Few places are as beautiful as Paris in the spring. The French manicure their gardens in ways that complement their architecture to render magnificent vistas that reflect the grace and charm of their capital city. What a wonderful place to celebrate your 25th birthday. How could you improve on Paris as the site of that momentous occasion?
Well, that may hold true for you and me, but that’s not how it worked out for Bob Dylan on his 25th birthday. Bob celebrated May 24, 1966, with one of his chaotic 1966 tour’s more cantankerous shows. With a huge American flag draped in the background, Dylan stood before a mixed audience. Sources report that there were those who were offended by the flag, others who were pleased to see their hero on his birthday, and others who were there for the spectacle of a public confrontation. By all reports, Dylan was antagonistic. The proof is in the Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings set. Bob’s defiant 14-minute, mid-show tuning session agitated an audience that he attacked by announcing: “I’m doing this for you. I couldn’t care less. I wouldn’t behave like that if I came to see you.” During another tuning break Dylan sneered, “Don’t worry, I’m just as eager to finish and leave as you are.”
Happy birthday, Bob.
The tour’s final shows featured more of the same; including the infamous Manchester concert and an idiot screaming “Judas” at a musician for playing a different instrument. This was not the England of Dont Look Back: no adoring English girls, no invitations to stay in mansions, no fun-loving escapes after shows. Tour ’66 was Hell. To suggest that Dylan returned to his native soil a road-worn celebrity is way past understatement—the man was literally knocking on death’s door. All reports confirm this situation—there are no exceptions. The proof is in Eat the Document.
What was in no way dying was the commercial juggernaut that operated under the name of “Bob Dylan.” In May 1966, Blonde on Blonde was released. After the 1966 tour, the commercial hellhounds were on Dylan’s trail. He owed ABC-TV the Eat the Document film. He owed Macmillan Tarantula. His contract with Columbia Records was expiring and negotiations were under way with Columbia and MGM (who reportedly offered a million dollar signing bonus). In addition, Albert Grossman had arranged a bearish 60-date tour that was scheduled to begin that fall. At the heart of it all was a frail, weak, uninspired artist whose bohemian lifestyle, demanding schedule, and commercial obligations were more than overwhelming; they were potentially fatal. Love, however, was in his life, and Sara Dylan proved to be his personal savior (Bob secretly married Sara Lownds in late 1965). But something had to be done about all of these obligations. The creative fire of 1965 was not only extinguished by the hard rain of the 1966 tour, the man’s life was threatened.
Then the motorcycle accident of July 29, 1966, occurred in rural New York. Much mystery surrounds this event. Just what was the extent of his injuries? Cynical observers questioned if the accident happened at all. Supposedly, Dylan was riding his bike when his rear wheel locked and sent him reeling. Rumors of a broken neck, crushed vertebrae, disfigurement, death, and insanity followed. Grossman was exasperated. Macmillan was polite. ABC was silent. The record companies disappeared. And Bob convalesced with his wife and her little girl in Woodstock, New York.
Welcome to the Americana Era and its mission of recovery. Dylan refocused his life after that infamous wreck on the highway. He embraced fatherhood (four times), embellished family life, and in general, quieted his lifestyle. Bob was unequivocal in Chronicles: “Truth was that I wanted out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.” It was a new day.
All the while, he worked, he read, he painted. He toyed with Eat the Document (doing irreparable damage to some of the raw footage) and invited members of the Hawks to Woodstock to participate in some filmmaking ideas. Rick Danko and Richard Manual rented a secluded house in West Saugerties with Garth Hudson. The split-level structure was painted a shade of pink, so the boys named their new digs Big Pink. Soon, Robbie Robertson and his girlfriend obtained a place nearby and, much later, Levon Helm found his way north as well. What started as informal music-making at Dylan’s house (in the so-called Red Room) found a new home in the basement of Big Pink. The results were cathartic for all.
Bob’s encyclopedic knowledge of American Song flourished as he initiated a creative strategy that would prove to be a magical elixir throughout his career. “The Basement Strategy” emerged during 1967, and whenever Dylan’s art entered a state of uncertainty this practice would rescue the wayward artist. The Basement Strategy is a process by which Bob turns to his vast musical education as a means of relieving creative pressure. As we observed in Bob’s Way, Dylan recycles ideas as he makes new art from old. The Basement Strategy is a systematic application of that practice. The lessons from Gatemouth Page’s radio show and the records ordered through his mail order system; the conversations with Jim Dandy and anybody that would talk about music; the experiences in Denver, Dinkytown, New Jersey, and New York; and all those hours with Library of Congress recordings and specialty record collections stocked Dylan’s musical toolbox. Consequently, he consistently used those tools to reorient his creative impulse and refocus his artistic aim. That strategy was perfected in 1967. It is, in every respect, a critical part of the Nobel laureate’s career and one of the keys to his longevity.
The Americana Era involves a wandering—at times, meandering—musical recovery. While this mission is crystal clear to us, it was more than a little bit fuzzy for the artist that endured it. The other missions were carefully orchestrated (portions of the Pop Icon Era are exceptions), but Bob felt his way through most of this time frame. Along with the Basement Tapes, this period contains six albums that I group into three segments: John Wesley Harding (released in December 1967) and Nashville Skyline (April 1969); Self Portrait (June 1970), New Morning (October 1970), and Dylan (November 1973); and finally, Planet Waves (January 1974) and the “Tour ’74” reunion with The Band.
At this point in our journey, Dylan struggles with his creative nexus. As he frolics in the basement with his buddies, returns to Music City to record country music, rejects his adoring constituency through one of his boldest acts, and revisits the stage with his 1966 cohorts, Bob Dylan abandons the sixties and inadvertently prepares himself for creative adventures that were unimaginable at the time. His nexus not only survives, it eventually prospers. Our story begins underground, inside Big Pink.
The Basement Tapes
After the motorcycle incident, Dylan’s activities slowed in a predictable fashion. He escaped the intrusions of celebrity via an extended stay with a nearby physician; using a spare apartment in the doctor’s home as his refuge. While he convalesced in and around the Woodstock area, his commercial engines churned onward in a steady manner. His first “greatest hits” was issued that March 1967 (containing but one unreleased song, “Positively 4th Street”) and Dont Look Back appeared that May. Although Tarantula, Eat the Document, Grossman’s protracted tour, and record contract negotiations were placed on hold, the Bob Dylan commercial machine prospered. With a huge back catalog of outtakes and concerts in the Columbia vaults, the label could conceivably hold out for quite a while; moreover, the company effectively used that stash in its negotiations over a new contract.
The story resumes in early 1967 when the Hawks—soon to be The Band—reassembled in the Woodstock area. The musical merriment that began in the Red Room moved over to Big Pink’s basement and a daily schedule emerged. Rick Danko told Howard Sounes that “Bob and Robbie . . . would come by every day, five to seven days a week for seven or eight months . . . [Bob] would show up like clockwork around noon.” With Band members still adhering to their late-night on-the-road lifestyle, the newly domesticated Dylan arrived each day to brew high-test coffee as he typed away with song ideas (loudly, we’re told) while the boys gradually awakened, and—once everyone was primed for the day—moved into the basement to play around with their musical ideas.
The biographers describe the open windows, the dog on the floor, and the relaxed, free-flowing qualities of these musicology exercises in which everybody played old and traditional songs, recorded them on minimal (but effective) equipment, and eventually used the exercise as the springboard to new material. Robbie Robertson described the process to subterranean expert Greil Marcus:
We went in with a sense of humor. It was all a goof. We were playing with absolute freedom; we weren’t doing anything we thought anybody else would ever hear, as long as we lived. But what started in that basement, what came out of it—and the Band came out of it, anthems, people holding hands and rocking back and forth all over the world singing “I Shall Be Released,” the distance that all of this went—came out of this little conspiracy, of us amusing ourselves. Killing time.
What might appear to be killing time may actually be a product of a systematic plan. Bob was telescoping those old songs, as Robertson indicated to biographer Clinton Heylin:
With the covers Bob was educating us a little. The whole folkie thing was still very questionable to us—it wasn’t the train we came in on. He’d be doing this Pete Seeger stuff and I’d be saying, “Oh God . . .” And then, it might be music you knew you didn’t like, he’d come up with something like “[The Banks of the] Royal Canal,” and you’d say, “This is so beautiful! The expression!” He wasn’t so obvious about it. But he remembered too much, remembered too many songs too well. He’d come over to Big Pink, or wherever we were, and pull out some old song—and he’d prepped for this. He’d practiced this, and then come out here, to show us.
Robertson told Marcus: “He would pull these songs out of nowhere. We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn’t tell.” Dylan was on a mission; turning things around through the Basement Strategy.
The songwriting that followed inspired all. It seeded The Band’s career and fertilized Dylan’s. Garth Hudson described the basement songwriting process in Heylin’s biography: “We were doing seven, eight, ten, sometimes fifteen songs a day. Some were old ballads and traditional songs . . . but others Bob would make up as he went along . . . We’d play the melody, he’d sing a few words he’d written, and then make up some more, or else just mouth sounds or even syllables as he went along. It’s a pretty good way to write songs.”
Instead of hiring expensive Nashville session players to play cards or ping pong while he prepared the next track, Dylan adapted his method to Big Pink; deploying a similar strategy in a more relaxed fashion that invited more participation. As a result, coauthored gems such as “Tears of Rage” (with Manual) and “This Wheel’s on Fire” (with Danko) emerged from Big Pink’s basement. Dylan offered his views on the proceedings to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in 1969: “You know, that’s really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s basement, with the windows open and a dog lying on the floor.” Such was the bliss of Big Pink.
To capture the fruits of their basement labors, Big Pink engineer Garth Hudson set up the home-cooked recording studio. Heylin’s session chronology cites the specifics. He reports that about “a hundred” of the approximately 150 basement recordings exist from the sessions that unfolded from March to April 1967 through November (sources indicate The Band continued the practice after Dylan departed for Nashville in mid-October for the John Wesley Harding sessions into early 1968). Although critics describe the results as “home recordings,” the equipment did the job. While the original edition of the basement recordings (released in 1975) doesn’t display the wide stereo sound that you hear on unofficial versions, Columbia corrected that problem in 2014 with The Basement Tapes Complete boxed set.
It would be misleading to suggest that the group entered the basement each day, fired up their system, and recorded whatever crossed their minds. This wasn’t the case. They ran through songs before rolling tape. They deleted song fragments and false starts (most of them, anyway). Although it took a while for Hudson to gain his basement legs (several songs feature poor levels or distorted sounds), the process was more systematic than the legend suggests. Once more, evidence of a specific mission floats in and out of the varied accounts of basement happenings. Like a good college teacher, Professor Dylan created an educational environment that inspired everyone; including the instructor. (Marcus’s incomparable discography charts the histories of all of the basement songs.)
Once the group started generating new material, Dylan’s publisher realized the potential for other artists to record these new songs. Consequently, Dwarf Music dubbed 14 songs from stereo to mono (via two “releases” of 10 and 4), pressed acetates of the demos, and sent them out to artists/publishers for consideration. Two important consequences flow from this decision. First, artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary (“Too Much of Nothing”), Manfred Mann (“The Mighty Quinn”), The Byrds (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered”), Julie Driscoll and the Brian Auger Trinity (“This Wheel’s on Fire”), and later, of course, The Band (selecting whatever they wanted for their Music from Big Pink album) recorded basement tunes and enjoyed varying degrees of success with the results.
Second, the “bootleg” industry was created at Big Pink. That channel for disseminating unofficial versions of songs, albums, and shows was born via these recordings. That Rolling Stone actually reviewed the bootlegged version of The Basement Tapes years before the official Columbia release is telltale. Subsequently, when Columbia finally got around to issuing a diluted version of the recordings (transforming the original stereo recordings into what Heylin terms “collapsed mono” and adding songs by The Band without Dylan), Bob wryly observed that he thought everybody already had them. Such is the historical significance of this informal gathering of friendly musicians “killing time” in their basement.
Turning to the tapes themselves, we hear a wonderful example of musical collegiality as a group of road veterans relax and fool around with musical ideas. Incomplete songs such as “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby,” “I’m Guilty of Loving You,” “Gimme Another Bourbon Street,” “Lock Your Door” and songs that would eventually appear on the first official release such as “Open the Door, Homer,” “Tears of Rage #2,” and “Nothing Was Delivered #1” demonstrate the work-in-progress qualities of the basement experience.
The Basement Strategy uses diverse material to unlock new ideas (recall the MusiCares speech). Songs may emerge from every conceivable direction. The Big Pink influences range from “Flight of the Bumble Bee” (Rimsky-Korsakov) to “Cool Water” (Nolan) to “See You Later, Allen Ginsburg” (Guidry) to “People Get Ready” (Mayfield) to Johnny Cash tunes (“Big River,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “Belshazar”) to John Lee Hooker songs (“I’m in the Mood” and “Tupelo”) to classics such as “The Royal Canal” (Behan), “Four Strong Winds” (Tyson), “Wild Wood Flower” (Carter), and “You Win Again” (Williams) to the silliness of “Coming Round the Mountain” (traditional). This repertoire extends from the ridiculous to the sublime to the more-than-ridiculous. At times, established songs such as “All American Boy” (Parsons/ Lunsford) are transformed into versions that Dylan’s publishers copyrighted. The use of traditional tunes such as “Going Down the Road,” “Bonnie Ship the Diamond,” “Po’ Lazarus,” and “Young but Daily Growing” demonstrate that Bob’s musical encyclopedia was wide open. Our ragpicker was in paradise as he telescoped the “great American song tradition.”
The informal instruction and the tomfoolery that appears on many tracks are revealing. We hear Dylan coaching his team; calling out chord changes or demonstrating harmonies. During “Big River #2” Dylan asks if there’s room on the tape for an ending. He breaks up laughing on “Get Your Rocks Off!” and “Lo and Behold #1.” His playful cursing colors “Next Time on the Highway.” “Bring It on Home” is one big hoot as the boys search for a groove while laughing, talking, probing, and laughing some more. “The Spanish Song” is the basement version of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” as the boys yell, whistle, and fool around (after the second take Dylan asks if “you wanna tape this one”—apparently unaware of the Big Pink engineer’s activities). Finally, after recording a raucous “Hills of Mexico” Dylan tells Hudson that he’s just “wasting tape.” You can hear the convalescence while listening to these recordings. Bob is on the mend.
When we pull back and examine the 100 or so tracks and kick out the incomplete, unintelligible, or cover songs, three types of songs emerge: hymns, blues or 1950s rock and roll songs, and goof tunes. There are but a few exceptions. The folk/country masterpiece that is “I’m Not There (1956)” is one. “Band songs” (e.g., “Goin’ to Acapulco” and the multiple tracks that appear on the official release) are another. Lastly, country songs such as “Next Time on the Highway” and “I’m a Fool for You” represent others. Let’s turn to some examples that communicate just how the basement songs initiated this mission of recovery.
We begin with the hymns. This designation has more to do with the songs’ sound than anything else, since their lyrics display varying levels of clarity. Covers such as “People Get Ready” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” are direct in their preachy style, whereas songs such as “I Shall Be Released” and “Tears of Rage” sound like hymns while flirting with cloudy topics. I’ve selected three basement tunes that extend across a spectrum from classic narrative impressionism (“This Wheel’s on Fire”) to moderate clarity (“Too Much of Nothing”) to undeniable reverence (“Sign on the Cross”). Salvation, repentance, moral justice, and faith are recurrent songwriting themes throughout the lifework, so the presence of these songs is no surprise. Here these inclinations assume a more enigmatic status due, no doubt, to the basement environment’s exploratory nature.
With the coauthored “Wheel’s” the musicians create a solemn musical background for a series of observations that lack any sense of character development or story line; nevertheless, it preaches the value of a strong memory. The three stanzas are highly repetitive with the opening seven lines loosely describing some scene before closing with a five-line sequence. The opening verse captures the strategy:
If your mem’ry serves you well,
We were goin’ to meet again and wait,
So I’m goin’ to unpack all my things
And sit before it gets too late.
No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell,
But you know that we shall meet again
If your mem’ry serves you well.
This wheel’s on fire,
Best notify my next of kin,
This wheel shall explode!
The next verse conveys how the narrator intends to “confiscate” the other person’s “lace” and tie it in a “sailor’s knot” and hide it. The final verse recalls how the character was called upon to get “them” to do the other person’s “favors” but those plans “failed” and that was that. As you can see, this is a classic example of the narrative impressionism writing strategy; in that, the opening lines present some cryptic scene that is anchored by the recurring embedded chorus. That “wheel” may surely be “on fire,” but precious little insight is offered as to the nature of that wheel, the narrator, or his/her correspondent—pure basement.
“Too Much of Nothing” is evasive but less cryptic. Here we have three eight-line verses that are followed by three four-line choruses in which the respective stanzas offer moral prescriptions regarding moderation, modesty, and patience (I think, they may also be about sewing, cooking, and gardening). Consider the second stanza and chorus as a case in point:
Too much of nothing
Can make a man abuse a king.
He can walk the streets and boast like most
But he wouldn’t know a thing.
Now, it’s all been done before,
It’s all been written in the book,
But when there’s too much of nothing,
Nobody should look.
Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion
As the song proceeds, the music builds in a haunting manner that creates a darker tone. Dylan sounds like the Rev. Vincent Price as the track unfolds. It’s a creepy vocal, that’s for sure. “Valerie” and “Vivian” rhyme nicely with “salary” and “oblivion” and therein rest their narrative significance. The last verse is insightful:
Too much of nothing
Can turn a man into a liar,
It can cause one man to sleep on nails
And another man to eat fire.
Ev’rybody’s doin’ somethin’,
But when there’s too much of nothing,
It just makes a fella mean.
This character has certainly been involved in a whole lot of nothing, so he shares his disgust via a warning that reports that moderation, modesty, and patience may prove to be useful elixirs for those facing an overabundance of emptiness. Still, beware. Reading into these songs is risky business.
“Sign on the Cross” follows a fundamentally different songwriting strategy. That this song is a hymn is beyond question. Not only does its slow, prodding musical structure follow that format, but the 11-line testimonial placed between the fourth and fifth verses fits firmly in that tradition. The verses vary. The song opens with two eight-line stanzas, followed by two four-line verses, then the testimonial, and closes with a 12-line stanza. This character is a worried man. He appreciates his “fine” “gold mine” all the while he knows it’s misleading. He recalls his childhood ambitions and declares “But I was lost on the moon / As I heard that front door slam” before he returns to his worries. The two four-line verses provide a bridge to the testimony as they ponder that “old sign,” its significance, and his passing “friends.” From there, we witness a spoken testimony that would make Hank Williams’s “Luke the Drifter” character proud:
Well, it seems to be the sign on the cross. Ev’ry day,
ev’ry night, see the sign on the cross just layin’ up
on top of the hill. Yes, we thought it might have
disappeared long ago, but I’m here to tell you, friends,
that I’m afraid it’s lyin’ there still. Yes, just a
little time is all you need, you might say, but I don’t
know ’bout that any more, because the bird is here and
you might want to enter it, but, of course, the door might
be closed. But I just would like to tell you one time,
if I don’t see you again, that the thing is, that the sign
on the cross is the thing you might need the most.
This sermon of perseverance continues with the closing stanza’s message of encouragement. Reverend Dylan reports that “when your days are numbered” or “your nights are long” you may think that “you’re weak” when in fact “you’re strong.” So, as your worries mount, relax, “sing” out, “And all your troubles will pass right on through.” While “This Wheel’s” may tease you with its reverent sounds and “Too Much” may frighten you with its haunting, eerie vocals, “Sign” is the real sermonic deal. The basement tent revival featured a blood-stained shade of pink when the tape rolled that day as the laureate fondled sentiments that never seem to be very far away from his award-winning pen.
To the extent that “Sign” previews the future, the 1950s-style tunes revisit the musical past. We consider two examples of this category: “Odds and Ends” and “Nothing Was Delivered.” “Odds” is classic 1950s rock and roll song; it’s vacuous beyond belief. The tune complains about a relationship and the narrator’s partner’s habit of “spillin’ juice” all over him. Like so many of those ’50s songs, a central metaphor is the song’s pivot—here, the “juice” reference. So have fun with this 1:46 ditty; that is, after all, what this genre is all about.
The three six-line stanzas pause for a spectacular guitar break between the second and third verses. This aural party is simple, coherent, and a solid example of a songwriting strategy that passed on almost the moment it arrived. Let’s examine the opening verses for detail:
I plan it all and I take my place
You break your promise all over the place
You promised to love me, but what do I see
Just you comin’ and spillin’ juice over me
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again
Now, you take your file and you bend my head
I never can remember anything that you said
You promised to love me, but what do I know
You’re always spillin’ juice on me like you got someplace to go
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again
The moral about “lost time” is our most accessible line as the song plays with the “juice” imagery. Since there’s no need to cry over spilt juice, we move on after appreciating this basement adaptation of an established genre.
“Nothing Was Delivered” is a New Orleans–style sermon that could easily fit with the hymns. The track’s sound moves me to place it here, however. Classic 1950s piano work echoes up river from the Big Easy and provides a musical context for lyrics that are as coherent as any basement offering. The three eight- to nine-line stanzas join three two-line choruses to create a balanced, steady statement. The opening verse/chorus captures the song’s prescriptive tone:
Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you,
Not out of spite or anger
But simply because it’s true.
Now, I hope you won’t object to this,
Giving back all of what you owe,
The fewer words you have to waste on this,
The sooner you can go.
Nothing is better, nothing is best,
Take heed of this and get plenty of rest.
The moralizing continues with the second verse:
Nothing was delivered
But I can’t say I sympathize
With what your fate is going to be,
Yes, for telling all those lies.
Now you must provide some answers
For what you sell has not been received,
And the sooner you come up with them,
The sooner you can leave.
The final stanza (which opens with an extra line, delivered in a deep, gospel-drenched voice, “Now you know”) continues the sermon by reiterating the central point: you’re going to have to resolve these matters before you’re allowed to proceed. The song is straightforward as it announces that you must pay your debts, stop lying, and explain yourself. Somebody is grinding an axe here.
If there’s an axe flailing about in our goof songs, it’s a foam rubber toy with chocolate fingerprints all over it. “Million Dollar Bash,” “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread,” “Lo and Behold!” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” are marvelous examples of what makes the basement songs so interesting. A master storyteller and enigmatic poet put down those songwriting tools in favor of a musical joyride to no particular destination. The results were, no doubt, medicinal—perhaps in more ways than one.
“Million Dollar Bash” is about as goofy as it gets. The five 11-line stanzas feature six lines of goofspeak before the five-line announcement of this inclusive gathering that is the “million dollar bash.” Come one, come all to the mother of all parties. The song opens with a mentally challenged blonde and her weirdly named friend, follows with a grunt of inclusion, continues with a barn scene populated by the narrator’s “counselor” and some storytelling friends, and the track closes with these two—highly representative—verses:
Well, I’m hittin’ it too hard
My stones won’t take
I get up in the mornin’
But it’s too early to wake
First it’s hello, goodbye
But then we’re all gonna make it
At that million dollar bash
Ooh, baby, ooh-ee
Ooh, baby, ooh-ee
It’s that million dollar bash
Well, I looked at my watch
I looked at my wrist
Punched myself in the face
With my fist
I took my potatoes
Down to be mashed
Then I made it over
To that million dollar bash . . .
The song’s light, bouncy rhythm complements the wordplay to create a classic basement number. It’s all one big laugh full of strange scenes, crazy rhymes, and joyful partying. That Dylan Edge is on vacation.
The basement folly continues with “Lo and Behold!” and its light—again, bouncy—tune that features up-front, tight vocals that suggest a country or pop tune with something to say; no matter how trite. Nothing could be further from the case. The world’s most famous word machine is on shuffle; generating phrases that share only a common language. The four 11-line verses roam from San Antonio through Pittsburgh down to Tennessee and back to Pittsburgh for no apparent reason. The individual stanzas don’t feature surreal imagery, clever associations, or narrative vignettes; rather, they are pure tomfoolery. The second and third verses offer insight as to this song’s inner workings:
I bought my girl
A herd of moose,
One she could call her own.
Well, she came out the very next day
To see where they had flown.
I’m goin’ down to Tennessee,
Get me a truck ’r somethin’.
Gonna save my money and rip it up!
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin’ for my lo and behold,
Get me outa here, my dear man!
Now, I come in on a ferris wheel
An’ boys, I sure was slick.
I come in like a ton of bricks,
Goin’ back to Pittsburgh,
Count up to thirty,
Round that horn and ride that herd,
Gonna thread up!
Lo and Behold! Lo and Behold! . . .
Of course, this is a direct invocation of the old “herd of flying moose” story with a slight twist for a pickup truck and a traveling carney. Lo and behold, indeed. This basement travelogue with its eight lines of gibberish followed by a three-line plea for escape is a fine example of the boys fooling around with a phrase or two and coloring it whatever shade comes to mind at that particular moment. There’s no escaping the subterranean joy of this basement classic.
With “Yea! Heavy” the goofspeak explodes in its simplicity and repetition. The basement spills over with this playful ditty that goes beyond nowhere. Our laureate is in his lyrical diapers hoping somehow to manage the damage caused by his natural urges. That the “bottle” is a major part of this song is to undermine the value of a good pun. The song’s structure is indicative of its lyrical depth. The four six-line verses offer three lines of description followed by a single line that is repeated three times (two stanzas are identical and repeat the title, one urges somebody to get the “loot” quickly so they can go fishing while the other aspires for a trip to California). The first and last verses open with these lines: “Well, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus / The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed / On the very next day, with a nose full of pus.” That’s a great image to hang onto; as is the next verse: “It’s a one-track town, just brown, and a breeze, too, / Pack up the meat, sweet, we’re headin’ out / For Wichita in a pile of fruit.” Finally, verse 3 brings everything into perspective: “Now, pull that drummer out from behind that bottle. / Bring me my pipe, we’re gonna shake it. / Slap that drummer with a pie that smells.” Assuredly, “Yea! Heavy” is a master statement by a master spokesman. The basement must have been a bit foggy on that wonderful day.
Our final goof tune involves a fine example of narrative impressionism—basement style. With “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” we have classic Dylan scenic descriptions, character one-offs, and surreal images held together by five-lines about the narrator’s bride. The four 11-line stanzas offer five lines of impressionism followed by the song title transition (the fourth verse substitutes an alternative line/segue) to the five-line embedded chorus. The first verse is telltale:
Clouds so swift
Rain won’t lift
Gate won’t close
Get your mind off wintertime
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
Whoo-ee! Ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day
My bride’s gonna come
Oh, oh, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair!
The impressionism complements the song’s catchy melody to create an enjoyable, light and lively, pop song. The second stanza opens: “I don’t care / How many letters they sent / Morning came and morning went / Pick up your money / And pack your tent / You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Simple rhymes support jumbled imagery with little-to-no relation to one another, as the final verse relates: “Genghis Khan / He could not keep / All his kings / Supplied with sleep / We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep / When we get up to it.” The smooth melody and catchy chorus provide a context for some traditional Dylan songwriting and one of Big Pink’s stronger tracks.
We close our exploration of The Basement Tapes with a coauthored tune that became a staple for The Band’s shows over the years that followed, “Tears of Rage.” The solemn sounds of yet another basement hymn support this cryptic account of relational angst. The three 13-line verses ramble through eight lines of cloudy complaint before the five-line closing lament concerning personal thievery and life’s tentative qualities. After an evasive opening verse that appears to involve a rebellious “daughter,” the song turns to more specific complaints:
We pointed out the way to go
And scratched your name in sand,
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand.
Now, I want you to know that while we watched,
You discover there was no one true.
Most ev’rybody really thought
It was a childish thing to do.
Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so low
And life is brief.
It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse.
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Tears of rage . . .
Not only does the song’s oh-so-slow delivery and churchy instrumentation create a solemn context for a tale of complaint, the lyrics tease that interpretation from time to time as well. Like several of the basement songs, the track’s music displays an incongruent relationship to the lyrics (classic Dylan). The music suggests something as ponderous as “Sign on the Cross” or a sentimental romantic complaint as it establishes a context for receiving something like a prayer, plea, or promise. Instead, we absorb lines that are closer to “Lo and Behold!” than anything else.
One reason for this kind of writing—aside from the totally informal qualities of the entire exercise—is its method of production. In Time-Life’s The History of Rock ’n’ Roll video, Levon Helm describes how Dylan and Richard Manual wrote songs together: “Bob and Richard used to have a typewriter that sat on the coffee table there in the living room. And the two of them would go by, type little notes to each other, and one would read what the other one wrote and put a couple of lines under that. A lot of times, by the end of the day, we’d have a couple-three pages out of there.”
Such is the spirit of Big Pink. Professor Bob may deploy his repertoire of old songs to teach class, but he also made room for improvisation. “All American Boy” may provide the starting point for a personal diatribe. A John Lee Hooker tune may offer the springboard to lyrical mayhem. Or a well-paced typewriter may serve as a harbinger for songs that rotate perspective with each line. In all cases, the musical laboratory that was Big Pink’s basement operated under an open-door policy, and that philosophy served its purpose very, very well. It also echoes the lessons of Dylan’s 2015 MusiCares speech in a direct fashion: old songs birth new songs. This is the Basement Strategy.
The Basement Tapes is a raw, impulsive creation. The boys may have run through a song’s structure and developed a strategy for the recording, but they gave one-off lip service to the writing. Hudson’s right: there’s as much mumbling and schoolboy-rhyming as there are coherent lyrics in these recordings. Helm’s recollections reinforce that point. Guthrie stories, Delta big-assed truths, and French colors are few and far between in these musicology exercises. Replacing the enigmatic ponderings of “Visions of Johanna” is the type of vacuous pop platitudes that go dormant until Under the Red Sky. But it’s the process that matters most here.
The Basement Strategy was born under Big Pink and that is as big a development as anything in Dylan’s career. It surely facilitated Bob’s convalescence. By fooling around with his musical playmates in the relaxed atmosphere of a secluded house with open windows, strong coffee, an accessible typewriter, and the time to allow it all to happen, Bob relaxed and released his talent in a way that unlocked the door to recovery. Through the goofy songs, the hilarious covers, the uneven hymns, and the musical camaraderie, Bob Dylan turned a creative corner. Still, we have songs and songs to go before this process is complete—some missions require time.
John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline
From the raucous freedom of Big Pink, we move to one of the musical world’s more restrictive environments: Music City. They may want you to believe that they sit around with the windows open and the hunting dogs lounging as they pick and grin their way through songs in Nashville, but that’s just not the truth of the matter. Those Nashville Cats are an uptight bunch with very specific, preconceived notions about what does and does not fit. The Nashville sound is not inclusive. Hank Williams was kicked out. Elvis Presley was initially rejected. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings became “outlaws.” This list goes on and on. But, somehow, Bob Dylan had his way with these musical warlords. They may have looked at Dylan as some sort of freakish cash cow, but Bob could’ve cared less. Williams, Presley, or the outlaws could only dream of the reservoir of rebellion available to this Iron Ranger. So, with the New York Mountains behind him, the laureate returned to Nashville where he would startle the locals by co-opting their methods of production and confuse the musical world with the results.
How bold was John Wesley Harding? Do you have any idea what records populated the musical world in 1967? In June 1967, the Beatles issued Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That November the Rolling Stones responded to the Beatles with Their Satanic Majesties Request. And gestating just over the horizon was the first record to be awarded “platinum” status by the music industry (selling over four million copies), Iron Butterfly’s In A Gadda Da Vida. Complementing those provocative offerings was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding—a country album recorded in Nashville.
Two points stand out immediately regarding John Wesley Harding: this is an amazing act of artistic courage for 1967 and the concentrated application of portraiture as a storytelling strategy—portraits that are a long way from the basement’s “Tiny Montgomery.” Throughout these songs the harmonica represents the project’s most compelling sonic signature; opening tunes, punctuating verses, and closing songs in a consistent fashion. Otherwise, the musical structures on this album stick to simple frameworks that support the vocals and harmonica.
Heylin’s session chronology reports that producer Bob Johnston enlisted the support of Nashville regulars Charlie McCoy (bass), Kenneth Buttery (drums), and Pete Drake (pedal steel) for the three sessions required to record the album. This is Nashville recording at its finest: quick, efficient, standardized. There are no unused songs from these sessions (and apparently, but two outtakes). From this, it is safe to say that Dylan totally abandoned his Blonde on Blonde production method and completely accepted Nashville’s operating procedures. That—in and of itself—is newsworthy.
Turning to the writing, there is a specific tone to the portraits that dominate this album and it’s decidedly biblical. Characters are presented and developed in a moralistic fashion. Like biblical parables the scenes unfold simply, the conflict is quickly exposed, and the resolution yields a concrete point. To that end, Harding offers 12 songs in a rapid-fire 38 minutes that follow six thematic orientations: two epic portraits (“John Wesley Harding” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”) and one not-so-epic portrait (“The Wicked Messenger”), three relational complaints (the fuzzy “As I Went Out One Morning” and the metaphorical “Dear Landlord” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”), an adaptation of Dylan’s trademark satire (“The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”), two individual complaints (“Drifter’s Escape” and “I Am a Lonesome Hobo”), two love celebrations (“Down along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”), and a piece of impressionism (“All along the Watchtower”).
The record’s thematic diversity involves a blend of past and present. The modification of Dylan’s satirical style via “Frankie Lee” and its enigmatic parable recalls the moralistic tales of earlier times. The song synthesizes the Folk Posturing Period’s narrative structures with the Newport Mod’s idiosyncratic imagery to introduce a songwriting hybrid. Dylan also revamps his impressionism with “Watchtower,” dusts off his finger-pointing techniques via the complaints, and revisits the love song genre with the relational celebrations. We have, then, a transitional piece. We begin in paradise and “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”
“Frankie Lee” is a smooth, relaxed tale of two friends and their domestic adventure. Like virtually all of Harding’s songs, the instrumental pattern provides an excellent platform for the unfolding story with its emphasis on the harmonica-vocal interplay supported by dynamic bass playing and light acoustic guitar-drums. The track’s 12 verses range from four to nine lines each (most are eight lines) with only one break featuring the harmonica interludes that dominate this album. The song involves a simple tale with clever lines that lead to a rather cryptic ending. There are no choruses, bridges, or any refrains. The song is what it says it is: a ballad. The opening verses capture Dylan’s writing:
Well, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,
They were the best of friends.
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day,
Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
And placed them on a footstool
Just above the plotted plain,
Sayin’, “Take your pick, Frankie Boy,
My loss will be your gain.”
Well, Frankie Lee, he sat right down
And put his fingers to his chin,
But with the cold eyes of Judas on him,
His head began to spin.
“Would ya please not stare at me like that,” he said,
“It’s just my foolish pride,
But sometimes a man must be alone
And this is no place to hide.”
Notice the simplicity of expression and its clever twists. The song immediately establishes the friendship and turns to little details that enliven the imagery—Judas’s willing response to Frankie’s need, Frankie’s embarrassment. Judas grants Frankie’s wish while warning him that his offer won’t last forever. Judas then departs for a location down the road that he calls “Eternity.” When Frankie inquires what that means, Judas responds that his friend may know it by another name, “Paradise.” They part.
A stranger approaches Frankie and informs him that Judas is asking for him. It appears Judas is “stranded in a house” down the road and Frankie quickly travels to his friend’s side. Upon his arrival Judas relates that his location is far more than a mere house, it’s a “home.” Frankie Lee contemplates the situation as he stares at this building with 24 windows; each featuring a woman’s face. Suddenly, Frankie Lee storms upstairs and initiates “his midnight creep” that lasts for 16 days. On the 17th day, he dies of “thirst” in his friend’s arms. When they carry his body out, no one speaks except the guilty “neighbor boy” who utters, “Nothing is revealed.” The song closes with its self-proclaimed moral that one shouldn’t mistake “Paradise” for a neighboring house and a 29-second harmonica tag.
“Frankie Lee” extends Dylan’s satirical storytelling formula as it uses the narrative detail we associate with the “Talkin’” songs or “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and adds new twists. His emphasis on the two characters over their scenic conditions is a reversal of his established style. Moreover, the evasive qualities of the story’s resolution add another modification. Unlike “Bear Mountain,” “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” or his other detailed narratives, this song omits crucial storytelling elements that leave aspects of the resolution in question. Is “Frankie Lee” as obvious as it seems? Did the guy wear himself out in a bordello? Did Judas know that Frankie’s “paradise” would become his “eternity” and, if so, did he betray him? What wasn’t “revealed”? The detailed plots of “Emmett Till” or “Only a Pawn” or “John Birch” have made way for a more focused characterization, and this shift in narrative style paves the way for future songs such as “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and the kinds of portraits that populate later works. Make of this parable what you will, but notice the shift in storytelling style. This song represents a significant transition.
Turning to the impressionistic tale “All along the Watchtower,” we note another stylistic evolution. Dylan told John Cohen and Happy Traum that the song has “the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order” which, in turn, opens it to a variety of interpretations, “anything we can imagine is really there.” One reason for this open-ended approach is the song’s brevity. It contains but three four-line verses. There are no recurring lines or bridges, just two characters who speak through cryptic morals before a brief scenic description closes the tune while opening the inverted story. With a lively harmonica and a most impressive bass guitar providing the musical context, Dylan introduces his characters in the opening verses:
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”
“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”
After establishing that people are inconsiderate and cynical, the song turns to its final lines and a quick description of the “watchtower” with its princes, women, and servants while a “wildcat” growls as two approaching riders travel through gusty winds. If you take Dylan at his word, the two riders are the joker and the thief. Right? The song hints of their characters as they lament life’s confusion, lack of sensitivity, and insincerity, but assuredly, “anything can happen” from there. This is not Dylan’s trademark narrative impressionism or patented wordplay; to the contrary, the language is clear while the plot is jumbled. There are no weird juxtapositions, odd pairings, or celebrity convolutions here. It almost seems as if Dylan started the song and just stopped. There are few songs in the Dylan canon like “All along the Watchtower.”
We now move to the meat of this record and Dylan’s portraits. “Harding,” “St. Augustine,” “Poor Immigrant,” and “Lonesome Hobo” spend considerable time developing their respective characters and “Wicked Messenger” uses this songwriting strategy in a less concentrated fashion. Whether the narrative stresses the positive or negative qualities of its subject matter, Dylan describes the heroic, never foolish outlaw (“Harding”), the virtuous St. Augustine, the failed lives of a dishonest people (“Immigrant” and “Hobo”), and the perils of an unwanted messenger in a direct manner.
The biblical imagery (Heylin cites Bert Cartwright’s count of 61 biblical references throughout the album), the enigmatic metaphors, and the songs’ brevity work with the writer’s emerging portraiture to produce yet another hybrid of Dylan’s storytelling signatures. Although he had certainly developed characters in the past, such characterizations typically appeared in service of the narrative. In these songs, the narrative flows from the characterization. Dylan songs often move too fast to embellish any single character (or scene, for that matter), so the energy spent developing these characters suggests an interesting shift in songwriting strategies. Again, the key word here is transition. Bob is searching.
The album’s title cut establishes this storytelling strategy. “John Wesley Harding” is an epic account of its subject’s heroic qualities that appears in three seven- to eight-line verses. The opening harmonica, active bass, along with their supporting guitar and drums, pave the way for a song without repetition or variance of any kind. The opening stanza introduces our hero:
John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor,
He trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand.
All along this countryside,
He opened a many a door,
But he was never known
To hurt an honest man.
Like Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” this heroic outlaw uses his own brand of Robin Hood logic to have his way with the law while serving his populist social philosophy: it’s perfectly fine to steal from the dishonest rich; proving one bad turn warrants another. The implication here is that they deserve it. The second stanza describes an event in which the outlaw and his moll take a stand against somebody and straighten that “situation” out—whatever it was. The final verse seals the story:
All across the telegraph
His name it did resound,
But no charge held against him
Could they prove.
And there was no man around
Who could track or chain him down,
He was never known
To make a foolish move.
The “us vs. them” qualities of this tale are self-evident in this final stanza in that “they” are unable to corral this heroic criminal. Never mind that the man has no respect for the law of the land, he never injures honest folk, he takes care of situations in helpful ways, and he refrains from foolishness (and thereby sustains his freedom). But you just know what’s going to happen somewhere, someday.
Another kind of character that always seems to get it in the end is the social warrior that confronts “them” by not hiding behind a gun, but by direct—unarmed—confrontation. With long blasts of harmonica painting the tragic backdrop for this portrait, Dylan offers his tale of martyrdom that is “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” The three eight-line verses of this story use irony as a narrative pivot. The narrator’s dream unfolds in three parts. First, St. Augustine is introduced, described, and his mission is established; second, he goes about his duty; and third, he pays the proverbial price as the narrator laments his participation in the martyr’s persecution. The irony occurs in that through Augustine’s denunciation of martyrdom he becomes one.
Dylan’s storytelling is precise in its description of the hero with his “blanket underneath his arm” and his “coat of solid gold” as he searches for “souls” that have “already been sold.” When he loudly lodges his “sad complaint” with the “gifted kings and queens” that “no martyr is among ye now” he closes by telling them to go “on your way accordingly” with the knowledge that they are “not alone.” The dream ends with the hero’s death after which our narrator awakens “in anger” as he embraces his loneliness and terror: “I put my fingers against the glass / And bowed my head and cried.” The epic character endures the tragedy of persecution, and Dylan’s dreaming narrator wrestles with his role in his nightmare.
From gallant gunslingers and persecuted preachers we move to the sad tale of the misguided messenger and “The Wicked Messenger.” Here the band deploys its standard instrumental approach in a more lively manner as Dylan uses the three verse (with seven lines) strategy for yet another narrative vignette. This time, however, the lyrics drift toward impressionism, and in so doing, obfuscate the story in the manner of “Watchtower.” Still, though cloudy, the tale unfolds in a linear fashion as the opening verse describes the messenger, the second stanza unveils the conflict, and the final verse provides the story’s resolution (complete with moral). Consider the song’s opening:
There was a wicked messenger
From Eli he did come,
With a mind that multiplied
The smallest matter.
When questioned who had sent for him,
He answered with his thumb,
For his tongue could not speak, but only flatter.
The second stanza notes how he lives behind a public building (it houses the “assembly”) and one day returned home with a statement that announced: “The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.” With that, the leaves fall from the trees, the oceans “part,” and lots of people confront this metaphoric messenger. The story ends with the messenger learning a lesson that “opened his heart” to the consensus opinion: “If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any.” While the public impact of the character’s statement was obviously profound, the trite resolution provides the moral of the story.
From concise portraits of heroism, martyrdom, and victimization we move to a series of relational complaints that deploy identical songwriting structures with varying degrees of clarity. Here we move from the enigmatic “As I Went Out One Morning” to the dogmatic “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” to the cryptic “Dear Landlord.” “As I Went Out” features an odd portrayal of a threatening woman in chains and Tom Paine’s successful intervention while “Landlord” offers an evasive characterization that drives a heartfelt complaint, and “Immigrant” describes a wretched soul that inspired the narrator’s contempt. There is, indeed, some interesting songwriting here. We begin with Paine, the woman in chains, and the song’s opening verses:
As I went out one morning
To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s,
I spied the fairest damsel
That ever did walk in chains.
I offer’d her my hand,
She took me by the arm.
I knew that very instant,
She meant to do me harm.
“Depart from me this moment.”
I told her with my voice.
Said she, “But I don’t wish to,”
Said I, “But you have no choice,”
“I beg you, sir,” she pleaded.
From the corners of her mouth,
“I will secretly accept you
And together we’ll fly south.”
Suddenly Paine appears running toward the couple, yelling at the woman, ordering her to stop, and apologizing to the narrator for the trouble. The song ends. Now what have we here? A throwaway? An effort to massage the anxieties over a long ago dinner date in Tom Paine’s name (“liberty” enchained by oppressive celebrities)? The song is weird, but not impressionistic. The symbolic complaint is direct, and relational. The narrator recognizes the threat the enslaved lady poses and instantly retreats. The symbolic structure is obvious, but the meaning is anything but.
The mysteries continue with Dylan’s switch to the piano and a track that sounds as if it came straight out of the basement, “Dear Landlord.” The song is an angst-ridden expression about a metaphorical landlord that appears to be a direct extension of “Too Much of Nothing,” “Nothing Was Delivered,” and “I Shall Be Released.” An evil is lurking in the shadows and like Tom Paine’s woman in chains, only the songwriter knows the score. The song opens with the narrator stating his case:
Dear landlord,
Please don’t put a price on my soul.
My burden is heavy,
My dreams are beyond control.
When that steamboat whistle blows,
I’m gonna give you all I got to give,
And I do hope you receive it well,
Dependin’ on the way you feel that you live.
Now, this is rich. Who is this landlord? Grossman? Columbia Records? Dylan’s audience? Richard Nixon? Subscribing to basement logic, this song is suggestive of some sort of celebrity-music biz frustration. The narrator’s dreams are his burden and the essence of his soul, and his landlord uses the character’s sincere efforts to maintain his lifestyle. The second of the song’s three eight-line stanzas pleads for the landlord’s understanding. Everybody suffers, the narrator reports, but we must not work in vain by pursuing materialism’s false promise. The song closes:
Dear landlord,
Please don’t dismiss my case.
I’m not about to argue,
I’m not about to move to no other place.
Now, each of us has his own special gift
And you know this was meant to be true,
And if you don’t underestimate me,
I won’t underestimate you.
Again, the connection to the basement’s “Too Much of Nothing” and its colleagues is too direct to ignore. Like “As I Went Out,” this is inside business and all we can do is sit on the outside, contemplate the symbolic consistency, and enjoy the results. Dylan is privately turning something around here.
Our final relational complaint falls in line with the others. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” is one prodigious diatribe against somebody who happens to be from someplace else. This “immigrant” is a dastardly soul whose evil ways are coming home to roost. The narrator paints a grim picture of a man “Who uses all his power to do evil” only to wind up abandoned; “who lies with ev’ry breath” and “passionately hates his life” while fearing death; who “eats” without satisfaction and “hears but does not see” while “he falls in love with wealth itself / And turns his back on me.” Although most of the song expresses the narrator’s “pity” for this fiend, that last line takes these descriptions from the abstract and anchors it in the narrator’s experience with this monster. The third eight-line verse closes with more acrimony as the narrator’s pity is surely a prelude to the joy he will no doubt experience upon the immigrant’s passing.
There’s a darkness enveloping “One Morning,” “Landlord,” and “Immigrant” as they complain about their situations. This thread is just too obvious to ignore (as is its connection to the basement tracks). The songs’ details certainly differ, but their themes wrestle with the same ideas—notions that also carry over to our two songs of individual complaint.
“Drifter’s Escape” and “I am a Lonesome Hobo” address societal issues through the experiences of the songs’ two central characters. In “Drifter’s,” an innocent wanderer is about to be victimized by a blood-thirsty jury before a divine intervention corrects that scenario. In “Hobo,” the central character has fallen prey to personal weaknesses inspired by societal norms and, although this character is resigned to his fate, he issues a warning for everyone. The world is full of evil landlords and heartless immigrants and they occasionally form lynch mobs that scream for recreational justice and form social systems that lead to ruination. “Drifter’s Escape” opens with the wanderer’s plight and his complaint:
“Oh help me in my weakness,”
I heard the drifter way,
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away.
“My trip hasn’t been a pleasant one
And my time it isn’t long,
And I still do not know
What it was that I’ve done wrong.”
The story is direct and the complaint is coherent: this character was seized, accused, and convicted. The second of these three eight-line verses features the judge tossing his “robe” aside in tearful disgust over his blood-thirsty jury’s decision while a “crowd” is “stirring” outside. The song concludes:
“Oh, stop that cursed jury,”
Cried the attendant and the nurse,
“The trial was bad enough,
But this is ten times worse.”
Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape,
And while ev’rybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape.
Echoing “With God on Our Side,” the song demonstrates the runaway qualities of a self-righteous jury willing to defy both the judge and the citizenry in order to exercise its divine right. However, the divine tables turned and enabled the drifter’s escape. Dylan tells his story through concise, understandable language presented through a coherent narrative structure. This trend holds true for our down-on-his-self-inflicted-luck hobo as well. “Lonesome Hobo” begins with a character sketch:
I am a lonesome hobo
Without family or friends,
Where another man’s life might begin,
That’s exactly where mine ends.
I have tried my hand at bribery,
Blackmail and deceit,
And I’ve served time for ev’rything
’Cept beggin’ on the street.
Having established the hobo’s immigrant-like ways, the second of our three eight-line verses describes the hobo’s fall from grace. He had it all: fine gold in his teeth, silk clothing—everything. But his distrust proved to be his undoing and his ultimate “doom.” The song closes with this admonition:
Kind ladies and kind gentlemen,
Soon I will be gone,
But let me just warn you all,
Before I do pass on;
Stay free from petty jealousies,
Live by no man’s code,
And hold you judgment for yourself
Lest you wind up on this road.
This character blames those around him for his failures—not his personal weaknesses. He lied and extorted because that’s the way you play the game. So refrain from the game and you’ll not have to grapple with your character. That skullduggery promotes an insecurity that breeds jealousy and ruination. This “the devil made me do it” escape clause is just what the immigrant, landlord, blood-thirsty jury, and persecuting dreamer need to lighten their respective loads. It’s why “they” hunt down our good man Harding. It’s why the bearers of bad news are shunned. It’s at the heart of the joker’s and thief’s concerns. And it’s the narrative logic of “With God on Our Side” as our emotional anthropologist reconsiders a long-standing feeling.
Having established why the world is hell, the album turns to the “Yea! Heavy, Music City” portion of John Wesley Harding, and its closing tunes of relational joy. These songs of loving celebration are, most assuredly, the stuff of traditional American pop and country songs. The snappy, piano-driven, basement-sounding, pop tune “Down along the Cove” and the smooth country and western track “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” convey their romantic celebrations in cute, direct, and loving styles. These pop songs are short, sweet, happy tunes that extol the virtues of romantic bliss.
Deploying the songwriting strategy that made Nashville Tin Pan Alley South, “Cove” and “Baby Tonight” are simple songs with lively melodies. The dancing piano of “Cove” complements the pedal steel authenticity of “Baby Tonight” to provide traditional musical platforms for the loving platitudes they espouse. In “Cove,” the three six-line verses repeat the opening two lines as a preface for the two-line statement of adoration that closes the stanza. One needs but a single example to capture the joy:
Down along the cove,
I spied my true love comin’ my way.
Down along the cove,
I spied my true love comin’ my way.
I say, “Lord, have mercy, mama,
It sure is good to see you comin’ today.”
Proving that one loving turn deserves another, the second verse features her response after the repeated opening lines: “Lord, have mercy, honey, / I’m so glad you’re my boy!” Supporting the notion that balance is always a desirable option in a Tin Pan Alley tune, the final verse portrays our lovers walking “hand in hand” as “ev’rybody watchin’” realizes the extent to which love is in the house. A 43-second harmonica blast offers a fine tag for 2:23 pop song.
The bliss ends with our final pop entry and the reassurances of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” How fitting is it that our closing song involves three three-line verses with a patented Nashville bridge separating the second and third stanzas. Once more, a capstone statement is issued on a Bob Dylan album. The song opens with an order to “close” both your “eyes” and the “door” and relax with the realization that the narrator is available for the evening. More instructions follow as the narrator asks his love interest to shut off the lights, lower the shades, and forget all fears, tonight is the night. The song turns to the bridge and the telltale final verse:
Well, that mockingbird’s gonna sail away,
We’re gonna forget it.
That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon,
But we’re gonna let,
You won’t regret it.
Kick your shoes off, do not fear,
Bring that bottle over here.
I’ll be your baby tonight.
With that, John Wesley Harding comes to a close. After over 33 minutes of clear and not-so-clear moralizing, the record concludes with 5 minutes of loving bliss.
Further proof of Harding’s role in the canon is available through the album’s liner notes. There the artist presents a cloudy tale of three kings and their efforts to understand a new Bob Dylan record. The story begins with its characters: “There were three kings and a jolly three too. The first one had a broken nose, the second, a broken arm and the third was broke. ‘Faith is the key!’ said the first king. ‘No, froth is the key!’ said the second. ‘You’re both wrong,’ said the third, ‘the key is Frank!’” So, off they go to consult Frank. As they arrive late that evening, “Terry Shute” was “prying open a hairdresser” when Frank’s wife (“Vera”) interrupts to announce the kings’ arrival. She describes the kings to Terry in her own way. For some reason, the kings crawled into Frank’s place and he immediately demands that they get off his freshly swept floor. When the second king inquires about Vera, Frank declares, “She’s in the back of the house, flaming it up with an arrogant man, now come on, out with it, what’s on our minds today?” No one responds.
Terry enters the room, derides the kings, and is promptly dismissed by Frank: “Get out of here, you ragged man! Come ye no more!” Terry departs. Frank presses on with his inquiry, and the first king finally responds: “Mr. Dylan has come out with a new record. This record of course features none but his own songs and we understand that you’re the key.” Frank concurs with their conclusion and asks “how far would you like to go in?” The king responds, “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there.” Frank responds by sitting down and crossing his legs, leaping to his feet, ripping off his shirt, waving it around (dropping a light bulb and crushing it with his feet), punching out a plate glass window, sitting back down, and pulling a knife. This seems to satisfy the kings who leave Frank, his wife, and Terry contemplating their visit while repairmen replace the window. The kings have, however, been cured: one king’s nose healed, the other’s arm was repaired, and the third was suddenly rich. They blow horns in celebration: “‘I’ve never been so happy in all my life!’ sang the one with all the money.” One may only presume that everyone lived happily ever after—or at least enjoyed themselves until the next Bob Dylan album appears.
The story is weird, but coherent. Unlike the previous editions of liners notes, Dylan presents a clear—albeit surreal—story without the moral undertones of the album’s songwriting. It introduces and develops characters, there’s plot progression, and the narrative conveys the value of knowledge (among other things) while poking fun at all of Dylan’s interpreters. This is the Harding package: in turns playful and moralistic, but always a long, long way from Highway 61. Here that Dylan Edge is toying with watered-down colors and diluted Confucius sayings.
John Wesley Harding is a systematic album. There is a straightforward, methodical musical structure controlling the record. The harmonica lead-ins, between-verse punctuations, and tags join the active bass lines and passive guitar-drums to provide the aural context for all songs. The melody may vary slightly in its pacing, but the formula is all-controlling. There is a systematic songwriting strategy dominating this project as well. Nine of the album’s 12 songs are structurally identical (give or take a line). Only the 12 verses of “Frankie Lee,” the bridge in “Baby Tonight,” and the brevity of “Watchtower” deviate from the basic three eight-line stanza structures that organize these songs. Finally, there is a systematic storytelling style used that makes 10 of the 12 songs more than accessible—they’re predictable (only “Watchtower” and “As I Went Out One Morning” are exceptions). That Dylan co-opted a specific songwriting structure and strictly adhered to it is overwhelmingly clear. The question is why?
First, we must recall Bob’s 1978 comments to Jonathon Cott regarding his change in songwriting after Blonde on Blonde (“Right through the time of Blonde on Blonde I was doing it unconsciously. Then one day I was half-stepping, and the lights went out. And since that point, I more of less had amnesia.”). Dylan was searching for his songwriting bearings and it shows. The Basement Strategy may have allowed him an opportunity to exercise his musical muscles in the friendly confines of Big Pink, and in so doing, to convalesce in Woodstock’s playground, but the writing in that wholesome basement featured no sign of that famed Dylan Edge. Those activities merely opened part of the creative door. With the simple melodies of Harding providing the context, Dylan concentrated on his writing, as he told Cott:
John Wesley Harding was a fearful album—just dealing with fear . . . but dealing with the devil in a fearful way, almost. All I wanted to do was to get the words right. It was courageous to do it because I could have not done it, too. Anyway, on Nashville Skyline you had to read between the lines. I was trying to grasp something that would lead me on to where I thought I should be, and it didn’t go nowhere—it just went down, down, down. I couldn’t be anybody but myself, and at that point I didn’t know it or want to know it.
What a fascinating statement! Notice Bob’s frustrations over his inability to be “anybody” else and how that left him wrestling with his muse, battling amnesia, and using his knowledge and resolve to fight through his formidable dilemma. Can you say transition?
There’s truth here. When you read Harding’s lyrics a strange thing happens with regard to a Bob Dylan song: all the lyrics are accurate. Never is a line reversed, omitted, or edited as the result of Dylan’s live method of music production. No. Each line is carefully crafted and executed. Dylan wasn’t combating the devil; he was struggling with his words about the devil. Hence, he devised a formula, fit his ideas within that structure, and stuck it out. From the unbridled joy of basement therapy to the systematic application of Dylan’s talent, this mission of recovery now backslides into the between-the-lines vacuity of Nashville Skyline. A meandering mission and The Show’s absence rendered a creative nexus that produced lackluster songwriting. The process was broken. Bob can’t be anybody but himself.
Dylan agrees. In his interview with Cohen and Traum, Bob admitted that Harding was a “conscious effort” to restart his career—not an attempt “to go in a certain direction, but rather like put up or shut up.” When Allen Ginsburg told Clinton Heylin that Bob used “functional language” in writing Harding he was right on target (and you can’t get more functional than the Bible). The laureate was trying to survive. It was also an instructive happening. Bob indicated to Anthony Scaduto that he learned an important lesson before composing Harding: “I discovered that when I used words like ‘he’ and ‘it’ and ‘they’ and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me. I went into John Wesley Harding with that knowledge in my head. You see, I hadn’t really known before, that I was writing about myself in all of those songs.” Clearly, Dylan was battling the “amnesia.” He tried to trick out the songs by consciously using functional language in a personal conversation. Yes, it was “put up or shut up.” You have to admire Bob’s determination.
Whereas John Wesley Harding departed from the poetic imperative that drove the Newport Mod to revolutionize songwriting, it still had the topical feel of Dylan’s pen. The portraits had some edge—even if they lacked the bite we associate with Bob’s finest work. Well, that’s all gone now. The nexus is running on fumes. Nashville Skyline is a pop record that features formulaic songwriting and predictable musical turns.
This record is, in a word, anti-Dylan. There are five key signs that support this claim. First, the album—all of 27 minutes in length—opens with a self-cover and an instrumental. Second, there is no harmonica (except for the instrumental) and guitars replace Dylan’s signature instrument via standard interludes that punctuate the verses in predictable fashions. Third, the record’s sonic strategy is lifeless (those great bass lines from Harding disappear); we’re talking Total Music City here—more anti-Dylan. Fourth, Dylan’s oh-so-sweet voice unveils the pop-singing specialist—more anti-Dylan. And fifth, the songwriting strategy is straight from Tin Pan Alley South: verse, verse, bridge, verse, verse with guitar breaks between verses 3 and 4—totally formulaic, totally anti-Dylan. So, let’s relax and read between the lines because there’s nothing else there. After all, this is not George Jones; it’s the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Unlike Harding, this 10-song album focuses on a single topic: love. Those songs explore two predictable themes: celebration (“To Be Alone with You,” “Peggy Day,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “Country Pie,” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You”) and complaint (the return of “Girl from the North Country” with Johnny Cash,” “I Threw It All Away,” “One More Night,” and “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”). The playful metaphors in “Country Pie” and the cloudy love triangle in “Lay Lady Lay” (written for the movie Midnight Cowboy, but not used) are smooth complements to the direct portrayals of the character who had it all and now has nothing (“I Threw It All Away”), the character who pleads with his lover to denounce the rumors of infidelity (“Tell Me That It Isn’t True”), the character who aspires for an evening of bliss (“Peggy Day”), and the determined lover forsaking all to be with his new woman (“Tonight I’ll Be Staying”). These two- to three-minute pop songs follow standard Nashville recipes in a manner that, once again, demonstrates Dylan’s capacity to co-opt a musical style.
Bob explained the shift in style to Newsweek’s Hubert Saal: “The songs reflect more of the inner me than the songs of the past. They’re more to my base than, say, ‘John Wesley Harding.’ There I felt everyone expected me to be a poet so that’s what I tried to be. But the smallest line in this new album means more to me than some of the songs on any of the previous albums I’ve made.” He continued:
Those songs were all written in the New York atmosphere. I’d never have written any of them—or sung them the way I did—if I hadn’t been sitting around listening to performers in New York cafes. . . . When I got to New York it was obvious that something was going on—folk music—and I did my best to learn and play it. I was just there at the right time with pen in hand. I suppose there was some ambition in what I did. But I tried to make the songs genuine.
Some ambition? Again, the mission dictated the expression’s form. The context plays a significant role in any Bob Dylan song’s style, and the latest songs were recorded in “Nashville.”
We begin with the love celebrations and “To Be Alone with You.” This evenly balanced, piano-led, instrumentally uneventful little ditty (running 2:05) contains three eight-line verses that extol the virtues of spending time with the one you love. The opening verse says it all:
To be alone with you
Just you and me
Ain’t that the way it oughta be?
To hold each other tight
The whole night through
Ev’rything is always right
When I’m alone with you.
The joy continues with lines that announce “That while life’s pleasures be few / The only one I know / Is when I’m alone with you” and a bridge that declares that the “nighttime” is the “right time” to be with the one “you’re always” busy “thinkin’ of.” The song closes with the narrator thanking the “Lord” for the “sweet reward” that is life with his baby.
“Peggy Day” advances the nocturnal nature of true love theme with its four three- to four-line verses that pause for a five-line bridge and a pedal steel instrumental between verses 3 and 4 (replacing the harmonica’s role in that standard slot). It doesn’t take that long to drive this point home (the track runs 1:59) and “Day” cuts to the chase with its opening verse in which the narrator reports that Peggy “stole” his heart and now he loves to “spend the night” with his new love. The second verse confirms that he enjoys his days with her as well. The bridge relates the narrator’s state of mind:
Well, you know that even before I learned her name,
You know I loved her just the same.
An’ I tell ’em all, wherever I may go,
Just so they’ll know, that she’s my little lady
And I love her so.
Ain’t love grand! From there, our proud lover recalls how Peggy changed those “gray” skies to “blue” and announces, once again, that his nights are truly special.
The night move theme continues with “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” and its four five-line verses that repeat the opening verse to close the song (there is, once more, a four-line bridge in the middle of the song). A happy piano lead supported by Skyline’s standard instrumental arrangement paves the way for this tale of a dedicated lover’s commitment to his newfound flame. The opening verse sets the scene:
Throw my ticket out the window,
Throw my suitcase out there, too,
Throw my troubles out the door,
I don’t need them any more
’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you.
The song continues with the narrator’s announcement that he “should have left this town this morning” but was unable to remove himself from the “spell” cast by his new love. Seemingly, a one-night stand has blossomed into a full-fledged affair and the narrator is unable to pull himself away. So, as the train whistle blows and the “stationmaster” awaits, he offers his ticket to anyone (even a “poor boy on the street”) because he’s staying right where he is for another night of bliss.
Why would anyone be so committed so quickly? I’m guessing it’s because this lady makes one fine “Country Pie.” The metaphors run deep in this 1:35 account of culinary wonder in which the narrator declares his unrequited love for all kinds of pie. The lively piano-guitar interplay that leads this country rocker through its five four-line verses (with a four-line bridge and another guitar break—again, no harmonica) sets the tone for a song that reminds you of Big Pink’s playfulness. The bridge says it all: “Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime / What do I care? / Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum / Call me for dinner, honey, I’ll be there.” Not only are his tastes inclusive, he promises not to be wasteful or to “throw” his pie “up in anybody’s face.” The guy just loves his pie, that’s all. That commitment is evident in the closing verse when he declares: “Shake me up that old peach tree / Little Jack Horner’s got nothin’ on me.” The word here is anti-Dylan.
From nocturnal wonders and sweet munchies, we turn to our final love celebration and the cloudy “Lay, Lady, Lay.” Those Nashville Cats had airplay on their minds when they recorded this track. The pedal steel, organ, close vocals, and funky drumming establish a precise musical setting for an uneven account of what appears to be a love triangle. The song is quite repetitive across its four four- to five-line stanzas that unfold without bridges or choruses. The opening verse offers the narrator’s plea for this lady to relax, “lay across” his “big brass bed,” and trust his ability to provide the “colors” that reside in her “mind.” The plot thickens in the second verse:
Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed
Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile
Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile
His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean
And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen
Unless our narrator is enjoying an out-of-body experience (very possible), a third person has entered the fray. After another request for the lady to spend more time with her man, the narrator inquires: “Why wait any longer for the world to begin / You can have your cake and eat it too.” This little piece of anti-Dylan communicates either the trite qualities of Skyline’s songwriting or its insatiable sweet tooth. In any event, the song closes with more requests, more night urges, and more repetition. The Music City pop engines are running full-bore here and Dylan fully acquiesces to its special needs.
When the night moves grow stale and you overdose on pie (or cake), well, things change. Proving to be the well-balanced purveyor of love that it is, Skyline turns to the down side of loving relations with its remaining songs. After the Cash-Dylan cover of “Girl from the North Country” and that song’s pining over the red-headed woman from the “borderline,” Skyline presents a man who wasted his life, a guy in denial, and a fellow whose nights are less than pleasant. It’s almost as if these songs represent the photo negative of the celebrations: one character “threw away” Peggy Day and regrets it, another realizes that the “stationmaster” might be right (it’s time to leave), and yet another desperately misses his down time with his woman—especially at night. All of these characters are on a diet. There’s no country pie anywhere in sight.
“I Threw It All Away” is a well-constructed pop song. This sad, organ-drenched, elegy unfolds in three five-line stanzas with a pivotal five-line bridge setting up the moral of the story. Our “woe is me” tale opens with the narrator’s acknowledgment of his ex-lover’s commitment before he wasted it all through foolish cruelty. Next, he describes his fall. He had it all and didn’t realize it until it was gone. His remorse is complete and his lesson has been learned, as the bridge and final stanza relate:
Love is all there is, it makes the world go ’round,
Love and only love, it can’t be denied.
No matter what you think about it
You just won’t be able to do without it.
Take a tip from one who’s tried.
So if you find someone that gives you all of her love,
Take it to your heart, don’t let it stray,
For one thing that’s certain,
You will surely be a-hurtin’,
If you throw it all away.
The song is coherent, well-constructed, and evocative. There’s no Peggy Day in this man’s world. No. She’s long gone and the narrator transcends his pain by testifying before the world. He faces his sad state, and shares his lot.
But at least he’s not in denial, unlike the central character in “Tell Me That It Isn’t True.” The opening stanzas state this pitiful case in no uncertain terms:
I have heard rumors all over town,
They say that you’re planning to put me down.
Is tell me that it isn’t true.
They say that you’ve been seen with some other man,
That he’s tall, dark and handsome, and you’re holding his hand.
Darlin’, I’m a-countin’ on you,
Tell me that it isn’t true.
This country pie has grown stale, but this character still wants a slice—as the ghost chorus relates. The brief two-line bridge expresses the injury the narrator endures before the song closes with two verses that repeat his dismay, his denial, and his plea for her loyalty. Unlike the character in “I Threw It All Away,” this character gains sympathy through his apparent innocence and his longing for fidelity. But you just know that his perseverance will yield more emptiness.
This tour of Nashville Skyline closes with one final night tale and, appropriately enough, “One More Night.” The four five- to six-line verses with a pivotal two-line bridge communicate that the narrator’s love is long gone; leaving him to cope with all of those moonlit nights of solitude. The song opens by describing our lonesome character on a clear, starry night pining for his lost love. The second verse and bridge state his awful situation:
Oh, it’s shameful and it’s sad,
I lost the only pal I had,
I just could not be what she wanted me to be.
I will turn my head up high
To that dark and rolling sky,
For tonight no light will shine on me.
I was so mistaken when I thought that she’d be true,
I had no idea what a woman in love would do!
The plot thickens here a bit. He failed her expectations; therefore, he lost his pal to another man. The song closes with two repeated verses sandwiched around a guitar break. With the winds whipping about as his heart sinks further in his lonesome sorrow, another joyless night passes by.
Without question, Nashville Skyline is a balanced treatment of pop music’s most extensively mined topic. Love is joyous. Love is hell. Infatuation is resplendent. Rejection—or treachery—is all-consuming. Wrap these sentiments up in two- to three-minute vignettes with steady—but uneventful—instrumental support, and you have, my friends, that patented Nashville sound. Pure anti-Dylan. Push that vocal upfront so the listener can’t confuse the platitudes, provide those instrumental breaks on their regularly scheduled cues, hint of or wink at the emotions that support the expression, and you’re on your way to a mighty-fine Music City song. Now, if you’ve concentrated and read between those lines, be sure to send your conclusions to my editor. She’s interested. Me? I’m off to celebrate the night with some good ol’ country pie.
I’m not being a snob when I question these pop songs. If I were writing about anyone other than Bob Dylan, I’d back off these insinuations. But I am writing about the Nobel laureate and I am wondering where all of this is heading. The Skyline sessions tell me exactly where that is, too. You see, many of the songs recorded during the four Skyline sessions were covers of Johnny Cash tunes or selected Nashville standards. This is not the sort of activity that we would associate with the Basement Strategy; rather, sources report that there was talk of a Cash-Dylan album, so the Cash songs and assorted covers were anything but throwaways or inspirational exercises. The artist was searching for his bearings. His creative nexus was broken. He relied on Cash to play The Band’s role in a more serious manner, and it didn’t work. The process was in disarray: no conscious mission, no Show, no Look, no songwriting. So now the story turns to the dark side of our Iron Ranger’s recovery and that special moment when Bob Dylan told everyone to go to hell.
Self Portrait, New Morning, and Dylan
The Americana Era of Bob Dylan’s lifework was a personally challenging period. While the thrills of discovery massaged childhood dreams and the acts of rebellion unleashed lifelong personality traits, the transitions of recovery tested Dylan’s resilience. Using musicological exercises to unwind (in Big Pink) and adhering to strict songwriting formulas (in Nashville) had merely presented the opportunity for recovery. That mission was a long ways from completion. Here we take a step back, a step forward, and a step sideways in this protracted process of creative rejuvenation. Had Bob Dylan not been so high on that artistic mountain, his fall would not have been so severe. But he was and his climb back up would take time and serious effort. What flowed so naturally for so long had to find another way to surface. Now Bob holds his nose, accepts the stench of commercial rebellion, and goes after his audience in an unheard of fashion. It’s time for Bob Dylan’s self-portrait.
We’ve surely witnessed Dylan’s inventive powers throughout this journey. The creation of the Bob Dylan character was most effective. His historic finger-pointing songs transformed what songwriters could say in a song. His unprecedented impressionism released the pens of every generation of songwriter to follow. Since Kris Kristofferson reports in The Bob Dylan Story that Blonde on Blonde was pop music’s first double album, even his album formats revolutionized the industry. Now, in his own special way, Bob offers another musical innovation: karaoke. What Dylan and Bob Johnston were thinking when they expanded on the failed Dylan-Cash sessions is hard to say. In any event, Self Portrait introduced the musical world to the possibilities of karaoke—whatever they may be.
Once more, Clinton Heylin’s session chronology assists our understanding of just how the Portrait album came to pass. After recording in Nashville and New York, overdubs were added in Nashville. Here Dylan’s method of record production shifted from its performance-based orientation to an ensemble method. Things would never be the same again. He applied his first vocal overdub during these sessions. After parts of some songs were recorded, the tapes were forwarded to Nashville where Johnson recruited Dylan veterans Charlie McCoy and Ken Buttrey to add overdubs (to their disbelief). Several songs feature layers and layers of bass, drums, piano, fiddle, dobro, trombone, cello, keyboards, viola, violin, saxophone, and according to Heylin, an arranger worked the album’s tenth session (Barry McDonald). Songs were also finished without Dylan’s direct participation. Thus, we are a long, long way from the Another Side of Bob Dylan experience: “Yea! Heavy, Music City.”
The results are certainly mixed. The 24-track, 74-minute double album was issued in June 1970. Rolling Stone’s review seems to reflect the consensus opinion with its lead: “What is this shit?” If you haven’t heard Portrait, that comment may seem harsh. If you have, you understand the sentiment. The album offers four songs from Dylan’s Isle of Wight concert (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “The Mighty Quinn,” “Minstrel Boy,” and “She Belongs to Me”), a host of surprising covers (e.g., “Let It Be Me,” “Blue Moon,” “The Boxer,” “Early Morning Rain”), traditional tunes (e.g., “Little Sadie”), and some “interesting” new songs (e.g., “All the Tired Horses” and “Wigwam”). Being the positive guy that I am, I’ll open with the good news.
Regardless of what the popular press may suggest, there is good news on this record—if you look at it from a different point of view. For instance, “Woogie Boogie” is fantastic. Despite the overdubs, the song is a classic example of a wonderful musical style. Correspondingly, the Isle of Wight track, “She Belongs to Me,” demonstrates the musical approach that will soon render Planet Waves. But what’s truly interesting is the set of songs that have to be removed from their Self Portrait context, reorganized, and presented in a different light. You see, Portrait contains a show that I deem the “Bob Dylan Revue.” These songs represent NashVegas at its finest—doors open at 2:00 AM folks. The layers upon layers of sound, the occasionally cheesy backing vocals by the Bobettes (from what I can ascertain, Hilda Harris, Maeretha Stewart, and Albertine Robinson with a number of vocalists overdubbed later), and Bob’s crooning yield one strong Las Vegas show dressed in a Nashville Nude suit.
The set opens with the swinging “Living the Blues” (the Bobettes shine), slows for the “Blue Moon” cover (Elvis is in the building), pauses for the obligatory bad song “Take a Message to Mary,” rebounds with a strong Nashville number “Take Me As I Am,” continues with the orchestral “Belle Isle,” and—if the crowd is hot and the promoter gives an approving wink—the program may expand to include “Let It Be Me” and “It Hurts Me Too.” The evening concludes with a grand finale “Wigwam” and the encore “Alberta #2” (gotta get the crowd back to those poker machines in the lobby!).
The performance’s ebb and flow is masterful as Dylan opens with his own composition, “Living the Blues,” as he strolls across the stage, crooning away while the backing vocalists add the kind of musical depth you find only in NashVegas. The “Blue Moon” pause is pure genius (the Bobettes!) as is the “Take a Message” lull before the storm that is “Take Me” and “Belle Isle.” But it’s how you leave ’em in NashVegas, and the Bob Dylan Revue does not disappoint here either. “Wigwam” is a one-of-a-kind closer. With Big Horns blaring (and more to come!) and Dylan humming (that’s right) along with the tune, the song cranks to an inspiring crescendo. I wonder what color lamé Bob would wear as he sashays in front of the crowded tables, “la la laing” his way through the number, accepting a soft rain of roses, panties, and tie-dyed boxer shorts. As the crowd nears exhaustion, the Revue returns for an encore that leaves them with “something” (even the harmonica has glitter on “Alberta #2”). What a night.
Somebody has a sense of humor.
Like all great art, Self Portrait embraces the ying-yang of life as well. To the extent that the Revue works, there are those sad tracks that don’t. When Dylan fights his way through “Early Morning Rain” you find yourself on the edge of your seat, anticipating The Band to appear and launch into the basement masterpiece “Hills of Mexico.” I mean, this has to be a joke, right? The laughs continue with what I call The Speechless Series—a group of songs that take you beyond words; for all of the wrong reasons. Here you wonder if Big Pink engineer Garth Hudson would’ve rolled tape or exercised better judgment. The Sadie Chronicles (“In Search of Little Sadie” and “Little Sadie”—same song, different arrangement) would, no doubt, have been considered to be a waste of precious basement tape. “The Boxer” would’ve miraculously caused Big Pink’s colors to devolve into a familiar shade of yellow; signifying its artistic value (the double-tracked vocals are a once-in-a-lifetime moment—Bob singing with Bob). Still, as the song proceeds, you get used to it—you know, sort of like you do when your eyes are dilated and you accept the disorientation. “Minstrel Boy” is a genuine basement outtake. The drunken vocals are pure Pink (at least I hope they’re drunk!).
At the top of this list is the incredible version of “Rolling Stone” from Isle of Wight. I was wrong when I once suggested that this track could be used as a motivational tape for karaoke performers. I’m younger than that now, and I realize that in karaoke you try to follow the tune in your own haphazard way. This is not like that at all. This is more like the kind of song four college freshmen would belt out while running away from the law during an underage drinking raid at a party—their minds are someplace else. (By the way, if caught, these guys would spend their time in jail singing Portrait’s “Mighty Quinn.”) So, to the extent that the Bob Dylan Revue shines, these songs sink. The commercial art world is a challenging environment.
Finally, we turn to those songs that fall somewhere in-between these extremes. The singing-talking voice used in “Days of 49” fits within this category as does another cover, “Copper Kettle.” In the latter song, what starts out as “The Little Drummer Boy” morphs into “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The overproduction is staggering. Of genuine interest is the musical style evidenced in “Gotta Travel On.” Too hokey to be included in The Revue (oh my!), this song uses a production strategy that will dominate future projects. The gospel-style backing vocals introduced on Portrait represent the wave of the future in that Bob Dylan will rely heavily on this soundstage from time-to-time. At times—as per Slow Train and Saved—to marvelous ends; at others—as per Street-Legal—to mixed results.
And it all starts here. A wandering creative nexus is searching for its bearings through a weaponized Basement Strategy. The laureate is attacking his world through distorted invocations of the “great American song tradition.” There is evidence of karaoke on Self Portrait. “Early Morning Rain” is the real thing. That he uses different voices to fit different songs is also telltale. From the third track’s “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know” to the fourth track’s “Days of 49” to the fifth track’s “Early Morning Rain,” Dylan deploys three distinct voices in service of the respective songs.
What was Bob Dylan thinking as he assembled Portrait? What were his objectives? He shared his motivations with Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in 1984 and explained his response to an audience that was increasingly debilitating:
I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, “Well, let’s go on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,” you know? They’ll go on to somebody else. But the whole idea backfired. Because the album went out there, and the people said, “This ain’t what we want,” and they got more resentful. And then I did this portrait for the cover. I mean, there was no title for that album. I knew somebody who had some paints and a square canvas, and I did the cover up in about five minutes. And I said, “Well, I’m gonna call this album Self Portrait”. . . . And to me, it was a joke. [Loder asks why a double album] Well, it wouldn’t have held up as a single album—then it really would’ve been bad, you know. I mean, if you’re gonna put a lot of crap on it, you might as well load it up!
These comments to Cameron Crowe are also instructive:
Self Portrait . . . was a bunch of tracks that we’d done all the time I’d gone to Nashville. We did that stuff to get a (studio) sound. To open up we’d do two or three songs, just to get things right and then we’d go on and do what we were going to do. And then there was a lot of other stuff that was just on the shelf. . . . So I just figured I’d put all this stuff together and put it out, my own bootleg record, so to speak. . . . Also, I wasn’t going to be anybody’s puppet and I figured this record would put an end to that.
This was Dylan’s attitude at that time. With his manager allegedly abusing his publishing income, his critics overanalyzing every syllable of his work, his fans rummaging through his garbage and hassling his family, his connection with his creative nexus strained, bootleggers making fortunes off his labors, and his contract with his record company under negotiations, Dylan decided to record cover versions of country, traditional, and pop songs thereby resting the muse and, perhaps, reducing the publishing royalties. So, the man weaponized the Basement Strategy! Producer Bob Johnston offers this strong response to Portrait’s critics in the BBC’s The Bob Dylan Story:
Critics are an eternal mediocrity living at the expense of genius either to belittle it or destroy it. A race of insects happily eating away at the foliage of art. [Wow. Thanks, Bob.] He came in and he said “What do you think about me doing other people’s songs?” And I said, “Great man, whatdaya got?” And he got a bunch of bibles and books and poetry and all that shit, came in and sat down and he recorded as long as he wanted to and we had all of those songs. I thought a bunch of ’em were wonderful. Presley things and all of those others—“Leaving on a Jet Plane” . . . he loved the songs so he recorded ’em all. Wasn’t any, like, hidden agenda.
This is not the Basement Strategy. This is not a group of seasoned friends exploring music history. Dylan’s and Johnston’s comments are at odds with one another. Was Dylan telling his audience off? Was he making his own bootleg? Was he seriously telescoping the songs searching for their possibilities? The extent to which problems on the business end affected the creative side of Dylan’s work is uncertain. Assuredly, there were problems. In response, this thing was assembled in the crassest manner; however, if disassembled, it may be reassembled in a way that makes sense. Johnson’s argument has merit. There is a NashVegas set here. There is a foreshadowing of Street-Legal here. And, to be sure, there is some filler here. As noted in Bob’s Way, learning involves the resolution of confusion and this portion of the canon reflects the confusion portion of that equation.
Whatever Dylan did to trick out the lyrics for Harding enabled him to build another selection of songs for what would become New Morning. However, unlike Harding, Morning’s songs display a musical diversity that is unique within the lifework to date. What’s so strange is how Dylan made Morning while recording the cover songs that would find their way onto Dylan. The Dylan project takes the Bob Dylan Revue even closer to the Street-Legal format. How these two approaches to music-making coexisted is anybody’s guess. The gospel backing vocals appear to be the common denominator, so perhaps that was the bridge. The two albums certainly deploy totally different musical strategies.
Sources indicate that all sorts of projects may have been in the works (e.g., Chronicles reports that several songs were composed for Archibald MacLeish’s play Scratch). There was an awful lot of recording taking place and it appears that the covers that wound up on Dylan consumed more of the artist’s time than his new material. The New Morning songs appear to be afterthoughts. Take, for example, Heylin’s session chronology reports the activities of June 3, 1970, when Team Dylan recorded “Jamaica Farewell” and “Long Black Veil” (which failed to make either cut); two takes of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and one of “Lily of the West” (both songs are on Dylan, but different takes may have been used), and at the end of the session, New Morning’s “One More Weekend.” He recorded songs from his back catalog (e.g., “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Rainy Day Women”), new songs that wound up on his next greatest hits collection released in November 1971 (e.g., “Watching the River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”), and odd songs of different stripes.
There are existing song lists that indicate a blend of Dylan and New Morning was on the table—some kind of Self Portrait, Volume 2. In 2013, Columbia issued the Bootleg Series Volume 10 and Another Self Portrait (1969–1971). Here many songs from the original production are presented without all of the overdubs alongside songs that were omitted from that record (e.g., a series of songs with George Harrison). Another Self Portrait offers a very different listening experience via its silky-smooth sounds. It also adds fuel to the curiosity about all of this. Maybe Dylan’s Gemini personality was operating on two planes. Maybe he was as lost as he says he was and feeling his way out of his situation (my vote). Maybe he was as flat-out mad as he seems to be in the Loder interview. Whatever it was, it was a part of his recovery—a mission that regains momentum with New Morning.
That the Dylan commercial machine was aware of Portrait’s limitations is evident by the speed with which New Morning came to the rescue. Released October 21, 1970, this would be the last studio album of new material produced by Bob Johnston (Al Kooper, Leon Russell, and Dylan also sat in the producer’s chair at one time or another). Morning’s 12 songs (running almost 36 minutes) focus on loving relationships with three exceptions: one song of personal celebration (the autobiographical “Day of the Locusts”) and two nonstories (“Three Angels” and “Father of Night”). The nonstories differ from Dylan’s wordplay or impressionism in that they offer clear, coherent lines that simply describe a scene (“Angels”) and praise its subject (“Father”).
The love songs, of course, focus on good and bad things (e.g., “Time Passes Slowly,” the cloudy “Went to See the Gypsy,” and “Sign on the Window”). The record is dominated by the six songs celebrating love: “If Not for You,” “Winterlude,” “If Dogs Run Free,” “New Morning,” “One More Weekend,” and “The Man in Me.” The joys of love are communicated through a variety of musical genres: a waltz (“Winterlude”), a scat jazz routine (“If Dogs”), classic pop songs (“If Not” and the title cut), rhythm and blues (“One More”), and country pop (the prayerful “The Man”). The shift in musical approaches contributes to the album’s pacing and reduces the redundancy that occurs when songs say the same thing repeatedly. We begin with songs of relational joy.
The ecstasies of relational contentment are presented through a pop music lens with “If Not for You” and “New Morning.” “If Not” offers our lone piece of harmonica as it otherwise sticks to tried and true pop music sound strategies (simple rhythm, light organ). Presented in four five- to six-line stanzas with a six-line bridge, the song extols the wonders of relational codependence. “If not” for his lover, our narrator would unable to “find the door” or “see the floor,” he would endure sleepless nights, his “winter would have no spring,” he would be unable to “hear the robin sing,” his life would be turned on end. The bridge (which is repeated as the third verse) explains why:
If not for you
My sky would fall,
Rain would gather too.
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all,
I’d be lost if not for you,
And you know it’s true.
The song is the epitome of the “I can’t make it without you” love song as it goes about its business in its own light and lively way.
That trend holds true for the second pop installment and the album’s title cut. In “New Morning” Dylan deploys a four verses (three with seven lines, the final verse with five) with a two-line bridge structure to weave a systematic account of love’s wonders. The strategy is simple: each verse uses three lines for a scenic description, pauses for the “So happy just to see you smile” or “So happy just to be alive” segue, and closes with the two-line embedded chorus. The light, bouncy organ-led backing reinforces the joyful expression. The first verse demonstrates the technique:
Can’t you hear that rooster crowin’?
Rabbit runnin’ down across the road
Underneath the bridge where the water flowed through
So happy just to see you smile
Underneath the sky of blue
On this new morning, new morning
On this new morning with you.
From there, the narrator ponders an automobile starting and moving down the road (verse 2), feels the sun shining as a ground hog frolics by a stream (verse 3), and simply enjoys his happy life (verse 4). Why? Because love is in his life and, for that, he is very, very thankful. “If Not for You” and “New Morning” are classic pop compositions that feature direct language presented in a coherent way.
To enliven this age-old tale, Dylan turns to different ways of presenting it. Let’s start with a waltz, shall we? “Winterlude” uses the John Wesley Harding–perfected three eight-line verses structure to praise a blissful relationship. The opening stanza sets the pace:
Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’,
Winterlude by the road tonight.
Tonight there will be no quarrelin’,
Ev’rything is gonna be all right.
Oh I see by the angel beside me
That love has a reason to shine.
You’re the one I adore, come over here and give me more,
Then Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine.
The waltz tempo and the Bobettes beautiful harmonies provide the perfect backdrop for these slightly syrupy sentiments that continue as the narrator praises his “little apple,” urges her to accompany him “down to the chapel,” return and “cook up a meal” (!), and afterward, enjoy the simple pleasures of a winter day. The final verse offers more of the same. What could be finer than love in the snow?
How about a nice cryptic dog tale? “If Dogs” shifts sonic gears to a scat jazz format with a marvelous piano riff as this loving little number takes a while to get to where it’s going. At first, the narrator is philosophical—“If dogs run free, then why not we?”—before he explains how his “ears hear a symphony / Of two mules, trains and rain” and conveys his optimism about the future. In the second verse he reminds us that his “mind weaves a symphony / And tapestry of rhyme” as he concludes “To each his own, it’s all unknown.” The third verse takes us home:
If dogs run free, then what must be,
Must be, and that is all.
True love can make a blade of grass
Stand up straight and tall.
In harmony with the cosmic sea,
True love needs no company,
It can cure the soul, it can make it whole,
If dogs run free.
As Dylan works through his treatise, the backing vocalist scats along adding her emotional tones to the philosophical platitudes that indicate how love is the end all, be all of life.
The demonstration of how to match romantic lyrics with different musical genres continues with the Delta blues and country pop tunes that are “One More Weekend” and “The Man in Me,” respectively. The blues-based “Weekend” hammers home the fun of another holiday with the one you love by way of this album’s most substantial instrumental tracks. Using four four-line verses with a perfectly situated middle-eight to tell this very repetitive tale, the song uses that age-old blues vernacular to do the deed. We open with “Slippin’ and slidin’ like a weasel on the run, / I’m lookin’ good to see you, yeah, and we can have some fun” before repeating the title for two lines and driving home the need for “one more weekend with you.” The metaphors do their thing in the following stanzas as the narrator urges his love interest to “Come on down to my ship, honey, ride on deck” and announces that they’ll be “Comin’ and goin’ like a rabbit in the wood” before his concluding simile, “Like a needle in a haystack, I’m gonna find you yet, / You’re the sweetest gone mama that this boy’s ever gonna get.” Get the drift? For the first time, but not the last, Bob has exchanged Robert Johnson’s big-assed truths for big-assed platitudes.
We shift gears to country-pop with “The Man in Me” and its “la la la” vocals, light backing support, and simple piano-organ interplay. With a classic three four-line verses and a four-line bridge providing the song’s structure, “Man” works just like “Weekend.” That is, two lines describe the man or his situation before the standard two-line tag. The song opens with the narrator explaining that he’ll do “any task” without regard for “compensation,” since, as the embedded chorus relates: “Take a woman like you / To get through to the man in me.” Storms may rage and he may sometimes hide from his oppressors, but she pulls him through. The bridge explains why:
But, oh, what a wonderful feeling
Just to know that you are near,
Sets my heart a-reeling
From my toes up to my ears.
Our Iron Ranger mines the same songwriting vein through these songs, but with different tools. In each case, the lyrics are tailored to fit their soundstage. Pop songs use platitudes. Scat jazz jumps about. A waltz floats. Country pop is homely. And the blues are a bit randy. Just as he used the song’s lyrical structure to shape his words on Harding, Dylan uses these musical structures to do the same. As he told Jonathon Cott, he may be enduring some form of “amnesia” in his songwriting, but he’s fighting it; searching for some key to unlock that once unconscious lyrical magic. Maybe he’s trying too hard.
The record’s love complaints vary in their intensity. “Time Passes Slowly” and “Sign on the Window” leave little doubt about their points, whereas “Went to See the Gypsy” is more cryptic and evasive. All use the piano to establish their respective moods. A real “woe is me” number, “Time” uses the standard four four-line verses with a four-line bridge format to state its case via a simple, light piano-guitar accompaniment. In the first verse, the narrator describes how time passes slowly when you’re in nature, lost in your dreams. Next, he reminisces about the days with his “sweetheart” and enjoying domestic life with her family. The bridge and final verse seal the deal:
Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town,
Ain’t no reason to go to the fair.
Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down,
Ain’t no reason to go anywhere.
Time passes slowly up here in the daylight,
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right,
Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day,
Time passes slowly and fades away.
From the sound of things, the narrator’s situation is not about to improve anytime soon. That pessimism appears in the solemn “Sign on the Window” as well; however, this time, a turning point occurs and the song ends optimistically. The three five-line verses with a three-line bridge song opens by offering a series of signs that appear on a window, a door, a street, and a porch. One says “Lonely,” while another relates “No Company Allowed,” another states “Y’ Don’t Own Me,” and the third unveils our story: “Three’s A Crowd.” The second verse states the narrator’s case:
Her and her boyfriend went to California,
Her and her boyfriend done changed their tune.
My best friend said, “Now didn’ I warn ya,
Brighton girls are like the moon,
Brighton girls are like the moon.”
Interestingly, after the bridge reinforces the narrator’s darkness, the tide turns. For some reason he resolves to build a “cabin in Utah,” get married, go fishing, and have a “bunch of kids who call me ‘Pa’.” He concludes “That must be what it’s all about,” the next line repeats that view, and the story ends. Apparently, his optimism wins out.
We continue our exploration of New Morning with a slight relational complaint (“Gypsy”) and a personal celebration (“Day of the Locusts”) that share identical songwriting strategies. Although their structures differ slightly, both march through their respective accounts from beginning to end. The autobiographical “Locusts” was written in response to Dylan’s acceptance of an honorary doctorate from Princeton University and, therefore, recalls the events of that apparently hot and exasperating day. The song’s four eight-line verses (the final stanza adds a line) use four lines to describe something from that day and the final four lines to praise those singing locusts who were celebrating the artist’s achievement (“Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singing just for me” closes each verse along with locusts sound effects). First, the narrator captures the scene with its seats “stained” with “tears and perspiration,” the busy birds, and silent participants. He continues by describing a dark, smelly “chamber” in which the “judges” conferred, and how as he was leaving, he saw “light” enter the room. Next, he talks of the heat and a man standing next to him with an exploding head (“Well, I was prayin’ the pieces wouldn’t fall on me.”) before concluding: “I put down my robe, picked up my diploma, / Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive, / Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota, / Sure was glad to get out of there alive.” One gains an image of Bob motoring away to a serenade of loving locusts.
“Went to See the Gypsy” follows a similar narrative logic in a more cryptic fashion by way of yet another organ-piano based musical backdrop. The song marches through the story, but the characters aren’t developed. Since the song pivots on the visit with the gypsy and we don’t know who or what that is, well, things get pretty darned cloudy. In the first verse, the narrator meets the gypsy and they greet one another (a scene that seems like it came straight out of “Frankie Lee”). Suddenly, he ventures down to the lobby, meets a “pretty dancing girl” who shouts at him to go back upstairs to the gypsy, declaring: “Go on back to see the gypsy / He can move you from the rear, / Drive you from your fear, / Bring you through the mirror. / He did it in Las Vegas, / And he can do it here.” The bridge pauses for a brief scene in which the narrator stares off at a “river of tears” with “music” in his “ears.” Afterward, he returns to the gypsy’s room only to find it vacated. Both the gypsy and the pretty dancing girl are gone. He decides to sit and watch the sun rise “From that little Minnesota town.” Clearly, something’s happening here and we don’t know what it is, but it hints of a complaint of sorts. Something somehow created that “river of tears” and either the gypsy or the girl is related in some manner. So, I suggest this is some form of cryptic complaint along the lines of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” or “Dear Landlord.”
Speaking of John Wesley Harding tunes, we witness an extension of the fragmentary “All along the Watchtower” songwriting strategy in “Three Angels” and “Father of Night.” These songs don’t feature stories arranged in a reverse order, they aren’t stories at all. “Angels” is a 20-line poem set to church music (winding organ, super light rhythm and acoustic guitar, and gospel backing vocals). The first four lines establish the context:
Three angels up above the street,
Each one playing a horn,
Dressed in green robes with wings that stick out,
They’ve been there since Christmas morn.
From there, we have line after line of street activity descriptions. The three angels look down on a wild guy from Montana, a brightly dressed lady, a rented trailer, a bus, dogs, pigeons, a man wearing a “badge,” three guys “crawlin’ on their way back to work,” a bakery vehicle, and more. The track closes in this fashion:
The angels play their horns all day,
The whole earth in progression seems to pass by.
But does anyone hear the music they play,
Does anyone even try?
With that, our brief hymn (running 2:09) comes to a quiet close. This sound—the sound of hymns—is percolating in the laureate’s musical mind. This is all leading to something, and “Father of Night” supports that trend.
“Father” is three six-line verses of respectful praise. Its gospel sound is as undeniable as its faithful message as a simple piano-backing vocalist soundstage paves the way for the Word. He is the “Father” of all things: day, night, black, white, mountains, time, dreams, the waterways, the grain, the wheat, cold and heat, air and trees, and time itself. The opening verse captures how this hymn of praise unfolds:
Father of night, Father of day
Father, who taketh the darkness away,
Father, who teacheth the bird to fly,
Builder of rainbows up in the sky,
Father of loneliness and pain,
Father of love and Father of pain.
The song continues with the list I cited above. The final line sums it all: “Father of whom we most solemnly praise.” Much like John Wesley Harding’s closing and its two tracks of pop love songs, New Morning ends with two songs that address heavenly matters. Again, the capstone strategy recurs. Dylan followed Harding with an entire album of love songs. Would he repeat the practice with these hymns?
As we’ve seen, this is the most eclectic album to this point. The record uses pop, waltz, scat jazz, blues, gospel, and country sounds to—in more cases than not—articulate views on loving relations. Now, this may be viewed two ways. One is that it’s a good thing, since the writer deploys various musical platforms to present his ideas. The other is that it’s a bad thing, since the work is directionless; wallowing in pop platitudes. There is, however, a thematic anchor holding this work in its designated place: love is on the artist’s agenda. Nevertheless, like most of the writing of this era, the songwriting is formulaic. Bridges, middle-eights, repeated lines and verses control most of these songs. That this is a transitional moment in the Dylan canon is abundantly clear.
Contributing to that view is the gospel tone that permeates the record. While these songs may not be full-fledged hymns, the two nonstories surely embrace religious sentiments, and the churchy organ and backing vocals use gospel sounds in no uncertain terms. Perhaps this is because religion is inching its way into the songwriter’s consciousness. Faith has always been a part of Dylan’s writing, but it’s moving closer to a position of dominance. The Bob Dylan Revue certainly displays a gospel feel—a trend that controls Dylan.
Released in November 1973, Dylan is widely viewed to be Columbia Records’ “revenge” album. You see, for the one time in his protracted career, Dylan left Columbia after his contract expired in 1972. He signed a one-album-at-a-time deal with David Geffen and Asylum Records. While Geffen received but two albums before Dylan returned to his original label, the Dylan release was a shot over the old bow. There was, after all, album after album worth of outtakes, unreleased songs, and live shows in Columbia’s vaults; therefore, releasing Dylan provided the writing on the commercial wall: Columbia is liable to do anything with Dylan’s back catalog.
Where Dylan stands in the lifework is questionable. Since it wasn’t released in a compact disc format until 2012, it is largely considered to be a throwaway. That’s too bad, since this record of covers is nothing like Self Portrait (although two of the album’s nine songs are from those sessions). There’s no fooling around as there is on Portrait. There are no layers of sound added for the sake of adding layers of sound. Until the final two tracks (“A Fool Such as I” and “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue”—the two songs from Portrait), the Bobettes restrain themselves and sing in the gospel—not NashVegas—tradition. Only on those two Portrait remnants does Dylan use his Skyline crooning voice. On the remaining seven tracks, we hear the Bob Dylan of days gone by.
The album opens with “Lily of the West” (by Davies and Peterson) and continues with: “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (Weiss, Peretti, and Creatore), “Sarah Jane” (Dylan receives the credit here), “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” (LaFarge), “Mr. Bojangles” (Walker), “Mary Ann” (traditional), “Big Yellow Taxi” (Mitchell), and closes with the two Portrait songs, “A Fool” (Abner) and “Spanish Is” (traditional).
The covers jump all over the place. The western saga “Lily” sounds like “Ghost Riders in the Sky” with seemingly misplaced backing vocals confusing its impact. The opening and closing harmonica solos on “Can’t Help Falling” add a Dylan touch to a fine arrangement—the song is treated seriously in my view. “Sarah Jane” and “Mary Ann” sound like a Rolling Thunder Revue preview while “Mr. Bojangles” is an honest-to-god cover (c’mon—go there!). “Ira Hayes” fits in with “Lily” in its authenticity and Dylan’s talking segments add to the song’s solemn treatment (super organ and backing vocals).
“Big Yellow Taxi” is worth the price of admission. It’s a hoot! With a cheesy-beyond-belief organ paving the way, the song instantly turns into parody. It’s just not believable (especially the Bobettes). What is particularly funny is the shift in lyrics. Dylan changes but one set of lyrics and it’s that segment that contains the song’s title. If you know the original you understand that Joni Mitchell sings about two things in the song: paving paradise and losing her lover. You just don’t appreciate things until they’re gone is her hook. In the original, she moves from one topic to the other by describing how she heard a door slam and watched a cab—hence, the title—take her lover away. Apparently Dylan can’t go there since there is a direct gender reference in the original, so he changes the line to describe a bulldozer (that’s the same color as Mitchell’s taxi) knocking over his home. What a scream.
Dylan, for some reason, closes with the over-the-top dimension of the Bob Dylan Revue and the two Self Portrait outtakes. These songs fly out the basement window, past the sleeping dog, and straight for the Nevada desert. Unlike the other covers, they are—to my ears—flat out disingenuous. Still, they’re the exception, not the rule. “Bojangles” is sincere. “Can’t Help Falling” is a signature treatment. “Lily” and “Ira” receive respect. And “Big Yellow Taxi” is straight from the basement—they had to edit out the laughter—it’s got to be there somewhere. I just don’t think that Bob is telescoping these songs as much as he’s enjoying them.
So now we reach the end of a fascinating era. Dylan’s mission takes those steps I mentioned earlier. He steps back with Portrait. He inches forward with New Morning. He steps to the side while easing forward with Dylan. Not until the Pop Icon Era will Bob write in this fashion again. When we pause and pull back, we instantly note the transitional qualities of these efforts. Dylan’s creative nexus was in disarray. Without The Show, there was no Look. Without The Look, there’s no need for a Script; consequently, no songwriting. Instead, Bob weaponized the Basement Strategy and attacked. How would the laureate repair this situation? Fortunately, the answer was not long in the making: it was time to restore the nexus by returning to the stage with The Band.
Dylan’s mission of recovery concludes with the dual Planet Waves-Tour ’74 project. Although the tour will dredge up bad memories and inspire another rebellious response, it created the opportunity to record with The Band and that required new songs. Dylan wrote the Planet Waves songs in a month. Clearly, Bob’s creative nexus was focused. Waves contains some extraordinary songs. There’s no plugging phrases into predetermined structures here. The Bobettes are on vacation. Nashville is history. And Bob Dylan turns his corner as The Show returns. Let’s take a moment to catch up with the events that led to this critical point in the artist’s rejuvenation.
In 1970, Dylan moved back to New York City and formally ended his relationship with Albert Grossman (although things would linger with the lawyers). Bob recorded with George Harrison in early spring. In March 1971, he recorded new songs that found their way onto his second greatest hits compilation released that November (e.g., “Watching the River Flow”). Dylan appeared in George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971 (his first performance since Isle of Wight in 1969). He returned to topical songwriting with the single “George Jackson” that fall. And he recorded with Allen Ginsberg, Happy Traum, and Doug Sahm, respectively. It was a busy time.
A major development unfolded in November 1972. What better way to leave the past and concentrate on the future than to fulfill one of your childhood dreams. When Dylan played the wonderfully named character “Alias” in Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, our Iron Ranger returned to his creative womb. So much of Dylan comes from those 1950s movies Bobby Zimmerman viewed over and over and over in Hibbing. Once he accepted the part he loaded up his wife and kids and took off for those hills of Mexico. When he arrived in Durango to join Kris Kristofferson and the cast, things turned weird fast. Peckinpah was out of control—drunk all day, we’re told. Howard Sounes reports that the director urinated on the film screen during a daily screening and cites Kristofferson’s response: “I remember Bob turning and looking at me with the most perfect reaction, you know: what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” Peckinpah fought relentlessly with the film studio, M.G.M., and the conflict affected all involved.
Part of Dylan’s role in the project involved making his first movie soundtrack. The recording began in Mexico City and was completed in Burbank in early 1973. He worked studiously writing songs and designing the film’s score—often while watching footage and feeling his way through the scenes. Much of that work was in vain since M.G.M. hacked away at Peckinpah’s version and displaced several of Dylan’s carefully arranged instrumentals. One untouched moment involved the song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and its beautiful placement in a sad scene. The song also charted well as a single. Dylan did a fine job with the movie’s sound design; although he swore off the practice immediately afterward. Columbia released the soundtrack in July 1973 after some internal debate over its timing. When all was said and done, we can safely say the experience yielded mixed results for Bob Dylan. No doubt, he enjoyed the acting even though the soundtrack experience was disappointing. Still, Bruce Langhorne told Sounes that Bob didn’t follow traditional prescriptions for a soundtrack in that he focused on “the feeling” of the film; once more, our emotional anthropologist brought his skills to the task at hand.
These events yielded meaningful lessons for an artist in transition. Working with arrangers and producers, witnessing Peckinpah’s struggles with management, and seeing the director’s work slip away from him, Dylan gained a deep appreciation for artistic control. After undergoing his own artistic-commercial struggles and observing the same with Peckinpah, Bob assumed control over his affairs (e.g., forming his own publishing company) and started anew.
Part of the restart involved an agreement to participate in the huge Tour ’74 operation promoted by Bill Graham and David Geffen. After signing with Asylum, Dylan entered the Los Angeles studio with The Band to record the album that they would promote during the reunion tour. While Dylan and The Band had unsuccessfully recorded together in the fall of 1965, these sessions were different. The Band had developed its own musical style and enjoyed its own commercial success. Now, these 1966 road veterans would pull it all together and create music that synthesized their respective histories into a single statement. The November sessions required a little over a week to complete. It was music-making on the run. Dylan’s creative nexus was on the mend.
Waves features 11 tracks (running just over 42 minutes) that convey that which had never before been captured in the studio: The Dylan-Band sound that was perfected during the basement experience. This is not the approach heard during the 1966 tours; although you can hear bits of it among the noise that is the “She Belongs to Me” recording from Isle of Wight. The Band’s musical style features a dynamic interplay between Robertson’s guitar, Hudson’s organ and accordion, and the Helm, Manual, and Danko rhythm section. Their sound is a distinct version of American roots music. Dylan’s vocals complemented these musical treks across Americana (every song feels like a carnival or a funeral). His lyrics concentrate on one topic with one exception: “Forever Young” (offered in two versions; one fast, one slow) is a prayer for his children’s futures. “Love” controls the remaining nine tracks through songs that complain about (“Going, Going, Gone,” “Hazel,” and “Dirge”) and celebrate that haphazard emotional state (“On a Night Like This,” “Tough Mama,” “Something There Is about You,” “You Angel You,” “Never Say Goodbye,” and “Wedding Song”). We begin with songs celebrating love.
In 1980, Dylan released an album called Saved. But that record should have been named Saved, Revisited because the original “saved” is in the six songs of relational joy that appear on Waves. After celebrating love by the fireplace on a snowy night in “On a Night Like This,” the five remaining love songs address how the glorious women featured in these stories saved their narrators’ lives. At times, these tributes appear as parts of other activities; at other times, they are the focal point of the story.
We open with “Tough Mama.” With a foot-stomping instrumental track leading the way, the song charts the narrator’s loving admiration for his wonderfully strong woman. The song—featuring four seven-line verses sandwiched around a nine-line stanza—opens with praise for our tough lady, references to her “sister” (currently on the road ), her “papa” (now in jail), and admiring statements about her perseverance. Apparently, “tough mama” has reasons for her toughness. The next verse discusses specific life events she has endured (seemingly, old boyfriends) and how those days have passed for our “Sweet Goddess.” The narrator—her “perfect stranger”—promises a better future:
Silver Angel
With the badge of the lonesome road sewed in your sleeve,
I’d be grateful if this golden ring you would receive.
Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch,
I stood alone upon the ridge and all I did was watch.
Sweet Goddess
It must be time to carve another notch.
I’m crestfallen
The world of illusion is at my door,
I ain’t a-haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore.
The prison walls are crumblin’, there is no end in sight,
I’ve gained some recognition but I lost my appetite.
Dark Beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight.
The plot thickens here. After once again praising her strength, he asks her to marry him and give love another try. Suddenly, he turns introspective. He’s dispirited. He perceives that things are falling apart. An illusionary world threatens him and he’s fighting back. It sounds as though he’s had “too much of nothing.” His success has cost him his drive. His solution? His “Dark Beauty.” She is the way out of his “prison.” He believes in her power to save him just as she’s saved herself.
The woman-as-savior theme advances in “Something There Is about You.” A strong guitar opens this systematic account of the narrator’s life and his new romantic curiosity. The first verse observes how she reminds him of something from the past—maybe the distant past. Next, he recalls his youth, his life in Duluth, and once more, how she puts him in touch with those “long-forgotten” sentiments in a magical way. Yet, this special lady does more than remind him of days-gone-by; she’s the key to his future:
Suddenly I found you and the spirit in me sings
Don’t have to look no further, you’re the soul of many things.
I could say that I’d be faithful, I could say it in one sweet, easy breath
But to you that would be cruelty and to me it surely would be death.
Something there is about you that moves with style and grace
I was in a whirlwind, now I’m in some better place.
My hand’s on the saber and you’ve picked up the baton
Somethin’ there is about you that I can’t quite put my finger on.
The song pivots on the third of the four four-line verses. Her mystery is inspiring and he wants to commit to her, yet he’s torn—apparently out of loyalty. He’s just not going to lie to her, no matter how easy it is. The fourth verse reveals the state of the relationship. She saved him and he’s happier for it. Now he’s prepared to address whatever conflict is before him with her by his side (sounds as if he’s ready to wage war). Her mystery lingers, yet he believes in her. She is his answer.
“You Angel You” and “Never Say Goodbye” also involve the woman as savior theme; however, the songs are nowhere near as complex as “Mama” and “Something There Is.” “You Angel” is a very repetitive, simple account of how that special woman did it again. With a pop song’s structure providing the framework (four four-line verses with two identical five-line bridges), we hear statements of praise, commitment, adoration, and gratitude. The second bridge and final verse capture the story’s essence:
You know I can’t sleep at night for trying
Never did feel this way before,
Never did get up and walk the floor.
If this is love then gimmie more
And more and more and more
You angel you
You got me under your wing.
The way you walk and the way you talk
It says everything.
As does this song! Our narrator has apparently never had to work in a relationship before and he loves the experience. The fact that he worries about her in the fine tradition of Ernest Tubb’s “Walkin’ the Floor” just inspires him more. The harder he has to work, the more he has to worry, the deeper in love he falls. He surrenders to her loving ways and treasures his subservience.
“Never Say” opens with a splendid acoustic guitar that is joined by a sharp lead guitar, smooth bass, and that unique Band rhythm as it launches into its five four-line verses (the printed version features six stanzas). The first verse describes a snowy day by a frozen lake before the second verse explodes in emotion:
You’re beautiful beyond words
You’re beautiful to me
You can make me cry
Never say goodbye.
What else needs to be said? After a cloudy self-description in which the narrator declares his dreams to be “made of iron and steel” with a bouquet of roses that extends from the “heavens” to the “ground,” he announces his need for her to “grab hold of my hand.” He needs her. He loves her. The song is as simple as it is compelling.
Although “Mama” conveys respect, “Something” admires mystery, and “Angel” and “Goodbye” state undying devotion, none of these sentiments compares to the emotional power of “Wedding Song.” Here Dylan performs unaccompanied on guitar and harmonica in a song that suggests a personal message. Like other such instances (e.g., “Restless Farewell” from The Times They Are A-Changin’), Dylan appeared during the album’s final mixing session and recorded this track—remarkably, the day after recording “Dirge.” Its eight four-line verses march through line after line of praise, unadulterated commitment, and subservience. She not only saved him, she sustains him. The first verse establishes the song’s depth of emotion:
I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love,
I love you more than money and more than the stars above,
Love you more than madness, more than waves upon the sea,
Love you more than life itself, you mean that much to me.
That she saved him is clear in the opening line of the next verse: “Ever since you walked right in, the circle’s been complete.” Now that she’s there, he’s rid himself of dark and foolish things (“I’ve said goodbye to haunted rooms and faces in the street”). Once she “breathed on” him, his tears dried and his life was renewed. She gave him children (and “saved” his “life”) as she challenges him constantly (her love “cuts like a knife”); for that, he loves her more than life itself (“I’d sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die”). The sixth verse is revealing:
It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large,
Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge,
’Cause I love you more than all of that with a love that doesn’t bend,
And if there is eternity I’d love you there again.
Bob Dylan is nobody’s spokesperson. He’s nobody’s leader. He seeks not followers; just his woman’s enduring love. The valentine continues with more praise and pledges (“You’re the other half of what I am, you’re the missing piece”). Slight references to the “past” and what was “lost” hint at relational difficulties that have, in the end, strengthened the relationship. From top to bottom, “Wedding Song” is as powerful a love song as has ever been written. The song may have been composed from a character’s stance, but its confessional qualities are inviting.
Feelings this strong often have another—equally powerful—side. The slavish devotion that characterizes these songs of loving adoration could easily turn dark. This side of love is introduced in “Going, Going, Gone.” Here we have a solemn song about a man at the end of his relational rope. The four seven-line verses pause for a pivotal four-line bridge as they follow a consistent strategy as the song unfolds. Each verse spends four lines describing the relationship’s demise before the three lines announcing his departure. The opening verse sets the pace: “I’ve just reached a place / Where the willow don’t bend. / There’s not much more to be said / It’s the top of the end.” After announcing he’s gone, the second verse reports that he’s “closin’ the book” on the relationship without regard for what follows. He’s tired of “hangin’ on threads” and playing fair, so he’s cutting “loose” before he’s too late. Interestingly, the bridge adds another element to the story:
Grandma said, “Boy, go and follow your heart
And you’ll be fine at the end of the line.
All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine.
Don’t you and you one true lover ever part.”
Grandma’s wisdom may add tension to the situation, but it goes unheeded and the darkness returns with the final verse: “I been walkin’ the road, / I been livin’ on the edge, / Now, I’ve just got to go / Before I get to the ledge.” He’s going, going, gone. Dylan’s singing drives the desperation home. The narrator loved this woman, it failed, he pressed on with Grandma’s advice, but he has to exit before it’s too late. The decision to leave is as life-saving as it is unsatisfying. This is a simple, yet demonstrative song.
It is, however, nothing like “Dirge.” Sources like to refer to “Dirge” as another “Positively 4th Street.” I totally disagree. “Positively 4th Street” is a nursery rhyme when placed alongside “Dirge.” I know of no song like it. It’s as damning a relational song as has ever been written. It’s the photo negative of “Wedding Song.” The song doesn’t feature random pot shots or the occasional wise crack. No, it is a systematic statement that moves from point to point in a calculated manner. First, the narrator states his self-loathing for his predicament. Second, it conveys how he hates their relational games. Third, he uses a metaphor to characterize his experience. Fourth, he describes his situation. Fifth, he attacks her one last time. And the sixth verse presents the resolution to this powerful statement. The song’s opening cuts to the chase:
I hate myself for lovin’ you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down Suicide Road.
The stage was set, the lights went out all around the old hotel,
I hate myself for lovin’ you and I’m glad the curtain fell.
Our angry narrator hates their codependent relational games and his empty, sad feelings (verse 2). He regrets that he traded intense pain and suffering for a flash of pleasure (verse 3). He believes he’s paid his dues for his isolation and resolves to discover an answer to his plight (verse 4). He’s so angry. In the fifth stanza, he denounces her value, derides her insincerity, and denies any chance for a reversal. The final verse fires another shot before his anger runs its course:
So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine,
The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.
Lady Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I’m at,
I hate myself for lovin’ you, but I should get over that.
Here we witness clear, direct language arranged in understandable, coherent statements that build in a systematic fashion. The finger-pointing master uses his middle finger to communicate where he stands in this most abusive of all relationships. The Dylan Edge is in full force.
The self-loathing is revealing. He shares a measure of the responsibility. Still, she’s the prime mover in this more than unhappy situation. The metaphor in the third stanza is compelling as the narrator describes a character playing a game at his expense and abusing him until he submits. Hints of optimism appear when he reports he’s paid his dues, but that quickly dissipates in favor of more invective. It’s hopeless. Apologies are worthless. The truth is forbidden. Now, he turns his optimism toward his recovery. What a song. From its introduction to its resolution, Bob Dylan paints a tale of devotion gone to relational hell—and the colors are bright red. You must be very much in love to see it devolve into this. How could the same person write this and “Wedding Song” on the same album? I find it breathtaking. Although “Hazel” describes the narrator’s love for his woman and his disappointment over her absence, it pales in its emotional impact when placed alongside “Going, Going, Gone” and “Dirge.” Dylan telescoped the vacillating qualities of loving relations and turned them around in melodramatic ways.
That level of emotional involvement carries over to our final song on Planet Waves. After all of this talk about love’s various qualities, we turn to the results of love and a parent’s adoration of his/her child. “Forever Young” is a prayer. The biographers report that Dylan was embarrassed when an observer made fun of the song’s sentiments and contemplated removing it from the album. Good sense prevailed. In fact, it prevailed to the point where the song appears twice. In both instances, it’s just not difficult to imagine a parent wishing this for their child:
May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
The song continues with the last of its three nine-line verses as the narrator prays for busy hands, fast feet, moral strength, a happy heart, and self-fulfillment. This character wishes for all the blessings any parent would bestow upon their child: health, hope, happiness, strength, wisdom, success, and most of all, joy. What a blessing. Although the songs for this album were prepared quickly, sources report that Dylan carried this one around for some time. That he was embarrassed suggests its heartfelt qualities. I doubt he was embarrassed over “Wedding Song” or “Dirge.”
Like John Wesley Harding and The Times They Are A-Changin’, Planet Waves is a systematic work of art. The “saved series” is a clear, evocative group of songs that hammer home a single point: love is our savior. The belief that righteous woman is the ultimate answer to earthly woes supports these songs in no uncertain terms. The strength of that belief is best measured by the degree of negativity associated with love’s failure. Nothing crashes as hard as a person’s ideals. Nothing. If you truly believe in something, and it fails, the bitterness can be more than dysfunctional; it may lead you to that metaphorical—or not so metaphorical—ledge.
Waves is not only systematic in its thematic orientation, the song’s narrative structures share that trait as well. The songs set scenes, establish conflict, and provide resolutions in coherent fashions. A master storyteller is plying his trade here, and that is evidence of his recovery. The songs’ instrumental patterns complement their narrative structures. Virtually all of Planet Waves songs feature long instrumental tags. Songs end and harmonica, or guitar, or organ, or instrumental combinations follow for extended periods (sometimes occupying as much as a third of the track). No other Dylan record subscribes to this production formula to the extent of this project. The laureate’s transition continues.
Finally, one other trait emerges here: Dylan consistently fails to follow his lyric sheet. This particular habit isn’t as bad as it once was, but the artist is back to his old game. Unlike Harding or Skyline and his careful line by line adherence to his lyric sheet, the Dylan of Waves is free to follow his emotions without regard to the occasional blown line or verse. In its own special way, this signifies the man’s gradual return to business as usual.
Planet Waves is a special record. The magical interplay of the organ, harmonica, drums, guitar, and voice that made Bob Dylan and the Hawks the talk of 1966 is instantly on display in a new, more refined manner. The mission-show-songwriting nexus had returned. The songs appeared so quickly. The sessions unfolded just as fast. The results are startling. No song bites as hard as “Dirge.” No song loves as much as “Wedding Song.” No song prays as hard—and as sincerely—as “Forever Young.” Whether the creative light just flicked back on or The Band inspired Dylan’s muse or the guy just had something to say (or, more likely, a combination of everything)—whatever happened—the musical world had not witnessed this quality of writing for close to 10 years. No word games and little mischief appear here. No. Just an explosion of talent that was dormant for close to a decade. Now, it was time to do something that hadn’t happened in eight years: it was time to take these songs on the road.
“Tour ’74” was the first of its kind. Dylan explained his motivation for the historic event to Newsweek’s Maureen Orth: “If there was something else out there to really give you a kick . . . I would have thought differently about doing this. What I want to hear I can’t hear so I have to make it myself.” (We’ve heard that before, haven’t we?) It was time to completely restore his creative nexus through an integral part of his career: The Show. He told Orth: “It’s as natural for me to do it as for a fish to swim.” To expand on that thought, to this point in his recovery Bob had, in fact, been the functional equivalent of a fish out of water. He needs the stage. Once he perceived an opportunity he acted, as he told Ben Fong-Torres: “I saw daylight. I just took off.”
In his conversation with Fong-Torres, Robbie Robertson followed a similar logic by returning to the 1966 tour to frame his rationale for the 1974 event:
We were going to do another one, and Bob had the motorcycle wreck. And for a long time it didn’t seem like a good idea to us at all. All of a sudden it started to become clear. There was a space, an opening, a necessity, almost, that just pulled you into it. It was no clever maneuver on anybody’s behalf to put the thing together, to expand our audience or get a few extra albums. Everybody just felt the same way at the same time.
In order to maximize this shared need to return to performance, Dylan and The Band turned to industry veterans David Geffen and Bill Graham.
Geffen placed the tour in context for Newsweek: “This event is the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business.” Newsweek reports that when the tour was announced via a series of December 2, 1973, news paper ads that “the post office was flooded with millions of envelopes.” Since Dylan wanted people of all ages to have a chance to see the show (not just those stalwarts willing to camp out for days outside ticket windows), the promoters turned to a mail order system. (Rolling Stone asserts the mail order system was also used to avoid “box-office riots.”) Sounes claims that “seven percent of the U.S. population applied for tickets.” Consequently, the tour booked large venues to accommodate the ticket demand. In the end, the six-week, 40 shows in 20 cities tour had, according to Newsweek, a capacity of 658,000 seats available. Geffen claims an estimated two to three million envelopes were returned. Demand was that great. With an unprecedented price of $9.50 per ticket, the tour projected a gross over $5 million and a net profit of $2.5 million. Dylan told Rolling Stone: “Originally, I wanted to play small halls, but I was just talked out of that.” Simply, he claimed, “I just let people know I was ready” and he willfully “put it in Bill Graham’s hands.”
The musical world had never seen this sort of thing before. Dylan answered Orth’s question regarding the ticket demand: “I’m not surprised by the response we’ve had for tickets to the tour, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they only sold 1,000 tickets. I give out a hard dose—like penicillin. People don’t have to worry if Dylan’s conning them. If it works, it works. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to try the dose again.” When Fong-Torres asked how he felt standing before such large crowds, Bob responded: “No, 18,000 people yelling isn’t that much of a thing. It’s nothing new. See, I used to sit in the dark and dream about it, you know. It’s all happened before.”
What revealing statements! After all he had endured—from the Folk Posturing Period to Newport to Tour ’66 to the postaccident recovery—his attitude displayed the same orientation that served him during his high school talent contest. He believed in that “hard dose” and its musical heritage. His loyalty was to the songs; consequently, the size of the audience was irrelevant—as was its behavior. That attitude reveals the extent to which Bob Dylan’s mission of recovery was near completion. His loyalty to American Song, his belief in his art, and his disdain for idolatry and business matters represent the laureate’s artistic foundation—a professional orientation that overcame Albert Grossman’s abuses, the media’s pressures, the audience madness, and the world of celebrity’s convolutions.
Newsweek describes opening night in Chicago: “19,000 fans, many busing, hitchhiking or driving hundreds of miles, braved a freezing Chicago evening to see and hear the minstrel who withdrew in 1966 at the height of his fame, told the world to get lost and, like Garbo, raised the status of celebrity to myth.” Orth reports that those in attendance weren’t “teenyboppers” anticipating the kind of show perfected by acts like Alice Cooper; to the contrary, they were “eager, expectant people, mostly in their 20s, who sat patiently as the house lights went down and only an occasional whiff of marijuana rose.” Once onstage, she claims, the audience greeted Dylan “not with the demoniac sounds of Mick Jagger’s vicarious street-fighting men, but with the healthy gladness of friends greeting a long-absent friend.” She concludes, “After eight long years, the most important single personality in the American popular culture of his generation was back.” That Fong-Torres observed tearful music critics fighting to regain their composure (much less their objectivity) signals the emotional depth so many people associated with the Tour ’74 experience. All the talk of profiteering, publicity, and punditry ceased once the lights went down and that sound filled the air.
What these huge audiences saw was impressive. Sources report The Show opened with six Dylan songs followed by six songs by The Band. Three more Dylan tunes prefaced a 15-minute intermission. Bob returned for a five-song solo acoustic set. Afterward, The Band performed three to four songs, Dylan rejoined the group for several Planet Waves tracks, and “Like a Rolling Stone” prefaced an encore of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (I’ll Go Mine).” Later in the tour, “Most Likely” opened and closed the evening, as Dylan explained to Fong-Torres, “It completes a circle in some way.” A typical show involved around 28 songs; many recast to meet the needs at hand, as Dylan told Fong-Torres: “You’ll always stretch things out or cut it up, just to keep interested. If you can’t stay interested that way, you’ll have to lose track. But I’m me now, that’s the way it comes out.”
But I’m me now—fascinating.
Responses to Tour ’74 vary with sources. The Band, it appears, was invigorated. Levon Helm describes opening night in his autobiography:
We understood that people were excited by Bob’s comeback from a long public absence, but we were astounded anyway when we walked onstage in the darkened hall in Chicago and saw the entire audience stand and hold up their flaring lighters in a roar of tribute to Bob. Imagine nineteen thousand candles in the dark, people calling and whooping. It was a moment, I’ll tell you. I could see the normally taciturn Dylan was moved. He walked over to the drums and looked at me, about to say something, but instead he turned back to the microphone and launched into an old song of his called “Hero Blues,” which caught everyone off guard, including us.
Robbie Robertson shared his response with Newsweek: “We were booed off of every stage in Europe. What happened tonight in Chicago is so reassuring for us. We don’t have any fancy outfits or sparklers on our eyes, and we don’t cut off any heads. I mean how many times can you set yourself on fire or rip off your shirts?” In a musical world populated by acts featuring incinerating theatrics, carnival stunts, and postmodern vaudeville, Bob Dylan and The Band simply played their music with passion and commitment. They recast their music to meet their perceived needs. They yielded to the commercial machines that drive such a far-reaching enterprise. They cooperated with the press. They harvested a fortune. The results pleased everyone, it seems, except Bob Dylan.
In the interview that accompanies Biograph, Dylan spends considerable time with Tour ’74. While Robertson described the tour as a “kind of a relief,” Bob assumed a different stance: “I think I was just playing a role on that tour. I was playing Bob Dylan and The Band was playing The Band. It was all sort of mindless. . . . It was just more of a ‘legendary’ kind of thing.” He continued with a blistering critique of the show (“a big circus except there weren’t any elephants”), his views on the audiences’ expectations (“You know, like knock me out, drive me to the wall, kick my brains in . . . that’s what people were accepting as heavy energy”), and his thoughts on the music industry (“behind your back, there’s a few people laughing and getting rich off your vanity”). He concluded, “The greatest praise we got on that tour was ‘incredible energy, man,’ it would make me want to puke.”
Bob was more specific in his response to Toby Creswell’s inquiry about the burdens of being Bob Dylan: “I don’t think I ever carried that around except for 1974. . . . That was pretty much of a heavy tour because of the notoriety and the legendary quality of the people involved. I had to step into Bob Dylan’s shoes for that tour. Since that time, I never thought about it. I wouldn’t do half the things I do if I was thinking about having to live up to a Bob Dylan myth.” (It’s interesting that Dylan said this in 1986 while he was in the midst of the Pop Icon Era and its struggles with that “Bob Dylan myth.”)
As these comments suggest, from this point forward, Dylan’s creative instincts would be balanced by his commercial skepticism. If an album is perceived to be too good, Bob removed tracks accordingly. He protected his songs by forming his own publishing company and overseeing their care. He performed where and when he wanted; rarely succumbing to the Tour ’74 method of staging and promotion (again, the Pop Icon confusion represents an exception). The lessons from the Folk Posturing, Newport Mod, and Americana eras have been assimilated. His successful recovery leaves him with the independence necessary to sustain his career.
Still, as he told Creswell, while his career rebounded Dylan continuously faced a formidable roadblock that was that pesky old “Bob Dylan myth.” Bob did everything he could to dismiss the messiah-seeking branch of his constituency—often with mixed results. One place where the myth refused to die was in interviews. His talk with Orth responded to the question that will never go away:
Idols are old hat. They aren’t people, they’re objects. But I’m no object. When we think of idols we think of those carved pieces of wood and stone people can relate to—that’s what an idol is. They do the same thing to someone like Marlon Brando—they attach themselves to certain people because of a need. But I’m just doing exactly what a lot of other people would be doing if they could. I’m not standing at an altar, I working in the marketplace.
Although his creative missions will vary over the years, Bob Dylan reentered the musical world with a firm understanding of his role. From this point forward, he will confront the idolatry—whether it emanates from his audience or his industry. His commitment to American Song joins his relentless independence to do whatever the Nobel laureate feels he needs to do to achieve his goals. And this, my friends, would not have been possible without the musical explorations of Big Pink; the writing lessons of John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and New Morning; the commercial struggles that unfolded with Self Portrait and Dylan; and the return to the stage associated with Planet Waves and Tour ’74. This eight-year mission of recovery set the scene for all that follows. Without it, this Iron Ranger’s career may have crashed with that motorcycle.
This era also demonstrates the delicate balance that sustains Dylan’s creative nexus. Yes, Bob started writing songs because he needed something to sing. The actor needed a script. However, when The Show was removed from the mission-show-songwriting formula the process suffered. The Show drives The Look and The Look feeds The Script. When a nebulous mission removed performance from that equation, everything fell apart. Dylan may have despised Tour ’74, but it temporarily restored the nexus, rejuvenated his pen, and restarted his historic career. Simply put: Bob recovered. With that the artist turned to a period of reorientation that not only revised his approach to songwriting, it facilitated a rush of creativity that would, once again, shake the musical world.