Bob Dylan Song #160: George Jackson

And, without the slightest bit of warning, Bob Dylan had returned to the forum of protest songs. Cut just over two months after the death of the Soledad Brother in a prison shootout (and released a mere week after the song's recording, a rather amazing turnaround if you stop to think about it), one of the few songs from Dylan's first period in the wilderness was a throwback to his acoustic days, as though the stern young man of the Times cover had inhabited his body for a couple of weeks until he could get the song cranked out before heading back to from whence he came. There happens to be two versions of the song - a mellow full-band version with the guys he'd recorded his Greatest Hits Vol. II songs with, and a solo acoustic version, just Bob and his harmonica, like the good ol' days. It is the solo acoustic version that I'm linking to, simply because it makes the most sense; until "Hurricane", after all, that was just Bob's metier.

I feel such a weird sense of unreality when I hear "George Jackson" - not because it's a bad song or because it's too weird or anything like that, but more because it doesn't really feel like it should exist, if that makes sense. I'm not saying that the life of a family man would automatically erase the part of Bob's mind that cared about humanity (any more than I would say that his crazy years as a rock star would do so); it's just that...I mean, of all the times, after all that had happened, that the killing of a Black Panther in prison would be the tipping point for Bob to finally pick back up his "outrage" pen seems a bit odd. And I'm not downplaying the historical significance of George Jackson at all (my brother was rather deeply moved by Soledad Brother, and it's a fair guess that he was not the only one), just feeling a bit bemused about the whole thing. After all, when MLK and Robert Kennedy were gunned down, Bob was baking bread and teaching his children the ABCs or what have you. It's just funny how these things work, I guess.

As for the actual song itself...I mean, there's not really much I can say about it, to be honest. It's not the best protest song Bob ever wrote (in the loosest sense of the word, I'd say "Hard Rain" qualifies; if you're talking more straightforward, probably "Blowin' in the Wind", forgive the cliched answer), nor is it the worst (I'll leave that answer as an exercise for you, the reader). What makes it a step down from some of his truly great songs isn't the fact that he knocked the song out in such a short span of time - Lord knows he's written his fair share of songs in a short period of time. The reason, then, is more just the fact that the song doesn't really reach the same poetic heights of something like "Hard Rain", opting instead to be more straightforward in its disgust at Jackson's treatment and sudden death (to the point where we get Bob's first ever recorded profanity!). And that's not necessarily a bad thing - after all, it seems a lot to ask for Bob to try and reach those heights - so much as it's just a limiting thing you have to get used to. The Bob that wrote those amazing protest songs had been long gone, even by then. The new Bob, the one trying to piece together a brand new writing style, was never going to write "Hard Rain" again.

And, I think, that's entirely what Bob had in mind. "George Jackson" was never really meant to be anything other than exactly what it was - Bob speaking his mind about a major issue of the moment, committing something to tape that could be immediately processed, not giving a hoot about posterity or what future generations would think about the song from a creative standpoint. After all, songs like these aren't really meant to be creative masterpieces, but rallying points, ways for outrage to be properly channeled and given an actual voice. In that sense, "George Jackson" does very well succeed.

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Bob Dylan Song #159: When I Paint My Masterpiece

This is a post that, in a way, almost writes itself. If ever there was a Dylan track that would qualify as my all-time sneaky favorite, it would be "When I Paint My Masterpiece", one of those songs that always seems to slip through the cracks when people talk about Bob's classics (some might append that classification to "Watching The River Flow", I think). What I really love about the song is just how laid-back Bob sounds on it, like he really is singing about chilling out in Rome and thinking about when he finally finishes his life's work. One almost wishes that it was true - that instead of being in upstate New York all this time, he'd actually been crossing the Continent by train, suitcase in hand, living it up with a big Derek Flint grin on his face. And the musicians help set that mood from the start, Leon Russell's piano leading us into a bevy of wry guitar solos and a gently propulsive rhythm. One imagines that this is the sound of Bob not taking himself all too seriously (much like the Christmas album, as a matter of fact - what is "Must Be Santa" if not one of his all-time great pisstakes?), and it's hard not to want him to do that more often.

Much has been made about how this song and "Watching The River Flow" are musical twins in that they depict Bob at his creative low point (well, until the mid-80s, of course), fumbling around for ways to relight his creative muse, none of them working until the ultimate torch arrived in the form of Bob's crumbling marriage. What occasionally seems to be lost in that assessment is the fact that both of the songs that are seemingly about Bob's fallow creative period are, of course, pretty darn good on their own, some of the best stuff that Bob released in this decade. And, rather amusingly, both of the songs manage to attack the subject in roughly the same way, with the musical equivalent of a good-natured shrug of the shoulders. If Bob really has lost his creative muse, he's doing a pretty darn good job of showing us that he could care less.

If there is one obvious difference between the songs, though, it would be the fact that Bob puts us in two different locales (and maybe even mindsets) in the two separate songs. "Watching The River Flow"'s narrator is basically all by himself, sitting in a cafe and staring out at the Mississippi or whatever rushing on by - there's something almost Zen-like in the way he talks about how the river keeps rolling along, no matter what happens - and just musing about how funny the ol' human race can actually be. In "When I Paint My Masterpiece", on the other hand, we're deposited right smack in the middle of some European vacation, a rush of memories coursing through the narrator's brain as he moves from country to country looking for the next big adventure and getting a kick out of, you guessed it, how funny the ol' human race can actually be. That the song still manages to retain its laid-back tone is really something; Bob's telling us a story about how strange his life is without being able to write that one masterpiece he's been waiting on (then again, most artists always feel this way), and yet it feels so casual, like he's relating this tale into a tape recorder sitting poolside in Malibu. It's a relaxed song about a hectic subject, which is always fun.

One is tempted, especially when doing a project like the one I'm embarking on, to speculate about whether or not Bob really did miss that hectic life at the time. Now, real life kind of answers that question all by itself, as Bob slowly worked his way back into the limelight before Tour '74 re-established him as one the biggest rock stars in the world. But that was a gradual process, one that went from recording new material to appearing in a movie to putting together a brand new album for a brand new record label. And yet, in 1971, there was still no real indication that Bob was ever going to go back out on the road, or release something like Planet Waves, or be anything other than a father and a husband. All people really had to speculate on were rumors, innuendo, and then these songs. And while most people tend to think of them as Bob talking about how his muse had done a runner, it's also possible to speculate on that second song, on Bob writing about the hustle and bustle of a life on the run, walking up the Spanish Steps and feeling history below his feet, and missing it just a little bit. The world was not as easy to reach then as it was now, and one imagines there were some nights in New York where our man Bob was getting just a touch antsy.

And, soon enough, that hustle and bustle would be back in Dylan's life. As much as we think about how hectic and crazy 1965-66 were for Bob, I don't think enough attention gets paid to just how wild the mid-70s were for the man; after all, for all of Bob's religious studies after he broke his neck, he didn't become a full-on Christian, for Pete's sake. After all, between Planet Waves and Slow Train Coming, Bob released a slew of albums that ranged from "quite good" to "absolute classics" (including what might very well be his masterpiece), embarked on four massive tours (including a World Tour that led to his voice's irrevocable damage and that aforementioned conversion), and forcefully re-injected himself into the lifestyle that a rock star of his stature tends to lead. That's a hell of a lot for one man to do. You wonder, though, if Bob would have had it any other way.

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Bob Dylan Song #158: Tomorrow Is A Long Time

I've always wondered what it was about "Tomorrow is a Long Time" that appealed to Elvis Presley so much, to the point where he would record his own version for one of his crappy movie soundtracks (the phrase "crappy" can apply to both the movie and the soundtrack, in general). Quite frankly, I wonder why Elvis would bother with a Dylan song at all; after all, this is a guy who used to joke when he had bad breath that "it feels like Bob Dylan's been sleeping in my mouth". But we have Elvis' version of this song nonetheless, and it's a surprisingly good version, a down-home Mississippi Delta touch attached to the tune, Elvis putting in a pretty decent vocal performance (although there are moments where he does something with his voice that reminds me why I don't like him more than I think I ought to, if that makes sense), a casual take on a love song that succeeds because it's so darn casual and laid back. You'd never have thought to turn the song into a crawling blues track, but Elvis and his producers did, and they get kudos for that.

Funny enough, the Elvis version is probably the reason why Bob chose to record the song in a bluesier style for the New Morning sessions, a version that would be left in the vaults yet again. Listening to the song, you can definitely tell that Bob had that version in mind, both in the literal (the slower, more blues-like arrangement, with a pedal steel doing some nice work) and in the more abstract (the "ah-ooh" backing vocals reminiscent of the Jordanaires, the somewhat amateurishly picked solos), although Bob fleshes things out a little more with his full New Morning band behind him. One presumes that this version was never going to have a shot at making the album - especially considering how much more jazz-influenced the official version would end up being - so listening to it can feel more academic than anything else, like it's Bob just having a goof in the studio before he got to "One More Weekend" or whatever. All the same, it's a fun goof, a nice little window into Bob's mind, and a weirdly fitting tribute to Elvis that works just as well as "Went To See The Gypsy" does.

And yet, for somebody like me that has such great affection for the Greatest Hits II version, recorded for what was supposed to be Bob Dylan In Concert way back in 1963, there's something kind of blasphemous about these bluesy recordings, like Elvis and Dylan are taking something chaste and pure and slapping some mud on it. That isn't to say that I don't like those versions, or that there's something wrong with turning a tune into a blues number; it's more that the original version, so beautifully downcast and gentle, so full of quiet wistfulness, is probably best served in its original state, a gently picked acoustic guitar the only accompaniment to Bob's gorgeous lyrics (some of his best of the acoustic era). It makes a kind of sense that this song, like "Mama, You Been On My Mind", was consigned to the vaults upon its release; both songs are as direct in their emotion as any Bob has ever recorded, and maybe Bob didn't want anybody to get the wrong idea.

Of all the emotions that Bob has managed to capture in his lyrics - anger, disdain, happiness, joy, pain, agony - the one that he never really quite gets to is loneliness; he's sung about isolation, but that's not quite the same thing. For whatever reason, we never get to hear much about the great loneliness that Bob must have felt all throughout his life, both in the literal sense (the 1966 tour springs to mind), and in the mental (that mind of his keeping people away by mere virtue of his almost crushing genius); we know so much about Bob in his public life that any glimpse at the private Bob, no matter how fleeting, is as treasured as gold. And that is what makes "Tomorrow is a Long Time" so valuable, because we get a very small glimpse at Bob singing about loneliness, even in the context of a love song, as he waits for his true love to be back with him and spins off words that tell us just how hard that wait can be. But, to me, what really sums up the loneliness of the song (more so than the lyrics, which I think I will get some disagreement over, and I don't blame you) is Dylan's performance, one of his most brutally direct of his early days, a quiet emotion in his voice not even heard on his most well-known classics. I hear that song and I think of that young man, all by himself, singing about his beloved, and it's as heart-wrenching as anything I could imagine. And yet I cannot help but listen to it over and over again, because of that heartache, and because it's so beautiful in its sadness. There's plenty of that in Bob's catalog, but few songs touch that emotion as well as this one does.

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Bob Dylan Song #157: Watching the River Flow

My sincerest apologies to those of you that assumed my discussion of Greil Marcus' review of Self Portrait would cease with the "Alberta #2" post, but I found myself thinking of that album, and rather specifically the bit about Dylan's responsibilities to his audience, during my most recent listen to "Watching the River Flow", one of a handful of original songs Bob recorded between 1970 and 1974's Planet Waves. Listening to Dylan kick the tune off with those fateful words "What's the matter with me?/I don't have much to say", then talk about sitting on a beach somewhere and watching the inexorable progress of some random waterway, one can only assume that Marcus must have been livid. After all, compare Self Portrait, in which Bob makes what could be interpreted as a symbolic retreat from the arena, to this song, in which Bob straight up admits it to all of us. I dunno - were I in Marcus' shoes, I think I might be kinda pissed.

I bet Dylan thought of this, too. Maybe he didn't have Marcus on his mind per se (it's worth wondering if Bob, in 1971, actually knew who Greil Marcus WAS), but I like to think he had a little smile on his face as he penned the words to this song, dreaming up a surrogate Bob wandering some deserted coastline, finding that all night cafe on the beach, having a cup of joe, and staring at the water rushing by. More specifically, I think of those middle eights Bob conjured up, where he sees people disagreeing about God knows what (and he's right - it really DOES make you want to stop and read a book) and just shakes his head knowingly to himself. It was not all too long ago that Young Bob was out there disagreeing with people himself, first in the protest songs that he wrote, then in his views on how his music should sound, to the point where he found himself really shook (and, if some people are to be believed, crying) on that Newport stage. It would only stand to reason that Older and Wiser Bob would be able to write so wittily and intelligently about that.

"Watching the River Flow" would be a fun song if Dylan had picked up an acoustic and sang about his casual acceptance of what sounds like one bitch of a case of writer's block, but the song is made all the more fun by his studio band, who bring a touch of 70's AM rock to Dylan's palette of recording tricks. From the moment that guitar solo comes ripping out of your speakers, it's clear that Dylan's in a rakish mood, and the song boogies along at a nice bluesy clip, Leon Russell's pounding piano mixing well with more radio-friendly soloing and a bouncy bass line. Dylan, for his part, appears to be having a grand old time, barking out his vocals in that 70s voice I've always considered his best. One imagines that, in the hands of somebody like Badfinger, the song might have become an even bigger hit. Instead, it just barely missed the top 40, and ended up on a Columbia stopgap; given the laid-back nature of the song, that's probably how it should be anyway.

I always liked that Bob chose to start off his 2nd (and, remarkably, more essential) Greatest Hits collection with this song, an amusing admission of his current fallow period leading off a collection of songs that demonstrated just how amazing he was when all his creative juices were flowing. What's made Bob so fascinating, along with the music and the myths and the history and all that, is that you really can't pin any kind of mental process upon the man, no matter how hard we try to shoehorn him into our preconceived notions. The same man who has enough self-awareness to wink at his audience with this song had the somewhat puzzling naivete to think that his conversion to Christianity would be well-received when he took it on the road (well, perhaps; he probably knew people would be surprised, but I'm not sure he knew he'd whip up 1965-levels of invective). The same man who exhibited the rigid self-control of his days in the upstate New York woods as he cared for his family and grew closer to his wife essentially fell to pieces on the 2nd leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, drinking himself into constant stupors as his marriage crumbled around him. And the same man who released some of the greatest albums ever recorded, leaving only a paucity of worthy tracks in the vaults in favor of legendary classics, essentially consigned three or four of his best songs of the 1980s to outtake status when putting together Infidels, maybe the most disappointing moment in his canon. That's all human nature, of course, to be that inconsistent; but it's human nature on a grand scale, and that's always interesting.

"Watching the River Flow", in its own way, is an encapsulation of part of Dylan's human nature, and a part that brings him closer to us. Having made mention in the previous post of the elusiveness of creativity, it's funny to hear a song where Bob directly addresses that elusiveness, fully admitting that the process is beyond his understanding ("What's the matter with me?") and not giving a damn anyway. It's kind of rare to see Dylan engaging his audience as directly (relatively speaking) as he does here, and it's all the better that he does it in such an amusing way. Who knows, maybe even Greil Marcus had to have been okay with that.

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Bob Dylan Song #84: Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

For all of the trail blazing that Bob Dylan did in the first stage of his career, expanding the ideas of what you could do with music both in terms of length and subject matter far more than any other musician, it's worth remembering that in many ways he was writing about the same stuff as many other musicians of his time were. Sure, he was writing about those things in wildly different ways (I'd daresay that Mick Jagger never thought to use the same wordplay Dylan did - well, at least until he wrote "Jigsaw Puzzle"), but there were still a fair share of jilted love and non-jilted love songs scattered across the discography of the Electric Trilogy, not to mention the folk songs that dealt with topics that many other lesser folk musicians were writing about. And this is definitely not a knock - I mean, if there are (supposedly) only seven basic plotlines that every story/movie/what have you draw from, then surely Dylan can be forgiven for touching on the same subject matter in his songs. Like any good film, it isn't so much the subject matter as what you do with it; even the most basic underdog story can take flight in the hands of a master craftsman.

And so, with "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", we get master craftsman Bob Dylan taking on the time-worn conceit of "your man doesn't appreciate you, you need to get away". What's interesting about this song is that Dylan's narrator never actually says "you need to get away...and come to ME", which is where a lot of these songs tend to go lyrically. In fact, the narrator even says "you can go back to him any time you want to", an odd suggestion given what a real jerkwad the boyfriend (or whoever - controlling father, maybe?) that's holding this woman down. I mean, he even mentions how the woman's "face is so bruised", a really uncomfortable image that gets tossed off almost casually by Bob. That actually makes the song a lot more interesting that maybe it should be - why is Bob saying this stuff? This guy is clearly an asshole, and yet Dylan says "you can leave him, no prob - hell, you can go back to him, if you want to"? Maybe that's where all that "Dylan = woman-hater" business came from.

Perhaps that's the reason why "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" doesn't have quite the same reputation as the other singles of this era (I've always found it odd that somehow this got A-side status, especially given any other number of options). It's a really odd duck of a song, mainly because those lyrics are so wickedly incisive - as they tended to be during this time - but somewhat conceptually muddled, thanks to that "you can go back to him" bit. Perhaps Dylan's trying to make a point about how women can find it so difficult to escape from an ugly relationship, no matter how gigantic an asshole the man in question is, or how badly the woman in question is treated; the "Trailer Trash Woman On Cops" theory, as it were. And this is certainly a true point - any of us can point to someone we know that found themselves trapped in a horrible relationship, knowing full well that their situation is a wreck, and yet unable to extricate themselves out of some misguided sense of duty, or perhaps just because they love that person, no matter how horrible they are. Somehow, though, I don't think so - the jaunty arrangement Dylan whipped up, with that organ that zips in like a flash of lightning, kind of belies any more sympathetic sentiments you'd like to tie to the song. Even when Dylan's singing "don't say it will ruin you/please, don't say it will haunt you", it sounds more like an annoyed exhortation than any attempt at comfort. Amazingly, Dylan spends the whole song knocking the man, and yet the woman comes off just as bad. The little snippet from "Positively 4th Street" he tacks on at the end, apparently just for funsies, doesn't help matters much.

Then again, it might just be a matter of perception. Not too long after the release of the song, Jimi Hendrix covered the song with the Experience on one of his many BBC sessions (it can be found on the official release), and would cover the song live as well. He gives the song the usual heavy Experience treatment, sacrificing some of the more charming aspects of the original (like that nifty organ, of course) for a heavier attack, allowing his still-astounding guitar chops to carry the day, and singing with that charmingly amateur voice he'd have his entire career. But - and here's the important part - while singing the lyrics from the song exactly as written, with absolutely no change at all, it still feels more playful, like he's being cheeky about it, but not in the same nasty way Dylan's being cheeky about it. And yes, there is a difference - there's a very fine line between being a smartass, and being an ass. So you have Hendrix, who wrote psychedelic-tinged songs without much meanness to them, and you have Dylan, who couldn't walk down a street in 1965 without coming up with a song with at least some meanness to it, performing the same song in very different ways. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Dylan's version is going to come off as the meaner one. That's just how perception works.

What makes Dylan's career so fascinating is just how these dichotomies work - the fact that so much analysis of his writing and his lyrics stems entirely from the perceptions we place upon him, and upon the inevitable biases that spring up from those perceptions. We then see things in his career because we expect to see them, which can make things quite handy, but often might pay him shorter shrift than we mean to. It's sort of like how Street Legal takes a critical beating because the arrangements are often overblown, which also leads into criticism of the 1978 world tour (thanks mainly to the Budokan live album, which honestly isn't that great), in which Dylan's back catalog received the same Michael Bay-style treatment. Never mind that Street Legal has some of the greatest lyrics Dylan ever wrote, or that the 1978 world tour has some really fantastic performances if you want to find them (although I will say that my favorite performances are entirely from the tour rehearsals). We have the ideas we know about Bob, and we go with them. I'm as guilty of that as the next guy - it's human nature, when you get down to it. We just have to try to do the best we can to avoid that pitfall, every chance we can. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #83: Positively 4th Street

In the wonderful essay he wrote for the official release of the 1966 Manchester show, Tony Glover mentioned the release of "Positively 4th Street", Dylan's follow-up single to "Like A Rolling Stone". I wish I could remember exactly how he described the song, but it was something to the effect of "a paler version of 'LARS' with inferior lyrics". Which sounds harsh, certainly, but I'm pretty sure that's the opinion that many of this site's readers may have about the song. On a surface level, the songs have quite a bit in common - the arrangements both prominently feature signature organ lines, and the lyrics are a harsh indictment of somebody that the songs' narrators seem to know a lot about. And when you compare the two songs that way, "Positively 4th Street" is always going to come out the loser. That's why I said it was unfortunate in the last entry that Dylan chose to play both of them at the same show in '66 - by playing them back to back, not only does it highlight how similar they both sound, but it actually robs both songs of their power because of those similarities. That's never a good thing.

"Positively 4th Street" has always sort of been "LARS"'s little brother, from the moment that it was slotted to follow "LARS" as Dylan's next single. It's hard enough to have to be the follow-up to that masterpiece, but its very nature tends to open it up to a lot more criticism than it might deserve. I mean, "Positively 4th Street" is a great song. It might not be up there amongst Dylan's best (depending on who you ask), but it's certainly worthy of consideration. After all, the song came out of the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, where Dylan was just a factory of great songs to begin with, and he had the same crack band behind him to give the tune life and power. Everybody remembers that organ bit, but for me the real highlight of the musical portion is Michael Bloomfield and Dylan's guitars interacting with each other, the rhythm guitar track laid on particularly thick and Bloomfield's fills just working its way around it. I've always loved that jangly guitar that (I assume) Dylan's playing, and it's probably at its most prominent here.

So you've got that exceptional band laying down the music, but that's only half of the battle. What is most interesting to me about the lyrics to this song is how utterly direct they are, especially in this period of Dylan's career. I would say that they have more in common with the emotional soul-baring of Blood on the Tracks than most of the Electric Trilogy, but even the lyrics of songs like "Tangled Up in Blue" have that impressionistic mind-picture quality (with the heartache neatly mixed in) to link them with the Dylan of the 60s, so that you knew you were listening to the same guy even when everything sounded so much more different. There's no wild imagery, no oddball poetic touches, nothing to soften the acidity of Dylan's lyrics here. He's just laying his anger and bitterness right out there, in twelve verses that spare absolutely no quarter. And I can certainly see how people might not like that, in their lack of any sort of literary cushioning, and would demean the song for it. I actually find Dylan's directness bracing, and kind of refreshing; after all the "Dylanesque" songs I've posted about, it's kind of nice to get a song that dispenses with the Tarantula shit and just gets nasty.

I realize that this appeals entirely to the baser instincts of both myself and mankind in general, but there's something kind of...I don't know, brilliant about the way Dylan could just release that venom into such an exceptional song. The venom isn't entirely coherent and seemingly bounces between pathos and self-pity and anger from verse to verse, but it's still there and it's still tremendously potent. And it's hard not to be jealous of that talent - Bob's ability to take these pent-up emotions and just let them go, in those words, is something I've often wished that I've had throughout my lifetime. And it's not because I'm some sort of hateful guy; on the contrary, I always do whatever I can to be nice to people and to avoid conflict (some of you that actually know me in real life are probably rolling their eyes, but I'm being serious here). All the same, I've had my moments in my life where I've had some anger towards somebody, and I've wished I had the ability to just bring it out, to really sting somebody with my words and make them feel as badly as I felt. Sadly, I don't have that kind of ability. But Bob does, or did, and we have the proof.

I often wonder if Dylan, as he's reached the twilight of both his lifetime and his epic career, looks back at the songs that he wrote as a young man, often full of vitriol and sharp words against his foes (real and imagined), and feels any regret about the way he wielded that sword he kept tucked away in his mind in those years. We know that he's felt remorse about "Ballad in Plain D", saying that he "wishe(s) he'd left that one alone", so it's entirely possible that he feels the same way about songs like these. I wouldn't doubt it - after all, the things that seem so very important to you when you're a young man (Bob was in his mid-twenties when he wrote these songs; it is impossible to conceive of somebody that young being that successful at his craft, unless he plays professional sports or something) seem much less important, maybe not even important at all, in your older days. Somehow, though, I don't really think that's how Bob feels. I like to think that he looks back on those days, when everything moved and changed at a speed nobody could conceive, smiles that little enigmatic Bob smile of his, and says to himself "man, that was a hell of a burn, wasn't it?" And not of malice, or because his hatred still burns within him - simply because it was one hell of a burn. Read more!