{81} HERO BLUES
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, December 6, 1962—4 takes; August 12, 1963—3 takes.
First known performance: Town Hall, New York, April 12, 1963.
Having spent much of 1962 compiling a veritable New Wobblies’ Songbook for the Cause, Dylan got around to writing another of his "feel better" songs, this time castigating "the gal I got" because "she wants me to be a hero / So she can tell all her friends." Another of his funny-ha-ha songs, "Hero Blues" takes great delight in ridiculing a girl who "reads too many books / she got new movies inside her head." In the end, the singer suspects she won’t be satisfied until he winds up dead—at which point she can "stand and shout hero / All over my lonesome grave," a delightfully Dylanesque exaggeration.
Though hardly a major composition, Dylan remained quite attached to it. The song survived in his set until Town Hall in April and was even attempted honky-tonk style at the Times They Are A-Changin’ sessions in August. Indeed, even after acetates were cut for the sequenced album, "Hero Blues" was scheduled for the side-one, track-four slot. Only at the last minute did good sense prevail, and it was ousted by "One Too Many Mornings," Dylan recognizing that the sentiments underlying "Hero Blues" could be further refined.
In May 1964 he decided to rewrite the song in an altogether more sarcastic, biting vein. The author of "It Ain’t Me, Babe" started thinking that even dying for "her" might not be enough. As for "Hero Blues," it made a most unexpected comeback in January 1974 as opening song for the first two shows on Dylan’s "returning hero" tour. Though the new set of words is not entirely audible on either tape, references to heading "out on the highway / As fast as I can go" and having "one foot on the highway / The other in the grave" suggest he was hoping audiences had come to see a song-and-dance man, not a hero of the old school. After all, it had never been his "duty to remake the world at large."
{82} WHATCHA GONNA DO?
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 14, 1962; December 6, 1962—1 take.
At the penultimate Freewheelin’ session, Dylan made one last attempt to cut the kind of blues he had originally intended to make the crux of this "make or break" album, demonstrating how the ghost of Robert Johnson was still rattling at his windowpane. Conceiving of a conversation with the Johnson of "Me and the Devil Blues," Dylan asks what plans he has "when the Devil calls your name" and whether he is prepared to meet his Maker—a full seventeen years before "Are You Ready?" Already preparing for "that dreadful day," he wants to know of this other sinner man: "What’re you gonna do when you can’t play God no more?" Next album around, he would be quoting directly from the Bible, raining judgment down on his elders as the times began to change at his command.
[1] Seven songs were recorded for Leeds Music, with an eighth ("He Was a Friend of Mine") lodged from a session-tape at Columbia. Those seven songs were as follows: "Ballad for a Friend," "Hard Times in New York Town," "Man on the Street," "Poor Boy Blues," "Rambling Willie," "Standing on the Highway," and "Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues."
[2] Among the MacKenzie papers are a list of numbers, in Dylan’s hand, which turn out to be references to specific songs in Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America, so we can be sure Dylan was referring to this book on a regular basis even then.
[3] Though "Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance" was credited to Dylan-Thomas on the original LP, the lyrics in Writings and Drawings (and both editions of Lyrics) are attributed to Dylan alone.
[4] The session-tape for December 6, 1962 is in circulation, having been initially misplaced by Columbia, marked, "Audition Folksinger." Some audition! As such, we have five versions of "I Shall Be Free," of which takes two and five are complete. The second take, recorded after a single false start, is the one that appears on Freewheelin’.
{ 1963: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; The Times They Are A-Changin’ }
Dylan began 1963 where he had left off at year’s end, writing up a storm of songs combining derivative melodies with stunningly original lyrics and execution. Indeed he would still be drawing on the many song ideas acquired in a matter of weeks in England through the spring of 1963, when the likes of "Liverpool Gal" and "With God on Our Side" were composed. It would take till the end of October—when he wrote the third-album finale, "Restless Farewell"—for the lyrical musing to abate. As far as we know, it was the last song he wrote until 1964.
Among the thirty-two songs from ten more months in Inspiration’s fiery furnace would be a quartet of songs that complete his second album, the ten that would make up his third, and another double album’s worth of songs debuted in concert but discarded, including songs of balladic brilliance ("Seven Curses," "Eternal Circle," "Lay Down Your Weary Tune," and "Percy’s Song"). But by October 31, when Dylan recorded "Restless Farewell," the first phase of his career had drawn to a close. When he emerged again in the new year, he had put away all protesty things . . .
{83} MASTERS OF WAR
Published lyric: Broadside #20; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;
Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Gil Turner’s home, New York, January 21, 1963.
Known studio recordings: Columbia Studio A, NY, April 23, 1963—3 takes [FR—tk.3].
There may be some dispute regarding the date of composition for "Masters of War," but there can be none about the actual source of the tune. That source was assuredly folksinger Jean Ritchie’s "Nottamun Town," a traditional English folk song now thought to constitute part of the mummers’ plays performed for the common people on holidays during the middle ages. The song itself has perhaps the most surreal set of lyrics found in traditional song, an incongruous compound that, one must suppose, held a meaning for the folk that is now lost to the ages ("Met the King and the Queen and a company more, a-riding behind and a-marching before / Came a stark-naked drummer a-beating a drum, with his heels in his bosom come marching along"). That the song spoke to Dylan is clear. As he told Nora Ephron in 1965, "‘Nottamun Town,’ that’s like a herd of ghosts passing through on the way to Tangiers. ‘Lord Edward’ [sic], ‘Barbara Allen,’ they’re [all] full of myth."
And yet the original song, with its magnetic modal melody, had almost dropped from the face of tradition when collected by England’s dean of field collecting, Cecil Sharp, in his travels through the Appalachian Mountains in 1917. His primary source? Jean Ritchie’s great aunt, Una. Apparently brought to America by her great-great-grandfather Crockett, the song was duly recorded by Jean on her self-titled 1960 album. Ritchie also returned the song to its ancestral home when she toured Britain, where it took root among revivalists, being recorded by both Davey Graham and Bert Jansch on key folk-revival collections, albeit post-Dylan.
As such, everyone in those circles, either side of the pond, knew it was one of Jean’s. As Martin Carthy says, "I remember [Bob] singing it and me thinking, ‘Oh, that’s "Nottamun Town." He would have learnt that from Jean Ritchie. That’s Jean Ritchie’s song.’" It is simply inconceivable that Dylan would not have already known Ritchie’s own rendition, given his deep knowledge of immediate predecessors, the number of times he has name-checked Ritchie, and the song’s position as one of the standards of the folk revival (the idea that he took it from the singer Jackie Washington, a recent claimant, is patently absurd).
Unlike many a fellow folkie—even those whose unique arrangement of a traditional song had been appropriated by the young Dylan—Ritchie went after the young tyke and his music publisher for using "her" tune. According to her, a settlement was made, though due credit was still not forthcoming. Ritchie responded in kind, writing in the preface of her 1965 songbook, "Because of recent developments in the field of folk music, I have found it necessary to copyright many of the Ritchie family so
ngs." Gee, I wonder, what can she mean?
Of course, it is possible Dylan felt prompted to reuse the tune because he heard a revivalist singing Ritchie’s arrangement. British folksinger Bob Davenport has claimed he played the song when Dylan was in the audience in London that January, reminding him of the tune. On the other hand, the more credible Martin Carthy insists Dylan played the song the first time he saw him play, in December "at the Troubadour. . . . He’d written [it] already." Well, if Carthy is right, he was certainly performing it for the first time, and almost certainly the day he wrote it, because he definitely wrote it in London. As an uncirculating recording of a version he played to folklorist Alan Lomax, on his return to New York, proves. On that rare reel, he prefaces the song with the kind of open, honest explanation of its inspiration that he will never make again:
I wrote it in London . . . about all them people over there in England—they don’t like Kennedy too much. I remember when the papers came out, I was at this rehearsal place out in Putney and I kept seeing in the papers every day, [them] putting down MacMillan, [saying] Kennedy’s gonna screw him, on these missiles. . . . They got headlines in the papers, underneath MacMillan’s face, saying, "Don’t mistrust me, don’t mistrust me, how can you treat a poor maiden so?"
The song certainly appears to be another one that came quickly—and largely complete. An early typescript of the song in the notebook he kept at the time contains just two couplets different from its April 1963 recording. The first, "You’re like the dirty rotten water / that runs down my drain," he improves by exchanging "dirty rotten water" for the kind one can "see through." The second, "For all of your money / You ain’t worth a hole in the ground" has also been changed in crayon to the vastly superior, "All the money you made / Will never buy back your soul." No question, the same man who’d written "I’d Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day" now instructed Freewheelin’ sleeve-note writer Nat Hentoff: "[‘Masters of War’] is a sort of striking out, a reaction to the last straw, a feeling of what can you do?"
Dylan may well have been prompted to vent these "feeling[s] of what can you do" after first responding to a request at the end of 1962 from folklorist Izzy Young for a contribution to an anthology of anti-bomb literature. Dylan gave him a forty-line poem, "Go ’Way Bomb," that shares the same kind of tone that spills over into "Masters of War":
I hate you cause you make my life seem like nothin at all
I hate you cause yer name’s lost it’s [sic] meanin an you can fool anybody now
I hate you cause yer man made and man owned an man handled
An’ you might be missmade and miss-owned an miss handled an even miss used.
At the time of its composition, Dylan thought he had already completed his second album. But when Freewheelin’ was recalled in April—purportedly because it included the potentially libelous "Talkin’ John Birch"—he decided to add "Masters of War," demonstrating a keen awareness of how his grasp of the protest-song genre had come on in leaps and bounds in the past year. The pace at which he was moving probably surprised even him. As he said in 1984, "If I wrote a song like [‘Masters of War’] now I wouldn’t feel I’d have to write another one for two weeks. . . . The old records I used to make, by the time they came out I wouldn’t even want them released because I was already so far beyond them."
"Masters of War" would make its concert debut at the legendary Town Hall show in April 1963. Over the next eighteen months, it would become one of those songs with which he was most identified. And yet within five years he was suggesting it was simply another song he’d written to order: "[Masters of War] was an easy thing to do. There were thousands and thousands of people just wanting that song, so I wrote it up. . . . I no longer have the capacity to feed this force which is needing all these songs. . . . My insight has turned into something else."
It took another decade before he felt the need to "feed this force" again, "Masters of War" finally being restored to live favor at Hollywood shows in June 1978 in a heavy-metal guise. It received much praise for its new arrangement in the European press that summer. Indeed, it retained this sledgehammer-cracking-a-nut guise through 1991, when he performed the song at Radio City Music Hall prior to receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Having informed the blustering Joe Queenan that he played this particular song that evening because the Gulf "war [was] going on and all that," he later flatly contradicted himself, asserting that the song has "got nothing to do with being anti-war. It has more to do with the military industrial complex that Eisenhower was talking about," which is what he had told Lomax.
The song finally returned to base in February 1994, when Dylan unveiled its first acoustic rendition in thirty years at a concert in Hiroshima, the most apposite place to reintroduce such a compelling sentiment. As gripping in its own way as the "Hard Rain" he performed at Nara City three months later, the acoustic "Masters of War" was retained for the remainder of the year, a reminder to the tens of thousands at the shows and the millions who tuned into Woodstock ’94 that "the military industrial complex" could yet bring down a hard rain.
{84} GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Oscar Brand’s World of Folk Music, March 1963.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 23, 1963—6 takes [FR—tk.2].
Bob went away to . . . Italy and in the time he was away . . . he wrote "Girl from the North Country," ’cause he came back and he said, "I’ve got a song to play you." It was at the Troubadour, and he started to play, and he had that little guitar thing that I play in "Scarborough Fair." He was singing the song and he went into this figure and he just burst out laughing . . . and he wouldn’t do the rest of it. He went all red. —Martin Carthy, Isis #83
Never one to disabuse claimants to muse status, Dylan has refused to lay to rest the eternal question of whom he had in mind when he wrote "Girl from the North Country." The most insistent claimant, high school sweetheart Echo Helstrom, laid it on thick for journalist Toby Thompson when he was writing his sophomoric book about the young Dylan, Positively Main Street. Yet Echo is surprisingly absent from the long litany of girls who broke the boy’s heart in a poem he wrote back in 1960. He did, however, introduce "Girl from the North Country" at a 1978 L.A. Forum performance by saying, "First girl I ever loved is here in the house tonight. I wrote a song about her, though she left me a long time ago for an older man." Echo was apparently there that night.
However, Echo was not in the audience two nights earlier in Oakland, when Dylan described "Girl . . ." as "a song about a girl who left me to be a movie star"; or the following night, when he admitted he "never came to see her, but she’s here tonight, so I’ll play this." Presumably, these dedications were for Bonnie Beecher, his Minneapolis girlfriend, who had settled in Oakland with Hugh "Wavy Gravy" Romney and was the "actress girl who kneed me in the guts," as so vividly described in "My Life in a Stolen Moment," an autobiographical poem written within four months of "Girl from the North Country." (Just to muddy the waters a little, it would appear that both Echo and Bonnie attempted to become actresses. The one reference to Beecher in Chronicles refers to a meeting in Hawaii in April 1966, while she was working on a John Wayne film.) Dylan, meanwhile, continued to introduce "Girl from the North Country" at those fall shows with a reference to the "first girl that ever broke my heart [and] left me for an older man. I wrote [her] this song and still wish her well." However, after L.A., he stopped claiming she was in the audience.
Critic Robert Shelton was always of the opinion that Bonnie was the "true" girl from the North Country. Of other potential candidates, Gretel Hoffman, who "left" Dylan to marry his best friend, the older Dave Whitaker, is another gal for whom Dylan professed to carry a torch. Judy Rubin, another home-state Jewess singled out in poems written in 1960 and 1963, evidently got under his skin, though the one biographer
to tackle her, Bob Spitz, found a lady who never took Dylan as a serious suitor. When asked point-blank by a Minneapolis journalist in 1986 if Echo Helstrom was the North Country girl, Dylan ducked and dived, finally suggesting, "Well, she’s a North Country girl through and through."
There is one gal the song is definitely about, by proxy, and that is Suze. "Girl . . ." is as much of a requiem to his "lost" true love as that "first" love; establishing another pattern Dylan would repeat throughout his career, generally with magnificent results. On Blood on the Tracks, at the end of another great love affair, an earlier such experience is recalled in "Simple Twist of Fate." "In the Summertime," on Shot of Love, also seems to refer more to an earlier summer spent on the farm in Minnesota than any recent relationship with a "God-fearing woman."
Less contentious is Dylan’s source for the tune to "Girl from the North Country"—and this one he acknowledged. It derives directly from English folksinger Martin Carthy’s arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" (also known as "Whittingham Fair"), a rationalized variant of the supernatural ballad, "The Elfin Knight." As Dylan told Kurt Loder, "I learned a lot of stuff from Martin [Carthy]. ‘Girl from the North Country’ is based on a song I heard him sing—that ‘Scarborough Fair’ song, which I guess Paul Simon just took the whole thing." Simon made the song famous, and in the process broke the code all folk revivalists were expected to abide by. Whereas Dylan simply took the tune—with Carthy’s blessing.
Dylan even puts in a pun on the title of the tune he has stolen, sending his traveler to the "north country fair"(adjective), rather than the "county fair" (noun). Though he told Scaduto he wrote "Girl . . ." down by the banks of Italy, it was apparently another idea he had been carrying around. As he told Boston Broadside later the same year: "I had the idea for that song for a long time, but it just wasn’t the right time for it to be written. When the right time finally did come, the song was in my mind and it was ready."
Revolution in the Air Page 14
