Untold Dylan

The story so far…

• Gates Of Eden part I: The Lady In The Water
• Gates Of Eden part II: As if he was just taking dictation
• Gates Of Eden part III: Hello lamppost, nice to see ya
• Gates Of Eden part IV: Out of the depths have I cried
• Gates Of Eden part V: A wedding-cake left out in the rain
• Gates Of Eden part VI: The cowpuncher and the Golden Calf
• Gates Of Eden part VII: She-devils and wild angels
• Gates Of Eden: part VIII. When everyone’s super… no one will be
• Gates Of Eden: part IX: I’m The Greatest
• Gates Of Eden: part X: Domus ad orientem solem
• Gates of Eden part XI: Forever Young
• Gates Of Eden part XII: Plato and that sort of thing

by Jochen Markhorst

XIII       Where did you sleep last night?

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

For the filling in of the only line Dylan left open in the draft phase, the poet chooses the loaded, enigmatic with no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means. The “colour” is still unambiguous; “to shovel into the ditch” is condescending, dismissive, denigrating. And so it fits in with the Heine-like tone Dylan often chooses in these years; the tone of the ironic point. Just as the nineteenth-century German master likes to do, the last verse opens with the promise of a tender, loving conclusion. “At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams”… it is an opening like I wish I could write you a melody so plain from “Tombstone Blues” or like Bow to her on Sunday from “She Belongs To Me”. Vulnerable, elegant introductions, which then turn into vicious, deconstructive continuations, into “your useless and pointless knowledge” and into “for Christmas, buy her a drum” respectively, into a punch line that destroys the promise of tenderness.

It’s not very clear, the words with which the narrator rebuffs his soon-to-be ex, but it’s not friendly; apparently, she’s the kind of person who thinks that others are enormously interested in her dreams. In any case, she makes no attempt to shovel their supposed meaning into the ditch – which is a pity. There is, after all, perhaps only one thing more boring than people who want to tell their dreams: people who interpret their own dreams.

Anyway, it seems that for this last verse and its vague narrative, the poet has been inspired by the last words of Rimbaud’s Un Saison En Enfer, from the last chapter, appropriately titled “Adieu”:

Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes.
Que parlais-je de main amie ! Un bel avantage, c’est que je puis rire des vieilles amours mensongères, et frapper de honte ces couples menteurs, -j’ai vu l’enfer des femmes là-bas ; – et il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps.

And at dawn, armed with burning patience, we shall enter the glorious cities.
What was I talking about a friendly hand! A nice advantage is that I can laugh at the old deceitful loves, and smite these lying couples with shame, – I have seen the hell of women down there; and I shall be granted to possess the truth in a soul and a body.

An even more subtle hint that this final couplet hides a love break-up is that odd time of day. “At dawn”? His lover comes to him at dawn? In the blues and folk tradition, that can only mean one thing:

My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?

… that’s what both the deluded Lead Belly (“Black Girl”, 1944) and the desperate Bill Monroe (“In The Pines”, 1941) ask, following the source of the song, the time-honoured “The Longest Train”. And it’s not an original question. “Five O’Clock In The Morning” (Big Joe Williams), “Quarter Past Nine” by Elmore James, “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer”, Neil Young’s “What Did You Do To My Life?”, George Jones’s “Tell Me My Lying Eyes Are Wrong”… it’s usually not a good sign when the protagonist’s sweetheart doesn’t come home until morning;

She's been out all night and it's the break of day
One scotch, one bourbon, one beer

Which would trivialise the heavy, symbolism-soaked closing line of “Gates Of Eden”, of course. “There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden” is then reduced to the punch-line of a break-up song, to a self-pitying lament of a deceived lover.

No, maybe we should stick to the more distinguished Heisenberg/Plato approach.

A very negative direction

“This is called a sacrilegious lullaby in D minor,” says Dylan on that Halloween night in October 1964 in New York’s Philharmonic Hall, when the world is introduced to the song. Not unwitty, but it seems to be deterrent nonetheless. “Gates Of Eden” is not in the Top 30 of most covered Dylan songs. Not by a long shot. Except for Bryan Ferry and Julie Felix, all the usual suspects ignore the song. Joan Baez, for one, is not impressed. David Hajdu quotes her in Positively 4th Street (2001):

“I didn’t like what he was doing. It was haphazard and it was sloppy and too negative for me. There was hardly anything positive in it. I thought he went just one step too far in a very negative direction.”

But then again, she’s not impressed by Highway 61 either. “A bunch of crap,” as she tells biographer Scaduto.

Why Jimmy LaFave, who after all plays half the Dylan catalogue, skipped the song is unknown. Manfred Mann may feel trumped by The Myddle Class (1965), which indeed seems to be fishing in Mann’s pond, just as the jingle-jangling, semi-psychedelic cover of The Etonians (1967) cuts the grass at the feet of any Byrds version (though ex-Byrd Gene Clark did perform the song, occasionally and breath-takingly). Barb Jungr, Bettye LaVette, Old Crow Medicine Show, Hugues Aufray… not even Jerry Garcia and/or Grateful Dead play the song – although Bringing It All Back Home is in Garcia’s list of “10 Favorite Albums Of All Time” according to Far Out Magazine; “Beautiful mad stuff. And that turned us all on, we couldn’t believe it.” Certified superfan Robyn Hitchcock may still play it every once in a while (twice in 2005, twice in 2018), but studio-recorded, serious covers are otherwise all done by the second ring, by artists with no solid reputation for Dylan covers.

Among them, by the way, are plenty of gems. Arlo Guthrie is wonderful, as is veteran Ralph McTell, and in the outsider category, Swede Totta Näslund scores, as in fact Näslund’s entire tribute album Totta’s Basement Tapes/Down In The Flood (2010) is a brilliant, surprising ode to Dylan’s oeuvre (including, by the way, a rather unique cover of “Wigwam” – more beautiful and melancholic than the somewhat dubious original).

Totta Näslund 

Another candidate for the Top 3 Best Gates Of Eden Covers is also on an equally overwhelming tribute record, on Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute To Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (various artists, 2010). The record features the chillingly beautiful version of “She Belongs To Me” by Norwegian Ane Brun, a rare and very successful “On The Road Again” (by the pride of New Brunswick, Julie Doiron), a staggering, almost lugubrious “Farewell Angelina” by William Fitzsimmons, and among all that beauty, a poignant, unsettling attack on “Gates Of Eden” by New Yorker DM Stith.

The only one with some sort of official Stamp of Approval, however, comes from another outsider, from “one of Ireland’s great lost songwriters” (Irish Times, February 2014), Jim Carroll, whose majestic, driven, layered labour of love is even on the highest stage for a while – as an audio stream at bobdylan.com.

Marc Carroll

Non-competitive are amusing, incomprehensible covers from Scandinavia; a solid Danish translation by Steffen Brandt, “Porten Ind Til Himlen” and a freakier one by Norwegian weirdo Oddvar Torsheim, “Lukk opp, lukk opp”.

And above all categories towers the jazz trio that demonstrates the profound truth of Dylan’s words from Chronicles (“Musicians have always known that my songs were about more than just words”): Michael Moore’s Jewels and Binoculars. The trio has produced more Olympic Dylan covers. “Floater”, “Visions Of Johanna”, perhaps the finest cover ever of “I Pity The Poor Immigrant” – and their graceful, thoroughly elegant and heartfelt “Gates Of Eden” also deserves a place of honour among them.

At times I think there are no words.

Jewels and Binoculars

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

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

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

We enjoyed doing that one so much we thought we’d inflict another on you.   This time, the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance – 1980.

And this time Bob won with “Gotta Serve Somebody”

This was the first year for this category and Bob picks it up!

It was certainly a more produced sound than we often got with Bob.  And of course it was picked up as part of the start-up of the “Christian project” as I once saw it noted, which really did give me a smile.

And Bob’s singing is particularly well-honed for this song – it sounds like he’s really worked at what he wants to do here, rather than just trying it out with the band and picking the best of a few run throughs.  And that’s really important with this strophic form, with such a simple two line chorus.  Indeed, given that it is purely strophic, there is no variation in the middle 8.  Everything comes from the smoothness of the performance, the entertaining lyrics, and that beautiful variable organ throughout.  Even the fade out appears to be well-manicured – how very unlike Bob (on occasion).

But what really tells us that this is a sublime performance is the fact that the oh-so-simple chorus comes into the song no less than seven times.   Now without a beautiful, controlled arrangement, that will not hold – the audience will move on, easily bored.  But not here, the sound is so beguiling, one just wants to stay (even if it is simply to find out if the song tells us any more about the choosing that has to be done – which in reality it doesn’t.)

Thus the message of the lyrics is so utterly simple: “you are going to have to serve somebody.”   And that someone turns out to be the Devil or God.   There’s not attempt to put forward the argument; it is a statement.   So the notion that one can simply have a life in which one aims to be a jolly nice person, being kind, helpful others, doing positive things, simply isn’t on the cards.  It is not that such a life is a bad thing, but rather it is, in this song, impossible.  It just isn’t on.

Which, to my mind, although probably no one else’s, makes the lyrics a complete load of turnips.  But well, that’s just me.

The song won the award, and yes one can see why.  But the real interest comes when one starts to listen to the rest of the nominees.   So here we go…

Joe Jackson – Is She Really Going Out With Him?

This was his first release I think, and so before he moved into a jazz sound, but it is a very attractive piece; the producers and musicians seem really to have worked together to take what could have just been an ordinary pop song and make it into a really unusual performance.   But perhaps not a strong enough song to take the judges by storm.

Robert Palmer – Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)

I always had time for Robert Palmer although I’d hardly pick this as one of his greats.  If I had to nominate something from him across his career, and particularly as this is Untold Dylan I think I’d come up with

but then that wasn’t on the list of nominations for the judges.   It’s good it’s fun, but it is not earth shattering or new, in the way that I think Dylan’s performance was.  Everyone knew what Dylan could do but they would not have heard him perform like that before and I think that influenced the judges.

Rod Stewart – Blondes (Have More Fun)

This too, is very much of its era – its a great dance song (although sadly in those days film producers didn’t approve of dancers actually expressing what was in the song so I guess only actual dancers will appreciate what I mean).

But this isn’t an award for a video, it is an award for a song, and really, they seriously thought this could win?  There’s nothing wrong with it, but surely no one was nominating this as the stand out moment of the year.  Were they?  (Perhaps they were – if so, these were sad days indeed).

I wonder if they managed to get insurance on that double bass.

Frank Zappa – Dancin’ Fool

Aaron: What an odd selection of tracks here!! Bob and Frank not hugely respected for their vocals and what is that Rod Stewart track doing there – the video was played on the first day of MTV but the single only reached 63 directly after the number 1 smash Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?

Robert Palmer’s hit top 10 in the US but outside the top 60 in the UK. The Joe Jackson track was his debut single and in my opinion it’s a real good ‘un!

Tony: I agree it is very odd to have Zappa and Dylan here.   Zappa was the artist I went to see every time he came to the UK – and I’d disagree about his singing actually, but what really made his music so incredibly important for me was the intricacies of the compositions and arrangements.  The only rock musician I can remember playing a piece on stage in 7/4 time.

The complexity of “Dancin Fool” is extraordinary, and his range of styles within the song is remarkable.   He was also the only rock performer who I have seen who conducted his band on occasions.  But then with four or five changes of time signature within one song it was totally necessary.

But in each case (Dylan and Zappa) it does seem to me that their originality has meant that there is no tradition started for others to take over.  They are the two sublime figures of post-war popular music.

The award is for vocal performance, and I’d have given it to Frank because of the variety.  If it had been for production, or the sound of the whole song, yep Bob would have won the day for me.

Probably a good job I’m never on the committee.

—————-

We have a lively discussion group on Facebook with over 10,000 members – if you want to join in please just enter Untold Dylan into the search bar on Facebook.

There are details of some of our other recent posts and some of our series on the home page of this site.

Selection by Aaron Galbraith, commentary by Tony Attwood

This is our celebration of the best, and the more unusual, cover versions of Dylan’s music.  You can find our previous articles here.

You might also enjoy: Over 200 of the greatest cover recordings of Dylan songs (with more to come)

13th Floor Elevators (1967)

Tony:  Blimey (as we say in England) I wasn’t expecting this.  Apparently this came out in 1967; listening to it without knowing the band or the date I wouldn’t have put it that early.

It seems to be a complete undermining of the essence of the of the song through the  accompaniment – and yet now I come to think of it this is not the case because it is a song of goodbye, farewell, get lost, go away.  It is just that Dylan treated it in a different manner in his recording, and that’s what I have always associated it with.

But as I think on lines like “strike another match,” yep, some of those comments are pretty cruel and nasty.

However, does this re-interpretation work?  Well, obviously yes in the sense that it made me listen to the lyrics in a new way.  But as a piece of music I would want to play again, or indeed play to my friends, no.  So if any of my friends have got to this page and are thinking “Why have you put this up Tony?” the answer is, it was Aaron’s choice!  As indeed most of the rest are – but I’ve come in with one of my own at the end.

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (1972)

My expectation was that we were going to be on safer ground here.

This was released in 1972, and as far as I can work out, it was the 30th new recording of the song.  Quite amazing.

It’s much more approachable, and the instrumentation is once more unusual but this time not painful.  Enjoyable with a few unexpected chords and a neat coda, but beyond that…. Hmmm….  Yes, I’d leave it playing, and if I was on the dance floor yes I’d have fun doing a modern jive interpretation.  But am I going to play it again and suggest it to others?… No, perhaps it hasn’t really stood the test of time.

Link Wray (1979)

The drum roll at the start tells us we are yet again going off in a different direction – and the anger that is completely missing from Dylan’s original musical interpretation but which is in the lyrics, is again found here.   Indeed the percussionist is having a great time.  But I’m not sure the beautiful melody should be removed quite so much just to allow Link Wray to shout and declaim.

However he is a guitarist and a half and that instrumental break was really worth waiting for.  Goodness I wish I could play a 10th as good as that.  In fact I was sorry when the vocal verses returned.  The change with the vagabond however, is clever and was unexpected.  Really worth a listen.

Chocolate Watch Band (1966)

In this case, there’s been a lot of imagination put into how to treat this song and yes this is fine…  but it’s not really taking me to that magical “somewhere else” that I somehow seem to demand of music these days.  I really didn’t understand why it was necessary to shout out the title line several times at the end.  True that is a reflection of what the lyrics say, but I got the impression he was just announcing that the recording was over to the engineer who was by this time hiding on the floor.

Falco (1985)

Interesting and enjoyable instrumentation, and then for no reason at all the singer shouts.  Why?   And then he says something after “gun” – I don’t know what.  And then…

Well, no I really couldn’t stand it.  It’s an effort that in my days as a lecturer (having failed to make it as a musician) I’d have marked down as “trying too hard” adding perhaps “without any good reason”.   So no, I couldn’t play it through to the end.  If you do, and something good happens after the “high heels” stuff, perhaps you could write in and let us know.  That’s where I left it.

Echo & the bunnymen (2000)

A 21st century version, which takes us back a little to the original, which is good in the sense that I couldn’t have stood going any further in the direction Falco was taking us.  And the accompaniment (on a synth? not quite sure) is ok but after a while, it is just… there.

However…

Although the mass of recordings of this song has slowed down, they are still continuing, and without Aaron’s permission I’ve had a little search for something that really does give me something new – remembering that I was alive and listening to music when the original came out.  So it’s been with me for much of my life.

It was hard going – and normally I am not this picky.  But I’ve found one version that really I can listen to all the way through, and indeed play more than once.  Sorry to subvert your role Aaron, but this one really is something.

Roddy Hart and Gemma Hayes

To me this does meet our vision within the “Beautiful Obscurity” title for the series.   And what makes this work so beautifully are the harmonies.  Indeed if I were to put in a complaint is that we don’t have more harmonies.   I don’t mind waiting until the end of the first line, and we do get more thereafter, but even so – the harmony singing is what takes this from “worthy of a second listen” right up to “put it on my song list in the car”.  And you don’t get higher than that!

Do listen to this.  It’s beautiful.  Just as was Dylan’s original.  This was recorded in 2011.  It took 46 years, but it was worth it.

Editorial

We’ve got 10,000 members of our Facebook group now.  If you’d like to join us, just go on Facebook and type in Untold Dylan.

You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.

By Larry Fyffe

Bliss Carman was a pre-Modernist Canadian poet who in his day  makes references the poetry of the ancient Greeks (like Sappho) with their visions of the Fields of Elysium. Carman does this in terms of the tenets of the Romantic poets and writers classified as Transcendentalists.

These literary artists believe in a unitary spiritual plane that lies beyond worldly existence though it pervades the fragmented beauty of Nature in the here-and-now; however, they prescribe to the hope of some kind of mystical restoration thereof after physical death.

Carman struggles with this idealistic perception due to the developments of modern science (like those of Charles Darwin) as to whether or not this eventual harmonization of mind, body, and soul be but wistful thinking:

Heart of mind, if all the altars
Of the ages stood before me
Not one pure enough or sacred
Could I find to lay this white, white
Rose of love upon

(Bliss Carman: Heart Of Mine)

Heart Of mine, go back home
You got no reason to wander, no reason to roam
Don't let her see, don't let her see that you want her
Don't push yourself over the line
Heart of mine
(Bob Dylan: Heart Of Mine)

As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving them wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

The racy smell of the forest loam
When the stealthy sad-heart leaves go home ....
These are the joys of the open road
For him who travels without a load
(Bliss Carman: The Joys Of The Open Road)

Take a load of Fanny
And you put the load right on me
I picked up my bag, and went looking for a place to hide
When I saw old Carmen and the Devil walking side by side
I said, "Hey Carmen, let's go downtown"
She said, "I gotta go, but my friend can stick around"

(The Band: The Weight)

The night can bring no healing now
The calm of yesterday is gone
Surely the wind is but the wind
And I a broken waif thereon
(Bliss Carman: The Windflower)

Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows
Too many people have died
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind
(Bob Dylan: Blowing In The Wind)

We’ve now completed a review of 1997 – here are the details

• Never Ending Tour, 1997, part 1.  The Lonely Graveyards of the Mind
• Never Ending Tour 1997, part 2: Hanging onto a Shadow
• Never Ending Tour 1997, part 3: I came in from the wilderness
• Never Ending Tour, 1997, Part 4. Like so many times before

There is an index to all previous episodes here

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

With the success of Time Out of Mind, released in September 1997, which won three Grammy awards and Album of the Year, Dylan came powering into 1998 enjoying the comeback of his career. He ripped into his concerts like there was no tomorrow. There was a new energy and focus. Pretty much gone were the long epics and the wandering guitar breaks of the earlier nineties. His electric performances were pared down, hard-edged and tight, while his acoustic performances were as committed as ever.

Dylan was on a roll. My only complaint is that he only rarely pulled out the harmonica.

He did 110 concerts in 1998, but I’m going to concentrate on a few ace shows rather than attempt to play the field. Most commentators agree that the San Jose show on May 19^th was outstanding, and I’ll be drawing heavily from that show, but his five day residency at Madison Square Gardens, New York (from 16^th to 21^st January) where he shared a billing with Van Morrison, is perhaps better known. My own favourite, after the San Jose show, is the Newcastle show (20^th June),  so I’ll be dipping into that as well.

Dylan continued to drip-feed new songs from the album, with, as far as I can tell, only two new songs introduced in 1998, ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ and ‘Million Miles’. ‘Lovesick’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’, however, became regulars on his setlist with ‘Till I Fell in Love with You’ and ‘Can’t Wait’ making occasional appearances.

Let’s start with ‘To Make You Feel My Love’. This of course became a huge hit for Adele, with some fans of the song not realising it was a Dylan composition. Adele’s version is so marvellous, it becomes hard to listen to how Dylan does it. It may be the saddest song on the album, a hopeless kind of love song full of forlorn avowals.

‘When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love’

I don’t think he ever did it better than this one, from the San Jose concert. The cracked voice and weariness are perfect for the song.

To make you feel my love

For ‘Million Miles’ we turn to the New York concerts (20^th). This may well be Dylan’s jazziest composition, and wouldn’t have sounded out of place much earlier in the century, the late 1940s perhaps. Its skipping beat puts it in that era. It’s another song of hopeless love, when that gap between two people just can’t be bridged. You can be standing right next to somebody and still feel a million miles apart.

‘I'm drifting in and out of dreamless sleep
Throwing all my memories in a ditch so deep
Did so many things I never did intend to do
Well I'm trying to get closer, but I'm still 
             a million miles from you’

But there is something more going on here than just a yearning for a distant love. There’s a metaphysical anxiety and spiritual loss, an existential disorientation that characterises the whole album:

‘Well I don't dare close my eyes and I don't dare wink
Maybe in the next life I'll be able to hear myself think
Feel like talking to somebody but I just don't know who’

And again:

‘Well, there's voices in the night trying to be heard
I'm sitting here listening to every mind polluting word
I know plenty of people who would put me up for a day or two’

Million Miles

The same existential disorientation drives the Grammy award winning ‘Cold Irons Bound,’ only with a more desperate edge. ‘Cold irons’ refers to the metal manacles worn by prisoners and slaves. In our lost and disoriented condition we are little better than prisoners. We cannot escape the human condition:

‘Well, I'm waist deep, waist deep in the mist
It's almost like, almost like, I don't (even) exist
I'm twenty miles out of town, Cold Irons bound.’

Note the use of repetition here to drive it home.

And again:

‘Well the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads’

(Incidentally, in a little creative mishearing, I always thought the line went, ‘reality as always, has too many heads…’)

As I listened to this one from the San Jose show, I found myself admiring Dylan’s electric guitar work. Mr Guitar Man has been reined in, his playing minimal and concise. He’s not muddying the melodic waters with over complicated picking, as he too often does, but kicks the song along with some wonderfully spare, driving sounds. Everything here clicks, and the band has never sounded better; tight, integrated and compelling. This is rock music at its best, folks; a bit rough and punky (that hint of garage band sound) and hard-edged. Take a moment to appreciate the drumming. New drummer David Kemper proves his worth, as does guitarist Larry Campbell.

For my ear, this is much better than the murky, too cluttered, album version. I can’t help but think that this comes closest to the sound Dylan was after for this song.

Cold Irons Bound

Staying with the San Jose concert, and the theme of existential displacement, we turn to ‘Lovesick’, the song that kicks off the album. I was immediately hooked by that opening song, which was doubtless the idea, but, listening to these live performances, I’m beginning to understand why Dylan expressed reservations about Lanois’ production. The Lanois sound tends to smooth over the raw edges of the songs. Take the backslap out of Dylan’s voice and sharpen the sound and you have this:

Lovesick

It sounds spooky enough, as it should, without the backslap on his voice. It’s all about distance, feeling a million miles from everything. To the wandering ghost, everything is perceived at a distance: ‘in a meadow,’ ‘silhouettes in the window,’ and ‘a distant cry.’ There’s no rest from grief for the loveless:

‘My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin'’

“Till I Fell in Love with You,’ drives home the message of the album, that without love, either the human or spiritual kind, we are lost. Lost and insomniac. I was surprised to note how often sleeplessness comes up in these songs. Another song which finds the poet tired and wired.

‘I've been hit too hard
I've seen too much
Nothing can heal me now
But your touch’

There are good performances of the song from New York and Minneapolis (23^rd October), but I’ve chosen this one from Springfield (2^nd Feb)

Till I fell in love with you

Dylan worked hard on ‘Can’t Wait’ to get the sound he wanted, and would go on experimenting with the song in future years. In 1997/98 he was playing it pretty  much straight from the album, minus Lanois’ embellishments. Waiting for love (or death perhaps) can be a soul destroying business. It’s a pity Dylan didn’t sing it more often in 1998. I had to go beyond my cluster of favourite concerts to find this one from the New London (CT) show, 14^th January. Here we find both mind and heart at the end of its tether.

Can’t Wait

One of the features of 1998 is the pretty much unvarying setlist. The same six or seven core songs keep recurring, with a few strays and wild cards thrown into the mix. Dylan would often kick the shows off with either ‘Serve Somebody’ or ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie.’ The latter song, particularly, was a good hard-driving crowd warmer. If you can leave behind the adolescent whine of the album version (Blonde on Blonde 1966), you have a rocker that doesn’t sound too out of place among the Time Out of Mind songs. Failed love and capricious fate rule.

‘Well, I don't know how it happened
But the river-boat captain, he knows my fate
But everybody else, even yourself
They're just gonna have to wait’

Here it is from the San Jose show:

Absolutely Sweet Marie

And while we’re in the fast paced rock mood, let’s stay in the sixties with ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. In previous posts I’ve characterised this as a serious song pretending to be a throw-away rocker. To hell with this mad world; down Highway 61 anything is possible. Another San Jose kicker.

Highway 61 revisited

Another regular on the 1998 setlist is ‘Silvio’, the Robert Hunter/Dylan song. It appeared on Down in the Groove (1988), perhaps Dylan’s least regarded album. This is certainly the best performance of the song I have heard. It’s great to hear Dylan doing this song before he became tired of it, and the performances became rote. As with ‘Highway 61’, the speed of the song can obscure the cunning of the lyrics:

‘I can snap my fingers and require the rain
From a clear blue sky and turn it off again
I can stroke your body and relieve your pain
And charm the whistle off an evening train’

Wonderful. Or this:

‘Honest as the next jade rolling that stone
When I come knocking don't throw me no bone
I'm an old boll weevil looking for a home
If you don't like it you can leave me alone’

On Time Out of Mind, in the song ‘Not Dark Yet’, Dylan sings:

‘Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain’

This is not a new insight. In ‘Silvio’ back in 1988 we find:

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

Silvio

Staying with the electric mood, let’s finish this post with the last song from the San Jose concert, that glorious piece of irreverence ‘Rainy Day Woman’ from Blonde on Blonde. I don’t think any performance can quite match the screaming saxophone version from 1996 (See NET, 1996, part 4), but Dylan’s voice is better on this one. Everybody must have fun. Happy foot-tapping, and I’ll see you soon with more sounds from 1998.

Rainy Day Woman

Kia Ora

You can read more about our current and recent series of articles on the home page of this site   You can also have your say on our Facebook site – just search Facebook for Untold Dylan.  If you’d like to contribute an article – or indeed a series – please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk     We are, as they say, mostly harmless.

• Gates Of Eden part I: The Lady In The Water
• Gates Of Eden part II: As if he was just taking dictation
• Gates Of Eden part III: Hello lamppost, nice to see ya
• Gates Of Eden part IV: Out of the depths have I cried
• Gates Of Eden part V: A wedding-cake left out in the rain
• Gates Of Eden part VI: The cowpuncher and the Golden Calf
• Gates Of Eden part VII: She-devils and wild angels
• Gates Of Eden: part VIII. When everyone’s super… no one will be
• Gates Of Eden: part IX: I’m The Greatest
• Gates Of Eden: part X: Domus ad orientem solem
• Gates of Eden part XI: Forever Young

by Jochen Markhorst

XII        Plato and that sort of thing

At dawn my lover comes t me an tells me of her dreams
At times I think / there are no words, but these t tell 
   no truths,

Episode 6 of Season 1, “Crazy Hand Full Of Nothing” is the episode in which Walter White is definitely breaking bad. Until then, he has been a chemistry teacher with a cancer diagnosis who is desperate to make money to cover his medical  bills by producing drugs; crystal meth to be precise. Reluctantly still, and he demands of his accomplice, his former pupil Jesse: no bloodshed. But now Jesse is in hospital, beaten up by drug dealer Tuco who has also stolen their just-produced pound of meth. Walter fills a bag with pieces of highly explosive fulminated mercury, goes to the lion’s den, blows up half the joint with only one piece, threatens Tuco with the rest and leaves with his money, plus compensation and the promise that Tuco will take two pounds of meth next week. Walter White’s transition is marked by the name with which he, for the first time, introduces himself at Tuco’s: “Heisenberg”.

At first glance, the name seems oddly chosen. Heisenberg was a physicist, not a chemist. But it is actually a very poetic choice; Walter White has become someone else – this is the same episode in which he shaves his head for the first time – and chooses “Heisenberg” perhaps because of a poetic interpretation of his Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never see the whole truth. Agreed, a poetic simplification of this pillar of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg proves that measuring, and indeed any observations at all, influence the system, and the outcome is therefore different from the same process without observation), but White’s train of thought is easy to follow. Fitting also to Walter’s musings on his own discipline: “Technically, chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change […] It is growth, then decay, then transformation.It is fascinating, really.”

Elvis Costello: Chemistry Class:

And a beautiful, elegant consequence of Heisenberg’s roots, as Werner Heisenberg himself analysed in an interview conducted by David Peat and Paul Buckley in the early 1970’s, as part of a CBC radio documentary series entitled Physics and Beyond: “My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. This gives a different attitude.” With which Heisenberg expresses his susceptibility to the conclusion of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the idea that we can never perceive the truth, but only shadows, reflections and echoes of reality – there are no truths in our world, in the world outside the gates of Eden.

In the remainder of the interview, Heisenberg builds a second bridge to the beautiful final couplet of Dylan’s song:

“The most important step was to see that our language is not sufficient to describe the situation. A word such as path is quite understandable in the ordinary realm of physics when we are dealing with stones, or grass, etc., but it is not really understandable when it has to do with electrons. […] The decisive step was to see that all those words we used in classical physics – position, velocity, energy, temperature, etc. – have only a limited range of applicability. The point is we are bound up with a language, we are hanging in the language. […] Words as position and velocity and temperature lose their meaning when we get down to the smallest particles.”

… there are no words, says Heisenberg, but these to tell what’s true. Language is even “a dangerous instrument”. Following Plato, Heisenberg thinks that only a retreat to the “language of mathematics”, to mathematical schemes, is pure enough to describe reality. And thus, coincidentally or not, touches on Dylan for the third time: “My songs are all mathematical songs.”

Unlike the first eight verses, the final couplet did not arise from one inspired flash. The manuscript reveals that Dylan has an overarching punchline à la “Desolation Row” and “Tombstone Blues” in mind, and also that he wants to make the lyrics “round”; after the opening line with “the truth does twist”, he wants to finish off with “no truths”. In fact, that is already fixed; the two lines remain unchanged in the end, the concluding “no truths” is already secured as well. Apparently, those two lines plus the outline absolutely have to be included, and at the moment the poet has no more time, or no more inspiration, for the completion of the lines in between. Anyway, somewhere between June and October ’64 it will eventually be finished:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

It is a poetic ruse Dylan often uses, these mercurial years. In the last verse, the narrator is suddenly linked to a “you” or, as here, to a lover in the third person, and a possible overarching narrative is offered. In “Tombstone Blues”, he plays with the notion that all the preceding stanzas are incitements to a song to his beloved:

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane

…as in “Desolation Row”, again out of the blue, a “you” appears plus the suggestion that all of the above is a letter to that “you”;

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the doorknob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

… and like that, this last verse of “Gates Of Eden” suddenly introduces “my lover”. And as elsewhere the poet offers “song” and “letter” as the binding factor, here he offers the key: “she tells me of her dreams” – the cowboy angel, the iron claws, the Golden Calf, the lonesome sparrow, the motorbike black Madonna, the pauper and the prince… all of them dream images. Perhaps even from Heisenberg’s dream, the dream of the Unified Theory, the theory that unites the fundamental theories; all the lies in the world added up to one big truth.

To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part XIII: Where did you sleep last night?

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’ll find details of our current series on the home page of this site, and details of some of our historic series under the picture at the top of the page.  We also have a Facebook group – just search for Untold Dylan.

By Tony Attwood

“All directions at once” is a series which looks at Bob Dylan’s writing as it evolves over time, rather than focusing on individual songs or albums, or an individual theme through Bob’s career.   The index of all the articles published so far is here.

The last episode was “All Directions at once, tangled up”

My point of late in this series, is that Dylan was by the mid 1980s seriously looking for his new direction, or at least a new theme.  Having written his last gospel song in 1981 (one of 23 songs that year) he slowed down a little, writing 17 songs in 1982/3 and 13 in 1984, but then upped the work rate to produce 27 in 1985.  (His all time record you may recall was 36 in 1962.)

But that intensity of writing did not come out of a certainty of what he wanted to write about.  Rather it was the opposite – Bob really was trying all sorts of ideas out as he was looking for a new direction.

Now I have already suggested that as early as 1984 Bob was struggling to find a direction but it is also important to remember the songs that we did get during this period, songs such as “Jokerman”, “I and I”, “Blind Willie McTell”, and “Foot of Pride” (among others) would certainly be described by some (or at least by me) as masterpieces.  But it is interesting that those last two, which I know I am not alone in describing as absolute masterpieces, were not released by Dylan at the time.

And that is the irony of this period.  He was searching for a new direction, but each time he created a work that could have led him into a new arena, a new style, a new approach… he walked away from it.

Now of course not everyone is going to agree with me as to what constitutes a masterpiece, and it is not the purpose of this exposition to examine in detail what makes one song a work of genius and another an interesting work, but not one of the highest order.  I’ll leave that for another series.

Certainly I believe “I once knew a man” from 1984 falls into the category of songs which discovered a new direction in Dylan’s songwriting.   Yet it was performed just once in rehearsal and lost thereafter.  And if that had been a one off, we might have shrugged and suspected there was some flaw in the work that Dylan could see but us mere mortals could not, perhaps even accepting Heylin’s evidence-lacking assertion that it was someone else’s work that Dylan had re-arranged, the origins of which the fans who seek out such things were too lazy or too ignorant to find.   But I see no reason for that view; I am sure it was a Dylan original.

And this approach of creating a masterpiece and then letting it go, continued into 1985.  Of course this could just be me deliberately valuing songs that Dylan ignored, but again I find here another sublime piece of work.  And yet having written the lyrics in 1985 for “Well Well Well,” the work in question, Dylan handed the music over to be finished elsewhere and seemed to take no further interest in the song.

Of course some of the songs Dylan wrote at this time did make it onto “Knocked out Loaded” and “After the Empire” but I’m often left with the feeling that if there could have just been a little more attention paid to each one, some of these would have become Dylan classics, rather than resting hidden, waiting for someone to champion their cause.

“Seeing the real you at last” is one such: a song which has more than enough originality and drive to have been recognised as an excellent original rock song.   The lyrics do describe something unpleasant; the person who hides their personality, but it deals with it in an energetic way that I have never come across elsewhere.

Well, I sailed through the storm
Strapped to the mast
Oh, but our time has come
And I'm seeing the real you at last

Simple lines, but an image and a half.

And indeed I would say that the fact that in the midst of this period Bob did write some (rather strange and not too successful) songs with Gerry Goffin, suggesting he really didn’t quite know where to turn.  As a result I get the feeling of a year that for much of the time could have been… it might have been…. something rather special.

True, “Maybe Someday” really is a stand out piece, not least because of its combination of energy and unusual rhythm effect from the percussion (something we also get with “Something’s burning baby” written in the previous year) which is simply not doing what you might expect.  But I don’t think the recorded version we have is perfect as there is a bit too much do-wop from the female singers.  Yet it is still a fabulous song.

But as noted above we do have Well well well.   In this version the co-composer spends one minute 20 seconds chatting about the song (and why not; if I’d ever had the chance to put music to a set of Dylan lyrics, I’d still be there talking about five hours later) so you can flip forward if you just want to get to the music…  And it sure is worth it.

Next on my list of the compositions that stand out from the rest this year comes “When the night comes falling from the sky”  – one of Dylan’s epic recordings about the end of time which appeared on Empire Burlesque.

The title is one of those lines that can keep a person pushing forward and searching forever to find the origins – and that is exactly what the music gives us.  That eternal search for personal answers.  And quite a line to write after a year of working with others to try and find a new direction.  Plus it is sung with certainty and enthusiasm.

And then of course, we have “Dark Eyes”.    And suddenly Bob has taken a completely different direction – except for the fact that “When the night comes falling from the sky” has a certain link with other songs written around the time.  “Dark Eyes” however is one of those Dylan songs that come out of nowhere, and indeed then seems to lead nowhere…

So, looked at this way, it was not such a bad year after all, especially if one can create lines such as…

I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls 
   and all I see are dark eyes

Oh my!  Every time I hear those lines I just have to stop and look out of the window at the trees blowing in the wind and take time out to recover.  It takes me back to an earlier song of this year “Seeing the real you at last” which has a lot of the drive and vigour that can announce a great Dylan song, but somehow seems to fall just a little short.

But really to understand what was going on with all these songs in 1985 we just have to look at what happened next, which is to say what did Dylan write in 1986.   And it must  be noted that several songs from this era have dates of composition that are uncertain, but even so we can get a view of what was going on.

On tour Dylan came up with one absolute stunner of a rock song…

https://youtu.be/k8w2JFJbESE

and a most staggering love song “To fall in love with you.”

So what was Bob up to here?  He needed some more pieces for his albums, and here and there some real stunners popped up and were then simply abandoned.  Quite why, of course, we don’t know.  But they are remarkable pieces.

And indeed if we put together this abandoned pieces and combine them with a couple that did creep into an album, but never really gained full prominence, we do have an album’s worth…

1. I and I
2. Blind Willie McTell
3. Foot of Pride
4. I once knew a man
5. Seeing the real you at last
6. Well well well
7. When the night comes falling from the sky
8. Dark Eyes
9. Rock em Dead
10. To fall in love with you

Of course you may well disagree over what is and what is not a song worthy of inclusion in an album, and of course as I noted above, “When the night comes falling” did make it onto a contemporary album, as did “Dark Eyes.”  But the rest were simply left, cast aside, abandoned.

I am not sure there was another period where Bob, (and of course this is just my opinion as a complete outsider), cast aside so many utter gems while clearly finding it difficult to write song of the brilliance that we had come to associate with him.

And even then it wasn’t all over, because the following year Dylan composed “Dignity” which was also abandoned for five years.  It really was a strange time in terms of what Bob felt was worth putting on an album.

You can find more about our current series on the home page of this site.  If you have an idea for an individual article, or a series, or you would like to write either, please email Tony@schools.co.uk

Poet and writer Bayard Taylor, if the overuse of the rhyme  ‘fire’/’desire’ be any indication, is at least aware of the poetry of pre-Romantic William Blake:

An example thereof:

Then to the savage race, who knew no world
Beyond the hunter's lodge, the council-fire
The clouds of grosser sense were sometimes furled
And spirits came to answer their desire
(Bayard Taylor: The Romance Of Maize)

An example of the same rhyme in the song lyrics below with regards to love between the sexes:

Baby, you can start a fire
I must be losing my mind
You're the object of my desire
(Bob Dylan: I Feel A Change Coming On)

Many of Bob Dylan’s songs show an avid interest in American history, literary and otherwise. The poet who pens the following lines comes out of the tradition born in the era of the American Romantic Transcendentalist writers that continues on by Walt Whitman.

Contends Bayard Taylor does with the discoveries by the science of evolutionary geology and biology during his day. ‘Social’ Darwinism arises to give support to the political agenda of jingoistic expansionism (perhaps a premonition of the invention of television, and with that technology comes the ‘Star Trek’ series):

Look up, look forth, and on
There's light in the dawning sky ....
To join and smite and cry
In the great task, for thee to die
And the greater task, for thee to live
(Bayard Taylor: The National Ode)

With end-rhyme ~ ‘cry’/’die’

Fom a Jungian perspective, Bayard Taylor’s influence is observed in the following song lyrics about art:

Tell old Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I'm not alone
That the hour has come to do or die
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)

With end-rhyme  ~ ‘try’/’die’

Taylor’s poetry is  influenced by a well-known British Victorian:

Theirs not to make reply
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die
(Alfred Tennyson: The Charge Of The Light Brigade)

With end-rhyme ~ ‘why’/’die’

The singer/songwriter often offers a darker view of American history, but the optimistic poetry of Bayard hangs in the background thereof:

Moan, ye wild winds around the pane
And fall, thou drear December rain
Fill with your gusts the sullen day
Tear the last clinging leaves away
Reckless as yonder naked tree
No blast of yours can trouble me
(Bayard Taylor: Moan Ye Wild Winds)

As in the following song lyrics:

The lights of my native land are glowing
I wonder if they'll know me next time 'round
I wonder if that old oak tree's still standing
The old oak tree, the one we used to climb
(Bob Dylan: Duquesne Whistle ~ Dylan/Hunter)

The symbol of a hardy oak spreading afar appears in the poetic lines beneath:

Till the bounty of coming hours
Shall plant, in thy fields apart
With the oak of Toil, and the rose of Art
Be watchful, and keep it so
(Bayard Taylor: The National Ode)

There’s an index to some of our more recent articles on the home page of the site, and more indexes below the picture of Bob, above.  If you are searching for a particular item the search box top right can also be helpful.  If you would like to contribute to this site please email Tony@schools.co.uk

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

This is a look at the Bob’s various Grammy nominations over the years, including the other nominees in the category and the winner (if not Bob).  And as with other series that the two of us have engaged in together, while writing from different sides of the ocean, we’re going to explore every angle that happens to pop into our minds, whether it is about the song that won, or why we think the panel made the correct decision or come to that anything else that pops into our mind.

To be clear, this isn’t going to be a chronological run through each event.  Instead we’ll just pick a year/category if something strikes Aaron (who is making the choices) as interesting and then as in other series (details at the end) Tony chimes in with a view.

So let’s start with Bob’s 1969 nomination for Best Folk Performance.

Winner: Judy Collins – Both Sides Now

Nominations:

• Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding (album)
• Peter, Paul & Mary – Late Again (album)
• Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (album)
• The Irish Rovers – The Unicorn (song)
• Gordon Lightfoot – Did She Mention My Name? (album)

This was one of those odd categories where a nominee can be either a song or an entire album.  So “Both Sides Now”… is a most staggeringly amazing song, worthy in my (Tony’s) view of award after award.  But, could there be challengers, and if so, what version stands out?

The story is that the was inspired by a passage from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King: “I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”

And knowing it as I am sure we all do it can be quite a shock to hear what Ms Mitchell could do with it…

And here’s the problem, having heard the earlier versions throughout my life, it is a stunning shock and a half to be reminded of what the composer ultimately did with the song.

The critics who love to discuss finer art (as opposed to what just sounds good) hated the top 10 version, and it is reported that Joni Mitchell didn’t care for it much either.  And although I am deeply moved by the composer’s rendition of her own work (see later), I would also admit to enjoying the pop version.  It’s been part of my life for a long as I can think.

Since then everyone’s had a go from Frank Sinatra to Leonard Nimoy… but please do relax because I’m not putting that edition up.   Instead, to move on to the other nominees…

The PP&M album “Late Again” which was nominated contains a couple of Dylan covers.  One is “I shall be released” which for me (Tony) is destroyed by its over the top production.  May the Almighty save us from arrangers who do this sort of this!  PPM never deserved to be treated this way – they had enough natural talent.

But the reverse is true with “Too much of nothing”.  I read a report that said that Bob was outraged by this performance and refused to deal with the band again… but Bob recorded two different versions of the song.  One takes us to the verge of insanity, the other has strong similarities to Bob’s own recording.  I’m choosing not to believe the story.

I tried in my normal fumbling way to disentangle this song on this site and Jochen as ever found a much greater depth than I could – and indeed included a very interesting additional cover version.

Looking back I can’t think that the PPM album has really stood the test of time but that song is still enjoyable.

The Irish Rovers

Now I really am lost.  If you were on a jury and you were judging these songs against each other, on what basis do you work?  How do you judge this song against what we have heard before?  I can’t even begin to think – and I am really not wanting to give a view of this nomination for fear that I have simply failed to understand what was going on.

So next the Incredible Strong Band, the centrepiece of the album being …

“A Very Cellular Song”

I think I still have this album in my house among the collection of LPs – “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter,” – and I absolutely adored the band, going to see them a few times.  What I loved was that they took us in a totally new direction with amazing, stunning  musical ability, that made me realise that I wasn’t anything like as good as I thought I was.   Just listen to the harmonies in the track above, and then get caught out by the extraordinary lyrics…

You know it ate all the children when they wouldn't be good
Goodnight, goodnight

Play the whole album – for me it is as fresh now as it was all those centuries ago (and no I am not going to reveal my age).

Gordon Lightfoot – The Last Time I saw Her Face

Of course this is exquisite, it is after all Gordon Lightfoot.  And indeed I recall Bob performing “Shadows” and “I’m not supposed to care” – and in fact the two of us have done and article on Bob and Gordon.

So it is against this line up that we place Bob’s JWT album which of course you will know and we have covered in depth.   You’ll know also it came after Blonde on Blonde and was a shock to most of us, but a very welcome shock to many, and was very highly rated.  Such things as we know and can guess tell us that it was written very quickly, that the minimalist band was taught the songs in the studio as they went along, and that at the end they had run out of material but didn’t have enough for a whole album, so Bob slipped in a couple of country songs.

The song everyone now knows, Dylan fan or not, is of course Hendrix playing the Watchtower – one of the few songs (perhaps the only song) where Dylan adopted the cover version for himself to play at gigs.  (If you know of others, please do tell me although preferably without ticking me off for my lack of knowledge.  If there are several we could do a series).

And because of that I am going (yet again) to sneak in not an original from the album (because you know that any way) but a cover version which I’ve highlighted so many times, and of which, if you are a regular reader, you will be bored stiff.   But I’m not.

Should Bob have won the award?   I am not at all sure that the album trumps the magnificence of “Both Sides Now” – that is one of those songs that just goes beyond all heaven and earth, by-passes reality and gives us a hint of a life beyond.  Much as I love Bob’s music, “Both Sides Now” is one of those amazing moments in music that still surpasses everything.

Below is the version I grew up with and loved with all my heart, wishing that somehow the Almighty (which even then I didn’t believe in) had given me the talent to be able to write like this.   This song, and this recording, still stirs me emotionally, and can take me to tears of joy and pleasure.

It is a monument in popular music.  They can play this at my funeral – which I do hope won’t be for quite a while yet.

Other series by Aaron and Tony…

• Beautiful Obscurity
• Play Lady Play
• Why Does Dylan Like…

by Larry Fyffe

No, Bob Dylan did not convert to the Islamic religion, but he’s apparently been influenced by the albeit western translations (ie, Fitzgerald/Khayyam) of the mystic writings of Persian inner-looking poets who fear not death nor the metaphor:

The lyrics below might be described as wtitten by a Zoroastrian “Sufi” poet:

Out of your love the fire of youth will rise
In the chest, visions of the soul rise
If you are going to kill me, kill me, it is alright
When a friend kills, a new life will rise
(Mawlana Rumi: Out Of Your Love ~ translated)

Take what you can gather from coincidence – the above flow-of-life message is not that unlike the one darkly delivered in following song lyrics:

Ramona, come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise
(Bob Dylan: To Ramona)

Clear it be though that the eastern mystic poet of yore values the spiritual ‘light’ carried by the transcendental power of music, and words:

Oh music is the meat of all who love
Music uplifts the soul to realms above
The ashes glow, the latent fires increase
We listen, and are fed with joy and peace
(Mawlana Rumi: Remembered Music ~ translated)

A similar theme depicted, upbeat and earth-bound, in the music and lyrics below:

The meat you cook for me is bloody rare
It's more than flesh and blood can bear ...
Take the saddle off your horse
And give yourself a chair
(Helena Springs: More Than Flesh And Blood Can Bear ~ Dylan/Springs)

Again, that regenerative motif proffered beneath:

Don't let me drift to far
Keep me where you are
Where I will always be renewed
And that what you've given me today
Is worth more than I can pay
(Bob Dylan: I believe in you)

Below, angst-ridden Rumian thoughts tread through the song lyrics:

When I awoke the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
(Grateful Dead: Dire Wolf ~ Hunter/Garcia)

In case you missed it: Songs about Dylan

There’s more on our home page.

The story so far…

• Gates Of Eden part I: The Lady In The Water
• Gates Of Eden part II: As if he was just taking dictation
• Gates Of Eden part III: Hello lamppost, nice to see ya
• Gates Of Eden part IV: Out of the depths have I cried
• Gates Of Eden part V: A wedding-cake left out in the rain
• Gates Of Eden part VI: The cowpuncher and the Golden Calf
• Gates Of Eden part VII: She-devils and wild angels
• Gates Of Eden: part VIII. When everyone’s super… no one will be
• Gates Of Eden: part IX: I’m The Greatest
• Gates Of Eden: part X: Domus ad orientem solem

XI         Forever Young

Leaving men wholly, total free t do anything they wish but die
And there’s nowhere t hide inside the gates of Eden

The first public company in history, and the first multinational for that matter, was the VOC, the Dutch East India Company. Founded in 1602, and still the largest and richest company that ever existed (at its peak eight times larger than Microsoft is today). It was not a gentle enterprise. The original aim of the VOC was political, to put the Spanish and the Portuguese at a disadvantage, and total, aggressive control of all trade with East Asia was an excellent way of doing this. The fact that it turned out to be extremely profitable was actually a bonus.

On a Sunday morning somewhere around 1680, when the VOC is experiencing an economic peak, Captain Willem van der Decken is arguing with his wife in Terneuzen. It is Easter Sunday and she does not want him to set sail on the Lord’s Day. Besides, the weather is bad. But there is a power struggle going on to reach Batavia (present-day Jakarta) as quickly as possible, and the eager, ambitious Van der Decken goes. It is a difficult, arduous voyage and the low point is reached at the Cape of Good Hope. The stormy weather makes it impossible to round the Cape and the crew begs the captain to take shelter in Table Bay. Van der Decken loses his head, throws the helmsman overboard and shouts: “God or the devil … I will round this Cape if I have to sail until Judgement Day!”

The outcome is known. The Devil strikes, and the Flying Dutchman has been sailing the Seven Seas ever since, slightly above the water with blood-red sails. Sometimes he sends a sloop out to a passing ship to pass on letters – letters to long-dead relatives and loved ones.

It is an ancient, archaic curse, immortality. And so cruel that even a Very Angry God, who is not at all reticent when it comes to cruel and unreasonable punishment, only imposes it very rarely. In apocryphal variants of the Creation story Cain is punished with it, and a few thousand years later Cartaphilus, the gatekeeper of Pontius Pilate, for beating Jesus, but that’s about it.

It seems that God himself is a bit ambivalent about immortality. Is it a curse or a blessing? On the one hand, His son recruits followers with the promise of “eternal life”, and one time He is so very pleased with His prophet Elijah that Elijah does not have to die, but is taken up directly into heaven (2Kings 2:11). On the other hand, an ultimate abomination is: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them” (Revelation 9:6).

This duplicity is already present at the other end of the Bible, in Genesis. It appears that Adam and Eve are originally intended to be immortal. There is only one tree from which they may not eat: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen 2:17). The Lord even states explicitly that they may eat from all other trees (“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat”) – thus also from the Tree of Life. But after Eve’s blunder the Lord feels He must punish them, and the final punishment is banishment from Eden, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Gen. 3:22). Immortality, in other words, is seen by God here as a blessing. Or at least as a favour, a favour that the disobedient Adam and Eve have now forfeited.

In the Arts, the question of curse or blessing also remains undecided. There are hundreds of stories in which Eternal Youth and Immortality are pursued. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, the Elves in Lord Of The Rings, the Eight Immortals from Taoism, all the myths surrounding the Fountain of Youth in the Alexander novels, in Pirates Of The Caribbean and at Herodotus, the alchemists who seek the elixir of life, Highlander… But then again, there are just as many stories in which that same immortality turns out to be a curse. The Flying Dutchman, the struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels, Ahasveros, Simone de Beauvoir’s Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels, the Greek myth of the pitiful Tithonos… all of them are extremely unhappy immortals – especially those who do not die, but still do age.

Dylan has struggled with this ambiguity before. In “Seven Curses” (1963), the last, the toughest curse that befalls the corrupt, lying judge is “that seven deaths shall never kill him”. But there the bard solves it pragmatically; the judge may be immortal, but that endless life becomes a long, unending torture of incurable diseases and social isolation (healers will not heal him, eyes will not see him, ears will not hear him). Dylan cannot resort to a comparable escape here; after all, we are inside the gates of Eden – he can’t make a kind of Hell on Earth out of that, obviously.

Still, one other curse from “Seven Curses”, the fifth, does seem to be transposable at first: “That five walls will not hide him” becomes here, in the original manuscript, “And there’s nowhere t hide inside the gates of Eden”. Apparently the poet, who writes down “Gates Of Eden” in one inspired flash also makes, probably unconsciously, the connection not be able to die – judge from Seven Curses – nowhere to hide. But before October, before the song’s premiere, the line is deleted and changed:

To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

In the first place because of the inner contradiction, presumably. “To do anything they wish but die” clashes of course with nowhere to hide. And secondly, to avoid repetition; at the moment, “Seven Curses” is just over a year old, so it’s still rather fresh in the memory.

Anyway, the rewrite is quite radical. “There are no trials” is quite loaded, especially when the setting is “inside the Gates of Eden” – after all, that is where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is. If there is one place in the universe where good and evil are distinguished, where trials must almost by definition take place, it is here. But according to the poet, there are no trials, from which follows the inevitable conclusion that there is no more Good and Evil inside the gates of Eden. God has, evidently, lifted the guard from the Tree of Life and transferred the Cherubim with the flaming sword to that accursed Tree of Knowledge. Thus Dylan’s Eden resembles Nietzsche’s ideal of a paradisaical, or at least desirable, world: a world Beyond Good and Evil.

Which at the very least for one unfortunate soul is good news. Captain Willem van der Decken and his ship with tattooed sails await salvation. He should be heading for the Gates of Eden.

To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part XII: Plato and that sort of thing

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

Could you write for Untold Dylan?

We are constantly looking for authors who can offer a new perspective on Dylan’s work.  If you have an article ready, or just an idea for an article, I’d love to hear from you – just email Tony@schools.co.uk   You can send me the full article (as a word file ideally) or just the idea, as you wish.

The bad news is we don’t pay.  The good news is your article will be widely read across the English speaking world, and if you are young enough to care about your CV, it can look good there.

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

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

By Tony Attwood

In our earlier article “California Brown Eyed Baby” we revealed a set of lyrics from Dylan which seemed never to have been used.  I had a bash at writing some music (a “bash” being the apposite word here) but Robert Thomas and his writing partner Paul Odiase have now come up with their version.

There are more details as well as another link to the song on Paul’s website.   The music is by Paul Odiase, lyrics Bob Dylan/Paul Robert Thomas.

The original lyrics as we published before are…

The rain is falling at my window
My thoughts are sad forever.
Thinking about my fair haired baby,
The one I really do adore

She's my California brown eyed baby,
She's the one I think about today,
She's my California brown eyed baby,
Livin' down San Francisco way

Sadly I look out my window,
Where I can hear the raindrops fall.
My heart is sayin' ***** ****
Where I can hear my true love call.

Now boys don't start to ramble,
You better stay in your hometown
Get you a gal that really loves you,
Stay right there and settle down.

If you are a solo performer or working with a band or as a duo or trio, and have recorded a cover version of one of Dylan’s songs, and want to send in a performance of the music, please send it as an MP3 or MP4 to Tony@schools.co.uk along with details of who you are, including any biographical details you want to reveal.

The only requirement I’d add for that is that it’s not just a straight rendition of a Dylan song in the way Dylan did it.  The whole point of our covering the covers (as it were) is that we are looking at the way the artists have changed the song and explored dimensions that are not in the original.  Hence me sitting at a piano and singing Times they are a-changin in a very pale imitation of the Dylan original would not be acceptable!  (Just to reassure you).

Here are some of the earlier songs we’ve had completed following presentation of the lyrics on Untold Dylan.

• Tioga Pass – Jeff Kosoff.
• Bowling Alley Blues
• Song to Bonny Paul Robert Thomas
• Listen Robert Moses: Chris Sheriden
• Dope Fiend Robber Nick Juno.
• Untold Dylan Showcase: the publisher’s turn
• Don’t let anyone write your story – original renditions
• Don’t let anyone write your story, Rob Beretta
• Don’t let anyone write your story, Paul Robert Thomas
• Don’t let anyone write your story, fourth edition
• Don’t Let Anyone write your story: Claudio Diarni

Meanwhile as you may have noticed we are slowly building a file of covers of Dylan’s songs.  If you are in or are associated with a band that has recorded (privately or commercially) a cover of a Dylan song and you would like to have it added to our files, just send me either a video or an MP3 or MP4 and I’ll put it up in our Showcase section.

Tony.

The first three articles from 1997 appear at

• Never Ending Tour, 1997, part 1.  The Lonely Graveyards of the Mind
• Never Ending Tour 1997, part 2: Hanging onto a Shadow
• Never Ending Tour 1997, part 3: I came in from the wilderness

There is an index to all previous episodes here

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

When I get to the fourth post of a particular year, I am sometimes left with a random collection of performances that don’t quite fit in anywhere else. That has led to some interesting results. It’s the same this year, although I find most of my ‘leftovers’ are familiar songs from the 1960s, a bunch of the usual suspects.

There are, however, a couple of rarities. ‘Roving Gambler’ is new to us in terms of the NET, but is a song Dylan has been singing, with variations, since the early 1960s. I urge interested readers to see the full account of this song by Tony Attwood here.

‘So we have one answer to why Bob Dylan likes it – it is a long lived song that has turned up in many places.   And it is unusual with the drawn out final line and the harmony opportunities that offers the performers.  The change of tempo is not unique to this song, but it is unusual, and seems to date back to some of the early performances.’

It’s a good rollicking performance piece, and fun to listen to, but I’d add that Dylan may like the song because it fits in perfectly with the ethos of his persona: the lonesome hobo, the travelling man, the blues journeyman who goes from town to town gambling his genius on stage and maybe breaking a pretty girl’s heart before leaving town at dawn, just like so many times before.

A joyful performance. (9^th August)

Roving Gambler

‘Joey’, from Desire (1975), is another rarity, although we have had a couple of strong performances in previous years. ‘Joey’ is an ambitious song, telling the story of the life and death of Joey Gallo, a mobster murdered on his birthday in 1972. Joey Gallo is not as sympathetic a figure as Hurricane Carter, and other than his rebel, outlaw status, it is hard to see what attracted Dylan to the story. It seems that Dylan saw him as an underdog hero:

‘I was on the outside
of whatever side there was.’

In 2016 Dylan described the story as ‘Homeric’ ( Gundersen, Edna (2016-10-28). “World exclusive: Bob Dylan – I’ll be at the Nobel Prize ceremony… if I can”. The Telegraph), but also claimed that his collaborator on the Desire songs, Jacques Levy, wrote all the lyrics.

It is my least favourite song on the album, and was described by music critic Lester Bang as ‘repellent romanticist bullshit,’ a judgement I tend to share. I would have preferred to see ‘Golden Loom’ or ‘Abandoned Love’ on the album instead and would have rather tiptoed past the song in silence here. However, it is the only Desire song that Dylan performed during the NET, and according to a Mojo poll, “Joey” was rated the 74th most popular Bob Dylan song of all time.

One thing I can say is that the live performances of the song are certainly heroic. Dylan throws everything he’s got at this performance. (Sorry, no date for this one)

Joey

‘To Ramona’ (1964) is described by Wikipedia as a ‘folk waltz’ and ‘inspired by traditional Mexican Corrido folk music’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Ramona). The song has been linked to Dylan’s relationship with Joan Baez, and is not as gentle as it sounds, or as the melody would have us believe. The song seems to attack the more apocalyptic wing of the protest movement:

‘You’ve been fooled into thinking
that the finishing end is at hand’

but is a more general exposé of the destructive effects of living inauthentically and personal fakery.

‘But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin' to be a part of
A world that just don't exist
It's all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin' like this’

It is no fun being deceived by the appearances of the world. In this 1997 performance Dylan plays the vocals pretty tenderly, but it won’t be long before he begins to give the song a rather nasty twist. There is an underlying element of jeering or mockery which balances the love in the song, and this can only be brought out in performance, the way it is sung. At this stage there are only hints of it.

This is an intimate, acoustic performance, with some nicely restrained guitar work by Dylan.(13^th August)

To Ramona

Another song linked to Joan Baez is the famous ‘It Ain’t Me Babe.’ This song can be seen as an extension of the sentiment in ‘To Ramona,’ and the further rejection of the role of supporter of a lover’s illusions and delusions. No hippy bullshit for Bob. This performance relies heavily on Mr Guitar Man’s acoustic work, and while I would have preferred a harp solo, which always gives the song a certain piquancy, the vocal is as rough and true as you could wish. (18^th December)

It Ain’t me Babe

Yet another song linked to Joan Baez is ‘Positively 4th Street’. Here the gloves have come off, and it is one of Dylan’s most deliberately nasty songs. As with ‘Just Like a Woman,’ however, it is too easy to miss the vulnerability and hurt revealed by the song. We always want to hit back when we have been betrayed and slighted by those who profess to love us. Dylan doesn’t filter or censor his feelings. It tumbles out raw and tough and real. Things have turned very sour, as these things do when love turns to hate. You can see a progression from ‘To Ramona,’ through ‘It Aint Me Babe’ to this:

‘Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you’

The original had a deceptively bouncy tempo. This created a disjunction between the lyrics and the upbeat sound. It only sounded like a happy song.

In this 1997 performance however, Dylan slows the tempo right down to create a nine minute epic. Oddly the effect is more tender and yearning than we would expect, and the passionate delivery is devoid of jeering edges. It is odd. It sounds almost like a love song. At least it sounds shot through with regret rather than anger. It has that world weariness more fitting to a Time out of Mind state of mind. (sorry, no date for this one)

Positively 4^th Street

A song closely associated with Dylan’s move away from topical protest songs is ‘My Back Pages’ (1964). When introducing this song previously, I suggested that the loss of moral certainty, the subject of the song, would cost Dylan dearly later on. The loss of moral compass is an important thread in Time out of Mind, and what I find fascinating about this performance in the year Dylan released that album is the way he hurls it out so defiantly. It becomes a forceful declaration, not of faith but of lack of faith. A declaration of uncertainty.

My back Pages

With ‘God Knows’ (1991), uncertainty turns into jeopardy. It might be important for considering Under the Red Sky to remember that 1991 was also the year of the first Gulf War, the year of the first US and coalition attack on Iraq. Suddenly the world was on a knife edge once more:

‘God knows it’s fragile
God knows everything
God knows it snap apart right now
Just like putting scissors to a string’

That’s just what it felt like to live through that war, with the possibility always lurking that it could turn into a more general Middle Eastern war:

‘God knows it's terrifying
God sees it all unfold
There's a million reasons for you to be crying
You been so bold and so cold’

It’s hard not to feel that the repeated phrase ‘God knows’ is meant sarcastically – God knows everything! And yet it is ambiguous. This same God ‘knows the secrets of your heart’ and might offer some hope, some prospect of a purpose, or even the ever elusive prospect of salvation.

‘God knows there's a purpose
God knows there's a chance
God knows you can rise above the darkest hour
Of any circumstance’

Here Dylan sticks pretty much to the tempo and spirit of the original album version, although the last two minutes are given over to the hectic, apocalyptic musings of Mr Guitar Man on his punky Stratocaster. God knows, you could have knocked a minute and a half off this performance with no loss, but maybe that ominous swirl of sound is the point. Remember the head-bashing 1993 performance? (see NET, 1993, Part 1). Note he changes the word ‘purpose’ in the last verse to ‘reason.’ (2^nd October)

God Knows

As has been the pattern in the 90s, Dylan has sung ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ without a chorus. During the Rolling Thunder Tour, the song sounded magnificent with a ragged chorus of voices all knocking on heaven’s door. In the 90s Dylan performs the song unaided, which creates an impression of heroic fragility, especially with this cracked voice. This is a wonderful vocal performance, with the voice upfront and well recorded. This is an encore, which might help explain the rough, end of the night voice. The song starts 1.40 mins into the recording. (13^th August)

 Knocking on heaven’s door

In this spirited performance of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, we hear Dylan ‘upsinging’ in at least one verse. Upsinging is when the voice is raised at the end of each line. Later this would become an annoying mannerism but at this stage he’s only trying it out.  Since this performance is faster than the album version (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965), it sounds a bit rushed, but Dylan’s high-pitched singing gives it a suitably desperate edge. (18^th April)

Ballad of a Thin Man

During the 90s Dylan was perfecting a slow, sumptuous arrangement of the mysterious ‘Love Minus Zero No Limit’ (1965). This 1997 version is pretty much the same arrangement (minus harp) as the MTV Unplugged performance of 1994. But to my ear the vocal is stronger, Dylan’s voice more expressive. The emotional range of the Time out of Mind songs, and the voice he finds to sing them, takes us further than Dylan has gone before, and he now brings that extended range to his earlier songs with, in this case at least, gorgeous effect. (Date not known)

Love Minus Zero

The same applies to ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, another from 1965. With the youthful idealism leached from the song by Dylan’s more aged voice, the desire to escape down ‘the foggy ruins of time’ away from this world ‘of crazy sorrow’ sounds world weary and disillusioned, just like the Time out of Mind songs. (18^th December)

Mr T Man

It is hard to overestimate the effect that recording Time out of Mind had on Dylan’s performances in 1997. A new maturity and emotional range are evident, and he delivers his familiar setlist with a renewed vigour and power. His voice is changing. There are new cracks. He takes advantage of this change, adding a feeling of being broken by age and experience – but still on the road, still singing the old songs, just like so many times before.

We’ll be back soon to have a look at 1998.

Kia Ora

mr tambourine says “hi”

It was 1982, and Dylan’s 80^th birthday, oh Lord. And it is swamping me, in stuff.

BBC  Radio      It Ain’t Me You’re Looking For: Bob Dylan at 80    5 x 15 minutes

BBC  Radio Drama   Dinner with Dylan

BBC Masked and Anonymous    ( they gave this one star! Meanies!! )

BBC Tangled Up With Dylan: the Ballad of A J Weberman

BBC  Well I can’t say they ignored his 80^th Birthday that’s for sure

BBC  …..Sings Dylan II     Cover versions of someone’s songs

BBC  Don’t Loook Back (or you’ll spot the extra “o”)

BBC  Getting to Dylan: the Interview (1987 if you really want to know)

BBC Arena  Bob Dylan – Trouble No More   (1979 via 2018)

BBC  Singer/Songwriters at the BBC (including Bob someone,……)

Sky Arts   New  Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan: Tomorrow is a Long Time

Sky Arts   Bob Dylan 30^th Anniversary Concert

ASDA DVD  I’m Not There  (and he may well not be). Bought this on the day, 24^th May.

YouTube   Woolhall 80 days countdown to Bob’s Birthday

YouTube    Irenehilda, SuperPenn21, e collins, nightly moth, neverending Bobfan

Thank you all, and all the others too

Rolling Stone “Inside Bob Dylan’s Lost Interviews and Unseen Letters”  and although this dates back to October 21, 2020, I find I am reading it today on 24^th May, because it has showed up. And within it there is a page of a letter (image) and he mentions “abandoned hotels….like out of last year at marianbad” and it was yesterday that I was following up on a few films a local film club is planning to show, and so I happened to read up a little about the enigma of “Last Year in Marianbad” because that is one of them. Else maybe it would mean nothing to me (O Vienna).

Brahms

I wish they’d show Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

I’m enjoying cowboys this year. Last night it was Wyatt Earp.

Sometimes, there is plenty of time, but at other times, it seems there isn’t.

Get the fuck up  Up get the fuck   fuck up the get   the up fuck get   the up get fuck

and you can find the remaining variations, but none will get you up.

That’s only the half of it.

Perhaps the best part was Elston Gunn’s cakes, even though I couldn’t concentrate on them for long.

One page is more than enough. Less is more, more or less.

H B Bob. Tomorrow is a new day.

https://youtu.be/VCzneHn4rDc

There is an index of some of our more recent series on the home page and further details of series at the top of the page under the picture.

Property of Jesus Part 1

By Larry Fyffe

But you've picked up quite a story, and you've changed since the womb
What happened to the real you, you've been captured, but by whom
(Bob Dylan: Property Of Jesus)

The double-edged song lyrics above can be construed as an expression of sympathy for the Devil, represented by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.

As goes one of their songs below:

'Cause she'll never break, never break, never break
Never break this heart of stone
(Rolling Stones: Heart Of Stone ~ Jagger/Richard)

Asserted it be that s/he who’d follow the compassion of the soft-hearted Christ, including His love for Nature’s creatures, are gone missing from most songs by the band from modern Babylon:

He's the property of Jesus
Resent him to the bone
You got something better
You've got a heart of stone
(Bob Dylan: Property Of Jesus)

Black’s the colour of true Baroque poetry:

Was ever heart like mine? So bad? black? vile
Is any devil blacker? Or can hell
Produce it's match? It is the very soil
Where Satan reads his charms, and sets his spell
(Edward Taylor: Still I Complain, I Am Complaining Still)

Extended metaphor, hyperbole, and paradox be its main literary devices; individual skepticism concerning the doctrines of orgainized religion the mood thereof:

Faith's overtrumped,  and oft doth lose her tricks
Repentance's chalked up noddy, and out shut
They post and pare off grace thus, and its shine
(Edward Taylor: Still I Complain, I Am Complaining Still)

I can’t think for you, you have to decide – do the following lyrics refer to Jumping Jack Flash, or to Jesus, the Saviour; perhaps to both:

When the whip that is keeping you in line
Doesn't make him jump
Say he's hard of hearing, say that he's a chump
Say he's out of step with reality as you try to test his nerve
Because he doesn't pay tribute to the king that you serve
(Bob Dylan: Property Of Jesus)

In the Thomas Hardy’s novel ‘Jude The Obscure’, Sue jumps from being a religious skeptic to being a true-believer. Seems the theme of the novel is that you’ve just gotta serve someone.

Hardy quotes from the following hymn:
Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed
Teach me to die, that so I may
Rise gloriously at the awful day
(Tallis/Ken: All Praise To My God, This Night)

The hymn refers to the Devil’s tempting Jesus by offering Him the whole wide world.

Replies Christ:

Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written
That thou shalt worship the Lord thy God
And Him only shalt thou serve
(Matthew 4:10)

Things fall apart, or do they? – the human Jesus becomes equated with the Almighty One:

You'll never break it, darling
You'll never break this heart of stone
(Rolling Stones: Heart Of Stone)

There is an index of some of our more recent series on the home page and further details of series at the top of the page under the picture.

by Jochen Markhorst

Older New Yorkers probably remember the terrible screech the BMT Broadway train made as it turned east near 59^th Street and Seventh Avenue. Almost three miles from West 4th Street, but on quiet evenings and with a north wind and an open window, Dylan must have heard it too.

It is probably no consolation, but on the other side of the ocean the suffering was, and unfortunately sometimes still is just as great. The Central Line’s tubular hell’s screeching in London, between Liverpool Street and Bethnal Green is at times ear-shattering. Our German friends in Berlin, who invented the wonderful word Kurvenquietschen (“curve squeaking”, pronounce coor-ven-kweet-shen) for it, suffer at the corner of Friedrichstraße/Unter den Linden, within earshot of the former Führerbunker, and Parisians on Boulevard Diderot (XII^e) have been going insane for decades now because of the enfer acoustique, the acoustic hell of the metro line 5, when it makes the turn between the Quai-de-la-Rapée and Gare-d’Austerlitz stations.

For me it is music, though. I can even tell you exactly which music: “Visions Of Johanna”. And not for some high-brow, erudite reasons, I might add. Not because Dylan sings escapades out on the “D” train there, or because it can be associated with a ghost of ‘lectricty’s howling, or because the nightly, screeching wagons are corroded empty cages, or anything like that.  No, it’s more prosaic.

I am from September 1964 and Dylan, quite literally, rocked my cradle. My parents, like everyone in the family and friends circle, had bought the first Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits somewhere in the spring of ’66. Spring 1966, so still before Blonde On Blonde, so a Greatest Hits with a different track list than “the” Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits which is still Dylan’s best-selling record of all time – the American CBS version, with “Rainy Day Women”, “Just Like A Woman”, “Positively 4th Street” and “I Want You”. In Europe, we had to make do with “Bob Dylan’s Blues”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “Queen Jane Approximately” and “Highway 61 Revisited”. Not too bad either, obviously. That first, European compilation even had two more songs than the ten songs on the American bestseller (also “Don’t Think Twice” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”).

So “Highway 61 Revisited 61” really rocked my cradle. Still, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits was not really the soundtrack of my earliest youth. That would be Rubber Soul and Georges Moustaki, Creedence’s Willy And The Poor Boys and Freddy Quinn, Help! and James Last’s Beat In Sweet (with “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”!), the records my parents used to play and that were on the turntable at every family gathering between Hanover and Amsterdam. The Dylan lightning strike came later.

The Kinkerstraat is a long straight street north of the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, connecting the ring of canals with the Rembrandtpark. Three tramlines have been running through this long, straight street for more than a hundred years: Line 7, Line 17 and, since 1921, Line 23. There is only one bend in this long straight street: at the end, where the Kinkerstraat branches off to the Kinkerbrug, the bridge over the Kostverlorenvaart.

And in that bend lived my Aunt Joop. Kurvenquietschen.

From 1973, 1974, I was considered old and wise enough to travel alone by train to Amsterdam, to stay with one of my beloved aunts. Free-spirited, unmarried aunts without educational principles, but with stacks of comic books and even higher stacks of gramophone records. Tommy. Lou Reed’s Berlin. Harvest. American Pie. Ziggy Stardust. But above all: Blonde On Blonde.

Mind you, I think I already knew Dylan. But that’s Dylan pre-Blonde On Blonde. “Rainy Day Women” is familiar – it comes on the radio often enough. “Pledging My Time” is nice. In the closing seconds, I hear Line 7 approaching the Kinkerbrug. The inner sleeve tells me that the next song is called “Visions Of Johanna”…

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet? screeeeeeech
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it queeeeeeeek
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it krcheeeeetsch

You only experience that excitement, that kind of lightning a few times, maybe just once in your life – and with this intensity only in those receptive years of early puberty, it seems. But it never leaves you.

Like it was written, no, like it was screeched in my soul.

Happy birthday Bob

The story so far…

• Gates Of Eden part I: The Lady In The Water
• Gates Of Eden part II: As if he was just taking dictation
• Gates Of Eden part III: Hello lamppost, nice to see ya
• Gates Of Eden part IV: Out of the depths have I cried
• Gates Of Eden part V: A wedding-cake left out in the rain
• Gates Of Eden part VI: The cowpuncher and the Golden Calf
• Gates Of Eden part VII: She-devils and wild angels
• Gates Of Eden: part VIII. When everyone’s super… no one will be
• Gates Of Eden: part IX: I’m The Greatest

by Jochen Markhorst

X          Domus ad orientem solem

The foreign sun / it rises / on a house that is not mine
As friends an other strangers from their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, total free t do anything they wish but die
And there’s nowhere t hide inside the gates of Eden

The finest Dave Van Ronk compilation is – of course – made by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and is called Down In Washington Square (2005). It is a 3-CD set with a representative sample of Van Ronk’s best recordings between 1958 and 2001, embellished with well-chosen previously unreleased material. Dave’s cover of Dylan’s “Buckets Of Rain”, for instance, and a beautiful version of the time-honoured “St. James Infirmary” (which Dylan used as a template for “Blind Willie McTell”). And with the infamous arrangement Dylan so uncollegially nicked from the “Mayor of MacDougal Street” for his first album in 1961. As might be expected this story is told again in the excellent liner notes, a beautiful booklet of forty pages:

“Van Ronk recalled that after Bob Dylan had learned Dave’s version of “House of the Rising Sun,” Dylan approached him and asked if he could record it for his first album. Van Ronk replied, “I’d rather you not, I’m planning on recording it soon myself.” Dylan said “uh oh.” Van Ronk had to stop performing it because everyone accused him of getting it from Dylan. However, Dylan himself had to stop playing it when the Animals made a top hit out of it, and people accused him of getting it from them (from the film No Direction Home). Dave learned “House of the Rising Sun” from a recording by Hally Wood.”

Dylan may have felt some remorse, as evidenced by that “uh-oh”, but it doesn’t go too deep. Forty years later, when he publishes his memoir Chronicles, the autobiographer spends a lot of admiring and respectful words on Dave Van Ronk, and also readily admits that he copied him at the time:

“I was greatly influenced by Dave. Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It’s not like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more than I did mine.”

In June 1964, when Dylan in an inspired flash dashes off the lyrics for “Gates Of Eden”, the song apparently still reverberates obtrusively in the back of his mind. Or he is in a bit of a vicious mood, that is also possible. The eighth verse of the draft version opens with a perfect fourteener, and is not too cryptic: “The foreign sun it rises on a house that is not mine”… intended or unintended, it can only be understood as a stab to Van Ronk and the “House Of The Rising Sun”-controversy. No, that’s going too far, the bard thinks in the following weeks, and he changes it after all.

The rewritten opening line is successful: “The foreign sun, it squints upon a bed that is never mine.” The foreign sun is an age-old, but not yet worn out image with a simple, appealing metaphorical power. Archibald MacLeish, so admired by Dylan (one of the “gigantic figures who had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America”, “the poet of night stones and the quick earth” and who “put everything in perspective”, Chronicles) chooses it in Immortal Autumn (“Now no more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth”). And in this same year 1964, The Priest, Dylan’s role model William Burroughs, uses it twice in Nova Express. Weirdly, of course: “this foreign sun in your brain,” for instance.

For the academic fan, however, Horace is the most attractive source:

Quid terras alio calentes
Sole mutamus? Patria quis exul
Se quoque fugit?

… which, while retaining its poetic force, can be translated as

Why do we leave for lands warmed 
by a foreign sun? What exiled fugitive 
can flee from himself?
                                (Horace Odes 2:16)

All the more attractive, because it fits so well with Dylan’s next verse, with as friends and other strangers from their fates try to resign. A coincidence, probably, but still a nice coincidence. And with the continuation of the opening line, it squints upon a bed that is never mine, the poet in any case smuggles in a pleasant interior rhyme (foreign sun – squints upon), and expresses the suggestion of an erotic intermezzo more subtly than with that reference to the most famous brothel in history.

Anyway, the foreign sun and the stranger’s bed (or, originally, the unfamiliar house) set the tone for the apparent theme of this verse, for detachment and alienation. “Friends and other strangers” is a beautiful poetic find with a charged, sad inner contradiction to express deep loneliness. And it seems to be a Dylan original; before “Gates Of Eden”, we don’t really know this loaded word combination. It hits home. The expression, and variants of it, is used in cinema, literature, songwriting, and also outside the arts, in science. Chapter 2 of the wonderful Benjamin Franklin biography, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (H.W. Brands, 2000), for example, is called “Friends and Other Strangers”, as is a 1995 DC Comics Star Trek: The Next Generation and an episode of the TV series Notorious. The latest episode of the hit series Roseanna is called “Daughters and Other Strangers”, an episode of the equally successful Golden Girls “Sisters and Other Strangers”, Husbands, Family, My Mother, Neighbors… the ironic addition of “and other strangers” has certainly proved to be a popular inspiration.

The not too coherent “from their fates try to resign” tries to express something like “not being able to escape your destiny” and gets a not unattractive, Jewish-mystic colour by the Yoda-like sentence structure, but is above all a bridge to one of the song’s most shining verses, to “Leaving men wholly, totally free to do anything they wish to do but die” – probably spending their lives in sin and misery, in other words. Which has been the ruin of many a poor boy, as we all know.

To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part XI: Forever Young

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’s an index to some of our more recent articles on the home page of the site, and more indexes below the picture of Bob, above.  If you are searching for a particular item the search box top right can also be helpful.

Happy birthday Bob.

Thank you for everything.

From all the writers and all the commentators and all the readers at Untold Dylan.

Research and track selections by Aaron Galbraith, commentaries and random thoughts by Tony Attwood

A list of the earlier articles in this series is given here

This is part of an ongoing series of reviews of cover versions of Dylan songs under the title “Beautiful Obscurity”.   We’re also, very laboriously, trying to putting together a complete index of covers of Dylan songs that we have commented upon over the years – the latest edition is here, and a new edition of that will be published in the next few days.

So here we go with Aaron’s selection, and Tony’s random thoughts.

Scottish rockers Nazareth from Loud n Proud (1974)

Tony: I do love covers which from the introduction don’t give you a clue as to which song this is going to be.  It’s not always possible of course but where it can be done, it gives a sense that this artist is going to try a serious re-interpretation.

The problem with the original, in terms of a re-working is that it is based entirely on one chord.  Dylan overcomes this by portraying the bleakness of Hollis Brown’s reality through the openness of the accompaniment and the fact that when the album came out, we’d never heard this before.  But as this recording shows, there are alternative routes forward.

Leon Russell also from 1974 from the album Stop All That Jazz

Tony: And wow doesn’t that opening throw us into a new dimension again – exactly as I was just saying needed to be done.   They’ve changed the backing rhythm too and the whole thing gives us a wild effect.

The only question is, having thrown so much in at the first, can they keep it up?  After all, we all know where this goes, but the horror of the starving children, and the knowledge of what Hollis Brown does keep me here, listening.

It’s really inventive and exploratory in its style, but I am not at all sure if I could listen to again.   It’s that “seven new people born” which is the problem.  How do you render this in music?

The Neville Brothers from Yellow Moon (1989)

The Neville Brothers give us a fade-in which works, and they change the rhythm of the lines which certainly holds my attention.  I particularly like what the bass guitar is doing, and the fact that the band holds back in contrast to the earlier recordings above.  I wonder if it would be possible to perform this with just a bass guitar and vocal?   It would certainly be haunting.

But I do like the pauses, which are retained throughout; it really adds to the horror.

Some more Scottish rockers Stone The Crows

Hmmmm…. that intro if not exactly commonplace is certainly something that is often heard, but then taking the music back, and the female voice really does make me listen again.

I have to admit a deep inner problem I have with this song, and that is the image of the deaths at the end.  Practicality burns into my head: how does he do it so that all of the family die and none run away?  Does he tie them up?  Is his wife complicit?   I turn the whole thing into a horror film, which actually I don’t like (but that’s my imagination for you).

Here the vocalist puts too much into the song as it builds for me.  It’s too easy to do that; the horrific silent scene of Hollis Brown committing suicide is lost.  Dylan gets it by telling  the tale in the same voice all the way through, so the deaths become matter of fact.  But the ghostly effects that the band try after the seven shotgun shells don’t work for me.

Maybe even now, after all these years of knowing the song, I am just too weighed down by it all.  As a result the organist going on a little jaunt around the 5th minute took me totally away from the scene of five children, a man and a woman lying dead at an isolated house.  This is the band having fun, each musician doing his or her stuff, without remembering Hollis Brown and his family.  The return of the vocal and the instrumentation of “roar” confirms; this is not an interpretation for me.

Aaron: You know I always like to throw a curveball your way so how about some Swedish Death Metal from Entombed

Tony: Sometimes Aaron, I reflect that it is a good job you live on the other side of the Atlantic rather than in my village.  I’d be round your house knocking on the door and demanding to know what the f*** you are playing at.

Does this add anything to the sum of human knowledge?  Does it offer insight or entertainment?  Does it carry a profound message or give a different view of reality?

As you probably have guessed, my answer is no.  There’s enough chaos in my life without this.

Aaron: After that onslaught you can clear out for brain with Stephen Stills excellent acoustic workout

Tony: Yes, thank you, although I’m not quite sure that I understand your comment above Aaron.  But the rule is I just write my response and don’t call you, so on we go.  And thank you for this, because this is an interpretation that I can appreciate, not least because of Stephen Still’s sublime talent.

It’s not just that he is a great singer and a terrific guitarist, it is that he can get right inside the song and express it in a way that reflects the complete meaning of the song as a whole, as well as the meaning inside each line.  This is one of the few in this collection that I could contemplate coming back to and playing again.  Although not today.

Aaron: Just two more to go. Academy award winning director David Lynch gave it a go on his 2013 album The Big Dream

Tony: Hmmm, don’t particularly appreciate the illustration above, and the introduction of the vocal was a disappointment to me.  But they do change the instrumentation as we progress and that works.

But it does strike me that many of these musicians and producers, talented as they are, are not considering one particular point: most of the people listening to their rendition are going to know this song off by heart.  The really, really, really good re-interpreters of Dylan do consider this – they know we know the song by heart, and so they start from that point of familiarity and take us on a new journey, making a well-known road somehow different.

That is why Hendrix’ “Watchtower” worked – he just totally shocked us by taking the music to a new place, while still keeping it as a Dylan song.

This version does that in part, but still can’t deal with the fact that every verse is musically the same.  Dylan didn’t have to worry because when he sang it, it was new to us.  But now…

Aaron: Last up it’s brother of Pete, Mike Seeger (and special guest) from his 1995 album Third Annual Farewell Reunion album

Tony: OK I think this is the eighth consecutive Hollis Brown I’ve listened to.  I’m still here, feeling that perhaps I should have stopped after four versions, and come back another day.  But I didn’t and I find myself now looking out of my window….  My study where I write is upstairs and looks down on my garden in a village so old it is mentioned in the Doomsday Book.  At the end of the garden are four huge trees with branches and leaves blowing in the wind.  To try and do my bit for the continuity of the village I’ve planted two more trees in my time here, (I’ve been here 21 years) and they are flourishing.  Beyond is farmland, the manor house and church built maybe 400 years ago, and the river flowing exactly as described in the Doomsday report.   When examined by King William’s researchers there were 36 freemen here and six slaves.

This village was thus created over 1000 years before Hollis Brown lived and died, and maybe will continue for centuries after I’ve given up the custodianship of my little part of it.  Hollis Brown reminds me how phenomenally lucky I have been with my life, and I wonder what I did to deserve it.  And I wonder why the world has to be like this – and at how I sit here where ten centuries ago the lives of the people who lived here was indeed nothing but a question of having enough food to survive until tomorrow.

———–

You can read about other series on this site on the home page.