Bob Dylan All the Songs
Page 16
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
A second edit appears to be made at 4:19, just before the words by now.
To Ramona
Bob Dylan / 3:51
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
“To Ramona” might be a love song written not in memory of Suze Rotolo, but in tribute to folksinger Joan Baez. This latter is the interpretation suggested by Baez in her book And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir, where she says that Dylan sometimes called her Ramona.33 Even if there are a few obvious differences between Joan Baez, a New Yorker, and the woman from the rural South mentioned in the song, a few lines seem to refer directly to the “queen of folk,” always at the forefront defending the peace and civil rights movements: “But it grieves my heart, love / To see you tryin’ to be a part of / A world that just don’t exist / It’s all just a dream, babe / A vacuum, a scheme, babe / That sucks you into feelin’ like this.” And Dylan shows even more fatalism in the last chorus, “For deep in my heart / I know there is no help I can bring / Everything passes / Everything changes / Just do what you think you should do.”
In 1985 Dylan gave his explanation of the origin of this song in the notes to Biograph: “Well, that’s pretty literal. That was just somebody I knew. I think I’d played this for the first time at the Gaslight, probably after hours,” which was before he knew Baez.12
Production
“To Ramona,” Dylan’s first folk waltz song for his fourth album, has a vague resemblance to “The Last Letter” by Rex Griffin. It was the third song recorded during a marathon session, with no particular technical difficulty. Voice and guitar sound good, harmonica (in C) provides the essential nostalgic touch to the atmosphere. Apart from some plosives on part (1:16) and passes (3:22), Bob recorded “To Ramona” with ease in only one take. He regularly performed the tune in various circumstances. In 1969, he confided to Jann Wenner that “To Ramona” was one of his favorite songs.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
While Dylan recorded his first folk waltz on June 9, 1964, the Beatles did the same on August 11 of the same year, in England, with “Baby’s in Black.”
Motorpsycho Nightmare
Bob Dylan / 4:32
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
Almost a talking blues song, “Motorpsycho Nightmare” is a fantasy that combines sarcasm, black humor, and nonsense. The song is a parody about a traveling salesman who is looking for a place to spend the night. He stops at a farmhouse where he is greeted by a gun-bearing farmer, accusing him of being after his daughter. Dylan based “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” either just the title or the story itself, on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho. He explicitly sings in the fifth verse, “There stood Rita / Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins.” With this song, as delusional as it may be, Bob Dylan criticizes a fearful and paranoid America with a series of inspired images of, for example, Rita, who “looked like she stepped out of / La Dolce Vita,” or her father, who at the mere name of Fidel Castro tries to turn the infamous provocateur over to the FBI after accusing him of being an “unpatriotic rotten doctor commie rat.”
Production
During the recording session Dylan makes mistakes at the beginning of the song three times. Nat Hentoff recalls that Bob had trouble reading the lyrics. As Bob’s friend, always ready to serve the cause, Hentoff asked Tom Wilson to turn down the lights to soften the atmosphere. “Atmosphere is not what we need,” Wilson answered, without turning around. “Legibility is what we need.”20 Bob resumes his song, and the fourth take becomes the master. Back in the control room, a cigarette in his hand, Dylan focuses on the playback, then takes a break, saying, “Hey, we’re gonna need some more wine!”20 This time, the atmosphere is more relaxed…
Dylan has nevertheless recorded an excellent take, ensuring a good rhythm on his Nick Lucas, even if sometimes the tempo is somewhat uneven. “Motorpsycho Nightmare” served as a prototype for the future “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” recorded in January 1965 for Bringing It All Back Home. Even though this latest version is electric, the two songs are harmonically very similar: same rhythm, same tone, and the tempo is essentially the same. Bob knows how to recycle his own creations. He never performed “Motorpsycho Nightmare” onstage.
My Back Pages
Bob Dylan / 4:21
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
Along with “Chimes of Freedom,” “My Back Pages” is the main song of this album. In the first song, Bob Dylan attempted a new kind of poetry, with a maelstrom of images and impressions that reminded one of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake; in the second one, he broke away from all past influences.
“My Back Pages” is a definitive, necessary break with the people who had crowned him a prophet after “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War.” In his book Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, Mike Marqusee compared Dylan’s break to his glorious predecessors “scorched by the flames of social revolt”: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, along with Arthur Koestler by way of William Butler Yeats, whose poem “Meditation in Times of Civil War” was in the background of the song.34
The message was underscored by the songwriter’s deep self-criticism. “I screamed / Lies that life is black and white / Spoke from my skull,” he sang in the second verse, or again in the fifth: “In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand / At the mongrel dogs who teach / Fearing not that I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach.” And the chorus is a breath of recovered freedom, a real renunciation of the songwriter: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” He may have borrowed this chorus from the chorus of the eighteenth-century English ballad “The Trees They Grow So High,” which Joan Baez recorded in 1961: “He’s young, but he’s daily growing.” He probably took this line for his own song.
When Dylan recorded “My Back Pages,” he had already begun to officially distance himself from the intelligentsia a few months before. In December 1963, when he was awarded the Tom Paine Award by a progressive association, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, he was unequivocal before their gathering: “I haven’t got any guitar, I can talk though. I want to thank you for the Tom Paine Award on behalf everybody that went down to Cuba. First of all because they’re all young and it took me a long time to get young and now I consider myself young. And I’m proud of it. I’m proud that I’m young. And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here tonight weren’t here, and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head—and everything like that, everything leading to youngness, celebrating the anniversary when we overthrew the House Un-American Activities just yesterday—because you people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax. [Laughter] It is not an old people’s world. It is not an old people’s world. It has nothing to do with old people. Old people when their hair grows out, they should go out. [Laughter] And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules—and they haven’t got any hair on their head—I get very uptight about it. There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down an
d down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”6 In a nutshell, as Allen Ginsberg said later, that evening Dylan did not present himself as a politician-poet serving the Left, but rather as a sort of independent minstrel.6
Bob Dylan’s insight into his past, into the commitments and causes he defended up to then, were rather striking for a young man barely twenty-three years old. With this speech, he clearly rejected any assimilation into or affiliation with any group or party whatsoever, and declared his independence, as he ceaselessly claimed throughout his career. He no longer endured being the spokesman of humanist or progressive causes: he wanted to write about his own life. He had previously felt old playing the role of the protest singer that was attributed to him, but today he was finally free and felt young. He recalled this in 2004, in Chronicles: “I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishiop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. What the hell are we talking about? Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw.”1
Finally, Joan Baez allowed him to define himself by asking what differentiated the two of them. He answered that it was really simple: she thought she could change things, while he knew no one could.33
Production
“My Back Pages” was the last song that Bob Dylan composed for his fourth album. It was also the last one he recorded on June 10, in barely two takes, including a false start. At the end of this marathon session, he had completed the forty-seventh take of this interminable session, after recording alone no less than fourteen songs, including eleven that appeared on this record! He was obviously getting extremely tired, as “My Back Pages” is a model of neither accuracy nor precision. Nat Hentoff noticed this. “Dylan was now tired, but he retained his good humor.”20 Bob had difficulty mastering his piece, which he did not seem to really know, hesitating on the melody and guitar chords. The first verse should have been recorded a second time, because he was searching for the harmony. The first two choruses lacked rigor, and the melody was curiously very close to “With God on Our Side.” Despite all these flaws, Dylan managed to surprise with his interpretation, a striking demonstration of his great talent. After this recording session, he never played “My Back Pages” again until 1978, and then he dropped it until he played it regularly once again starting in 1988.
COVERS
The Byrds recorded “My Back Pages” on their album Younger Than Yesterday (1967), with a title that explicitly referred to Dylan’s chorus. The song was also recorded by the Hollies (Sing Dylan, 1969), the Nice (Keith Emerson with the Nice, 1971), the Ramones (Acid Eaters, 1993), jazz pianist Keith Jarrett (Somewhere Before, 2000), Steve Earle (Side Tracks, 2002), and Murray Head (My Back Pages, 2012).
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
In 1992, Dylan recorded an anthology version of “My Back Pages” during the Madison Square Garden concert, celebrating a thirty-year career, surrounded by his friends Roger McGuinn, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and George Harrison.
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
Bob Dylan / 4:21
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
Bob Dylan wrote “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” at the end of May 1964, in Vernilya, a small village outside of Athens, Greece, after traveling from London to Berlin via Paris. He wrote and finished in just a week most of the songs that would be released on his fourth album. Does “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” describe a night of love with a woman who pretends the following day that they never met? Or is it a flashback to his affair with Suze Rotolo? Hard to say. Dylan unusually reverses the roles of men and women: for once, it is the woman who, after getting satisfaction, ditches the man. This ephemeral and torrid adventure touches the soul of the songwriter. “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” is a playful song, even if the singer struggles to understand the emotional abandonment and detached attitude of his partner: “It’s all new t’ me / Like some mystery / It could even be like a myth,” he sings at the beginning of the second verse. Is this an allusion to his new reputation, which made him such a desirable prey? Ultimately, he prefers to make fun of this situation and follow the path of his unlikely lover: “An’ if anybody asks me / ‘Is it easy to forget?’ / I’ll say, ‘It’s easily done / You just pick anyone / An’ pretend that you never have met!’”
Production
The guitar introduction has the air of a Greek folk song, obviously influenced by his stay in Vernilya. Dylan develops a rather interesting six-string part, alternating rhythmic strumming and gimmicks, unfortunately tarnished by the harmonica parts (in G). Neither of the two instruments is truly in harmony. In the first solo; Bob gives the impression that he is looking for the right key. This is particularly unfortunate at the end of the second verse, at about 1:39. He does not succeed in providing the right chords for the guitar, even though he tries. Similarly, in the fourth stanza at 2:59, he does not respect the tempo, which he abruptly abbreviates. Is it the difficulty of the piece that makes him laugh at 2:09? Or insecurity? He confesses to Nat Henthoff before recording, “I just want to light a cigarette, so I can see it in there while I’m singing… I’m very neurotic. I need to be secure.”20 It took him five takes before getting the best version.
He loved the song and performed it more than 350 times in concert, including new electric arrangements—actually quite different from the disc version, but still very successful.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
Some people link “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” to Dylan’s reply, “I don’t believe you—you’re a liar,” in 1966 to a fan who called him “Judas” for switching to electric guitar, but the context is so different that the connection seems unlikely…
Ballad In Plain D
Bob Dylan / 8:18
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
This song recounts the argument in March 1964 between Bob Dylan and Carla Rotolo, Suze’s sister. The conflict was in the presence of Suze, who was on the edge of hysteria and threatening to commit suicide. A few months earlier, in August 1963, Suze had left their apartment to stay with her sister Carla on Avenue B in the East Village, Suze recalls. She could not stand Bob’s celebrity status, which had become too intrusive and disruptive for her. The relationship between Dylan and Carla was bad. “They didn’t get along well and she felt I was better off without the lyin’ cheatin’ manipulatin’ bastard.”14 Torn between the two, she felt helpless and tired of their confrontation. “Carla and Bobby each felt the other was bad for me… But at a certain point I wanted nothing more than to get away from them both so I could find out where I was.”14 These circumstances led to the disintegration of their relationship, and “Ballad in Plain D” served as Dylan’s outlet.
Twenty years later, Dylan regretted having written such violent words against Carla Rotolo; the victim of his separation with Suze. He confessed to Bill Flanagan in 1985, “I must have been a real schmuck to write that.”24 Meanwhile, Suze had long forgiven him: “I understood what he was doing. It was the end of something and we both were hurt and bitter.” Bob Dylan never sang “Ballad in Plain D” onstage.
Production
Initially, the song title was just “Plain D.” It was Dylan’s longest song to date, at eight minutes and eighteen seconds. Five takes were necessary. The song is the second one on the album (the other being “I Shall Be Free No. 10”) for which Tom Wilson used the insert of another take (apparently the first) to complete the fifth and master take. This editing is heard after into pieces at 4:36: the sound of the guitar changes slightly and Bob comes back for the ninth verse at a somewhat faster tempo. With a reverb present, his voice is as self-assured as his guitar playing, although he plays the wrong chord at 2:08! Only the two harmonica parts are not really convincing. As with most songs with a deep meaning for Dylan such as “Chimes of Freedom,” “Ballad in Plain D” is written in 3/4 time.