Some analysts of the songs by Bob Dylan have pointed out that the key to breaking the secret “code” hidden in a number of his lyrics is to realize that the words therein are those spoken by none other than Jesus Christ.
Other ‘Dylanologists’ have disputed this assertion, but Untold researchers have uncovered proof that this ‘theory’ is essentially correct.
The story uncovered be like a movie that stars Humphrey Bogart as Christ and Ingrid Bergman as ‘Spanish’ Mary.
In a cave near the Black Sea is found the Holy Grail which contains fragments of Dylan songs written when he travels back in time.
As we have already noted, these fragmented manuscripts, backed up by recent songs, reveal that Jesus and the pregnant Mary Magdalene escape from Mexico, and make their way to Morocco.
Pursued they are by religious authorities; they separate and decide to meet up in Tangiers.
Part of a song, the fragments thereof pasted back together, shows that the couple have tough times before they are able to settle down quietly in Morocco.
(Some analysts of the song quoted below – revived later on – relate it to the movie “Bend Of The River” that stars James Stewart, but that just goes to show you how far off an interpretation can be):
Well, I gonna quit this baby talk now
I guess I should have known
I got troubles, I think maybe you got troubles
I think maybe we'd better leave each other alone
(Seeing The Real You At Last)
Troubles indeed – Jesus and Mary’s child creates a biological line of descent for the adherents of the Christian faith to follow.
The traditional foundation ‘rock’ of the established church is shattered all to hell:
And I say unto thee, "That thou are Peter
And upon this rock I will build my church
And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it"
(Matthew 16: 18)
Be that it may, another restored piece of a manuscript that’s stuffed in the Holy Grail suggests that Jesus is on his way to Morocco to join Magdalene there:
Pretty Mary
Don't be lonely
Don't be cool
You're my only destination
And I'm coming for you
(Pretty Mary)
A lot of this information about the life of Jesus and Mary is swept under the carpet, never revealed.
But now our readers know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is addressing Mary Magdalene in songs like the one quoted beneath:
Kick your shoes off, do not fear
Bring that bottle over here
I'll be your baby tonight
(I'll Be Your Baby Tonight)
You can find details of some of our recent articles and series on the home page
Well, the last I heard of Arab, he was stuck on a whale
That was married to the deputy sheriff of the jail
It is an image that is engraved in the collective memory: Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, stuck on Moby Dick. Peck himself, though, was hardly satisfied with his role in John Huston’s classic (1956). He did not quite understand why director Huston did not take on the role – partly because he thought himself too young to play the old, bitter Ahab. He still thinks so twenty years later, when Spielberg asks permission to use some scenes in Jaws. Robert Shaw is intended to watch the film and laugh at the inaccuracies. But Peck obstructs it; he is still “uncomfortable with his performance”. Huston thinks differently. A quarter of a century later, looking back in the long interview in American Film (September 1980), he is still full of praise:
“I liked him and I liked the film. Still do. I just saw it again the other day. As a matter of fact, I think that Greg is quite remarkable. He’s not the ranting, raving psychotic of the book.”
We owe the chilling, dramatic death scene to scriptwriter Ray Bradbury. And then probably to his troubles with Melville’s undisputed masterpiece. Moby Dick is his first screenplay, written just before his breakthrough with his pièce de résistance Fahrenheit 451, the immortal dystopia that paved the way for modern science fiction into the literary mainstream, the work that predicts ATMs, earbuds and bluetooth and that has since been filmed three times, rewritten for the stage and made into one of the first interactive computer games (1984).
But John Huston is not yet familiar with that work when he asks Bradbury for his film;
“It all came about because I gave him a copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun in early 1953, little realizing that one story, “The Fog Horn,” read by Huston, would cause him to call me to his hotel in August of that year.”
Bradbury reveals this in his wonderful, semi-autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale (subtitle: “A novel of Ray Bradbury’s adventures making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland”, 2002). He wrote it, as he claims, partly because Katherine Hepburn in her autobiographical account of her experiences with John Huston, The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (1987), is so reticent, talks so little about Huston’s ugly sides:
“They said that they had asked Hepburn to provide more material, but she had refused. Faced with this, after many years I said to myself: Well, I think I know Huston as well as anyone and I will try and do a book which is fair, which presents the Huston that I loved along with the one that I began to fear on occasion.”
Bradbury occasionally clashes with Huston, if his book is to be believed, but both he and the legendary director can appreciate that. In any case, the first encounter is already unorthodox:
“When I arrived at his hotel he put a drink in my hand, sat me down, stood over me, and said, “How would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay for Moby Dick?”
I was stunned. My response was, “I’ve never been able to read the damned thing.”
Huston, in turn, was stunned. He’d never heard anything like that from any screenwriter.”
Huston can appreciate the frankness, gives Bradbury homework, and the young writer struggles through the monumental tome that night. “I read as much as I could and went back the next day and took the job.” This superficial knowledge probably also explains the most impressive scene in the film, Ahab’s death. The oppressive image of the vengeful captain, entangled in the lines, stuck on the whale, does not appear in the book. Well, it does, but in a different context, and not with Ahab:
“Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.” (Chapter 135. The Chase.—Third Day.)
So, the corpse of Parsee, Ahab’s unlucky harpooner, that is. Ahab himself basically just disappears into the depths without much ado;
“The flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.”
Bradbury actually uses the portrayal of Parsee’s death for Ahab’s film death, and successfully so – in the collective memory, that is what Ahab’s death is; entangled in the lines, stuck on the whale. And, as the opening of the last verse of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” reveals, Dylan too has Ahab’s film death in mind, not the “actual” Melville-death. Presumably, the then 23-year-old Dylan has not yet read the damned thing either. As late as in 1985, when Scott Cohen interviews him extensively for Spin Magazine, he still seems to have the film version, and not the book version, in mind:
“Then you got someone like Herman Melville who writes out of experience–Moby Dick or Confidence Man. I think there’s a certain amount of fantasy in what he wrote. Can you see him riding on the back of a whale? I don’t know.”
… apparently unswervingly convinced that there is an Ahab-on-the-back-of-Moby scene in the book.
Thirty years after that interview, and fifty years after 115th Dream, when he delivers his Nobel Prize speech, Dylan finally has done his homework, with the help of SparkNotes: “Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.” Alright, Ahab is not really “thrown out of his boat”, but pulled out, “shot out of the boat”, as Melville says through Ishmael, but the thrust is right.
“That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs,” Dylan says a little later in the same speech about Melville’s Moby-Dick, by which he obviously means more than a single name-dropping like in “Lo And Behold” from The Basement Tapes (“What’s it to ya, Moby Dick? This is chicken town”). And it’s probably true that themes from the book permeate his songs. But on the other hand: Murders In The Rue Morgue, Juarez, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle and of course Moby Dick … John Huston’s filmography has left more than one mark on the oeuvre of cinephile Dylan as well. And so did Gregory Peck, for that matter; Dylan extensively pays tribute to his Gunfighter in 1985’s “Brownsville Girl”. That damned thing he has seen more than once, obviously.
To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 8: The historians’ delight
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Our series looking at Dylan’s songs in the order they were written, to try and ascertain his thoughts and the reasons why he wrote these particular songs, has brought us to the end of the 1990s. The most recent articles were
In the last couple of articles in this series we have seen Bob write and record the music for “Time out of Mind” through 1996 and 1997. Having recorded the album, he stopped writing except for one song in 1999: “Things have changed” for the movie “Wonder Boys”.
(PS – leave the video running after the song ends).
It was released in 2000 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Golden Globe Award also for Best Original Song.
When Bob received his Oscar he called it a song that “doesn’t pussyfoot around or turn a blind eye to human nature”.
And indeed, when has Dylan ever pussyfooted around or turned a blind eye? From the moment that Hollis Brown pulled the trigger , or if you prefer, from the moment the night started playing tricks when you are trying to be so quiet, everything has mostly been falling apart rather than falling into place, within the world of Dylan lyrics. There have been happy, jolly interludes from “Country Pie” to “Make you Feel my Love” and the like, and the 18 months period of writing songs about Christianity, but they were interludes. The feeling I get is that Dylan is at his absolute best when telling us that the world is not how it generally is portrayed, but is in reality something much darker.
And I think it is helpful when contemplating the masterpiece that is “Things have changed”, to remember that the previous compositions were indeed those from that most troubled and troubling album “Time out of mind”. True Bob had just had another break from writing but the previous compositions could be summarised by the line that “I was all right til I fell in love with you.” Or if you want the line of the song at the heart of that year’s writing, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
Indeed Bob’s vision of the world was very clearly expressed through lines such as
I'm walkin'
Through streets that are dead
Walkin'
Walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin'
Although the feel of “Things have changed” is different from “Love sick” the negative vision of human existence within “Things have changed” continues the theme from the album. After all you can’t get much more negative than the repeated line, “I used to care but things have changed” (apart of course from, “It’s not dark yet…”)
And if that doesn’t convince you consider…
Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose
It is not just the lyrics that give us this darkness, but also the way Bob sings the song. He’s not trying to convince us that his interpretation of reality is right, but rather is simply painting the world as it is. It is not up for discussion, this is the world, take it or leave it.
And this approach is all the more shocking because here is the man who, whether he agreed with the notion or not, was the voice of a generation who wanted the world changed, who wanted more social justice, who wanted an end not just to war but to the war industry, who was looking forward to dancing on the graves of the manufacturers of the weaponry of war.
Yet in a most curious way we have also gone back to “Don’t think twice it’s all right”. Because there really wasn’t any use in wondering why things happened as they do, but one was simply to accept the world as it goes along. Thus caring about the world and the people in it, is pointless. Did the man within “Don’t think twice” actually care? Not really. No more than the man who wrote “Ballad in Plain D” actually care.
Of course this is not to say that just because Dylan writes something in a song he actually believes it; there is after all such a thing as fiction. But what we do now hear is that he certainly doesn’t care now. And when he writes an album in which most of the theme is not caring, things really are pretty bleak.
In effect we are once again in the reality in which people come and go, talking but saying nothing. The past has not yet happened yet. The future was yesterday. I am you, you are him, he is not. Dylan’s subconscious is perhaps one more time taking him back to TS Eliot
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains...
So we have this dark image of a worried man who used to care but now… well now he’s just worried – and who would not be when (and please excuse the repeated quote, but it is, I feel, the very heart of the song) he is…
Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose
This is not the Darkness, it is almost as if one is standing outside the Dark looking in, for somehow in “Things have changed” there is a level of abstraction and removal from the real world which makes the song even more frightening than Not Dark Yet.
As a result of such negative feelings, we might have expected another long pause from Bob the songwriter, but no, in 2001 he wrote the “Love and Theft” an album for which he won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
But in the year of writing that album, and as unpredictable as ever he started out with an instrumental (King of Kings) for Ronnie Wood’s album, when seemingly Wood was expecting Dylan to produce a song with lyrics.
However having got that out of the way, the real songwriting started again and 12 songs followed before the end of the year. We were back to Bob the songwriter, working away, creating an album.
And interestingly, given the negative thoughts of both the last album collection and “Things have changed”, this was in fact Bob’s most productive spell since 1990 when he wrote the Red Sky songs.
So perhaps it is not too surprising that with “Summer Days” the first of the group to be written we get a straight 12 bar song in the classic format – a return to the roots if ever there was one, and as good a way as any to get going when an old blues man has decided to write another album.
And just to push home the message that the basic musical concept of the blues is good enough to express all that needs to be expressed, that was followed by another three chord piece, “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, taking us into the world of Lewis Carol (although opinion is divided on this).
The website Bob Dylan Song Analysis, for example, says of this piece, “The song deals with doctrine, both Judeo-Christian and Buddhist, while also being in debt to traditional nursery rhyme. The themes are love and theft, as one might expect from the album title, as well as desire, suffering, and redemption.
“Stylised characters and third person narrative initially lull the listener into imagining a comfortable distance between him and the song’s fictional world of bitterness and betrayal. We perhaps don’t even notice the descriptions which place the protagonists as much in our world as in that of the bible….
“By the end of the song Tweedle Dum has not developed morally. Rather than making up for the sin committed in Eden, he’s presented as compounding it. In Eden they were throwing knives at a tree. Now, in the land of Nod, Tweedle Dee’s innocent use of ‘throw’ in ‘Throw me something …’, reminds us of this.”
The article in Wikipedia says, “The opening track, “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”, includes many references to parades in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where participants are masked, and “determined to go all the way” of the parade route, in spite of being intoxicated.”
So we have those two options, plus numerous others, but, however you perceive the song, the world it portrays seems to have fallen apart. That negative vision of humanity once expressed in the phrase “the world gone wrong” is still there, overseeing everything
One is a lowdown, sorry old man
The other will stab you where you stand
“I’ve had too much of your company,”
Says Tweedle-dee Dum to Tweedle-dee Dee
The negative themes continued with “Honest with Me” which was written next… a lost love song which has moments of Tom Thumb’s Blues in it; these are songs of disaffection and disorientation. In short, we are still with “Things have changed”.
But then, having taken characters from Lewis Carrol, for the next composition Bob takes lines from Leroy Carr’s Blues before Sunrise”, a 1930s classic to create “Lonesome Day Blues.” And indeed if one wants to portray the world in a negative way, what better a model than the old blues songs?
After that, the notion of borrowing from the past continued, as for “Bye and Bye” Bob borrowed from a Billie Holiday song. And I feel, when listening to the songs in the order they were written, by now he was certain of what he was doing on this album. For with “Floater” the next track written, he goes overboard on the borrowing, with music taken directly from “Snuggled On Your Shoulders” by Lombardo/Young and lyrics taken from Junichi Saga’s novel Confessions of a Yakuza (translated by John Bester). Maybe after his Academy Award he just felt he could do anything he wanted to, and certainly given the list of his songs composed thus far, who could argue with that?
https://youtu.be/T6KDJtgvxaU
I’ll continue looking at this collection of songs in the next article in the series.
There are details of some of our recent articles on the home page, and some of our series in the links below the picture at the top of the page.
Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan drops a big clue concerning the real story behind the biblical Jesus in a recent song that he writes:
I searched the world over
For the Holy Grail
I sing songs of love
I sing songs of betrayal
(False Prophet)
We’ve decided it’s the appropriate time for the Untold Dylan Corporation to open it’s massive vaults, and discuss with readers some of the fragmented manuscripts of songs penned by time-traveller Bob Dylan.
Our weary and world-wandering archaeologists discover the manuscripts in a cave near the Black Sea.
Now in the Untold vaults be the genuine Holy Grail, and engraved on the goblet are symbols, including the Eye of Horus, that tell the actual story of Jesus Christ and ‘His companion’ Mary Sophia Magdalene.
Inside that Holy Grail stuffed are a number of song lyrics with music notated on parchments that our linguistic and music specialists piece back together.
We are not sure what language that the time-transported Dylan uses, but our experienced experts nevertheless decode the meaning of the words.
The key to deciphering the parchment lyrics is the realization that Jesus is speaking the words written down by Bob Dylan.
One of the songs is very similar to one still sung today, but in the discovered original lyrics the gender of the child is female; the baby’s named Sophia.
Jesus prays to his Father in Heaven to protect the girl that He and Mary produce:
For her age, she's wise
She's got her mother's eyes
There's gladness in her heart
She's young, and she's wild
And my only prayer
Is if I can't be there
Lord, protect my child
(Lord Protect My Child)
It’s quite clear from above lyrics that the guardians of the Christian canon are on Jesus/Dylan’s trail in America, and that their intention is not full of love.
What happens is encoded via allegory within the lyrics of a song written in the present time.
One of the high priests sent out by the established Church to assassinate both Jesus and the pregnant Magdalene is gunned down.
It’s claimed by the shooter that Jesus fires the shot:
Was it me that shot him down in the cantina
Was it my hand that held the gun
Come, let us fly, my Magdalena
The dogs are barking, and what's done is done
(Romance In Durango)
After a short gun battle with a sheriff’s posse, in which Jesus is wounded, the Spanish-speaking cowboy Christ and Magdalene sail off to southern France, and eventually end up together in Morocco.
So it’s for good reason, as recorded by the time-traveller, that Jesus decides to say little about His sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.
A song placed in the Holly Grail that we put back together (what remains of it anyway) reads like this:
'Tis not of me to talk absurd
No rumour do I carry
No, I'll not give you one word
But for the love of Spanish Mary
A full index to all 50 previous articles in the series is given here.
By Mike Johnson (kiwipoet)
The first three posts covering the year 2000 of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour were focused on the Rock Dylan, and we saw some remarkable vocal performances from the jazzy ‘If Dogs Run Free’ to the ripping rocker like ‘Wicked Messenger.’
Dylan brought that same vocal clout to his acoustic songs, delivering full-throated, powerful performances of his early acoustic work. Gone is the thin, nasal whine of his youth. Bring on the full-throated baritone. Those who think Dylan can’t sing might have problems adjusting to performances such as this ‘Desolation Row’ from London, 6th October. I’ve never heard him belt out the song like this before. I invite you to listen to the remarkable vocal performance of the ‘superhuman crew’ verse that starts at 5.28 mins. He flings the words out as if from a high pressure jet and is rewarded by an appreciative audience.
Desolation Row (A)
You’d be hard put to find a better performance of the song. Although I do hark back to the 1995 performance in which he sings all the verses, and plays the harp as well, I concede that this one is the most urgent and vocally powerful.
Compare that to this one from Anaheim (10th March). The performance is softer, not quite so hard-driven, but with a trembling intensity.
Desolation Row (B)
It might be a good idea to pause at this point to notice that I am constantly drawn to the same concerts for my examples. Anaheim is the odd one out, being the first concert of the year in the U.S. The others, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, London are from the European and British leg of the tour. Cardiff gets particularly high praise from the commentators, but I think the two London concerts have more vigorous performances. Of course I’ve had to go beyond those concerts to find some of the songs; George of the second American leg and Dresden from the first European leg.
It’s to Cardiff, however, that we’re headed for the next one, a warm performance of ‘Don’t Think Twice’, another from Dylan’s stable of regulars, songs that never drift too far from his setlists. The Cardiff audience is in a receptive mood, and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ is greeted like an old friend. It’s a sad song with a jaunty rhythm, best played up tempo as Dylan does here.
One of the bonuses of listening to these live, mostly audience recorded performances is being able to tune in to the rapport between the performer and the audience. Dylan is often accused of ignoring his audience, not talking to them and so on, and while there is some truth in that, what we hear in many of these recordings is Dylan playing to, and in response to, audience reactions. The warm bond between audience and performer is a part of the pleasure in listening to the Cardiff recordings. There is a roar of appreciation when he produces the harmonica and respectful quiet for the whimsical solo he plays. The slow, drawn out ending is greeted ecstatically.
Don’t think twice (A)
That rapport with the audience is not confined to Cardiff, or the other UK concerts. Here’s the same song from George (18th June) on the second leg of the American tour. It’s very similar to the Cardiff performance, but I’m including it here because, to my mind, the George performance has the edge on the more famous Cardiff one. We can say that Dylan is not just playing the song, he’s playing the audience.
Don’t think twice (B)
‘Blowing in the Wind’ is another regular. Having heard this song many times, and introduced it many times in this series, I’m still struck by the underlying pathos of the song. The questions asked in the song strike at our conscience, but the answers are whirled away by forces seemingly beyond our control. The song became an anthem of the protest movement, but in its sadness, it doesn’t lead any battle charge.
Dylan is well aware of its status as an anthem, as this performance demonstrates. I prefer these more nostalgic versions to the strident performances of 1974 and the Rolling Thunder tour, as they are more in tune with the song’s underlying melancholy. This one, again, is from Cardiff.
Blowing in the wind (A)
The potential of the song to be soft and intimate is evident in this performance from Dresden, 24th May. It sounds like he’s almost whispering the verses into our ears.
Blowing in the wind (B)
Or he can take it from the soft and intimate to the forthright with an edge of outrage (London, 5th Oct).
Blowing in the wind (C)
One of the surprises of 2000 was the appearance of ‘Chimes of Freedom’, often thought of as a strong protest song, from The Other Side of Bob Dylan (1964) and rarely performed. It is a protest song in that it is a ringing declaration of sympathy for all those alienated from society one way or another.
‘Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused,
strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe’
But it is also a song that relates the story of a mystical revelation.
‘Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing’
Dylan’s commitment to freedom does not come from some political ideology or doctrine but from direct revelation.
‘Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder’
Those ‘majestic bells of bolts’ and the ‘mad mystic hammering’ illuminate the soul as well as the human condition: ‘the disrobed faceless forms of no position’.
It’s a grand and ambitious song with a slow tempo and six long verses, no easy song to deliver live. Despite Dylan’s fine singing, this is not the most compelling performance of the song. He fumbles the lyrics at the beginning, leaves out two verses, and only just seems to catch the lyrics in the last verse. This redacted version gives us the flavour of the song, but not the total experience. (West Lafayette, 2nd Nov)
Chimes of Freedom
Staying in the protest vein, we come once more to ‘Masters of War’. This has the same arrangement that Dylan evolved in the early 90s, a quieter, more minimal, threatening version, restrained in its anger. I’d like to refer the reader to my discussion of the Dorian Mode in which the song is written in NET, 1999, part 4. This may well be Dylan’s most explicit and unambiguous anti-war song. Another powerful performance, this one from Dresden.
Masters of War
Dylan’s most comprehensive and scathing attack on the world of false appearances remains, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, 1964, a song both complex and dramatic. I’m not sure, however, that the light, skipping beat Dylan developed to carry the song serves it best. These complex images need to flash by. It needs to be fast and overwhelming. It needs to rip along, not bounce. Maybe I’m getting spoiled. I can always go back and listen to the scintillating performance from 1990 (see NET, 1990, Part 1). This one does have its virtues: Garnier’s bowed double bass to provide that dark undertone; the musical restraint during the verses; Dylan’s singing, expressive and powerful; the leap into the chorus with the drums… What am I complaining about? Maybe I just think this is not a song that should tempt the audience into clapping along…
It’s all Right Ma
If ‘It’s All Right Ma’ unhinges us with its destabilizing imagery, ‘Mama You’ve Been on my Mind’ reassures us with its familiarity. We all know what it’s like to have someone on our minds, someone we can’t forget, someone who makes us nostalgic for happy times spent together, happy times that are no more.
The very ordinary nature of the sentiment, and the commonplace phrasing and rhymes, might fool us into thinking that the song is ordinary too, but it’s not. It captures a subtle feeling perfectly, with great precision. It’s not despair, but rather a little niggle, a touch of rueful sadness:
‘Perhaps it is the color of the sun cut flat
An' cov'rin' the crossroads I'm standing at
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind’
Incidentally, Christopher Ricks (Dylan’s Vision of Sin) contrasts what he calls ‘the impassive calm of mind’ in the line ‘the crossroads I’m standing at’ with the more desperate impasse in ‘One Too Many Mornings’:
‘From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they begin to fade’
Sung too slow, the song can drag its heels a bit, get bogged down in nostalgia, but this upbeat performance escapes that. In this case the skipping beat that did not suit ‘It’s All Right Ma,’ suits this song perfectly. I like this version because it skirts the sentimentality inherent in the song and opts for a more resilient emotional posture. We’ve done all our crying and hey! remembering you is kind of fun too. (Dresden)
Mama you’ve been on my mind
It has been suggested that the ‘no, no, no’ of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ was designed as a mocking echo to the Beatles ‘yeah yeah yeah’ of ‘She Loves Me’. I don’t know how true that is, but the song has come to represent not just Dylan’s rejection of the hippie expectations of a lover, but of all who might mistake Dylan for something he is not. I think the song is about projection – the qualities or whatever that people might project onto us. I’m not that ideal person you thought I was. I’m not here.
Because the song is full of imperatives (go away, go lightly, go melt back) I think it is best delivered softly, with more than a touch of tenderness, as in this performance from Dresden (24th May). Note the gentle, reflective harp solo.
It ain’t me babe (A)
Much as I love Dylan’s sensitive singing on this, I again have problems with giving the song a foot-tapping rhythm, easily turned by an enthusiastic audience into hand-clapping. This second version from Anaheim follows a similar pattern, but you can feel the tension behind the restraint. It’s a little sharper. The harp solo is again reflective but also a little sharper. Two exquisite performances; no complaints.
It ain’t me babe (B)
One more for luck. A lucky last. A decidedly more emphatic version from Horsens, Denmark (21st May). Again the annoying clapping, but maybe the best harp solo of the lot.
It ain’t me babe (C)
That’s it this time around. Next I’ll clean up what’s left of these bedrock songs. Until then, stay safe and happy.
Music is such a wonderful thing. It can lift spirits, improve your mood and help to create wonderful memories. Both listening and playing are such amazing things, which is why it is not surprising to see just how many people are fans. With such a widespread interest, it’s easy to see how the world has been graced with such amazing artists. Some of which have created music so inspiring they have defined an era.
A musician that potentially falls into this category is Bob Dylan. The American singer-songwriter is regarded worldwide as one of the best to ever do it. His songwriting ability especially has been one of a kind. If you love music but haven’t listened to Bob Dylan, it’s probably about time you changed that. If you want to start listening to the artist, here are some tips on how to get on your way to becoming a super fan:
Be Active When Listening to His Music
Something that a lot of people will recommend when listening to new music is to be active. If you are just sitting and listening to the music, chances are if you don’t connect with it the first time, you’ll probably be put off. Being busy while listening still gives you the chance to hear and appreciate but in a more casual and easy-going way. One thing you could do while listening to some Bob Dylan music is play online. Casinos online offer great gaming experiences, meaning you will be able to have fun while listening to some great music.
Start off with the Hits
An artist’s most popular songs are usually that way for a reason. Although the hardcore fans usually won’t choose them as their favourite tracks, these are usually the songs that appeal to the most people. This is why it is a good idea when listening to any new artist to look at their more popular stuff. If you like their sound, you can then get into their lesser-known content. For Bob Dylan, you might want to start off with songs such as the following:
Another good way to get into a new artist is to start listening with a friend. This way, you can both compare which songs you like more. The discussion of the artist could be enough to inspire you to listen more. The more and more you both listen as well, the more songs you will be able to recommend to each other. For example, it could be a good idea for each of you to choose an album and listen to it in its entirety. This way, you can let each other know what the best songs off that album are. You can do this until you have established what his best work is. You should just make sure that you and your friend don’t have too dissimilar tastes.
Well, by this time I was fed up at tryin' to make a stab
At bringin' back any help for my friends and Captain Arab
I decided to flip a coin, like either heads or tails
Would let me know if I should go back to ship or back to jail
So I hocked my sailor suit and I got a coin to flip
It came up tails, it rhymed with sails, so I made it back to the ship
Chapter 90 of Moby-Dick, “Heads or Tails”, is an amusing digression with cynical undertones. The chapter opens with a Latin quote from the books of the Laws of England: De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam. “From the whale, it is sufficient, if the king does have the head, and the queen has the tail.” Cynical, because the whale has no middle part – everything behind the head is tail. “Much like halving an apple,” as Melville explains, “there is no intermediate remainder.”
After eight stanzas full of hit-and-run, time-travelling jumps, exploding kitchens and assaults on body and soul, it’s time for a breather, for a fermate. After all, we are on our way in a narrative song, and it is about time to bring the story back home. The narrator feels that too. He’s fed up, which is understandable, but that doesn’t make his decision to abandon his friends any less nasty. Some self-justification is therefore welcome; it is not he, but fate that will decide that he turns his back on his friends.
Well, fate does have to be manipulated a bit for that. And a small price must be paid; I hocked my sailor suit, so apparently the narrator will finish the story as a nudist (it is unlikely that he was carrying a set of extra clothes with him all along). The proceeds are a coin, and that coin is needed to provide the narrator with his hypocritical justification. Hypocritical, because the outcome is already determined; whatever it will be, the narrator will save his own skin and go to the harbour. Heads or tails, as for a whaler under English law, shall make no difference. Some inventiveness is still required, though. The coin flip yields tails, which, as lines 3 and 4 demonstrate, neatly rhymes with jail. Any suspense, however, has already been torpedoed by the poet; line 5 ends in flip – we already know that the final verse will end with ship.
XI Ερυκε
Well, I got back and took the parkin' ticket off the mast
I was ripping it to shreds when this Coast Guard boat went past
They asked me my name and I said, "Captain Kidd"
They believed me but they wanted to know what exactly that I did
I said, for the Pope of Eruke I was employed
They let me go right away, they were very paranoid
In the first song of Side 1, in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” the spiritual father does explicitly warn: watch the parking meters. In vain. By the end of Side 1, in the tenth stanza of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, he has already forgotten. Fortunately, he is a notorious lawbreaker, so he can tear up the parking ticket without any further consequences. Even the Coast Guard bows to Captain Kidd’s reputation; this man is so far outside the law that neither enforcement nor fines will do any good.
The name-dropping in this verse is a gift for the diligent exegete. The eventful life story, the alleged hidden treasure and the tragic end of the pirate/privateer William Kidd inspire dozens of books, references and allusions in three centuries of books, musicals, films, video games and songs, and thus just as many side paths to follow in interpreting the single mention of “Captain Kidd” in this Dylan song. Entertaining but a little too overzealous, all these attempts at interpretation. The first-person narrator lives outside the law, as demonstrated by the careless ripping action, and the associative hopscotch of boat – criminal – New York – Captain Kidd is quite obvious. Long John Silver or Henry Morgan or Blackbeard would also have been possible – but the poet needs to rhyme with “that I did”. Hence: Captain Kidd.
“The Pope of Eruke” causes more headaches, for the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of Dylanology. And despair. Assiduous googlers find that eruke is the Middle English word for a “palmerworm”, some kind of caterpillar. Others believe that the official spelling is wrong and that Dylan actually is singing “Uruk”, the capital city of Gilgamesh. Who or what should then be meant by “the Pope of Uruk”, or “the Pope of the palmerworm”, is of course not answered by these finds. “Meant is King Farouk,” thinks a third faction, also keeping open the option of “Baruch”, a notorious Wall Street financier from the 1920s. And most applause goes to the analyst who discovers that “eruke” is Greek for restrain, curb, hold back. Which doesn’t really help either, of course (“The Pope Of Restraint”?), and is also a bit dubious anyway; restrain is αναχαιτίζω, or συγκρατήστε. “Eruke, ερυκε” does not exist. The Old Greek ἐρυκάνω (restrain, indeed) comes close, but has only the first four letters in common.
In short: much enthusiastic digging, little result. Not surprising, of course – given the nature of the song, being one long, cheerful, nonsensical outburst, it makes little sense to expect too much meaning behind name-droppings like “Captain Arab”, “Guernsey cows”, “Captain Kidd” or “Pope of Eruke”. Filler lyrics is more obvious. At the most, with a little tolerance, you can hear a phonetic distortion of “New York” in “Eruke”. Just like the final line shows a certain rhyme-over-reason attitude. Paranoia, after all, has little to do with the emotion that now overwhelms the intimidated Coast Guard members. On the plus side, this is probably the first song ever to use the word “paranoid” – the beginning of an unstoppable rise of song characters plagued by a biased perception of reality, hostile and persecutory beliefs. Culminating in one of the pillars of heavy metal, Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. In which, appropriately enough, the word “paranoid” does not appear at all – we only believe that Ozzy sings the word.
To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 7: I’ve never been able to read the damned thing
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
In the first little venture into the idea of exploring how Bob Dylan can re-write his own songs (to which we gave the adventurous name Dylan re-writes Dylan) we looked particularly at how the music was changed between one version of “We better talk this over” and another. In the second it was the lyrics that changed and took us around the block a few times with Groom’s Still Waiting at the Alter.
So we enjoyed ourselves with those, even if no one else did, and so we’re carrying on. Aaron’s still in the USA and Tony’s as ever in the UK.
Aaron:How about taking a look at Dylan’s performance from the Great Music Experience in Japan in 1994?
Let’s start with “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” – I remember hearing this on the Dignity CD single back in the day and been blown away.
Tony:I remember this too and was utterly amazed that Dylan would perform with an orchestra, because it meant that he could no longer re-arrange the song as he went along – which he often seems to do on stage.
There are two elements that utterly, utterly move me in this re-arrangement. One is the orchestration which could so easily have been overwritten in the hands of a lesser arranger. However it changes throughout but keeps its place behind Dylan, while dramatically adding to the meaning throughout. It brings tears to my eyes even today.
But then listen to Bob – totally controlled (because of the need to stay with the agreed and rehearsed arrangement). Indeed, I don’t believe he ever puts as much into a performance of this song as here. For me this truly is utterly staggering beyond belief. I find it so emotional much as I want to play it twice, but I can’t, and have to leave it for later when I’ve finished the writing.
And all the way through remember this is a piece we all know off by heart. Yet somehow when he tells us about the deepest dark forest and the pellets of poison, for me at least, it is as if I’ve never heard it before.
I can well understand why orchestral performances with Bob did not become a central part of his work in years to come because the level of preparation, and the agreement not to re-write the song the night before, are just not how Bob likes to perform. But I can say that if I had been there I doubt that I would have been able to take in the rest of the concert, so overwhelming do I find this.
However if you can take it (and I am sure it is just me doing my hyper-emotional thing again) when the piece finishes just go back to the 30 second marker and listen to that first verse again. It is one of the absolute, overwhelming, extraordinary and compelling performance statements by Bob Dylan in his entire career.
Ring Them Bells
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goADAjQRj_M
Tony: OK so having got overwhelmed by “Hard Rain” I am more ready for this but it still knocks me out. I wonder how this worked – did the idea come up and the arrangement was written and then Bob just accepted it and played to it? Maybe the story of it is in a book somewhere, and I’ve forgotten. Feel free to remind me – but do remember you are talking to an old timer now, whose memory is not what it was.
Bob still manages to put his own feeling and emotion into this – as one can hear with the final words, “right and wrong”, but somehow the arrangement (although incredibly powerful) feels a little more obvious, a little less revolutionary than with “Hard Rain”. Perhaps it is because this is more of an obvious song to work with in this context.
By which I mean, to me “Hard Rain” always feels as if it should be an acoustic session with a couple of performers contemplating the end of the world. I would never have thought this could be done with “Hard Rain” – but with “Ring them bells”, maybe yees.
And I thought I’d just add a little PS with this video of “Ring them Bells” because in the video below it looks to me as if Bob is actually saying to the band, “Let’s do Ring them Bells” – which seems more like the norm of Bob across the years.
The orchestral version is utterly magnificent and I am not trying to suggest that the version above should be compared with the version that follows – it just seems to add to the contrast between the orchestral performance and what the normal Dylan we are used to.
Hope you enjoyed those as much as I did. That’s Aaron. Can we do some more?
An index to the full “Cooking Up More Mythologies” series appears at the end of this article.
by Larry Fyffe
Already pointed out, the influence from writers of figurative-laden tracts, that later became described as ‘Gnostic”, shows up in the Old Testament – i.e., the depiction of a masculine God with a feminine side (called ‘Wisdom’ and/or ‘Sophia’):
Say unto wisdom, "Thou art my sister"
And call understanding thy kinswoman
That they may keep thee from the strange woman
From the stranger which flattereth with her words
(Proverbs 7: 4,5)
Quite clearly the biblical verses above leave a mark on the song lyrics below:
Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms
You should not treat me like a stranger
Our father would not like the way that you act
And you must realize the danger
(Bod Dylan: Oh Sister ~ Dylan/Levy)
In Greek/Roman mythology, Apollo, the Sun God, has Artemis, the Moon Goddess, for a sister. In the Gnostic Gospels, while down on Earth, the Christian Messiah, has wise Mary Magdalene as His binary companion:
“The companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene”
(Gospel of Philip)
Much later lore asserts that Mary sails off to southern France to spread the Word after Jesus is crucified; unto other places as well.
Should the narrator in the following song lyrics be taken as Jesus Himself, Magdalene journeys to Morocco:
If you see her, say hello
She might be in Tangier
She left here in early spring
Is living there I hear
(Bob Dylan: If You See Her Say Hello)
Of course, no matter how you look at it, Jesus survives; there’s nothing to stop the two from getting back together again.
Kees deGraaf, for example, claims that the narrator in the song lyrics beneath is Jesus speaking:
I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn't do
Go to the ends of the Earth for you
To make you feel my love
(Bob Dylan: Make You Feel My Love)
Orthodox Christian analysts go to the ends of the Earth to downplay any suggestion that Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene is anything other than ‘spiritual’.
Not included in the Holy Bible, the contents of the Gnostic Gospels let loose all the angels and all the demons from Heaven and Hell.
Even Paul the Apostle’s writing has allegorical Gnostic dualities therein, but missing is a Demiurge who creates a dark material Earth:
There are also celestial bodies
And bodies terrestrial
But the glory of the celestial is one
And the glory of the terrestrial is another
There is one glory of the sun
And another glory of the moon
And another glory of the stars
(I Corinthians 15: 40, 41)
So it is said by some religious authorities that the first verse of the Holy Bible ought to be changed from “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” to read “God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth” to avoid any reversed Gnostic-like interpretation that something else exists prior to the Judeo-Christian God (i.e., that it’s Heaven and Earth who create Jehovah)
I ran right outside, I hopped inside a cab
I went out the other door, this Englishman said, "Fab"
As he saw me leap a hot dog stand and a chariot that stood
Parked across from a building advertising brotherhood
I ran right through the front door like a hobo sailor does
But it was just a funeral parlor and the man asked me who I was
The music video for the Oscar winning song “Things Have Changed” (2000) amusingly intercuts footage of Dylan with sequences from the movie it was written for, from Wonder Boys. The video is also directed by the film director himself, Curtis Hanson, and lead actor Michael Douglas has been invited to contribute to the clip as well. Dylan’s acting is easy to characterise: Buster Keaton. Throughout the clip, Dylan keeps his face in the Keaton mode, his body language is almost identical. The resemblance is inescapable in the scenes in the car park before the diner; the straw hat Dylan has put on his head completes the imitation.
It doesn’t come out of the blue. On Wednesday, 5 November 2014, producer and writer Larry Charles is guest at Pete Holmes’ podcast You Made It Weird, and there Charles elaborates on a project Dylan wanted to undertake with him in the late 1990s: a surrealist comedy series for HBO. After an initial joint writing session, Charles dares to take the plunge. Together with Dylan, he pitches the idea on the executive floor of HBO, where it is indeed received enthusiastically. But in the elevator down Dylan has had enough already and says, to Charles’ disappointment: “I don’t wanna do it anymore. It’s too slapstick-y.” Larry can live with it; shortly afterwards he and Dylan write Masked And Anonymous (2003).
In short, Larry Charles is well-informed and has some right to speak when he makes statements about Dylan’s working methods. In the podcast he recalls how Dylan puts “this very ornate, beautiful box” on the table, he opens the box and dumps all these pieces of scrap paper on the table:
“It was hotel stationary, little scraps like from Norway, and from Belgium and from Brazil, you know places like that. And each little piece of paper had a line […]. I realized, that’s how he writes songs. He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesize into a coherent thing. And that’s how we wound up writing also. We wound up writing in a very ‘cut-up’ technique. We’d take scraps of paper, put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it. And we finally wrote… a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff.”
And Dylan doesn’t just want to write it: “He wanted to star in it, almost like a Buster Keaton or something.” Eventually, Dylan will realise this ambition. Only not in a “surrealist comedy series for HBO”, but in the music video, shortly after this episode.
The love for slapstick, the deadpan presentation of fast-forward sequences of increasingly insane incidents, is distinctive in enough songs. In the Basement songs of course (“Million Dollar Bash”, “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread”, to name but two), in mercurial songs like “On The Road Again”, and also in even older songs like “Motorpsycho Nightmare” or “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”.
“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” belongs to the same category, if only for this seventh verse. The protagonist flees from the restaurant with the exploding kitchen, finds shelter with a nice French girl, but her aggressive boyfriend chases him back onto the street, he gets into a taxi waiting for him and jumps out again on the other side – to continue with a hurdle across a hot dog stand and a chariot. A fast-forward sequence of farcical situations like a Buster Keaton scene, all in all. The weird metaphor “like a hobo sailor does” may be traced to this – both hobo and sailor are two Buster Keaton archetypes. Only the place of refuge, the shelter from the storm, is a Dylan original; there is not a single Keaton film with a funeral parlor as a setting.
IX What’s so bad about misunderstanding?
I repeated that my friends were all in jail, with a sigh
He gave me his card, he said, "Call me if they die"
I shook his hand and said, "Goodbye", ran out to the street
When a bowling ball came down the road and knocked me off my feet
A pay phone was ringing and it just about blew my mind
When I picked it up and said, "Hello", this foot came through the line
The 2015 Swedish cult film Kung Fury is a short (31 minutes), derailing homage to the martial art and police films of the 1980s, overflowing with visual gags, deliberately absurd plot holes solved with time travel hassle and an endless series of idiotic side characters like the god Thor, a Tyrannosaurus, whizkid “Hackerman” and Hitler.
Clearly, the script aims at unconventionality, and quirky and imaginative it is, but director and writer David Sandberg, just as often, rightly considers the joke to be more important than originality…
Hitler : Give me ze phone!
[Punk gives Hitler his cell phone. Hitler dials the police precinct. Meanwhile, the Chief is looking at a police report]
Chief : What the hell is this?
[Phone rings]
Chief : Chief McNickles speaking.
Hitler : Is this ze police?
Chief : Yeah, this is the police.
Hitler : Fuck you!
[Hitler shoots through the phone, killing the Chief. He then continues to shoot at the whole precinct through the phone before Kung Fury storms in and shoots down the phone]
It is a classic Looney Toon gag that closes the slapstick interlude. The hurdle via the English taxi, over the hot dog stand and the chariot inspires analysts like Prof. Renza to reflect on “appreciation of his work in England’s rock scene”, and jumping over an American stereotype like the hot dog stand then says something about the “transcending” nature of his art, and “chariot” then signals something with criticism of militarism or something. Well, the importance of being earnest, as Oscar Wilde would say. In any case, its slapstick character is ignored. The continuation gives enough hints, though; the actions and the rebuttal of the undertaker (Call me if they die) and the bowling ball knocking over the protagonist are next, slapstick-y steps towards an increasingly anarchistic, Groucho Marx-like tone, culminating in the foot-through-the-telephone-line-gag.
No, this confetti-like salvo of wild idiosyncrasies seems rather to demonstrate what Larry Charles notices more than thirty years later: “He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that.” In 2014, when Charles recounts this, he is still impressed by Dylan’s response to his cautious criticism. During the joint writing of that slapstick project, Charles remembers, Dylan trots out a scene about a “pig with a wig”.
“I said, Bob, even in this thing, that doesn’t make any sense. No one’s gonna understand that. And he said: what’s so bad about misunderstanding?”
…Dylan reveals his fondness for the next step in comedy; the dry, pointless humour as perfected by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman.
Still, the first love, the love for good old-fashioned slapstick humour with visual gags never dies. Fifty-five years later, in “Murder Most Foul”, Dylan requests: “Play Buster Keaton, play Harold Lloyd.”
To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 6: Caput vel cauda
————
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
In the first little venture into a possible series on Dylan re-writes Dylan we looked particularly at how the music was changed between one version of “We better talk this over” and another.
Taking the matter forward Aaron has had a look at “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” which turns matters around the other way. The music changes in the sense that the lead guitar “commentary” between the lyrics is played by a different virtuoso guitarist, (and isn’t there at all in the version recorded for the album) and so is different in that respect, but otherwise the music stays much the same. Same key, same tempo, same melody, same chord changes. No, here, unlike “Talk it over” it is the lyrics that go for a meander.
The first example is the live performance with Carlos Santana on guitar
Now that fascinates me (Tony), because I read so many books about Dylan in which the minutiae of his lyrics are examined and given great meaning. Their origins are found and the significance considered in depth. And although it is quite clear that Dylan has read widely and does take inspiration from all sorts of sources, the fact that he can change the lyrics around so much in performance suggests to me that he is, at least on occasion, more interested in the phrases as phrases, rather than as deeply meaningful sets of lyrics.
So in this case we can compare the version above with the last ever performance (selected by Aaron) which has Mike Bloomfield as the guest virtuoso
What I am going to do however is compare the lyrics Dylan often sang, and the lyrics that are published on BobDylan.com which must have been handed over by Dylan to his publishers – most likely for the registration of copyright of the song.
Just consider these two versions of the first verse
Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement,
heard the last moan of a boxer, I seen the massacre of the innocent,
felt around for the light switch, became nauseated.
Just me, an over worked dancer, between walls that had deteriorated.
Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated
So there is this one small change here. “Just me, an over worked dancer, between…” becomes “She was walking down the hallway while…”
My question is, what difference does that make? Does the change make any difference to the meaning of the song? Does it tell us anything new? My answer is no. It’s just using one phrase instead of another. Both are pleasing, each is interesting, and perhaps one was more pleasing to Dylan than the other, but that’s it. If this were a painting it would be a case of slightly different brush strokes.
Verse 2 has even more changes
Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becomin’ what one was never meant to be
highwaymen on murder charges pushin' women into robbery,
mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery.
Never did get the message, didn't even know one was sent to me
for the madness of becomin', what one was never meant to be.
So the first line changes. We can have highwaymen on murder charges, or we have have try to be pure at heart. We might prefer one to the other – I like the highwaymen because it gives me an image as opposed to the abstractness of “pure at heart” but on the other hand the contradiction between “try to be pure at heart” and “they arrest you for robbery” is more stark.
But what do we make of the difference between “Got the message” and “never did get the message” in line three? It would seem that for the context of the song it doesn’t matter if the message was ever got or not, which is curious, but also fun.
Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know
better standin’ around like furniture
There’s a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it
Tonight you got the power to take it,
tomorrow you won’t have the power to keep it
Locked into a time zone, with a high-degree temperature,
worlds coming to an end wise men,
fools standin' around like furniture.
There's a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it.
Tonight you got the power to take it,
tomorrow you won't even need the power to keep it.
There seems no connection here between “Put your hand on my head” and “Locked in a time zone” – the former is specific and physical, the latter is abstract.
In the next line Dylan expresses what seems the same idea in a different way and thereafter we have the same verse from start to finish.
In the next verse we really do get some changes…
Cities on fire, phones out of order
They’re killing nuns and soldiers, there’s fighting on the border
What can I say about Claudette? Ain’t seen her since January
She could be respectfully married
or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires
Wait on a minute, I found the solution,
too rich for my blood and I needed a transfusion.
Don't know what I can say 'bout Claudette?
She's in the mountains or the prairies,
she could be respectably married
or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires.
There seems no real connection between the “cities on fire” line and the “wait on a minute”, and it looks as if the need for “solution” was to find a rhyme for “transfusion” (or vice verse depending on the order in which the lines were written).
And the “prairies” line does look as if it was introduced to give a rhyme to Buenos Aires, not to add anything to the meaning.
Now, I must stress, none of this is written in any way to demean Bob’s writing or to suggest that in some way it is trivial. But rather to make a point that I have made elsewhere, that sometimes Bob Dylan uses words to deliver the lyrical equivalent of painted abstract pictures. Just as we can find the individual flourishes and the overall effect of an abstract painting interesting and pleasing, so I (Tony) personally find the images that tumble out one on top of the other here interesting and pleasing.
One could say, “Hey, Claudette, I don’t know where she went,” but that would of course be terribly dull, so there are different ways of making this more enjoyable, more interesting, and indeed given the music, more exciting.
In short, to me this playing around with the lyrics of a song, suggests strongly that the actual lyrics and the meaning are not the important thing here: it is the sound and the individual images that Dylan is interested in. There doesn’t have to be a connection between them; it is the lines of music and lyrics themselves that fascinate him.
Here is the official audio without a guest lead guitarist, and below it the complete set of lyrics
Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated
West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar
Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becomin’ what one was never meant to be
West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the stage
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar
Don’t know what I can say about Claudette
that wouldn’t come back to haunt me
Finally had to give her up ’bout the time she began to want me
But I know God has mercy on them who are slandered and humiliated
I’d a-done anything for that woman if she didn’t make me feel so obligated
West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the cage
Curtain risin’ on a new stage
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar
Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know better
standin’ around like furniture
There’s a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it
Tonight you got the power to take it,
tomorrow you won’t have the power to keep it
West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the stage
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar
Cities on fire, phones out of order
They’re killing nuns and soldiers, there’s fighting on the border
What can I say about Claudette? Ain’t seen her since January
She could be respectfully married or
running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires
West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the burning of the stage
Curtain risin’ on a new age
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar
Different images, each one fascinating and interesting. Just as the sources are. But for me the deeper meaning is, as often as no meaning at all, is a figment of the imagination of the critic.
An index to the full “Cooking Up More Mythologies” series appears at the end of this article.
by Larry Fyffe
In Greek/Roman mythology, Hera, the wife of the Thunder God, punishes Venus by cursing her, and with Dionysus the Goddess of Love produces an ugly child with a big cock. Biblical lore tells of screech owl Lilith, the first wife of Adam, flying off, and mating with Samael, the Angel of Death; she gives birth to lots of demons.
Some Gnostic writers speak about the figurative Sophia this way –
She’s the female Holy Ghost of Wisdom who decides to reproduce without her rational male binary Christ; He’s eternal, not born in Time; she gives birth to an ugly, ignorant and vengeful Dimiurge, the snake-like Creator of the material Earth, inhabited by flawed (if not downright evil) people, including Adam and Eve.
The Gnostic’s Sophia (Wisdom) is mentioned a number of times in the Holy Bible.
In the Old Testament as the gnostic-like divine female side of God:
Say unto wisdom, "Thou art my sister"
And call understanding thy kinswoman
That they may keep thee from the strange woman
From the stranger which flattereth with her words
(Proverbs 7: 4,5)
In the New Testament she’s in the heart of Jesus, the apple of his eye. He materializes on Earth to lead Sophia back to the higher angelic plane:
And the child grew
And waxed strong in spirit
Filled with wisdom
And the grace of God was upon Him
(Luke 2: 40)
Could be said that the previously mentioned song “If You Belonged To Me” takes a humorous poke at how happy Sophia could have been. That is, if she hadn’t desired to know what it’s like to be the mysterious, far-away, hermaphroditic Monad from whom she emanated downwards to the watery plane.
She’s punished for creating chaos, and is only able to leave sparks of light there:
You could feel like a baby again
Sitting on your daddy's knee
Oh how happy you would be
If you belonged to me
(Travelling Wilburys: If You Belonged To Me)
Another piece of biblical lore, rooted in the verse beneath, has Jesus escaping from the crucifixion by exchanging places with a Libyan:
And as they led Him away
They laid hold of one Simon, a Cyrenian
Coming out of the country
And on him they laid the cross
That he might bear it after Jesus
(Luke 23: 26)
From a Gnostic point of view, eternal Jesus can’t be killed or made to feel pain. He simply transfigures Himself into looking like Simon, and watches as the Libyan suffers on the cross.
The song lyrics below might be interpreted from that point of view:
Well, I'm going to Libya
There's a guy I gotta see
He's been living there three years now
In an oil refinery
(Travelling Wilburys: Got My Mind Made Up)
Allegories abounding, Gnostics bespeak of the material plane, and the spiritual plane, of light and of darkness; some portray Mary Magdalene as the perfect wife for Jesus, she having climbed the gnostic steps to find female purity:
Wisdom, who is called barren, is the mother of angels
The companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene
And he kissed her often on the lips
And the other disciples said to Him
"Why do you love her more than all of us?"
And the Saviour answered, and said to them
"If a blind person, and one who can see are both in darkness
There is no difference between them
But when the light comes, the one who can see
Sees the light, and the blind one stays in darkness"
(Gospel Of Philip)
On one level, the double-edged song lyrics below, can be interpreted to have the same meaning as the words spoken above:
Quick, Magdalena, take my gun
Look up in the hills, that flash of light
Aim well my little one
We may not make it through the night
(Bob Dylan: Romance In Durango ~ Dylan/Levy)
For his first entirely solo, acoustic album since 1964, Bob Dylan asks Jimmy Wachtel to shoot the photograph. This is a bit of an odd choice. In the Seventies Wachtel had designed album covers for big artists such as Joe Walsh, Warren Zevon, Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar, Buckingham Nicks … but as the music business changed in the Eighties, Wachtel decided he wanted a career switch and started to design movie posters. “It’s a vertical version of the same graphic design I had been doing for square album covers”, he explained in 2014 to Jimmy Steinfeldt. “… and it went very well. I started doing it by myself, and then I started a company which eventually died. But then I continued my original company Dawn Patrol, which I had started when I did record covers. This time I started hiring people, and it became a real company with a lot of overhead.”
That’s why, when he got the call from Dylan, he didn’t even have a camera anymore. “So I borrowed a camera”, Wachtel told Zach Schonfeld in 2019, “which I didn’t know how to work. And I went out to his house up above Malibu.”
The first contact is difficult. “He doesn’t speak a lot. To me, at least. I just got that Bob Dylan attitude, you know: not a big smile.”
In addition, “He wasn’t dressed very well,” Wachtel laughs. “So I gave him my shirt to wear. It looked a little jazzier. I just said, ‘Keep that shirt.’ He liked it. I liked it too, but whatever.”
In some of the outtakes of the shoot, Bob can be seen with his long-time friend, Debbie Gold, who’s credited as producer on the album. They seem to be having lots of fun.
Wachtel has issues with the borrowed equipment. “I shot one roll and then changed the film – this was prior to digital – and I couldn’t get the film out of the camera. […] I hadn’t used this camera before.
At that point, Dylan said: ‘Maybe we should get another photographer.’
I soon got the film loaded and the shoot turned out great. But I have to say I was a little nervous there for a minute.”
A few days later Wachtel drives back to Dylan’s place in Malibu, where the singer chooses a portrait from the pile: one in profile, unshaven and looking thoughtful to something up high on the left side. “That’s the one he liked. He liked the attitude. I designed the package, sent it to him, he approved it, and that was it,” the photographer says.
Wachtel chooses not to cut the photo as a square, but fills the space on either side of the portrait with a blue border, which seems to be illuminated from below. He also provides black collars at the bottom and above the photo, in which the name of the singer and the title of the record are saved. The lettering is filled with the same blue to white color scheme.
The whole thing comes across as a bit cheap, like a cover of budget CD with out of copyright material of an old blues singer, but perhaps that might be exactly what Dylan was looking for.
On the back there’s another picture of Dylan – the photographer uncredited. The singer is onstage, holding a Yamaha L6.
Guessing by the way he is dressed, the picture was most probably taken in July 1986, during the True Confessions Tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
In case you’re wondering: Wachtel never got the shirt back. “I’m sure he could afford his own shirt. But I just thought, ‘I’ll give Bob Dylan a gift.’”
Oh and yes: Jimmy is is the older brother of guitarist Robert ‘Waddy’ Wachtel.
Well, I rapped upon a house with the U.S. flag upon display
I said, "Could you help me out? I got some friends down the way"
The man says, "Get out of here, I'll tear you limb from limb"
I said, "You know, they refused Jesus, too", he said, "You're not Him"
"Get out of here before I break your bones, I ain't your pop"
I decided to have him arrested and I went looking for a cop
A regrettable development on the political scene in the 21st century is the steady decline of self-mockery. Incomprehensible, really – the twentieth century has taught us that self-mockery is a powerful weapon for winning voters and disarming opponents – but it is how it is. Biden, Putin, Merkel, Xi and in extremis Trump… they all may have qualities, but self-mockery is not one of them. Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan mastered the art at expert level. For example, by making a point of his advanced age himself: “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.” As he does in the debate with Walter Mondale, also in 1984, defusing any potential age-related attack by Mondale (who was then 56) with a witty, simple reversal: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
After his presidency, when he has nothing more to win, he continues to use the weapon. At the Republican Convention in 1992, as the Republicans prepare for the upcoming Bush-Clinton battle, the Clinton campaign team gives him a chance to vary his Thomas Jefferson joke: “This fellow they’ve nominated claims he’s the new Thomas Jefferson. Well, let me tell you something. I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine. And governor, you’re no Thomas Jefferson.”
It’s a layered upgrade of the Jefferson joke with an extra dollop of self-mockery. Reagan parodies the famous uppercut from Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Lloyd Bentsen to Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator Dan Quayle in their 1988 debate:
Quayle: I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration, if that unfortunate event would ever occur. Bentsen: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy. [shouts and applause] What has to be done in a situation like that is to call in the— Quayle: That was really uncalled for, Senator. [shouts and applause] Bentsen: You are the one that was making the comparison, Senator—and I’m one who knew him well. And frankly I think you are so far apart in the objectives you choose for your country that I did not think the comparison was well-taken.
Actually, it is a cheap shot by Bentsen. He knows very well, of course, that Quayle is not comparing his personality or his presidential qualities with Kennedy, but merely the quantity of his years of service. But Bentsen does not let the opportunity pass by. You’re no Jack Kennedy is, after all, a straw man argument that cannot be countered without getting yourself into deeper trouble. The same frustrating dead end in which our poor protagonist finds himself once he has made the Jesus comparison. Of course, he does not say at all that he is Jesus, but only tries to get the occupant of the house with the U.S. flag upon display to show some mercy. And is promptly hit with the irrefutable You’re not Him. On a text-external level, the argument is still spicy; after all, Judaism rejects Jesus as a failed Jewish messiah claimant and a false prophet – that the Jewish Dylan now invokes they refused Jesus, too, has a – probably unintended – ironic inversion value.
Analysts and Dylanologists do not elaborate on this. However, the U.S. flag is a thing that does catch on with most Dylanologists. With Prof. Louis A. Renza, as usual, most eloquent and most far-fetched: “To salvage whatever he can of his belief in an American Dream, he appeals to American cultural tradition.” Heylin sees in this verse something like Dylan “demolishing Puritans in a single vignette” and Andrew Gamble concludes, “America is a weird place in which hypocrisy and self-serving behaviour abound” (in The Political Art of Bob Dylan, 2004).
It is a general tenor, though. Every commentator recognises that the song is funny and farcical, but then spends words and creativity arguing that Dylan is “painting a portrait of America” (Wilentz), or qualifies the song as “his spoof on the founding of America” (Sounes). Shelton also places the label “free-floating satire” and John Hughes takes the crown: “Anxious confusion results in surreal narratives that bring together disillusion and exhilaration.”
A lot of “America”, in short, among the analysts. But it seems a bit sought after. If we were to judge this stanza alone or the song at all on its satirical qualities, it would be rather disappointing. Sure, there is plenty of humour, exaggeration and irony, but to say that it is used to expose wrongdoing, or vices, or stupidity… no, that is reading perhaps a bit too eagerly, a bit too much in it. An eagerness that has more to do with Dylan’s image, anyway, than with the actual lyrics including the supposed subtext – sort of like how “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is stubbornly qualified as a “protest song”, while that song doesn’t actually protest against anything.
In fact this verse is, like the entire song, way too light-hearted, carefree, witty to be burdened with something as humorless as cultural criticism or social protest, or to be labelled as something as heavy as satire. The unusual “rapped upon a house” in the opening line is a funny, anachronistic hallmark of what the rapper avant-la-lettre Dylan is doing in this song: what you hear is not a test, I’m rapping to the beat – rhyming semi-improvised anecdote upon anecdote, loosely captured in a very non-committal framework (arriving on a boat, leaving on a boat). Which is also evident from the less successful rhymes, such as in this stanza. The blunt, dismissive landlord threatens and jeers in rough and rowdy ways (I’ll tear you limb from limb, I’ll break your bones), but closes with the dull, rather empty “I ain’t your pop”.
No big deal. Rapper Dylan wants to keep the dryly comic punchline I decided to have him arrested and I went looking for a cop and easily settles for a weaker subclause to work towards it. And right he is.
Taj Mahal & The Phantom Blues Band – Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream:
https://youtu.be/Ke8uZIvPa7w
To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 5: Almost like a Buster Keaton or something
————–
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:
Way back in the dark ages (well, 2008 actually) I wrote a review of We Better Talk This Over in which I said ‘“We better talk this over” is hardly a great song, but it does have a way with words that is unusual even for Dylan.’
Then this week (early September 2021) Mike Johnson reminded me in his latest Never Ending Tour article that “Tony Attwood gives a good account of the song and describes the 2000 version as one which ‘totally transforms the song’, although he doesn’t say how.”
In fact I did have a go in a subsequent article (but certainly don’t expect Mike to have to go trawling through all my ramblings just to check) and suggested that “Dylan re-writes Dylan” could be a new series. Exactly what I have just said on reading today’s article NET, 2000, part 3: Master Vocalist: Rock and Roil.
So anyway, I’ve highlighted the idea before of a Dylan re-writes Dylan series, and I am now re-publishing my article on “We better talk this over” for one simple reason. In the earlier edition I missed the key factor in the song which is not just there in the original, but there all the way through Dylan’s reworking on the songs. It is the key to making the song what it is.
And I missed it.
The instrumentation of guitars at the start gives us an interest of something unusual happening, and the use of the chorus just to sing the first two beats of every other line – in fact the last word of each line of lyrics.
But what is particularly catching (and this is what I missed last time around) is that Dylan alternates four beats in a bar and five beats in a bar. Now that is incredibly unusual in rock music and you might think that to a trained musician this would stick out. So would I, so I guess I am losing it.
In my defence it is subtle, but even so – an extra beat in the bar…
Here is is
123 4 12345
I think we better talk this over
123 4 12345
Maybe when we both get sober
You’ll understand I’m only a man
Doin’ the best that I can
This situation can only get rougher
Why should we needlessly suffer?
Let’s call it a day, go our own different ways
Before we decay
Now I am sure everyone can hear the “Why” emphasis and the extension of “Before…..” But it is that extra beat which is the heart of the edginess and uncertainty in the piece, and it is there from the start. The extra emphases added for this final version make a huge difference, but only because that fifth beat is already in place.
Indeed what really makes the piece is adding those extra emphases on what are effectively random words. Even if after my explanation of the fifth beat you can’t hear it (and really there is no reason why you should) but it now contrasts utterly with the additional emphasis on “Best”, “Why” and “Before”.
Thus what is so clever however is that this additional beat is so subtle, and then in this final version, it is then hidden even more by the unexpected emphasis.
To me, this is Dylan the musical arranger at his peak. It is not just that he re-writes the arrangements of songs and plays them in new ways. He goes back and studies the song again and finds ways to expand the meanings.
So Bob isn’t just saying to the guys, “Let’s try it in B flat” or whatever key he has suddenly chosen. He is thinking about the way the music and the lyrics work together and then exploring different approaches.
I certainly can’t think of anyone else who does this, and for myself I am so finally relieved that I found what it is that so draws me to this song. That fifth beat utterly symbolises how the singer and the lady who is sung about our completely out of step. Without the fifth beat the song would still be great but with it, it becomes a work of genius.
It’s taken me one hell of a long time, but I’m glad I have got there in the end. And maybe we can now try the “Dylan re-writes Dylan” series.
An index to the full “Cooking Up More Mythologies” series appears at the end of this article.
By Larry Fyffe
The dogma of ‘original sin’ is rooted in the following biblical verse:
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world
And death by sin
And so death passed upon all men
For that all have sinned
(Romans 5:12)
Taken by many non-literalist Christian theologians to mean that Adam with Eve are representatives of humankind; they disobey God, and therefore they are cast out of Eden where they are now mortal.
That everybody thereafter gets stuck with Adam’s ‘orginal’ sin comes from an earlier translation:
“In whom all have sinned”
The Hebrew faith holds that’s Adam and Eve’s problem, and that though members of humankind may be tempted, they be not stamped with original guilt; they are not basically depraved from the get-go.
Satire abounds, it can be construed, in the double-edged song lyrics below:
Shake the dust off of your feet, don't look back
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack
Temptation's not an easy thing, Adam given the devil reign
Because he sinned I got no choice, it run in my vein
(Bob Dylan: Pressing On)
Mark Twain-like humour pops up again in the song lyrics below. Apparently, Christian authorities have Adam with Eve trapped there in Romans Five – Moses cries in vain:
Preacher was talking, there's a sermon he gave
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied
It ain't easy to swallow, it sticks in your throat
She gave her heart to the man in the long black coat
(Bob Dylan: Man In The Long Black Coat)
The writer(s) of the “Gospel of John” really stick it to the Jews.
They’re no different than Christians. Jesus, the ‘Son of God’, is the only one who can save them all.
Accordingly, the Jews are forced to symbolically eat the body and drink blood of Jesus, the ‘Lamb of God’ at the Passover meal. Christ, it’s said, be crucified at the time of the feast.
Traditionally, blood-drained lamb, unleavened bread, and wine are served at the table just before the holiday week. In the other three Gospels, it’s said, Christ and His disciples have already consumed a supper.
As previously mentioned, seems that the the songwriter, in the the lyrics quoted next, notices the changes made to the story of the crucifixion:
Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could learn to hold you, love
And call you mine
(Tight Connection To My Heart)
For the first two posts on this ace year for the NET, 2000, I was interested in Dylan’s vocal performances, the way in which his singing changed, and came to a peak. 1999 and 2000 are peak years for Dylan all around; the band was tight and disciplined, the songs were arranged to give prominence to Dylan’s voice, and Dylan threw himself into his songs, determined to give them his best.
One of his vocal innovations I have called downsinging, a lowering of his voice at the end of the line. To appreciate this, we only have to listen to ‘To Ramona’, a regular on the setlists over the years but never performed this way. The music is sweet and romantic, it is after all a gentle waltz, but his voice…. hell, he sounds downright triumphant, with a sinister, nasty edge. If I were Ramona I’d be running a mile. He rubs her face in her sorrow in no uncertain terms. This way of performing the song brings it into focus in a manner we’ve never heard before. Is this the true feeling that lies behind the song, and always has? (Portsmouth, 24th Sept).
To Ramona
‘Blind Willie McTell’ is a song perfectly suited to downsinging, as the melody tends to drop at the end of the line anyway. However Dylan does not overuse it, in fact resists it to paint an upbeat, loving portrait of the old blues singer. But the song is ultimately a pessimistic one, too much ‘power and greed and corruptible seed’, and he balances a little hopeful upsinging against the inevitable dropping of the voice at the end. It’s hard to find a better performance of the song than this one, although I get disturbed by the jump in the lyrics that has us missing out on the gorgeous ‘sweet magnolia blooming’ verse. (Cardiff, 23rd Sept).
Blind Willie (A)
That was so nice, let’s hear it again, this time from the first London concert, 5th October. Another wonderful version. Dylan’s voice is more upfront and the downsinging more pronounced.
Blind Willie (B)
In Anaheim on 10th March, Dylan produced another rare one out of the hat. ‘We’d Better Talk This Over’, from Street Legal (1978) had not been played since 1978, and here it pops up for a final airing. Tony Attwood gives a good account of the song and describes the 2000 version as one which ‘totally transforms the song’, although he doesn’t say how. Dylan keeps pretty much the same tempo as the album version, but I think the reason for Tony’s comment lies in Dylan’s vocal performance. Dylan brings out the strained weariness of the song in this sustained and powerful performance. Certain words are drawn out. There’s a pleasing rush of rhyme at the end of each verse, interrupted, in the following case, by drawing out the word ‘bed’.
‘The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
’Neath the beeeeed where we slept…’
He does the same thing, at the same moment, with the other verses.
This is a divorce song par excellence. Its rushing movement sweeps us along to those awful conclusions.
‘Oh, babe, time for a new transition
I wish I was a magician
I would wave a wand and tie back the bond
That we’ve both goooone beyond’
We’d better talk this over
‘Watching the River Flow’ is generally seen as Dylan’s ode to indolence, but there’s nothing indolent about the way the song powers along. Christopher Ricks, in his book Dylan’s Visions of Sin, put the matter rather eloquently, ‘….the song is thrillingly disagreeing with itself. Its rhythmic and vocal raucousness is far from flowing. More like shooting a few rapids.’ Indeed, this river doesn’t flow but rocks and roils. It has a density to it. Ricks again, ‘ ‘Watching the River Flow’ is tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy, although never to the point of abolishing what the words express a hope for: some relaxation, please, if at all possible.’ (Ricks, pages 116/117)
Dylan’s energetic and swinging performance here brings that internal contradiction into sharp relief. And a bit of messing with the lyrics. In these cases I often can’t decide whether Dylan has forgotten the lyrics and is bluffing his way through, or has carefully re-written them. (Cardiff, 23rd Sept)
Watching the river flow
While we’re in the rock and roil groove, let’s take a quick listen to ‘Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat’. It’s a fine piece of sarcasm, given loving treatment here. Yes, fashion can make us all look a bit ridiculous at times, but there seems to be a pinch of that ‘thrillingly disagreeing with itself’ here too, as Dylan evidently loves that damned hat. How wonderfully this clips along. Best performance since the album, I’d say. (London 6th Oct).
Leopard skin pillbox hat
Now I’m in this rocking groove, I can’t escape it, not with a pumping song like ‘Serve Somebody’. Yes indeed! And who does Dylan serve? I don’t think it’s God or the devil; I think it’s us. His audience. Who else is he serving night after night after night? Funny, but as the years pass in the NET, this sounds less and less like a Christian song. More fumbling with the lyrics, but with this song, anything is possible. Another ace performance.
Serve Somebody
Help! I can’t get away from these hard rockers and rollers. I’m still on the dance floor, doing my rhythm and blues. Put together like this, these songs have a cumulative effect, reminding us just what a great rock singer Dylan is, and what better song for us to turn to, and for Dylan to take on, than ‘Cold Irons Bound’. This is a desperate, angry rocker from Time out of Mind, a Grammy Award winner, a hurricane of a song. It has a short, galloping beat and a punky edge. We are pushed right over that edge into existential despair – ‘It feels like, I don’t even exist…’
In this performance (6th Oct, London) there is nothing to soften it. Like the winds of Chicago, the song tears us to shreds. There is no echo to distance the experience. We’re right up against Dylan’s voice.
Cold irons bound
No direction home now, except an uplifting, ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone,’ Dylan’s most famous rock song, an anthem to loneliness and existential angst. This will slow our pace a little, but not the intensity. As always it is the false and the phony that rouse Dylan’s ire. Living someone else’s life, not serving anybody but yourself. It’s a kind of protest song, an attack on social snobbery and classism. That surreal imagery has a social purpose, revealing hollow social identities.
‘Ahh princess on a steeple and all the pretty people
They're all drinking, thinking that they've got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you better take your diamond ring, you better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can't refuse
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal’
There’s no comfort for Miss Lonely out on the street. She feels like she doesn’t exist.
Perhaps no live performance will ever match the 1966 versions, especially the howling performance after the Judas jibe at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on 17 May 1966. For a rip it up version, I suggest the reader check out 1988 (NET, 1988, part 1).
This performance doesn’t let the song down, but the master vocalist of 2000 can’t hold the notes as long as he could thirty-four years before. However, he hasn’t forgotten how to give the lyrics a good punch. (Cardiff, 23rd Sept)
Like a rolling stone.
Let’s kick the pace up again. ‘Dignity’, and ‘the land of dry bone dreams’ as he sings in this performance. You won’t find Dignity in the streets, or ‘in the shadows that pass’, and it’s no use asking the cops. Many years later Dylan would write, ‘I’ve been through hell, what good did it do?’ (Pay in Blood, 2012) Here we find an earlier version, written in 1989, of that journey to the netherworld, the ‘land of the midnight sun’.
‘I went down where the vultures feed
I would've got deeper, but there wasn't any need
Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn't any difference to me’
This song had been hanging around in the background since the 1994, MTV Unplugged concert, where it came to prominence. It’s a great mid-tempo rocker. (Anaheim, 10th March) Take it away, Bob.
Dignity
We can slow down for ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ but we can’t sit it out. Rather than the echoey, woozy versions of the 1960s by The Band and Julie Driscoll, which play on the song’s trippy mysteriousness, Dylan has been developing a much more abrasive, sharper interpretation. I love Julie Driscoll’s performance , which soars into the stratosphere of psychedelic madness, but there is a much grittier, more sordid aspect to the song, a harsh reminder of ‘favours done’ where the promise that ‘we shall meet again’ becomes a threat. Harsh and uncompromising as they are, I have come to prefer these later Dylan performances to the druggy, insubstantial interpretations of the sixties. (5th October, London).
Wheel’s on fire
Still in the rock and roil department, we suddenly discover a new one, ‘10,000 Men’ from Under the Red Sky, never before performed. The song has a blues structure, and is a nonsense rhyme. Dylan’s use of childhood rhymes and themes in that album has not been well understood. Even the droll masterpiece ‘Under the Red Sky’ hasn’t been that well received. This starts promisingly enough, but turns a bit clunky after a while. The humour is welcome, however. (12th Nov)
‘Ten thousand women all sweepin' my room,
Ten thousand women all sweepin' my room,
Spilling my buttermilk, sweeping it up with a broom.’
10,000 Men
I want to finish with two performances of the magnificent ‘Lovesick’ off Time Out of Mind. A stately, 3 a.m. end to our rock and roil party. I’ve discussed this song in previous posts, and coming to it again I still find it one of the finest expressions of alienation in modern literature. The ghost walks, and leaves us ‘hanging on to the shadow’. It’s the ultimate outsider’s song, best indulged in when you’re feeling sorry for yourself and your lost loves. Both these performances are superlative. Restrained, yet full of tension. The first is from early in the tour, the first American leg (Billings, MT 25th March), and is a little harder and sharper than the second, from later in the year, the European and British leg (Dublin, 14th Sept).
Lovesick (A)
Lovesick (B)
That’s all for now. Stay safe, stay sane and keep rocking.
I went into a restaurant lookin' for the cook
I told them I was the editor of a famous etiquette book
The waitress, he was handsome, he wore a powder-blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said, "Could you please make that crepe"
Just then the whole kitchen exploded from boilin' fat
Food was flyin' everywhere, I left without my hat
On April 1, 2019, TheaterMania serves up the ridiculously transparent April Fool’s joke that the very tough, very macho Captain America Chris Evans has been won over to headline a gender-bending lead role in a musical: “BREAKING: Chris Evans to Become First Male Jenna in Waitress on Broadway”. Clickbait, of course, and the article is accompanied by a – not too professionally – photoshopped Evans-as-waitress. Waitress in itself is well chosen, by the way. The successful musical version of the 2007 indie film is an all-female production, with a female director (Diane Paulus), a female music writer and lyricist, a female choreographer and a female scriptwriter. To have the female lead played by an ultimate he-man would be amusing self-mockery bordering on irony.
And the colour of Chris Evans’ clothes on the photoshopped poster is just as well chosen: powder-blue.
The cape of Dylan’s male waitress is powder-blue too, which is a fitting colour anyway: powder-blue is as difficult to define as the timeline along which the protagonist moves. Throughout the centuries it has been used for different shades of blue, but since the 20th century we all agree on a dusty, pale shade of blue. In 2021, it happens to be trendy again; both fashion collections and car manufacturers (Toyota, for example), concentrate on colours like pink, lilac and blush – and powder-blue, too. Still, the colour indication is as rare in the twenty-first century as it was in 1965.
In Dylan’s bookcase it can probably only be found once or twice. Once in the work that is on Dylan’s bedside table in these months, judging by the many references in the songs he writes in these mercurial 500 days: William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine from 1961. In one of the many homoerotic scenes:
“He was lying on a lumpy studio bed in a strange Room – familiar too – in shoes and overcoat – someone else’s overcoat – such a coat he would never have owned himself – a tweedy loose-fitting powder-blue coat.”
That, LBGTQ or effeminacy, seems to be the connotation anyway. In Funny Girl, the mega-hit that already has been running at The Majestic for several months as Dylan records “115th Dream” half a mile away, the colour comes along once (A rootin’, shootin’, ever-tootin’ Dapper Dan who carries in his satchel a powder-blue Norfolk suit, “Cornet Man”) and Dylan uses the bluer shade of pale himself once more, twenty years later, in “Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love?)”:
There’s just a hot-blooded singer
Singing “Memphis in June”
While they’re beatin’ the devil out of a guy
Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig
Later he’ll be shot
For resisting arrest
… again suggesting effeminacy, indeed.
In “115th Dream”, the suggestion is not too subtle. The handsome man wearing the powder-blue cape is introduced with the female job title waitress, which is not elaborated on. It’s 1965, a comic effect has already been achieved by giving a man feminine traits, and this cheap way to score a laugh is being milked long after 1965 in TV comedies, musicals (La Cage Aux Folles is probably the ultimate example) and films like Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire and White Chicks. Dylan, too, feels that the joke already has been made with the mere job title “waitress”, and can immediately move on to the next dramatic development: the kitchen explodes and the protagonist flees.
VI A little plumbing on the side
By the mid-sixties, the interviews are getting sillier and sillier, and certainly in press conferences, Dylan’s words are barely worth taking seriously. A fitting finale is the fabricated interview that Dylan concocts over the phone after both he and interviewer Nat Hentoff have seen the proof of an “edited” interview that Playboy intends to print. Hentoff tells: “I got a call and he was furious. I said, ‘Look, tell them to go to hell. Tell them you don’t want it to run.’ And he said, ‘No, I got a better idea. I’m gonna make one up.’”
He has no tape recorder, so at the cost of a colossal writer’s cramp, Hentoff tries as hard as he can to keep up with the unleashed Dylan on the phone. Playboy accepts the “interview” and prints it (March ’66); “It was run as there was absolutely no indication it was a put-on.” Hentoff can’t use his hand for a day, but it’s all worth it and Dylan is content with the prank too. “He thought it was a very funny caper, which it was.”
Actually, it’s a wonderful “interview”, comparable to one of the best “interviews” with Dylan, the “one-act play, as it really happened one afternoon in California” that Sam Shepard wrote for Esquire in 1986 with the title True Dylan, and later actually included as a one-act play in the collection Fifteen One-Act Plays (2012). Not comparable in content (absolutely not, in fact), but in value; both interviews have the paradoxical quality that fiction tells more about the artist Dylan than faithful reportage does. Here, thanks to the wild story Dylan shakes out of his sleeve when asked what made you decide to go the rock n’ roll route. The warmed-up singer gleefully rattles off a 286-word answer with a high 115th dream quality, in which “I” squeezes out a disastrous jack-of-all-trades biography that takes him from Philadelphia to Phoenix to Dallas to Omaha, culminating in:
“I move in with a high-school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at,-but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce.-Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless-to say, he burned the house down, and hit the road.”
Both in terms of content and style, unmistakably the author of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”. In terms of content, we see a similar stumbling path of a protagonist staggering from conflict to conflict, within an unreal frame. In the interview, Dylan builds that unreal frame by placing geographically absurd distances between the conflicts (over 4,000 miles, roughly from the East Coast to the Far West to the Deep South to the High North), in the song, the time jumps through the centuries provide the surreal frame.
And stylistically we see an identical acceleration; at first the frenzies pass by every two, three lines, then in every following line and it culminates in accumulations of two, three absurdities within one sentence – both the interlocutor Dylan and the songwriter Dylan run on a diesel:
Now, I didn't mean to be nosy, but I went into a bank
To get some bail for Arab and all the boys back in the tank
They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants
They threw me in the alley, when up comes this girl from France
Who invited me to her house, I went, but she had a friend
Who knocked me out and robbed my boots and I was on the street again
… with which Dylan en passant lays a first building block for intertextuality; a year later, in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, we have a next encounter with the French girl in the alley, and we get some more clarity about the identity of her aggressive, boots-robbing boyfriend:
Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well
… taking us back to the seventeenth century again.
Bob Dylan – 115th Dream (19.10.1988 New York):
To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream part 4: I knew Thomas Jefferson
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:
An index to the full “Cooking Up More Mythologies” series appears at the end of this article.
by Larry Fyffe
Throw a Passover feast at the time that Jesus Christ is nailed to the cross by the Romans, and the narratives presented in the Holy Bible get rather tangled up.
The following song lyrics, at one level of meaning, apparently take a cheeky look at attempts to untangle the confusion as to the timeline of the crucifixion:
Tomorrow's Friday
We'll see what it brings
Everybody's talking
'Bout the early Roman kings
(Bob Dylan: Early Roman Kings)
The Jewish Sabbath, a day of rest, begins Friday evening; ends Saturday evening.
The standard Christian interpretation be that Jesus gives up the ghost on Friday afternoon before the Jewish Sabbath begins.
Saith the biblical verses below:
In the end of the Sabbath
As it began to dawn toward the first day of the week
Came Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary
To see the sepulchre ....
"He is not here for he is risen, as He said
Come, see the place where the Lord lay"
(Matthew 28:1,6)
So far so good, but the Jewish Passover (the holiday celebrating the passing over of households by the Angel of Death on which lamb’s blood marks the door) is happening at this time.
In the biblical verses beneath, Jesus is said to partake of the Passover feast:
Then came the day of the unleavened bread
When the Passover must be killed ....
And when the hour was come, He sat down
And the twelve apostles with Him
(Luke 22: 7,14)
Then along comes the gnostic-like Gospel of John wherein the timeline of the crucifixion is messed with – Jesus, symbolized as the the Passover Lamb, sacrificed on the day of the feast:
Christ’s eaten a last supper, but apparently not a Passover feast, with his disciples:
Now before the feast of the Passover
When Jesus knew that His hour was come
That He should depart of this world ...
And the supper ended, the devil now put into the heart
Of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray Him
(John 13: 1,2)
According to the Gospel of John, Christ becomes the Passover Lamb, sacrificed on the cross; consumed at the feast of the unleavened bread.
The narrative confirmed earlier by John the Baptist:
The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him
And saith, "Behold the Lamb of God
Which taketh away the sin of the world"
(John 1:29)
The chief priests had determined things wouldn’t happen this way:
And consulted that they might take
Jesus by subtilty, and kill Him
But they said, "Not on the feast day
Lest there be an uproar among the people"
(Matthew 26: 4,5)
It’s supposedly a non-Passover supper that Jesus attends with His disciples:
And as they did eat, Jesus took the bread
And blessed it, and break it, and gave it to them
And said, "Take, eat it: this is my body"
And He took the cup, and when he had given thanks
He gave it to them, and they drank it, and He said unto them, "This is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many"
(Mark 14: 22, 23, 24)
The narrator in the following song lyrics takes exception to the shift in the tmeline of the crucifixion story as told by the Gospel of John:
Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could learn to hold you, love
And call you mine
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)
The five songs Dylan composed in 1997 take us on a strange journey as he worked to complete the recordings for Time Out of Mind. An index to the full series is here
This article concludes the writing of “Time out of Mind”
“Cold Irons Bound” clearly describes a journey, but notes that he is in chains (probably metaphorical chains, but chains nonetheless,) which of course reflects the title of the album. Time is passing, as it does on a journey, but his mind is not in the same place as his body. It’s a theme that seems to be there through much of the album.
Then in the next piece, that journey sees a possible end point as the central character in the tale is “Trying to get to heaven”. If he succeeds then time really will be out of mind, for as Talking Heads so clearly reminded us, “heaven is a place where nothing ever happens”.
https://youtu.be/sZpZuIWu1tw
Yet we soon see that the heaven he wants to reach is not the actual Christian heaven but a symbolic heaven in which he can make the woman he loves understand that he loves her. The mental emphasis is there once more; it has nothing to do with religion.
So we come to the final three compositions of the year “Make you feel my love,” “Til I fell in love with you,” and “Love Sick”. After that all that is left is the putting of the songs in the right order for the album.
Make you feel my love
To see how life has changed we only have to look at the opening
When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love
The man who last year was thinking it was not dark yet but getting there, is now wanting the woman he loves to feel his love. Having given up, having been in chains, he’s now trying once more.
This is not just a long way from
I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping.
this is so far removed from those thoughts, we are now at the other end of the spectrum.
Now I am not with those who think that “Feel my love” is a mistake for this album or in any way an inferior song. If I had written it, and never written anything else, I’d still spend every day walking around saying to people “I wrote that”. Of course I’d probably get carried off to an institution at the same time, but even so… to me it is a magnificent work of art.
Dylan is offering us both sides of love – the total and utter despair on the one hand, and the overwhelming yearning, desire and need to express the love he feels, on the other hand. And that is perfectly reasonable at this point, because this is what the whole album is about. He loves her, but it has no impact on her.
And that is emphasised because he knows that he was ok until he met her and fell for her. So he changes track again and writes…
Till I fell in love with you
https://youtu.be/iQtYvx4Y4lM
It is a strange conundrum: Dylan puts at least one 12 bar blues song onto every album, which acknowledges that this is the key to his roots, this is the music he loves. And yet it is these 12 bar blues that are so often ignored by reviewers looking for the very essence of Dylan’s music.
So when we come to Time Out of Mind we think of Love Sick and Not Dark Yet maybe, but not of Til I fell in love with you, a classic 12 bar blues. And it is the same through all the albums.
This is more than a song of disengagement, this is a song of falling apart; and the cause this time is not the reminiscence of things past but rather the total lack of self. He loves her so much, he is losing himself.
He has, in the previous composition, expressed his utter love for the lady and the need to make her feel his love, and now he finds that expressing that love does not lead to paradise at all but to torment. In fact this is the old blues of perfidious womanhood betraying honest hardworking men, underlined by the fact that love itself cannot be trusted.
But there is also the old blues concept of life going on, you just have to suffer it, that is how it is. Just keep on keeping on. And the piece moves the “keep on keeping on” thought to the notion that…
If I’m still among the living, then I’ll be Dixie bound.
Down the Road to the Southern States, the home of the blues, Highway 61, New Orleans. At least there people will understand. And anyway, I’ll have the music. Although having spent so much time professing he stayed in Mississippi a day too long, he’ll probably not planning to hang around in any one particular place.
The jagged chord at the very start on the album, played over and over punches at our nerves from the first second. During the first verse, it overpowers us as the first sound we hear and then slowly fades into the background – but always there. Our nerves are on edge.
And as if that were not enough, as an opening
Well, my nerves are exploding and my body’s tense
is about as hard as a blues song, or come to that any song, can get. You want a punch in the face? Here it comes.
I’ve been hit too hard, I’ve seen too much
Incidentally, that line and the following line (Nothing can heal me now, but your touch) both turn up on “Marchin’ To The City” which was recorded in the same sessions but dropped from the album.
So, we kick off with desperation, and then we find the resolution is no resolution at all.
Nothing can heal me now, but your touch
I don’t know what I’m gonna do
She’s got the power, he’s sucked in, (or perhaps I should say, “All boxed in”) and has no idea how to escape. Oh this really is the blues.
This song, with its continuing images of the world falling apart (it won’t even rain, damn it, when he needs it to), is part of the descent from desperation to utter total despair and then a complete sense of giving up, that marks out the first seven songs on Time Out of Mind.
Yes it is the world gone utterly, totally wrong.
Well, my house is on fire, burning to the sky
I thought it would rain but the clouds passed by
Now I feel like I’m coming to the end of my way
But I know God is my shield and he won’t lead me astray
Still I don’t know what I’m gonna do
I was all right ’til I fell in love with you
That’s a lovely contradiction of the religious message. God won’t lead me astray, but even so, I still don’t know what to do.
This being the blues, there is no relief for the middle 8, no change of key, no variation in the chord sequence, it is just verse after verse pounding after verse of desperation.
When I’m gone you will remember my name
I’m gonna win my way to wealth and fame
I don’t know what I’m gonna do
That old terrifying fear that no one will come to the funeral, no one will miss me or even remember me when I’m gone, so little is the mark we have left on this world, so tiny is the care other people have for us. And so he does the only thing a Dylan character can do; he keeps on keeping on, moving on, always moving on, because that way he’ll never know if people remembered him or not.
And yet, I spy something odd – although this might be my complete misunderstanding of American phraseology, so do put me right if I am mistaken. He’s Dixie bound. Now I have always (as a non-American) understood Dixie to be the south, and I thought Mississippi was part of the south. I guess if that’s right his solution is just to tour in the home of the blues.
So, by my understanding, Bob now had everything he needed for his album except for a song that would introduce the collection: a song that would show us the landscape we were inhabiting once we ventured into Time out of Mind. A total and absolutely unmistakable scene-setter.
I would guess that also by this point Dylan had the title for the album, because the songs are so very much about his mental state and the way that plays around with the notion of time that he really couldn’t help but use the words “time” and “mind” in the album.
But in other ways we can understand why “Love Sick” was written at the end of the 18 months or so of composing this work. It is, to my mind, the most amazing opening to an album – and one that very few composers would ever have contemplated. At the time of writing Dylan has performed the song 914 times live in a 22 year period, making it the 12th most performed song ever by Dylan and his band, and the most performed song from this album. (Cold Irons Bound is second, in relation to the album’s songs, with 423 live performances – but that song only lasted 14 years).
And to divert for just a moment, in case it is of interest, here is the list of the 14 most performed songs as of August 2021.
All Along the Watchtower
Like a Rolling Stone
Highway 61 Revisited
Tangled Up In Blue
Blowin’ in the Wind
Ballad of a Thin Man
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
It Ain’t Me, Babe
Maggie’s Farm
Things Have Changed
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
Love Sick
I find that interesting. I’d classify all the 11 songs before “Love Sick” in the list to be utter classics from the Dylan genre. Not my own personal favourites, but songs that symbolise the very essence of Dylan in different ways. But “Love Sick” feels to me like a different sort of song.
If one can just stand aside from the music for a moment and consider the lyrics, the sheer power of this song emerges as once.
I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping.
Also of note, I feel, is the fact that the final three compositions required for the album all have the word “love” in the title, and love is clearly the curse. As he says in “Til I fell in love with you”
I don’t know what I’m gonna do
I was all right ’til I fell in love with you
And what of “Make you feel my love?” How does Dylan write “Love Sick” and “Make you feel my love” one after the other? Indeed what made Bob write three consecutive songs with “love” in the title, ending with, as we note above, “Love Sick”?
The only answers I have are a) Bob writes as the ideas that plop into his head rather than in a thoroughly planned way, and b) that as the songs emerged he began to understand what the album was about. In this second explanation the album wasn’t fully planned as he started writing, although he had a general idea. But as he got near the end the order of songs began to emerge and he realised what he needed to make the whole concept work.
In the classic approach of popular music, albums start with something fairly upbeat, and then have a slow number as the second track, but this album begins
I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping
So he sets out travelling and experiences total disintegration – yesterday was too fast, today is too slow. He moves on and on, until in the end he acknowledges that the moving on and moving on has begun to deflect the pain just a little as “Every day your memory grows dimmer… It doesn’t haunt me like it did before, I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere, Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.”
And as the songs move on he knows full well what the cause of all this is, as he says, “I was all right ’til I fell in love with you.” And so we reach the point where it’s not dark yet but getting there – the lowest possible point that there can be.
From there on we get the sense of movement forwards. He’s still trapped in one sense in “Cold Irons Bound” but he is moving on, and the lightness slowly returns until he gets to the even suggesting that he still feels the love that started off this whole disaster of a life.
But he knows that there is no point hanging about, no point in waiting for the woman to change her mind, he manages at last to move his thoughts away from this utter disaster of a relationship which was announced in “Love Sick”. He knows he can do it, and that “There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow; But I’m already there in my mind; And that’s good enough for now.”
Now I fully admit, virtually everyone to whom I have presented this view of “Time out of Mind” has scoffed and suggested I am fitting the songs to a notion that I already have – and yes many theories emerge in that way. All I can say is, it works for me.
I don’t think Bob had this vague story of how a break up of a love affair led to decline and despair, and how eventually the character in the story managed to pull himself back together by imagining a place where he could feel ok once more, at the time he started. I think it evolved as time went by.
I enjoy the story I hear in this album, but then I also enjoy the individual songs. And I enjoy some of the cover versions too.
There are indexes to some of the series developed on this site under the picture at the top of the page, as well as on our home page.
