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.   The index of all articles is here.

After a review of the ebbs and flows of Dylan’s writing process from the late 1950s to 1978, I then produced a set of five overviews (which in retrospect should have been written after each group of five of the main articles!) before in the last piece returning to the detailed look at the themes within one period – in this case 1979/80

This was indeed a unique spell for Dylan, since for 18 months every song was on the same theme: the Christian faith.  What’s more, in writing about Christianity although Bob didn’t change his approach to music, his approach to lyrics did change.  The metaphor and obscurity went and direct and clear commentary came in.

My thought on the removal of metaphors and obscurity – songs in which the meaning is not always clear and which leave the listener puzzling over the exact meaning of certain lines – is also a reason why I place “Slow Train” outside of the Christian catalogue.  It’s not the only reason, but it is a powerful argument.  The Christian songs are all immediately clear in their meaning.

Of course Dylan then adopted “Slow Train” as part of the Christian collection – but from where I sit, that song still suggests to me it is about change, not about giving everything up, to give oneself to the Lord.  And as I have noted, Dylan had written a few religious songs across the years – but previously it was just another topic among the 46 different subject areas his songs had dealt with.

Thus for me “Property of Jesus” was the last of the series of Christian songs that began with “Gotta Serve Somebody.”  After that came the pivotal point with “Every grain of sand”.

Others far more capable than I have argued this song back and forth, and for me it was Jochen who expressed the nature of the song when he wrote on this site, “Dylan weaves Blakean influences, biblical references, French symbolists and François Villon, intertwining with baroque, impenetrable, Dylanesque imagery.”

Of course it can be read as a Christian text, but I see it as having so much more than that inside it, exactly as Jochen points out.  It has a confession, and Cain, knowing exactly what he has to do next…  But hang on… what Cain did was kill his brother.  So what is Dylan saying?  Cain as a reference point to the future?  That seems a trifle odd.  No, I think it is as he said in 1962, it’s a “Mixed up confusion”.

Bob had turned away from his preaching to his familiar theme of ambiguity – of introducing words that are as likely to be there because they make interesting images and basically sound good, as they are they to carry a literal meaning.  Plus the metaphor is back, the clear statement of handing oneself over to the service of the Lord has been edged out of the door.

To see fully where Bob is going, perhaps we need to know what the “dying voice within me reaching out somewhere” is actually reaching out to.  But we are not told. OK, he is in despair and in despair some people turn to an all encompassing religion.  But now he is encompassing possibilities once more.  And indeed we might even consider that “Every Grain of Sand” is not a religious song at all, but a song of despair about religion.

But, the contrary argument could be made when considering…

“In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand”

and my reply is that yes this could be The Master as God, except we are back with metaphors. Tangled metaphors maybe, but still metaphors.  And in the religious songs metaphors were pretty much set aside.

If it is Christian imagery it is convoluted and obscure, in my view, and also not what Blake was writing about at all.

However there is another way through this, to step aside from Christian imagery and see this as more a Taoist vision.  Here the Master is not God or Jesus, but a master in the sense of a teacher.  One who has mastered the arts of meditation.  A swami.  A Lao Tsu character – depending how you want to see him.  And the mere fact that all is not clear again suggests Bob has moved on from the explicit Christian messaging in songs.

I would argue that in the second verse (and I take this song as having three verses not the six four liners as sometimes printed) there is little that is specifically Christian but there is everything to do with inward reflection and consideration.   Yes, temptation is a Christian concept, but it appears in many philosophies.  Where there is the notion of the free mind there is the choice of what to do – and temptation can always be there.  But that notion in itself does not have to lead on to saying that this is temptation placed by the Devil.  In the way Dylan writes, it could just be circumstance.

So, to me this is the tipping point; these are not Christian questions, but questions from a man who is interested in a philosophy that asks questions relating to the very nature of man without having the God-given certainty of the answers….. Dylan is gazing into the doorway, not just of temptation, but of his own future.

I also find it incredibly interesting to note that “Every Grain” was then followed by the majestically confused and constantly confusing Caribbean Wind…

Again some argue that this is a Christian song, and to this I would make just three points.  First, it is not a song like those of  the previous year in which the Christian message was set out clearly in a way that could not be misunderstood.  Second, we have metaphors and the Christian songs don’t do metaphors.  Third the lyrics go for a meander – it is hard to say it is all about the Christian message – although that argument has been made, and indeed made on this site.

We might call this period of Bob’s writing “varied”, or if we were being less generous it could be called “confused”, and that latter thought does help us understand “Groom’s still waiting at the alter”.  Indeed lines such as

Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement,
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated.
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated.

could just as easily have been written into one of the many re-writes of Caribbean Wind as destined for the Groom.

It is also extraordinary that Bob could devise these amazing pieces of music and literature one after the other, and then abandon them.  And why did it happen like this?  To me the most obvious answer is that the old rock and roll, and all those metaphors just kept on breaking through, refusing to lie down.  It is almost as if Bob could find a song writing itself, could play it, and then decide he didn’t want it!

And we get more of it with the next song Yonder comes sin  (also one that was seemingly abandoned).

You wanna talk to me
You got many things to say
You want the spirit to be speaking through
But your lust for comfort get in the way

I say: See them six wild horses, honey
You say: I don't even see one
You say: Point them out to me, love
I say: Honey I got to run

The Year of Abandoned Masterpieces indeed – and he keeps going with at least a couple of versions of “Let’s keep it between us”.     But Bob is never anything if not contrary, so he ended the year with … a piece of gospel in “City of Gold”.  Make of that sudden change what you will.

As I have argued before, in studying science we are always taught to accept the simplest interpretations of anything we find, and I think the simplest of interpretations for this change was that Bob had stopped seeing himself as a servant of God.

Its a step by step process running down to Making a liar – the penultimate song of the year and one that I consider an absolute masterpiece of simple music.

For the most part just two chords over and over, and yet he can hold our attention all the way through.   Who was making a liar out of Bob – if anyone – we are not really told.

Is he talking to the believers or the non-believers, or everyone?  Certainly when I first heard the line, “Well I say that, that ain’t flesh and blood you’re drinking” gives us quite a challenge.   From the moment I heard that line I felt it was a reference – an obvious reference – to the Eucharist (Holy Communion) in which the bread and wine are transformed into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ.

Which makes the lines

Well I say that, that ain't flesh and blood you're drinking
In the wounded empire of your fool's paradise
With a light above your head forever blinking
Turning virgins into merchandise

an attack on contemporary Roman Catholicism.  But does he also say that the church is correct in its beliefs, but it is misusing Dylan’s input?  Or is Dylan admitting that he was a liar in the past?   Everyone can decide for her or himself.

There were a few more religious songs to come, but after the statement of “Liar” I think it was by and large over.   We were back to the old pre-1979 Bob.

All Directions continues shortly…

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

Below is part 34 of the Never Ending Tour series of articles.  A full index of the series can be found here.   The previous section on 1966 contained:

• Never Ending Tour, 1996, part 1. Busy being born. With Al Kooper in Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour, 1996,  Part 2  – More Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour 1996 part 3: Berlin and Beyond
• Never Ending Tour, 1996, part 4. In the House of Blues forever.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘While I'm strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind
I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line
I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate
But I don't know how much longer I can wait’

1997 was a big and varied year for Bob Dylan. In September the album he’d been working on since August 1996, Time out of Mind was released, his first since Under the Red Sky in 1991. This meant it was only later in the year that some of the songs from the new album made their way into the concerts. As well as a few of the new songs, Dylan introduced a couple of older songs he’s never performed, most importantly ‘Blind Willy McTell’. ‘The Wicked Messenger’, also, which hadn’t been performed since 1987 I believe, was to become a staple over the next few years.

There were also some changes to the make up of his band, also the first since 1991. Larry Campbell joined in March, replacing John Jackson, and in October 1996 David Kemper took over the drums from Winston Watson.

Watson has been criticised for being too heavy-handed on the drums. That heavy-handedness worked brilliantly for some performances – try ‘I and I’ in 1991 (see 1991: Part 1 Hidden Gems in a Train Wreck – The Undesirables) – but perhaps didn’t always work so well. However you feel about that, Kemper did bring a new sensitivity to the drums, which subtly altered the sound of the band.

Larry Campbell, who would stay with Dylan through to 2004, is generally considered to be a better guitarist than John Jackson. I think Jackson did his best guitar work for Dylan in 1993, when Dylan was veering towards the jazzy side. Campbell is also credited with being a multi-instrumentalist. Wikipedia comments: ‘Campbell expanded the role to multi-instrumentalist, playing instruments such as cittern, violin/fiddle, pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, mandolin, banjo, and slide guitar,’ but I’m not sure of the accuracy of that. Bucky Baxter was retained as steel guitarist, and is also credited with playing dobro, pedal steel guitar and mandolin for Dylan.

In addition 1997 was the year the apparently unstoppable Dylan ended up in hospital with a chest infection. Official statements indicated that the ailment was histoplasmosis, a fungal infection of the lung that causes swelling of the pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart. After recovering, and going back on the road Dylan’s only comment was: ‘Thought I was going to see Elvis.’

Finally, in 1997, Dylan performed before Pope John Paul II, at the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, with an audience of 400,000. (Sept 27^th). The performances were not as outstanding as the occasion.

The anonymous CM, of the website A Thousand Highways, flatly declares that ‘1997 is one of the best years of Bob Dylan’s NeverEnding Tour.’  I don’t entirely agree, but I’m happy to put it to the test in the next few posts.

Let’s start with those new songs from Time out of Mind. The first track of the album is ‘Lovesick’, a song which would undergo many changes in the next ten years. Dylan has indicated that he believes ‘Lovesick’ to be one of the few songs he’s written that might be worthy of inclusion in what is loosely called the Great American Songbook. In the song we drift like ghosts through the nighttime world, observing the rites of humanity as if from afar.

‘I see
I see lovers in the meadow
I see
I see silhouettes in the window
I watch them 'til they're gone
And they leave me hangin' on
To a shadow’

‘Lovesick’ is an astonishing and dramatic introduction to the despair and alienation of the album, setting the tone for the coming songs. Its slow, heavy, death-march beat, and sudden reversal at the very end, all make for one of Dylan’s most memorable songs.

Dylan exploits a possible ambiguity in the term ‘lovesick’ which he creates for the song. During most of the song he uses the term to mean being sick of love, which is not the conventional meaning of the term. Only at the very end does the sentiment return to the normal meaning of the term, to feel sick from being in love. The misery of that last line changes the whole meaning of the song. He’s sick of love because he’s lovesick, if you can make sense of that.

This first performance is from San Jose, 14^th of November. He sticks pretty much to the studio arrangement. The backing is good, Larry Campbell emphasising the heavy grandeur of the chords and the emotional anguish of the vocals.

Lovesick (A).

Dylan sounds a bit wan, but that’s at least partly how he’s singing the song. He really does sound like a wandering ghost. That effect may be, at least in part, a result of the recording. Here’s another version from December the 18^th (El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles) that’s stronger and more upfront:

Lovesick (B)

Overall, however, we’ll find that Dylan’s vocals are nothing too special in 1997. He doesn’t soar the way he did in 1995, and despite the energy of some of the performances, I get the feeling that Dylan is once more struggling with his voice. New cracks and fissures are opening up in his voice which will eventually lead, after 2004 or so, to his fully cracked, circus barker voice. To my ear, this is not the scratchiness of the early nineties, which he eventually overcame, but a more genuine ageing.

This is his Time out of Mind voice, full of bitter experience and marinated in awareness of mortality. Arguably, Dylan’s songs have never strayed too far from an awareness of mortality; what is different in Time out of Mind is Dylan’s response to ageing. It crops up directly in songs like ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’ and ‘Highlands,’ but permeates the whole album, and is cultivated in his voice.

It’s hard to match ‘Can’t Wait’ for desperate weariness, both as a song and in performance. Different studio versions of the song found on Tell Tale Signs (a compilation of outtakes released in 2008) show Dylan working hard to find the right  sound and tempo for the song, and that experimentation would continue right up to 2019. Dylan may never have settled on a particular arrangement and sound for the song, but the journey itself is a fascinating one.

Even during 1997 Dylan was trying out different paced performances. This first, fast tempo performance is from the highly regarded December 19^th show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. (There were three shows at El Ray, the 19^th is the second of them.) It’s full of verve, yet sung by a man sounding at the very end of this tether. Can’t wait for what? Love? Death? The end of time? The end of mind? Whatever, it’s a real kicker.

Can’t Wait (A).

In tailoring this song for the stage, Dylan eschewed the swampy sound Lanois achieved on the album. This is much more raw. But he didn’t always play it at this pace. Sometimes he slowed it down. This one’s from the 24^th of October. The slower pace enables Dylan to relish the despair of the song.

Can’t Wait (B)

‘Cold Irons Bound’ is one of the most acknowledged songs on Time Out of Mind.  and won Dylan a Grammy award. In the song the lovesick poet, whose love is ‘taking such a long time to die,’ is likened to a prisoner chained in cold irons.

‘One look at you and I’m out of control
Like the universe has swallowed me whole
I’m twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound’

While this state of mind might have been sparked by a love he couldn’t kill, the feeling is universalised into a general sense of alienation from the world. The ‘too many heads’ refers to the Greek myth of a Hydra who would grow two new heads for every one chopped off. We find the same desperation here as in ‘Can’t Wait’.

‘Oh, the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads
Some things last longer than you think they will
There are some kind of things you can never kill’

This hard-driving rocker suits Dylan’s snarling delivery perfectly. This is from the 11^th of November, and had only been played a couple of times. It’s fresh and full of fire.

Cold Irons Bound (A)

No less compelling is this performance from the 19^th of December, the Los Angeles show.

Cold Iron Bound (B)

Until I heard the following performance, I’d always thought of the bluesy ‘Till I Fell in Love with You’ as one of the lesser tracks on Time Out of Mind. One of those fillers you get from time to time on Dylan albums. But this rough and tearing performance, plus another look at the lyrics, has convinced me otherwise.

The album version can’t match the sheer raw power of this 19 of December Los Angeles performance. The throat-ripping vocal takes me back to the early days of the NET, 1988/89, and the lyrics are some of the very best in terms of how Dylan can convey his inner state by the condition of his body. Remember ‘Mr Tambourine Man’:

‘My weariness amazes me
I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming’

Compare that to this from ‘Till I Fell..’

‘Well, my nerves are exploding
And my body's tense
I feel like the whole world
Got me pinned up against the fence’

Dylan songs are full of references to, and the feeling of, entrapment; as he’d later put it in ‘Mississippi’ – nowhere to escape. ‘Till I Fell…’ gives powerful expression to the physicality of that feeling:

‘Well junk is piling up
Taking up space
My eyes feel
Like they're falling off my face

Sweat falling down
I'm staring at the floor
I'm thinking about that girl
Who won't be back no more’

At the risk of getting sidetracked, I’m reminded of these lyrics from ‘Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight’ from Infidels (1983), a song Dylan has never performed as far as I know.

‘But it's like I'm stuck inside a painting
That's hanging in the Louvre
My throat start to tickle and my nose itches
But I know that I can't move’

Anyway, here it is. I can’t help feeling that this is what Dylan really had in mind for the song, the way it should sound, the emotions right up front, not buried in an echo chamber.

Till I fell in love with You

I’m running out space, but I want to finish this post with two performances of ‘Blind Willie McTell’, performed for the first time in 1997 and which would, over the coming years, be developed alongside the Time out of Mind songs. Although written for Infidels, but never included on the album, it fits well with the dark aesthetic of Time out of Mind.

‘Well god is in his heaven
And we are what was his
But power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is’

The first performance is from the 5^th of October. It swings along and Dylan is in great cracked-voice form.

Blind Willie

This second performance, from the 23^rd of October, slows the pace down a fraction, giving Dylan more time to savour those wonderful lyrics. Some great guitar work on both these performances.

NET, 1997, part 1 ins 8 Blind Willie (B)

I’ll be back shortly with more exciting sounds from 1997.

Kia Ora

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 Larry Fyffe

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy (Part V)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part VI)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part VII)

As singer Bob Dylan does in the television play “The Madhouse On Castle Street”, Thomas Hardy in his novel “The Mayor Of Casterbridge” sets the stage for his tragic tale through folk song – ballads similar to those ‘borrowed’ by Robert Burns:

It's home, and it's home, home glad would I be
O home, home, home to my own country
There's an eye that ever weeps, and a fair face will be fain 
As I pass through Annan Water with my bonnie bands again
When the flower is in the bud, and the leaf upon the tree
The lark shall sing me home to my own country
(Home To My Own Country)

Later artists, such as  poet William Wordsworth, consider industrialized, city-enclosed, people as no longer in touch with the regenerative ‘spirit’ of Nature; Darwinian science depicts the Universe as uncaring, and at times even cruel to its living inhabitants.

Alienation from natural world is portrayed in the dark-humoured song from the TV play:

Lady Margaret's pillow is wet with tears
No body's been on it in twenty years
(Bob Dylan: The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan)

Happier is the following ballad that shows up in Hardy’s story:

As I came in by my bower door
As day was waxing weary
Oh, who came tripping down the stairs
But bonnie Peg, my dearie
(Bonnie Peg My Dearie)

The singer of the similar ballad below adds a humorous last line to the traditional song:

Come a-running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O
Come a-running down the stairs
Combing back your yellow hair
You're the prettiest darn girl I ever seen-io
(Bob Dylan: Pretty Peggy-O)

It’s a line that parodies the last line in the song below that’s mentioned by Hardy in “The Mayor Of Casterbridge”:

The rosebud washed in summer's shower
Bloomed fresh within the sunny bower
But Kitty was the fairest flower
That ever was seen in Gowrie
(The Lass Of Gowrie)

A folk song based on the following biblical text is also noted by Hardy:

When he shall be judged
Let he be condemned
And let his prayers become sin
Let his days be few,
And let another take his office
Let his children be fatherless
And his wife a widow
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg
(Psalm 109)

The song too calls for the deceitful to be severely punished:

His seed shall orphans be, his wife
A widow plunged in grief
His vagrant children beg their bread
Where none can give relief
His ill-gotten riches shall be made 
To usurers a prey
The fruit of all his toil shall be
By strangers borne away
None shall be found that to his wants
Their mercy will extend
Or to his helpless orphan seed
The least assistance lend
A swift destruction shall soon seize
On his unhappy race
And the next age his hated name
Shall utterly disface
(Psalm One Hundred Nine)

Reminding of the curse cast by the singer/songwriter in the song beneath:

These be seven curses on a judge so cruel
That one doctor will not save him
That two healers will not heal him
That three eyes will not see him
That four ears will not hear him
That five walls will not hide him
That six diggers will not bury him
And that seven deaths shall never kill him
(Bob Dylan: Seven Curses)

All the above verses are befitting musical props to Hardy’s story. Unemployed Michael gets drunk, sells his wife Susan and their baby girl Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor; Michael regrets that, reforms, sells corn, climbs the social ladder. He becomes the mayor of Casterbridge.

Then things fall apart. Believing the sailor dead, the mayor’s wife returns, and ‘remarries’ her husband; his beautiful grown-up ‘stepchild’ is there too – she’s also named Elizabeth-Jane, but sired by the sailor (the baby that Michael sold to the sailor having died). Things go from bad to worse. Susan dies; the mayor’s business fails; the girl’s father turns up, and Michael tells him that Elizabeth is dead.

In the end, the ‘stepchild’ gets happily married to a successful man. Needless to say, the former mayor is now a social outcast; he wishes to be forgotten, and dies alone.

If Bob Dylan were around at that time, he’d be in Hardy’s novel singing a ballad that addresses the amoral Universe:

You treat me like a stepchild
Oh, Lordy, like a stepchild
I wanna turn my back, and run away from you
But you know that I can't leave you, babe
(Bob Dylan: Stepchild)

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

Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965) – the final part

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter word – Part III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?
• Love is just a four letter word Part VI: You been double-dealing
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word; Part VII: Now I understand
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word. Part VIII: But it’s all over now

Part IX: I sit and watch the children play

 The follow-up to “As Tears Go By” is a failure. Marianne Faithfull’s version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” is pretty atrocious, and the performer herself is the first to agree wholeheartedly: “A total disaster. All I remember about that session was how dreary I sounded.” Despite Faithfull’s sudden popularity and her closeness to the Stones, the single doesn’t even make it to the bottom of the charts; it’s really a rather gruesome version. Like a real Lady, by the way, she blames the debacle entirely on herself:

“I did my best to blame Andrew and Decca for “Blowing in the Wind” but it was my own doing entirely. Poor Andrew, it wasn’t his fault at all. Somebody must have said to him, “Why don’t you just let Marianne do the sort of thing she’d like to do?” I can just see it. And, of course, I worshipped Bob Dylan. Andrew went against his better judgement and it was a fiasco.”

Fortunately, she recovers immediately after this flop – the three following singles (Jackie DeShannon’s “Come And Stay With Me”, the Tennessee Williams-inspired “This Little Bird” and the charmingly aged “Summer Nights”) all make the Top 10. But “As Tears Go By” is and remains her signature song.

It is a beautiful song, of course. And remarkably, the first song written by Jagger and Richards. In her memoirs (Faithfull, An Autobiography, 1994), Faithfull already tells the urban legend-like story of manager Andrew Loog Oldham locking the Glimmer Twins in the kitchen with the order that they may not come out again until they have written a song, and sixteen years later Keith Richards indeed confirms that story in his life story, in Life (2010):

“The famous day when Andrew locked us in a kitchen up in Willesden and said, “Come out with a song”–that did happen. Why Andrew put Mick and me together as songwriters and not Mick and Brian, or me and Brian, I don’t know. It turned out that Brian couldn’t write songs, but Andrew didn’t know that then. I guess it’s because Mick and I were hanging out together at the time. Andrew puts it this way: “I worked on the assumption that if Mick could write postcards to Chrissie Shrimpton, and Keith could play a guitar, then they could write songs.” We spent the whole night in that goddamn kitchen.”

La Faithfull “was never that crazy about” the song but is still amazed that two twenty-year-old boys could create such lyrics, “about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life”.

When Faithfull for days hangs around in Dylan’s crowded hotel suite at the beginning of May ’65, The Beatles have gone straight to number one with “Ticket To Ride”, Donovan’s “Catch The Wind” and The Stones’ “The Last Time” are at six and seven, and her biggest hit “Come And Stay With Me” is still high on the charts. It’s her third single and her LP has just been out for three weeks, but “As Tears Go By” already is the Marianne Faithfull song, and she can’t escape it in the hotel suite either. Not to her displeasure, by the way, as her cheerful, witty recollection of it shows:

“At one point Baez, whom I worshipped, picked up a guitar and began to sing “As Tears Go By.” I’ve never heard it sound better, even by whatsisname. It quite blew me away. Very unlike my version! “As Tears Go By” as a folk song (it sounded like one of her records). When sung like that, the meaning is flopped: instead of being a subjective thought, the words become beautiful artefacts. Which is what folk interpreters do as a rule.”

“Never Better” is a gallant overstatement, and its beauty is partly due to Faithfull’s and Baez’s surprisingly beautiful, spontaneous singing together, but still, it’s true: it’s a mesmerising minute in which Mrs. Baez’s Olympic talent is reaffirmed once again.

Of more musical historical interest is La Baez’s action of just before or just after this moment. From the seating arrangement and the clothing of the ladies, we can deduce that this is the playtime in which Baez saves “Love Is A Four-Letter Word” from the dustbin of Dylan’s overflowing creativity. The Joan Baez Appreciation Society doesn’t have too many rabid Dylan fans, but even the Baez bashers will have to give her credit for this: without her, this song of the outer category would have sunk into the Waters of Oblivion.

After that hotel room scene in May ’65 at the Savoy Hotel in London, it takes quite a long time before the song really comes to the surface. The film is released two years later, in May 1967, including that one minute with that one verse that Baez sings and the ensuing discussion about whether or not to finish the song. Baez’s promise (“If you finish it, I’ll sing it on a record”) is not an empty promise, but it does take almost another two years for it to be fulfilled – Baez’s recording takes place in September ’68, the Dylan debut album Any Day Now hits American shops in December, Europe’s in January ’69. The single “Love Is A Four-Letter Word” b/w “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” is released in March 1969. Assuming that Dylan first plays the song to Baez in November 1964, at her home in Carmel Valley, there are over four years between conception and birth.

The single has limited success; the top position is #86, the album reaches #30. But the song has a long run; it becomes one of Baez’s signature songs, audiences keep asking for it, it is selected for compilation albums, is on her live album From Every Stage (1975, with five Dylan songs, including her interpretation of “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”) and she continues to play the song well into the twenty-first century (in November 2018, during her Fare Thee Well Tour, it is the opening song in Portland, for example).

Strangely enough, not too many artists are venturing into a cover. Perhaps the song is too attached to Baez; comparable to the reluctance of artists to cover “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or, for example, “Waterloo Sunset” or “Like A Rolling Stone” – songs of which the definitive version already exists, and which are almost impossible to separate from the original. The title itself inspires – usually saltless – paraphrases (“Hate Is A Four-Letter Word”, for instance, and “Love Is More Than A Four-Letter Word”), but real covers… no, hardly any. About four or five. One stands out.

Joy Of Cooking is a relatively unknown hippie band from California in the late 60s, early 70s, that released three nice records with dated sounding, but definitely attractive music. No Dylan songs. Although… “Don’t The Moon Look Fat And Lonesome” from 1972 is a pleasantly rocking song that opens with the words “Don’t the moon fat and lonesome, shining through the trees”; almost literally the opening of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”.

But in 2007, the beautiful, noteworthy cover of “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” surfaces on a collection of unreleased recordings 1968-1972 (Back To Your Heart). Superb Westcoast harmonies in a The Mamas & The Papas-like vocals arrangement.

Seems like only yesterday. 

———————–

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

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122 outstandingly wonderful covers of Bob Dylan songs

Beautiful Obscurity: the songs considered so far

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

Update: 23 May 2021, the original source of the White Stripes recording had vanished – it has been replaced.

This is part of an ongoing series of reviews of covers of Dylan songs under the title Beautiful Obscurity.  There is a link to other articles in the series at the foot of the page.   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.  There are links to both at the foot of this article.

Tony: There is only one mention of “One more cup of coffee” on that list so far, so I’m delighted Aaron went searching for more.  It is a song with great challenges because of the unique qualities of the melody line against the very commonplace descending bass and chord sequence in the verse.  How does one make originality of out both without losing the essence of the song?

Aaron: Let’s start off with the very first released cover of One More Cup Of Coffee by Hard Nutz from 1977

Tony: Obviously the explosive chord after a the gentle guitar intro tells us there is going to be something unusual here.  And the key to carrying that off is by having total security in the very unusual (for Dylan) first melodic line of each verse.

By the time the dramatic explosive chord hits us for the third or fourth time we’re getting it and there is a danger of tedium by repetition, but the extended instrumental moment around the 2 minutes 30 mark, which includes some energetic bass guitar work too gives a musical justification for it all.  The intro of the violins (or maybe it an organ sounding violinish) helps too, and thus everything works.

So throughout the song keeps us going.  I imagine lots of young men doing air guitar work as an accompaniment. Very enjoyable.

Aaron: Now, almost certainly the best cover of this one, The White Stripes

Tony: Of course one of the big problems is that the melody and instrumentation in the original is so, well, utterly original, even though the chord sequence has been heard 10,000 times.  Thus we know where this is going but it is the Stripes, so we don’t know where the accompaniment will take us.  Novelty is needed to hold attention as we all know the words so well, and that is indeed what the Stripes always delivered.

Sudden pauses, perfect singing, that highly distinctive drumming of the Stripes, and slightly changes to the melody throughout… exactly what is needed.  Oh yes.

In fact I agree with Aaron this is brilliant – indeed an absolute triumph of talent and inventiveness over familiarity.   Even the line “One more cup of coffee for the road” is sung as a variation on the Dylan original.  Brilliantly done.

Aaron: Now, something a bit different by Robert Plant

Tony: Robert Plant MBE can always surprise, and he certainly does it with his vocalisation here.  Not for nothing did Rolling Stone rate him as the greatest of all lead singers.  Not for nothing did Hit Parader name him the “Greatest Metal Vocalist of All Time” and not for nothing did Planet Rock call him “the greatest voice in rock”.  I’ll go with all three.

And here we not only hear that but also the instrumentation behind him works wonders.  The Indian feel to the acoustic guitar (at least I hear it as an acoustic guitar) is a fabulous addition.  Oh goodness, to have talent like that…

Aaron:  Talking of different, take a listen to this by Bic Runga

Tony:  We are immediately reminded of Dylan’s original, only to have it whisked away by the full orchestration – which is a little lacking in originality.  It is exactly how I would have written it, by which I mean, its rather obvious.   The sudden drop of the strings downwards… oh no surely a pro can do better.  I know I couldn’t, but that’s why they didn’t hire me.

And it is the strings that are the problem – the playing is of course perfect – but it is the arrangement which seems to be a little too obvious, using every trick in the book to give a touch of the mysterious east and all that stuff which is actually not mysterious any more.

And yet, and yet, this is highly listenable.  I don’t mean I will go back and play it again at the end of writing this little article, as I certainly will do with Mr Plant, but its good.  Indeed if it suddenly was played while I was on the dance floor I’d be there doing the full interpretation, and enjoying myself like crazy.  In fact when my dance partner comes back from wherever she’s meandered off to (Yorkshire I think) we’ll be back in the studio and I’ll try this.  (Stop giggling, some people think we’re quite good.  Not very good, but quite good).

Aaron: Roger McGuinn with Calexico

Tony: This soundtrack really really does throw up some extraordinarily interesting elements, and having just listened to four tracks that is what I need.   There is a subtle change of chord on the singing of “One more cup” and that really is arresting.   Plus the backing is so subdued, it works brilliantly.

As this moves on second by second, minute by minute, I am transfixed.  And that is remarkable because of course like everyone I know the song inside out, and yet these arrangers really know how to introduce something new, different and yet fitting.  It is exactly what is needed, and what we have not always had in some of the other renditions in this series.

I love this.

Aaron: Now let’s bring things right up to date with the most recent cover, from his new album (out today as it happens) it’s Tom Jones!!

Tony: Not my favourite performer, but one cannot deny his magnificent voice.  And just listening to this orchestral opening…  Oh my oh my.  I’m transfixed, and relieved at the way Mr Jones approaches the vocals.  He’s not trying too hard, but letting his natural talent shine through.

I think the restraint of that backing over the constant percussion really is an inspired bit of arranging.

So there we are, a remarkable collection, and Aaron mate, I’m really indebted to you for this.  I’ve no idea how long it took you to dig this lot out, and whether they were in your head already, but that was really, really great.  I can only hope I did the selection justice.

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From the existing file of covers: One more cup of coffee by Frazey Ford; listen to the harmonies in the chorus lines.  Exquisite.

122 outstandingly wonderful covers of Bob Dylan songs

Beautiful Obscurity: the songs considered so far

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy (Part V)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part VI)

by Larry Fyffe

Tommy’s in the basement stirring up the medicine.

Thomas Hardy’s novel “Tess Of The d’Urbervilles” is sprinkled with large doses of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which asserts that chance within the biological composition of individuals determines whether or not a species survives by adaptation to changes in the environment.

Economic circumstances are a-changing in moralistic Victorian times, and ‘Social’ Darwinism comes to the fore as a supposedly ‘scientific’ explanation of how societies develop. The ‘survival of the fittest’ explains why the moneyed bourgeoisie successfully displaces the aristocracy. The ‘divine right’ to hold social, economic, and political power through blood lines is put asunder.

Hardy adds a pinch of Romantic Transcendentalism, quoting a poet who endeavours to save the God of the Holy Bible from the jaws of the scientific-oriented Age of Enlightenment – the loving ‘spirit’ of the Almighty pervades all Nature.

Quoted in the novel:

Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness
Ans not in utter nakedness
But in trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home
(William Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations Of Immortality)

A  romantic sentiment expressed in the song lyrics below:

Winterlude, Winterlude, my little apple
Winterlude by the corn in the field
Winterlude, let's go down to the chapel
Then come back, and cook up a meal
(Bob Dylan: Winterlude)

However, Hardy dumps into the broth a Late Victorian writer who’s musical poetry is plagued with doubt and confusion because of Charles Darwin’s theory.

Quotes Thomas:

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays
Her early Heaven, her happy views
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days
(Lord Tennyson: In Memoriam)

Darwin, Hardy, and Tennyson-influenced be the song lyrics beneath:

The call of the wild is 
Forever at my door
Wants to fly like an eagle
While being chained to the floor
(Bob Dylan: You Changed My Life)

(This version is from Iva & Alyosha)

As are the following lines:
Time's piling up, we struggle, and we scrape
All boxed in, nowhere to escape
City's just a jungle, and more games to play
I'm trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
(Bob Dylan: Mississippi)

Hardy shakes up the medicine bottle and out pops the story of Tess.

To help out her poverty-stricken parents, the beautiful, young, and innocent girl (the noble Viking blood of history running in her veins) goes to work for a retired ‘nouveau-riche’ merchant. His son, fails to seduce Tess, and so rapes her when she’s sleeping.

Tess marries Angel, a son of a parson. Angel’s dubious of his father’s religious beliefs, and befriends the local, pagan-like farmers. Angel leaves Tess when she tells him of her relations with the merchant’s son, Alec.

Tess reluctantly goes back to the amoral son of the retired merchant after Alec tells her that her husband is gone for good, and he himself is now a follower of Christ.

Angel realizes he made a mistake by going away, and trying to make a pleasant living by farming; he comes back home looking for Tess; she tells him that she has stabbed the fork-tongued Alec to death.

Angel “looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the d’Urberville blood had led to this aberration – if it were an aberration”.

The story told by Hardy depicts Tess a reversed version of Frankenstein’s creature; she’s extremely pretty, and not unlearned; she’s out of time, and not able to adapt to the materialistic, self-serving social order of modern times.

Says she to Angel: “I have had enough, and now I shall not live for you to despise me”.

Thomas Hardy suggests that the fate of Tess is not under the control of a predetermined plan made by a God who cares for his creations, but rather she’s trapped in a randomly unfolding, and disinterested evolutionary process.

A darkling Darwinism lies abed in the following song lyrics:

Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don't sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above

(Bob Dylan: One More Cup Of Coffee)

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.

The last two articles which dealt in depth with the way Dylan’s writing took us up to 1978.

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

Because of the momentous change that 1979 brought I decided that, before tackling 1979, I would go back to the start with five articles covering the first 15 years of Dylan’s writing, as I felt (even if no one else did) it was important to reflect on the enormous variance that there was in Bob’s music from the late 1950s to 1978.   Those five articles were

• 42: The first five directions
• 43: Before the basement
• 44:  Did Dylan really change in the Basement?
• 45: Bob starts the 70s… slowly
• 46: All Directions: the early 70s and Bob Dylan’s themes in his first 15 years

So now it is time to move on again…  1979 was a unique moment not just because Bob wrote overtly Christian songs having not written much about religion at all prior to this, but because he had never once before occupied himself with just one subject in the course of a whole year.

If you are interested, the full count of subject matter of Dylan songs up to 1978 is at the foot of the last article in this series.  It is most certainly not definitive, not least because in many cases one cannot be exactly certain what Dylan’s specific intentions were within the lyrics, beyond providing entertainment.  But we can pick out the religious songs before 1979 with some certainty, because there were so few of them.

Bob wrote two religious songs in the 1960s, and one in the sparse writing era of the early 1970s.   I’ve concluded that Bob’s major areas of interest between his starting out as a composer and the end of 1978 were:

• Love, desire lust: 62
• Moving on, leaving: 51
• Lost love: 48
• Humour: 22
• Protest, rebellion: 20
• The environment: 17
• The blues: 15
• Being trapped: 12
• Dada: 12

Of course these are my classifications, and obviously everyone is welcome to have a bash at categorising Dylan’s songs, but I can say it is not as easy as it looks.  I have tried these allocations of themes several ways and I now get roughly the same sorts of numbers each time, no matter which way I look at what we have.  But since Bob doesn’t write (“Lost love”) or whatever after each song title, we can each decide for ourselves.

And even if I have allocated a few songs wrongly, there surely can’t be much doubt that Dylan’s religious output prior to 1979 was dwarfed by his main themes of love, lost love and moving on.

As for the religious songs, those which I feel can genuinely be considered as religious prior to 1979 are…

• Whatcha Gonna Do?  1962
• When the ship comes in 1963
• Father of night 1970
• Three Angels 1970
• Slow train 1978 (?)

“Whatcha Gonna Do?” seems to me to be a song asking simply what the listener will do at the time of the ending of all days – assuming that there is an all powerful God.

“When the Ship Comes In” feels like an ending of time song – the Second Coming of Christ, or God simply calling the end, or indeed similar predictions for the end of time which is not just the universe burning itself out but organised by a Supreme Being.

https://youtu.be/Zg0LM2fdP0A

“Father of night” is, I think, related to a Jewish Prayer, although the version above (which I really adore) doesn’t take us in that direction at all.  But, hey, what do I know?

As for “Three Angels” I am less convinced, although others have suggested strong religious references.  To me it is an observation of what is out there in one street with a little philosophy at the end – but then again, opinions differ.

Which finally brings us to “Slow Train,” which sounds to me very much like a suggestion of change, but not of a change necessarily brought about by religion.  Listening to Bob’s introductions of the song at concerts I think it became, in his mind, a religious piece, but it wasn’t written that way at the start.

Now I have read in other commentaries the notion that much, indeed some seem to suggest, all, of Dylan’s work is a religious commentary.  Such a thought may be right (although I disagree), but what I don’t understand is why anyone who believed not only in a religion, but in the need to convince other people of the virtues of this particular religion, should tie up the meaning in a set of statements that are not clear.  After all, in terms of Christianity, the final book of the bible seems very clear about what is going to happen.  So why not be absolutely clear what you mean if you want to convert people?

Consider in contrast, “Whatcha gonna do” – I’ve removed the repeats from the lyrics to save space.

Tell me what you're gonna do
When the shadow comes under your door?
O Lord, O Lord, what shall you do?

Tell me what you're gonna do
When the devil calls your cards?

Tell me what you're gonna do
When your water turns to wine?

Tell me what you're gonna do
When you can't play God no more?

It seems to me that makes it very clear that the meaning is that one should repent your sins and believe in God, otherwise you are going to be in trouble after death.

Now compare and contrast with “Slow Train” where we have lines like

But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
All non-believers and men-stealers talkin' in the name of religion

OK, lots of religions tell us to beware of false prophets, but when we get to the end of Slow Train we have

Well, my baby went to Illinois 
   with some bad-talkin' boy she could destroy
A real suicide case, but there was nothin' I could do to stop it
I don't care about economy, I don't care about astronomy
But it sure do bother me to see my loved ones turning into puppets

and that’s about having more concern for those we care for than for the world at large.  If might mean more than this, but if so, it is not clear.  And that’s the problem with ambiguous songs.  They’re ambiguous.

But now consider the 19 songs written in 1979.  The ambiguity has vanished, the whole style and approach is different in every regard.  Different not just from 1978 but from virtually all 376 or so songs that have been composed before.   Dylan has often been outspoken in previous songs, but where he was so different from other writers in the world of pop, rock and folk is that he used the metaphor, that part of the language that gives the poet the chance to show us that what we see is not all there is.  To quote Shakespeare’s most famous stolen line (and yes Shakespeare nicked other people’s lines just as Dylan has done), “All the world’s a stage,” – a staggeringly brilliant simple metaphor.

Now the essence of a metaphor is that it is saying A is (or was or might be) a way of getting a deeper understanding of B.  In short to understand A you can look at B and either get the whole picture or maybe a helpful detail.  As in

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie

which is a more exciting way of saying, “there is no truth”.

But what do we have in “Gotta Serve Somebody?”  Here there is an absolute absence of metaphor.  The answer is not blowing in the wind – there is no wind, nothing is blowing, the world is not a stage, it is what it is, here is the answer, no arguing allowed.

Because the metaphor, in its multifarious forms, has been so central to Dylan’s writing, this non-metaphorical series of songs is something of a shock.  Not that Dylan hasn’t changed before – of course he has – but it is the literary equivalent of Bob giving up singing and simply reading his works out with no melody or time structure.

In short these songs not only appear to be different in their meaning, they are also utterly different in their poetic approach.  There is no metaphor, no obscurity, no phrases that we might think, “wow I’ve never thought of that”.

“Gotta Serve Somebody”  won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Male in 1979.  It was also a hit single with Dylan, singing it as the opener for every one of over 100 shows between 1979 and 1981.   And here Dylan was indeed preaching.  In fact there is surely nothing in the song apart from the preaching over a modest backing track.  I am not sure I would go as far as the readers of Rolling Stone in voting it the second worst Dylan song – some of the more obscure items we found in our list of 625 Dylan compositions are far, far worse.  Rather I’d say it is just, well, a rather ordinary song that bops along and tries to make up in background what it lacks in foreground.  And not too successfully.

So my point is not that I am against Dylan writing propaganda for Christianity.  Rather that a) it was sad to see him suddenly move over to one, and only one subject, instead of multiple subjects in his writing years and b) his strongest writing suit were metaphors and obscurity, and with that gone, the song lyrics lack a major part of what Dylan previously was.  “My love she speaks like silence” is no longer on the agenda.

And so we are as far away from

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides

as it is possible to be.  Dylan spells out the meaning out both in the songs and in his sometimes rather long introductions to his shows (which on occasion met with a somewhat rowdy response from the paying public).

What I am reminded of most of all is the comment by David Byrne of Talking Heads: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”  It simply is.  Interestingly Byrne also took that view in song, “Say it once, say it again.” (Psycho Killer).  And that is what Dylan is doing here.  Telling us the same thing rather than endlessly changing his vision of the world.

And this was not just a big loss but also a curious situation.   For where previously many of his songs were obscure, such that some craved information as to what they were about, these songs are overt and clear, and yet Dylan spent a lot of time on stage telling us what they were about – as if we didn’t know.

When finally the meaning of one of these Christian songs was transformed it was not by Dylan at all but by Sinead O’Connor who had been cruelly abused in the name of Christianity, and whose poignant “I believe in you” took on extraordinary levels of meaning once her past at the hands of the Magdalene Laundry was revealed.

Meanwhile back with Bob, aside from the assertion of his own faith, he was looking to convert.  “Ye shall be changed” for example has the lines

 All your loved ones have walked out the door
You’re not even sure ’bout your wife and kids no more,

Telling people that they have got it all wrong had never been Bob’s style before now.  Even “Times they are a changin” doesn’t do that – although it does tell people not to criticise what they don’t understand.  “With God on our Side” criticises the view of suggesting that one country can claim God as its own, and songs like “Only a Pawn” and “Hattie Carroll” tell us what’s wrong socially, but Bob had until now always shied away from telling us exactly how to behave to put things right – until now.

And yet even if I find a major part of Bob’s work to have vanished in 1979, we cannot dismiss the music – or at least not all of it, because half way through this year Bob Dylan gave us one of his absolutely amazing best pieces of music of his entire career.   “I believe in you” is exquisite music way beyond the norms of popular song, but if you are a regular reader of my ramblings you will know where we have got to: When He Returns.

For me, it isn’t the lyrics that make this a masterpiece (and indeed that would be hard given my lack of the faith that occupied Dylan for around 18 months) but the sheer beauty and elegance of the public performances of this song.

And it is a song that can easily be destroyed by going totally over the top but Bob doesn’t in the live performances of piano and organ.

And that is (for me at least) the great moment to come out of this year of religious songs.  Lyrics, music, arrangement merge today into a sublime performance; one of the most sublime performances of Bob’s career.  Which probably just shows that if you believe in what you are singing, it certainly helps.

As time passed, (and certainly by the time of the composition of Covenant Woman), Bob seemed certain he had sorted out a deal with the almighty.

I’ve been broken, shattered like an empty cup
I’m just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up
And I know He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true
He must have loved me so much to send me someone as fine as you

Some of the songs kept going, and some even got introductions from Bob…

… while songs like “Saved” got played and played and then were suddenly dropped with never a hint of a return.

And as the first six songs of 1980 continued in the same way we began to wonder if there were ever going to be any non-Christian-preaching songs ever again.  Even the rehearsal songs like “See by faith” were Christian.

But as Chrissie Hynde (who is a follower of Vaishnavism) shows is that doesn’t stop anyone singing the songs and enjoying the music.

And then quite suddenly that was it.  For out of the blue there is that awkward feeling that maybe Bob did not want to be the property of an entity from beyond any more.  Maybe he was saying that there are others who are the property of Jesus and that’s ok, but it’s not Bob, at least not any more.   For next Dylan wrote a song that he said came to him out of the blue, and didn’t come from the Bible but from one of his old sources of inspiration William Blake: “Every Grain of Sand.”

And Blake most certainly was not a Christian in the classic sense, at all.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter word – Part III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?
• Love is just a four letter word Part VI: You been double-dealing
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word; Part VII: Now I understand

Part VIII: But it’s all over now

They met once, as Bobby Womack tells us shortly before his death in 2014. In fact, they even made music together, although unfortunately history does not tell when, nor what they played;

“I was at Ronnie Woods’ house. Ronnie said to me, “you ever met Bob Dylan?” I said, “I’ve seen him but never really met him. I would love to meet him.” Ronnie said, “I’ll call him and maybe you can play something together.” I’ll never forget that when we played, I was looking at him and the whole time, he was looking at the wall. I couldn’t believe that he would be shy of me. If anything, it should’ve been the other way around, me in awe of him, cuz you know, Bob Dylan is history.”

(interview met Tee Watts, Glide Magazine 4 april 2014)

“We never talked,” Womack adds, still amused. Intermediary Ronnie Wood later explains it to him. Dylan is bashful, and, “He’s just a quiet guy and with you being there, he’s kind of freakin’ out.”

Well, perhaps Womack has, as a kind of reaching out, tried his version of “All Along The Watchtower” (although his cover, from 1973, is more Hendrix than Dylan based), but more tempting is the thought that he has harked back to his first world success, “It’s All Over Now”;

Well, baby used to stay out all night long
She made me cry, she done me wrong
She hurt my eyes open, that's no lie
Tables turn and now her turn to cry

Bobby is nineteen when he writes the song for his and his brothers’ band, The Valentinos. At that time, Sam Cooke is already the boys’ mentor, which opens doors. When The Stones are in New York in the radio studio of DJ Murray The K, Murray plays them “It’s All Over Now”, and Mick and Keith are immediately sold. Bobby Womack, then twenty years old, is still arrogant enough to want to veto it (“I told Jagger to get his own song”), but fortunately Sam Cooke puts his young protégé in his place. Six months later, when the first royalty check has come in, Womack gladly changes his mind – that one cover is a financial treat until his death.

Dylan may be familiar with The Valentinos’ modest hit (peaking at 94 in June ’64), and obviously, he knows The Stones’ world hit. In the summer of 1964, their first English number 1 hit is in the top 10 all over the world. The song is still hovering in the ether when Dylan forces a final verse for “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” out of his pen, and the first verse of Womack’s song echoes in the first line of it:

Strange it is to be beside you, many years the tables turned
You’d probably not believe me if I told you all I’d learned
And it is very, very weird indeed
To hear words like “forever,” “please,”
Those ships sail through my mind, I cannot cheat
It’s like lookin’ in the teacher’s face complete
I can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard,
That love is just a four-letter word.

…as is the overarching plot, the wounded lover who has a sweet moment of revenge years later. And the similarity to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, which Dylan wrote a little later, is also a little too great to be a coincidence, of course.

In terms of narrative technique, this “extra” couplet may offer a nicely rounded plot, but stylistically and linguistically it is rather disappointing. It seems to demonstrate the truth of Dylan’s own remark, I never finished it:

• This is the only time in the five verses that Dylan resorts to a semi-rhyme (indeed – please);
• Those ships sail through my mind seems to be a draft to integrate a playful adaptation of the expression that ship has sailed, which would be very appropriate in this context. The choice of words (“please”) suggests that the adulteress has now lost her husband and would like to continue with the narrator. But as it is, those ships can only refer to the preceding words “forever”, “please” – making the metaphor rather lame;
• “I cannot cheat” suggests a fourth party (apart from the female antagonist and her husband) and comes completely out of the blue;
• The incomprehensible It’s like lookin’ in the teacher’s face complete is hardly anything more than filler lyrics and suggests that the poet had half a mind to do something with “lookin’ at her completely blank” and maybe something with a metaphor on the student has become the teacher, or in that vein – but didn’t find the words right away and left the unfinished note thereon as a reminder.

All weaknesses, anyway, justifying Dylan’s refusal to include this verse in Writings & Drawings, and confirming Dylan’s outburst I never finished it. The attempts to do so, to write a final couplet, are perhaps also frustrated by that tables turned and the consequent, untenable Bobby Womack associations. The refrain keeps imposing itself on the poet,

because I used to love her, but it's all over now

… but perhaps that comes a little too close to being an overly autobiographical reference to his broken relationship with Joan Baez.

Baez herself has no problem with that, with voyeuristic frankness, as evidenced by her autobiographical, wonderful song “Diamonds And Rust” and by her candid memoirs – in which she even publishes parts of her letters. And the “unfinished” closing couplet that she chooses to sing, despite the filler and the break in style, is really not out of place, in terms of content. It is after all a satisfying finale, with a moving, poetic ending.  In which one can hear how the narrator actually wants to answer with that other Womack song, with “I Don’t Wanna Be Hurt By Ya Love Again”. Or better still, with “If You Think You’re Lonely Now”:

If you think you're lonely now
Oh, wait until tonight
I'll be long gone
And you'll never find another man that'll treat you right

Oh, ain't it funny how the tables turn
When things aren't going your way
But when love runs out, and the pain walks in
And settles for a stay, ooh

To be continued. Next up the final: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part IX: I sit and watch the children play

————————-

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

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy (Part V)

by Larry Fyffe

The Miltonic poet of Scotland describes how he sees the Babylon of his day:

Deceits, and perjuries, and vanities
Rewarded worthlessness, rejected worth
Assassinations, robberies, thefts, and wars
Disasterous accidents, life thrown away
Divinity insulted, Heaven despised
Religion scorned ....

(Robert Pollok: The Course Of Time)

In sentiment quite like the song lyrics, by the modern-day American singer/songwriter/musician, presented below:

Big-time negotiators, false healers, and woman haters
Masters of the bluff, masters of the proposition
But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
All non-believers, and men-stealers, talking in the name of religion
(Bob Dylan: Slow Train)

In the romantic-realistic-naturalistic novel “A Pair Of Blue Eyes”, Thomas Hardy quotes from poetry penned by the Scottish  ‘Dissenter’:

And now her eyes grew bright, and brighter still
Too bright for ours to look upon, suffused
With many tears, and closed without a cloud
They set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky
But melts away in the light of heaven
(Robert Pollok: The Course Of Time)

In his story, Hardy depicts beautiful Elfride as a young, and kitten-like; no man-eating belle without mercy is she, but her name brings to mind a dark romantic ballad:

She took me to her Elfin grot
And there she wept, and sighed full sore
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four
(John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci)

Thomas quotes the following lines from the Gothic poem – ‘Knight’ is the last name of one of her four suitors:

I set her upon my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song
(John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci)

The novel focuses on Elfride’s love and affection when it’s torn between two suitors –  Stephen Smith, an ambitious country lad, son of a mason, who’s determined to improve his economic situation; and Henry Knight, a well-established man from London, a barrister, and an editor, with an avid interest in geology; he rejects the blue-eyed fairy- girl when he finds out that she’s been previously courted.

Aspects  of Charles Darwin’s science, which considers  the physical environment uncaring as to the fate of human beings, lurk in the background of the novel – it’s the female, chess-playing, Elfride who saves Knight by tearing up her undergarments when Henry falls over a cliff; independent-minded, she, in the end, rejects both suitors; marries, dies giving birth; leaving together her two frustrated male suitors to make their way back to ‘the grey still valley.’

In the song lyrics below, matters mixed-up are too – the same poetic Gothic belle-well drawn upon:

The tempest struggles in the air ....
You trampled on me as you passed
All of my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing more to tell you now
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)

Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy – two very creative artists, and both oft under-rated by art critics who know not of what they speak.

————————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Aaron sent me a recording of  this previously unpublished Dylan song over a week ago, and I struggled with the review, and set it aside until Aaron kindly reminded me.  Making up excuses by the ton, I’ve rushed around and caught up.  So here we are.

It is “Uncut” magazine that has come up with this previously unheard Bob Dylan track – which will become song number 625 in terms of the list of Dylan compositions.  Several people have commented it sounds like an early version of Foot of Pride.

You might be able to make sense of it at once, but if not try listening with the lyrics below – that’s how I gradually got the hang of what is going on here.

If that doesn’t work, try the one below.   And below that is my (Tony’s) version of the lyrics and I am notorious for inaccuracies.

https://youtu.be/22P46wdohO4

Here are the lyrics…

Whether there was a murder, I don`t know, I can`t say, 
I was visiting a friend in jail. 
There were only two women at the scene at the time, 
neither one of them saw a thing, both of them were wearing a veil.
I said it was a natural situation, and it reached too high,
???? (missing section)
It`s too late to bring him back. 
Too late, too late, too late, too late, too late to bring him back.

He got a brother named Paul, hanging out at the Cafe Royale, 
where the all of the company is mixed. 
He is pretty to look at, he wants someone to throw the book at, 
but you know he drinks, and drinks can be fixed. 
Sing me one more song about your summer romance, 
Or maybe the one about you`re one night stand with Erroll Flynn. 
In these times of compassion, with conformities and fashion, 
say one more stupid thing to me, before the final nails driven in. 
You know it`s too late to bring him back, 
Too late, too late too late, to bring him back

Dr Silver Spoon from the ecstasy ballroom, he`s a retired businessman, 
who feeds off everyone he touched. 
He gives money to the church foundation for research, 
he`s not someone you can play around with too much. 
Miss Rose in a plate from spinning both sides of the lake, 
she`s rough to look at, but she`s safe, 
She`ll give you coconut bread and spiced buns in bed, 
and you won`t have to worry about 
sleeping with your head face down in your plate. 
But know it`s too late to bring him back, 
too late, too late too late, to bring him back

You gonna arrange to see a man tonight, 
to tell you some secret things that you think might open some doors. 
How to enter the gates of paradise, 
No, not really, more like going crazy from carrying a burden 
never meant to be yours. 
On the stage ever doing the bumps and the grinds, 
A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand, 
and say, "well boys, thanks." 
They like to take all this money but then build castles to study in, 
and sing `Amazing Grace` all the way to food bank, 
But it`s too late to bring him back, too late, too late 
Too late, to bring him back.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Below is part 34 of the Never Ending Tour series of articles.  A full index of the series can be found here, and the earlier 1966 articles are:

• Never Ending Tour, 1996, part 1. Busy being born. With Al Kooper in Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour, 1996,  Part 2  – More Liverpool
• Never Ending Tour 1996 part 3: Berlin and Beyond

Dylan’s stint in Atlanta, at the House of the Blues (August 3^rd and 4^th), gave rise to some solid and even outstanding performances, and we are lucky enough to have some of these on video.

My favourite is this impassioned performance of ‘My Back Pages’, Dylan’s awakening in 1964 to moral complexity and the failure of a simple, black and white view of the world. We see here Dylan’s restless style, and his one-handed harp playing – harp and microphone in one hand. The harp break is sharp and trenchant. As usual I’ve added the audio file in case the video vanishes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2eKm7Bmgeg&t=16s

My Back Pages

Another video worth watching is this ‘To Be Alone with You,’ a light-hearted love song from Nashville Skyline (1969) which takes on a harder edge in this poker-faced performance. Dylan doesn’t expend energy needlessly on stage, which may be the secret of his longevity as a performer. It’s a good song to kick off the concert as the ‘you’ in the song could be read as the audience. It’s a good song to get people jiving and in the mood for some Dylan.

‘To be alone with you
At the close of the day
With only you in view
While evening slips away
It only goes to show
That while life's pleasures be few
The only one I know
Is when I'm alone with you’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JSl1mzvxJk

To Be Alone with You

Time now to check out some of the usual suspects, songs that Dylan has been cultivating from the start of the NET and which regularly show up on his setlists. A core of songs, mainly from the sixties and seventies around which his concerts are built. If you have the patience, it’s fascinating to follow these songs through the years, how they change over time.

One of the songs that doesn’t change a lot, although we get both electric and acoustic versions, is ‘Gates of Eden’. Dylan would continue to plumb the mystery and menace of this song right through to 2001. One of Dylan’s great strengths is the ability to express a profound alienation from the world. ‘Gates of Eden’ hits both the unreal and horrific nature of the world and our separation from it.

‘The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden’

Those two lines, ‘Leaving men wholly, totally free/ to do anything they wish to do but die,’ are a neat summing up of the kind of existentialism encountered in Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, writers very much in the air in the mid sixties. At the same time, these lines foreshadow the biblically rooted sentiment we would later find in ‘Precious Angel’ (1979), ‘Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high/When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die.’

While I love the dark, plunging electric performance of 1988 (See NET, 1988, part 1), I think it’s these minimal, acoustic versions that move me the most. No drums, a gentle sound, with Mr Guitar Man excelling himself picking thoughtfully around the melody. (date unknown)

Gates of Eden

Also in a quiet, reflective mood is this ‘Shelter from the Storm.’ This is a good example of the quiet electric sound. You think for a moment that it is acoustic. Again, while I like the fast, upbeat performances of the song, and the hammering performance form the Rolling Thunder Tour, I think the slower, thoughtful performances such as this one suit the song best. This song is surely a candidate for Dylan’s best 1970’s love song, maybe his best ever, particularly if we count the wry humour behind the lyrics.

‘Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm’

While Dylan gave the hippie, flower-power philosophy short shrift in the 1960s, here the hippy chick is reborn as a goddess, goddess of protection and maybe even salvation, although that’s a big ask. Be careful what you ask for, as they say:

‘In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation and she gave me a lethal dose’

Shelter from the Storm

Never too far away from ‘Shelter from the Storm’, you will find ‘If You See Her Say Hello’, another song about what once was.  If you listen to the evolution of the song on the compilation More Blood More Tracks you can hear Dylan trying out the song with a number of different moods and tempos. Slow it down and you accentuate the nostalgia; speed it up and it sounds more like a happy hour recollection. Dylan keeps this one fast and upbeat, giving it a bit of a country touch.

A lovely, generous, magnanimous song. I’m not quite sure than I believe the sentiment, it’s a bit too nice for me, but I’m happy to try it on for size (July 3^rd)

If you see her say hello

There is something epic in the chord structure of ‘Tears of Rage’ so we don’t mind getting a nine and half minute performance. The editor of Untold Dylan, Tony Atwood, has a fine discussion of the chord changes , but flounders a bit when it comes to the song’s meaning, as indeed do I. What I do get is the sense of betrayal, of selling out to greed, materialism and ‘false instructions’.

I could take a stab at it, and suggest that if the song were sung by George Washington, or rather the ghost of George Washington, or one of the founding fathers of America, and if the ‘daughter’ were America, then the song would make some kind of sense. The betrayal would be the way America has betrayed the ideals of the founding fathers, and the upsurge of hope on Independence Day. As it stands, however, the song works on an emotional level and we can’t say exactly why. (Date unknown)

Tears of Rage

‘What Good Am I?’ is an unusual song in Dylan’s canon. He doesn’t usually question himself, or his own veracity, in quite this way. We all know what it feels like to have to face the way in which we have ignored or sidelined important things. Facing that inner uselessness is not an easy thing to do. Sung in a hard, waspish voice, as we heard in 1989 and 1990, the song comes across as a bitter self accusation. Here, it is much more gentle, and our sins of omission sad rather than anything else.

While I think the instrumental break goes on for too long at the end, Dylan’s singing is soft and sensitive, a beautiful and therefore painful probing of our shortcomings. (date unknown)

What good am I

GE Smith tells a story of how, back in 1988, when he was auditioning for the role of Dylan’s guitarist, Dylan played nothing but ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ over and over again. Smith comments that Dylan must have liked the song very much. And indeed it seems he does, for of all the folk songs he learned before starting to write songs himself, ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ survives and has been performed from time to time.

This song originated in Scotland several hundred years ago. Here’s a summary of the story. ‘The song is a fairly standard trooper-and-maid story: that is, soldier passes through town, soldier seduces girl, soldier is ordered to leave, girl says hey I’m pregnant, soldier says tough luck and marches away. In some versions the girl follows him, though only for a little while, but in most versions she ends up abandoned.’

It’s fun to look at the original Scottish lyrics. Here are the first couple of verses:

There once was a troop o’ Irishdragoons
Cam marching doon through Fyvie-o
And the captain’s fa’en in love wi’ a very bonnie lass
And her name it was ca’d pretty Peggy-o

There’s many a bonnie lass in the Howe o Auchterless
There’s many a bonnie lass in the Garioch
There’s many a bonnie Jean in the streets of Aiberdeen
But the floower o’ them aw lies in Fyvie-o

Once the song migrated to America, various lyrical variations occurred, Dylan’s cryptic version being one of them. Here are Dylan’s opening verses:

I’ve been around this whole country
But I never yet found Fenneario.

Well, as we marched down, as we marched down
Well, as we marched down to Fennerio’
Well, our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove
Her name that she had was Pretty Peggy-O

Well, what will your mother say, what will your mother say
What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-O
What will your mother say to know you’re going away
You’re never, never, never coming back-io ?

The story is not so much told as alluded to in Dylan’s inimitable way. What is fascinating about this 1996 performance is that Dylan makes further lyrical variations which have not been written down. I don’t have the ear to transcribe them all, but if you look at Dylan’s known variation as you listen to this, you will be able to hear the differences. In Dylan’s hands it becomes a Civil War ballad, and my suggestion here is that it underlay a group of songs with a historical aspect that he wrote while writing the Time Out of Mind songs. Songs such as ‘Red River Shore’, ‘Girl on the Green Briar Shore’ and ‘Cross the Green Mountain’ all seem to relate or look back to ‘Pretty Peggy-O’. (date unknown).

Pretty Peggy-O

When looking at Dylan’s 1995 performances, we highlighted two versions of ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ (NET, 1995 part 1 and 1995 part 5) and noted how the song itself is a-changing in mood as the times change. By the mid nineties the song is no longer a rallying cry for action, but an occasion for nostalgia for those earlier, more radical times. The audience sings along on the chorus and a little sadness enters. It is both sad and uplifting at the same time.

In 1996 Dylan keeps the same, slow-paced arrangement, but for this performance he is joined onstage by two members of the Dave Matthews Band, a saxophonist and a violinist. You don’t hear much of the sax, but the violin, after a tentative start, adds a melancholy strain to the song in perfect keeping with the mood. It’s that violin that lifts this performance above others like it. He gets the words a bit mixed up, but that harp break cuts to the heart. The audience loves it and so do I. Enjoy. (July 3^rd)

The times they are a changing

I’ve been holding back this one so that I can end this post, and our visit to the NET in 1996, with a real blast. It’s ‘Rainy Day Woman’ like you’ve never heard it. It’s got all of the insouciant lurch of the original, album version with the added dimension of the Dave Mathews band joining in, particularly the sax.

My usually reliable info sources tell me that Dylan is joined by a saxophone and a violin, but I can’t hear the violin. The rollicking, instrumental break that begins at about 4.10 mins, seems to have two saxes, both wailing away in fine blues jazz style. It’s over to your ear on that one. Whatever, it’s a helluva way to go out, all that swagger and vigour, that screaming sax.

Makes you wonder what’s around the corner in 1997.

See you then.

Rainy Day Woman

Kia Ora

————————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in this series…

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love is just a four-letter world – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?
• Love is just a four letter word Part VI: You been double-dealing

by Jochen Markhorst

Part VII: Now I understand

Though I never knew just what you meant
When you were speaking to your man
I can only think in terms of me
And now I understand
After waking enough times to think

In Writings & Drawings, in Lyrics and on the site, the fourth stanza is the last stanza. The poet himself seems to prefer a poetic, melancholy ending in which the matured narrator looks back on that short, shattering affair with a slightly cynical undertone, but mainly in resignation. In terms of narrative build-up, this may be less satisfying than Baez’s finale, with the fifth stanza leading to a sort of final showdown, but lyrically it is more successful; this fourth stanza actually closes the circle to the first stanza very nicely.

Stylistically, this stanza stands out because of an atypical, Shakespearean interlude in the centre;

I see
The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity
Blow up in smoke, its destiny
Falls on strangers, travels free

…in which the archaic, rather biblical Holy Kiss is, of course, the most eye- and ear-catching – especially on paper, as Dylan, evidently attaching great importance to it, writes it in capitals. In this context, however, quite inappropriate. There are five occurrences of the Holy Kiss in the Bible, but each one is a kind of brotherly kiss, exchanged by two men. Each time in the New Testament, each time at the end of a letter, so probably meant as part of a Eucharist celebration. In any case, this is how it is integrated into the early Christian Eucharist – after the opening prayer, the brothers greet each other with a Peace be with you and a kiss on the mouth; with a Holy Kiss, as they call it.

Absolutely no bearing, all in all, on the context of the expression in Dylan’s lyrics. Here it has the same context as with Shakespeare: it is a kiss to seal an amorous union between a man and a woman. “The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity”… so, a kind of marriage vow, really. Shakespeare first uses it in this sense in one of his earliest (and weakest) plays, in the comedy of errors The Two Gentlemen Of Verona:

Proteus.
When possibly I can, I will return.
Julia.
If you turn not, you will return the sooner.
Keep this remembrance for thy Julia's sake.
[Giving a ring]
Proteus.
Why, then, we'll make exchange;
here, take you this.
Julia.
And seal the bargain with a holy kiss.

For The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, the young Shakespeare has, as befits a master thief of thoughts, plundered extensively from world literature, including the work from which he would later copy even more lavishly, Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), and from this he may also have picked up this combination of kiss, love and vow;

Then Romeus in arms his lady 'gan to fold,
With friendly kiss, and ruthfully she 'gan her knight behold.
With solemn oath they both their sorrowful leave do take

The Bard from Stratford-upon-Avon will place a holy kiss only once more in his entire oeuvre. Again in Verona, again to make a kind of marriage vow, so again a kiss with amorous overtones – yes indeed, in Romeo And Juliet. Spoken by that poor schmuck Paris, who at that moment still thinks he will soon be a happily married man with Juliet:

PARIS
Juliet, on Thursday early will I rouse ye.
[kisses her] Till then, adieu, and keep this holy kiss.

We all know how that ends, and the holy kiss referred to by the narrator in “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” has the same supposed eternal value. This narrator, however, is already a plot development further than Proteus and Paris, and cynically concludes that such a holy kiss is as fleeting as smoke – with which the Bard from Manhattan-upon-Hudson again follows in the footsteps of Shakespeare and Romeo And Juliet: “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs” (Act I, sc. 1). And with which we can also place the revenge fantasy of ten years later, in “Idiot Wind” (I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy) geographically even more accurately: Verona, that is.

Fortunately, the rising cynicism, the sour conclusion that such a holy kiss is as fleeting as smoke, like a butterfly traveling freely, and happy-go-luckily descending again on the next stranger, is softened again by the beautiful, resigned finale

Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me
And I do not really need to be
Assured that love is just a four-letter word

… words from a purified man, who has gone through the mourning stages of Denial, Bewilderment and Grief, and has now arrived at Acceptance. A beautiful ending to a beautiful lyric, as the poet seems to think when compiling Writings & Drawings (1972) – but by then the world has long been singing along with Baez’ version. And with one more Last Stanza.

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part VIII: But it’s all over now

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

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part IV)

By Larry Fyffe

Confronted with Charles Darwin’s environmental determinism, writer Thomas Hardy, in his novel “The Return Of The Native”,  turns to the unscientific offshoot of the Theory Of Evolution – ‘Social Darwinism’.

He tells the story of a native of the English heathlands who returns from Paris to be a school master in hopes of advancing the thinking of the traditionalist sheep farmers of the darkling moor.

The returned native marries the beautiful Eustacia who yearns for the excitement of modern city life – she hopes they’ll go off to the bright lights.

Eustacia cannot adapt to the barren physical environment of the heath; she rejects another suitor who yearns for city life too, but fails to deliver – so he settles for the traditionalist Miss Thomasin.

Below, Hardy quotes from an old-time ballad (he does not provide its title):

He told her that she was the joy of his life
And if she'd consent, he would make her his wife
She couldn't refuse him; to church so they went
Young Will was forgot, and young Sue was content
And then was she kissed, and down on his knee
No man in the world was so loving as he
(Susan's Complaint And Remedy ~ traditional)

Akin to the above be to the following song lyrics:

You changed my life
Came along in a time of strife
In hunger and in need
You made my heart bleed
(Bob Dylan: You Changed My Life)

(This version is by Ivan & Alyosha)

Hardy’s native blunts his sight through too much reading, and Eustacia and her former love interest (married now to Thomasin) both drown after they run off together though the native arrives and tries to save them; thereafter, the distraught  heathlander becomes a wandering priest.

Hardy’s ‘naturalistic’ novel is inspired in part by the following ballad from which the writer quotes near the beginning of his novel (without mentioning the name of the ballad):

Queen Eleanor was a sick woman, and sick just like to die
And she has sent for two friars of France to come to her speedily
The King called down his nobles all, by one, by two, by three
Earl Marshal, I go shrive the Queen, and thou shalt wend 
with me
'A boon, a boon', quoth Earl Marshal
And fell on his bended knee
'That whatsoever the Queen shall say
No harm therof may be'
(Queen Eleanor's Confession ~ traditional)

King Henry and the Earl disguise themselves as the friars, and the Queen confesses that she lost her virginity to the Earl; needless to say, the King’s not happy to learn about that, but he has promised to do no harm.

The singer/songwriter messes with tragic ballads of yore, including ‘Lord Thomas And Fair Eleanor’; in the following song, each member of the love triangle dies, fires a-burning as they do in Hardy’s novel:

You got something to tell me, tell it to me, man
Come to the point as straight as you can
'Old Henry Lee, chief of the clan
Came riding through the woods, and took her hand'
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

In another song lyric, the scientific Theory Of Evolution takes a beating because it fails to adequately explain the human condition:

They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff
I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't care'
High water everywhere
(Bob Dylan: High Water)

In ‘The Return Of The Native’, Eustacia takes part in a nationalistic Christmas play – she’s  the brave Turkish knight who is slain by the patron Christian saint of England:

Here come I, a Turkish knight
Who learnt in Turkish land to fight
I'll fight this man with courage bold
If his blood's hot, I'll make it cold
(Saint George ~ traditional play)

Like Thomas Hardy in the novel above, Bob Dylan mixes up the artistic medicine in the basement below:

Do you know where she's hiding
How long are we gonna be riding
How long must I keep my eyes glued to the door
Will there be any comfort there, senor
(Anna Kaye: Senor ~ Dylan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Selections by Aaron Galbraith, commentary and a few extra choices by Tony Attwood

This series takes a new – and personal – look at some of the more unusual cover versions of Bob Dylan’s music.  It started out from a previous series which was summarised in

•  “The 100 Greatest Cover Versions of Bob Dylan songs ever”

In this new series we have had…

• What makes a beautiful obscurity
• Beautiful Obscurity: Acquaraggia play Dylan: a new experience
• Beautiful obscurity: revisiting the alternative versions of Sweet Marie
• Beautiful obscurity: unexpected reworkings of “All along the watchtower”
• Beautiful Obscurity: such different renditions of Spanish Leather
• Love minus zero and a journey to infinity
• Blind Willie McTell: amazingly amazing

If you would like to join in, please do write out your selection of covers, put in the links from the internet, and email to Tony@schools.co.uk     No extra comments by Tony will be added, unless you invite them.

—————-

Aaron: Here I present some covers of Dylan’s wondrous 1971 single “Watching the River Flow”

First up – The Rolling Stones.   Mick and the boys recorded this for an Ian Stewart tribute album in 2011. Interesting side note, Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie and for the first time with the band since 1992, Bill Wyman, recorded their contributions at different times in different studios. The song was chosen due to Stewart’s judgement that its “the only decent thing Bob Dylan ever did”.

So in the band we have Ben Waters, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood and Bill Wyman

If in your part of the world this video appears as “unavailable” then try this link….

Hearing this version really does prime us for what comes hereafter.  Many many artists have had a go at this song, but original versions and completely new interpretations are harder to find.  Everyone seems to think all they can do is find a bit of a variation on Bob’s work, rather than work on a truly original re-arrangement.

But, the instrumental break is interesting – it takes a lot of time to get going, and then doesn’t really go at all.  They have a second bash at the end, and I wondered whether the saxophonists actually played that break over and over or did they do a bit of trickery with the tape.  It is a long old time to play same three notes.

Joe Cocker

Immediately the point is made about everyone following the same approach – it is that rhythm that does it.  Once you hear it, you know what’s coming.

Joe again goes for the saxophone sound, but I really wish they wouldn’t try and mix saxes and a lead guitar doing their own thing both at the same time.   By the middle eight it sounds too much to me as if everyone is having a fight to get their favourite riff in.  Still, at least by the instrumental break things have calmed down a bit and we can have a spot of virtuoso sax playing.  It’s fun, it’s ok, but to my ears not that special.

Bobby Darin

Yes indeed Bobby Darin.  Remember Bobby?  He not only had a multi-million selling hit with “Dream Lover”, he also wrote it, so during his sadly short life he should have been ok for money.

One of things about doing this series is I learn all sorts of stuff I didn’t know.  Not relevant to the music I guess, but still I find it interesting.  Thus, for example, I have learned Darin had a child early on that was then put up for adoption.  I didn’t know that.  Nor indeed that he wrote what to my ears is the awful “Splish Splash” which was a hit in England for Charlie Drake (I think that’s so, I’m writing that from memory).

Anyway, it’s an ok recording, but again I am not sure I got any really big insights here.

Steve Gadd

Now my heart lifted when I came to this one (and you should remember that I – Tony – don’t know what Aaron has in store for me to write about when I open the file).  Steve Gadd is a musician – I mean like a real musician.  As a percussionist he has worked with everyone, and then some more.  Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Chick Corea, Steely Dan …. everyone wants him.

And this version of the song shows all those people who have performed it by just taking the song and doing it straight, exactly what there is to be found herein.   This is where one can go.   Thanks Aaron for picking this one.  Brilliant.

The last of Aaron’s selection is what he describes in his note to be as “George, Bob and a whole bunch of people (I think I see Jesse Ed Davis) present a (probably very drunken) impromptu performance as The Silver Wilburys.”

Yes well, lots of guitars – and no knowledge of what the song actually is.   Hmmmmm….

OK, well the deal is I (Tony) can throw in some of the versions of the song that I like as well.  And if you are still here, this is quite a contrast with the mess above.

Now in his 80s Chris Farlowe is apparently still performing – and I hope taking it easy.  Here’s another little note of no consequence, he was born and brought up not far from me in north London.  I’d love to know when this was recorded.  Can someone tell me?

What I like here is that this version just treats the song as bouncy fun – I’m doing all right, I’m sitting here watching the river flow, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But until now we have not had anyone who has decided to take this song anywhere new while keeping the lyrics in.  So here we go with Leon Russell.  And I really welcome this, because after all, what is the point of performing and recording a song that everyone else has done, if you don’t have something new to offer in the performance?

And I am going to cheat here and deviate and offer you Leon Russell’s own composition, in case you missed it, or have not heard it for a long time.  I’ll make it an optional extra by just putting the link to it here, but this guy was really a great songwriter in his own right.

Back to Basic

But still we have the problem – everyone ends up doing the song in the same sort of way.  Except it is rather nicely done without stretching the song beyond where it was meant to go in the first place.

So can anyone do something new with this song.

According to Wiki “Seatrain was an American roots fusion band based initially in Marin County, California, and later in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Seatrain was formed in 1969, subsequently drawing some members from the Blues Project when it broke up. Seatrain recorded four albums and disbanded in 1973.”

I don’t know anything else about them, but it is quite a nice track.  If there is more to know, please write in.

Last one now, if anyone is left reading and listening…. and believe me there are 1000 more recordings of this song that could be highlighted.  And I’ve left the one I rather like until the end, for no particular reason.  Except perhaps because at least Graham Bell has done his own thing.

But then he always did – including appearing in the LSO’s version of Tommy.  Sadly Graham is no longer with us, but like so many less than totally famous rock musicians, his music is most certainly worth remembering.

https://youtu.be/3-wHW55GFQA

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in this series…

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love is just a four-letter world – Part IV: Tennessee
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (Part V): Are you going away with no word of farewell?

by Jochen Markhorst

Part VI: You been double-dealing

Both in the final pages of the graphic novel, and in the final minutes of the film version, Rorschach, as the only one of the remaining Watchmen, refuses to join Adrian’s gruesome, bloody plot to save the world. Without saying goodbye, he leaves the geodesic dome at the South Pole. He goes back to civilisation. “People must be told.” Outside, Jon, Dr. Manhattan, stops him. “Rorschach… you know I can’t let you do that.”

Rorschach knows. And also that this will be his death. Which comes, and it’s quick and painless. Complete evaporation to the core.

I said goodbye unnoticed
Pushed towards things in my own games
Drifting in and out of lifetimes
Unmentionable by name
Searching for my double, looking for
Complete evaporation to the core

The creator of Watchmen, British master storyteller Alan Moore, is a seasoned Dylan fan. His masterpiece is – quite literally – framed by and larded with Dylan songs. Just as the successful and respectful film adaptation by Zack Snyder (2009) opens with “The Times They Are A-Changin'” (stretched, with Dylan’s permission, to over five minutes) and closes, under the credits, with My Chemical Romance’s cover of “Desolation Row”. The dramatic denouement is introduced, again as in Moore’s graphic novel, with “All Along The Watchtower” (in the film Hendrix’s version).

Illustrator Dave Gibbons writes the foreword to the Deluxe Edition in 2013 and explicitly articulates Dylan’s influence:

“It began with Bob Dylan.   For me, a couplet from his 1966 masterpiece Desolation Row was the spark that one day would ignite Watchmen.

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

It was a glimpse, a mere fragment of something; something ominous, paranoid and threatening. But something that showed that comics, like poetry or rock and roll or Bob Dylan himself, might feasibly become part of the greater cultural continuum. The lines must have also lodged in Alan’s consciousness for, nearly twenty years later, Dylan’s words eventually provided the title of the first issue of our comic book series Watchmen.”

… so, in addition to the title for the first episode, Dylan also provides inspiration for plot, background and scenes up to and including the final episode.

And, perhaps somewhat far-fetched, even the bizarre death of Rorschach seems a literal interpretation of Dylan’s beautiful metaphor from that wonderful third verse of “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” – an execution method that is later copied again in a slightly less literary, much more exuberant superhero film, in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). With an identical, paradoxical motivation, by the way; Thanos commits mass murder, evaporating humans to the core, to save mankind.

The farewell couplet is a poetic highlight of the song. The opening words I said goodbye unnoticed are already of a rare, thoroughly melancholic beauty, and the following lines are no less successful.

The narrator sneaks away, or at least tries to disappear completely, while in the adjoining room a – presumably – marital quarrel rages, the quarrel in which the woman speaks those memorable words love is just a four-letter word, the words that make such a crushing impression on the narrator. His state of mind is stormy. He may not be the reason for the impending marital break-up, but he is not entirely innocent. Ten years later, he will find the words:

She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam, I guess
But I used a little too much force

… but for the moment he stands at a crossroads, confused. He does not know which exit to take. He feels pushed towards things, and also understands that he owes this to his own games, the games that make him drift in and out of lifetimes. Bingo again for the biographical interpreters: thanks to Joan Baez’s autobiography And A Voice To Sing With, we know that Dylan writes this song during a phase when he is yo-yoing back and forth between Sara and Joan;

“Twelve years later, when I finally met and became friends with Sara, we talked for hours about those days when the Original Vagabond was two-timing us.”

In the next paragraph, Baez recalls how the two-timing Original Vagabond Dylan, after a few romantic days with Sara in Woodstock, reports back to Carmel Valley:

“You stood at the big kitchen windows with your typewriter perched on top of a waist-high adobe structure and faced the hills. You wrote “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” among other things.”

These are, in any case, confusing times on Lover’s Lane, but the added bonus is that our songwriter is able to empathise with the relational whirlpool into which he throws his poor protagonist. What is striking is that he is looking for an anchor point, is trying to decide who his True Love is, looking for the woman who actually could be his double (“Searching for my double”).

It is the first time that the poet Dylan chooses this image to express something like the One True Love. At the end of 1965 he chooses “entwined” (Just Louise and her lover so entwined, “Visions Of Johanna”), and ten years later, when the poet himself is going through a divorce, he chooses “twin”. First in “Simple Twist Of Fate” (I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring) and again a couple of years later, after the divorce is finalised, in “Where Are You Tonight?” (I fought with my twin, that enemy within) – though there it is less clear whether the narrator means his Own True Love.

This narrator is still far from that point. He does not yet know who his double is, and here, at this crossroads, he cannot even find a door that might lead to her;

Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more
Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word

Well, there must be some way out of here.

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part VII: Now I understand

———

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

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part I
• Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy Part II
• Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy (Part III)

by Larry Fyffe

‘The Hand Of Ethelberta’ by Thomas Hardy has a happy ending. From a poor background, young Ethelberta marries well, but her husband soon dies. She’s able to keep her low beginnings a secret by becoming known as a writer of poetry about sexual love and desire.

She has four suitors, including a struggling musician, but settles for an elderly womanizer who’s learned of her background; saving his estate from bankruptcy allows Ethelberta to look after her impovished family.

Without naming the author, Hardy pops befitting poetic quotes into the novel that focuses in on England’s class-based society.

From one of his favorite poets:

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow
(Percy Shelley: Adonais - 'The Hand Of Ethelberta': Hardy)

Likewise, the singer/songwriter/musician in the following song lyrics:

I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies 
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

From the same poet who’s quoted by Thomas Hardy:

Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)

In the aforementioned “Far From The Madding Crowd”, Hardy distinguishes the lower from the high class characters by the songs that they choose to sing.

He gives the first two lines of the song below; a ‘draggle-tail’ being an untidy women, even a prostitute:

'Twas Moll and Bet and Doll and Kate
And Dororthy Draggle-Tail
And Tom and Dick, and Joe and Jack
And Humphrey with his flail
And Kitty she was the charming girl
To carry her milking pail
(Dame Durden~ traditional -'Far From The Madding Crowd': Hardy)

Tangled up are Kitty and Bathsheba in the following book report apparently written in regard to Hardy’s novel:

The cat's in the well, the wolf is looking down
He got a big bushy tail, dragging all the way to the ground
The cat's in the well, the  gentle lady is asleep ...
She can't hear a thing, the silence is a-sticking her deep
(Bob Dylan: Cat's In The Well)

ThomasHardy mentions a jig song “Jockey To The Fair” which goes like this:

My dad and mam are fast asleep
My brother's up, and with the sheep
(Jockey To The Fair ~ traditional)

Bob Dylan And Thomas Hardy draw buckets of  water from the same artistic well.

Another quote by Hardy in ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’:

Swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw
Which comes from poetry considered to be 'high art":
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed
But swollen with wind , and the rank mist they draw

 (John Milton: Lycidas)

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This is part of the “All Directions at Once” series which looks at the ebb and flow of Dylan’s writing across the years, rather focusing entirely on individual songs or (as our earlier episodes have done) individual years.

There is an index to the whole series of articles here.   The previous article in the series was “The Early 70s” took us up to 1974 and the creation of the masterpiece that was “Blood on the Tracks”.   So the question now is, what did Bob do next after having written his utter masterpiece that is that album.

Bob’s life had shown him that while in his early years he had been able to create masterpieces at the drop of the hat, this was no longer possible.  Works of genius had to be nurtured, and that could mean having time off in between bursts of creativity.  Sometimes those “times off” could last a year or more.

As we saw, Blood on the tracks developed from the experimental work at the end of the previous year and so on that basis we might have expected the second half of the 1970s to involve several years out, an experimental year which shows signs of amazing genius, and then the creative burst of another album.   At least that is how it went last time around.

1975

But no, this is Bob Dylan we are talking about and it doesn’t work like that with Bob.  What we actually got in 1975 was a year of working with Jacques Levy.  Not exclusively of course, but much of the time.

That he could put out his own works of genius such as “Abandoned Love” which could inspire other brilliant musicians, was never in doubt …

… but the work with Levy gave Bob all sorts of new insights and directions.  Sometimes he did his old trick of taking a real live person (Joey) and writing about him in a way that annoyed many who failed to understand the whole concept of artistic re-interpretation.  They are probably the people who prefer photographs to visual art.

And there was a new bit of fun, turning the ruins of Mozambique into a sun-seekers paradise.  Has anyone ever done such a thing before in a pop or rock song?  I certainly can’t think of who.

A quick bit of hero worship in Catfish, a song about his wife, and the very curious, “What will you do when Jesus comes?” which is a real scream.

There are songs to argue about like “Rita May” and songs that themselves seem to be produced in order to create an argument such as “Oh sister”.  In short there is a lot of an artist who knows he has got his genius back, and who is now having fun as well as expressing himself.  He certainly isn’t holding himself back.

I am sure Bob didn’t say, “Hey let’s start a song by telling the fans I married a woman called Isis – they’ll spend months trying to work out who that was,” but with the level of fun and mischief this year, alongside the genius, that could have been exactly what he thought.

As for “Abandoned Love”.  Everything about this song shouts out “genius” and leaves one wondering why Dylan needed a collaborator.  Both versions that we have are so worth playing again, and again, and again.  “Patty’s gone” could be just as great, if only we could make it all out, but these are tantalising signs that the genius is most certainly still on full charge.

Looking at the video below we get, the checking of the ear peace, look up, look down… a solo performer doing a Dylan piece… that suggests this is going to be almost as awful as me performing the music for a set of Dylan lyrics for which the master didn’t have time to do the tune…. but in this case no.  Give the lady a try

1976

But then we did get the year of a pause, as 1976 gave us one song: Seven Days a song of lost love, and nothing more.  Bob played it a number of times in concert before abandoning it.  And yes there was something in there, but Bob simply couldn’t tease it out.

So we are now seeing the pattern – although two great albums came out before the pause.

1977

1977 with just seven songs looks like a modest year.  And it is possible that some readers in the United States will still see these as very modest songs in comparison with Bob’s earlier masterworks.

And yet in much of the world 1977 was seen as a year of another major breakthrough in terms of composition for Bob Dylan.  Indeed it is impossible to pick out one particular masterpiece above the others from this collection.  And they are not just masterpieces of popular music, they are unique experiments with rhyming schemes and formulations which, had anyone else decided to pick them, could have taken rock music in a totally new direction.  But musicians and composers tend not to try and emulate what Bob does.

From “Changing of the Guards” through to “No Time to Think” and ending the sequence of compositions for the year with “We better talk this over” and “Where are you tonight?” each of the seven songs of the year adds something so very special to Dylan’s collection; it is quite amazing that he not only had new things to say but new ways of saying it.

So these are songs that are of a very different type, and so once again the simple answer to the question of why he wrote nothing much for a year in between such productive periods is that Bob needed time to stop and refresh and find his new direction.

We also know that Bob and Sara divorced in June 1977, which means 1976 has to be seen as a year of turmoil and uncertainty, during which Bob almost certainly didn’t feel in any way at ease and relaxed enough to compose.   Not that the compositions of 1977 are very relaxed – far from it in fact – but sometimes anger and tension can be channelled into composition as much as love and relaxation.  “No time to think” seems to sum it all up.

1978

So what do you do when you’ve just had a really messy divorce, when your wife is threatening to take the kids half way across the Pacific ocean and your fans (at least in your homeland) didn’t much like your last album?

https://youtu.be/Q7-bMpj88Z8

One option of course is to simply to go quiet.  Another is to go on tour.  Another is to write a load of songs with one of your backing singers.

Now the popular opinion of course is that Dylan found God and started writing with the evidence for this being the single song “Slow Train” which of course became the title track of next year’s album.  Except…

You really do have to stretch the imagination to turn Slow Train into a religious song and see it as the herald a new Dylan era.  Of course once the idea that Dylan had “gone all religious” has settled in, Slow Train sounds religious.  But on its own – and most certainly considering what else was written by Dylan around that song – no, it is not a religious song.  Rather it is a song which tells us we have become disenfranchised because we choose to see ourselves as disenfranchised.

In this regard “Slow Train” is very much like “Times they are a-changin'”.  As I have so-oft pointed out, “Times” doesn’t tell us to go out and change the world, it just says change is happening.  Likewise “Slow Train carries the same message”: times are changing.  It’s just going a bit slower than we previously thought.

And of course for anyone who believes in the inevitability of the Second Coming then these two songs make sense from a Christian perspective.  Otherwise they just tell us that things change.

But this time the big change that happened was that instead of saying that the world we see around us is the world we choose to make, Dylan announced that we were here because of the design of the Supreme Being.

And we can see the signs of this before it all starts, as Dylan’s 1978 compositions do have a flavour of our fate not being capricious chance, but being our own fault.  He’s not saying we’ve fallen, but he is saying it is down to us.

Both “I must love you too much” and “Slow Train” could easily be the highlights of the year; such brilliant contrasts.  However these songs are helped by the fact that elsewhere the year the compositions seems to be directionless.  Two further songs for “Street Legal” were written, in the midst of around eight co-compositions with Helena Springs of which we have copies, and at least as many again of which there seem to be no copies around, followed by a collection that only the most ardent fan even knows, let alone can sing.

“Daddy’s gonna take one more ride” and “Legionnaire’s disease” preceded “Slow Train” and “Do right to me baby” followed it, and then that was it for another year’s writing.  To me, it has all the hallmarks of a composer looking for the next big thing to write about.

https://youtu.be/Q7-bMpj88Z8

I am not suggesting Dylan was cynical in adopting Christianity as the theme for his songs, but rather I am suggesting he adopted Christianity as a theme for song writing, when he had no other dominant theme in mind.  That doesn’t make him cynical, or his belief in Christianity insincere – it is just my observation of where his career as a songwriter had got to.

So, that just leaves me with my attempt to add my table of the topics on which Dylan was writing.  As I have said before the exact numbers here are not the point of this table, simply because so many Dylan songs can be classified under different headings, and I have to admit that each and every time I try and run this table it changes, simply because on listening to a certain song again I think it shouldn’t be in one subject area, it should be in another.

The purpose here is to show the spread of topics wrote about in his first 20 years of writing, and give a general idea of the themes, not an exact account – simply because we will all disagree on any attempt to classify the songs exactly.

Five subject areas I have identified have 20+ songs written in them and I have coloured them.   There are 48 themes in total and only nine have over 10 songs written in them.

This variety of themes is in contrast what was about to happen in 1979 – the first year in which Dylan wrote on one subject, and one subject only.

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word (1965): 1 – Anything goes
• Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word: Part II: Can ya dig this?
• Love is just a four-letter wordPart III: Good and evil are but four-letter words, too
• Love is just a four-letter world – Part IV: Tennessee

by Jochen Markhorst

Ironically, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (2000) is Oasis’ weakest album. While it stands on the shoulders of the preceding giants Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory and, well alright, Be Here Now, the view is sadly not better, further or greater. Noel Gallagher’s misspelling should have been a warning signal already. Noel came up with the idea for the album title after first noticing the inscription on the side of a British £2 coin in the pub (where Newton is honoured with the quote standing on the shoulders of giants), but he was a little too drunk to copy it correctly.

Which does not alter the fact that there is a profound truth in the aphorism which, thanks to Newton, has acquired proverbial status. Newton, and before him wise men like Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century and the Roman grammarian Priscian (around 500), put their own wisdom into perspective with (variants of) the sympathetic disclaimer If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants, with which they wanted – of course – to indicate that they owed their insights to the work of predecessors.

In the Arts, it is roughly the same. The real wizards are not the pathfinders, not the revolutionaries or the visionaries, but the artists who create their masterpieces at the end of an evolution. Mozart stands on the shoulders of the giants Gluck, Haydn and Bach. Rembrandt reaches his total mastery through Lastman, Caravaggio and Rubens, and Shakespeare cuts and pastes from the entire history of literature from Seneca to Marlowe.

The mechanism can be extended to the micro level: the subgenres of the works of art themselves. The farewell song, or the lost love song such as this “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, is now, in the sixties, reaching its peak after about a century and a half of pre-work by giants. One of the finest farewell songs of the 1960s, Tom Paxton’s “Last Thing On My Mind” is a wonderful example.

In the last regular episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, aptly titled “Goodbye”, the DJ plays 23 farewell and goodbye songs. Number 4 on the playlist is The Clancy Brothers version of “The Leaving Of Liverpool”. After the song, the presenter briefly discusses the history:

“A song from at least 1885, according to W.M. Doerflinger, who collected the song from an ex-seaman, named Dick Maitland. He told him: ‘I was on deck one night, when I heard a Liverpool man singing it. Yes Sir, that song hit the spot!’ It still does.”  

… with which DJ Dylan limits himself to the second, better-known version, as written down by Doerflinger in 1951. Earlier, in 1942, he had also transcribed the song after the version of Captain Patrick Tayleur, a sailor whose farewell to the sea is worthy of an article in the New York Times of 13 March 1937: “Mariner, 81, Quits Roving Seven Seas” – Now Happy Making Model Boats At Seamen’s Institute (“Time was when Captain Patrick Tayleur, who has sailed the seven seas for nearly seventy years and has walked across three Continents besides, was not happy unless he was on the move”). In 1942, when Doerflinger visits him on Staten Island, he is still hale and hearty enough to recite the song with some melody, including the chorus:

Singing fare you well, my own true love,
When I return, united we will be.
For it ain’t the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me,
But, me darling, when I thinks of you.

The Captain Maitland version mentions the name of the ship, Davy Crockett, and the name of its captain, Burgess, and that is historically correct. So we know that the song was probably sung between 1863 and 1874, the years that Burgess and his Davy Crockett sailed between California and Liverpool. But Captain Tayleur says he knew the song, with the same refrain but different verses, even before that and places it around the Gold Rush, so around 1849.

After Doerflinger has recorded it, it is picked up by the folk revival in the 1950s, and Dylan is no doubt familiar with Ewan MacColl’s 1962 version. The young Dylan rebuilds the lyrics, leaves the melody largely intact, calls the song “Farewell” and records it in 1963 – the version later used in the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) (but done even more beautifully, almost excitingly, by Mumford & Sons).

Dylan’s “Farewell” is picked up by Tom Paxton, who in turn rebuilds it a year later, in 1964, into one of the gentlest farewell songs of the 1960s, into the magical “Last Thing On My Mind”… a titan of a song, standing on the shoulders of giants.

Paxton thus dives into the gap left by Dylan. After two stanzas of the lost love song “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, the third verse takes the turn for farewell song, with the irresistible, poignant opening

I said goodbye unnoticed
Pushed towards things in my own games
Drifting in and out of lifetimes
Unmentionable by name
Searching for my double, looking for
Complete evaporation to the core
Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more
Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word

The four words “I said goodbye unnoticed” might have been enough to inspire a Dylan in this form to write the most beautiful farewell song of the 1960s – but the songwriter himself is apparently overwhelmed by its beauty. He has been in lost love mode for two verses, but this third verse is actually the perfect opening couplet to a farewell song. Maybe Dylan sees that too. In any case, one could conclude so from the first official publication of the lyrics, in which he changed these words to:

I went on my way unnoticed in the winter driving rain,
In and out of lifetimes unmentioned of my name

…as it is notated in the obscure songbook published at the release of Don’t Look Back (1967). On the first page, the only song printed in manuscript, and then only the one verse that Baez sings in the film. But below that, written across the staves, is this third verse, and below that it says: “© mcmlxvii by m. witmark & sons”.

Poetically an impoverishment, in the context of a farewell song an improvement. In any case, it proves that after 1965, after the scene in which Dylan, quasi-annoyed, snarls at Baez “do you still remember that goddamn song?!”, the scene in which Marianne Faithfull is curled up in the corner, heart-warmingly shy, the scene in which Dylan says “I never finished it”, upon which Baez laughs and says “oh god, you finished it in about eight different ways”, upon which Dylan indulgently says “yeah – that’s a good song,” and Baez again “it’s beautiful. If you finish it, I’ll sing it on a record,” and Dylan concludes, rubbing his eyes wearily: “Yeah, that’s groovy. I can finish that. I’ll think about it”… it proves, in any case, that Dylan did think about it after 1965. And even tinkered with it.

But alas. “Each song in my breast dies a-bornin’.”

To be continued. Next up: Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word part VI: You been double-dealing

—————

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

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

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a Victorian novel about love and lust, the times they are a-changing. “Under The Greenwood Tree” by Thomas Hardy involves a schoolmistress and three suitors – a rich landowner, a vicar, and a musician; she ends up marrying the musician, the story, though less bleak, reminds of the poem below:

That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware

(Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush)

Ends the novel:

"Tippiwit! Swe-e-et! ki-ki-ki! Come hither, come hither, come hither!"
"O, 'tis the nightingale", murmured she, and thought of a secret 
she would never tell

(Thomas Hardy: Under The Greenwood Tree)

Bringing the novel back home to:

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved
Try to imagine a place where it's always safe and warm
"Come in", she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm"

Hardy’s long story crafted around the following song of yore:

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat
Come hither, come hither, come hither
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather

(Donovan: Under The Greenwood Tree ~ Shakespeare, "As You Like It")

Bringing it all back home again:

And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

Thomas Hardy’s novel “Far From The Madding Crowd” concerns the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene  who inherits a farm. She has three suitors – a reliable farmhand; a gambling soldier; and a reserved, well-to-do landowner:

Next came the question of the evening. Would Miss Everdene sing to them the song she always sang so charmingly -‘The Banks Of Allan Water’ – before they went home?

(Thomas Hardy: Far From The Madding Crowd)

So go some of the the lyrics thereof:
Fairest of them all
For his bride, a soldier sought her
And a winning tongue had he ....
On the banks of Allan water
When the winter snow fell fast
Still was seen the miller's daughter
Chilling blew the blast

(Adelina Patti: On The Banks Of Allan Water ~ traditional/Lewis)

The song above mentioned by Thomas Hardy in the novel reflects in the lyrics below:

If you go when the snowflakes fall
When the rivers freeze, and summer ends
Please see for me she's wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howling wind
 (Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)