Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

All Directions is a series of articles that considers Bob Dylan’s compositions in the order they were written, looking for links between the songs which perhaps on occasion reflect how Bob was feeling about himself, his friends, and the world.

The series index is here.  The previous episode was All Directions 59: Going down down down

My thesis in that previous article was simple: although some people see the songs of the early part of 1990 as “children’s songs” those songs are much darker and deeper, and in fact continue the negativity of 1989.  And with this much negativity going on it was probably a great relief for Bob to return to the Wilburys for a second expedition (called volume 3).

There were 11 songs all told in this second collection but most commentators suggest that four of them (New blue moon, Wilbury Twist, Poor House and Cool Dry Place) had little to do with Bob Dylan the composer.   They have been considered briefly on this site, and I think that’s enough.

Which leaves seven songs starting with “The Devil’s been busy” – which itself seems to have some of the negative thoughts of the earlier songs from this year and the previous year, still lurking within.

You see your second cousin
Wasted in a fight
You say he had it coming
You couldn’t do it right
You’re in a western movie, playing the part
The devil’s been busy in your back yard

Apart from that, I’m not sure there is much to get excited about.

With the next song, “If you belonged to me” I am ready to get very unexcited by the title – I really don’t like references to one person in a relationship owning the other… I thought we removed that in the 1960s.

There is some fun such as with “You say let’s go to the rodeo to see some cowboy fall,” and some real negative nastiness reminding us of day to day reality…

The guy your with is a ruthless pimp
Everybody knows
Every cent he takes from you
Goes straight up his nose.

That darkness that has beset Bob last year and this, sure is still there.

Inside Out takes Bob into an area of concern I am not sure we have had much of before, with the issue of the environment.  And musically Bob does something very odd – although it is possible that George Harrison is the one who threw this in… he suddenly jerks to a new key, with “Be careful where you’re walking…”  I really do wonder if that came from a quite separate Harrison song and was just thrown in the middle.

But the negativity is still there…

The other link we find here

You’re saying that you’re all washed up
Got nothing else to give.
Seems like you would’ve figured out
How long you have to live

which is a sort of mirror image of Positively 4th Street – which is about as negative as you can get.

But then we really do have a song that is Dylan through and through, a tribute to a slow 1950s doo-wop type of music that might be associated with a B side of a 78rpm by the Platters or the Teenagers.

“She’s my baby” was copyrighted by Dylan and there’s a fair amount of his feeling for the opposite sex in it.

My baby
She’s got a body for business
Got a head for sin
She knocks me over
like a bowling pin.
She came home last night and said,
“Honey, honey, honey it’s hard to get ahead.”
My baby

And then, finally Bob came up with something that I think is worthy of this array of talent gathered together for no purpose other than to make a follow up, a song that has Bob Dylan with a bit of help from Tom Petty written all over it: “Where were you last night” (not to be confused with Nightwish).

What makes it Dylan is the unusual chord structure – after the first 8 bars there are a couple of unexpected minor chords which really makes the listener jump back, even if one doesn’t know why.

There’s also a bit of the sloppiness in the lyrics that were typical of Dylan at this time – rhyming “week” with “tree” really won’t do (although I have seen it written as “creek” – which rhymes but is out of context.)

But what makes this work is the melody – only occasionally one of Dylan’s strong points -combining in a perfect way with the lyrics, and mixing with that irresistible bass line.

What did you do, who did you see?
Were you with someone who reminded you of me?

It is not just a lost love song – there is the twist – “who reminded you of me” is one of the most interesting lines that I think Bob wrote around this time.  You’re not going out with me, but with someone who reminds you of me, because….    Well because I’m in the studio with the guys or I’m on tour or…

The purists tend to dismiss these albums as being quite unnecessary, but there is fun and laughter here, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  And it is even funnier when we have

You weren’t waiting where you said
You sent someone in your place instead.

That’s the twist. What on earth is going on?  So now, who is reminding who of whom?  Who is taking whose place?

Maybe as said, everyone was throwing lines and ideas in, and Bob Dylan popping in occasionally.  Heylin also makes the point that Dylan recorded everything before letting the rest of the band get on with it.  Maybe all that is so, but this song hardly feels like that at all.

Yes it is a pop song, with no deep or profound meaning but it works perfectly in the genre for which it is made.  The confusions within the song fit perfectly with the “where were you” notion, and the bounce and life and indeed sheer vivacity within the piece adds to the notion that the singer is searching here there and everywhere

But it is a pop song with twists.  Take the chords for example.  The first line runs

D G Gm D A D

Then we get a C minor included, and later in the middle 8 we have a modulation to E major.  Unexpected or what?

Maybe everyone was throwing in ideas – although I’d still say this was mostly Bob with a bit of Tom Petty, but for me this makes the album worthwhile, first because I really enjoy it as a song, and second because although Bob is still in his negative mode (his woman didn’t turn up) he is having fun with reality.  This is much more “who’s who, and who’s where?” rather than “the world gone wrong”.

The negative songs that beset the last couple of years seem to have been pushed back, just a little bit, and in retrospect we can see just how important that was because after this set of songs Bob was about to set off into a prolonged period of not writing.

Four compositions have been suggested between this point and 1995

• Well well well
• Howlin at your window
• Tragedy of the trade
• Time to end this masquerade

but all four could equally be considered as part-pieces from 1984 as well as 1995.  I only rate one of those four as really interesting – “Well well well” and we know that Bob only wrote the lyrics not the music.  But either way, and irrespective of whenever it was written, I think it is a stunning piece of music.

We have two recordings of Well Well Well and I’ll include both here because they are so good.

In this first version by Danny O’Keefe, there is  talk first about how he came to write the song with Bob Dylan, which is ok, but could put you off… so I would beg you to stay with it, or reset the counter to 1’16” and listen.  This is so worth hearing…

And then go to Ben Harper

And if you enjoy the Ben Harper version do get some of his albums.  You will not be disappointed.

I would love to say these songs were Bob’s return to real live songwriting of genius but no.   What happened next was a long period of not writing after the second Wilbury’s album.  That not-writing period lasted for around about five years and as noted above at most during that time Dylan wrote four songs, only one of which is particularly memorable.  However when he did hit the floor once more he was most certainly running.

He hadn’t got rid of the blues – far from it in fact – but he came back with the blues like we had never heard them before.  It made that wait worthwhile.  Oh, so worthwhile.

And then some.

This series charts the NET from its origins in 1987 to the present day, with multiple examples of Dylan’s performances through the period in question.  The full index is here.

The 1999 series so far is…

• NET, 1999, Part 1: Every night in a combustible way.
• Never Ending Tour, 1999, part 2 – Is everything as hollow as it seems?
• NET, 1999, part 3 Touchdown at Tramps – Archaic Music

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

For practical purposes, we can invent two Bob Dylans  (there are a lot more; the man contains multitudes, after all). One is a rock singer with his feet firmly planted in the 1950s and the era of rock and roll. I explored the Rock Dylan in my last post. There we saw Dylan singing ‘Not Fade Away’, ‘Money Honey’, ‘That’ll Be the Day’, and the rock and roll derived ‘Alabama Getaway’. There are others we’ll catch up with in the next post. We saw how the rhythms and chords of rock and roll influenced Dylan’s great early songs like ‘Tombstone Blues’ and ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way’.

Full credit is due to guitarists Sexton and Campbell for brilliantly echoing the sounds of that earlier era of music.

But as well as the Rock Bob we have the Folk Bob. In the 1960s, Dylan acknowledged these two Bobs by breaking his concerts into acoustic and electric sections. That division carries through into the 1990s largely intact, although Dylan evolved a ‘soft rock’ sound which tended to blur the gap. He didn’t necessarily divide his shows into two halves, as he did in the 60s, but the two sides of Bob Dylan were evident every time he switched guitars from acoustic to electric and back again.

In this post I want to explore the Folk Bob because, in 1999, Dylan covered some of the folk songs that influenced him, just as he did with the rock and roll songs. The two Bobs have distinct musical lineages, although when it comes to the blues, the line gets blurred.

Let’s start with ‘Roving Gambler’ (See https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/15673). This is a traditional song, first recorded by Samantha Bumgarner in 1924, but which dates back to 19^th Century England. The Folk Bob has an English/Celtic connection, sometimes direct but more often, as in this case, after the song has entered the American tradition.

Dylan has been singing it since 1960. It’s peppy and a good performance piece. Like ‘Pretty Peggy O’ it’s a root song for Folk Bob’s own songwriting. As evidenced in this performance, the song has lost none of its charm for Dylan. ( 19^th November, Atlantic City.) Here he uses it as an opener.

Roving Gambler

‘You’re Gonna Quit me’ is credited to Blind Blake, first recorded in 1926, and included in Dylan’s folk collection Good as I Been to You, in 1993. The title of the album is a phrase from that song. Here Dylan plays it straight, just as he does on the album, and the ambience of it takes us right back to the folk clubs in New York in the early 60s. (8^th April)

You’re gonna quit me

It is well known that Dylan began his songwriting career by writing his own lyrics for pre-existing melodies. (I believe ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was Dylan’s first fully original melody.) The first song Dylan wrote, ‘Song to Woody’, takes its melody from the Woody Guthrie song, ‘1913 Massacre’. (see https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/45540) The origin of the melodies of these songs is often obscure, which suggests they come from more ancient folk traditions.

In ‘Song to Woody’ the major features of a Folk Bob song are established – a simple ballad like structure with multiple verses, and no bridge. In revisiting the song, I was surprised at how good it is. Dylan didn’t begin by writing bad songs; he was good right from the start. Like ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, another early song, there’s a sense of nostalgia, as if the singer is much older than he was, a sense of a life travelled and lived. There’s a world weariness that belies his youth, but of course by 1999 his voice has grown old enough for the song.

The song celebrates and is quite explicit about these folk and blues singers from the 1930s and 40s whose melodies and attitudes underpin Dylan’s own.

‘Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind’

The reference is to Cisco Houston, a comrade of Guthrie. Sonny is probably Sonny Boy Williamson, a bluesman from the 1930s and a great harmonica player, while Leadbelly and his prison songs were getting known in the early 1960s, mainly thanks to the efforts of collector Alan Lomax.

Once more, Dylan plays it straight, with no frills.

Song to Woody

The early ‘Masters of War’ shows how effective welding his own lyrics to pre-loved melodies could be. The melody comes from ‘Nottamun Town,’ an ancient traditional English song, a nonsense rhyme, which was collected and then arranged by Jean Ritchie.  (See https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/527)

In the article just referenced, Tony Atwood has a fascinating discussion of the ‘Dorian Mode’ in which the song is written, a mode that is in neither the major nor the minor keys, but a more ancient key which has largely fallen out of use. This Dorian Mode helps create that ominous, threatening effect we hear in the song, something that has come from a more ancient place. The genius of the song lies in this combination of hard hitting, contemporary anti-war lyrics with this antique Dorian Mode. Somehow, I am reminded of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’ (Kublai Khan) and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’:

‘And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

Dylan has done this song as a hard rocker, but in the 90’s he developed a more quiet but no less threatening arrangement, not as rigidly dumpty-dum as the original (Freewheeling, 1962), but more a syncopated, surging sound better suited to the song. I’m still stuck on the 1995 London performance, but I have no quarrel with this powerful version (a harp break would have been nice, though). The audience is a little rowdy for my taste, but what interests me is the guitar work, with Sexton, Campbell and Dylan giving the song a Celtic drive both moving and spooky.

Masters of War

Dylan does the same thing with his anti-war drama, ‘John Brown’. In this case he uses a traditional Irish melody from ‘My Son John’, an anti-war song in its own right. (See https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/48) Again it is this mix of antique folk melodies and contemporary themes that drives the song along. There is a curious sense of antiquity to the lyrics of this song also, however. The term ‘cannon ball’ takes us back to wars of previous eras.

Probably the best live version of ‘John Brown’ remains the 1994 MTV Unplugged performance. It’s very smooth. But by the late 90s Dylan had evolved a slower, starker arrangement, with banjo, that rivals the Unplugged performance. This 1999 performance (From Tramps, New York) is both simpler and more deadly. The antique nature of the melody is brought to the fore by the arrangement.

There is however a problem. By the late 90s Dylan has lost his grip a little on the lyrics (same with ‘Blowing in the Wind’), and he fluffs them a couple of times (while brilliantly covering up for it) and this mars the performance for me.

John Brown

‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ (1963) is built on three simple chords common to many songs, which is maybe why it sounds familiar, even if we haven’t heard it. It’s a wonderful love song, I put it alongside ‘Girl from the North Country’ – it has a similar innocence.  In this performance Dylan doesn’t try any clever tricks, or attempt to add chords, but plays it in all its original simplicity, giving it a gentle melody  with the band joining in on the chorus.  It is done without sacrificing the delicacy of feeling we find in the original.

Tomorrow is a long Time.

It’s not exactly clear where the melody for ‘Girl from the North Country’ comes from, and it doesn’t really sound much like ‘Scarborough Fair’ to which it has been linked. It does, however, have an old worldly sense to it in some of the phrasing. Love songs are as old as folk music itself, and it’s the sense of deep time, a long tradition, that gives these songs their gravitas. In singing these compositions, Dylan becomes the archetype of the travelling bard or minstrel.

Once more the 1999 performances honour the feeling of the original. This is a softer version from 2^nd April.

Girl from the north country. (A)

And here’s a somewhat sharper version. (Date unknown)

‘Blowing in the Wind’ is derived from ‘No More Auction Blocks’, a song about slavery dating back to the American Civil War. The wind may be elusive, but the questions are eternal. It was one of the first protest songs Dylan wrote that wasn’t based on a topical event. The antique feel of it, and its anthemic quality, give a sort of timelessness. Again the use of ‘cannon ball,’ a deliberate archaism to give the message a more universal feel.

 Blowing in the Wind

Fast forward three or four years and we have ‘Fourth Time Around’, a narrative which evokes the English ballad tradition and was a poke at the Beatles song, ‘Norwegian Wood’, which Dylan felt was too much like one of his own songs. But the lyrics tell a sordid, unsavoury little tale quite at variance with the sweetness of the melody. It is a deadly little song about an un-romantic encounter. It is dripping with venom and bitterness.

‘She threw me outside, I stood in the dirt where everyone walked
And after finding out I'd forgotten my shirt, I went back and knocked
I waited in the hallway, she went to get it, and I tried to make sense
Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair that leaned up against

Her Jamaica rum, and when she did come, I asked her for some
She said, "No, dear, " I said, "Your words aren't clear, 
             you'd better spit out your gum"
She screamed 'til her face got so red, then she fell on the floor
And I covered her up and then thought I'd go look through her drawer’

But what a beautiful, spooky performance Dylan gives here. The complaint that Dylan never sings his songs the way they sound on the album doesn’t apply here. The thirty-three years between the writing of the song and this performance drop away. Yep. This is just the way it sounded.

Fourth Time Around

Well that’s me this time around. Back soon with more sounds from 1999.

Kia Ora

• Early Roman Kings (2012) part I: Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
• Early Roman Kings (2012) part II: Anything goes
• Early Roman Kings (2012) part III: He had a left like Henry’s hammer

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         You can ring my bell, ring my bell

I’ll dress up your wounds with a blood clotted rag
I ain’t afraid to make love to a bitch or a hag
If you see me coming and you’re standing there
Wave your handkerchief in the air
I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings
I keep my fingers crossed like the early Roman Kings

 It is number 18 in Billboard’s “The 50 Sexiest Songs Of All Time”, Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” from 1979. Which was not exactly the intention of songwriter Frederick Knight. He was so concerned about the image of the 22-year-old elementary school teacher Ward, honestly. “Anita is a very clean-cut person,” Knight tells Billboard Magazine (9 June ’79) without blinking an eye, “I went to great pain being picky about lyric content. We’re trying to build a respectable image for her.”

It works out anyway. One-hit wonder Ward never gets an image like that of sex goddess Donna Summer. She really is a clean-cut person. The oldest of five children in a Baptist family from Memphis has never even been to a disco before her hit single, and the song is definitely not as explicit as “Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi”, or as the No. 1 Sexiest Song, Olvia Newton-John’s “Physical” (There’s nothing left to talk about, unless it’s horizontally), but still… “Ring My Bell” is not No. 18 for nothing;

I'm glad you're home
Now did you really miss me?
I guess you did by the look in your eye
Well lay back and relax
While I put away the dishes 
Then you and me can rock a bell

You can ring my bell, ring my bell

https://youtu.be/4_68RwJyzkA

… and more unambiguous flirting, like “The night is young, and full of possibilities, well, come on and let yourself be free”. Agreed, not bawdy or unrespectable, but also not really the words a lyricist who is “being picky about lyric content” chooses to use in an attempt to build “a respectable image”. No, Frederick Knight’s pious words notwithstanding: since 1979, ring my bell has meant something like “let’s have sex”.

It lends an ambiguity to Dylan’s “Early Roman Kings” that Dylan is not averse to. In the context, however, it takes on a different connotation. We are in the fourth verse, and the tone has long been set: sinister, dark, menacing. Nailed in their coffins, dragging you back, destroying you and your city, treacherous sluggers… hardly the prelude to a sultry seduction scene with an erotic finale. And certainly not by the somewhat macabre main sentence with which the protagonist introduces the ringing of the bell: “I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings”. The evoked atmosphere has already led us to the Victorian, Gothic far horizons, from Roman kings to a Romanian count, to the undead Dracula. “My bell still rings” then pushes the associations to the very nineteenth-century safety coffins.

The cholera epidemics of the 19th century cause a spike in a time-honoured collective fear: the fear of being buried alive – which, incidentally, happens all too often, with “succumbed” cholera patients. One of Dylan’s literary idols, Edgar Allan Poe, floated along with the Zeitgeist – and undoubtedly stirred up the collective fear as well – with stories such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado and with the horror story The Premature Burial (1844). A final scene like the one in the House of Usher, the entry of Madeline, thought dead and buried, does resonate in this verse; “There was blood upon her white dressing gowns, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame” – well, the couleur resonates, in any case.

Anyway – atmosphere and preliminary insinuations push the verse I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings towards good old-fashioned nineteenth-century horror, towards a narrator buried alive in his safety coffin, operating the cord-and-bell system to indicate that he ain’t dead yet. Just as the handkerchief, the blood clotted rag and the dressed-up wounds push the associations to good-old Count Dracula. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, after all, the handkerchief has only one function: “I noticed that Van Helsing tied a soft silk handkerchief round her throat,” for example (Ch. 12) – to dress up Lucy’s bite wounds in the neck. Too late, as we know – Lucy is already an UnDead, gives herself to the Count night after night, has already become his bitch.

It is an attractive, and in this case narratively correct, underlying layer of the scabrous “ring my bell”. After all, also with Bram Stoker the unspoken suggestion is that poor Lucy (and later Mina too) has become the “bride” of Dracula, there is a sexual undertone in the gruesome, phased murder of Lucy and the attempted murder of Mina.

It is not conclusive, however. Dylan is not writing a poetic retelling of the Victorian masterpiece – like many of his best songs, the lyrics of “Early Roman Kings” are a kaleidoscopic, multi-coloured jewel. Impressions from all corners of Dylan’s cultural baggage seem to descend on it. Waving with the handkerchief, for example, does not suit Lucy at all; every time she reports to the count, she is in a trance, moving like a sleepwalker – that handkerchief is really only there to dress up her wounds. Waving a handkerchief in the air at a male counterpart is not uncommon though, in Victorian, nineteenth-century English masterpieces, but much less gruesome:

“You’ll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road? I think it’ll encourage me, you see.”
“Of course I’ll wait,” said Alice.

… when Alice waves to her Knight, that is, in Through The Looking Glass (1871), the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, and in any case a work from which Dylan repeatedly draws in the twenty-first century (for Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, for instance).

But of course the poet Dylan can take all the freedom he wants to mould his poetic Dracula retelling to his liking. So he can turn a Romanian count into a Roman king and he can turn a sleepwalking UnDead into a handkerchief-waving vampire groupie. Although in that scenario, the last line does introduce a curious plot twist. Does “Lucy” say that? “I’ll keep my fingers crossed”? The sign of the cross? To ward off the vampire?

https://youtu.be/ZPHuZ_8xGGM

To be continued. Next up: Early Roman Kings part V: I will massacre you

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

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

Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies part 1

Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

An archetype of Lilith apparently gets a mention in the New Testament:  “The queen of the south shall rise up in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it.  For she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon”

(Matthew 12:42)

The Old Testament states that the southern queen from Ethiopia brings gifts to Solomon; traditional lore says he gives her a ring, and that she returns home carrying the King’s child in her belly:

And  King Solomon gave unto the Queen of Sheba all her desire
whatsoever she asked
Beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty
So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants
(I Kings 10:2)

In another extrabiblical tale, Jehovah-defying Lilith sneaks back into Eden one night, and  has sex with the sleeping Adam;  his present mate is the submissive (at least for now) rib-begotten Eve; Lilith carries away his seed in order to produce more demons.

In the song lyrics below, the stories above get modernized,  stirred up real good, left open to allegorical interpretation ~

Said it could be that whoring Lily (Lilith) fools around with mine-owner Big Jim (King Solomon of the  United Kingdom) who’s married to the older, now trying-to-be-faithful Rosemary – she in her youth, like Lily, having messed about with big-cocked Egyptains.

Needless to say, the Jack Of Hearts (Jehovah’s earthly manifestation) is on everyone’s mind:

Rosemary started drinking hard, and seeing her reflection
in the knife
She was tired of the attention, tired of playing the role of Big Jim's wife
She had done a lot of bad things, even once tried suicide
Was looking to do just one good deed before she died
She was gazing to the future, riding on the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

As noted, it’s said that  King Solomon gives a ring to the Queen of Sheba:

It was well known that Lily had Jim's ring
And nothing even would come between Lily and the king
No nothing ever would except maybe the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Seems the Jack Of Hearts pays a visit to Lily before leaving the scene:

In the darkness by the riverbed, they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

The people we have in mind for this series are going to be artists who have a direct connection to Dylan and his work or life. So they could be from his backing bands, friends from back in the day or even family members.

As with other series that the two of us have worked on, there is no detail plan set out of where this might go.   We might look at an overview of someone’s career or focus on one particular album. As usual Aaron will pick the subject and send four or five  tracks to Tony  who plays the game of writing a commentary while listening to the track.

If you have not come across the notion before you might like to have a look at the Beautiful Obscurity series in which we use the same technique to look at some of the less well-known cover versions.  Links to that series can be found at the end of this piece.

But now, first up in “Dylan adjacent artists”…

Aaron: Let’s look at some of the solo work for Charlie Sexton. He was Dylan’s guitar player from 1999 to 2002 and played on Things Have Changed and Love and Theft amongst others.

He made his first album at 16 and had a big hit (US #17) in 1985 with the Bowie-esque Beat’s So Lonely.

Tony: And that was his problem as I recall – he put everything possible into this song and it was his biggest hit.  After that it was downhill as a solo artist.  Listening to it now it doesn’t really work for me any more, it is just another song of the era.  And really I am not sure that video does it any favours.

But the video certainly captures the chaos of recording sessions where there seems to be a load of guys around who think that anything they touch is going to turn to gold, and maybe once or twice it does.

That’s not to put down his guitar work – it’s just, as a single…. it doesn’t work now.  Goodness me I am getting so very, very old.

Aaron: Stints with (amongst others) Bowie, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, Don Henley, Lucinda Williams and Dylan followed.    Solo work continued with several fine albums, including Under The Wishing Tree. Here is Sunday Clothes from that album.

Tony:   Close your eyes and just listen to that musical introduction to the song.  I don’t think it really does anything – which is why there is so much in the video – to hide the lack of content of the song.   The song content has been done so many times before: life in four minutes.   And that’s the problem – it just doesn’t do anything new, nor does it do something old in an exciting new way.  The one bit that shines is the guitar solo – although the return to the vocal after the instrumental break seems to have a little more light.

Aaron: His 2005 album Cruel and Gentle Things showed a new maturity in his writing and heavily influenced by all the fantastic artists he had worked with over the years.

Tony: And indeed it is true – he has worked with so many people and is an utterly fantastic guitarist, but I am not at all sure that his forte is as a solo artist or as the leading light.  It is as if when he does his own thing, everything is technically perfect (including the guitar work of course) but he doesn’t have that final spark which makes me stop everything else and think, “oh my – who is this?” and make me want to play the track again.

Moving on… for the next track there are two video links as it seems there are country limitations on them.  Hopefully one will work where you are, but if not type “Charlie Sexton Gospel” into Google and it might well find you a copy for where you are.

https://youtu.be/EXc3ITKOiuM

Tony: Now having written my negative intro I must admit this is more like it.  I think here has got his voice and exquisite guitar technique together working in sympathy with each other.   Just listen to the total sound of the piece, treating the voice and the instrumentation as one, and there is perfect harmony between the two.   It sounds to me like a song that came together as music and lyrics, without trying to force one part to fit with the other.

Without even listening to the lyrics the over all sound comes straight into me. OK I realise there is a lot of Jesus in there and being an atheist that doesn’t appeal to me, but that still doesn’t detract from a beautiful sound.

And incidentally, if you are enjoying this music and don’t know too much about all the things Charlie Sexton has done there is a decent summary of his life and work on Wikipedia which is worth looking at if you want an introduction.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RsXQ7ruc5PY

Tony: But now back to my nagging.  That opening doesn’t grab me at all – it’s just like so many other songs.  And yet it feels like it could be so much more.   I’m sorry if you are a real fan of Charlie, but I can only reflect it as I hear it. – and I hear an amazing guitarist… who I think wants to be more than that.

For example, that middle 8 section seems disconnected and the upping of the percussion after the middle 8 feels like it was added as a rescue moment because the song wasn’t going anywhere.  Sorry, Aaron, but for me this really is a brilliant musician, not focusing on what he is brilliant at.  He is a fantastic technician, but I am not sure that much of the time he has anything to say.  Even the title has been said so many times before.

Cruel And Gentle Things: again there seems to be regional issues – hopefully one of these two will work for you.

https://youtu.be/2pLamihiJ4Q

And if you, dear reader, disagree with me from top to bottom, please explain to me what I am missing.  I really would like to learn how to appreciate this music better.  I think he misses that instinctive knowledge that Bob so often has of being able to make the lyrics, the melody and the accompaniment all work together in equal parts.

But that’s probably just me getting all carried away once again.

• Beautiful Obscurity: The man in me
• Hollis Brown, and why does it all have to be like this?
• The album of extraordinary rarities now has its own page.
• Beautiful Obscurity: The Dignity Covers
• Beautiful Obscurity: John Brown (but not beautiful)
• Beautiful Obscurity: 8 covers of “Girl from the north country”

Early Roman Kings (2012) part I: Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

Early Roman Kings (2012) part II: Anything goes

by Jochen Markhorst

III         He had a left like Henry’s hammer

They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers, they buy and they sell
They destroyed your city, they’ll destroy you as well
They’re lecherous and treacherous, hell bent for leather
Each of them bigger than all men put together
Sluggers and muggers wearing fancy gold rings
All the women going crazy for the early Roman Kings

The paths of British guitar god Mark Knopfler do cross Dylan’s career quite often, and each time it results in beautiful music. The first feat is smashing right away: the session work that the then up-and-coming talent does on Slow Train Coming (1979). Producer Jerry Wexler and Dylan wisely let Knopfler do whatever pleases him, resulting in, apart from the ear-catching ornaments in every song, the superb melancholy of “I Believe In You” and especially the irresistible drive of the forgotten gem “Precious Angel”. Dylan is impressed, and a few years later asks Knopfler to produce Infidels, which again yields many beautiful songs, plus one of Dylan’s all-time highlights, the perhaps most beautiful version of “Blind Willie McTell”.

Knopfler does not understand at all why the song is rejected for Infidels, but he is and always will be a devout admirer. Like when he, following in the footsteps of broadcaster Dylan, is allowed to host the British Grove Broadcast series for SiriusXM’s Volume channel. It is an extremely attractive series of 24 broadcasts in which DJ Knopfler, à la Dylan, leads an eclectic journey along “some goodies”, as he calls it, along 263 songs, his musical loves. Dylan as a performer is featured five times, and the DJ also likes to play Dylan covers. The first reverence is right away in Episode 1 (4 March 2020), of course:

“The most important songwriter for me growing up was Bob Dylan. From the age of 12 onwards, really, it hasn’t changed that much. Let me just read from this next song, just a couple of lines: Seen the arrow on the doorpost, saying this land is condemned all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem – and that was a song Bob wrote called ‘Blind Willie Mc Tell’. We ended up doing that song in the studio and this is Bob on the piano, doing a version, and yours truly on the 12-string guitar. And that’s all it was. That’s a fantastic song, Bob, and what an honour to be part of it. Blind Willie McTell, studio outtake from 1983.”

Bizarrely, the Dire Strait follows his idol not only as a musician and a radio DJ, but also as a crash pilot. At a quarter to eleven in the morning on Monday 17 March 2003, Knopfler, then 53, is riding his Honda along the Grosvenor Road in Belgravia, London, when he is unable to swerve out of the way of a red Fiat Punto that is suddenly turning right. He breaks six ribs and his collarbone and, like Dylan in ’66, cannot perform for months. In fact, after seven months of therapy, he still cannot hold an acoustic guitar. Which he handles with British understatement, by the way: “I thought, oh no, that’s going to be a drag, I’ll just be playing electric guitar for the rest of my life.”

These are not lost months. Knopfler is sitting at his computer, writing the songs for his next solo album, the beautiful Shangri-La. Which is eventually, indeed, recorded in the legendary Shangri-La Studio in Malibu, just around the corner from Dylan’s home – the studio which was set up by The Band and Dylan producer Rob Fraboni, where Richard Manuel lived, where Dylan camped in a tent in the garden, where Clapton recorded No Reason To Cry (1976) with the help of The Band and Dylan, and whatnot.

The record contains, not unusually for Knopfler, drawn-out, epic songs, but this time it is also clear that he has had a lot of time to read. Quotations from the autobiography of Ray Croc, the man behind McDonald’s worldwide success, are used verbatim in the single “Boom, Like That”, “Back To Tupelo” about Elvis’ film career, the murder ballad based on the true story of the 1967 One-Armed Bandit Murder in North East England, where Knopfler grew up, “5:15 A.M.”, but also songs with Dylanesque joy of language in the lyrics, like the ode to Lonnie Donegan, “Donegan’s Gone”;

Donegan's gone
Gone, Lonnie Donegan
Donegan's gone
Stackalee and a gamblin' man
Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham
Gone, Lonnie Donegan
Donegan's gone

And like the enchanting “Postcards From Paraguay”, played on the good old red Stratocaster:

I never meant to be a cheater
But there was blood on the wall
I had to steal from Peter
To pay what I owed to Paul
I couldn't stay and face the music
So many reasons why
I won't be sending postcards
From Paraguay

… which sounds Dylanesque enough, but the Dylan bell goes off earlier, on the opening line already: “One thing was leading to the next, I bit off more than I could chew” – an abrupt opening line like that of Dylan’s “Up To Me” (Everything went from bad to worse, money never changed a thing).

Presumably, however, Dylan himself really pricked up his ears on one of the the record’s stand-out tracks, and a 21st century fan favourite: “Song For Sonny Liston”.

“Song For Sonny Liston” is, in a way, Knopflers “Hurricane”. Remarkably, though, more poetic than that template, and less activist anyway. Knopfler is also aiming for a kind of rehabilitation of a boxer, of the greatest intimidator of all time, the 1962 world heavyweight champion, the unpopular Big Bear, who had to relinquish his world title to Muhammad Ali in 1964. The song is epic, tells of rise and fall, larded with sentimental asides, and is above all Dylanesque; just like his idol, Knopfler draws from old folksongs, he seeks the Golden Mean of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason, and sometimes lets sound outweigh semantics. Like in the near-perfect chorus:

He had a left like Henry's hammer
A right like Betty Bamalam
Rode with the muggers in the dark and dread
And all them sluggers went down like lead

First, a brilliantly found reference to the folk song “John Henry”, the black nineteenth-century “steel-driving man” with the hammer, embedded in a masterfully alliterating opening line (He had a left like Henry’s hammer). Then a wonderful bridge to Betty Bamalam, which is both an onomatopoetic nod to a boxer and a salute to that other legendary antique work song, to Lead Belly’s “Black Betty” (Whoa, Black Betty bam-ba-lam), and finally the two closing lines which are a joy in rhyme and language.

The same, that joy of rhyme and language, of course applies to this third verse of Dylan’s “Early Roman Kings”. And the suspicion that Dylan borrowed that unusual sluggers and muggers from his music partner Knopfler is strengthened by another remarkable verse line from “Song For Sonny Liston”:

The writers didn't like him the fight game jocks
With his lowlife backers and his hands like rocks
They didn't want to have a bogey man
They didn't like him and he didn't like them
Black Cadillac alligator boots
Money in the pockets of his sharkskin suits

A boxer, Lead Belly, a Cadillac, “John Henry”, inner rhyme, assonance and alliteration, sharkskin suits… when music archaeologists dig up this song five hundred years from now, “Song For Sonny Liston” will undoubtedly be catalogued as “Folk ballad. Late 20^th/early 21^st century. Most likely written by the then famous troubadour B. Dylan.”

To be continued. Next up: Early Roman Kings part IV: You can ring my bell, ring my bell

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

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

Bob Dylan: Cooking Up More Mythologies part 1

by Larry Fyffe

What Bob Dylan leaves out of song lyrics is often as important as what he puts in them.  Space is left for interpreters who dare to trek where angels fear to tread:

Three angels up above the street
Each one playing on a horn ....
But does anyone hear the music they play
Does anyone even try
(Bob Dylan: Three Angels)*

As already mentioned, according to Judeo-Christian lore, Lilith’s not happy with her relationship with Adam; she flees Eden in the form of a ‘screech owl’; sets down in a cave in Babylon where she bears lots and lots of children.

Adam snitches to God who sends three angels to fetch her back. But Lilith refuses to return. The angels blow their horns; sing to her that they’ll kill a hundred of her offspring each day as just punishment for disobeying God’s winged messengers.

Unlike the high priest Eli, who too does not repent, Lilith swears that she’ll fight back.

Eli just let’s things slide; tells Samuel, his student:

And he was to told these few words
which opened up his heart
"If you cannot bring good news, then
don't bring any"
(Bob Dylan: The Wicked Messenger)

Not so Lilith. Says she’ll have her revenge; she’ll cause other’s children to be still-born, or die while sleeping in their cribs.

She aims her bolt well, this pretty one.  Ready now to show mercy, the three angels promise that they’ll not slay any of the screech owl’s children if they’ve been given special amulets to hold:

With your holy medallion in your fingertips that fold
And your saintlike face, and your ghostlike soul
Who among them could ever think he could destroy you
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

In Greek/Roman mythology, the owl is associated with Athena (Minerva), the flashing-eyed virgin Goddess of Wisdom:

Shut your mouth, says the wise old owl
Business is business, and it's murder most foul.
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

As a judge, not a Mafia boss, Athena lets Orestes off because he’s suffered greatly for what he did; does not try to excuse himself for causing the death of both his mother and her lover even though Apollo tells the court that he commanded Orestes to kill them both.

Another reference to the ancient mythology:
You were born with a snake in both of your fists
While a hurricane was blowing
(Bob Dylan: Jokerman)

Hercules is strong even as a baby. With his two hands, he kills a couple of snakes sent into his bedroom at midnight by the angry, vengeful Hera, the wife of Zeus.

* Publisher’s note: it may seem perverse in an article about the lyrics of Dylan to provide a musical example not sung in English.  The reason here is twofold.  First, I’ve not been able to find any covers of the song in English which in my view actually add something to Dylan’s interpretation of his own work.  Second, musically I rather like this.  So it was a case of this version, or none, and since you have the choice of playing it or not, you already have the option of none.  So, in essence, I’ve just added an option.   I hope that explains everything.  Tony.

By Tony Attwood

There is an index to the All Directions series here.  The idea of the series is to trace Dylan’s compositions in the order of their being written, to see what insights that gives us into what he was thinking, and where he was going.

The last episode ended “Everything is broken, there is no sense of direction.  That is 1989.” and that is certainly the impression I got from Bob in the year which also gave us “Disease of Conceit”, “Series of Dreams”, “Most of the Time”, “Where teardrops fall” and ended with “Man in a long black coat”.   Was there ever a more downward spiralling collection in terms of negative themes, combined with an upward spiral of musical and poetic inventiveness?

The question at this time was therefore, could Bob pick himself up and give us something a lot more forward looking and positive?  Indeed did he want to?  Or if not, could he at least retain some of the mystery without every prognostication being negative.

It certainly did not seem so with the opening song of the new decade, “Handy Dandy.”  Negativity might not pull him through, but it gave him a lot of ideas…

Handy dandy, controversy surrounds him
He's been around the world and back again
Something in the moonlight still hounds him
Handy dandy, just like sugar and candy

Handy dandy, if every bone in his body was broken he would never admit it
He got an all girl orchestra and when he says
"Strike up the band", they hit it
Handy dandy, handy dandy

You say, "What are ya made of?"
He says, "Can you repeat what you said?"
You'll say, "What are you afraid of?"
He'll say, "Nothin' neither 'live nor dead"

Bob created a lilting version of the song which gave a different musical vision – as if we can just drift along through this world without taking any notice of the world around us.

but the picture above tells us what the album really is about.   The desolation of his home town, and other towns like it.

This version totally undermines the album version; it is much more insidious because it sounds so sweet and fine and ok when in fact everything is absolutely not OK.   We are still trapped by the man in the long black coat and the disease of conceit.  This remains a very dark world.

And just in case we thought this might be a passing phase (albeit one that was taking a hell of a long time pass) Bob had no hesitation in pointing out we were wrong.  For the next song told us…

The cat's in the well, the wolf is looking down.
The cat's in the well, the wolf is looking down.
He got his big bushy tail dragging all over the ground.

The cat's in the well, the gentle lady is asleep.
Cat's in the well, the gentle lady is asleep.
She ain't hearing a thing, the silence is a-stickin' her deep.

The cat's in the well and grief is showing its face
The world's being slaughtered and it's such a bloody disgrace.

Just because it is a rocking 12 bar blues, it doesn’t mean everything is ok.  It sure isn’t.  And it wasn’t going to stop.  For if ever Bob had a theme that he wanted to pour through and look at in every possible way, this was that moment.   10,000 men takes us once more along the same route.

Ten thousand men on a hill,
Ten thousand men on a hill,
Some of 'm goin' down, some of 'm gonna get killed.

Ten thousand men dressed in oxford blue,
Ten thousand men dressed in oxford blue,
Drummin' in the morning, in the evening they'll be coming for you.

This is not a world in which sometimes things are ok, and sometimes not.  This really is “Everything is broken” over and over and over again.  And not surprisingly, there are not too many cover version around.   I mean, “Desolation Row” tells us just how bad the world is – how appallingly awful the world is – but at least if we can see the world as Bob sees it, we can talk with him, and share thoughts with him.  And it has a nice tune.

But these songs have nothing like that.  In Desolation Row we live in a broken world, but we can share some hopes together, some desire to make the world better, some comfort that we can give each other.  Here we live in a world of utter and total bleakness.  And that’s been the theme of one song after another after another.

My point is that the 1965 sequence of 15 songs from “On the road again” to “Ballad of a thin man” told us of moving on and disdain, of life being a jumble, of hopeless self-centred people etc.  But by and large these are people who are as much as anything hurting themselves by their own attitude – which is why Bob’s lyrics in works such as “Rolling Stone” are so disdainful.

But now this is far worse.  It is not the junkie who has hurt him or herself by overdosing the drugs but people who appear to be living normal lives but are just going to get really hurt by the world they live in.  And like the cat in the well (a really pitiful and painful metaphor) we are stuck.

And he’s not giving up because the lyrics to the next song (Unbelievable) take us even lower

It's unbelievable, it's strange but true,
It's inconceivable it could happen to you.
You go north and you go south
Just like bait in the fish's mouth.
Ya must be livin' in the shadow of some kind of evil star.
It's unbelievable it would get this far.

The song ends

It don't matter no more what you got to say
It's unbelievable it would go down this way.

And there isn’t anything more negative than this.

The only question there was, was how negative could this get, and how long could it go on.  OK that is two questions.  But they get answered by the next song, “Under the red sky” – the song that Bob himself said was about being stuck in one’s backwater home town.

Let the wind blow low, let the wind blow high.
One day the little boy and the little girl were both baked in a pie.

This is the key to the kingdom and this is the town
This is the blind horse that leads you around.

And so it has continued song after song of total negativity.  There is no way out.  Perhaps the message became unclear because of the way Dylan chose to write the music, but the cat is most certainly still stuck down the well, only now the cat has become two young people whose lives are ruined by being born in a dead end town and having no way out of it.

Even when working with Willie Nelson there was no escape

There's a home place under fire tonight in the Heartland
And the bankers are takin' my home and my land from me
There's a big achin' hole in my chest now where my heart was
And a hole in the sky where God used to be

There's a home place under fire tonight in the Heartland
There's a well with water so bitter nobody can drink
Ain't no way to get high and my mouth is so dry that I can't speak
Don't they know that I'm dyin', Why nobody cryin' for me?

And still the negativity went on with Wiggle Wiggle

Wiggle ’til you vomit fire

Was it possible to go any deeper?  Well yes

How many paths did they try and fail?
How many of their brothers and sisters lingered in jail?
How much poison did they inhale?
How many black cats crossed their trail?

And that was it.  Bob, having taken us down so deep he couldn’t find anything much deeper now went back to the Wilbury’s (and it is interesting that the first song from the second collaboration seems to have been “The Devil’s been busy in your back yard”, but that takes us onto the next episode.

And I’m left thinking, it is hand’t been for the Wilbury’s, just how dark could Bob have got?

https://youtu.be/h7njX93gjbQ

Previously in this series:

• The Mythology Of Bob Dylan
• The Mythology of Bob Dylan part II
• Bob Dylan And His Mythology (Part III): Emily Dickinson And The Door 
• The Mythology Of Bob Dylan (Part IV): Arthur Rimbaud
• Dylan and his mythology (Part V)

By Larry Fyffe

The Holy Bible verse below indicates that the God thereof has both male and female attributes:

So God created man in His own image
In the image of God created He him
Male and female created He them
(Genesis 1:27)

The following song indicates that the God thereof has both a good (god) side, and an evil (devil) side; be the Creator of both Life and  Death:

Already the fiesta has begun
And in the streets, the face of God will appear
With His serpent eyes of obsidian
(Bob Dylan: Romance In Durango ~ Dylan/Levy)

The next lyrics create a figure that’s serpentine:

His eyes were two slits
That would make a snake proud
With the face any painter would paint
As he walked through the the crowd
(Bob Dylan: Angelina)

The Godlike creature is associated with Anubis, the male  Embalmer – albeit the Egyptian deity described beneath is likened to a female:

Worshipping a God
With the body of a woman
Well endowed
And the head of a hyena

(Bob Dylan: Angelina)

In the jolly green valley below, the partner of the giant Goddess  is painted as both heavenly and hellish, even Nazi-like:

I've tried my best to love you
But I can't play this game
Your best friend
And my worst enemy
Is one and the same
(Bob Dylan: Angelina)

Referencing Genesis 1:27, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, Jewish biblical lore presents Lilith as Adam’s first wife; translated into to a ‘screech owl’ in the New Testament (akin to Egyptian mythology in which Ra, the Sun God, is depicted as a “falcon”); Lilith flies out of Eden to Babylon because her male partner is sexually domineering – she, her offspring, portrayed as night demons:

Therefore the wild beasts of the desert
With the wild beasts of the islands
Shall dwell there
And the owls shall dwell therein
And it shall be no more inhabited for ever
Neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation
(Jeremiah 50: 39)

The following lyrics, the songster, claws retracted, laments that America is modern Babylon:

The driver peeks out, trying to find one face
In this concrete world full of souls
The angels play on their horns all day
The whole earth in progression seems to pass by
But does anyone hear the music they play
Does anybody even try
(Bob Dylan: Three Angels)

Bob Surprises us all, at least he surprises me.

By Tony Attwood

Pausing between writing up my review part one and the second section (imaginatively named, “part 2”), I saw a comment that had come in from a reader.

“It’s prerecorded. Disappointing. Staged. Would of been nice to see him unplugged & live. Mistakes and all. Good musicianship & arrangements but uninspired , faux playing & the band is wearing masks… does that mean they don’t get performance credits? Bummed this could be his last recorded “live” performance.”

I would agree that it was disappointing that the advertising was misleading, and I can’t see the point of that.  Advertising is there to generate interest so that people buy, but I am surprised that anyone would think that calling the show one thing when it turns out to be another is going to help Dylan.  £20 for the video?  No, I wouldn’t say that is the best £20 I have spent this week.

Of course it may well be that the advertising agency had no idea what the show was going to be like and their brief was wrongly written because Bob told his management that it was going to be something else.  That certainly happens.

And indeed maybe he started working on a live show and then changed his mind (just like on one tour when he rehearsed with a group of female vocalists for two months and then sacked them all two weeks before they went on the road).

Anyway, advertisements change as things develop, and we have what we have.  So although I am not at all sure it was worth £20, I thoroughly enjoyed it as far as I got before my first break to post my thoughts and do the odds and ends a person running a website has to do.

So now to move on – still writing the review as I listen to the show for the first time.

To be alone with you

As I suspected earlier, this sound has been re-mixed, for it really doesn’t correspond with the movement of the musicians on stage.   Not for the first time the bassist is playing away but we can’t hear her, until suddenly there she is.   I’ve got no problem with that, but it just seems odd to let us see the musician play when nothing is there on the track.

And there is that business of Bob holding the guitar and not doing that much with it.   Not my favourite song, but an OK arrangement for me.  Just doesn’t move me much.

What was it you wanted

Now this is interesting for me (even if no one else) since I recently spent several days trying to place this song within the context of Dylan’s writing in the 1980s (“All Directions part 58”).  It is one hell of a song, and musically very different from his normal writing, although the lyrics are very much in the context of the music, and this rendition does it perfect justice.

He only ever played it 22 times on stage (1990 to 1995 – so very spaced out one performance to the next), and yet it is such an amazing song from an exquisite sequence of writing.

Forever Young

Really – that is strange.  The spooky final response to the “Visions of Johanna” that is “What was it you wanted” followed instantly by “Forever Young”.   But then what do I know?

Maybe he is still thinking of the person in “What was it you wanted” and wanted to say “but no hard feelings”.  Could be.

This rendition doesn’t really add anything to the song for me; the accompaniment is too picky and plinky plinky (technical terms, sorry).

Pledging my time

Plinky plinky introduction to this as well, which I don’t really understand either.  Either my focus has gone or Bob and his band had lost the feel for the show.  It can’t be them, so it must be me.  I’m obviously losing it.

But I am redeemed for once into it, this really is enjoyable as a straight 12 bar blues.  It’s a re-arrangement I can totally believe in, and believe in it so much it feels as if this how it was meant to sound from the start.  A little too strong in the mixing of the lead guitar occasionally, for my taste, but that is me just finding something to say.

I should add that by this time in my first viewing of the show, I had stopped bothering with the film, and was just focused on the music.  I am not at all a film critic, so ignore any of my comments on the visuals that gets through.

The Wicked Messenger

One of Bob’s favourites from the JWH album, and the re-working took me by surprise.  Although I quickly got used to it and appreciated the new arrangement even by the end I couldn’t get the hang of the end of every other line with the extended last two syllables.  Struck me that it could have been possible to hold interest in the arrangement by just having it at the end of each verse, but twice a verse seems too much.

Which is a shame for me (and as ever it is just for me) because otherwise I really enjoyed this.

Watching the river flow

An interesting insert here, given that we started with “Masterpiece” – the two great songs from 1971 while he was having a two year break from the heavy lifting in terms of compositional stuff.   It’s a jolly bounce, but it doesn’t really give me new insights.

It’s all over now baby blue

Is it going to be slow all the way through?  Well, yes, it is, which means we have a fair bit of listening to a set of lyrics that we have all known by heart through most if not all of our adult life.

So is there enough here to keep us alert?  Is there a secret message?

Well, there could be a message for an unknown lover or friend, but for us… we know there are some new gigs planned now the lock downs are ending, so no it is not the end in that sense.  No message – and not a lot of listening; just a short version of the song.

But we do get a chance to see that the bass player was Janie Cowan – and that is a worthwhile snippet, because that led me to this, which I really did enjoy.

I always try to take something from a show, and this time I didn’t have to try – she is there for all the hear – and the track above is something special.

As for Bob’s show, I enjoyed watching it this bright sunny morning, but I can’t imagine watching it again, nor will I buy it if it comes out as a video release.  But it was fun, and I can certainly see why Bob invited Janie Cowan into the ensemble.  Thanks for that Bob; I’ve found a new exciting talent to listen to.

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

So here we go with Shadow Kingdom.

I’d already heard that this was not really a live concert as we had been told, but a set.  Some already seem not to like it.  I don’t mind, because it is Bob and I am always fascinated with how he chooses to rework his music.

But this time what overwhelms me is his voice – that 18 month rest seems to have done it a lot of good.

Paint my masterpiece

Wow – if I hadn’t been told I would have thought this was cover version from a singer with a better voice than Dylan in his old age.   The re-arrangement is superb; Dylan does not normally take this much trouble with re-arrangements – it is not just the speed and the melody but he’s also changed the chord sequence too, at times.  And the accompaniment is fully and utterly rehearsed.  Only oddity is that some of the solo runs of the lady bass player can’t be heard.  That’s odd mixing and I was enjoying what she was doing.   I’ve always enjoyed the fact that Bob mostly prefers the double bass to the electric bass.

False endings too.   Whatever next?

Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine

Now Bob doesn’t stand on stage and do movements does he?   Well apparently he does.  But just listen to the accompaniment on this piece.  I have never ever heard Dylan use an accompaniment like this.

Mind you I have also never heard him do “Well the judge” middle eight like that – sudden change of beat and accompaniment and then BOB SINGING UNACCOMPANIED for a couple of bars.   Honestly?  Yes indeed, and it works.

This is original and inventive and above all 100% entertaining.   In fact it is bloody amazing (and you will have gathered by now I am writing this as I hear it, exactly as we do with the Beautiful Obscurity.  It is the verdict as I hear, not after I’ve had time to add clever anecdotes and afterthoughts (not that I get any of those anyway).

Queen Jane

Gentle, slow and Bob doing hand gestures.  No this isn’t Bob is it?  Well, yes it is.  He’s turned his whole act upside down and become a night club entertainer with an audience that can’t always be bothered, and well, why not?   I must admit that when I got up this morning (in the UK) ready to listen to the recording I thought one or two of our regular contributors might have written in with their commentaries- but maybe they are as stunned as I am.

I am not in any way saying this ain’t good – it is bloomin’ incredible – I mean has he always been able to sing like this but simply not bothered to do it before?

I’ll be your baby tonight

This is where it gets weird.  I don’t mean the arrangement or Dylan voice but the filming.  I’m a bit lost here – not that I am looking for a direct meaning (I know enough about art and have created enough of my own not to think that way) but something isn’t right for me.

Mind you, nor do I get the music with the sudden slow down.  I know I have no right to criticise Bob and his musical arrangements, but this sounds to me like a “hey guys lets suddenly slow down at that point – we haven’t done a sudden pointless slow down yet have we?” and the band says “no Bob, whatever you say Bob, you’re the boss Bob.”

Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

And then he redeems himself totally – this is a beautiful arrangement.  It works to perfection, by which I mean one could think this was not how it was originally written.  Bob sounds as if he utterly believes in this song and this music and this arrangement.  It moves gently from verse to verse and the accompaniment sounds as if this is the original.

Even we when Bob changes the melody on “housing project hill” it works sublimely, and he builds up from there – not to frenetic excitement of course (not Bob!) but in a gentle musical form.

So far (and I am still writing this as I hear it for the first time) this is the song that shows the validity of the whole approach; the style, the band, Dylan’s signing…. and yes on the singing front Bob continues to  sound like he means it – not like he is trying to do a new arrangement.

Tombstone Blues

So I am enthused and enthused even more by the opening of Tombstone Blues – he’s completely rethought is.  No change of lyrics, it is the music that is reworked.  And through that first verse we are wondering if he is suddenly going to bounce into the original beat for the second verse.

But no he is taunting us.  Hey guys you were expecting a beat in verse two, but no I ain’t giving you that.   Oh that is really good.

And we get to the third verse and it becomes clear he’s running the whole song like an accompanied monologue.  And what a song to choose – a song with a chorus no less.

Best of all the band are controlled.  I’ve played on songs like this, and the temptation of everyone is to have a little bit of moment for each instrument – and then the result is we all start fighting each other (musically, not literally).  But none of that for Bob.  Everything is as controlled at the end as it was at the start.

And then he really bemuses us with a brief instrumental break, before we are back in with the “roadmaps for the soul” verse.  And those words, which we surely all know so well, are now given new strength, new meaning, new life.   How can that be after all these years.

I’ll be back anon with more from the show, but my advice, for what it is worth, is that if you ain’t watched it yet, find a very quiet space where you are all alone and give yourself time.   This is something very different and needs to be appreciated as a whole.   Or at least in a couple of parts.

By Tony Attwood

If you are a regular reader you will know that “Abandoned Love” is a Dylan song I have often championed as one of the great unknowns of Dylan’s songwriting career.

You might also know that in the “Beautiful Obscurity” series Aaron and I have been playing a little game in which he chooses the cover versions of a particular Dylan song, and then I write a review while listening to that cover version, usually for the first time.

Aaron has not sent me in a new article for the series in the last few days, so feeling rather adrift I thought I would play the game on my own, and see if there were a number of covers for Abandoned Love – and to my delight I found the answer is yes.  So as I have found them on the internet I’ve listed them, and done a quick review.

And one reason for choosing this song is that it has been covered, and yet it remains one of the lesser known Dylan songs – despite its elegance.   But Aaron – please come back and do another one.  It’s less fun on my own.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Because the song is not that well known it must be tempting for those covering the song to simply perform it in the Dylan style.  What takes this version up to a higher level is the sparing use of harmonies – and the way they are developed through the whole piece.

But a warning.  The recording doesn’t end properly.  It sounds rather as if it were being played on an old gramophone and someone picks up the stylus and pulls it across the LP.  But we get most of the song, and it is worth hearing.

Paul Rodgers and Nils Lofgren

OK if Nils Lofgren is involved this is going to be good, and so it turns out.  The stretching of the words in places while never losing track of the time.  But I wonder; did Nils really sit down and consider what he could be doing, or did he simply knock it out and that was that.

The guys take us straight through, and even though I know the song by heart there is so much here that catches me out; so many new variations, and so that is good.  My negative thought is simply that a few of the variations aren’t quite thought through, in my view.

The main thing I find to complain about it is that they keep on adding to the orchestration and variation of the melody, gives a feeling that the guys can’t wait for it to be over but that is a very minor worry.  This is most certainly worth hearing, and they do recover from that issue of adding more and and more to the accompaniment – which means that even though every instrument is fighting with the other in the instrumental verse it turns out to fun.

OK the end instrumental section is chaotic, but it is fun.

David Moore

Such is the instrumental in-fighting at the end of the previous version it is almost a relief to get back to some sort of arrangement sanity.  But there is still that feeling of wanting to put a lot of extras into the backing, perhaps just because it is simply, verse verse verse.

But here is works better because the backing track is established and we can hear that steady pulse throughout.  I think that is a double bass I’m hearing in the background (in my old age my ears are not as reliable as before and the tinnitus certainly doesn’t help).

Stay with this to the end, it most certainly is worth it.

Seán Keane

After the previous versions it is a relief to come to something that appreciates that this can be a very simple song.

Simple accompaniment from the accordion and guitar, and the sparse use of the harmonies just takes me back to the first time I heard the song.

There is a question for everyone playing this song – do you play each verse straight after the other or pause?  And then – how do you finish?  Such are the deep questions that trouble arrangers.

I like this ending.  It’s refreshing and fits so much with the lyrics.

The Everly Brothers

I think this is one of the earliest covers, and done very straight as a pop song, with the bass guitarist doing that traditional little upwards run between each verse.  There’s a penny whistle in the accompaniment, and the verses roll on and on.

Of course the harmonies are perfect, but I never get the feeling that they actually realise they are singing a masterpiece here.  Nor does the percussionist.  Nor the arranger come to that.  But it is the Everleys.    (Oh but please, on this song of all songs, not a fade out.)

If you want some more comparisons you might care to glance at…

Covers of Dylan songs

Beautiful Obscurity

Early Roman Kings (2012) part I: Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

by Jochen Markhorst

II          Anything goes

All the early Roman Kings in the early, early morn’
Coming down the mountain, distributing the corn
Speeding through the forest, racing down the track
You try to get away, they drag you back
Tomorrow is Friday, we’ll see what it brings
Everybody’s talking ’bout the early Roman Kings

“It’s not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind. I wanted to make something more religious. That takes a lot more concentration – to pull that off 10 times with the same thread – than it does with a record like I ended up with, where anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.”

In the peculiar Rolling Stone interview with Mikael Gilmore (September 2012), it’s a rather remarkable but still credible revelation, the confession that he actually wanted to make “something more religious”. A little further on, the surprising beauty of the interview is suddenly marred by muddled, embarrassing talk of transfiguration and Dylan’s childish fascination with something as ordinary as a name. Dylan waves an autobiographical book about the life and times of Sonny Barger, the Hell’s Angel, and, awkwardly, sees mystic depths and supernatural meaning behind the unremarkable fact that some Hell’s Angel named Bobby Zimmerman died in a motorbike accident in 1964.

It is tempting to think that Dylan is here performing a mildly vile parody of Donovan’s confused autobiography (The Hurdy Gurdy Man, 2005), a painful work that shows Donovan convinced to be at the centre of an endless series of cosmic interventions and mystical fatalities. But it’s to be feared that Dylan is serious – journalist Gilmore questions the topic for a time, and Dylan persistently suggests deep, hidden knowledge (but unfortunately demonstrates naive, horoscope-like wisdom);

That’s who you have in mind? What could the connection to that Bobby Zimmerman be other than name?

“I don’t have it in mind. I didn’t write that book. I didn’t make it up. I didn’t dream that. I’m not telling you I had a dream last night. Remember the song, “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”? I didn’t write that, either.
“I’m showing you a book that’s been written and published. I mean, look at all the connecting things: motorcycles, Bobby Zimmerman, Keith and Kent Zimmerman, 1964, 1966. And there’s more to it than even that. If you went to find this guy’s family, you’d find a whole bunch more that connected. I’m just explaining it to you. Go to the grave site.”

Uncomfortable, but prevailing is the candid nature of the interview and its revealing quality. And: it puts entire songs of Tempest into perspective – like this second verse of “Early Roman Kings”.

The Biblical borrowings are unmistakable, of course. Joseph distributing the corn (Genesis 41), Moses coming down the mountain (Exodus 34), and Friday must, in this context, be triggered by the dying day of Jesus, Good Friday. These unrelated Bible references are larded with anachronistic, twentieth-century embellishments. That weird Hell’s Angels preoccupation from the interview opens the gateway to understanding speeding through the forest, racing down the track as a reference to Bobby Zimmerman’s death, and a stream-of-consciousness seems to lead him further to The Godfather III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990). At least, it does seem to do; the line you try to get away, they drag you back seems to paraphrase Michael Corleone’s embittered “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”, one of the few iconic quotes from that weirdly half-failed ending to the Godfather trilogy.

A narrative, or even one single all-encompassing lyrical impression is not to be found. Which is not the intention either, Dylan’s analysis suggests: “Anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.” In line with the mosaic-like character of dozens of great Dylan songs, of songs like “Shelter From The Storm”, “No Time To Think”, “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” and “Mississippi”, of the masterpieces, in short, on which already a third generation of Dylanologists is breaking the teeth in the attempt to formulate a comprehensive interpretation. Driven by, as Dylan says, the belief that it makes sense.

“Early Roman Kings” seems to fit into that tradition. Just like those great masterpieces, coherence is mainly suggested by a recurring line. The big difference is the lack of an unambiguous charge, or at least: of a guiding portent. Refrain lines such as “I’ll give you a shelter from the storm”, “there’s no time to think”, “can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of Mobile” and “only one thing I did wrong, stayed in Mississippi a day too long” have a connecting, overarching quality – they direct the emotional charge of the images in the preceding lines. Apparently, the protagonist is going through something that evokes in the “she” the need to offer him shelter. An accumulation of setbacks causes despondency, so much so that the narrator fears to be stuck in Mobile.

Dylan offers no such handle in “Early Roman Kings”. Not only is “early Roman Kings” not a loaded term, as “Mobile”, “shelter” or “Mississippi” are, it is not even a term with an actual, overarching quality; nobody has any knowledge of the seven historical early Roman Kings (the first rulers of Rome, 753-510 BCE). At best, there are some associations with the very first early King, with Romulus. Raised by wolves, he – like Cain – killed his brother, Remus, abducted the Sabine Virgins and became the first King of Rome. Sort of, anyway… Romulus and his six successors called themselves Rex, King, but were elected as presidents are elected and had to answer to the Senate.

Our knowledge of the six remaining early Roman Kings is even more sketchy and apocryphal. We don’t know much more than that they all seem to have worn sharkskin suits. And we only know that since Dylan told us in 2012.

In short: the choice of “early Roman Kings” as protagonists has at best an as yet unexplored metaphorical quality. The same value as, for example, Jimmy Reed, and Jezebel the nun, and Blind Willie McTell, and Tom Paine, and all those other loaded names in Dylan’s songs; names that in the song itself clearly have no relation to the historical Jezebel, McTell, Paine or Reed, but that do evoke, as a free bonus, images or characters in the listener – images and character traits that will differ from listener to listener.

“Early Roman Kings” then, vaguely and unsubstantiatedly, has something threatening, something fateful.  Rather like the Nine Ancient Kings in The Lord Of The Rings, after their deaths turned into Nazgûl, cursed, invisible Ringwraiths, introduced by Tolkien as Black Riders… another loaded moniker Dylan will pick up (for “Black Rider” on Rough & Rowdy Ways, 2020).

Yeah well. Anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.

Dylan live (2016)

To be continued. Next up: Early Roman Kings part III: He had a left like Henry’s hammer

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

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

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

Bob Dylan In Search Of Eden (Part I)

Bob Dylan In Search Of Eden (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

‘Gates Of Eden’, a song by Bob Dylan, is open to differing levels of interpretation though of course these levels must be based on evidence reasonably drawn from the lyrics, and on the mood of the music, plus on outside literary and music sources that are referenced:

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

‘War and Peace’ is a novel by Leo Tolstoy that takes a “bird’s eye” perspective of history, and the image of ‘The swan on the river goes gliding by’ from “The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan” suggests events occur that do not connect with the best laid plans of human beings – happenings that are beyond their control.

In the following song, the narrator makes it farther than Moses does in his quest for the biblical, and supposedly Edenic, Promised Land; Moses dies and does not make it across the River Jordan, but the narrator in the recent song below makes it across the Rio Grande – only to find that a modern Babylon awaits:

And when you reach the broken-promised land
And all your dreams flow through your hands
You'll know that it's too late to change your mind
Because you paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are
And you're still just across that borderline
(Bob Dylan: Across The Borderline ~ Ry Cooder, et.al.)

Seems that the person in the song above has been misinformed just like the one in the lyrics beneath:

Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden
(Bob Dylan: The Gates Of Eden)

The collapse of an ideal situation be a theme the above singer/songwriter often expresses as he does in the lyrics below:

People call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
(Bob Dylan: Like A Rolling Stone)

Frequently accompanied by the theme that having money is better than not having it, but still it won’t buy spiritual happiness – as in the following song:

How many times have you heard someone say
If I had his money, I could do that my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind
(Bob Dylan: A Satisfied Mind ~ Rhodes/Hayes)

In “Letters From The Earth”, Mark Twain sarcastically  notes how religious authorities do not allow persons to rest in peace even after they die, but follow them beyond the grave to judge them in a supposed afterlife.

In “The Prince and The Pauper” by Mark Twain, look-alike boys change places, and the prince experiences what it’s like to live in poverty, and the pauper experiences what’s it’s like to be rich and powerful in a palace that is Edenic by comparison.

Perspective depends on which side of the gates you are on:

The kingdoms of experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what's real, and what is not
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

By Tony Attwood

The previous episode in this series was All directions at once part 56: Most of the time Bob’s a genius

The index to the series is to be found here 

1989 was a year of confusion, of mystery, of uncertainty – at least as portrayed in Bob Dylan’s compositions that year.  Uncertainty indeed could be felt in all directions,  and the measure of this uncertainty becomes ever clearer when we consider the songs in the order they were written.

It was a year that started with “Born in Time” (“When we were made of dreams”) which finishes with the singer knowing that he is done for, and he can’t fight any more, so “You can have what’s left of me.”

Even “God knows” which sounds like a statement of belief turns out to be anything but for the meaning of the phrase seems to be reversed as in, “God knows what this world is all about”, meaning “I don’t have a clue.”

In this world of uncertainty even the man of God can turn out to be a crook, as the “Disease of Conceit” seemed to confirm.

Uncertainty is everywhere and is continued with “What was it you wanted”, perhaps one of Bob’s most spooky and mysterious songs, at least in its original form, and it is a song that is absolutely packed full of possibilities….

Is it something important
Maybe not
What was it you wanted
Tell me again I forgot

And the only explanation for all this chaos turned out to be the chaos itself given that “Everything is Broken.”  For indeed when he said “everything” he most certainly meant “everything”

Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules

And please do remember, we are going through these songs in the order they were written, as they continue the feeling of Political World: this world don’t work no more.

True, on the face of it Ring them bells might seem a celebration, but in effect is a reflection, I believe, on the cascading sound of the bells in a broken world, not the bells symbolising hope.

The bells cascade, and so of course do the images conjured by the “Series of Dreams” – in both songs the images cascade, with everything tumbling over everything else.

Out of this confusion one could consider “Most of the time” to be a love song, but actually now seen as part of this series about tumbling randomness of the world around us, it has far more in relation to  “Visions of Johanna”.  Now the fog is of the singer’s making, not poor Johanna.  For as Visions says,

“We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it”

and that is the world I see proclaimed all the way through this series of songs.

Most of the time was desperate but the singer was still coping,

Most of the time
I’m clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path, I can read the signs
Stay right with it when the road unwinds
I can handle whatever I stumble upon
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time

with “Where teardrops fall” there is still desperation as the singer admits he can’t cope

Roses are red, violets are blue
And time is beginning to crawl
I just might have to come see you
Where teardrops fall

And all he can do is trying and find a place “far away from it all… where teardrops fall.”

She’s gone to another place.  They have been together, taken things at a gentle pace, got to know each other, stood at the edge of the world (in the shadows of moonlight) but it is her, the woman who is in the place where teardrops fall, who can show the singer “a new place to start.”

And he needs that re-start of his world, because he has lost himself…

I’ve torn my clothes and I’ve drained the cup
Strippin’ away at it all
Thinking of you when the sun comes up
Where teardrops fall

He is certainly lost, while she is in a place where one cries gently over the passing of good times.  If they could only just get together again they could pull down all the barriers between them, – and that is part of the point of this series of songs, there are barriers and uncertainties everywhere.

And that is really what this year of writing is about.  It really is saying “everything is broken” at every level.  At the social level, political level, personal level… everything but everything that can be broken, physically or mentally, has been broken.

Whereas “Tangled up in Blue,” talks of two people in a mix of different times and different realities, where the story is in the wrong order, now everything at every level just keeps moving in and out, in and out.  Just consider “Shooting Star”

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

Where Dylan moves step by step down the chromatic scale

(C sharp minor) Listen to the engine, (C) listen to the bell 
(B) As the last fire truck (B flat) from hell
(A) Goes rolling by
(B) All good people are (E) praying

and again with

It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

This is what 1989 is all about.  Now of course I do appreciate of course that many people have seen this as an overtly Christian statement, and obviously there are many overtly religious connotations here but not even Revelations has a fire truck in it.  Nor a radio.

I find lines like “The last radio is playing” incredibly moving, and this is what Dylan does so well – that impossible contradiction in the image to suggest oblivion, desolation and destruction.   Not entering God’s grace, but a world on the very edge.  The next thing you know the stars are beginning to hide.

The final song of the year gathers all this collapse and all this menace together, and uses a time signature that is very rare for Dylan: 12/8.   To hear what this means in practice listen to the count in on the live version below – the counting is 1-2-3-4 but there are three beats on each of those four.  Musicians would count it

123 223 323 423

the first number of each three indicating the beat of the bar, the remaining “23” counting out the triples within each beat.

And the song is sung on the album version (see the foot of this piece) as if each beat of every bar is an effort to complete.  The start is uncertain, the harmonica plays three tentative fading notes, and off we go, plod, plod, plod.  When the harmonica returns there is a haunting feeling added to the plodding.  There’s less of that in this live version, but more pain in the voice.

Here’s the live version

What sort of world is this, where each beat is like a boot sinking into the mud and the only relief is a feeling of being haunted?  Dylan calls it “something menacing and terrible,”  although that comes through more strongly on the album version than on stage.

The effect of menace, when it does emerge, is achieved by the undermining of the four beats in a bar each divided into three concept.  Each start of the three beat process is of equal importance here; normally in rock the second and fourth beat of the bar have an extra emphasis to give the music its swing.  There is no swing.  We are stuck.  There is no escape.

This is a song of atmosphere; the atmosphere of despair.  The lover has gone, for the man left behind, everything is mud or possibly even glue.  There is no way to follow, there is no way out.  We cannot even lift a foot from the floor to try and find the exit.

Everything is useless in this experience, “every man’s conscience is vile and depraved”.  There is not even the chance of a way out through which one can push one’s own life forward.  Nothing is possible, because what will be will be.  There is no decision to be made.  We are trapped.   “People don’t live or die people just float”

Oh the horror.  There is no escape at all in this world.  Because you just have to accept what is thrown at you, and get on with it.   There really is no escape ever, at all, in any way, we are here for all eternity.  There is no argument to be had, no debate, no putting forward an alternative point of view.

The sense of continuing futility is overwhelming which ever way you look at it.   The blues chords used throughout (in C you would play C E-flat B-flat C for the opening line) tell their own tale.  No major or minor key here, it is just the flattened third and flattened seventh.

In fact even when the music gives you a sense of reprieve it is still so hopeless and awful.

people don’t live or die people just float

Rarely has Dylan written more poignant, sad, desperate lines.   There’s nothing, simply nothing.  Take away the hope and all is lost.

Everything is broken, there is no sense of direction.  That is 1989.

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the early Roman Kings in their sharkskin suits
Bowties and buttons, high top boots
Driving the spikes in, blazing the rails
Nailed in their coffins in top hats and tails
Fly away little bird, fly away, flap your wings
Fly by night like the early Roman Kings

The brilliant opening line immediately sets the tone. It winks at Humpty Dumpty (“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again”) and at Watergate (All The President’s Men), it offers intriguing alienation, and it seems to have a fascinating intertextual reference;

It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death.

… from Peter Hamill’s award-winning liner notes for Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks (1975).

An ancient children’s song, a reference to antique history, and a fearfully hissing, alliterating (sharkskin suits) anachronism. And we are only one line, nine words, on the move. The style, this opening line promises, shall be eclectic, the tone menacing.

That promise is fulfilled right away. The next three verses evoke a confusing carousel of a high society wedding, street violence and a moody funeral, which after that opening line with Roman Kings in sharkskin suits pushes the associations not so much to Four Weddings And A Funeral, but much more towards The Godfather part I. In accordance with the promised eclectic character, the poet grasps left and right through his cultural baggage for the description of that carousel. Through Alan Lomax’s American Ballads and Folk Songs, for example, where Dylan seems to be touched by Song 8, “Mike”;

Mike he come from Tipperary, his name's O'Burke.
Fought like he was stewed, but didn't fight to work.
A-levelin' up the road bed ain't no fun,
Nor a-drivin' down the spikes in the boilin' sun.
Heat boils down, and shakes along the blazing rails,
Hangs around your head until your mind nearly fails.

“Top hat and tails” echoes Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie And Tails” from 1935, made famous by Fred Astaire (in Top Hat, 1935) and in Dylan’s record cabinet you’ll probably find Tony Bennet’s version, or Louis Armstrong’s or Ella Fitgerald’s (but the best is of course Gonzo’s version, who tries to sing it while tap-dancing in a vat of oatmeal).

The somewhat unusual expression “nailed in their coffins” may have entered Dylan’s baggage from a variety of sources, but one attractive option is the oldest, from the Canterbury Tale “The Clerk’s Tale”. The clerk chooses these words when he introduces his story with a tribute to the recently deceased “Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete” (the Italian poet from the fourteenth century, Francis Petrarc, the laureate poet): He is now dead and nailed in his coffin.

The same goes for “high top boots”; not too common, neither in songs nor in literature, but when it is used, it is almost always to describe the appearance of an unsympathetic persona. Chekhov consistently has this association, as for instance in one of his most oppressive stories, Ward No. 6 (1892), in chapter 15:

Hobotov thought it his duty to look in on his sick colleague from time to time. Everything about him was revolting to Andrey Yefimitch — his well-fed face and vulgar, condescending tone, and his use of the word “colleague,” and his high top-boots.

Lloyd Cole seems to be lovingly describing a nice girl when he introduces her with I love to see you in your jumper girl / I love you in your high top boots, but a little later she turns out to be an annoying bitch (“I Hate To See You Doing That Stuff”, 1990), and back in the seventeenth century, the ancient folk song “The Oak and the Ash” (also known as “The North Country Maid”) warned how to recognise him, the smooth talking asshole who gets you pregnant and then runs off:

She jumped into bed without the least alarm,
Never thinking that the sailor boy would do her any harm,
Oh, he huddled her and cuddled her all the night long,
And many a time they wished it had been ten times as long.

Now if it be a girl she'd have to wear a ring,
And if it be a boy he must fight for his king,
With his high top boots and jackets all in blue,
He must walk the quarter deck as his daddy used to do.

In short, you’d better avoid them, those people in their high-top boots.

And the alienating, nursery rhyme-like closing lines of the first stanza, finally, do make an appearance in the exceptional song “Bye Bye Blackbird” but only in the last verse, which is hardly ever sung. A bluegrass source like Hazel Dickens’ “Pretty Bird” is more obvious;

Fly away little pretty bird
Fly fly away 
Fly away little pretty bird
And pretty you'll always stay

… although the words are too common to attribute to any source at all, of course. More important is the film noir trick the poet employs here; embedding something as pure, lovely and innocent as “Fly away little bird, fly away, flap your wings” in a dark, ominous context. Few scenes are as terrifying as Jack Nicholson singing “Three Little Pigs” just before he attacks the door to his family with an axe (The Shining, 1980). Or as oppressive as the use of “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” in Nightmare On Elm Street. Which is the effect of that sweet little bird here in “Early Roman Kings”, where, at the very last moment, the poet also leaves open the possibility that it is not a sweet birdie after all, but a bat: fly by night.

A bat, a bowtie, a top hat and tail, nailed in the coffin… are we really talking about Roman Kings? Or could it perhaps be about a Romanian count? From Transylvania, to be more precise?

It is truly a spectacular, eclectic, wild opening couplet.

To be continued. Next up: Early Roman Kings part II: Anything goes

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

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

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

Bob Dylan And The Eye Of Horus

Bob Dylan And The Eye Of Horus (Part II)

By Larry Fyffe

The falcon of Horus flies at twilight:

Far away in a stormy night
Far away, and over the wall
You are there in the flickering light
Where teardrops fall
(Bob Dylan: Where Teardrops Fall)

The  mythology of Isis, Osiris, and Horus be long known to the Hebrews:

And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt
And that the Lord brought thee out thence through a mighty hand
And by a stretched out arm
(Deuteronomy 5: 15)

The restorative power of symbolic Horus exemplified in the following song lyrics:

Every empire that's enslaved him is gone
Egypt, Rome, even the great Babylon
He made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, and under no one's command
(Bob Dylan: Neighbourhood Bully)

The ancient Egyptian symbol of the “Eye Of Horus” is adopted as a Christian symbol – the “Eye of Providence” represents the all-seeing eye of a trinitified, protective God.

The Christian adaptation of the image, like the Judaic one, lacks the stylised teardrop below the eye, and is featured on both the American one dollar bill, and on the Great Seal of the United States; the Eye atop a yet-completed pyramid.

On the back cover of the “Blood On The Tracks” record album is an abstract image of an unfinished pyramid that apparently  represents a Promised Land desecrated; above the pyramid, a very small Eye of Providence can be discerned.

The songs on the Bob Dylan album mentioned above are sorrowful in mood.

The lyrics concern the social/economic/political state of modern America on a macro-, and on a micro-level, and said it can be that the teardrop under the Eye of Horus figuratively re-appears:

We had a falling out, like lovers often will
And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we've never been apart
(Bob Dylan: If You See Her Say Hello)

Let the teardrops fall:

Don't know how it all got started
I don't know what they doing with their lives
But me I'm still on the road
Heading for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point
Of view
(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

• 220 selected cover versions of Dylan songs
• Beautiful Obscurity: The man in me
• Hollis Brown, and why does it all have to be like this?
• The album of extraordinary rarities now has its own page.
• Beautiful Obscurity: The Dignity Covers
• Beautiful Obscurity: John Brown (but not beautiful)
• Tonight I’ll be staying here with you: the cover story

There are details of more articles from this series here

In this series Aaron selects a Dylan song and then a collection of cover versions which he sends over to Tony on the other side of the Atlantic, for his comments.  The game we play is that Tony has to write his comments during his hearing of each recording (almost always hearing this version for the first time).

Aaron: I thought I was going to do When The Ship Comes In next, but then I heard a new (to me) version of this song and I just had to share it straight away. So here it is.

Eels

Tony: Changing the melody and accompaniment is clever – or at least clever when it works, but what also needs is reference point back to the original, and here we do get occasional lines with the original melody, which really works in my view.

In fact I really like the whole performance except … except for the instrumental break.  It comes early on and adds nothing to the who performance.  In fact, since everyone listening is going to know the song, it just leaves all of us waiting there for what we know will be the next verse.

Given the other changes so successfully made to the piece it wouldn’t have been beyond the excellent ability of the arranger to do something else in the break – and take it back so that it resides between the penultimate and final verses.

But that’s probably just me getting all fancy.

Aaron: And now onto the rest of the selections

Keith Richards

Tony: And showing my prejudices that surprised me.  Keith Richards choosing this delicate song?

I found the video utterly distracting with its jerky frame by frame format but once I closed my eyes I was able to focus much more on the music.  And fortunately I am a touch typist so I could keep typing.

But then had to open again around 1.38 to see the time and wonder what on earth was going on.  So I am presuming this is taken from a tape that was left running in the studio.  I went to see what else I could find about this and found this quote from Mr Richards

“While the British Invasion was going on, Bob Dylan was the man who really pulled the American point of view back into focus. At the same time, he had been drawing on Anglo-Celtic folk songs, and that’s certainly true of “Girl From the North Country”. It’s got all the elements of beautiful folk writing without being pretentious. In the lyrics and the melody, there is an absence of Bob’s later cutting edge. There’s none of that resentment. He recorded it again later with Johnny Cash, but I don’t think it’s a duo song. Bob got it right the first time.”

And just in case you don’t like the the video there is another copy of the recording with a different video; also distracting but in a more acceptable way.  Actually I saw a murmuration of starlings last December over Melton Mowbray, a small town in the English East Midlands – the region in which I live.  I do think next time a see a murmuration I’ll think of this rather gorgeous recording.  I do wish he’d made a version without the pauses.

Secret Machines

Now here is a real obscurity (I think it’s beautiful – Tony’s mileage may vary). This was on the b side of a cd single from 2005 by the Secret Machines – I loved it then (especially on headphones) and listening again now, I still do – although it is looooonnng.

Tony: There is a tiny hint of also “Also sprach Zarathustra” in those opening notes which is rather strange – so that’s probably a musical allusion that wasn’t meant (or is only heard by my curious musical memory).

But after that gentle held introduction, I found the arrival of the vocalist and piano was unexpected strong, and something of an unwelcome interruption.

It is one of those songs where I have the notion that the guys said, “hey let’s do it like this” and another says, “ok yeah and you can come in here with some piano chords…” and I’m left asking “Why?”

Not that I mean that every crotchet and held chord can be explained logically – no, most of the time things just work and sound right, although thankfully we can generally eventually understand why (and so learn more about music and musical arrangements).

But here, “I’m wondering if she remembers me at all” comes belting out on storm of a growing storm, and that’s never how I’ve felt this song.  Yes of course “I wonder if she remembers me at all” is painful and desperately sad, and I guess like many people now of a certain age I’ve thought that – although not with the same painful feeling of loss (for me that seems to go after a while).

And then the big crescendo with the repeated chords, and no no no no no I do not see any connection between the meaning of the lyrics and what is happening musically.  The music  around 6 minutes 40 sounds like someone said, “And lets have a big build up here,” and I am just thinking, “What is the point of all this?”

No, really, I think this is a bunch of guys trying to be clever by doing something new, and forgetting that there are issues in music that are infinitely more profound than “clever.”

Tony Rice

Aaron: Now a bluegrass cover by the always excellent Tony Rice. Ricky Skaggs said he was “the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years.”

Tony: It is quite a shock to move from one track to another like this.  You’d never hear this on a radio show because no radio programme would play the previous version followed by this.

There is a warmth in this song – the singer is wanting to be remembered to the lady, and wants to make sure she is all right in her coat so warm, and yes I can just about get that out of bluegrass, but only just.   I love the vocals, both solo and duets – the harmonies are gorgeous.  It is just when we move over the guitar picking solos that I feel it doesn’t quite fit.  It is a case of forget the meaning of the words and go with the fun.

Pete Townshend

Aaron: Not many people attempt to rewrite a Dylan song, but Pete Townshend gave it a go.

“Roy Harper did a version of North Country Girl based on a version done by Bob Dylan … and I do a version, based on the version done by Roy Harper.”

Tony: Oh what is that accompaniment from at the start?  How very annoying, I know it so well but can’t place it.

This is odd.  The melody is a really good rewrite and the arrangement is interesting, the harmonies work well… and the chord sequence works well; it is fine, except for that “North Country Girl oh oh oh oh oh oh”.   Really – after all the reworking before that do we need that bit.  And indeed that so reminiscent introduction.  It DOES come from somewhere else and this is really bugging me. I can hear it in my head but just can’t get what comes after it, to tell me where it comes from.

How very annoying.  But this is really good reworking only spoiled by the opening and the ending.  The rest of it is really good in my view.

But as always, that’s just my view.   Townshend made his multi-millions and I didn’t, so I guess he knows best.

Neil Young

Aaron: I could go on and on here, there are many fine versions of this – I tried to stick to some more obscure, and interesting takes, but for now I’ll finish up with a version by Neil Young from his A Letter Home album – the entire album was recorded on a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-graph vinyl recording booth at Jack White’s studio.

Tony: Only Neil Young could do this!  Yes its fun.  And actually I wish I had heard this first.  I think I’ll come back tomorrow and play this again before I’ve not heard any other music.  There is something so right about this in terms of the lonesome guy singing to the girl he left behind.

The point here is that I really do believe in the words, I believe in the “darkness of my night”.  That’s the genius of Neil Young.  He gets inside the song and becomes the song.

Brilliant.

But I (Tony) want to add one of my own suggestions to give back to Aaron.  It somehow seems to fit after having listened to all the previous versions.  I need this to allow me to continue with my day (and it’s not yet 9am).

Manu Lafer

https://youtu.be/KkFT2d5sYBs

Yes, that’s better.  I’m ready to take on the world once more.

• On The Road Again (1965) part I: I don’t know why everyone is so rude
• On The Road Again (1965) part 2: The shitting Pope
• On The Road Again (1965) part 3: A handsome Malacca sword-cane

by Jochen Markhorst

V          Mailman, stay away

Well, there’s fistfights in the kitchen
They’re enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he’s gotta take a side
Even the butler
He’s got something to prove
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you don’t move?

In the second take of “On The Road Again”, the mailman is still the milkman, and vice versa. The role reversal does not seem to be based on too profound intellectual considerations; apparently, the fifties archetypes of milkman and mailman are completely interchangeable to the songwriter. In any case, in both stanzas the mailman avoids the cliché. In songs since the beginning of time, the role of the mailman is rather one-dimensional: he is the link between the narrator and the lover. Dylan has Buddy Holly’s “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues”(1957) on a pedestal, as well as Elvis’ “Return To Sender” and “Tryin’ To Get To You”, and Tampa Red’s “Sad Letter Blues” from 1939, but “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes from 1961 (with Marvin Gaye on drums!) has become the template.

The archetype is much older, of course. Back in 1938, Andy Kirk And His Twelve Clouds Of Joy with Mary Lou Williams sang the song that would inspire Oasis to title their best album, “What’s Your Story Morning Glory”:

What is your story, morning glory
You've got me worried too
The postman came this morning
And left a note for you
Did you read it, then you know that I love you

… oh well, the power of a uniformed, neutral force to initiate dramatic plot turns has already been recognised by Goethe, by Shakespeare and, in fact, by every literary scholar with a sense of drama since Homer.

Dylan breaks with song tradition. In the last verse of the song, the mailman is added to the list of factors that threaten his happiness, the mailman is one of the enumerated reasons why he does not want to live in this house. So he is not a connecting link between him and his beloved – on the contrary, he is one of those responsible for the impending removal.

It suggests that the role of the mailman, like that of the milkman, does not correspond to the thousands of previous songs, dramas and poems, but to that of the mailman in Playboy cartoons, farces and screwball comedies. Which is also demonstrated by the remarkable introduction of the mailman in this song; he just walks in. Remarkable, because this is a large and probably well-to-do household (they even have a butler), but the mailman can apparently just open the door, walk in and get involved in a big, physical domestic fight. He doesn’t even ring once, let alone twice.

It breaks the narrator. Buddy Holly buzzes through his head;

Cried like never before
So hard, couldn't cry no more
Shoo, shoo, Mailman, stay away from my door

Buddy Holly – Mailman Bring Me No More Blues:

VI         I gave it a name yesterday

Time is cruel to this minor mercurial masterpiece. In the studio, Dylan spends plenty of time on “On The Road Again” (18 takes in three days), but then he rejects the song rudely to the Waters Of Oblivion; he will never play it again. Unique – even the other throwaway track from Bringing It All Back Home, “Outlaw Blues” eventually gets the spotlight. Presumably thanks to Jack White’s guest appearance and persuasion, by the way. “Outlaw Blues” debuts, more than forty years after its inception, in Nashville, on September 20, 2007, after Dylan has already approved the long-overdue premiere of “Meet Me In The Morning” the night before. And that, we know, was indeed at the request of the White Stripe.

Peculiar, as “On The Road Again” is undeniably at least as wonderful. Perhaps the master himself is still on the wrong track. The very first takes are indeed not too earth-shattering. The first is on that packed, explosive first day of recording Bringing It All Back Home, Wednesday 13 January 1965. We hear Dylan droning a thirteen-in-a-dozen blues on the piano, while he seems to be plucking words and sounds out of the air. Producer Tom Wilson tries to get his attention.

“Wait a minute Bob. Let me slate it. What’s the name of it?”
[in the distance] “Paa-pa, paa-pa”
“Bob?”
“Oow babe”
“HEY BOB!”
“Ahm.. ahm the name of this one is… ahm… [some piano notes] … ahm On The Road Again! [chuckles]”

That first take is straight off a complete take. Dylan seems to be thinking up the piano accompaniment as he goes along, it doesn’t quite fit yet, he plays a catchy harmonica solo in between, is sometimes too late for a chord change and the tempo is unsteady. So, for the time being, “On The Road Again” seems to be a poorly worked out, hardly serious in-between – not much more than a warm-up exercise.

Still, Dylan seems to see something in the song after all. The next day, the song is played at the end of the session. Four takes, two of which are complete, now with a full band. Overfull even; Dylan sits at the acoustic piano and around him three guitarists, two bassists, a drummer and Frank Owens on the electric piano are ready to do their best.

“What’s the name of this Bob?”
“Ahm… I don’t know. I gave it a name yesterday! [laughter] On The Road Again!”

The band makes a difference like a frog inside a sock. Suddenly, in the second full take, the song takes on a jittery, attractive pulse, a vibrating wall-of-sound. Dylan seems to hear it too. In the ensuing studio talk, we don’t hear any more chuckling or other nonsense – Dylan sounds a lot more serious and gives focused directions to one of the guitarists (“Were you playing high notes? Play it lower. Yeah, that’s good, yeah”). Drummer Bobby Gregg is also taken. The nervous pulse comes more and more from him, with the train ruffle in continuo that he now puts under it.

The third and final day of recording, Friday 15 January, begins with the first and only take of “Maggie’s Farm”. That one is a one-take hit, but “On The Road Again”, which comes next, keeps Dylan busy. The song is given thirteen more takes. The last one is the definitive one, and on The Cutting Edge we can hear how the song grows towards perfection. The surprisingly conventional harmonica opening is introduced in the second take, the striking vibrato on the guitar thereafter, Gregg abandons his continuo roll and arrives at a concrete base with unconventional, fierce Keith Moon-like breaks – the second guitarist (Kenneth Rankin, presumably) now has to guard the tempo with a staccato, unimaginative blues riff. Which works great. The mercurial vibrato guitar (Bruce Langhorne, by the sound of it) has all the freedom he wants to glue hundreds of shimmering accents against the massive wall of sound and Dylan’s harmonica flutters around it from time to time.

However successful, it does not seduce the master. Maybe he still has that first, saltless take in his head when he thinks of the song, maybe he has trouble identifying with the protagonist. After all, contrary to what Dylan says about himself in the liner notes, the protagonist is incapable of accepting chaos. On the other hand, the song does fit the profile Dylan formulates a little further on in those same liner notes:

my poems are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion/ divided by pierced ears. false eyelashes / subtracted by people constantly torturing each other.

Behind Dylan’s cold shoulder the colleagues hide; the song is pretty much ignored, even by the usual suspects. Only four noteworthy dreadnoughts:

American jazz phenomenon Ben Sidran delivers an attractive, neurotic cover on his wonderful tribute project Dylan Different (2009) – the performance on Dylan Different Live In Paris At the New Morning (2010) is a degree more neurotic and two degrees more attractive.

Ben Sidran Live: 

In 2005, Ava Wynne makes the unnoticed but very enjoyable CD Never-Was, full of fine performances of beautiful songs (“In The Pines”, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “I Still Miss Someone”), including a solid, nice and dirty pounding version of “On The Road Again”.

Ava Wynne: 

Incomparable to the trashy, oldest cover of the song, by the Australian savage weirdos The Missing Links, which music historians and now elderly fans are placing – and rightly so – in the “Psychedelic Garagepunk” corner (1965).

 The Missing Links: 

They are all defeated by the superior version by Canadian talent Julie Doiron, on the equally superior 2010 tribute project Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute to Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. It skims along the original and doesn’t really add much more than the wonderful double female vocals, but hey… a song is anything that can walk by itself, as the master himself defined it at the time, in those wonderful liner notes.

Julie Doiron: 

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

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

There is an index to earlier articles in this series here   The two earlier parts of 1999 are…

• NET, 1999, Part 1: Every night in a combustible way.

• Never Ending Tour, 1999, part 2 – Is everything as hollow as it seems?

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

The story goes that in 1989, while recording Oh Mercy, Dylan exclaimed to producer Lanois, ‘This is archaic music we’re making.’ In other words, Dylan realised he was no longer on the cutting edge of rock music, which had become increasingly sophisticated during the 80s, and arguably increasingly over-produced, or at least elaborately produced – a tendency that continued into the 90s. Along with that sophistication came a certain slickness, the kind of slickness you hear in the Spice Girls, whose music now seems to typify the commercial sounds of that decade.

In the face of these developments, Dylan’s approach in the 90s seems determinedly retro. Not for the first time. At the end of the 1960s, when bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were making albums that were increasingly baroque, complex and sophisticated, and the Cream were producing their creamy sounds, Dylan released, John Wesley Harding which had a thin, minimal sound, deliberately backward looking musically.

Listening to some of these recordings from 1999, I’m struck by how 1950s the sound is, or at least how obviously and deeply rooted in the origins of rock music Dylan’s music is. Call it primitive, call it primal, call it dance music, call it roots music, call it whatever,  Dylan determinedly evokes music from a previous age. Not just rock music but rock-and-roll, pre-rock. While the album Time out of Mind shows the influence of that ‘archaic music,’ more consciously and deliberately than Oh Mercy, his live performances tap directly into the music of a previous age. He loves to sing those old songs.

Buddy Holly was right on the cusp, as rock-and-roll was turning into rock music. Holly wrote ‘Not Fade Away’ in 1957, but in the late 90s we find Dylan doing wonderful performances of the song, heavier than Holly would have conceived, but smack-bang in that tradition. The one thing we know when listening to Dylan performing the song at Tramps, New York, is that this is not the Spice Girls, that this is as far away from that kind of music as you can get. That this, most joyfully, taps into the roots. While I love the more minimal version of 1998, the sheer verve and energy of this performance carries me away. I think I’ll just listen to it one more time.

Not fade away

Wow! that was as good as I thought it was. Even better. Buddy Holly would have loved it. Dylan does some nifty guitar work on this one. Stand up and dance!

‘Not Fade Away’ is not an isolated example. ‘Alabama Getaway’ is a Robert Hunter song, released by the Grateful Dead in 1980, but it taps right into Chuck Berry and the more ‘primitive’ tradition of 1950s countrified blues. I imagine Dylan likes the song because it’s doing what he wants to do, to return to the golden age of Sun records when the music was still fresh and you could go to jail for playing it. This is another from Tramps.

Alabama Getaway

Dylan’s music is haunted by these 50s, early 60s pre-rock singers like
Buddy Holly, Jean Vincent, Dion – and of course Elvis Presley. Presley released ‘Money Honey’ (written by Jesse Stone) in 1956. Dylan clearly enjoys raking it over here, in 1999 (date unknown). It feels just like coming home.

Money Honey

It’s not hard to see how firmly rooted Dylan’s own rock songs are in this ‘primitive’ tradition, however sophisticated the lyrics might be. This performance of ‘Tombstone Blues’, for example, takes us right into the simple, jangling chords of old rock-and-roll, jump music. Dylan’s twin guitarists, Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell, make all this possible with their happily expert, retro playing. It’s that disjunction between the ‘primitive’ music and the wild lyrics that makes Dylan’s rock songs so distinctive. This is another one from Tramps.

Tombstone Blues (A)

Fascinating lyric change here. This is what I think he’s singing:

‘Mama’s in the alley, she ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the graveyard, looking for the fuse’

I have tended to argue throughout this series that Dylan didn’t really stop writing protest songs, he just extended and deepened the range of protest. In ‘Tombstone Blues’ we find surrealist mockery as a form of social criticism.

‘The ghost of Belle Starr, she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun, she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce’

Where, I assume, he’s still sitting.

‘Tombstone Blues’ (1965) is not really a blues in the strict sense of the word. It’s not a three chord, twelve bar structure, with a repeated first line, and nor is ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way’. This latter song is fast and hard-driving, and the more advanced technology permits sounds impossible to achieve in the 50s, but it wouldn’t have sounded too out of place in a rock and roll dance hall of the late 50s. Some of these lyrics, though, might  have sounded a bit strange. They still do:

‘The judge, he holds a grudge
And he's about to call on you
But he's badly built and he walks on stilts
Watch out he don't fall on you’

Gone are the long, wandering epics of the earlier 90s. This is short and sharp and takes no prisoners. And the way Dylan drops his voice at the end of the lines (down-singing) makes for an ominous, nastyish effect. I start to reach for that word definitive when I think of this performance. It captures all the turbulence and bile of the original (Blonde on Blonde, 1966), but ups the tempo to a frenetic pace. It’s sharp and punky. Another Tramps performance.

Most likely you go your way (A)

That Tramps version is very hard-edged, but Dylan didn’t always perform it like that. This performance (date unknown) changes the mood a bit with a more echoey sound and a less strident vocal. I sometimes wonder if these variations of sound and mood have to do with the acoustics of the venue, and even the nature of the recording, but this one certainly has a different feel to it. Both are great vocal performances.

Most likely you go your way (B)

The rise of rock-and-roll, and later rock music, is closely associated with the blues, and how blues spilled across racial boundaries to became popular with young white kids. (For those interested in that history, I recommend the acclaimed multi-part PBS series ‘Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues’.) Also, listen to Dylan’s early 1960s recording of ‘One Kind Favour’ and you’ll get the feel for how important the blues were in shaping Dylan’s music and vocal style.

A catchy little blues number, ‘Down Along the Cove’ comes as the second to last track on John Wesley  Harding (1967), but we had to wait until 1999 to get the first live performance. Bringing it forward at this point, nested among the Time out of Mind songs, and antique songs, is yet another indication of the influence of this retro music on Dylan’s own songs. It’s a Dylan song but could almost be someone else’s. It’s a straight no frills rock blues. A treat for the ears. (8^th November)

Down along the Cove

While on the subject of the blues, let’s consider ‘Leopardskin Pillbox Hat,’ a derisive social commentary in blues style. But while he keeps the twelve bar, three chord structure, instead of repeating the first line, he makes up a new one for line two:

‘Well if you, wanna see the sun rise
Honey, I know where
We'll go out and see it sometime
We'll both just sit there and stare
Me with my belt wrapped around my head
And you just sittin' there
In your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat’

Dripping with sarcasm, it’s a comic put down. Taken out of Blonde on Blonde and transferred to 1999, with Campbell and Sexton on the job, it loses none of its jeering insouciance. (Date unknown)

Leopardskin Pillbox hat

Funny thing is, this song sounded pretty retro even in 1966 when it first appeared. It was a throwback to an earlier urban blues sound.

Mockery as social criticism is again to the fore in ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ another retro sounding song, although less obviously derived from the blues. Again the complexity of the lyrics is set against a simple, ‘primitive’ jump music structure. It’s a lot of irreverent fun. This Tramps performance really pushes it along, the wild lyrics flying by before we can get a hold of them. Taming Dylan’s lyrics to the page hardly does justice to the madcap, whirling effect this song creates.

Highway 61 revisited

A little less hard and fast, but no less rooted in the early history of rock is the 1985 ‘Seeing The Real You At Last’. Its dramatic portentous style might hark back to early Ray Charles, but it’s that same jump rhythm that marks these Dylan songs. The lyrics too, some of them lifted from late 1940s movies (the Humphrey Bogart connection), reinforce the antique feel of the music. I keep thinking I’ve heard it before somewhere. There’s an echo of Presley in it. This snarling Tramps performance does it full justice. The song is starting to fade from Dylan’s setlists, so it’s good to hear it get such lively treatment.

Seeing the Real You

Let’s end this post where we started, with that pivotal figure Buddy Holly, that mid fifties rock and roll singer whose music pointed firmly towards the future. ‘That’ll Be The Day’ (1957) is another Holly song that fits quite seamlessly into Dylan’s setlists in 1999. In this case, Dylan creates a medley with Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’. Dion DiMucci is another transitional figure, the last of the great doo-woppers who didn’t quite make it onto rock music, and whose sound had already dated by the mid sixties. Yet there are echoes of Dion’s high, clear voice in Dylan, and some of Dylan’s 1999 performances of ‘The Wanderer’ sound uncannily like Dion himself.

By morphing without changing the beat from Holly to Dion, it says a lot about 50s pop music. These songs are sort of interchangeable. But it also says a lot about the influence of these singer/songwriters on Dylan. In some respects Dylan belongs more to that era of pop music which featured the vocalist (Dion, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bobby Darin…) than to the rock music of the 60s which was oriented towards groups, bands (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, the Animals…).

Even in his heyday in the 60s, there was something retro about Dylan – ‘the last of the best…’

I think he’s singing here with Paul Simon, another lone singer/songwriter. (20^th July)

That’ll be the Day/The wanderer

In the light of all this, I’m tempted to declare Dylan to be the last and the greatest of the old rock-and-roll merchants, yet he was able to do what those 50s singers didn’t or couldn’t do, namely bring rock-and-roll into the rock era.

Of course there was another side to Bob Dylan, that of the folk singer, another kind of retro, it is there we’ll be turning in the next post.

Stay cool and safe.

Kia Ora