Untold Dylan

Beautiful Obscurity 

This series, compiled by Tony Attwood, takes a new look at the best ever – or at least some of the more unusual – cover versions of Bob Dylan’s music.  Previously we have had…

• Beautiful Obscurity: Acquaraggia play Dylan: a new experience
• What makes a beautiful obscurity
•  “The 100 Greatest Cover Versions of Bob Dylan songs ever”
• Beautiful obscurity: revisiting the alternative versions of Sweet Marie
• Beautiful obscurity: unexpected reworkings of “All along the watchtower”
• Beautiful Obscurity: such different renditions of Spanish Leather

Today, it is Every Grain of Sand.

We all know the song, and most commentators have had their bash at describing it, and nigh on everyone calls it a masterpiece. I think Jochen on this site described it perfectly, being “imbued with the Lutheran vision that suffering in this earthly valley of tears is our destiny, until death comes to redeem us.”

Nana Mouskouri has claimed that after a concert of hers she and Bob went out for a meal and “he wrote Every Grain Of Sand‘ for me” and thus Ms Mouskouri puts it on her next album.  Jochen’s view is that “The versions by Emmylou Harris, especially the studio version of Wrecking Ball (1995, produced by Dylan expert Daniel Lanois), can hardly be improved and overshadow all the other covers.”  I’m hoping I’ve picked up the right version here – Jochen do tell me if not.

The issue for everyone singing the song is whether to go with the snare drum double beat or not.  Ms Harris does, and she gets away with it completely because the accompaniment is so perfectly balanced, that the snare is never overpowering, and it changes as the melody changes for two lines.  Plus she puts in her harmonies there, and only there, to add  to perfection (if that is possibly, which technically it isn’t).

Jochen taunts us in his piece with a reference to the Blind Boys of Alabama version.  They feel the need for some sort of percussion, but not that normally used – but I don’t really understand the point here.  What is the drum part saying to us in this otherwise beautiful version?  It is, for me, as the lyrics have it at one moment, an indulgence – to such a degree I can hardly listen.

Luka Bloom vary the melodic line and add a new accompaniment but for me this feels as if everyone (musicians and vocalist) is simultaneously holding back but still wanting to be noticed.   I think the problem is exacerbated by a chunky rhythm with a clink counter melody that seems to be there because someone thought let’s have a secondary instrumental melody at the same time but no one asked why.

Above all I think this is one of those arrangements where everyone had an idea and they just let them all happen, without having an arranger in chief or producer or director there who is going to say, “Hang on guys, there is just too much here”.  Or maybe they were told but no one wanted to lose their little bit.

It is worth heading back from that experience to Bob, to see where he went.  He uses harmonies but they are restrained and the instrumentation knows it is background, and that is where it stays.  Yes there is a lot here, but every player knows his place just as grain of sand knows its place.  Except… my only concern is the harmonica… I don’t think we needed anything more.  There were enough instruments out there – but I guess no one could tell Bob.

There is a real temptation with this song to perform it as four solid beats in each bar, but that is not what the song really is, as we can tell with this edition from Madison Cunningham.  She has a gorgeous voice and can deliver a simple, straight performance without variation, but when stripped down to the minimum, there is a feeling that we need more.  It is just that double beat of a drum is not the “more” that I need.

Luka Bloom takes the accompaniment to a mid-point and in the opening seconds I feel this really is just what I need from this song, but then the change of the melody turns me away, because a fundamental part of the glory of the song is the melody.  There are many Dylan songs that can be given an extra life by changing the melody (Dylan has done it himself many times of course) but for me this is not one of them.  Or if it does need a new melodic interpretation, then it needs something on a par with the glorious original, and we don’t get that.

So let us pause for a moment and remind ourselves where Bob took this piece when he was playing it without the pulsing drum double beat.

It is a relief to get back to the original melody – what a gorgeous creation it is.  But is that a glockenspeil I hear behind; oh no!  Actually no I don’t think it is, I think it is an electronic keyboard with the “glock” tone clicked down.  So once again I find myself hearing something not needed.  Imagine this delicious rendition without the tinny twinkly pinging of metal on metal.  Fortunately the instrument is not always there so it can be done.

Twinkly twinkly goes the introduction of the Peter Viskinde Band- the influence of the glockenspiel is still here.  If you can listen to the version below and get to the “glory of the moment” when the glock sound has gone, I think you may see what I mean.  Sadly, the wretched twinkly sound comes back, and the organist even feels like adding a twinkle too.  I feel I just want simplicity.

And so thank you thank you Amanda Ghost (or possibly Gohst – as I have found it written on one site).  Yes you can have percussion, yes you can have a repeating bass (although if I’d do anything here I’d take it out), but I do like this.  And this version makes me think, maybe the song is so beautiful no human can actually fully realise its beauty.  In my head I know where it could be, but I certainly couldn’t arrange that in reality, even given the greatest performers on the planet.

Of course there are more and more recordings, and if you have not had enough, you might want to try these…

Each one goes somewhere new…

And yes, even Bob has a go…

While occasionally some to a planet I can’t actually recognise or relate to

And – blimey – you are still here are you?  Wow, that is resilience.  So yes, of course you need a reward.  Now of course I don’t know if you share any of my feelings for this wonderful musical creation, and quite possibly you have consigned my views to a dustbin marked irrelevance.

But this one is the closest to what is in my mind.

I got there in the end.

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Dylan.pl the band of Untold Dylan contributor and chief Polish correspondent Filip Łobodziński, is playing live on the internet on Sunday (or Monday very early in the morning if you are in Australia).

The concert lasts 50 minutes and runs through 12 Dylan songs.  The songs will be performed in Polish but the music is in the international language of music – and besides you’ll know the language because you know the songs – and if you are a regular reader you will know Filip as well.

Here are the the starting times (I hope I have them right).

• 1800 Western Europe
• 1700 UK and Ireland (GMT)
• 1300 Eastern Time
• 1000 Pacific Time
• 0900 Alaska Time
• 0400 Sydney, Australia.

Because of the lock downs everywhere this is the first concert of the band in 13 months so Filip suggests there might be some errors, but I am sure he is being modest.

Anyway, it’s probably your only chance for a while to listen to familiar tunes played live and explored in a strange language that you are not used to.

Below please find are the links to the event, which will be active tomorrow just before the gig and then for the next 24 hrs.

https://fb.me/e/5bXDNLCYQ

https://youtu.be/asUtOGeojYE

https://mokjozefow.pl/dylan-pl-czyli-bob-dylan-po-polsku/

Filip’s comment is typically modest, saying, “Of course, don’t feel obliged to watch it but I thought perhaps you’d just be curious.  And, above all, stay healthy, safe and observant (I hope you are in a good shape and state of mind).”

While you are waiting you might like to read Filip’s article on the top Polish rock band T Love

But better still you can listen to Filip’s band

There will be more about Filip on line tomorrow before the concert.  If you want to read about Filip we’ll be publishing that tomorrow.

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part IX – final

by Jochen Markhorst

• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part I
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part II: Johnnie, that’s called songwriting
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part III: Do right man
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part IV: Exquisite corpse
• More Than Flesh And Blood part V: Time regards a snarky bacterium
• More Than Flesh And Blood: VI – Muddy kickin’ in your stall
• More Than Flesh And Blood part VII: The line dances a jig
• More Than Flesh And Blood part VIII, Unsaddle, Charley

IX         Good groove, strong hook

A few months after his death (7 September 1978), Keith Moon’s unbridled, restless ghost seems to have found a new haven: The Knack. Especially on stage, singer Doug Fieger has an appearance and facial gesticulation uncanny similar to the young Moon, but the real spirit of the legendary Toilet Terminator is where it should be: behind the drum kit. There is the irresistible Bruce Gary, who should have gotten a Grammy for his distinct opening claps on “My Sharona” alone, and who has elevated himself to the status of the one and only True Heir of Moon the Loon, not least thanks to his staggering contribution to “Your Number Or Your Name”.

The story of The Knack is the story of a comet: fierce, bright and short. The debut single is a world hit in the summer of ’79, at the end of ’81, after three albums and six singles in less than 30 months, the band falls apart. Drummer Gary, who before The Knack had already built up a reputation as an accompanist to such big guns as Albert Collins, Jack Bruce, Mick Taylor and Dr John, does not fall into a black hole. In the 80s, he keeps on drumming, for George Harrison, Rod Stewart and John Lee Hooker – to name just a few – and starts a career as a producer. For The Ventures, for example, and especially for the famous Jimi Hendrix Blues compilation (1994).

His paths do cross with Dylan a few times. In January 1978, Bruce checks in at the Rundown Studios for the Far East Tour Rehearsals, which can be heard on the bootleg The Rundown Rehearsal Tapes (2002); Gary plays on three songs on CD 1 (“Going, Going Gone”, “Simple Twist Of Fate” and on that remarkably arranged “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”). Incidentally, that’s also the session where actress Katey Sagal (Peggy Bundy from Married With Children) can be heard in the backing chorus, which she has – understandably – been telling in every interview for the past thirty years;

“I was like 19 or 20 years old. I shouldn’t have been in the band in the first place. I’d already been in a band with one of these girls that was a friend of Bob’s. She said Bob’s looking for singers, come with me to the rehearsal. So I went. He just hired us, he didn’t even listen to us. So before I knew it, I was in the band. I worked with him for like two months in rehearsal, then he fired all of us girls a week before the tour. But I still always consider it like I sang with Bob Dylan. I don’t care if it was a week, you know what I mean?”

In other interviews, she is eighteen years old and starstruck, and the tenure lasts sometimes three months and sometimes four months. In January 1978, Sagal turned 24, and it can’t have been very much more than four weeks (the first rehearsal is 30 December ’77, the last before her dismissal 1 February), but who cares. As Katey says: “I always put it on my resume, ’cause it is so impressive. I was so impressed by it.”

Katey will never work with Dylan again, but Bruce Gary stays in the picture. In ’79, Dylan’s drummer and mutual acquaintance Jim Keltner invites him backstage a couple of times at the gospel shows, which make quite an impression on Gary. He is even invited to play along a few times, when Dylan wants to try out performing with two drummers, just like the Grateful Dead:

“I’d just left the Knack. Keltner and Kooper, on the same phone, called me up from New Orleans and said, ‘Listen, we know you’re depressed, we spoke to Bob and we asked him if it would be okay for you to come and play,’ because there’s two drum sets anyway. The drummer roadie was playing on the second drum set because Bob liked the idea of two drums at the time. So Kooper says, ‘All you gotta do is get on a plane and get to New Orleans, and we’ll take care of everything from there.’ So I jumped on a plane and the following night I played at the Saenger Center two nights in a row […] The best thing that happened to me was the confirmation from Bob, he came up to me, wanted to thank me, [saying] that I’d breathed some new life into the shows.”

… which must be the performances of 10 and 11 November 1981. A final collaboration with Dylan is most mysterious and takes place in June ’82. Bruce is called again. Whether he could drop by the Rundown Studios.

“He had a little makeshift studio setup, like an eight-track machine … He sat down at the piano and started playing, and then he moved over to the bass. This went on for about three and a half hours, just jamming along. He played guitar, keyboards, bass. It was all being recorded and the afternoon was climaxed by Clydie King showing up, and Bob sat at the piano and played a couple of songs … They ended up leaving together in a white Cadillac.”

(Clinton Heylin, Behind The Shades Revisited, 2001)

Also with Heylin, in Still On The Road, is the otherwise unsubstantiated claim that Bruce Gary produced “More Than Flesh And Blood”:

“Dylan and/or Springs decided it was far too good a song to discard, cutting a version for a Helena Springs single, backed by the tour band, produced by Knack drummer Bruce Gary.”

Heylin dates the studio recording September ’78, which seems like a mistake; September 15 is when the American leg of Dylan’s World Tour begins on the East Coast, in Maine, and Dylan and the band stay there, on the East Coast, for the rest of September. The song is played twice during a rehearsal (17 September in New Haven, Connecticut), and it seems rather unlikely that Dylan, prior to the tour, i.e. in the first half of September, had Bruce Gary make studio recordings in Los Angeles of an insignificant throwaway song.

On the other hand, the guitar playing, the sax and the bass do sound like they could be Billy Cross, Steve Douglas and Jerry Scheff. This is also Billy Cross’s guess, with reservations though:

“I remember the song and actually I liked it a lot. Good groove and a strong hook. Is this from the Street-Legal sessions or just a rehearsal recording? It was all done in the same room so sometimes it’s difficult to tell. […] I’m not 100% certain it’s me but since I heard the saxophone in there, I simply assumed that it was Steve Douglas and that would definitely make it the Street Legal Band and me. It also sounds like me but… we’ll never know. As to the sound, they re-mixed Street-Legal in the 90’s or thereabouts and the sound of the remixed CD is very close to the sound of that recording so assuming that they remixed this along with the album if they came from the same sessions… well that would explain it. I also think it sounds like Jerry on bass.”

The sound, Mr Cross means, is much clearer than the Street-Legal sound. The clarity of the remastered 1999 recordings is indeed closer, but it’s still unlikely that during that restoration time and energy would have been spent on a throwaway, sung by a backing vocalist. Anyway, the “More Than Flesh And Blood” studio recording is excellently mixed – so well, in fact, that it comes awfully close to the sterile 80s sauce. Not quite, thankfully; the synthesizers and bathroom reverb that make many of the 80s records sound so dated are not used here.

But a short paragraph on page 92, the show news page of the Ottawa Citizen of Friday, March 27, 1981 throws open the gate to Heylin’s “Bruce Gary hypothesis” again. Between the announcement that Dolly Parton is excitedly looking forward to working with Burt Reynolds on the film adaptation of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the tidbit that Eagles’ guitarist Don Felder will be featured on Jefferson Starship singer Mickey Thomas’ second solo LP Alive Alone, the name “Bob Dylan” stands out:

“Knack drummer Bruce Gary is producing an album by former Bob Dylan backup singer Helena Springs in L.A. Among the songs is a Dylan-Springs collaboration, Flesh and Blood. Players include Gary and fellow Knackers Berton Averre and Prescott Niles, with the Doors’ Robbie Krieger on guitar.”

Indeed, the drummer on the recording is exceptionally good, occasionally throwing in small, unobtrusive but definitely unusual, Keith Moon-like fills and at the same time seems to be holding back enormously – it could just be Gary Bruce. The introductory guitar solo, on the other hand, does not sound at all like Robby Krieger, The Doors guitarist who, for all his virtuosity and musicality, always remains a bit messy. It could be The Knack’s Berton Averre, though.

We can no longer ask Bruce Gary, unfortunately – August 2005 he dies at the age of 55 of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the disease that is quite literally worse than flesh and blood can bear. At the Tarzana Regional Medical Center in Tarzana, where Bob Dylan some 36 years before in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship had seen the Light. The Light that made him turn away from all worldly songs – like from the worldly song with the good groove and the strong hook that he had just written with Helena Springs, from “More Than Flesh And Blood”.

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

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

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This article follows on from All Directions at once: the first five directions which showed us that Bob exploded into the world of composition by writing not just many different songs, but songs for which the lyrics encompassed many different themes.  Indeed already by 1962/3, as Dylan established himself as the prime songwriter of the day, he was doing so not just by writing songs that became classics but also by moving seamlessly from subject to subject.

Indeed I would argue that it is his ability to write lyrics that take in so many different visions and subjects, that is a central part of his appeal and the reason he is so fully recognised.

For the fact is that there are so many superb, magnificent masterpieces in 1963 the question must have arisen at the time (at least among those who were aware of just how prodigious his output was), could he keep this up?   From “Masters of War” to “Times they are a changing” from “Girl from the North Country” to “One too many mornings” anyone appreciating this outpouring of genius could have been excused from thinking he was suddenly going either to explode or implode.

And I do want to emphasise both points that I am making here: that he wrote so many of his classic works very quickly, after only a few years experience as a song writer, and that then as throughout most of his life he kept changing his subject matter.

But of course such an amazing outpouring of great works meant that Bob became central to people’s awareness of new ways of writing, which meant that the pressure on him to carry on doing more of the same must have been enormous.  And yet he was able to resist and continue the “all directions at once” approach with songs focusing on social protest, surrealism, humour, love and lost love, blues, individualism and saying goodbye.

I do believe this is a point that is sometimes missed.  Dylan was not just a brilliant songwriter who was highly prolific, although that would have been enough to keep him in the public eye and to give him recognition at the highest level.  He was, from the off, finding new themes and styles.

The change in musical styles across the years from 1959 to 1966 are obvious – everyone is aware that he moved from traditional folk and blues to contemporary rock.  But there was far more to his musical shifts than that, although I am going to leave my commentary on the changes in musical style for another article.

But let us take just one year: 1964.  For me it is the sheer variety of Dylan’s output in 1964 that is the marker of that year.  From “Chimes of Freedom” to “Motorpsycho Nighmare” from “It ain’t me babe” to “To Ramona”.  From “My back pages” to the “Gates of Eden”.  What an amazing tour de force.  And that was just one year!

And then having had the relatively light year of “just” 20 songs in 1964, Bob came back with an absolute bang in 1965 with 29 compositions.  If we note that the first composition of the year was Farewell Angelina and the last was Visions of Johanna, we can see at once what an incredible year this was.

Then, as if that were not enough, 1965 seems to have been the year of everything, from the delicacy of “Love minus zero” to the insanity of “115th dream”,  from the disdain of “4th Street” to the sad farewell of “Baby Blue”.  But looking at the full list it really does look as if this was the year when Bob fell out of love with being in love.  (If you have not found it before, we have a list of all of Dylan’s compositions of the 1960s in chronological order of composition on this site).

To take a detail from within this extraordinary period in which, at the very opening of his career, he wrote 170 songs, there is a sequence of compositions part way through the period which really shows a troubled mind, a mind centred on discord and disdain.

• On the Road Again
• Maggie’s Farm
• It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry
• Sitting on a barbed wire fence
• Like a Rolling Stone
• Why do you have to be so frantic (Lunatic Princess). 
• Tombstone Blues
• Desolation Row

These are songs of moving on, confronting society, being tired, feeling nothing makes sense, feeling disdain, seeing life as a jumble, and there being no escape. He’s moved on, but still the world now makes no sense.  We cannot look at that list of songs written in a very short space of time, exactly in the order above, without recognising that this outpouring must have both reflected on Dylan’s inner turmoil, and also expressed his genius ability to move from subject to subject.

But we can also see the changes that happen.  For example, 1966 saw the interest in dada fade and be replaced by surrealism, with the songs of “lost love” still proclaiming themselves as Dylan’s dominant feeling.

I have several times set out to try and put all the songs into a classification of content and each time the answer comes out differently, and I would never claim that my classification is absolute, but I think the general trend does nevertheless become clear through each year.  Thus the table below is my latest attempt to classify Dylan’s songs by subject matter, year by year from the start to the Basement Tapes.  There is a more detailed review of 1959 to 1963 in the previous article in this series.

25 different subject categories, the most prolific of which were

• Moving on 27
• Lost love 20
• Humour 18
• Protest / rebellion 17
• Love and desire 13
• Dada 12

Of course some of these subject areas can be contested – no sooner do I put one song in a particular category than I am told that a) it is obvious that it should be in another category, b) I know nothing of Dylan’s work and c) categorising Dylan’s work is pointless because he is uncategorisable.

And of course everyone can decide if they would prefer to have no chart which explores Dylan’s evolving styles and approaches, or a different set of subject titles.  But if I may, perhaps I can point out that having a consistent set of themes is not as easy as it looks.  The one example of “Times they are a changin'” as a protest song is a perfect example.  The general listener has learned to hear it as a protest song, but in reality the lyrics say nothing of the kind.  They say, times change, and there is nothing you can do about.

Now from that point you can argue that this whole process of categorising Dylan is a farce; he’s a one off, he’s unique, he can’t be categorised.  And I’d even go along with that.  But, I find that by going through this exercise of trying to understand and list what Bob was writing about, helps me understand Dylan as not just a writer of individual songs that so many people admire and even love, but also as a man who has evolved and developed over the years.  Indeed my hope is that by sharing my thoughts on this, you too might see the value of exploring the subject matter of Bob’s writing, not in terms of each individual song, but in terms of an on-going process.

And the key point I take from these first eight years is that the title “All Directions at Once” is valid.  Bob does move around from topic to topic.   He has a range of topics within each year and he jumps between those, but then within a year or two he has moved on to other topics.

Plus what this little chart above shows is that there is no gentle ebb and flow in the normal sense.  Subjects appear and then vanish.  For every topic such as “Love and desire” which continues year after year there are several that appear and then just stop dead.

The question is, would he, beyond the period covered by the chart above, continue to travel in all these different directions, or would he find new themes that would suit him and which he could focus on.  I’m looking for the creative flow of his work at this point.

Certainly he slowed down, coming down to 20 songs in 1964, instead of 35 or more in the previous year.  So would he slow down again?

No, of course not.  This is Dylan, he never does what we expect.  Next came the Basement Tapes.

The series continues.  There is an index to the whole series here.

https://youtu.be/rfZpaaldLFM

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan And Subtle Irony

by Larry Fyffe

Contend a number of Christian theologians – The religion of Christianity holds that the bodies of the dead in the ‘afterlife’ get resurrected back to life, but without carnal desires; it’s a commune of brotherly love – just like Adam and Eve, supposedly, in the Garden of Eden before they get kicked out.

In songs concerning Christianity, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan sometimes follows in the footsteps of author Mark Twain:

Well, I spied me a girl, and before she could leave
I said, “Let’s go play Adam and Eve”
I took her by the hand, and my heart was thumping
When she said, “Hey man, you crazy or something
You seen what happened last time they started
(Bob Dylan: Talking World Three Blues)

More often Dylan offers lyrics that contain seeds of skepticism; treads he softly. In the following song lyrics, the narrator thereof references the Lord Jesus while mixing in a bit of subtle irony – he’s not at all sure that he’ll be assigned to Paradise, but hopes that the Lord will forgive him:

The death of life, then comes the resurrection
Wherever I am welcome is where I'll be
I'll put all my confidence in Him, my sole protection
Is the saving grace over me
(Bob Dylan: Saving Grace)

In the biblical verse below, not all the disciples believe that Jesus survives the crucifixon:

And when they saw Him, they worshipped Him
But some doubted 
And Jesus came, and spake unto them, saying
"All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth"
(Matthew 28: 17,18)

A doubt echoed by the narrator in the following song lyrics – easily construed as an ironic comment, a subtle one for sure:

When He rose from the dead did they believe
He said, "All power is given to Me in heaven and earth"
Did they know right then and there what that power was worth
(Bob Dylan: In The Garden)

The narrator in the song lyrics beneath clings onto the solid rock known as Earth; an undoubting, unambiguous speaker on religious matters, the narrator thereof is not; he ain’t no dyed-in-the-wool true believer that the Christian Messiah will triumph in the end:

It's the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit
Twenty-four hours a day you can feel it, you can hear it
Using every angle under the sun
He never give up, until the battles lost or won
(Bob Dylan: Solid Rock)

If Christ is coming back again to save all humankind, He’s sure taking His good time about it –  if He’s travelling by train, it’s a slow, slow one:

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

It’s religious dogma that irks the singer/songer, or at least the narrator, in the lyrics below – in this case, the doctrine of ‘original sin’:

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

And there’s the ritual of sipping of wine that supposedly represents the drinking of Christ’s blood:

Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could learn to hold you love
And call you mine
(Bob Dylan: Close Connection To My Heart)

A ‘selfie rhyme’ above~ ‘wine’/ ‘mine’;  with that below ~ ‘line’/’wine’:

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine
(Bob Dylan: Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jochen: More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part I
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part II: Johnnie, that’s called songwriting
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part III: Do right man
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part IV: Exquisite corpse
• More Than Flesh And Blood part V: Time regards a snarky bacterium
• More Than Flesh And Blood: VI – Muddy kickin’ in your stall
• More Than Flesh And Blood part VII: The line dances a jig
• Tony: All Directions beyond Street Legal: Bob and Helena unravelled (partly)

by Jochen Markhorst

It's more than flesh and blood can bear
More than flesh and blood can bear
Take the saddle off your horse and give yourself a chair
More than flesh and blood can bear.

Musician and graphic artist Robert Crumb is likely to remain controversial well into the twenty-second century. Not for his musical outbursts, of course. His music is respectful, tradition-steeped and quite safe. With his R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders, for instance, he produces catchy retro music in the twenties style, with Crumb singing, and playing banjo and mandolin. They make nice records, but the main attraction is the cover art; Robert Crumb makes the beautiful covers himself, obviously, entirely in his unique, very recognisable style.

Crumb And His Cheap Suit Serenaders – Alabama Jubilee:

No, Crumb is and remains controversial for his underground comics, for legendary notorious comics such as Fritz the Cat, the Big Ass Comics and Keep On Truckin’, which are full of sexist, pornographic and racist satire. As recently as 2011, Crumb had to cancel an appearance at a Graphic Festival in Sydney after local tabloids unleashed an outcry with headlines like “Cult Genius or Filthy Weirdo?” and activists’ quotes like “perverted images emanating from what is clearly a sick mind”.

Less disputed is Crumb’s more serious graphic work. The attraction of the record sleeves for Grateful Dead (The Music Never Stopped, 1995) and for Janis Joplin’s Big Brother And The Holding Company (Cheap Thrills, 1968) is universally agreed upon. And his graphic novel adaptation of The Book Of Genesis (2009) even reached number one on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list and number one on Amazon’s Christian Books List. Introducing Kafka (1993) is a masterly portrayal of Kafka’s life and work, his illustrations for R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country (2006) are a loving, music-historically correct tribute to heroes like Dock Boggs, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sleepy John Estes.

Crumb’s fascination for Kafka, Genesis and the old blues and country heroes connects him to Dylan, but the most remarkable, most evident common denominator is Charley Patton. Outspoken by Crumb in his brief (12 pages), brilliant graphic biography in R. Crumb Draws The Blues (1995), by Dylan most reverently in “High Water Everywhere (For Charley Patton)” and, just as unapologetically, in numerous interviews. “It is not an album I’ve recorded to please myself. If I really wanted to do that, I would record some Charley Patton songs,” he says 2001, commenting on his album containing that reverence, “Love And Theft”. “Charlie Patton, I always liked to listen to him,” he reveals to Bono, in the entertaining interview the U2 frontman conducted with him in 1984, and in 1978, the year he co-wrote “More Than Flesh And Blood” with Helena Springs, journalist Robert Hilburn notes:

“My music comes from two places: white hillbilly music – Roscoe Holcomb, stuff like that – and black blues; people like Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson. These are the two elements I’ve always related to best, even now.”

The love for Charley Patton (Dylan himself writes his first name alternately as Charlie and Charley) seems even deeper than for Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. On Highway 61 Revisited we already hear a quote from Patton’s “Poor Me”, Don’t the moon look pretty shinin’ down through the tree (in “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”) Patton’s brown-skinned woman Dylan greets just under a year earlier, in “Outlaw Blues” on Bringing It All Back Home. That brown-skinned woman comes from the same song that is one of the foundations under Dylan’s “New Pony”, from Charley Patton’s “Stone Pony Blues” (1934):

Got a brand new Shetland, man, already trained
Just get in the saddle, tighten up on your reins 

And a brown-skinned woman like somethin' fit to eat 
But a jet black woman, don't put your hands on me

https://youtu.be/JmJmYMuHSdo

… Patton’s own reworking of his greatest hit “Pony Blues” from 1929, which via arrangements by Son House and Arthur Crudup is enriched with the line Dylan will also copy in “New Pony”, with he can fox-trot, he can lope and pace.

In all those Pony songs, the saddle is used as the metaphor for what saddle is used for in almost the entire music catalogue of the twentieth century: get in the saddle usually means something like sexual intercourse, and if it doesn’t symbolise that, then it signals something like I’m leaving, or I’m on my way. At least in all those songs that are also in Dylan’s personal jukebox. In Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”, in John Lee Hooker’s “Pea Vine Special” (I’m gonna catch my pony, boys, saddle up my black mare), in “Black Jack Davey”, Aerosmith’s “Back In The Saddle”, in “Out Of Control” by The Eagles, “Streets Of Laredo”… in old folksongs, in blues, in rock and in country every use of “saddle” signals: action. Just like, for that matter, in Dylan’s own songs (“Country Pie”, “Tin Angel”).

But in “More Than Flesh And Blood” the songwriter demonstrates, not for the first time in his catalogue and not for the first time in this song, his fondness for inverting the cliché. The conclusion that the antagonist with the feeble mind is intellectually superior is probably an unintended result of the clumsy cadavre exquis technique Dylan and Springs seem to have chosen, but the remarkable sidestep in Time regards a pretty face like time regards a fool and the playing with the blues cliché mule kickin’ in your stall are nice, well-chosen language finds from a songwriter who is picking up steam. Just as Take the saddle off your horse and give yourself a chair in this last refrain is a fine, Dylan-worthy aphorism.

The introduction of the catchphrase as a metaphor for something like “settle down” or “stop living this hectic life” is successful in itself and, although obvious, strangely enough completely unusual. Poetic shine is given to the line by its correlation with the nearby association, with settle down, by the semantic mirroring saddle – chair, and by its technical perfection: another heptameter, a fourteener, exactly fourteen syllables, in a mercilessly tight metre.

Not iambic, but trochaic this time. Which will not stop C.S. Lewis from giving his blessing to this verse line too. The line dances a jig, after all.

To be continued. Next up: More Than Flesh And Blood part IX (final): Good groove, strong hook

——————————-

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

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

——————————-

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

The Beautiful Obscuriti series aims to find little known or even unknown reworkings of Bob Dylan’s music, and with this in mind I have been sent a copy of the album Pontifex by Acquaraggia from which I’m going to offer a few recordings below.

I must admit from the start I don’t feel that qualified to be able to comment on an enterprise as broad as this but it is utterly fascinating as it seeks to use Bob’s music as a method of bringing together two totally disparate musical traditions – something I have not come across before.

My own view is that the music on this album (and there are three tracks set out below for you to judge) incredibly intriguing it is not like anything I have heard before.  But of course that’s a dangerous thing to say; you may well have experience of this type of fusion.

Of course not having experienced this approach before leaves me at a disadvantage in that I don’t have a base line from which to build my comparisons or comments.  So I am going to offer these three tracks along with my own thoughts on what I find here – but I am keeping them much shorter than usual.

So in what follows please do remember this is just me exploring something that is quite new to me, and I am doing it on my own.  You might reach a totally different conclusion.

The essence of the music, as far as I understand it, builds from within the phrase, “A wall that unites instead of dividing.”  In short it is using the music of Dylan to combine the very different worlds of western and eastern music symbolised by the Great Wall of China, in a way that enriches both sides.

The first track from the album I have selected is my eternal favourite…

Drifters’ Escape

This is a project that has been realized thanks to the encounter between the celestial sounds of the guzheng (21-string musical instrument, of the family of zithers) of the virtuoso performer Chinese Nie Xin (called Silvia) and the band known as Acquaraggia.

The notion (as I understand it) is that the wall has become a connecting, peaceful, brotherly bridge between cultures and civilisations, between thoughts and moods.

I think one can see how this can be extended particularly here with…

Chimes of Freedom

Each song is thus seen as an exploration of backgrounds and sensitivity, to see where it goes which in a sense takes us back to Marco Polo’s exploration of the far east.

Giuseppe, who has been my guide to the album, gave me a particular insight when he explained that there is a sizeable Chinese community in Florence but there is very limited communication between Chinese and Italian parts of the city, despite the recognition of this reality through dual language signs in the city.

Thus the bringing together the music of two disparate cultures is an understandable response especially as there were musicians from both cultures willing to work together.   It was out of this that the idea of Dylan on the Great Wall emerged.

Blowing in the Wind

Band members are…

• Giuseppe Oliverio, writer, singer , rhythm guitarist
• Domenico Arcuri, playing bass guitar and ideas
• Alessandro Abba, electric guitar and ideas

Visiting musicians who usually play alongside the band are…

• Fabrizio Mocata, pianist, famous for tango throughout South America (www.facebook.com/mocatapiano )
• Gabriele Savarese, fiddle  player and Spanish guitarist. www.gabrielesavarese.com
• Bernardo Baglioni, guitarist , now working  and playing in the USA www.bernardobaglioni.com

You can get more information from giuseppe@acquaraggia.it

The Beautiful Obscurity series

• What makes a beautiful obscurity
• “The 100 Greatest Cover Versions of Bob Dylan songs ever”
• Beautiful obscurity: revisiting the alternative versions of Sweet Marie
• Beautiful obscurity: unexpected reworkings of “All along the watchtower”
• Beautiful Obscurity: such different renditions of Spanish Leather

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane (part I)
• Bob Dylan And Stephen Crane (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And Stephen Crane (Part III)

by Larry Fyffe

The Red Badge Of Courage” is an Existentialist/Naturalist  novel, the story of which takes place during the American Civil War. The indifference of the Universe to the plight of humankind is depicted as a cowardly soldier becomes a brave one after he’s assisted in his recovery – he being injured by a fellow soldier who’s fleeing from a battle.

The song lyrics below are about the Civil War – The historical General Jackson dies after being shot accidentally by his own men in the haze and fog of war:

Close the eyes of our captain, peace may he know

His long night is done, the great leader is laid low
He was ready to fall, he was quick to defend
Killed outright by his own men
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

The singer/songwriter/musician below pays tribute to an American neoRomantic-Transcendental poet:

A letter to mother came today
Gunshot wound to the breast is what it did say
But he'll be better soon, he's in a hospital bed
But he'll never be better, he's already dead
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

Drawn from the lyrics of the following poem:

Sentences broken, "gunshot wound to the breast, cavalry

skirmish, taken to hospital

At present low, but soon will be better"

(Walt Whitman: Come Up From The Fields Father)

Tributes Stephen Crane too whose God is much farther away than Whitman’s:

Black Riders came from the sea
There was clang and clang of spear
and shield
(Stephen Crane: Black Riders Came From The Sea)

Paid to the poet in the lines beneath:

Something came up out of the sea
Swept through the land of
The rich and the free
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

In the “The Red Badge Of Courage”, the soldier no longer sees war as Romantic as he once did, but he becomes heroic to help himself and his unit survive.

A motif expressed in the song lyrics beneath:
Let them say that I walked in fair nature's light
And that I was loyal to truth and to right
Serve God and be cheerful, look upward beyond
Beyond the darkness  of man, and  the surprises of dawn
In the deep green grasses, and the  blood-stained world
They never dreamed of surrendering
 They fell where they stood
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

And in the poem beneath:

"Tell brave deeds of war"
Then they recounted tales
"There were stern stands
And bitter runs for glory"
(Stephen Crane: Tell Brave Deeds Of War)

The poem below shows the influence of Whitman:

In Heaven, some little blades of grass
Stood before God
"What did you do?" ....
The little blade of grass answered, "Oh, my Lord
Memory is bitter to me
For if I did good deeds
I know not of them"
(Stephen Crane: Little Blades Of Grass)

Overall, far more Romantic and contented be Walt:

I loafe, and invite my soul
I lean and loafe at my ease
Observing a spear of summer grass
(Walt Whitman: Song Of Myself)

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

A new look at the best ever cover versions of Bob Dylan’s songs.  In the series this far…

• What makes a beautiful obscurity
•  “The 100 Greatest Cover Versions of Bob Dylan songs ever”
• Beautiful obscurity: revisiting the alternative versions of Sweet Marie
• Beautiful obscurity: unexpected reworkings of “All along the watchtower”

When I start these series on Untold I really have no idea where they are going to go.  Am I going to find something in them that makes me think the notion is worth following; are the readers going to enjoy it?  Ideally both of those get a yes, but I’ll go along with one out of two.

So far I’m not sure about the readers, because I’ve had very few comments, which rather makes me think I’m doing this for myself.  But as I just said, one out of two keeps me going, so I will do, even if (not for the first time) I am simply talking to myself.

This time we have Boots of Spanish Leather, wherein two versions were suggested when we did the original “Best covers” series a few years back.

Patti Smith, suggested by Mike Rude

This appears to be recorded in a near empty concert hall and yet the acoustics really do something – the echo just sends shivers through me, as if the two distant lovers are not just apart from each other, but somehow trapped in this empty environment.  It’s weird – I am not drawn back to playing it over and again, but oh, it will stay in my thoughts.

Dylan på svenska

The second contribution last time came from Jesper Fynbo.  Boots of Spanish Leather on Dylan på svenska which is on Spotify.  First please don’t turn away just because it is not in English, don’t turn away because you’ve got to get your Spotify account sorted out and don’t turn away because it sounds just like another straight singing of the song.  No, this is not that… please do play it; you know the lyrics so you can just enjoy a completely different way of performing the piece.

Now the one’s I’ve found…

Mandolin Orange. 

From the off we know this is a standard rendition of the music, and yes of course the guitar is spot on, as is the lady’s voice.  But then it is clear that we are getting the two characters singing to each other, and this is what makes it so worth listening to.  Because they are not going through motions – they really are singing to each other.

OK you might say so they should be, but believe me this is so much harder than it might seem just by looking and listening.  Yes they really are communicating.  What’s more they resist the temptation to bring the strings in too early.  But when it comes in, it is perfect, as is the final harmony.

What could have been a simplistic idea of two instruments and two singers becomes a rendition that makes me learn the song afresh.  I am so indebted to these two performers.

Trevor Willmott & Juliana Richer Daily

Here the harmonies are utilised at once and the impact is immediate, because the harmonies at the end of the verse are not those expected.  This is goose pimple land, heightened by the glorious range of the man’s voice.

One of the points about this type of performance is that the artists need to be able to be restrained – exactly the opposite of the rock band with cheering fans.  This is gentility to the nth degree; “how can how can you ask me again?” needs this completely, and they deliver.

I smiled all the way thought.  I like to think this was / is / would be Bob’s reaction to hearing this setting of his song as well.

Tyler Hilton

Strumming the guitar from the start is an interesting choice, because it gives a different feel.  They take up the emotion straight away because of that and the effect is a real conversation between the two.  The lady’s voice really is perfect; she gets every nuance from the performance; I feel they really are talking to each other.  How different from the version before.

Kiersten Holine

The idea of holding back the harmonies and then using them sparingly is an excellent idea – the song is so open to the harmonies makes it harder to show restraint, but there is a real power in the idea.

She is so sad when she looks at the camera it is almost unbearable.  Even though I have known the words by heart for so many years that I don’t want to remember how long this moves me as if I had never heard it before.

Dan McCafferty

This is another choice from Jochen made during his in-depth review of the song.  It is fascinating to hear the song wherein at certain times all we have is the percussion and a bass guitar as accompaniment.   I can just see the production meeting where Mr McCafferty announces that for this song, he’s going to sing part of it with such a limited accompaniment.   “I think not Mac,” says the producer.

But he makes it work, and the introduction of instrumentation and build up of his voice never goes too far.   It’s not my favourite, probably by this time all my goose bumps have been used up before I got here – but it is certainly worth exploring.

I had great fun doing this little piece.  If you would like to create a collection of versions of a Dylan song and then add your own commentary, or if you prefer, just send them to me, allowing me to comment, let’s try it.   Any Dylan song except the one’s we’ve already tried in this little series.

Thanks for listening.

by Jochen Markhorst

• More Than Flesh And Blood part I: Lousy poetry
• More Than Flesh And Blood part II: Johnnie, that’s called songwriting
• More Than Flesh And Blood part III: Do right man
• More Than Flesh And Blood part IV: Exquisite corpse
• More Than Flesh And Blood part V: Time regards a snarky bacterium
• More Than Flesh And Blood part VI: Muddy kickin’ in your stall

VII        The line dances a jig

I'm going down to find a church that I can understand
I need new inspiration and you're only just a man.
And with the blackjack table I can't play another hand,
The meat you cook for me is bloody rare 
It's more than flesh and blood can bear

Sinéad O’Connor is a certified Dylan fan. “Slow Train Coming is my favourite album of all time,” she says in 2009, and Street-Legal‘s “Baby Stop Crying” is in her Top 10 favourite songs. Sinead’s congratulatory cum love letter to birthday boy Bob Dylan in 2011, in the Huffington Post, is above all awkward, but the love is real (“I only meant to tell you you’re gorgeous. So have seventy kisses for yourself on Tuesday”).

Her Dylan covers are almost all successful, and her “I Believe In You” even belongs in the very select club of the most beautiful Dylan covers ever. O’Connor is able to balance on the edge of hysteria, on a good day she has an angelic appearance, she is steeped in Catholicism and her breath-taking voice is ethereal – all of which happen to be excellent qualities for the ultimate performance of “I Believe In You”.

There are – of course – plenty of Dylan traces in her own work, but with some goodwill, you might even assume something like cross-pollination on 2020’s Rough And Rowdy Ways. Dylan’s song “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, which seems to have Sinéad’s birthplace and homeland Ireland as a backdrop anyway, opens with

I live on a street named after a saint
Women in the churches wear powder and paint

It is safe to assume that at least O’Connor’s heart has made a leap; the unconditionally infatuated long-distance admirer may lose herself in the belief that Dylan is making an allusion to her little hit “4th And Vine” from 2012;

Gonna put my pink dress on
And do my hair up tight
I'm gonna put some eyeshadow on
It's gonna look real nice
I'm going down to the church
On 4th & Vine

It’s a charming song in which the protagonist sings of her happiness: she’s going down to the church today to marry the sweetest man you could find, so gentle and so kind, and beautiful brown eyes he has too – he’s a brown-eyed handsome man. The address of the church, 4th and Vine, is nowhere to be found in Ireland, but seems especially Dylan-inspired (“Positively 4th Street” and Twelfth Street and Vine from “High Water”). And in the last verse her future husband takes her on a buggy ride – just like the protagonist in Dylan’s “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” does (I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane). Of course, the phrase “down to the church” only coincidentally mirrors the opening line of the last verse of “More Than Flesh And Blood”, but still, it’s a nice coincidence.

This last verse is poetically without doubt the strongest verse of the song. Only one weak line, the rest is all right – Dylan the Poet is clearly coming into his own, and has taken the helm from Springs, or so it seems.

The first three lines, the opening tercet, is good old craftsmanship. Three times fourteen syllables, tightly metrical: iambic heptameters – it is the first time in this unsteady, wobbly song text that a unity of three form-retaining, classical lines of poetry is presented. In an archaic, indestructible form, too. The first English translations of Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey were written by George Chapman in these so-called fourteeners (1616), C.S. Lewis disliked the six-foot alexandrines, and argued with infectious enthusiasm for the beauty of the seven-foot heptameter (“The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one: the line dances a jig”) and Lewis’ friend Tolkien regularly chooses them for the poems in The Lord Of The Rings. As in Treebeard’s “The Ent And The Entwife” (The Two Towers, 1954):

When Spring unfolds the beechen leaf, and sap is in the bough;
When light is on the wild-wood stream, and wind is on the brow;
When stride is long, and breath is deep, and keen the mountain-air,
Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is fair!

At least as relieving as the consistent, tight form with “the pleasant movement” is the epic quality of Dylan’s tercet:

I'm going down to find a church that I can understand
I need new inspiration and you're only just a man.
And with the blackjack table I can't play another hand

… fascinating in content, beautiful, loaded words. Extra charged, of course, because of Dylan’s impending, much-discussed conversion, because of the biographical fact that shortly afterwards he will indeed find a church that he understands and that will give him new inspiration, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Tarzana, Los Angeles (unfortunately not on the 4th and Vine).

Nice, this biographical line, but also coincidental, supposedly. The “search for a church” is not elaborated in this song, is not a theme. The associative poetic genius Dylan is probably triggered by previously used, religiously charged jargon like “flesh and blood”, “spirit”, “pure”, “lily and garment” – all Biblical, all leading the stream of consciousness towards church. Perhaps the evergreen “Down To The River To Pray” has popped up, the nineteenth-century classic that survives into the twenty-first century thanks to Alison Krauss’ phenomenal performance on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou (Coen Brothers, 2000) and the huge sales success of that soundtrack;

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way

… from the album that tempts Dylan to an unequivocal declaration of love: “I was delighted with this album and even watched the movie” (press conference Rome, 2001). Understandable; the album features almost exclusively beautiful performances of songs that are in Dylan’s heart, songs like “Man Of Constant Sorrow”, “Po’ Lazarus” and “Hard Time Killing Floor”, songs performed by artists who are on a pedestal with Dylan anyway, such as The Stanley Brothers and Emmylou Harris – and Ralph Stanley’s “O Death”, of course.

But in 1978, at a time when he is intensely preoccupied with old blues, it is more likely that the creative part of Dylan’s poetic brain gets hooked on John Lee Hooker, on “Burning Hell” (1959):

I'm going down to the church house
Get down on a bended knee
Deacon Jones pray for me
Deacon Jones please pray for me

Irresistible in the blazing performance by old-timer Tom Jones, on his remarkable old-school masterpiece Praise & Blame (2010). The album opens with a brilliant performance of Dylan’s “What Good Am I?”, so brilliant that it earns him the ultimate compliment from the master himself: Jones is one of twelve artists who are selected by Dylan to come over and sing a Dylan song at the MusiCares event in 2015.

In his autobiography Over The Top And Back (2015) Tom Jones remembers that honour with still bewildered gratitude, in the chapter that he also names What Good Am I. When, after the performances, he sits at a table and listens to that overwhelming speech by Dylan (“the most remarkable piece of oratory I’ve ever heard from a musician”), he sits there “enthralled – enthralled and also amazed to have played a humble part in that evening.”

The rediscovered poetic vein, Dylan’s superior linguistic gifts, John Lee Hooker… it all leads to the most successful tercet of “More Than Flesh And Blood”. For the sake of convenience, let’s ignore the following miss, the lousy poetry of The meat you cook for me is bloody rare. After all, there soon will be a next, last, flash of poetic brilliance.

To be continued. Next up: More Than Flesh And Blood part VIII: Unsaddle, Charley

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

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

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting at 30 seconds into the recording.

Tell me What kind of friend is this?
What kind of friend is this?
Who loves me behind my back
What kind of friend is this
Shows up every place I've been
She act kind of 'lone
but she don't
She making a loan
But you know she won't
She so languid in the morning
And she's making it on my bed
Aw, what kind of friend is this?

What kind of friend is this?
What kind of friend is this?
makin' [...]
What kind of friend is this?
Losing up anything
Back off, boy
When she goes down
[Lay down laid]
She's walking around
Well, she ain't got nothin'
but she's teedle toodle tummin' on a
pack of beans
Tell me what kind of friend is this?

Well she [don't lean if she don't man]
You know she's gonna be her dog.
She [done gone], She no whore
Heart stopped a-beating and she [...]

Well, what kind of friend is this
make me holler to and fro
who wants to go everywhere I wanna go
Back off, she
don't care for me
[...] own lady
if she could only see
I'd give her everything
If she comes back along to this 
Tell me what kind of friend is this?

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series…

• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part I: Lousy poetry
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part II: Johnnie, that’s called songwriting
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part III: Do right man
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part IV: Exquisite corpse
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part V: Time regards a snarky bacterium

VI         Muddy kickin’ in your stall

Time regards a pretty face like time regards a fool
You drive off in your Cadillac and leave me with the mule
In order to keep up with you I must go back to school
I see right through the wicked way you stare
And that's more than flesh and blood can bear

 Muddy Waters hovers like a spirit on the water over Dylan’s entire oeuvre. Both in the liner notes to Bob Dylan and to The Freewheelin’, Muddy’s influence is acknowledged in so many words, an influence that Dylan keeps stressing in interviews in every decade of his career; he consistently lists him among Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and Bill Monroe. In Theme Time Radio Hour, the old blues hero is one of the radio broadcaster’s absolute favourites with eight spins, and the Muddy-rip off “Rollin’ And Tumblin’” on Modern Times (2006) is perhaps not the first, but certainly the most overt reverence in Dylan’s catalogue.

In later years, or rather from 1978 on, not only Waters’ music, but also his work ethic is a reference point; Dylan invariably mentions Muddy as an example, when asked why he still performs so much. In 1978 even twice, in quick succession, both times in Australia. The first time in the interview with Craig McGregor, 12 March in Brisbane:

CM: Tell me why you’re getting back on the road again; do you really like it?
BD: It’s not that I like it or dislike it; it’s what I’m destined to do. Muddy Waters is still doing it, and he’s 65.

… and again three weeks later, when Karen Hughes in Sydney asks something similar: “I’ll just be doing this until the fire’s burnt out. Muddy Waters is still playing, he’s 65-66 […] It’s not uncommon to be 65 to 70. Muddy Waters, I keep coming back to Muddy Waters.”

The maximum age seems to move with Dylan’s own age, by the way. In 1986, when he himself starts approaching the Big 5, he says: “People like T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters — these people who played into their sixties. If I’m here at eighty, I’ll be doing the same thing.”

In 1978, when Dylan says he keeps coming back to Muddy Waters, he does demonstrate this on stage. Back in the States, Muddy Waters’ “I’m Ready” suddenly appears on the set list. In September, October and November, Dylan performs the song more than twenty times, always as the first or second number of the evening. Actually, it is a Willie Dixon song, but it is one of the few songs Dixon wrote explicitly for Muddy, as biographer Inaba reconstructs (in Preacher Of The Blues, 2011):

The inspiration for “I’m Ready” occurred when Willie Foster, harmonica player for Muddy’s tour band, visited Muddy’s house to leave for a concert tour together. As the story goes, when Foster knocked on the door, Dixon, who was visiting Muddy, answered it because Muddy was busy shaving. From the bathroom, he asked Foster, “Are You Ready?” and then Foster said, “Ready as anybody can be.” Muddy remembers, “[I said,] ‘Willie, are you thinking about what I’m thinking about? Let’s make a song out of it.’… It took [Dixon] three days, I think, to finish it out.”

The first verse immediately demonstrates that the song has been under Dylan’s skin since at least 1965, since Highway 61 Revisited:

I gotta ax handle pistol, on a graveyard frame
That shoots tombstone bullets, wearing balls and chain
I'm drinkin' TNT, smokin' dynamite
I hope some screwball start a fight

… the steps from a graveyard frame to I got this graveyard woman, from smokin’ dynamite to lookin’ for the fuse and from tombstone bullets to tombstone blues are not that big, anyway. And it’s played by one of Dylan’s all-time favourite bands; when Spin Magazine asks him in 1985 to fill out the “Five bands I wish I had been in” list, Dylan puts “Muddy Waters’ Chicago band (with Otis Spann and Little Walter)” in third place.

Helena Springs recalls that she started writing songs with Dylan in Australia at the time. It is then an educated guess that “More Than Flesh And Blood” is being produced in or around these days – in the days when Muddy Waters is apparently haunting Dylan’s mind more prominently again. In this song, that suspicion is raised by this one line:

 You drive off in your Cadillac and leave me with the mule

In the entire blues canon, there is probably only one song in which both a Cadillac and a mule are part of the scenery, and that is Muddy Waters’ “Long Distance Call”;

One of these days I'm going to show you just 
     how nice a man can be
I'm going to buy you a brand new Cadillac
If you only speak some good words about me
Hear my phone ringing, sound like a long distance call
When I picked up my receiver, the party said another mule 
     kicking in your stall

Dylan is undoubtedly familiar with the song. It was a big hit in 1951 and is still considered one of Waters’ Greatest Hits – DJ Dylan also plays this song, in 2006.

The use of mule in “More Than Flesh And Blood”, however, leads to a confusing plot twist. In the blues, “another mule” is the metaphor for the bastard who’s doing your girl. We owe that attribution to that same Willie Dixon; apart from in “Long Distance Call”, he also uses it three years later for “Evil (Is Goin’ On)”, which is recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in ’54. Wolf’s re-recording in 1969 even gives him his last hit (and Dylan copies the stomp and the sound in songs like “Lonesome Day Blues” and “Cry A While”). Muddy himself uses the phrase for the song he gives to his legendary pianist Otis Spann, who records it just before his death in 1970 and releases it on Cryin’ Time as the closing track: “Mule Kickin’ In My Stall”. There, too, the meaning of the metaphor is hardly puzzling:

I let a mule kicking in my stall
Let a mule kicking in my stall
I gonna kill that mule
Have no trouble at all

Woman I'm loving girl she out of sight
Woman I'm loving she out of sight
The mule let me see the light
Another mule kicking in my stall
If I found that mule won't be no mule at all

And through Old Crow Medicine Show, the phrase survives into the twenty-first century. On their definite breakthrough, in the four minutes allotted on their debut at The Grand Ole Opry, January 2001, they opt for a high-speed rendition of “Tear It Down”:

Every time I'd hit her she'd holler "Police" 
Cook them biscuits, cook 'em brown 
Done talkin' I'll tear it around 
If you catch another mule kickin' in your stall 
Then tear it down

The mention of a mule by Dylan and Springs in “More Than Flesh And Blood” would then suddenly insinuate that the female protagonist is adulterous and has just been caught by the antagonist. He takes off in his Cadillac, and she stays behind, with the mule – with her now-not-so-secret-anymore lover.

In itself, a nice, Dylan-worthy inversion of the blues cliché. Instead of bloody fantasies of revenge about what the protagonist will do to his slut wife and that mule (as with Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and Old Crow Medicine Show), this cuckold says: OK, bye. And, merrily honking goodbye in his Cadillac, just leaves the cheating trollop behind with the mule, with his love rival.

Attractive, but unlikely. This plot twist, or this scenario at all, finds no confirmation in the rest of the text. Just as this one line, like many verse lines in this song, is difficult to fit into the line before and the lines after it. “In order to keep up with you I must go back to school” suggests, alienatingly enough, an otherwise unspecified intellectual superiority of the antagonist, who a stanza ago still had a “feeble mind”. “I see right through the wicked way you stare” is just as empty; didn’t the intellectually superior ex-lover with the feeble mind just drive off in his Cadillac?

Perhaps he is still wickedly staring in his rear-view mirror at her, sultry regarding her pretty face, the fool.

To be continued. Next up: More Than Flesh And Blood part VII: The line dances a jig

——————-

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

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

———————

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

The most recent editions of the “All Directions at once” series are…

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

In the on-going series, “All directions at once,” I’ve been looking at Dylan’s compositions as a connected series of artistic creations, seeing how Dylan moved across various themes through his writing, and in particular noting how although certain themes could grip him for a while, he could also suddenly move in a new direction.  At other times he’d just jump from one theme to another.

I’ve now reached 1979, the year in which Dylan changed from being a man who wrote on multiple subjects, to the man who wrote exclusively about one subject.   That was a dramatic change and a pivotal moment.

So this seems like a good time to go back over the 41 episodes and try and make sense of the review so far, seeing if it is possible to gain an overview and check that there really has been a connected ebb and flow within Dylan’s writing, rather than his work being a series of jumps from one creation to another.

To begin, what are the key factors that seem to stand out.

1.  A song is like a painting, or a novel – it doesn’t have to be real.

First, although some songs have a meaning, some are just observations, and some appear as an abstract a set of images, which may or may not be centred around a theme – a theme which may or may not be little more than hinted at.

In short I don’t think each Dylan song is about something concrete.  Likewise if the song is about something, it doesn’t have to be definitive in its position.  Furthermore a song about a person doesn’t have to portray that person exactly, any more than a portrait or a cartoon has to be like the individual.  Additionally, there is nothing in the guidebook to song writing to say that the writer’s view have to be consistent nor that they have to be coherent.

Thus if Dylan writes about John Wesley Hardin, Tom Paine, Blind Willie McTell, Casanova, TS Eliot, Rubin Hurricane Carter, Joey Gallo, Lenny Bruce, Rita Mae, Rubin Hurricane Carter… he often feels free to play with reality, just as an artist might do in painting a picture.  If you want to explore the characters further there is an interesting website that will help.  

2.  Dylan the plagiarist – so what?

Shakespeare was a pretty good writer.  But he was also one hell of a plagiarist.  I’ve often written that “All the world’s a stage” is the one of the greatest metaphors of our language, but it’s most certainly not a Shakespeare original.

Some might declare that plagiarism diminishes Dylan’s work, but I can’t recall writers claiming that knowing the he nicked some ideas and phrases diminishes Shakespeare’s work.  The point here is that the song is far more than the lyrics alone, and the lyrics are far more than the individual phrases.

And using other people’s phrases and music has happened in writing across the centuries, although I’d complain like mad if he nicked one of mine.

3.  Songs about people and situations don’t have to be true, real, or realistic

If Dylan writes a song that says “I love you” or “Why did you leave me?” it doesn’t have to be about an individual or his feelings.  Blind Willie McTell isn’t about the singer, it is not true that no one could sing the blues as he could, and Dylan’s music isn’t anything like a McTell song.

From which we can conclude that Dylan doesn’t have to believe in something in order to write about it, no more than just because a science fiction writer writes about a group of aliens abducting children he/she actually believes that is happening.

Sometimes yes, his personal feelings will come through, but that doesn’t mean that everything he writes is what he feels, anymore than a playwright believes that her or his characters on the stage are actually true people.

I think these notions are perfectly obvious, and yet think of the headline asking if Dylan actually cares about the people he writes about, and all the pieces saying “this guy wasn’t a hero he was a murderer” or whatever.  Now consider the caricaturist – and ponder why we don’t ask if he or she cares about the people who are drawn.

My point is simple: in all media, the artist has every right to stand aside and reflect on what she or he sees through the art created, no matter what form it is in.

4.  Bob has themes and images 

They don’t have to be particularly exciting themes but he makes something of them.  Railroad tracks, moving on, love, lost love….   They are simply his themes and images and if we choose to believe that they mean something beyond themselves, then we need to have lots of evidence – not the evidence of just one song.

Bob never told us to rise up and overthrow the tyrant.  He doesn’t (any more) say “Worship the Almighty,” or “get up and move on”.   Rather he says, “here’s an image which you might find interesting…”

Indeed as he actually said, “A lot of times you’ll just hear things and you’ll know that these are the things that you want to put in your song. Whether you say them or not. They don’t have to be your particular thoughts. They just sound good,” (talking to Bill Flanagan in 1986).  I think this is one of Bob’s most important statements concerning songwriting.  He went on…

“I didn’t originate those kinds of thoughts. I’ve felt them, but I didn’t originate them. They’re out there, so I just use them.”  In short what is in the songs is not necessarily what Bob Dylan feels or believes.  It can be, but isn’t always, and it is not always self-evident what is from real life and what is not.

As a result of his interest in many different themes, from urban poverty to Kafka, from moving on to the rural poor, Dylan is able to create works that can within them have multiple possible meanings.

And maybe that’s what many of us find so wonderful about Dylan: he gives us the power to interpret his work.  He doesn’t tell me how it is.  He hints, rather like a Turner painting.  And while he’s at it, he empowers those who wish to be empowered, by showing us the options and the possibilities.

The early songs

From 1959 to 1961 Dylan was learning his craft and the recordings of some of the songs he wrote have survived; I suspect there were many, many more which were jotted down and not retained.  Indeed had such notes been retained they would only be of interest because of what came later, but what we do know is that Bob was constantly experimenting.

As a way of considering these songs I have previously created a summary of the subject matter of all the songs from Bob’s first five years of songwriting.  If you want to find where a particular song has been placed that is recorded here – but I would like to emphasise that this is meant to be a guide – a suggestion of the themes, not a definitive account.

So what we can see is that from the start Bob really was exploring all directions at once.  And what the table tells us is that having had his early years of experimentation and quite probably jettisoning songs he tried and didn’t like, Bob’s songwriting exploded – and it really did go in all directions at once.  For we have to remember that in 1962 all he had by way of experience was the 16 songs written over the previous few years (and, possibly, some more that he didn’t bother to keep).  And then he found his directions.

Take, as one example, the six protest songs of 1962.

• Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues
• Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
• Ballad of Hollis Brown
• John Brown
• Train A Travellin’
• Oxford Town

I doubt there are many people who would not see these as excellent works of art, and yet they were created by an inexperienced write and they came out of nowhere.  It is extraordinary to think of it, but before “Hard Rain”, Dylan had only written one protest song – and that a talking blues.  “Hollis Brown” was the first ever song he wrote about rural poverty; the only song close to it was his urban poor composition, “Man on the Street,” written the year before.

So we have a multiplicity of themes, an explosion of writing, an array of masterpieces tucked among some lesser, but nonetheless interesting works… and the emergence of Dylan as a storyteller.

“Ballad for a friend” is a perfect example of this side of Dylan’s art.  He throws away all the conventions of the blues, apart from the fact it deals with sadness.  The song itself doesn’t actually sound sad, but that works because Dylan is not raging against the world; he is just desolate, reporting what has happened, removed from the reality.  No dressing up of the reality, no repeats, no chorus.  It just was.  It just is.  The start of Dylan the storyteller.

I have the feeling that these songs proved to Dylan the value and merit of his art.  He didn’t have to write another blues, or another song protesting about the current state of America.  He could do something totally different.  Or not, as the case might be.

And so he wrote “Blowing in the Wind” before moving in and out of a multiplicity of other themes.

We also have to remember that the first arguments about copyright start around this time, although I don’t see this as central to our understanding of Dylan.  He was immersed in music and drawing ideas from everywhere.  If he found some exquisite words to someone else’s tune, that was no reason not to play the tune.

And I argue this point because of the speed at which he was writing.  There are ideas, melodies and chord sequences coming at him from every direction, and he was writing and completing a new song on average every nine days throughout the year.

I can’t imagine that with all the talent he had he would bother himself with trying to take a line from someone else’s lyrics or melody.  It would have happened, and in the speed of writing I doubt that he realised, rather as in the George Harrison case and I’ve discussed this at length elsewhere.   When you listen to the two songs, one after the other, it is obviously Dylan and Harrison both copied.  But the copying came out of the song in the memory, without realising it.  My own compositions are of course are irrelevant, but I’ve not only had it happen to me, I’ve even copied one of my own songs written five years earlier, not realising it until a friend pointed it out to me.

From my perspective there is nothing I have found in Dylan’s writing that gives me the slightest hint that he has deliberately lifted someone else’s work.   The fact is that he is creating song after song.  And if no one approaches him and says, “Hey Bob that sounds awfully close to…” then he probably won’t know.

What we can also see in this opening burst of songwriting is that Bob developed themes that interested him.  For example, following “Blowing in the Wind”, five of his next eight compositions were on the theme of lost love.   But then, seemingly out of nowhere (other than the fact that Bob was writing, writing, and writing some more) he writes two masterpieces one after the other, both with political connotations and both deadly serious: “Hard Rain’s a gonna fall” concerning the worries about a possible nuclear war (made all the more relevant by the revelations of the USSR using Cuba as a nuclear arms base one month later), and “Ballad of Hollis Brown” which is probably the most hard hitting attack on the plight of farmers in the USA ever written.

After these recordings Bob then wrote on more protest song, John Brown – an anti-war song, before he brought in another new composition, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right“.  That of course made the cut for Freewheelin, but Hollis Brown was omitted. 

The Freewheelin version of “Don’t Think Twice” was recorded on 14 November and has widely been noted as an autobiographical response to Bob’s girlfriend prolonging her stay in Italy.  And here is the material he utilised.

This is Paul Clayton’s re-working of the folk song “Who’s gonna buy you chickens” into “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone?”   Dylan and Clayton knew each other and were on friendly terms, and Clayton recorded his reworking of the traditional “chickens” song two years before Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.”

How much was the original folk song, how much Clayton’s reworking, how much was Dylan?   And if that is not confusing enough we have the fact that when first performing the song Bob Dylan changed some of the Clayton lyrics, but Clayton’s original lyrics did gradually drift back into Dylan’s performances as time when by.

Clayton performed in Greenwich Village and was friends with Dylan in his early years, but the use of the song by Dylan did result in a legal case between each artists’ respective publishers, fronted by the duo’s respective recording companies.  Inevitably the case was settled out of court, almost certainly (although obviously I don’t have access to the legal documents so I can’t prove this) because of the difficulty of considering the copyright ownership of a traditional song which had already mutated over time, and already been re-written for contemporary use.  In other words, how much copyright did Clayton actually own in terms of his recording, given that he had himself borrowed it from a traditional folk song?  I suspect both sides realised that the case could cost a fortune, with neither side being certain to win, and an out of court settlement would be the best way forwards.  It appears that some of Dylan’s earning from the song would go to Clayton, and it is reported that Dylan and Clayton remained friends.  Sadly however Clayton suffered from severe bouts of mental illness and ultimately committed suicide in 1967.

“Don’t think twice” is itself a summation of Bob’s numerous lost love songs and songs of leaving of this period.  In the months prior to writing “Don’t think twice” Dylan wrote Corrina Corrina,  Honey just allow me one more chance,  Rocks and Gravel, Down the Highway, and Tomorrow is a long time all of which dwell on the theme of the end of the affair, leaving and walking away.   This song summed it all up, although with that underlying feeling of putting on a brave face by walking away first, while there is the suggestion that at least some of the anguish and hurt is still there, underneath.

The series continues…

What else?

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

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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

Previously published: Bob Dylan and Stephen Crane (part I)

by Larry Fyffe

In the onomatopoeic lines below, though he be influenced by the neo-Romantic sentiments of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the dark tenets of anti-Romanic Naturalism of modernist writers, the poet alludes to biblical scripture:

Black riders came from the sea
There was clang and clang of spear and shield
The clash and clash of hoof and heel
(Stephen Crane: Black Riders)

Poetry, full of irony, that has an obvious effect on musician/singer/songwriter Bob Dylan:

Something came up out of the sea
Swept through the land of the rich and the free
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

The biblical allusion is to the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian invaders of northern and southern Israel:

Which were clothed with blue
Captains and rulers, all of them desirable young men
Horsemen riding upon horses
(Ezekiel 23: 6)

In the following poem, the futility of war is expressed, though it’s in vain:

I saw a man pursing the horizon
Round and round he sped
I was disturbed at this
I accosted the man
"It is futile", I said
"You can never - "
"You lie", he cried
And ran on
(Stephen Crane; I Saw A Man )

A cynicism found below in song lyrics:

Beyond the horizon, in the springtime or the fall
Love waits forever, for me and for all
Beyond the horizon, across the divide
Around about midnight, we'll be on the same side
(Bob Dylan: Beyond The Horizon)

https://youtu.be/NGfk0jdCQwk

The Modernist poet tosses in a slip of Sigmund Freud:

I stood upon a highway
And, behold, there came
Many strange pedlars
To me each one made gestures
Holding forth little images, saying
"This is the pattern of my God
Now this is the God I prefer"
(Stephen Crane: I Stood Upon The Highway)

The male poet is not alone:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionaly rides
You may have met him, did you not
His notice sudden is
(Emily Dickinson: A Narrow Fellow In The Grass)

Given an explicit twist in the song lyrics beneath:

Black rider, black rider, hold it right there
The size of your cock will get you nowhere
I'll suffer in silence, I'll make not a sound
Maybe I'll take the high moral ground
(Bob Dylan: Black Rider)

Said less bluntly in reference to divided Israel in the Holy Bible:

For she doted upon their paramours
Whose flesh is as the flesh of asses
And whose issue is like the issue of horses
(Ezekiel 23: 20)

One final example of existential angst on the part of the poet:

I looked here
I looked there
No where could I see my love
(Stephen Crane: I Looked Here, I Looked There)

Echoed in the song lyrics below:

Has anybody seen my love
Has anybody seen my love
I don't know
Has anybody seen my love
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)

What else?

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

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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

By Tony Attwood

The aim of this little series is to look at a few Dylan songs and find some cover versions that take different approaches, including maybe one or two that you might not know.  Or if not, at least remind you of something from the past that you’ve not heard for a while.

In our first outing we looked at variant versions of Sweet Marie.  This time it is the turn of the Watchtower – which is of course somewhat odd, because for many years Dylan closed his concerts with his own cover version of the Hendrix cover version.  Indeed returning to the original, if you have not heard it for a time, can be quite a surprise.

Coming back to it after a while of listening to other versions, and Dylan’s own concert closer I find that I had forgotten just how plaintive the harmonica is, and how perfectly that captured the notion of the castle in the countryside and the outlooks watching for approaching enemy, while inside, life goes on, and on, unchanging.

And there is also that way harmonica just plays on at the end, a few notes of solo when all else has past.  I always have the same picture in my head at that moment, but then maybe that’s because all music becomes images to me.

In our previous look at cover versions Diego D’Agostino offered up Brian Ferry’s version – suitable restrained, although knowing Ferry’s work, perhaps not as refined as I had expected.  Indeed when I first heard this I thought, surely there must a way of doing an even more laid back version than Dylan’s original.  There is – it comes later.

The Dave Matthews Band showed us however that there is no point trying to out-Hendrix Hendrix because there are many other directions to travel with this, as with all songs.

The point is that the lyrics are so exquisite they will hold attention no matter where the music goes.  But when we do have a simpler version they have that additional chance to shine.

Personally I don’t know why there was a need to give us a full-on version at the end, but maybe that was the feeling of what the audience demanded.  Maybe in those days they did.

It is also not always necessary to tell us what the song is by playing that chord sequence over and over from the off – there is nothing in the rule book that says we can’t change all of it.  That’s the whole point of freedom of musical expression and the opportunities that cover versions give us.

The Battlestar Galactica version below isn’t one that I have rushed around telling people to listen to (as is my occasional wont) but I’m glad they had the thought to see where else the song could go.   Interesting but not yet at the ultimate.

https://youtu.be/J1__dINxiXU

Everlast make sure we know exactly where we are from the opening beat, but then do give us an unexpected decline in the volume for the instrumental verse before the lyrics enter.

And I think they were realising that those lyrics are now so well known (well have been so well known since the arrival of the JWH album) that something else was needed.  Just listen to the instrumental after the first verse has been sung.

What really needs to happen (in my view, no one else’s I’m sure) is for the drummer to be told this isn’t just about making a lot of noise.

So, enough of the ones that I enjoy, but which don’t take me to a higher level.  By which I mean a higher level than Dylan took me to when I heard the original on JWH, and just thought, “Oh my, oh my… where has he taken us to now?”  (Or something like that).

In those days, when I was also still studying classical music, I used to sit at the piano and play that chord sequence and then try and re-arrange in a mock classical-romantic theme and variations style.  Fortunately no one else heard that, and I’m sure it wasn’t very good, but in my head I was going somewhere.  Maybe one day someone will do that.

And yet that somewhere, which did only exist in my head, partly came to fruition with the extraordinarily entertaining TV series “The Young Pope”.  There is a beautiful contrast between the pope walking through the Vatican and the music… my only regret is that the band decided to led it build quite so much.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with Willie Nelson guesting, are of course not going to give us a gentle ballad, but he plays and sings it as if greeting an old friend who he is so glad to see again, admiring the textures and colours, feeling every beat and every nuance, taking the endlessly repeating sequence, but still remembering that the lyrics hold everything together.

Stay with it to the very last, it’s worth it.

Of course Eric Clapton is not going to let a masterpiece like this go by without him leaving his imprint.  But what can he do when everyone else has done it?

What is so interesting is that he can just “do it” while hardly moving.  Now, perhaps for the first time, with the Young Pope version and Clapton, we can see just how much can be made from a three chord sequence and an unusual rhythm.  The lyrics now become less than what the guitar says after each line.  It’s an extraordinary talent – not just the playing of the guitar, but knowing what to do with a masterpiece that everyone else has left their mark on.

And so to the penultimate offering (or the second if you have, for reasons of your own, decided to work backwards).

Thea Gilmore, who has given us what I consider to be the ultimate “Drifter’s Escape” of course recorded this as well, and she has certainly provided a reinterpretation that, because of the new rhythm, does indeed cause much confusion (at least in my mind).  And that is what is needed with such enigmatic lyrics.

Brewer and Shipley give my first prize as they take us back to something approaching the original – and then keep going back.  The background vocals in between the verses are really an interesting extra.  They kept me with them all the way through.

Of course after all this you might well still prefer Dylan’s original – but then I’m not trying to say one shouldn’t.  It’s just a case of the new places each version takes me.  If you’ve travelled somewhere new, then I guess that’s good.  Or at least I hope so.

What else?

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

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series…

• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part I: Lousy poetry
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part II: Johnnie, that’s called songwriting
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part III: Do right man
• More Than Flesh And Blood (1978) part IV: Exquisite corpse

V          Time regards a snarky bacterium

You have an inflated sense of your importance. To a thing like me, a thing like you, well… Think about how you’d feel if a bacterium sat at your table and started to get snarky. This is one little planet, one tiny solar system, in a galaxy that’s barely out of its diapers.

I’m old, Dean, very old, so I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.

– Death to Dean in Two Minutes To Midnight

In March 2019, the makers of the American hit series Supernatural announce that the upcoming, fifteenth season will be the last. Perhaps a little too late; the plot developments did get a little all too crazy from about the twelfth season onwards. Anyway, the series is a huge success, has an enormous cult following and high ratings. The strongest assets are the two main characters, brothers Dean and Sam Winchester, two handsome guys, and the script: a well-balanced mix of soft-horror, mystique, humour and detective. The writers plunder from the Bible, from just about every known religion, they use urban legends, mystical literature and superstition, and let the two heroes hunt and fight demons, vampires, witches, ghosts, angels, creatures from other dimensions, mythical monsters and whatnot.

American folklore is also respected by the makers on the soundtrack. The unofficial theme song is a rock song, Kansas’ 1977 classic “Carry On Wayward Son”, and rock songs in the AOR category of Styx, Boston and Bob Seger colour about 90% of the soundtrack anyway, but in between, “God” surprises with a jaw-dropping rendition of “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)”, and blues monuments such as Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues”, Little Walter’s “Key To The Highway.” B.B. King can be heard too.

A highlight, both in terms of artistic realization and narrative dramatic power, is the introduction of Death. Death arrives in a stormy Chicago, which he will destroy today. In slow motion, he walks towards a pizzeria. A chilling, heart-breaking version of the ancient “O Death” has been started up on the soundtrack;

O, Death
Won't you spare me over 'til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With icy hands takin' hold of me

“My name is Death and the end is here.” It is an exceptionally beautiful introduction to the confrontation of protagonist Dean with Death, in which the above monologue is the next highlight. The song is on a pedestal with Dylan anyway, and then of course especially the version by The Stanley Brothers, the version he plays as a radio DJ in his Theme Time Radio Hour (episode 49, “Death & Taxes”);

“Here’s a song you may have heard before. It’s kind of a roots music greatest hit ever since its appearance in the Coen Brothers’ movie O Brother Where Art Thou. In that movie, it was sung by Ralph Stanley. But I can’t help but have a soft spot for Ralph when he’s singing with his brother Carter. Here they are, The Stanley Brothers: Oh Death.”

Dylan is referring to the blood-curdling a cappella version, for which Ralph Stanley received a Grammy Award in 2002, for Best Male Country Vocal Performance.

Apart from the accompanying music in the episode “Two Minutes To Midnight” from the fifth season of Supernatural, Dylan will feel drawn to the unspoken but unmissable philosophical undercurrent of Death’s monologue: Time is the great equaliser, time relativises everything to insignificance. “I’m old, Dean, very old.”

That also seems to be the indifferent thrust of this one Dylan-worthy gem in “More Than Flesh And Blood”:

Time regards a pretty face like time regards a fool

Time is a recurring theme, or at least a motif, throughout Dylan’s sixty-year oeuvre anyway. Beginning with “Don’t Think Twice” in 1963, and still fascinating the poet in 2020 – the opening words of Rough & Rowdy Ways are “Today and tomorrow and yesterday too” (and the closing line of “False Prophet” is “Can’t remember when I was born and I forgot when I died”). And in between, in dozens of songs, more than once on each album, the bard professes his acknowledgement of Time’s omnipotence and indifference.

It is mostly amusing, and it seems ironic, but there is a deep truth in the commercial for IBM, for which Dylan lent himself in 2015, the video in which the talking computer Watson declares to have analysed all Dylan’s songs: “Your main themes are Time Passes and Love Fades.” And Dylan replies amused: “That sounds about right.”

Every now and then, the poet does cast a bit more explicitly a more philosophical eye on the phenomenon of time, as in 1967, in “Odds And Ends”; Lost time is not found again, though rarely with the poetic brilliance and depth as in this one line in a throwaway song from 1978, as in Time regards a pretty face like time regards a fool from “More Than Flesh And Blood”. It echoes reflections of ancient philosophers and great poets on Time, Natural Forces and Morality, and enriches those reflections with its own twist. Usually, the poets and philosophers before Dylan also come to a point that is so elegantly expressed by Death: I invite you to contemplate how insignificant you are. Statelier, for example, by Goethe in 1783, in “The Divine”:

Because nature
Is insensitive:
The sun is shining
On bad and good,
The moon and the stars.
It shines on the evil
As on the best of us

… and a quarter of a century later Goethe nuances that not only Nature, but even more abstractly, Time itself is amoral: Die Zeit rückt fort und in ihr Gesinnungen, Meinungen, Vorurteile und Liebhabereien (“Time moves on and in it attitudes, opinions, prejudices and loves,” Elective Affinities, 1809). In the Middle Ages, Augustine resolved this terrible immorality by placing God “outside of Time” – too terrible is the thought that anything or anyone could be untouched by God’s omnipotence.

The beauty of Dylan’s reflection lies in what he does not do; Dylan avoids the antithesis, does not juxtapose two opposing concepts to illustrate how insensitive Time is, as Nietzsche, Kant and Goethe all do, and, in variants, even Plato does. Dylan plays with this expectation, but then places beauty and folly, an aesthetic qualification and an intellectual one, opposite each other. Both human and both culture-bound, and both undoubtedly applicable to the antagonist Dylan and Springs have in mind in this song – but above all qualities that impress Time as much as the appearance and mental capacities of a snarky bacterium do.

On a side note: Dylan sounds one single time in Supernatural, again in a beautiful, moving scene. Main character Dean wakes up in his car, on a deserted country road at night. The car radio softly plays “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. When Dean gets out of the car, it is silent. There comes his brother Sam, with a box of fireworks, excited for the upcoming fireworks show that he will secretly light up together with his big brother. Only: it’s his brother as an eight-year-old boy, more than twenty years ago. “Weird dream,” Dean thinks. When both Dean and the viewer start to realise that Dean is dead, that this is his afterlife, Dylan’s song swells again.

Cheap? Why, certainly. Effective? Very.

To be continued. Next up: More Than Flesh And Blood part VI: Muddy kickin’ in your stall

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

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

What else?

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

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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

This is episode 32 of the series looking at the artwork on Bob Dylan albums, with as many illustrations of pictures used and unused on the album.  An index of the whole series can be found under the Album Artwork index which is listed at the top of the screen.  I am also glad to say that Patrick has been added to our Untold Authors page.     Tony

Blonde On Blonde…

by Patrick Roefflaer

• Released: (probably) June 20, 1966
• Photographer: Jerry Schatzberg
• Art-director: John Berg

The photographer

In the mid Sixties Jerry (his mom called him Jerold) Schatzberg was a freelance photographer in New York. His speciality was portraying beautiful, well-dressed women for glamor magazines such as Vogue, Life, Town and Country and Esquire. Thanks to the recommendation of some of these models, he got interested in Bob Dylan and made the photo for one of rock’s first double albums.

“People kept telling me I should meet him,” the photographer, recounted aged 91 in 2018.  “I knew Sara first, when she was Sara Lowndes. Sara was telling me about him. I remember being at her apartment overlooking the village and she would point out where Dylan was playing. I didn’t know Dylan, or his music at that time.

“The other person that kept telling me about Dylan was Nico, who went on to sing with the Velvet Underground, of course. Everywhere I’d see her, whether in Paris or London or New York, Nico would mention Dylan, “You gotta see Dylan…you gotta hear Dylan.” Finally I did and of course once I heard him, I loved him.”

However, it took some time before he actually met Dylan. “I don’t remember the occasion,” the photographer said, “but not long after that, Al Aronowitz [the rock journalist famous for introducing Dylan to the Beatles] and a disc jockey named Scott Ross [a “left-wing Jesus freak,” according to Aronowitz, and now a TV host on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network] were in my studio. They had been with Dylan the day before, and out of the blue I said, “Hey, next time you see him, tell him I’d like to photograph him.”

“The next day I get a call from my old friend Sara, who was living with Dylan at that point, and she says, “Bobby hears you want to photograph him.” She gave me the address of the studio where he was recording, and off I went.”

“I was assured that I could photograph him freely,” he adds.

That was August 1965, and Dylan was recording the songs for Highway 61 Revisited in the Columbia studio on Seventh Avenue.

“He greeted me like an old friend,” says Schatzberg. “Immediately he wanted me to listen to what they just recorded. I did and was a little inhibited, but he was very friendly from the very beginning. I wish I could remember what song they were working on that day. I think it was a song about a guy, definitely an ‘up’ tune.” (In another interview however he mentions ‘Desolation Row’ – although not exactly “a song about a guy”).

“I just sort of got myself in a discreet place and did what I could. I got photographs of him writing, singing, of him just relaxing, playing the piano…. I think I got some very interesting photographs.”

Dylan agreed to a follow up session. In order to have more control over the situation, Schatzberg invited him to his photo studio, at 335 Park Avenue South. There Jerry experienced firsthand that the singer always followed his instincts. “We were doing a lot of pictures and I wanted something of a change. So I went up to my flat and I brought down a couple of shirts, a turtleneck and another shirt, and I asked him to put it on.”

The photographer took a roll of film of Dylan in the new outfit, but then the singer said, “No, no, no — it’s not me. It’s not mine.”

1965, New York, New York, USA — Bob Dylan Posing by Brick Wall — Image by © Jerry Schatzberg/Corbis

“He wasn’t thinking that way; he’s just thinking that’s not him. Because in those days, he was really a pace-setter in style. Everyone was looking at Dylan — wanted to have the same polka-dot shirts as he had, in the same color as he had, and stuff like that.”

Schatzberg got another chance, some months later, when an image was commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post for a piece they planned on Dylan, to be published coinciding with the release of his next album. The photographer decided to try a change in scenery. “I took him near the Brooklyn Bridge for it. I liked shooting in downtown Manhattan.”

With an abandoned factory building on Jacobs Street as background, Dylan is portrayed wearing a white scarf.  With the difficulty of trying to finish the album however, the photos were not used until Summer 1966. In June one of them was chosen for the cover of the ‘I Want You’ single, while another was used as planned on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on July 30. Those were both in color. A black and white print also appeared on the inside cover of Blonde On Blonde and in 2018 the photographer chose a photo of the session for the cover of his book Dylan by Schatzberg.

Dylan was so pleased with the results that he asked Schatzberg to take the picture for the cover of the album.

On January 28, 1966, they met again in the photo studio. Dylan was wearing a fashionable yellow shirt, a short brown leather vest and black-gray striped trousers. He posed in front of the photographer’s lens with a number of objects present there: a large Zippo lighter, a cross, a bunch of keys, a book about Flemish painters … But the most successful is a series of black and white portraits of Dylan smoking a cigarette. One of these, with Dylan blowing out the smoke, is considered as the cover photo.

You can see the photos at Bob Dylan – Jerry Schatzberg Sessions New York.

However, the singer is not completely convinced. Schatzberg agrees: “None of the pictures I was getting in my studio were all that special. They were good, soulful, but I didn’t feel that any of them would make an album cover.

I wanted an interesting location – outside the studio. I remembered going to the Meatpacking District with my parents when I was a kid, and I always thought it was a really interesting part of town. So I asked Bobby if he wanted to go there to take some pictures, and he was all for it—even though it was early February and he only had a jacket and a scarf. I could have put on a heavy coat, but he was in his little jacket, and for some reason I figured I should be in my little jacket, too.”

At 375 West Street in Morton Street, they stop outside Brooks Transportation Co. They get out of the car, quickly take some pictures and within 30 minutes they’re back in the car. “It was freezing and I was very cold. […] We were both out there shivering. We were joking, having fun. I have one photograph with a smile but I don’t like it as much; I like the serious, soulful ones. I was able to keep the camera steady through most of the sitting but there were four or five images that were out of focus.

It turns out he liked the blurry ones and chose one for the cover. I thought the record label would never go for it, but Dylan had a lot of sway by then and could make those decisions. I just loved it. […] Obviously, everyone was guessing as to what it meant: that it was supposed to suggest he was high or tripping on LSD. None of that. We were just cold and both were shaking. There were other photos that were sharp and focused, but – credit where credit is due – Dylan chose this photo.”

The design

Dylan confronts art director John Berg with a problem: he has recorded so much material that it takes two vinyl discs. The phenomenon of a double LP is completely new. Coincidentally, another record company has the same problem with Freak Out! from The Mothers of Invention (an album produced by Tom Wilson – Bob Dylan’s former producer). Jack Anesh, the art director of Verve / MGM solves it by just putting the records in a single sleeve.

Berg, however, comes up with the idea of ​​making a flip cover – a totally new concept. In 2007, the art director sheds light on his contribution: “We worked from that image [the photo chosen by Dylan] – as opposed to a total concept. So the cropping and the font was our contribution. I shaped the Blonde on Blonde cover so you could close it. That gave us an interesting rectangular / vertical photo instead of the standard square format.”

He fills the rectangle, with a ratio of one to two, by turning the portrait of Dylan 90°. The great thing, however, is that when the cover is closed, the whole thing can be positioned so that Dylan’s head and torso stand upright when the LP is presented in the window of a record store. This is especially important because it is the only information a potential customer will see: neither Dylan’s name nor the title of the album are printed on the cover of the cover. That’s probably precisely because of the double way in which the cover can be presented.

However, the title and name are indicated in small letters on the fold in the middle of the portrait. After all, that spine remains visible when the LP is in a rack between other albums. “I think that was the first time something like this happened for an LP,” Berg says proudly. “Of course the plates were in danger of falling out, but it looked good.”

On the inside of the flip cover, Berg arranges nine black and white photos. They were chosen by Dylan from Schatzberg’s portfolio. “At that time, whatever Dylan would send to the record companies, they would use,“ the photographer explains, “He picked all the inside photographs also. They were lying around my studio and he chose them. He picked the self-portrait of me and put it in there. He never said a word about it – he just took it. I don’t get a written credit on the album, which suits me just fine. That’s the way he is. […] We’ve never discussed it, even till this day and I think it’s his way of saying ‘thank you.”

As mentioned, the photo on the lower right, of Dylan wearing the white scarf, is one from the original session on Jacob Street, which inspired the cover. On another we see the back of manager Albert Grossman’s head.

On the first printing, a portrait of Claudia Cardinale is shown, but after her agent objected to the use of her image without her permission, the inner sleeve is changed to leave seven photos.

The photo of a woman whispering something in Dylan’s ear is another that disappeared. It’s  Carole Adler, the daughter of harmonica player Lou Adler.

John Berg and Jerry Schatzberg rightly receive a Grammy award for the iconic cover.

The title

Like the blurry photo, the mysterious title Blonde on Blonde is food for speculation.

Why has the English spelling been used instead of the American “blond”? And what does it mean?

As usual, Dylan’s explanation doesn’t get you any wiser: “I have no idea where that came from, but I’m sure it was with the best of intentions … No idea who came up with it. I certainly didn’t. ”

What is immediately noticeable is that the initials spell Dylan’s first name. This was also the case with Brecht On Brecht, a partly improvised play that Bob attended in the autumn of 1961, on the advice of Suze Rotolo. The piece about Bertold Brecht made a great impression on him.

The most obvious association for blonde on blonde is a duo of lesbian blondes. Or maybe it’s Rolling Stone blonde Brian Jones and his equally blonde girlfriend Anita Pallenberg? Another possibility is a reference to Warhol actress Edie Sedgwick – reportedly an inspiration for many of the songs on the record, but completely absent from the photos – who had her hair bleached. Combine that with Lebanese hashish, also called “blonde” and you get: a blonde with blonde drugs.

More likely, however, is Al Kooper’s story. “We were mixing when (producer) Bob Johnston asked,” What are you going to call it? ” Bob immediately came up with a long series of suggestions: free associations and craziness.”

If we can believe Dylan, the suggestion comes from someone else. This is how we come to a Dutchman: Jan Cremer, the author of the sensational books Ik, Jan Cremer (1964) and Ik, Jan Cremer, tweede boek (1966). Cremer was in New York in the winter of 1965-66 to promote the American edition of his novels.

In 2007 he stated in an interview in the bimonthly cultural magazine Hollands Diep: “On January 10, 1966, I went out to dinner with Bob Dylan, Jayne Mansfield and her manager Irving Arthur. Dylan had read my book and when he heard that he lived right above me at the Chelsea, he immediately came over to buy a painting. He wanted it as an image on the cover of his LP Blonde On Blonde. A very large canvas measuring 1.80 by 2.50 meters. I ended up selling it for $ 8,000, which was a lot of money at the time. […] I also attended the Blonde On Blonde shoot in Nashville. He wanted me to stay with him, but I am independent and I had my own job.” Said canvas would be called “Ode to World Poet Number 1”. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a picture of it.

In an older interview with the Belgian magazine Humo, sometime in the 1970s, Cremer claims to have come up with the title. “What rhymes with blonde?” Dylan would have asked. To which our hero: “Why not Blonde On Blonde?”

However, I find none of his claims very credible. Hans Sleutelaar, who, as editor of Cremers work, was in New York, remembers nothing of the so-called friendship. “You cannot take everything Jan wrote for the literal truth, that is not his way of writing either.”

The mystery remains.

Postscript

The photos used for the cover of Bob Dylan Live (1966) and of course The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 (an outtake of the Blonde on Blonde photo session) are also by Jerry Schatzberg.

More photos:

The location: http://www.popspotsnyc.com/blonde_on_blonde/

Outtakes: http://popspotsnyc.com/PIP_BLONDE_on_BLONDE_outtakes/index.html

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.

And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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

There is a full index to our series on the Never Ending Tour here.

The 1995 episodes published so far are

• 1995, part 1: The Prague Revelation and other astonishments
• 1995, part 2: The Prague Revelation – Salt for Salt, Peak Prague
• 1995, Part 3, The Prague Revelation – down in the flood
• 1995, Part 4, Beyond Prague, London Calling
• 1995, Part 5.  Acoustic wonderland

By Mike Johnson (kiwipoet)

So we come to the last of my posts on that most remarkable year in Dylan’s Never Ending Tour – 1995. The performances I’ve included here did not fit neatly into any of the previous articles, but are no afterthoughts. Or if they are, they are necessary afterthoughts. We wouldn’t want to be without them for a full understanding of Dylan’s achievements in that year.

We’ll kick off with something of a rarity, a live performance of the blues ‘Pledging My Time’ from Blonde on Blonde(1966). I remember around the time I first heard Dylan I was very much into the blues. I was not alone. The blues was sweeping into our musical world from The Rolling Stones and rock music in general, from jazz and singers like Ray Charles, and the rural blues men like Lightning Hopkins. The blues was everywhere. I remember thinking when I heard Dylan’s ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘One Kind Favour’ that Dylan could become a great blues singer, with his expressive inflections, maybe the greatest.

Dylan loved the blues but also avoided it; he didn’t want to be defined by it. He had other fish to fry.  But when he decides to get into it, he can do it like no other. This is one of the more successful adaptions of his Blonde on Blonde songs to live performance. Just leave the insinuating inflections of the album behind and you have, well… just the blues. (Don’t know date of this one, I’m afraid)

Pledging my time.

Staying with Blonde on Blonde we have a committed performance of ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’. This is a long song and not an easy one to sustain in performance. Given the lyrics it’s well worth persevering with, however. It takes us into the same circus territory as ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’. Whereas ‘Visions of Johanna’ is a queasy evocation of a 3 a.m. zonkout, ‘Mobile’ is a surreal trip through the madness of the world, and all the freaked out people in it, and has its roots in Dylan’s earlier more humorous madcap adventure songs like ‘Talking World War 3 Blues’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream’.

The sense of being trapped in a claustrophobic world is strong in Dylan, and has been right from the start. It comes through strongly on Blonde on Blonde. I always loved ‘Mobile’ for this devastating last verse. This performance may not have the gloomy intensity of the album version, coming over more like a raw cry for help. (No date for this one either, sorry).

‘Now, the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice’

Stuck inside of mobile.

Another of Dylan’s mid-sixties classics is ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, another madcap song full of mysterious characters and events. Once more the meaninglessness of material accumulation comes under fire. A couple of circus characters have this conversation:

‘Well, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
"I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?"
And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son"

And he said, "Yes, I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61" ‘

When the album came out, the buzz was that Highway 61 was a reference to the main artery in the arm which junkies use to hit up. Maybe but maybe not. The humour here is derisive. Highway 61 is the junkyard of the spirit. This song is deeper than it sounds on first listening.

For my ear, the virtues of the song have all too often been buried in a blizzard of guitar sounds. Yes, it’s supposed to rip along with the images flashing by, but this is one of my favourite performances with its dark, insistent beat and minimal backing. There is no sense of strain either with the vocals, which come across loud and clear. (2^nd April, Birmingham)

Highway 61 Revisited.

My favourite version of ‘When I Paint my Masterpiece’ (1967) has to be the piano demo found on the ‘Other Self Portrait’. It has something of a lumbering beat and is not easy to pull off in performance as it can easily drag. In this performance, however, Dylan doesn’t let it drag, using his wonderful voice to lift it at the end, working to build up the energy of the song. It seems to hit on the yearning of all artists to achieve something astonishing and superlative, but the message seems to be that lots of scenes go by and that masterpiece will probably never be painted.

‘Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh to be back in the land of Coca-cola.
Well I left Rome, and landed in Brussels
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried
Clergy men in uniform, and young girls pulling muscles
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside
Newspaper men eating candy
Had to be held down by big police.
Someday, everything's gonna be different
When I paint my masterpiece.’

The song reflects the crazy life of the rock star on tour, wishing he was back in America. It’s also the first Dylan song to express Dylan’s interest in the classics and the world of antiquity which would play such a big part in his compositions after 2000. (26^th October, Bloomington)

When I paint my masterpiece.

When ‘Jokerman’ appeared in 1994, I commented on the difficulties the song presented, not only in the complexity of its lyrics. I see the song in terms of Dylan distancing himself from the Christianity that had driven his gospel years (1979-81),

‘Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within’

and moving closer to the Old Testament:

‘Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face’

I’m not sure where the small dog fits in, but I love the imagery of those last four lines. Again, it’s not an easy song to carry, but the 1995 Dylan is up to the challenge. The song suits the softer treatment. (2^nd April, Birmingham)

Jokerman.

‘The Man in Me’ from New Morning (1971) is no masterpiece, and arguably the lyrics are a little weak, but it is a love song and Dylan’s soaring vocals bring it to life. Mr Guitar Man has a fair go at it too, with his strange repetitive guitar work, hammering away on the same few notes. (June 29^th Oslo)

The Man in Me.

Perhaps because it’s such a crowd-pleaser, and a great song to end a concert. You can go out with an apocalyptic storm of guitars. I can’t think of a song that better expresses that sense of impending doom – oh, he ain’t no false prophet. Those riders arriving at the end are not bringing good news. In a few short verses Dylan is able to evoke a fantasy land under siege by external forces.

What I like about this performance is the way the band goes quiet while Dylan is singing. Between verses the guitars can let rip. Mr Guitar Man is in his element, his often discordant guitar sounds finding their perfect home. (27th March Cardiff, Wales)

Watchtower

To finish off this post, let’s return to Blonde on Blonde, and that wonderful concert at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on the 13^th of December. ‘Rainy Day Woman 12 & 35’ is one of Dylan’s funniest, most irreverent songs. ‘Everybody must get stoned’ became something of a rallying cry for all stoners, most of whom didn’t get the more shadowy implication that to ‘get stoned’ also meant to be killed by stoning, an Old Testament punishment. I like the story, true or not, that when the police busted The Rolling Stones in 1966 this song was playing full bore. A bit of an embarrassment, really.

This is a wonderful performance of the song, with the audience once more singing along on the punchline. This is pretty close to the in-your-face irreverence of the original, but after a minute and a half Dylan gives up singing and the song turns into an instrumental. Everybody’s having a great time, and Mr Guitar Man excels himself for the next five minutes. It’s a rough and rowdy goodbye.

Rainy Day Woman

So ends our account of the NET, 1995, a year in which Dylan’s voice breaks through the constrictions of previous years, building solidly on his 1994 performances. And the band feels happily at home in his material. Dylan’s performances reach a certain peak in 1995.

What else?

You can read about the writers who kindly contribute to Untold Dylan in our About the Authors page.

And you can keep an eye on our current series by checking the listings on the home page

You’ll also find, at the top of this page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

Though it may be by mere coincidence, seems that singer/songwriter Bob Dylan not only borrows rhymes, often twisting the around a bit, from songs and poems by others. And he borrows them from his own works too, giving them a twist as well.

In the song verse below, end-rhymed be ~ ‘dawn’/’gone’/’on’:

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window, I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm a-travelling on
(Bob Dylan: Don't Think Twice, It's all Right)

In the following song lyrics, ‘dawn’/’on’ be the rhyme:

Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting,  'Which side are you on?'
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

In the song lyrics below, rhymed be ~ ‘dawn’/’gone’:

They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
Honey, you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you've been gone
(Bob Dylan: Meet Me In The Morning)

Internally rhymed be ~ ‘swan’/’on’ in the following song yrics:

The swan on the river goes gliding by
The swan on the river goes gliding by
(Bob Dylan: The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan ~ Dylan/Jones)*
(*May be from traditional song)

Below, an end-twist thereon ~ ‘dawn’/’swan’:

My heart's in the Highland at the break of dawn
By the beautiful Lake of the Black Swan
(Bob Dylan: Highland)

In the lyrics below, the end-rhyme is ~ ‘arrive’/’survive’:

I'll be waiting at the station for her to arrive
Seven more days, all I gotta do is survive
(Bob Dylan: Seven Days)

Selfie-referenced in the following lyrics with the twist ~ ‘arrived’/’survived’:

There's new day at dawn, and I finally arrived
If I'm there in the morning,  baby, you'll know I survived
(Bob Dylan: Where Are You Tonight)

In the song lyrics beneath, the rhyme sequence is ~ ‘spirit’/’hear it’:

It's the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit
Twenty-four hours a day, you can feel it, and you can hear it
(Bob Dylan: Solid Rock)

In the following lyrics, it’s ~ ‘hear it’/’spirit’:

Got the right spirit, you can feel it, and you can hear it
You've got what they call 'the immortal spirit'
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

Below, rhymed be ~ ‘road’/’explodes’:

The fiddler he now steps to the road .....
While my conscience explodes
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

But below it’s  ~ ‘explode’/’road’:

To live it you have to explode ....
Sacrifice was the code of the road
(Bob Dylan: Where Are You Tonight)

In the next song lyrics, rhymed is ~ ‘concertina’/’Angelina’:

Where the current is strong, and the monkey dances
To the tune of the concertina....
But whatever it could be, makes me think you've seen me before
Angelina
(Bob Dylan: Angelina)

However, the rhyme’s borrowed from a verse by another songwriter ~ ‘Angelina”/’concertina’:

Angelina, Angelina
Please bring down your concertina
And play a welcome for me 'cause I'll be home from the sea
(Harry Belafonte: Angelina ~ Burgie)

What else?

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

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

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