Untold Dylan

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy (Part V)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part VI)

by Larry Fyffe

Tommy’s in the basement stirring up the medicine.

Thomas Hardy’s novel “Tess Of The d’Urbervilles” is sprinkled with large doses of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which asserts that chance within the biological composition of individuals determines whether or not a species survives by adaptation to changes in the environment.

Economic circumstances are a-changing in moralistic Victorian times, and ‘Social’ Darwinism comes to the fore as a supposedly ‘scientific’ explanation of how societies develop. The ‘survival of the fittest’ explains why the moneyed bourgeoisie successfully displaces the aristocracy. The ‘divine right’ to hold social, economic, and political power through blood lines is put asunder.

Hardy adds a pinch of Romantic Transcendentalism, quoting a poet who endeavours to save the God of the Holy Bible from the jaws of the scientific-oriented Age of Enlightenment – the loving ‘spirit’ of the Almighty pervades all Nature.

Quoted in the novel:

Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness
Ans not in utter nakedness
But in trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home
(William Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations Of Immortality)

A  romantic sentiment expressed in the song lyrics below:

Winterlude, Winterlude, my little apple
Winterlude by the corn in the field
Winterlude, let's go down to the chapel
Then come back, and cook up a meal
(Bob Dylan: Winterlude)

However, Hardy dumps into the broth a Late Victorian writer who’s musical poetry is plagued with doubt and confusion because of Charles Darwin’s theory.

Quotes Thomas:

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays
Her early Heaven, her happy views
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days
(Lord Tennyson: In Memoriam)

Darwin, Hardy, and Tennyson-influenced be the song lyrics beneath:

The call of the wild is 
Forever at my door
Wants to fly like an eagle
While being chained to the floor
(Bob Dylan: You Changed My Life)

(This version is from Iva & Alyosha)

As are the following lines:
Time's piling up, we struggle, and we scrape
All boxed in, nowhere to escape
City's just a jungle, and more games to play
I'm trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
(Bob Dylan: Mississippi)

Hardy shakes up the medicine bottle and out pops the story of Tess.

To help out her poverty-stricken parents, the beautiful, young, and innocent girl (the noble Viking blood of history running in her veins) goes to work for a retired ‘nouveau-riche’ merchant. His son, fails to seduce Tess, and so rapes her when she’s sleeping.

Tess marries Angel, a son of a parson. Angel’s dubious of his father’s religious beliefs, and befriends the local, pagan-like farmers. Angel leaves Tess when she tells him of her relations with the merchant’s son, Alec.

Tess reluctantly goes back to the amoral son of the retired merchant after Alec tells her that her husband is gone for good, and he himself is now a follower of Christ.

Angel realizes he made a mistake by going away, and trying to make a pleasant living by farming; he comes back home looking for Tess; she tells him that she has stabbed the fork-tongued Alec to death.

Angel “looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the d’Urberville blood had led to this aberration – if it were an aberration”.

The story told by Hardy depicts Tess a reversed version of Frankenstein’s creature; she’s extremely pretty, and not unlearned; she’s out of time, and not able to adapt to the materialistic, self-serving social order of modern times.

Says she to Angel: “I have had enough, and now I shall not live for you to despise me”.

Thomas Hardy suggests that the fate of Tess is not under the control of a predetermined plan made by a God who cares for his creations, but rather she’s trapped in a randomly unfolding, and disinterested evolutionary process.

A darkling Darwinism lies abed in the following song lyrics:

Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don't sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above

(Bob Dylan: One More Cup Of Coffee)

By Tony Attwood

“All directions at once” is a series which looks at Bob Dylan’s writing as it evolves over time, rather than focusing on individual songs or albums.

The last two articles which dealt in depth with the way Dylan’s writing took us up to 1978.

• 40: 100 twists before trying Christianity
• 41: the Slow Train to the end of the year

Because of the momentous change that 1979 brought I decided that, before tackling 1979, I would go back to the start with five articles covering the first 15 years of Dylan’s writing, as I felt (even if no one else did) it was important to reflect on the enormous variance that there was in Bob’s music from the late 1950s to 1978.   Those five articles were

• 42: The first five directions
• 43: Before the basement
• 44:  Did Dylan really change in the Basement?
• 45: Bob starts the 70s… slowly
• 46: All Directions: the early 70s and Bob Dylan’s themes in his first 15 years

So now it is time to move on again…  1979 was a unique moment not just because Bob wrote overtly Christian songs having not written much about religion at all prior to this, but because he had never once before occupied himself with just one subject in the course of a whole year.

If you are interested, the full count of subject matter of Dylan songs up to 1978 is at the foot of the last article in this series.  It is most certainly not definitive, not least because in many cases one cannot be exactly certain what Dylan’s specific intentions were within the lyrics, beyond providing entertainment.  But we can pick out the religious songs before 1979 with some certainty, because there were so few of them.

Bob wrote two religious songs in the 1960s, and one in the sparse writing era of the early 1970s.   I’ve concluded that Bob’s major areas of interest between his starting out as a composer and the end of 1978 were:

• Love, desire lust: 62
• Moving on, leaving: 51
• Lost love: 48
• Humour: 22
• Protest, rebellion: 20
• The environment: 17
• The blues: 15
• Being trapped: 12
• Dada: 12

Of course these are my classifications, and obviously everyone is welcome to have a bash at categorising Dylan’s songs, but I can say it is not as easy as it looks.  I have tried these allocations of themes several ways and I now get roughly the same sorts of numbers each time, no matter which way I look at what we have.  But since Bob doesn’t write (“Lost love”) or whatever after each song title, we can each decide for ourselves.

And even if I have allocated a few songs wrongly, there surely can’t be much doubt that Dylan’s religious output prior to 1979 was dwarfed by his main themes of love, lost love and moving on.

As for the religious songs, those which I feel can genuinely be considered as religious prior to 1979 are…

• Whatcha Gonna Do?  1962
• When the ship comes in 1963
• Father of night 1970
• Three Angels 1970
• Slow train 1978 (?)

“Whatcha Gonna Do?” seems to me to be a song asking simply what the listener will do at the time of the ending of all days – assuming that there is an all powerful God.

“When the Ship Comes In” feels like an ending of time song – the Second Coming of Christ, or God simply calling the end, or indeed similar predictions for the end of time which is not just the universe burning itself out but organised by a Supreme Being.

https://youtu.be/Zg0LM2fdP0A

“Father of night” is, I think, related to a Jewish Prayer, although the version above (which I really adore) doesn’t take us in that direction at all.  But, hey, what do I know?

As for “Three Angels” I am less convinced, although others have suggested strong religious references.  To me it is an observation of what is out there in one street with a little philosophy at the end – but then again, opinions differ.

Which finally brings us to “Slow Train,” which sounds to me very much like a suggestion of change, but not of a change necessarily brought about by religion.  Listening to Bob’s introductions of the song at concerts I think it became, in his mind, a religious piece, but it wasn’t written that way at the start.

Now I have read in other commentaries the notion that much, indeed some seem to suggest, all, of Dylan’s work is a religious commentary.  Such a thought may be right (although I disagree), but what I don’t understand is why anyone who believed not only in a religion, but in the need to convince other people of the virtues of this particular religion, should tie up the meaning in a set of statements that are not clear.  After all, in terms of Christianity, the final book of the bible seems very clear about what is going to happen.  So why not be absolutely clear what you mean if you want to convert people?

Consider in contrast, “Whatcha gonna do” – I’ve removed the repeats from the lyrics to save space.

Tell me what you're gonna do
When the shadow comes under your door?
O Lord, O Lord, what shall you do?

Tell me what you're gonna do
When the devil calls your cards?

Tell me what you're gonna do
When your water turns to wine?

Tell me what you're gonna do
When you can't play God no more?

It seems to me that makes it very clear that the meaning is that one should repent your sins and believe in God, otherwise you are going to be in trouble after death.

Now compare and contrast with “Slow Train” where we have lines like

But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
All non-believers and men-stealers talkin' in the name of religion

OK, lots of religions tell us to beware of false prophets, but when we get to the end of Slow Train we have

Well, my baby went to Illinois 
   with some bad-talkin' boy she could destroy
A real suicide case, but there was nothin' I could do to stop it
I don't care about economy, I don't care about astronomy
But it sure do bother me to see my loved ones turning into puppets

and that’s about having more concern for those we care for than for the world at large.  If might mean more than this, but if so, it is not clear.  And that’s the problem with ambiguous songs.  They’re ambiguous.

But now consider the 19 songs written in 1979.  The ambiguity has vanished, the whole style and approach is different in every regard.  Different not just from 1978 but from virtually all 376 or so songs that have been composed before.   Dylan has often been outspoken in previous songs, but where he was so different from other writers in the world of pop, rock and folk is that he used the metaphor, that part of the language that gives the poet the chance to show us that what we see is not all there is.  To quote Shakespeare’s most famous stolen line (and yes Shakespeare nicked other people’s lines just as Dylan has done), “All the world’s a stage,” – a staggeringly brilliant simple metaphor.

Now the essence of a metaphor is that it is saying A is (or was or might be) a way of getting a deeper understanding of B.  In short to understand A you can look at B and either get the whole picture or maybe a helpful detail.  As in

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie

which is a more exciting way of saying, “there is no truth”.

But what do we have in “Gotta Serve Somebody?”  Here there is an absolute absence of metaphor.  The answer is not blowing in the wind – there is no wind, nothing is blowing, the world is not a stage, it is what it is, here is the answer, no arguing allowed.

Because the metaphor, in its multifarious forms, has been so central to Dylan’s writing, this non-metaphorical series of songs is something of a shock.  Not that Dylan hasn’t changed before – of course he has – but it is the literary equivalent of Bob giving up singing and simply reading his works out with no melody or time structure.

In short these songs not only appear to be different in their meaning, they are also utterly different in their poetic approach.  There is no metaphor, no obscurity, no phrases that we might think, “wow I’ve never thought of that”.

“Gotta Serve Somebody”  won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Male in 1979.  It was also a hit single with Dylan, singing it as the opener for every one of over 100 shows between 1979 and 1981.   And here Dylan was indeed preaching.  In fact there is surely nothing in the song apart from the preaching over a modest backing track.  I am not sure I would go as far as the readers of Rolling Stone in voting it the second worst Dylan song – some of the more obscure items we found in our list of 625 Dylan compositions are far, far worse.  Rather I’d say it is just, well, a rather ordinary song that bops along and tries to make up in background what it lacks in foreground.  And not too successfully.

So my point is not that I am against Dylan writing propaganda for Christianity.  Rather that a) it was sad to see him suddenly move over to one, and only one subject, instead of multiple subjects in his writing years and b) his strongest writing suit were metaphors and obscurity, and with that gone, the song lyrics lack a major part of what Dylan previously was.  “My love she speaks like silence” is no longer on the agenda.

And so we are as far away from

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides

as it is possible to be.  Dylan spells out the meaning out both in the songs and in his sometimes rather long introductions to his shows (which on occasion met with a somewhat rowdy response from the paying public).

What I am reminded of most of all is the comment by David Byrne of Talking Heads: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”  It simply is.  Interestingly Byrne also took that view in song, “Say it once, say it again.” (Psycho Killer).  And that is what Dylan is doing here.  Telling us the same thing rather than endlessly changing his vision of the world.

And this was not just a big loss but also a curious situation.   For where previously many of his songs were obscure, such that some craved information as to what they were about, these songs are overt and clear, and yet Dylan spent a lot of time on stage telling us what they were about – as if we didn’t know.

When finally the meaning of one of these Christian songs was transformed it was not by Dylan at all but by Sinead O’Connor who had been cruelly abused in the name of Christianity, and whose poignant “I believe in you” took on extraordinary levels of meaning once her past at the hands of the Magdalene Laundry was revealed.

Meanwhile back with Bob, aside from the assertion of his own faith, he was looking to convert.  “Ye shall be changed” for example has the lines

 All your loved ones have walked out the door
You’re not even sure ’bout your wife and kids no more,

Telling people that they have got it all wrong had never been Bob’s style before now.  Even “Times they are a changin” doesn’t do that – although it does tell people not to criticise what they don’t understand.  “With God on our Side” criticises the view of suggesting that one country can claim God as its own, and songs like “Only a Pawn” and “Hattie Carroll” tell us what’s wrong socially, but Bob had until now always shied away from telling us exactly how to behave to put things right – until now.

And yet even if I find a major part of Bob’s work to have vanished in 1979, we cannot dismiss the music – or at least not all of it, because half way through this year Bob Dylan gave us one of his absolutely amazing best pieces of music of his entire career.   “I believe in you” is exquisite music way beyond the norms of popular song, but if you are a regular reader of my ramblings you will know where we have got to: When He Returns.

For me, it isn’t the lyrics that make this a masterpiece (and indeed that would be hard given my lack of the faith that occupied Dylan for around 18 months) but the sheer beauty and elegance of the public performances of this song.

And it is a song that can easily be destroyed by going totally over the top but Bob doesn’t in the live performances of piano and organ.

And that is (for me at least) the great moment to come out of this year of religious songs.  Lyrics, music, arrangement merge today into a sublime performance; one of the most sublime performances of Bob’s career.  Which probably just shows that if you believe in what you are singing, it certainly helps.

As time passed, (and certainly by the time of the composition of Covenant Woman), Bob seemed certain he had sorted out a deal with the almighty.

I’ve been broken, shattered like an empty cup
I’m just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up
And I know He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true
He must have loved me so much to send me someone as fine as you

Some of the songs kept going, and some even got introductions from Bob…

… while songs like “Saved” got played and played and then were suddenly dropped with never a hint of a return.

And as the first six songs of 1980 continued in the same way we began to wonder if there were ever going to be any non-Christian-preaching songs ever again.  Even the rehearsal songs like “See by faith” were Christian.

But as Chrissie Hynde (who is a follower of Vaishnavism) shows is that doesn’t stop anyone singing the songs and enjoying the music.

And then quite suddenly that was it.  For out of the blue there is that awkward feeling that maybe Bob did not want to be the property of an entity from beyond any more.  Maybe he was saying that there are others who are the property of Jesus and that’s ok, but it’s not Bob, at least not any more.   For next Dylan wrote a song that he said came to him out of the blue, and didn’t come from the Bible but from one of his old sources of inspiration William Blake: “Every Grain of Sand.”

And Blake most certainly was not a Christian in the classic sense, at all.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter word – Part III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?
• Love is just a four letter word Part VI: You been double-dealing
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word; Part VII: Now I understand

Part VIII: But it’s all over now

They met once, as Bobby Womack tells us shortly before his death in 2014. In fact, they even made music together, although unfortunately history does not tell when, nor what they played;

“I was at Ronnie Woods’ house. Ronnie said to me, “you ever met Bob Dylan?” I said, “I’ve seen him but never really met him. I would love to meet him.” Ronnie said, “I’ll call him and maybe you can play something together.” I’ll never forget that when we played, I was looking at him and the whole time, he was looking at the wall. I couldn’t believe that he would be shy of me. If anything, it should’ve been the other way around, me in awe of him, cuz you know, Bob Dylan is history.”

(interview met Tee Watts, Glide Magazine 4 april 2014)

“We never talked,” Womack adds, still amused. Intermediary Ronnie Wood later explains it to him. Dylan is bashful, and, “He’s just a quiet guy and with you being there, he’s kind of freakin’ out.”

Well, perhaps Womack has, as a kind of reaching out, tried his version of “All Along The Watchtower” (although his cover, from 1973, is more Hendrix than Dylan based), but more tempting is the thought that he has harked back to his first world success, “It’s All Over Now”;

Well, baby used to stay out all night long
She made me cry, she done me wrong
She hurt my eyes open, that's no lie
Tables turn and now her turn to cry

Bobby is nineteen when he writes the song for his and his brothers’ band, The Valentinos. At that time, Sam Cooke is already the boys’ mentor, which opens doors. When The Stones are in New York in the radio studio of DJ Murray The K, Murray plays them “It’s All Over Now”, and Mick and Keith are immediately sold. Bobby Womack, then twenty years old, is still arrogant enough to want to veto it (“I told Jagger to get his own song”), but fortunately Sam Cooke puts his young protégé in his place. Six months later, when the first royalty check has come in, Womack gladly changes his mind – that one cover is a financial treat until his death.

Dylan may be familiar with The Valentinos’ modest hit (peaking at 94 in June ’64), and obviously, he knows The Stones’ world hit. In the summer of 1964, their first English number 1 hit is in the top 10 all over the world. The song is still hovering in the ether when Dylan forces a final verse for “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” out of his pen, and the first verse of Womack’s song echoes in the first line of it:

Strange it is to be beside you, many years the tables turned
You’d probably not believe me if I told you all I’d learned
And it is very, very weird indeed
To hear words like “forever,” “please,”
Those ships sail through my mind, I cannot cheat
It’s like lookin’ in the teacher’s face complete
I can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard,
That love is just a four-letter word.

…as is the overarching plot, the wounded lover who has a sweet moment of revenge years later. And the similarity to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, which Dylan wrote a little later, is also a little too great to be a coincidence, of course.

In terms of narrative technique, this “extra” couplet may offer a nicely rounded plot, but stylistically and linguistically it is rather disappointing. It seems to demonstrate the truth of Dylan’s own remark, I never finished it:

• This is the only time in the five verses that Dylan resorts to a semi-rhyme (indeed – please);
• Those ships sail through my mind seems to be a draft to integrate a playful adaptation of the expression that ship has sailed, which would be very appropriate in this context. The choice of words (“please”) suggests that the adulteress has now lost her husband and would like to continue with the narrator. But as it is, those ships can only refer to the preceding words “forever”, “please” – making the metaphor rather lame;
• “I cannot cheat” suggests a fourth party (apart from the female antagonist and her husband) and comes completely out of the blue;
• The incomprehensible It’s like lookin’ in the teacher’s face complete is hardly anything more than filler lyrics and suggests that the poet had half a mind to do something with “lookin’ at her completely blank” and maybe something with a metaphor on the student has become the teacher, or in that vein – but didn’t find the words right away and left the unfinished note thereon as a reminder.

All weaknesses, anyway, justifying Dylan’s refusal to include this verse in Writings & Drawings, and confirming Dylan’s outburst I never finished it. The attempts to do so, to write a final couplet, are perhaps also frustrated by that tables turned and the consequent, untenable Bobby Womack associations. The refrain keeps imposing itself on the poet,

because I used to love her, but it's all over now

… but perhaps that comes a little too close to being an overly autobiographical reference to his broken relationship with Joan Baez.

Baez herself has no problem with that, with voyeuristic frankness, as evidenced by her autobiographical, wonderful song “Diamonds And Rust” and by her candid memoirs – in which she even publishes parts of her letters. And the “unfinished” closing couplet that she chooses to sing, despite the filler and the break in style, is really not out of place, in terms of content. It is after all a satisfying finale, with a moving, poetic ending.  In which one can hear how the narrator actually wants to answer with that other Womack song, with “I Don’t Wanna Be Hurt By Ya Love Again”. Or better still, with “If You Think You’re Lonely Now”:

If you think you're lonely now
Oh, wait until tonight
I'll be long gone
And you'll never find another man that'll treat you right

Oh, ain't it funny how the tables turn
When things aren't going your way
But when love runs out, and the pain walks in
And settles for a stay, ooh

To be continued. Next up the final: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part IX: I sit and watch the children play

————————-

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

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy (Part V)

by Larry Fyffe

The Miltonic poet of Scotland describes how he sees the Babylon of his day:

Deceits, and perjuries, and vanities
Rewarded worthlessness, rejected worth
Assassinations, robberies, thefts, and wars
Disasterous accidents, life thrown away
Divinity insulted, Heaven despised
Religion scorned ....

(Robert Pollok: The Course Of Time)

In sentiment quite like the song lyrics, by the modern-day American singer/songwriter/musician, presented below:

Big-time negotiators, false healers, and woman haters
Masters of the bluff, masters of the proposition
But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
All non-believers, and men-stealers, talking in the name of religion
(Bob Dylan: Slow Train)

In the romantic-realistic-naturalistic novel “A Pair Of Blue Eyes”, Thomas Hardy quotes from poetry penned by the Scottish  ‘Dissenter’:

And now her eyes grew bright, and brighter still
Too bright for ours to look upon, suffused
With many tears, and closed without a cloud
They set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky
But melts away in the light of heaven
(Robert Pollok: The Course Of Time)

In his story, Hardy depicts beautiful Elfride as a young, and kitten-like; no man-eating belle without mercy is she, but her name brings to mind a dark romantic ballad:

She took me to her Elfin grot
And there she wept, and sighed full sore
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four
(John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci)

Thomas quotes the following lines from the Gothic poem – ‘Knight’ is the last name of one of her four suitors:

I set her upon my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song
(John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci)

The novel focuses on Elfride’s love and affection when it’s torn between two suitors –  Stephen Smith, an ambitious country lad, son of a mason, who’s determined to improve his economic situation; and Henry Knight, a well-established man from London, a barrister, and an editor, with an avid interest in geology; he rejects the blue-eyed fairy- girl when he finds out that she’s been previously courted.

Aspects  of Charles Darwin’s science, which considers  the physical environment uncaring as to the fate of human beings, lurk in the background of the novel – it’s the female, chess-playing, Elfride who saves Knight by tearing up her undergarments when Henry falls over a cliff; independent-minded, she, in the end, rejects both suitors; marries, dies giving birth; leaving together her two frustrated male suitors to make their way back to ‘the grey still valley.’

In the song lyrics below, matters mixed-up are too – the same poetic Gothic belle-well drawn upon:

The tempest struggles in the air ....
You trampled on me as you passed
All of my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing more to tell you now
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)

Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy – two very creative artists, and both oft under-rated by art critics who know not of what they speak.

————————–

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Tony Attwood

Aaron sent me a recording of  this previously unpublished Dylan song over a week ago, and I struggled with the review, and set it aside until Aaron kindly reminded me.  Making up excuses by the ton, I’ve rushed around and caught up.  So here we are.

It is “Uncut” magazine that has come up with this previously unheard Bob Dylan track – which will become song number 625 in terms of the list of Dylan compositions.  Several people have commented it sounds like an early version of Foot of Pride.

You might be able to make sense of it at once, but if not try listening with the lyrics below – that’s how I gradually got the hang of what is going on here.

If that doesn’t work, try the one below.   And below that is my (Tony’s) version of the lyrics and I am notorious for inaccuracies.

https://youtu.be/22P46wdohO4

Here are the lyrics…

Whether there was a murder, I don`t know, I can`t say, 
I was visiting a friend in jail. 
There were only two women at the scene at the time, 
neither one of them saw a thing, both of them were wearing a veil.
I said it was a natural situation, and it reached too high,
???? (missing section)
It`s too late to bring him back. 
Too late, too late, too late, too late, too late to bring him back.

He got a brother named Paul, hanging out at the Cafe Royale, 
where the all of the company is mixed. 
He is pretty to look at, he wants someone to throw the book at, 
but you know he drinks, and drinks can be fixed. 
Sing me one more song about your summer romance, 
Or maybe the one about you`re one night stand with Erroll Flynn. 
In these times of compassion, with conformities and fashion, 
say one more stupid thing to me, before the final nails driven in. 
You know it`s too late to bring him back, 
Too late, too late too late, to bring him back

Dr Silver Spoon from the ecstasy ballroom, he`s a retired businessman, 
who feeds off everyone he touched. 
He gives money to the church foundation for research, 
he`s not someone you can play around with too much. 
Miss Rose in a plate from spinning both sides of the lake, 
she`s rough to look at, but she`s safe, 
She`ll give you coconut bread and spiced buns in bed, 
and you won`t have to worry about 
sleeping with your head face down in your plate. 
But know it`s too late to bring him back, 
too late, too late too late, to bring him back

You gonna arrange to see a man tonight, 
to tell you some secret things that you think might open some doors. 
How to enter the gates of paradise, 
No, not really, more like going crazy from carrying a burden 
never meant to be yours. 
On the stage ever doing the bumps and the grinds, 
A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand, 
and say, "well boys, thanks." 
They like to take all this money but then build castles to study in, 
and sing `Amazing Grace` all the way to food bank, 
But it`s too late to bring him back, too late, too late 
Too late, to bring him back.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Below is part 34 of the Never Ending Tour series of articles.  A full index of the series can be found here, and the earlier 1966 articles are:

• Never Ending Tour, 1996, part 1. Busy being born. With Al Kooper in Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour, 1996,  Part 2  – More Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour 1996 part 3: Berlin and Beyond

Dylan’s stint in Atlanta, at the House of the Blues (August 3^rd and 4^th), gave rise to some solid and even outstanding performances, and we are lucky enough to have some of these on video.

My favourite is this impassioned performance of ‘My Back Pages’, Dylan’s awakening in 1964 to moral complexity and the failure of a simple, black and white view of the world. We see here Dylan’s restless style, and his one-handed harp playing – harp and microphone in one hand. The harp break is sharp and trenchant. As usual I’ve added the audio file in case the video vanishes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2eKm7Bmgeg&t=16s

My Back Pages

Another video worth watching is this ‘To Be Alone with You,’ a light-hearted love song from Nashville Skyline (1969) which takes on a harder edge in this poker-faced performance. Dylan doesn’t expend energy needlessly on stage, which may be the secret of his longevity as a performer. It’s a good song to kick off the concert as the ‘you’ in the song could be read as the audience. It’s a good song to get people jiving and in the mood for some Dylan.

‘To be alone with you
At the close of the day
With only you in view
While evening slips away
It only goes to show
That while life's pleasures be few
The only one I know
Is when I'm alone with you’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JSl1mzvxJk

To Be Alone with You

Time now to check out some of the usual suspects, songs that Dylan has been cultivating from the start of the NET and which regularly show up on his setlists. A core of songs, mainly from the sixties and seventies around which his concerts are built. If you have the patience, it’s fascinating to follow these songs through the years, how they change over time.

One of the songs that doesn’t change a lot, although we get both electric and acoustic versions, is ‘Gates of Eden’. Dylan would continue to plumb the mystery and menace of this song right through to 2001. One of Dylan’s great strengths is the ability to express a profound alienation from the world. ‘Gates of Eden’ hits both the unreal and horrific nature of the world and our separation from it.

‘The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden’

Those two lines, ‘Leaving men wholly, totally free/ to do anything they wish to do but die,’ are a neat summing up of the kind of existentialism encountered in Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, writers very much in the air in the mid sixties. At the same time, these lines foreshadow the biblically rooted sentiment we would later find in ‘Precious Angel’ (1979), ‘Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high/When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die.’

While I love the dark, plunging electric performance of 1988 (See NET, 1988, part 1), I think it’s these minimal, acoustic versions that move me the most. No drums, a gentle sound, with Mr Guitar Man excelling himself picking thoughtfully around the melody. (date unknown)

Gates of Eden

Also in a quiet, reflective mood is this ‘Shelter from the Storm.’ This is a good example of the quiet electric sound. You think for a moment that it is acoustic. Again, while I like the fast, upbeat performances of the song, and the hammering performance form the Rolling Thunder Tour, I think the slower, thoughtful performances such as this one suit the song best. This song is surely a candidate for Dylan’s best 1970’s love song, maybe his best ever, particularly if we count the wry humour behind the lyrics.

‘Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm’

While Dylan gave the hippie, flower-power philosophy short shrift in the 1960s, here the hippy chick is reborn as a goddess, goddess of protection and maybe even salvation, although that’s a big ask. Be careful what you ask for, as they say:

‘In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation and she gave me a lethal dose’

Shelter from the Storm

Never too far away from ‘Shelter from the Storm’, you will find ‘If You See Her Say Hello’, another song about what once was.  If you listen to the evolution of the song on the compilation More Blood More Tracks you can hear Dylan trying out the song with a number of different moods and tempos. Slow it down and you accentuate the nostalgia; speed it up and it sounds more like a happy hour recollection. Dylan keeps this one fast and upbeat, giving it a bit of a country touch.

A lovely, generous, magnanimous song. I’m not quite sure than I believe the sentiment, it’s a bit too nice for me, but I’m happy to try it on for size (July 3^rd)

If you see her say hello

There is something epic in the chord structure of ‘Tears of Rage’ so we don’t mind getting a nine and half minute performance. The editor of Untold Dylan, Tony Atwood, has a fine discussion of the chord changes , but flounders a bit when it comes to the song’s meaning, as indeed do I. What I do get is the sense of betrayal, of selling out to greed, materialism and ‘false instructions’.

I could take a stab at it, and suggest that if the song were sung by George Washington, or rather the ghost of George Washington, or one of the founding fathers of America, and if the ‘daughter’ were America, then the song would make some kind of sense. The betrayal would be the way America has betrayed the ideals of the founding fathers, and the upsurge of hope on Independence Day. As it stands, however, the song works on an emotional level and we can’t say exactly why. (Date unknown)

Tears of Rage

‘What Good Am I?’ is an unusual song in Dylan’s canon. He doesn’t usually question himself, or his own veracity, in quite this way. We all know what it feels like to have to face the way in which we have ignored or sidelined important things. Facing that inner uselessness is not an easy thing to do. Sung in a hard, waspish voice, as we heard in 1989 and 1990, the song comes across as a bitter self accusation. Here, it is much more gentle, and our sins of omission sad rather than anything else.

While I think the instrumental break goes on for too long at the end, Dylan’s singing is soft and sensitive, a beautiful and therefore painful probing of our shortcomings. (date unknown)

What good am I

GE Smith tells a story of how, back in 1988, when he was auditioning for the role of Dylan’s guitarist, Dylan played nothing but ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ over and over again. Smith comments that Dylan must have liked the song very much. And indeed it seems he does, for of all the folk songs he learned before starting to write songs himself, ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ survives and has been performed from time to time.

This song originated in Scotland several hundred years ago. Here’s a summary of the story. ‘The song is a fairly standard trooper-and-maid story: that is, soldier passes through town, soldier seduces girl, soldier is ordered to leave, girl says hey I’m pregnant, soldier says tough luck and marches away. In some versions the girl follows him, though only for a little while, but in most versions she ends up abandoned.’

It’s fun to look at the original Scottish lyrics. Here are the first couple of verses:

There once was a troop o’ Irishdragoons
Cam marching doon through Fyvie-o
And the captain’s fa’en in love wi’ a very bonnie lass
And her name it was ca’d pretty Peggy-o

There’s many a bonnie lass in the Howe o Auchterless
There’s many a bonnie lass in the Garioch
There’s many a bonnie Jean in the streets of Aiberdeen
But the floower o’ them aw lies in Fyvie-o

Once the song migrated to America, various lyrical variations occurred, Dylan’s cryptic version being one of them. Here are Dylan’s opening verses:

I’ve been around this whole country
But I never yet found Fenneario.

Well, as we marched down, as we marched down
Well, as we marched down to Fennerio’
Well, our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove
Her name that she had was Pretty Peggy-O

Well, what will your mother say, what will your mother say
What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-O
What will your mother say to know you’re going away
You’re never, never, never coming back-io ?

The story is not so much told as alluded to in Dylan’s inimitable way. What is fascinating about this 1996 performance is that Dylan makes further lyrical variations which have not been written down. I don’t have the ear to transcribe them all, but if you look at Dylan’s known variation as you listen to this, you will be able to hear the differences. In Dylan’s hands it becomes a Civil War ballad, and my suggestion here is that it underlay a group of songs with a historical aspect that he wrote while writing the Time Out of Mind songs. Songs such as ‘Red River Shore’, ‘Girl on the Green Briar Shore’ and ‘Cross the Green Mountain’ all seem to relate or look back to ‘Pretty Peggy-O’. (date unknown).

Pretty Peggy-O

When looking at Dylan’s 1995 performances, we highlighted two versions of ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ (NET, 1995 part 1 and 1995 part 5) and noted how the song itself is a-changing in mood as the times change. By the mid nineties the song is no longer a rallying cry for action, but an occasion for nostalgia for those earlier, more radical times. The audience sings along on the chorus and a little sadness enters. It is both sad and uplifting at the same time.

In 1996 Dylan keeps the same, slow-paced arrangement, but for this performance he is joined onstage by two members of the Dave Matthews Band, a saxophonist and a violinist. You don’t hear much of the sax, but the violin, after a tentative start, adds a melancholy strain to the song in perfect keeping with the mood. It’s that violin that lifts this performance above others like it. He gets the words a bit mixed up, but that harp break cuts to the heart. The audience loves it and so do I. Enjoy. (July 3^rd)

The times they are a changing

I’ve been holding back this one so that I can end this post, and our visit to the NET in 1996, with a real blast. It’s ‘Rainy Day Woman’ like you’ve never heard it. It’s got all of the insouciant lurch of the original, album version with the added dimension of the Dave Mathews band joining in, particularly the sax.

My usually reliable info sources tell me that Dylan is joined by a saxophone and a violin, but I can’t hear the violin. The rollicking, instrumental break that begins at about 4.10 mins, seems to have two saxes, both wailing away in fine blues jazz style. It’s over to your ear on that one. Whatever, it’s a helluva way to go out, all that swagger and vigour, that screaming sax.

Makes you wonder what’s around the corner in 1997.

See you then.

Rainy Day Woman

Kia Ora

————————–

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

Previously in this series…

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love is just a four-letter world – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?
• Love is just a four letter word Part VI: You been double-dealing

by Jochen Markhorst

Part VII: Now I understand

Though I never knew just what you meant
When you were speaking to your man
I can only think in terms of me
And now I understand
After waking enough times to think

In Writings & Drawings, in Lyrics and on the site, the fourth stanza is the last stanza. The poet himself seems to prefer a poetic, melancholy ending in which the matured narrator looks back on that short, shattering affair with a slightly cynical undertone, but mainly in resignation. In terms of narrative build-up, this may be less satisfying than Baez’s finale, with the fifth stanza leading to a sort of final showdown, but lyrically it is more successful; this fourth stanza actually closes the circle to the first stanza very nicely.

Stylistically, this stanza stands out because of an atypical, Shakespearean interlude in the centre;

I see
The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity
Blow up in smoke, its destiny
Falls on strangers, travels free

…in which the archaic, rather biblical Holy Kiss is, of course, the most eye- and ear-catching – especially on paper, as Dylan, evidently attaching great importance to it, writes it in capitals. In this context, however, quite inappropriate. There are five occurrences of the Holy Kiss in the Bible, but each one is a kind of brotherly kiss, exchanged by two men. Each time in the New Testament, each time at the end of a letter, so probably meant as part of a Eucharist celebration. In any case, this is how it is integrated into the early Christian Eucharist – after the opening prayer, the brothers greet each other with a Peace be with you and a kiss on the mouth; with a Holy Kiss, as they call it.

Absolutely no bearing, all in all, on the context of the expression in Dylan’s lyrics. Here it has the same context as with Shakespeare: it is a kiss to seal an amorous union between a man and a woman. “The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity”… so, a kind of marriage vow, really. Shakespeare first uses it in this sense in one of his earliest (and weakest) plays, in the comedy of errors The Two Gentlemen Of Verona:

Proteus.
When possibly I can, I will return.
Julia.
If you turn not, you will return the sooner.
Keep this remembrance for thy Julia's sake.
[Giving a ring]
Proteus.
Why, then, we'll make exchange;
here, take you this.
Julia.
And seal the bargain with a holy kiss.

For The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, the young Shakespeare has, as befits a master thief of thoughts, plundered extensively from world literature, including the work from which he would later copy even more lavishly, Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), and from this he may also have picked up this combination of kiss, love and vow;

Then Romeus in arms his lady 'gan to fold,
With friendly kiss, and ruthfully she 'gan her knight behold.
With solemn oath they both their sorrowful leave do take

The Bard from Stratford-upon-Avon will place a holy kiss only once more in his entire oeuvre. Again in Verona, again to make a kind of marriage vow, so again a kiss with amorous overtones – yes indeed, in Romeo And Juliet. Spoken by that poor schmuck Paris, who at that moment still thinks he will soon be a happily married man with Juliet:

PARIS
Juliet, on Thursday early will I rouse ye.
[kisses her] Till then, adieu, and keep this holy kiss.

We all know how that ends, and the holy kiss referred to by the narrator in “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” has the same supposed eternal value. This narrator, however, is already a plot development further than Proteus and Paris, and cynically concludes that such a holy kiss is as fleeting as smoke – with which the Bard from Manhattan-upon-Hudson again follows in the footsteps of Shakespeare and Romeo And Juliet: “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs” (Act I, sc. 1). And with which we can also place the revenge fantasy of ten years later, in “Idiot Wind” (I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy) geographically even more accurately: Verona, that is.

Fortunately, the rising cynicism, the sour conclusion that such a holy kiss is as fleeting as smoke, like a butterfly traveling freely, and happy-go-luckily descending again on the next stranger, is softened again by the beautiful, resigned finale

Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me
And I do not really need to be
Assured that love is just a four-letter word

… words from a purified man, who has gone through the mourning stages of Denial, Bewilderment and Grief, and has now arrived at Acceptance. A beautiful ending to a beautiful lyric, as the poet seems to think when compiling Writings & Drawings (1972) – but by then the world has long been singing along with Baez’ version. And with one more Last Stanza.

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part VIII: But it’s all over now

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

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)

By Larry Fyffe

Confronted with Charles Darwin’s environmental determinism, writer Thomas Hardy, in his novel “The Return Of The Native”,  turns to the unscientific offshoot of the Theory Of Evolution – ‘Social Darwinism’.

He tells the story of a native of the English heathlands who returns from Paris to be a school master in hopes of advancing the thinking of the traditionalist sheep farmers of the darkling moor.

The returned native marries the beautiful Eustacia who yearns for the excitement of modern city life – she hopes they’ll go off to the bright lights.

Eustacia cannot adapt to the barren physical environment of the heath; she rejects another suitor who yearns for city life too, but fails to deliver – so he settles for the traditionalist Miss Thomasin.

Below, Hardy quotes from an old-time ballad (he does not provide its title):

He told her that she was the joy of his life
And if she'd consent, he would make her his wife
She couldn't refuse him; to church so they went
Young Will was forgot, and young Sue was content
And then was she kissed, and down on his knee
No man in the world was so loving as he
(Susan's Complaint And Remedy ~ traditional)

Akin to the above be to the following song lyrics:

You changed my life
Came along in a time of strife
In hunger and in need
You made my heart bleed
(Bob Dylan: You Changed My Life)

(This version is by Ivan & Alyosha)

Hardy’s native blunts his sight through too much reading, and Eustacia and her former love interest (married now to Thomasin) both drown after they run off together though the native arrives and tries to save them; thereafter, the distraught  heathlander becomes a wandering priest.

Hardy’s ‘naturalistic’ novel is inspired in part by the following ballad from which the writer quotes near the beginning of his novel (without mentioning the name of the ballad):

Queen Eleanor was a sick woman, and sick just like to die
And she has sent for two friars of France to come to her speedily
The King called down his nobles all, by one, by two, by three
Earl Marshal, I go shrive the Queen, and thou shalt wend 
with me
'A boon, a boon', quoth Earl Marshal
And fell on his bended knee
'That whatsoever the Queen shall say
No harm therof may be'
(Queen Eleanor's Confession ~ traditional)

King Henry and the Earl disguise themselves as the friars, and the Queen confesses that she lost her virginity to the Earl; needless to say, the King’s not happy to learn about that, but he has promised to do no harm.

The singer/songwriter messes with tragic ballads of yore, including ‘Lord Thomas And Fair Eleanor’; in the following song, each member of the love triangle dies, fires a-burning as they do in Hardy’s novel:

You got something to tell me, tell it to me, man
Come to the point as straight as you can
'Old Henry Lee, chief of the clan
Came riding through the woods, and took her hand'
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

In another song lyric, the scientific Theory Of Evolution takes a beating because it fails to adequately explain the human condition:

They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff
I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't care'
High water everywhere
(Bob Dylan: High Water)

In ‘The Return Of The Native’, Eustacia takes part in a nationalistic Christmas play – she’s  the brave Turkish knight who is slain by the patron Christian saint of England:

Here come I, a Turkish knight
Who learnt in Turkish land to fight
I'll fight this man with courage bold
If his blood's hot, I'll make it cold
(Saint George ~ traditional play)

Like Thomas Hardy in the novel above, Bob Dylan mixes up the artistic medicine in the basement below:

Do you know where she's hiding
How long are we gonna be riding
How long must I keep my eyes glued to the door
Will there be any comfort there, senor
(Anna Kaye: Senor ~ Dylan)

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Selections by Aaron Galbraith, commentary and a few extra choices by Tony Attwood

This series takes a new – and personal – look at some of the more unusual cover versions of Bob Dylan’s music.  It started out from a previous series which was summarised in

•  “The 100 Greatest Cover Versions of Bob Dylan songs ever”

In this new series we have had…

• What makes a beautiful obscurity
• Beautiful Obscurity: Acquaraggia play Dylan: a new experience
• Beautiful obscurity: revisiting the alternative versions of Sweet Marie
• Beautiful obscurity: unexpected reworkings of “All along the watchtower”
• Beautiful Obscurity: such different renditions of Spanish Leather
• Love minus zero and a journey to infinity
• Blind Willie McTell: amazingly amazing

If you would like to join in, please do write out your selection of covers, put in the links from the internet, and email to Tony@schools.co.uk     No extra comments by Tony will be added, unless you invite them.

—————-

Aaron: Here I present some covers of Dylan’s wondrous 1971 single “Watching the River Flow”

First up – The Rolling Stones.   Mick and the boys recorded this for an Ian Stewart tribute album in 2011. Interesting side note, Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie and for the first time with the band since 1992, Bill Wyman, recorded their contributions at different times in different studios. The song was chosen due to Stewart’s judgement that its “the only decent thing Bob Dylan ever did”.

So in the band we have Ben Waters, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood and Bill Wyman

If in your part of the world this video appears as “unavailable” then try this link….

Hearing this version really does prime us for what comes hereafter.  Many many artists have had a go at this song, but original versions and completely new interpretations are harder to find.  Everyone seems to think all they can do is find a bit of a variation on Bob’s work, rather than work on a truly original re-arrangement.

But, the instrumental break is interesting – it takes a lot of time to get going, and then doesn’t really go at all.  They have a second bash at the end, and I wondered whether the saxophonists actually played that break over and over or did they do a bit of trickery with the tape.  It is a long old time to play same three notes.

Joe Cocker

Immediately the point is made about everyone following the same approach – it is that rhythm that does it.  Once you hear it, you know what’s coming.

Joe again goes for the saxophone sound, but I really wish they wouldn’t try and mix saxes and a lead guitar doing their own thing both at the same time.   By the middle eight it sounds too much to me as if everyone is having a fight to get their favourite riff in.  Still, at least by the instrumental break things have calmed down a bit and we can have a spot of virtuoso sax playing.  It’s fun, it’s ok, but to my ears not that special.

Bobby Darin

Yes indeed Bobby Darin.  Remember Bobby?  He not only had a multi-million selling hit with “Dream Lover”, he also wrote it, so during his sadly short life he should have been ok for money.

One of things about doing this series is I learn all sorts of stuff I didn’t know.  Not relevant to the music I guess, but still I find it interesting.  Thus, for example, I have learned Darin had a child early on that was then put up for adoption.  I didn’t know that.  Nor indeed that he wrote what to my ears is the awful “Splish Splash” which was a hit in England for Charlie Drake (I think that’s so, I’m writing that from memory).

Anyway, it’s an ok recording, but again I am not sure I got any really big insights here.

Steve Gadd

Now my heart lifted when I came to this one (and you should remember that I – Tony – don’t know what Aaron has in store for me to write about when I open the file).  Steve Gadd is a musician – I mean like a real musician.  As a percussionist he has worked with everyone, and then some more.  Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Chick Corea, Steely Dan …. everyone wants him.

And this version of the song shows all those people who have performed it by just taking the song and doing it straight, exactly what there is to be found herein.   This is where one can go.   Thanks Aaron for picking this one.  Brilliant.

The last of Aaron’s selection is what he describes in his note to be as “George, Bob and a whole bunch of people (I think I see Jesse Ed Davis) present a (probably very drunken) impromptu performance as The Silver Wilburys.”

Yes well, lots of guitars – and no knowledge of what the song actually is.   Hmmmmm….

OK, well the deal is I (Tony) can throw in some of the versions of the song that I like as well.  And if you are still here, this is quite a contrast with the mess above.

Now in his 80s Chris Farlowe is apparently still performing – and I hope taking it easy.  Here’s another little note of no consequence, he was born and brought up not far from me in north London.  I’d love to know when this was recorded.  Can someone tell me?

What I like here is that this version just treats the song as bouncy fun – I’m doing all right, I’m sitting here watching the river flow, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But until now we have not had anyone who has decided to take this song anywhere new while keeping the lyrics in.  So here we go with Leon Russell.  And I really welcome this, because after all, what is the point of performing and recording a song that everyone else has done, if you don’t have something new to offer in the performance?

And I am going to cheat here and deviate and offer you Leon Russell’s own composition, in case you missed it, or have not heard it for a long time.  I’ll make it an optional extra by just putting the link to it here, but this guy was really a great songwriter in his own right.

Back to Basic

But still we have the problem – everyone ends up doing the song in the same sort of way.  Except it is rather nicely done without stretching the song beyond where it was meant to go in the first place.

So can anyone do something new with this song.

According to Wiki “Seatrain was an American roots fusion band based initially in Marin County, California, and later in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Seatrain was formed in 1969, subsequently drawing some members from the Blues Project when it broke up. Seatrain recorded four albums and disbanded in 1973.”

I don’t know anything else about them, but it is quite a nice track.  If there is more to know, please write in.

Last one now, if anyone is left reading and listening…. and believe me there are 1000 more recordings of this song that could be highlighted.  And I’ve left the one I rather like until the end, for no particular reason.  Except perhaps because at least Graham Bell has done his own thing.

But then he always did – including appearing in the LSO’s version of Tommy.  Sadly Graham is no longer with us, but like so many less than totally famous rock musicians, his music is most certainly worth remembering.

https://youtu.be/3-wHW55GFQA

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

Previously in this series…

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love is just a four-letter world – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?

by Jochen Markhorst

Part VI: You been double-dealing

Both in the final pages of the graphic novel, and in the final minutes of the film version, Rorschach, as the only one of the remaining Watchmen, refuses to join Adrian’s gruesome, bloody plot to save the world. Without saying goodbye, he leaves the geodesic dome at the South Pole. He goes back to civilisation. “People must be told.” Outside, Jon, Dr. Manhattan, stops him. “Rorschach… you know I can’t let you do that.”

Rorschach knows. And also that this will be his death. Which comes, and it’s quick and painless. Complete evaporation to the core.

I said goodbye unnoticed
Pushed towards things in my own games
Drifting in and out of lifetimes
Unmentionable by name
Searching for my double, looking for
Complete evaporation to the core

The creator of Watchmen, British master storyteller Alan Moore, is a seasoned Dylan fan. His masterpiece is – quite literally – framed by and larded with Dylan songs. Just as the successful and respectful film adaptation by Zack Snyder (2009) opens with “The Times They Are A-Changin'” (stretched, with Dylan’s permission, to over five minutes) and closes, under the credits, with My Chemical Romance’s cover of “Desolation Row”. The dramatic denouement is introduced, again as in Moore’s graphic novel, with “All Along The Watchtower” (in the film Hendrix’s version).

Illustrator Dave Gibbons writes the foreword to the Deluxe Edition in 2013 and explicitly articulates Dylan’s influence:

“It began with Bob Dylan.   For me, a couplet from his 1966 masterpiece Desolation Row was the spark that one day would ignite Watchmen.

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

It was a glimpse, a mere fragment of something; something ominous, paranoid and threatening. But something that showed that comics, like poetry or rock and roll or Bob Dylan himself, might feasibly become part of the greater cultural continuum. The lines must have also lodged in Alan’s consciousness for, nearly twenty years later, Dylan’s words eventually provided the title of the first issue of our comic book series Watchmen.”

… so, in addition to the title for the first episode, Dylan also provides inspiration for plot, background and scenes up to and including the final episode.

And, perhaps somewhat far-fetched, even the bizarre death of Rorschach seems a literal interpretation of Dylan’s beautiful metaphor from that wonderful third verse of “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” – an execution method that is later copied again in a slightly less literary, much more exuberant superhero film, in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). With an identical, paradoxical motivation, by the way; Thanos commits mass murder, evaporating humans to the core, to save mankind.

The farewell couplet is a poetic highlight of the song. The opening words I said goodbye unnoticed are already of a rare, thoroughly melancholic beauty, and the following lines are no less successful.

The narrator sneaks away, or at least tries to disappear completely, while in the adjoining room a – presumably – marital quarrel rages, the quarrel in which the woman speaks those memorable words love is just a four-letter word, the words that make such a crushing impression on the narrator. His state of mind is stormy. He may not be the reason for the impending marital break-up, but he is not entirely innocent. Ten years later, he will find the words:

She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam, I guess
But I used a little too much force

… but for the moment he stands at a crossroads, confused. He does not know which exit to take. He feels pushed towards things, and also understands that he owes this to his own games, the games that make him drift in and out of lifetimes. Bingo again for the biographical interpreters: thanks to Joan Baez’s autobiography And A Voice To Sing With, we know that Dylan writes this song during a phase when he is yo-yoing back and forth between Sara and Joan;

“Twelve years later, when I finally met and became friends with Sara, we talked for hours about those days when the Original Vagabond was two-timing us.”

In the next paragraph, Baez recalls how the two-timing Original Vagabond Dylan, after a few romantic days with Sara in Woodstock, reports back to Carmel Valley:

“You stood at the big kitchen windows with your typewriter perched on top of a waist-high adobe structure and faced the hills. You wrote “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” among other things.”

These are, in any case, confusing times on Lover’s Lane, but the added bonus is that our songwriter is able to empathise with the relational whirlpool into which he throws his poor protagonist. What is striking is that he is looking for an anchor point, is trying to decide who his True Love is, looking for the woman who actually could be his double (“Searching for my double”).

It is the first time that the poet Dylan chooses this image to express something like the One True Love. At the end of 1965 he chooses “entwined” (Just Louise and her lover so entwined, “Visions Of Johanna”), and ten years later, when the poet himself is going through a divorce, he chooses “twin”. First in “Simple Twist Of Fate” (I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring) and again a couple of years later, after the divorce is finalised, in “Where Are You Tonight?” (I fought with my twin, that enemy within) – though there it is less clear whether the narrator means his Own True Love.

This narrator is still far from that point. He does not yet know who his double is, and here, at this crossroads, he cannot even find a door that might lead to her;

Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more
Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word

Well, there must be some way out of here.

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part VII: Now I understand

———

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

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)

by Larry Fyffe

‘The Hand Of Ethelberta’ by Thomas Hardy has a happy ending. From a poor background, young Ethelberta marries well, but her husband soon dies. She’s able to keep her low beginnings a secret by becoming known as a writer of poetry about sexual love and desire.

She has four suitors, including a struggling musician, but settles for an elderly womanizer who’s learned of her background; saving his estate from bankruptcy allows Ethelberta to look after her impovished family.

Without naming the author, Hardy pops befitting poetic quotes into the novel that focuses in on England’s class-based society.

From one of his favorite poets:

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow
(Percy Shelley: Adonais - 'The Hand Of Ethelberta': Hardy)

Likewise, the singer/songwriter/musician in the following song lyrics:

I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies 
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

From the same poet who’s quoted by Thomas Hardy:

Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)

In the aforementioned “Far From The Madding Crowd”, Hardy distinguishes the lower from the high class characters by the songs that they choose to sing.

He gives the first two lines of the song below; a ‘draggle-tail’ being an untidy women, even a prostitute:

'Twas Moll and Bet and Doll and Kate
And Dororthy Draggle-Tail
And Tom and Dick, and Joe and Jack
And Humphrey with his flail
And Kitty she was the charming girl
To carry her milking pail
(Dame Durden~ traditional -'Far From The Madding Crowd': Hardy)

Tangled up are Kitty and Bathsheba in the following book report apparently written in regard to Hardy’s novel:

The cat's in the well, the wolf is looking down
He got a big bushy tail, dragging all the way to the ground
The cat's in the well, the  gentle lady is asleep ...
She can't hear a thing, the silence is a-sticking her deep
(Bob Dylan: Cat's In The Well)

ThomasHardy mentions a jig song “Jockey To The Fair” which goes like this:

My dad and mam are fast asleep
My brother's up, and with the sheep
(Jockey To The Fair ~ traditional)

Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy draw buckets of  water from the same artistic well.

Another quote by Hardy in ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’:

Swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw
Which comes from poetry considered to be 'high art":
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed
But swollen with wind , and the rank mist they draw

 (John Milton: Lycidas)

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Tony Attwood

This is part of the “All Directions at Once” series which looks at the ebb and flow of Dylan’s writing across the years, rather focusing entirely on individual songs or (as our earlier episodes have done) individual years.

There is an index to the whole series of articles here.   The previous article in the series was “The Early 70s” took us up to 1974 and the creation of the masterpiece that was “Blood on the Tracks”.   So the question now is, what did Bob do next after having written his utter masterpiece that is that album.

Bob’s life had shown him that while in his early years he had been able to create masterpieces at the drop of the hat, this was no longer possible.  Works of genius had to be nurtured, and that could mean having time off in between bursts of creativity.  Sometimes those “times off” could last a year or more.

As we saw, Blood on the tracks developed from the experimental work at the end of the previous year and so on that basis we might have expected the second half of the 1970s to involve several years out, an experimental year which shows signs of amazing genius, and then the creative burst of another album.   At least that is how it went last time around.

1975

But no, this is Bob Dylan we are talking about and it doesn’t work like that with Bob.  What we actually got in 1975 was a year of working with Jacques Levy.  Not exclusively of course, but much of the time.

That he could put out his own works of genius such as “Abandoned Love” which could inspire other brilliant musicians, was never in doubt …

… but the work with Levy gave Bob all sorts of new insights and directions.  Sometimes he did his old trick of taking a real live person (Joey) and writing about him in a way that annoyed many who failed to understand the whole concept of artistic re-interpretation.  They are probably the people who prefer photographs to visual art.

And there was a new bit of fun, turning the ruins of Mozambique into a sun-seekers paradise.  Has anyone ever done such a thing before in a pop or rock song?  I certainly can’t think of who.

A quick bit of hero worship in Catfish, a song about his wife, and the very curious, “What will you do when Jesus comes?” which is a real scream.

There are songs to argue about like “Rita May” and songs that themselves seem to be produced in order to create an argument such as “Oh sister”.  In short there is a lot of an artist who knows he has got his genius back, and who is now having fun as well as expressing himself.  He certainly isn’t holding himself back.

I am sure Bob didn’t say, “Hey let’s start a song by telling the fans I married a woman called Isis – they’ll spend months trying to work out who that was,” but with the level of fun and mischief this year, alongside the genius, that could have been exactly what he thought.

As for “Abandoned Love”.  Everything about this song shouts out “genius” and leaves one wondering why Dylan needed a collaborator.  Both versions that we have are so worth playing again, and again, and again.  “Patty’s gone” could be just as great, if only we could make it all out, but these are tantalising signs that the genius is most certainly still on full charge.

Looking at the video below we get, the checking of the ear peace, look up, look down… a solo performer doing a Dylan piece… that suggests this is going to be almost as awful as me performing the music for a set of Dylan lyrics for which the master didn’t have time to do the tune…. but in this case no.  Give the lady a try

1976

But then we did get the year of a pause, as 1976 gave us one song: Seven Days a song of lost love, and nothing more.  Bob played it a number of times in concert before abandoning it.  And yes there was something in there, but Bob simply couldn’t tease it out.

So we are now seeing the pattern – although two great albums came out before the pause.

1977

1977 with just seven songs looks like a modest year.  And it is possible that some readers in the United States will still see these as very modest songs in comparison with Bob’s earlier masterworks.

And yet in much of the world 1977 was seen as a year of another major breakthrough in terms of composition for Bob Dylan.  Indeed it is impossible to pick out one particular masterpiece above the others from this collection.  And they are not just masterpieces of popular music, they are unique experiments with rhyming schemes and formulations which, had anyone else decided to pick them, could have taken rock music in a totally new direction.  But musicians and composers tend not to try and emulate what Bob does.

From “Changing of the Guards” through to “No Time to Think” and ending the sequence of compositions for the year with “We better talk this over” and “Where are you tonight?” each of the seven songs of the year adds something so very special to Dylan’s collection; it is quite amazing that he not only had new things to say but new ways of saying it.

So these are songs that are of a very different type, and so once again the simple answer to the question of why he wrote nothing much for a year in between such productive periods is that Bob needed time to stop and refresh and find his new direction.

We also know that Bob and Sara divorced in June 1977, which means 1976 has to be seen as a year of turmoil and uncertainty, during which Bob almost certainly didn’t feel in any way at ease and relaxed enough to compose.   Not that the compositions of 1977 are very relaxed – far from it in fact – but sometimes anger and tension can be channelled into composition as much as love and relaxation.  “No time to think” seems to sum it all up.

1978

So what do you do when you’ve just had a really messy divorce, when your wife is threatening to take the kids half way across the Pacific ocean and your fans (at least in your homeland) didn’t much like your last album?

https://youtu.be/Q7-bMpj88Z8

One option of course is to simply to go quiet.  Another is to go on tour.  Another is to write a load of songs with one of your backing singers.

Now the popular opinion of course is that Dylan found God and started writing with the evidence for this being the single song “Slow Train” which of course became the title track of next year’s album.  Except…

You really do have to stretch the imagination to turn Slow Train into a religious song and see it as the herald a new Dylan era.  Of course once the idea that Dylan had “gone all religious” has settled in, Slow Train sounds religious.  But on its own – and most certainly considering what else was written by Dylan around that song – no, it is not a religious song.  Rather it is a song which tells us we have become disenfranchised because we choose to see ourselves as disenfranchised.

In this regard “Slow Train” is very much like “Times they are a-changin'”.  As I have so-oft pointed out, “Times” doesn’t tell us to go out and change the world, it just says change is happening.  Likewise “Slow Train carries the same message”: times are changing.  It’s just going a bit slower than we previously thought.

And of course for anyone who believes in the inevitability of the Second Coming then these two songs make sense from a Christian perspective.  Otherwise they just tell us that things change.

But this time the big change that happened was that instead of saying that the world we see around us is the world we choose to make, Dylan announced that we were here because of the design of the Supreme Being.

And we can see the signs of this before it all starts, as Dylan’s 1978 compositions do have a flavour of our fate not being capricious chance, but being our own fault.  He’s not saying we’ve fallen, but he is saying it is down to us.

Both “I must love you too much” and “Slow Train” could easily be the highlights of the year; such brilliant contrasts.  However these songs are helped by the fact that elsewhere the year the compositions seems to be directionless.  Two further songs for “Street Legal” were written, in the midst of around eight co-compositions with Helena Springs of which we have copies, and at least as many again of which there seem to be no copies around, followed by a collection that only the most ardent fan even knows, let alone can sing.

“Daddy’s gonna take one more ride” and “Legionnaire’s disease” preceded “Slow Train” and “Do right to me baby” followed it, and then that was it for another year’s writing.  To me, it has all the hallmarks of a composer looking for the next big thing to write about.

https://youtu.be/Q7-bMpj88Z8

I am not suggesting Dylan was cynical in adopting Christianity as the theme for his songs, but rather I am suggesting he adopted Christianity as a theme for song writing, when he had no other dominant theme in mind.  That doesn’t make him cynical, or his belief in Christianity insincere – it is just my observation of where his career as a songwriter had got to.

So, that just leaves me with my attempt to add my table of the topics on which Dylan was writing.  As I have said before the exact numbers here are not the point of this table, simply because so many Dylan songs can be classified under different headings, and I have to admit that each and every time I try and run this table it changes, simply because on listening to a certain song again I think it shouldn’t be in one subject area, it should be in another.

The purpose here is to show the spread of topics wrote about in his first 20 years of writing, and give a general idea of the themes, not an exact account – simply because we will all disagree on any attempt to classify the songs exactly.

Five subject areas I have identified have 20+ songs written in them and I have coloured them.   There are 48 themes in total and only nine have over 10 songs written in them.

This variety of themes is in contrast what was about to happen in 1979 – the first year in which Dylan wrote on one subject, and one subject only.

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love is just a four-letter world – Part IV: Tennessee

by Jochen Markhorst

Ironically, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (2000) is Oasis’ weakest album. While it stands on the shoulders of the preceding giants Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory and, well alright, Be Here Now, the view is sadly not better, further or greater. Noel Gallagher’s misspelling should have been a warning signal already. Noel came up with the idea for the album title after first noticing the inscription on the side of a British £2 coin in the pub (where Newton is honoured with the quote standing on the shoulders of giants), but he was a little too drunk to copy it correctly.

Which does not alter the fact that there is a profound truth in the aphorism which, thanks to Newton, has acquired proverbial status. Newton, and before him wise men like Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century and the Roman grammarian Priscian (around 500), put their own wisdom into perspective with (variants of) the sympathetic disclaimer If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants, with which they wanted – of course – to indicate that they owed their insights to the work of predecessors.

In the Arts, it is roughly the same. The real wizards are not the pathfinders, not the revolutionaries or the visionaries, but the artists who create their masterpieces at the end of an evolution. Mozart stands on the shoulders of the giants Gluck, Haydn and Bach. Rembrandt reaches his total mastery through Lastman, Caravaggio and Rubens, and Shakespeare cuts and pastes from the entire history of literature from Seneca to Marlowe.

The mechanism can be extended to the micro level: the subgenres of the works of art themselves. The farewell song, or the lost love song such as this “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, is now, in the sixties, reaching its peak after about a century and a half of pre-work by giants. One of the finest farewell songs of the 1960s, Tom Paxton’s “Last Thing On My Mind” is a wonderful example.

In the last regular episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, aptly titled “Goodbye”, the DJ plays 23 farewell and goodbye songs. Number 4 on the playlist is The Clancy Brothers version of “The Leaving Of Liverpool”. After the song, the presenter briefly discusses the history:

“A song from at least 1885, according to W.M. Doerflinger, who collected the song from an ex-seaman, named Dick Maitland. He told him: ‘I was on deck one night, when I heard a Liverpool man singing it. Yes Sir, that song hit the spot!’ It still does.”  

… with which DJ Dylan limits himself to the second, better-known version, as written down by Doerflinger in 1951. Earlier, in 1942, he had also transcribed the song after the version of Captain Patrick Tayleur, a sailor whose farewell to the sea is worthy of an article in the New York Times of 13 March 1937: “Mariner, 81, Quits Roving Seven Seas” – Now Happy Making Model Boats At Seamen’s Institute (“Time was when Captain Patrick Tayleur, who has sailed the seven seas for nearly seventy years and has walked across three Continents besides, was not happy unless he was on the move”). In 1942, when Doerflinger visits him on Staten Island, he is still hale and hearty enough to recite the song with some melody, including the chorus:

Singing fare you well, my own true love,
When I return, united we will be.
For it ain’t the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me,
But, me darling, when I thinks of you.

The Captain Maitland version mentions the name of the ship, Davy Crockett, and the name of its captain, Burgess, and that is historically correct. So we know that the song was probably sung between 1863 and 1874, the years that Burgess and his Davy Crockett sailed between California and Liverpool. But Captain Tayleur says he knew the song, with the same refrain but different verses, even before that and places it around the Gold Rush, so around 1849.

After Doerflinger has recorded it, it is picked up by the folk revival in the 1950s, and Dylan is no doubt familiar with Ewan MacColl’s 1962 version. The young Dylan rebuilds the lyrics, leaves the melody largely intact, calls the song “Farewell” and records it in 1963 – the version later used in the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) (but done even more beautifully, almost excitingly, by Mumford & Sons).

Dylan’s “Farewell” is picked up by Tom Paxton, who in turn rebuilds it a year later, in 1964, into one of the gentlest farewell songs of the 1960s, into the magical “Last Thing On My Mind”… a titan of a song, standing on the shoulders of giants.

Paxton thus dives into the gap left by Dylan. After two stanzas of the lost love song “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, the third verse takes the turn for farewell song, with the irresistible, poignant opening

I said goodbye unnoticed
Pushed towards things in my own games
Drifting in and out of lifetimes
Unmentionable by name
Searching for my double, looking for
Complete evaporation to the core
Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more
Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word

The four words “I said goodbye unnoticed” might have been enough to inspire a Dylan in this form to write the most beautiful farewell song of the 1960s – but the songwriter himself is apparently overwhelmed by its beauty. He has been in lost love mode for two verses, but this third verse is actually the perfect opening couplet to a farewell song. Maybe Dylan sees that too. In any case, one could conclude so from the first official publication of the lyrics, in which he changed these words to:

I went on my way unnoticed in the winter driving rain,
In and out of lifetimes unmentioned of my name

…as it is notated in the obscure songbook published at the release of Don’t Look Back (1967). On the first page, the only song printed in manuscript, and then only the one verse that Baez sings in the film. But below that, written across the staves, is this third verse, and below that it says: “© mcmlxvii by m. witmark & sons”.

Poetically an impoverishment, in the context of a farewell song an improvement. In any case, it proves that after 1965, after the scene in which Dylan, quasi-annoyed, snarls at Baez “do you still remember that goddamn song?!”, the scene in which Marianne Faithfull is curled up in the corner, heart-warmingly shy, the scene in which Dylan says “I never finished it”, upon which Baez laughs and says “oh god, you finished it in about eight different ways”, upon which Dylan indulgently says “yeah – that’s a good song,” and Baez again “it’s beautiful. If you finish it, I’ll sing it on a record,” and Dylan concludes, rubbing his eyes wearily: “Yeah, that’s groovy. I can finish that. I’ll think about it”… it proves, in any case, that Dylan did think about it after 1965. And even tinkered with it.

But alas. “Each song in my breast dies a-bornin’.”

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part VI: You been double-dealing

—————

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 (only German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

In a Victorian novel about love and lust, the times they are a-changing. “Under The Greenwood Tree” by Thomas Hardy involves a schoolmistress and three suitors – a rich landowner, a vicar, and a musician; she ends up marrying the musician, the story, though less bleak, reminds of the poem below:

That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware

(Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush)

Ends the novel:

"Tippiwit! Swe-e-et! ki-ki-ki! Come hither, come hither, come hither!"
"O, 'tis the nightingale", murmured she, and thought of a secret 
she would never tell

(Thomas Hardy: Under The Greenwood Tree)

Bringing the novel back home to:

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved
Try to imagine a place where it's always safe and warm
"Come in", she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm"

Hardy’s long story crafted around the following song of yore:

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat
Come hither, come hither, come hither
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather

(Donovan: Under The Greenwood Tree ~ Shakespeare, "As You Like It")

Bringing it all back home again:

And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Thomas Hardy’s novel “Far From The Madding Crowd” concerns the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene  who inherits a farm. She has three suitors – a reliable farmhand; a gambling soldier; and a reserved, well-to-do landowner:

Next came the question of the evening. Would Miss Everdene sing to them the song she always sang so charmingly -‘The Banks Of Allan Water’ – before they went home?

(Thomas Hardy: Far From The Madding Crowd)

So go some of the the lyrics thereof:
Fairest of them all
For his bride, a soldier sought her
And a winning tongue had he ....
On the banks of Allan water
When the winter snow fell fast
Still was seen the miller's daughter
Chilling blew the blast

(Adelina Patti: On The Banks Of Allan Water ~ traditional/Lewis)

The song above mentioned by Thomas Hardy in the novel reflects in the lyrics below:

If you go when the snowflakes fall
When the rivers freeze, and summer ends
Please see for me she's wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howling wind
 (Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)

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

The most recent articles are…

• Never Ending Tour, 1996, part 1. Busy being born. With Al Kooper in Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour, 1996,  Part 2  – More Liverpool

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

While I have taken the Liverpool concerts at the end of June as representative of Dylan’s 1996 form (see NET, 1996, parts 1 and 2 above), those concerts may not have been the very best of that year. Many commentators point to the Berlin concert earlier in June, on the 17^th, as being the high point of the year.

Certainly the recordings are better, so the performances come over more clearly and sharply. The song Dylan used to kick off the Berlin show, ‘Drifter’s Escape’ is a good example. The Liverpool performance (See NET, 1996, part 1) sounds very similar to this one, even the harp break is the same, but this Berlin performance certainly has the edge.

 Drifter’s Escape.

The same applies to ‘Watching the River Flow.’ The same countrified arrangement as in Liverpool, very similar vocals, with perhaps a bit more energy than the Liverpool concert. This is a real pleasure to listen to. I think this arrangement gives rise to Dylan’s best performances of the song. While it suited to some extent the hard rock treatment he’d been giving it, there is a levity, a devil-may-care attitude in the song which suits this lighter treatment.

Watching the river flow

One song that did not appear in Liverpool setlists is ‘Seeing the Real You at Last’ (from Empire Burlesque, 1985).  Dylan is consistently concerned with false versus true appearances, being real in the world and true to oneself. This spirit animates many of Dylan’s so called finger pointing songs like ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’.

Behind many Dylan songs, no matter how complex, there lies a recognizable, common emotion or experience. I’m sure many of us know what it’s like to suddenly see somebody in a new, more real light. It’s not a pleasant sensation, not if we’ve been seeing someone through rose-coloured glasses.

Dylan has often performed this song in a strident or triumphant tone. Ha ha! Now I’ve seen the real you! Here, however, we find a softer, more reflective performance. It’s been a long time coming, honey, but now I see who you really are. The lyrics are studded with lines from tough-guy style, late 1940s movies.

Seeing the real you at last

‘Friend of the Devil’ is another Grateful Dead, Robert Hunter song, but Dylan makes a few changes to the lyrics. This verse from the Grateful Dead reads:

‘I ran down to the levee
But the Devil caught me there
He took my twenty dollar bill
And he vanished in the air’

Dylan changes that to:

‘I went down to the crossroads
and the devil met me there
took my twenty dollar bill
and vanished in the air’

‘Crossroads’ evokes that famous blues song of that name by Robert Johnson. He sang:

‘Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin' down’

Friend of the Devil

Another song not performed at Liverpool is that mysterious Sixties classic ‘Love Minus Zero’. Since 1994 Dylan had been cultivating a slow version of the song, savouring each one of those puzzling lines. While ‘She Belongs to Me’ (also of the 1965 Subterranean Homesick Blues album) warns of the dangers of adoration, ‘Love minus Zero’ expresses and celebrates that adoration. When we love someone with sufficient intensity, they take on a mysterious quality which in turn suffuses and colours our vision of the world itself.

‘The wind howls like a hammer
the night blows cold and rainy
my love she's like some raven
at my window with a broken wing.’

I couldn’t ask more of this lovingly delivered performance except perhaps a harp break at the end.

Love Minus Zero

1996 was a big year for ‘Positively 4^th Street,’ one of Dylan’s great sarcastic songs. Yet, as we saw with the Liverpool performance, these 1996 versions go beyond the whining sarcasm of the original 1965 recording. Performed more slowly and thoughtfully, the complaint goes deeper and we catch a glimpse of moral outrage at hypocritical, callous behaviour. I like the song better this way. It rubs off the nasty edge of the song, and takes us to that sinking feeling we get when we know we’ve been shafted.

Positively 4^th Street

I must have introduced that kaleidoscope of life lived, that compelling foot-tapper of a song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ at least a dozen times since starting this series, and every time I think ‘this is a version that will blow everybody’s socks off’ and every time I am right. This is the performance of all performances that will blow you away, just like a last one. Another epic not to be skipped. Listen to how Mr Guitar Man drives the song forward with his relentless picking at a few notes, and how Dylan’s harp achieves a beautiful balance between restraint and ecstasy.

Tangled up In Blue

I’d like to leave the Berlin concert with this slow ‘Queen Jane Approximately’. It’s an invitation to share a world-weariness which sounds aged but has been a part of Dylan’s emotional mix right from the start. I’m reminded of ‘One Too Many Mornings’. However it goes deeper in suggesting that only when you have reached the depths of existential despair and alienation should you get in touch with me. Then we will have something to share. When you’ve had enough of the world and all its uses, come see me.

As in ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, Dylan takes a sideswipe at hippie idealism.

‘Now, when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain…’

I don’t think you’ll find a more tenderhearted performance of the song than this ten and half minute, gorgeously sung version.

Queen Jane

I’m  sorry I don’t have the performance date for this wonderful acoustic version of ‘To Ramona’. We know that Dylan no longer stands alone before an audience with just acoustic guitar and harmonica, but this performance comes the closest of any I’ve heard to capturing that quality. The common complaint that Dylan never sounds the way he used to, or sings the songs the way he used to, doesn’t stand up in this case. Except for that crack of age in his voice, it’s eerie how like a sixties performance this is.

The harp break is a rare treat, as this song usually lacks the harp. To me, despite the harshness of it, this performance is more loving and accepting than the original. The recording itself is a bit on the hard, metallic side. The song is unsettling in its accusations but not without compassion.

To Ramona

Again, I don’t know the date of this powerful performance of that rarity ‘Born in Time’. In performance Dylan’s soft approach to the vocals can mean his voice gets overwhelmed by the band. This doesn’t happen here. In this case the sharpness of the recording works in our favour. Although the song is from Under the Red Sky (1991), it always sounds to me as if it were written later. It wouldn’t go amiss on Time Out of Mind:

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

The seeds of the despair in Time Out of Mind, which Dylan started writing in 1996, can be found in the earlier album.

Born in Time

‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ is a masterpiece of storytelling. It tells of one desperate man’s build up to murder and suicide, a crime born out of poverty. The plight of this small farmer has its roots in the 1930s depression, and the imagery of the song echoes the same era.

‘The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare
If there’s anyone that knows
Is there anyone that cares?’

Coming from the same place, Harlan Howard wrote ‘Busted’ probably about a year before Dylan wrote ‘Hollis Brown’. ‘Busted’ was sung by Johnny Cash and Ray Charles:

‘My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted’

Unlike the Harlan Howard song, however, which is a long recitation of woes, Dylan’s song builds narrative tension to a shattering climax.

‘Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That’s hanging on the wall

Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can’t seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can’t seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That you’re holding in your hand’

How wonderfully (in narrative terms) that shotgun moves from the wall into his hands as if by its own volition. I love the hard rock version Dylan did in 1974, because of its cracking pace, but this slower paced performance is just as relentless, and the band echoes the sound of those early blues records. Forget you are in 1996, you could be in 1936. Wonderfully rough and hard-edged. (2^nd July)

Ballad of Hollis Brown

I would like to leave this post on an exciting note, what I believe to be the first ever live performance of ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ from the Basement Tapes (1967). The lyrics of this song are obscure, and point to events hidden from our sight by a veil of coded language:

‘If your memory serves you well
I was going to confiscate your lace
And wrap it up in a sailor’s knot
And hide it in your case
If I knew for sure that it was yours
But it was oh so hard to tell
But you knew that we would meet again
If your memory serves you well’

It is uncertain if the anticipated next meeting will be a pleasant one. Maybe not. But what is certain is that this is a powerful song, serving as a reminder and a warning, a warning not to forget ‘favours’ done. Dark circumstances are hinted at.

I can’t help feeling that it is no accident that Dylan returned to this song in the year he was to write most of Time out of Mind. The darkness of the lyrics suits the flavour of the new album that is brewing.

This performance has a wonderfully gutsy sound, quite distinct from what has come before, and foreshadowing what is to come in later years.

This Wheel’s on Fire

Catch you next post, when I will be wrapping up 1996.

Kia Ora

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

Intro by Tony Attwood

From the earliest days of this blog it has been clear that we’ve attracted not just fans of Bob Dylan, but also academics and musicians who each bring their own input to the world of Bob.

Indeed you might have seen one or two of our pieces touching on the work of others which we gathered together in the Untold Dylan Showcase, including Dylan lyrics which have never previously been set to music, and the setting of Dylan songs to new arrangements, performed by readers of Untold.

You might also have noted our feature Acquaraggia Play Dylan – which again took us in another direction.

And now here is another step into using Dylan as creative inspiration – this report is by Paul Robert Thomas

———–

I was inspired by Mr. Dylan (as I always am) and particularly by his album Rough & Rowdy Ways album song ‘Murder Most Foul’ to make an album of songs from the characters that I was aware of when growing up in the 60’s.

Our unreleased album, Scared of America – Volume Three contains songs about the suspected murder of Marilyn Monroe, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, John Wayne (the song is really about America), Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (who inspired many to wear their badge with pride), Robert Johnson’s legend (the song is about the letter that his grandson wrote to me) and, most importantly, Our Prodigal Son which is our new song about Mr. Dylan and his artistic journey through the 60’s to the present. The songs can be checked out at https://www.paullyrics.com/album/scared-america-volume-three.

Our Prodigal Son can be heard at https://www.paullyrics.com/album/scared-america-volume-three/our-prodigal-son.

Thank you, Paul Robert Thomas, song lyricist for ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s).

P.S. Check out our Dylan ‘co-writes’ Dylan Found at https://www.paullyrics.com/album/dylan-found created in conjunction with the Untold Dylan Facebook group and the bob-dylan.org.uk site and we hope to produce more from the Dylan lyrics that we have after we have finished recording a number of present projects.

By Larry Fyffe

In the poem beneath, the end-rhyme be ~ ”someone’/’run’:

I'm petty sure she'll make me kill someone
Then I'll be on the run
For I'm a dangerous man
When I have a knife in my hand
(Geoffrey Chaucer: Monk's Tale ~ modernized)

In the likewise dark lyrics below, the rhyme twist be ~ ‘run’/ ‘someone’:

One of these days, I'll end up on the run
I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone
I'm going inside, roll the shutters down
I just wanna say, "Hell's my wife's home town"
(Bob Dylan: My Wife's Home Town)

https://youtu.be/hrgXpz7e-Uw

A motif akin to the one expressed in the following song – the double negative idiomatic:

You mistreat me, baby, I can't see no reason why
You know that I'd kill for you, and I'm not afraid to die
You treat me like a stepchild
(Bob Dylan: Stepchild~ Dylan/Springs)

The end-rhyme in the love lyrics below ~ ‘me’/’see’/’Marie’:

Come to me, Sweet Marie, Sweet Marie, come to me
Not because your face is fair, love to see
But your soul, so pure and sweet, makes my happiness complete
Makes me falter at your feet, Sweet Marie
(Ada Jones: Sweet Marie~ Moore/Warman)

The end-rhyme in the euphemistic song lyrics beneath ~ ‘see’/’me’/’Marie’:

Sometimes it gets so hard, you see
I'm just sitting here, beating on my trumpet
With all these promises you left for me
But where are you tonight, Sweet Marie

(Bob Dylan: Absolutely Sweet Marie)

The end-rhyme in the baroque poem following ~ ‘dim’/’swim’/’within’:

You want clear spectacles, your eyes are dim
Turn inside out, and turn your eyes within
Your sins like motes in the sun do swim
(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)

The end-rhyme in the unrequited love lyrics below ~ ‘dims’/’swims’/’hymns’ – a ‘match-book song’ being one of which some lyrics are quickly scribbled on matchbook cover lest they be forgotten:

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
And your match-book songs, and your gypsy hymns
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

A final example of a similar, but twisted, rhyme that’s drawn from another piece of writing, in this case a Gothic poem, that’s quite likely the inspirational source.

With the end-rhyme ~ ‘by’/’sky’:

From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by
From the thunder and the storm
And the cloud that took the form ...
Of a demon in my view
(Edgar Allan Poe: Alone)

Then the song lyrics of unrequited love with the end-rhyme ~ ‘by’/’fly’:

Some of us turn off the lights, and we live
In the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

Earlier articles in the series on rhyme…

• Bob Dylan: Looking Back At Rhyme
• Bob Dlyan: “Booging” The Rhyme 
• The Dylanesque Rhyme Twist
• Hardin And Hardy: The Dylanesque Rhyme Twist (Part II)
• Bascom Lunsford: The Dylanesque Rhyme Twist (Part III)
• Odds And Ends: The Dylanesque Rhyme Twist (Part IV)
• The Dylanesque Rhyme Twist: The Immortal ‘I’ (Part V)
• Bob Dylan And The Shakespearean Tambourine Rhyme Twist
• Cry A While, There’s A Mean Old Rhyme Twister Bearing Down On You
• Bob Dylan And The Selfie Rhyme Twister

Selections by Aaron Galbraith, commentary by Tony Attwood

This series takes a new – and personal – look at some of the more unusual cover versions of Bob Dylan’s music.  It started out from a previous series which was summarised in

•  “The 100 Greatest Cover Versions of Bob Dylan songs ever”

In this new series we have had…

• What makes a beautiful obscurity
• Beautiful Obscurity: Acquaraggia play Dylan: a new experience
• Beautiful obscurity: revisiting the alternative versions of Sweet Marie
• Beautiful obscurity: unexpected reworkings of “All along the watchtower”
• Beautiful Obscurity: such different renditions of Spanish Leather
• Love minus zero and a journey to infinity

So now, Blind Willie.

The Dream Syndicate 

This video cuts off suddenly at the end when I play it, but it is still worth hearing – unless of course you find a complete version – I think only a few seconds are missing at the end.

In listening to this, as with all versions of Blind Willie McTell, I am influenced by two notions.  The first is that Dylan’s original version has, within its music, absolutely nothing to do with Blind Willie McTell.

And second, following on from this, it is thus not a song about Blind Willie’s music, but about Bob’s reaction to the music – it is about Bob in fact.  So for me, reinterpretations ought to be saying something personal.

(Or if not that, it was just a handy line to put into the lyrics at the end of each verse, and here again it works perfectly)

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To new Jerusalem”
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I can tell you one thing
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Thus I argue that when one produces a cover version, it is perfectly reasonable to make the piece about one’s own personal feelings in the music and a new interpretation, either of Willie McTell or of Dylan’s emotional reaction to the music or of the creator’s reaction.  In what follows I’ll try and show how those who are super-talented and willing to take risks, really can do this.

I enjoyed this opener – one can do bleak and desolated landscapes with near silence and with wild rock.  Both work.

The Band

If anyone had a chance to ask Bob how he came to write Blind Willie I guess it was members of the Band, and listening to their version straight after the Dream Syndicate is really interesting.  As is their sudden use of harmonies.

The Band makes far less of the descending bass lines, and I think there is a tendency for everyone to do their standard stuff without really considering what is in the lyrics.    As in OK – percussion, you come in here – and organ can you hold back to half way through the third verse.  But…

… after a while it loses my interest, but oh, how about the whole song sang with those harmonies.  Maybe without any accompaniment at all.  As it stands there is a desire to build and build, as producers always seem to demand.  But hey guys, rock songs don’t have to build and build, until taking us back down at the end.  Yes it works, but it’s not the only way through.  And it has been done 10  billion times already.

Of course the members of the Band know that, which we shall see below.

Mick Taylor 

Interestingly Mick Taylor keeps us in the same key (a coincidence of course) and playing his version after the Band’s sounded as if it could be a coda.

But from the off I think there is a bit too much showing off… “this land is condemned” and the falling of the martyrs is bleak and empty to me, not a chance to show off how good a guitarist one is but a chance to be, well, bleak and empty.

However the move into a rock number is inevitable, and I really do feel this is another one of these “hey guys lets take it real slow at the start and then we can suddenly make it a rock song.”  It’s been done before (you’d think they might have noticed).

Yes, well arranged, well sung, decent instrumentation, but a) not that standout and b) is there any thought about the meaning of the song?  Virtuoso performers surely still need to be able to hold on to the song’s meaning as well as their own personal performing brilliance.

So if you are still with me, now for something completely different….  And from here on we really are going somewhere else…

Garth & Maud Hudson

According to those in the know it was Garth Hudson who created the sound of The Band.  Keyboard magazine called him the “most brilliant organist in the rock world”.  With the rest of The Band leaving this mortal coil its just Hudson and Robertson still here, and personally I just listen in awe to what Hudson does.

I’d never heard this before (which shows how out of touch one can be leaving in rural Northamptonshire) and it just knocked me out.  It is one of those moments in which a true musician thinks “what can we do here?” and then does it because it makes perfect sense, rather than just being an idea.

If one is going to have a re-working of the song as far away from McTell’s music as Bob’s version then yes, this is it.  It is stunning because it is beautifully performed and because it takes me into the song in ways I have not been taken before.

It is beyond Indigo Girls performing “Tangled up in Blue” and beyond even Old Crowe doing “Visions of Johanna”.

Scarecrow Hat (the Girl From The North County Band)

Unfortunately I can’t find a copy of this on line in the UK, but Aaron found it in the USA here  

So since part of the idea is that you can hear what I am talking about I’m going to leave this one and slip in a link to our good friends in Poland Dylan.pl

You’ll recall they recently put on a live concert online which we covered, and that they also have in their ensemble our good friend Filip Łobodziński who has contributed to Untold Dylan.  There’s more about Filip in the “About the authors” section.

What Dylan.pl do is change the feel totally with the beat and the banjo, and through those two steps utterly alter the song’s impact.  And that to me is exactly what doing a cover version is all about… let’s take the music and see what else it can say to us.  You don’t have to speak a word of Polish to get this.  It’s the music that carries the message.  You know about God being in his heaven, after all, and yes we know what is his.  But power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.

What a stunningly brilliant couple of lines that is.

Interestingly, when we ran our series on cover versions in which all readers were invited to contribute, no one wrote in about Blind Willie, so I am having to search elsewhere to find anything to add.   But since we have been a-speaking of the Band how about…

Now this I really do like because it is a proper re-think of what’s there.  Of course Rick would have a feel for what Bob was up to, and that clearly gives him a total insight.   Oh this is deliciously different and entertaining.

The real mark of a decent cover version is that it gives you insights into the song you never had before and that is exactly what I got.  Just listen to the instrumental break.  How did they get that sound?

In fact you really don’t have to go too far away from the original to add a new element to the song to add something that offers a new insight and of course, entertainment.  That is what this version does, and it is why I have chosen to stop here.

Music can be about a clear message, but the best music is about emotion – expressing something that cannot be said in words alone.  This is what I find here.  This is both entertainment and expression, insight and elegance, meaning and feeling.   This is beautiful. It is gorgeous.  It is insightful and delightful.

If you have got this far, thank you for reading, but mostly thank Iain for this recording.

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too

by Jochen Markhorst

Part IV: Tennessee

 For years, the Wikipedia entry on the song states quite firmly: “The title line Love is just a four-letter word derives from a line in the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real”, but in 2020 it is deleted. Increased insight, presumably. Although completely deleting it may have been a bit too radical; of course it is certainly possible that Dylan derived the phrase from the play – so a formulation like “perhaps Dylan was inspired by…” would have appeased even the stricter academic. In any case, Kilroy’s monologue is Dylanesque:

ESMERALDA: You’re being sarcastic?

KILROY: Nope. Just realistic. All of you gypsies’ daughters have hearts of stone, and I’m not whistling Dixie! But just the night before a man dies, he says, ‘Pretty please – will you let me lift your veil?’ – while the Streetcleaners wait for him right outside the door! – Because to be warm for a little longer is life. And love? – that’s a four-letter word which I sometimes no better than one you see printed on fences by kids playing hooky from school -well – what’s the use of complaining? You gypsies’ daughters have ears that only catch sounds like the snap of a gold cigarette case! Or, pretty please, Baby – we’re going to Acapulco!

Very Dylanesque even. Gypsies’ daughters (“Spanish Harlem Incident”), hearts of stone (“Property Of Jesus”), whistlin’ Dixie (“Man Of Peace”), lift your veil (“Golden Loom”), streetcleaner (“Desolation Row”)… by cutting and pasting from Dylan’s oeuvre, one could reconstruct almost the entire monologue. With “Goin’ To Acapulco” as an encore. And Camino Real contains a multitude of colourful side characters who all seem to move from this Royal Road to Desolation Row later on: the Gypsy, the Baron, Casanova, Don Quixote, Lord Byron and Esmeralda all fit right in, of course, among those birds of paradise over there.

But the Wikipedia editor has probably figured out by now that the phrase is not an isolated one and is used more often. Which makes it a bit more difficult to pinpoint Dylan’s source. The chance that the cinephile Dylan picked it up from the successful film adaptation of Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is at least as big, or bigger actually. The film in which none other than Paul Newman says: “You don’t know what love means. To you it’s another four-letter word,” in the dramatic climax, the final argument with his father. The dialogue echoes in more pop highlights, by the way: “You can’t buy love!” shouts Brick/Newman after Big Daddy’s retort, and from Big Daddy’s line “I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?” is also just a small step to Andrea Bocelli’s dramatic “Vivere”, to Eels’ wonderful “Friendly Ghost” (If you’re scared to die, you better not be scared to live) and, for that matter, to Dylan’s “Let Me Die In My Footsteps” (‘stead of learnin’ to live they are learnin’ to die).

Tennessee Williams is a frequent occurrence in Dylan’s oeuvre. Dylan is an outspoken admirer anyway; both in writing, in Chronicles;

“… the wondrous truth of his plays. On paper they always seemed kind of stiff. You had to see them live onstage to get the full freak effect. I’d met Williams once in the early ’60s, and he looked like the genius that he was.”

… and orally, in Theme Time Hour (season 1, Tennessee episode: “one of my favourite playwrights”), in which he quotes Big Daddy’s entire mendacity-monologue with such conviction and passion, that one might well conclude that Cat On A Hot Tin Roof indeed is under Dylan’s skin. Including the love is just a four-letter word quote, that is.

And in Dylan’s songs, as is well known, a Tennessee Williams fragment flares up from time to time. In “Things Have Changed” we hear Blanche DuBois’ “don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through,” from A Streetcar Named Desire, of course, the title that also gets a nod in “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” (“They’re taking a street car named Desire”), and who knows – maybe Dylan was thinking of that too when he came up with the title for Desire.

The love is mutual, as it turns out when Follies Of God is published in 2015. In the autumn of 1982, young aspiring playwright James Grissom writes a letter to his idol Tennessee Williams. His timing is good. The old writer may feel his end is near (Williams dies in February 1983), and may want to take stock of his life; he invites the young Grissom over. Williams talks for hours and days, on walks, at the kitchen table and in the study, and Grissom takes notes. After Williams’s death, the accidental biographer, at the request of the elderly writer, visits all the women of his life, all the old actresses, interviewing them in detail about their experiences with Tennessee Williams. The whole results in a wonderful, justly acclaimed portrait of one of America’s greatest playwrights: Follies Of God.

Grissom publishes parts of it on his blog, and for Dylan fans, his annotation with Tennessee’s comments on Dylan is intriguing. Williams remembers 1970, one of several low points in his life, when he slipped into depression, feared insanity and was committed to an institution. Two songs offer him solace, salvation even. “Let It Be” is one.

“The other song that got me along was “Lay Lady Lay,” by Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan speaks to me. I think we’re on similar paths–of reinvention, of discovery, of telling a story, of trying to matter. I love women, and Dylan is loving–fully and beautifully–some woman in this song. She may become a character for me, still. I thought so then, and I hope so now. There is such a lovely yearning in Dylan’s songs, in his voice, in the construction of his lyrics. For me–for this writer–yearning is walking, crawling, perhaps, towards some understanding, and I can listen to him, and I can lose myself in the journey he has constructed, and I can be saved.”

Touching, poetic words from the then 71-year-old nestor – and miles away from the man who wrote love is just a four-letter word.

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part V: Are you going away with no word of farewell?

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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 (only German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.   And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.  Series we are currently running include

• The art work of Bob Dylan’s albums
• The Never Ending Tour year by year with recordings
• Beautiful Obscurity – the unexpected covers
• All Directions at Once

You’ll find links to all of them on the home page of this site

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down