Bob Dylan Song #114: I'll Be Your Baby Tonight

And so we reach the end of John Wesley Harding with "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", considered by many to be the logical bridge between this album and Nashville Skyline, and a wonderfully low-key way to end this particular song cycle. Maybe it's the gentle (and well-placed) pedal steel guitar, or Dylan's mellow harmonica notes at the beginning and end, or even the short running time (2 min., 39 sec.) that allows the song to reach its fadeout almost as quickly as it started, but I would say this might be one of Dylan's most relaxed songs, his equivalent of a summer afternoon on a back porch with a glass of lemonade and a corncob pipe. I would guess that he'd enjoy that description as well; it seems pretty obvious that that was the mood that he was shooting for. Small wonder that Norah Jones, who has made her fame on quiet and gentle piano-based music, has recorded a cover version of this song - it's nice sounding, at least, if a little more capable of helping me drift to sleep than I'd like. What the heck, it beats the Robert Palmer/UB40 version, that's for sure.

I've gone a couple of posts without talking much, if at all, about the musical arrangements for these songs (I'm not sure what to say, honestly - the arrangements, while not quite monochromatic, only have so much going for them when they're that stripped down), but for this track a few words should be spared about Dylan's band's performance. Say what you will about both this, the previous song, and the entire album that followed, but one thing that has to be said about the country efforts is that they never sound inauthentic. And you can certainly give Dylan credit for some of that - he had a pretty good ear for the country genre at that point - but much more needs to go to his talented studio musicians, a group of men malleable and intelligent enough to go in any direction Dylan wanted them to go. With the pedal steel woven in and out of the track and the rest of the band offering sympathetic backup, a song that could very easily have become a genre parody is given a level of authenticity instead.

And it's a darn good thing that issue of authenticity was settled so early; when you make that kind of stylistic leap, it doesn't really help matters if you can't walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Nobody will ever get demerit points for branching out and trying something different in their work (at least, not from me), but it's a different story when that branching out is done haphazardly or without any affection or consideration for whatever genre the artist chooses to dive into. And even having that affection and consideration doesn't necessarily guarantee that things will work out for the best. Take, for example, Bowie's Young Americans, his tribute/co-opting of Philadelphia soul. The album sounds just fine (with the title track and "Fame" being outright classics) and Bowie never sounds like he's just having himself a right ol' larf throughout. But there's still something off about the whole proceedings, like we're getting a Xerox of the real thing, and that makes the album more of a curiosity than anything else. I'll get more into this during the Nashville Skyline posts, as so much about that period of Dylan's life deserves consideration, other than "a country album? Whoa!"

It seems rather odd that such an unassuming song as "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" might become a lightning rod for interest and discussion (outside its aesthetic value, I mean), but "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" has a level of fascination attached to it that goes far beyond Dylan just wanting to record a country song. I touched briefly on this in the last post and will return to it later on (hint: it will be during a song I consider one of Dylan's great unknown classics), but attention needs to be paid to just how jarring the switch in Dylan's metier must have been for his fans. And not just for this album in general - the last two songs, far less rooted in the mysterious and a lot friendlier than the surly genius that had cropped up the past few years, must have been just a trip, if not more so, than the ten songs preceding them. That, in itself, is not a shock; after all, we are often unprepared for something different in our lives, and this was something very different indeed. For a man who had already had his share of masks in his short but brilliant recording career, how strange must it have been to have seen that mask removed, and to see a smile underneath?

I've given Clinton Heylin his share of mockery, and the one bit I've always been most annoyed at him about is his taking to task of the Rolling Stone review of Nashville Skyline in which Dylan was credited for making a masterpiece about being happy. Granted, the praise seems to be a bit much, and the reviewer did adjust his opinion later on. All the same, Heylin's aggravation towards that review (and the album in particular, which he dismisses outright) has always rubbed me the wrong way. What I sort of get out of that is that there's something wrong with writing songs about being happy, especially when one desirable form of creativity (Dylan's Electric Trilogy, even the John Wesley Harding aesthetic) is substituted for a less desirable, more simplistic form (i.e. country music). And that, to me, seems entirely unfair. Dylan was in a frame of mind in that time to write songs about being happy, and he chose to write those songs in a certain way (I can't imagine the trainwreck that would've been "Tell Me That It Isn't True" recorded in the Blonde on Blonde style). I don't really see anything wrong with that. And I certainly see no reason to begrudge Dylan his happiness during that times. Things would get stormy quick enough for him. It's nice to have a couple songs when that storm was still on the horizon, and the sun was out and shining on him.

And that's all for John Wesley Harding! Come back next time for the next album in Bob's oeuvre, as I try to make sense of one of the true outliers of Dylan's career. Thanks for reading and commenting! Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #113: Down Along The Cove

Even now, having listened to "Down Along The Cove" over and over, I find myself in the same quandary - how in the world can I possibly analyze or even talk about this song? Decades of Dylanologists have peered into those forbidding lyrics, two minutes and twenty six seconds of mysterious allusions and strangely off-putting imagery. Even on an album that has spawned reams of discussion and debate over what exactly Dylan was onto while recording it, "Down Along The Cove" takes the absolute cake. In fact, as I type these words...

Okay, I tried to keep that up as long as I could. "Down Along The Cove" works best as a surprise after you've already listened to the rest of the album, get to this track expecting perhaps another parable-like cryptic masterpiece or morality tale disguised in plain sight, and instead you get, well, this. To be perfectly frank, even Dylan's career up to this point couldn't entirely prepare you for this song; there aren't a lot of songs this upbeat, this blunt in its meaning, and this completely over-the-moon in terms of being a love song. After all, we know what a Dylan love song sounds like up to this point - where's the stuff about ravens with broken wings? Where's the Egyptian ring, or the cliffs of wildcat charms, or the mercury mouth in the missionary times? Honestly, I would not fault anybody that heard this song for the first time and thought Dylan had recorded a cover song. It's almost disarming how un-Dylan the song is.

This song, along with its companion "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", is generally considered the appetizer for the main course that is Nashville Skyline, Dylan's way of preparing us for what would come next. I don't entirely buy that - Dylan's never really been one for sketching out a far-reaching plan to begin with, and while the rather narrow subject matter fits the general aesthetic of that album, that doesn't necessarily mean it's to be thought of in the same way. One interesting thing, though, is that both this and the next song were written in the same way (music and lyrics at the same time), a way completely different from the rest of the album (where the lyrics came before the music, a complete rarity in Dylan's career). There's going to be a lot more discussion of this both in the next post and in the Nashville Skyline series, so I don't want to delve too deeply into it now, but what I see in those last two songs is a natural extension of the songwriting process that Dylan was undergoing at the time, as he was reinventing the way he approached both lyrics and the arrangements surrounding them. After all, not every song has to be a sparse tale of bandits or Biblical stories or what have you - keeping it simple, stupid can very easily apply to love songs, as well.

Instead of the narrower idea that "Down Along The Cove" was simply pointing to the country album that apparently seems obvious in retrospect, I find it easier to think that "Down Along The Cove" spoke to the artistic reimagining Dylan was putting himself through, as he tried to find a new voice for himself after having ditched his old one. What seems to baffle some people, then, isn't so much that he looked for that new voice, as it was that of the lyrical threads he'd picked out on this album, this was the one that he chose to follow. Why would such a great artist willingly shoehorn his music into an even smaller box, singing about the moon and June and country pies and so on? Like so many other questions with Bob, that's one that's ultimately going to the grave with him; the plain fact is that he followed that thread, we got a fine album out of it, and he moved on, another step in his constant evolution complete. With "Down Along The Cove", we actually get to see that evolution in process, as Dylan grasps for the only suitable recording style to fit the lyrics he was writing. The fact that it's a song you can dance to seems to be a bonus, as well. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #112: The Wicked Messenger

I find it a little bit interesting that "The Wicked Messenger", a song that clearly has Biblical roots, ends the way that it does. As any number of commentators have pointed out (including Mike Marqusee, who named his book about Dylan in the 1960s after this song), Proverbs 13:17 reads "A wicked messenger falleth into mischief: but a faithful ambassador is health". And this song reads very much like a parable, like its brethren on this album - a "wicked messenger" sent from some dude named Eli (a very Biblical name) appears from nowhere, delivers a cryptic message (soles of feet burning - something to do with Hell? Hmm) and has his heart opened by a well-chosen piece of advice from somebody in the throng that confronts him. But the surprising thing is that the piece of advice is more folksy than, well, Jesus-y; "if ye cannot bring good news, then don't bring any" seems closer in tone to the age-old chestnut "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" than one of Christ's famed parables. And unlike those parables, in which his message is more or less explicitly clear at the end, it's hard to tell if that piece of advice is actually meant to do anyone any good. Why, after all, should the only news brought to people be good news? It's something to puzzle over, at least.

With the final two songs on John Wesley Harding making a somewhat dramatic shift in tone and subject matter from the rest of the album, it seems like this is a good moment to stop and take stock of Dylan's preoccupations while writing this album. After all, as I mentioned in the first post for this album, this was a decidedly major change in his recording career, in which Dylan brought his career arc up to that point (such as it was - can you possibly imagine that the Electric Trilogy was recorded in a period of 14 months???) to an absolute screeching halt, setting up a period of experimentation in the studio and alternating between recording albums and trying to live life as a family man. What seemed mysterious at the time has become clearer with hindsight (not the lyrics, though - those still remain mysterious); Dylan had grown weary of the pressures of fame, his Basement Tapes jams gave him a new style with which to record music, and his preoccupation with the Bible helped reshape how he approached writing lyrics. Even the Bible reading, if you think about it, makes sense - you come that close to death, you'd probably start ruminating on that sort of thing as well. I mean, we can never know for sure, of course, but that seems as good a reason as any.

What I think deserves a bit of discussion, then, is that Dylan didn't make the Bible and Christianity his major focus of songwriting while recording this album, as he would twelve years later. As with many organized religions, what allows said religions to spread out into the world is the devotion of those that adhere to their faiths, the proselytizers who are excited to go out and spread the word of Jesus or Allah or Buddah to as many people that will listen as they can. And this devotion, I would assume, burns brightest in the newly converted, in those that have just had that faith bubble up in them and are as enthralled with their new religion as they will ever be in their lives. It would stand to reason, I would think, that a middle-aged man who has come to Christ will have far more fervor and enthusiasm than a person who has been born into a Baptist or Protestant family and has observed the word of God their entire life. This isn't a bad thing, and I'm not saying that religion has no part in a young person's life. I just mean that, in some ways, becoming a member of a religion as an adult is somewhat akin to having your first child - it's an experience unlike any you will ever have again, and a million different emotions hit you once it has happened, as your life is completely and utterly changed.

Now we know that that religious conversion changed Dylan's life completely in that way, as he more or less immediately recorded Slow Train Coming once he had embraced the Christian life. And I think we can then infer that, twelve years earlier, Dylan didn't have that kind of conversion in his life; he may have become more interested in the afterlife and in spirituality, but not to the extent of becoming the devout believer he would become later. But you cannot deny that his reading of the Good Book had a profound impact on his songwriting - while the ideas of writing in parables was more or less minnowed out after this album, the sparcity of language and the ability to say a lot with just a little (as opposed to his earlier songwriting policy of saying a lot with, well, a lot) would remain with Dylan for a good long time, arguably the rest of his career. And that illustrates what appears to be something of a paradox - a songwriter completely in tune with the way the Gospels were written, yet not entirely in tune with taking those Gospels to heart.

As I alluded to in the comment I wrote for "I Am A Lonesome Hobo", we have the idea of the Bible as a religious document so deeply ingrained in our public consciousness that it is difficult to think of it as also being a document of tremendous historical import, one along the level of Herodotus' Histories or the Domesday Book. And Dylan, in that sense, made as much out of the Bible as he did with the old folk songs and tall tales that helped shape his Basement Tapes songs, appropriating pieces of history and molding them into something that is now recognizably Bob Dylan music. He didn't exploit the Bible for his own means, pretend to be a Christian to draw in any new fans, or take liberties with something that means a lot to a lot of people. He simply found something in those writings that he could take and funnel his remarkable talent into, moving his own career into a new and exciting phase. That, to me, is something worth applauding. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #111: I Pity The Poor Immigrant

I'm wondering, having listened to "I Pity The Poor Immigrant" a few times again in preparation for writing this post, why exactly Dylan chose to use "immigrant" as the name/description of whomever he's singing about. The song's lyrics, some of the most downcast and depressing on the album, depicts a person who lives a terrible life, where he seems to both enjoy destroying everything he touches and hate himself for doing so. And yet Dylan chooses "immigrant" to describe this person, which seems strange because to most of us "immigrant" probably conjures sepia-toned images of sad-eyed Europeans in 1920's clothes standing on the bow of a steamer as Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty come into view. I myself think of my parents, both of whom were born in Korea and made their way over here in their youth. So unless Dylan chose the word simply for having the proper syllables to fit the flow of the song, there's a seeming disconnect there.

I myself come from a family of immigrants - both my mother and father were born in South Korea and moved to the United States sometime in their teens, my dad settling in Hawaii and my mom in California. I've never really learned as to why either of them ended up in the United States; the assumption is that times were tough for both of them, and America was seen as the place to go for Koreans (as, indeed, the population of Koreans in this country has grown exponentially in the last few decades). In particular, Fairfax County (where I spent the bulk of my formulative years) has become a major destination for Koreans to go to. And without delving too deeply into my family history, I can say that both of my parents have had relative success in this country, as have many of my other family members. Now, lest you think I'm turning this post into my own version of Roots, I'm pointing all this out because I at least have a little experience in what has been referred to as the "American Dream"; for my mom's family of twelve (the parents, one boy, and NINE girls - hard not to feel a little sorry for my uncle there) to take that trip across the Pacific to come here, there had to be some hope for something better.

So, then, how does one get from the image of that family coming to America to find a better life to the immigrant of Dylan's song that's basically a combination of the worst traits of Shylock and Charles Foster Kane? Our popular culture (and, ever so often, our actual culture) has delved into the notion of perverting said American Dream, in which the idea of becoming a successful self-made person has become distorted to the point where "successful" means "get absurdly rich by destroying everything in your way, and occasionally a few things not in your way". The archetypical example of this, I would say, is Scarface, Brian De Palma's famously overwrought epic about a Cuban criminal sent to 1980s America as part of Fidel Castro's "our problem is now YOUR problem" policy who rises to power as a drug dealer and eventually pays for his hubris in a gunfight scene that defies any measure of rational belief. We all remember Tony Montana saying "say goodnight to the bad guy" and "say hello to my little friend", but it's sometimes easy to forget that the movie is basically an illustration of that infamous quote "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Perhaps what Dylan envisioned, in writing this song, was that idea of corruption, of a person from humble means who finds themselves in a position of power, and using that power to do evil, only to find at the end of his life that it was all for nothing. If so, that would be proof enough that Dylan was reading the Bible, and that he had the words of the Lord in his mind while putting together this album. After all, we remember the Beatitudes that Jesus laid down, including the one about how the poor in spirit (i.e. the oppressed, or the humble) are blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. And in "I Pity The Poor Immigrant" we get the flipside, a person who is anything but humble, who is anything but oppressed, and for whom there is great emotional wealth but a black hole where the spirit ought to be. And, if I'm going to take this idea to its logical conclusion, the immigrant could be any of us, people who have come to this Earth for a limited time, and who could find themselves turned into a vulgar beast if we don't remain humble, spiritual beings. I don't think you need to be a Christian to be cool with that idea.

One final note - I made mention way back about how disappointed I am by the 1976 version of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and one of the songs of the tour I've always felt unhappy with is their arrangement of "I Pity The Poor Immigrant". For somebody who has always had a keen ear when it comes to this sort of thing, it seems odd for Dylan & Co. to take a downbeat song like this one and try to pep it up, in the interest of having another upbeat tour in a setlist usually chock full of them. I'm sure some of you will disagree with me, but the idea of taking that kind of song and turning it into a knee-slapping good time just doesn't sit well with me. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #110: I Am A Lonesome Hobo

Perhaps it's just me, but for some reason "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" feels to me like one of the songs where Dylan makes his Bible-reading most explicit on the album. Maybe it's the subject matter; the Bible, especially the New Testament, has something of a soft spot for the downtrodden and the unfortunates amongst us (after all, the Christian religion caught on amongst the less fortunate of ancient times, mainly because it promised a reward beyond earthliness that far exceeded anything those poor souls were getting in their living days), and no modern-day image quite evokes that sense of despondency like a hobo with a Red Skelton beard and a bindle thrown over his shoulder. Or it could be the little parable tossed in the final verse, when the narrator gives us three keys for avoiding his fate (the pithiness of which, for whatever reason, made me think of Satchel Paige's "Rules For Staying Young") in a style reminiscent of Jesus' little life lessons or something out of Paul's epistles. Either way, that's what the song brings to my mind.

One thing that amuses me a little, listening to this song, is that it sort of reminds me of the kind of stories that Dylan would tell about himself as he was coming up in the New York folk scene, casting himself as a vagrant that traveled this fair and dusty land, just looking for a pillow to rest his head and a six-string to tell his tales of woe. I like to believe that, in some small way, Bob had that same image in his mind as he penned the song, and a small smile would creep up on his face when he sung the lyrics in studio. It wouldn't be outside the realm of reason - if there was something that Bob had going for him during his prime, it was that he could be decidedly self-aware, and that allowed him to occasionally have a wink and laugh both with and at his listeners. You could definitely hear that humor in his more humorous acoustic songs (e.g. "Yippee! I'm a poet and I know it/Hope I don't blow it), occasionally in some of the electric period, and in fits and starts during his years in the wilderness (Blood on the Tracks, of course, is entirely self-aware, but not particularly humorous). If you know how to puncture your own balloon, it makes it a lot harder for your enemies to do so.

Not to belabor a point I've made a few times over the course of this blog, but it really bears thinking about where Bob Dylan was at this point of his life, and what the idea of "nostalgia" and "looking back on one's life" must have meant to him at this point. I am 27 years old as I write this, one year older than Bob was when he recorded John Wesley Harding, and I look back on my life as both a series of missed opportunities and of learning experiences, all of them culminating on the path I plan on taking as I enter my thirties and forties and basically take the path I will follow for the first half of my life. And I assume you all have roughly the same sort of life path, minus a few detours here and there - birth, school, college, work, etc. - that catalog the vast majority of our lives. Then we have Bob, at the tender age of 26 years old, being able to draw from a life story so astounding and outside our normal conception that it would have had to have been dreamed up if it never had actually happened (pardon the cliche). I dare say most of us can't hear a song like "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" and actually identify with it the way Bob can, unless some of you actually have told tall tales about riding the rails and eating food out of tin cans (and if you actually HAVE lived that life, by all means leave a comment - I'd love to hear about it).

It's a neat little crossroads, then, that we get in a song as unassuming as "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" - a song that serves as convergence between the younger Bob Dylan (i.e. the one that made up stories about his life) and the (comparatively) older Bob Dylan (the one reading the Bible, er, religiously). And even if Dylan wasn't actually having a moment of self-awareness here, the facts that he has that history of being able to poke gentle fun at himself allows us to go "hey, maybe he's doing the same thing here". It must be nice to have that kind of songwriting cache. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #109: Dear Landlord

Can a purely acoustic song be funky? I was really surprised the first time I ever heard "Dear Landlord", as I hadn't heard much of Bob outside his hits and wasn't prepared for something that sounded like this. I can assume I'm not the only person who has had this experience, too - what with all the creative avenues Dylan has gone down, and making the logical assumption that most people start either with an acoustic-era or Electric Trilogy album (or, I guess, BOTT), most of the more unusual or unique albums in Dylan's canon have to throw those first-time listeners off. And this is a song that even stands out on its own album, by virtue of its comparatively complicated chord structure, a nifty little piano accompaniment, and that bouncy bass line, courtesy of Nashville veteran Charlie McCoy (the second guitarist on "Desolation Row", btw). Anybody that loves music can tell you that a well-played bassline can take a song to a new dimension (just think of "Live With Me" or any number of Who songs), and "Dear Landlord"'s bassline gives it that added dimension, kind of a head-nodding bent, that you don't get from any other song on the album.

So as most of you probably know, the most popular interpretation of "Dear Landlord" (as advanced by self-styled Dylanologist/full-time douchebag AJ Weberman) is that Dylan is singing about Albert Grossman and the tangled web of business dealings that cropped up after Dylan went into seclusion. Now, apparently most critics tend to disabuse people of that notion, and there really isn't too much in the way of evidence that there would be enough malfeasance or even really bad feelings to birth this song in the first place. I will confess, though, that I still tend to think of that theory whenever I hear the song, mainly because it just makes so much sense on the surface, doesn't it? That's kind of how Weberman's theories on these songs tends to work - because he basically says every damn song Dylan writes is about himself, you kinda take a look at the lyrics and go "hey...yeah, I see what he means! Wow, that's really cool!" Of course, it says way more about Weberman than about Bob that Weberman feels Bob's only singing about Bob, not just in the songs where it's clear Bob's singing about Bob, but in songs where Bob would probably not have any reason to be singing about Bob. If that makes sense.

Now, unless Dylan had a really nasty apartment issue in Greenwich Village or was getting a real hard time about his house up in Woodstock, it seems pretty clear that the song should not be taken in that specific a way. I, personally, don't think you need to dig too deep into the song - my own feeling is that you can think of the "landlord" in a universal context, in terms of somebody that you look up to and feel some sort of debt to, whether it be a parent ("I know you've suffered much/but in this you are not so unique"...eh? eh?) or a boss or whoever. In that sense, the song works perfectly; it captures the feelings somebody in that debt feels when thinking about this special person, the conflicting emotions that accumulate over a long period of time, and what it means to have that kind of relationship in your life. It also, probably unintentionally, captures the current state of our society, constantly working around the clock to pursue a life just outside of our grasp, full of "things we can see but just cannot touch" (like that new boat, or even our line of credit - money that's not really money!) - and do we pursue that course of life because we actually want to, or because we're being driven to do so?

I listen to the words of "Dear Landlord" and I see three different branches that our lives can take as we grow into adults and settle into the life we're going to have for at least three decades, if not longer. The first is a life of constant satiation, where nothing drives or interests you, and that little part of your brain that represents your pleasure center has shrunk to nothingness. Obviously, nobody wants that. The second is a life of constantly pushing yourself, always feeling like you have to do bigger and better (and not even necessarily that) things, because something in your younger days has molded you into this constantly moving beast. And nobody wants that, either; our culture is so built for creating stress as it is, to put stress on yourself for no reason hardly seems like the way to go. And that leaves the third path, the harmonic mean between the other two, in which you lead a life of comfort and happiness, always able to do something you want to when you want to, but not at the point where doing that something won't actually bring you joy. That's the life that everybody wants. And the narrator of "Dear Landlord" wants that as well, and he knows how hard it is to fulfill that dream, and to have somebody put pressure on him absolutely breaks his heart. That's something I think we all can relate to.

I think, then, that "Dear Landlord" found its place on the massive career retrospective that was Biograph (can you imagine that Biograph now more or less represents the halfway mark of Bob's career?) not just because it's an exceptional song from a very strong album. In the lyrics of the song, you can hear one of modern humanity's deepest struggles, the desire to please those we look up to or owe something to, and just how hard doing that can actually be. As somebody about to re-enter the higher education system (more on that later), I feel that struggle very strongly in my own mind; there are precious few people that enter higher education entirely of their own volition. And just as I hope I don't disappoint those that I love and care about, I can believe that Dylan had those same worries, albeit on a much larger scale, and even at his height of fame worried about pleasing somebody, even if we couldn't possibly ever figure out who that would be. It's nice to find something that binds me to Bob Dylan, let alone the rest of the human race; I'm glad he gave me an avenue to write about it. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #108: Drifter's Escape

I've always thought of this as my "sneaky favorite" song on John Wesley Harding, i.e. the one I'd probably pick as my favorite if I wasn't the kind of doofus that would buckle and say "All Along the Watchtower" actually is. One of the things that separates an uber-fan of an artist from a more casual fan is that, at a certain point, uber-fans develop favorite songs or even entire albums that the casual fan wouldn't even think twice about. It isn't as though somehow "Like A Rolling Stone" or "Hurricane" or "Tangled Up in Blue" aren't still great songs and that a long-time fan like myself doesn't love those songs through and through. It's just that, the longer you listen to Dylan, the more you find yourself digging into his catalog and unearthing tracks that eventually take a more deeply rooted place in your heart than the Greatest Hits. I may have made mention of the lesser-known songs on Bob's previous albums that I feel about in that way, but for this album "Drifter's Escape" is my choice. I will say that if Bob hadn't seen fit to put "Dear Landlord" on Biograph, that would have been my choice. But he did, so there you are.

Dylan manages a nice trick in this song, in which he combines both the stock figure of the Drifter/Vagabond/Outlaw of lore (cf. "I Ain't Got No Home") and Kafka's The Trial into one neat little package. There's something almost cinematic about the lyrics, three short verses telling a quick little tale of a man prosecuted for reasons nobody knows, about to be jailed despite the cries of both himself and others for salvation, and a sudden deux ex machina allowing the persecuted man to go free. The obvious way to go with this song would be to try and match that drifter in the song to, say, Dylan himself; other than trying to write something that brings back the railroad hobos of yore, why else would Dylan write such a mysterious tale if it's not a veiled reference to himself? I don't see it, myself, but somebody else might.

What I hear in the song is something that might be more mundane, or might be more interesting. I hear Dylan, once the leading friend of the downtrodden and voice for those without one, getting back to his folk roots, albeit in a more sideways manner, and writing a song about a man with no rights who manages to slip out of a noose despite some evil higher power trying to hold him down. Maybe it's the very deeply buried optimist inside of me thinking this, but I like to believe that Dylan still had some feelings towards the folk movement in those days, and that despite what we know now about his path towards folk music (i.e. a bit more cynical than we'd like), that he really did care about issues and about singing songs that feature people in need of help in our society. The Dylan of 1967 probably had no interest in going back to the pieties of The Times They Are A-Changin' or even the more plainer folk of Freewheelin', just as much as he had no interest regurgitating the weirdness of the Electric Trilogy, but maybe he still wanted to write something along the lines of those folk songs, highlighting a man in desperate plight the same way he'd sing about Hattie Carroll. And "Drifter's Escape" would be the result of that. Who knows, just something to chew on. That's what this blog is all about, right?

Now, maybe this is just me (I should start every post this way from now on), but there's an interesting musical link that I believe ties this song to "Tomorrow Never Knows", the Beatles' choice for closer to Revolver. Now, aesthetically, obviously the songs sound as different as can be; "Drifter's Escape" is all acoustic guitar, bass, and drums, while "Tomorrow Never Knows" is an assault on the senses, a melange of tape loops and sound effects mashed together into what might very well be the first (or at least most famous) psychedelic song ever recorded. But one thing that underpins both songs, and actually serves to give them common ground, is the usage of a drone as the musical bed - the simplest possible chord arrangement, repeated over and over, with everything else given all the more attention because of it. For "Drifter's Escape", the two high ringing chords Dylan bangs out on his acoustic serve as that drone, shifting attention to the song's lyrics (and Dylan having to go out of his usual register as a result, which is always fun). In the case of "Tomorrow Never Knows", the two chords for that song act as the glue that holds together the sound of organized chaos. One musical philosophy, two different applications. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #107: The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

If nothing else, "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" serves as proof positive that Bob Dylan didn't need to write about motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queens to properly confuse the hell out of his listeners. Instead of whatever crazy images the combination of his natural talent and a witches' brew of drugs were causing him to spit out for the Electric Trilogy, we get a long-winded, entirely confusing "narrative" about money, temptation, seduction (?), insanity, and death, all wrapped up with not one, but two separate parting shots. And, in my opinion, if you want to actually try and analyze this song, the main decision you have is to decide which of those is more meaningful to the song - the semi-profound "don't go mistaking Paradise/for that home across the road", or the equally semi-profound "nothing is revealed". Take one path and the song is a morality tale about how the love of filthy lucre and lascivious succubi can cause a good person to come unhinged. Take the other and the song becomes a wicked gag Dylan's playing on us, five minutes of droll sermonizing wrapped up with a simple, direct punchline. Either road is just as correct as the other; that's the fun part, I guess.

If you take the song as an actual morality tale, you're confronted with the idea of Dylan potentially talking about himself (like so many of his songs). Having already brought up the idea of Dylan possibly encoding the seductions he faced on his year-long boos-ridden sojourn across the world, I am somewhat loath to bring it up again here; after all, assuming Dylan did bury that message in "As I Went Out One Morning", why would he possibly want to rehash it in some weird tale about some poor cat who loses his marbles? But at least here the idea of somebody being driven insane by earthly pleasures is more explicit (relatively speaking). The former song has a chained woman begging the narrator to take her South, which could really mean anything, honestly. Here, though, you have Frankie Lee first being sent in a tizzy by his "friend" Judas Priest's roll of ten-dollar bills, then completely going cuckoo for cocoa puffs upon encountering the house with a woman's face in every one of its twenty-four windows (apparently they're staying in MC Hammer's old house) and eventually succumbing to thirst - one has an idea of why, if you take the "woman in each window" thing to its logical conclusion, and it's kinda icky to think about, no? That sounds more like how worldly pleasures can suck out a man's soul, and possibly a little closer to how Dylan nearly lost everything during those crazy years where he was nearly more God than man, musically speaking.

And then there's the second option, which isn't particularly satisfying for those that enjoy parsing Dylan's words, but lends the song a bit of humor that really isn't there otherwise. I'd made previous mention of the infamous scene in "Last Exit to Springfield", possibly the greatest episode in the entire run of The Simpsons, where Grandpa Simpson tells a rambling story that goes absolutely nowhere and bores his audience nearly to tears. Not to get all Professor Comedy on you here, but the obvious comedic value of this bit (other than "I had an onion tied to my belt - which was the style of the time) is in hearing a story so astoundingly stultifying that you can't help but laugh at its dullness. Now think of "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" in this way - all the weird emotional shifts (Frankie Lee goes from confused to smiling to scared, like he's bipolar or something), the goofy bits like the stranger asking if Frankie Lee's dad is dead, and all the stuff that almost seems thrown in just to make the couplets rhyme (what does it matter if the stranger is quiet as a mouse?), and the creeping sense that Dylan may just have been making this up as he was going along. And then the little boy says "nothing is revealed" at the end, and it all makes sense, doesn't it?

What's interesting to me is that while songs that the listener can make his own analysis of isn't really a rarity, there aren't too many songs in which you could make the debate that Dylan is actively having a laugh at the people listening to this song. In a purely performance-wise sense, the song has a level of repetition The Fall would be proud of, four chords banging out over and over (with a guitar out of tune - maybe another wink to his audience?), and Dylan speak-singing his strange tale with only the barest hint of emotion. The only real flourish to the song is Dylan's short harmonica solo, cropping up almost out of nowhere and breaking the mood/monotony with its crisp notes. It is Dylan's poker face, then, that gives the song its mystery, both in his vocal delivery and in those strange lyrics, and allows us to wonder if he really is spinning some kind of morality tale. And without any other cues to figure out where his head's at, you can see both that morality tale and the possibility of Dylan just writing a five-minute joke set to music.

It's funny, listening to a song like "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest", thinking about those lyrics, how simple and easy to understand the lyrics are in terms of plain writing, and yet how much could be hidden behind those words. Check that - how much we think could be hidden behind those words. You can draw a remarkably straight line from where Dylan had been to where he was going; how the Basement Tapes allowed Dylan to be as weird and literate and off-putting as he'd been since BIABH, only without using the language of Tarantula but using the language of ancient times, the Wild West, and the pages of American history most of us never flipped to in our textbooks. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call "musical evolution", and Dylan has proven himself time and again to be a master of that. You can hear the proof in one of his most cryptic songs, as well as a song as moralizing as any of his gospel-era tunes. Or, maybe, one of his funniest tunes outside of his talking blues period. That distinction is entirely up to you. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #106: All Along the Watchtower

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A few months ago I went to see Watchmen, Zach Snyder's much-anticipated film adaptation of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel masterpiece. Much like Gravity's Rainbow or Finnegan's Wake, I'd always thought Watchmen was more or less unfilmable, and for Snyder to have made an adaptation that wasn't completely horrible is a commendable feat. That being said, the movie was overwrought, badly acted at times, and (almost amazingly) boring at times, no mean feat considering how exciting the graphic novel is. I bring this up not because I'm attempting to turn this into a movie review blog, but because at one point in the movie Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" pops up on the soundtrack - a soundtrack that just so happens to be littered with famous songs of the past 40 years, as a (somewhat cheap) way of using cultural touchstones to help the audience connect to the film. It's somewhat justified in this case - "All Along the Watchtower" lends the title to one of the book's chapters - but the simple fact that Hendrix's version has been used in so many damn movies for the same purpose kind of makes it look hackneyed.

It's sort of funny how that works - Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" has now become a sort of audio/visual shorthand for the 1960s, just as much an easy way to invoke that decade as showing the peace sign or talking about JFK. And it's even funnier that the song is used to invoke one rather specific version of the 60s - the flower power/hippies/peace and love 1960s, with the love beads and the acres of pot and all that. It's both something of a cheat, and a very clever way of summoning a mental image quickly. And it speaks a lot about the power of music that we can actually use these songs as shorthand for an entire decade, where we can hear something like "The Power of Love" and go "okay, that's the 1980s", or hear "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and immediately think of the 1990s. Sure, Hollywood has taken that identification to its logical lazy extremes - who doesn't sort of cringe thinking about The Big Chill, or any number of crappy Vietnam movies blasting the entire Time-Life collection over images of gunboats cruising down a river or grunts shouldering their automatic rifles in the heat of the jungle? But that's a co-opting of music that we should be used to by now; we should welcome something that can, if properly used, help condense the confusing and complicated sectors of our human existence.

I have been known, in the past, to have composed a few songs of my own; like about 99% of all songwriters that have ever lived, most of them were utter rubbish, with maybe one or two exceptions. But what I took away from the songwriting experience (this is gonna sound real obvious, but bear with me) is just how extremely personal that experience actually is. And I think that, by default, the songwriting experience in general is one that is extremely tied in to what kind of person the songwriter or songwriters actually are. Love songs are obvious; even writers of protest songs or historical songs add their own slant to the proceedings, choosing to take a viewpoint that (in general) matches their own, or writing about a figure or event in a way that shows either their approval or disapproval thereof. There are surely exceptions out there - one can only imagine the number of crass scribbled pop singles designed purely to sell records (and not in the good way, i.e. Motown's carefully considered pop symphonies), and I'm not sure "Imagine" is totally in line with John Lennon's otherwise skewed and acidic view of the world. But, for the most part, a song is going to have somebody's voice deeply embedded within it.

Which makes it all the stranger, then, when one of those songs takes on a meaning far beyond what the songwriter intended, when a "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Hotel California" becomes more than just a song, so to speak. I'm reasonably sure that Bob Dylan, when writing "All Along the Watchtower", never dreamed that one of the rising superstars of music in that era would hear the song, love it so much that he'd adopt it into the metier of his uber-genius guitar abilities and his tremendously talented band, and have that song become a touchstone for the decade for over 40 years and counting. But I'm also reasonably sure that it is the rare listener of that song that ever pays much attention to the lyrics when they hear Hendrix's version of the song. I might be talking out of turn here, but the words to "All Along the Watchtower" are by no means the calling card of Hendrix's take; when we think of that song, we think of the thundering instrumental attack of the intro, the pounding, insistent thrum of Dave Mason's twelve-string rhythm guitar, and of Hendrix spinning off classic solo after classic solo. We tend not to think about the Biblical allusions all that much. That's just how it is.

And that is something I think is worth thinking about the next time you see one of those movies that try to show something epic or grandly historical or whatever, and one of those iconic songs pops up on the soundtrack. These songs were not written in order for all of us to go "oh, okay, there's the era right there" or to plant some sort of marker in a period of time that now can seem distant and hazy to us young whippersnappers. Those songs were written for reasons only really comprehensible to the people that wrote those songs (and sometimes not even then), with meanings that can often be very meaningful and occasionally painful to the writers, and with emotions that burned powerful at the time of the writing of the song. And, in that sense, that piece of the person, that little window of their personality imprinted into the words and music, have now become co-opted for all eternity, a part of our own national consciousness just as much as a part of their personal consciousness. I'm not sure if that's always a good thing, but it's certainly a very meaningful thing. History, after all, is not created by robots, but by people doing things and moving along our world. And when that history can be encoded in three verses and four chords, that's something truly special.

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It does occasionally behoove me to wonder what exactly it was that Hendrix saw in "All Along the Watchtower" and made him decide to record his take, one so instantly iconic that now Dylan has more or less made it his own, performing the song in concert with the heavy guitar attack Hendrix afforded it. It's possible that Hendrix heard that simple four (maybe even three) chord attack, with its haunting minor chords ringing out, and the equally simple studio arrangement, and figured that this was a good melody to hang his explosive solos upon. Perhaps he was just drawn to the starkness of Dylan's take, the same way that countless artists afterwards have been drawn to it, and have wanted to make it their own and add their own spin to a song that virtually has no spin to its own. Maybe the words and music just hit him the right way at the right time, who knows.

I suppose I'm kind of stalling for time right now - I've almost dreaded talking about this song as an actual song and not as a cultural phenomenon, simply because the lyrics have been picked over and picked over and picked over. Wikipedia links to an interesting analysis of the song, one that I might have picked up upon had it already not been thrown out there for the world to see. I'm reminded, looking at these analyses, of something Alan Moore (him again) threw out in his wrapup of From Hell, where he talked about just how difficult it is to find something new in the Jack the Ripper case, with over a hundred years and just as many researchers digging into a trail long gone cold. The Koch Snowflake, and I hope I'm getting this right, is essentially a series of triangles being drawn over and over in a certain way, creating an infinite perimeter within a finite, closed space. Moore states that the Jack the Ripper case is the same way - you can throw out as many theories as you want, but ultimately all you have is what we know about those horrible murders, and in the end you're only going to get so far in your analysis of the case.

I think of the lyrics to "All Along the Watchtower" much the same way. What we have is three verses, two of which are dedicated entirely to a conversation between two people who disappear in the third verse, nothing in the way of a story (you could probably make one out of the "two riders were approaching" bit, but that comes at the very end), and this feeling of cryptic, puzzling doom. Hendrix's arrangement, as explosive as it was, could only heighten the apocalyptic aura of the song - that aura was there from the very beginning. And yet we really have nothing when it comes to the song; the whole thing is almost like one of those Creative Writing courses where you have the first part of a story and are meant to create the rest of the story from there, only the whole "rest of the story" bit was junked completely. And without that rest of the story, the more inquisitive listeners have tried to create that whole tale out of what we have, leaning on the Bible verse from the Book of Isaiah, trying to sneak glimpses of Dylan's own life into the lyrics, and slapping identities onto the joker, the thief, the princes, and so on and so forth. Koch's Snowflake in effect - we can think up all the fanciful speculation we want, but those twelve lines are where that speculation ultimately begins and ends.

I mean, doesn't it seem like quite a bit to attribute a host of meanings to Dylan sitting down, putting pen to paper or fingertips to typewriter keys, and banging out the three verses of this song? Far be it for me to cast stones on anybody that attempts to dig into what Dylan's talking about, but let's back up for a second and imagine Dylan with that Bible of his, putting his finger on Isaiah 21:5-9, and reading those words over and over again. Suddenly something just pops in his head, the same way it must have happened for Sherlock Holmes whenever he solved a case; gears start grinding, puzzle pieces are fitted together, and something magic arises almost out of nothing. He sits down and writes out this song, maybe changing a word here and there, junking lines that sound a little too clunky, tweaking the chord structure, seeing if the song sounds better faster or slower. Sometimes we forget that songs don't pop out fully formed, but come together through a long and arduous process of editing, testing, and occasional blind faith. But in the end Dylan did finish that process, and we got "All Along the Watchtower" out of it - and maybe he can't even explain why, when you really get down to it, he wrote the song the way thaat he did. I don't think anybody really can.

"All Along the Watchtower" has been feted as one of the greatest songs of all time, and as much as I think that reputation comes from Hendrix's definitive reading, I would say that just as much credit comes from those lyrics and the sense of mystery that inhabits those words. The vast majority of art is very clear-cut at its core; you think of a classic film like The Maltese Falcon, a great song like "God Only Knows", or a brilliant painting like Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, and you can understand where they're coming from and what they're trying to get you to think or feel. But then you have something that doesn't push your buttons in that way, something that defies our traditional understanding of artwork, and it causes us to scratch our heads and go digging in our local libraries (or, ahem, Google) to help us reach that level of understanding. Dylan's catalog is full of songs that stand just beyond the reach of easy comprehension - I've been lucky enough to write posts about them that people have enjoyed reading - but rarely has he written a song in that vein that's so simple, so pared down and seemingly common in language and form, that still manages to frustrate us like the mythical word on the tip of our tongues. And it doesn't matter if those words are sung over a gentle acoustic backing, over heavy electric firepower, or with a classical backing - they still confound us, and beckon us to come and listen one more time, so that we might be able to understand. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #105: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

Before we delve into some deeper stuff in this post, a few words should be said about the musical arrangement of "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine". To me, the arrangement is one of the best showcases for Dylan's harmonica on the album; he doesn't do too much outside mirror the chords for the song, but he manages to pack a great deal of emotion and power into those solos, holding notes perfectly and acting as counterpoint to his disciplined, straightforward vocal performance on the track. Add to that the gentle tempo the band takes, along with the now-familiar sparse backup (you know it's stripped-down when the rhythm guitar - an acoustic rhythm guitar, no less - gets a lot of play in the song's mix), and you have the perfect backing for the lyrics to this tune.

Much has been made about how much influence the Bible had in terms of the lyrics on John Wesley Harding (which is not to say Dylan didn't incorporate some religious imagery in his previous songs - it's just more overt here), and "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" is the first song in the album order that makes that influence felt. St. Augustine (for those that don't know, including myself before preparing this post) was a Catholic bishop renowned for his contributions to Christian theology and philosophy. He wasn't actually put to death, for the record, although he passed away as his city was being overrun by Vandals. One wonders why it was Augustine who was chosen as the saint mentioned in the song - if you wanted to choose an actual martyr, you certainly have your pick of the litter in that regard. Maybe it was just because "Augustine" rolls off the tongue particularly well in the context of the music Dylan wrote, who knows.

Or who knows, maybe Augustine held something for Dylan at that particular juncture of his life. It's worth mentioning time and again that the Dylan that recorded John Wesley Harding was a man very much at a crossroads in his life; I've made previous mention of his anecdote about staring out into the sky one night and saying to himself "something's gotta change". Augustine, as he wrote about in his famous Confessions, did not come into Christianity at an early age; rather, he was converted at about 30 years of age, after a self-professed lifetime of sin and vice. He talks about how the death of one of his friends caused him to hate many of the things he used to love, because they reminded him of what he had lost. This leads to the realization that it is only the love of earthly things that can cause such a feeling of loss, whereas the love of God never leaves you wanting in that way. Dylan, one can assume, didn't quite feel that way about things (at least, not until '78 or so), but he could definitely identify with a lot of what Augustine was saying about traumatic events rendering what you once loved into something that gives you great pain. Sure, Dylan kept jamming with the Band, but one can only assume he couldn't look at pills or think about hotel rooms in 1967 without a little shudder passing through him. For a man still in a state of flux, Augustine's message had to have a great deal of resonance.

Augustine's Confessions also relates stories about a young Augustine stealing pears, a needless venture when Augustine could very easily get better pears as part of a well-to-do family, and the feeling he had while doing so. The future saint gives a textbook case of group mentality, as he says that he probably wouldn't have had the urge to steal without being in the company of people who would share in the stealing and alleviate him of some of his guilt. That feeling of groupthink ties in beautifully to one of the messages to "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine", the idea of the pain of doing something that causes you grief because other people are doing it ("I dreamed I was amongst the ones/who put him out to death...And bowed my head and cried"). For hundreds of years people have thought and written about group psychology, where something a single person couldn't possibly forgive can easily be committed by a group of people, and the worst things about us are easily dispersed amongst many. Without being much of a psychologist, I'd say that one of the appealing factors of this phenomenon is the idea of deindividualization - we all talk about being our own person and standing out and all that, but we also know that it's goddamn hard to do that, to be a lone voice in a crowd, and to stand up and say "this is bullshit" when need be. We are human, after all; this doesn't forgive us for looking the other way, but the legitimate struggle of human existence can explain why we look the other way. To quote Samuel Johnson (and, by proxy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." It's a lot easier to do this in the company of others.

That quote by Dr. Johnson, it should be mentioned, has to do with what overindulgence in drink can do to you (small wonder it makes sense as epigraph to Fear and Loathing, a book more or less entirely devoted to the "joys" of substance abuse). And I can't help but think about Bob Dylan in 1965-1966, continually blasted out of his mind, playing crazy music that people booed the hell out of him for, withdrawing further and further into himself to the point that he almost certainly would have died if the motorcycle crash hadn't changed things forever. I wrote before about how Dylan was all alone on these tours; I didn't mean in the literal sense, of course, but more in the sense that none of his other companions was encountering the same massive wave of publicity, scrutiny, and pressure that Dylan faced in those years. And in that situation, he basically had two choices in dealing with this wave - he could sit in his room by himself and internalize all that pain, or he could hang with his boys, turnontuneindropout, and allow sweet pharmaceuticals to wash the pain away. It's not hard to see why Dylan made the choice that he did. And it turned him into an asshole at times, to be sure, but even that was okay - hey, it's just the drugs, right? Dylan chose to become as much of a beast as he could, and it made all the pain of the rest of his waking life all the easier to bear. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #104: As I Went Out One Morning

"As I Went Out One Morning" is one of those songs that almost has to be fairly dripping with meaning; we've had plenty of those so far on this little project I've undertaken, but this is surely one of the songs most budding Dylan fanatics will take a fine-tooth comb over when they first hear it. For one thing, it's a tremendously dramatic song - built around a D minor chord and played with insistent, almost menacing rhythm, there's something kind of cinematic about the album version. The studio band deserves a great deal of credit for building that drama, certainly, as essentially an MTV Unplugged crew managed to summon up a great deal of emotion with very little (dig that expressive bassline - it bounces with a solemn energy, like if Morse Code could be set to music). And then you have Dylan's sublime contributions - not just the music and lyrics, but his fantastic vocal performance (the second verse, in particular, is one of my favorite vocal moments of his entire canon) and that ringing harmonica. Eyolf Ostrem, whose truly amazing Dylanchords website has been invaluable to me even before I started this blog, notes that the harmonica playing here is tremendously expressive, possibly thanks to the '66 World Tour, and it's hard to disagree. So, from a purely musical standpoint, "As I Went Out One Morning" has a great deal to offer.

But, of course, it's the lyrics to the song that draws all the attention, and the boatloads of analysis that comes along with that sort of attention. AJ Weberman, a man for whom the word "asshole" doesn't quite seem strong enough, made the all-too obvious parallel between the Tom Paine reference and the infamous NECLC dinner in 1963 where a rather loaded Dylan said he saw a little of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald. Greil Marcus, in turn, wrote a somewhat tortured analysis about how the song actually is about American history or something like that. Marcus, at least, has the good sense to suggest that "it'd be astonishing if what I've just described was on Dylan's mind when he wrote the song" (gee, you think?), noting that Dylan's words have the power to make us think in that sort of way, where we can draw metaphors from the world we live in just as surely as we can draw them from the lyrics to Dylan's songs. Weberman, on the other hand, has figured out what the song means to him, and that is that. Which method of looking at songs is correct, I'll leave for the reader to figure out on their own.

I've always thought that Weberman's way of looking at the song was off from the very beginning - if somebody can untangle the girl in chains and all that flying South business from the dinner where Bob made an ass of himself, feel free to write about it in the comment section, but I don't particularly feel it's worth the effort to try. And yet there's something about the song that makes you wonder what Bob was getting at (if, indeed, he was getting at something), and as I listen to the song again I keep wondering about why this girl is in chains, and why the narrator would offer his hand and then pushes her away, and so on and so forth. Perhaps what the song could be about is the dark side of seduction - not just from women, but from anything that promises far more than it could ever deliver and ends up leaving you worse off than when you started, like heroin, or compulsive gambling. Or maybe, just maybe...fame. This is, after all, the withdrawn Dylan we're talking about, the one that sought to remove himself from the pressures of being a superstar as much as he could, and the siren song and accompanying insanity of said stardom had to have been fresh on his mind.

That, to me, could very easily explain the "girl in chains bit" - when it comes to vices, they're always held back, sometimes by society, sometimes by our own dint, just waiting to be let loose by some poor unsuspecting person. What we tend to forget about such things as cocaine is that very rarely does anybody tell you "hey, sniff this or I'll put a bullet in your temple" or "try this cigarette or your dog gets it". It is always a conscious decision to tie that vein and shoot that needle, or to make that trip to Atlantic City just one more time, or to tip your elbow again because surely this is the last beer you'll be needing for the night. And I'm not climbing on some bully pulpit here; the reason such things are so seductive is because they can make you happy, at least for a little while, and a lot of people don't even get that much in their lives. But all the same, you take that step down the road to ruin and it's hard to move in another direction...that is, unless you utilize a little common sense. Or should I say...Common Sense? Eh? Eh?

Ah, and here I go, falling prey to the siren song of digging into Dylan's lyrics to find something that may or may not be there. I can see why people will dedicate portions of their lives and kill tree after tree to do it - it can be a lot of fun, if you really do think you're on to something. And there we see Greil Marcus's words validated - not the American history lesson business, but Dylan's words as gateway to your imagination, so to speak. If you can think this way about a song like "As I Went Out One Morning", you can put that same cerebral cortex power to looking at your favorite movies, or even the way you approach the world and the people inhabiting this planet of ours. That's pretty special, in my opinion. We often take a very myopic view of the world, and if it takes a pretty darn good song off a pretty darn good album to yank those blinders off our heads, so be it.

BONUS! At the risk of losing readers of my blog to a more well-written and erudite piece of work, I'm linking you here to a tremendous blog that focuses on Dylan's music and exceptional analyses therein, and more specifically a post he wrote about "As I Went Out One Morning" that goes on a way different tangent from mine. Read it here.

BONUS #2! For those that haven't heard it before, I'm embedding below the one and only live performance of "As I Went Out One Morning", played on January 10th, 1974 at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. It's a fine performance, one that captures the drama of the original while enfolding it in the aesthetic of Tour '74, and makes me wonder why this song was never played again in any iteration of Bob's touring band. Enjoy!

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Bob Dylan Song #103: John Wesley Harding

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John Wesley Harding is an album that makes sense if you really step back and take a look at the big picture of Dylan's career, and an album that can make exceptionally little sense when trying to put it in the context of that career. After all, even with hindsight the album kinda looks like an alien in its musical climate - a mainly acoustic album of sparse lyrics and equally sparse arrangements, recorded by an artist famed for his complicated lyrics and exceptional band arrangements, released in a season where psychedelica was running rampant and where Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the album everybody was paying attention to. It must have been even more insane back then; can you imagine picking up Dylan's first album after the mindblowing Blonde on Blonde, putting it on your turntable expecting another Electric Trilogy blast, then hearing that first song and realizing you're getting something entirely different? It was a different world back in 1967, and people were still getting used to the idea of creative maturation and evolution in rock music. Hearing John Wesley Harding must have been a real trip.

At least, for most people. We tend to occasionally overestimate just how much technology plays a part in our lives - after all, there are still parts of this country (let alone the world) that don't have broadband internet yet, never mind Twitter or BitTorrent or all that fooferaw. But there is still that segment of the population that constantly stays up to date on the cutting edge of technology, knows just when the next iPhone iteration is coming out, and where we're headed as an information-saturated society. And, back in 1967, there were a chosen few that had managed to snag themselves a copy of what Dylan and the Band were up to in the early days of that year, heard the songs that we now know as the Basement Tapes, and had their minds blown a little earlier than everybody else. We're talking a very chosen few (Great White Wonder, not exactly a widely released record to begin with, was still two years away), but those select musicians and lucky friends/acquaintances of those musicians that heard those tapes could get what Dylan was up to on John Wesley Harding. And, again with the benefit of hindsight, we can hear the Basement Tapes and realize that Dylan had the direction for his next Columbia album more or less in mind all that time.

There's something interesting about the fact that Dylan went to Nashville, where he'd churned out his last drug-influenced album, to record John Wesley Harding (in more typical Dylan fashion, the twelve songs were cranked out in three sessions and just under twelve hours - most bands these days are lucky to have done ONE song, maybe two or three if everything breaks right, in the studio in that time). Maybe he was just comfortable working there, with many of the same musicians that worked on Blonde on Blonde, who knows. But what I like to think was happening was that Dylan was affirming, maybe even to himself, that even though the music itself was far different from what came before (quite frankly, the closest any of his previous records comes to sounding similar in tone is his debut), he knew exactly who he was and why he was recording it. Even the fact that he wore the same jacket on this cover as he did on the last album says something - yeah, you're not used to this, but I'm still Bob Dylan, after all.

And he backed that up on record, as well. I kind of brought this up when I began writing about Blonde on Blonde - one thing that makes the last two Electric Trilogy records so strong is how remarkably cohesive the albums are, top to bottom. Every song serves a purpose on the album, outside of its own individual strength, and the album becomes far more worthy as a total listening experience because of that. Bringing it All Back Home, naturally, doesn't have this same unity (although you could argue that both Side A and Side B have their own intrinsic unity), which isn't a bad thing, just a statement of fact. Once Dylan had found his feet as an electric musician, he completely understood how to make albums, not collections of songs, but pieces of music that immersed you in its own internal world from beginning to end. And John Wesley Harding has that same cohesion; the internal world Dylan created might be miles away from what he was on about in 1965-1966, but there is a world all the same, and it's just as interesting and beautiful as the worlds he'd created wired to the gills on speed.

One of the really remarkable things about this album is that Dylan proved conclusively that you can make creative strides as a musician without resorting to overstuffed instrumentation or a gaggle of cohorts to help create a ton of half-baked ideas. It was the Basement Tapes where Dylan made a left turn in songwriting styles, and it was here where that left turn bore fruit. Dylan stripped down as much of himself as he could, both in the arrangements and in his words, and managed to point the way towards a new direction, one that owed just as much to the past as his acoustic records did, while also paying debts to a strand of music only hinted at in his previous work - country music. The country-rock boom may have still been on the horizon, but Dylan was already incorporating that into his music, not so much anticipating a trend as putting himself in the right place as that trend arose. And the country elements in Dylan's music lasted long enough for Dylan to create some of his best music of his career. You could even argue that the simpler, more rootsy country style espoused on this and Nashville Skyline would reach its apex in the spare, gentle, powerful arrangements of Blood on the Tracks. Not too bad for an album that shocked the hell out of a lot of people upon its release.

John Wesley Harding, in some ways, is the forgotten Dylan masterpiece, an album nearly as strong as the Electric Trilogy but maybe a fifth as well-known and loved (even with "All Along the Watchtower" on it). And that is perfectly understandable; an album this unassuming, this straightforward and direct, bereft of the spaced-out genius of the previous albums (though not without its own genius, of course), was probably never going to be as popular or draw as much attention. Maybe that's just the way that Dylan wanted it. He'd come off one of the craziest years any human being had ever lived, achieved fame only a few people that ever lived could ever dream of, and every account tells us that he wanted to pull back from that and try to get to a lifestyle that might be considered "normal" by someone's standards. And, for a little while, he succeeded in that. But he could never stop recording music, and he recorded an album that captured his frame of mind, his desire to pare back and keep it simple, stupid. And we got a masterpiece out of that, a great record in a year full of great records. Not too shabby.

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Even the choice of opener for the album speaks to the overall tone of the album - Dylan kicks things off with, of all things, a tale of a Western bandit on the run from the law. Dylan later said that he named the album after this song so that people wouldn't think of it as a throwaway, and it's entirely possible that he would have been proven right. After all, there really isn't too much of a story to the song - this guy's great, he's like Robin Hood, nobody can pin him down, so what? - and the simple four-chord arrangement isn't the kind of thing that brings people back for repeat listens. But by giving the entire song cycle that name, we find ourselves thinking about whether or not Dylan saw something of himself in this man (named John Wesley Hardin, by the way - maybe the "g" was added because it sounds better when sung, or Dylan just didn't have an Encyclopedia Britannica handy) or in the "story" that he's telling, and decided to apply what he saw to the rest of the songs. Either way, it's an interesting decision, and one that's worth exploring.

Dylan didn't quite get all the facts right about the guy - not that it matters, since it's pretty obvious he was going more for the evoking of the Wild West and the old, weird America (forgive my use of the term) than any attempt at making a biographical sketch of a reasonably minor outlaw from the frontier period of our nation's history. What should matter more is the fact that Dylan chose to write this kind of song at all; he'd performed numbers like "Pretty Boy Floyd" during his folk days and surely knew of any number of other likeminded songs, but this was the first time that he'd taken his own stab at writing an outlaw song. Maybe he just felt like it was the right time - for a man that's always played fast and loose with his own history, he might have felt right at home writing a song that played a little fast and loose with the history of a vagabond. Dylan's fascination with the Wild West has always been a little overt, after all (cf. Masked and Anonymous, his role in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, etc.).

Whatever reason he chose to write the song, he gave it both the honor of album title and pole position, and in the same way that just about every album opener ever lends at least a little of its spirit to the rest of the album, "John Wesley Harding" adds a little bit of flavor to how we view John Wesley Harding. The mere fact alone that he started with a folk-style outlaw tale, consciously drawing on Americana the same way that the Basement Tapes did, tells us that we're in for an album that makes no bones about its debts to the old bluesmen and "Man of Constant Sorrow" and "I'll Fly Away", with songs that draw upon old tales passed down through generations and the Bible and on half-forgotten corners of our national consciousness, all told in a language so clean and stripped-down that you'd be forgiven for wondering if the lyrics were ever meant to be songs at all. And you also can see that Dylan's focused on the cross-section of that old America he'd never written about before, on tramps and hoboes and outsiders and men who lived outside the law (honest or not), men that he very easily could have identified with as a kid who threw away his past for any number of pasts he could easily make up. What this adds up to, then, is an album that you can easily surmise is about where Bob Dylan's head was at this stage of his life and what was occupying space up there in the fall of 1967, codified in that sly way of his, where both everything and nothing is revealed. Or he's just singing about lonesome hoboes, I dunno.

Going back to that imaginary person cueing up the record for the first time back when it was released, I can only imagine what he thought while listening to that first minute of the song. There's the opening acoustic strum (shades of "Subterranean Homesick Blues"?), the realization that acoustic guitars, a low-key bass, and snare rim shots are all we're getting for instrumentation, and then Dylan's voice, gruffer and yet clearer than the sneering whine of Blonde on Blonde, all adding up to a brand new revelation in a career already chock full of them. It is this instrumentation, in my opinion, that allows the song to work the way it does; I suppose that straight acoustic would have worked just fine as well, but the gently propulsive backing does give the tale a bit more oomph, whereas a rock band arrangement would obviously have overwhelmed the take and scuppered the whole thing right out of the gate. Dylan claimed that he had wanted to add more instrumentation ("I didn't plan that sound") and had talked to Robbie Robertson about some overdubs, but how would a piano - even a saloon-style piano - or a few guitar licks have really helped this arrangement out? Retrospect definitely makes the arrangements sound just right, and I can't imagine that as the years go by, somebody will say anything different.

I'd like to conjure up that imaginary listener again, one more time, staring at the cover of the album he'd just purchased, at the black and white photo of Dylan with those unknown men - Native Americans? - and still puzzling out what he'd just heard. Maybe he pulls up the needle and cues the title track again, wondering if he'd heard it wrong and Dylan really had snuck in Robertson's nasty little fills or an "Absolutely Sweet Marie"-style organ in there somewhere. Maybe he skips ahead a few tracks, looking for something that sounds more like Highway 61 Revisited, continually scratching his head when he keeps hearing acoustic guitars and muted drums and Dylan singing about something straight out of Sunday school. And maybe, just maybe (this is my hopeful side talking here), he realizes that it doesn't matter that Dylan's taken a brand new direction; this brand new direction, believe it or not, sounds pretty damn good. And that imaginary listener cues up the title track again, listens to that tale of a man who never made a foolish move, and readies himself for what comes next.

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