Untold Dylan

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.

There is an index to the whole series of articles here.   The previous article in the series was Bob starts the 70s… slowly

My thesis in this series is that we can get a better understanding of Bob Dylan’s compositions by looking at them in the order  they were written, and seeing them as an ebb and flow of creativity. In this way I feel we can understand much more about Dylan through this process, than through criticisms of individual songs heard in isolation from each other.

In the last episode of All Directions I tried to summarise up to 1970, with the “New Morning” songs, seeing how the subject matter of his work had changed across time.

As others have often said, in these songs we can get a clear impression that two things dominated Dylan’s creativity in 1970 – his desire to get away, and his need to create an album to fulfil contractual obligations.  Listening to the compositions as a collection I don’t get the feeling that this was music Dylan was satisfied with or that he really wanted to create.  The fact that it is nevertheless enjoyable and indeed that beautiful new arrangements can emerge from it, shows us what a master craftsman he has always been. Stunning songs, even when he was just fulfilling the contract.

1971 saw five songs.  Two of these most of us will remember as great works (“When I paint my Masterpiece” and “Watching the river flow”) and a more contentious protest type song (“George Jackson”) which again raised the issue of Dylan’s approach to writing about real people, which I’ve covered in a little detail already (32: Does Dylan really care about these people he writes about?))

In 1972 we had one song still fondly remembered as a masterpiece (“Forever Young”) and the incidental music and main them to “Billy the Kid”, which for some composers would be a fine year’s work, but for Dylan seems excellent in itself, but many of us wanted far more!

But then in 1973, he was suddenly up and running again.  Everyone will remember “Knocking on heaven’s door”, and many dismiss “Never say goodbye,” while a small minority revere the level of experimentation, not least because Bob had by now written hundreds of songs and yet was still interested in seeing just how far the form could be pushed.

If that song never quite works, “Going Going Gone” shows Dylan experimenting further and learning all the way, such that by the time he wrote  “You Angel You” and “On a night like this”…Bob was clearly back on track, able to produce enjoyable and entertaining pieces, as he gathered his creative strength ready to produce two extraordinary works.  That neither of these are well remembered except among absolute aficionados of the man’s compositions, shows us just how far Bob was willing to go to find something new.

My point thus is that the wonderful songs that emerged through the utter explosion of reignited genius that was 1974, had to come from somewhere.  If we argue that they simply popped into his head then we have no explanation as to why he couldn’t write a new “Blood on the Tracks” every year.  But if we listen closely to the two songs that ended 1973 we do see that Bob was pushing the limits of the form, just to see where he could get to.

These final two songs of 1973 were Dirge and Wedding Song.

Thus I argue that to dismiss “Dirge” and “Wedding Song” as being of little importance, suggests there was no artistic build up to collection of extraordinary works that followed in 1974.  But if we do see Dylan’s creativity as a wave, then in 1973 the tide was certainly coming in, as those final songs took us to a new high point from which Dylan was completely ready and free to launch himself forward with not only works of genius, but works of genius the fans and the self-appointed critics would like.  Quite a combination!

Thus if you are not fully familiar with the final two compositions that preceded “Blood on the Tracks” I would strongly recommend listening to these recordings and then consider what came next.

Dylan opened 1974 with a return to the old story telling songs on which he had honed his composition skills in the 1960s.  Tales of gamblers and travellers, tales of down and outs, the guys who are outside the law but are good at heart.  We think back perhaps to Rambling Gambling Willie and Only a Hobo.   Since then Dylan had experimented with taking this genre further in 1967 with Drifter’s Escape  and I am a lonesome hobo but that year he was minimising the songs, reducing them to a matter of a few enigmatic verses rather than giving us the full on tale.

Now he was back to theme and he gave it everything he had with Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

Where did that work come from?  My view as I suggest above is that it came out of the previous year’s work for if ever two songs were a preparation for the next two this is it.  “Dirge” is serious, while “Tangled” is playful, but the same notion of the complex weave of life is present in “Wedding Song”, “Dirge”, “Jack of Hearts” and “Tangled”; they are all about the complexity of life and the complexity of people.  Even when we think we know what it is all about, life can still play tricks on us.  Thus each song is about the same entanglement and chaos that life gives us, it is just that each song starts from a different point of view (as it were).

When I first came across “Tangled up in blue” it took me a while to realise that I was not just listening to a song equal in merit to the ultimate classics of the 60s.  A song I would put alongside “Desolation Row”, “Rolling Stone”, “Johanna”, “One of us must know”, “Fourth Street” “When the Ship Comes In”….    But also a song which once again, just like those just mentioned, seemingly came out of nowhere, to take us into totally new ground.

For “Tangled” has that quality of “Visions” in which you can’t quite get a grip on who is where and what is what or indeed, when is when.   It really is an absolute ground-breaking event in the history of 20th century music, continuing the theme of “Visions,”  “Drifter’s Escape” et al that life doesn’t actually make sense at all.

And quite amazingly, through this season of writing songs Dylan rarely let the level slip.  No matter which way he turned, he seemed to be able to deliver, even the simple format of  Shelter from the storm still finds room for Dylan to go where no one has looked before.

And he most certainly wasn’t done yet, because we still had the almighty Idiot Wind waiting to burst forth.   I’ve made this sort of comment before but I can’t resist running it again: for anyone else a song like “Tangled” would be the ultimate highlight of a writing career.  For Dylan it was a return to his highest level of form, but then, just to make sure we got the point, he did it again with another piece that for anyone else would be the all time greatest achievement of a lifetime of writing: Idiot Wind.

I’m trying hard not to make this just a list of the songs – this section of “All Directions” is meant to be an overview – but let me just throw in Up to Me.

So go on, boys, and play your hands, life is a pantomime
The ringleaders from the county seat say you don’t have all that much time
And the girl with me behind the shades, she ain’t my property
One of us has got to hit the road, I guess it must be up to me

If you want to know where Bob was this year, if you want to know what was going on inside his head as he wrote these incredible pieces of music, he had just found a way, in one verse to sum up the whole of the “songs of farewell” concept.

In fact Dylan created his latest masterpiece album by moving into a new topic of writing – writing about fate.

I have the clear impression that two things dominated 1970 – his desire to get away, and his need to create an album to fulfil contractual obligations, without actually feeling that this was music he was satisfied with or really wanted to create.

And so, to deal with this, in the next three years Dylan distanced himself from songwriting.  It wasn’t that he stopped writing totally but that he wrote far less frequently, with moments of inspiration and occasional genius interspersed with more ordinary everyday works, and the occasional song that might be best noted as a “throwaway”.

Which just leaves the issue of the subject matter that Dylan used from 1970 to 1974 to create this new direction.  As in earlier editions of All Directions I’ve assigned simple descriptors to each song, and totalled them up.  And as before I would stress, it doesn’t matter too much if we disagree with individual categories – it is the flow of topics and noting which topics particularly occupied Bob’s mind, that gives us further insight.  Below is the number of songs I have noted in each of  the topics that I feel the songs covered.

1970

• The environment, places, locations: 5
• Jewish prayer: 1
• Visit: 1
• Love: 4
• Lost love: 1
• Blues: 1
• Be yourself: 1

1971-3

• Postmodernist blues: 1
• The environment: 2
• Protest: 1
• Asking for a dance: 1
• Love: 2
• Being trapped 1

1974

1. Love: 5
2. Lost love: 2
3. The environment: 1
4. Death: 1
5. Moving on: 3
6. Rejection of labelling: 1
7. Disdain: 1

And finally an attempt to add these to those topics noted in previous articles

And finally highlighting the most commonly used topics (ie those with over ten songs composed on that theme)

• Dada: 12
• Humour: 22
• Life is a mess / tragedy of modern life: 15
• Lost love: 34
• Love, desire, lust: 26
• Moving on: 43
• Protest, rebellion: 17
• The Blues, being world weary: 10

These are the eight topics that have dominated Bob’s writing from his emergence as a composer to the conclusion of the Blood on the Tracks sessions.  Those eight topics are, as far as I can see, what he wrote about most in his first 15 years of composing.

By Larry Fyffe

Immersed singer/songwriter/musician is Bob Dylan in the Jungian sea of songs and literary works from the days of yore, including the Holy Bible.

Beneath there be a somewhat sorrowful song:

We carried you in our arms 
On Independence Day
And now you'd cast us all aside
And put us on our way
(Bob Dylan: Tears Of Rage ~ Dylan/Manuel)

The following somewhat happier song reverses the theme of a loved one gone away; it’s takes a while, but the tears of the patient and faithful lover dry up:

He picked her up all in his arms
And kisses gave her one, two, and three
Saying weep no more, my own true love
I am your long lost John Riley
(Joan Baez: John Riley ~ traditional)

However, it’s an unfulfilled hope for happier days that’s expressed in the song below:

There's a man on the cross, and He's been crucified 
You know who He is, and you know why He died
When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up
When you gonna wake up, and strengthen the things 
that remain
(Bob Dylan: When You Gonna Wake Up)

https://youtu.be/ry7VxmTse7g

Referring to the demanding message that follows –  from the Holy Bible:

Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things
That are shaken, as of things that are made
That those things which cannot be shaken may remain
(Hebrews 12: 27)

Difficult it be for earth-bound humans to decide which way to turn during life’s journey; the message in the lyrics below can easily be construed as ironic:

Shake the dust off of your feet, don't look back
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack
Temptation's not an easy thing, Adam given the Devil reign
Because he sinned, I got no choice, it run in my vein
(Bob Dylan: Pressing On)

Whether or not the above song is a ringing endorsement of the biblical quote beneath by a songwriter with a Jewish background, I’ll leave it for the listener/reader to decide:

And whosoever shall not receive you
Nor hear your words
When ye depart out of that house or city
Shake off the dust of your feet
(Matthew 10:14)

A poetic reference worth mentioning once again much to the chagrin of Eyolf Ostem:

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

To wit, uncovered by Untold:

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)

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?

————

by Jochen Markhorst

Part III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too

The eleven poems that make up the liner notes to Another Side Of Bob Dylan, “Some Other Kind Of Songs” (1964) are presumably serious sketches and outlines for the literary side-paths that the songwriter Dylan is considering, in those months. A novel, a play, a book of poetry… rumours, Dylan’s daydreams spoken aloud and half-announcements make publishing houses circle the stern of fishing boat Dylan like gulls. Understandable; those liner notes do indeed contain literary gems and promising leads.

The first poem, for example, “Baby’s Black” (the poems are untitled, but have been given titles for convenience on fan sites and in reviews), is pure Beat Poetry and announces, with the wisdom of hindsight, the rhythmic, sound-oriented barrage of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”;

baby black’s
been had
ain’t bad
smokestacked
chicken shacked
dressed in black
silver monkey
on her back
mammy ma
juiced pa

“For françoise hardy”, the second poem, has the evocative power of an early twentieth-century impressionist poem, Rimbaudesque metaphors (old men clothed in curly mustaches) and the mature, lyrical power of Seurat’s masterpiece Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte;

at the seine’s edge
a giant shadow
of notre dame
seeks t’ grab my foot
sorbonne students
whirl by on thin bicycles
swirlin’ lifelike colors of leather spin
the breeze yawns food

And those are just two examples from the first two poems. Each of the eleven poems has its own magical appeal, enchanting rhythmic, sound-focused finds or provides special aha moments. The ending of Poem 5, “The Jumping”, for example:

just go ahead out there
right out there
do what you say
you’re gonna do
an’ who knows
someday
someone might even
write
a song
about you

… that will echo on this Another Side Of Bob Dylan in “To Ramona”:

Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you

The long (18 stanzas, over 1200 words), layered and semi-epic “The Jumping” is another quasi-autobiographical gem, in which the reader is taken along inside the mind of a keenly observing, extremely receptive and widely associative stroller through the Lower East Side, from Manhattan Bridge via Orchard Street to East 14th Street. A half-hour walk in 285 lines of verse and a wealth of quotable, aphoristic musings, with an underlying suspense and pure, impressionistic lyricism.

One of those quotable, aphoristic musings is stanza XIII:

i talk t’ people every day
involved in some scene
good an’ evil are but words
invented by those
that are trapped in scenes

… which also touches scriptwriter Todd Haynes, who – slightly paraphrasing – makes it return in I’m Not There, in the “Jude” sequence, the sequence in which the Dylan-like protagonist is played by Cate Blanchett:

Jude
Good and evil were invented
by people trapped in scenes.

… the after-party scene in the sterile, white setting in which the swaggering, half-hallucinating, amphetamine-laden Jude verbally humiliates the Edie Sedgwick-like co-star, and which also inspires the rudderless Jude just before that, when “Edie” has already left, to ponder “I tell you, love and sex are two things that really hang people up”.

References to “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” are not directly inserted by Haynes, but this set of plot, quotes and the triangle setting seems at least to have been inspired by the suggested plot of the second verse:

Outside a rambling storefront window
Cats meowed to the break of day
Me, I kept my mouth shut, too
To you I had no words to say
My experience was limited and underfed
You were talking while I hid
To the one who was the father of your kid
You probably didn’t think I did, but I heard
You say that love is just a four-letter word

As far as the narrative is concerned, a key couplet. The poet still follows the structure of a classical novella; after the exposition, the first stanza, the development of the catastrophe now follows, as it should.

This second verse opens cinematically, mirroring the opening words of “One Too Many Mornings” (Down the street the dogs are barkin’ / And the day is a-gettin’ dark), with a camera zooming in from outside through a bedroom or bathroom window. The camera stays with the male protagonist, who is hiding. The suggestion is that he and a friend of a friend of mine have just been almost caught by her husband, the father of her child. Hiding, he hears them arguing, and during that argument she apparently speaks that one-liner that continues to haunt him, the chorus line and title: love is just a four-letter word.

Biographical interpreters can rub their hands a second time: when the man behind the poet first meets his Sara, she is still married to Hans Lownds – and in Howard Sounes’ biography Down The Highway (2001), Peter, Hans’ son from a previous marriage, states: “Bob was the reason (she left Hans).” Perhaps even after a quarrel in which a certain four-letter word fell, but history does not tell.

Unfortunately for those biographical interpreters, the third verse opens with I said goodbye, and the rest of the lyrics make it clear that the relationship with the friend of a friend of mine was a profound, but also a short, transient phase in the protagonist’s love life. That does put a stop to the childish tendency of those biographical interpreters to see Dylan’s lyrics as encrypted reports of his life; after “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” Dylan stayed with Sara for years. At best, the lyrics offer a mosaic of poetic impressions of various life experiences, embellished with fiction – like all great works of art, in fact.

Darryl Holter:

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part IV: Tennessee

————–

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

By Tony Attwood

“Dylan Obscuranti” is an imaginary album, that I have created to highlight just a handful of tracks that Dylan has composed, and specific performances that he (and occasionally others) have given, which I think are sublime in themselves, and are not as well known as perhaps they should be.

Tracks 1 to 12 have been set out along with the “sleeve notes” as we used to call them.

• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 1 – Angelina
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 2. Tomorrow is a long time
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 3. I’m not there
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 4. Mama you been on my mind
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 5. Love is just a four letter word
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 6. To fall in love with you.
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 7.  Restless Farewell for Frank
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 8. Ballad for a friend
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 9  Dusty old fairgrounds
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 10. What kind of friend is this.
• Dylan Obscuranti: Tracks 11 & 12: When He Returns and I believe in you.

Now my final track.  And for me it is Dylan’s riposte to his Christian excursions – “Making a liar out of me.”

Now you may not agree at all that this is a reply to his own Christian writing of the previous year, but then one of the absolutely great things of creating your own album is that you can, by and large, do what you want and follow any argument you want.

And for me this is an absolutely perfect end to an album.  Musically, it is simplicity itself.  The same vocal line over and over again, with just two chords.  The vocal line changes slightly to accommodate the lyrics, with each verse ending with the different final line to “You’re making a liar out of me.”

Just ask yourself, how on earth can anyone make a song out of the same vocal line sung over and over with only minor changes?

I tell people, you just going through changes
And that you're acquainted both with night and day
That your money's good and you just being courageous
On them burning bridges knowing your feet are made of clay
Well I say you won't be destroyed by your inventions
That you brought it all under captivity
And that you really do have all the best intentions
But you're making a liar out of me

Well I say that you just young and self-tormented
But that deep down you understand
The hopes and fears and dreams of the discontented
That threaten now to overtake your promised land
Well I say you'd not sow discord among brothers
Nor drain a man of his integrity
That you remember the cries of orphans and their mothers
But you're making a liar out of me
But you're making a liar out of me

Well I say that, that ain't flesh and blood you're drinking
In the wounded empire of your fool's paradise
With a light above your head forever blinking
Turning virgins into merchandise
That you must have been beautiful when you were living
You remind me of some old-time used-to-be
I say you can be trusted with the power you been given
But you're making a liar out of me

So many things so hard to say as you stumble
To take refuge in your offices of shame
As the earth beneath my feet begins to rumble
And your young men die for nothin', not even fame
I say that someday you'll begin to trust us
And that your conscience not been slain by conformity
That you stand up unafraid to believe in justice
But you're making a liar out of me
You're making a liar out of me

Well I can hear the sound of distant thunder
From an open window at the end of every hall
Now that you're gone I got to wonder
If you ever were here at all
I say you never sacrificed my children
To some false god of infidelity
And that it's not the Tower of Babel that you're building
But you're making a liar out of me
You're making a liar out of me
Well you're making a liar out of me

I have listened to this song a thousand times and still never tire of it – and indeed some time ago I wrote quite a long piece going through the meaning of the lyrics, so I’m not going to go through that all again.  It’s still on this site if you want it.

But I would say that there are just so many lines in this piece which endlessly mean something to me.  Not the same thing each time – but an endlessly evolving and moving set of meanings through phrases that have become part of my life since I first heard the song.  As an album ender it is perfection.

So let me, if I may, end my imaginary album notes to my imaginary album with a few of the lines above that still knock me out, and have become part of my life (if both can be true at the same time, which I rather doubt).

The hopes and fears and dreams of the discontented
That threaten now to overtake your promised land

As the earth beneath my feet begins to rumble
And your young men die for nothin', not even fame

Now that you're gone I got to wonder
If you ever were here at all

These lines mean something different to me each time I hear them.  They bring forth images seemingly suitable to one in his later years of life, when I find I do start to wonder about some of the things that happened in my past, but maybe didn’t…

That’s my album of lesser known Dylan songs that are with me day by day.   And if by any chance you would like to join in and provide an album cover as a jpg file, I would be honoured to add that to this collection.

If you have enjoyed this you might also enjoy

Dylan 1980: our created album of the great works of that year, which of course also includes the song highlighted here

Play lady Play – the ladies take on Bob’s songs.

Sheep in Wolves Clothing (the replacement to “Down in the Groove”)

Dylan’s lost 1966 album

Finally, if you have an idea for an alternative album of Dylan’s which you think could make an interesting series here, do say.  You can either write it all yourself, or come up with the idea and ask others to join in.

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:

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

by Larry Fyffe

In the song lyrics below, often construed as strictly religious, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan explains his mythology of American history for dummies:

She lit a burner on the stove
Wearing a dress made out of stars and stripes ...
Then she opened up the Bible
And she stated quoting it to me
Jeremiah, Chapter 13, from Verses 21 and 33
And every one of them words rang true

(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue ~ version)

That is, in the song above, the United States, from an allegorical point of view, is the biblical Babylon:

It shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon
And he shall burn it with fire
(Jeremiah 21: 10)

In Dylan’s mythology, there is hope that the scar of disunity left by America Civil War between the North and South, analogous to the historical rift between Northern Israel and Southern Judea, will eventually be healed, and its fortunes restored as the Promised Land once was when united under the rule of King Solomon:

And I will cause the captivity of Judah
And The captivity of Israel to return
And will build them, as at first
(Jeremiah 33: 7)

Quite consistent the singer, songwriter has always been in his presentation of this mythology – unity won’t come easy:

Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
(Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changing)

Seems love for one’s fellow man is on a slow train, and it’s not certain when it will arrive:

They say lose your inhibitions
Follow your own ambitions
They talk about a life of brotherly love
Show me someone who knows how to live it
There's a slow, slow train coming up around the bend
(Bob Dylan: Slow Train)

The lyrics above influenced by the gospel song below, but where the train that’s carries the worthy is leaving for is the hoped-for happy place up around the bend:

It's a slow, slow train
But it's moving on
Now everybody's got the ticket
You, you and me
It's up to you to catch a ride
That's how it's gotta be
Everyone, oh yeah
Has to prove that he's a man
(Staple Singers: Slow Train)

The song directly above also influences the lyrics below –  admitted it be that the Whore of Babylon has her attractive points:

Storm clouds raging all around my door
I think to myself, I might not take it anymore
Take a woman like your kind
To find the man in me
(Bob Dylan: The Man In Me)

Friedrich Nietzsche criticizes Christianity for hawking these train tickets even unto a mysterious far-off Gnostic outpost:

Oh, they tell me of a home far beyond the skies
And they tell me of a home far away
Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise
Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day
(Willie Nelson: Unclouded Day ~ J. Alwood)

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

While most of the Dylan catalogue has been highlighted over and over again, there are odd moments that haven’t had too much attention, so that’s what this “Dylan Obscuranti” collection brings together.

In effect I had the idea of creating an imaginary album of some of those great moments.  Tracks 1 to 10 have been set out along with the “sleeve notes” as we used to call them.  Now tracks 11 and 12 come together, and this time we have two songs that are well known in themselves but in live recordings that really, really do add something else.

These two songs that make up tracks 11 and 12 of my mythical album come from Dylan’s Christian period, and both are live recordings which to me totally turn the original versions upside down.   If it weren’t for the fact that I am an atheist I might suggest divine intervention.

As a reminder here are the tracks so far…

• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 1 – Angelina
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 2. Tomorrow is a long time
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 3. I’m not there
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 4. Mama you been on my mind
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 5. Love is just a four letter word
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 6. To fall in love with you.
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 7.  Restless Farewell for Frank
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 8. Ballad for a friend
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 9  Dusty old fairgrounds
• Dylan Obscuranti: Track 10. What kind of friend is this.

And now we have Dylan Obscuranti: Track 11/12: When He Returns / I believe in you

The two tracks come together on the video below, one after the other – “I believe in you” and

As I have oft said on this site, I do not take to singers, composers, or indeed anyone else telling me what I should believe in terms of religion.  But that does not stop me enjoying the expression and performance within the song.  And indeed I comfort myself in two other ways – first because the title of the song is generally written with a lower case and second because there is another performance of this song which I would like to sneak onto my imaginary album.

However here “I believe in you” although highly enjoyable, turns out to be merely the warm up to the main fare: the performance of When He Returns (capital H this time).   For me this piano and organ rendition is the absolute summit of Dylan’s performance of his religious songs.  I can forgive him telling me his 18 months of how to live my life, if that was the cost of this exquisite creation.

But, if we were short of time I would just have “When He Returns” from the concert above, and then, and then….

If you really have not had anything better to do in recent years and you’ve been reading my ravings over certain performances of certain songs you’ve probably already worked out exactly where I am going.

The full story behind this extraordinary performance is told, as best I can manage, in my article “The Sinead O’Conner experience” (telling the tale of how “on 3 October 1992, Sinead O’Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live and held up a picture of Pope John Paul and ripped it up declaring that paedophile priests and others in the church were the enemy”).  The response from an esteemed chat show host was that if she had done that on his show he would have hit her.  As the Monty Python team once said, “Now we see the violence inherent in the system.”

I guess for me this more than anything else expresses my position with the enjoyment and love of music.  Of course I am a person for whom music is a central part of life, but when I hear music, the background of the song, plus the feeling and emotion of the lyrics and the music all combine in my appreciation.  It is thus not the song alone – it is the total experience.  So I don’t begrudge Bob his religious conversion; especially when it can deliver performances like this.

As it happens I have occupied my time during the UK’s “lockdown” period to create playlists on Spotify, although these are mostly made of dance music so that my dance partner and I can explore the music for hours on end through the dance routines we create.  Of course we haven’t been able to dance in the clubs for over a year, and so we have been creating our own routines and moves in a private studio.   Dancing to Dylan?  Yes it certainly is possible if you work at the routine.

And I mention this because I want to offer another Sinead O’Connor piece.  Nothing to do with Dylan, but just in case you don’t know her music, and because a few people over the 13 years or so we’ve been running this site have dropped me notes to say that they quite like my rambles which travel to all sorts of unrelated places.  It’s at the end of this article, and if you’ve got here, and are only interested in Dylan songs, you can stop now.  So if you, like me, like exploring music of different textures, you might want to go on one step beyond.

The dance routine we’ve worked out to this song one is an absolute scream.  Fortunately there’s only two of us in the room, so no video is available of us dancing.

In the end, it is, after all, just a matter of personal choice.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Part II: Can ya dig this?

Youth is blessed with perception, but still lacks reflection. Which is amply demonstrated by the infamous, embarrassing dialogue between young Dylan and young Baez in Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (1972). At least, the dialogue as Baez remembers it during the long interview with Scaduto:

“He teased about songs, I got him in some songs, but not the radical ones. It was like “Four Letter Word.” I remember he’d just written it all out on paper, and he said, “Hey, can ya dig this?” I read it off, he hadn’t finished the last verse yet. He said, “Bet ya can’t guess what’s gonna happen,” and I said, “Sure I can, you’re gonna go back to the girl’s house and fuck her.” And he said, “You bitch, how’d you figure that out?” And I said, “‘Cause that’s what you always do.” It didn’t take any genius on my part.”

Baez is 31 when she tells this to Scaduto, reproducing an intimate moment of two 24-year-olds, but neither the reproduction nor the original transcends the painful bleating of the transparent 16-year-old adolescent who tries to mask her insecurity with acted worldly wisdom. “Go back to the girl’s house and fuck her ’cause that’s what you always do”? Neither Dylan’s biography, as far as we know, nor Dylan’s oeuvre gives cause for this misplaced triumphalism and banality. In fact: in Dylan’s troubled-relationship songs, the narrator usually drops off quietly, closing the door to never come back, let alone for a last sexual intercourse (“One Too Many Mornings”, “Mama You Been On My Mind”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather”, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”) and similarly, the songs Dylan writes after “Four-Letter Word” have this scenario more often than not.

In 1987, when she publishes her own autobiography And A Voice To Sing With, Baez is 46. The youthful perception has already been filtered through adult reflection, and now she recounts the same memory a little less deliriously. Still somewhat smug, but at least with a thimbleful of modesty:

“I was always flattered when he would share one of his bizarre images with me, or ask me what a line in a song meant. If I guessed right, he would say, ‘How the fuck did you know?’
Once, at his request and for his amusement, I told him my interpretation of a whole song. He seemed impressed.”

Moreover, Mrs. Baez’s disqualification in Scaduto’s book is particularly inappropriate for a song with the beauty, elegance and melancholy of “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”. Perhaps she is guided by the most vulgar of the interpretative possibilities of the ambiguous title, by the variant love is just fuck. Possibly. “Fuck” is a four-letter word which, as her memoirs attest, is pretty much at the front of her vocabulary anyway.

The song seems to be a rise-and-fall report of a brief love affair that has left its mark on the narrator. A linear report, chronological with time jumps, like Dylan rarely writes in these mercurial years, balancing on the edge of epic and lyric. Although a story is told in which even a plot can be discerned, the dominant feature is the lyricism, the emotions that the words express – similar to off-category songs like “Visions Of Johanna” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” – although in those songs, a story is mainly suggested rather than actually told.

“Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, in any case, already opens with a classic “It all started when…”:

Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind
Down in the Gypsy Café
With a friend of a friend of mine

… the conventional opening of a novella, with neatly sequenced when-what-where-who, an intriguing setting (the Gypsy Café) and a fine, rhythmic introduction of the antagonist, the friend of a friend of mine. And, as befits a Dylan in top form, successful borrowing, in this case I left my mind behind from Dinah Washington’s frivolous, irresistible “New Blowtop Blues” (1952);

When someone turned the lights on me it like to drove me blind
I woke up this morning in Bellevue but I've left my mind behind

… the song from which Dylan perhaps also borrows for “Tombstone Blues” (I’m a gal who blew a fuse, I’ve got those blowtop blues – there aren’t that many songs that make blues rhyme with fuse), and the song with the superb clincher

Well I got high last night, 
   and I took my man to his wife's front door
Yes I got juiced last night 
   and I took my man to his wife's front door
Oh but she was a forty-five-packin' mama, 
   and I ain't goin' to try that no more

It is the B-side of Dinah’s “Trouble In Mind”, by the way – another word combination that will return with Dylan.

Not too far-fetched; Dinah Washington is on a marble pedestal with Dylan. In Theme Time Radio Hour, she appears no less than ten times (even more than George Jones). “Dinah was one of the greatest of the jazz singers,” he says in Episode 30, Thanksgiving Leftovers, introducing “Teach Me Tonight”, “and her throaty sass soulful vocal dips, and end of the lyric growls make this version an invitation that’s almost impossible to resist.” The DJ seems to effortlessly quote half of the song lyrics from memory, as with “Blow Top Blues” (as “New Blowtop Blues” is registered here) and he announces the song with the words he also borrowed for “Four-Letter Word”: “Dinah Washington. Leaving her mind behind, Blow Top Blues” (Season 3, Episode Madness).

After the technically perfect and the, in terms of content, conventional opening lines, the deepening of the antagonist follows, still following a classic narrative structure:

She sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Yet spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she I heard
That love is just a four-letter word

… in which the Dylanologists who are so eager to interpret biographically are presented with an unmistakable link to the life of the man named Dylan; it is in this period that Dylan meets his future wife Sara, who does indeed have a little daughter at the time (Maria, who is about two and a half years old when Dylan meets her). The image that emerges of the lady’s character is also in line with descriptions of Sara’s personality in autobiographies of bystanders such as Joan Baez, Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson: untouchable, independent, stable.

Still, to appreciate the poetic beauty and narrative power of the words that’s irrelevant, of course. This is the first part of the text with that droning repetition of the “C”, of the fourfold accumulation of the same rhyme, which here has the force of a postponed climax – reinforced by likewise droning, unaltered musical accompaniment under these four lines. More or less in the same way that Rossini likes to use the Trugschluss, the “false ending” in arias, in order to increase the listener’s tension towards the liberating climax.

And, as with Rossini, at Dylan the listener is also rewarded for his patience – I heard that love is just a four-letter word is a wonderful climax – “ya really can’t guess what’s gonna happen.”

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too

————

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

Bob Dylan And The Three Cranes Part 1

While riding on a train going west
I fell to sleep to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself, and the first few friends I had
(Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan's Dream)

Now the chimney is rotten
And the wallpaper's torn
The garden in the back
Won't grow no more corn
The windows are boarded with paper mache
And even the dog just ran away
(Was Brothers: Mr. Alice Doesn't Live Here ~ Dylan/Was Brothers)

Where are the men that I used to sport with
What has become of my beautiful town
Wolf, my old friend, even you don't know me
This must be the end, my house is tumbled down ....
And you know that stolen liquor, it was sweeter than whiskey
Many times quicker, just to put me to sleep
That drinking with strangers can be very risky
My sleep it was long, it was twenty years deep

(Bob Dylan: Kaatskill Serenade ~ Bromberg)

I ain't seen my family in twenty years
That ain't easy to understand, they may be dead by now
I lost track of them after they lost their land
(Bob Dylan: Long And Wasted Years)

I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog
Talking to myself in a monologue
I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat
Somebody just asked me if I'm registered to vote
(Bob Dylan: Highland)

• There is an index to this series of articles on the Never Ending Tour here.

This is episode 32; the first part of the series about Liverpool appeared as

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

You can find details of our current series and latest articles on the Untold Dylan home page.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In the previous post we saw that although 1996 does not have a good reputation among Dylan commentators, the performances are solid and workmanlike. They are not as inspired as some of the 1995 performances, but you don’t always need inspiration to bring these songs to life.

One way or another, acoustic or electric, Dylan has pounded the hell out of a core group of songs that have proved indestructible. Unless Dylan is in very bad form, which despite rumours to the contrary doesn’t happen that often, the inspiration of the song itself will carry it in performance. Over the long term, it’s the greatness of the songs themselves that shines through.

A perfect example of this is ‘Girl from the North Country.’ Written in 1963, this song has the feel of a timeless classic. Fond remembrance is the emotion it evokes, and every time I listen to it in various performances, it works the same magic. This is from June 26^th.

Girl from the North Country

I have chosen the two Liverpool performances (26^th, 27^th of June) as they are perhaps the most typically representative of that year. Not breathtaking, but solid and satisfying. Dylan sounds fully committed to the vocal and his guitar picking is just as complex and dissonant as ever.

What I’ve said about ‘Girl from the North Country’, you could say about ‘Don’t Think Twice’, a song from the same era. It suits the upbeat performance we find here, the audience is quite delighted with Dylan’s spirited vocal and keen to join in. The darkness of the song is buoyed by the brisk pace. This wonderful performance reminds me, in spirit, of the 1964 upbeat performances. (June 26^th)

Don’t Think Twice

Let’s make that three in a row by listening to ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ (27^th June). For me this song is about shrugging off all of those things people project onto you, about who you are and what kind of person you are. The singer’s not buying into any hippie idealizations of love. Dylan’s disenchantment with the more doozie aspects of the mid-sixties youth moment shows in this song.

At eleven and a half minutes, this is another epic performance. I might have wanted a little less guitar, but Mr Guitar Man was very much to the fore in 1996. Dylan works hard at these guitar breaks which Andrew Muir in his book on the Never Ending Tour describes as ‘overlong, uninspired, unproductive’, and while I’m not as set in my opinion as Muir, I do wonder what Dylan was intending or doing with these breaks, and his guitar work in general, both acoustic and electric. There is a driving quality to them that’s hard to shake.

It Ain’t me Babe

‘My Back Pages’ is credited with being the first song in which Dylan confronts his disillusion with the counterculture and his move away from the moral certainties of the protest movement. Its famous refrain ‘I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now’ suggests a return to a more open-ended view of the world.

This performance, from June 26^th. Once more the audience joins in. It’s not the most accessible of Dylan’s songs, but here he makes it sound almost homely and familiar. Once of the reasons I like the Liverpool performances is the audience’s response to the songs. This would have been a wonderful concert to attend as there is a special rapport between Dylan and his audience. This rapport gives these performances their singular feel.

My Back Pages

This ‘When I Paint my Masterpiece’ is one of my favourite versions of the song. It’s carried along by a slow, easy beat and the lyrics come across sharp and clear. The perfections of the imagined masterpiece are contrasted to the messy imperfections and craziness of life. The nice paradox is that the song itself is a masterpiece in which the disparate elements of an itinerant life come into a momentary balance. (27^th June)

When I paint my Masterpiece

In 1995 Dylan perfected a slow, thoughtful version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ that stands in contrast to the bright, assertive performance on the album (1965). The song is about surrender to the deeper, more magical forces of life, and must be counted as one of Dylan’s top ten songs. It paves the way for much darker songs like ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’. These long, slow versions accentuate the yearning in the song, and the weariness explicit in the lyrics. Arguably, the original version was too bright and bouncy for the lyrics, although the ‘skipping reels of rhyme’ work with a faster pace.

I like these slower paced versions as they immerse me deeper into the song, and those lyrics are good enough to linger over and be savoured. (July 27^th)

Mr Tambourine Man

Staying in the sixties, but moving away from acoustic performances, we once more encounter ‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’ Dylan’s great ode to strangeness. The song lands us squarely in the circus world of geeks (circus performers who bite off the heads of chickens for the delight of audiences), freaks and other strangers. Anyone who’s been pushed way out of their comfort zone will relate to this story, and, along with some other commentators, I can’t help thinking that the Mr Jones of the song is not some convention bound reporter or squarehead but a freaked out kid from Hibbing.

Always good as a heavy, though slow rocker, this performance doesn’t disappoint. I don’t think any live performance has captured the sinister spooky atmosphere of the album version, but there’s plenty of fright and anger in it, and Al Kooper is on home ground with his thumping organ. (27^th July)

Ballad of a Thin Man

I’ve always had a soft spot for the song ‘Under the Red Sky’ from the album of that name (1991). There is a beautiful but world weary whimsicality to it, with its children’s song, fairy-tale like structure and imagery. This performance brings out all the gentleness and the reflective quality of the song. It’s a sad little number with a mysterious heart.

Under the Red Sky

Ah! Where would we be without a scintillating rendition of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’? While my personal favourite for this kaleidoscope of a song, at least for the nineties, remains the 1993 performance, with Mr Guitar Man’s whacky break and a brilliant harp break (See NET, 1993, part 1), this 1996 version can stand proudly with any previous versions, including the glittering Prague performances of 1995. You might have heard it a hundred times before, and Dylan might have played it a thousand times before, but from those opening chords tipping you headlong into the song, you’re a goner until the final, grand chord sounds. Whew! What a trip.

Tangled up in Blue

I was going to leave out this performance of ‘John Brown’ one of Dylan’s great protest songs, as Dylan’s voice feels under-recorded, and I didn’t think it was quite up to scratch. Listening to it again now, however, I think it is worth inclusion, although I prefer the MTV Unplugged performance from 1994. The band sounds great, giving the song a relentless forward movement, with Tony Garnier providing a dark undertone by using the bow on the double bass. (27^th July)

John Brown

Dylan finished off his two day gig at Liverpool with an abrasive ‘Maggie’s Farm.’ This song was meant to be rough and rowdy and in your face. The phantasmagoric American family it portrays are a danger to your body and your soul. Better to get out quick while the going is good. This song is similar in spirit and imagery to ‘On the Road Again,’ (Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965) which to my knowledge Dylan hasn’t performed live. In it he sings, ‘You ask why I don’t live here/ Honey, how come you don’t move?’

Maggie’s Farm

That’s it for Liverpool, 1996. Soon we’ll be back to consider the Berlin concert from that year and other goodies. In the meantime, keep listening and stay clear of the plague.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Part I: Anything Goes

In February 1981, a touchingly young Elvis Costello performs on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show, the second time Costello is on American television. He plays two songs (beautiful renditions of “New Lace Sleeves” and “Watch Your Step”) and in between has a rather extensive, relaxed and light-hearted conversation with Tom Snyder. For all his corniness, Snyder has a disarming charm and Costello is correspondingly charming and talkative. Towards the end of the interview, the presenter asks, “Who are your heroes? Do you have songwriters that are heroes to you?” The young Brit struggles with the question:

“Not ‘heroes’, that’s a really… I remember when they did a program called Heroes Of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Well, that’s a contradiction of terms, as far as I am concerned. I’ve got a lot a people I admire, some current people, and some people you might not expect. I admire people like Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart as lyricists, and I really like Hank Williams.”

Tom Snyder doesn’t seem too surprised. But he may have a déjà-vu. Sixteen years ago, he saw and heard a predecessor of Costello’s with a predecessor of his say virtually the same thing:

Dylan: I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.
Crane: Hank Williams? Did he really inspire you?
Dylan: Yeah.
Crane: “Cold Cold Heart”? “Jambalaya?” Things like that?
Dylan: Yeah. Cole Porter.
Crane: Cole Porter??
Dylan: Yeah.
Crane: Now you’re putting me on!
Dylan: No. [audience laughter].
Crane: Yeah, you are!
Dylan: No, I’m not!

Dylan is a guest of the bad boy of late-night television, Les Crane. It is 17 February 1965, one year after Crane caused a stir by interviewing the openly gay Randy Wicker, six months after he welcomed the Rolling Stones for their American television debut, and one and a half months after Malcolm X was a guest. It is a special broadcast, of which unfortunately only the audio tape has survived. Dylan is the chief guest, opening with two songs, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “It’s Alright, Ma”, accompanied – unusually – by a guitarist (Bruce Langhorne, Mr. Tambourine Man himself), and then remains on stage for the rest of the broadcast. The conversation with Crane is light-hearted and not too serious, with Crane soon believing that Dylan is only talking nonsense. Both he and the studio audience think that Dylan is making a funny joke when he tells that he has written a song called “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (Dylan recorded the song a month before, the single will be in the shops in three weeks).

Just as funny, apparently, is Dylan’s revelation that Hank Williams and Cole Porter inspired him to become a songwriter. It is 1965, Dylan has already shaken off his folk feathers, appears for the first time not in jeans and that eternal suede jacket, but in a suit (no sunglasses yet), and the other performances, of “I Don’t Believe You” and “It Ain’t Me Babe”, already sound suspiciously like rock ‘n’ roll. In short, Dylan is cool. And Hank Williams and Cole Porter are totally uncool, so undoubtedly, that was another tongue-in-cheek wisecrack from this New Yorker hipcat.

By now we know that Dylan’s love and admiration for both Hank Williams and Cole Porter, and the American Songbook at all, are deep and sincere. He admires the veracity of the former, and the latter’s linguistic virtuosity and poetic frivolity, freakish rhymes and wild enjambments as in “Anything Goes”:

Why, nobody will oppose!
When every night
The set that's smart
Is intruding in nudist parties in studios
Anything goes

… which on paper, through its layout, conceals the frenzied rhyming:

Why, nobody will oppose!
When every night The set that's smart Is in-
truding in nudist parties in
studios
Anything goes

Delightful rampages, which Dylan will try to emulate in these mercurial years. Like in “I Want You”, for example;

The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I s-
-hould refuse you

The throwaway (or rather, lost classic) “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” doesn’t show such excesses, but “Anything Goes” seems to have given a push all the same:

But now, God knows
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose,
Anything goes

When Porter writes his song, in 1934, the term four-letter word has only existed for about ten years, and it quickly made its way into the vocabulary of newspapers in particular. To avoid, of course, having to quote profane language like fuck, cunt and shit. Humorous, ironic use of the term, for instance to refer to work or golf, is obvious, and thus flourishes. Dylan’s use is nevertheless still quite fresh; the possibility of understanding the song’s title and recurring refrain line as love is just fuck, gives a perhaps somewhat banal, but still an extra layer to the pun.

In terms of rhyme finds, the song may not have much to offer, but technically the lyrics are every bit as ambitious as a Cole Porter song. More ambitious even; the nine stanza lines are actually ten-line stanzas in the recital, with the rhyme scheme abab-cccc-dd, thanks to Porter-like enjambment:

Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind
Down in the Gypsy Café
With a friend of a friend of mine
She sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Yet spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she I heard
That love is just a four letter word

… where the last two lines are actually three lines:

A phrase in connection first with she
I heard
That love is just a four letter word

That shift, to preserve that special rhyme scheme abab-cccc-dd, can be applied to each of the six known stanzas. It does, in passing, explain the grammatical peculiarity “with she” – the poet Dylan insists on having the fourth “C” in his rhyme scheme. Very special; unique in the art of song, and you won’t find this structure in world literature either. At most in a single Medieval Christian hymn, and Thomas Hardy’s “A Sheep Fair” comes close, but that’s about it.

The four C’s are of course a deterrent for the ambitious poet. It soon turns into whining or droning, and it does require quite some elocution to avoid that. If it works out well, this succession of identical rhymes can have a comic effect, as in Porter’s “Anything Goes”;

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today
And black's white today
And day's night today
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos

Or else a reinforcing effect. Italian poets from the thirteenth century were rather fond of the ottava rima and chose the rhyme scheme abab-cccc mainly to suggest a kind of “repetition is the power of the message”. Because of the repetitive rhyme, the message – for instance, that the lady in question is so beautiful – gains in persuasiveness. That seems to come close to what Dylan achieves in “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, as, for example, in the third verse:

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

… in which the helpless confusion of the protagonist is indeed reinforced by the accumulation of similar rhyming sounds.

None of this sheds any light on why Dylan rejects the song so unlovingly and why – to Joan Baez in Dont Look Back – he talks about the song in such a downright hostile and condescending way.

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part II: Can ya dig this?

————————

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

By Larry Fyffe

Embedded in the song verse below be a riddle that first must be decoded – hint, ‘Henry’ is the name of the main soldier in ‘The Red Badge Of Courage”:

Now, I'm starting to drain
My stool's gonna squeak
If I walk too much farther
My crane's gonna leak
(Bob Dylan: Please Mrs Henry)

The solution is that either Stephen Crane or Hart Crane is gonna speak.

Okay … okay … let’s get serious for a moment.

The poetic lyrics below speak of a hopeful awakening of a new morning in the Promised Land:

The fog leans one last moment on the sill
Under the misletoe of dreams, a star
As though to join us at some distant hill
Turns in the waking west, and goes to sleep
(Hart Crane: Harbour Dawn)

Of a less polluted place than that depicted in the following line:

The yellow fog that rubs its back up on the window-panes

(TS Eliot: The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock)

Feelings of hope and doubt also expressed in the song lyrics below; rhyming again ~ ‘hill’/’sill’:

Well, I ride on a mail train, baby, can't buy a thrill
Well, I been up all night, leaning on the window sill
Well, if I die on the top of the hill
And if I don't make it
You know my baby will

(Bob Dylan: It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry)

Darker are the poetic lines below – conceited yes, but hope there’s still:

Should the whole wide world roll away
Leaving black terror
Limitless night
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential
If thou and thy white arms were there

(Stephen Crane: Should The Whole World Roll Away)

Above, the theme of the quick passage of time, drawn from the poem quoted beneath:

Had we world enough and time
This coyness, lady, were no crime
We will sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day

(Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress)

Giving rise to cynicism that’s expressed in the following song lyrics:

I was born here, and I'll die here against my will
I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
That I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from

(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

Hey, but I fooled you, dear readers – the “Please Mrs Henry” verse above is actually about Ichabod Crane:

And he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the devil
and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being
that causes more perplexing to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and
the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman

(Washington Irving: The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow)

A sentiment conveyed at the beginning of song below:

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)

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.

There is an index to the whole series of articles here.

The previous article in the series was All Directions: did Dylan really change in the Basement?

Having watched the ebb and flow of writing step by step from the earliest days up to the moment when Bob suddenly changed and started writing only about one subject,  I’m now summarising that period by looking at the topics Bob considered in his songs.

By the end of 1969 Bob Dylan had written around 260 songs which can be classified as being on anything between 23 and 40 separate topics (depending on how you want to do the classification). As I have noted a number of times before, I am not asking anyone to accept my list of topics or themes, but rather I recognise that if anyone else were to undertake an analysis of Dylan’s themes within his music, the names might be different and the groupings might be different, but one would still be struck by the variety of the themes.

However I’m not sure I’ve seen too many articles on the way in which Bob moved from subject to subject in his songwriting, and it strikes me as interesting as we consider his creative journey.

What comes across is not just the variety of topics that Bob wrote about but the way in which he was willing and able to experiment, moving onto themes he had never tried before, and back again to his mainstream topics.

For example by the end of 1969, 13 of the themes I’ve identified were only used once, 14 themes were used between two and five times each, and 12 themes were used six or more times.  In short he had his favourites, but throughout the 60s he was never afraid to look elsewhere for topics.

Here is my list of themes in the order of the number of songs used in relation to that theme

• The city: 1
• Disaster: 1
• Escape: 1
• Gambling: 1
• History: 1
• Homage: 1
• How we see the world: 1
• Leaving: 1
• On the run: 1
• Relationships: 1
• Self interest: 1
• Sex: 1
• World weariness: 1
• Art: 2
• Do the right thing: 2
• Future / eternity: 2
• Justice: 2
• Religion: 2
• Protest / hurting / despair: 2
• Party freaks: 3
• Patriotism: 3
• Change: 4
• Death: 4
• Modern life (the tragedy of): 4
• Nothing changes: 4
• Kafka: 5
• Civil rights/ social commentary: 6
• Disdain: 6
• Women in control: 6
• Individualism: 7
• Randomness/stream of consciousness/ surrealism: 8
• The Blues, being world weary: 10
• Life is a mess: 11
• Dada: 12
• Protest, rebellion: 17
• Humour: 22
• Love, desire, lust: 26
• Lost love: 34
• Moving on: 43

Of course many of these descriptors are contentious both in the words I have used and the allocation of songs to each group, so I have now tried to put the songs into broader categories which might be a little less contentious.

But before that I would make the point that around 40% of Dylan’s songs of the sixties are songs of love, lost love and moving on.  Not protest songs, not the blues, not the need to do one’s own thing, but those old traditional popular song favourites love and lost dance, and the old blues theme (if not the blues musically) moving on.

To make this whole list a little easier to grasp I have gone back and with the hindsight of knowing what my categories are going to be I have tried to reduce the number of themes to make the list easier to grasp.  However I still end up with 23 separate categories.  But at least this way, 215 songs are in categories with ten or more compositions

1. The city: 1
2. Disaster: 1
3. Gambling: 1
4. History: 1
5. Homage: 1
6. Art: 2
7. Future / eternity: 2
8. Religion: 2
9. How we see the world, world weariness  Self interest: 3
10. Patriotism: 3
11. Death: 4
12. Do the right thing, justice: 4
13. Disdain: 6
14. Women in control: 6
15. Change / nothing changes : 8
16. Individualism, Party freaks: 10
17. Humour: 22
18. The Blues, being world weary, life is a mess Modern life (the tragedy of): 25 (10% of all songs from this era.
19. Dada, Kafka surrealism, randomness, stream of consciousness: 25 (10% of all songs from this era.
20. Protest, rebellion, hurting / despair, Civil rights/ social commentary: 25 (10% of all songs from this era.
21. Love, desire, lust, Sex, relationships : 28 (11% of all songs from this era)
22. Lost love: 34 (13% of all songs from this era)
23. Moving on:  On the run: Escape leaving 46 (18% of all songs from this era)

So the period up to the end of the sixties has been the era of Bob Dylan the protest singer – a time in which Dylan wrote 260 songs.  But only 25 at most can be put into the expanded category of protest, rebellion, hurting / despair, civil rights and social commentary.

Thus we can clearly see the huge variety of Dylan’s songwriting output and his desire to cover a multiplicity of themes in his songwriting.

But we’ve also noted the way in which the simplest measure of Bob’s output – the number of songs he wrote changed year by year.  As Dylan varied the themes he wrote on, so he also varied the number of songs he felt he could write in a year.

• 1959/60: 6 songs
• 1961: 9 songs
• 1962: 36 songs
• 1963: 31 songs
• 1964: 29 songs
• 1965: 29 songs
• 1967: 12 JWH songs + 64 Basement tape songs *
• 1968: 1 song
• 1969: 15 songs

*The lyrics from the notebook which were used for the creation of the New Basement Tape series with the music written by other artists are not included.  And of course we must also note that while many Basement songs were indeed complete pieces of great merit, there were quite a few that were just one-off experiments.  I suspect that if we had access to recordings of all the jam sessions that Dylan engaged in with fellow musicians in the years prior to the Basement, we would probably have many more songs along the lines of the Basement collection.

But even without these imagined extra songs, or indeed even if we were to decide to cut out 75% of the Basement songs as being little more than incomplete ideas and sketches, there is still only one songwriter in the world of western popular music that I can think of who consistently wrote songs of such merit on this scale and that is Irving Berlin.

Berlin wrote about 260 songs in his first ten years of writing, although writing his first hit took a bit longer.   For  between his first song (“Marie from Sunny Italy”) in 1907 and his first hit (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”) in 1912 he wrote over 100 songs.  For Dylan between his first song and “Blowing in the wind” there were just 17 songs.

Both Dylan and Berlin have had their songs worked and re-worked ever since they were first written.  For Berlin, to take one example, the song “Play a Simple Melody” was written in 1914, but was a hit once again in 1950 when Bing Crosby recorded it, and again in 1966.

As for “God Bless America” (written in 1917 while he was serving his country in the armed forces), that song has lived ever since, just as “Times They Are A-Changing”.

The careers of these two men are obviously different, but they are the two great American songwriters producing endless masterpieces, and in both cases often performing the songs themselves.  Of course their way of writing was different, the style was different, but the songs of both men are songs of the America they inhabited and were interested in.

Walter Cronkite said of him he “helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives.”

Thus my own view is that in years to come the two great songwriters of American history will be seen together, each writing music that reflected their own time, each having their own favourite themes.   But let’s for now return to the start of the 1970s.  Bob had written over 200 songs covering at least 23 different subjects (depending on how you want to arrange them) and through various parts of 1969 from April onwards, through to March 1970 he recorded Self Portrait and the early songs for New Morning.  In interviews he talked about wanting to be with his family, and about not wanting to be the symbol of a revolution or new way of thinking.

In 1970 the first three songs recorded were

• Time passes slowly
• Father of night
• Went to see the gypsy

and none of them has (to my knowledge) ever been performed live by Dylan.

The recordings which were used for New Morning were made between June and August 1970.  Meanwhile there was a musical under discussion with the poet Archibald MacLeish and these early songs from this year’s collection were written for the production.   Indeed as Al Kooper has suggested the work for this commission, although unfulfilled, started the new process of composition again for Dylan.

“All the tired horses” was also composed at this time, and then the rest of what became “New Morning” was written in quick succession, although it seems the recordings took longer and were subject to a lot more debate.

• If not for you
• Sign on the window
• One more weekend
• New Morning
• Three Angels
• If dogs run free
• The Man in Me
• Winterlude
• Day of the locusts

In the review of “The Man in Me” on this site, I said, “so he were are, rocking along and feeling content with life, just as we are with Winterlude, New Morning, and One More Weekend.  The guy’s ok, the world’s ok, the woman with him is ok.  He’s a solid worker, he’ll just get on with it.”

And that still seems a reasonable way of summarising where all this had got to.  The intensity of the musical was probably too much, which was probably why it never got completed.  Instead Bob moved on to writing songs that were much more relaxed.

Of course sometimes the relaxation was maybe a bit too relaxed, and not too many good things seem to have been said about “Three Angels”, “If Dogs Run Free”, and “Winterlude” although each, like “Country Pie” two years before, has its advocates.

Dylan it seems however was not convinced of what he was writing, and seemed to feel the muse was not at its height.  So he simply used all the songs he composed.

The final song from the series was created after the main thrust of writing, after Dylan accepted an honorary doctorate in music from Princeton University early in June and subsequently wrote “Day of the Locusts”.

My prime concern on this website is always with Dylan the composer, but here it seems that Bob’s personal view of the world was causing problems for his ability to write and record.  It appears that there were arguments with Bob Johnston the producer, Dylan had just produced an album with the intention of making people forget him, and in creating New Morning he struggled to achieve the quality of writing that had been his hallmark up to the time of JWH.

Reworking the album continued through summer, and Al Kooper said of the era, “When I finished that album I never wanted to speak to him again…He just changed his mind every three seconds so I just ended up doing the work of three albums…”

This is a reflection of a mind still in turmoil – David Crosby’s commentary on the events at Princeton University add to this feeling of a very angry Bob Dylan.   And yet some of the songs of this year written for New Morning don’t reflect this.  It is as if Dylan were able (at least on occasion) to turn away from the anger, artistic disputes and uncertainty and still produce more delicate pieces of music.

In the end however, the songs were written and the album generally got good reviews, and the work was to some degree an antidote to the emotions that had created the need for Self Portrait.

He had created an album which often speaks of family life and hiding away in the countryside, and that, it seems, was what he wanted.  As ever, for me that fulfilment of that vision comes in this one later recording…

About Untold 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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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 Jochen Markhorst

This article is an addendum to a previous piece on the same song,

The two autobiographical bookfs by Anatole Broyard, author, New York Times reviewer and columnist, were only published after his death in 1990. For Dylanologists, the second one is especially fascinating: Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993).

Broyard moves, well-timed, to Greenwich Village in 1947, and he describes with entertaining journalistic detachment how the neighbourhood develops into an artists’ colony, a focal point of poets, outsiders and birds of paradise. He moves into a flat on Jones Street – the street where the cover photo of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan will be taken, around the corner from Dylan’s 161 West 4th Street. There’s something in the air there, apparently. Dylan is not the only literary phenomenon in the neighbourhood:

“It was in a stationery store on West Fourth Street and she fell because she bumped into W. H. Auden. In fact, they both fell. Auden lived around the corner on Cornelia Street and I often saw him scurrying along with his arms full of books and papers. He looked like a man running out of a burning building with whatever of his possessions he’d been able to grab. He had a curious scuttling gait, perhaps because he always wore espadrilles.”

… followed by a somewhat farcical description of clumsy attempts to get up and flailing limbs. It is a romantic idea to imagine how Dylan had such a physical tête-à-tête with W.H. Auden, but when Dylan moves into his little flat on West 4th Street in the early 1960s, the English American has already left. In 1953 Wystan Hugh moves in with his lover Chester Kallman on the second floor of 77 Saint Marks Place, on the other side of Washington Square Park, near Tompkins Square Park. Only one mile, twenty minutes’ walk, from Positively 4th Street, by the way, and Auden continued to live there until his return to England in 1972 – the fantasy that the two literary hot shots at one time or another collided is not entirely science fiction.

In any case, Auden has left traces. The cultural impact of Dylan and Auden is comparable on a one-to-one basis and is often enough mentioned in so many words. In literary reviews, Dylan is called the “W.H. Auden of the 1960s” about as often as Auden is called the “Dylan of the 1930s” in the twenty-first century. But the similarities are more tangible than something as debatable as “cultural impact”; Dylan uses Auden’s poetry more than once as a template.

The first time on John Wesley Harding. Auden’s “As I Went Out One Evening” is fairly widely believed to have been used by Dylan as a template for “As I Went Out One Morning”; word choice, rhyme scheme and the remarkable metre all match. But Auden draws from a source that, despite a diversion, is even closer to Dylan, and thus may actually have provided Dylan’s format: the centuries-old English (or Irish) folk song “John Riley”. A song that Dylan knows and admires, if his words in Chronicles are to be taken seriously:

“I could do the songs she did, for starters…”Mary Hamilton,” “Silver Dagger,” “John Riley,” “Henry Martin.” I could make them drop into place like she did, but in a different way. Not everyone can sing these songs convincingly. The singer has to make you believe what you are hearing and Joan did that.”

Dylan is, of course, talking about Joan Baez, who recorded the song for her debut album. There are dozens of variations on the lyrics, and Baez sings the same variation that Odetta (1960), Judy Collins (1961), Bob Gibson (1957) all sing, and that Dylan will also sing along effortlessly:

A fair young maid all in her garden,
A strange young man comes passing by
Saying fair maid, will you marry me
And this answer was her reply

… and which has at most a superficial resemblance to Dylan’s “As I Went Out One Morning” and, apart from the theme, Eternal Love, no resemblance to Auden’s “As I Went Out One Evening”. But Auden knows the ancient variant, and Dylan knows Pete Seeger’s 1950 adaptation of it:

As I went walking one Sunday morning
To breathe the sweet and pleasant air,
Who should I spy but a fair young maiden
She seemed to me like a lily fair.
I stepped to her add kindly asked her,
"Would you like to be a bold sailor's wife?"
"Oh no kind sir," she quickly answered,
"I choose to lead a sweet single life."

…which unmistakably echoes in Dylan’s song:

As I went out one morning
To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s
I spied the fairest damsel
That ever did walk in chains

“The Wicked Messenger”, on Side 2 from the same John Wesley Harding, rings another W.H. Auden bell. In terms of form, it is an anomalous song on the album. Almost all songs (eight of the twelve) consist of eight-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme abcbdefe; a classic ballad form, indeed. But “The Wicked Messenger” has six-line verses and a rather unusual, open rhyme scheme: abcdbc, with a surprising, non-rhyming fourth line. Not unique however as we can find it one time in the literary canon – yes, with W.H. Auden, who uses the identical structure and unique rhyme scheme for his brilliant “In Schrafft’s”;

Having finished the Blue-plate Special
And reached the coffee stage,
Stirring her cup she sat,
A somewhat shapeless figure
of indeterminate age
In an undistinguished hat

 In 1978, on Street-Legal, Dylan reaches another peak of the poetic high-mountain range that his oeuvre has been up to then anyway. Musical, sound-focused masterpieces such as “Spanish Harlem Incident”, “Visions Of Johanna” or “Shelter From The Storm” are now produced rather effortlessly by the poet, and it seems he is looking for a new challenge: the rigid form. The highlight is “No Time To Think”, in fact a sonnet series with a structure, rhyme scheme and metre that Dylan copies from T.S. Eliot’s cat poem “Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town”.

Graphically, through the formatting of the lyrics in Lyrics and on the site, Dylan obscures the template, and he does so here, in “True Love Tends To Forget”. On paper, the verses are unspectacular. Four-line, rhyme scheme aabb:

I’m getting weary looking in my baby’s eyes
When she’s near me she’s so hard to recognize
I finally realize there’s no room for regret
True love, true love, true love tends to forget

The recital, however, is:

I’m getting weary
looking in my baby’s eyes
When she’s near me
she’s so hard to recognize
I finally realize
there’s no room for regret
True love, true love, true love tends to forget

Seven lines, rhyme scheme ababbcc. That rearrangement, or actual form, has every verse. The second stanza, for example, is in fact:

Hold me,
baby be near
You told me
that you’d be sincere
Every day of the year
’s like playin’ Russian roulette
True love, true love, true love tends to forget

… and the third and fourth stanzas can be rearranged exactly like this, as seven-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme ababbcc. Which can be traced back to W.H. Auden.

The form itself, the rhyme royal, is centuries old and actually already extinct in the twentieth century. In the late Middle Ages, especially in England, it is used for long, narrative poems. Introduced by Chaucer, who also uses it in four of the Canterbury Tales. The literary not untalented King James I of Scotland was a fan, and around 1423 he composes his long “The Kingis Quair” (197 stanzas) after Chaucer’s model – hence perhaps the name royal rhyme (although it is more likely that the French model, the chant royal, is the namesake). Chaucer remains the measure of things for a century, but in the Elizabethan Era, in the sixteenth century, the form dies out. Only Shakespeare uses it one more time (for “The Rape Of Lucrece”, 1594).

The most striking, and best, attempt at resuscitation comes in the twentieth century, and is performed by W.H. Auden in his monumental “Letter To Lord Byron”, probably one of the longest light verses of the twentieth century, with its irresistible opening:

Excuse, my lord, the liberty I take
In thus addressing you. I know that you
Will pay the price of authorship and make
The allowances an author has to do.
A poet's fan-mail will be nothing new.
And then a lord—Good Lord, you must be peppered,
Like Gary Cooper, Coughlin, or Dick Sheppard,

With notes from perfect strangers starting, ‘Sir,
I liked your lyrics, but Childe Harold's trash,'
‘My daughter writes, should I encourage her?'
Sometimes containing frank demands for cash,
Sometimes sly hints at a platonic pash,
And sometimes, though I think this rather crude,
The correspondent's photo in the nude.

… in which the power of the joy of rhyme, the humour and the linguistic acrobatics is reinforced by the chosen archaic form, by the use of the extinct royal rhyme. And when Dylan, forty years after Auden, picks up the form for his “True Love Tends To Forget”, the two poets meet once again. Though not through a physical collision, on the corner of West 4th Street and Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, but more poetic, less brutal and much more charming – here, on Street-Legal.

——————

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

About Untold 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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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:

• The Mythology Of Bob Dylan
• The Mythology of Bob Dylan part II
• Bob Dylan And His Mythology (Part III): Emily Dickinson And The Door 

by Larry Fyffe

The mythology constructed in the lyrics of songs by Bob Dylan is influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, who, in his reaction to established religious canon, takes on a Gnostic point of view in his poetry. In the poem below, symbolized by the latrine, the corrupted, crapped-up material world is shut off from the far away, goodly Absolute Monad; the light from which, that figuratively represents the Absolute One’s Spirit, now just sparks in bits and pieces when it reaches Earth:

In summer especially
Stupid, he persisted
In locking himself in latrines
Where he reflected in peace
Inhaling deeply
(Arthur Rimbaud: The Seven Year Old Poet ~ translated)

The Holy Bible contains remnants of Gnostic thought. Lucifer (oft depicted as a snake) is the Great Deceiver, capable of taking the form of either male or female humans; down on Earth, Lucifer reigns.  The Demiurge, the flawed Lion King, is no match for Satan’s darkness:

How art thou fallen from Heaven
O Lucifer, son of the morning
How art thou cut down to the ground
Which did weaken the nations
 (Isaiah 14:12)

Bob Dylan, Gnostic-like, mixes up the mythological medicine. The Moon, in Greek/Roman mythology, is  the sister of the Sun-God, Apollo; he’s usually quite rational though thought of in later alchemic terms, he’s composed mostly of the elements fire and air. She has an unseen dark side as well as a bright side; in alchemic terms, she’s composed mostly of earth and water:

The cold-blooded moon
The captain's waiting for the celebration
Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid
Whose ebony face is beyond communication
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

The narrator in the above song takes on the persona of Apollo who also happens to be the God of Music:

The captain is down, but still believing
That his love will be repaid
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

Whether depicted as a Sun or as a Lion, as a God is wont to do, the narrator, who’s previously associated sharing a bottle of wine and a mattress, seduces the maiden:

Near broken chains, mountain laurel, and rolling rocks
She's begging to know what measures he now will be taking
He's pulling her down, and she's clutching on to his long golden locks
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

Mythological allusions abound in the above Dylan song.

Titan Prometheus is chained to a rock for all eternity; he’s stolen fire from the gods, and given it to humans. Zeus, Apollo’s father, eventually takes pity on him; Hercules kills the eagle, linked with Zeus, that is eating Prometheus’ liver, and unbounds the Titan.

Lusty Apollo gets not lucky with Daphne, the independent-minded daughter of a river-god; she’s transformed into a laurel tree just as the fiery Olympian catches up to her. He’s quite reasonable about his failure to have sex with the maiden. Says Apollo: “But at least you shall be my tree. With your leaves my victors shall wreathe their brows. You shall be part of all my triumphs” (Edith Hamilton: Mythology)

King Sisyphus be a trickster who manages to cheat Death more than once; Zeus has enough of him, and condemns him to push a rock up a hill in Hades forever – the rock rolls back down every time the top is reached.

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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

Beautiful Obscurity 

This series takes a new 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

In today’s article the music has been selected by Aaron Galbraith, with a commentary commentary by Tony Attwood.  Throughout we are looking at Live Minus Zero

1: Chrissie Hynde

OK, I’m positive from the off because I like Chrissie Hynde – and the slight hesitancy she has brought into the recording – it is as if she is not trying, just saying it as it is.  Which is how this wonderful song should be performed.  Mind you this is a singer who claimed that her unusual approach to the timing in songs was down to an inability to count!

But counting is the antithesis of what is needed for a song that begins “My love she speaks like silence…”  Of course that is a contradiction for a song – apart from John Cage no one can write songs of silence.  (Although incidentally the Sound of Silence came out in 1964; Love minus zero in 1965.  I’ve oft wondered if Dylan was influence by the notion in writing his opening lines.)

And since I am writing this I’m going to sneak in something else by Chrissie just because I like it (and I love the fun of naming the album “Learning to Crawl” – a reference to Tom Petty perchance?).

But to conclude her Love Minus, this is a standard to which others should aim to emulate.

Rod Stewart (recorded for a Princess Diana tribute album)

It’s not a reflection of what I think of Rod’s version of the song, but I genuinely can’t get the link to pop up.  But you can hear it here.

I do like Rod, but in this rendition he loses me.   Is he trying too hard to say something?  Is he doing it like this because it is for Princess Di?  It is possible to slow down this song but here it is slowed down with a level of hesitancy that makes it sound (to me) utterly false.  So just as I loved Chrissie, I can’t bear Rod.

Jackson Browne

If that link doesn’t work in your country try this one.

Now this is more to my taste.  Jackson Browne keeps the feeling of the original but still manages to bring in his own vision of the meaning.  But what kills it off for me is the instrumental break; that organ sound is, for me, so dated, whereas the song itself lives on forever.  It’s such a shame, his voice is perfect for this song.

Instrumental breaks can be a real problem, and there is always the temptation for the band to choose one of their number for a solo, and leave it at that.  Dylan is of course famous for having instrumental breaks that just continue the music without letting someone have a virtuoso performance.  One doesn’t always have to go that far, but whatever is done the instrumental break must be in keeping.  Indeed the whole backing of the singer must be in keeping with the meaning and emotions of the song.

But here we get just that we’ve heard organs do that so often.   The second instrumental break with the guitar lead is much more satisfying, even when the organ comes in as the music fades.

Eric Clapton

Of course we know our Eric is going to do something different; and he keeps the melody plaintive but lurking behind it is a real Clapton guitar doing its thing.  And somehow he gets the two to work perfectly.

I don’t feel there is any lack on continuity between the lyrics, the melody, the backing and the instrumental verse.  Better, Eric doesn’t feel tied to the guitar jump at the end of each line; it’s there but he doesn’t make anything special of it; it’s been done before.

And even if you don’t like this too much, do stay for Eric’s solo.  It is still “Love minus zero” but it is also “plus one guitar”.

Buck Owens

This is strange; minor changes to the words, and no concept of love speaking like silence.  I don’t mind people totally taking a song in a new direction, but I find this almost painful, because I can’t understand why it needs the full-on vocal attack.  It is like saying “Hey listen to me!” in a song that says, “Here I am nothing, she is everything.”

Sorry Aaron, not for me.  I just don’t understand how you can make yourself the centre of a song as delicate as this.  Also I don’t think there has been much thinking as to what the meaning of the lyrics is.  Each line is sung as if the words are the same.

And what’s with the humming?

The Turtles

Ah the sound of the sixties.  At least seeing it is the Turtles I had an idea of what I was going to get.  A gentler vocal and jingle jangle accompaniment. Oh and then a full-on “ahhh” vocal backing.  Hmmm.

What I think is needed is something extra in the vocals – a feeling that the singer actually understands the surrealism of what he is singing.   The Turtles do however draw back from the brink by having the harmonies in the latter part of the performance.  But why that chord change in the last ah-ah-ah section.

Just because they can, I suppose.

I do remember the Turtles for Happy Together – and having not heard that for several thousand years I played it again before moving on.   Yes, it was fun, but just because it was, doesn’t mean they can interpret a delicate Dylan song.  Mind the picture of the stage set on the front of the video above is just wonderful.

So let’s move on with Aaron’s collection.

Ricky Nelson.

Yes, he gets it from the off.  It is a delicate song – I mean it has the line “My love she laughs like the flowers”.  Of all those so far, this is the one that I think gets the emotional feel.  It is simple, he can sing, and although the pianist wants to show off a little (something on which I can comment from experience being endlessly guilty of that myself), it is all acceptable for it doesn’t destroy the song.  Even the unnecessary repeat at the end is acceptable.  You really were one of the good guys.

Walker Brothers

Now I hold my breath, because if ever I am asked to name the three greatest recordings of all time (not that this is an everyday occurrence), and excluding anything by Dylan, then I jump straight in with the Walker Brothers recording of “No Regrets”.  I really have never found anything that has dug deeper into my heart and soul than than song.  So here we go with their version of Love – Zero.

And at once those voices and those harmonies… oh these guys really did have it.  I’m still not sure of the accompaniment involving a piano, and then the violins come in with an oversugared background until… everything is destroyed by the lead guitar.  What the hell is he or she doing?

If we can ignore the guitarist and just the voices and harmonies – how could anyone ever improve on that.

But it really does me realise that throwing a musical interlude into this song is nigh on impossible.  And actually by the second verse the violins are become unnecessarily sugary.  I don’t know who played the guitar instrumental break, but oh no, not for me.  It has nothing to do with the song.  You have here two guys with perfect voices who can sing in perfect harmony.  You don’t need much more.

Judy Collins

OK I am getting desperate now.  I love Judy’s work as I have commented here before, and of course her singing is perfect.

But I am still not convinced  by the accompaniment.  Everyone seems to want twiddly bits.  What is it with musical arrangers and twiddly bits?  The full title is Love Minus Zero / No limits.   And yes “no limits” is a very difficult concept to replicate in music, but I am not sure these orchestrators have even thought about it.

However it is a very sympathetic vision of the song, as we would expect from such a sublime artist.

And we have Joan Baez (of course)

And the moment we start, you know she’s going to get it right.  Except, why is the guitar doing all that between each line?  I can’t even find words.   As for what happens after “Cloak and Dagger dangles”… well.  I truly found it hard to go on.  Really as a recording I found this truly awful.

So, I am mostly not fulfilled by these recordings.  But I have mentioned the Walker Brothers, and have written about accompaniments and how they can destroy rather than enhance a performance.  And therefore, just in case you are still here, I am therefore going to offer an example of how to write an accompaniment that enhances the song, rather than puts a lot of jingly dangly bits in just because you can.   If you feel moved to explore what I am trying to say, listen to the Walker Brothers below, and then if you can, ignore his staggeringly wonderful voice, but listen to a) the orchestral accompaniment and b) the harmonies.

That is how you do it.   It gets me every single time.  Keep the ghosts away, indeed.  Yes you can have violins and guitars and everything; you just need to know what to do with them.

If someone could record Love Minus Zero in the style of “No Regrets” (contradictory though that sounds, and actually is) I think I would be in musical heaven.  Complete with orchestra, and brilliant lead guitar as we approach the ultimate climax, and a musical arranger who knows what she or he is doing.

If you can’t see how this relates to Love Minus Zero, that is entirely due to my lack of ability at explaining it.

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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

Dylan’s Ways to Leave His Lovers

by John Henry

There must be 50 ways to leave your lover, sings Paul Simon, with the implicit suggestion that he means at least 50. But he sums them up as putting distance between you and your lover (slip out the back, hop on the bus), and being bold and decisive (make a new plan, don’t need to be coy, don’t need to discuss, drop off the key). Underlying this jokiness, however, is a more serious, maybe a more grown-up message. The singer is in dialogue throughout the song with another woman, who is seeking to help him leave his current lover. She starts off by simply offering advice, but before the end of the song she takes more pragmatic steps to separate him from his lover:

She said it grieves me so to see you in such pain,
I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again.
I said I appreciate that and would you please explain
About the fifty ways…

She said, why don't we both just sleep on it tonight?
And I believe in the morning you'll begin to see the light.
And then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right:
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.

Paul Simon’s witty song, “50 Ways to Leave your Lover” is distinctively quirky but also presents an unusual theme in popular music; how to walk out on someone that you no longer care for. Most break-up songs are written from the point of view of the jilted lover, lamenting with a broken heart that they’ve been dumped, or are about to be (because their lover already has been seen with somebody else, as in “I’d Rather Go Blind”, or Dylan’s “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”). There are a few more triumphalist break-up songs, though, where the singer is glad to be free of the abusive lover, as in Dylan’s “Cry a While”. Or, think, for example, of the Rolling Stones’ “It’s All Over Now”:

Well, she used to run around with every man in town;
She spent all my money, playing her high-class game.
She put me out, it was a pity how I cried.
Tables turning now it’s her turn to cry,
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now!

Or, their “You’re Out of Time”:

The girl who wants to run away
Discovers that she's had her day.
It's no good your thinking that you are still mine.
You're out of touch, my baby,
My poor unfaithful baby.
I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

As with the broken-hearted jilted lover’s songs, the blame here remains with the other half of the relationship, not with the singer. In some cases there is no blame because the songs detail a mutual break-up, where both partners agree that separating is best. Dylan has written a number of these, including “One Too Many Mornings”, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”, and “Seeing the Real You at Last”. There are other break-up songs, though, where the singer admits to being at fault in losing the love of their former lover, and regretting it—think of Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away”, or Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobbi McGee”:

One day up near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away;
She's lookin' for that home I hope she’ll find. 
Well, I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday,
To be holdin' Bobbi's body next to mine.

But. it’s one thing to take the blame for failing, foolishly, to hang on to a worthy and wonderful lover; and it’s quite another thing to admit to callously dumping your lover, simply because you want to move on. Presumably, this is why Simon chose to make “50 Ways” a wryly comic song: representing the singer as trying to hide their callousness behind a facetious whimsicality.

Dylan, however, is different. He’s a songwriter who has made something of a speciality of writing songs—very wonderful songs—in which the singer is walking out on a current lover. Furthermore, the singer of these dumping songs never shows any feelings of guilt or remorse. There simply is an underlying callousness underneath the songs. You might say, therefore, that they are related to (perhaps special cases of) Dylan’s cruel put-down songs (songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Positively 4^th Street”, “What Was It You Wanted”, and numerous others). The clear difference between the straightforward put-down songs and these dumping songs, though, is that the dumping songs are cunningly disguised, and can even come across as broken-hearted laments by a jilted lover.

Consider, for example, perhaps one of Dylan’s most famous moving-on songs, indeed one of his most famous songs of any stripe: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. This is more often than not regarded as a break-up song where the singer is being jilted. Part of the song’s brilliance is that it is meant to give the unwary listener that impression. As we listen, we are meant to be suckered into feeling sorry for the “jilted” narrator. But we are listening to an unreliable narrator—a narrator who is presenting things to put himself in the best light. There are in fact ample clues in the lyrics that the narrator is the one who is leaving his lover, and leaving without discussing it (as is recommended in “50 ways”), and without even saying goodbye. In fact, he’s sneaking out of her house in the middle of the night, while she’s fast asleep:

When your rooster crows at the break a dawn,
Look out your window and I'll be gone.
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on;
Don't think twice, it's all right.

He even tells us he’s deliberately walking on the dark side of the road so she won’t see him if she turns on the light. Our unreliable narrator tries to make out that this is her fault, but he gives himself away by inadvertently suggesting that, even if he doesn’t love her, she really loves him. He starts off by presenting her as someone who would not call after him, to ask him back, but immediately slips into admitting that he’s not listening.

No it ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal,
Like you never done before.
And it ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal,
I can't hear ya any more.

That “any more” suggests she has been calling out his name, but he’s now choosing to ignore it. Similarly, he tries to claim he loved her, but she was too young to appreciate what it meant:

“I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin', walkin' down the road,
I once loved a woman, a child I am told.

But the next line is the most telling: “I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.” He gave her his body, represented here in the clichéd claim about giving his heart, but the girl loved him enough to want his soul. But the singer makes it all too clear in the final verse that whatever his lover did for him would not satisfy him, as he so cuttingly summed it up: “You just kinda wasted my precious time.”

“Don’t Think Twice” is a love-gone-wrong song, but if anyone is to blame for the love going wrong, it is the singer himself, who tells us in no uncertain terms that he’s had enough and he’s moving on to take his chances elsewhere. Unlike Simon’s narrator in “50 Ways”, there is no suggestion that Dylan’s narrator has fallen in love with someone else. Dylan’s narrator is just fed up and wants to be on the road again.

Another brilliant song in a very similar mould is “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Well, at least, it is similar in its moral stance, but very different in its light-hearted and even jokey tone. Here is the narrator (we can justifiably say the narrator here is Dylan himself, since this was definitely written as a way of sending Ellen Bernstein on her way after Dylan had completed Blood on the Tracks), as in “50 Ways”, trying to hide his callousness behind a breezy carelessness.

Again, on first hearing, it sounds as though the lover is about to leave the soon-to-be broken-hearted narrator. But who is leaving whom here? Whose idea is it to split up? In fact, for all the wonderful expressions of the narrator’s love for the leaver, this song is equivalent to the old Music-Hall gag: “Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry?” The joke is that the bored host tries to encourage his visitor to go by giving them their hat, but then, realising this is a bit rude, the host tries to pretend it is the visitor who is eager to leave—why are you in such a hurry?

A more familiar move, you might encounter in everyday life is when you are having a conversation with someone and they suddenly say to you: “Well, I mustn’t keep you.” The speaker is the one who feels detained, but they pretend that you are the one who has to be moving on. “You’re gonna have to leave me now, I know”, sings Dylan as he presses Ellen Bernstein’s hat into her hand. He might as easily have written a song called “Missing You, Already”. In Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades, Bernstein said of her relationship with Dylan during the making of Blood on the Tracks: “It felt sorta like ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I was a very young 24… This was brand-new stuff to me, so I never thought to ask, ‘So, what’s going on with your wife?’… I didn’t want to get married, and I wasn’t being asked to leave.” At least, she wasn’t being asked to leave until Dylan presented his variation on “I mustn’t keep you”. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, but go now.

One more superb song that shows that Dylan’s need to keep on moving on with relationships brings out the best in his song-writing is “Abandoned Love”. With an emotional delivery precisely in between the faux regretfulness of “Don’t Think Twice”, and the jauntiness of “When You Go”, the narrator in this wonderful song has also made up his mind to leave his lover and move on. Like the other two, there is no suggestion that he has found someone else; he simply wants to be rid of his current lover. Nor is there any sense of guilt or wrong-doing—to abandon your lover is presented as just something you sometimes have to do.

There are clear signs here that our unreliable narrator at least thinks he is still in love with his lover: “But my heart is a-tellin’ me I love ya still”; “But my heart is telling me, I love ya but you’re strange.” He is conscious, though, that he has lost, not his precious time, but his precious freedom: “Oh, something’s a-telling me I wear the ball and chain”; “But as long as I love you I’m not free.” This last comment leads him to lay the blame for the break-up on the lover: “How long must I suffer such abuse?” Indications are, however, that the lover still loves our narrator, who is still on her list: “I asked ya please to cross me off your list.” This seems to be confirmed when the narrator sings “Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it.” So, it is the narrator who wants to end things. Essentially, it is just the narrator’s own need to move on that leads him to walk out of this relationship: “My head tells me it’s time to make a change.”

These are the songs of a serial monogamist, and as such they constitute a sub-genre of break-up songs of a very unusual kind. There aren’t many break-up songs written from the point of view of the partner who is actively breaking things up—mostly, they are presented from the other side, from the point of view of the passive jilted lover. The fact that three of Dylan’s richest and most complex songs are written from this unusual point of view confirms his genius as a song-writer, and reveals the power of his mind and art.

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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 Jochen Markhorst

 “The Wandering Kind” is an oddity in the rather disordered catalogue of Dylan/Springs songs; it is the only epic song, the only song that tells a story – with an (almost) linear narrative structure, too. Admittedly, not too complex or layered, but still: a song that may, with some tolerance, be inserted in the line of “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”, “Isis” and, well alright, “Tin Angel”.

The story may not be very complex, but it does rely on an amusing, quite Dylanesque inversion: this time, the licentious, restless antagonist is not the man, who is sung about in blues format by a desperate lady, but the other way round: the woman plays the role of the criminally abusive man, the male protagonist is the complainer who tries in vain to bind his beloved to house and home. With, as a bonus, funny intertextual echoes from that long cowboy ballad from 1974, from “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts” on Blood On The Tracks. Unintentional coincidence perhaps, or intellectual laziness or perhaps even playful, literary intent, but Dylan and/or Springs seem to have Rosemary and Jack in mind, and even Big Jim plays a – fatal – supporting role again.

On Blood On The Tracks Jack of Hearts is the elusive, roaming actor of a wandering kind, the décor is also nineteenth century, somewhere in the border region of Mexico and Texas, and especially the dramatic climax, the murder of the local big shot, seems to be a copy. In “The Wandering Kind”, in the second verse, she is approached by some big shot who, in the third verse, apparently visits her in her hotel room:

A strange bedfellow wandered in her room
She was more unfaithful than I ever could assume
She took his money and slayed him from behind
‘Cause she knew she was restless in her mind
She’s the wandering kind.

And in “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”, Big Jim is killed by the woman he trusts, who also only shares his bed for his money: Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back. Rosemary is hanged, and that will probably also be the fate of the lady with the restless mind too, a Queen of Spades, presumably:

I wrote this letter before leaving the hotel
To where she’s staying in that dark adobe cell

As for the choice of words, the songwriters once again smoothly browse through the gigantic inventory of the human jukebox Dylan. Refrain line and character description of the femme fatale seem to be borrowed from an oldie by B.J. Thomas, from “Sandman” from 1968;

No ties to bind
The wandering kind
I was a rolling stone
My only prayer
The restless wind
My only debt my own

From the LP On My Way, which also features the world hit “Hooked On A Feeling”, and written by Wayne Carson, who also writes the world hits “The Letter” and “Always On My Mind” in these years – no small fry, in short. The song “Sandman” isn’t too mind-blowing, but it’s conceivable that Dylan would prick up his ears at “I was a rolling stone”, and then in passing picks up “wandering kind” and “restless”.

Stylistically, the opening couplet is still on the “usual”, unimpressive Dylan/Springs level:

She’s like sweet water that runs down my face,
I keep her posted in diamonds and lace.
I give her freedom and what else I can find,
But I know she’s restless in her mind
And the wandering kind.

… or rather something above the “usual” level; the opening line is in any case a nice inversion of a poetic cliché. “Running down my face” has since centuries been reserved for tears, and tears are salt water. Here, its usual signalling function, sorrow, is reversed and the image is used in a – not entirely successful – attempt to describe the blissful impact of her beauty on the narrator.

The subsequent line is a somewhat clumsy attempt to represent the narrator’s efforts to hold on to the restless wanderer. The only cover worth mentioning, Paul Butterfield’s, also has trouble with this line and changes it to She keeps me posted with diamonds and lace – not really an improvement and a miss in terms of content; the implication that now she uses “diamonds and lace” as relationship glue is, of course, completely out of character.

The choice of words is again striking. In Dylan’s record collection, there is only one song with the word combination diamonds and lace:

She loves the free fresh wind in her face
Diamonds and lace
No God, so what
For Rod Steiger she whistles and stamps
That's why the lady is a tramp

… just as “The Lady Is A Tramp” is the only song with the word bleachers, which Dylan then chooses as backdrop for a “Highway 65 Revisited” couplet in 1965.

The echoing diamonds and lace illustrates that the creative part of Dylan’s mind, in 1978, is not with the old blues masters alone. Traces of heroes like Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Charley Patton abound in the Dylan/Springs songs, but in the Street-Legal songs we see, as in this text fragment, the love for the poets of the American Songbook, for Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer and Lorenz Hart. First and foremost, of course, in the exuberant pleasure of rhyme, in the fun of integrating frenzied rhyme finds. The brilliant opening of “The Lady Is A Tramp”, which Sinatra and Bing Crosby unfortunately skip, but which Ella Fitzgerald does sing, already makes Dylan the Rhymer jump up:

I've wined and dined on Mulligan stew and never wished for turkey
As I hitched and hiked and grifted too, from Maine to Albuquerque
Alas I missed the Beaux Arts Ball and what is twice as sad
I was never at a party where they honored Noel Ca-ad
But social circles spin too fast for me
My “hobohemian” is the place to be

… in which a rhyme like wished for Turkey / Albuquerque is colourful enough, but the rhyme twice as sad / Noel Coward is really infectiously frenzied. It animates Dylan in 1978 to similar language acrobatics in songs like “No Time To Think” and “Changing Of The Guards”, but for a throwaway like this “The Wandering Kind” he limits himself to charming, but otherwise hardly stunning borrowings – to reuse of word combinations and remarkable jargon, that is. The pun hobohemian, which summarises Dylan’s first five years as a recording artist in five syllables, is too distinctive to reuse, unfortunately.  

Re-usage characterises the lyrics anyway. Clichés and hackneyed verse fragments like I can’t keep from crying, down at the border, ease my heavy load or don’t need no woman are known from countless blues, country and folk classics, and the lines that deviate from them are mostly weak; I tried to help her but she knows I’m not blind, for instance, or She was more unfaithful than I ever could assume… clumsy, awkward lines. Not to say: lousy poetry.  

There is nothing wrong with the music, though. Not too ambitious and not too original either, but oh well – good groove, strong hook, as band guitarist Billy Cross probably would say. Paul Butterfield still manages to make something of it.

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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

There is an index to this series of articles on the Never Ending Tour here. This is episode 31.

‘It might look like I’m moving
but I’m standing still’

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘It is not a year remembered with great fondness by most long-term fans. In contrast to the innovation and stellar performing levels of most of 1995, it was all too predictable; same band, same set structure, and not many song debuts. Overall the shows were solid enough, but, as in late ’93 and periods of ’94, just not particularly special. More alarmingly, some of the overlong, uninspired, unproductive guitar instrumentals were reappearing too.’
-Andrew Muir, One More Night: Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour

Doesn’t sound too hopeful, does it? From Muir’s point of view, having reached a peak in 1995, Dylan had nowhere left to go but down. With dogged inspiration Dylan had led the band on its rising curve from 1991 to 1995, but without some new input or change, he could at best mark time. And of course he is talking about our Mr Guitar Man, Bob himself, when he identifies ‘overlong, uninspired, unproductive guitar instrumentals,’ although he doesn’t say so.

There tends to be more guitar work in 1996, as Dylan uses the harmonica less. For the next couple of years the harp would fall out of favour.

CS, the anonymous compiler at A Thousand Highways, has a gentler perspective:

‘1996 was not an especially noteworthy year of performances for Bob Dylan, though it would be the last full year of touring before Dylan shifted towards performing new and traditional material with his 1997 release of Time Out Of Mind​. In the interim, he and his band stuck to the sound they had established over the past two years.’

In other words, Dylan was on the edge of another great leap forward. Tony Attwood, Editor of Untold Dylan, puts it this way in “Bob Dylan in 1966”

‘Bob Dylan toured consistently in 1996 from April through to August, before finally taking a break.  And at this point, for the first time in over five years, he started writing and recording new songs again, and from this we have the first set of songs that became Time out of Mind.

The re-writing of the songs, plus the addition of new compositions, continued through to 1997, but 1996 clearly marks not just the end of Dylan’s longest period without writing songs at all but the emergence of a new way of writing songs about moving on – and despair.’

Time Out of Mind, starting to incubate in Dylan’s mind in 1996, would not be just another Dylan album, but arguably the darkest, most despairing album Dylan ever cut, although Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Street Legal (1978) are rivals for that distinction. I bear that in mind when watching some of Dylan’s stony-faced performances of 1996 (The Hyde Park performances, for example, twenty minutes of which you can find on You Tube). We can only assume that Dylan was performing in that face of that despair during 1996.

However, as with other lesser years of the NET, we find a number of treasures and standout performances.  There are also some concerts well worth tuning into. A standout in my mind are the Liverpool concerts of the 26^th and 27^th of June, when he was joined by his organist from the 1960s, Al Kooper, who came up with that famous organ opening to the album version of ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’.

These performances may not have the aura of magic of the Prague concerts of 1995, but if this is another day at the office for Dylan, these Liverpool performances are pretty damn good. New cracks are beginning to appear in his voice. The voice we hear on Time Out of Mind is far from the clear, high tones of 1995, but this is not the scratchiness of the early nineties, rather the beginning of a new stage or new maturity in his voice. There is no loss of power and conviction.

I see 1996 as a year of consolidation and preparation. There was, however, some innovation and experiment. Remember that bouncy ‘Positively 4^th Street’ from the 1965/66 era. It is a song of complaint about the betrayal of a friendship. I liked the studio version as its message is at odds with the happy sounding music, creating a pleasing disjunction. Here, however, Dylan has slowed down the tempo and drawn it out, and it sounds less happily vicious. Great to hear Al Kooper doing the opening chords. (June 26^th)

Positively 4^th Street

Some of the songs get a bit of a country twist. That works brilliantly for ‘Watching the River Flow’ which up to this point has been given the full rock treatment. This may well be the most successful adaptation of this wonderful paean to indolence. Impossible not to enjoy this fast paced performance. Great work from the steel guitar. (Also from June 26^th)

Watching the River Flow

A bit of country twang works well too for ‘She Belongs to Me’. Almost sounds like a love song with that lazy beat and a vocal performance that reeks of regret.

She belongs to Me.

Staying with the June 26^th concert, and Al Kooper’s backing, we come to that magnificent tale of temptation and loss, ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’. This version doesn’t have the soaring harmonica of the unforgettable 1995 Prague performances, but Dylan’s vocal compares favourably to any previous performances. Beautifully atmospheric.

Man in the long black coat.

‘Silvio’, co-written with the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter, makes for a great rock song. To my mind, these early performances of the song are the best. In later years it was to become a bit of beaty filler, but here (June 26^th) we hear it fresh and full of life. I read that Hunter wrote the lyrics and Dylan wrote the music, but find that kind of hard to believe given how Dylan-like the lyrics are:

‘I give what I got until I got no more
I take what I get until I even the score
You know I love you and further more
When it is time to go you got an open door

I can tell you fancy I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain’

I’m not complaining, but can you see anything there that doesn’t sound like Dylan? Hunter channelling Dylan? He was to do it again with Dylan in 2009 with the album Together Through Life.

Silvio

‘Seven Days’ was written back in 1976, and first performed in that year, but rarely played during the NET. This is one of Dylan’s orphan songs, never recorded in a studio, and only known through the few performances of it. And yet it is a powerful expression of desire for an absent lover, and would have fitted the Desire album perfectly. It captures that impatience we feel anticipating the arrival of a lover. Joe Cocker did a great live performance of the song in 1982.

This 1996 performance is as good as any with its descending guitar line. (June 27^th)

 Seven Days

‘Drifter’s Escape’ was first played live in 1992, but rarely performed until 1996. It’s another madcap tale from 1967. The website Songfacts makes this comment: ‘The surreal absurdity of the song has been compared to the writing of Franz Kafka. Its ambiguous nature has provoked all manner of analyses. Some critics have noted that the song mirrored Dylan’s own experience with the media and his fans and critics (which seemed to overlap more frequently than one might expect).’

From 1996, over the next few years, Dylan was to develop the song into a hard-hitting and powerful rocker. This particular arrangement was only to last for a couple years, and features some full-on rock harp. (26^th July).

Drifter’s Escape

‘Ramona’, a 1960s favourite, has been performed some 380 times. This 1996 performance is certainly no better than the 1995 version, but it’s a solid performance. Again, don’t be deceived into thinking that this is a love song. It may arise out of love, but is a song of admonition, and a warning not to be deceived by the appearances of life. (27^th June)

Ramona

The arrangement of ‘Masters of War’ that Dylan came up with in 1995 for his stunning London performance of that year was pretty much the same as this 1996 version, minus the harp. Its surging, menacing beat is perfect for this song, one of Dylan’s most explicit protest, anti war songs . As long as we have war, and companies manufacturing weapons for profit, this song will be playing in the background. As eternally true as warmongering itself. (26^th June)

Masters of War

Andrew Muir, in the front quote to this article, says that there were not many debut songs in 1996. Well, one of those ‘not many’ is ‘Alabama Getaway’, another Grateful Dead, Robert Hunter song. It’s a zany little number with Dylan-like, absurdist lyrics. It’s a good spot to pause in this look at Dylan’s Liverpool performances of 1996.

Alabama Getaway

I’ll be back shortly to look further at the performances from that concert.

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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 series “All directions at once” which seeks to explore how Dylan’s writing evolved and developed over time.

Recent episodes are

• 39: Beyond Street Legal: Bob and Helena unravelled (partly)
• 40: 100 twists before trying Christianity
• 41: the Slow Train to the end of the year
• 42: The first five directions
• 43: Before the basement

The whole series is indexed at All Directions at Once

Leaving aside the New Basement Tapes notebooks (the abandoned lyrics from the period around 1967, which were later turned into songs by other artists, Dylan wrote 63 songs in the Basement.  Many are of little importance musically, and are nothing more than the guys playing around.  That’s not to knock the process of musicians improvising together, but it is not the same as writing and completing a song to make it ready for recording or performance on stage.

What is interesting in terms of the “All Directions” series is whether Dylan radically changed the themes he was writing about during his time in the Basement, perhaps doing so as a result of the regular work with the musicians day after day.  Or was the Basement merely an extension of his regular approach in which he had sketches of songs that could then be turned into performances?

Going through the 63 basement songs what I find interesting in terms of subject matter is that it is not in any way a reflection of where Dylan had been before.  Indeed it seems to me to be a significant change in the landscape of his songs.  And in fact when he left the Basement and created his next album, the same happens again.  He goes off in another direction.

As ever with my attempts to classify each song in one or two words, opinions are bound to vary, but I suspect the overall list of themes that others would come up with, if doing this exercise, are going to be similar to mine – even if the terminology is different.  A “lost love” song is a “lost love” song, a “blues” number stays exactly that.

This table takes all the songs Dylan wrote from 1959 to 1969 and ascribes a simple subject title to each.   The series from 1959 to 1966 already has its own table

1959-63: The first five directions

Before the Basement

So now taking that data and the years up to the end of the 60s this is what I have…

What stands out to me here is that apart from three of his regular favourite themes of love, lost love, and moving on, plus the occasional spot of humour, Dylan moved onto writing on completely new themes.  The Basement really was an occasion for seeing what new themes he could discover.   Protest and rebellion, the blues, disdain, dada – there is no sign of any of these any more.  There is an awfully large amount of “moving on.”

At the same time some new themes were explored in numerous songs, with the theme of s “life is a mess” (11 songs), standing out.

But then Dylan did not take any of what he had explored in the Basement into his new writing.  It is as if this were a set of ideas he tried, and then threw away.  Only three songs from JWH actually touched on themes that Dylan had written about in the Basement.  eight of the compositions were on themes he had never used before, covering history, homage and (most of all) Kafka.

So Dylan had drawn a line and was clearly not going to give us on his favoured themes of love, lost love, and moving on.  Instead he certainly used the Basement to think around different corners, and find directions he had never considered before.

With John Wesley Harding, the story is that Bob had a contract to create a new album, so he simply did that.  His own tale is that he sat on a train writing to lyrics – and even if we accept this, it surely seems most likely that he wrote the two country songs that have no connection with the rest of the album after the recording of the rest of the album had concluded (and presumably they had discovered that they didn’t have enough to make a full album).

Here are the topics

• Kafka 5
• History 1
• Eternity 1
• Poetic homage 1
• Do your own thing / individualism 1
• Stream of consciousness 1
• Love 2

Whether the story of writing to complete the contract is true or not, it is interesting that Bob didn’t feel like using the new compositions from the time in the basement.  It is possible that they were all considered part of the contract of writing songs for other performers, but it seems to me also likely that having moved out of  the basement he figuratively turned a new page in his writing, as he turned a new page in terms of where he lived.

Interestingly also, there was no sign of Kafka in the basement – I wonder if he read Metamorphosis and The Castle in the break between the Basement and the commencement of the writing of JWH…

What Dylan did say in his interviews was that he had written some homespun folk songs which didn’t have repeated lines – and that second point of course is true, at least in terms of the lack of repeated lines such as is found in a chorus.

But what Dylan has done is taken the music he has been playing, to a completely new place.  If there was an antecedent to “Drifter’s Escape” in the canon of popular or folk music, I’ve missed it.  Who else has used Kafa as a source of themes for two and a half minute songs?

It was indeed a revolutionary moment, and JWH is a revolutionary album because of its song content.  As revolutionary as “Johanna” or “Desolation Row” and the other masterpieces were themselves each revolutionary in their own ways.

And then, what did Dylan do next having delivered on his contract?  Well, actually nothing.  He had a year out, during which time he wrote one song – “Lay Lady Lay” and even that he delivered late for the movie it was supposed to headline.  Which brings us to 1969, and a resumption of songwriting.

Interestingly the process of writing in 1969 began with a co-composition with George Harrison (Nowhere to go).  I’m not clear who wrote what in this song, but it sounds to me like Dylan lyrics but certainly not Dylan’s music.

And maybe the song had a value in Dylan’s life, because after that he started writing again, and ended the year with 15 songs.  There is of course some dispute about the provenance of some of these songs:  “Minstrel Boy” for example is counted as a Basement song, but it seems it was never written down at the time, and when it was set in stone, it had changed somewhat.

Indeed the year is a curious mixture with songs that we might well immediately recognise as Dylan (“I threw it all away”), songs that are clearly part of his country music period (“Country Pie”) and real oddities like “Champaign Illinois”.

All in all the impression I get is of a man trying to find his way back into composing.  Indeed to return to the first song of the year (“Nowhere to go”) I find myself asking how could two songwriters of such brilliance create a song that is so hard to listen to, let alone perform?

As a result of this strange hinterland that Dylan had slipped into, there was no real direction beyond the notion that there is no direction because there is nowhere to go.

And inevitably finding themes in such a year is tough.  But I’ve had a go…

• Celebration of a city: 1
• Escape: 1
• Lost love: 2
• Love 4
• On the run: 1
• Self-interest: 1
• Sex: 1

From my point of view of trying to see Dylan’s compositions as moving through time like a wave, sliding up and down, I think we’ve got to a moment where the wave crashes on the shore.  It really doesn’t have anywhere else to go.  As the subject matter shows…

Of the 16 songs written in 1968/9 what would we remember thereafter? A fairly good guide comes from seeing how often Bob performed the songs….  totals are taken from the official Dylan site.

1. Lay Lady Lay: 407
2. Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You: 144
3. Country Pie (sex? country life?): 136
4. To be alone with you (love): 126
5. Tell me it isn’t true (love): 76
6. I threw it all away (lost love; love is all there is): 48
7. One more night (lost love): 2
8. Living the blues: 1

That is the list of the eight out of the 16 songs that were played, and indeed if we discount the songs played just once or twice that is six out of 16.  Excluding “Lay Lady Lay”, written the year before all the other songs here, these top performance rankings of between 126 and 144 put them, in terms of performance alongside, “Man gave name to all the animals” and “Duncan and Brady.”

Of course Dylan has always been eccentric in his choice of songs to perform, but the lack of any stand out performance favourite from the album perhaps gives some indication that Bob himself was not sure where he was going next.

So what are we to make of this period?  First, Bob had his first year off from writing, and then when he did come back, the excitement and the new directions seemed to be lacking from the album.  Which is curious, since we often think that after having a break artists will come back refreshed.  It seemed not, in this case.

Bob in fact was the other way around.  Having played, improvised and composed seemingly all night and half the day through the Basement Tape months, Bob ended up with a range of masterpieces.  And each written straight one after the other!

• This Wheel’s on Fire
• I shall be released
• Too Much of Nothing
• Tears of rage
• Quinn the Eskimo – The Mighty Quinn

And then although Bob didn’t seem too worried about performing the John Wesley Harding songs I think many fans would see a lot of them as being of high merit – including of course his most performed song of all “All Along the Watchtower”.

So in the end perhaps we should best see 1968/9 as an extended recovery period.  Beyond “Lay Lady Lady” would any of these songs make the top 50 list of Dylan songs for anyone who was minded to create such a list?  Yes, undoubtedly one or two, because we all have different tastes, but still, not exactly Bob’s most prolific and successful two years.

Obviously for mere mortals toiling away in the world of songwriting, such a two year period would be a huge success, but for Bob, perhaps not.

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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:

• The Mythology Of Bob Dylan
• The Mythology of Bob Dylan part II

by Larry Fyffe

The Puritan creed predestines individuals to be members of God’s Elect; Saint Peter holds the keys to the pearly gates of Heaven, and they are closed to everyone else:

But the two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more
(John Milton: Lycidas)

Richard Thomas notes that “In  ‘Bob Dylan: Aeneas Visits Key West’ …., Larry Fyffe suggests the song is figuratively transformed into the Underworld of Greek/Roman mythology … the regions to the left … punished the wicked for their misdeeds. But the road to the right led to the Elysian Field”

(An Open Access Journal).

In one story of the Greek/Roman mythology, pursued Philomela turns into a nightingale in order to escape  – as if to say that a talented artist is able to live on forever through her works of art.

Patty below (perhaps a reference to American punk poet Patti Smith) manages not to cry:

Patty's gone to Laredo
But she'll be back soon ....
The doorway, the door is locked
But the key's inside
(Bob Dylan: Patty's Gone To Laredo)

The key being in one’s own head  – the ability to keep on trucking whilst suffering through the trials, the tribulations, the despair, and the chaos of human existence. In other words, it’s up to each individual to stoically find the strength to carry on –  so expresses the following anaphoric poem by a female artist from a dark Puritan background; the poem concerns the trouble females face becoming accepted outside their assigned sex roles:

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame
And could not breathe without a key
And 'twas like midnight some
(Emily Dickinson: It Was Not Death For I Stood Up)

The following song could be taken as addressed specifically to Emily Dickinson herself:

They shaved her head
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs, and I couldn't help but follow
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

In the poem below, there’s a vision of a female writer transformed into a nightingale who has flown to the other side of death’s door:

But differed in returning
Since Yorkshire hills are green
Yet not in all the nests I meet
Can Nightingale be seen
(Emily Dickinson: Nightingale)

Note the Dylanesque ‘rhyme twist’ in the song lyrics below ~ ‘before’/’door’:

Now I'll cry tonight
Like I cried the night before
And 'leased on the highway
But I dream about the door
(Bob Dylan: I'm Not There)

Coincidental with ~ ‘door’/’before’ in the following poem:

I laughed a crumbling laugh
That I could fear a door
Who consternation compassed
And never winced before
(Emily Dickinson:“I Years had been from Home”)

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
• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane
• 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