Untold Dylan

Publisher’s note: I’ve had a technical fault (or alternatively a publisher cock up) on the site and this article which was showing as being published is now showing as not being published.  I have seriously reprimanded myself, and am now publishing it again (or for the first time).   1999 part 2 will follow shortly.

Previous articles are still on line and available for viewing.   The full index to the tour is here as is the 1998 section…

• NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• 1998 Part 2: Friends and other strangers
• The Never Ending Tour 1998, part 3, What’s a Protest Song?
• Never ending tour, 1998, Part 4. You won’t regret it

Tony (quite possibly soon to be replaced publisher).

————————————————

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘Touring is something you either love or hate doing. I’ve experienced both. I try to keep an open mind about it. Right now, I’m enjoying it. The crowds make the show. Going onstage, seeing different people every night in a combustible way, that’s a thrill. There’s nothing in ordinary life that even comes close to that.’
– Bob Dylan (Edna Gundersen interview for USA Today – April 1999)

At this point in our headlong dash through the NET, it is time to pause and take stock. The NET has completed its first decade, we are entering its eleventh year, we are on the brink of a new millennium, and it is fair to say that Dylan and his band have never sounded better.

When I began this series I observed that some commentators are tempted to see the NET as a work of art in itself. That would imply, however, some intentionality or deliberate structuring, and I certainly don’t see that. That doesn’t mean that the NET doesn’t have some kind of shape or movement, but having said that, no two commentators see the same thing. Everybody who looks at the NET creates their own narrative, and I’m no exception.

One commentator claims that the NET’s finest hour was the performance of ‘Ring Them Bells’ at the Supper Club in 1993. Another claims that 1997 was the strongest year of the NET. The same claim is made for 1998, suggesting that the San Jose concert of that year was the best NET concert ever. Another claims that 1994 was the peak year for the NET, with a distinct falling off in 1995. Still others (me included) see the Prague concerts of 1995 as a high point of the NET. And so it goes on.

Rather than a work of art, it seems, the NET is more like a Rorschach test with everybody reading their own narrative into it, creating their own version of Bob Dylan as they go. With over a thousand concerts for the decade and about fourteen songs per concert we have an incredible 14,000 plus performances, enough raw material for all sorts of constructions.

I have spoken of a ‘rising curve’, (from the song ‘Born in Time’) which I see moving from 1991, a low point generally, to 1995 and the outstanding Prague concerts. 1996 saw something of a falling off (but a fine concert in Berlin that year), with a strong comeback in 1997, and a new rising curve that takes us through 1999 to 2000.

‘One of the peaks of the Never-Ending Tour, 1999 may be one of Dylan’s finest years on-stage. After years of building credibility throughout the 1990s, the performances exploded at the turn of the century.’ (CS at A Thousand Highways)

Egil, at AllDylan, comments: ‘Every N.E.T. junkie seems to agree that 1999 was a wonderful Dylan year. Strong performances in all 5 legs.’

I have to agree with these assessments. Dylan finishes the decade, and the century, with a bang. Other than the galvanising effect of the success of Time Out of Mind, we have other factors to consider. First, there was another shake up in the band’s line up. Bucky Baxter, who joined Dylan is 1992 playing steel guitar and dobro, leaves the band. But rather than simply replacing him, Dylan brings in Charlie Sexton, a guitar all-rounder, who will often play dual lead with Larry Campbell. Sexton would leave Dylan’s band in 2002 and rejoin it in 2009.

Both Sexton and Campbell are superior guitarists, weave a wonderful web of sound around Dylan’s voice, and at the same time provide an expanded context for Dylan’s own lead guitar playing. Mr Guitar Man’s insistent hammering at one or two notes during a guitar break sounds a lot better with these two ace guitarists backing him. To my mind, and I have to say I’m no expert, Sexton is easily a match for Eric Clapton. Clapton has a commanding grasp of the blues, and a rapid, fluid style.  But Sexton is more adventurous, sharper and more passionate.

But it’s not only the backing, it’s Dylan’s voice, his major instrument, which puts the icing on the cake for 1999. Dylan makes his voice as rough as any roadhouse blues singer, but can also sing softly and smoothly when the song calls for it. And power. There’s little that is thin and reedy here, unless he wants it to be. His voice is full of power and expression. I have to go back to 1995 to catch him singing like this. Now, however, his voice is richer and fuller than it was in the mid nineties. The origins of Dylan’s later crooning voice might be found here, although we could push that right back to Nashville Skyline(1969) and the Johnny Cash sessions.

My problem as your tour guide is that there is just such a surfeit of high quality material. Looking at the past three years, I have been able to hone in on two or three ‘best’ concerts, but that’s not so obvious for 1999. The concert at Tramps, New York, is highly regarded, but most of the 117 concerts he did that year are good. I can’t organise a post around three or four concerts. Furthermore, I suspect that technology took a jump around the end of the century, as the quality of the audience recordings is very high, better than we’ve ever heard, I think. There is a cornucopia of material.

While in 1997 and 1998 the setlists were pretty consistent, with essentially the same concert being delivered night after night with variations and wild cards thrown in, in 1999, particularly in the latter part of the year, Dylan throws the setlists wide open, singing a wide variety of his songs and cover songs.

So where do I start and, more urgently, what do I leave out? For 1996 and 1997, I began with new songs being drip fed from Time out of Mind, and we will certainly cover those songs, but I’m sorely tempted to begin with a kick, that old familiar warhorse ‘Maggie’s Farm’.  This song may be so familiar that we can easily slip over it. Dylan might not have helped by, on occasion, ripping through it as if he just wanted to get to the end. It can too easily become a messy guitar fest. Not here. Listening to this, I’m taken back to 1964, the Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan rounded up some musicians from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and blew everybody’s ears out with ‘Maggie’s Farm’,  a hard-edged attack on those folkie sensibilities.

It’s too easy to miss the bitter irony of his lampooning of the American family, and the claustrophobia inherent in that desperate desire to escape. Maggie’s Farm just ain’t no place to be, especially if you happen to be a restless young genius: ‘They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.’ This performance restores the song to its original power and vigour. Dylan is in wonderful voice and the band is working as sweetly as any freight train.

It’s a good song to start with because it’s all about busting loose, busting out of constrictions which is just what Dylan does in 1999, busting out of his setlists, busting into new vocal power, busting open the sound of the band. (I don’t have the date)

Maggie’s Farm

If that doesn’t get you up and rocking, I don’t know what will. I think there’s a bit of a fudge with the lyrics, well disguised, but it doesn’t matter. And that nifty little riff Sexton puts in behind it gives it style.  This has quickly become my favourite performance of the song, keeping well clear of the word definitive.

I could say the same about this masterful performance of ‘Senor’, in which there is also a glitch in the lyrics. If I was tortured into choosing just one superlative performance from 1999, it would be this one (I think…). ‘Senor’ is a wonderful song,  easily my favourite from Street Legal (1978) and apparently Dylan’s favourite too, as it’s the only song from that album that has stayed the course in terms of live performance. The song has a sinister edge. To my mind it’s about having your whole universe, your world view, shaken up, tipped upside-down. Unwelcome reality comes crashing in. You’d better watch out for that ‘gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring’. He’s (she’s?) the harbinger of the most unbearable truth.

When writing about this song for the Master Harpist series, I commented that it reminded me of that famous quote from Thoreau, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…’ What are we waiting for, Senor? There’s nothing left for us here. It’s a song from the dark side.

I certainly get that sense from this performance. And, for fans of Dylan’s harmonica playing (like me), the harp work here is a rare pleasure, for, as with 1997/98, Dylan mostly left his harp at home in 1999. The searing, cutting edge of Dylan’s harp works well with the end of the line feeling that comes through the song. Unfortunately I have not been able to track down who is playing violin here, perhaps some helpful reader knows. But it’s compelling, and transports us back to the Rolling Thunder Tour.

I wouldn’t be tempted to equate the mysterious Senor of the song with Jesus or any particular figure. We may well all have our ‘senors’ who we hope will have the answers to our most desperate questions.

Senor

After completing the European summer tour Dylan returned to the United States to perform a thirty-eight date tour with Paul Simon. I believe that this ‘Sounds of Silence’ comes from Portland Oregon, 12^th June. In my last post I commented that Dylan seldom does his best work when duetting with others, but I’m eating my words now. While avoiding hyperbole as much as possible, I now have to say this duet is exquisite. There’s no other word for it. Maybe ‘The Sounds of Silence’ is a song Dylan wished he’d written. It’s all about our moral silence, the creeping deadness of our outrage, the quiet apocalypse.

Paul Simon takes the lead with Dylan doing back up vocals. It’s gentle and totally moving. And the harmonica. Talk about rare moments of harp magic in 1999, we certainly have one here, chilling and melodic. I can’t imagine the song sounding any better. And doesn’t the crowd love it!

Sounds of Silence

They look good together on stage too, a sense of close communion. They are both living the song. This video is not the same performance as the sound clip above, and is of poor visual quality, but gives us the idea of how these two work together. Another brilliant, but quite different, harp solo.

So I’ve run out of space, just when I was getting started. I’ll be back soon to continue this exploration of this peak NET year.

Kia Ora

Bob Dylan In Search Of Eden (Part I)

by Larry Fyffe

God boots Adam and Eve from the earthly kingdom of innocence; locks them outside in kingdoms of experience. He’s not happy that the couple disobeyed His order to stay away from the Tree of Knowledge, and if it’s thought that they’re going to find a delightful places to live, the Almighty has news for them.

The kingdoms of experience will be found waiting but wanting:

The kingdoms of experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

There’ll be never-ending struggles to control what’s out there in a hungry world. Darwinians fighting with Marxists, for example:

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Not only that, God makes sure that on the outside of the Gates of Eden, Adam meets his always-complaining, screech owl-like previous partner who, like a gypsy, flees from the Garden of Eden because she’s had enough of acting the part of an obedient wife:

The screech owl also shall rest there
And find for herself a place of rest
(Isaiah 34: I4)

Lilith, Adam’s first wife, had expected to he treated as an equal in an Edenic relationship because no man’s rib was involved when God creates both sexes in His own image:

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

Time marches on, and Lilith’s now riding a motorcycle. No more an underling be she; the suited-up little boss man can go to Hell:

The motorcycle black Madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Seems the narrator’s girlfriend is the smart one – she’s got the mystery of human existence all figured out – it can’t be done:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel  the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Publisher’s note…

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

Dylan’s nominations and awards

• Best contemporary folk album
• Bob Dylan’s Grammies: Album of the year 1998 – Time out of mind
• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins
• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 2: Best male rock vocal 1980!
• Best rock vocal performance (male)

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

• 2007 Grammy Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance
• Winner – Bob – Someday Baby

Nominees

• Beck – Nausea
• Tom Petty – Saving Grace
• John Mayer – Route 66
• Neil Young – Lookin’ For A Leader

Beck

Aaron: Beck – from the 2006 album The Information. Beck said he wanted the song “to sound like the Stooges in South America.” When performed live, it is done in more of a punk rock vein, more akin to the Stooges.

Tony: Songs without melody don’t do much for me.   One note in the verse and three in the chorus.  It’s a sort of music without all the ingredients  and I can’t see the benefit of that especially when there is only one chord in verse and two others in the chorus.

But obviously some people find it ok.  I played it all the way through, just in case.  But nope, there was nothing else.  Sorry, it must be just me.

Tom Petty – from the album Highway Companion. It was a good year for the Wilburys as this one was produced by Jeff Lynne.

Tony:  Now this is completely different; I’ve always been a Tom Petty fan.  The sound is always perfect, every song is original, and as with so many this one builds in a very satisfactory way, the production is superb and the unexpected instrumental break on about 2 minutes 10 is exquisite.   Even the use of the word “carpet” is exciting; it is unexpected to have two syllables here.   I cried all night when he passed away.

John Mayer – Route 66. From the soundtrack to the Pixar movie Cars, so it’s a big hit in my house!

Tony: Now there’s a rhythm I recognise, and very cleverly leading in into a totally unexpected percussion accompaniment.

It is clever because we all know the song so well, to do something different that works and is interesting is very hard.

But… at its heart Route 66 isn’t itself that interesting a song.  The instrumental break really does liven things up, and presumably the nomination was just for the arrangement.  And although that’s good I am not sure it is “award winning” material.

Neil Young – From his Bush baiting album Living With War.

Aaron: In it Neil predicts the future:

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all

Yeah, maybe it's Obama
But he thinks that he's too young

Aaron: Maybe a better selection from the album would have been Let’s Impeach The President, but perhaps that one was too controversial for the selection committee!

Neil returned to the song in 2020 for his The Times EP with an update to the lyrics – this time attacking you-know-who

Yeah, we had Barack Obama
And we really need him now
The man who stood behind him
Has to take his place somehow
America has a leader
Building walls around our house
He don't know black lives matter
And we got to vote him out

Tony: Another of my favourites.  He might have got my vote just for the message.  You have to give it to Neil, he’s never given up the cause.

But… Neil can do really long songs, but this one really seems to go on a bit long from a musical point of view.  And if you are going to put across a message in the song you really do have to keep the music interesting.  Neil’s a great guitarist, but somehow I found myself drifting away.  Perhaps that’s because the story is told and the events have happened.

So what of the winner Bob – Someday Baby?

Tony: This is one of the songs that Bob has evolved from the heritage of the blues, in this case a Sleepy John Estes song and a Muddy Waters song.  Dylan changed the lyrics and kept the blues style and the title line.  This was recorded in 1935.

As a result of its age there many versions around which can contain elements of the original and of Dylan’s re-write

https://youtu.be/qb1HukPExlQ

Here’s Bob’s re-worked version

What makes this song so attractive and listenable is that the band behind Bob does the standard blues accompaniment but in such a background manner, even when he’s not singing, that it gives a completely new meaning to the piece.  It is about life just going on and on… it is there, we live it, but there is, out in the far distance, this hope for change.

And this way, the laid back feel makes total sense in relation to the lyrics; a perfect re-working of original concept for modern times.  In an extraordinary way the whole sound projects the notion to me that the old times have gone but we are still just chugging on awaiting the ever hoped for change that never materialises.

Plus that laid back feel mean that we have to listen to the lyrics, even though they are just rhyming couplets all the way through followed by the chorus line.   We know where we are but we just really have to have to keep on listening.

One other thing: it is one hell of a track to jive to.  That beat really keeps you on your toes, both literally and metaphorically.  Not to be tried if prone to heart attacks however.

Love it.

=================

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins
• Love minus zero/No limit part VI: Fair is foul
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VIII: A Study Of Provincial Life

IX         Where little girls say pardon

The wind howls like a hammer / The night blows cold and rainy

 “I would seriously give all of Bob Dylan for Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Nothing Rhymed,” tweets Rev. Richard Coles in August 2019. It’s a rather bold statement from the intelligent, colourful Englishman, who after an extremely successful career as a musician (in Bronski Beat and in The Communards, with huge world hits) studies theology, becomes Church of England parish priest and who is now active as a vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire. And as a writer, a journalist, a radio DJ, a TV panellist (QI, Would I Lie to You? and Have I Got News For You) and whatnot. Generally, understatement is the weapon of choice in all these Coles splits, but every now and then he doesn’t shy away from hyperbole either, as his Gilbert O’Sullivan tweet shows.

Now, “Nothing Rhymed” is indeed a song of the outer category – the point Rev. Coles is trying to make does have some truth to it. It is an extremely attractive song with an addictive melody and lyrics that encompass the Holy Trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason. Demonstrated, for example, by the bridge;

This feeling inside me could never deny me
The right to be wrong if I choose
And this pleasure I get
From say winning a bet
Is to lose

… a bridge with a high Dylan vibe, as the pop-and-rock savvy Reverend should also be able to see. The right to be wrong is a wonderful antithesis, rhyming technically it is a perfect, antique Spanish sextet with, as it should be, the rhyme scheme AABCCB and Sullivan’s variant of the most famous antithesis, no success like failure, is of a dazzling beauty and simplicity: this pleasure I get from say winning a bet is to lose. “I’m a sucker for good middle eights,” as O’Sullivan himself says.

Still, O’Sullivan himself would never be so immodest as to place “Nothing Rhymed” or any other highlight of his rich oeuvre above Dylan. In all interviews over the years, he continues to pay his respects to his hero, as in Reader’s Digest (August 2018), when he names The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as one of the three Records That Changed My Life (the other two being Please Please Me and Johnny Duncan and His Bluegrass Boys’ Last Train To San Fernando);

“I was hugely into Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was the one who gave me the feeling that I could achieve something with my voice. I don’t have a great voice, but I always felt it was kind of distinctive and if there’s one thing Bob Dylan had, it was a distinctive voice. And of course, his songwriting sort of moved away from I-love-you-you-love-me and that kind of helped us to be able to write lyrics other than the traditional love songs that were the key at that time. Bob Dylan was a huge influence on me.”

O’Sullivan, who says he is a stickler for words, illustrates the influence on his lyrics with examples inspired by Dylan’s enjoyment of language and playfulness. As he demonstrates in a detailed podcast for Strange Brew with Jason Barnard in 2016, using the same “Nothing Rhymed”;

The line “I’m drinking my Bonaparte shandy”. You know what that is, don’t you?
What’s that?
You don’t? It’s Napoleon brandy. [chortles] So I’m drinking my Napoleon brandy. Not quite. Doesn’t have the ring for me. I kind of like playing with words

… just as he is still a bit proud of the Basement-like nonsense from one of his older juvenilia, the charming “Mr. Moody’s Garden” (1968), from the time when he was still only called “Gilbert”;

I wrote things like “Down among the partridge trees, lives a don who loves his knees, so much so he’s framed them in a jar” [both Jason and Gilbert chuckle] – what was I on when I wrote that? It brings a smile to my face when I hear that.

O’Sullivan could also have quoted the last verse from that song, in which he quite openly salutes his hero Dylan:

Cos every day's a holiday in Mr. Moody's Garden
Where little girls say pardon
And Bill and Ben found stardom
While playing John Wesley Harding
Who looked just like Billy Cardon's
Answer to choo-choo

… and in which, by the way, the garden-pardon-stardom-Harding-Cardon sequence shows the same frenzied enjoyment of rhyme as Dylan’s oeuvre.

Both songs, “Nothing Rhymed” and “Mr. Moody’s Garden”, can be found on the compilation The Berry Vest Of Gilbert O’Sullivan – and that title is another sign of art fraternity: with Dylan, the Irish Englishman also shares a soft spot for spoonerisms.

“The post office has been stolen and the mailbox is closed”, “honky-tonk lagoon”, “round that horn and ride that herd”, “it ain’t my cup of meat”, “I got for good luck my black tooth”… in the mid-60s Dylan develops a taste for a quirky, often nonsensical variant of the time-honoured spoonerisms. Sometimes “classic” indeed, as in the post-office example from “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, but more often in the more playful variant, where the spoonerism is a sound-driven mix-up. Lagoon instead of saloon, for example, not tea but meat, round instead of sound and not rabbit foot but my black tooth.

Spoonerisms, named after the absent-minded Oxford don William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) who, according to tradition, often mixed up syllables (kinkering congs instead of conquering kings, for example), tend to be rather corny. Aerosmith calling an album Night In The Ruts, or Hairway To Steven by The Butthole Surfers. And The Berry Vest Of Gilbert O’Sullivan, of course. But in the hands of a gifted wordsmith like Dylan, they can still take on a poetic glow; if you don’t take the spoonerism, as here in “Love Minus Zero”, all the way. Thus The wind howls like a hammer / The night blows cold and rainy gets an attractively confusing suggestion of a spoonerism by – obviously – the second part, where the listener “corrects”; no, the aforementioned wind blows cold and rainy. But then, “correcting back”, the listener gets stuck on the wind howls like a hammer. Stylistically a nice alliteration and content-wise a synaesthetic Dylan original (“howling like a hammer”?), but the other half of the spoonerism, of the inverted morphemes gets stranded. The wind may blow, as Dylan already has told us ad nauseam, but the night cannot howl. Let alone “howling like a hammer”.

But then again, maybe Dylan, like O’Sullivan to John Wesley Harding, is winking at Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Swannanoa Tunnel”: The wind blowed cold, baby / When you hear my watchdog howling / This old hammer it rings like silver.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part X:

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

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

You can read more about all our regular writers here

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

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

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

By Filip Łobodziński

No, it’s not going to be about Tarantula nor the sadly-up-to-now-discontinued Chronicles. It’s going to be about the songs. Because with Bob Dylan it all starts with the songs and their performance.

Each time I see a ranking of The Best Bob Dylan Covers I expect to find there only songs covered in English. Bob Dylan’s native language is an obvious choice, even for the foreigners, given the fact that this is the form within which the songs conquered people’s minds and spirits in the first place. In English were they conceived, shaped, burnished, performed, modified, reiterated by the Man himself. In English they have been intercepted and diffused by hundreds of their admirers.

The English language is a modern-day’s Latin or lingua franca. There are probably magnificent scientific explanation as to why it’s happened – by way of commerce, by way of power, by way of technology, by way of its apparent grammatical simplicity. Whatever the cause, English rules the world, or at least its richest and most influential (which does not mean the best!) part.

I don’t know when a Bob Dylan song first was translated into and sung in a foreign tongue. It could be a fascinating journey through time and space – to see how the Unidylanverse kept on expanding from the moment zero on. What zone did it conquer first, or leave its mark upon? Was it Spanish? German? Possibly French? (The French adapted plenty of British songs in the sixties, so maybe…). My bet is on Hans Bradtke’s adaptation of Blowin’ in the Wind that was released as Die Antwort weiβ ganz allein der Wind in December ’63, in an unforgeable interpretation by Marlene Dietrich.

Since then, tons of foreign-language versions have appeared, from Italian to Indonesian, from Hungarian to Hebrew, from German to Greek.

One can only surmise how accurate and true to the original songs’ spirit all these cover versions are. Some of them surely are faithful, some are approximations, some are just vague impressions based on the primary sources. Or even caricatures, for that matter.

Of course, within this non-English Bob Dylan world we have a Polish team too. I’m proud to be part of it, having translated over 250 songs by Bob Dylan into my native language and having been singing some of my works.

I’ve already written down and published on these friendly pages some of my reflections on singing Dylan in Polish and on translating them. If I wanted to quote now something from those articles I’d opt for Tony Attwood’s own intro to the first of them:

“When I started Untold Dylan I had no idea that Dylan’s music was being translated into and recorded in other languages.  But of course now I think of it, that is a typical anglocentric view, seeing the language Dylan speaks as being the only way to hear and appreciate Dylan’s music.”

And those words, when read once again a week ago, prompted me to add something for you English-speaking readers and fans to consider. And no, it’s not an anglocentric view to think Dylan’s lyrics can be (beauty)fully sung and understood in English only. Actually, most people think their native literature tastes best in its original shape. And it does.

So why on Earth bother to re-write the same lyrics but in a mutilated form? What is the purpose of spoiling the perfect form? What sense is there in singing “som en hemlös själ”, “comme des pierres qui roulent”, “földönfutó” or “jak błądzący łach” instead of “like a rolling stone”?

The answer is blowin’ in history seen as a constant process of learning.

Let’s have a look at the tale known from Gen 11.1–9. The Tower of Babel (though it was not called so in the Bible). Its demolition by the Hand of God is described and meant as a chastisement brought upon people for having assumed nearly the same status as the Almighty. God confounded their languages so they could no longer understand each other, and work together. Misunderstandings and conflicts replaced former unity and accord. From then on, we were doomed to guess instead of knowing, to cross blades instead of shaking hands.

The way I see it, and it is not only me who shares this view, this etiological biblical narrative should rather be interpreted as a blessing. For, as it is obvious, different peoples on Earth developed various speeches and tongues not because of some superimposed verdict from Up There but because, I believe, of different ways of perceiving the world and the different soundscapes those peoples were surrounded by. And only when they started to confront each other did they feel the need to understand, and to stand under the same sheltering sky.

In war, there’s no literature; just instructions. In war, there’s no reflection; just orders. In war, there’s no good will; just malevolence. In war, there are no neighbours; just competing opponents.

The phenomenon of a foreign language creates the gate to an alternative universe. When learning English, not only do I memorize English words and the rules according to which they can be used. I get to know a whole new world, a world furnished by these guys who say “tea” instead of “herbata”, “curve” instead of “krzywa”, “fuck” or “whore” instead of “kurwa” and The Tempest instead of Burza. A world where a little baby feels at home when they sing Hush Little Baby – and absolutely not so if they start to sing Na Wojtusia z popielnika.

This is the world where people don’t need dictionaries to understand Like a Rolling Stone. At least to understand the words and their sequences – as in Spanish ‘comprender’ – even if they need more studies to understand the song’s deeper  m e a n i n g – as in Spanish ‘entender’.

A translator, thus, is someone who wants to break into this fascinating world and fully understand, and then to find her/his way back with a bag full of ideas that would help her/him transform the original message (song, poem, novel…), to recreate it in a new language.

The implication is powerful: there are no readers more observant, more perceptive, more perspicacious than a translator. There is no lecture more discerning and subtle than the one executed by a translator. Because the native readers may feel satisfied with what they understand (Spanish ‘comprenden’) while the translator urgently needs to understand profoundly; to catch on to the original text (Spanish ‘entender’) (what a powerful distinction, by the way!) and to its possible conditioning.

We, the translators (of literature, of official speeches, of technical use instructions and s.o.), build bridges. We open the gates. We tread on underground waters to find paths leading to distant solar systems.

There’s one more advantage of being a translator. Not only do we read the text, and read into the text, but also we listen to it. We taste the sounds and the messages. And then we try to breathe a new linguistic life into the text. To do so, we need to be extremely aware of our own speech. Few people learn their native language as thoroughly as the translators.

I try to find a gate or a window through which my countrywomen and countrymen could inhabit a part of your world, Tony, Aaron, Denise, Larry, Pat. Even more, meet Jochen and François on a common ground and breathe the same air. Literature, besides music, dance and food, is one of the most effective options to share the world. Bob Dylan’s songs provide us with a splendid opportunity to effectuate such a great flirting date.

Is my piece about Bob Dylan at all? Oh yes, it is.  By way of example, in mid-June, our band dylan.pl gave our first live concert for a live audience in 16 months. Afterwards, we signed our albums, I signed my Polish Dylan translations, an anthology of his songs Duszny kraj and Tarantula. And quite a few people approached us and said that only thanks to attending our concert had they felt an urge to explore the Dylan world. Before, they just knew a couple of songs but they didn’t understand them so it had been more like a part of the soundscape, and not necessarily an important one. Now, they said they wanted to dive deep into his songs because they’d smelled something incredibly beautiful, powerful, moving and thought-provoking that lied beneath the music.

I managed to trace a path that would lead them somewhere they didn’t ever expect. I gave them a chance. It should be stressed, though, that the aim of translating is not to replace the original text literally word for word. The text is a prey and the translator is a hunter on a bloodless chase. The prize is a new foreign version that speaks the same truth albeit with different words (my struggle with the Polish title of Like a Rolling Stone and my proposition of translating are described here.  For me, more important is to stay true to the depth and spirit even if I “lose” something at the level of specific words.  I write Dylan’s songs in Polish the way I think he might have written them had he been born somewhere near Wałbrzych or Białystok.  (Although a Jewish family in 1941 was one of the most endangered species in Central/Eastern Europe, as everybody knows, and there would be no songs at all…).

Bob Dylan doesn’t write in Polish. But he can be perfectly spoken in Polish, if I may use such a strange syntactic construction. Thank God (and rather contrary to His will…) the Tower of Babel became a vivid monument to the beginning of a mutual understanding. Untold Dylan people are my sisters and brothers, even if we never meet face to face. And my Polish audience are my “rabbit’s friends-and-relations” who participate in a huge gathering. Hope nobody steals the silver spoon shadowed by the enmity darkness…

You might also enjoy also by Filip Łobodziński

• T.Love, top Polish rock band, paying tribute to Bob Dylan
• The consequences of sequences in Bob Dylan’s writing of song
• Studious Dylan in the Studio
• Memories of Dylan’s first ever Polish concert

You can read more about all our regular writers here

By Larry Fyffe

According to the Holy Bible, the Almighty One drives Adam and Eve out of earthly paradise after Eve disobeys God’s order. She’s temped by the Devil into having a taste of the Tree of Knowledge of Good And Evil; that is, into an experience of sensual delight, apparently including sex; what’s more, as further punishment, the couple will never again be able to eat from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden which gives them immortality; the gates are sealed forever, but left to them is a second chance – the possibility of rising to a heavenly, albeit asexual, paradise after they drop dead:

So He drove out the man
And He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubims
And a flaming sword which turned every way
To keep the way of the Tree of Life
(Genesis 3: 24)

In the mythic, symbolic, and Blakean-like song lyrics beneath, the cherubim angel is transformed into the shape of a western gunslinger who carries a lighted candle rather than a flaming sword; he rides (foremost/fore-est?) ahead of the dark and cloudy, rather Puritan, skies – the candle, a symbol  of hope regained (albeit a dim one) of a peaceful and joyful existence in the Promised Land of spacious America:

Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun 
Though it's glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Dimmed the prospect be by the rise of industrialzed cities – concrete and over-populated that are under the control of violent and iron-hearted police:

The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

With machine-like military men who obey without questioning  their commanders as to what they are fighting for:

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter
But still remains
Upon the beach where hounddogs bay
(Bod Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

The hope of a regained Eden lost to the false idols of the modern-day Babylon from out of the past:

With time-tested compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

It looks like God has delt from the bottom of the deck so that it is only He who gets to eat from the Tree of Life now while the mortal humans get nothing but promises that they just might be able to escape from the dark experiences of Babylon up in a heavenly Eden after they die.

Indeed, according to the song lyrics below, some humans think it would be better to just die, and have done with it –  they have to first make it pass a trial outside Edenic Heaven, that’s overseen by the Supreme Judge, in order to enter the Gates of Heaven.

Else it’s eternal Hell for them:

As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

This article is part of a unique series which reviews the artwork on Dylan’s albums.  A full index can be found here.    The most recent articles are

• NEW: Blood on the Tracks
• Blonde On Blonde: The Artwork

by Patrick Roefflaer

• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II
• Released: November 17, 1971
• Photographer front: Barry Feinstein (1971)
• Photographer backside: ? (Apple Film)
• Art-director:  ?

On Sunday, August 1, 1971, two benefit concerts will take place at New York’s Madison Square Garden to raise money for the people of Bangladesh (formerly known as East Pakistan). As a result of civil war and persistent severe weather, the living conditions for the many refugees are harrowing. The first benefit in music history is an initiative of George Harrison. Unsure if enough people are interested in him alone, the ex-Beatle enlists the help of friendly musicians. He even manages to get both Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan out of their isolation.

It has been five years since Dylan last toured and his appearance is eagerly anticipated. The five songs he performs are the highlight of the show and the reactions of press and public are unanimously positive. His record company, Columbia Records, is very happy with the renewed interest in their artist and wants to cash in on this. As Bob has no new material, it is decided that the best option is a compilation.

Naturally there has to be a photo from Bob at the concert on the front cover. So Columbia’s art director has to contact the official photographers for the concerts: Camouflage Productions.

That creative team consists of photographer Barry Feinstein and designer Tom Wilkes who were previously responsible for the cover of Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass and of course also for the packaging of The Concert for Bangla Desh (sic).

Dylan chooses two photos by his buddy Feinstein (see The Times They Are A-Changin’). On the first, taken during rehearsal the day before the concert, Bob Dylan and George Harrison are seen from the back, against a blue background and lit from the left by a white spotlight. Harrison says something and Dylan listens intently.

On the second, Bob’s face is on the left side of the photo, blowing his harmonica while a large number of microphones are on the right side.   Both photos are landscape (twice as wide as high) and therefore excellent for a gatefold cover.

However, on both photographs, Dylan head is on the left side of the photo, so his head would end up on the back side of the cover. Mirroring would mess up the effect, because then Dylan would look to the left. (The reading direction in the Western world is from left to right, so a movement to the left is perceived as slowing down – decline, while a movement to the right indicates progress – forward-looking.   If you would like to know more this video explains in detail why left to right, and right to left, matters).

The (unknown) designer solves the problem by cutting off Harrison and further enlarging Dylan’s head.

Striking is the resemblance of both photos with those on the cover of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits from 1967. On the front cover of that compilation there’s a portrait of Dylan in profile, looking to the right, with blue as the main color.

This is to the amazement of the photographer of that original photo, Rowland Scherman, who said, “I heard that Dylan didn’t like my photo [at the time], and then he chooses one that looks very similar. I said to him, ‘You little bastard.’ He looked embarrassed and turned around. He knew well enough that he was wrong the first time because the image captured Dylan so well in the sixties, with his hair, his harmonica and that halo.”

The portrait of Dylan used for the reverse side of the compilation is not really a photo, but a still image from the Apple film The Concert For Bangla Desh. Because Dylan was hesitant to give permission to use footage of him in the film, Harrison’s manager Alan Klein invited him to a private screening at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan. He possibly selected that image then. Note the guitar strap that rests on the wrong shoulder, this image is also printed mirrored, so that Dylan is also looking to the right.

Because there was already a Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2, released in Germany and the Netherlands (and later the UK), the new compilation gets a Roman numeral in the title: Vol. II.

To avoid further confusion, the cover will be given a new look in the Netherlands and a different name.

In England it is called More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits and in Italy: Un Poeta Un Artista.

by John Henry

As one of the richest and most captivating songs in an unequalled catalogue of brilliant songs, “Desolation Row” has attracted a lot of attention from commentators on Dylan’s art. Much has been said about it, and no doubt more will be said in future. One thing that has not been noticed so far, however, is that Desolation Row marks the culmination, the end-point, of a series of songs on repressive, oppressive, soul-destroying, and downright awful places.

Around the time of his first album, New York was a place where people had to cut something, and they’d rob you with a fountain pen (“Talkin’ New York”), and as far as Dylan was concerned it was a place where they stepped on your name and tried to “get me beat” (“Hard Times in New York Town”). If New York seemed to be unwelcoming and defeating, Bear Mountain was even worse. Feeling as though he’d “climbed outa m’ casket”, the narrator wished he’d “never got up that morn” (“Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”). On Freewheelin’ “Oxford Town” represented those places you’d “Better get away from”, where “The Sun don’t shine above the ground.” But Dylan also sang at that time about “the deep hollow dungeon” of “The Walls of Red Wing”.

These early songs about God-forsaken places belong to Dylan’s apprenticeship, when he was only beginning to forge his song-writing craft. By the time we get to Bringing It All Back Home, though, some of the most outstanding songs are about diabolically awful places.

The first of these, of course, is “Maggie’s Farm”. A wonderful indictment of how modern America (representing any Western state for that matter) stifles creativity and independence. On Maggie’s Farm bland conformity is imposed not just by talk of “man and God and law”, not just by fines, but by random violence—Maggie’s Pa “puts his cigar/Out in your face just for kicks.”

An even better song, one of Dylan’s very best, perhaps because of its evocative mysteriousness, is “Gates of Eden.” The song is complex and difficult to understand, but one thing is certain, and that is that the imagery is generally scary and disorientating. The “truth just twists” here, lampposts have “iron claws”. “No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden”, and yet the only place “you will hear a laugh” is “inside the Gates of Eden.” Seeming to suggest the paradise of the Garden of Eden, the song in fact conveys a disturbing ethos of dispossession. Promises of paradise merely raise that laugh, friends are really strangers and they are all trying to resign from their fates. The narrator’s lover recounts her dreams, but these are not dreams of optimistic ambitions, their meanings are described as “ditches”, and the best way to deal with them is to fill them in by the shovelful.

But there are two other songs about dreadful places on this album. As in “Maggie’s Farm”, in both cases Dylan turns to humour and satire to paint vivid pictures of places you don’t want to be. In “On the Road Again”, the singer is once again involved with a family that seems deranged, violent, and deceitful. This is the family of the singer’s girlfriend, but when she asks why the singer doesn’t live with her, he replies, “Honey, how come you don’t move?”

America as a thoroughly awful place, again as in “Maggie’s Farm”, reappears in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” The joke, in this hugely under-rated song, is that the singer and his companions discover American before Columbus, but it is an America already populated with cops, political activists, waiters, bankers; and already established with jails, undertakers, parking restrictions and so forth. After various nightmarish adventures the singer manages to make his escape, and meeting Columbus as he’s arriving, he wishes him good luck.

This brings us to Highway 61 Revisited, but before we get to “Desolation Row”, we hear about the scary and disorienting place that Mister Jones finds himself in, in the “Ballad of a Thin Man.” There is already something crucially different here, however, from the earlier songs we’ve been looking at. In the earlier songs, the narrator or singer is the one who is appalled by the awful things going on in the places he describes. But in “Ballad” the singer seems to be part of the nightmarish cast of characters that are so profoundly upsetting Mr Jones. It is as though the singer, let us consider him to be Dylan himself, has changed sides. Where previously he has seen the places he describes as places to get away from, and the sooner the better, or as places that you shouldn’t go to, if you can avoid it, now Dylan seems to want to be among the freaks and the circus-like performers who make up the disturbing scene where the staid and conservative Mr Jones is so tormented.

It is this same switch of outlook, this same change in desires, that we see in “Desolation Row”. At a first, perhaps superficial, listen “Desolation Row” might give the impression that this Desolation Row is another of these places to get away from, or to avoid going to. After all, let’s face it, Desolation Row does not sound like a good address. If we follow the lyrics, however, it is easy to see that Desolation Row is the place to be. We discover at the end of the first verse that the singer is looking out “From Desolation Row”—he seems to be looking out from there to the even worse place where they are selling postcards of a lynching, and the riot squad is restlessly, and ominously, looking for something to do. Contrary to what we might expect, there’s a “carnival tonight/On Desolation Row”, and Ophelia, a troubled soul if ever there was one, spends her time looking into Desolation Row, not trying to escape from it. Similarly, Einstein used to play the violin on Desolation Row.

Dr Filth and “his nurse, some local loser”, who is “in charge of the cyanide hole”, are not on Desolation Row but outside it. You can only hear their patients play on their penny whistles, “If you lean your head out far enough/From Desolation Row.” Casanova is punished for going to Desolation Row, so we can assume he is punished in the world beyond Desolation Row, that place which is obviously worse than Desolation Row. We learn in the next verse that people try to escape to Desolation Row—again, it seems to be better than whatever is outside. At the end of the song, the singer seems to have lost his place in Desolation Row, but he still yearns to be back there. “Don’t send me no more letters”, he sings, “unless you mail them/From Desolation Row.” A letter from there, presumably, would remind him of the place to which he wants to get back.

So, what are we to make of this—a series of songs, about places to avoid and why, which eventually give way to a magnificent final song, “Desolation Row” about a place which, for all its faults, seems to be preferable to the places and their inhabitants which surround it? It is important to note, of course, that Desolation Row cannot be perfect. Dylan didn’t call the song “Paradise Row”, and the name “Desolation Row” clearly gives the impression of being a depressing and unpleasant place to be. And yet, it seems to be surrounded by even worse places. Where the earlier songs of this kind all suggest the places being sung about are places you need to escape from, Desolation Row is somewhere you want to escape to. And, if you are exiled from it, as the singer seems to be in the last verse, you might want to be reminded of it by receiving letters only from there.

We can only speculate, of course, but it seems as though Dylan the songwriter has learned valuable lessons between those initial hard times in New York and Desolation Row. When he first came to New York, naïve but full of ambition, he must have experienced many knock-backs which led him to write these songs. At first, he associated the set-backs with specific recognisable places but later wrote instead of more abstract representations of repressive places, as he moved from New York and Maggie’s Farm, to a house where “there’s fist fights in the kitchen”, and on to the Gates of Eden. In the early songs Dylan sees it as his role to draw a moral conclusion. In “Talking New York” he seems to place himself above those without much food on their table, who therefore use their knives and forks to cut something else—the narrator’s cue to leave New York. Similarly, in “Hard Times in New York”, the narrator proudly boasts he’ll be able to leave New York “still standin’ on my feet” in spite of everything the people of New York throw at him. Dylan writes as though it is possible to maintain separation from the place you are in, to be unaffected by it, to rise above its horrors while remaining unchanged by it.

By the time we get to “Ballad of a Thin Man”, however, Dylan knows better. He now recognises that he himself is part of the place, part of the action of the place, for good or ill. It is now Mr Jones who is trying to hold himself aloof from what is going on around him, while the narrator of the song is one of his tormentors, pointing relentlessly to Mr Jones’s inability to understand what is happening in this frightening place. The message of the song is now much more subtle and sophisticated. Although nothing is made explicit, the separation of the narrator from Mr Jones; the one an observer and commentator on what’s happening, the other a would-be innocent visitor who is trying to stay standing on his feet, gives the sense that Mr Jones is actually learning from this dreadful experience. While the narrators in the early New York songs talk of leaving town with their integrity unaffected by their bad experiences, we get the sense that Mr Jones gradually becomes one of the weirdos that so frightened him to begin with. At the beginning he feels himself to be different from those around him: “Oh my God/Am I here all alone?” By the end, however, he walks into the room like a camel—he puts his eyes in his pockets and his nose on the ground—as weird as anyone else there. So weird, in fact, that now the narrator says “There ought to be a law/Against you coming around.”

The point is, that the frightening, repressive, and disorientating things that happen to us, whenever we find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar place, become part of our experience and therefore make us who we are. Dylan wouldn’t be the man he is today if he hadn’t endured those hard times in New York; he wouldn’t be who he is if he hadn’t had to metaphorically scrub the floors on Maggie’s Farm. Suffering and frustration are all part of life in this veil of tears, and we cannot remain unchanged as we endure them. In the end these adversities make us who we are. “Desolation Row” is the song where Dylan finally acknowledges that.

Before going any further, it is worth noting that “Desolation Row” marks the end of this preoccupation with place in some of Dylan’s songs. There’s no similar song on Blonde on Blonde. “Stuck inside of Mobile” may sound as though it is a song about Mobile, but if we read the lyrics we can see that they do not focus on any particular place—Mobile only appears in the repeated refrain at the end of each verse. “I Shall Be Released” says little or nothing about the place from which the singer will be released. Although “All Along the Watchtower” begins with the famous line: “There must be some way out of here”, we hear no more about this place. The thief, responding to this comment by the joker, does not go on to discuss the problems of the place but talks instead about life and fate. Try as you might, after “Desolation Row”, you can’t find a song by Dylan which is focussed on a place which is in itself portrayed as a dreadful place, a place to get away from. Even “Scarlet Town” doesn’t fit the bill.

So, “Desolation Row” is Dylan’s final brilliant statement that bad places can be the making of us—living in them and through them forges us in the fires of adversity and helps us to endure whatever worse places we might find ourselves in. The narrator and his lady, in the first verse, do not hide but look out; later the narrator talks of leaning your head out to hear Dr Filth’s patients. The song seems to tell us about what is going on beyond Desolation Row, but with an address like that, we can safely assume things are no better on the Row itself. Like the narrator we too are looking out from Desolation Row; we are all part of it, our personal development takes place within it, and inexorably it becomes part of our make-up—it is the making of us. The whole world is Desolation Row. We might think that being there is awful, and we might think of it as somewhere to get away from, but in the end living there shapes us and makes us who we are. So, if someone says to us “You’re in the wrong place my friend/You better leave”, we shouldn’t listen, but should continue to muddle through on Desolation Row. When Dylan saw that, he switched tack, and wrote “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Desolation Row”, two songs which acknowledged that although we might find ourselves in bad places where bad things happen to us, in the end they forge our personalities and make us who we are. “Desolation Row” was Dylan’s final magnificent word on this, and he never again wrote a song focussed on the iniquities of a particular place. But no doubt, like the rest of us, he continued to look out from Desolation Row.

———————————————————–

Other articles by John Henry

• Dylan’s Ways to leave his lovers
• Why is “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” on Dylan’s Break-up album?
• Dylan’s unnoticed murder ballad
• Three Scottish songs and their influence on Dylan

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

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

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

Whether it’s through playing entertaining games at the spin casino online or being featured in movies, gambling has touched different facets of life. Several musicians have also composed songs to show their love and appreciation for the industry. Bob Dylan is among the hundreds of musicians, who’s known for his love for gambling, even composing multiple songs, including:

1. Huck’s Tune – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was the first musician to get a Nobel Prize thanks to his contributions to this American tune and the intuitive story that he invented it. Like most of his other songs, “Huck’s  Tune” is dynamic and lyrical, pulling right at the heartstrings.

Written for Lucky You and starring Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana, the song covers various topics, mostly focusing on the dangers of poker. The song also talks about the difficulty of mixing relationships with money. From this song, it’s clear that Dylan’s musical mastery is unmatched, making “Huck’s Tune” a great song on gambling to add to your Spotify list.

2. Rambling, Gambling Willie – Bob Dylan

Released in 1992, “Rambling, Gambling Willie” is dedicated to the archetype of every gambler. Bob’s hero is among the greatest gamblers of all time and his song has a story to tell. The song speaks of Willie, a gambler who’s all over the place and lives for the game.

According to Dylan, the gambler is willing to take a shot at almost anything, even sailing down New Orleans to try his hand with the Jackson River Queen. He also swings by Cripple Creek, which is a popular gambling area, and keeps going.

3. Lily, Rosemary & Jack of Hearts

Using a third-person omniscient narration to tell his story, Dylan uses a basic storytelling plot structure for this song. The song starts by talking about conflict, followed by rising action and climax before the resolution. This classic song talks about Jack of Hearts as Lily’s true, although she was Big Jim’s mistress and no love was lost between them.

According to the story, Lily came from a broken home but finally traveled to lots of places while having lots of strange affairs. However, only the outlaw (Jack of Hearts) managed to conquer her heart. The song is yet another great combination of gambling and love, with Dylan using his lyrical mastery to combine the two.

4. House of the Rising Sun

A traditional folk song also known as Rising Sun Blues, this song talks about a person’s life going wrong in New Orleans. The song has been recorded in different versions since its release, with most versions urging children and parents to stay away from the same fate. However, the most successful version of this folk song was recorded by the Animals in 1964.

5. Little Willie The Gambler

First released by Bob Dylan in 1991, Little Willie The Gambler talks about the story of a great gambler that’s worth knowing. In this song, Dylan tells the story of his friend Willie, who liked to gamble anywhere there were people, whether it’s the white house, railroad yards, or while sailing to New Orleans. Fortunately, Willie had a good heart, supported his kids and all their mothers.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins
• Love minus zero/No limit part VI: Fair is foul
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery

VIII       A Study Of Provincial Life

The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection / 
       Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer / The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing

Ironically, one of The Smiths’ best-loved songs is one of the most atypical Smiths songs: the hypnotic “How Soon Is Now?” from 1984. It’s the only song in which creative force of nature Johnny Marr lingers on one chord for that long, with a beat and tremolo effect like in Bo Diddley’s “Mona”, smeared across a carpet of guitars. Singer Morrissey’s lyrics, also unusual, put the listener on the wrong track. In any case, “I am the sun and the air” is sung along long enough in the clubs. A self-glorifying opening line that, on second thought, is equally atypical; atypical for Morrissey’s usual self-hatred and self-depreciation, that is. The actual lyrics make a lot more sense:

I am the son
And the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son
And the heir
Of nothing in particular

… now, that’s how we know and love our Morrissey. Still, it is not a Morrissey original; the icon paraphrases another English cultural heritage, from the nineteenth-century bestseller Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871). From the last chapter of Book I, “Miss Brooke”:

“To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and Vyan—certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.”

Middlemarch – A Study Of Provincial Life is a very English highlight, a psychological novel that always makes it to the lists of “Hundred Most Important Books” or “Hundred Best All-Time Novels” and similar elections. New translations still appear in the 21st century – apparently the work has quite literally centuries-transcending value.

Morrissey being a fan is understandable. The novel tends towards melodrama, plots and subplots are driven by a lot of awkward and unhappy relationship hassles, very English fiddling with social status and social hierarchy and unfathomable hypersensitivities, and George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans’s nom de plume) hews marble phrases like “That’s a pity, now, Josh,” said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed, interspersed with by Jove‘s and I shan’t‘s. Much ado, anyway, about pride and prejudice, sense and sensibility, and all.

But that Dylan could be captivated by such an antique through-and-through English weighty tome is rather uncharacteristic. And yet it is very likely: The country doctor rambles / Bankers’ nieces seek perfection… protagonist Tertius Lydgate is an idealistic, somewhat naive country doctor who, against all wisdom, marries Rosamond Vincy, the stunningly beautiful but exasperatingly superficial niece of banker Bulstrode. It is a marriage doomed to failure with an airhead who indeed strives for what she perceives as “perfection” and is quite sensitive to all the gifts that wise men bring – although the latter sounds more like a noncommittal reference to Jesus’ birth than a laborious nod to Middlemarch.

Anyway, the reference to country doctor and banker’s niece is oddly specific, and the combination is nowhere else to be found in the canon. Some analysts think that the “banker’s niece” might be an echo of A Portrait Of A Lady (Henry James, 1881), but have little more argument for this than the otherwise disinterested fact that protagonist Isabel is a niece of retired, wealthy banker Daniel Touchett. No country doctor widely. Although country doctors are popular main and supporting characters in countless novels, television series and films (Kafka creates the most poignant, oppressive country doctor in world literature in Ein Landarzt, for example), they never appear with banker’s nieces.

Middlemarch then. But still, it is unlikely that an unbridled, slightly revved-up, 23-year-old cool hipcat in Greenwich Village like Dylan would have wrestled through those 800 pages, let alone been touched by them. No, that is – with all due respect – more something for a calm lady who radiates peace and reflection, a sphinx-like beauty like the one that has recently been found at Dylan’s side; for Sara, in short.

In this closing couplet, it is not the only hint that a love-struck Dylan incorporates small, intimate insider hints into the lyrics. The opening line, thanks to the candour of Joan Baez in her autobiography, can also be seen in that light:

Sara was afraid of standing on a bridge over water that didn’t move. I thought hers was a much more poetic phobia than my own fear of throwing up and I wrote her a song called “Still Waters at Night.”

… in which Baez incorporates a rather unambiguous reference to Dylan and his Sara in the last verse (“Songs of the vagabond / It’s to you he has sung them”), and indeed processes that poetic phobia in the first verse:

Still waters at night
In the darkest of dark
But you rise as white
As the birch tree's bark
Or a pale wolf in winter
You look down and shiver
At still waters at night

So the lady is trembling on a bridge at night – a not too cryptic paraphrase of The bridge at midnight trembles, of that dreamy opening line of the last verse of “Love Minus Zero”. She probably has “gephyrobia, which is fear of bridges,” as Lucy tries to diagnose with Charlie Brown (in A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965, Lucy means gephyrophobia). In any case, it is clear: this lady would rather not stand on a trembling bridge at night. She’d rather be at home, curled up in front of the fireplace, with a nice, thick, old-fashioned novel.

By the way: that banker, Mr Bulstrode, is an avid horseman. And he is not the only one in Middlemarch. All through the novel, he does like to hang out with other horsemen, cultivating and discussing all kinds of ceremonies.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IX:

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

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

• NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• NET 1998 Part 2: Friends and other strangers
• NET 1998, part 3, What’s a Protest Song?

The complete Never Ending Tour index

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

During 1998, Dylan shared the stage with other performers, notably Van Morrison, Mick Jagger and Joni Mitchell. Dylan’s performances with others can be quite fun to watch, but rarely does Dylan do his best work on those occasions.

This scrappy ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ with Mick Jagger is a good example. Jagger jumps around plausibly, trying to look like one of those ‘British bad boys’ Dylan mentions in ‘I Contain Multitudes’. Dylan tries to hunker down into the song but Jagger doesn’t know the words. He can however belt out the chorus in fine style. Just  like a Rolling Stone? You bet. As I said, fun to watch…

Dylan also did some shows where he was the opening act for Van Morrison. Van the Man was riding pretty high in those days. Occasionally they would join each other for a duet. Here Dylan and Van have a fair go at ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. There’s a nice impromptu moment when master harpist Dylan finds a harmonica for Van to have a blast.

The two of them seem to enjoy themselves singing Van’s ‘More and More’. The grin on Dylan’s face in the last verse gives the game away.

Joni Mitchell joins Van and Bob for a rather moving performance of ‘I Shall Be Released’. It’s nicely impromptu, with each pointing to the other for taking the next verse. It’s great to see these three poets of rock music onstage together.

But, as I said, Dylan usually does his best work alone. Let’s pick up on  ‘I and I’, a song Dylan has been cultivating since the heavy, thunderous versions he did with Tom Petty in 1986. My peak performance of the song remains the 1993, guitar heavy version (See NET, 1993, Part 1), but this 1998 performance comes a very close second. The song is slowly disappearing from Dylan’s setlists by this time, but the power of the song is undiminished, as is Dylan’s commitment to it. (1^st July)

I and I

‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ and ‘To Be Alone With You’ are both in a lighter vein than the Time out of Mind songs, and ‘Blind Willie McTell’, ‘Silvio’ and ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, songs Dylan brought forward to sit alongside the album songs.

One of the most laid back Dylan songs of the sixties must be ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’, the last track on John Wesley Harding(1967), which was stylistically a taste of what was to come in Nashville Skyline a couple of years later. The lyrics are deliberately goofy.

‘Well, that mockingbird's gonna sail away
We're gonna forget it
That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon
But we're gonna let it
You won't regret it’

‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ is a warm song, and his jokes at love’s expense are gentle rather than sharp. It is, after all, an invitation to love, a night of boozy love by the sound of it. (14^th January)

I’ll be your baby tonight

Another from Nashville Skyline (1969) that Dylan picks up on from time to time is the bouncy ‘To Be Alone With You’. He relishes these lines:

‘It only goes to show
That while life's pleasures be few
The only one I know
Is when I'm alone with you’

and I can’t help thinking that the ‘you’ in the verse is the audience, even if that was not his intention when writing the song.

To be alone with you

‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’ also from Nashville Skyline, is in the same vein, only a touch more melancholy. I like the 1975 lyric change, ‘Throw my ticket in the wind’, but in this 1998 performance we get the original lyrics with the implied tiredness of the song beautifully rendered in Dylan’s cracked, aged voice. That voice reminds us that Dylan is now a rich old man, and not the poor kid who wrote ‘Only a Hobo’. These lines take on a special resonance because of that.

‘I can hear that whistle blowin’
I see that stationmaster, too
If there’s a poor boy on the street
Then let him have my seat
’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you’

That ‘poor boy on the street’ might have been Bob in the winter of 1962.

Tonight I’ll be staying here with you

That pretty much does it for lightening up the mood, the dark, sombre mood of Time out of Mind. ‘Born in Time’ (from  Under The Red Sky, 1991)  fits so perfectly into that mood it could have come from the later album. This song has always been a favourite of mine. Although the frailty and contingency of love might be Dylan’s overriding theme, to my mind it was never done with such delicacy of feeling.

‘In the lonely night
In the blinking stardust of a pale blue light
You're comin' through to me in black and white
When we were made of dreams.
You're blowing down the shaky street
You're hearing my heart beat
In the record breaking heat
Where we were born in time.’

In keeping with the high quality of these 1998 performances, this is a particularly lush version of the song.

Born in time

Talk about the frailty and contingent nature of love! ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’, with its elusive sub-textual narrative, says it all. We noted before how Dylan plays around with the pronouns in the song. In this version, the main character is the woman. The fact that it still works as well as the original, male centred narrative, demonstrates the equality of the sexes when it comes to regret and desire. The fact that the song sounds just as natural featuring a woman may be Dylan’s point in playing with the pronouns in this way. In this version he sings:

‘They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark.
She looked at him and she felt a spark
Tingle to her bones.
'Twas then she felt alone
And wished that she'd gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate.’

It works for me, especially in this slow, thoughtful version.

Simple twist of fate

‘My Back Pages’ (1964) was starting to fade from Dylan’s setlists, and this performance doesn’t add much in terms of innovation, or interesting arrangements. Still, it’s nice to hear a rare harp intro, and the solid acoustic performance. (23^rd October). If you don’t know the lyrics of the song, it’s a good idea to check them out, for there are some interesting complexities. I note how Dylan’s love life somehow becomes a part of the changes he describes:

‘Girls' faces formed the forward path
from phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
of ancient history’

‘Phony jealousy’ becomes entangled in morally rigid politics. To be free from the latter means being free from the former. Faithfulness to an ideology gets tangled with faithfulness in personal relationships. Again:

‘"Equality", I spoke the word as if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now’

My back Pages

Seen through this lens, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ flows naturally from ‘My Back Pages’.

‘You say you're lookin' for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you and more’

He could be addressing these words to the ‘corpse evangelist’ of ‘My Back Pages’. Again, there’s nothing too special about this performance, which has a rough, acoustic feel to it.

It Ain’t Me babe

‘Don’t Think Twice’ doesn’t come from the same place, more like the ‘restless hungry feeling/that don’t do no one no good’ from ‘One Too Many Mornings’. I quoted some of the lyrics of ‘Don’t Think Twice’ to my wife who commented that it sounds cruel. I think that is an aspect of the song; the indifference you need to cultivate to keep moving on has its cruel side. But here it’s an indifference touched with tenderness and regret. It’s no fun being ‘on the dark side of the road’. The song is best performed in a jaunty manner, as is this one from 20^th February. I like the performance but the rowdy audience is a bit intrusive.

Don’t think twice

Still in the acoustic vein, we have another old friend, ‘Girl From the North Country,’ a song animated by a gentle and loving nostalgia. It doesn’t have the bitter edge of ‘If You See Her Say Hello’.

Girl from the north country

There’s not much loving nostalgia in ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, either. Just the pain of the thought of what the woman in question might be doing without him. It’s a fine way to torture yourself, imagining your lover ‘in somebody’s room’. Sometimes the ‘dark side of the road’ can be very dark indeed. Dylan does a fine vocal here, but to my ear the performance is compromised by Dylan’s determinedly ‘off key’ guitar playing. I’ve mentioned Mr Guitar Man’s disconcerting style before, and it certainly comes to the fore in this version. Maybe he doesn’t want the sound to become too sweet. Your call, dear reader.

You’re a big girl now

Mr Guitar Man is less of a bother in this ‘Senor,’ and except for some upsinging, it’s a raw and powerful performance of the song. Whenever I hear this song I imagine a seedy canteen or bar near the Mexican border somewhere, some lonely end of the world place where you might forget what it is you’re waiting for, and you have to surrender to your gypsy fate.

Senor

The words that keep coming to mind to describe Dylan’s performances in 1998 are rough and raw. Dylan never allows the performances to become smooth, easy listening. Others can do that with his songs, often to the songs’ detriment. For Dylan, the experiences conveyed in the songs are never smoothed over or homogenised. The emotional edges are ragged, as the sound can be, often more so than the album versions, and Mr Guitar Man’s insistent dissonances never allow us to let our guard down.

So that’s it for 1998, folks, a big year, 117 shows, and there is another big, to my mind, better year coming up – 1999, on the edge of the millennium. We’ll catch you then.

Kia Ora

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

Joseph Rodman Drake be a member of the Knickerbocker group of writers, a number of whom are influenced by George Byron –  the British poet serves as a link between Joseph Drake and Bob Dylan.

In the lengthy poem below, a fairy of the night-meadows receives a sentence consisting of travails imposed by the elfin court because he falls in love with a mortal; the fairy makes it all the way to the heavenly-lit palace of the Queen of the Air who takes pity on him; she bids him stay, but he declines because he cannot forget the memory of his earth-bound lover:

'Twas the middle watch of a summer's night
The earth is dark, but the heaven's are bright
Nought is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky
(Joseph Rodman Drake: The Culprit Fay)

There’s rhymed ~ ‘night’/’bright’.

Brings to mind the following poem:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
George Byron: She Walks In Beauty)

There’s ~ ‘night’/’bright’ again rhymed.

In the song lyrics beneath, the situation is somewhat similar to that in Drake’s poem except there are no fairies anywhere to be seen – a satire, not a sylph, is in the air:

One more night, the stars are in sight
But tonight I am as lonesome as can be
Oh, the moon is shining bright
Lighting everything in sight
But tonight no light will shine on me
(Bob Dylan: One More Night)

There’s ~ ‘sight’/’bright’ rhymed.

A gnostic-like, black humoured jokerman prevails in a number of lyrics by the singer/musician:

I've never lived in the land of Oz
Or wasted my time with an unworthy cause
It's hot down here, and you can't be overdressed
(Bob Dylan: Key West)

In the ironic style of satire, Bob ‘Byron’ Dylan (as he once signed himself) wears the masque of a mortal Don Juan flittering about in a dimly-lit meadow full of hellish flowers.

As depicted in the following song lyrics:
Charlotte's a harlot, dresses in scarlet
Mary dresses in green
It's soon after midnight, and I've got a date
With a fairy queen
(Bob Dylan: Soon After Midnight)

He’s a physical-bodied, and chained-down-to-earth culprit, for sure:

Don't know what I'd without it
Without this love we call ours
Beyond here lies nothing
Nothing but the moon and stars
(Bob Dylan: Beyond Here Lies Nothing)

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

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

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

There is an index to earlier articles in the series here.

Tony: If you are a regular reader of Untold, you cannot but be aware of the work of Jochen, who takes the review and analysis of Dylan compositions to places way beyond anything any of us could ever have imagined – and then some.

Consider his opening comments on part 1 of his series on “Dignity”

“Oh Mercy! is quite a beautiful album… Otherwise we would have been forced to impose a serious reprimand on Dylan for omitting the masterpieces “Series Of Dreams”, “Born In Time” and “Dignity”. One reproach can still be made, though: “Dignity” would have been a much more successful opening than the equally driving, but melodic and lyrically much less catchy “Political World” – great song, but hardly as monumental as “Dignity”.”

You can read the whole series through these articles…

• Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess
• Dignity Part II: You can never play too much Bob Wills
• Dignity Part III: One line brings up another
• Dignity Part IV: I contain multitudes
• Diginity Part V: Nowhere to fade
• Dignity Part VI: The Gay Scientist

So I think we can safely say that the insights into the song have been covered – and the series of articles tells you everything you ever needed to know.

Yet there is one point from the opening article that I’d like to reiterate, for as Jochen points out at the beginning, “Dignity” was one of a collection of songs (like Angelina, Caribbean Wind and Blind Willie McTell) which Bob felt could wait for “better times with a fresh producer”

For the staggeringly beautiful and amazing “Angelina” were it not for Ashley Hutchings, the wait would still be going on, but Dignity has been brought back into the fold, not only by Bob himself but by others.   As ever, Aaron has made the choice, and it’s left to me (Tony) to ramble on for a while in the hope that something interesting might emerge at the end of it all.  Here we go…

Joe Cocker from his 1996 album Organic

You want a classic rhythm and blues opening – that is it.  And suddenly this is a completely new song, and this really does send shivers down my spine.

OK that might be because the central heating has gone off and despite it being mid-summer it’s rainy and cold in the England countryside.  But even so…

What works so incredibly well here is that the rhythm n blues approach is kept through making the instrumental breaks into 12 bar blues.  Such a simple idea, but boy does it work.

Brilliant.  5 stars. I love it.

Robyn Hitchcock from the 2002 Robyn Sings album

Robyn Hitchcock has a wonderful website which is worth seeing for its own sake.

And the music… just listen to what he does with Mary Lou – oh goodness, that is so, so clever.  And believe me if you think its just one idea then you’ve not tried to take a long song like “Dignity” and re-develop it in a way that shows respect to the original but still takes it somewhere else.   Nor is the engagement of the bass half way through.  Whoever thought of that.

Because I suspect many readers from outside my country won’t know Robyn I’m going to quote from his website in the hope that you start to listen to more of his music:

“A surrealist poet, talented guitarist, cult artist and musician’s musician, Hitchcock is among alternative rock’s father figures and is the closest thing the genre has to a Bob Dylan (not coincidentally his biggest musical inspiration).

“Since founding the art-rock band The Soft Boys in 1976, Robyn has recorded more than 20 albums as well as starred in ‘Storefront Hitchcock’ an in-concert film recorded in New York and directed by Jonathan Demme”.

The Low Anthem

This time: not a band I know, so I have to quote from elsewhere… “The Low Anthem is a band from Providence, Rhode Island formed in 2006 by friends Ben Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky. The current lineup consists of Knox Miller (vocals, guitars, trumpets, saws), Prystowsky (vocals, drums, double basses, synths), Bryan Minto (vocals, guitars, harmonicas) and Florence Grace Wallis (violins, vocals).”

Give it five seconds and you know this is another really worthwhile and intriguing reworking.  Love it.

Denny Freeman

There must be something quite magical about “Dignity” for it to be possible reinterpret in so many ways, and yet still keep the integrity of the piece intact.

Denny Freeman, who sadly passed away last year, played with Bob from 2005 to 2009 and on “Modern Times”   This was the band of which Bob said, “This is the best band I’ve ever been in, I’ve ever had, man for man. When you play with guys a hundred times a year, you know what you can and can’t do, what they’re good at, whether you want ’em there. It takes a long time to find a band of individual players. Most bands are gangs…. On this record I didn’t have anybody to teach. I got guys now in my band, they can whip up anything, they surprise even me.”

Francis Cabrel

Cabrel has sold over 25 million albums, and to quote the wiki article on him, he is “Considered one of the most influential French musical artists of all time.”   Very enjoyable version for me, and indeed during the past year I have started to listen to more Dylan in languages other than English – I should have started doing this years ago.  It really is a good thing to do to gain extra insights into the music.

Such a superb bounce, and great piano work without the feeling that the pianist is trying to show off.

Francesco De Gregori

We didn’t include a link to this version in Jochen’s first article in the series – and I’m glad to put that right now.  We have mentioned this artist several times however including including his remarkable Tweedle Dum

The point is that Dylan is not a poet, he is a songwriter, and the music of the songs is as important as the lyrics; that is part of what makes Bob so amazing.  Listening in a language that one does not speak (and for me, these days, even my French is fading away) really does help understand what Bob was up to.

Aaron – this is an utterly superb collection.  I can’t tell you how much pleasure it has given me to listen to these and try and find a few words to express my thoughts.

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

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

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

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins
• Love minus zero/No limit part VI: Fair is foul

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        Your silent mystery

The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen / Even the pawn must hold a grudge
Statues made of matchsticks / Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge

“His name and voice are fake,” says a spiteful Roberta Joan Anderson, the real name of Joni Mitchell, in the famous LA Times interview in 2010. In the interview, Mitchell lashes out. Grace Slick and Janis Joplin are both dismissed as drunken sluts, Madonna is sort of blamed for the fact that “Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980,” but Dylan gets the most pointed uppercuts. “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist,” says Joni and she concludes with a not too authentic antithesis: “Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”

It causes a stir, and continues to haunt her, despite her half-hearted denials in a CBC television interview in 2013. In it, she now lashes out at the journalist. “I hate doing interviews with stupid people, and this guy’s a moron.” The moron on duty, Matt Diehl, is said to have “misconstrued” her words, and her disqualification “asshole” is bleeped, but not bleeped too successfully.

Nevertheless, it does fit her profile, such a ferocious, insulting outburst, as in this case aimed at Dylan. In terms of content, it doesn’t, of course – in the forty years prior to this, Mitchell only ever said nice, admiring, deeply respectful things about Dylan. If in her presence a Donovan or a Bruce Springsteen is called a “new Dylan”, she usually snaps: “It’s absurd! Who in their right mind could compare that kind of talent to Bobby’s?”, and her standard answer to the question about her career start is:

“When I heard Positively Fourth Street, I realized that this was a whole new ballgame; now you could make your songs literature. The potential for the song had never occurred to me. But it occurred to Dylan.”

But the impulsiveness is most recognisable; Joni does have the reputation of being a blabbermouth, and especially in her many confessional songs, she is often frank, unashamed and clumsy to the point of embarrassment. Like in her “Dylan confrontation song” “Talk To Me” (1977), in which she again demonstrates self-knowledge in a carefree way;

Oh, I talk too loose
Again, I talk too open and free
I pay a high price for my open talking
Like you do for your silent mystery
Come and talk to me
Please talk to me
Talk to me, talk to me
Mr. Mystery

… Joni begs her mysterious and taciturn travelling companion Dylan, after she shamelessly recalls a drunken memory (“I pissed a tequila anaconda the full length of the parking lot”). In which she also places the beautiful, reproachful one-liner “You spend every sentence as if it was marked currency”. And in which she does not seem to consider authenticity very important:

That mind picks up all these pictures
It still gets my feet up to dance
Even though it's covered with keloids
From the "slings and arrows of outrageous romance"
I stole that from Willy the Shake
You know, "neither a borrower nor a lender be"
Romeo, Romeo, talk to me

A second “confrontation song” seems to be the duet with Michael McDonald “Good Friends”, the opening track of one of her very weak albums, the 80s misfire Dog Eat Dog. The content is vague enough; the good friend could refer to any of the men in Joni’s life, romantic or not, and is presumably nothing more than an amalgam of experiences with different men. But the third verse at least winks at Dylan:

But now it's cloak and dagger
Walk on eggshells and analyze
Every particle of difference
Ah, gets like mountains in our eyes

… in the canon there is really only one song with the phrase “cloak and dagger”, and Joni Mitchell knows that too, of course.

The cloak and dagger from the opening line of the third verse of “Love Minus Zero” is one of the many Shakespeare triggers, although of course Philip Marlowe is the cloak-and-dagger poet par excellence. But still, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet… the association with Shakespeare is justifiable. Dylan’s use of the expression, however, does not seem too significant.

Stylistically, this third verse marks a turning point. The earthy, “small” observations from the first half of the song – people reading books, people carrying roses – and the earthy, “small” settings – bus stations, dime stores – make room for charged, symbolically heavy scenes in theatrical settings. Apart from those archaic stage props cloak and dagger representing intrigue, betrayal and lust for power, the scene moves to a brothel where a madam has just lit the candles, the narrator suggests a mysterious ritual with “horsemen” and a meaningful collapse of “matchsticks statues”.

Very inviting, and plenty of analysts gratefully accept the invitation. And find biblical references (because Daniel explains a dream of a collapsing statue), or something of social criticism (the simple citizen, who is a “pawn” in the power games of the higher-ups, the “horsemen”), or see something with normative fading and moral decay in the madam of prostitutes who is “the light”… it is only a small selection from the many interpretation possibilities – this stanza is a big house with four and twenty windows.

Within the context of the song and the leitmotif antithesis at all, however, the textual interpretations do not fit so well. Here, the poet seems above all to be taking the next step on the same path; after the smaller antitheses such as ice/fire and success/failure, this verse illustrates, transcendingly, something like “complex, restless outside world” versus “simple, pleasant and quiet intimacy”. In expressing this, the poet is guided more by Rhyme & Rhythm and less by Reason. Hence the choice of the alliterating, rhyming and assonant four-tier dagger-dangles-madams-candles and the similarly melodious statues-made-matchsticks. The suggestive power of these, and the many symbolic charges that can be attached to props such as “matchsticks”, “pawn” and “statues”, is of course also recognised by a master literator like Dylan – but none of them are given the slightest hint of a fulfilment; we have to make do with these few cinematographic stills.

“Are you really exclusive,” as Joni Mitchell asks, “or just miserly?”

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VIII: A Study Of Provincial Life

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan And Fitz-Greene Halleck

By Larry Fyffe

Like Bayard Taylor, Fitz-Greene Halleck be a member of the American  “Knickerbock” writers’ group; Fitz leaves his mark in the Jungian culture of American literary history to this day though he’s not that well known anymore.

A Byron enthusiast, Fitz pokes fun at what he considers to be human foibles on display during the tenure of his stay:

... he excelled them all
In the most noble of the sciences
The art of making money ....
Flashed like the midnight lightning on the eyes
Of all who knew him; brilliant traits of mind
And genius, clear and countless as the dies
Upon the peacocks plumage; taste refined
Wisdom and wit, were his - perhaps much more
'Tis strange they had not found it out before
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Fanny)

Halleck’s not the only lyricist sometimes called the “American Byron”.

As evidenced in the song lyrics below:

Handy Dandy, he got a stick in his hand, and a pocket full 
of money
He says, "Darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?"
She says, "You got all the time in the world, honey"
(Bob Dylan: Handy Dandy)

Which brings us, dear readers, to the possible source of another song. In a long satiric epic by Byron, Don Juan is bought as a slave by a Sultan’s wife; she has him dressed up as “Juanna”, and put to bed in the Oda with one of her help-maidens. Later on in the night, the girl screams; wakes others. The young virgin ‘explains’ what happened – it was a dream (note: a rather Blakean vision) “and in the midst a golden apple grew”.

Beneath are more lines about the story that the maiden tells about why she screams, her ‘Visions of Juanna’ so to speak –

it’s clear that the author thereof is not at all amused by the neoPlatonic visions of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets):

Just as her lips began to ope
Upon the golden fruit the vision bore
A bee flew out, and stung her to the heart
(George Byron: Don Juan, Canto VI)

Albeit not so humorous as those above, take what you can from the following song lyrics – take what you can gather from coincidence:

He writes everything's been returned that was owed
On the back of a fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonics play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Since I was the one who invented the name “Untold Dylan” I am particularly aware that the word “untold” implies that we don’t cover stuff that other websites do.

And by and large we stick to that – but not so dogmatically that important issues are missed.  And so I make an exception for the announcement that Bob is to offer an online concert – or to give it the official title a “streaming performance”.

Which you almost certainly already know.

Indeed I appreciate that most readers of Untold Dylan will already have far more information on this and will have purchased their tickets, bought the official souvenir programme (or I should write ‘program’ since it will be published in the USA I imagine) and perhaps in a moment of madness paid an extra $500 for the bits of the show that the official performance didn’t include (which turns out to be 30 seconds of Bob walking from his dressing room to the performance area).

(actually I made all that last bit up).

But just in case you have missed it all, here are the details.  Not Untold, but still, I’d hate it if you missed the show just because I didn’t mention it (extremely unlikely though that would seem to be).

By Tony Attwood

This series of articles under the title “All Directions at Once” seeks to see Dylan’s writing not as a series of individual songs but as a response to the ebbs and flows of his emotions and feelings, and to his own creativity.  The songs responded to what he had written before, and what was going on around him.

It has turned out to be a complicated affair – and much longer than I ever imagined.  So complicated and so long that I have managed to get the numbering system of the articles mixed up, but I think I’ve got it sorted now… Below are the most recent articles with corrected numbers (just in case anyone is still with me), and there is a full index here.

• AD50: 1981 – farewell to the Almighty, welcome back Bob
• AD51: Dylan post Angelina: step by step it’s falling apart in all directions at once.
• AD 52: All directions at once, tangled up
• All directions at once 53: how to describe a feeling of loss (as the walls came down)

So now, this really is episode 55 – the start of 1989.

And by here my thesis is that during much of the late 1980s Dylan was casting around for a new direction in which to take his writing, and because of the frustration of not finding this at once, I believe he was tempted by the notion of the Travelling Wilburys project in 1988.  And yet ironically just before that took off, he did produce three songs of astounding merit, “Political World”, “What good am I?” and “Dignity”.

These, it can be argued, had a certain biographical quality within them, reflecting Bob’s attempt to get a grips with what he had become and the world in which he found himself living.   Those songs give a sense that Bob himself didn’t quite know where he was and what would happen to his reputation.   Was he going to be known, later in his life, for those magnificent early songs – a troubadour who carried on that bit too long and whose writing suffered an inevitable decline?  Certainly “Dignity” can have an element of that meaning within it, as indeed can “What good am I?”   Or was it the fault of the world around him – the political world is which we lived, and which despite the protests of the 1960s was never going to be changed?

That he saw himself as one of the old gang whose involvement with radical new musical forms of expression was now long gone, is reflected to a degree by his engagement with the Wilburys.  The band produced some interesting and enjoyable music, but not necessarily anything that could be compared with Bob at his greatest moments.

And yet, after the Wilburys, and seemingly out of nowhere came, “Born in Time”.   And here we have Bob suddenly leaping back to the top of his creative form.  For it is not just that the lyrics are have an elegance and beauty associated with some of his earlier works, the music goes to places we would never previously have associated with Bob.

But it is not only this and the Dignity group of compositions that are themselves remarkable.  Nor that it is extraordinary that these songs had to wait until this moment to emerge.  But it is that feeling that it is almost as if Bob suddenly remembered that he really did have the ability to take his music and lyrics anywhere he wanted.  Certainly he did this with “Dignity”, and he must have known in himself that works such as “I once knew a man” and “Dark Eyes” were profound, different and of the highest creative content.  He was just not connecting them together and seeing them as the outliers of a new round of renewed creativity and musical innovation.

Thus to me, looking at these songs not just as individual items but within the flow of Dylan’s work, we now reach a point where he thought, “oh yes, I remember where I was and what I was saying.  Right let’s have a go at sorting this out.  How can I say this differently?”

As a result Bob then he wrote this song of staggering beauty and we, his audience, gained  Dylan revitalised.  And not just for one song, for after this we were given some absolute classics such as Series of Dreams, Most of the Time, What was it you wanted and Everything is Broken and onward until we reach Man in a Long Black Coat

“Born in time” was played 56 times in concert thus helping us see that this song occupies a pivotal spot at the change over from the Wilburys back into writing specifically for himself.  Given the changeover taking place it is not surprising that Dylan spent so much time (in this song at least) changing things around.

The lyrics vary from version to version as Dylan did his thing of exploring and experimenting to see just how far this work could be pushed.  And the beauty of the cover versions also shows just how much Bob was experimenting with the musical form as well as the words.  Only the last four lines of the second bridge remain the same between these versions.

In the Red Sky version we have bridge 1 as

Not one more night, not one more kiss
 Not this time baby, no more of this
 Takes too much skill, takes too much will
 It’s revealing
 You came, you saw, just like the law
 You married young, just like your ma
 You tried and tried, you made me slide
 You left me reelin’ with this feelin’

And bridge 2 as…

You pressed me once, you pressed me twice
 You hang the flame, you’ll pay the price
 Oh babe, that fire
 Is still smokin’
 You were snow, you were rain
 You were striped, you were plain
 Oh babe, truer words
 Have not been spoken or broken

But in the Tell Tale Signs version we have

Just when I knew
you were gone, you came back
Just when I knew
It was for certain
You were high, you were low
You were so easy to know
Oh babe, now is time to raise the curtain
I'm hurtin'.

And then after the instrumental break

Just when I knew
who to thank, you went blank
And just when the whole
fires was smokin'
You were snow, you were rain
You were stripes, you were plain
Oh babe, truer words
Have not been spoken
or broken.

A huge difference.  And what we have here is a truly wonderful song from a man who has been mashed around by this romance but still is there loving her, forgiving her.  All that happens through the various versions is that Dylan reworks just how much forgiveness is delivered in those two bridge sections.

But above all we have the fact that at long last he had a song that he wanted to explore and develop.  A song that he loved and caressed and wanted to make ever more expressive.

I have one internet version; I am not sure if this is the one that Heylin thinks is the greatest recording of them all – it certainly has a huge amount to recommend it.

https://youtu.be/b5EpXuN__BY

God knows we can get all the way from here to there
 Even if we’ve got to walk a million miles by candlelight

God knows we can rise above the darkest hour
 Under any circumstance

God knows you ain’t pretty
 God knows it’s true
 God knows there ain’t anybody
 Ever gonna take the place of you

God knows I need you
God knows I do
God knows there ain't anybody
Ever gonna take the place of you

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Fair is foul

My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

It’s a bright cold day in April in London, and the clocks are striking thirteen, when we are introduced to Winston Smith. Every one of us knows the book, and it is still one of the most read books in high schools – Nineteen Eighty-Four is firmly entrenched in our collective consciousness. “Big Brother” is a household concept, “newspeak” does not need to be explained, the Trump era lead to a new sales spree and the return of the word “doublethink” in the newspapers, and anyway: the countless references in books, films, newspaper articles and music are effortlessly keeping Orwell’s masterpiece alive.

This anchoring in the collective consciousness is also demonstrated by the work of songwriters from the 1960s onward, about from the time when these songwriters ticked off their reading lists at school – which, in addition to 1984, are usually graced with Animal Farm as well. Stevie Wonder (“Big Brother”), The Kinks, David Bowie, Radiohead (“2+2=5”), Rage Against The Machine (“Testify”), Alan Parsons, Eurythmics… in every corner of the record shop there are A category artists who have based at least a verse, one song, and often more, on Orwell’s work.

Dylan cannot escape Orwell either. 1983’s “Man Of Peace” breathes 1984, as does the political reality in Dylan’s film Masked & Anonymous and as does the superhumans couplet from “Desolation Row”. Mr. Jones (“Ballad Of A Thin Man”) is the name of the farmer from Animal Farm who sees that something’s happening, but doesn’t know what it is, and here too, on Bringing It All Back Home, more than one Orwell bell rings.

“Napoleon Bonaparte” in “On The Road Again” is a first, accidental one (Napoleon is the name of the pig, of the protagonist in Animal Farm), and the opening line of “Gates Of Eden” a second.

Winston and the reader are from Chapter 1 onwards continuously confronted with the official party slogans war is peace, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery. The first of these we hear in “Gates Of Eden”: Of war and peace the truth just twists – of course, the line becomes extra remarkable because of the second part. After all, Winston Smith works at the Ministry Of Truth, the ministry where thousands of civil servants have a day job to distort the truth, to rewrite history. Especially the truth about war and peace; when the war changes again, when Oceania reconciles with Eurasia and now goes to war against Eastasia, Winston has to go into the archives to rewrite the old news into this new truth; of war and peace the truth just twists.

The third Orwell bell on Bringing It All Back Home then rings in this second verse of “Love Minus Zero”, through the best-known aphorism of the song, and one of the more beloved Dylan quotes at all: there’s no success like failure.

There are – of course – plenty of analysts and Dylanologists who see a deep truth in the paradox. Most of them come up with self-help management book wisdoms like “if you don’t learn from your mistakes you will never be successful” and “many false steps lead to the road to success” or similar clichés. Shelton sees “a reflection of the isolation of the American writer”, and the esteemed Professor Louis A. Renza once again takes the crown with the inimitable interpretation: “Dylan’s aphorism bespeaks an existential truism: one’s failure at social projects can lead one back to oneself, but only if one does not use such failures to judge existence as such, for then they turn into yet another wave of failure” (a book token will be raffled off among those who send in the correct solution).

Professor Renza even beats Dylan himself, who, encouraged by a young, attractive lady journalist, actually provides some kind of explanation:

But what does it really mean? He smiles that faraway, enigmatic smile again “When you’ve tried to write this story about me if you’re any good you’ll feel you’ve failed. But when you’ve tried and failed, and tried and failed – then you’ll have something.”

… from which, well alright, a kind of clarity emerges. Which a presumably startled Dylan then immediately tries to blur again:

“Look.” He’s sitting up again, intense, eyes bright. “If I met you in a bar somewhere, or even at a party, I could tell you more, we could talk better, I know it. But you’re a reporter, you’re here for your interview – and where will it all get either of us? Nothing will happen. You’re not even writing this story under your own conditions. And how much can you say? How much room would you have to say it in, even if you could say it?”

(Margaret Steen interview for The Toronto Star Weekly, November 1965)

However, despite all the euphony, classical brilliance and suggested profundity, the aphorism fails the critical test, especially thanks to the second part (“… and that failure’s no success at all”); it just don’t fit, to paraphrase another great Dylan song.

In spite of this (or because of it), the phrase remains popular, even with Dylan himself. In 2001, at the press conference in Rome, he plays with the notion in response to an Italian journalist’s question:

Q: Thinking about your 43 records, which one do you think was the most successful from your point of view?
A: Successful? To tell the truth I never listen to them. I’m sure they were all successful in their own way and I’m sure in their own way they were all failures.

… as Dylan did over twenty years earlier, in 1978, in the interview with the French journalist Philippe Adler for L’Expresse:

PA: Did you say that failure was preferable to success?
BD: Yes, because failure engenders success, whereas success is the end of the line. I’ve never had the feeling of having succeeded and I’m very happy about that. If I had had that feeling, I would no longer be around. Already long gone.

But undisguised and unprovoked is the poet of “Love Minus Zero” a year before that, in Ron Rosenbaum’s wonderful Playboy interview in 1977, when Rosenbaum subtly and value-free moves Dylan to comment on his bizarre motion picture Renaldo & Clara:

BD: I am the overseer.
RR: Overseeing various versions of yourself?
BD: Well, certain truths I know. Not necessarily myself but a certain accumulation of experience that has become real to me and a knowledge that I acquired on the road.
RR: And what are those truths?
BD: One is that if you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there’s no success like failure.

Dylan wisely swallows the second, nonsensical part of the aphorism. But then, a little later, another Orwellian bell rings when Dylan elaborates on the importance of failure with an equally loaded one-liner: “You fail only when you let death creep in.” Rosenbaum, as throughout the interview, is alert enough to keep asking:

RR: How does death creep in?
BD: Death don’t come knocking at the door. It’s there in the morning when you wake up.
RR: How is it there?
BD: Did you ever clip your fingernails, cut your hair? Then you experience death.

At first glance, it seems like a rather hysterical definition of death, but on second thought, it suddenly seems to illustrate the idea that Orwell, war is peace, “Love Minus Zero”, 1984 and failure is success are situated somewhere in the same corner of Dylan’s creative brain:

“Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?”
(from the last chapter, the torture scene with O’Brien and Winston)

But then again, Orwell, for his part, is also just one more child of Shakespeare, who like all of us had to read Macbeth at school;

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

… when the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won – the love for the paradoxical antithesis has been in our system for centuries.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VII: Your silent mystery

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

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

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Previously in this series:

• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 1
• Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 2: Best male rock vocal 1980!
• Grammies Part 3: Best rock vocal performance (male) 1997
• Best contemporary folk album

Album of the Year Winner 1998 – Time Out Of Mind

The nominations were

• Paul McCartney – Flaming Pie
• Radiohead – Ok Computer
• Babyface – The Day
• Paula Cole – This Fire

Aaron: In my reviewing of this award it would appear there was at the time much controversy around the decision to give Bob this award over the Radiohead album. The theory (in a nutshell) goes that, sure it’s a great late career comeback album, plus Bob’s recent health issues had led some to believe this might be his last album,  and maybe that’s why he won this one, but that the Radiohead album was groundbreaking, a one of a kind, one of the greatest albums of all time.

I’m going to ignore the Babyface and Paula Cole albums here as I listened to them and just didn’t like them very much I’m afraid to say! Not sure why they would be nominated along with the three other, genuinely great albums here? Particularly when there were also fantastic albums released that year from Bowie, Blur, Elliott Smith, Nick Cave not to mention Van Morrison’s brilliant The Healing Game.

Similar to Bob’s album, McCartney’s Flaming Pie album is another late career highlight coming on the back of The Beatles Anthology series. I’m a big fan of this album and am the proud owner of the recent 7 disc deluxe box set. Here are a couple of my favorite tracks

Tony: Musically this is a super track, but when we get to the “We always came back” I think the difference between McCartney as a composer and Dylan, comes to the fore.   I can’t imagine Dylan, in a song like this having a chorus which consisted of two lines repeated.   Of course McC was a great songwriter, but somehow for me he lacked that phenomenal depth that Dylan still had by this time.

Incidentally it is McCartney’s 80th birthday next year.  I imagine he’ll have the same interest uptake as Bob had – particularly in England.   If transport systems have opened I suspect Liverpool will have a year long carnival.

This is much better in my view: a beautifully executed love song.  For anyone who has been truly and deeply in love it is perfection in music.

But moving on…

Aaron: Ok Computer is indeed a once in a lifetime album. In 2014 , it was included by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

It contains my two favorite Radiohead tracks (plus Paranoid Android isn’t bad either!)

No Surprises

Tony: Yes well, as my friends will immediately attest a song that contains the lines

Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us

gets my vote, but oh I can’t stand the video.  That fear of drowning cuts in and I have to close my eyes.

I don’t have any Radiohead albums and am probably the only person in the country who doesn’t listen to them, but I can appreciate why this was nominated

Karma Police

Aaron: As to who should have won this one, my heart say Paul or Bob but my head says Radiohead. Let’s see what Tony thinks! Maybe I’m going to get asked to leave the site for that!!

Tony: The problem is history and life.   Historically Dylan’s album has been part of me.  I really can recall the very moment I first heard “Not dark yet” – and know exactly where I was standing (not just which city I was in, or which house, but the exact place I was) who I was standing with, what I said, what I did… the impact that song had on me was just utterly overwhelming and extraordinary.

And here’s a thought.  “Not dark yet” was Dylan’s first single since “Dignity”.  I’m not quite sure why that seems important, but somehow it does.

It was also the first time I started to think about Dylan’s songs not in isolation, but as a sequence, and I spent a long time listening to the album in that way – feeling the very specific connection between one song and the next throughout.  In fact (and in that very inward looking way that writers can sometimes have) I just looked up my review on this site written nearly 14 years ago (oh my could it really be that long?????) in which I started to explore the notion of Dylan riding a wave.

But enough… the Dylan album is of course an utter masterpiece.  Nothing else can compare.

By chance, my dance partner and I have been able to keep rehearsing during the lock down that has beset our country for the last 10 years (or so it seems) and by chance we’re just working on a dance arrangement of this version below.   It’s great fun to do, and by and large it keeps us ol’ timers off the streets.

Don’t worry however.  The few videos of us dancing are kept well out of the way, so unless you are attending clubs in certain parts of the English east midlands, you are unlikely to stumble across any of our reworkings of the whole concept of blues and jive dancing.

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

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Along with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, Fitz-Greene Halleck be a member of the Knickerbocker writers’ group.

Halleck’s poetry demonstrates that the author is an admirer of the English poet Lord Byron:

For thou art Woman - with that word
Life's dearest hopes and memories come
Truth, beauty, love - in her adored
And earth's lost paradise restored
In the green bower of home
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Woman)

Similar sentiments regarding a beautiful woman are expressed in the following verse:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies ....
Where thoughts sincerely sweet express
How pure, how dear, their dwelling-place
(George Byron: She Walks In Beauty)

The Knickerbocker poet in the lines below envisions Eve as personification of a new hoped-for America, an idealized woman in Paradise Regained:

'Tis she that listens while he sings
With blended smiles and tears
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Woman)

And if George Byron’s here, can Mary Shelley be far behind – perhaps it’s by coincidence, but Fitz gets jolted forward to modern times through the lines of a song:

Gonna jumpstart my creation to life 
I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years
Do it with laughter, and do it with tears
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

The vision of America presented above, and in the song lyrics beneath is one of Adam in a puritanical Paradise Lost:

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
I offered her my hand
She took me by the arm
I knew that very instant
She meant to do me harm
(Bob Dylan: As I Went Out One Morning)

At times it seems that, other than death, poetry and music are the only means to escape this world of woe:

Music bid thy minstrels play
No tunes of grief or sorrow
Let them cheer the living brave today
They may wail the dead tomorrow
(Fitz-Greene Halleck: Young America)

Fitz gets no argument from the modern day Byron:

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky ....
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

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

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

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