Production
It is surprising that “On the Road Again” was the tune requiring the most takes of the entire album, and even of all Dylan’s recordings to date: seventeen takes over three recording sessions! The first with Dylan on the acoustic guitar and harmonica on January 13, then four takes the following day backed by his group, and finally twelve on January 15. The seventeenth was used as the master take. It is a simple blues-rock song with no complications, performed by excellent musicians. The song is not, as some may claim, untidy, but rather well structured and well interpreted. Bruce Langhorne provides a guitar solo, colored by a pronounced tremolo; Kenny Rankin and Al Gorgoni play rhythm guitars; Joe Macho Jr. certainly provides the bass part; drums and tambourine by Bobby Gregg; and the piano part, virtually inaudible (except just before the last verse) is by Frank Owens. Bob does not play guitar, which explains his excellent harmonica part (in D), where he uses a lot of vibrato and bending effects. “On the Road Again” has yet to be performed live in concert.
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
You can hear Bruce Langhorne making a small mistake at 1:58. He apparently thought that his colleagues were changing chords just before the last verse.
Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
Bob Dylan / 6:32
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Bruce Langhorne: guitar
Al Gorgoni: guitar
Kenny Rankin: guitar
John Hammond Jr.: guitar (?)
Paul L. Griffin: piano
Joseph Macho Jr.: bass (?)
William E. Lee: bass (?)
Bobby Gregg: drums, tambourine (?)
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: January 13 and 14, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” has little in common with “Bob Dylan’s Dream” released two years earlier in the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Just as the Dadaism of the European avant-garde emerged in the early twentieth century in reaction to the cataclysm of the First World War, which had ended the dream of grandeur of Old Europe, Dylan’s surrealism was fed by the improbabilities of Western society in the 1960s. The picture that Dylan gives of the surrounding world is cynical: the cop who throws people in jail (“He throw us all in jail / For carryin’ harpoons”), the paranoid and violent American middle class, and the Bowery slum dwellers who, directed by a Guernsey cow, “carried signs around / Saying, ‘Ban the bums.’” Since this world is grim, it is better to run away. It is with unrestrained imagination that Dylan describes this wacky procession, during which he stumbles on a bowling ball coming down the road, a foot comes out of the telephone line (“This foot come through the line”), and Captain Arab (referring to Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick) is “stuck on a whale / That was married to the deputy / Sheriff of the jail.” In this song, Dylan seems to express his delight in nonsense, a taste that goes back to his childhood in Hibbing, playing guitar and singing with his friend John Bucklen.
Production
“Later Bob Dylan’s Dream,” the working title for “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” is the last electric song on the album and, at 6:32, the longest. Taking a few nuances from the harmony and rhythm of an earlier work, “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” Dylan tells of his extravagant adventures on a blues-rock grid that Chuck Berry could have written. He performed two acoustic takes on January 13 before recording two more the following day with his electric band. The first two takes begin with a false start. Bob begins to play the song alone without waiting for the musicians, and they all burst out laughing. “Take two,” says Tom Wilson. Bruce Langhorne recalls in No Direction Home: “Dylan was playing all by himself at first and then he stopped and everybody laughed; and then, two seconds later, he started it again and everybody came on, just bang, like gangbusters.”32 Same distribution: Dylan on vocals, harmonica (in C), and acoustic guitar, Langhorne solo on the guitar, Rankin and Gorgoni on the rhythmic guitars, Macho Jr. on bass, Griffin playing piano, and Gregg on drums (and certainly tambourine). The musicians gave a perfect performance, which Langhorne defined as “a form of telepathy.” To this day Bob Dylan has performed the song only six times onstage, all during his autumn tour of the East Coast, October 13 through 19, 1988.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
Tom Wilson was probably dizzy hearing Bob commit two huge plosives in quick succession on the line “Food was flying everywhere” (at 2:24).
Mr. Tambourine Man
Bob Dylan / 5:26
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Bruce Langhorne: guitar
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: January 15, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
Bob Dylan began writing “Mr. Tambourine Man” in February 1964 during a journey across the United States with Peter Karman, Paul Clayton, and Victor Maymudes. He probably started work after attending the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans on February 12, as he claimed in 1985. Opinions differ on the exact date he finished composing this song. In the New York Sunday News on November 11, 1973, journalist Al Aronowitz wrote that Dylan wrote “Mr. Tambourine Man” at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, right after he had broken up with Suze Rotolo, while folksinger Judy Collins stated that he completed the song at her home. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is so rich in literary references that all sorts of influences have been “mentioned” by journalists and scholars of Dylan’s work. It is difficult under these conditions to disentangle the coil of analysis and to know the exact origins of the song. The singer admitted that he was influenced by Federico Fellini’s film La Strada (1954), which portrays a strange relationship between Zampano, a strong man, and the naive young woman, Gelsomina. This Hercules makes his living as an itinerant street performer, playing both trumpet and tambourine, and the movie stresses the themes, typical for Fellini, of mobility and the fragility of life. But “Mr. Tambourine Man” could be also a transposition of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale dating back to 1280. The piper is hired by the people of Hamelin to lure rats away with his magic pipe, and then, after he has led the rats away, is himself chased away with stones by the townspeople. There is an echo in Dylan’s fourth verse, “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.” Robert Shelton, meanwhile, suggests that Dylan’s inspiration may have come from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1812 by the British writer Thomas De Quincey. In this work De Quincey refers to opium as “the dark idol,” a translation of the Latin Mater Tenebrarum. According to Robert Shelton, “Is it possible that Dylan, reading De Quincey, could have been sufficiently intrigued by the sound of Mater Tenebrarum to have rendered it as ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’?”33
Mr. Tambourine Man: A Drug Song?
It is but a small step from Thomas De Quincey’s opium experiences to the hallucinatory journeys of acid heads. Is “Mr. Tambourine Man” a drug song? Such lines as “Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship” and “take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind” could easily be interpreted as references to a trip under LSD’s influence, as could “In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you” and, more specifically, “jingle jangle.” This latter, according to Howard Sounes, may come from “Scrooge” by Lord Buckley, a comic, poet, actor, and moreover a pioneer of the hallucinogenic experiences. Dylan called him “the hipster bebop preacher who defied all labels.”13 However, the songwriter has always denied that drugs played a role in the writing of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” A deeper listening makes it possible to go beyond the simple reference to hallucinogenic drugs. In 1985, he said, “Drugs never played a part in that song.”12
Behi
nd the story of the narrator, who, tired after a sleepless night, hears the tambourine man’s song and wants to follow him on the path of salvation, one can detect Dylan’s deference to his still-inspiring muse. Or perhaps it is the singer’s attempt to transcend consciousness and attain the ultimate ideal. This mysterious “tambourine man” could in this case be Jesus Christ, the Redeemer himself.
Finally, and more prosaically, the tambourine man may simply have been guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who, during sessions, played a gigantic tambourine from time to time. This is the explanation given by Dylan in 1985. “‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne… On one session, Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine,” he recalled. “And he had this gigantic tambourine… It was as big as a wagon wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind.”12 Dylan never told this to Langhorne, who in 2000 confessed to Richie Unterberger, “He didn’t tell me about that. And probably if he did tell anybody, he’d probably deny it [laughs]. Because… I don’t know, just because he would. I think he has a wonderful sense of humor.”39
Dylan knew that he had peaked with this song. This is the only time in his career that he tried to write a sequel to a song, as he confessed in 1968 to the magazine Sing Out!: “But after enough going at it, it just began bothering me, so I dropped it. I don’t do that anymore.”20
Production
With “Mr. Tambourine Man” opening the B-side of Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan returned to an acoustic atmosphere, away from the rock fury in the first seven songs on the album. This recording, one of his most important works, had a long gestation. The first recording was made at Eric Von Schmidt’s apartment in Florida in early May 1964. Dylan premiered the song at a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London on May 17. But only on June 9, during the recording sessions for Another Side of Bob Dylan, did he finalize two takes of the song, accompanied by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on vocals. “I knew he was going to try to record ‘Tambourine Man’ and he invited me to sing on it with him but I didn’t know the words, ’cept for the chorus, so I just harmonized with him on the chorus.”15 Unfortunately, this version was not convincing. Ramblin’ Jack’s performance did not do justice to the song, and Dylan’s own lacks conviction. Later he said that he was not ready to record it. He therefore continued to work on the song throughout 1964. In June of that year, he recorded another version on piano for his publisher Witmark & Sons. And finally, on January 15, 1965, he immortalized the song at Columbia Records’ Studio A, nearly one year after writing it.
Dylan played acoustic guitar and harmonica, accompanied by Bruce Langhorne on the guitar. Bob played his Gibson Nick Lucas Special, providing a superb sound, with Bruce delivering an exceptional guitar accompaniment. They gave an inspired interpretation, which remains a pinnacle in Dylan’s work. His harmonica solo (in F) is a success, besides a few pops on far and frozen at 4:15, and a slight acceleration in the tempo after the second chorus between 1:34 and 1:43. Dylan often hesitates to set the key of his songs. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is no exception: the Witmark demo version is in D (The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964), the one with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot in E (The Bootleg Series Volume 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack), and the version on the album in F! The sixth take was selected for the master of the album.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
Pete Townshend of the Who performed “Mr. Tambourine Man” in March 2008 at the funeral of Neil Aspinall, former assistant to the Beatles and director of Apple Corps.
The Byrds’ Version: The Birth of Folk Rock?
When the Byrds signed at Columbia in November 1964, they did not have any choice. They had to record a hit; otherwise they would be dropped. The band’s manager, Jim Dickson, heard that a few months earlier Dylan had performed “Mr. Tambourine Man” with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot without any success, and Dickson obtained an acetate print from Dylan’s publisher, Witmark & Sons. He played the record to his protégé, Roger McGuinn, a singer and guitarist, who recalls, “We were all standing around in front of these speakers and Dickson played it for us. It was in 2/4 time, about 5 minutes long, and Crosby immediately piped up and said, ‘I don’t like it, man! It’s that 2/4 beat! It’s never gonna play on the radio!’ And so I said, yeah, what if we cut it down to one verse and put a Beatle-beat to it, and I came up with a little lick for the front.”41 On January 20, 1965, the California group recorded its own version for Columbia Studios in Hollywood—or, rather, Roger McGuinn’s version, since the other band members were, at the request of the producer Terry Melcher, replaced by a group of studio musicians known as the “Wrecking Crew.”
The adaptation of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” with the characteristic sound provided by McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker and angelic harmonies, was released as a single on April 12, with “I Knew I’d Want You” on the B-side.
On June 5, the single reached number 1 on the Billboard charts. Two weeks later, on June 21, the first Byrds album was available in stores, called… Mr. Tambourine Man. This album includes three other songs written by Dylan (“Spanish Harlem Incident,” “All I Really Want to Do,” and “Chimes of Freedom”). A peculiarity: “Mr. Tambourine Man” is now listed twice on Rolling Stone’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”: the Byrds’ version is number 79 and Dylan’s 107. Both versions received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award, the Byrds’ in 1998 and Bob Dylan’s in 2002.
Gates Of Eden
Bob Dylan / 5:42
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: January 15, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
Written in the summer of 1964, “Gates of Eden” results from deep reflection, with imagery heavily influenced both by William Burroughs and William Blake. From Burroughs, the key writer of the Beat generation, Dylan borrowed the literary collage technique in which a collection of strong images from scattered sources found in various publications are arranged together to create a new text, following the structure of the language. In this regard, “Gates of Eden” is in the same tradition as Burroughs’s trilogy, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. Dylan took from Blake, the pre-Romantic British poet, his strange poetry marked by biblical references. Hence there is a parallel between Dylan’s song and Blake’s collection of imagery, The Gates of Paradise (1793), an illustrated children’s book that was one of Blake’s most prophetic works. In it he presents the foundations of his philosophy, focusing on intuitive and mystical visions at the expense of reason. Although this influence seems obvious, Dylan has not claimed any intended reference. In an interview conducted by Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston in August 1965, he answered the question “Do you consider yourself primarily a poet?” by saying, “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.”20
Searching for the truth in a false Garden of Eden or living in a decaying society and seeking self-satisfaction are the evils of the modern world in Dylan’s “sacrilegious lullaby in D minor,” as he called it on October 31, 1964, at New York’s Philharmonic Hall. The nightmare vision starts in the first verse: “The cowboy angel rides / With his candle lit into the sun.” He continues in the third verse, “The savage soldier sticks his head in sand / And then complains / Unto the shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf”; in the fourth verse, “Aladdin and his lamp / Sits with utopian hermit monks / Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf”; and in the sixth verse, “The motorcycle black madonna / Two-wheeled gypsy queen / And her silver-studded phantom cause / The gray flannel dwarf to scream.” The song ends with the narrator’s lover telling him his dreams, and the narrator understanding that “there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.” Curiously, in Philharmonic Hall Dylan introduced the song as a “love song.”42
Production
“Gates of Eden” returns to an uncluttered aesthetic. It is the first song on the record where Bob performs solo, showing an urgency to immortalize the tune. The song was recorded in a single take on January 15, 1965, and despite some imperfections Dylan did not redo the recording. Plosives, kicks into the microphone, a floating tempo, unsatisfactory sound: the producer, Tom Wilson, obviously viewed the interpretation as more important than technical perfection. “Gates of Eden” has a hypnotic quality that comes as much from its stream of images as its dark harmony. And, as always, Dylan captures the listener’s attention. To the question “Do you think your words stand without the music?” Dylan answered without hesitation, “They would stand but I don’t read them. I’d rather sing them.”20 This is exactly the alchemy present in “Gates of Eden.”
Dylan has performed the song more than two hundred times, including at a concert at Symphony Hall in Boston, on October 24, 1964, and at a concert in London on May 9, 1965, featured in the rockumentary Dont Look Back. The song was also released as a single on the B-side of “Like a Rolling Stone,” on July 20, 1965.
Although he describes this song as a “sacrilegious lullaby in D minor,” the key of “Gates of Eden” is actually in G major.
Bob Dylan All the Songs Page 22
