Unfortunately, whatever inspirational zone Dylan found at the Black Pussycat earlier in April had now deserted him. All the portentous talk about the song’s meaning seems to have had a detrimental effect on the boy writer, convincing him to give folk the surface-level profundity they sought, devising a trio of platitudes regarding the number of times one must look up in order to see the sky, the number of ears required to "hear people cry," and finally how many deaths it takes to get a rhyme for sky and cry. For an inspirational lyricist like Dylan, this was an important lesson—one reiterated in later years, notably to Rolling
Stone’s nervous young editor Jann Wenner: "I try to write the song when it comes. I try to get it all . . . ’cause if you don’t get it all, you’re not gonna get it."
He wasn’t even sure where this new verse went, initially placing it last—which was how it appeared in Broadside #6 at the end of May. But Dylan quickly realized it lacked the power the other two held and moved it mid-song, where it could do the least harm. The handwritten version of the song included in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook—probably from the Cunningham archive—has a long, looping arrow moving the verse to its final resting place (this manuscript, a copy of the finished song in Dylan’s handwriting, was written at least a month after the song’s original composition, making it a lot less interesting than a fragment that he dated and signed April 12, quite possibly its composition date).
For now, Dylan didn’t seem to know what to do with the song, save record it for his label, which he did across three takes in July. If he really didn’t want the song to be considered a topical song, then giving it to Broadside wasn’t the wisest decision (it also allowed a student named Lorre Wyatt to learn the song early enough to claim to friends he wrote it and sold it to Dylan—a lie Newsweek dredged up in an infamous October 1963 "hatchet" piece). He soon tired of trying to explain this "feeling" without a name. Yes, it could be interpreted any which way, but at its nub was a sense that any purpose and/or answer would remain ever out of reach.
As he told one Canadian journalist at the time, "I’m not politically inclined. My talent isn’t in that area; it’s just to play music. As it is, it falls into areas where people are politically motivated. . . . ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ was just a feeling I felt because I felt that way." Sixteen years later, when the pan-dimensional beings in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had to concoct the ultimate question, they actually came up with, "How many roads must a man walk down?"
Only later did Dylan come to view "Blowin’ in the Wind" to "Every Grain of Sand" as an eighteen-year journey from yearning to redemption. As such it is entirely fitting that the song sprang from a spiritual, as he informed Marc Rowland in 1978, a matter of months before Christ entered his life: "‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song . . . called ‘No More Auction Block.’ . . . ‘Blowin in the Wind’ follows the same feeling. . . . I just did it on my acoustical guitar when I recorded it—which didn’t really make it sound spiritual—but the feeling, the idea . . . that’s where it was coming from."
What prompted him to talk in these terms was a grandiose new arrangement of the song he was performing nightly. When he worked up this big-band version for the very first time at the January 1978 Rundown rehearsals—though only after a particularly painful reggae version was thankfully abandoned—he turned to the girls and said, "Like a church choir." It stayed this way through 1981, at which point Dylan gave the first verse over to the girl singers entirely.
It is not mere happenstance that prompted Dylan to adopt the antislavery song "No More Auction Block" (a.k.a. "Many Thousand Gone") as his template for "Blowin’ in the Wind." The original song, composed by runaway slaves who fled to Nova Scotia in the early nineteenth century—after Britain had abolished slavery in all its colonies—was passed on to Negro Union soldiers during the Civil War. The traditional song drives home its point without hectoring its audience; it simply juxtaposes new-found freedoms—"No more driver’s lash for me . . . No more mistress’ call"—with a powerful lament for the "many thousand gone," i.e., those who died in slavery.
"Blowin’ in the Wind" expresses a similar disquiet with the order of things, but on a grander canvas. Unfortunately, when the Peter, Paul, and Mary version rose to the top of the charts in the summer of 1963, it began to tear apart its author’s cozy world. Dylan soon began to be pestered by those who thought that anyone asking such questions had answers. Having previously performed the still-unreleased song at the Town Hall show in April 1963—where it barely drew a smattering of recognition—six months later, now at Carnegie Hall, he felt obliged to preface the performance with a long, anti-intellectual monologue, dissecting the first verse of the song line by line, then asking a hypothetical teacher perplexed by the song’s meaning if he understands each line as it stands. The teacher replied that he understood each line, just not the whole song. Dylan then informed the audience, "And this man has a degree!"
Unsure how he should respond to those who saw confusion in the song’s oblique message, Dylan stopped talking about the song, and then stopped playing it altogether. Gone by his next New York showpiece, he only returned to it in 1971, responding to a personal request from George Harrison by playing it at the two concerts for Bangladesh. But he remained reluctant to invest it with any of himself. It took until June 28, 1984, playing to many thousand rabid Spaniards at a show in Barcelona, for him to finally understand the universality of its appeal. As the Iberians began to sing along with him word for word, a galvanized Dylan rose to the occasion, delivering the remainder of the song with the passion of a complete unknown, introducing it to those twenty hardy souls at Gerde’s for the very first time.
{53} CORRINA, CORRINA
{54} HONEY, JUST ALLOW ME ONE MORE CHANCE
{55} ROCKS and GRAVEL
#53–4—Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;
Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Gerde’s Folk City, New York, April 1962.
#55—Published lyrics: Bob Dylan Himself songbook.
First known performance: Cynthia Gooding’s apartment, April 1962.
#53—Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 24, 1962—2 takes;
October 26, 1962—7 takes [FR—tk.6].
#54—Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 9, 1962—1 take
[FR—tk.1].
#55—Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 25, 1962—3 takes;
November 1, 1962—2 takes [FR ver.1].
While starting to transcend Guthrie’s influence on songs like "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" and "Blowin’ in the Wind," Dylan was still content to pay his dues when it came to the blues. Save when he immersed himself in those caffeine-fueled writing sessions in the bars and coffee houses, it was to the blues greats that he liked to defer. Along with Robert Johnson, who continued to shape his universe, he now embraced the likes of Leroy Carr, Skip James, Big Joe Williams (with whom he recorded that March), Lonnie Johnson, and Henry Thomas, willing himself to become their heir apparent.
Of these mostly mythical figures, only Williams and Lonnie Johnson were able to make their influence felt in person. It may well have been Williams who had shown him the blistering bottleneck arrangement of "Baby Please Don’t Go" with which he wowed his Minnesota friends the previous December (but which he failed to rekindle for Columbia four months later). And according to Dylan, in both Biograph and Chronicles, Lonnie Johnson had an equally profound effect: "He greatly influenced me. You can hear it in that first record—I mean ‘Corrina, Corrina.’"
The pair chanced to meet at Gerde’s, where they were both working in September 1961. Johnson, booked at the club for a fortnight-long residency immediately preceding Dylan’s second residency, was a highly accomplished jazz-blues guitarist who had been making records since 1925, scoring his biggest hit with the standard "Tomorrow Night" (resp
ectfully covered by Dylan on 1992’s Good As I Been to You). Yet it was not so much the sound he got from a twelve-string acoustic as that loping 12/8 meter that Dylan seems to have applied to his own version of "Corrina, Corrina."
As to his source for the song itself, the traditional "Corrina" had been recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks’ Bo Carter as early as 1926 (Dylan’s lifelong fascination with the Sheiks probably began when Big Joe Williams introduced him to "Sitting on Top of the World" in the winter of 1962). "Corrina " also appears in Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America (1960), a tome Dylan had been steadily working his way through since finding a copy at the MacKenzies’ in the spring of 1961.[2] Also recorded at the same April 1962 Columbia session was his version of "Milk Cow Blues," with one verse from "Good Morning Blues," the entry before "Corrina" in Lomax’s vast compendium.
Lomax himself described "Corrina" as "a tender little blues with a touch of jazz and a flavour of hillbilly . . . [which] has been so often resung by white and negroes in the south that it is now impossible to say on which side of the Jim Crow line it was born." In Dylan’s hands it crossed the line again, befitting its status as one of the more successful "Bob Dylan blues." Lyrically, the influence of the other Johnson drips from every line. The second verse as recorded ("I got a bird that whistles . . .") has been lifted whole from "Stones in My Passway," while in its earliest incarnation, at Gerde’s in April, Dylan also appropriated lines and verses from "Hellhound on My Trail," "Me and the Devil Blues," and "32.20 Blues," making it a one-song tribute to this king without a crown.
"Rocks and Gravel" was another quasi-traditional "original" debuted at that Gerde’s residency, as Dylan was preparing for make-or-break sessions at Columbia. Recorded in acoustic and electric incarnations for Freewheelin’, it remained part of Dylan’s set for the remainder of the year, before being copyrighted to him in February 1963. It appeared in numerous early songbooks (but not Writings and Drawings). Like "Corrina, Corrina," it demonstrated that Dylan could take a traditional blues—in this case "Solid Road," another song collected by the Lomaxes—and tie together a fleet of floating verses with enough wit to make it his own. Though he would subsequently transpose the most famous verse in "Rocks and Gravel" to "It Takes a Lot to Laugh," it was never one of his own, "originating" in Leroy Carr’s "Alabama Woman Blues":
Don’t the clouds look lonesome across the deep blue sea,
Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me.
In the months to come, presumably in response to Grossman’s importunities, Dylan became less and less coy about copyrighting songs he had merely tweaked. Yet on the one song in which he created something almost entirely his own, he gave co-credit to its originator, Henry Thomas—at least initially.[3] "Honey Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance" may have formed the basis for Dylan’s "Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance," but it is only the refrain that Dylan purloined from Thomas’s 1927 original. As Todd Harvey has written, "Dylan wrote, for the most part, new text . . . increased Thomas’s tempo and added his own guitar accompaniment, placing harmonica solos between verses." Quite a change.
Even among Dylan’s Village buddies, few would have known Henry Thomas’s original or his work, save for his memorable contribution ("Fishing Blues") to Harry Smith’s bootleg boxed set, the Anthology of American Folk Music. "Honey Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance"—originally issued on an ultra-rare Vocalion 78—was not reissued until 1961, and then only on a limited-edition LP, Henry Thomas Sings the Texas Blues. Perhaps the sheer obscurity of Thomas’s work prompted Dylan to co-credit him on Freewheelin’. After all, the long dead Texas singer was not about to come knocking for his cut of any royalties.
Although Dylan did not get around to recording Thomas’s song until July, it featured in the same April Gerde’s set as "Corrina, Corrina." And like the latter, it was clearly a song he was working out in performance. In April he was looking for "someone who will understand." By July she was "a worried woman / [who] needs a worried man." The song continued to serve as light relief in concert into 1963 (and maybe 1964, if it was played at the Royal Festival Hall), only to be unexpectedly revised and re-recorded at a joint session with George Harrison in May 1970, while Dylan was running through all the Henry Thomas songs he knew.
{56} QUIT YOUR LOWDOWN WAYS
First known performance: Finjan Club, Montreal, July 2, 1962.
{57} BABE, I’M IN THE MOOD FOR YOU
{58} DOWN THE HIGHWAY
{59} BOB DYLAN’S BLUES
#56–9—Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;
Lyrics 2004.
#56–9— Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 9, 1962.
#56—1 take [TBS—tk.1]; #57—4 takes [BIO—tk.3]; #58—1 take
[FR—tk.1]; #59—3 takes [FR—tk.1].
"Quit Your Lowdown Ways" demonstrates the increasing sophistication with which Dylan was concocting his own stew from the melting pot of tradition. On the face of it, it is little more than a clever reworking of bluesman Kokomo Arnold’s "Milk Cow Blues" ("You can read out your Bible / You can fall down on your knees / Pretty mama and pray to the Lord / Ain’t gonna do you no good" is a direct lift), a song he had recorded back in April, in the vein of Robert Johnson’s remake. In fact, Dylan took the underlying idea from a Negro spiritual, "Your Low Down Ways" ("God’s goin’ to get you ’bout your lowdown ways"), crossing it with Arnold, Johnson, and even a bit of Elvis. Finally he takes a whiff of Blind Willie Johnson’s "You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond," adding an exuberant performance that succeeds in making the song his own.
"Babe, I’m in the Mood for You" is an early example of a Dylan come-on song. He will make a number of forays into similar territory with the likes of "I Don’t Believe You," "If You Gotta Go, Go Now," "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word," "Lay, Lady, Lay," and "Rita Mae." It is a slightly frenzied performance, distilling a number of verbal come-ons down to a two-minute-something song that captures the knee-pumping hyperactivity of the man. In the Biograph notes Dylan suggests it was "probably influenced by Jesse Fuller . . . more ’n’ likely my version of his thing." If so it was Fuller’s style, not a specific song, he was emulating, also adding elements of the incendiary version of "Baby, Please Don’t Go" he was performing at the time. In fact, in a letter written to absent muse Suze in the same month he recorded it, he says the song "is for you but I don’t mention your name."
"Down the Highway" is a real oddity. This one he tells Suze she is "in" (along with another now-lost song "about that statue we saw in Washington of Tom Jefferson"). It would survive every vagary of the convoluted process by which Dylan eventually arrived at his second album, though there is no record of him ever performing the song live (unlike songs 53–7) or returning to the song at demo sessions or informal jams during the six months he spent awaiting the return of the lover who’d taken his heart in a suitcase. Perhaps it made the album because it was addressed to this lady, who returned to his side just in time to shoot the album cover.
For the second time Dylan was attempting to write something as archetypal as "Crossroads Blues." But while "Down the Highway" is superior to "Standing on the Highway," Robert Johnson it is not. Not only did Dylan not live with the song in performance, he barely dallied with it in the studio, executing the album version in a single take. The next song written to his long-distance lover is of an entirely different caliber. And a whole lot more personal.
{60} TOMORROW IS A LONG TIME
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: [Tony Glover’s, Minneapolis, August 11, 1962]. Town Hall, NY, April 12, 1963 [MGH].
Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, November 1962.
The starting point within tradition for "Tomorrow Is a Long Time—which Dylan shared with his Minnesota friends at an informal jam session at Tony Glover’s home in August 1962, when it
was little more than a raw idea—proves to be the starting point for pretty much all Anglo-American folk music. "Westron wind," a fifteenth-century relic from oral tradition, comprises just an aching melody and four lines, yet nonetheless manages to encompass a whole world of pain:
O westron wynde when wyll thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne
Cryst yf my love wer in my armys
and I yn my bed agayne.
Dylan redrafts lines 3–4 as "Only if she was lying by me / Then I’d lie in my bed once again" and takes it from there. For the heartbroken lad from Hibbing, a world of "endless highways" and "crooked trails" separates him and his true love. And so, while heading down the highway to his North Country home to escape the bed they had shared and the haunted memories it brought, he began to write this song. The August recording by Tony Glover—which Dylan prefaces by saying, "My girl, she’s in Europe right now. She sailed on a boat over there. She’ll be back September 1, and till she’s back, I’ll never go home"—is just the bare bones of the song, conveying little save the feeling Dylan is hoping to translate. Those feelings he communicated to Suze in letter form—"It’s just that I’m hating time—I’m trying to . . . bend it and twist it with gritting teeth and burning eyes—I hate it I love you,"—but not with anything like the despair in his voice the day he played this song to his old friends.
Perhaps if she had been privy to this recording, Suze might indeed have returned around Labor Day as she had planned. Instead, she phoned to inform him that she had decided to stay on in Italy to work on her art. He had no choice but to return to his Fourth Street apartment, where he finished this song of inconsolable loss. At this point he turned up at the Van Ronks’ Village apartment, knowing that Terri and Dave would not turn him away, or stop him from playing the same song over and over again. As Terri told Scaduto, "He used to play . . . the one about him wishing he could lie next to her again all the time." (my italics)
Revolution in the Air Page 10
