Very unlikely that writers Bayard Taylor and William Blake are aware of the poems of Edward Taylor – so put the following lines up to sheer creative coincidence:
And, like a finer sunshine swims
Round every motion of thy limbs
The sweet, sad wonder and surprise
Of waking glimmers in thine eyes
(Bayard Taylor: Like A Finer Sunshine)
And these lines too:
Our life is scare the twinkle of a star
In God's eternal day. Obscure and dim
With mortal clouds, it may yet beam for Him
And darkened here, shine fair to spheres afar
(Bayard Taylor: What Know The Woods)
In reference to the verse below by the Puritan/Baroque poet:
You want clear spectacles: your eyes are dim
Turn inside out, and turn your eyes within
Your sins like motes in the sun do swim: nay, see
Your mites are molehills, molehills mountains be
(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)
The writer of the song lyrics beneath, however, might well be aware of either one or both Taylors; take from each and all what messages you have gathered from coincidence:
With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
And your match-book songs, and your gypsy hymns
Who among them would try to impress you
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)
For sure, Quaker Bayard Taylor sentiments are influenced by those of the pre-Romantic poet William Blake:
My heart, a bird with broken wing
Deserted by its mate of spring
Droops shivering, while the winds blow
And fills the nest of love with snow
(Bayard Taylor: Bird With Broken Wing)
Similar enough they be to the sorrow expressed in the following lines:
How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing
How can a child, when fears annoy
But droop his tender wing
And forget his youthful spring
(William Blake: The Schoolboy)
In the song lyrics below, Blake’s sorrowful outlook is mixed together with that of the dark Gothic visions of Edgar Allan Poe:
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love, she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero/ No Limit)
In Part 1 of 1998 (see previous post) I tried to cover the songs from Time out of Mind new to live performance, and I found ‘Million Miles’ and ‘To Make you Feel my Love.’ However, I missed a song: ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’. I might have passed over it because I don’t think this is the best performance of the song that Dylan did, or even a memorable one, but I am being influenced by how it was to develop over the coming years, and how good it was to become.
This is a song, I contend, that Dylan would grow into as the years passed and the shadows lengthened. After all, he was still on the sunny side of sixty when he recorded Time Out of Mind, and such a stark encounter with mortality would need the following twenty years to fully develop. It was almost as if he was too young in 1997 to fully feel the bite of the lyrics. No other song on the album quite confronts death the way this one does. For a man who’s wrestled with his faith, the last verse is devastating, and signals a loss of faith.
‘I was born here and I'll die here against my will
I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there’
In the face of the gathering dark, our faith can fail us. To me, this performance from New London (CT) on the 14th of January sounds surprisingly tentative. He’s stepped away from Lanois’ swampy sound but doesn’t seem to have found a new sound that will bring the song to life, although I don’t want to judge this unfairly in the light of later performances that I prefer.
It’s not dark yet
In the previous post I pointed out that Dylan’s set list was pretty unvarying for this year, with the same songs cropping up again and again. One of these is ‘Serve Somebody’, the first track of the 1979 album Slow Train Coming. Because of its context, Dylan’s sudden conversion to Christianity, the song has been seen as a Christian song, but by 1998, nineteen years later, and set in the context of Time Out of Mind, I’m beginning to wonder. The song, in all its lyrical variants, merely states that no matter who we are, we are serving somebody, some force or other. We can serve the powers of good or the powers of evil, it’s up to us. That’s a much more universal message than a strictly Christian one. Are we really the good guys or not?
It’s hard to get past the powerful 1979 – 1981 performances of this song, but this is much rougher than those earlier gospel versions, rougher but no less powerful, I think. And some of those lyrical variations bring us closer to a Time Out of Mind state of mind:
might think that you’re living
might even think that you’re dead
sleeping on nails
sleeping on a feather bed
Dylan would kick off his shows with either this song or ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ (see part 1). Here he is blasting his way into the 5th of November, Wollongong (Australia) concert, and he’s in great voice.
Serve Somebody
The odd one out among these regulars, to my mind, is ‘The Man in Me’, a fairly minor song from New Morning (1970). I say this because there is a freshness of feeling in the song that is far from the spirit of Time Out of Mind.
‘But, oh, what a wonderful feeling
Just to know that you are near
Sets my a heart a-reeling
From my toes up to my ears’
Maybe that’s why Dylan brought it to the fore, for the contrast of feeling. He’d typically bring it in around number three on the setlist. Here it is from that wonderful San Jose concert (19th May)
Man in Me
In 1997/98 Dylan brought two songs to the fore that he’d never played live. One was ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and the other was ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, a song Dylan wrote with Rick Danko. I’ve written before about how provocatively elusive the lyrics are to ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ (See NET, 1997, part 2), and the impression that the language is coded. Even the refrain is ambivalent in terms of its mood or intention; is it a threat or a promise?
‘No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell
But you know that we shall meet again
If your mem’ry serves you well’
And dead men tell no tales…or do they? And is it a pleasant memory? Probably not, as it’s a reminder of an obligation incurred, and somebody will be back to collect the debt.
This version from New London (CT) certainly brings out the element of threat or darkness in the song, more so than the nostalgia of the Band’s recorded version (Music from Big Pink, 1968). That may be due to the ominous sound of the opening guitar riffs here, and the urgency of the drumming.
Wheel’s on fire
We find the same sense of threat in the guitar work on ‘Blind Willie McTell’ which I think we need to think of as a protest song. ‘This land is condemned’ and ‘power and greed and corruptible seed’ rule that land, America. This is justly considered one of Dylan’s greatest songs, written in 1983, yet he seems to have become aware of that in only 1997/98. It contains unforgettable pictures of a fallen America with imagery that takes us back to the Civil War (1860s)
‘Seen them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghost of slavery ship
I can hear them tribes moaning
Hear the undertakers bell
Nobody can sing the blues like blind Wille McTell’
This is what he mostly sings. But there are variations and ellipses in performance, as well as in written versions. Consider this verse:
‘There's a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He's dressed up like some squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There's chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like blind Wille McTell’
However, the official lyrics have this:
‘There’s a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
Some of them died in the battle
Some of them survived as well…’
… which I’ve never heard him sing. In most of the live performances the rebels disappear to be replaced by the undertaker’s bell. Sadly, his tendency is to drop the wonderful ‘big plantations burning’ verse altogether. Whatever the lyrical variations, however, it remains a powerful song, powerfully delivered, and it sits very comfortably with the Time Out of Mind songs. (Sorry, no date for this one)
Blind Willie McTell
Another regular on Dylan’s setlist in 1998 is ‘Across the Borderline’, a song by John Hiatt, Ry Cooder and Jim Dickinson. When you look at the lyrics it’s easy to see what attracted Dylan to this song at this time. Dylan could have written it himself for Time Out of Mind:
‘When you reach the broken promised land
And every dream slips through your hands
Then you'll know that it's too late to change your mind
'Cause you've paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are
And you're still just across the borderline’
This one’s from November 3rd, a sweet, reflective rendition.
Across the Borderline
Another song that never strayed far from the setlists is our old friend ‘Tangled up in Blue.’ No stranger, this song. Ten years on the road and the song hasn’t lost its bite; the memories it canvasses still sound fresh. Dylan rarely produced the harmonica in 1998, but he does here at the San Jose concert for this song. A sharp and edgy performance.
Tangled up in Blue
On the subject of brief harp breaks, the opening harp work on this ‘Just Like a Woman’ sets a gentle and fragile tone. Strip the Blonde on Blonde jeer from Dylan’s voice, make it sound more care-worn, and we get quite a different impression of the song. Indeed the mood can shift from scorn to compassion. Suddenly the details feel different, maybe more sad:
‘everybody knows
that baby's got new clothes
but lately I see her ribbons and her bows
have fallen
from her curls’
A very telling detail. Like ‘Miss Lonely’ in ‘Just like a Rolling Stone’, the woman here has fallen, her pretty pretences stripped away. And then there’s the matter of the singer’s hunger, of which he is ashamed. I think we tend to be scornful of those we have revealed too much of ourselves to. Revealing our need makes us vulnerable, so we hit back. But in this performance, there’s not so much hitting back as regretting. (23rd October) It was just one of those things:
Just like a Woman
‘Masters of War’ is another song that got plenty of stage time in 1998. I still think his 1995, London concert version is the best, but by 1998 Dylan has settled on a slow, heavy beat for the song. He has largely abandoned fast electric versions for these ominous acoustic sounds. It’s interesting that even within the confines of the same basic arrangement, the mood and tone of the song can vary a lot.
In this first one, from San Jose, the song sounds urgent and intimate, the anger very evident. There’s a furious crackle in his voice.
Masters of War(A)
In this following performance, however, from Los Angeles, 21st May, the sound is more distant, softer and more spooky. The differences in recording might play a part here, but it sounds to me as if Dylan is using the echo of the Los Angeles venue to effect that more distant voice.
Masters of War (B)
In 1998, Dylan often returned to that wonderful dirge, ‘Forever Young’. As with ‘Masters of War’ the mood and tone of the song vary a lot from concert to concert. It’s another old friend that ages well. Apparently Dylan wrote the song for one of his children in 1974, but by 1998 it sounds more grandfatherly. We oldies might grow old but you young ones please stay young. It’s a plea from age to youth. The older Dylan’s voice sounds, the deeper the irony becomes.
The first is from San Jose, another intimate performance, yet with the first signs of upsinging (lifting the voice at the end of the line) which will come to plague later performances. Here it works all right, as he’s not doing it at the end of every line. The ragged chorus works well too.
Forever young (A)
This next one is slower, gentler perhaps, with no upsinging. Another irresistible performance. (23rd October)
Forever Young (B)
So that’s it for this time around, folks. Stay young (at least at heart), and we’ll be back soon with another round of friends and other strangers.
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
At the other end of the spectrum is Hamburg punk band Abwärts: “Meine Liebe kommt mit Überschall – my love comes with ultrasound” (“Das Wort zum Sonntag”, 1982). Which, come to think of it, might be so deafening that it could make sense after all: my love she speaks like silence. The continuation, however, disrupts the comparison; the words are spoken by an aircraft bomb hurtling down, so “without ideals or violence” is a bit difficult to fit in.
Anyway, in a text full of antitheses, it is right from the start one of the most famous antitheses in the song (the success/failure antithesis from the second stanza is of course the most quoted). With a curious extra layer that is often missed.
Superficial listening leaves little doubt: a protagonist in love sings of the exceptional attractiveness of some lady. Like some Italian poet from the thirteenth century, say Petrarch, about Laura. Particular word choice may have been inspired by William Blake (speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, “To The Evening Star”) and Edmund Spenser (“My Love Is Like To Ice And I To Fire”), but given the vocabulary in general and the apparent clarity thereof, even more by Shakespeare and his love sonnets. After all, the lady is lovely and clearly more temperate, like the lady sung about in “Sonnet 18”, like Ol’ Bill says my love is like a fever, very Dylanesque and ambiguous in “Sonnet 147”, though at least Dylan’s lover seems more faithful than the my love from “Sonnet 138”;
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies
The sweetness of the melody and the somewhat archaic, Shakespearean tone of the lyrics conceal a layer that is usually much more obvious in Shakespeare: an ambiguity that leaves open the possibility of understanding exactly the opposite. This is already true of that famous opening line My love she speaks like silence. Analysts usually link this to a Madonna-like, mysterious aura in general, and to Sara Dylan’s aura in particular. Dylan indeed wrote the song sometime during the first, enamoured months of their relationship, and qualifications like “mysterious”, “good listener” and “shy and quiet” are used by every biographer. The bridge to “silence”, in short, is easily made.
The ambiguity of the metaphor is then ignored by the analysts. Still, “speaking like silence” is a somewhat dubious compliment to say the least. After all, silence equals not saying anything. Thus, “speaking like silence” would actually be a neutral, concealing way of saying: she speaks, but she does not say anything.
Equally dubious is the subsequent “compliment”: without ideals or violence. One may wonder whether that is such an admirable quality – no opinions and no passion is another way of saying the same thing. The more positive explanation is that the lady is detached, unaffected by worldly concerns such as – for example – social injustice or, say, racial issues. But then the image of a somewhat unworldly figure, almost like someone with an autism-related disorder, still prevails; when she talks she says nothing, she has no opinions and doesn’t care about anything – she is expressionless. If it is about Sara at all, it is in keeping with the image that emerges from a supposed “farewell-to-Sara” song Dylan writes twelve years later, from the brilliant “Abandoned Love”: I love you, but you’re strange.
Dylan – Abandoned Love (live at the Bitter End):
It is an attractive quality, the art of disguising ambiguity, of covering up a second, opposing layer. Dylan shares this quality with a master like Kafka, Dylan of course having the advantage of being a musician; he can use the music to lift one layer, and cover the other. Successfully, usually. Like “Every Grain Of Sand”: also the more serious analysts like Shelton and Paul Williams are fooled by the gorgeous melodies into thinking that Dylan is trying to express something like “sense of wonder or awe at the beauty of the natural world”, where Dylan explicitly stacks up eerie, gloomy, saddening images (a pool of tears, a dying voice, nocturnal sorrow, chill, pain, decay, despair, bitterness and so on).
The same goes for “Make You Feel My Love”. The song is heavily criticised in Dylan circles, both by fans on the forums and by “professional” Dylanologists, who then all stumble over the alleged cuteness of the lyrics. A text that, upon clinical analysis, is spoken by a stalking creep who lists all the things he will do “to make you feel my love” and meanwhile sketches nothing but abysmal misery. The rain hits her face, the whole world is nagging at her, tears, hunger, black and blue, storm and a “highway of regret”… hardly cute, all in all.
Once the doubts about the veracity of the immeasurable, infinite love of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” have been raised after those first two lines, the ambivalence of the third and fourth lines becomes noticeable as well;
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
“Not having to say you are faithful” is as dubious a compliment as being “without ideals”. Did the other women in the narrator’s life have to fulfil this requirement in order to dispel doubts about adultery? “Other women had to say they were faithful, but you don’t” – and yet she’s true. Which is apparently quite remarkable: despite not having to say it, she still is faithful. Strange enough, but not as strange as the metaphor the narrator chooses to express how “true” she is: like ice, like fire. The poet can choose hundreds of images to express something like the “purity”, the “uncomplicatedness” of her faithfulness. Spring water, puppies, mountain air, tears, the stars above or a rolling stone, for that matter. But he chooses ice and fire; two most unreliable phenomena that are both painful, dangerous and deadly.
It is probably no more than an echo of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet “My Love Is Like To Ice And I To Fire” (1594), a much more unambiguous, rather explanatory play with exactly the same antithesis – yes, Spenser is very much in love with his second wife Elizabeth Doyle, shouting his love from the rooftops and, he too, writes this sometime during the first, enamoured months of their relationship. But Dylan eschews unambiguity.
No, perhaps we must ask ourselves whether we should not be looking for the Shakespeare connection in the Dark Lady sequence of his sonnets, in Sonnets 127-152. For the Shakespeare who writes:
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
… again offering antithesis on antithesis, by the way.
The Walker Brothers – Love Minus Zero/No Limit:
To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
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:
We first mentioned Tioga Pass in July 2020 with a plea for anyone who could complete this song.
As we noted at the time Tioga Pass is a song that was seemingly recorded at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, on 16 June 1987 and according to the only note we have concerning the song, it was written by Robert Hunter and Bob Dylan.
Needle's on empty
and here I'm stuck
Four in the morning
and just my luck
Listen to the radio
waiting for the sun
Can't flag a ride
until daylight comes
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
Tuned to a station
I've never heard
while moonlight glimmers
on Dead Man's Curve
Glory in the morning
and God bless you
for playing that song
when another would do
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
Ain't quite rock
although it moves
It sure ain't country
and it's not the blues
They don't say nothing
when it gets to the end
Just keep playing it
over again
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
It isn't pop
and it isn't soul
Nothing like fifties
rock and roll
It isn't folk
Not especially jazz
Got something special
nothing else has
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
The sun comes up
about six o'clock
The station drifts
to some pre-fab rock
Although they played it
all night long
I never did learn
the name of that song
Our rowboat journey across the wide and wavy Jungian Sea continues.
Sentimental Bayard can be grouped in with the anti-Puritan Romantic Transcendentalist poets providing you consider his Quaker’s ‘inner light’ of love and pity be a part thereof – Joan Baez, an anti-war, anti-creed, this-worldly Quaker herself.
Admittedly, attempts at such classifications are fuzzy at best.
In the poem below, a delightful life apparently awaits the lonely faithful, but die first they must:
No more an outcast on her sod
Or at her board a stinted guest
But now in purple raiment dressed
And heir to all delight, that
She receives of God
(Bayard Taylor: Love And Solitude)
In the song lyrics beneath, that one last hope gets tossed overboard without a life jacket into the deep blue sea:
When the Reaper's task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The lovliest, and the best
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)
Romantic/Existentialist thoughts from the poetry of Percy Shelley pop up in Taylor’s poems as they do in those of Thomas Hardy:
Thou seest, beyond, the cool kiosk
And far away the pencilled towers
That shoot from many a stately mosque
Thou hast no world beyond the chamber
(Bayard Taylor: The Odalisque)
As in the lines quoted beneath:
Column, tower, and dome, and spire
Shine like obelisks of fire
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)
More directly paid tribute to in the following song lyrics:
There's a woman on my lap
And she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
Up jumps poet William Wordsworth as well in the Quaker’s works:
If she but smile the crystal calm will break
In music, sweeter than it ever gave
And when a breeze breathes over some sleeping lake
And laughs in every wave
(Bayard Taylor: The Return Of The Goddess)
As observed in the sentimental lines presented below:
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
(William Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud)
The song lyrics beneath darken the delight that pervades Nature in the poem above:
I walk by tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season's dawn awaits
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)
Like poet Emily Dickinson, the singer/songwriter is more likely to encounter a slithering snake rather than a sweet smile, a laughing wave, or a dancing flower:
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone
(Emily Dickinson: A Narrow Fellow In The Grass)
Aaron: Now moving on to what we have rather controversially decided to call part 3 of this series, we get to 1997 which was Bob’s most successful year at the Grammy’s with 3 nominations and a clean sweep of wins!
Over the next 3 articles we will look at the 3 categories Bob competed in this year.
First up it’s: Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male
Bob’s winning track – “Cold Irons Bound”
The studio version is not on YouTube so here is Bob’s live performance from the Grammy night itself! (And there is a rare old collection of Bob Dylan smiles here).
Tony: There is an interesting commentary on this song on Wikipedia, which I think is worth taking a peek at…
Dylan was inspired to write the song in the studio after hearing drummer David Kemper, who had arrived early one day, playing an unusual beat. As Kemper explained in an interview with Uncut:
I heard this disco record with a Cuban beat, and when I got to the studio, I sat back at the drums and I slowed the beat down, and turned it upside down, and I was just playing, and there was nobody there. No one was expected for a half hour. So I was playing this drum beat, and then Bob snuck up behind me and said, “What are you playing?” I said, “Hey Bob, how are you today?” He said, “No, don’t stop, keep playing, what are you playing?” I said, “It’s a beat, I’m just writing it right now”. “Don’t stop it. Keep doing it”. And he went and got a yellow pad of paper and sat next to the drums, and he just started writing. And he wrote for maybe ten minutes, and then he said, “Will you remember that?” And I said, yeah, I got it. And then he said, all right, everybody come on in, I want to put this down”.
Well I got it in my head, and by then everyone had arrived and tuned up. And take one, he stepped up to the microphone, and “I’m beginning to hear voices, and there’s no one around”. And I think we did two takes, and then he said, “All right, let’s move on to something else”. I remember Daniel Lanois wasn’t happy; he didn’t like it. It was one of his guitar breaking incidents. He said to Tony (Garnier) and I: “The world doesn’t want another two-note melody from Bob”. And he smashed a guitar. So I thought, well, there goes my chance of being on this record. Next time I saw Daniel was at the [Grammys] because we had performed that night, and all of a sudden, Male Vocal Performance of the Year, came from that song – the one that Dan was adamant wouldn’t get on the record
Tony: Back in 2015 I had a bash at explaining my understanding of the song (at least I think I wrote it – it reads like one of my pieces but with the modesty for which I am justly famous across the world, there’s no author’s name). I try and explain why it is all about the rhythm – and that was written before seeing the article above from Uncut. It’s at Dylan’s Mathematical Songs
The other nominees were
David Bowie – Dead Man Walking
Well now, you want a pounding rhythm? There it is. And some freaky guitar work too.
What makes this really work for me is the inclusion of the background male vocals, just at the moment when we think it is all going to be about beat and fuzzy guitar. That is one of those rare touches of musical genius which leaves me wishing I knew who decided on that. Was it DB, or the producer, or someone in the band?
If you have just played the piece and didn’t notice the male voices behind the music at various points, and if you have a few minutes to spare do go back and listen again. The lyrics they sing are strange too…
Gone gone gone spinning slack through the end?
Deadens? my brain falling up through the years
Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly
Losing breath from the water then I'm gone gone gone
John Fogerty – Blueboy
Yes well when someone calls out “Are you ready” during the opening bars of a song I tend to meander onto another planet and contemplate the lesser known literary works of the English Civil War.
It’s really strange listening to this after the two previous entries, because there is no comparison in terms of musical composition, improvisation, vocal exploration, rhythm or… well, anything.
Nothing wrong with the song, it is indeed very pleasant, but with the two previous entries you have composers at the top of their game exploring where else they might take the genre. This is a track of top quality musicians doing their thing that they’ve done lots of times before.
Still nothing wrong with that, but then again, there’s nothing wrong with me sitting in my English country garden for a few hours in the sun, watching the wind blowing the tall trees.
John Mellencamp – Just Another Day
Strange start which I suspect will get rather tiresome if one listened to this a lot. But it the bass and the harmonies which tell us this is going to be something else. Yes it is just another rock song, but the production and the laid back calmness of the whole piece really makes me listen and want to listen again. Nothing is forced, nothing is that original but it really grabs my attention. He really is a superb vocalist.
Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road (live 95) from the b side to the Secret Garden single
Tony: The lyrics of this song – or rather should I say the lyrics at the end of this song – really get me every time. They are for me the perfect example of using every day words in a way that can send a chill through my bones.
But when you get to the porch they're gone on the wind
So Mary, climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win
Left on their own they are not that special, but put into the song and performed they become something oh so powerful. I have no idea what it really means, but it seems to mean something, and I love phrases like that. These days as an ol’ timer I don’t need lyrics to mean anything but I do want them to sound as if they ought to mean something.
Maybe they move me as the father of three daughters, thinking of all that I tried to do to give them every chance in life and the endless fear that they would take all the freedom I tried to offer and then just wander into the distance. (I’m so lucky; they didn’t).
Aaron: It’s a pretty strong selection this time. The only one I didn’t know prior to this was the Fogerty track, and whilst it isn’t a patch on Bob, Bruce or Bowie it’s still a decent tune and great vocal. I’m a massive fan of 3 of these acts (plus I’ve been known to listen to a bit of Mellencamp from time to time). So, for me it’s a close run race between Bob, Bruce and Bowie – With Bob probably getting the win…just!
Tony: For me Bob gets the win for the rhythm, but that’s not what the competition was all about!
At the end of July 2021 is finally the release of Welcome 2 America, the album that Prince recorded in 2010 but then put on the shelf. The deluxe edition has a bonus concert recording from 2011, wherein the ladies from his band are given the spotlight to sing a beautiful, hushed and soulful “Make You Feel My Love”. Prince has them perform the song a few more times, in 2011 and 2012, and then leaves the stage himself each time. This is different for “All Along The Watchtower”; in a mash-up with Foo Fighter’s “Best Of You”, this Dylan song becomes a showcase for his stage, singing and guitar skills (half-time Super Bowl show, 2007).
https://youtu.be/2hZIeEgwv-4
The other way round, there are just as few points of contact. Dylan does comment on Prince a few times, usually with reserved respect (in the 1987 Rolling Stone interview he calls him a boy wonder and “he certainly don’t lack talent, that’s for sure”), and in Theme Time Radio Hour the DJ says, ironically, “Prince is from the same area of the country that I’m from so we have plenty in common.”
That is what radio broadcaster Dylan says when announcing “Little Red Corvette” (episode 12, Cars), and he may have noticed a subtle similarity:
A body like yours
Oughta be in jail
'Cause it's on the verge of bein' obscene
… a presumably unintended paraphrase of his own There ought to be a law against you comin’ around from “Ballad Of A Thin Man”.
The other great little man from Minnesota had neither the ambition to be, nor the reputation of being a great song poet, but the wild, surreal, hallucinatory part of his oeuvre most certainly does have a poetic quality. “When Doves Cry” is one such song that surprises with a verse like
Dream, if you can, a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you
… a classic, tried and tested stylistic device that Prince often uses; quite literally colourful, expressionistic sets. Like every day is a yellow day (“Condition Of The Heart”), the sky was all purple (“1999”), the crystal blue stream of desire (“Adonis And Bathsheba”) and of course I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain.
And in the more ambitious lyrics, he does come close to a literary quality that Dylan wouldn’t be ashamed of either. On several fronts, even; the evocative power, the enjoyment of language, the orientation towards sound and the suggestion of epic… all quality features of Dylan’s better lyrics that Prince equals in his best moments. “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”, for example, unites a freewheelin’ Dylan with the syllables-juggling Dylan of “Highlands” and with the kaleidoscopic poet of “Absolutely Sweet Marie”;
Oh, I said, “Cool, but I'm leavin' my pants on (what you say?)
'Cause I'm kinda goin' with someone”
She said, “Sound like a real man to me
Mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Oh, my favorite song,” she said
And it was Joni singing: "Help me, I think I'm falling"
(Drring) The phone rang and she said
“Whoever's calling can't be as cute as you”
Right then and there I knew I was through
(Dorothy Parker was cool)
… and around it glitters like I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine / Dorothy was fast, mercurial asides like I’d been talkin’ stuff in a violent room and Dylanesque, dryly comic extras like Well, I ordered: “Yeah, let me get a fruit cocktail, I ain’t too hungry”.
The other classical figure of speech is even more frequent, and Prince’s predilection for it links him to Dylan in his mid-60s: the antithesis. With Prince, the preference is quite persistent – he hardly writes a lyric without an antithesis. Often enough, simple, straightforward antitheses such as Between white and black, night and day or
You're just a sinner I am told
Be your fire when you're cold
Make you happy when you're sad
Make you good when you are bad
(from “I Would Die 4 U”, lyrics that are more layered and complex than this simple quatrain would suggest).
But every now and then, Prince manages to spice up his lyrics with more subtle antitheses. Like the brilliant opening line of “Sign O’ The Times”: In France, a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name. In strong one-liners like used to have the party on New Years Eve / first one intoxicated last one to leave, and a robin sings a masterpiece that lives and dies unheard. And in one of his most successful lyrics, in “Raspberry Beret”. Stylistically, the opening couplet is poetic craftsmanship, with a powerful epic, almost cinematic quality:
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
“Leisurely” is a masterly find. The word is rather highbrow, clashes tellingly with the blue-collar content of the first three lines, it rhymes originally with Mr. McGee and immediately gives depth to the character of the first-person narrator. The continuation is just as strong:
Seems that I was busy doing something close to nothing
But different than the day before
That's when I saw her, ooh, I saw her
She walked in through the outdoor,
“Busy doing something close to nothing” is a witty, original antithesis, made all the funnier by the introduction “seems that I was busy”. The concluding antithesis in through the outdoor is not necessarily original (it is also the title of Led Zeppelin’s last LP, for example), but here it has a literary shine through its added value: for the third time, Prince succeeds in giving depth to the actor’s character with a minimum of words. We already know what type “Mr. McGee” is after one line, eleven words, the I-person gets a profile with just that one word “leisurely”, and the introduction of the picturesque co-star is already coloured by just “in through the outdoor”: unconventional and carefree character, apparently an attractive girl who doesn’t need to care much about rules.
The irresistible chorus immediately confirms this impression:
She wore a
Raspberry beret
The kind you find in a secondhand store
Raspberry beret
And if it was warm she wouldn't wear much more
Raspberry beret
I think I love her
Prince – Raspberry Beret:
The fondness for the antithesis, in Prince as well as Dylan, and in all classical poets in general, can probably ultimately be traced back to the Bible, and more specifically to the Gospel of Matthew. The Sermon on the Mount, for example, from which Dylan draws more than once, is full of this stylistic device. Love your enemies, do not let your left hand know what the right hand is doing, the broad and the narrow way, the strait and the wide gate, light and darkness, and so on. The public’s receptiveness is not so mysterious either – opposites attract, after all. And the popularity with the poets themselves may have a more prosaic reason as well: lines with antitheses are simply easier to remember;
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
… indeed – you only need to hear that once.
To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
———————
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:
With poets William Blake and Bayard Taylor, singer/songwriter/ musician Bob Dylan sails upon the misty sea in a shoe filled with rhymes.
William Blake envisions a new dawn of love rising above the ashes of the not-so-‘Enlightered’ industrial age ~ ‘gold’/’unfold’:
Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold
Bring me my chariots of fire
(William Blake: Jerusalem)
Bayard Taylor dreams too of a happier future ~ ‘old’/’unfold’:
From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire ....
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold
And the stars are old
And the leaves of the the Judgement Book unfold
(Bayard Taylor: Bedouin Song)
The song lyrics beneath bespeak of a cheery life ~ ‘old’/’unfolds’:
As his youth unfolds
He is centuries old ....
He's young and on fire
Full of hope and desire
(Bob Dylan: Lord Protect My Child)
In the following lyrics, Taylor reveals that he’s not shy about stealing Blake’s ~’fire’/’desire’ motif:
Fiercely stamp the tethered horses, as they snuff the
morning fire
Their impatient heads are tossing, and they neigh with keen desire
(Bayard Taylor: The Bison Track)
Below a bit by Bob Dylan:
I feel like I'm on fire
Nothing matters to me
And there's nothing I desire
(Bob Dylan: Nobody 'Cept You)
In the lines beneath, there’s the rhyme ~ ‘bright’/’night’:
They sat by the hearth-stone, broad and bright
Whose burning brands threw a cheerful light
On the frosty calm of the winter's night
(Bayard Taylor: The Voice Of The Fire)
As taken from the following lines:
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
(William Blake: The Tiger)
In the song lyrics below, the singer/songwriter/musician looks back, and brings the rhyme home:
We stopped into a strange hotel
With a neon sign burning bright
He felt the heat of the night
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)
[Publisher’s note: this article appeared on Untold Dylan recently, before Jochen’s series on Gates of Eden had finished. That was entirely the editor’s fault, and he has been sent to Bouvet Island (you can look it up) for the rest of the year, with eight 78rpm discs and a wind up gramophone as punishment. We’re now publishing this article again, and will follow it shortly with part II. If we can work out how to do that. Sorry.]
I Rose of England
Steve Harley is one of England’s national treasures, and with the acoustic Uncovered he reaffirms his class in 2020. Two of his own songs and nine beautiful covers form a kind of road map of Harley’s musical roots, development and role models. The Stones’ “Out Of Time”, the traditional “Star Of Belle Isle”, McCartney’s “I’ve Just Seen A Face”, Bowie, Cat Stevens, Hot Chocolate… it’s probably in the DNA of any musician born in the fifties, actually.
Dylan is at the top of Harley’s list. The album closes with a beautiful, sunny, intimate rendition of “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, demonstrating true Dylan love. Which the old Cockney Rebel also professes in so many words in every interview; how he was in hospital from the age of 12 to 14, as a polio patient, and discovered Dylan there. “I was 12 years old when I got Freewheelin’ by Bob Dylan and then Another Side of Bob Dylan when it was all about drum, bass and guitar. I bought into it all. Bob Dylan changed my life.” And that Highway 61 Revisited is the “record to grab in an emergency”.
Steve Harley – When I Paint My Masterpiece:
Usually, Harley mentions in such an interview, without too many details, how he had one real tête-à-tête with Dylan. “I’ve met him. He was incredibly charming,” for example (Birmingham Entertainment, November 2016), and “Dylan is a strange man – he’s out there – but he couldn’t be nicer” (The Guardian, August 2005).
But on stage at Nell’s Jazz and Blues in London on October 27th, 2017, he finally tells the whole story:
“I’ve had time with Dylan, I met him. He was very very sweet to me. It’s a long story, I won’t bother you with it. He was very sweet to me. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes. I had to say everything. For ten minutes. And my lips dried up. You know, I ran out of energy. And words. You know, when you meet a hero after 45, 50 years, you’ve got all these things, you accumulated thoughts, words, questions, that you’ve got to have to put to this idol of yours, and you meet this person, and you haven’t got a word to say. It just all goes, it just disappears, through a sieve. And that kind of happened to me, but it was quite good with him. But he didn’t talk back. It’s hard work. It’s like hard work. And when it was over, when he wanted to go, he stood up and shook my hand, and he said four words to me. No wait, it was two words. But he repeated. He stood up, and he took my hand to say goodbye, he said: [growling imitation of Dylan’s voice] ‘The weather, the weather.’
[audience laughter, but Harley is smiling proudly] I spent time with Bob. Got two words. It’s good enough for me.”
“When I Paint My Masterpiece” is of course not Steve’s first Dylan cover. On stage, he plays a wonderful “Mr. Tambourine Man” and a fine “She Belongs To Me”, at the start of his career he tries to get a record deal with a demo of “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and in his peak year 1975 ( “Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)”) he produces a single for his sister-in-law; a remarkable, loving, rather failed cover of “Can You Please Crawl Out Of Your Window”.
This video Patricia Paay sadly is not available in all countries – but you can find the song on Spotify.
Presumably due to a kind of midlife crisis, to a kind of gotta-change-it-all phase that every great artist goes through from time to time. Occasionally, this turns out to be surprisingly good. Steve Harley’s cover of “Here Comes The Sun” (1976) is so curious and inappropriate that it still stands, half a century later – though perhaps more as a guilty pleasure than for purely artistic reasons. And, not to forget, for Stuart Elliot’s jaw-dropping work on the drums.
Harley’s cover of another pop monument, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” balances on the edge. The love is real, and the approach – a stripped-down, slightly melodramatic interpretation with mainly acoustic instruments – is not wrong either, but unfortunately Harley chooses to let an extremely dated-sounding synthesiser carry the whole arrangement. As a result, the song drowns in a sterile, Teutonic 80s sauce.
But then, the song is so strong – it survives even those full, stately chords on a pathetically echoing synthesiser. Although, apparently, Harley seems to be touching the right chord by 90s standards: when Rod Stewart records the song in 1997 for the somewhat sentimental album Diana, Princess of Wales: Tribute, he copies the arrangement almost one-on-one.
Rod Stewart – Love Minus Zero:
(Another video giving me problems in the UK. Try here )
The song has a special attraction for Britons anyway. No coincidence, probably; “Love Minus Zero” is one of Dylan’s most Shakespearean love songs, underpinned by Blakean imagery with a touch of T.S. Eliot. The song also made a great impression on another Stewart, on Harley’s fellow countryman Dave Stewart.
When The Wall Street Journal interviews him in February 2016, Dave Stewart once again loses himself in a long declaration of his Dylan love in general, and specifically of his love for this song. And for him too, like young polio patient Steve Harley, it starts with hospitalisation.
“When I was 13, I had to have surgery on my left knee due to a soccer injury. Back at home a few weeks later in Sunderland, England, I was forced to rest for six months. My brother gave me his acoustic guitar, and I began working out how to play things. One of the first songs I learned was Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero/No Limit.”
The Eurythmic tells how he performs the song in front of an audience as a fifteen-year-old boy, at the Rose & Crown, a local pub, remembers making an impression and attributes it, very elegantly, to the power of the lyrics, “so gothic and epic”,
“Bob took stuff that you’d expect to be spoken in Shakespearean plays and added these dime-store situations, throwing them down like dice in our contemporary world. They were quite captivating. His lyrics also capture moments in time in a visual as well as an allegorical sense. In Love Minus Zero, the lyrics start as social insights but then conclude with something romantic and sexy.”
… and concludes by telling how he still plays the song today, at the age of sixty-three. Just a few days ago, for his wife, sitting in front of the fireplace. “My wife was knocked out. She teared up but was incredibly happy. Bob can still do that to you.”
With which he, once again very elegantly and very British, gives all the credit to Dylan. Sympathetic, but the analysis “the lyrics start as social insights but then conclude with something romantic and sexy” is a bit puzzling. Or actually just wrong. A similar testimony from Stewart’s autobiography Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: A Life In Music (2016) puts the anecdotal declaration of love in The Wall Street Journal somewhat into perspective:
“Then one day I had an Eko acoustic. I can’t remember where it came from. I do remember playing Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom over and over again, memorizing the words and how to play the chords without looking at my fingers.”
…so perhaps Mr. Stewart is allowing himself some poetic license when expressing the origins of his love for Dylan in general and for “Love Minus Zero” in particular.
Which goes to show. Nothing speaks love like silence.
To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II: A Song Of Ice And Fire
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:
I’ve had “Bob Dylan’s Malibu” by Martin Newman on my desk and indeed my living room sofa for several weeks now, pondering how to write this review. Actually more than that. Could even be a couple of months.
And if you are a regular reader here you might be a little surprised at that, perhaps having got the notion that I am not normally that short of words – and by and large I would go along with that, including when it comes to reviewing books.
But “Bob Dylan’s Malibu” is so unusual I have found myself putting it to one side, picking it up, putting it aside… Not because there is anything wrong with it, far from it, but because of the effect it has on me, and because I am not sure how to describe the book, or the effect.
I’ll start with the facts. The book consists of Martin Newman’s “experiences” with Bob Dylan in the 70s in Malibu and elsewhere. And because I don’t know where else to start I’ll describe the opening chapter. The author’s friend is wearing a jacket the author had made. A lady approaches and asks where the jacket came from. On hearing it was made by a friend the lady asks if the friend could make one for the lady, and the lady’s friend.
So ok, we are getting a multiplicity of friends. Could be confusing, but let’s go on.
All is agreed and Martin Newman, the author, goes to meet the lady and her friend. Newman makes the jacket, and through this intro gets to know Bob and Sara, helps with the design and decor of the family’s houses in Malibu (as one does), and Bob wears one of Newman’s jackets on the cover of the Basement Tapes album. For reasons unexplained Bob gave Martin Newman the jacket back and Newman auctiones it for £11,032 (a very odd price – was the auctioneer calling “I have 11,029 pounds, any advance, I have 11,030 pounds, any advance that I have….”) in 2012 in London.
In story 2, the gang go to a “Renaissance Pleasure Faire”. Bob wears a disguise but is recognised and has to be hassled out. Later they go to a Ramona Pageant but no one recognises Bob.
In story 3, the guys try to buy a vintage National guitar to give as a present to a member of the band. They meet Don who has some. Don’s son comes in and starts dancing. Bob buys five guitars.
In story 4, they go to the Baked Potato club and sit in a dark corner so Bob is not recognised. On the way out he bumps into David Blue (who played in the Rolling Thunder Review), which is nice as the guys hadn’t seen each other for five years or more.
And this is how it goes. We’re told that the Baked Potato club is still going strong, but not (in case the reader doesn’t know, and why should the reader know everything?) that David Blue died suddenly in his early 40s. Or come to that why David was important.
Plus all the way through there are pictures. A sign outside a famous night club, a wide angle lens shot of a studio, a pic of the most popular dish in the Baked Potato…
This is not a book to get if you want something that has checked out the facts and done all the research. The line “I think she has written a book about it” in the “Yoga on a rope” chapter is typical. Indeed most writers would look up whether or not she (whoever she is) had written a book about it and if so what it was called and who published it, but no… this is like the writer is there in the room, lazing back in an old time rock chair, cigarette in one hand, whisky is the other, eyes half closed, keeping the family entertained with memories. At the end of one tale one of those gathered around shouts, “Hey granddad did you ever see her again?” but granddad has closed his eyes and is nodding happily to himself, and the parents carefully usher the children out, a finger over the mouth…. Granddad’s having a snooze now…
Is this fair? I really have no idea because these stories and the pictures (“here’s a donkey that thinks he’s a dog…”) go on for a little while and then just stop. The author is living with Bruce (no surname provided) and Bob turns up in a helicopter unannounced. Oh, except the author doesn’t remember the helicopter, but two of his friends swear that Bob definitely turned up in a chopper. Turn the page.
Maybe that’s how life was for these guys. They give each other presents. They turn up suddenly, nothing is really planned. Stuff happens.
If you’ve never had a life like this, where the money is in place, and you can just hire a chopper and drop in, the lifestyle takes some adjusting to. At first it seems all a bit false and fake, but keep going, and gradually you get the idea of what a weird life these people live. Bob says, “His eyes are like lakes” and the author thinks, “Wow!” Yep, that is how it goes.
The point is, if you can stay with the book and read 40 or more pages at a time, the truly weird life these people lead does begin to make itself seem real. And that’s the point. You have to keep going and immerse yourself in the work, not treat it like a coffee table volume. I even found the typeface more than a little disturbing. But, well, us folk who write ordinary books for ordinary people, what do we know of life?
Bob Dylan’s Malibu is published by Edlis Cafe Press, Hibbing, 2021 (ISBN 9781736972304). If it makes no impression on you, you’ve either never been near that scene, or you’ve been there so long you’ve forgotten how weird it all is (or was). As for me, even the typeface was alarming.
You can read details of some of recent articles and series on the home page of this site If you want to provide an article, or have an idea for a series, or pretty much anything else that is sort of Bob Dylan-ish please email Tony@schools.co.uk We’re awfully nice people, but we don’t pay for articles. Sorry.
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
For the filling in of the only line Dylan left open in the draft phase, the poet chooses the loaded, enigmatic with no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means. The “colour” is still unambiguous; “to shovel into the ditch” is condescending, dismissive, denigrating. And so it fits in with the Heine-like tone Dylan often chooses in these years; the tone of the ironic point. Just as the nineteenth-century German master likes to do, the last verse opens with the promise of a tender, loving conclusion. “At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams”… it is an opening like I wish I could write you a melody so plain from “Tombstone Blues” or like Bow to her on Sunday from “She Belongs To Me”. Vulnerable, elegant introductions, which then turn into vicious, deconstructive continuations, into “your useless and pointless knowledge” and into “for Christmas, buy her a drum” respectively, into a punch line that destroys the promise of tenderness.
It’s not very clear, the words with which the narrator rebuffs his soon-to-be ex, but it’s not friendly; apparently, she’s the kind of person who thinks that others are enormously interested in her dreams. In any case, she makes no attempt to shovel their supposed meaning into the ditch – which is a pity. There is, after all, perhaps only one thing more boring than people who want to tell their dreams: people who interpret their own dreams.
Anyway, it seems that for this last verse and its vague narrative, the poet has been inspired by the last words of Rimbaud’s Un Saison En Enfer, from the last chapter, appropriately titled “Adieu”:
Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes.
Que parlais-je de main amie ! Un bel avantage, c’est que je puis rire des vieilles amours mensongères, et frapper de honte ces couples menteurs, -j’ai vu l’enfer des femmes là-bas ; – et il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps.
And at dawn, armed with burning patience, we shall enter the glorious cities.
What was I talking about a friendly hand! A nice advantage is that I can laugh at the old deceitful loves, and smite these lying couples with shame, – I have seen the hell of women down there; and I shall be granted to possess the truth in a soul and a body.
An even more subtle hint that this final couplet hides a love break-up is that odd time of day. “At dawn”? His lover comes to him at dawn? In the blues and folk tradition, that can only mean one thing:
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
… that’s what both the deluded Lead Belly (“Black Girl”, 1944) and the desperate Bill Monroe (“In The Pines”, 1941) ask, following the source of the song, the time-honoured “The Longest Train”. And it’s not an original question. “Five O’Clock In The Morning” (Big Joe Williams), “Quarter Past Nine” by Elmore James, “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer”, Neil Young’s “What Did You Do To My Life?”, George Jones’s “Tell Me My Lying Eyes Are Wrong”… it’s usually not a good sign when the protagonist’s sweetheart doesn’t come home until morning;
She's been out all night and it's the break of day
One scotch, one bourbon, one beer
Which would trivialise the heavy, symbolism-soaked closing line of “Gates Of Eden”, of course. “There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden” is then reduced to the punch-line of a break-up song, to a self-pitying lament of a deceived lover.
No, maybe we should stick to the more distinguished Heisenberg/Plato approach.
A very negative direction
“This is called a sacrilegious lullaby in D minor,” says Dylan on that Halloween night in October 1964 in New York’s Philharmonic Hall, when the world is introduced to the song. Not unwitty, but it seems to be deterrent nonetheless. “Gates Of Eden” is not in the Top 30 of most covered Dylan songs. Not by a long shot. Except for Bryan Ferry and Julie Felix, all the usual suspects ignore the song. Joan Baez, for one, is not impressed. David Hajdu quotes her in Positively 4th Street (2001):
“I didn’t like what he was doing. It was haphazard and it was sloppy and too negative for me. There was hardly anything positive in it. I thought he went just one step too far in a very negative direction.”
But then again, she’s not impressed by Highway 61 either. “A bunch of crap,” as she tells biographer Scaduto.
Why Jimmy LaFave, who after all plays half the Dylan catalogue, skipped the song is unknown. Manfred Mann may feel trumped by The Myddle Class (1965), which indeed seems to be fishing in Mann’s pond, just as the jingle-jangling, semi-psychedelic cover of The Etonians (1967) cuts the grass at the feet of any Byrds version (though ex-Byrd Gene Clark did perform the song, occasionally and breath-takingly). Barb Jungr, Bettye LaVette, Old Crow Medicine Show, Hugues Aufray… not even Jerry Garcia and/or Grateful Dead play the song – although Bringing It All Back Home is in Garcia’s list of “10 Favorite Albums Of All Time” according to Far Out Magazine; “Beautiful mad stuff. And that turned us all on, we couldn’t believe it.” Certified superfan Robyn Hitchcock may still play it every once in a while (twice in 2005, twice in 2018), but studio-recorded, serious covers are otherwise all done by the second ring, by artists with no solid reputation for Dylan covers.
Among them, by the way, are plenty of gems. Arlo Guthrie is wonderful, as is veteran Ralph McTell, and in the outsider category, Swede Totta Näslund scores, as in fact Näslund’s entire tribute album Totta’s Basement Tapes/Down In The Flood (2010) is a brilliant, surprising ode to Dylan’s oeuvre (including, by the way, a rather unique cover of “Wigwam” – more beautiful and melancholic than the somewhat dubious original).
Totta Näslund
Another candidate for the Top 3 Best Gates Of Eden Covers is also on an equally overwhelming tribute record, on Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute To Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (various artists, 2010). The record features the chillingly beautiful version of “She Belongs To Me” by Norwegian Ane Brun, a rare and very successful “On The Road Again” (by the pride of New Brunswick, Julie Doiron), a staggering, almost lugubrious “Farewell Angelina” by William Fitzsimmons, and among all that beauty, a poignant, unsettling attack on “Gates Of Eden” by New Yorker DM Stith.
The only one with some sort of official Stamp of Approval, however, comes from another outsider, from “one of Ireland’s great lost songwriters” (Irish Times, February 2014), Jim Carroll, whose majestic, driven, layered labour of love is even on the highest stage for a while – as an audio stream at bobdylan.com.
Marc Carroll
Non-competitive are amusing, incomprehensible covers from Scandinavia; a solid Danish translation by Steffen Brandt, “Porten Ind Til Himlen” and a freakier one by Norwegian weirdo Oddvar Torsheim, “Lukk opp, lukk opp”.
And above all categories towers the jazz trio that demonstrates the profound truth of Dylan’s words from Chronicles (“Musicians have always known that my songs were about more than just words”): Michael Moore’s Jewels and Binoculars. The trio has produced more Olympic Dylan covers. “Floater”, “Visions Of Johanna”, perhaps the finest cover ever of “I Pity The Poor Immigrant” – and their graceful, thoroughly elegant and heartfelt “Gates Of Eden” also deserves a place of honour among them.
At times I think there are no words.
Jewels and Binoculars
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:
We enjoyed doing that one so much we thought we’d inflict another on you. This time, the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance – 1980.
And this time Bob won with “Gotta Serve Somebody”
This was the first year for this category and Bob picks it up!
It was certainly a more produced sound than we often got with Bob. And of course it was picked up as part of the start-up of the “Christian project” as I once saw it noted, which really did give me a smile.
And Bob’s singing is particularly well-honed for this song – it sounds like he’s really worked at what he wants to do here, rather than just trying it out with the band and picking the best of a few run throughs. And that’s really important with this strophic form, with such a simple two line chorus. Indeed, given that it is purely strophic, there is no variation in the middle 8. Everything comes from the smoothness of the performance, the entertaining lyrics, and that beautiful variable organ throughout. Even the fade out appears to be well-manicured – how very unlike Bob (on occasion).
But what really tells us that this is a sublime performance is the fact that the oh-so-simple chorus comes into the song no less than seven times. Now without a beautiful, controlled arrangement, that will not hold – the audience will move on, easily bored. But not here, the sound is so beguiling, one just wants to stay (even if it is simply to find out if the song tells us any more about the choosing that has to be done – which in reality it doesn’t.)
Thus the message of the lyrics is so utterly simple: “you are going to have to serve somebody.” And that someone turns out to be the Devil or God. There’s not attempt to put forward the argument; it is a statement. So the notion that one can simply have a life in which one aims to be a jolly nice person, being kind, helpful others, doing positive things, simply isn’t on the cards. It is not that such a life is a bad thing, but rather it is, in this song, impossible. It just isn’t on.
Which, to my mind, although probably no one else’s, makes the lyrics a complete load of turnips. But well, that’s just me.
The song won the award, and yes one can see why. But the real interest comes when one starts to listen to the rest of the nominees. So here we go…
Joe Jackson – Is She Really Going Out With Him?
This was his first release I think, and so before he moved into a jazz sound, but it is a very attractive piece; the producers and musicians seem really to have worked together to take what could have just been an ordinary pop song and make it into a really unusual performance. But perhaps not a strong enough song to take the judges by storm.
Robert Palmer – Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)
I always had time for Robert Palmer although I’d hardly pick this as one of his greats. If I had to nominate something from him across his career, and particularly as this is Untold Dylan I think I’d come up with
but then that wasn’t on the list of nominations for the judges. It’s good it’s fun, but it is not earth shattering or new, in the way that I think Dylan’s performance was. Everyone knew what Dylan could do but they would not have heard him perform like that before and I think that influenced the judges.
Rod Stewart – Blondes (Have More Fun)
This too, is very much of its era – its a great dance song (although sadly in those days film producers didn’t approve of dancers actually expressing what was in the song so I guess only actual dancers will appreciate what I mean).
But this isn’t an award for a video, it is an award for a song, and really, they seriously thought this could win? There’s nothing wrong with it, but surely no one was nominating this as the stand out moment of the year. Were they? (Perhaps they were – if so, these were sad days indeed).
I wonder if they managed to get insurance on that double bass.
Frank Zappa – Dancin’ Fool
Aaron: What an odd selection of tracks here!! Bob and Frank not hugely respected for their vocals and what is that Rod Stewart track doing there – the video was played on the first day of MTV but the single only reached 63 directly after the number 1 smash Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?
Robert Palmer’s hit top 10 in the US but outside the top 60 in the UK. The Joe Jackson track was his debut single and in my opinion it’s a real good ‘un!
Tony: I agree it is very odd to have Zappa and Dylan here. Zappa was the artist I went to see every time he came to the UK – and I’d disagree about his singing actually, but what really made his music so incredibly important for me was the intricacies of the compositions and arrangements. The only rock musician I can remember playing a piece on stage in 7/4 time.
The complexity of “Dancin Fool” is extraordinary, and his range of styles within the song is remarkable. He was also the only rock performer who I have seen who conducted his band on occasions. But then with four or five changes of time signature within one song it was totally necessary.
But in each case (Dylan and Zappa) it does seem to me that their originality has meant that there is no tradition started for others to take over. They are the two sublime figures of post-war popular music.
The award is for vocal performance, and I’d have given it to Frank because of the variety. If it had been for production, or the sound of the whole song, yep Bob would have won the day for me.
Probably a good job I’m never on the committee.
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Tony: Blimey (as we say in England) I wasn’t expecting this. Apparently this came out in 1967; listening to it without knowing the band or the date I wouldn’t have put it that early.
It seems to be a complete undermining of the essence of the of the song through the accompaniment – and yet now I come to think of it this is not the case because it is a song of goodbye, farewell, get lost, go away. It is just that Dylan treated it in a different manner in his recording, and that’s what I have always associated it with.
But as I think on lines like “strike another match,” yep, some of those comments are pretty cruel and nasty.
However, does this re-interpretation work? Well, obviously yes in the sense that it made me listen to the lyrics in a new way. But as a piece of music I would want to play again, or indeed play to my friends, no. So if any of my friends have got to this page and are thinking “Why have you put this up Tony?” the answer is, it was Aaron’s choice! As indeed most of the rest are – but I’ve come in with one of my own at the end.
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (1972)
My expectation was that we were going to be on safer ground here.
This was released in 1972, and as far as I can work out, it was the 30th new recording of the song. Quite amazing.
It’s much more approachable, and the instrumentation is once more unusual but this time not painful. Enjoyable with a few unexpected chords and a neat coda, but beyond that…. Hmmm…. Yes, I’d leave it playing, and if I was on the dance floor yes I’d have fun doing a modern jive interpretation. But am I going to play it again and suggest it to others?… No, perhaps it hasn’t really stood the test of time.
Link Wray (1979)
The drum roll at the start tells us we are yet again going off in a different direction – and the anger that is completely missing from Dylan’s original musical interpretation but which is in the lyrics, is again found here. Indeed the percussionist is having a great time. But I’m not sure the beautiful melody should be removed quite so much just to allow Link Wray to shout and declaim.
However he is a guitarist and a half and that instrumental break was really worth waiting for. Goodness I wish I could play a 10th as good as that. In fact I was sorry when the vocal verses returned. The change with the vagabond however, is clever and was unexpected. Really worth a listen.
Chocolate Watch Band (1966)
In this case, there’s been a lot of imagination put into how to treat this song and yes this is fine… but it’s not really taking me to that magical “somewhere else” that I somehow seem to demand of music these days. I really didn’t understand why it was necessary to shout out the title line several times at the end. True that is a reflection of what the lyrics say, but I got the impression he was just announcing that the recording was over to the engineer who was by this time hiding on the floor.
Falco (1985)
Interesting and enjoyable instrumentation, and then for no reason at all the singer shouts. Why? And then he says something after “gun” – I don’t know what. And then…
Well, no I really couldn’t stand it. It’s an effort that in my days as a lecturer (having failed to make it as a musician) I’d have marked down as “trying too hard” adding perhaps “without any good reason”. So no, I couldn’t play it through to the end. If you do, and something good happens after the “high heels” stuff, perhaps you could write in and let us know. That’s where I left it.
Echo & the bunnymen (2000)
A 21st century version, which takes us back a little to the original, which is good in the sense that I couldn’t have stood going any further in the direction Falco was taking us. And the accompaniment (on a synth? not quite sure) is ok but after a while, it is just… there.
However…
Although the mass of recordings of this song has slowed down, they are still continuing, and without Aaron’s permission I’ve had a little search for something that really does give me something new – remembering that I was alive and listening to music when the original came out. So it’s been with me for much of my life.
It was hard going – and normally I am not this picky. But I’ve found one version that really I can listen to all the way through, and indeed play more than once. Sorry to subvert your role Aaron, but this one really is something.
Roddy Hart and Gemma Hayes
To me this does meet our vision within the “Beautiful Obscurity” title for the series. And what makes this work so beautifully are the harmonies. Indeed if I were to put in a complaint is that we don’t have more harmonies. I don’t mind waiting until the end of the first line, and we do get more thereafter, but even so – the harmony singing is what takes this from “worthy of a second listen” right up to “put it on my song list in the car”. And you don’t get higher than that!
Do listen to this. It’s beautiful. Just as was Dylan’s original. This was recorded in 2011. It took 46 years, but it was worth it.
Editorial
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Bliss Carman was a pre-Modernist Canadian poet who in his day makes references the poetry of the ancient Greeks (like Sappho) with their visions of the Fields of Elysium. Carman does this in terms of the tenets of the Romantic poets and writers classified as Transcendentalists.
These literary artists believe in a unitary spiritual plane that lies beyond worldly existence though it pervades the fragmented beauty of Nature in the here-and-now; however, they prescribe to the hope of some kind of mystical restoration thereof after physical death.
Carman struggles with this idealistic perception due to the developments of modern science (like those of Charles Darwin) as to whether or not this eventual harmonization of mind, body, and soul be but wistful thinking:
Heart of mind, if all the altars
Of the ages stood before me
Not one pure enough or sacred
Could I find to lay this white, white
Rose of love upon
(Bliss Carman: Heart Of Mine)
The song lyrics below express similar frustration at the pursuit of pure love in an obviously flawed earthly existence:
Heart Of mine, go back home
You got no reason to wander, no reason to roam
Don't let her see, don't let her see that you want her
Don't push yourself over the line
Heart of mine
(Bob Dylan: Heart Of Mine)
The transcendental view concerning the possibility of a blissful afterlife, the narrator in the following song lyrics finds more dubious than does ‘feminine-feeling’ Bliss Carman:
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving them wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)
In spite of the out-of-hand dismissal thereof by most ‘high brow’ literary critics, the graduate of the University of New Brunswick’s imagistic and symbolic poetry hangs on in non-academic circles:
The racy smell of the forest loam
When the stealthy sad-heart leaves go home ....
These are the joys of the open road
For him who travels without a load
(Bliss Carman: The Joys Of The Open Road)
The song lyrics beneath, in the basement, mix-up archetypes and mythologies – from a Canadian band, the members thereof long-time associates of the man in the long black coat:
Take a load of Fanny
And you put the load right on me
I picked up my bag, and went looking for a place to hide
When I saw old Carmen and the Devil walking side by side
I said, "Hey Carmen, let's go downtown"
She said, "I gotta go, but my friend can stick around"
(The Band: The Weight)
In ancient Greek/Roman mythology, Adonis is the handsome mortal loved by both Aphrodite, the sex goddess, and Persephone, the queen of the underworld (she hides him down there); on his death, the blood of Adonis transforms into spring flowers spread by the wind:
The night can bring no healing now
The calm of yesterday is gone
Surely the wind is but the wind
And I a broken waif thereon
(Bliss Carman: The Windflower)
A sorrow expressed in the following song lyrics:
Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows
Too many people have died
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind
(Bob Dylan: Blowing In The Wind)
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With the success of Time Out of Mind, released in September 1997, which won three Grammy awards and Album of the Year, Dylan came powering into 1998 enjoying the comeback of his career. He ripped into his concerts like there was no tomorrow. There was a new energy and focus. Pretty much gone were the long epics and the wandering guitar breaks of the earlier nineties. His electric performances were pared down, hard-edged and tight, while his acoustic performances were as committed as ever.
Dylan was on a roll. My only complaint is that he only rarely pulled out the harmonica.
He did 110 concerts in 1998, but I’m going to concentrate on a few ace shows rather than attempt to play the field. Most commentators agree that the San Jose show on May 19th was outstanding, and I’ll be drawing heavily from that show, but his five day residency at Madison Square Gardens, New York (from 16th to 21st January) where he shared a billing with Van Morrison, is perhaps better known. My own favourite, after the San Jose show, is the Newcastle show (20th June), so I’ll be dipping into that as well.
Dylan continued to drip-feed new songs from the album, with, as far as I can tell, only two new songs introduced in 1998, ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ and ‘Million Miles’. ‘Lovesick’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’, however, became regulars on his setlist with ‘Till I Fell in Love with You’ and ‘Can’t Wait’ making occasional appearances.
Let’s start with ‘To Make You Feel My Love’. This of course became a huge hit for Adele, with some fans of the song not realising it was a Dylan composition. Adele’s version is so marvellous, it becomes hard to listen to how Dylan does it. It may be the saddest song on the album, a hopeless kind of love song full of forlorn avowals.
‘When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love’
I don’t think he ever did it better than this one, from the San Jose concert. The cracked voice and weariness are perfect for the song.
To make you feel my love
For ‘Million Miles’ we turn to the New York concerts (20th). This may well be Dylan’s jazziest composition, and wouldn’t have sounded out of place much earlier in the century, the late 1940s perhaps. Its skipping beat puts it in that era. It’s another song of hopeless love, when that gap between two people just can’t be bridged. You can be standing right next to somebody and still feel a million miles apart.
‘I'm drifting in and out of dreamless sleep
Throwing all my memories in a ditch so deep
Did so many things I never did intend to do
Well I'm trying to get closer, but I'm still
a million miles from you’
But there is something more going on here than just a yearning for a distant love. There’s a metaphysical anxiety and spiritual loss, an existential disorientation that characterises the whole album:
‘Well I don't dare close my eyes and I don't dare wink
Maybe in the next life I'll be able to hear myself think
Feel like talking to somebody but I just don't know who’
And again:
‘Well, there's voices in the night trying to be heard
I'm sitting here listening to every mind polluting word
I know plenty of people who would put me up for a day or two’
Million Miles
The same existential disorientation drives the Grammy award winning ‘Cold Irons Bound,’ only with a more desperate edge. ‘Cold irons’ refers to the metal manacles worn by prisoners and slaves. In our lost and disoriented condition we are little better than prisoners. We cannot escape the human condition:
‘Well, I'm waist deep, waist deep in the mist
It's almost like, almost like, I don't (even) exist
I'm twenty miles out of town, Cold Irons bound.’
Note the use of repetition here to drive it home.
And again:
‘Well the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads’
(Incidentally, in a little creative mishearing, I always thought the line went, ‘reality as always, has too many heads…’)
As I listened to this one from the San Jose show, I found myself admiring Dylan’s electric guitar work. Mr Guitar Man has been reined in, his playing minimal and concise. He’s not muddying the melodic waters with over complicated picking, as he too often does, but kicks the song along with some wonderfully spare, driving sounds. Everything here clicks, and the band has never sounded better; tight, integrated and compelling. This is rock music at its best, folks; a bit rough and punky (that hint of garage band sound) and hard-edged. Take a moment to appreciate the drumming. New drummer David Kemper proves his worth, as does guitarist Larry Campbell.
For my ear, this is much better than the murky, too cluttered, album version. I can’t help but think that this comes closest to the sound Dylan was after for this song.
Cold Irons Bound
Staying with the San Jose concert, and the theme of existential displacement, we turn to ‘Lovesick’, the song that kicks off the album. I was immediately hooked by that opening song, which was doubtless the idea, but, listening to these live performances, I’m beginning to understand why Dylan expressed reservations about Lanois’ production. The Lanois sound tends to smooth over the raw edges of the songs. Take the backslap out of Dylan’s voice and sharpen the sound and you have this:
Lovesick
It sounds spooky enough, as it should, without the backslap on his voice. It’s all about distance, feeling a million miles from everything. To the wandering ghost, everything is perceived at a distance: ‘in a meadow,’ ‘silhouettes in the window,’ and ‘a distant cry.’ There’s no rest from grief for the loveless:
‘My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin'’
“Till I Fell in Love with You,’ drives home the message of the album, that without love, either the human or spiritual kind, we are lost. Lost and insomniac. I was surprised to note how often sleeplessness comes up in these songs. Another song which finds the poet tired and wired.
‘I've been hit too hard
I've seen too much
Nothing can heal me now
But your touch’
There are good performances of the song from New York and Minneapolis (23rd October), but I’ve chosen this one from Springfield (2nd Feb)
Till I fell in love with you
Dylan worked hard on ‘Can’t Wait’ to get the sound he wanted, and would go on experimenting with the song in future years. In 1997/98 he was playing it pretty much straight from the album, minus Lanois’ embellishments. Waiting for love (or death perhaps) can be a soul destroying business. It’s a pity Dylan didn’t sing it more often in 1998. I had to go beyond my cluster of favourite concerts to find this one from the New London (CT) show, 14th January. Here we find both mind and heart at the end of its tether.
Can’t Wait
One of the features of 1998 is the pretty much unvarying setlist. The same six or seven core songs keep recurring, with a few strays and wild cards thrown into the mix. Dylan would often kick the shows off with either ‘Serve Somebody’ or ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie.’ The latter song, particularly, was a good hard-driving crowd warmer. If you can leave behind the adolescent whine of the album version (Blonde on Blonde 1966), you have a rocker that doesn’t sound too out of place among the Time Out of Mind songs. Failed love and capricious fate rule.
‘Well, I don't know how it happened
But the river-boat captain, he knows my fate
But everybody else, even yourself
They're just gonna have to wait’
Here it is from the San Jose show:
Absolutely Sweet Marie
And while we’re in the fast paced rock mood, let’s stay in the sixties with ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. In previous posts I’ve characterised this as a serious song pretending to be a throw-away rocker. To hell with this mad world; down Highway 61 anything is possible. Another San Jose kicker.
Highway 61 revisited
Another regular on the 1998 setlist is ‘Silvio’, the Robert Hunter/Dylan song. It appeared on Down in the Groove (1988), perhaps Dylan’s least regarded album. This is certainly the best performance of the song I have heard. It’s great to hear Dylan doing this song before he became tired of it, and the performances became rote. As with ‘Highway 61’, the speed of the song can obscure the cunning of the lyrics:
‘I can snap my fingers and require the rain
From a clear blue sky and turn it off again
I can stroke your body and relieve your pain
And charm the whistle off an evening train’
Wonderful. Or this:
‘Honest as the next jade rolling that stone
When I come knocking don't throw me no bone
I'm an old boll weevil looking for a home
If you don't like it you can leave me alone’
On Time Out of Mind, in the song ‘Not Dark Yet’, Dylan sings:
‘Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain’
This is not a new insight. In ‘Silvio’ back in 1988 we find:
‘I can tell your fancy I can tell your plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain’
Silvio
Staying with the electric mood, let’s finish this post with the last song from the San Jose concert, that glorious piece of irreverence ‘Rainy Day Woman’ from Blonde on Blonde. I don’t think any performance can quite match the screaming saxophone version from 1996 (See NET, 1996, part 4), but Dylan’s voice is better on this one. Everybody must have fun. Happy foot-tapping, and I’ll see you soon with more sounds from 1998.
Rainy Day Woman
Kia Ora
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At dawn my lover comes t me an tells me of her dreams
At times I think / there are no words, but these t tell
no truths,
Episode 6 of Season 1, “Crazy Hand Full Of Nothing” is the episode in which Walter White is definitely breaking bad. Until then, he has been a chemistry teacher with a cancer diagnosis who is desperate to make money to cover his medical bills by producing drugs; crystal meth to be precise. Reluctantly still, and he demands of his accomplice, his former pupil Jesse: no bloodshed. But now Jesse is in hospital, beaten up by drug dealer Tuco who has also stolen their just-produced pound of meth. Walter fills a bag with pieces of highly explosive fulminated mercury, goes to the lion’s den, blows up half the joint with only one piece, threatens Tuco with the rest and leaves with his money, plus compensation and the promise that Tuco will take two pounds of meth next week. Walter White’s transition is marked by the name with which he, for the first time, introduces himself at Tuco’s: “Heisenberg”.
At first glance, the name seems oddly chosen. Heisenberg was a physicist, not a chemist. But it is actually a very poetic choice; Walter White has become someone else – this is the same episode in which he shaves his head for the first time – and chooses “Heisenberg” perhaps because of a poetic interpretation of his Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never see the whole truth. Agreed, a poetic simplification of this pillar of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg proves that measuring, and indeed any observations at all, influence the system, and the outcome is therefore different from the same process without observation), but White’s train of thought is easy to follow. Fitting also to Walter’s musings on his own discipline: “Technically, chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change […] It is growth, then decay, then transformation.It is fascinating, really.”
Elvis Costello: Chemistry Class:
And a beautiful, elegant consequence of Heisenberg’s roots, as Werner Heisenberg himself analysed in an interview conducted by David Peat and Paul Buckley in the early 1970’s, as part of a CBC radio documentary series entitled Physics and Beyond: “My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. This gives a different attitude.” With which Heisenberg expresses his susceptibility to the conclusion of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the idea that we can never perceive the truth, but only shadows, reflections and echoes of reality – there are no truths in our world, in the world outside the gates of Eden.
In the remainder of the interview, Heisenberg builds a second bridge to the beautiful final couplet of Dylan’s song:
“The most important step was to see that our language is not sufficient to describe the situation. A word such as path is quite understandable in the ordinary realm of physics when we are dealing with stones, or grass, etc., but it is not really understandable when it has to do with electrons. […] The decisive step was to see that all those words we used in classical physics – position, velocity, energy, temperature, etc. – have only a limited range of applicability. The point is we are bound up with a language, we are hanging in the language. […] Words as position and velocity and temperature lose their meaning when we get down to the smallest particles.”
… there are no words, says Heisenberg, but these to tell what’s true. Language is even “a dangerous instrument”. Following Plato, Heisenberg thinks that only a retreat to the “language of mathematics”, to mathematical schemes, is pure enough to describe reality. And thus, coincidentally or not, touches on Dylan for the third time: “My songs are all mathematical songs.”
Unlike the first eight verses, the final couplet did not arise from one inspired flash. The manuscript reveals that Dylan has an overarching punchline à la “Desolation Row” and “Tombstone Blues” in mind, and also that he wants to make the lyrics “round”; after the opening line with “the truth does twist”, he wants to finish off with “no truths”. In fact, that is already fixed; the two lines remain unchanged in the end, the concluding “no truths” is already secured as well. Apparently, those two lines plus the outline absolutely have to be included, and at the moment the poet has no more time, or no more inspiration, for the completion of the lines in between. Anyway, somewhere between June and October ’64 it will eventually be finished:
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
It is a poetic ruse Dylan often uses, these mercurial years. In the last verse, the narrator is suddenly linked to a “you” or, as here, to a lover in the third person, and a possible overarching narrative is offered. In “Tombstone Blues”, he plays with the notion that all the preceding stanzas are incitements to a song to his beloved:
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
…as in “Desolation Row”, again out of the blue, a “you” appears plus the suggestion that all of the above is a letter to that “you”;
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the doorknob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
… and like that, this last verse of “Gates Of Eden” suddenly introduces “my lover”. And as elsewhere the poet offers “song” and “letter” as the binding factor, here he offers the key: “she tells me of her dreams” – the cowboy angel, the iron claws, the Golden Calf, the lonesome sparrow, the motorbike black Madonna, the pauper and the prince… all of them dream images. Perhaps even from Heisenberg’s dream, the dream of the Unified Theory, the theory that unites the fundamental theories; all the lies in the world added up to one big truth.
To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part XIII: Where did you sleep last night?
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“All directions at once” is a series which looks at Bob Dylan’s writing as it evolves over time, rather than focusing on individual songs or albums, or an individual theme through Bob’s career. The index of all the articles published so far is here.
My point of late in this series, is that Dylan was by the mid 1980s seriously looking for his new direction, or at least a new theme. Having written his last gospel song in 1981 (one of 23 songs that year) he slowed down a little, writing 17 songs in 1982/3 and 13 in 1984, but then upped the work rate to produce 27 in 1985. (His all time record you may recall was 36 in 1962.)
But that intensity of writing did not come out of a certainty of what he wanted to write about. Rather it was the opposite – Bob really was trying all sorts of ideas out as he was looking for a new direction.
Now I have already suggested that as early as 1984 Bob was struggling to find a direction but it is also important to remember the songs that we did get during this period, songs such as “Jokerman”, “I and I”, “Blind Willie McTell”, and “Foot of Pride” (among others) would certainly be described by some (or at least by me) as masterpieces. But it is interesting that those last two, which I know I am not alone in describing as absolute masterpieces, were not released by Dylan at the time.
And that is the irony of this period. He was searching for a new direction, but each time he created a work that could have led him into a new arena, a new style, a new approach… he walked away from it.
Now of course not everyone is going to agree with me as to what constitutes a masterpiece, and it is not the purpose of this exposition to examine in detail what makes one song a work of genius and another an interesting work, but not one of the highest order. I’ll leave that for another series.
Certainly I believe “I once knew a man” from 1984 falls into the category of songs which discovered a new direction in Dylan’s songwriting. Yet it was performed just once in rehearsal and lost thereafter. And if that had been a one off, we might have shrugged and suspected there was some flaw in the work that Dylan could see but us mere mortals could not, perhaps even accepting Heylin’s evidence-lacking assertion that it was someone else’s work that Dylan had re-arranged, the origins of which the fans who seek out such things were too lazy or too ignorant to find. But I see no reason for that view; I am sure it was a Dylan original.
And this approach of creating a masterpiece and then letting it go, continued into 1985. Of course this could just be me deliberately valuing songs that Dylan ignored, but again I find here another sublime piece of work. And yet having written the lyrics in 1985 for “Well Well Well,” the work in question, Dylan handed the music over to be finished elsewhere and seemed to take no further interest in the song.
Of course some of the songs Dylan wrote at this time did make it onto “Knocked out Loaded” and “After the Empire” but I’m often left with the feeling that if there could have just been a little more attention paid to each one, some of these would have become Dylan classics, rather than resting hidden, waiting for someone to champion their cause.
“Seeing the real you at last” is one such: a song which has more than enough originality and drive to have been recognised as an excellent original rock song. The lyrics do describe something unpleasant; the person who hides their personality, but it deals with it in an energetic way that I have never come across elsewhere.
Well, I sailed through the storm
Strapped to the mast
Oh, but our time has come
And I'm seeing the real you at last
Simple lines, but an image and a half.
And indeed I would say that the fact that in the midst of this period Bob did write some (rather strange and not too successful) songs with Gerry Goffin, suggesting he really didn’t quite know where to turn. As a result I get the feeling of a year that for much of the time could have been… it might have been…. something rather special.
True, “Maybe Someday” really is a stand out piece, not least because of its combination of energy and unusual rhythm effect from the percussion (something we also get with “Something’s burning baby” written in the previous year) which is simply not doing what you might expect. But I don’t think the recorded version we have is perfect as there is a bit too much do-wop from the female singers. Yet it is still a fabulous song.
But as noted above we do have Well well well. In this version the co-composer spends one minute 20 seconds chatting about the song (and why not; if I’d ever had the chance to put music to a set of Dylan lyrics, I’d still be there talking about five hours later) so you can flip forward if you just want to get to the music… And it sure is worth it.
Next on my list of the compositions that stand out from the rest this year comes “When the night comes falling from the sky” – one of Dylan’s epic recordings about the end of time which appeared on Empire Burlesque.
The title is one of those lines that can keep a person pushing forward and searching forever to find the origins – and that is exactly what the music gives us. That eternal search for personal answers. And quite a line to write after a year of working with others to try and find a new direction. Plus it is sung with certainty and enthusiasm.
And then of course, we have “Dark Eyes”. And suddenly Bob has taken a completely different direction – except for the fact that “When the night comes falling from the sky” has a certain link with other songs written around the time. “Dark Eyes” however is one of those Dylan songs that come out of nowhere, and indeed then seems to lead nowhere…
So, looked at this way, it was not such a bad year after all, especially if one can create lines such as…
I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls
and all I see are dark eyes
Oh my! Every time I hear those lines I just have to stop and look out of the window at the trees blowing in the wind and take time out to recover. It takes me back to an earlier song of this year “Seeing the real you at last” which has a lot of the drive and vigour that can announce a great Dylan song, but somehow seems to fall just a little short.
But really to understand what was going on with all these songs in 1985 we just have to look at what happened next, which is to say what did Dylan write in 1986. And it must be noted that several songs from this era have dates of composition that are uncertain, but even so we can get a view of what was going on.
On tour Dylan came up with one absolute stunner of a rock song…
https://youtu.be/k8w2JFJbESE
and a most staggering love song “To fall in love with you.”
So what was Bob up to here? He needed some more pieces for his albums, and here and there some real stunners popped up and were then simply abandoned. Quite why, of course, we don’t know. But they are remarkable pieces.
And indeed if we put together this abandoned pieces and combine them with a couple that did creep into an album, but never really gained full prominence, we do have an album’s worth…
I and I
Blind Willie McTell
Foot of Pride
I once knew a man
Seeing the real you at last
Well well well
When the night comes falling from the sky
Dark Eyes
Rock em Dead
To fall in love with you
Of course you may well disagree over what is and what is not a song worthy of inclusion in an album, and of course as I noted above, “When the night comes falling” did make it onto a contemporary album, as did “Dark Eyes.” But the rest were simply left, cast aside, abandoned.
I am not sure there was another period where Bob, (and of course this is just my opinion as a complete outsider), cast aside so many utter gems while clearly finding it difficult to write song of the brilliance that we had come to associate with him.
And even then it wasn’t all over, because the following year Dylan composed “Dignity” which was also abandoned for five years. It really was a strange time in terms of what Bob felt was worth putting on an album.
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Poet and writer Bayard Taylor, if the overuse of the rhyme ‘fire’/’desire’ be any indication, is at least aware of the poetry of pre-Romantic William Blake:
An example thereof:
Then to the savage race, who knew no world
Beyond the hunter's lodge, the council-fire
The clouds of grosser sense were sometimes furled
And spirits came to answer their desire
(Bayard Taylor: The Romance Of Maize)
An example of the same rhyme in the song lyrics below with regards to love between the sexes:
Baby, you can start a fire
I must be losing my mind
You're the object of my desire
(Bob Dylan: I Feel A Change Coming On)
Many of Bob Dylan’s songs show an avid interest in American history, literary and otherwise. The poet who pens the following lines comes out of the tradition born in the era of the American Romantic Transcendentalist writers that continues on by Walt Whitman.
Contends Bayard Taylor does with the discoveries by the science of evolutionary geology and biology during his day. ‘Social’ Darwinism arises to give support to the political agenda of jingoistic expansionism (perhaps a premonition of the invention of television, and with that technology comes the ‘Star Trek’ series):
Look up, look forth, and on
There's light in the dawning sky ....
To join and smite and cry
In the great task, for thee to die
And the greater task, for thee to live
(Bayard Taylor: The National Ode)
With end-rhyme ~ ‘cry’/’die’
Fom a Jungian perspective, Bayard Taylor’s influence is observed in the following song lyrics about art:
Tell old Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I'm not alone
That the hour has come to do or die
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)
With end-rhyme ~ ‘try’/’die’
Taylor’s poetry is influenced by a well-known British Victorian:
Theirs not to make reply
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die
(Alfred Tennyson: The Charge Of The Light Brigade)
With end-rhyme ~ ‘why’/’die’
The singer/songwriter often offers a darker view of American history, but the optimistic poetry of Bayard hangs in the background thereof:
Moan, ye wild winds around the pane
And fall, thou drear December rain
Fill with your gusts the sullen day
Tear the last clinging leaves away
Reckless as yonder naked tree
No blast of yours can trouble me
(Bayard Taylor: Moan Ye Wild Winds)
As in the following song lyrics:
The lights of my native land are glowing
I wonder if they'll know me next time 'round
I wonder if that old oak tree's still standing
The old oak tree, the one we used to climb
(Bob Dylan: Duquesne Whistle ~ Dylan/Hunter)
The symbol of a hardy oak spreading afar appears in the poetic lines beneath:
Till the bounty of coming hours
Shall plant, in thy fields apart
With the oak of Toil, and the rose of Art
Be watchful, and keep it so
(Bayard Taylor: The National Ode)
There’s an index to some of our more recent articles on the home page of the site, and more indexes below the picture of Bob, above. If you are searching for a particular item the search box top right can also be helpful. If you would like to contribute to this site please email Tony@schools.co.uk
This is a look at the Bob’s various Grammy nominations over the years, including the other nominees in the category and the winner (if not Bob). And as with other series that the two of us have engaged in together, while writing from different sides of the ocean, we’re going to explore every angle that happens to pop into our minds, whether it is about the song that won, or why we think the panel made the correct decision or come to that anything else that pops into our mind.
To be clear, this isn’t going to be a chronological run through each event. Instead we’ll just pick a year/category if something strikes Aaron (who is making the choices) as interesting and then as in other series (details at the end) Tony chimes in with a view.
So let’s start with Bob’s 1969 nomination for Best Folk Performance.
Winner: Judy Collins – Both Sides Now
Nominations:
Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding (album)
Peter, Paul & Mary – Late Again (album)
Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (album)
The Irish Rovers – The Unicorn (song)
Gordon Lightfoot – Did She Mention My Name? (album)
This was one of those odd categories where a nominee can be either a song or an entire album. So “Both Sides Now”… is a most staggeringly amazing song, worthy in my (Tony’s) view of award after award. But, could there be challengers, and if so, what version stands out?
The story is that the was inspired by a passage from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King: “I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”
And knowing it as I am sure we all do it can be quite a shock to hear what Ms Mitchell could do with it…
And here’s the problem, having heard the earlier versions throughout my life, it is a stunning shock and a half to be reminded of what the composer ultimately did with the song.
The critics who love to discuss finer art (as opposed to what just sounds good) hated the top 10 version, and it is reported that Joni Mitchell didn’t care for it much either. And although I am deeply moved by the composer’s rendition of her own work (see later), I would also admit to enjoying the pop version. It’s been part of my life for a long as I can think.
Since then everyone’s had a go from Frank Sinatra to Leonard Nimoy… but please do relax because I’m not putting that edition up. Instead, to move on to the other nominees…
The PP&M album “Late Again” which was nominated contains a couple of Dylan covers. One is “I shall be released” which for me (Tony) is destroyed by its over the top production. May the Almighty save us from arrangers who do this sort of this! PPM never deserved to be treated this way – they had enough natural talent.
But the reverse is true with “Too much of nothing”. I read a report that said that Bob was outraged by this performance and refused to deal with the band again… but Bob recorded two different versions of the song. One takes us to the verge of insanity, the other has strong similarities to Bob’s own recording. I’m choosing not to believe the story.
Looking back I can’t think that the PPM album has really stood the test of time but that song is still enjoyable.
The Irish Rovers
Now I really am lost. If you were on a jury and you were judging these songs against each other, on what basis do you work? How do you judge this song against what we have heard before? I can’t even begin to think – and I am really not wanting to give a view of this nomination for fear that I have simply failed to understand what was going on.
So next the Incredible Strong Band, the centrepiece of the album being …
“A Very Cellular Song”
I think I still have this album in my house among the collection of LPs – “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter,” – and I absolutely adored the band, going to see them a few times. What I loved was that they took us in a totally new direction with amazing, stunning musical ability, that made me realise that I wasn’t anything like as good as I thought I was. Just listen to the harmonies in the track above, and then get caught out by the extraordinary lyrics…
You know it ate all the children when they wouldn't be good
Goodnight, goodnight
Play the whole album – for me it is as fresh now as it was all those centuries ago (and no I am not going to reveal my age).
Gordon Lightfoot – The Last Time I saw Her Face
Of course this is exquisite, it is after all Gordon Lightfoot. And indeed I recall Bob performing “Shadows” and “I’m not supposed to care” – and in fact the two of us have done and article on Bob and Gordon.
So it is against this line up that we place Bob’s JWT album which of course you will know and we have covered in depth. You’ll know also it came after Blonde on Blonde and was a shock to most of us, but a very welcome shock to many, and was very highly rated. Such things as we know and can guess tell us that it was written very quickly, that the minimalist band was taught the songs in the studio as they went along, and that at the end they had run out of material but didn’t have enough for a whole album, so Bob slipped in a couple of country songs.
The song everyone now knows, Dylan fan or not, is of course Hendrix playing the Watchtower – one of the few songs (perhaps the only song) where Dylan adopted the cover version for himself to play at gigs. (If you know of others, please do tell me although preferably without ticking me off for my lack of knowledge. If there are several we could do a series).
And because of that I am going (yet again) to sneak in not an original from the album (because you know that any way) but a cover version which I’ve highlighted so many times, and of which, if you are a regular reader, you will be bored stiff. But I’m not.
Should Bob have won the award? I am not at all sure that the album trumps the magnificence of “Both Sides Now” – that is one of those songs that just goes beyond all heaven and earth, by-passes reality and gives us a hint of a life beyond. Much as I love Bob’s music, “Both Sides Now” is one of those amazing moments in music that still surpasses everything.
Below is the version I grew up with and loved with all my heart, wishing that somehow the Almighty (which even then I didn’t believe in) had given me the talent to be able to write like this. This song, and this recording, still stirs me emotionally, and can take me to tears of joy and pleasure.
It is a monument in popular music. They can play this at my funeral – which I do hope won’t be for quite a while yet.
No, Bob Dylan did not convert to the Islamic religion, but he’s apparently been influenced by the albeit western translations (ie, Fitzgerald/Khayyam) of the mystic writings of Persian inner-looking poets who fear not death nor the metaphor:
The lyrics below might be described as wtitten by a Zoroastrian “Sufi” poet:
Out of your love the fire of youth will rise
In the chest, visions of the soul rise
If you are going to kill me, kill me, it is alright
When a friend kills, a new life will rise
(Mawlana Rumi: Out Of Your Love ~ translated)
Take what you can gather from coincidence – the above flow-of-life message is not that unlike the one darkly delivered in following song lyrics:
Ramona, come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise
(Bob Dylan: To Ramona)
Clear it be though that the eastern mystic poet of yore values the spiritual ‘light’ carried by the transcendental power of music, and words:
Oh music is the meat of all who love
Music uplifts the soul to realms above
The ashes glow, the latent fires increase
We listen, and are fed with joy and peace
(Mawlana Rumi: Remembered Music ~ translated)
A similar theme depicted, upbeat and earth-bound, in the music and lyrics below:
The meat you cook for me is bloody rare
It's more than flesh and blood can bear ...
Take the saddle off your horse
And give yourself a chair
(Helena Springs: More Than Flesh And Blood Can Bear ~ Dylan/Springs)
Again, that regenerative motif proffered beneath:
Don't let me drift to far
Keep me where you are
Where I will always be renewed
And that what you've given me today
Is worth more than I can pay
(Bob Dylan: I believe in you)
Below, angst-ridden Rumian thoughts tread through the song lyrics:
When I awoke the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
(Grateful Dead: Dire Wolf ~ Hunter/Garcia)
