempted to begin with a kick, that old familiar warhorse ‘Maggie’s Farm’.  This song may be so familiar that we can easily slip over it. Dylan might not have helped by, on occasion, ripping through it as if he just wanted to get to the end. It can too easily become a messy guitar fest. Not here. Listening to this, I’m taken back to 1964, the Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan rounded up some musicians from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and blew everybody’s ears out with ‘Maggie’s Farm’,  a hard-edged attack on those folkie sensibilities.

It’s too easy to miss the bitter irony of his lampooning of the American family, and the claustrophobia inherent in that desperate desire to escape. Maggie’s Farm just ain’t no place to be, especially if you happen to be a restless young genius: ‘They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.’ This performance restores the song to its original power and vigour. Dylan is in wonderful voice and the band is working as sweetly as any freight train.

It’s a good song to start with because it’s all about busting loose, busting out of constrictions which is just what Dylan does in 1999, busting out of his setlists, busting into new vocal power, busting open the sound of the band. (I don’t have the date)

Maggie’s Farm

If that doesn’t get you up and rocking, I don’t know what will. I think there’s a bit of a fudge with the lyrics, well disguised, but it doesn’t matter. And that nifty little riff Sexton puts in behind it gives it style.  This has quickly become my favourite performance of the song, keeping well clear of the word definitive.

I could say the same about this masterful performance of ‘Senor’, in which there is also a glitch in the lyrics. If I was tortured into choosing just one superlative performance from 1999, it would be this one (I think…). ‘Senor’ is a wonderful song,  easily my favourite from Street Legal (1978) and apparently Dylan’s favourite too, as it’s the only song from that album that has stayed the course in terms of live performance. The song has a sinister edge. To my mind it’s about having your whole universe, your world view, shaken up, tipped upside-down. Unwelcome reality comes crashing in. You’d better watch out for that ‘gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring’. He’s (she’s?) the harbinger of the most unbearable truth.

When writing about this song for the Master Harpist series, I commented that it reminded me of that famous quote from Thoreau, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…’ What are we waiting for, Senor? There’s nothing left for us here. It’s a song from the dark side.

I certainly get that sense from this performance. And, for fans of Dylan’s harmonica playing (like me), the harp work here is a rare pleasure, for, as with 1997/98, Dylan mostly left his harp at home in 1999. The searing, cutting edge of Dylan’s harp works well with the end of the line feeling that comes through the song. Unfortunately I have not been able to track down who is playing violin here, perhaps some helpful reader knows. But it’s compelling, and transports us back to the Rolling Thunder Tour.

I wouldn’t be tempted to equate the mysterious Senor of the song with Jesus or any particular figure. We may well all have our ‘senors’ who we hope will have the answers to our most desperate questions.

Senor

After completing the European summer tour Dylan returned to the United States to perform a thirty-eight date tour with Paul Simon. I believe that this ‘Sounds of Silence’ comes from Portland Oregon, 12^th June. In my last post I commented that Dylan seldom does his best work when duetting with others, but I’m eating my words now. While avoiding hyperbole as much as possible, I now have to say this duet is exquisite. There’s no other word for it. Maybe ‘The Sounds of Silence’ is a song Dylan wished he’d written. It’s all about our moral silence, the creeping deadness of our outrage, the quiet apocalypse.

Paul Simon takes the lead with Dylan doing back up vocals. It’s gentle and totally moving. And the harmonica. Talk about rare moments of harp magic in 1999, we certainly have one here, chilling and melodic. I can’t imagine the song sounding any better. And doesn’t the crowd love it!

Sounds of Silence

They look good together on stage too, a sense of close communion. They are both living the song. This video is not the same performance as the sound clip above, and is of poor visual quality, but gives us the idea of how these two work together. Another brilliant, but quite different, harp solo.

So I’ve run out of space, just when I was getting started. I’ll be back soon to continue this exploration of this peak NET year.

Kia Ora

Bob Dylan In Search Of Eden (Part I)

by Larry Fyffe

God boots Adam and Eve from the earthly kingdom of innocence; locks them outside in kingdoms of experience. He’s not happy that the couple disobeyed His order to stay away from the Tree of Knowledge, and if it’s thought that they’re going to find a delightful places to live, the Almighty has news for them.

The kingdoms of experience will be found waiting but wanting:

The kingdoms of experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

There’ll be never-ending struggles to control what’s out there in a hungry world. Darwinians fighting with Marxists, for example:

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Not only that, God makes sure that on the outside of the Gates of Eden, Adam meets his always-complaining, screech owl-like previous partner who, like a gypsy, flees from the Garden of Eden because she’s had enough of acting the part of an obedient wife:

The screech owl also shall rest there
And find for herself a place of rest
(Isaiah 34: I4)

Lilith, Adam’s first wife, had expected to he treated as an equal in an Edenic relationship because no man’s rib was involved when God creates both sexes in His own image:

So God created man in his own image
In the image of God created He him
Male and female created He them
(Genesis  I: 27)

Time marches on, and Lilith’s now riding a motorcycle. No more an underling be she; the suited-up little boss man can go to Hell:

The motorcycle black Madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Seems the narrator’s girlfriend is the smart one – she’s got the mystery of human existence all figured out – it can’t be done:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel  the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more commentaries, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

Dylan’s nominations and awards

• Best contemporary folk album
• Bob Dylan’s Grammies: Album of the year 1998 – Time out of mind
• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins
• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 2: Best male rock vocal 1980!
• Best rock vocal performance (male)

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

• 2007 Grammy Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance
• Winner – Bob – Someday Baby

Nominees

• Beck – Nausea
• Tom Petty – Saving Grace
• John Mayer – Route 66
• Neil Young – Lookin’ For A Leader

Beck

Aaron: Beck – from the 2006 album The Information. Beck said he wanted the song “to sound like the Stooges in South America.” When performed live, it is done in more of a punk rock vein, more akin to the Stooges.

Tony: Songs without melody don’t do much for me.   One note in the verse and three in the chorus.  It’s a sort of music without all the ingredients  and I can’t see the benefit of that especially when there is only one chord in verse and two others in the chorus.

But obviously some people find it ok.  I played it all the way through, just in case.  But nope, there was nothing else.  Sorry, it must be just me.

Tom Petty – from the album Highway Companion. It was a good year for the Wilburys as this one was produced by Jeff Lynne.

Tony:  Now this is completely different; I’ve always been a Tom Petty fan.  The sound is always perfect, every song is original, and as with so many this one builds in a very satisfactory way, the production is superb and the unexpected instrumental break on about 2 minutes 10 is exquisite.   Even the use of the word “carpet” is exciting; it is unexpected to have two syllables here.   I cried all night when he passed away.

John Mayer – Route 66. From the soundtrack to the Pixar movie Cars, so it’s a big hit in my house!

Tony: Now there’s a rhythm I recognise, and very cleverly leading in into a totally unexpected percussion accompaniment.

It is clever because we all know the song so well, to do something different that works and is interesting is very hard.

But… at its heart Route 66 isn’t itself that interesting a song.  The instrumental break really does liven things up, and presumably the nomination was just for the arrangement.  And although that’s good I am not sure it is “award winning” material.

Neil Young – From his Bush baiting album Living With War.

Aaron: In it Neil predicts the future:

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all

Yeah, maybe it's Obama
But he thinks that he's too young

Aaron: Maybe a better selection from the album would have been Let’s Impeach The President, but perhaps that one was too controversial for the selection committee!

Neil returned to the song in 2020 for his The Times EP with an update to the lyrics – this time attacking you-know-who

Yeah, we had Barack Obama
And we really need him now
The man who stood behind him
Has to take his place somehow
America has a leader
Building walls around our house
He don't know black lives matter
And we got to vote him out

Tony: Another of my favourites.  He might have got my vote just for the message.  You have to give it to Neil, he’s never given up the cause.

But… Neil can do really long songs, but this one really seems to go on a bit long from a musical point of view.  And if you are going to put across a message in the song you really do have to keep the music interesting.  Neil’s a great guitarist, but somehow I found myself drifting away.  Perhaps that’s because the story is told and the events have happened.

So what of the winner Bob – Someday Baby?

Tony: This is one of the songs that Bob has evolved from the heritage of the blues, in this case a Sleepy John Estes song and a Muddy Waters song.  Dylan changed the lyrics and kept the blues style and the title line.  This was recorded in 1935.

As a result of its age there many versions around which can contain elements of the original and of Dylan’s re-write

https://youtu.be/qb1HukPExlQ

Here’s Bob’s re-worked version

What makes this song so attractive and listenable is that the band behind Bob does the standard blues accompaniment but in such a background manner, even when he’s not singing, that it gives a completely new meaning to the piece.  It is about life just going on and on… it is there, we live it, but there is, out in the far distance, this hope for change.

And this way, the laid back feel makes total sense in relation to the lyrics; a perfect re-working of original concept for modern times.  In an extraordinary way the whole sound projects the notion to me that the old times have gone but we are still just chugging on awaiting the ever hoped for change that never materialises.

Plus that laid back feel mean that we have to listen to the lyrics, even though they are just rhyming couplets all the way through followed by the chorus line.   We know where we are but we just really have to have to keep on listening.

One other thing: it is one hell of a track to jive to.  That beat really keeps you on your toes, both literally and metaphorically.  Not to be tried if prone to heart attacks however.

Love it.

=================

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins
• Love minus zero/No limit part VI: Fair is foul
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VIII: A Study Of Provincial Life

IX         Where little girls say pardon

The wind howls like a hammer / The night blows cold and rainy

 “I would seriously give all of Bob Dylan for Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Nothing Rhymed,” tweets Rev. Richard Coles in August 2019. It’s a rather bold statement from the intelligent, colourful Englishman, who after an extremely successful career as a musician (in Bronski Beat and in The Communards, with huge world hits) studies theology, becomes Church of England parish priest and who is now active as a vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire. And as a writer, a journalist, a radio DJ, a TV panellist (QI, Would I Lie to You? and Have I Got News For You) and whatnot. Generally, understatement is the weapon of choice in all these Coles splits, but every now and then he doesn’t shy away from hyperbole either, as his Gilbert O’Sullivan tweet shows.

Now, “Nothing Rhymed” is indeed a song of the outer category – the point Rev. Coles is trying to make does have some truth to it. It is an extremely attractive song with an addictive melody and lyrics that encompass the Holy Trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason. Demonstrated, for example, by the bridge;

This feeling inside me could never deny me
The right to be wrong if I choose
And this pleasure I get
From say winning a bet
Is to lose

… a bridge with a high Dylan vibe, as the pop-and-rock savvy Reverend should also be able to see. The right to be wrong is a wonderful antithesis, rhyming technically it is a perfect, antique Spanish sextet with, as it should be, the rhyme scheme AABCCB and Sullivan’s variant of the most famous antithesis, no success like failure, is of a dazzling beauty and simplicity: this pleasure I get from say winning a bet is to lose. “I’m a sucker for good middle eights,” as O’Sullivan himself says.

Still, O’Sullivan himself would never be so immodest as to place “Nothing Rhymed” or any other highlight of his rich oeuvre above Dylan. In all interviews over the years, he continues to pay his respects to his hero, as in Reader’s Digest (August 2018), when he names The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as one of the three Records That Changed My Life (the other two being Please Please Me and Johnny Duncan and His Bluegrass Boys’ Last Train To San Fernando);

“I was hugely into Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was the one who gave me the feeling that I could achieve something with my voice. I don’t have a great voice, but I always felt it was kind of distinctive and if there’s one thing Bob Dylan had, it was a distinctive voice. And of course, his songwriting sort of moved away from I-love-you-you-love-me and that kind of helped us to be able to write lyrics other than the traditional love songs that were the key at that time. Bob Dylan was a huge influence on me.”

O’Sullivan, who says he is a stickler for words, illustrates the influence on his lyrics with examples inspired by Dylan’s enjoyment of language and playfulness. As he demonstrates in a detailed podcast for Strange Brew with Jason Barnard in 2016, using the same “Nothing Rhymed”;

The line “I’m drinking my Bonaparte shandy”. You know what that is, don’t you?
What’s that?
You don’t? It’s Napoleon brandy. [chortles] So I’m drinking my Napoleon brandy. Not quite. Doesn’t have the ring for me. I kind of like playing with words

… just as he is still a bit proud of the Basement-like nonsense from one of his older juvenilia, the charming “Mr. Moody’s Garden” (1968), from the time when he was still only called “Gilbert”;

I wrote things like “Down among the partridge trees, lives a don who loves his knees, so much so he’s framed them in a jar” [both Jason and Gilbert chuckle] – what was I on when I wrote that? It brings a smile to my face when I hear that.

O’Sullivan could also have quoted the last verse from that song, in which he quite openly salutes his hero Dylan:

Cos every day's a holiday in Mr. Moody's Garden
Where little girls say pardon
And Bill and Ben found stardom
While playing John Wesley Harding
Who looked just like Billy Cardon's
Answer to choo-choo

… and in which, by the way, the garden-pardon-stardom-Harding-Cardon sequence shows the same frenzied enjoyment of rhyme as Dylan’s oeuvre.

Both songs, “Nothing Rhymed” and “Mr. Moody’s Garden”, can be found on the compilation The Berry Vest Of Gilbert O’Sullivan – and that title is another sign of art fraternity: with Dylan, the Irish Englishman also shares a soft spot for spoonerisms.

“The post office has been stolen and the mailbox is closed”, “honky-tonk lagoon”, “round that horn and ride that herd”, “it ain’t my cup of meat”, “I got for good luck my black tooth”… in the mid-60s Dylan develops a taste for a quirky, often nonsensical variant of the time-honoured spoonerisms. Sometimes “classic” indeed, as in the post-office example from “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, but more often in the more playful variant, where the spoonerism is a sound-driven mix-up. Lagoon instead of saloon, for example, not tea but meat, round instead of sound and not rabbit foot but my black tooth.

Spoonerisms, named after the absent-minded Oxford don William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) who, according to tradition, often mixed up syllables (kinkering congs instead of conquering kings, for example), tend to be rather corny. Aerosmith calling an album Night In The Ruts, or Hairway To Steven by The Butthole Surfers. And The Berry Vest Of Gilbert O’Sullivan, of course. But in the hands of a gifted wordsmith like Dylan, they can still take on a poetic glow; if you don’t take the spoonerism, as here in “Love Minus Zero”, all the way. Thus The wind howls like a hammer / The night blows cold and rainy gets an attractively confusing suggestion of a spoonerism by – obviously – the second part, where the listener “corrects”; no, the aforementioned wind blows cold and rainy. But then, “correcting back”, the listener gets stuck on the wind howls like a hammer. Stylistically a nice alliteration and content-wise a synaesthetic Dylan original (“howling like a hammer”?), but the other half of the spoonerism, of the inverted morphemes gets stranded. The wind may blow, as Dylan already has told us ad nauseam, but the night cannot howl. Let alone “howling like a hammer”.

But then again, maybe Dylan, like O’Sullivan to John Wesley Harding, is winking at Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Swannanoa Tunnel”: The wind blowed cold, baby / When you hear my watchdog howling / This old hammer it rings like silver.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part X:

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

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

You can read more about all our regular writers here

If you would like to read more, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group: Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Filip Łobodziński

No, it’s not going to be about Tarantula nor the sadly-up-to-now-discontinued Chronicles. It’s going to be about the songs. Because with Bob Dylan it all starts with the songs and their performance.

Each time I see a ranking of The Best Bob Dylan Covers I expect to find there only songs covered in English. Bob Dylan’s native language is an obvious choice, even for the foreigners, given the fact that this is the form within which the songs conquered people’s minds and spirits in the first place. In English were they conceived, shaped, burnished, performed, modified, reiterated by the Man himself. In English they have been intercepted and diffused by hundreds of their admirers.

The English language is a modern-day’s Latin or lingua franca. There are probably magnificent scientific explanation as to why it’s happened – by way of commerce, by way of power, by way of technology, by way of its apparent grammatical simplicity. Whatever the cause, English rules the world, or at least its richest and most influential (which does not mean the best!) part.

I don’t know when a Bob Dylan song first was translated into and sung in a foreign tongue. It could be a fascinating journey through time and space – to see how the Unidylanverse kept on expanding from the moment zero on. What zone did it conquer first, or leave its mark upon? Was it Spanish? German? Possibly French? (The French adapted plenty of British songs in the sixties, so maybe…). My bet is on Hans Bradtke’s adaptation of Blowin’ in the Wind that was released as Die Antwort weiβ ganz allein der Wind in December ’63, in an unforgeable interpretation by Marlene Dietrich.

Since then, tons of foreign-language versions have appeared, from Italian to Indonesian, from Hungarian to Hebrew, from German to Greek.

One can only surmise how accurate and true to the original songs’ spirit all these cover versions are. Some of them surely are faithful, some are approximations, some are just vague impressions based on the primary sources. Or even caricatures, for that matter.

Of course, within this non-English Bob Dylan world we have a Polish team too. I’m proud to be part of it, having translated over 250 songs by Bob Dylan into my native language and having been singing some of my works.

I’ve already written down and published on these friendly pages some of my reflections on singing Dylan in Polish and on translating them. If I wanted to quote now something from those articles I’d opt for Tony Attwood’s own intro to the first of them:

“When I started Untold Dylan I had no idea that Dylan’s music was being translated into and recorded in other languages.  But of course now I think of it, that is a typical anglocentric view, seeing the language Dylan speaks as being the only way to hear and appreciate Dylan’s music.”

And those words, when read once again a week ago, prompted me to add something for you English-speaking readers and fans to consider. And no, it’s not an anglocentric view to think Dylan’s lyrics can be (beauty)fully sung and understood in English only. Actually, most people think their native literature tastes best in its original shape. And it does.

So why on Earth bother to re-write the same lyrics but in a mutilated form? What is the purpose of spoiling the perfect form? What sense is there in singing “som en hemlös själ”, “comme des pierres qui roulent”, “földönfutó” or “jak błądzący łach” instead of “like a rolling stone”?

The answer is blowin’ in history seen as a constant process of learning.

Let’s have a look at the tale known from Gen 11.1–9. The Tower of Babel (though it was not called so in the Bible). Its demolition by the Hand of God is described and meant as a chastisement brought upon people for having assumed nearly the same status as the Almighty. God confounded their languages so they could no longer understand each other, and work together. Misunderstandings and conflicts replaced former unity and accord. From then on, we were doomed to guess instead of knowing, to cross blades instead of shaking hands.

The way I see it, and it is not only me who shares this view, this etiological biblical narrative should rather be interpreted as a blessing. For, as it is obvious, different peoples on Earth developed various speeches and tongues not because of some superimposed verdict from Up There but because, I believe, of different ways of perceiving the world and the different soundscapes those peoples were surrounded by. And only when they started to confront each other did they feel the need to understand, and to stand under the same sheltering sky.

In war, there’s no literature; just instructions. In war, there’s no reflection; just orders. In war, there’s no good will; just malevolence. In war, there are no neighbours; just competing opponents.

The phenomenon of a foreign language creates the gate to an alternative universe. When learning English, not only do I memorize English words and the rules according to which they can be used. I get to know a whole new world, a world furnished by these guys who say “tea” instead of “herbata”, “curve” instead of “krzywa”, “fuck” or “whore” instead of “kurwa” and The Tempest instead of Burza. A world where a little baby feels at home when they sing Hush Little Baby – and absolutely not so if they start to sing Na Wojtusia z popielnika.

This is the world where people don’t need dictionaries to understand Like a Rolling Stone. At least to understand the words and their sequences – as in Spanish ‘comprender’ – even if they need more studies to understand the song’s deeper  m e a n i n g – as in Spanish ‘entender’.

A translator, thus, is someone who wants to break into this fascinating world and fully understand, and then to find her/his way back with a bag full of ideas that would help her/him transform the original message (song, poem, novel…), to recreate it in a new language.

The implication is powerful: there are no readers more observant, more perceptive, more perspicacious than a translator. There is no lecture more discerning and subtle than the one executed by a translator. Because the native readers may feel satisfied with what they understand (Spanish ‘comprenden’) while the translator urgently needs to understand profoundly; to catch on to the original text (Spanish ‘entender’) (what a powerful distinction, by the way!) and to its possible conditioning.

We, the translators (of literature, of official speeches, of technical use instructions and s.o.), build bridges. We open the gates. We tread on underground waters to find paths leading to distant solar systems.

There’s one more advantage of being a translator. Not only do we read the text, and read into the text, but also we listen to it. We taste the sounds and the messages. And then we try to breathe a new linguistic life into the text. To do so, we need to be extremely aware of our own speech. Few people learn their native language as thoroughly as the translators.

I try to find a gate or a window through which my countrywomen and countrymen could inhabit a part of your world, Tony, Aaron, Denise, Larry, Pat. Even more, meet Jochen and François on a common ground and breathe the same air. Literature, besides music, dance and food, is one of the most effective options to share the world. Bob Dylan’s songs provide us with a splendid opportunity to effectuate such a great flirting date.

Is my piece about Bob Dylan at all? Oh yes, it is.  By way of example, in mid-June, our band dylan.pl gave our first live concert for a live audience in 16 months. Afterwards, we signed our albums, I signed my Polish Dylan translations, an anthology of his songs Duszny kraj and Tarantula. And quite a few people approached us and said that only thanks to attending our concert had they felt an urge to explore the Dylan world. Before, they just knew a couple of songs but they didn’t understand them so it had been more like a part of the soundscape, and not necessarily an important one. Now, they said they wanted to dive deep into his songs because they’d smelled something incredibly beautiful, powerful, moving and thought-provoking that lied beneath the music.

I managed to trace a path that would lead them somewhere they didn’t ever expect. I gave them a chance. It should be stressed, though, that the aim of translating is not to replace the original text literally word for word. The text is a prey and the translator is a hunter on a bloodless chase. The prize is a new foreign version that speaks the same truth albeit with different words (my struggle with the Polish title of Like a Rolling Stone and my proposition of translating are described here.  For me, more important is to stay true to the depth and spirit even if I “lose” something at the level of specific words.  I write Dylan’s songs in Polish the way I think he might have written them had he been born somewhere near Wałbrzych or Białystok.  (Although a Jewish family in 1941 was one of the most endangered species in Central/Eastern Europe, as everybody knows, and there would be no songs at all…).

Bob Dylan doesn’t write in Polish. But he can be perfectly spoken in Polish, if I may use such a strange syntactic construction. Thank God (and rather contrary to His will…) the Tower of Babel became a vivid monument to the beginning of a mutual understanding. Untold Dylan people are my sisters and brothers, even if we never meet face to face. And my Polish audience are my “rabbit’s friends-and-relations” who participate in a huge gathering. Hope nobody steals the silver spoon shadowed by the enmity darkness…

You might also enjoy also by Filip Łobodziński

• T.Love, top Polish rock band, paying tribute to Bob Dylan
• The consequences of sequences in Bob Dylan’s writing of song
• Studious Dylan in the Studio
• Memories of Dylan’s first ever Polish concert

You can read more about all our regular writers here

By Larry Fyffe

According to the Holy Bible, the Almighty One drives Adam and Eve out of earthly paradise after Eve disobeys God’s order. She’s temped by the Devil into having a taste of the Tree of Knowledge of Good And Evil; that is, into an experience of sensual delight, apparently including sex; what’s more, as further punishment, the couple will never again be able to eat from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden which gives them immortality; the gates are sealed forever, but left to them is a second chance – the possibility of rising to a heavenly, albeit asexual, paradise after they drop dead:

So He drove out the man
And He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubims
And a flaming sword which turned every way
To keep the way of the Tree of Life
(Genesis 3: 24)

In the mythic, symbolic, and Blakean-like song lyrics beneath, the cherubim angel is transformed into the shape of a western gunslinger who carries a lighted candle rather than a flaming sword; he rides (foremost/fore-est?) ahead of the dark and cloudy, rather Puritan, skies – the candle, a symbol  of hope regained (albeit a dim one) of a peaceful and joyful existence in the Promised Land of spacious America:

Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun 
Though it's glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Dimmed the prospect be by the rise of industrialzed cities – concrete and over-populated that are under the control of violent and iron-hearted police:

The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

With machine-like military men who obey without questioning  their commanders as to what they are fighting for:

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter
But still remains
Upon the beach where hounddogs bay
(Bod Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

The hope of a regained Eden lost to the false idols of the modern-day Babylon from out of the past:

With time-tested compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

It looks like God has delt from the bottom of the deck so that it is only He who gets to eat from the Tree of Life now while the mortal humans get nothing but promises that they just might be able to escape from the dark experiences of Babylon up in a heavenly Eden after they die.

Indeed, according to the song lyrics below, some humans think it would be better to just die, and have done with it –  they have to first make it pass a trial outside Edenic Heaven, that’s overseen by the Supreme Judge, in order to enter the Gates of Heaven.

Else it’s eternal Hell for them:

As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

This article is part of a unique series which reviews the artwork on Dylan’s albums.  A full index can be found here.    The most recent articles are

• NEW: Blood on the Tracks
• Blonde On Blonde: The Artwork

by Patrick Roefflaer

• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II
• Released: November 17, 1971
• Photographer front: Barry Feinstein (1971)
• Photographer backside: ? (Apple Film)
• Art-director:  ?

On Sunday, August 1, 1971, two benefit concerts will take place at New York’s Madison Square Garden to raise money for the people of Bangladesh (formerly known as East Pakistan). As a result of civil war and persistent severe weather, the living conditions for the many refugees are harrowing. The first benefit in music history is an initiative of George Harrison. Unsure if enough people are interested in him alone, the ex-Beatle enlists the help of friendly musicians. He even manages to get both Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan out of their isolation.

It has been five years since Dylan last toured and his appearance is eagerly anticipated. The five songs he performs are the highlight of the show and the reactions of press and public are unanimously positive. His record company, Columbia Records, is very happy with the renewed interest in their artist and wants to cash in on this. As Bob has no new material, it is decided that the best option is a compilation.

Naturally there has to be a photo from Bob at the concert on the front cover. So Columbia’s art director has to contact the official photographers for the concerts: Camouflage Productions.

That creative team consists of photographer Barry Feinstein and designer Tom Wilkes who were previously responsible for the cover of Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass and of course also for the packaging of The Concert for Bangla Desh (sic).

Dylan chooses two photos by his buddy Feinstein (see The Times They Are A-Changin’). On the first, taken during rehearsal the day before the concert, Bob Dylan and George Harrison are seen from the back, against a blue background and lit from the left by a white spotlight. Harrison says something and Dylan listens intently.

On the second, Bob’s face is on the left side of the photo, blowing his harmonica while a large number of microphones are on the right side.   Both photos are landscape (twice as wide as high) and therefore excellent for a gatefold cover.

However, on both photographs, Dylan head is on the left side of the photo, so his head would end up on the back side of the cover. Mirroring would mess up the effect, because then Dylan would look to the left. (The reading direction in the Western world is from left to right, so a movement to the left is perceived as slowing down – decline, while a movement to the right indicates progress – forward-looking.   If you would like to know more this video explains in detail why left to right, and right to left, matters).

The (unknown) designer solves the problem by cutting off Harrison and further enlarging Dylan’s head.

Striking is the resemblance of both photos with those on the cover of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits from 1967. On the front cover of that compilation there’s a portrait of Dylan in profile, looking to the right, with blue as the main color.

This is to the amazement of the photographer of that original photo, Rowland Scherman, who said, “I heard that Dylan didn’t like my photo [at the time], and then he chooses one that looks very similar. I said to him, ‘You little bastard.’ He looked embarrassed and turned around. He knew well enough that he was wrong the first time because the image captured Dylan so well in the sixties, with his hair, his harmonica and that halo.”

The portrait of Dylan used for the reverse side of the compilation is not really a photo, but a still image from the Apple film The Concert For Bangla Desh. Because Dylan was hesitant to give permission to use footage of him in the film, Harrison’s manager Alan Klein invited him to a private screening at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan. He possibly selected that image then. Note the guitar strap that rests on the wrong shoulder, this image is also printed mirrored, so that Dylan is also looking to the right.

Because there was already a Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2, released in Germany and the Netherlands (and later the UK), the new compilation gets a Roman numeral in the title: Vol. II.

To avoid further confusion, the cover will be given a new look in the Netherlands and a different name.

In England it is called More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits and in Italy: Un Poeta Un Artista.

by John Henry

As one of the richest and most captivating songs in an unequalled catalogue of brilliant songs, “Desolation Row” has attracted a lot of attention from commentators on Dylan’s art. Much has been said about it, and no doubt more will be said in future. One thing that has not been noticed so far, however, is that Desolation Row marks the culmination, the end-point, of a series of songs on repressive, oppressive, soul-destroying, and downright awful places.

Around the time of his first album, New York was a place where people had to cut something, and they’d rob you with a fountain pen (“Talkin’ New York”), and as far as Dylan was concerned it was a place where they stepped on your name and tried to “get me beat” (“Hard Times in New York Town”). If New York seemed to be unwelcoming and defeating, Bear Mountain was even worse. Feeling as though he’d “climbed outa m’ casket”, the narrator wished he’d “never got up that morn” (“Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”). On Freewheelin’ “Oxford Town” represented those places you’d “Better get away from”, where “The Sun don’t shine above the ground.” But Dylan also sang at that time about “the deep hollow dungeon” of “The Walls of Red Wing”.

These early songs about God-forsaken places belong to Dylan’s apprenticeship, when he was only beginning to forge his song-writing craft. By the time we get to Bringing It All Back Home, though, some of the most outstanding songs are about diabolically awful places.

The first of these, of course, is “Maggie’s Farm”. A wonderful indictment of how modern America (representing any Western state for that matter) stifles creativity and independence. On Maggie’s Farm bland conformity is imposed not just by talk of “man and God and law”, not just by fines, but by random violence—Maggie’s Pa “puts his cigar/Out in your face just for kicks.”

An even better song, one of Dylan’s very best, perhaps because of its evocative mysteriousness, is “Gates of Eden.” The song is complex and difficult to understand, but one thing is certain, and that is that the imagery is generally scary and disorientating. The “truth just twists” here, lampposts have “iron claws”. “No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden”, and yet the only place “you will hear a laugh” is “inside the Gates of Eden.” Seeming to suggest the paradise of the Garden of Eden, the song in fact conveys a disturbing ethos of dispossession. Promises of paradise merely raise that laugh, friends are really strangers and they are all trying to resign from their fates. The narrator’s lover recounts her dreams, but these are not dreams of optimistic ambitions, their meanings are described as “ditches”, and the best way to deal with them is to fill them in by the shovelful.

But there are two other songs about dreadful places on this album. As in “Maggie’s Farm”, in both cases Dylan turns to humour and satire to paint vivid pictures of places you don’t want to be. In “On the Road Again”, the singer is once again involved with a family that seems deranged, violent, and deceitful. This is the family of the singer’s girlfriend, but when she asks why the singer doesn’t live with her, he replies, “Honey, how come you don’t move?”

America as a thoroughly awful place, again as in “Maggie’s Farm”, reappears in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” The joke, in this hugely under-rated song, is that the singer and his companions discover American before Columbus, but it is an America already populated with cops, political activists, waiters, bankers; and already established with jails, undertakers, parking restrictions and so forth. After various nightmarish adventures the singer manages to make his escape, and meeting Columbus as he’s arriving, he wishes him good luck.

This brings us to Highway 61 Revisited, but before we get to “Desolation Row”, we hear about the scary and disorienting place that Mister Jones finds himself in, in the “Ballad of a Thin Man.” There is already something crucially different here, however, from the earlier songs we’ve been looking at. In the earlier songs, the narrator or singer is the one who is appalled by the awful things going on in the places he describes. But in “Ballad” the singer seems to be part of the nightmarish cast of characters that are so profoundly upsetting Mr Jones. It is as though the singer, let us consider him to be Dylan himself, has changed sides. Where previously he has seen the places he describes as places to get away from, and the sooner the better, or as places that you shouldn’t go to, if you can avoid it, now Dylan seems to want to be among the freaks and the circus-like performers who make up the disturbing scene where the staid and conservative Mr Jones is so tormented.

It is this same switch of outlook, this same change in desires, that we see in “Desolation Row”. At a first, perhaps superficial, listen “Desolation Row” might give the impression that this Desolation Row is another of these places to get away from, or to avoid going to. After all, let’s face it, Desolation Row does not sound like a good address. If we follow the lyrics, however, it is easy to see that Desolation Row is the place to be. We discover at the end of the first verse that the singer is looking out “From Desolation Row”—he seems to be looking out from there to the even worse place where they are selling postcards of a lynching, and the riot squad is restlessly, and ominously, looking for something to do. Contrary to what we might expect, there’s a “carnival tonight/On Desolation Row”, and Ophelia, a troubled soul if ever there was one, spends her time looking into Desolation Row, not trying to escape from it. Similarly, Einstein used to play the violin on Desolation Row.

Dr Filth and “his nurse, some local loser”, who is “in charge of the cyanide hole”, are not on Desolation Row but outside it. You can only hear their patients play on their penny whistles, “If you lean your head out far enough/From Desolation Row.” Casanova is punished for going to Desolation Row, so we can assume he is punished in the world beyond Desolation Row, that place which is obviously worse than Desolation Row. We learn in the next verse that people try to escape to Desolation Row—again, it seems to be better than whatever is outside. At the end of the song, the singer seems to have lost his place in Desolation Row, but he still yearns to be back there. “Don’t send me no more letters”, he sings, “unless you mail them/From Desolation Row.” A letter from there, presumably, would remind him of the place to which he wants to get back.

So, what are we to make of this—a series of songs, about places to avoid and why, which eventually give way to a magnificent final song, “Desolation Row” about a place which, for all its faults, seems to be preferable to the places and their inhabitants which surround it? It is important to note, of course, that Desolation Row cannot be perfect. Dylan didn’t call the song “Paradise Row”, and the name “Desolation Row” clearly gives the impression of being a depressing and unpleasant place to be. And yet, it seems to be surrounded by even worse places. Where the earlier songs of this kind all suggest the places being sung about are places you need to escape from, Desolation Row is somewhere you want to escape to. And, if you are exiled from it, as the singer seems to be in the last verse, you might want to be reminded of it by receiving letters only from there.

We can only speculate, of course, but it seems as though Dylan the songwriter has learned valuable lessons between those initial hard times in New York and Desolation Row. When he first came to New York, naïve but full of ambition, he must have experienced many knock-backs which led him to write these songs. At first, he associated the set-backs with specific recognisable places but later wrote instead of more abstract representations of repressive places, as he moved from New York and Maggie’s Farm, to a house where “there’s fist fights in the kitchen”, and on to the Gates of Eden. In the early songs Dylan sees it as his role to draw a moral conclusion. In “Talking New York” he seems to place himself above those without much food on their table, who therefore use their knives and forks to cut something else—the narrator’s cue to leave New York. Similarly, in “Hard Times in New York”, the narrator proudly boasts he’ll be able to leave New York “still standin’ on my feet” in spite of everything the people of New York throw at him. Dylan writes as though it is possible to maintain separation from the place you are in, to be unaffected by it, to rise above its horrors while remaining unchanged by it.

By the time we get to “Ballad of a Thin Man”, however, Dylan knows better. He now recognises that he himself is part of the place, part of the action of the place, for good or ill. It is now Mr Jones who is trying to hold himself aloof from what is going on around him, while the narrator of the song is one of his tormentors, pointing relentlessly to Mr Jones’s inability to understand what is happening in this frightening place. The message of the song is now much more subtle and sophisticated. Although nothing is made explicit, the separation of the narrator from Mr Jones; the one an observer and commentator on what’s happening, the other a would-be innocent visitor who is trying to stay standing on his feet, gives the sense that Mr Jones is actually learning from this dreadful experience. While the narrators in the early New York songs talk of leaving town with their integrity unaffected by their bad experiences, we get the sense that Mr Jones gradually becomes one of the weirdos that so frightened him to begin with. At the beginning he feels himself to be different from those around him: “Oh my God/Am I here all alone?” By the end, however, he walks into the room like a camel—he puts his eyes in his pockets and his nose on the ground—as weird as anyone else there. So weird, in fact, that now the narrator says “There ought to be a law/Against you coming around.”

The point is, that the frightening, repressive, and disorientating things that happen to us, whenever we find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar place, become part of our experience and therefore make us who we are. Dylan wouldn’t be the man he is today if he hadn’t endured those hard times in New York; he wouldn’t be who he is if he hadn’t had to metaphorically scrub the floors on Maggie’s Farm. Suffering and frustration are all part of life in this veil of tears, and we cannot remain unchanged as we endure them. In the end these adversities make us who we are. “Desolation Row” is the song where Dylan finally acknowledges that.

Before going any further, it is worth noting that “Desolation Row” marks the end of this preoccupation with place in some of Dylan’s songs. There’s no similar song on Blonde on Blonde. “Stuck inside of Mobile” may sound as though it is a song about Mobile, but if we read the lyrics we can see that they do not focus on any particular place—Mobile only appears in the repeated refrain at the end of each verse. “I Shall Be Released” says little or nothing about the place from which the singer will be released. Although “All Along the Watchtower” begins with the famous line: “There must be some way out of here”, we hear no more about this place. The thief, responding to this comment by the joker, does not go on to discuss the problems of the place but talks instead about life and fate. Try as you might, after “Desolation Row”, you can’t find a song by Dylan which is focussed on a place which is in itself portrayed as a dreadful place, a place to get away from. Even “Scarlet Town” doesn’t fit the bill.

So, “Desolation Row” is Dylan’s final brilliant statement that bad places can be the making of us—living in them and through them forges us in the fires of adversity and helps us to endure whatever worse places we might find ourselves in. The narrator and his lady, in the first verse, do not hide but look out; later the narrator talks of leaning your head out to hear Dr Filth’s patients. The song seems to tell us about what is going on beyond Desolation Row, but with an address like that, we can safely assume things are no better on the Row itself. Like the narrator we too are looking out from Desolation Row; we are all part of it, our personal development takes place within it, and inexorably it becomes part of our make-up—it is the making of us. The whole world is Desolation Row. We might think that being there is awful, and we might think of it as somewhere to get away from, but in the end living there shapes us and makes us who we are. So, if someone says to us “You’re in the wrong place my friend/You better leave”, we shouldn’t listen, but should continue to muddle through on Desolation Row. When Dylan saw that, he switched tack, and wrote “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Desolation Row”, two songs which acknowledged that although we might find ourselves in bad places where bad things happen to us, in the end they forge our personalities and make us who we are. “Desolation Row” was Dylan’s final magnificent word on this, and he never again wrote a song focussed on the iniquities of a particular place. But no doubt, like the rest of us, he continued to look out from Desolation Row.

———————————————————–

Other articles by John Henry

• Dylan’s Ways to leave his lovers
• Why is “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” on Dylan’s Break-up album?
• Dylan’s unnoticed murder ballad
• Three Scottish songs and their influence on Dylan

If you would like to read more, Untold Dylan also has a very active Facebook group:  Untold Dylan.

If you would like to see some of our series they are listed under the picture at the top of the page, and the most recent entries can be found on the home page.

If you would like to contribute an article please drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

Whether it’s through playing entertaining games at the spin casino online or being featured in movies, gambling has touched different facets of life. Several musicians have also composed songs to show their love and appreciation for the industry. Bob Dylan is among the hundreds of musicians, who’s known for his love for gambling, even composing multiple songs, including:

1. Huck’s Tune – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was the first musician to get a Nobel Prize thanks to his contributions to this American tune and the intuitive story that he invented it. Like most of his other songs, “Huck’s  Tune” is dynamic and lyrical, pulling right at the heartstrings.

Written for Lucky You and starring Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana, the song covers various topics, mostly focusing on the dangers of poker. The song also talks about the difficulty of mixing relationships with money. From this song, it’s clear that Dylan’s musical mastery is unmatched, making “Huck’s Tune” a great song on gambling to add to your Spotify list.

2. Rambling, Gambling Willie – Bob Dylan

Released in 1992, “Rambling, Gambling Willie” is dedicated to the archetype of every gambler. Bob’s hero is among the greatest gamblers of all time and his song has a story to tell. The song speaks of Willie, a gambler who’s all over the place and lives for the game.

According to Dylan, the gambler is willing to take a shot at almost anything, even sailing down New Orleans to try his hand with the Jackson River Queen. He also swings by Cripple Creek, which is a popular gambling area, and keeps going.

3. Lily, Rosemary & Jack of Hearts

Using a third-person omniscient narration to tell his story, Dylan uses a basic storytelling plot structure for this song. The song starts by talking about conflict, followed by rising action and climax before the resolution. This classic song talks about Jack of Hearts as Lily’s true, although she was Big Jim’s mistress and no love was lost between them.

According to the story, Lily came from a broken home but finally traveled to lots of places while having lots of strange affairs. However, only the outlaw (Jack of Hearts) managed to conquer her heart. The song is yet another great combination of gambling and love, with Dylan using his lyrical mastery to combine the two.

4. House of the Rising Sun

A traditional folk song also known as Rising Sun Blues, this song talks about a person’s life going wrong in New Orleans. The song has been recorded in different versions since its release, with most versions urging children and parents to stay away from the same fate. However, the most successful version of this folk song was recorded by the Animals in 1964.

5. Little Willie The Gambler

First released by Bob Dylan in 1991, Little Willie The Gambler talks about the story of a great gambler that’s worth knowing. In this song, Dylan tells the story of his friend Willie, who liked to gamble anywhere there were people, whether it’s the white house, railroad yards, or while sailing to New Orleans. Fortunately, Willie had a good heart, supported his kids and all their mothers.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins
• Love minus zero/No limit part VI: Fair is foul
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery

VIII       A Study Of Provincial Life

The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection / 
       Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer / The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing

Ironically, one of The Smiths’ best-loved songs is one of the most atypical Smiths songs: the hypnotic “How Soon Is Now?” from 1984. It’s the only song in which creative force of nature Johnny Marr lingers on one chord for that long, with a beat and tremolo effect like in Bo Diddley’s “Mona”, smeared across a carpet of guitars. Singer Morrissey’s lyrics, also unusual, put the listener on the wrong track. In any case, “I am the sun and the air” is sung along long enough in the clubs. A self-glorifying opening line that, on second thought, is equally atypical; atypical for Morrissey’s usual self-hatred and self-depreciation, that is. The actual lyrics make a lot more sense:

I am the son
And the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son
And the heir
Of nothing in particular

… now, that’s how we know and love our Morrissey. Still, it is not a Morrissey original; the icon paraphrases another English cultural heritage, from the nineteenth-century bestseller Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871). From the last chapter of Book I, “Miss Brooke”:

“To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and Vyan—certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.”

Middlemarch – A Study Of Provincial Life is a very English highlight, a psychological novel that always makes it to the lists of “Hundred Most Important Books” or “Hundred Best All-Time Novels” and similar elections. New translations still appear in the 21st century – apparently the work has quite literally centuries-transcending value.

Morrissey being a fan is understandable. The novel tends towards melodrama, plots and subplots are driven by a lot of awkward and unhappy relationship hassles, very English fiddling with social status and social hierarchy and unfathomable hypersensitivities, and George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans’s nom de plume) hews marble phrases like “That’s a pity, now, Josh,” said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed, interspersed with by Jove‘s and I shan’t‘s. Much ado, anyway, about pride and prejudice, sense and sensibility, and all.

But that Dylan could be captivated by such an antique through-and-through English weighty tome is rather uncharacteristic. And yet it is very likely: The country doctor rambles / Bankers’ nieces seek perfection… protagonist Tertius Lydgate is an idealistic, somewhat naive country doctor who, against all wisdom, marries Rosamond Vincy, the stunningly beautiful but exasperatingly superficial niece of banker Bulstrode. It is a marriage doomed to failure with an airhead who indeed strives for what she perceives as “perfection” and is quite sensitive to all the gifts that wise men bring – although the latter sounds more like a noncommittal reference to Jesus’ birth than a laborious nod to Middlemarch.

Anyway, the reference to country doctor and banker’s niece is oddly specific, and the combination is nowhere else to be found in the canon. Some analysts think that the “banker’s niece” might be an echo of A Portrait Of A Lady (Henry James, 1881), but have little more argument for this than the otherwise disinterested fact that protagonist Isabel is a niece of retired, wealthy banker Daniel Touchett. No country doctor widely. Although country doctors are popular main and supporting characters in countless novels, television series and films (Kafka creates the most poignant, oppressive country doctor in world literature in Ein Landarzt, for example), they never appear with banker’s nieces.

Middlemarch then. But still, it is unlikely that an unbridled, slightly revved-up, 23-year-old cool hipcat in Greenwich Village like Dylan would have wrestled through those 800 pages, let alone been touched by them. No, that is – with all due respect – more something for a calm lady who radiates peace and reflection, a sphinx-like beauty like the one that has recently been found at Dylan’s side; for Sara, in short.

In this closing couplet, it is not the only hint that a love-struck Dylan incorporates small, intimate insider hints into the lyrics. The opening line, thanks to the candour of Joan Baez in her autobiography, can also be seen in that light:

Sara was afraid of standing on a bridge over water that didn’t move. I thought hers was a much more poetic phobia than my own fear of throwing up and I wrote her a song called “Still Waters at Night.”

… in which Baez incorporates a rather unambiguous reference to Dylan and his Sara in the last verse (“Songs of the vagabond / It’s to you he has sung them”), and indeed processes that poetic phobia in the first verse:

Still waters at night
In the darkest of dark
But you rise as white
As the birch tree's bark
Or a pale wolf in winter
You look down and shiver
At still waters at night

So the lady is trembling on a bridge at night – a not too cryptic paraphrase of The bridge at midnight trembles, of that dreamy opening line of the last verse of “Love Minus Zero”. She probably has “gephyrobia, which is fear of bridges,” as Lucy tries to diagnose with Charlie Brown (in A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965, Lucy means gephyrophobia). In any case, it is clear: this lady would rather not stand on a trembling bridge at night. She’d rather be at home, curled up in front of the fireplace, with a nice, thick, old-fashioned novel.

By the way: that banker, Mr Bulstrode, is an avid horseman. And he is not the only one in Middlemarch. All through the novel, he does like to hang out with other horsemen, cultivating and discussing all kinds of ceremonies.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IX:

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

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