Untold Dylan

NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.

NET 1998 Part 2: Friends and other strangers

The complete Never Ending Tour index

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In 1995, at Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday bash, Dylan presented a song I don’t think he’d ever performed live before, ‘Restless Farewell’. Apparently Sinatra requested the song. This is the last track on The Times They are a Changing(1964), and despite being a self-justifying exercise, it has a weary beauty with Dylan in fine lyrical form. The melody is from an old Scottish ballad, ‘The Parting Glass’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parting_Glass)

‘Oh, ev'ry thought that's strung a knot in my mind
I might go insane if it couldn't be sprung
But it's not to stand naked under unknowin' eyes
It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung
But the time ain't tall
Yet on time you depend and no word is possessed
By no special friend
And though the line is cut
It ain't quite the end
I'll just bid farewell till we meet again’

It is therefore a surprise to find it appearing in 1998, quite out of the blue. I don’t think this is a particularly wonderful performance, or recording, but its sheer rarity value compels its inclusion here. This is from the Los Angeles concert 21^st May:

Restless Farewell

From the same album, and in a very similar vein, we find ‘One Too Many Mornings’. It’s a sad farewell song in which the temporary, contingent nature of things is keenly felt. It captures that bleak, lonely feeling that might come upon you after a one night stand, or on realising that a love is all over. The song has a disarming simplicity, and is quite disingenuous in pretending to come from an unsophisticated, ‘unlearned’ man.

‘From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes start to fade
And I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
And I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I'm one too many mornings

And a thousand miles behind’

Within that ‘restless hungry feeling,’ there is no room for the moral certainty or moral absolutism that rule the protest songs. In ‘Masters of War’ we find the certainty that ‘even Jesus would never forgive what you do’, but in ‘One Too Many Mornings’ we find ‘You’re right from your side/and I’m right from mine’. This moral relativism, if you like, prepares the way for a more thorough relativism in ‘My Back Pages’.

This song has been a regular on Dylan’s setlist over the years, and this a particularly good acoustic performance that captures the weariness and ambience of the original (31^st March). That moral relativism sits quite naturally with the voice of the Time out of Mind Dylan, the voice of the soul possessed by alienation and despair.

One Too many Mornings (A)

Perhaps a little better recorded, with Dylan’s voice more to the front, is this performance. I think, from those opening chords, that the audience thinks they’re about to hear ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’.

One Too many Mornings (B)

Of course the early sixties was the era of the protest song, which Dylan himself made famous. Through the nineties, Dylan didn’t forget his protest songs, despite his dislike of the term. ‘What’s a protest song?’ he once famously responded to someone in the audience requesting one. It’s a good question, but his best known protest songs are not that hard to identify. They are mostly topical and protest against war and social injustice.

‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ is a perfect example with its dark, brooding blues melody and its tale of desperation and murder-suicide. Its lyrics evoke the rural dust bowl songs of the 1930s

‘The rats have got your flour
Bad blood it got your mare’

but it has a contemporary force that makes it still relevant. Critic David Horowitz makes the following comment:

‘Technically speaking, “Hollis Brown” is a tour de force. For a ballad is normally a form which puts one at a distance from its tale. This ballad, however, is told in the second person, present tense, so that not only is a bond forged immediately between the listener and the figure of the tale, but there is the ironic fact that the only ones who know of Hollis Brown’s plight, the only ones who care, are the hearers who are helpless to help, cut off from him, even as we in a mass society are cut off from each other…. Indeed, the blues perspective itself, uncompromising, isolated and sardonic, is superbly suited to express the squalid reality of contemporary America….A striking example of the tough, ironic insight one associates with the blues.’

This is a particularly good performance, sparse and hard-driving acoustic. The electric performances of 1974 make great blues based rock music, but this arrangement again captures the desolate atmosphere of the original. (Sorry, no date for this one.)

The Ballad of Hollis Brown

Perhaps Dylan’s most famous protest song is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. This is the song that made Dylan’s name. I believe there have been over sixty cover versions. It is built around a series of rhetorical questions designed to prick our consciences on matters of race and war. The song can easily become an anthem as it did in 1974 and 1984, but to my mind those anthem-like arrangements, despite audience participation, lose the frail intensity of the acoustic original. In this 1998 performance Dylan once more seems to be reaching back to the original sound and inspiration of the song, although the band joins him for the chorus.

Curiously, Dylan often stumbles over the lyrics of this song, or gets them a little wrong, but he covers up well for the gaffes and delivers a powerful performance. (23^rd October)

Blowin in the Wind

While ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ might be Dylan’s best known protest song, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall’ may be his most wide reaching outside ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. Dylan’s ‘surrealist period’ of the mid-sixties is prefigured here in a stunning series of apocalyptic images that show rather than tell. The effect of this is that these images have not aged. They are as contemporary now as when they were written.

‘I saw ten-thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children’

That sounds like the 21^st Century to me.

In 1998 Dylan does not seek radical arrangements of these old songs, but rather to reach back and uncover the impulse that led to the writing of the songs. With ‘Hard Rain’, we have a subtle reworking of the mood and tone of the song. We have had the loud, driving electric version of 1975/6, the slow, lush orchestral version of 1994, but here we have a gently lilting, discreetly adorned performance, not as strident as the original, but sadder and more contemplative. (20^th January)

Hard Rain

Aside from ‘Masters of War’ (see NET, 1998, part 2), ‘John Brown’ is Dylan’s most effective anti-war song. It precisely identifies the generational gap between the young, anti-war movement and the parents of those young people. The song sets out to demystify war. The physically broken young returning soldier confronts his patriotic mother on the railway station upon his return. It’s quite astonishing that the song was written in 1962, several years before the Vietnam War became an issue, and soldiers did come back from ‘the war’ their bodies and souls broken. In that respect the song is remarkably prescient. (Sorry, date not available for this one.)

John Brown

Is ‘Tears of Rage’ also a protest song? Not as obviously as ‘John Brown’ or ‘Masters of War’, but the song seems to be driven by a moral outrage that at least belongs to the spirit of protest.

‘It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse ?’

Whatever that ‘false instruction’ might be, it leads to the kind of greedy materialism that always provokes Dylan to outrage. Fast forward to 2020 and ‘False Prophet’:

‘Bury 'em naked with their silver and gold
Put them six feet under and pray for their souls’

Or ‘Silvio’ (1988), a regular in the concerts of the late nineties:

‘Silvio, silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold’

What we think of as a protest song depends on our frame of reference. In ‘Tears of Rage’, rage and grief go hand in hand. It’s hard to find a more passionate performance of the song than this one, from 13th January.

Tears of Rage

So maybe ‘Desolation Row’ too is a kind of protest song:

‘And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go…’

Look at ‘False Prophet’ again:

‘I’m the enemy of treason
I’m the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life’

Something of the quality of that ‘unlived meaningless life’ comes through in ‘Desolation Row’:

‘To her death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness’

But we all suffer from some variation of the same oppression:

‘Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row’

Isn’t there a deeper sense of protest here than in even the recognised protest songs?

In 1997/98 ‘Desolation Row’ fell into the background. It was only performed once in 1997, and rarely in 1998. I don’t think this is a best ever performance, but I find it hard to pass over any performance of what might be Dylan’s greatest song ever.

Desolation Row

Finally, what about ‘All along the Watchtower’? Aren’t the first verses, the conversation between the joker and the thief, all about the insufferable oppressiveness of our modern culture, which in itself is on the edge of a more ancient doom, doom the ‘two riders’ will bring with them. ‘There must be some way out of here…’ but maybe there isn’t, except for that approaching doom. I always felt that ‘Watchtower’ was a protest song without quite understanding why. Perhaps it’s that ominous tone, or the guitar war that breaks out after the last verse.  Again it depends on your terms of reference.

I like the way he breaks up the verses, fragments the lines, in this performance. (6^th June)

‘So let us
 not talk falsely now
the hour
is getting late…’

Words as true now as when they were written. May the spirit of protest never die, in whatever guise it comes!

That’s it for now, gentle reader. I’ll be back with more from 1998 soon.

Kia Ora!

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

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

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

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part III: I love you, but you’re strange
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes

by Jochen Markhorst

V          When a sighing begins in the violins

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

It is only the distinct elegance of the second verse, even more classic than the cool beauty of the opening verse, that reveals the underlying structure of “Love Minus Zero”. On paper, in written form, the poet Dylan, as he often does, conceals the form.

In the official publications, in Writings & Drawings, in Lyrics and on the site, the lyrics are printed in four eight-line stanzas, with no fixed rhyme scheme or metre. Presumably, the musician Dylan dictates the formatting; as it is formatted, each four-line segment falls into the same chord progression:

E
My love she speaks like silence,

B   A                            E
     Without ideals or violence,

B   A                                         E
     She doesn't have to say she's faithful,

                 F#m         A            B
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.

Rhyming-wise, however, the lyrics consist not of four octaves, not of four eight-line stanzas, but of four sextets with the classic rhyme scheme AABCCB:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

… a restructuring that can be applied to each of the four octaves, with each strophe “actually” turning out to be a Spanish sextet, a sextet with the rhyme scheme AABCCB. So also like this second stanza:

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all

In Anglo-Saxon literature, Spanish sextets are not too popular. A natural talent like Dylan probably comes to them instinctively, but on the other hand he gives enough hints that Verlaine triggered him. As, in retrospect, in the interview with Jeff Rosen for No Direction Home (2005): “I stayed at a lot of people’s houses which had poetry books and poetry volumes and I’d read what I found… I found Verlaine poems or Rimbaud.”

Verlaine is a fan of the Spanish sextet anyway, and if Dylan did indeed immerse himself in Verlaine in the early 1960s, then he inevitably took in one of the absolute highlights of French literary history, Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” from 1866. The poem that the Allies used as a code to warn the French resistance that D-Day was about to begin, the masterpiece that was incorporated into songs by Dylan’s colleagues such as Brassens, Gainsbourg and Trenet, and can be found on house walls, monuments and cemeteries throughout Europe;

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

… the first sextet (of three), which Dylan then presumably read in Arthur Symons’ (1902) excellent translation, “Autumn Song”:

When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long

… in which Symons, as in the other sextets, admirably succeeds in saving both the rhyme scheme and the rhythm and the melancholic colour. But even that does not convert the Anglo-Saxon poets. Spanish sextets remain primarily a French form. The English find it more suited for nursery rhymes (“Little Miss Muffet”, for example, also known as “Along Came A Spider”). And the occasional song. “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein, consists of ten Spanish sestets, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps”, and above all: Leonard Cohen’s chef d’oeuvre “Hallelujah”, for which the Canadian bard claims to have written eighty couplets over a period of more than ten years – all Spanish sextets;

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you dont really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Dylan, by the way, will use the same poetic artifice more than twelve years later in a highlight of Street-Legal (1978), in “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”: there, too, the formatting conceals the fact that the lyrics “actually” consist of Spanish sextets. Incidentally, it also reaffirms a kind of artistic brotherhood with fellow Minnesotan Prince, who does the same in the first quatrain of highlight “Raspberry Beret” – after all, that quatrain can also be restructured into a sextet with the rhyme scheme aabccb:

I was working part time 
in a five-and-dime
My boss was Mr. McGee
He told me several times 
that he didn't like my kind
'Cause I was a bit too leisurely

“Hallelujah”, “A Boy Named Sue”, “Raspberry Beret”… all exceptional songs that approach perfection within the Holy Trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason – the form seems to bring out the best in talented songwriters.

That also applies to this second verse of “Love Minus Zero”. Literally, it is even more successful than the opening couplet. In terms of content, the poet draws a tighter line between what Dave Stewart seems to mean when he says: “The lyrics start as social insights but then conclude with something romantic and sexy.”

The first five lines “capture a moment in time,” as Stewart calls it, with observations, sketchy impressions of dime stores and bus stations, and in the sixth line the poet then switches to the private, to “my love” and her remarkable aphorism. Stylistically, the poet chooses an extremely melodious wording, with that exuberance of rhyming “-ions”, alliterations (stores-stations, read-repeat) and abundant assonance (people-read-repeat-speak, talk-draw-wall)… it is truly, like “Chanson d’automne”, a dazzling work of art by a brilliant song poet with a perfect mastery of language. If Dylan is not Verlaine’s brother in art, then at least Verlaine’s spirit descended on Greenwich Village for a brief, glorious moment on this spring day 1965.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part VI: Foul is fair

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize Part 1.

by Larry Fyffe

In a particular song, Bob Dylan names the title of a fragmented poem by Jack Kerouac, using Jack’s alliterative, assonant, off-rhymed writing style that expresses an anti-material vision, akin to that of the Romantic Transcendentalists, but modernized,  turned upside down, and double-edged ~ with an earthy, not heavenly wind, infused with burning sexual desire, and a hope for a watery ‘spiritualistic’ love in the future for those that are labelled in the social order as outcasts:

I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track
Like Ginsberg, Corso,  and Kerouac
(Bob Dylan: Key West)

The Kerouac piece mentioned in the song lyrics below:

I feel it in the wind, in the wind, in the wind, 
    and it's upside down
I can feel it in the dust as I get off the bus 
    on the outskirts of town
I've had the Mexico City Blues since the hairpin curve
I don't wanna see you bleed, I know what you need
And it ain't what you deserve
(Bob Dylan: Something's Burning Baby)

Dylan as usual mixes up the musical medicine – the motifs above he finds in the writings of Nobel Prize winners, such as William Faulkner.

As in ‘Barn Burner’ by Faulkner, a story wherein a mistreated son goes to warn a wealthy white Southern landowner for whom his poor white father works that his racist dad, seeking vengeance, plans to burn down the rich man’s barn. Chased off by the owner, the son runs away; his father’s likely shot:

Something is burning, something's in flames
There's a man going 'round calling names
Ring when you're ready, baby, I'm waiting for you
I believe in the impossible, you know that I do

(Bob Dylan: Something’s Burning Baby)

There’s the modernist Romantic poet William Yeats who, with other artists, influences Kerouac:

Blackout; Heaven blazing in my head
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost
(William Yeats: Lapis Luzuli)

Quite likely, Yeats is given a tribute in the following song lyrics:

I cross the Green Mountain
I slept by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

In the novel ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus, an Algerian is needlessly shot by a alienated, colonial Frenchman – a symbolic struggle therein between the ancient ‘elements’ of fire and water in which the oppressively hot sun dominates the cool sea.

It’s an absurd Cosmos, disinterested in the elemental struggle, that’s depicted in the song lyrics below:

People are crazy, and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
This place ain't doing me any good
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

The singer/songwriter/musician in turn influences the writings of a satirical Nobel Prize winner:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter
Try Again. Fail again. Fail better
(Samuel Beckett: Westward Ho)

A complete index to this series looking at the art work of Bob Dylan’s albums can be found here.

by Patrick Roefflaer

• Released: January 17, 1975
• Photographer:  Paul Till
• Illustration: David Oppenheim
• Liner Notes:  Pete Hamill
• Art-director:  Ron Coro

Version 1 – Lithograph by David Oppenheim

The story of the cover of Dylan’s masterpiece starts in 1973, in France on the tarmac from an Parisian airport.

While boarding a flight to London, a man spots a handsome woman. “She was a classy lady. I did everything to be able to sit next to her.” He is David Oppenheim, an atypical and anarchic painter, born in the south of France.

She is an American businesswoman, Stevie Phillips, artistic representative of stars such as Judy Garland, Robert Redford and Liza Minnelli. There’s a connection between the two and Phillips decides to take advantage of her connections to boost his career.

“After we met, I contacted Dylan through the lawyer we had in common, David Braun. My agency was a big client for David Braun; he couldn’t refuse. I was happy to help David.”

In September 1974, shortly before the first studio sessions of Blood On the Tracks, Bob Dylan is handed David Oppenheim’s portfolio.

The timing couldn’t be better, as Bob is very interested in painting at the time. In the Spring of 1974 he took a two-month painting course in New York with Norman Raeben. When browsing through the portfolio, he reacts enthusiastically saying, “This guy is my spiritual brother.”

Dylan decides that, once the recordings finished, he wants to go to France, to see how the painter lives and works. In anticipation of that visit, Dylan wants him to make the cover of his new album. It is agreed that the Frenchman will make eight lithographs, from which Dylan can choose. A cheque is sent, “not much, a few thousand francs,” says Oppenheim.

With an eye on the Christmas market, the album is scheduled for rush release November 1st.

In a preview, published in Rolling Stone magazine, Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman writes: “The scheduled cover is a shot of a huge red rose on a white background. And Dylan was reportedly hunting for old photos of himself performing at Gerde’s Folk City for the back sleeve.”

Version 3 – A photo disguised as a painting

But Dylan changes his mind and lets the record company know that he wants to make new recordings in Minneapolis. The cover design is also being overhauled because, when the record is released in mid-January 1975, it turns out that the cover art in no way fits Sloman’s description.

The front shows a portrait of the singer. Dylan looks to the left, wearing dark sunglasses and his signature curly hair. To the left of the portrait, over the full height of the cover, is a broad plum color strip with the singer’s name and the title of the album. Both are in white New Deco font and underlined.

The portrait looks like a painting, but on the back cover is printed: ‘Cover Photo: Paul Till’.

Paul Till is born in England, but in 1957, at the age of three, he emigrated with his parents to Ontario in Canada. As a 20 year-old, he has two interests: music and photography. The first time those hobbies combine is on January 10, 1974, during a Bob Dylan concert in the Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto. By a happy coincidence (the tickets are distributed by lottery), he secured a fairly good seat: front right, not close to the stage, but also not too far away to get some good pictures, thanks to a borrowed telephoto lens.

With those photos he starts experimenting in his darkroom. In 2008 he explained his technique: ‘I enlarged the negative in my darkroom on another piece of film, so that all I was left with was Dylan’s head. This gives a positive image, so that when printing on photo paper, a negative image appears. However, I solarized the piece of film while it was being developed.’

In human language: when the exposed photo paper of a black-and-white photo is in the developer, turn the light on and off briefly, so that the photo is fixed. “This not only resulted in the image becoming positive again, but also gave the striking line between what was previously dark and what became dark due to solarization. Technically this is called ‘the Sabbater effect’ and the dark lines are ‘Mackie lines’. It resulted in a rather dark, low-contrast piece of film, with which I could make a print. I had to use paper of excellent quality to get enough contrast.” Till then colors the obtained result manually, with special watercolor. With this he wants to emphasize the old/new discord that he hears in Dylan’s work.

The young man is so pleased with the result that he sends a copy to Dylan’s New York office. He doesn’t get an answer.

He is therefore extremely surprised when his work appears on the cover of Dylan’s new record. “I suspect Bob Dylan saw the photo and thought it was beautiful. But I have no idea if it happened that way.”

Back cover

The back of the cover features one of Oppenheim’s lithographs. This is framed in a wide border of the same plum color used on the front.

The lithograph shows a man’s head, depicted in a kind of worn-out pyramid. This, in turn, appears to be mounted in a frame with two purple surfaces. In front of all that, a black-tinted object floats, with two angular bumps.

At the top, some information is printed in black letters: song titles, musicians (only the original New York musicians are credited, but not those from Minnesota) and some collaborators for the cover art work.

Then there’s also an essay by New York writer and journalist Pete Hamill. He wrote the liner notes after listening to the test pressing, as evidenced by some quotes that deviate from the lyrics on the album.

Because that text, due to the additional recordings, is no longer very relevant, Columbia Records released a new back cover for the second American pressing in mid-1975: both Hamill’s text and Oppenheim’s illustration are dropped in favor of another work by Oppenheim, which is printed larger. The new lithograph shows a man stepping over a fence. He has two faces and carries a bouquet of flowers in each hand. Two much smaller figures can be seen on one side: a naked woman and a person seated, engrossed in a newspaper.

It gets a little annoying for the record company when Hamill receives a Grammy Award for the liner notes that have since been removed. CBS is therefore forced to adjust the back cover again. From 1976 the original design is restored, but now with white text (the black letters were difficult to read against the plum background). This remains the standard version until the end of the nineties, when vinyl is replaced by CDs.

All that time, the covers pressed in England, kept the original design unchanged.

Extra information for quiz fanatics

In Malaysia and the Republic of Singapore, EMI released Blood on the Tracks, with a blue cover.

Since Dylan has moved to Los Angeles in 1973, the covers of his records are no longer handled by the art directors of CBS in New York, under the direction of John Berg, but by the West Coast Art Director Ron Coro.

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Best Contemporary Folk Album: Winner: Bob Dylan – Time Out Of Mind

Time Out of Mind won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year in 1998. It was also ranked number 410 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2012.

Nominations 

• Guy Clark – Keepers : A Live Recording
• Iris Dement – The Way I Should
• Indigo Girls – Shaming For The Sun
• John Prine – Live On Tour

Aaron: I didn’t know any of the albums so I spent the week listening to them (they are all on YouTube if you are so inclined).

Guy Clark I’m aware of as a songwriter but I’ve never heard his own performances. I knew two of the tracks from his album through Johnny Cash covers.

The Last Gunfighter Ballad

If the video below doesn’t work for you, it is a regional issue.  Try this link instead

Tony: I had no idea what to expect here, and the sudden appearance of the harmony completely took me by surprise.  As did part two (if I can call it that) with its new rhythm.

I don’t know what to make of this, I really don’t.  If you have a clear view of the song, or know about  the context or … well anything, could you either write a comment below, or send me an article about it to publish here?  Email: Tony@schools.co.uk

Desperadoes Waiting For A Train

Again, different parts of the world may need different versions.  Try one of these, or failing that do a search on Google of Spotify.

Tony:   OK I’m getting ready to hang up my writing hat (or fingers).  I just don’t hear anything here that I can feel, oh yes wow, I see what the guy is doing here.  How many times does the title line need to be sung with the same accompaniment?

Aaron: Iris Dement – Here is the title track. It’s a great tune and Mark Knopfler plays some fine National guitar on this track

Tony: That’s interesting for me, because if I had been asked what type of music this was I would have said half way between C&W and folk.  But that shows how ignorant I am.

There is a phrase in the melody which is so reminiscent of a line from Dylan’s “Jack of Hearts” I get distracted and can’t pick up on what is really going on.

Oh hell, I’m really doing badly today.  And it is such a beautiful day here in middle England.

Indigo Girls: Shame on You.

Aaron: Indigo Girls. I liked this one a lot, some real good singles

Shame On You – brave to include a line like :

"The beautiful ladies walk right by and I never know what to say"

I like that, it would have made some fans feel included and accepted for who they are.

Tony: In the latest edition of the greatest cover versions of Dylan’s song we have Indigo Girls’ version of Tangled up in Blue – in fact it is in there twice largely because of my difficulties with alphabetical order.

I really enjoy their music, it always sounds so fresh and lively as if they really want to be there signing and performing; plus they are highly original in their reinterpretations.

Get Out The Map

John Prine – Live On Tour

Aaron: This was a real good one!

Tony: Ooooh, Aaron we are going to have to find a different way of doing these – I just can’t get into this music at all.  Would anyone like to do a review?  Aaron, if you send me a review I’ll paste it in here.

The Late John Garfield Blues

Tony: So I end the whole affair bemused.  But then, I know so many people who have listened to a little bit of Bob Dylan and just don’t get it at all.

And that really brings me to the issue of the judging.  Maybe the judges really do know about all the music being issued that year, but really how on earth do you judge formats that are so different?  It’s like being asked to evaluate a Haydn symphony against a Bach Prelude and Fugue.  It’s just not possible to do in any meaningful way.

Aaron: Now I admit Bob’s album is the best and by quite some distance, however I’m struggling to see it as a “Contemporary Folk” album. I’d probably give this to John Prine but I found each of the other nominees highly enjoyable also. A great selection all round, and I’m delighted to have discovered some new music and artists I’d have never listened to without this article!

Tony: I haven’t gone exploring the others yet – because I am now stuck on listening to all the Indigo Girls tracks.  But maybe that is the point.  There is so much music out there how can we ever meet more than a tiny fraction of 1 percent.  If you, dear reader, have managed to get through this far, and if you have a few minutes to spare, try this.

It knocks me out totally.

Dear dear reader – I hope somewhere in this you found something of interest, and also that you had a moment to think: how on earth do these awards work?  I mean, how can you judge one of these albums against another.

I find it all quite weird.

By Larry Fyffe

Metonymic associations be the hallmark of Postmodern poetic and song lyrics, but there are lots of onomatopoeic words floating around on the top of the deep blue Jungian Sea for the taking.

There’s the harsh “jangle which indicates a discordant lack of harmony –  often it’s juxtaposed with the softer-sounding ‘jingle’ – a contrast provided by background singers at the beginning of the lyrics below:

(Jingle jangle, jingle jangle
Jingle jangle, jingle jangle, jingle jangle, jingle jangle)
Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way

Dished out to Charles Dickens by the King of Onomatopoeia in the following description of a not-so-well-dressed ghost:

He looked like seventeen gas-light stove pipes
Come together with jingle-jangle bells all over
(Lord Buckley: Scrooge)

Utilized in the poetic lines below to signify discordance on life’s journey:

And by degrees your heart is tangled
Bliss grows apace, and then its course is jangled

(Bayard Taylor: Prelude At The Theatre)

Skipping and swirling onomatopoeia, aided by the rhythm of the dreamy music, pops up in the following masterful lyrics:

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning, I'll come following you
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

‘Jangled’ diction be found once more in the song lyrics below –  featuring another ragged clown who ‘clicked’ his heels – from the “Dylan” album:

I knew a man, Bojangles, and he danced for you
In worn out shoes
Silver hair, a ragged shirt, and baggy pants

(Bob Dylan: Mr. Bojangles ~ Walker)

https://youtu.be/CTraYM0WeLQ

A standard onomatopoeia heard in the song lyrics beneath:

No one knew the circumstance, but they say that 
    it happened pretty quick
The door to the dressing room burst open, 
    and a cold revolver clicked

(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary,  And The Jack Of Hearts)

By Tony Attwood

Earlier episodes are listed here

Two episodes ago the article was called “Dylan post Angelina: step by step it’s falling apart in all directions at once,” which took us up to the composition of “Foot of Pride.”

The last one was “All directions at once, tangled up”

And falling apart and being tangled up certainly were the themes of the day in terms of Bob Dylan’s compositions, and now not only falling apart in all directions at once but in all times at once, so that not only is this moment one of muddle and confusion, the music also expresses the notion that it is impossible to understand the past, and so inevitably impossible to comprehend or predict the future.

Between writing “Angelina” in 1981 and writing “What good am I” in 1987 Dylan wrote, as far as we know, getting on for 100 songs, but I suspect only the most hardened and dedicated fans would be able to name more than 30, and quite a few of those are remembered primarily because they were on the albums, not because of their stand-out brilliance.

In those 30 there were some really good pieces, in my estimation, and maybe 10 were absolute Dylan gems.  My list of songs in that category would include…

1. Lenny Bruce
2. Jokerman
3. I and I
4. Blind Willie McTell
5. Neighbourhood Bully
6. When the night comes falling from the sky
7. Dark Eyes
8. To fall in love with you
9. What good am I?
10. Dignity

Now for your average professional songwriter that would be a pretty good haul across a few years of songwriting, but for Dylan, we are now a very long way from the days of 1974 in which ten utter masterpieces were knocked out seemingly effortlessly within one year.  And we might also note that a number of these songs of this era were either not used at once, others never used at all.

Whether you agree with my choice from this period or are thinking “how can this idiot [ie me] have omitted x and included y” I have found in discussions that most people will agree that the long list of getting on for 100 songs between Heart of Mine and the early Wilburys songs does not include too many more absolute masterpieces.  And to be clear I am not talking about songs that one quite likes, but songs that utterly stand out and which would be chosen if (as we have done a few times here) one was making a compilation album of one’s own.

Certainly when I compare the list of titles during this period with the period in 1980 when in sequence Dylan composed

1. Every grain of sand
2. Caribbean Wind
3. Groom’s still waiting at the alter
4. Yonder comes sin
5. Let’s keep it between us
6. Making a liar out of me

well, there is no comparison. Six amazing songs one after the other.

So, in my estimation (and of course that is all it is) Dylan wanted to write, and was indeed writing song after song, and very occasionally hit gold with songs like Blind Willie McTell, but often he simply wrote good songs, that deserved to be heard, but not majestic masterpieces.  And to be honest there were a few fairly poor pieces in there too, which were never taken any further.

Now Dylan, as you will know if you have been following this series, had times where he stopped writing.  In 1968 he wrote only one song.  It is a song which we all remember (Lay Lady Lay) but that was it.   Then in 1969 although he wrote maybe 15 songs, few of them stand out (“I threw it all away” is one of the few that did).

In 1971 there were six songs of which “Watching the river flow” is perhaps the one we all remember; 1972 had “Forever young” and the film music for “Billy the kid” and nothing else.  1973 was the preparation for a year of pure genius.  But thereafter the writing becomes harder – or at least harder to create those moments of genius.  Indeed I would be happy to bet that most Dylan fans would struggle to remember many beyond the songs I have mentioned above.

They are all out there, and are listed in our “Dylan songs of the 80s” index but unless you live a life totally centred around Dylan songs, I really do think you might struggle to recall too many of them.

Which perhaps explains why the invite to work with the Wilburys was attractive to Bob.  And curiously, just before the Wilburys started creating their music Bob suddenly found a run of form once again with “Political World”, “What good am I?” and “Dignity”.

Indeed I find it endlessly fascinating that Dylan wrote “What good am I” and “Dignity” just before setting off the play with his mates.  What came next were the Wilbury songs, and there is nothing wrong with most of them, but they are not really what we expect from Bob, and to my ear don’t match up to the quality of Bob’s own work..

Of course we don’t know how much Bob wrote of each Wilbury song, if anything although Tweeter and the monkey man  clearly sounds like a Dylan song.

For myself, I see this as a period where Bob wanted a new direction, a new style, a new approach… a new uplift in his songwriting, and he couldn’t find it.   When he did make breakthroughs for one reason or another he not only didn’t continue using that style or approach, as often as not, he abandoned the song that could have led to the new style.

And this wasn’t just happening in 1985 and 1986, this situation goes all the way back to 1982 with Blind Willie McTell and Foot of Pride.

But I must confess we also face a difficulty here with dating Bob’s compositions.  Dylan often leaves no information of when something was written, and all we have to go with are dates of initial recordings.

However there is a fair chance that Political Word, not recorded until early 1989, was by that time, considerably re-written, and the same is true of “What good am I?” but there is evidence that this song was undergoing rewriting at that time, and indeed had already undergone quite a bit of re-writing prior to this time.

My view is that “Political World” was followed by “What good am I?” and “Dignity”, with “Tweeter and the monkey man” and “Like a Ship” coming later in 1988.

Which means that the most magical “To fall in love with you” which was abandoned preceded the fine run of “Political World” and onward.

Plus, what is striking to me about these songs is their sheer variety – they are different from each other and different from the songs written in the previous year or two.  It really does sound to me as if Bob is seriously trying out different ideas rather than just letting the ideas come into his head.

What is also fascinating is just how different these songs are from each other.   As I have commented before, “Political world” shouldn’t work at all – virtually no melody, one chord only, but but at the same time setting out the repeat of an old Dylan message in a completely new format… this world really has gone wrong.  Not wrong in the Christian sense of falling from grace, but simply going wrong because it has gone wrong.

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last

We live in a political world
The one we can see and can feel
But there’s no one to check, it’s all a stacked deck
We all know for sure that it’s real

It’s not that mankind has turned its back on Jesus, but rather mankind has put its trust in politicians.

It was played by Bob 28 times on stage – and maybe it only got that low number because of those restrictions with the chord and melody make it less exciting to play than many others.  The format certainly restricts what the instrumentalists can do.

This is followed by the same message but from an utterly personal perspective: “What good am I?” a real self-battering.  It is not just the world gone wrong, Bob is not doing anything to make it better.

The answer as to what we could do to get out of all this mess came with the third song in the trilogy: Dignity.  We need to hold onto ourselves, to keep our sense of self-worth, but not let it blow out of all proportion.  For the issue we all face is not the issue of the world around us (although that can be horrible enough) but the way we perceive the world.  If we can have a genuine self-respect based on honourable behaviour maybe, just maybe we can survive (but it’s probably not a good idea to put a bet on it).

In “What Good Am I” which in contrast to “Political World” got played 241 times, Dylan is saying is that in the end the only way out is honesty, out of which we get engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy… these are the qualities of the really human and humane person.    Each verse says it all; take this for example

What good am I if I know and don’t do
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you
If I turn a deaf ear to the thundering sky
What good am I?

What he then does is goes one step further and says, it is dignity (of which honesty is a pre-requisite) which encapsulates all these elements of being a good person.   If you have  engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy, you can have dignity.

This is an astounding trilogy of songs, of which the full emotional impact and musical genius can only be understood if heard as a trilogy.  And the tragedy is that we don’t hear them as a trilogy, because they have never been released that way.  It is only by seeing the chronology of Dylan’s writing that we can understand.

What’s more they are three incredibly different songs – and it is interesting to ponder what Dylan would have done next after these three superb songs, written one after the other, each in its own way contemplating the mess that is our world, if he hadn’t already agreed to work with the Wilburys.  But he had so the year ended with two Wilbury’s songs,

Tweeter and the monkey man and Like a Ship good compositions and interesting in their own way, but not ground breakers like, for example Blind Willie McTell.

So Bob had had his distraction – his fun with the gang, doing their own thing.  Would that refresh him and allow him to find his new direction?   It is pointless but still fun to imagine what might have happened if Bob had not signed up  to the Wilburys project.  Would he have found his new direction sooner?  I suspect so.  But ultimately Bob did settle down in 1989, and after a couple of early try outs, he hit the ground running once more with a collection of compositions which well and truly build on all that had been going on through these years of uncertainty.

We’ll come on to that next time.  But at least we can pause here reflecting on three works of genius, and the knowledge that at last Bob had cleared the blockage.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part III: I love you, but you’re strange

IV         The Order of the Whirling Dervishes

People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

“I used to recite prayers. Now I recite rhymes and poems and songs,” says Rumi, probably around 1260, about his “ecstatic poetry”, in one of his thousands of ghazals. Rumi’s ghazals (short poems consisting of rhyming couplets) and quatrains are basically one long ode to the liberating, uplifting qualities of song, dance and love, and he is still honoured in that vein: as a prophet of Love, Song and Dance. After Rumi’s deeply regretted death in 1273, Sultan Walad comes up with perhaps the most fitting tribute: he founds The Order of the Whirling Dervishes, the order that is still famous for its religious ritual, for its wildly spinning monks, reciting poetry and prayers, in order to get closer to God in a religious ecstasy.

Seven centuries later, its magic has not worn off:

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it

… Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man is a twentieth-century dervish, who even properly adheres to the prescribed choreography of the Order (Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow / Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free); spinning round and round, with one hand raised above the head.

That, of course, is not the only line between Dylan and Rumi; “I recite rhymes and poems and songs” is a perhaps very compact but also a very apt one-liner to summarise Dylan’s life and work, and beyond that the confrères seem to think and write in similar imagery – the kind of imagery that borders on synaesthesia, as here, in “Love Minus Zero”.

In Western culture, it is a rather exotic image, “laughing like a flower”. Its synaesthetic content is in itself not an obstacle, but perhaps it is a little too woeful, or too childish – in any case, it does not really penetrate. In Eastern culture, the image is more popular. Thanks to Rumi, of course, who wrote in the thirteenth century: “Why so happy to laugh with your mouth shut? You should laugh like a flower, without a care,” with which he immediately defines what that actually is, “laughing like a flower” – with open mouth, that is. Fully, without embarrassment. And just to be sure, he repeats his definition in a poem: I laugh like a flower, not just mouth laughter (translating as not just the lips, or rather: not just smiling, is probably better), I burst forth with gaiety and mirth.

It has almost the status of a Sufi motto, and its impact can still be measured centuries later. In a 1963 Bollywood classic, for example, Dil Hi To Hai (“It Is Only A Heart”), the film that yields a whole series of now-classic Indian hits. Including “Tum Agar Mujhko Na Cha Ho To (If You Don’t Want Me)”, which became so popular partly because it was sung in the film by the greatest Indian film star of all time, Raj Kapoor. And in that song, he tries to charm his adored one, who had just been so angry with him:

Phool ki taraha hanso sab ki nigaahon mein raho
Apni maasoom jawaani ki panaahon mein raho
Mujhko woh din na dikhaana tumhe apni bhi kasam
Mein tarasta rahoon tum gair ki baahon me raho

Laugh like a flower, be the center of everyone's attention.
Stay safe in the shelter of your innocent youth.
Let me not see the day, I beg you...
In which I yearn for you while you’re in another man's arms.

Raj Kapoor – Tum Agar Mujhko Na Cha Ho To:

https://youtu.be/kXnHoJ5ZH44

… फूल की तरह हँसो, phool ki taraha hanso, laugh like a flower… it is not too likely, obviously, that Dylan did visit a Bollywood film in the early sixties, vehemently taking notes in the process. The shared use of this remarkable metaphor illustrates, mostly, an art fraternity across centuries, continents and cultures. On the other hand: in the twenty-first century, Rumi is still the most widely read and one of the best-selling poets in the US, and Dylan’s comrade Allen Ginsberg has undoubtedly waved Rumi’s poetry around… it is not entirely inconceivable that Dylan did, in fact, read this particular image at Rumi.

The introduction of Valentines, however, is all-American. The name does trace back to a third-century Saint Valentine, and Chaucer’s poem “Parliament Of Fowls” (c. 1380) may have contributed something as well (“For this was on seynt Volantynys day / Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make – For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day / When every bird comes there to choose his match”), but its commercialisation, from the 19th century onwards in the Anglo-Saxon world, is primarily an American success story. Oriental it is certainly not, in any case. In Islamic countries, celebrating Valentine’s Day is even forbidden – which would probably have been against the sentimental swooner Rumi’s wishes.

Anyhow, the content of Dylan’s final line in this stanza is probably primarily driven by rhyming pleasure. “Love Minus Zero” has no iron-clad rhyme scheme – the four octaves each have a different rhyme scheme. The only constants are the rhyming opening lines and the rhyming of verse four with verse eight. In this first octet Dylan shows off with the indeed nice and original rhyme find buy her – fire. Nice and original perhaps, but this particular rhyme is still not widely imitated. Dylan fan Dan McCafferty, the singer of the Scottish rock band Nazareth, borrows it in 1991 for the unimpressive opening song of the unsuccessful album No Jive, “Hire And Fire” (Setting my soul on fire / Try her and buy her). The other songs on the album are equally unmemorable. The record’s meagre highlight is the finale, a poor remake of their 1973 hit, Joni Mitchell’s “This Flight Tonight” – a brilliant cover of one of Joni’s most beautiful Valentine’s songs.

Nazareth – This Flight Tonight:

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part V: When a sighing begins in the violins

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

Naysayers and the the connoisseurs of ‘high art’ alike claim Bob Dylan is not deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature because, for one thing, the singer/songwriter/musician is not that familiar with those artists considered worthy thereof.

I beg to differ – Bob Dylan makes it clear that he is quite aware of the works of a number of Nobel winners – often brought to his attention through watching movies.

There’s Rudyard Kipling, for example:

The finest man I knew
Was our regimental 'bhisti', Gunga Din
He was Din, Din, Din
(Rudyard Kipling: Gunga Din)

The song lyrics beneath mention the darkly humorous 1939 movie based thereon, starring Carey Grant:

Clouds so swift, and the rain falling in
Gonna see a movie called 'Gunga Din'
(Bob Dylan: You Ain't Going Nowhere)

An early humorous poem by the singer/songwriter refers to Nobeller TS Eliot:

I thought she was hip
When we sat and drank coffee
And I flipped when she recited 
All of 'Prufrock' by heart
(Bob Dylan : Untitled Poem)

Dylan’s certainly aware of Nobel-winner Steinbeck’s ‘Mice And Men’ – through the well-known ‘Beat writer’ for one, who refers to a film starring Burgess Meredith:

Once I went to a movie
At midnight, 1940, 'Mice
 And Men', the name of it
(Jack Kerouac: Mexico City Blues)

The song lyrics below refer to the 1950 movie titled “The Gunfighter” – Kerouac’s off-hand style of writing paid tribute to in the lines below (as in “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”):

Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert, and it starred 
Gregory Peck
(Bob Dylan: Brownsville Girl ~ Dylan/Shepard)

Below, an example of Kerouac’s casual and wordy style:

… but burn, burn burn, like yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the  blue centerlight pop …”

(Jack Kerouac: On The Road)

Dylan has a little fun at the Beat’s expense though Jack is not a Nobel Prize winner:

Build a fire, throw on logs, and listen to it hiss
And let in burn, burn, burn, burn on a night like this
(Bob Dylan: On A Night Like This)

But all kinds of tributes as well:

No one in front of me, and nothing behind

(Bod Dylan: Things Have Changed)

A Dylanesque twist on:

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me ...

(Jack Kerouac: On The Road)

The following verse comes from a poem that’s written by a Nobel winner:

It wasn't the King of Diamonds 
Nor the Joker she drew first
It wasn't the King or Queen of Hearts
But the Ace of Spades reversed 
(WH Auden: Victor)

Tribute is paid thereto in the following song lyrics:

Back stage the girls were playing five-card stud 
by the stairs
Lily had two queens, she was hoping for a third 
to match her pair ....
Lily called another bet, and drew up the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily,  Rosemary,  And The Jack Of Hearts)

Song lyrics below are from a 1964 movie, based on the play “Pygmalion”:

And, oh, what a towering feeling
Just to know that somehow you are near
The overpowering feeling 
That any second, you may suddening appear

(Bill Shirley: On The Street Where You Live)

The lines from the song beneath indirectly pay tribute to George Bernard Shaw, a Nobel winner – referencing, not without humour, the above song from the movie “My Fair Lady” based on  Shaw’s “Pygmalion”:

But, oh, what a wonderful feeling
That just to know that you are near
Sets my heart a-reeling
From my toes up to my ears
(Bob Dylan: The Man In Me)

Writes a Nobel Prize winner, the verse below:

I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips, and take her hands
 And walk among long dappled grass
(William Yeats: The Song Of The Wandering Aengus)

Rather directly alluded to in the following song lyrics:

You gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
(Bod Dylan: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

Les Paul’s have sent in another Dylan co-composition – as part of a project we’ve been running for a number of years now relating to lyrics written by Dylan for which no music has been created by Bob Dylan himself.

The lyrics to Phone Operator Love appeared half way down the page on the lyrics sheet headed as Bowling Alley Blues but as Paul Robert Thomas points out, these lyrics are seemingly not  part of the Bowling Alley Blues lyrics (the song which Les Paul’s created from those lyrics they renamed Sugar Daddy Blues).

So here they are now separated them and called them Phone Operator Love.   Their comment is “we tried to give a ‘retro’ vibe to that we have posted on our website HERE.”  The lyrics are below.

This whole project of completing Bob’s songs came out of our series “Bob Dylan Showcase” and you can hear other versions of Bob’s completed songs there.

Here are the lyrics to Phone Operator Love

I’m in love with the phone operator
She’s the only one for me
I’m in love with the phone operator
I phone her number for free

Anytime I’m out of money
I just call her on the line
She always tells me ‘Look honey
Everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine’

Every time when I hear her voice
It rings my bell
I wonder what she looks like
It’s driving me crazy, can’t you tell?

I’m in love with the phone operator
I can’t get enough
I’m in love with the phone operator

It’s what they call ‘blind love’
It’s what they call ‘blind love’

I’m in love with the phone operator
She’s the only one for me
I’m in love with the phone operator
I phone her number for free

Anytime I’m out of money
I just call her on the line
She always tells me ‘Look honey
Everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine
Oh everything will soon be fine
Lord everything will soon be fine
Everything will soon be fine’

Every time when I hear her voice
It rings my bell
I wonder what she looks like
It’s driving me crazy, can’t you tell?

I’m in love with the phone operator
I can’t get enough
I’m in love with that phone operator
It’s what they call ‘blind love’

• Bob Dylan and Bayard Taylor Part 1
• Bob Dylan and Bayard Taylor Part II
• Bob Dylan And Bayard Taylor (Part III)

by Larry Fyffe

Very unlikely that writers Bayard Taylor and William Blake are aware of the poems of Edward Taylor – so put the following lines up to sheer creative coincidence:

And, like a finer sunshine swims
Round every motion of thy limbs
The sweet, sad wonder and surprise
Of waking glimmers in thine eyes
(Bayard Taylor: Like A Finer Sunshine)

And these lines too:

Our life is scare the twinkle of a star
In God's eternal day. Obscure and dim
With mortal clouds, it may yet beam for Him
And darkened here, shine fair to spheres afar
(Bayard Taylor: What Know The Woods)

In reference to the verse below by the Puritan/Baroque poet:

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

The writer of the song lyrics beneath, however, might well be aware of either one or both Taylors; take from each and all  what messages you have gathered from coincidence:

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

For sure, Quaker Bayard Taylor sentiments are influenced by those of the pre-Romantic poet William Blake:

My heart, a bird with broken wing
Deserted by its mate of spring
Droops shivering, while the winds blow
And fills the nest of love with snow
(Bayard Taylor: Bird With Broken Wing)

Similar enough they be to the sorrow expressed in the following lines:

How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing
How can a child, when fears annoy
But droop his tender wing
And forget his youthful spring
(William Blake: The Schoolboy)

In the song lyrics below, Blake’s sorrowful outlook is mixed together with that of the dark Gothic visions of Edgar Allan Poe:

The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love, she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero/ No Limit)

Previously in this series

NET 1998 Part 1: One who sings with his tongue on fire.

There is an index to the entire series on the Never Ending Tour here.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In Part 1 of 1998 (see previous post) I tried to cover the songs from Time out of Mind new to live performance, and I found ‘Million Miles’ and ‘To Make you Feel my Love.’ However, I missed a song: ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’. I might have passed over it because I don’t think this is the best performance of the song that Dylan did, or even a memorable one, but I am being influenced by how it was to develop over the coming years, and how good it was to become.

This is a song, I contend, that Dylan would grow into as the years passed and the shadows lengthened. After all, he was still on the sunny side of sixty when he recorded Time Out of Mind, and such a stark encounter with mortality would need the following twenty years to fully develop. It was almost as if he was too young in 1997 to fully feel the bite of the lyrics. No other song on the album quite confronts death the way this one does. For a man who’s wrestled with his faith, the last verse is devastating, and signals a loss of faith.

‘I was born here and I'll die here against my will
I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there’

In the face of the gathering dark, our faith can fail us. To me, this performance from New London (CT) on the 14^th of January sounds surprisingly tentative. He’s stepped away from Lanois’ swampy sound but doesn’t seem to have found a new sound that will bring the song to life, although I don’t want to judge this unfairly in the light of later performances that I prefer.

It’s not dark yet

In the previous post I pointed out that Dylan’s set list was pretty unvarying for this year, with the same songs cropping up again and again. One of these is ‘Serve Somebody’, the first track of the 1979 album Slow Train Coming. Because of its context, Dylan’s sudden conversion to Christianity, the song has been seen as a Christian song, but by 1998, nineteen years later, and set in the context of Time Out of Mind, I’m beginning to wonder. The song, in all its lyrical variants, merely states that no matter who we are, we are serving somebody, some force or other. We can serve the powers of good or the powers of evil, it’s up to us. That’s a much more universal message than a strictly Christian one. Are we really the good guys or not?

It’s hard to get past the powerful 1979 – 1981 performances of this song, but this is much rougher than those earlier gospel versions, rougher but no less powerful, I think. And some of those lyrical variations bring us closer to a Time Out of Mind state of mind:

might think that you’re living
might even think that you’re dead
sleeping on nails
sleeping on a feather bed

Dylan would kick off his shows with either this song or ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ (see part 1). Here he is blasting his way into the 5^th of November, Wollongong (Australia) concert, and he’s in great voice.

Serve Somebody

The odd one out among these regulars, to my mind, is ‘The Man in Me’, a fairly minor song from New Morning (1970). I say this because there is a freshness of feeling in the song that is far from the spirit of Time Out of Mind.

‘But, oh, what a wonderful feeling
Just to know that you are near
Sets my a heart a-reeling
From my toes up to my ears’

Maybe that’s why Dylan brought it to the fore, for the contrast of feeling. He’d typically bring it in around number three on the setlist. Here it is from that wonderful San Jose concert (19^th May)

Man in Me

In 1997/98 Dylan brought two songs to the fore that he’d never played live. One was ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and the other was ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, a song Dylan wrote with Rick Danko. I’ve written before  about how provocatively elusive the lyrics are to ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ (See NET, 1997, part 2), and the impression that the language is coded. Even the refrain is ambivalent in terms of its mood or intention; is it a threat or a promise?

‘No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell
But you know that we shall meet again
If your mem’ry serves you well’

And dead men tell no tales…or do they? And is it a pleasant memory? Probably not, as it’s a reminder of an obligation incurred, and somebody will be back to collect the debt.

This version from New London (CT) certainly brings out the element of threat or darkness in the song, more so than the nostalgia of the Band’s recorded version (Music from Big Pink, 1968). That may be due to the ominous sound of the opening guitar riffs here, and the urgency of the drumming.

Wheel’s on fire

We find the same sense of threat in the guitar work on ‘Blind Willie McTell’ which I think we need to think of as a protest song. ‘This land is condemned’ and ‘power and greed and corruptible seed’ rule that land, America. This is justly considered one of Dylan’s greatest songs, written in 1983, yet he seems to have become aware of that in only 1997/98. It contains unforgettable pictures of a fallen America with imagery that takes us back to the Civil War (1860s)

‘Seen them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghost of slavery ship
I can hear them tribes moaning
Hear the undertakers bell
Nobody can sing the blues like blind Wille McTell’

This is what he mostly sings. But there are variations and ellipses in performance, as well as in written versions. Consider this verse:

‘There's a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He's dressed up like some squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There's chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like blind Wille McTell’

However, the official lyrics have this:

‘There’s a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
Some of them died in the battle
Some of them survived as well…’

… which I’ve never heard him sing. In most of the live performances the rebels disappear to be replaced by the undertaker’s bell. Sadly, his tendency is to drop the wonderful ‘big plantations burning’ verse altogether. Whatever the lyrical variations, however, it remains a powerful song, powerfully delivered, and it sits very comfortably with the Time Out of Mind songs. (Sorry, no date for this one)

Blind Willie McTell

Another regular on Dylan’s setlist in 1998 is ‘Across the Borderline’, a song by John Hiatt, Ry Cooder and Jim Dickinson. When you look at the lyrics it’s easy to see what attracted Dylan to this song at this time. Dylan could have written it himself for Time Out of Mind:

‘When you reach the broken promised land
And every dream slips through your hands
Then you'll know that it's too late to change your mind
'Cause you've paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are
And you're still just across the borderline’

This one’s from November 3^rd, a sweet, reflective rendition.

Across the Borderline

Another song that never strayed far from the setlists is our old friend ‘Tangled up in Blue.’ No stranger, this song. Ten years on the road and the song hasn’t lost its bite; the memories it canvasses still sound fresh. Dylan rarely produced the harmonica in 1998, but he does here at the San Jose concert for this song. A sharp and edgy performance.

Tangled up in Blue

On the subject of brief harp breaks, the opening harp work on this ‘Just Like a Woman’ sets a gentle and fragile tone. Strip the Blonde on Blonde  jeer from Dylan’s voice, make it sound more care-worn, and we get quite a different impression of the song. Indeed the mood can shift from scorn to compassion. Suddenly the details feel different, maybe more sad:

‘everybody knows
that baby's got new clothes
but lately I see her ribbons and her bows
have fallen
from her curls’

A very telling detail. Like ‘Miss Lonely’ in ‘Just like a Rolling Stone’, the woman here has fallen, her pretty pretences stripped away. And then there’s the matter of the singer’s hunger, of which he is ashamed. I think we tend to be scornful of those we have revealed too much of ourselves to. Revealing our need makes us vulnerable, so we hit back. But in this performance, there’s not so much hitting back as regretting. (23^rd October) It was just one of those things:

Just like a Woman

‘Masters of War’ is another song that got plenty of stage time in 1998. I still think his 1995, London concert version is the best, but by 1998 Dylan has settled on a slow, heavy beat for the song. He has largely abandoned fast electric versions for these ominous acoustic sounds. It’s interesting that even within the confines of the same basic arrangement, the mood and tone of the song can vary a lot.

In this first one, from San Jose, the song sounds urgent and intimate, the anger very evident. There’s a furious crackle in his voice.

Masters of War (A)

In this following performance, however, from Los Angeles, 21^st May, the sound is more distant, softer and more spooky. The differences in recording might play a part here, but it sounds to me as if Dylan is using the echo of the Los Angeles venue to effect that more distant voice.

 Masters of War (B)

In 1998, Dylan often returned to that wonderful dirge, ‘Forever Young’. As with ‘Masters of War’ the mood and tone of the song vary a lot from concert to concert. It’s another old friend that ages well. Apparently Dylan wrote the song for one of his children in 1974, but by 1998 it sounds more grandfatherly. We oldies might grow old but you young ones please stay young. It’s a plea from age to youth. The older Dylan’s voice sounds, the deeper the irony becomes.

The first is from San Jose, another intimate performance, yet with the first signs of upsinging (lifting the voice at the end of the line) which will come to plague later performances. Here it works all right, as he’s not doing it at the end of every line. The ragged chorus works well too.

Forever young (A)

This next one is slower, gentler perhaps, with no upsinging. Another irresistible performance. (23^rd October)

Forever Young (B)

So that’s it for this time around, folks. Stay young (at least at heart), and we’ll be back soon with another round of friends and other strangers.

Kia Ora

• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I: Rose of England
• Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part II : A Song Of Ice And Fire

by Jochen Markhorst

III         I love you, but you’re strange

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire

At the other end of the spectrum is Hamburg punk band Abwärts: “Meine Liebe kommt mit Überschall – my love comes with ultrasound” (“Das Wort zum Sonntag”, 1982). Which, come to think of it, might be so deafening that it could make sense after all: my love she speaks like silence. The continuation, however, disrupts the comparison; the words are spoken by an aircraft bomb hurtling down, so “without ideals or violence” is a bit difficult to fit in.

Anyway, in a text full of antitheses, it is right from the start one of the most famous antitheses in the song (the success/failure antithesis from the second stanza is of course the most quoted). With a curious extra layer that is often missed.

Superficial listening leaves little doubt: a protagonist in love sings of the exceptional attractiveness of some lady. Like some Italian poet from the thirteenth century, say Petrarch, about Laura. Particular word choice may have been inspired by William Blake (speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, “To The Evening Star”) and Edmund Spenser (“My Love Is Like To Ice And I To Fire”), but given the vocabulary in general and the apparent clarity thereof, even more by Shakespeare and his love sonnets. After all, the lady is lovely and clearly more temperate, like the lady sung about in “Sonnet 18”, like Ol’ Bill says my love is like a fever, very Dylanesque and ambiguous in “Sonnet 147”, though at least Dylan’s lover seems more faithful than the my love from “Sonnet 138”;

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies

The sweetness of the melody and the somewhat archaic, Shakespearean tone of the lyrics conceal a layer that is usually much more obvious in Shakespeare: an ambiguity that leaves open the possibility of understanding exactly the opposite. This is already true of that famous opening line My love she speaks like silence. Analysts usually link this to a Madonna-like, mysterious aura in general, and to Sara Dylan’s aura in particular. Dylan indeed wrote the song sometime during the first, enamoured months of their relationship, and qualifications like “mysterious”, “good listener” and “shy and quiet” are used by every biographer. The bridge to “silence”, in short, is easily made.

The ambiguity of the metaphor is then ignored by the analysts. Still, “speaking like silence” is a somewhat dubious compliment to say the least. After all, silence equals not saying anything. Thus, “speaking like silence” would actually be a neutral, concealing way of saying: she speaks, but she does not say anything.

Equally dubious is the subsequent “compliment”: without ideals or violence. One may wonder whether that is such an admirable quality – no opinions and no passion is another way of saying the same thing. The more positive explanation is that the lady is detached, unaffected by worldly concerns such as – for example – social injustice or, say, racial issues. But then the image of a somewhat unworldly figure, almost like someone with an autism-related disorder, still prevails; when she talks she says nothing, she has no opinions and doesn’t care about anything – she is expressionless. If it is about Sara at all, it is in keeping with the image that emerges from a supposed “farewell-to-Sara” song Dylan writes twelve years later, from the brilliant “Abandoned Love”: I love you, but you’re strange.

Dylan – Abandoned Love (live at the Bitter End):

It is an attractive quality, the art of disguising ambiguity, of covering up a second, opposing layer. Dylan shares this quality with a master like Kafka, Dylan of course having the advantage of being a musician; he can use the music to lift one layer, and cover the other. Successfully, usually. Like “Every Grain Of Sand”: also the more serious analysts like Shelton and Paul Williams are fooled by the gorgeous melodies into thinking that Dylan is trying to express something like “sense of wonder or awe at the beauty of the natural world”, where Dylan explicitly stacks up eerie, gloomy, saddening images (a pool of tears, a dying voice, nocturnal sorrow, chill, pain, decay, despair, bitterness and so on).

The same goes for “Make You Feel My Love”. The song is heavily criticised in Dylan circles, both by fans on the forums and by “professional” Dylanologists, who then all stumble over the alleged cuteness of the lyrics. A text that, upon clinical analysis, is spoken by a stalking creep who lists all the things he will do “to make you feel my love” and meanwhile sketches nothing but abysmal misery. The rain hits her face, the whole world is nagging at her, tears, hunger, black and blue, storm and a “highway of regret”… hardly cute, all in all.

Once the doubts about the veracity of the immeasurable, infinite love of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” have been raised after those first two lines, the ambivalence of the third and fourth lines becomes noticeable as well;

She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire

“Not having to say you are faithful” is as dubious a compliment as being “without ideals”. Did the other women in the narrator’s life have to fulfil this requirement in order to dispel doubts about adultery? “Other women had to say they were faithful, but you don’t” – and yet she’s true. Which is apparently quite remarkable: despite not having to say it, she still is faithful. Strange enough, but not as strange as the metaphor the narrator chooses to express how “true” she is: like ice, like fire. The poet can choose hundreds of images to express something like the “purity”, the “uncomplicatedness” of her faithfulness. Spring water, puppies, mountain air, tears, the stars above or a rolling stone, for that matter. But he chooses ice and fire; two most unreliable phenomena that are both painful, dangerous and deadly.

It is probably no more than an echo of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet “My Love Is Like To Ice And I To Fire” (1594), a much more unambiguous, rather explanatory play with exactly the same antithesis – yes, Spenser is very much in love with his second wife Elizabeth Doyle, shouting his love from the rooftops and, he too, writes this sometime during the first, enamoured months of their relationship. But Dylan eschews unambiguity.

No, perhaps we must ask ourselves whether we should not be looking for the Shakespeare connection in the Dark Lady sequence of his sonnets, in Sonnets 127-152. For the Shakespeare who writes:

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

… again offering antithesis on antithesis, by the way.

The Walker Brothers – Love Minus Zero/No Limit: 

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part IV: The Order of the Whirling Dervishes

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

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

We first mentioned Tioga Pass in July 2020 with a plea for anyone who could complete this song.

As we noted at the time Tioga Pass is a song that was seemingly recorded at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, on 16 June 1987 and according to the only note we have concerning the song, it was written by Robert Hunter and Bob Dylan.

You can see the lyrics and the background to the song (as far as we were able to sort that out) in our earlier article on the subject here.

Now Paul Robert Thomas has provided us with a musical version of the song

And here one more time are the lyrics

Needle's on empty
and here I'm stuck
Four in the morning
and just my luck
Listen to the radio
waiting for the sun
Can't flag a ride
until daylight comes

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

Tuned to a station
I've never heard
while moonlight glimmers
on Dead Man's Curve
Glory in the morning
and God bless you
for playing that song
when another would do

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

Ain't quite rock
although it moves
It sure ain't country
and it's not the blues
They don't say nothing
when it gets to the end
Just keep playing it
over again

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

It isn't pop
and it isn't soul
Nothing like fifties
rock and roll
It isn't folk
Not especially jazz
Got something special
nothing else has

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

The sun comes up
about six o'clock
The station drifts
to some pre-fab rock
Although they played it
all night long
I never did learn
the name of that song

The song can also be  found on their website HERE and is part of our ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) Dylan Found project.

On our site we’ve created an alphabetical list of all Dylan’s compositions and co-compositions that we know about.  You can find that here.

Bob Dylan and Bayard Taylor Part 1

Bob Dylan and Bayard Taylor Part II

by Larry Fyffe

Our rowboat journey across the wide and wavy Jungian Sea continues.

Sentimental Bayard can be grouped in with the anti-Puritan Romantic Transcendentalist poets providing you consider his Quaker’s ‘inner light’ of love and pity be a part thereof – Joan Baez, an anti-war, anti-creed, this-worldly Quaker herself.

Admittedly, attempts at such classifications are fuzzy at best.

In the poem below, a delightful life apparently awaits the lonely faithful, but die first they must:

No more an outcast on her sod
Or at her board a stinted guest
But now in purple raiment dressed
And heir to all delight, that
She receives of God
(Bayard Taylor: Love And Solitude)

In the song lyrics beneath, that one last hope gets tossed overboard without a life jacket into the deep blue sea:

When the Reaper's task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The lovliest, and the best
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

Romantic/Existentialist thoughts from the poetry of Percy Shelley pop up in Taylor’s poems as they do in those of Thomas Hardy:

Thou seest, beyond, the cool kiosk
And far away the pencilled towers
That shoot from many a stately mosque
Thou hast no world beyond the chamber
(Bayard Taylor: The Odalisque)

As in the lines quoted beneath:

Column, tower, and dome, and spire
Shine like obelisks of fire
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)

More directly paid tribute to in the following song lyrics:

There's a woman on my lap
And she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

Up jumps poet William Wordsworth as well in the Quaker’s works:

If she but smile the crystal calm will break
In music, sweeter than it ever gave
And when a breeze breathes over some sleeping lake
And laughs in every wave
(Bayard Taylor: The Return Of The Goddess)

As observed in the sentimental lines presented below:

When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
(William Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud)

The song lyrics beneath darken the delight that pervades Nature in the poem above:

I walk by tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season's dawn awaits
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)

Like poet Emily Dickinson, the singer/songwriter is more likely to encounter a slithering snake rather than a sweet smile, a laughing wave, or a dancing flower:

When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone
(Emily Dickinson: A Narrow Fellow In The Grass)

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Part 1 of this series covering Bob’s 1969 nomination for Best Folk Performance appeared here: Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins

And part 2: Bob’s Grammy Nominations and Wins 2: Best male rock vocal 1980!

Aaron: Now moving on to what we have rather controversially decided to call part 3 of this series, we get to 1997 which was Bob’s most successful year at the Grammy’s with 3 nominations and a clean sweep of wins!

Over the next 3 articles we will look at the 3 categories Bob competed in this year.

First up it’s: Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male

Bob’s winning track – “Cold Irons Bound”

The studio version is not on YouTube so here is Bob’s live performance from the Grammy night itself!   (And there is a rare old collection of Bob Dylan smiles here).

Tony: There is an interesting commentary on this song on Wikipedia, which I think is worth taking a peek at…

Dylan was inspired to write the song in the studio after hearing drummer David Kemper, who had arrived early one day, playing an unusual beat. As Kemper explained in an interview with Uncut:

I heard this disco record with a Cuban beat, and when I got to the studio, I sat back at the drums and I slowed the beat down, and turned it upside down, and I was just playing, and there was nobody there. No one was expected for a half hour. So I was playing this drum beat, and then Bob snuck up behind me and said, “What are you playing?” I said, “Hey Bob, how are you today?” He said, “No, don’t stop, keep playing, what are you playing?” I said, “It’s a beat, I’m just writing it right now”. “Don’t stop it. Keep doing it”. And he went and got a yellow pad of paper and sat next to the drums, and he just started writing. And he wrote for maybe ten minutes, and then he said, “Will you remember that?” And I said, yeah, I got it. And then he said, all right, everybody come on in, I want to put this down”.

Well I got it in my head, and by then everyone had arrived and tuned up. And take one, he stepped up to the microphone, and “I’m beginning to hear voices, and there’s no one around”. And I think we did two takes, and then he said, “All right, let’s move on to something else”. I remember Daniel Lanois wasn’t happy; he didn’t like it. It was one of his guitar breaking incidents. He said to Tony (Garnier) and I: “The world doesn’t want another two-note melody from Bob”. And he smashed a guitar. So I thought, well, there goes my chance of being on this record. Next time I saw Daniel was at the [Grammys] because we had performed that night, and all of a sudden, Male Vocal Performance of the Year, came from that song – the one that Dan was adamant wouldn’t get on the record

Tony: Back in 2015 I had a bash at explaining my understanding of the song (at least I think I wrote it – it reads like one of my pieces but with the modesty for which I am justly famous across the world, there’s no author’s name).   I try and explain why it is all about the rhythm – and that was written before seeing the article above from Uncut.  It’s at Dylan’s Mathematical Songs

The other nominees were

David Bowie – Dead Man Walking

Well now, you want a pounding rhythm?  There it is.  And some freaky guitar work too.

What makes this really work for me is the inclusion of the background male vocals, just at the moment when we think it is all going to be about beat and fuzzy guitar.  That is one of those rare touches of musical genius which leaves me wishing I knew who decided on that.  Was it DB, or the producer, or someone in the band?

If you have just played the piece and didn’t notice the male voices behind the music at various points, and if you have a few minutes to spare do go back and listen again.  The lyrics they sing are strange too…

Gone gone gone spinning slack through the end?
Deadens? my brain falling up through the years
Till I swivel back round then I fly fly fly
Losing breath from the water then I'm gone gone gone

John Fogerty – Blueboy 

Yes well when someone calls out “Are you ready” during the opening bars of a song I tend to meander onto another planet and contemplate the lesser known literary works of the English Civil War.

It’s really strange listening to this after the two previous entries, because there is no comparison in terms of musical composition, improvisation, vocal exploration, rhythm or… well, anything.

Nothing wrong with the song, it is indeed very pleasant, but with the two previous entries you have composers at the top of their game exploring where else they might take the genre.  This is a track of top quality musicians doing their thing that they’ve done lots of times before.

Still nothing wrong with that, but then again, there’s nothing wrong with me sitting in my English country garden for a few hours in the sun, watching the wind blowing the tall trees.

John Mellencamp – Just Another Day

Strange start which I suspect will get rather tiresome if one listened to this a lot.  But it the bass and the harmonies which tell us this is going to be something else.  Yes it is just another rock song, but the production and the laid back calmness of the whole piece really makes me listen and want to listen again.  Nothing is forced, nothing is that original but it really grabs my attention.  He really is a superb vocalist.

Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road (live 95) from the b side to the Secret Garden single

Tony: The lyrics of this song – or rather should I say the lyrics at the end of this song – really get me every time.   They are for me the perfect example of using every day words in a way that can send a chill through my bones.

But when you get to the porch they're gone on the wind
So Mary, climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win

Left on their own they are not that special, but put into the song and performed they become something oh so powerful.  I have no idea what it really means, but it seems to mean something, and I love phrases like that.   These days as an ol’ timer I don’t need lyrics to mean anything but I do want them to sound as if they ought to mean something.

Maybe they move me as the father of three daughters, thinking of all that I tried to do to give them every chance in life and the endless fear that they would take all the freedom I tried to offer and then just wander into the distance.  (I’m so lucky; they didn’t).

Aaron: It’s a pretty strong selection this time. The only one I didn’t know prior to this was the Fogerty track, and whilst it isn’t a patch on Bob, Bruce or Bowie it’s still a decent tune and great vocal. I’m a massive fan of 3 of these acts (plus I’ve been known to listen to a bit of Mellencamp from time to time). So, for me it’s a close run race between Bob, Bruce and Bowie – With Bob probably getting the win…just!

Tony: For me Bob gets the win for the rhythm, but that’s not what the competition was all about!

by Jochen Markhorst

Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I: Rose of England

II          A Song Of Ice And Fire

At the end of July 2021 is finally the release of Welcome 2 America, the album that Prince recorded in 2010 but then put on the shelf. The deluxe edition has a bonus concert recording from 2011, wherein the ladies from his band are given the spotlight to sing a beautiful, hushed and soulful “Make You Feel My Love”. Prince has them perform the song a few more times, in 2011 and 2012, and then leaves the stage himself each time. This is different for “All Along The Watchtower”; in a mash-up with Foo Fighter’s “Best Of You”, this Dylan song becomes a showcase for his stage, singing and guitar skills (half-time Super Bowl show, 2007).

https://youtu.be/2hZIeEgwv-4

The other way round, there are just as few points of contact. Dylan does comment on Prince a few times, usually with reserved respect (in the 1987 Rolling Stone interview he calls him a boy wonder and “he certainly don’t lack talent, that’s for sure”), and in Theme Time Radio Hour the DJ says, ironically, “Prince is from the same area of the country that I’m from so we have plenty in common.”

That is what radio broadcaster Dylan says when announcing “Little Red Corvette” (episode 12, Cars), and he may have noticed a subtle similarity:

A body like yours
Oughta be in jail
'Cause it's on the verge of bein' obscene

… a presumably unintended paraphrase of his own There ought to be a law against you comin’ around from “Ballad Of A Thin Man”.

The other great little man from Minnesota had neither the ambition to be, nor the reputation of being a great song poet, but the wild, surreal, hallucinatory part of his oeuvre most certainly does have a poetic quality. “When Doves Cry” is one such song that surprises with a verse like

Dream, if you can, a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you

… a classic, tried and tested stylistic device that Prince often uses; quite literally colourful, expressionistic sets. Like every day is a yellow day (“Condition Of The Heart”), the sky was all purple (“1999”), the crystal blue stream of desire (“Adonis And Bathsheba”) and of course I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain.

And in the more ambitious lyrics, he does come close to a literary quality that Dylan wouldn’t be ashamed of either. On several fronts, even; the evocative power, the enjoyment of language, the orientation towards sound and the suggestion of epic… all quality features of Dylan’s better lyrics that Prince equals in his best moments. “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”, for example, unites a freewheelin’ Dylan with the syllables-juggling Dylan of “Highlands” and with the kaleidoscopic poet of “Absolutely Sweet Marie”;

Oh, I said, “Cool, but I'm leavin' my pants on (what you say?)
'Cause I'm kinda goin' with someone”
She said, “Sound like a real man to me
Mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Oh, my favorite song,” she said
And it was Joni singing: "Help me, I think I'm falling"
(Drring) The phone rang and she said
“Whoever's calling can't be as cute as you”
Right then and there I knew I was through
(Dorothy Parker was cool)

… and around it glitters like I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine / Dorothy was fast, mercurial asides like I’d been talkin’ stuff in a violent room and Dylanesque, dryly comic extras like Well, I ordered: “Yeah, let me get a fruit cocktail, I ain’t too hungry”.

The other classical figure of speech is even more frequent, and Prince’s predilection for it links him to Dylan in his mid-60s: the antithesis. With Prince, the preference is quite persistent – he hardly writes a lyric without an antithesis. Often enough, simple, straightforward antitheses such as Between white and black, night and day or

You're just a sinner I am told
Be your fire when you're cold
Make you happy when you're sad
Make you good when you are bad

(from “I Would Die 4 U”, lyrics that are more layered and complex than this simple quatrain would suggest).

But every now and then, Prince manages to spice up his lyrics with more subtle antitheses. Like the brilliant opening line of “Sign O’ The Times”: In France, a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name. In strong one-liners like used to have the party on New Years Eve / first one intoxicated last one to leave, and a robin sings a masterpiece that lives and dies unheard. And in one of his most successful lyrics, in “Raspberry Beret”. Stylistically, the opening couplet is poetic craftsmanship, with a powerful epic, almost cinematic quality:

I was working part time in a five-and-dime
My boss was Mr. McGee
He told me several times that he didn't like my kind
'Cause I was a bit too leisurely

“Leisurely” is a masterly find. The word is rather highbrow, clashes tellingly with the blue-collar content of the first three lines, it rhymes originally with Mr. McGee and immediately gives depth to the character of the first-person narrator. The continuation is just as strong:

Seems that I was busy doing something close to nothing
But different than the day before
That's when I saw her, ooh, I saw her
She walked in through the outdoor,

“Busy doing something close to nothing” is a witty, original antithesis, made all the funnier by the introduction “seems that I was busy”. The concluding antithesis in through the outdoor is not necessarily original (it is also the title of Led Zeppelin’s last LP, for example), but here it has a literary shine through its added value: for the third time, Prince succeeds in giving depth to the actor’s character with a minimum of words. We already know what type “Mr. McGee” is after one line, eleven words, the I-person gets a profile with just that one word “leisurely”, and the introduction of the picturesque co-star is already coloured by just “in through the outdoor”: unconventional and carefree character, apparently an attractive girl who doesn’t need to care much about rules.

The irresistible chorus immediately confirms this impression:

She wore a
Raspberry beret
The kind you find in a secondhand store
Raspberry beret
And if it was warm she wouldn't wear much more
Raspberry beret
I think I love her

Prince – Raspberry Beret: 

The fondness for the antithesis, in Prince as well as Dylan, and in all classical poets in general, can probably ultimately be traced back to the Bible, and more specifically to the Gospel of Matthew. The Sermon on the Mount, for example, from which Dylan draws more than once, is full of this stylistic device. Love your enemies, do not let your left hand know what the right hand is doing, the broad and the narrow way, the strait and the wide gate, light and darkness, and so on. The public’s receptiveness is not so mysterious either – opposites attract, after all. And the popularity with the poets themselves may have a more prosaic reason as well: lines with antitheses are simply easier to remember;

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire

… indeed – you only need to hear that once.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part III: I love you, but you’re strange

———————

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

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

There is more information about Untold-Dylan on our home page.

Bob Dylan and Bayard Taylor Part 1

By Larry Fyffe

With poets William Blake and Bayard Taylor, singer/songwriter/ musician Bob Dylan sails upon the misty sea in a shoe filled with rhymes.

William Blake envisions a new dawn of love rising above the ashes of the not-so-‘Enlightered’ industrial age ~ ‘gold’/’unfold’:

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold
Bring me my chariots of fire
(William Blake: Jerusalem)

Bayard Taylor dreams too of a happier future ~ ‘old’/’unfold’:

From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire ....
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold
And the stars are old
And the leaves of the the Judgement Book unfold
(Bayard Taylor: Bedouin Song)

The song lyrics beneath bespeak of a cheery life ~ ‘old’/’unfolds’:

As his youth unfolds
He is centuries old ....
He's young and on fire
Full of hope and desire
(Bob Dylan: Lord Protect My Child)

In the following lyrics, Taylor reveals that he’s not shy about stealing Blake’s ~’fire’/’desire’ motif:

Fiercely stamp the tethered horses, as they snuff the
morning fire
Their impatient heads are tossing, and they neigh with keen desire
(Bayard Taylor: The Bison Track)

Below a bit by Bob Dylan:

I feel like I'm on fire
Nothing matters to me
And there's nothing I desire
(Bob Dylan: Nobody 'Cept You)

In the lines beneath, there’s the rhyme ~ ‘bright’/’night’:

They sat by the hearth-stone, broad and bright
Whose burning brands threw a cheerful light
On the frosty calm of the winter's night
(Bayard Taylor: The Voice Of The Fire)

As taken from the following lines:

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright 
In the forests of the night
(William Blake: The Tiger)

In the song lyrics below, the singer/songwriter/musician looks back, and brings the rhyme home:

We stopped into a strange hotel
With a neon sign burning bright 
He felt the heat of the night
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965) part I

by Jochen Markhorst

[Publisher’s note: this article appeared on Untold Dylan recently, before Jochen’s series on Gates of Eden had finished.  That was entirely the editor’s fault, and he has been sent to Bouvet Island (you can look it up) for the rest of the year, with eight 78rpm discs and a wind up gramophone as punishment.   We’re now publishing this article again, and will follow it shortly with part II.  If we can work out how to do that.  Sorry.]

I           Rose of England

 Steve Harley is one of England’s national treasures, and with the acoustic Uncovered he reaffirms his class in 2020. Two of his own songs and nine beautiful covers form a kind of road map of Harley’s musical roots, development and role models. The Stones’ “Out Of Time”, the traditional “Star Of Belle Isle”, McCartney’s “I’ve Just Seen A Face”, Bowie, Cat Stevens, Hot Chocolate… it’s probably in the DNA of any musician born in the fifties, actually.

Dylan is at the top of Harley’s list. The album closes with a beautiful, sunny, intimate rendition of “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, demonstrating true Dylan love. Which the old Cockney Rebel also professes in so many words in every interview; how he was in hospital from the age of 12 to 14, as a polio patient, and discovered Dylan there. “I was 12 years old when I got Freewheelin’ by Bob Dylan and then Another Side of Bob Dylan when it was all about drum, bass and guitar. I bought into it all. Bob Dylan changed my life.” And that Highway 61 Revisited is the “record to grab in an emergency”.

Steve Harley – When I Paint My Masterpiece:

Usually, Harley mentions in such an interview, without too many details, how he had one real tête-à-tête with Dylan. “I’ve met him. He was incredibly charming,” for example (Birmingham Entertainment, November 2016), and “Dylan is a strange man – he’s out there – but he couldn’t be nicer” (The Guardian, August 2005).

But on stage at Nell’s Jazz and Blues in London on October 27th, 2017, he finally tells the whole story:

“I’ve had time with Dylan, I met him. He was very very sweet to me. It’s a long story, I won’t bother you with it. He was very sweet to me. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes. I had to say everything. For ten minutes. And my lips dried up. You know, I ran out of energy. And words. You know, when you meet a hero after 45, 50 years, you’ve got all these things, you accumulated thoughts, words, questions, that you’ve got to have to put to this idol of yours, and you meet this person, and you haven’t got a word to say. It just all goes, it just disappears, through a sieve. And that kind of happened to me, but it was quite good with him. But he didn’t talk back. It’s hard work. It’s like hard work. And when it was over, when he wanted to go, he stood up and shook my hand, and he said four words to me. No wait, it was two words. But he repeated. He stood up, and he took my hand to say goodbye, he said: [growling imitation of Dylan’s voice] ‘The weather, the weather.’
[audience laughter, but Harley is smiling proudly] I spent time with Bob. Got two words. It’s good enough for me.”

“When I Paint My Masterpiece” is of course not Steve’s first Dylan cover. On stage, he plays a wonderful “Mr. Tambourine Man” and a fine “She Belongs To Me”, at the start of his career he tries to get a record deal with a demo of “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and in his peak year 1975 ( “Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)”) he produces a single for his sister-in-law; a remarkable, loving, rather failed cover of “Can You Please Crawl Out Of Your Window”.

This video Patricia Paay sadly is not available in all countries – but you can find the song on Spotify.

Presumably due to a kind of midlife crisis, to a kind of gotta-change-it-all phase that every great artist goes through from time to time. Occasionally, this turns out to be surprisingly good. Steve Harley’s cover of “Here Comes The Sun” (1976) is so curious and inappropriate that it still stands, half a century later – though perhaps more as a guilty pleasure than for purely artistic reasons. And, not to forget, for Stuart Elliot’s jaw-dropping work on the drums.

Harley’s cover of another pop monument, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” balances on the edge. The love is real, and the approach – a stripped-down, slightly melodramatic interpretation with mainly acoustic instruments – is not wrong either, but unfortunately Harley chooses to let an extremely dated-sounding synthesiser carry the whole arrangement. As a result, the song drowns in a sterile, Teutonic 80s sauce.

But then, the song is so strong – it survives even those full, stately chords on a pathetically echoing synthesiser. Although, apparently, Harley seems to be touching the right chord by 90s standards: when Rod Stewart records the song in 1997 for the somewhat sentimental album Diana, Princess of Wales: Tribute, he copies the arrangement almost one-on-one.

Rod Stewart – Love Minus Zero: 

(Another video giving me problems in the UK.  Try here )

The song has a special attraction for Britons anyway. No coincidence, probably; “Love Minus Zero” is one of Dylan’s most Shakespearean love songs, underpinned by Blakean imagery with a touch of T.S. Eliot. The song also made a great impression on another Stewart, on Harley’s fellow countryman Dave Stewart.

When The Wall Street Journal interviews him in February 2016, Dave Stewart once again loses himself in a long declaration of his Dylan love in general, and specifically of his love for this song. And for him too, like young polio patient Steve Harley, it starts with hospitalisation.

“When I was 13, I had to have surgery on my left knee due to a soccer injury. Back at home a few weeks later in Sunderland, England, I was forced to rest for six months. My brother gave me his acoustic guitar, and I began working out how to play things. One of the first songs I learned was Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero/No Limit.”

The Eurythmic tells how he performs the song in front of an audience as a fifteen-year-old boy, at the Rose & Crown, a local pub, remembers making an impression and attributes it, very elegantly, to the power of the lyrics, “so gothic and epic”,

“Bob took stuff that you’d expect to be spoken in Shakespearean plays and added these dime-store situations, throwing them down like dice in our contemporary world. They were quite captivating. His lyrics also capture moments in time in a visual as well as an allegorical sense. In Love Minus Zero, the lyrics start as social insights but then conclude with something romantic and sexy.”

… and concludes by telling how he still plays the song today, at the age of sixty-three. Just a few days ago, for his wife, sitting in front of the fireplace. “My wife was knocked out. She teared up but was incredibly happy. Bob can still do that to you.”

With which he, once again very elegantly and very British, gives all the credit to Dylan. Sympathetic, but the analysis “the lyrics start as social insights but then conclude with something romantic and sexy” is a bit puzzling. Or actually just wrong. A similar testimony from Stewart’s autobiography Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: A Life In Music (2016) puts the anecdotal declaration of love in The Wall Street Journal somewhat into perspective:

“Then one day I had an Eko acoustic. I can’t remember where it came from. I do remember playing Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom over and over again, memorizing the words and how to play the chords without looking at my fingers.”

…so perhaps Mr. Stewart is allowing himself some poetic license when expressing the origins of his love for Dylan in general and for “Love Minus Zero” in particular.

Which goes to show. Nothing speaks love like silence.

To be continued. Next up: Love Minus Zero/No Limit part II: A Song Of Ice And Fire

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

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

You can read details of some of our latest series on the home page, and in the listings below the picture at the top of the page

Review  by Tony Attwood

I’ve had “Bob Dylan’s Malibu” by Martin Newman on my desk and indeed my living room sofa for several  weeks now, pondering how to write this review.  Actually more than that.  Could even be a couple of months.

And if you are a regular reader here you might be a little surprised at that, perhaps having got the notion that I am not normally that short of words – and by and large I would go along with that, including when it comes to reviewing books.

But “Bob Dylan’s Malibu” is so unusual I have found myself putting it to one side, picking it up, putting it aside…  Not because there is anything wrong with it, far from it, but because of the effect it has on me, and because I am not sure how to describe the book, or the effect.

I’ll start with the facts.  The book consists of Martin Newman’s “experiences” with Bob Dylan in the 70s in Malibu and elsewhere.  And because I don’t know where else to start I’ll describe the opening chapter.    The author’s friend is wearing a jacket the author had made.  A lady approaches and asks where the jacket came from.  On hearing it was made by a friend the lady asks if the friend could make one for the lady, and the lady’s friend.

So ok, we are getting a multiplicity of friends.  Could be confusing, but let’s go on.

All is agreed and Martin Newman, the author, goes to meet the lady and her friend.  Newman makes the jacket, and through this intro gets to know Bob and Sara, helps with the design and decor of the family’s houses in Malibu (as one does), and Bob wears one of Newman’s jackets on the cover of the Basement Tapes album.  For reasons unexplained Bob gave Martin Newman the jacket back and Newman auctiones it for £11,032 (a very odd price – was the auctioneer calling “I have 11,029 pounds, any advance, I have 11,030 pounds, any advance that I have….”) in 2012 in London.

In story 2, the gang go to a “Renaissance Pleasure Faire”.  Bob wears a disguise but is recognised and has to be hassled out.  Later they go to a Ramona Pageant but no one recognises Bob.

In story 3, the guys try to buy a vintage National guitar to give as a present to a member of the band.  They meet Don who has some.  Don’s son comes in and starts dancing.  Bob buys five guitars.

In story 4, they go to the Baked Potato club and sit in a dark corner so Bob is not recognised.  On the way out he bumps into David Blue (who played in the Rolling Thunder Review), which is nice as the guys hadn’t seen each other for five years or more.

And this is how it goes.  We’re told that the Baked Potato club is still going strong, but not (in case the reader doesn’t know, and why should the reader know everything?) that David Blue died suddenly in his early 40s.  Or come to that why David was important.

Plus all the way through there are pictures.  A sign outside a famous night club, a wide angle lens shot of a studio, a pic of the most popular dish in the Baked Potato…

This is not a book to get if you want something that has checked out the facts and done all the research.  The line “I think she has written a book about it” in the “Yoga on a rope” chapter is typical.  Indeed most writers would look up whether or not she (whoever she is) had written a book about it and if so what it was called and who published it, but no… this is like the writer is there in the room, lazing back in an old time rock chair, cigarette in one hand, whisky is the other, eyes half closed, keeping  the family entertained with memories.  At the end of one tale one of those gathered around shouts, “Hey granddad did you ever see her again?” but granddad has closed his eyes and is nodding happily to himself, and the parents carefully usher the children out, a finger over the mouth…. Granddad’s having a snooze now…

Is this fair?  I really have no idea because these stories and the pictures (“here’s a donkey that thinks he’s a dog…”) go on for a little while and then just stop.  The author is living with Bruce (no surname provided) and Bob turns up in a helicopter unannounced.  Oh, except the author doesn’t remember the helicopter, but two of his friends swear that Bob definitely turned up in a chopper.  Turn the page.

Maybe that’s how life was for these guys.  They give each other presents.  They turn up suddenly, nothing is really planned.  Stuff happens.

If you’ve never had a life like this, where the money is in place, and you can just hire a chopper and drop in, the lifestyle takes some adjusting to.  At first it seems all a bit false and fake, but keep going, and gradually you get the idea of what a weird life these people live.  Bob says, “His eyes are like lakes” and the author thinks, “Wow!”   Yep, that is how it goes.

The point is, if you can stay with the book and read 40 or more pages at a time, the truly weird life these people lead does begin to make itself seem real.  And that’s the point.  You have to keep going and immerse yourself in the work, not treat it like a coffee table volume.  I even found the typeface more than a little disturbing.  But, well, us folk who write ordinary books for ordinary people, what do we know of life?

Bob Dylan’s Malibu is published by Edlis Cafe Press, Hibbing, 2021 (ISBN 9781736972304).  If it makes no impression on you, you’ve either never been near that scene, or you’ve been there so long you’ve forgotten how weird it all is (or was).   As for me, even the typeface was alarming.

You can read details of some of recent articles and series on the home page of this site   If you want to provide an article, or have an idea for a series, or pretty much anything else that is sort of Bob Dylan-ish please email Tony@schools.co.uk   We’re awfully nice people, but we don’t pay for articles.  Sorry.