Untold Dylan

• NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• NET 1998 Part 2: Friends and other strangers
• NET 1998, part 3, What’s a Protest Song?

The complete Never Ending Tour index

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

During 1998, Dylan shared the stage with other performers, notably Van Morrison, Mick Jagger and Joni Mitchell. Dylan’s performances with others can be quite fun to watch, but rarely does Dylan do his best work on those occasions.

This scrappy ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ with Mick Jagger is a good example. Jagger jumps around plausibly, trying to look like one of those ‘British bad boys’ Dylan mentions in ‘I Contain Multitudes’. Dylan tries to hunker down into the song but Jagger doesn’t know the words. He can however belt out the chorus in fine style. Just  like a Rolling Stone? You bet. As I said, fun to watch…

Dylan also did some shows where he was the opening act for Van Morrison. Van the Man was riding pretty high in those days. Occasionally they would join each other for a duet. Here Dylan and Van have a fair go at ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. There’s a nice impromptu moment when master harpist Dylan finds a harmonica for Van to have a blast.

The two of them seem to enjoy themselves singing Van’s ‘More and More’. The grin on Dylan’s face in the last verse gives the game away.

Joni Mitchell joins Van and Bob for a rather moving performance of ‘I Shall Be Released’. It’s nicely impromptu, with each pointing to the other for taking the next verse. It’s great to see these three poets of rock music onstage together.

But, as I said, Dylan usually does his best work alone. Let’s pick up on  ‘I and I’, a song Dylan has been cultivating since the heavy, thunderous versions he did with Tom Petty in 1986. My peak performance of the song remains the 1993, guitar heavy version (See NET, 1993, Part 1), but this 1998 performance comes a very close second. The song is slowly disappearing from Dylan’s setlists by this time, but the power of the song is undiminished, as is Dylan’s commitment to it. (1^st July)

I and I

‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ and ‘To Be Alone With You’ are both in a lighter vein than the Time out of Mind songs, and ‘Blind Willie McTell’, ‘Silvio’ and ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, songs Dylan brought forward to sit alongside the album songs.

One of the most laid back Dylan songs of the sixties must be ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’, the last track on John Wesley Harding(1967), which was stylistically a taste of what was to come in Nashville Skyline a couple of years later. The lyrics are deliberately goofy.

‘Well, that mockingbird's gonna sail away
We're gonna forget it
That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon
But we're gonna let it
You won't regret it’

‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ is a warm song, and his jokes at love’s expense are gentle rather than sharp. It is, after all, an invitation to love, a night of boozy love by the sound of it. (14^th January)

I’ll be your baby tonight

Another from Nashville Skyline (1969) that Dylan picks up on from time to time is the bouncy ‘To Be Alone With You’. He relishes these lines:

‘It only goes to show
That while life's pleasures be few
The only one I know
Is when I'm alone with you’

and I can’t help thinking that the ‘you’ in the verse is the audience, even if that was not his intention when writing the song.

To be alone with you

‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’ also from Nashville Skyline, is in the same vein, only a touch more melancholy. I like the 1975 lyric change, ‘Throw my ticket in the wind’, but in this 1998 performance we get the original lyrics with the implied tiredness of the song beautifully rendered in Dylan’s cracked, aged voice. That voice reminds us that Dylan is now a rich old man, and not the poor kid who wrote ‘Only a Hobo’. These lines take on a special resonance because of that.

‘I can hear that whistle blowin’
I see that stationmaster, too
If there’s a poor boy on the street
Then let him have my seat
’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you’

That ‘poor boy on the street’ might have been Bob in the winter of 1962.

Tonight I’ll be staying here with you

That pretty much does it for lightening up the mood, the dark, sombre mood of Time out of Mind. ‘Born in Time’ (from  Under The Red Sky, 1991)  fits so perfectly into that mood it could have come from the later album. This song has always been a favourite of mine. Although the frailty and contingency of love might be Dylan’s overriding theme, to my mind it was never done with such delicacy of feeling.

‘In the lonely night
In the blinking stardust of a pale blue light
You're comin' through to me in black and white
When we were made of dreams.
You're blowing down the shaky street
You're hearing my heart beat
In the record breaking heat
Where we were born in time.’

In keeping with the high quality of these 1998 performances, this is a particularly lush version of the song.

Born in time

Talk about the frailty and contingent nature of love! ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’, with its elusive sub-textual narrative, says it all. We noted before how Dylan plays around with the pronouns in the song. In this version, the main character is the woman. The fact that it still works as well as the original, male centred narrative, demonstrates the equality of the sexes when it comes to regret and desire. The fact that the song sounds just as natural featuring a woman may be Dylan’s point in playing with the pronouns in this way. In this version he sings:

‘They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark.
She looked at him and she felt a spark
Tingle to her bones.
'Twas then she felt alone
And wished that she'd gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate.’

It works for me, especially in this slow, thoughtful version.

Simple twist of fate

‘My Back Pages’ (1964) was starting to fade from Dylan’s setlists, and this performance doesn’t add much in terms of innovation, or interesting arrangements. Still, it’s nice to hear a rare harp intro, and the solid acoustic performance. (23^rd October). If you don’t know the lyrics of the song, it’s a good idea to check them out, for there are some interesting complexities. I note how Dylan’s love life somehow becomes a part of the changes he describes:

‘Girls' faces formed the forward path
from phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
of ancient history’

‘Phony jealousy’ becomes entangled in morally rigid politics. To be free from the latter means being free from the former. Faithfulness to an ideology gets tangled with faithfulness in personal relationships. Again:

‘"Equality", I spoke the word as if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now’

My back Pages

Seen through this lens, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ flows naturally from ‘My Back Pages’.

‘You say you're lookin' for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you and more’

He could be addressing these words to the ‘corpse evangelist’ of ‘My Back Pages’. Again, there’s nothing too special about this performance, which has a rough, acoustic feel to it.

It Ain’t Me babe

‘Don’t Think Twice’ doesn’t come from the same place, more like the ‘restless hungry feeling/that don’t do no one no good’ from ‘One Too Many Mornings’. I quoted some of the lyrics of ‘Don’t Think Twice’ to my wife who commented that it sounds cruel. I think that is an aspect of the song; the indifference you need to cultivate to keep moving on has its cruel side. But here it’s an indifference touched with tenderness and regret. It’s no fun being ‘on the dark side of the road’. The song is best performed in a jaunty manner, as is this one from 20^th February. I like the performance but the rowdy audience is a bit intrusive.

Don’t think twice

Still in the acoustic vein, we have another old friend, ‘Girl From the North Country,’ a song animated by a gentle and loving nostalgia. It doesn’t have the bitter edge of ‘If You See Her Say Hello’.

Girl from the north country

There’s not much loving nostalgia in ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, either. Just the pain of the thought of what the woman in question might be doing without him. It’s a fine way to torture yourself, imagining your lover ‘in somebody’s room’. Sometimes the ‘dark side of the road’ can be very dark indeed. Dylan does a fine vocal here, but to my ear the performance is compromised by Dylan’s determinedly ‘off key’ guitar playing. I’ve mentioned Mr Guitar Man’s disconcerting style before, and it certainly comes to the fore in this version. Maybe he doesn’t want the sound to become too sweet. Your call, dear reader.

You’re a big girl now

Mr Guitar Man is less of a bother in this ‘Senor,’ and except for some upsinging, it’s a raw and powerful performance of the song. Whenever I hear this song I imagine a seedy canteen or bar near the Mexican border somewhere, some lonely end of the world place where you might forget what it is you’re waiting for, and you have to surrender to your gypsy fate.

Senor

The words that keep coming to mind to describe Dylan’s performances in 1998 are rough and raw. Dylan never allows the performances to become smooth, easy listening. Others can do that with his songs, often to the songs’ detriment. For Dylan, the experiences conveyed in the songs are never smoothed over or homogenised. The emotional edges are ragged, as the sound can be, often more so than the album versions, and Mr Guitar Man’s insistent dissonances never allow us to let our guard down.

So that’s it for 1998, folks, a big year, 117 shows, and there is another big, to my mind, better year coming up – 1999, on the edge of the millennium. We’ll catch you then.

Kia Ora

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 Larry Fyffe

Joseph Rodman Drake be a member of the Knickerbocker group of writers, a number of whom are influenced by George Byron –  the British poet serves as a link between Joseph Drake and Bob Dylan.

In the lengthy poem below, a fairy of the night-meadows receives a sentence consisting of travails imposed by the elfin court because he falls in love with a mortal; the fairy makes it all the way to the heavenly-lit palace of the Queen of the Air who takes pity on him; she bids him stay, but he declines because he cannot forget the memory of his earth-bound lover:

'Twas the middle watch of a summer's night
The earth is dark, but the heaven's are bright
Nought is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky
(Joseph Rodman Drake: The Culprit Fay)

There’s rhymed ~ ‘night’/’bright’.

Brings to mind the following poem:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
George Byron: She Walks In Beauty)

There’s ~ ‘night’/’bright’ again rhymed.

In the song lyrics beneath, the situation is somewhat similar to that in Drake’s poem except there are no fairies anywhere to be seen – a satire, not a sylph, is in the air:

One more night, the stars are in sight
But tonight I am as lonesome as can be
Oh, the moon is shining bright
Lighting everything in sight
But tonight no light will shine on me
(Bob Dylan: One More Night)

There’s ~ ‘sight’/’bright’ rhymed.

A gnostic-like, black humoured jokerman prevails in a number of lyrics by the singer/musician:

I've never lived in the land of Oz
Or wasted my time with an unworthy cause
It's hot down here, and you can't be overdressed
(Bob Dylan: Key West)

In the ironic style of satire, Bob ‘Byron’ Dylan (as he once signed himself) wears the masque of a mortal Don Juan flittering about in a dimly-lit meadow full of hellish flowers.

As depicted in the following song lyrics:
Charlotte's a harlot, dresses in scarlet
Mary dresses in green
It's soon after midnight, and I've got a date
With a fairy queen
(Bob Dylan: Soon After Midnight)

He’s a physical-bodied, and chained-down-to-earth culprit, for sure:

Don't know what I'd without it
Without this love we call ours
Beyond here lies nothing
Nothing but the moon and stars
(Bob Dylan: Beyond Here Lies Nothing)

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 Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

There is an index to earlier articles in the series here.

Tony: If you are a regular reader of Untold, you cannot but be aware of the work of Jochen, who takes the review and analysis of Dylan compositions to places way beyond anything any of us could ever have imagined – and then some.

Consider his opening comments on part 1 of his series on “Dignity”

“Oh Mercy! is quite a beautiful album… Otherwise we would have been forced to impose a serious reprimand on Dylan for omitting the masterpieces “Series Of Dreams”, “Born In Time” and “Dignity”. One reproach can still be made, though: “Dignity” would have been a much more successful opening than the equally driving, but melodic and lyrically much less catchy “Political World” – great song, but hardly as monumental as “Dignity”.”

You can read the whole series through these articles…

• Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess
• Dignity Part II: You can never play too much Bob Wills
• Dignity Part III: One line brings up another
• Dignity Part IV: I contain multitudes
• Diginity Part V: Nowhere to fade
• Dignity Part VI: The Gay Scientist

So I think we can safely say that the insights into the song have been covered – and the series of articles tells you everything you ever needed to know.

Yet there is one point from the opening article that I’d like to reiterate, for as Jochen points out at the beginning, “Dignity” was one of a collection of songs (like Angelina, Caribbean Wind and Blind Willie McTell) which Bob felt could wait for “better times with a fresh producer”

For the staggeringly beautiful and amazing “Angelina” were it not for Ashley Hutchings, the wait would still be going on, but Dignity has been brought back into the fold, not only by Bob himself but by others.   As ever, Aaron has made the choice, and it’s left to me (Tony) to ramble on for a while in the hope that something interesting might emerge at the end of it all.  Here we go…

Joe Cocker from his 1996 album Organic

You want a classic rhythm and blues opening – that is it.  And suddenly this is a completely new song, and this really does send shivers down my spine.

OK that might be because the central heating has gone off and despite it being mid-summer it’s rainy and cold in the England countryside.  But even so…

What works so incredibly well here is that the rhythm n blues approach is kept through making the instrumental breaks into 12 bar blues.  Such a simple idea, but boy does it work.

Brilliant.  5 stars. I love it.

Robyn Hitchcock from the 2002 Robyn Sings album

Robyn Hitchcock has a wonderful website which is worth seeing for its own sake.

And the music… just listen to what he does with Mary Lou – oh goodness, that is so, so clever.  And believe me if you think its just one idea then you’ve not tried to take a long song like “Dignity” and re-develop it in a way that shows respect to the original but still takes it somewhere else.   Nor is the engagement of the bass half way through.  Whoever thought of that.

Because I suspect many readers from outside my country won’t know Robyn I’m going to quote from his website in the hope that you start to listen to more of his music:

“A surrealist poet, talented guitarist, cult artist and musician’s musician, Hitchcock is among alternative rock’s father figures and is the closest thing the genre has to a Bob Dylan (not coincidentally his biggest musical inspiration).

“Since founding the art-rock band The Soft Boys in 1976, Robyn has recorded more than 20 albums as well as starred in ‘Storefront Hitchcock’ an in-concert film recorded in New York and directed by Jonathan Demme”.

The Low Anthem

This time: not a band I know, so I have to quote from elsewhere… “The Low Anthem is a band from Providence, Rhode Island formed in 2006 by friends Ben Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky. The current lineup consists of Knox Miller (vocals, guitars, trumpets, saws), Prystowsky (vocals, drums, double basses, synths), Bryan Minto (vocals, guitars, harmonicas) and Florence Grace Wallis (violins, vocals).”

Give it five seconds and you know this is another really worthwhile and intriguing reworking.  Love it.

Denny Freeman

There must be something quite magical about “Dignity” for it to be possible reinterpret in so many ways, and yet still keep the integrity of the piece intact.

Denny Freeman, who sadly passed away last year, played with Bob from 2005 to 2009 and on “Modern Times”   This was the band of which Bob said, “This is the best band I’ve ever been in, I’ve ever had, man for man. When you play with guys a hundred times a year, you know what you can and can’t do, what they’re good at, whether you want ’em there. It takes a long time to find a band of individual players. Most bands are gangs…. On this record I didn’t have anybody to teach. I got guys now in my band, they can whip up anything, they surprise even me.”

Francis Cabrel

Cabrel has sold over 25 million albums, and to quote the wiki article on him, he is “Considered one of the most influential French musical artists of all time.”   Very enjoyable version for me, and indeed during the past year I have started to listen to more Dylan in languages other than English – I should have started doing this years ago.  It really is a good thing to do to gain extra insights into the music.

Such a superb bounce, and great piano work without the feeling that the pianist is trying to show off.

Francesco De Gregori

We didn’t include a link to this version in Jochen’s first article in the series – and I’m glad to put that right now.  We have mentioned this artist several times however including including his remarkable Tweedle Dum

The point is that Dylan is not a poet, he is a songwriter, and the music of the songs is as important as the lyrics; that is part of what makes Bob so amazing.  Listening in a language that one does not speak (and for me, these days, even my French is fading away) really does help understand what Bob was up to.

Aaron – this is an utterly superb collection.  I can’t tell you how much pleasure it has given me to listen to these and try and find a few words to express my thoughts.

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

• 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

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        Your silent mystery

The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen / Even the pawn must hold a grudge
Statues made of matchsticks / Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge

“His name and voice are fake,” says a spiteful Roberta Joan Anderson, the real name of Joni Mitchell, in the famous LA Times interview in 2010. In the interview, Mitchell lashes out. Grace Slick and Janis Joplin are both dismissed as drunken sluts, Madonna is sort of blamed for the fact that “Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980,” but Dylan gets the most pointed uppercuts. “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist,” says Joni and she concludes with a not too authentic antithesis: “Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”

It causes a stir, and continues to haunt her, despite her half-hearted denials in a CBC television interview in 2013. In it, she now lashes out at the journalist. “I hate doing interviews with stupid people, and this guy’s a moron.” The moron on duty, Matt Diehl, is said to have “misconstrued” her words, and her disqualification “asshole” is bleeped, but not bleeped too successfully.

Nevertheless, it does fit her profile, such a ferocious, insulting outburst, as in this case aimed at Dylan. In terms of content, it doesn’t, of course – in the forty years prior to this, Mitchell only ever said nice, admiring, deeply respectful things about Dylan. If in her presence a Donovan or a Bruce Springsteen is called a “new Dylan”, she usually snaps: “It’s absurd! Who in their right mind could compare that kind of talent to Bobby’s?”, and her standard answer to the question about her career start is:

“When I heard Positively Fourth Street, I realized that this was a whole new ballgame; now you could make your songs literature. The potential for the song had never occurred to me. But it occurred to Dylan.”

But the impulsiveness is most recognisable; Joni does have the reputation of being a blabbermouth, and especially in her many confessional songs, she is often frank, unashamed and clumsy to the point of embarrassment. Like in her “Dylan confrontation song” “Talk To Me” (1977), in which she again demonstrates self-knowledge in a carefree way;

Oh, I talk too loose
Again, I talk too open and free
I pay a high price for my open talking
Like you do for your silent mystery
Come and talk to me
Please talk to me
Talk to me, talk to me
Mr. Mystery

… Joni begs her mysterious and taciturn travelling companion Dylan, after she shamelessly recalls a drunken memory (“I pissed a tequila anaconda the full length of the parking lot”). In which she also places the beautiful, reproachful one-liner “You spend every sentence as if it was marked currency”. And in which she does not seem to consider authenticity very important:

That mind picks up all these pictures
It still gets my feet up to dance
Even though it's covered with keloids
From the "slings and arrows of outrageous romance"
I stole that from Willy the Shake
You know, "neither a borrower nor a lender be"
Romeo, Romeo, talk to me

A second “confrontation song” seems to be the duet with Michael McDonald “Good Friends”, the opening track of one of her very weak albums, the 80s misfire Dog Eat Dog. The content is vague enough; the good friend could refer to any of the men in Joni’s life, romantic or not, and is presumably nothing more than an amalgam of experiences with different men. But the third verse at least winks at Dylan:

But now it's cloak and dagger
Walk on eggshells and analyze
Every particle of difference
Ah, gets like mountains in our eyes

… in the canon there is really only one song with the phrase “cloak and dagger”, and Joni Mitchell knows that too, of course.

The cloak and dagger from the opening line of the third verse of “Love Minus Zero” is one of the many Shakespeare triggers, although of course Philip Marlowe is the cloak-and-dagger poet par excellence. But still, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet… the association with Shakespeare is justifiable. Dylan’s use of the expression, however, does not seem too significant.

Stylistically, this third verse marks a turning point. The earthy, “small” observations from the first half of the song – people reading books, people carrying roses – and the earthy, “small” settings – bus stations, dime stores – make room for charged, symbolically heavy scenes in theatrical settings. Apart from those archaic stage props cloak and dagger representing intrigue, betrayal and lust for power, the scene moves to a brothel where a madam has just lit the candles, the narrator suggests a mysterious ritual with “horsemen” and a meaningful collapse of “matchsticks statues”.

Very inviting, and plenty of analysts gratefully accept the invitation. And find biblical references (because Daniel explains a dream of a collapsing statue), or something of social criticism (the simple citizen, who is a “pawn” in the power games of the higher-ups, the “horsemen”), or see something with normative fading and moral decay in the madam of prostitutes who is “the light”… it is only a small selection from the many interpretation possibilities – this stanza is a big house with four and twenty windows.

Within the context of the song and the leitmotif antithesis at all, however, the textual interpretations do not fit so well. Here, the poet seems above all to be taking the next step on the same path; after the smaller antitheses such as ice/fire and success/failure, this verse illustrates, transcendingly, something like “complex, restless outside world” versus “simple, pleasant and quiet intimacy”. In expressing this, the poet is guided more by Rhyme & Rhythm and less by Reason. Hence the choice of the alliterating, rhyming and assonant four-tier dagger-dangles-madams-candles and the similarly melodious statues-made-matchsticks. The suggestive power of these, and the many symbolic charges that can be attached to props such as “matchsticks”, “pawn” and “statues”, is of course also recognised by a master literator like Dylan – but none of them are given the slightest hint of a fulfilment; we have to make do with these few cinematographic stills.

“Are you really exclusive,” as Joni Mitchell asks, “or just miserly?”

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VIII: A Study Of Provincial Life

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

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

Bob Dylan And Fitz-Greene Halleck

By Larry Fyffe

Like Bayard Taylor, Fitz-Greene Halleck be a member of the American  “Knickerbock” writers’ group; Fitz leaves his mark in the Jungian culture of American literary history to this day though he’s not that well known anymore.

A Byron enthusiast, Fitz pokes fun at what he considers to be human foibles on display during the tenure of his stay:

... he excelled them all
In the most noble of the sciences
The art of making money ....
Flashed like the midnight lightning on the eyes
Of all who knew him; brilliant traits of mind
And genius, clear and countless as the dies
Upon the peacocks plumage; taste refined
Wisdom and wit, were his - perhaps much more
'Tis strange they had not found it out before
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Fanny)

Halleck’s not the only lyricist sometimes called the “American Byron”.

As evidenced in the song lyrics below:

Handy Dandy, he got a stick in his hand, and a pocket full 
of money
He says, "Darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?"
She says, "You got all the time in the world, honey"
(Bob Dylan: Handy Dandy)

Which brings us, dear readers, to the possible source of another song. In a long satiric epic by Byron, Don Juan is bought as a slave by a Sultan’s wife; she has him dressed up as “Juanna”, and put to bed in the Oda with one of her help-maidens. Later on in the night, the girl screams; wakes others. The young virgin ‘explains’ what happened – it was a dream (note: a rather Blakean vision) “and in the midst a golden apple grew”.

Beneath are more lines about the story that the maiden tells about why she screams, her ‘Visions of Juanna’ so to speak –

it’s clear that the author thereof is not at all amused by the neoPlatonic visions of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets):

Just as her lips began to ope
Upon the golden fruit the vision bore
A bee flew out, and stung her to the heart
(George Byron: Don Juan, Canto VI)

Albeit not so humorous as those above, take what you can from the following song lyrics – take what you can gather from coincidence:

He writes everything's been returned that was owed
On the back of a fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonics play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

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 Tony Attwood

Since I was the one who invented the name “Untold Dylan” I am particularly aware that the word “untold” implies that we don’t cover stuff that other websites do.

And by and large we stick to that – but not so dogmatically that important issues are missed.  And so I make an exception for the announcement that Bob is to offer an online concert – or to give it the official title a “streaming performance”.

Which you almost certainly already know.

Indeed I appreciate that most readers of Untold Dylan will already have far more information on this and will have purchased their tickets, bought the official souvenir programme (or I should write ‘program’ since it will be published in the USA I imagine) and perhaps in a moment of madness paid an extra $500 for the bits of the show that the official performance didn’t include (which turns out to be 30 seconds of Bob walking from his dressing room to the performance area).

(actually I made all that last bit up).

But just in case you have missed it all, here are the details.  Not Untold, but still, I’d hate it if you missed the show just because I didn’t mention it (extremely unlikely though that would seem to be).

By Tony Attwood

This series of articles under the title “All Directions at Once” seeks to see Dylan’s writing not as a series of individual songs but as a response to the ebbs and flows of his emotions and feelings, and to his own creativity.  The songs responded to what he had written before, and what was going on around him.

It has turned out to be a complicated affair – and much longer than I ever imagined.  So complicated and so long that I have managed to get the numbering system of the articles mixed up, but I think I’ve got it sorted now… Below are the most recent articles with corrected numbers (just in case anyone is still with me), and there is a full index here.

• AD50: 1981 – farewell to the Almighty, welcome back Bob
• AD51: Dylan post Angelina: step by step it’s falling apart in all directions at once.
• AD 52: All directions at once, tangled up
• All directions at once 53: how to describe a feeling of loss (as the walls came down)

So now, this really is episode 55 – the start of 1989.

And by here my thesis is that during much of the late 1980s Dylan was casting around for a new direction in which to take his writing, and because of the frustration of not finding this at once, I believe he was tempted by the notion of the Travelling Wilburys project in 1988.  And yet ironically just before that took off, he did produce three songs of astounding merit, “Political World”, “What good am I?” and “Dignity”.

These, it can be argued, had a certain biographical quality within them, reflecting Bob’s attempt to get a grips with what he had become and the world in which he found himself living.   Those songs give a sense that Bob himself didn’t quite know where he was and what would happen to his reputation.   Was he going to be known, later in his life, for those magnificent early songs – a troubadour who carried on that bit too long and whose writing suffered an inevitable decline?  Certainly “Dignity” can have an element of that meaning within it, as indeed can “What good am I?”   Or was it the fault of the world around him – the political world is which we lived, and which despite the protests of the 1960s was never going to be changed?

That he saw himself as one of the old gang whose involvement with radical new musical forms of expression was now long gone, is reflected to a degree by his engagement with the Wilburys.  The band produced some interesting and enjoyable music, but not necessarily anything that could be compared with Bob at his greatest moments.

And yet, after the Wilburys, and seemingly out of nowhere came, “Born in Time”.   And here we have Bob suddenly leaping back to the top of his creative form.  For it is not just that the lyrics are have an elegance and beauty associated with some of his earlier works, the music goes to places we would never previously have associated with Bob.

But it is not only this and the Dignity group of compositions that are themselves remarkable.  Nor that it is extraordinary that these songs had to wait until this moment to emerge.  But it is that feeling that it is almost as if Bob suddenly remembered that he really did have the ability to take his music and lyrics anywhere he wanted.  Certainly he did this with “Dignity”, and he must have known in himself that works such as “I once knew a man” and “Dark Eyes” were profound, different and of the highest creative content.  He was just not connecting them together and seeing them as the outliers of a new round of renewed creativity and musical innovation.

Thus to me, looking at these songs not just as individual items but within the flow of Dylan’s work, we now reach a point where he thought, “oh yes, I remember where I was and what I was saying.  Right let’s have a go at sorting this out.  How can I say this differently?”

As a result Bob then he wrote this song of staggering beauty and we, his audience, gained  Dylan revitalised.  And not just for one song, for after this we were given some absolute classics such as Series of Dreams, Most of the Time, What was it you wanted and Everything is Broken and onward until we reach Man in a Long Black Coat

“Born in time” was played 56 times in concert thus helping us see that this song occupies a pivotal spot at the change over from the Wilburys back into writing specifically for himself.  Given the changeover taking place it is not surprising that Dylan spent so much time (in this song at least) changing things around.

The lyrics vary from version to version as Dylan did his thing of exploring and experimenting to see just how far this work could be pushed.  And the beauty of the cover versions also shows just how much Bob was experimenting with the musical form as well as the words.  Only the last four lines of the second bridge remain the same between these versions.

In the Red Sky version we have bridge 1 as

Not one more night, not one more kiss
 Not this time baby, no more of this
 Takes too much skill, takes too much will
 It’s revealing
 You came, you saw, just like the law
 You married young, just like your ma
 You tried and tried, you made me slide
 You left me reelin’ with this feelin’

And bridge 2 as…

You pressed me once, you pressed me twice
 You hang the flame, you’ll pay the price
 Oh babe, that fire
 Is still smokin’
 You were snow, you were rain
 You were striped, you were plain
 Oh babe, truer words
 Have not been spoken or broken

But in the Tell Tale Signs version we have

Just when I knew
you were gone, you came back
Just when I knew
It was for certain
You were high, you were low
You were so easy to know
Oh babe, now is time to raise the curtain
I'm hurtin'.

And then after the instrumental break

Just when I knew
who to thank, you went blank
And just when the whole
fires was smokin'
You were snow, you were rain
You were stripes, you were plain
Oh babe, truer words
Have not been spoken
or broken.

A huge difference.  And what we have here is a truly wonderful song from a man who has been mashed around by this romance but still is there loving her, forgiving her.  All that happens through the various versions is that Dylan reworks just how much forgiveness is delivered in those two bridge sections.

But above all we have the fact that at long last he had a song that he wanted to explore and develop.  A song that he loved and caressed and wanted to make ever more expressive.

I have one internet version; I am not sure if this is the one that Heylin thinks is the greatest recording of them all – it certainly has a huge amount to recommend it.

https://youtu.be/b5EpXuN__BY

God knows we can get all the way from here to there
 Even if we’ve got to walk a million miles by candlelight

God knows we can rise above the darkest hour
 Under any circumstance

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 I need you
God knows I do
God knows there ain't anybody
Ever gonna take the place of you

• 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

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Fair is foul

My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

It’s a bright cold day in April in London, and the clocks are striking thirteen, when we are introduced to Winston Smith. Every one of us knows the book, and it is still one of the most read books in high schools – Nineteen Eighty-Four is firmly entrenched in our collective consciousness. “Big Brother” is a household concept, “newspeak” does not need to be explained, the Trump era lead to a new sales spree and the return of the word “doublethink” in the newspapers, and anyway: the countless references in books, films, newspaper articles and music are effortlessly keeping Orwell’s masterpiece alive.

This anchoring in the collective consciousness is also demonstrated by the work of songwriters from the 1960s onward, about from the time when these songwriters ticked off their reading lists at school – which, in addition to 1984, are usually graced with Animal Farm as well. Stevie Wonder (“Big Brother”), The Kinks, David Bowie, Radiohead (“2+2=5”), Rage Against The Machine (“Testify”), Alan Parsons, Eurythmics… in every corner of the record shop there are A category artists who have based at least a verse, one song, and often more, on Orwell’s work.

Dylan cannot escape Orwell either. 1983’s “Man Of Peace” breathes 1984, as does the political reality in Dylan’s film Masked & Anonymous and as does the superhumans couplet from “Desolation Row”. Mr. Jones (“Ballad Of A Thin Man”) is the name of the farmer from Animal Farm who sees that something’s happening, but doesn’t know what it is, and here too, on Bringing It All Back Home, more than one Orwell bell rings.

“Napoleon Bonaparte” in “On The Road Again” is a first, accidental one (Napoleon is the name of the pig, of the protagonist in Animal Farm), and the opening line of “Gates Of Eden” a second.

Winston and the reader are from Chapter 1 onwards continuously confronted with the official party slogans war is peace, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery. The first of these we hear in “Gates Of Eden”: Of war and peace the truth just twists – of course, the line becomes extra remarkable because of the second part. After all, Winston Smith works at the Ministry Of Truth, the ministry where thousands of civil servants have a day job to distort the truth, to rewrite history. Especially the truth about war and peace; when the war changes again, when Oceania reconciles with Eurasia and now goes to war against Eastasia, Winston has to go into the archives to rewrite the old news into this new truth; of war and peace the truth just twists.

The third Orwell bell on Bringing It All Back Home then rings in this second verse of “Love Minus Zero”, through the best-known aphorism of the song, and one of the more beloved Dylan quotes at all: there’s no success like failure.

There are – of course – plenty of analysts and Dylanologists who see a deep truth in the paradox. Most of them come up with self-help management book wisdoms like “if you don’t learn from your mistakes you will never be successful” and “many false steps lead to the road to success” or similar clichés. Shelton sees “a reflection of the isolation of the American writer”, and the esteemed Professor Louis A. Renza once again takes the crown with the inimitable interpretation: “Dylan’s aphorism bespeaks an existential truism: one’s failure at social projects can lead one back to oneself, but only if one does not use such failures to judge existence as such, for then they turn into yet another wave of failure” (a book token will be raffled off among those who send in the correct solution).

Professor Renza even beats Dylan himself, who, encouraged by a young, attractive lady journalist, actually provides some kind of explanation:

But what does it really mean? He smiles that faraway, enigmatic smile again “When you’ve tried to write this story about me if you’re any good you’ll feel you’ve failed. But when you’ve tried and failed, and tried and failed – then you’ll have something.”

… from which, well alright, a kind of clarity emerges. Which a presumably startled Dylan then immediately tries to blur again:

“Look.” He’s sitting up again, intense, eyes bright. “If I met you in a bar somewhere, or even at a party, I could tell you more, we could talk better, I know it. But you’re a reporter, you’re here for your interview – and where will it all get either of us? Nothing will happen. You’re not even writing this story under your own conditions. And how much can you say? How much room would you have to say it in, even if you could say it?”

(Margaret Steen interview for The Toronto Star Weekly, November 1965)

However, despite all the euphony, classical brilliance and suggested profundity, the aphorism fails the critical test, especially thanks to the second part (“… and that failure’s no success at all”); it just don’t fit, to paraphrase another great Dylan song.

In spite of this (or because of it), the phrase remains popular, even with Dylan himself. In 2001, at the press conference in Rome, he plays with the notion in response to an Italian journalist’s question:

Q: Thinking about your 43 records, which one do you think was the most successful from your point of view?
A: Successful? To tell the truth I never listen to them. I’m sure they were all successful in their own way and I’m sure in their own way they were all failures.

… as Dylan did over twenty years earlier, in 1978, in the interview with the French journalist Philippe Adler for L’Expresse:

PA: Did you say that failure was preferable to success?
BD: Yes, because failure engenders success, whereas success is the end of the line. I’ve never had the feeling of having succeeded and I’m very happy about that. If I had had that feeling, I would no longer be around. Already long gone.

But undisguised and unprovoked is the poet of “Love Minus Zero” a year before that, in Ron Rosenbaum’s wonderful Playboy interview in 1977, when Rosenbaum subtly and value-free moves Dylan to comment on his bizarre motion picture Renaldo & Clara:

BD: I am the overseer.
RR: Overseeing various versions of yourself?
BD: Well, certain truths I know. Not necessarily myself but a certain accumulation of experience that has become real to me and a knowledge that I acquired on the road.
RR: And what are those truths?
BD: One is that if you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there’s no success like failure.

Dylan wisely swallows the second, nonsensical part of the aphorism. But then, a little later, another Orwellian bell rings when Dylan elaborates on the importance of failure with an equally loaded one-liner: “You fail only when you let death creep in.” Rosenbaum, as throughout the interview, is alert enough to keep asking:

RR: How does death creep in?
BD: Death don’t come knocking at the door. It’s there in the morning when you wake up.
RR: How is it there?
BD: Did you ever clip your fingernails, cut your hair? Then you experience death.

At first glance, it seems like a rather hysterical definition of death, but on second thought, it suddenly seems to illustrate the idea that Orwell, war is peace, “Love Minus Zero”, 1984 and failure is success are situated somewhere in the same corner of Dylan’s creative brain:

“Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?”
(from the last chapter, the torture scene with O’Brien and Winston)

But then again, Orwell, for his part, is also just one more child of Shakespeare, who like all of us had to read Macbeth at school;

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

… when the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won – the love for the paradoxical antithesis has been in our system for centuries.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery

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 Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Previously in this series:

• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 1
• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 2: Best male rock vocal 1980!
• Grammies Part 3: Best rock vocal performance (male) 1997
• Best contemporary folk album

Album of the Year Winner 1998 – Time Out Of Mind

The nominations were

• Paul McCartney – Flaming Pie
• Radiohead – Ok Computer
• Babyface – The Day
• Paula Cole – This Fire

Aaron: In my reviewing of this award it would appear there was at the time much controversy around the decision to give Bob this award over the Radiohead album. The theory (in a nutshell) goes that, sure it’s a great late career comeback album, plus Bob’s recent health issues had led some to believe this might be his last album,  and maybe that’s why he won this one, but that the Radiohead album was groundbreaking, a one of a kind, one of the greatest albums of all time.

I’m going to ignore the Babyface and Paula Cole albums here as I listened to them and just didn’t like them very much I’m afraid to say! Not sure why they would be nominated along with the three other, genuinely great albums here? Particularly when there were also fantastic albums released that year from Bowie, Blur, Elliott Smith, Nick Cave not to mention Van Morrison’s brilliant The Healing Game.

Similar to Bob’s album, McCartney’s Flaming Pie album is another late career highlight coming on the back of The Beatles Anthology series. I’m a big fan of this album and am the proud owner of the recent 7 disc deluxe box set. Here are a couple of my favorite tracks

Tony: Musically this is a super track, but when we get to the “We always came back” I think the difference between McCartney as a composer and Dylan, comes to the fore.   I can’t imagine Dylan, in a song like this having a chorus which consisted of two lines repeated.   Of course McC was a great songwriter, but somehow for me he lacked that phenomenal depth that Dylan still had by this time.

Incidentally it is McCartney’s 80th birthday next year.  I imagine he’ll have the same interest uptake as Bob had – particularly in England.   If transport systems have opened I suspect Liverpool will have a year long carnival.

This is much better in my view: a beautifully executed love song.  For anyone who has been truly and deeply in love it is perfection in music.

But moving on…

Aaron: Ok Computer is indeed a once in a lifetime album. In 2014 , it was included by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

It contains my two favorite Radiohead tracks (plus Paranoid Android isn’t bad either!)

No Surprises

Tony: Yes well, as my friends will immediately attest a song that contains the lines

Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us

gets my vote, but oh I can’t stand the video.  That fear of drowning cuts in and I have to close my eyes.

I don’t have any Radiohead albums and am probably the only person in the country who doesn’t listen to them, but I can appreciate why this was nominated

Karma Police

Aaron: As to who should have won this one, my heart say Paul or Bob but my head says Radiohead. Let’s see what Tony thinks! Maybe I’m going to get asked to leave the site for that!!

Tony: The problem is history and life.   Historically Dylan’s album has been part of me.  I really can recall the very moment I first heard “Not dark yet” – and know exactly where I was standing (not just which city I was in, or which house, but the exact place I was) who I was standing with, what I said, what I did… the impact that song had on me was just utterly overwhelming and extraordinary.

And here’s a thought.  “Not dark yet” was Dylan’s first single since “Dignity”.  I’m not quite sure why that seems important, but somehow it does.

It was also the first time I started to think about Dylan’s songs not in isolation, but as a sequence, and I spent a long time listening to the album in that way – feeling the very specific connection between one song and the next throughout.  In fact (and in that very inward looking way that writers can sometimes have) I just looked up my review on this site written nearly 14 years ago (oh my could it really be that long?????) in which I started to explore the notion of Dylan riding a wave.

But enough… the Dylan album is of course an utter masterpiece.  Nothing else can compare.

By chance, my dance partner and I have been able to keep rehearsing during the lock down that has beset our country for the last 10 years (or so it seems) and by chance we’re just working on a dance arrangement of this version below.   It’s great fun to do, and by and large it keeps us ol’ timers off the streets.

Don’t worry however.  The few videos of us dancing are kept well out of the way, so unless you are attending clubs in certain parts of the English east midlands, you are unlikely to stumble across any of our reworkings of the whole concept of blues and jive dancing.

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 Larry Fyffe

Along with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, Fitz-Greene Halleck be a member of the Knickerbocker writers’ group.

Halleck’s poetry demonstrates that the author is an admirer of the English poet Lord Byron:

For thou art Woman - with that word
Life's dearest hopes and memories come
Truth, beauty, love - in her adored
And earth's lost paradise restored
In the green bower of home
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Woman)

Similar sentiments regarding a beautiful woman are expressed in the following verse:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies ....
Where thoughts sincerely sweet express
How pure, how dear, their dwelling-place
(George Byron: She Walks In Beauty)

The Knickerbocker poet in the lines below envisions Eve as personification of a new hoped-for America, an idealized woman in Paradise Regained:

'Tis she that listens while he sings
With blended smiles and tears
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Woman)

And if George Byron’s here, can Mary Shelley be far behind – perhaps it’s by coincidence, but Fitz gets jolted forward to modern times through the lines of a song:

Gonna jumpstart my creation to life 
I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years
Do it with laughter, and do it with tears
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

The vision of America presented above, and in the song lyrics beneath is one of Adam in a puritanical Paradise Lost:

As I went out one morning
To breathe the air around Tom Paine's
I spied the fairest damsel
That ever did walk in chains
I offered her my hand
She took me by the arm
I knew that very instant
She meant to do me harm
(Bob Dylan: As I Went Out One Morning)

At times it seems that, other than death, poetry and music are the only means to escape this world of woe:

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 Halleck: Young America)

Fitz gets no argument from the modern day Byron:

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky ....
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

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

NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.

NET 1998 Part 2: Friends and other strangers

The complete Never Ending Tour index

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In 1995, at Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday bash, Dylan presented a song I don’t think he’d ever performed live before, ‘Restless Farewell’. Apparently Sinatra requested the song. This is the last track on The Times They are a Changing(1964), and despite being a self-justifying exercise, it has a weary beauty with Dylan in fine lyrical form. The melody is from an old Scottish ballad, ‘The Parting Glass’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parting_Glass)

‘Oh, ev'ry thought that's strung a knot in my mind
I might go insane if it couldn't be sprung
But it's not to stand naked under unknowin' eyes
It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung
But the time ain't tall
Yet on time you depend and no word is possessed
By no special friend
And though the line is cut
It ain't quite the end
I'll just bid farewell till we meet again’

It is therefore a surprise to find it appearing in 1998, quite out of the blue. I don’t think this is a particularly wonderful performance, or recording, but its sheer rarity value compels its inclusion here. This is from the Los Angeles concert 21^st May:

Restless Farewell

From the same album, and in a very similar vein, we find ‘One Too Many Mornings’. It’s a sad farewell song in which the temporary, contingent nature of things is keenly felt. It captures that bleak, lonely feeling that might come upon you after a one night stand, or on realising that a love is all over. The song has a disarming simplicity, and is quite disingenuous in pretending to come from an unsophisticated, ‘unlearned’ man.

‘From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes start to fade
And I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
And I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I'm one too many mornings

And a thousand miles behind’

Within that ‘restless hungry feeling,’ there is no room for the moral certainty or moral absolutism that rule the protest songs. In ‘Masters of War’ we find the certainty that ‘even Jesus would never forgive what you do’, but in ‘One Too Many Mornings’ we find ‘You’re right from your side/and I’m right from mine’. This moral relativism, if you like, prepares the way for a more thorough relativism in ‘My Back Pages’.

This song has been a regular on Dylan’s setlist over the years, and this a particularly good acoustic performance that captures the weariness and ambience of the original (31^st March). That moral relativism sits quite naturally with the voice of the Time out of Mind Dylan, the voice of the soul possessed by alienation and despair.

One Too many Mornings (A)

Perhaps a little better recorded, with Dylan’s voice more to the front, is this performance. I think, from those opening chords, that the audience thinks they’re about to hear ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’.

One Too many Mornings (B)

Of course the early sixties was the era of the protest song, which Dylan himself made famous. Through the nineties, Dylan didn’t forget his protest songs, despite his dislike of the term. ‘What’s a protest song?’ he once famously responded to someone in the audience requesting one. It’s a good question, but his best known protest songs are not that hard to identify. They are mostly topical and protest against war and social injustice.

‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ is a perfect example with its dark, brooding blues melody and its tale of desperation and murder-suicide. Its lyrics evoke the rural dust bowl songs of the 1930s

‘The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare’

but it has a contemporary force that makes it still relevant. Critic David Horowitz makes the following comment:

‘Technically speaking, “Hollis Brown” is a tour de force. For a ballad is normally a form which puts one at a distance from its tale. This ballad, however, is told in the second person, present tense, so that not only is a bond forged immediately between the listener and the figure of the tale, but there is the ironic fact that the only ones who know of Hollis Brown’s plight, the only ones who care, are the hearers who are helpless to help, cut off from him, even as we in a mass society are cut off from each other…. Indeed, the blues perspective itself, uncompromising, isolated and sardonic, is superbly suited to express the squalid reality of contemporary America….A striking example of the tough, ironic insight one associates with the blues.’

This is a particularly good performance, sparse and hard-driving acoustic. The electric performances of 1974 make great blues based rock music, but this arrangement again captures the desolate atmosphere of the original. (Sorry, no date for this one.)

The Ballad of Hollis Brown

Perhaps Dylan’s most famous protest song is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. This is the song that made Dylan’s name. I believe there have been over sixty cover versions. It is built around a series of rhetorical questions designed to prick our consciences on matters of race and war. The song can easily become an anthem as it did in 1974 and 1984, but to my mind those anthem-like arrangements, despite audience participation, lose the frail intensity of the acoustic original. In this 1998 performance Dylan once more seems to be reaching back to the original sound and inspiration of the song, although the band joins him for the chorus.

Curiously, Dylan often stumbles over the lyrics of this song, or gets them a little wrong, but he covers up well for the gaffes and delivers a powerful performance. (23^rd October)

Blowin in the Wind

While ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ might be Dylan’s best known protest song, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall’ may be his most wide reaching outside ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. Dylan’s ‘surrealist period’ of the mid-sixties is prefigured here in a stunning series of apocalyptic images that show rather than tell. The effect of this is that these images have not aged. They are as contemporary now as when they were written.

‘I saw ten-thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children’

That sounds like the 21^st Century to me.

In 1998 Dylan does not seek radical arrangements of these old songs, but rather to reach back and uncover the impulse that led to the writing of the songs. With ‘Hard Rain’, we have a subtle reworking of the mood and tone of the song. We have had the loud, driving electric version of 1975/6, the slow, lush orchestral version of 1994, but here we have a gently lilting, discreetly adorned performance, not as strident as the original, but sadder and more contemplative. (20^th January)

Hard Rain

Aside from ‘Masters of War’ (see NET, 1998, part 2), ‘John Brown’ is Dylan’s most effective anti-war song. It precisely identifies the generational gap between the young, anti-war movement and the parents of those young people. The song sets out to demystify war. The physically broken young returning soldier confronts his patriotic mother on the railway station upon his return. It’s quite astonishing that the song was written in 1962, several years before the Vietnam War became an issue, and soldiers did come back from ‘the war’ their bodies and souls broken. In that respect the song is remarkably prescient. (Sorry, date not available for this one.)

John Brown

Is ‘Tears of Rage’ also a protest song? Not as obviously as ‘John Brown’ or ‘Masters of War’, but the song seems to be driven by a moral outrage that at least belongs to the spirit of protest.

‘It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse ?’

Whatever that ‘false instruction’ might be, it leads to the kind of greedy materialism that always provokes Dylan to outrage. Fast forward to 2020 and ‘False Prophet’:

‘Bury 'em naked with their silver and gold
Put them six feet under and pray for their souls’

Or ‘Silvio’ (1988), a regular in the concerts of the late nineties:

‘Silvio, silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold’

What we think of as a protest song depends on our frame of reference. In ‘Tears of Rage’, rage and grief go hand in hand. It’s hard to find a more passionate performance of the song than this one, from 13th January.

Tears of Rage

So maybe ‘Desolation Row’ too is a kind of protest song:

‘And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go…’

Look at ‘False Prophet’ again:

‘I’m the enemy of treason
I’m the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life’

Something of the quality of that ‘unlived meaningless life’ comes through in ‘Desolation Row’:

‘To her death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness’

But we all suffer from some variation of the same oppression:

‘Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row’

Isn’t there a deeper sense of protest here than in even the recognised protest songs?

In 1997/98 ‘Desolation Row’ fell into the background. It was only performed once in 1997, and rarely in 1998. I don’t think this is a best ever performance, but I find it hard to pass over any performance of what might be Dylan’s greatest song ever.

Desolation Row

Finally, what about ‘All along the Watchtower’? Aren’t the first verses, the conversation between the joker and the thief, all about the insufferable oppressiveness of our modern culture, which in itself is on the edge of a more ancient doom, doom the ‘two riders’ will bring with them. ‘There must be some way out of here…’ but maybe there isn’t, except for that approaching doom. I always felt that ‘Watchtower’ was a protest song without quite understanding why. Perhaps it’s that ominous tone, or the guitar war that breaks out after the last verse.  Again it depends on your terms of reference.

I like the way he breaks up the verses, fragments the lines, in this performance. (6^th June)

‘So let us
 not talk falsely now
the hour
is getting late…’

Words as true now as when they were written. May the spirit of protest never die, in whatever guise it comes!

That’s it for now, gentle reader. I’ll be back with more from 1998 soon.

Kia Ora!

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

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes

by Jochen Markhorst

V          When a sighing begins in the violins

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

It is only the distinct elegance of the second verse, even more classic than the cool beauty of the opening verse, that reveals the underlying structure of “Love Minus Zero”. On paper, in written form, the poet Dylan, as he often does, conceals the form.

In the official publications, in Writings & Drawings, in Lyrics and on the site, the lyrics are printed in four eight-line stanzas, with no fixed rhyme scheme or metre. Presumably, the musician Dylan dictates the formatting; as it is formatted, each four-line segment falls into the same chord progression:

E
My love she speaks like silence,

B   A                            E
     Without ideals or violence,

B   A                                         E
     She doesn't have to say she's faithful,

                 F#m         A            B
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.

Rhyming-wise, however, the lyrics consist not of four octaves, not of four eight-line stanzas, but of four sextets with the classic rhyme scheme AABCCB:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

… a restructuring that can be applied to each of the four octaves, with each strophe “actually” turning out to be a Spanish sextet, a sextet with the rhyme scheme AABCCB. So also like this second stanza:

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

In Anglo-Saxon literature, Spanish sextets are not too popular. A natural talent like Dylan probably comes to them instinctively, but on the other hand he gives enough hints that Verlaine triggered him. As, in retrospect, in the interview with Jeff Rosen for No Direction Home (2005): “I stayed at a lot of people’s houses which had poetry books and poetry volumes and I’d read what I found… I found Verlaine poems or Rimbaud.”

Verlaine is a fan of the Spanish sextet anyway, and if Dylan did indeed immerse himself in Verlaine in the early 1960s, then he inevitably took in one of the absolute highlights of French literary history, Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” from 1866. The poem that the Allies used as a code to warn the French resistance that D-Day was about to begin, the masterpiece that was incorporated into songs by Dylan’s colleagues such as Brassens, Gainsbourg and Trenet, and can be found on house walls, monuments and cemeteries throughout Europe;

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

… the first sextet (of three), which Dylan then presumably read in Arthur Symons’ (1902) excellent translation, “Autumn Song”:

When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long

… in which Symons, as in the other sextets, admirably succeeds in saving both the rhyme scheme and the rhythm and the melancholic colour. But even that does not convert the Anglo-Saxon poets. Spanish sextets remain primarily a French form. The English find it more suited for nursery rhymes (“Little Miss Muffet”, for example, also known as “Along Came A Spider”). And the occasional song. “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein, consists of ten Spanish sestets, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps”, and above all: Leonard Cohen’s chef d’oeuvre “Hallelujah”, for which the Canadian bard claims to have written eighty couplets over a period of more than ten years – all Spanish sextets;

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you dont really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Dylan, by the way, will use the same poetic artifice more than twelve years later in a highlight of Street-Legal (1978), in “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”: there, too, the formatting conceals the fact that the lyrics “actually” consist of Spanish sextets. Incidentally, it also reaffirms a kind of artistic brotherhood with fellow Minnesotan Prince, who does the same in the first quatrain of highlight “Raspberry Beret” – after all, that quatrain can also be restructured into a sextet with the rhyme scheme aabccb:

I was working part time 
in a five-and-dime
My boss was Mr. McGee
He told me several times 
that he didn't like my kind
'Cause I was a bit too leisurely

“Hallelujah”, “A Boy Named Sue”, “Raspberry Beret”… all exceptional songs that approach perfection within the Holy Trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason – the form seems to bring out the best in talented songwriters.

That also applies to this second verse of “Love Minus Zero”. Literally, it is even more successful than the opening couplet. In terms of content, the poet draws a tighter line between what Dave Stewart seems to mean when he says: “The lyrics start as social insights but then conclude with something romantic and sexy.”

The first five lines “capture a moment in time,” as Stewart calls it, with observations, sketchy impressions of dime stores and bus stations, and in the sixth line the poet then switches to the private, to “my love” and her remarkable aphorism. Stylistically, the poet chooses an extremely melodious wording, with that exuberance of rhyming “-ions”, alliterations (stores-stations, read-repeat) and abundant assonance (people-read-repeat-speak, talk-draw-wall)… it is truly, like “Chanson d’automne”, a dazzling work of art by a brilliant song poet with a perfect mastery of language. If Dylan is not Verlaine’s brother in art, then at least Verlaine’s spirit descended on Greenwich Village for a brief, glorious moment on this spring day 1965.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VI: Foul is fair

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

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

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize Part 1.

by Larry Fyffe

In a particular song, Bob Dylan names the title of a fragmented poem by Jack Kerouac, using Jack’s alliterative, assonant, off-rhymed writing style that expresses an anti-material vision, akin to that of the Romantic Transcendentalists, but modernized,  turned upside down, and double-edged ~ with an earthy, not heavenly wind, infused with burning sexual desire, and a hope for a watery ‘spiritualistic’ love in the future for those that are labelled in the social order as outcasts:

I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track
Like Ginsberg, Corso,  and Kerouac
(Bob Dylan: Key West)

The Kerouac piece mentioned in the song lyrics below:

I feel it in the wind, in the wind, in the wind, 
    and it's upside down
I can feel it in the dust as I get off the bus 
    on the outskirts of town
I've had the Mexico City Blues since the hairpin curve
I don't wanna see you bleed, I know what you need
And it ain't what you deserve
(Bob Dylan: Something's Burning Baby)

Dylan as usual mixes up the musical medicine – the motifs above he finds in the writings of Nobel Prize winners, such as William Faulkner.

As in ‘Barn Burner’ by Faulkner, a story wherein a mistreated son goes to warn a wealthy white Southern landowner for whom his poor white father works that his racist dad, seeking vengeance, plans to burn down the rich man’s barn. Chased off by the owner, the son runs away; his father’s likely shot:

Something is burning, something's in flames
There's a man going 'round calling names
Ring when you're ready, baby, I'm waiting for you
I believe in the impossible, you know that I do

(Bob Dylan: Something’s Burning Baby)

There’s the modernist Romantic poet William Yeats who, with other artists, influences Kerouac:

Blackout; Heaven blazing in my head
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost
(William Yeats: Lapis Luzuli)

Quite likely, Yeats is given a tribute in the following song lyrics:

I cross the Green Mountain
I slept by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

In the novel ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus, an Algerian is needlessly shot by a alienated, colonial Frenchman – a symbolic struggle therein between the ancient ‘elements’ of fire and water in which the oppressively hot sun dominates the cool sea.

It’s an absurd Cosmos, disinterested in the elemental struggle, that’s depicted in the song lyrics below:

People are crazy, and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
This place ain't doing me any good
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

The singer/songwriter/musician in turn influences the writings of a satirical Nobel Prize winner:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter
Try Again. Fail again. Fail better
(Samuel Beckett: Westward Ho)

A complete index to this series looking at the art work of Bob Dylan’s albums can be found here.

by Patrick Roefflaer

• Released: January 17, 1975
• Photographer:  Paul Till
• Illustration: David Oppenheim
• Liner Notes:  Pete Hamill
• Art-director:  Ron Coro

Version 1 – Lithograph by David Oppenheim

The story of the cover of Dylan’s masterpiece starts in 1973, in France on the tarmac from an Parisian airport.

While boarding a flight to London, a man spots a handsome woman. “She was a classy lady. I did everything to be able to sit next to her.” He is David Oppenheim, an atypical and anarchic painter, born in the south of France.

She is an American businesswoman, Stevie Phillips, artistic representative of stars such as Judy Garland, Robert Redford and Liza Minnelli. There’s a connection between the two and Phillips decides to take advantage of her connections to boost his career.

“After we met, I contacted Dylan through the lawyer we had in common, David Braun. My agency was a big client for David Braun; he couldn’t refuse. I was happy to help David.”

In September 1974, shortly before the first studio sessions of Blood On the Tracks, Bob Dylan is handed David Oppenheim’s portfolio.

The timing couldn’t be better, as Bob is very interested in painting at the time. In the Spring of 1974 he took a two-month painting course in New York with Norman Raeben. When browsing through the portfolio, he reacts enthusiastically saying, “This guy is my spiritual brother.”

Dylan decides that, once the recordings finished, he wants to go to France, to see how the painter lives and works. In anticipation of that visit, Dylan wants him to make the cover of his new album. It is agreed that the Frenchman will make eight lithographs, from which Dylan can choose. A cheque is sent, “not much, a few thousand francs,” says Oppenheim.

With an eye on the Christmas market, the album is scheduled for rush release November 1st.

In a preview, published in Rolling Stone magazine, Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman writes: “The scheduled cover is a shot of a huge red rose on a white background. And Dylan was reportedly hunting for old photos of himself performing at Gerde’s Folk City for the back sleeve.”

Version 3 – A photo disguised as a painting

But Dylan changes his mind and lets the record company know that he wants to make new recordings in Minneapolis. The cover design is also being overhauled because, when the record is released in mid-January 1975, it turns out that the cover art in no way fits Sloman’s description.

The front shows a portrait of the singer. Dylan looks to the left, wearing dark sunglasses and his signature curly hair. To the left of the portrait, over the full height of the cover, is a broad plum color strip with the singer’s name and the title of the album. Both are in white New Deco font and underlined.

The portrait looks like a painting, but on the back cover is printed: ‘Cover Photo: Paul Till’.

Paul Till is born in England, but in 1957, at the age of three, he emigrated with his parents to Ontario in Canada. As a 20 year-old, he has two interests: music and photography. The first time those hobbies combine is on January 10, 1974, during a Bob Dylan concert in the Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto. By a happy coincidence (the tickets are distributed by lottery), he secured a fairly good seat: front right, not close to the stage, but also not too far away to get some good pictures, thanks to a borrowed telephoto lens.

With those photos he starts experimenting in his darkroom. In 2008 he explained his technique: ‘I enlarged the negative in my darkroom on another piece of film, so that all I was left with was Dylan’s head. This gives a positive image, so that when printing on photo paper, a negative image appears. However, I solarized the piece of film while it was being developed.’

In human language: when the exposed photo paper of a black-and-white photo is in the developer, turn the light on and off briefly, so that the photo is fixed. “This not only resulted in the image becoming positive again, but also gave the striking line between what was previously dark and what became dark due to solarization. Technically this is called ‘the Sabbater effect’ and the dark lines are ‘Mackie lines’. It resulted in a rather dark, low-contrast piece of film, with which I could make a print. I had to use paper of excellent quality to get enough contrast.” Till then colors the obtained result manually, with special watercolor. With this he wants to emphasize the old/new discord that he hears in Dylan’s work.

The young man is so pleased with the result that he sends a copy to Dylan’s New York office. He doesn’t get an answer.

He is therefore extremely surprised when his work appears on the cover of Dylan’s new record. “I suspect Bob Dylan saw the photo and thought it was beautiful. But I have no idea if it happened that way.”

Back cover

The back of the cover features one of Oppenheim’s lithographs. This is framed in a wide border of the same plum color used on the front.

The lithograph shows a man’s head, depicted in a kind of worn-out pyramid. This, in turn, appears to be mounted in a frame with two purple surfaces. In front of all that, a black-tinted object floats, with two angular bumps.

At the top, some information is printed in black letters: song titles, musicians (only the original New York musicians are credited, but not those from Minnesota) and some collaborators for the cover art work.

Then there’s also an essay by New York writer and journalist Pete Hamill. He wrote the liner notes after listening to the test pressing, as evidenced by some quotes that deviate from the lyrics on the album.

Because that text, due to the additional recordings, is no longer very relevant, Columbia Records released a new back cover for the second American pressing in mid-1975: both Hamill’s text and Oppenheim’s illustration are dropped in favor of another work by Oppenheim, which is printed larger. The new lithograph shows a man stepping over a fence. He has two faces and carries a bouquet of flowers in each hand. Two much smaller figures can be seen on one side: a naked woman and a person seated, engrossed in a newspaper.

It gets a little annoying for the record company when Hamill receives a Grammy Award for the liner notes that have since been removed. CBS is therefore forced to adjust the back cover again. From 1976 the original design is restored, but now with white text (the black letters were difficult to read against the plum background). This remains the standard version until the end of the nineties, when vinyl is replaced by CDs.

All that time, the covers pressed in England, kept the original design unchanged.

Extra information for quiz fanatics

In Malaysia and the Republic of Singapore, EMI released Blood on the Tracks, with a blue cover.

Since Dylan has moved to Los Angeles in 1973, the covers of his records are no longer handled by the art directors of CBS in New York, under the direction of John Berg, but by the West Coast Art Director Ron Coro.

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Best Contemporary Folk Album: Winner: Bob Dylan – Time Out Of Mind

Time Out of Mind won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year in 1998. It was also ranked number 410 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2012.

Nominations 

• Guy Clark – Keepers : A Live Recording
• Iris Dement – The Way I Should
• Indigo Girls – Shaming For The Sun
• John Prine – Live On Tour

Aaron: I didn’t know any of the albums so I spent the week listening to them (they are all on YouTube if you are so inclined).

Guy Clark I’m aware of as a songwriter but I’ve never heard his own performances. I knew two of the tracks from his album through Johnny Cash covers.

The Last Gunfighter Ballad

If the video below doesn’t work for you, it is a regional issue.  Try this link instead

Tony: I had no idea what to expect here, and the sudden appearance of the harmony completely took me by surprise.  As did part two (if I can call it that) with its new rhythm.

I don’t know what to make of this, I really don’t.  If you have a clear view of the song, or know about  the context or … well anything, could you either write a comment below, or send me an article about it to publish here?  Email: Tony@schools.co.uk

Desperadoes Waiting For A Train

Again, different parts of the world may need different versions.  Try one of these, or failing that do a search on Google of Spotify.

Tony:   OK I’m getting ready to hang up my writing hat (or fingers).  I just don’t hear anything here that I can feel, oh yes wow, I see what the guy is doing here.  How many times does the title line need to be sung with the same accompaniment?

Aaron: Iris Dement – Here is the title track. It’s a great tune and Mark Knopfler plays some fine National guitar on this track

Tony: That’s interesting for me, because if I had been asked what type of music this was I would have said half way between C&W and folk.  But that shows how ignorant I am.

There is a phrase in the melody which is so reminiscent of a line from Dylan’s “Jack of Hearts” I get distracted and can’t pick up on what is really going on.

Oh hell, I’m really doing badly today.  And it is such a beautiful day here in middle England.

Indigo Girls: Shame on You.

Aaron: Indigo Girls. I liked this one a lot, some real good singles

Shame On You – brave to include a line like :

"The beautiful ladies walk right by and I never know what to say"

I like that, it would have made some fans feel included and accepted for who they are.

Tony: In the latest edition of the greatest cover versions of Dylan’s song we have Indigo Girls’ version of Tangled up in Blue – in fact it is in there twice largely because of my difficulties with alphabetical order.

I really enjoy their music, it always sounds so fresh and lively as if they really want to be there signing and performing; plus they are highly original in their reinterpretations.

Get Out The Map

John Prine – Live On Tour

Aaron: This was a real good one!

Tony: Ooooh, Aaron we are going to have to find a different way of doing these – I just can’t get into this music at all.  Would anyone like to do a review?  Aaron, if you send me a review I’ll paste it in here.

The Late John Garfield Blues

Tony: So I end the whole affair bemused.  But then, I know so many people who have listened to a little bit of Bob Dylan and just don’t get it at all.

And that really brings me to the issue of the judging.  Maybe the judges really do know about all the music being issued that year, but really how on earth do you judge formats that are so different?  It’s like being asked to evaluate a Haydn symphony against a Bach Prelude and Fugue.  It’s just not possible to do in any meaningful way.

Aaron: Now I admit Bob’s album is the best and by quite some distance, however I’m struggling to see it as a “Contemporary Folk” album. I’d probably give this to John Prine but I found each of the other nominees highly enjoyable also. A great selection all round, and I’m delighted to have discovered some new music and artists I’d have never listened to without this article!

Tony: I haven’t gone exploring the others yet – because I am now stuck on listening to all the Indigo Girls tracks.  But maybe that is the point.  There is so much music out there how can we ever meet more than a tiny fraction of 1 percent.  If you, dear reader, have managed to get through this far, and if you have a few minutes to spare, try this.

It knocks me out totally.

Dear dear reader – I hope somewhere in this you found something of interest, and also that you had a moment to think: how on earth do these awards work?  I mean, how can you judge one of these albums against another.

I find it all quite weird.

By Larry Fyffe

Metonymic associations be the hallmark of Postmodern poetic and song lyrics, but there are lots of onomatopoeic words floating around on the top of the deep blue Jungian Sea for the taking.

There’s the harsh “jangle which indicates a discordant lack of harmony –  often it’s juxtaposed with the softer-sounding ‘jingle’ – a contrast provided by background singers at the beginning of the lyrics below:

(Jingle jangle, jingle jangle
Jingle jangle, jingle jangle, jingle jangle, jingle jangle)
Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way

Dished out to Charles Dickens by the King of Onomatopoeia in the following description of a not-so-well-dressed ghost:

He looked like seventeen gas-light stove pipes
Come together with jingle-jangle bells all over
(Lord Buckley: Scrooge)

Utilized in the poetic lines below to signify discordance on life’s journey:

And by degrees your heart is tangled
Bliss grows apace, and then its course is jangled

(Bayard Taylor: Prelude At The Theatre)

Skipping and swirling onomatopoeia, aided by the rhythm of the dreamy music, pops up in the following masterful lyrics:

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning, I'll come following you
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

‘Jangled’ diction be found once more in the song lyrics below –  featuring another ragged clown who ‘clicked’ his heels – from the “Dylan” album:

I knew a man, Bojangles, and he danced for you
In worn out shoes
Silver hair, a ragged shirt, and baggy pants

(Bob Dylan: Mr. Bojangles ~ Walker)

https://youtu.be/CTraYM0WeLQ

A standard onomatopoeia heard in the song lyrics beneath:

No one knew the circumstance, but they say that 
    it happened pretty quick
The door to the dressing room burst open, 
    and a cold revolver clicked

(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary,  And The Jack Of Hearts)

By Tony Attwood

Earlier episodes are listed here

Two episodes ago the article was called “Dylan post Angelina: step by step it’s falling apart in all directions at once,” which took us up to the composition of “Foot of Pride.”

The last one was “All directions at once, tangled up”

And falling apart and being tangled up certainly were the themes of the day in terms of Bob Dylan’s compositions, and now not only falling apart in all directions at once but in all times at once, so that not only is this moment one of muddle and confusion, the music also expresses the notion that it is impossible to understand the past, and so inevitably impossible to comprehend or predict the future.

Between writing “Angelina” in 1981 and writing “What good am I” in 1987 Dylan wrote, as far as we know, getting on for 100 songs, but I suspect only the most hardened and dedicated fans would be able to name more than 30, and quite a few of those are remembered primarily because they were on the albums, not because of their stand-out brilliance.

In those 30 there were some really good pieces, in my estimation, and maybe 10 were absolute Dylan gems.  My list of songs in that category would include…

1. Lenny Bruce
2. Jokerman
3. I and I
4. Blind Willie McTell
5. Neighbourhood Bully
6. When the night comes falling from the sky
7. Dark Eyes
8. To fall in love with you
9. What good am I?
10. Dignity

Now for your average professional songwriter that would be a pretty good haul across a few years of songwriting, but for Dylan, we are now a very long way from the days of 1974 in which ten utter masterpieces were knocked out seemingly effortlessly within one year.  And we might also note that a number of these songs of this era were either not used at once, others never used at all.

Whether you agree with my choice from this period or are thinking “how can this idiot [ie me] have omitted x and included y” I have found in discussions that most people will agree that the long list of getting on for 100 songs between Heart of Mine and the early Wilburys songs does not include too many more absolute masterpieces.  And to be clear I am not talking about songs that one quite likes, but songs that utterly stand out and which would be chosen if (as we have done a few times here) one was making a compilation album of one’s own.

Certainly when I compare the list of titles during this period with the period in 1980 when in sequence Dylan composed

1. Every grain of sand
2. Caribbean Wind
3. Groom’s still waiting at the alter
4. Yonder comes sin
5. Let’s keep it between us
6. Making a liar out of me

well, there is no comparison. Six amazing songs one after the other.

So, in my estimation (and of course that is all it is) Dylan wanted to write, and was indeed writing song after song, and very occasionally hit gold with songs like Blind Willie McTell, but often he simply wrote good songs, that deserved to be heard, but not majestic masterpieces.  And to be honest there were a few fairly poor pieces in there too, which were never taken any further.

Now Dylan, as you will know if you have been following this series, had times where he stopped writing.  In 1968 he wrote only one song.  It is a song which we all remember (Lay Lady Lay) but that was it.   Then in 1969 although he wrote maybe 15 songs, few of them stand out (“I threw it all away” is one of the few that did).

In 1971 there were six songs of which “Watching the river flow” is perhaps the one we all remember; 1972 had “Forever young” and the film music for “Billy the kid” and nothing else.  1973 was the preparation for a year of pure genius.  But thereafter the writing becomes harder – or at least harder to create those moments of genius.  Indeed I would be happy to bet that most Dylan fans would struggle to remember many beyond the songs I have mentioned above.

They are all out there, and are listed in our “Dylan songs of the 80s” index but unless you live a life totally centred around Dylan songs, I really do think you might struggle to recall too many of them.

Which perhaps explains why the invite to work with the Wilburys was attractive to Bob.  And curiously, just before the Wilburys started creating their music Bob suddenly found a run of form once again with “Political World”, “What good am I?” and “Dignity”.

Indeed I find it endlessly fascinating that Dylan wrote “What good am I” and “Dignity” just before setting off the play with his mates.  What came next were the Wilbury songs, and there is nothing wrong with most of them, but they are not really what we expect from Bob, and to my ear don’t match up to the quality of Bob’s own work..

Of course we don’t know how much Bob wrote of each Wilbury song, if anything although Tweeter and the monkey man  clearly sounds like a Dylan song.

For myself, I see this as a period where Bob wanted a new direction, a new style, a new approach… a new uplift in his songwriting, and he couldn’t find it.   When he did make breakthroughs for one reason or another he not only didn’t continue using that style or approach, as often as not, he abandoned the song that could have led to the new style.

And this wasn’t just happening in 1985 and 1986, this situation goes all the way back to 1982 with Blind Willie McTell and Foot of Pride.

But I must confess we also face a difficulty here with dating Bob’s compositions.  Dylan often leaves no information of when something was written, and all we have to go with are dates of initial recordings.

However there is a fair chance that Political Word, not recorded until early 1989, was by that time, considerably re-written, and the same is true of “What good am I?” but there is evidence that this song was undergoing rewriting at that time, and indeed had already undergone quite a bit of re-writing prior to this time.

My view is that “Political World” was followed by “What good am I?” and “Dignity”, with “Tweeter and the monkey man” and “Like a Ship” coming later in 1988.

Which means that the most magical “To fall in love with you” which was abandoned preceded the fine run of “Political World” and onward.

Plus, what is striking to me about these songs is their sheer variety – they are different from each other and different from the songs written in the previous year or two.  It really does sound to me as if Bob is seriously trying out different ideas rather than just letting the ideas come into his head.

What is also fascinating is just how different these songs are from each other.   As I have commented before, “Political world” shouldn’t work at all – virtually no melody, one chord only, but but at the same time setting out the repeat of an old Dylan message in a completely new format… this world really has gone wrong.  Not wrong in the Christian sense of falling from grace, but simply going wrong because it has gone wrong.

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last

We live in a political world
The one we can see and can feel
But there’s no one to check, it’s all a stacked deck
We all know for sure that it’s real

It’s not that mankind has turned its back on Jesus, but rather mankind has put its trust in politicians.

It was played by Bob 28 times on stage – and maybe it only got that low number because of those restrictions with the chord and melody make it less exciting to play than many others.  The format certainly restricts what the instrumentalists can do.

This is followed by the same message but from an utterly personal perspective: “What good am I?” a real self-battering.  It is not just the world gone wrong, Bob is not doing anything to make it better.

The answer as to what we could do to get out of all this mess came with the third song in the trilogy: Dignity.  We need to hold onto ourselves, to keep our sense of self-worth, but not let it blow out of all proportion.  For the issue we all face is not the issue of the world around us (although that can be horrible enough) but the way we perceive the world.  If we can have a genuine self-respect based on honourable behaviour maybe, just maybe we can survive (but it’s probably not a good idea to put a bet on it).

In “What Good Am I” which in contrast to “Political World” got played 241 times, Dylan is saying is that in the end the only way out is honesty, out of which we get engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy… these are the qualities of the really human and humane person.    Each verse says it all; take this for example

What good am I if I know and don’t do
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you
If I turn a deaf ear to the thundering sky
What good am I?

What he then does is goes one step further and says, it is dignity (of which honesty is a pre-requisite) which encapsulates all these elements of being a good person.   If you have  engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy, you can have dignity.

This is an astounding trilogy of songs, of which the full emotional impact and musical genius can only be understood if heard as a trilogy.  And the tragedy is that we don’t hear them as a trilogy, because they have never been released that way.  It is only by seeing the chronology of Dylan’s writing that we can understand.

What’s more they are three incredibly different songs – and it is interesting to ponder what Dylan would have done next after these three superb songs, written one after the other, each in its own way contemplating the mess that is our world, if he hadn’t already agreed to work with the Wilburys.  But he had so the year ended with two Wilbury’s songs,

Tweeter and the monkey man and Like a Ship good compositions and interesting in their own way, but not ground breakers like, for example Blind Willie McTell.

So Bob had had his distraction – his fun with the gang, doing their own thing.  Would that refresh him and allow him to find his new direction?   It is pointless but still fun to imagine what might have happened if Bob had not signed up  to the Wilburys project.  Would he have found his new direction sooner?  I suspect so.  But ultimately Bob did settle down in 1989, and after a couple of early try outs, he hit the ground running once more with a collection of compositions which well and truly build on all that had been going on through these years of uncertainty.

We’ll come on to that next time.  But at least we can pause here reflecting on three works of genius, and the knowledge that at last Bob had cleared the blockage.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part III: I love you, but you’re strange

IV         The Order of the Whirling Dervishes

People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

“I used to recite prayers. Now I recite rhymes and poems and songs,” says Rumi, probably around 1260, about his “ecstatic poetry”, in one of his thousands of ghazals. Rumi’s ghazals (short poems consisting of rhyming couplets) and quatrains are basically one long ode to the liberating, uplifting qualities of song, dance and love, and he is still honoured in that vein: as a prophet of Love, Song and Dance. After Rumi’s deeply regretted death in 1273, Sultan Walad comes up with perhaps the most fitting tribute: he founds The Order of the Whirling Dervishes, the order that is still famous for its religious ritual, for its wildly spinning monks, reciting poetry and prayers, in order to get closer to God in a religious ecstasy.

Seven centuries later, its magic has not worn off:

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it

… Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man is a twentieth-century dervish, who even properly adheres to the prescribed choreography of the Order (Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow / Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free); spinning round and round, with one hand raised above the head.

That, of course, is not the only line between Dylan and Rumi; “I recite rhymes and poems and songs” is a perhaps very compact but also a very apt one-liner to summarise Dylan’s life and work, and beyond that the confrères seem to think and write in similar imagery – the kind of imagery that borders on synaesthesia, as here, in “Love Minus Zero”.

In Western culture, it is a rather exotic image, “laughing like a flower”. Its synaesthetic content is in itself not an obstacle, but perhaps it is a little too woeful, or too childish – in any case, it does not really penetrate. In Eastern culture, the image is more popular. Thanks to Rumi, of course, who wrote in the thirteenth century: “Why so happy to laugh with your mouth shut? You should laugh like a flower, without a care,” with which he immediately defines what that actually is, “laughing like a flower” – with open mouth, that is. Fully, without embarrassment. And just to be sure, he repeats his definition in a poem: I laugh like a flower, not just mouth laughter (translating as not just the lips, or rather: not just smiling, is probably better), I burst forth with gaiety and mirth.

It has almost the status of a Sufi motto, and its impact can still be measured centuries later. In a 1963 Bollywood classic, for example, Dil Hi To Hai (“It Is Only A Heart”), the film that yields a whole series of now-classic Indian hits. Including “Tum Agar Mujhko Na Cha Ho To (If You Don’t Want Me)”, which became so popular partly because it was sung in the film by the greatest Indian film star of all time, Raj Kapoor. And in that song, he tries to charm his adored one, who had just been so angry with him:

Phool ki taraha hanso sab ki nigaahon mein raho
Apni maasoom jawaani ki panaahon mein raho
Mujhko woh din na dikhaana tumhe apni bhi kasam
Mein tarasta rahoon tum gair ki baahon me raho

Laugh like a flower, be the center of everyone's attention.
Stay safe in the shelter of your innocent youth.
Let me not see the day, I beg you...
In which I yearn for you while you’re in another man's arms.

Raj Kapoor – Tum Agar Mujhko Na Cha Ho To:

https://youtu.be/kXnHoJ5ZH44

… फूल की तरह हँसो, phool ki taraha hanso, laugh like a flower… it is not too likely, obviously, that Dylan did visit a Bollywood film in the early sixties, vehemently taking notes in the process. The shared use of this remarkable metaphor illustrates, mostly, an art fraternity across centuries, continents and cultures. On the other hand: in the twenty-first century, Rumi is still the most widely read and one of the best-selling poets in the US, and Dylan’s comrade Allen Ginsberg has undoubtedly waved Rumi’s poetry around… it is not entirely inconceivable that Dylan did, in fact, read this particular image at Rumi.

The introduction of Valentines, however, is all-American. The name does trace back to a third-century Saint Valentine, and Chaucer’s poem “Parliament Of Fowls” (c. 1380) may have contributed something as well (“For this was on seynt Volantynys day / Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make – For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day / When every bird comes there to choose his match”), but its commercialisation, from the 19th century onwards in the Anglo-Saxon world, is primarily an American success story. Oriental it is certainly not, in any case. In Islamic countries, celebrating Valentine’s Day is even forbidden – which would probably have been against the sentimental swooner Rumi’s wishes.

Anyhow, the content of Dylan’s final line in this stanza is probably primarily driven by rhyming pleasure. “Love Minus Zero” has no iron-clad rhyme scheme – the four octaves each have a different rhyme scheme. The only constants are the rhyming opening lines and the rhyming of verse four with verse eight. In this first octet Dylan shows off with the indeed nice and original rhyme find buy her – fire. Nice and original perhaps, but this particular rhyme is still not widely imitated. Dylan fan Dan McCafferty, the singer of the Scottish rock band Nazareth, borrows it in 1991 for the unimpressive opening song of the unsuccessful album No Jive, “Hire And Fire” (Setting my soul on fire / Try her and buy her). The other songs on the album are equally unmemorable. The record’s meagre highlight is the finale, a poor remake of their 1973 hit, Joni Mitchell’s “This Flight Tonight” – a brilliant cover of one of Joni’s most beautiful Valentine’s songs.

Nazareth – This Flight Tonight:

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins

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 Larry Fyffe

Naysayers and the the connoisseurs of ‘high art’ alike claim Bob Dylan is not deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature because, for one thing, the singer/songwriter/musician is not that familiar with those artists considered worthy thereof.

I beg to differ – Bob Dylan makes it clear that he is quite aware of the works of a number of Nobel winners – often brought to his attention through watching movies.

There’s Rudyard Kipling, for example:

The finest man I knew
Was our regimental 'bhisti', Gunga Din
He was Din, Din, Din
(Rudyard Kipling: Gunga Din)

The song lyrics beneath mention the darkly humorous 1939 movie based thereon, starring Carey Grant:

Clouds so swift, and the rain falling in
Gonna see a movie called 'Gunga Din'
(Bob Dylan: You Ain't Going Nowhere)

An early humorous poem by the singer/songwriter refers to Nobeller TS Eliot:

I thought she was hip
When we sat and drank coffee
And I flipped when she recited 
All of 'Prufrock' by heart
(Bob Dylan : Untitled Poem)

Dylan’s certainly aware of Nobel-winner Steinbeck’s ‘Mice And Men’ – through the well-known ‘Beat writer’ for one, who refers to a film starring Burgess Meredith:

Once I went to a movie
At midnight, 1940, 'Mice
 And Men', the name of it
(Jack Kerouac: Mexico City Blues)

The song lyrics below refer to the 1950 movie titled “The Gunfighter” – Kerouac’s off-hand style of writing paid tribute to in the lines below (as in “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”):

Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert, and it starred 
Gregory Peck
(Bob Dylan: Brownsville Girl ~ Dylan/Shepard)

Below, an example of Kerouac’s casual and wordy style:

… but burn, burn burn, like yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the  blue centerlight pop …”

(Jack Kerouac: On The Road)

Dylan has a little fun at the Beat’s expense though Jack is not a Nobel Prize winner:

Build a fire, throw on logs, and listen to it hiss
And let in burn, burn, burn, burn on a night like this
(Bob Dylan: On A Night Like This)

But all kinds of tributes as well:

No one in front of me, and nothing behind

(Bod Dylan: Things Have Changed)

A Dylanesque twist on:

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me ...

(Jack Kerouac: On The Road)

The following verse comes from a poem that’s written by a Nobel winner:

It wasn't the King of Diamonds 
Nor the Joker she drew first
It wasn't the King or Queen of Hearts
But the Ace of Spades reversed 
(WH Auden: Victor)

Tribute is paid thereto in the following song lyrics:

Back stage the girls were playing five-card stud 
by the stairs
Lily had two queens, she was hoping for a third 
to match her pair ....
Lily called another bet, and drew up the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily,  Rosemary,  And The Jack Of Hearts)

Song lyrics below are from a 1964 movie, based on the play “Pygmalion”:

And, oh, what a towering feeling
Just to know that somehow you are near
The overpowering feeling 
That any second, you may suddening appear

(Bill Shirley: On The Street Where You Live)

The lines from the song beneath indirectly pay tribute to George Bernard Shaw, a Nobel winner – referencing, not without humour, the above song from the movie “My Fair Lady” based on  Shaw’s “Pygmalion”:

But, oh, what a wonderful feeling
That just to know that you are near
Sets my heart a-reeling
From my toes up to my ears
(Bob Dylan: The Man In Me)

Writes a Nobel Prize winner, the verse below:

I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips, and take her hands
 And walk among long dappled grass
(William Yeats: The Song Of The Wandering Aengus)

Rather directly alluded to in the following song lyrics:

You gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
(Bod Dylan: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

Les Paul’s have sent in another Dylan co-composition – as part of a project we’ve been running for a number of years now relating to lyrics written by Dylan for which no music has been created by Bob Dylan himself.

The lyrics to Phone Operator Love appeared half way down the page on the lyrics sheet headed as Bowling Alley Blues but as Paul Robert Thomas points out, these lyrics are seemingly not  part of the Bowling Alley Blues lyrics (the song which Les Paul’s created from those lyrics they renamed Sugar Daddy Blues).

So here they are now separated them and called them Phone Operator Love.   Their comment is “we tried to give a ‘retro’ vibe to that we have posted on our website HERE.”  The lyrics are below.

This whole project of completing Bob’s songs came out of our series “Bob Dylan Showcase” and you can hear other versions of Bob’s completed songs there.

Here are the lyrics to Phone Operator Love

I’m in love with the phone operator
She’s the only one for me
I’m in love with the phone operator
I phone her number for free

Anytime I’m out of money
I just call her on the line
She always tells me ‘Look honey
Everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine’

Every time when I hear her voice
It rings my bell
I wonder what she looks like
It’s driving me crazy, can’t you tell?

I’m in love with the phone operator
I can’t get enough
I’m in love with the phone operator

It’s what they call ‘blind love’
It’s what they call ‘blind love’

I’m in love with the phone operator
She’s the only one for me
I’m in love with the phone operator
I phone her number for free

Anytime I’m out of money
I just call her on the line
She always tells me ‘Look honey
Everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine
Oh everything will soon be fine
Lord everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine’

Every time when I hear her voice
It rings my bell
I wonder what she looks like
It’s driving me crazy, can’t you tell?

I’m in love with the phone operator
I can’t get enough
I’m in love with that phone operator
It’s what they call ‘blind love’