Bob Dylan Song #124: Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

Author's note (boy, I've had a lot of those recently, haven't I?): Keep reading below the post for two special announcements, one regarding the next post, and one regarding the blog's future.

Maybe it's those opening bars, with the pedal steel guitar coming together beautifully with a really cool piano line. Maybe it's the oddly thick guitar notes played all throughout the song. Maybe it's the funky middle eight, that pedal steel soaring to great heights and Dylan hitting the high notes in a way that suggests that some real skill does go into his vocal performances. Or perhaps it's just the way the song written, a few simple chords arranged perfectly into a gorgeous and fitting closer to the album. Whatever the reason, "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" stands as my favorite song on Nashville Skyline, one of my favorite closers to any album, and a song that I would put on a Dylan mixtape for somebody trying to explore further into Dylan's massive body of work. It's a sentimental favorite, what can I say.

For one thing, "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" boasts probably my favorite musical arrangement on the album, on an album that's chock full of fun musical moments (even "Nashville Skyline Rag", with its fun banjo work, has something to be said for it). That pedal steel, an instrument that almost immediately conjures up country music whenever you hear it, is used here to devastating effect, swooping between Dylan's lines and adding extra emphasis when he's not singing. And the piano adds an extra sweet counterpoint, like a musical flourish at the start and end of the track. People tend to make a lot about how simplistic country music tends to be, and while I don't disagree with many of the complaints (modern country music, in particular, doesn't seem to have much going for it), there is still a great deal to like in the best of country, just like in the best of any genre. And one thing that I've always enjoyed, even with crappy country music, is its differences in instrumentation, with pedal steel guitars, violins, banjos, and other things you don't always hear in music coming to the forefront. It's almost like hearing a different language, and that's always cool.

The other thing that I've found interesting about this song, especially as I get older, is the actual subject matter of the song. What Dylan's singing about, and I never really thought of it when I first heard it, is a tale of a man who is apparently visiting some town or whatever, has fallen in love with a woman there, and now has decided to give up his train ticket (I always liked that "if there's a poor boy on the street" line) in order to stay with his newly beloved and do all sorts of things not actually mentioned in the lyrics. That's a take on the love song you don't always hear; it's not a tale of a devoted relationship, nor is it simply about a one-night stand with some girl the narrator will never see again. Instead, you have Dylan singing about actually having what was supposed to be a one night stand, and becoming so enamored with the woman in question that he's prepared to chuck everything in his life ("throw my troubles out the door") in order to just stay with this woman. That's kind of sweet, isn't it?

It's somewhat educational to compare the album take of this song with the version played on the Rolling Thunder Revue's first leg, as heard on the official Live 1975 album. Whereas this version aims for a sort of modest declaration of love, the RTR's version comes on far more strong (as evidenced by the "you came down on me like rolling thunder" line, which Dylan always sang with a great deal of panache) and packs a more overwhelmingly sexual punch. Of course, the arrangements have a lot to do with that, as the 1975 version swaps out the pedal steel and piano for roaring guitars and Scarlet Rivera's bewitching violin (along with a lot more shouting), and Dylan had rewritten the lyrics to give the song a totally different energy. The narrator in this new version is more insistent of his desire ("you got to understand/that tonight I'll be staying here with you...get ready!") and seems a lot less innocent ("I could have left this town by noon/by tonight I'd been to some place new"), almost like Dylan was inserting his current touring incarnation into the song rather than the random traveler/businessman/whoever of the album version. It's the same song, but with a whole other meaning behind it.

We can be thankful, then, that Dylan kept that sexual energy latent or completely absent in the album version. The kind of blatant come-hither aura that permeates the RTR's version (and the RTR in general, really) would have been incredibly out of place in the pastoral setting that Nashville Skyline resides in. Instead, we have a take that still exudes joyfulness, but in a much more innocent way. It's a charming ending to a charming album, maybe the most charming Bob ever recorded.

Okay, so.

First, a word about the next entry in the blog. I'm already starting to break out in hives thinking about starting up the Self Portrait series, so before I delve into that album I'm going to do something rather more fun. We all know about Dylan's performance at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival with The Band, an unexpected and often overlooked moment in his career. Recently a new version of the concert tape surfaced in the trading community, a definite step up over the barely listenable Frankenstein's monster that was the original version. And, in the interest of giving more attention to a strange part of Dylan's canon, I'm going to be listening to the show and writing up my own running diary, to be posted on this site. I urge all of you to download the show, pull up the diary on Monday, and follow along with me as I give you my thoughts about a truly unique show. Join me, won't you?

And now, a word about me. I would say about 99.99% of the readers of this blog don't know me personally, and so none of you would really have an idea as to what I do when I'm not writing this blog. Well, starting in August I will be attending the University of San Diego School of Law, giving up three years of my life in the hopes of "making something of myself" (he says with a wry smile). I bring this up not just because it'd be cool to meet any readers from San Diego, but also because I'm not entirely sure how this will affect this little project I've undertaken. Now, lest you think I'm saying goodbye a mere decade into Dylan's career, fear not - I will still be making posts and reading comments and so on. This blog is not going away. However, whether or not I'll still be posting at the same clip...that I don't know. I might be going to one entry a week, maybe one entry a month. Okay, definitely not one entry a month - I'd like to finish this project before I pass on. But the chances that I continue to provide the same amount of content every week seem slim. At any rate, I wanted to let you all know in advance. I'm still continuing the blog, and I hope you still continue reading and commenting.
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Bob Dylan Song #123: Country Pie

I was sorely tempted to just post live videos of "Country Pie", much like I did for the "Nashville Skyline Rag" post, but it was probably pushing it to do it the one time. Besides, Lord knows that there are times where I have to dig deep to find things to talk about with some of these tunes; "Nashville Skyline Rag" really doesn't inspire much outside of "hey, an instrumental", so it seemed better to just have a little bit of fun. "Country Pie", essentially, serves the same function as "NSR" does; a lighthearted piece of music, essentially the equivalent of what you'd play at a hoedown or hootenanny or some other word for country-music dance, and a bookend for the end of the album the same way that other song works as bookend for the start. The major difference is that "Country Pie" has lyrics, which allows it to fall in for more scrutiny, certainly way more than it deserves. "NSR", just a quick two-minute banjo showcase, ultimately gets taken off the hook. "Country Pie", which might as well be an instrumental for the depth of its lyrics (although "Lil' Jack Horner got nothing on me" is worth a smile), doesn't get let off that easy.

This is stepping on something I'd like to get into more in-depth down the line, but one of the topics Greil Marcus gets into in his infamous review of Self Portrait is the idea of Dylan's past work giving him the freedom of creativity. As Marcus puts it, Dylan basically created an entire legend out the body of work he created between 1965 and 1966, music that "defined and structured a crucial year" - you would think Dylan's tremendous acoustic work beforehand would fit in to that legend as well, but never mind. And, by dint of that legend, Dylan basically has been afforded the privilege of being able to record whatever he wants to, essentially trading on the goodwill afforded him from his previous work, regardless of whether or not it has any merit. To quote again, he "doesn't have to do good, because he has done good. One wonders...how long he can get away with it". And while he's not talking about Nashville Skyline, you can certainly imagine him tossing it in along with the rest of Dylan's "disappointing" post-1966 output (it'd be nice to ask 1970 Marcus what he thought of John Wesley Harding, but that would probably bring on another judgmental rant, so perhaps it's best that can never happen). Songs like "Country Pie", a little lark to say the least, probably don't help matters.

Now, I can certainly fill up an entire post talking about this little bit of sermonizing Marcus saw fit to give us (to be fair, it was a different time that Marcus wrote that in), but I'd prefer to save that and just concentrate on this one song, one that I happen to like and consider a fun ol' time. A song like this one, surely, would be considered by 1970 Marcus to be another instance of trading on goodwill, Dylan simply having himself a goof because he can. And, of course, he's absolutely right. To which the obvious rejoinder, one that you might actually have in your mind right now, is "so what?" The great thing about those fantastic albums, the ones that made Dylan the man that he was in 1969, was that they didn't have any ambitions of turning Dylan into some sort of Greek god or giving him a reputation as Jesus with a six-string (and the fact that they did clearly made him uncomfortable); you never got the feeling that Dylan set out to deliberately make music that would cause the earth to move. And those albums had their share of less-than-amazing music, like all classic albums do - not to mention songs clearly meant to put a smile on the listener's face like "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" or "Absolutely Sweet Marie". Dylan has a sense of humor about himself, and a showman's desire to entertain. "Country Pie" showcases both of those traits, but does it in a more direct way, and thus is not worthy of praise. I don't see how that works.

One of the more surprising moments of Dylan's latter-day touring career was in around 2000 or so, when for whatever reason "Country Pie" started getting semi-regular airings on stage. Usually clocking in at a brisk 2 and a half minutes or so, the song generally works as a chance for the band to strut its stuff (Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton, in particular, get to whip up some fiery guitar solo) and get the audience movin' and groovin'. Not only is that a cool thing - it's not exactly as though Dylan's catalog is chock full of dance songs - but it illustrates what a song like "Country Pie" can be under the right circumstances. I've written any number of words about Nashville Skyline being an album that shows that Dylan can appeal to our heart and feet, just as much as he could appeal to our brain. To close this post out, I think I'll let Dylan and His Band do the work for me.

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Bob Dylan Song #122: Tell Me That It Isn't True

Author's note: My original post was accidentally deleted, so I'm more or less stitching this together from memory. With any luck, it's better than the original.

One of the more gratifying aspects of Dylan's career, so diverse and full of albums that sound remarkably different from each other, is that any number of his albums can grab your attention for long periods of time and not let go until you've fully exhausted the joys of that particular song cycle. While this type of obsessive listening can lend itself to adverse results (for a while I'd pegged Desire as Dylan's best album, whereas today I don't even consider it the best representation of that era in Dylan's career), on the whole that sort of nonstop listening can prove to be truly rewarding. As you might expect, I bring this up because I spent the first week or two after my first time hearing Nashville Skyline cueing it up again and again, pulled in by its hit-and-run brevity (one can make too much of this, but let's face it - this album is great at 27 minutes and would be interminable at 54), the catchy tunes, and that (in)famous croon. How can it not be such a weird standout, especially if you start with the Electric Trilogy or BOTT like just about everyone else?

A song that caught my attention from the first time was this one, "Tell Me That It Isn't True", a song that I still enjoy to this day. It has one of the best intros on the album, a gently rising guitar line backed up by some really nice organ work (the organ playing throughout is a real standout on the album, understated yet always well-deployed). Some of the best lyrics of the album can be found here, with Dylan's narrator quietly pleading for his woman to affirm that the rumors of her infidelity are false and that she really is faithful to him. And the band arrangement, gently adding emphasis to Dylan's singing (mainly aided, again, by that organ), is as good as it gets here. For an album that boasts a strong internal consistency as one of its strengths, in that the songs all suggest each other without sounding like each other (if that makes sense), this is one of the songs that helps hold that consistency in place. It's not a stone cold classic like "Lay Lady Lay", but it's well worth the listen.

It occurs to me, as the Nashville Skyline series winds down, that one of the main talking points of this album is also one of the most ultimately irrelevant. I'm talking, of course, about Dylan's voice on this album, the high-pitched singing style he'd adopted for these ten (well, nine) songs alone and would only adopt once more, for his shambolic joke of a cover of Paul Simon's "The Boxer". It's always been debated as to where that voice came from - be it a side-effect of quitting smoking, or a conscious reverting to his singing voice from 1960, or whatever it is. But I think that concentrating on where the voice came from kind of obscures the main question - why that voice came to be. I touched on this earlier, but that question seems to have an obvious answer, as well as an important one. I'll put it like this - imagine a song like "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", with its vicious barbs towards some poor fictional (?) woman, and imagine it in the smooth Nashville Skyline voice. Now take "Tell Me That It Isn't True" and try to hear it in Dylan's sandpaper and grit snarl from Highway 61 Revisited. It just doesn't sound right, does it? Just as the lyrical styles are so very different - if "Tell Me That It Isn't True" had been written in 1965, the woman's infidelity would not even be a question - the voices Dylan used to sing those lyrics matches so very well. You want rough edges for 1965 Dylan's poetic slings and arrows, and you want baby skin-smooth sounds to match 1969 Dylan's charming, folksy words.

For an album that, lyrically, appears to have no preconceptions or hidden motives, it also shows a remarkable amount of self-awareness on Bob's part. He knew perfectly well that nobody would accept the Dylan that sneered his way through "Positively Fourth Street" singing songs about laying in a big brass bed or throwing his suitcase out the window. And he also knew that his regular voice had no antecedent in country music's already-rich history to that point, and any country fans that picked up this album would be instantly turned off if they heard "I Threw It All Away" in even the less-rough vocalizing found on John Wesley Harding. So Bob reached into his bag of tricks, pulled out a vocal style that he'd either never or very rarely tried before, and used it to his absolute advantage. It is that singing style that stands as the absolute hallmark of this album, and that is because the singing style works so very well. Kudos to Dylan for taking that chance, and making it work for him. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #121: One More Night

"One More Night", like the other songs on this album (with the possible exception of "Girl of the North Country"), is the type of song that could have been recorded by any great country artist and would have sounded just fine. Note that I didn't say "any country artist" - there is enough poetry and rhythm in the way Dylan stitched the lyrics together to make it virtually impossible for some hack to write and perform the song the way Dylan did on Nashville Skyline. But the original point still stands; this is a song that paints a universal sentiment, more or less removing what we'd consider Dylan's own original voice from the equation. It's this removing of his voice that is usually the bane of contention when it comes to this album, where Dylan's usage of the occasional cliche and the more common impersonal phrase gives the album more distance than it should have, the equivalent of a great painting of some random landscape or a bowl of fruit or something. One wonders just how personal, say, "Gates of Eden" or "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" actually were, but that's a whole other post.

Let's assume that Dylan wasn't recording this album purely for any financial/career-linked considerations, and that he was genuinely interested in following that thread he suggested at the end of John Wesley Harding to its logical conclusion and exploring a genre of music that legitimately interested him. The question, then, is one that's been puzzling for a full four decades: why did Dylan choose to completely hide his writing voice? Putting aside the thorny issue of what exactly that voice actually is, we can reasonably state that whatever that voice is, it isn't anywhere to be found on the nine songs with vocals found on this album. Did Dylan really believe that there was no way to record a country album with any sense of "authenticity" (whatever THAT means) or "legitimacy" without sticking strictly to songs of love and the absence thereof? Why not any songs about growing up poor or running from the law? He's made up those stories before - would anybody really have called him out if he penned a few ditties on those subjects? And, most of all, why has Dylan "dumbed down" his approach to lyricism, giving us an album that could very well have been written by one of the country artists I mentioned in the initial post for this album, rather than the Bob Dylan we know and love?

Roger Ebert, who has been keeping up a blog that suggests he may have missed his true vocation when he decided to become a film critic, has posted a couple entries related to the steaming pile that is the second Transformers movie and his evisceration of a review for that particular dud. The most recent entry is a spirited discussion about our current cultural divide, where the educated and intellectual are derided nonstop for being "elitist", "snobby", and so on. Although Ebert stops just short of saying this, he also advances the notion that the great majority of the general population is of average intelligence and below, and tends to confront those in the other part of the spectrum with fear and disgust. He's right about this, of course. He also challenges people to keep their minds open and curious, to seek out higher forms of entertainment, and to never simply settle for big explosions and cheap jokes about poop or doing it. He's right about this, as well.

But there's something of an undercurrent to this argument that I think deserves some discussion. I'm not talking about the insanely trite "it's just entertainment" excuse that people have been chucking at Ebert; if you are willing to settle for lowest common denominator in that which stimulates and entertains you, where else will you be willing to lower the bar? I'm talking about the idea that the masses do need to be entertained, and that occasionally they will not want to be entertained by something that shakes us to our very core and makes us question God or the meaning of life or what have you. For most people, life is hard. Life is a constant struggle of doing work you probably don't like, living in a relationship that isn't always perfect, maybe having kids that give you migraine after migraine. The vast majority of Americans deal with traffic jams and 401(k)s, with going to McDonald's because they're too tired to cook, and with paying insane bills just so they can TiVO some Food Network show and watch it on Saturday when they have an hour to spare. And, these days, most Americans are dealing with a painfully crippled economy still struggling for signs of recovery. These Americans are, I'm sad to say, just not going to be appeased by The Seventh Seal or, yes, even by Blonde on Blonde, and the odds are good they never will be. Do they not have a right to be entertained?

Look, I think Michael Bay peddles a particularly odious brand of filmic garbage (no wonder Ebert, a man who has dedicated his life to great films, hates that movie so much), most music people download for ringtones tends to suck big time, and a certain amount of artistic power has to be present in even the lowest forms of entertainment for that entertainment to have any merit at all. I also think that too much can be made of this. People sometimes just want to laugh, just want to hear music that makes them happy, and so on. We don't have to make too much out of those impulses. Now, if ALL they want to do is just laugh or just listen to happy music or whatever, there's a problem. But emotions don't always have to be deep or thought-provoking.

That brings me to Nashville Skyline, an album that has sold its fair share of copies and somehow managed to entertain despite not reaching the same dizzying intellectual heights that Blonde on Blonde has. People like this album just fine, without pondering why Dylan's used such a nondescript lyrical voice or why the album wanders between all of two separate themes. And that, to me, is okay. Dylan, in recording this album, didn't worry about any snobs-against-the-slobs cultural war or being taken to task by people who'd already grasped what "It's Alright, Ma" is all about and now feel almost let down by an album that doesn't force us to approach it with that much brainpower. He wrote a bunch of songs that sounded good to him, recorded an album that he wanted to record, and that is that. A piece of art that simple doesn't need to be twisted around like some kind of Rubik's Cube. We can let it just be what it is.

Author's note: for the readers of this post that come via Expecting Rain, please note that if you go to the main page, below this entry is an article I wrote yesterday about Michael Jackson and what might appear to be a tangential, but I think is quite interesting connection to our man Bob. I invite you all to read and comment. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #120: Peggy Day

Note: I could make up an excuse for why I forgot to do "Peggy Day" in its correct chronological order, but instead I'll just ask for a mea culpa on this one. Hey, one mess-up out of 120 songs ain't bad, right?

You know, as much as I've made my opinions known about the people that have ragged on this album, a song like "Peggy Day" kind of makes me think those fellows might have more of a point than I'd originally want to concede. Sure, the song is a pleasant trifle, with some neat chord changes and a fun bump-'n-grind finale that has Dylan channeling Elvis (if not for the first time, surely the first time on vinyl). But "pleasant trifle" doesn't really begin to describe how slight this tune is - the lyrics are, well, not the most complicated I've ever heard (children's album...hmmm?), and it's not really a good thing when it feels like Bob's actually padding in order to hit the two-minute mark. As an album filler and part of the aesthetic of the album, "Peggy Day" isn't too bad. As an actual song worthy of being judged for its merits, well...

It kind of says something where people give Bob some stick for writing a song with lyrics so slight that they don't even work well for a quickie country tune. I realize that what I just wrote will sound like a massive insult to country music fans (of which I know a few, both of the modern variety I don't care for and the Cash/Haggard variety I can get behind), so I hope I can elaborate a little bit. There is nothing in our human experience that says that all music needs to be extremely complicated in either its lyrical content or its production values - if so, all we'd be listening to is prog rock or something like that. And you don't even need to have music reach the level of Dylan's lyrics on Blonde on Blonde or the musical interplay Radiohead reaches to touch somebody on an emotional or intellectual level. Country music, which generally doesn't get too complicated in its lyrical content or overly ornate musically, can easily reach the emotional and intellectual heights the best of music has to offer. Think of "Mama Tried", "Folsom Prison Blues", "Lost Highway", and so on.

Now, with that being said, when somebody talks about "country music" certain expectations are usually raised. Some of them are based on our own biases, which is unavoidable; some of them, like the subject matter ("There's A Tear In My Beer", etc.) are often accurate. And that is where a song like "Peggy Day" gets into trouble - by virtue of the fact that it's SO simplistic, so willing to completely buy into the pickin' and grinnin' model some people find distasteful, and so bereft of the qualities that makes the great country music songs so great (other than a certain uncomplicated charm), it speaks to the ingrained idea many people (including myself, on occasion) have about country music. And that's not entirely Bob's fault - nobody said his little country album had to change the world, or even change the way we think about country music. Even the most cursory listen to the album shows that Bob was more interested in adopting to country music and its genre qualifications, rather than make country music bend to what we consider Dylan's music. But it's one thing to immerse yourself in a musical genre, and something else entirely to play to the expectations of that genre. And that's not a particularly good thing.

In the end, I'm not going to say that I haven't tapped my foot to "Peggy Day" or that I automatically skip past it whenever I take Nashville Skyline out for a listen on the ol' iPod. It's not an actively bad song, and I get quite the kick out of when the song goes into that little shimmy at the end. But I can never shake the feeling that Bob probably scribbled out the lyrics on the back of a napkin or something and slapped the tune together as quickly as he could in order to get that running order up to ten songs (seriously, the only way the album could have been any shorter would've been for Bob to make it an EP). And that feeling, I assume, turns off people when it comes to this album - not just the idea that Bob recorded a country album, but that he recorded it so quickly and haphazardly that a song like this, cutting-room material for any other album, instead made the final cut. That may not be a fair assessment, but it is an understandable one. And that kind of assumption is what makes Nashville Skyline an album far more discussed and debated than it might actually deserve. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #119: Lay Lady Lay

Even if you had no prior knowledge of Dylan's career before hearing "Lay Lady Lay", it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that this was the first and biggest single off of the album. That famous intro (the swelling organ, the wandering pedal steel, and what suspiciously and awesomely sounds like a cowbell), combined with the catchiness of those deceptively rote verses and the little guitar lick we all know from the chorus, adds up to a song that sounds like it would be right at home being played by DJs coast to coast. It also wouldn't surprise you to know that this song has taken a spot on just about every Dylan compilation there is, often as the only Nashville Skyline representative, including (somewhat oddly) the pole position on Dylan's sprawling and always-interesting Biograph. And you might not even be surprised to learn that "Lay Lady Lay" was Dylan's last Top 10 hit in the US and one of the biggest singles of his career. That's the kind of song it is; both gently unassuming and almost astoundingly commercial-friendly.

The one impression that's always lasted with me in regards to this song is just how beautiful it sounds, especially in the context of a career not always noted for care and craft when it comes to studio arrangements. I know that "Lay Lady Lay" was recorded as quickly as any other number of Dylan hits - in a session that lasted all of ten days, there probably wasn't too much attention paid to any one song. And yet I can't help hearing the song and feeling like Dylan wanted this song to sound as immaculate as possible, from the burnished sheen of the organ to the way he pushes himself vocally on the middle eight. In a way, that actually makes the song more endearing; nominally it's a track about a man beseeching his woman to spend a night with him, but in its recorded version it takes on a more dignified air - what could've sounded like cheap come-ons instead sound like gentle, emotional pleas. I'm not sure that would've happened without the studio band's fantastic contributions.

One wonders what a blow this song must have been to all those Dylan fans that were expecting him to continue to be their birds-nest-haired hero after 1966; not only did it come on a country album, for the love of Pete, but people are BUYING this tripe and requesting it on the radio! Given Dylan's other top-tens ("LARS", "Positively 4th Street", "Rainy Day Women"), "Lay Lady Lay" is the obvious anomaly, both in its date of release and its sound. But what's interesting (and probably was infuriating back in those heady days of 1969) is that "Lay Lady Lay" sounds the most like a radio single, whereas the other songs sound like great songs that just happened to be played on the radio. There is a difference. I'm reminded, thinking of the chart success of this song, both of William Goldman's famous maxim about Hollywood - "nobody knows anything" - and the judge who made a ruling on pornographic materials by essentially saying "I know it when I see it". These are two diametrically opposing viewpoints, and yet they both can work when it comes to a song that becomes a big hit. We never know why a song can blow up on the radio and Billboard charts, but when we hear it somehow it becomes more apparent. "Lay Lady Lay", when you hear it, just sounds like a song that should be coming out of transistor speakers.

Dylan, surely, knew this as well. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Bob Dylan wrote "Lay Lady Lay" so he could get one of those fancy schmancy gold records to hang up on the wall of his den or something. But Dylan knows what's what when it comes to music, and it's no surprise that "Lay Lady Lay" has played a prominent role in his live career when he returned to the stage. He gave the song an airing during the Isle of Wight concert (one of a whopping six post-crash songs out of the 17-song setlist), and also included the song as a mainstay of the Tour '74 setlists (one of far less post-crash tunes, along with "Forever Young", "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", "All Along the Watchtower", and a few random Planet Waves tunes). And every tour since, more or less, has had at least one airing of the song (including the 1976 version, which I consider an abomination; that's probably not the majority opinion). Hey, even Dylan likes to satiate the masses sometimes.

It is with the release of this song that we see the end of Bob Dylan as a singles artist, somebody capable of ruling the radio for a few weeks with a song that you can't spin the dial without hearing. That's not a bad thing, of course - it's not like Dylan hasn't kept commercial appeal, with his mid-70s resurgence and his 2000s back-to-back chart toppers - but it's still something that we don't really think of when we're assessing Dylan's career. Not only is Dylan one of the defining artists of his generation (if not every generation), but there was a moment where his tracks rubbed shoulders on Billboard and Cashbox and Melody Maker and the NME with the Supremes and the Hollies and, yes, the Beatles. Yeah, it was a different time, but it's still funny to imagine our hero pushing product (like he did by appearing on The Johnny Cash Show) and having his 45s advertised in magazines. Ah, nostalgia. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #118: I Threw It All Away

Okay, this will be the last time I bring up Clinton Heylin (at least for this album, anyway). "I Threw It All Away", one of the most popular songs on the album, a favorite of any number of Dylan fans, was the subject of one of Heylin's more pointed criticisms in his Behind the Shades. Aside from the "once I had mountains/in the palm of my hands" lyric, he saw the lyrics to the song as nothing but trite cliches, a level of songwriting far below the lofty standards that Bob has established, even in the confines of a mere country music song. Now, far be it for me to criticize the opinion - repeat: opinion - of somebody with a great deal more qualifications, life experience, and musical wherewithal than I; on the other hand, screw 'im. Heylin, who apparently has this weird idea that Dylan's career needs to be wrapped in the snug cocoon of about five years of its existence, also apparently can't deal with the notion of his counterculture hero saying what he means, dealing in plain-spoken language instead of Rimbaud-by-way-of-Kerouac, or writing a song that directly goes for emotion instead of cleverly dancing around it. Kind of sad, if you ask me.

Dylan's pre-country career has not wanted for songs that have been able to summon emotion and tug at the heartstrings; indeed, it's what gives him more substance than the pseudo-hipsters that rip him off with about half his cleverness and a mere fraction of his humanity. But he never had a song that hit people in quite this way, with a directness he only sporadically visited outside of this album. Dylan's croon is a great help in this regard - as has already been mentioned, it's hard to imagine Dylan's regular singing voice (even the John Wesley Harding model) conjuring up that same kind of feeling, and that silky-smooth voice Dylan adopted works very well in this context. It should also be mentioned that his band offers maybe their best backing performance of the whole album, no mean feat. The intro, with that delicately picked acoustic backed by a dramatic, droning organ, is as arresting a musical moment as Dylan has had, and the sympathetic backing gives added weight to Dylan's vocal performance. I'm not suggesting that only an unfeeling robot wouldn't be moved by this song...well, just for fun, let's say I am suggesting that.

Now, one thing that this blog has started to become known for (at least, amongst the cooler cats out there in Internet-land) is occasional song analysis, in which I let loose the wilder side of my imagination and attempt to figure out just what it is our hero's trying to get at. I'd originally suggested at the start of this project that I was going to try to steer clear of that, as there is already a massive market of Dylan analysis and it doesn't seem entirely prudent to try and jam one more frat boy into that particular phone booth. All the same, I keep finding myself lured in by his exceptionally cryptic lyrics and mind-boggling imagery, much like so many others have been in the last 40+ years, and I keep finding myself wanting to get some sort of handle on where Bob was coming from, in order to make my listening experience that much better. I'm not sure this is always a good thing; after all, as much as enjoying music occurs on an intellectual level, a great deal of that enjoyment also comes purely from how that music stimulates us, makes us want to dance, and so on. All the same, there is something fun about parsing some of Bob's crazier lyrics, and he's had plenty of tracks that can double as treasure hunts.

I bring this up because it's kind of funny to me that this sort of spyglass-poring over analysis is rarely, if ever, applied to Nashville Skyline. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that an album this unassuming hasn't been subjected to the microscope so many other Dylan albums have suffered. But you do have to wonder what it is about us that wants to search for hidden meanings in the complex, without ever imagining that those same meanings could be hidden in the simple. Take "I Threw It All Away", for example. Where are the mountains of articles suggesting that this song is actually about Suze Rotolo, or Joan Baez, or any of the women that Dylan had loved and lost up to this point? Why can't those mountains stand for "the mountains of Madrid" Dylan wrote about in "Boots of Spanish Leather", a song that just about everyone assumes is about Suze heading off to Europe and her relationship with Bob splintering. Why aren't there people crying out that it's Baez that Dylan used to hold in his arms and so on and so forth? Maybe because it's not as much fun to place that sort of idea somewhere that makes it obvious, instead of somewhere that makes it hard for everyone but the most in tune with Dylan's wavelength to properly discern?

If you ever needed a reason to really enjoy Nashville Skyline, outside its own considerable artistic merits, just think about the fact that it's escaped so much of the chattering that has surrounded the rest of Bob's canon, both good and ill. So often we want to find deeper meanings in Bob's words - mainly because it makes it easier to defend his music against those that mock his lyrics as gibberish - that it's a real breath of fresh air when we can just enjoy his music on the level that goes no further than "isn't that sweet how he's singing about lost love?" It doesn't lessen the quality of the music, trust me. "I Threw It All Away" still remains a classic, one of Bob's finest songs. If you'd rather his finest songs were all about the Sixties or his battle with the folk crowd, well, that's your business. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #117: To Be Alone With You

My sneaky favorite* of Nashville Skyline, and potentially my outright favorite - it's either this or...well, I won't spoil the surprise. I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard this album (I immediately called it one of my favorites ever - my ardor has somewhat cooled in that regard) and being struck the most by this little ditty. In my opinion, everything that makes this a great album is encoded in the 2:12 that this track runs. There's the unassuming quality of that little studio snippet at the start, Charlie McCoy's snappy lead guitar intertwining with Bob Wilson's equally punchy piano workout, the band kicking things up a notch for the middle eight, and Dylan's croon smoothly sliding over everything like butter melting over pancakes. It's a pretty sweet way to really get things rolling on the album, if you ask me.

In the "Girl of the North Country" post, I'd mentioned how that particular song worked best as album opener, and that none of the other songs that made it on the album would have worked in the pole position. I still stand by that statement (it would be unseemly to back away from that just one post later, if nothing else), but the closest any of the 9 tracks afterwards comes to being an acceptable album opener would be this one. One could argue that, in some ways, it actually IS the album opener - at least, the song that gets you more prepared for what Nashville Skyline has to offer. After all, the Cash one-off is just that - a one-off - and the song afterwards is a fun, but ultimately superfluous instrumental (which, I should mention since I didn't in the last post, features some fine banjo work from well-known banjoist Earl Scruggs); it is right here where the album truly reveals its hole cards, giving us listeners the first taste of what kind of material Dylan was cranking out at the start of 1969. And, I can only guess, it was the kind of material that had to throw people for a loop.

Perhaps this is the sentimental side of me talking, but I have a picture in my mind of Dylan up in Woodstock, still ironing out the last kinks in "To Be Alone With You", strumming this song as his children (or child; he had at least one by 1969) sat at his feet and listened. And I think that's something worth thinking about. We all know that Dylan, at this point in his life, had more or less done a Beatles and stepped away from the public eye as much as he could. And we also know that Dylan, still following his muse, was recording albums and writing songs and keeping himself busy as a recording artist (otherwise I'd already be at Planet Waves or something by now). Perhaps I'm entirely off-base about this, but it could be possible that the family man Dylan we all remember from those pictures up at Woodstock, the one with the spindly beard and the nifty eyeglasses, was thinking about his recording career not just in terms of songs he's written for himself, or for Sara, but for his offspring as well.

You might scoff - and I wouldn't blame you if you did - but it's not outside the realm of possibility that Dylan might have been recording songs that his children could enjoy as they grew and started to mature. After all, we have all sorts of evidence of celebrities and musicians creating something aimed towards younger folk (the children's book market, for a while, was practically glutted with famous people's contributions); maybe Dylan wasn't recording a 1969 version of Yo Gabba Gabba!, but the overall sweetness of this album sort of makes me feel like he might have had his children (who, as any first-time parents would tell you, trump everything else in a way no non-parent could ever imagine) in the back of his mind while playing these songs. And there are some quibbles with this - the notion that country music is simplistic enough for children to understand can be taken as a major insult, and basically every song on this album is about love or the lack thereof. Now, while I obviously don't think country music is simplistic, it can definitely be performed in a stripped-down, less complicated manner, and while the songs do deal with love, they deal with it in about as sanitized and non-offensive a manner as possible. So what's left to deal with?

I imagine I might get a little bit of flack for this, as it could very easily look like I'm saying that "One More Night" is on the same level as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" or something like that. Hopefully nobody's gotten that idea (and if they have, I'm entirely to blame). What I hope I've put across, instead, is that a young man just settling into the idea of having to care about more than himself and his wife, a young man that also happens to be maybe the most talented musician that ever lived, might have thought about channeling his enormous gift into something that, yes, his children might enjoy as they grow up. And far from suggesting that Dylan went country just so he could write moon/June couplets that even three year olds would get, it would seem that Dylan's interest in Americana and country music might have intersected with that burgeoning family life, and he chose to write and perform songs that have the catchiness that appeals to all walks of life, with lyrics that deliver their points with brevity and ease, rather than meander around them or confound us by hiding those points under cryptic imagery. And let's face it - if I wanted to make a child happy through music, and I had to choose between "To Be Alone With You" or "Only A Pawn In Their Game" (or, maybe, even "Like A Rolling Stone"), there doesn't seem to be much of a choice at all.





*just in case you were wondering, my sneaky favorites for the albums I've already posted about:

Bob Dylan - "Gospel Plow"
Freewheelin' - "Bob Dylan's Blues"
The Times - "Boots of Spanish Leather"
Another Side - "Spanish Harlem Incident"
BIABH - "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"
H61 Revisited - "Queen Jane Approximately"
Blonde On Blonde - "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)"

Kinda hard to call some of those "sneaky favorites", given how well-known most of his early albums are, but what can you do? Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #116: Nashville Skyline Rag

Next! Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #115: Girl of the North Country (w/Johnny Cash)

(1)

"Vapid, down-home cliches"; "one can't help feeling something is missing"; just about every damn thing Clinton Heylin wrote about the album - Nashville Skyline is that true rarity, the 1960's Bob Dylan album that isn't beloved by the vast majority of critics and fans alike. This seems hardly surprising, given the fact that both the concept (Dylan goes country) and the execution (What's up with the voice? Is he singing about pie? What's going on here?) are ripe for divisiveness amongst anybody in the Dylan audience that hears the album. Not even the stabs at country on John Wesley Harding prepare you for this album, as Dylan fully embraces the genre (or, at least, what he feels the genre is) and gives us an album full of twangy guitars, pedal steel, lyrics about love and the loss thereof, and that wonderfully strange, obviously affected croon. One can only imagine how this must have freaked out the cognoscenti of the 60s, waiting for the Dylan they were comfortable with to return and spout his hipster poetry, and instead getting Dylan Does The Louvin Brothers.

I'm bringing up the Louvin Brothers for a specific reason. In his fantastic entry in the 33 1/3 series for The Gilded Palace of Sin, country music columnist Bob Proehl draws a distinct comparison between the Appalachian vocal sound of that duo and Dylan's voice on Nashville Skyline, a voice he'd only used once in his lifetime (in 1960, as a 19-year old in Minnesota). And that, to me, is the most important aspect of Dylan's voice on this album - the debate over cigarettes or Dylan's teenage self is ultimately window dressing. Dylan rather clearly knew what he was doing when he changed up his register for this album; much like the kid recording blues covers on his debut album to fit in with the folk crowd, Dylan decided to take a shot at aping Hank Thompson and Billy Grammer in order to make the medicine go down smoother. He knew the country world (who he was trying to play to, as much as the rest of the world - certainly not to the crowd that ate up the Electric Trilogy) would not accept "Country Pie" et. al. in his normal singing voice, so he decided to change things up to help gain the acceptance necessary for this album. One can only wonder what would've happened if he'd gained that acceptance - after all, once you're in with country fans, you're in for life - and how his career might have been altered if Nashville Skyline had hit big.

And one has to wonder whether there was any chance of this album gaining acceptance, given both the timing of its release and its very nature. Proehl, in another great line, suggested that Dylan was the first artist of the sixties who had totally given up on the sixties itself, preferring to retreat into his family life and turn away the hippies begging him to be their sunglass-wearing hero once again. Hindsight makes it clear why Dylan would want to retreat from that kind of overwhelming neediness, and Chronicles gives us some insight into the insane world Dylan lived in even AFTER he retreated from the public eye. And this ugly dynamic - Dylan wanting to stay out of the limelight, and an increasingly desperate fanbase trying to drag him back in - would define his career for the better part of a decade, culminating in his Tour '74, where he more or less bent that nostalgia into a means of profiting (I love Tour '74, but let's call a spade a spade). Nashville Skyline is a very important milestone in that dynamic.

With all that being said about Nashville Skyline as defining moment in Dylan's career (and one of his true outliers), it would probably do to take a moment and talk about Nashville Skyline as an actual musical piece of work. And, now that all the fussin' and the feudin' about the album has kind of melted away (along with all the rubbish about the 1960s cultural wars), we can see what this album is and was probably meant to be - a good old time, through and through. The brevity of the album (27 minutes - sitcom-length!), IMO, works to the album's advantage, as the songs hit and run before you get too discombobulated with the whole deal and last just long enough for you to go "wow, these are pretty darn good tunes!" Now, I think you'd agree with me when I say that there are some cliches and easy rhymes on the album, and that "Peggy Day" might not exactly stand up when compared to "Gates of Eden" or something like that. But if Dylan had wanted to write another "Gates of Eden", he surely would have done so, and it would have sounded absolutely atrocious in the aesthetic of this album. Dylan chose to write an album that sounded like the country music of the time - which should make post writing difficult; we're talking a very limited emotional and subject range here - and on that level, it works very well. And with his usual nifty studio band behind him, the music was always going to sound great.

I'm not going to suggest that Dylan KNEW this was going to happen, like he was recording an album of country music in an era of roiling cultural torment because he knew it would sound better to listeners forty years in the future. But an album that clearly skirts any political or cultural agenda will almost always sound better removed from the context of its time, and Nashville Skyline is that sort of album. Is it a classic of the highest order? Probably not. Does it set out to do what Dylan wanted to do - pay homage to a style of music Dylan had listened to and appreciated for a long time, and wanted to emulate at least once in his career (and maybe more, as almost happened before the Self Portrait sessions took over)? I would say so, yes. And is this an album that rewards repeat listening, maybe not because it's a deeply intellectual experience, but certainly because it's just so darn fun? Again, I would say yes to that. Dylan has done enough stimulation of our minds and hearts to last a lifetime. Sometimes we want something to stimulate our feet, as we tap them (or maybe even use them to dance) to "Country Pie". Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

(2)

In my post for "Fourth Time Around" I wrote a brief account of the meeting between Bob Dylan and The Beatles, where Dylan introduced the boys to weed, the earth moved or something, and a beautiful legend was born. Now, we all love a good legend (Kris Kristofferson, for one, appears to have a treasure chest full of them), since they carry a ring of glory and excitement about them that our real lives can very rarely provide, but they're also aggravating because they're almost always untrue and really deflating when you do find out how untrue they are. Lucky for us, many legends aren't always so easy to prove or disprove - certainly Snopes.com has a lot of those old wives' tales and urban legends locked down, but there are still some stories of legendary meetings or jam sessions or "(x) director was gonna team up with (x) actor to make the greatest movie EVER!!!!" type deals to freak us out and make us go "if only...". Our world is becoming increasingly devoid of mystery, for better or for worse, and to have mysteries in our lives is a good thing.

Of course, it's also nice to actually know that some crazy jam session or meeting of iconic minds actually did happen, if only because it makes all the other stories that much more plausible. And when it comes to icons, they don't come much bigger than Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Which is what makes their sessions in 1969 all the more fascinating - mainly because they take a big, shiny tack and pop the balloon full of hot air and speculation that usually surround these sorts of things. I've been lucky enough to hear those sessions, and they're basically what you might expect those meetups to be in real life - a loose session of cover songs and extended takes on whatever songs they care to play (the "Careless Love" pisstake is particularly amusing), the occasional flash of genius buried under the playfulness of two men not giving a shit if there are any flashes of genius. I don't think a full album of this stuff would've had any commercial viability (or even that they meshed all that well), but the good stuff is pretty darn good, as you might expect. And, best of all, you have that simpatico instinct between two friends that helps take the good stuff to that extra level, where there's a level of good feeling that a musician and a studio band simply cannot replicate.

Which brings me to "Girl of the North Country" as performed by Dylan and Cash, the leadoff song to Nashville Skyline and one of the few (and best) examples of Dylan collaborating with another famous musician. Always a highlight of the Dylan/Cash sessions, one figures that this made the album both because those sessions were clearly picked over to find something salvageable for vinyl release, and because it would help country fans unsure if they could trust the quintessential New York singer-songwriter's dip into their favorite genre get over their worries, if just for a little bit. As a calculated move, it's pretty darn smart. As a musical choice, it's equally smart. Not only is it a good introduction to what the album is all about (by way of Dylan's croon and the gentle arrangement), but it helps offer a touch of the familiar (by way of a previous Dylan song being rearranged). Consider any of the other songs on the album - would any of them have worked as opener to the album? I don't believe so.

Aside from the obviously jarring notion of a well-known song now being sung by two well-known musicians, it's interesting to see how the tone of the song has been altered by having it as a duet. The melancholy emotion, which made the original version so stirring, is still there; one of the great things about Cash is that he could sound both like the manliest of men and the saddest baritone-voiced poet you could imagine, and he summons up a great deal of regret and longing on the verse he gets for himself as well as the choruses. But the dynamic of the song itself is different - rather than one man telling his tale of woe about the girl that got away, instead you have two men telling that same tale, almost commiserating with each other about their own separate girls of the North Country, maybe about to take pulls off their beers in some bar somewhere. I'm not about to say that it makes the song better per se (that is up to the listener to decide), but it makes the song different, and I think that's a good thing. It always benefits a tune, even a classic one, if it can be heard in more than one way.

Even in a take as good as this, you can sort of hear why the Dylan/Cash teamup never quite worked out - the two never mesh together as well as we would hope, and the looseness (even here) means that you never get the total commitment that makes these one-offs something special. All the same, a song as good as this take on "Girl of the North Country" makes up for a lot of the indulgences, offering us a tantalizing glimpse at the heights this combo could have reached. Sometimes a pairing as gigantic as this one doesn't have to shake the earth. Sometimes it just has to be good enough to make you close your eyes and smile as the music plays on. Read more!