Revolution in the Air
Page 13
Even as a twenty-one-year-old lapsed Jew, he seemed to believe in an actual Judgment Day, an essential part of Christian eschatology, but not of mainstream Judaism. On "Dreadful Day," though the target for God’s (and Dylan’s) wrath is not specified, there is a strong implication he is a rich man ("You’re gonna have to walk naked / Can’t ride in no car"). Warming up for the bilious Pirate Jenny, he has taken a leaf from "Dives and Lazarus," a sixteenth-century English ballad he would have known via more modern variants. Dives, a rich man who refuses to feed the hungry Lazarus, causes the latter to envisage his fate on "that dreadful day" (though the phrase itself probably derives from the Carter Family’s rendition of "The Day of Wrath," which opens, "The day of wrath, that dreadful day . . .").
{73} PATHS OF VICTORY
Published lyrics: Broadside #17; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, November 1962;
Studio A, NY, August 12, 1963—1 take [TBS—tk.1].
Whereas "Dreadful Day" targets the black hearted, "Paths of Victory" flips the coin, vouchsafing victory for those movers and shakers willing to share the author’s righteous zealotry. As with the contemporary "Ain’t Gonna Grieve," Dylan does little to disguise the gospel source of "Paths of Victory." It is less than a skip from "Palms of Victory, crowns of Glory / Palms of Victory I shall wear" to "Trails of troubles, roads of battles / Paths of Victory I shall walk." "Palms of Victory," a traditional hymn, was collected by the likes of Vance Randolph in the Ozarks (and we know that Dylan had access to Harry Weber’s copy of Randolph’s four-volume collection), though Dylan probably drew from a less traditional source: the June 1936 recording made by the Carter Family (under the title "The Wayworn Traveler").
Though Dylan allowed the song to appear in a December 1962 Broadside, he had not quite finished the lyrics. At this stage it seemed to have acquired a couple of discarded images from "Tomorrow Is a Long Time": "I walked along the highway / I walked along the track.
. . . I went out to the valley / I turned my head up high / I saw the silver lining / That was hangin’ in the sky." By August 1963, when one might have expected the song to have already slipped from his crowded mind, Dylan had the song how he wanted it, cutting it for the Times . . . album. It would not make the short list, though, perhaps because he ended up reusing the "original" Carter Family melody on the altogether more poetic "When the Ship Comes In."
{74} TRAIN A-TRAVELIN’
Published lyrics: Broadside #23; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, November 1962 [BR].
Still in a vengeful mood, and perhaps feeling like "I Hear a Train A-Rolling" was one of those ideas whose time had arrived, Dylan test-ran this more apocalyptic variant at a November 1962 home session, seemingly for Broadside’s use. On "Train A-Travelin’," Dylan envisages another slow train "with a firebox of hatred and a furnace full of fears." Once again he personifies the forces of evil—a curiously Christian
concept—preempting "Sympathy for the Devil" by a good five years as he suggests, "You’ve heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name." Performed in prototype for the Cunningham tape recorder, Dylan added another three verses before its publication in late March 1963, accompanied by a Suze Rotolo drawing of this trainload of fools, carrying placards proclaiming "Support War," "KKK," and the like. By then, he had much better songs in his locker. He was just no longer sure that Broadside was where they should end up.
{75} WALKIN’ DOWN THE LINE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, November 1962;
Witmark demo, New York, March 1963 [TBS].
The narrator of "Walkin’ Down the Line" can no longer see the silver lining in the sky, oppressed as he is by a "heavy-headed gal," and frustrated by all the money that "flows / through the holes in the pockets of my clothes." When he does "see the morning light," it is only because he has had another sleepless night—à la "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." Yet the song has a jaunty melody and an upbeat delivery, which belies its troubled message, making it more of a partner-in-rhyme for "Paths of Victory" than "Dreadful Day." Another song he was content to give away, "Walkin’ Down the Line" came back to haunt him in June 1987, when at least one member of the Dead expressed a yen for it. He even ran it down at tour rehearsals, though that was as far as it got. But the song continued to have its fans, and in 1991 it appeared on The Bootleg Series in its Witmark guise (no Columbia take being available), presumably because it struck a chord with compiler Jeff Rosen.
{76} CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Published lyrics: Words Fill My Head.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, November 1962.
As late as 1965, Dylan was still claiming that he wrote "Hard Rain" at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis: "We just hung around at night- people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I." Actually it is this innocuous three-verse ditty that depicts "the fearful night [when] we thought the world would end." If the crisis passed soon enough, so did this cursory by-product.
{77} YE PLAYBOYS and PLAYGIRLS
Published lyrics: Broadside #18; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, November 1962.
First known performance: Newport Folk Festival, July 27, 1963 [NB].
Being one of those souls who liked hanging out at the Broadside offices—a.k.a. Gil Turner’s apartment—Pete Seeger was among the first to hear this simple little rallying cry, which Dylan recorded for Broadside at the end of an eventful year. And this one evidently lodged in Seeger’s memory, because in the summer of 1963 he convinced Dylan to reprise the song at a Newport workshop. By then, the acolyte had better material with which to exhort the festival goers—as the recent Newport DVD demonstrates—but he still made a brave fist of this checklist for countless broadside ballads, past and present: fall-out shelters ("Let Me Die in My Footsteps"), Jim Crow ("Only a Pawn in Their Game"), lynch mobs ("Emmett Till"), "insane tongues of war talk" ("Masters of War"), and "red baiters and race haters" ("With God on Our Side").
Note: The song’s belated appearance on the 1964 An Evening at Newport LP seems to have convinced Dylan that the song belongs with the Another Side songs in Writings and Drawings, not with the "early songs." This position has remained unchallenged in subsequent editions of Lyrics. Dylan also omitted a verse or two—"Your cold prison walls / Can’t change my mind. . . ." and "Your free-talking money-makers / Can’t get me down. . . ." being two of the targets deleted (or more likely forgotten) by the time he appeared at the Newport workshop.
{78} OXFORD TOWN
Published lyrics: Broadside #17; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Broadside session, New York, November 1962.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, December 6, 1962—1 take [FR—tk.1].
There are some songs written to order, i.e., take a theme and explode it, and those that are written to order. "Oxford Town" appears to belong to the latter category, being the product of an informal competition set by editors "Sis and Gordon" in Broadside #14, to get someone to write "a song about one of the most important events of this year—the enrollment of [black student] James Meredith in the University of Mississippi. . . . The least tribute we could pay him would be a good lasting song in his honor." The first response to their plea came from a young Phil Ochs, recently arrived in town, whose "Ballad of Oxford, Mississippi" appeared in the following issue. In #16, five more nominees wrote the kind of tripe that had been giving broadsides a bad name for four hundred years. Finally, in issue #17—appearing on stands in early December—Dylan showed everyone how it was done, giving the magazine "Oxford Town" (the title of a quite diffe
rent traditional song).
In five four-line verses he showed the gulf that was daily growing between him and his so-called peers in the topical-song field. While the others sank beneath a mire of platitudes, Dylan came up with an amulet of structural sophistication. Using all the "leaping" but little of the lingering generally found in olde worlde precursors, Dylan found another use for that verbal bayonet: to make a polemical point—"He come in the door, he couldn’t get in / All because of the color of his skin," a clear reference to Meredith’s courageous attempts to gain admission to the University of Mississippi.
By astutely placing the narrator at the center of the contretemps that initially greeted Meredith—"Me and my gal, my gal’s son / We got met with a tear gas bomb"—he makes it difficult for the listener to place him- or herself at any emotional distance from the seismic events occurring down South. And yet he never mentions Meredith or the university by name, enabling the song to live on long after the actual incident has become a footnote to academic treatises. As he told Studs Terkel the following April, "It deals with the Meredith case, but then again it doesn’t. . . . I wrote that when that happened, and I could have written that yesterday. It’s still the same. ‘Why doesn’t somebody investigate soon,’ that’s a verse in the song."
The studio take, recorded when the song was wholly fresh and vital—and Broadside #17 was rolling off the presses—has so much power and immediacy that, when Dylan nailed it in one go, his producer exclaimed at song’s end, "Don’t tell me that’s all." It is. It would be another twenty-eight years before he allowed the song another live airing, but it was a momentous one: an almost word-perfect performance at the University of Mississippi in October 1990, for which he received a standing ovation from black and white attendees alike.
{79} I SHALL BE FREE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [recorded version: Words Fill My Head].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, December 6, 1962—5 takes [FR—tk.2]; Broadside session, New York, December 1962; Witmark demo, April 1963.
During conversations with the Dallas Morning News’ Pete Oppel in October 1978, Dylan went to great pains to emphasize the diversity of material brought to his early acoustic albums: "If you check those [early] albums out carefully, you’ll see there’s more on those albums than just the spokesman’s role or the generation role. On all those albums there were some songs on there that had nothing to do with being a spokesman for anybody but myself." "I Shall Be Free" is just such a song, and a clear indicator that he was already thinking of an upbeat way to end that difficult second album.
It was, after all, recorded at what he envisaged would be the final session, on December 6, 1962. The decision to end the album with this variant of a talkin’ blues was probably intended to show how rooted his music remained in the forms that served him well before he ever dreamed of becoming the songwriter now daringly displayed. He still liked to leave ’em laughing. Dylan’s association with the kind of talkin’ blues on which he had built much of his early reputation underlines the whole song. Indeed, the structure of "I Shall Be Free" is copped from a 1944 song, "We Shall Be Free," recorded by Woody, "Cisco and Sonny and Lead Belly, too"—though its main lyrical debts are to Lead Belly’s rambunctious "Take a Whiff on Me" and the traditional "Talkin’ Blues."
"Take a Whiff on Me" had already provided Dylan with a couplet for "Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance" ("I’m a-walkin’ down the road with my hat in my hand / Lookin’ for a woman who needs a worried man"). It now provided further grist. Lines like "I got a woman six feet tall / Sleepin’ in the kitchen with her feet in the hall" gave Dylan the necessary license to get more wacky (his woman actually "works herself blind"). And from "Talkin’ Blues" he appropriates not just occasional lines but its whole licentious leer; witness its final verse:
Ain’t no use me workin’ so hard,
I got a gal in the rich folks’ yard.
They kill a chicken, she sends me the head.
She thinks I’m workin’, I’m a-layin’ up in bed,
Just dreamin’ about her, having a good time,
Two other women.
Dylan’s rewrite of this verse—which also takes something from Hank Williams’s "My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It"—survives to the recorded take. In his original, six-verse typescript, though, it contains yet more of its paradigm:
There ain’t no use in me working so hard,
I got me a woman who works in the yard,
Rakes the leaves up to her neck,
Every week she sends me a check.
She’s a humdinger. . . .
That typescript also contains a coupla rhymes that were bound to go—notably an admission that "sometimes I might get high / Walk like a duck, buzz like a fly"—but Dylan had more. Its six verses are embellished by a further five on the Freewheelin’ take, suggesting that the second half of the song was largely an act of spontaneous creation (all seven verses on the Broadside version he recorded in December are different from the typescript, but he stumbles over the performance, as if he can’t quite remember how it goes, suggesting that it probably postdates the Columbia session).
The "I Shall Be Free" on Freewheelin’ was actually a first complete take (along with another eight songs on the LP!). Yet he wasn’t sure he’d quite got it out of his system, and made three more attempts before admitting he’d got it right the first time around. At some point he decided to use the song to renounce one aspect of his previous persona, the first verse ending with him tossing that trademark hat on the fire:
I was standing on the corner, just waiting around,
The prices were up and the temperature was down,
Cost too much to freeze outside,
So now I sit by my fireside.
Burning telephone books, burning newspaper clippings,
Huckleberry Finn hats.
By the end of the session, though, he reverts to starting with, "I took me a woman . . ." (which is how it is on the LP).[4] Throughout Dylan sounds like he is enjoying himself. He also sounds at least half a lifetime away from telling an interviewer, "I lose my inspiration in the studio real easy, and it’s very difficult for me to think that I’m going to eclipse anything I’ve ever done before. I get bored easily, and my mission, which starts out wide, becomes very dim after a few failed takes." On December 6, 1962, there would be very "few failed takes." Having a ball, he lets wordplay be his guide.
Nor would this be the last time he felt a need to update the template, re-recording the song for Witmark the following spring, adding a verse about going to Reno on a horse "to get a divorce." On the face of it, he appeared to give it another makeover in 1973 for the benefit of readers of Writings and Drawings. The version included in the first collected lyrics even has a touch of the basement tapes, with couplets that would not have seemed out of place on "Tiny Montgomery" or "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread":
She took off her wheel, took off her bell,
Took off her wig, said, "How do I smell?" . . .
Well, I got a woman sleeps on a cot,
She yells and hollers and squeals a lot. . . .
Oh, there ain’t no use in me workin’ so heavy,
I got a woman who works on the levee.
Except that—guess what—those first two couplets appear, clear as type, in Dylan’s original six-verse typescript, as do his rhymes of "honeymooner / crooner / spoon feeder" and "folk singer / dead ringer," also preserved in Writings and Drawings. Only the third couplet quoted above appears to have been a latter-day tweak. So it would seem Dylan held onto a notebook or two, doing a lot more editorial work on that edition of lyrics than he ever did on its successors.
{80} KINGSPORT TOWN
Published lyrics: Words Fill My Head.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 14, 196
2—1 take [TBS—tk.1].
When "Kingsport Town" entered general circulation in the late eighties, it seemed like a real throwback. Its use of folk commonplaces—and inclusion alongside a first-album outtake—suggested an early composition. Yet its delivery bore the hallmark of a songwriter who was some way down the road to the fully realized "Seven Curses" and "Percy’s Song," both written the following year. In fact Dylan appears to be purposely demonstrating how sophisticated his grasp of traditional templates is becoming.
Though he self-consciously builds the song around the "Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?" motif, a balladic construct that dates back to at least the eighteenth century—where it first appeared in the Scottish "Lass of Loch Royal" ballad series—the story Dylan tells is neither the one used by Woody and Cisco on "Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?" nor the so-called "Storms Are on the Ocean" variant, favored by the likes of Doc Watson, the Carter Family, and Jean Ritchie, familiar as he would have been with both of these.
If anything "Kingsport Town" is a "letter home" song, drawn from the same lineage as "I Was Young When I Left Home." In this instance he is writing to "the gal I’m a-thinkin’ of" (two months before "Boots of Spanish Leather")—she of the Memphis lips, dark eyes, coal-black hair, and sandy-colored skin (quite how this translates into an "African-American woman," as Harvey suggests, I know not). In the song the narrator has been driven from old Kingsport Town because of an illicit affair, probably with the high sherriff’s daughter, and is left wondering who will be taking care of his babe when he’s "out in the wind." "Kingsport Town" remains a fascinating ragbag of ideas that Dylan has yet to formalize into a style he can really call his own (which in no way explains—or excuses—its absence from the latest edition of Lyrics).