Revolution in the Air
Page 15
What finally sent him into "reminiscence blues" mode again was surely the unprecedented weather he had encountered in England. Just as when he first came to New York, he arrived in London as the worst winter in living memory set in. Airports were closed, train services were suspended, and the country all but ground to a halt. As a house guest to the Carthys one evening, he had joined in chopping up a piano for firewood in a desperate attempt to stay warm. No wonder he felt inspired to muse upon "the north country fair / where the winds hit heavy on the borderline"!
{85} BOOTS OF SPANISH LEATHER
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Town Hall, New York, April 12, 1963.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 6, 1963—1 take; August 7, 1963—1 take [TIMES—tk.1].
When Dylan first flew to London in mid-December 1962—to appear in a BBC production of a new TV play called Madhouse on Castle Street—at the back of his mind he apparently had a half-formed notion he might track down his elusive girlfriend Suze at her Italian refuge in Perugia. Though Suze was scheduled to sail home at the exact same time Dylan landed in London, she had already changed her plans once, back in September. The result had been, in Mikki Isaacson’s words, "Bobby . . .
running around the Village looking lost and skinnier, a real mess. When he talked about Suze, he’d always say, ‘I don’t think she’s ever coming back.’"
That nagging and, this time around, unfounded feeling provided the germ of an idea which would grow into "Boots of Spanish Leather," a song Dylan told Scaduto he wrote in Italy when there in January 1963: "Suze had gone back to the States, and that’s when I worked up the melodies of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ and ‘Girl from the North Country.’"
In fact, by the time he arrived in Italy, Suze was back home in New York. As Suze writes in her memoir, "Our letters had crossed in the mail." We know that Dylan now knew Suze was not in Italy because the lady in question recently auctioned a postcard Dylan sent her from Italy that January, addressed to "Sue Rotolo c/o Bob Dylan, 161 W. 4th Street." The card—posted the day Dylan returned to London (the tenth)—is remarkably upbeat if it was written the same week he composed the maudlin "Boots of Spanish Leather," displaying plenty of flashes of that characteristic off-beat humor: "Gotta go, gotta [sic] meeting with the Pope about all the colored people coming over here. Amore, Bob."
It was that "amore" that inspired Dylan to write about the dark days when he thought she ain’t "ever coming back." The verbal jousting (originally between a virgin and the devil) that constitutes the conceptual core of "Scarborough Fair" again gave Dylan a format. But whereas "Girl from the North Country" is a lyrical lament, pure and simple, "Boots of Spanish Leather" is an old-world ballad from someone whose grasp of traditional modes was coming on in leaps and bounds. The first six verses represent a conversation between two lovers, one of whom is set to sail the seas and has asked the other what kind of token they might want. The other insists it is unnecessary, professing undying love. After half-a-dozen verses lingering on the lovers’ parting, the narrator leaps to the devastating denouement, demonstrating real mastery of so-called "leaping and lingering."
The tone shifts 180 degrees in a single ominous couplet: "I got a letter on a lonesome day / It was from her ship a-sailin’ . . ." Having led the listener to expect a "Dear John" letter, Dylan leaves the convention behind and digs instead into his own memory banks: "She says I don’t know when I’ll be coming back / It depends on how I’m a-feelin’." Bereft, the narrator bids her a fond farewell with the subtlest of references to the hurt she’s engendered, instructing her to "take heed of the western wind," the same wind which had blown through "Tomorrow Is a Long Time."
Dylan later described "Boots of Spanish Leather" to a Carnegie Hall audience as a "when you can’t get what you want, you have to settle for less kinda-song." In the last couplet, with his love now forsaken, he finally asks for that token—"spanish boots of spanish leather." It is a request commonly held to refer to "Gypsy Davey," but the reference there has no bearing on this song. And "Shoes of Spanish Leather" is also the title of an English nursery rhyme. And here the list of trinkets desired by a lady has a meaning commensurate with Dylan’s:
My shoes are made of Spanish [leather]
my stockings are made of silk
My petticoats of calico
and that’s as white as milk.
Refrain:
Here we go round and round
Till our frocks touch the ground.
Assuming this is Dylan’s point of reference, it must be something he heard or read about on his trip to London. The rhyme has no known provenance in America. "Boots of Spanish Leather" was a song he kept close to his chest for a couple of months more. He is not known to have performed it before April’s Town Hall performance and did not record it "properly" until the first third-album session in August. Perhaps he thought it unwise to highlight melodic similarities to that other song penned in Perugia, which he was anxious to debut. "Boots of Spanish Leather," though, has continued to be a song he can surrender to in performance, whether in Prague or Perugia.
{86} BOB DYLAN’S DREAM
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: "The Banjo Tape," Gerde’s Folk City, February 8, 1963.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 23, 1963—2 takes [FR—tk.2].
We would have some sessions out at my sister’s house. She and Bob and I would travel out there. Later, when I heard the song "Bob Dylan’s Dream," I couldn’t help but think that some of the sessions we had at my sister’s house were part of that "Dream." . . . We used to love to play and sing. —John Bucklen to Robert Shelton, Isis #98.
The nostalgia Dylan was feeling for the North Country, five thousand miles away but still blasted by winter winds, was expressed in another song whose melody he appropriated from Carthy that January. Again he does not confine his debt to the traditional tune. He takes the whole "dreamed a dream" section from the song Carthy obligingly shared with him—which, though it has an alternate title, "The Sailor’s Dream," is better known as "Lady Franklin’s Lament." In Lady Franklin’s case, she "had a dream, which I thought was true / Concerning Franklin and his bold crew." Her lament was written not by the lady concerned, but from the vantage point of the distraught wife hoping a search expedition might yet find her husband, Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer who had gone missing in 1845 while searching for a Northwest Passage. In 1859 a stone cairn on King William Land dashed Lady Franklin’s hopes. This broadside ballad presumably dates from the interim.
Dylan now drew on traditional-sounding imagery with such sophistication that his variant of Lady Franklin’s plea—"Ten thousand pounds would I freely give / To learn that my husband still did live"—is seamlessly stitched onto a moralizing coda usually found in derivatives of "Love Has Brought Me to Despair" (Laws P25): "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain / that I was single again." Together they comprise one of Dylan’s most evocative final verses—which originally read, "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain / that I could sit simply in that room again / Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a dime / I’d give gladly if my life could be like that time."
By the time Dylan was playing it to Gil Turner at an after-hours session at Gerde’s, barely a fortnight after returning "home," he had changed that final rhyme to the superior "drop of a hat / . . . could be like that." He also turned "played many a joyful tune" into "spent many an afternoon," and that was that.
"Bob Dylan’s Dream," which formed part of the Town Hall showcase and a revamped Freewheelin’, was a way of reflecting on the friends he had left behind in his youthful zest to leave Hibbing. A nostalgia for more innocent times was already coloring his view of these modern times. In the early nineties, at his lowest ebb since perhaps 1966, he revived "Bob Dylan’s
Dream" in concert and the sense of a deep yearning was palpable. Later still, he told the Times: "[Minnesota] was a very itinerant place—no interstate highways yet, just country roads everywhere. There was an innocence about it all, and I don’t recall anything bad ever happening. That was the Fifties, the last period of time I remember as being idyllic." It was this exact idyll he wistfully recalls in "Bob Dylan’s Dream."
Note: As Todd Harvey points out, Dylan was surely already conversant with "Lady Franklin’s Lament" when he came to England, it having been recorded by his good friend, Paul Clayton, on the 1957 album, Whaling and Sailing Songs: From the Days of Moby Dick. But he is closer to Carthy’s arrangement—found on his second Topic album.
{87} FAREWELL
Published lyrics: Broadside #24; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, January 19, 1963; Studio A, NY, August 6, 1963—4 takes.
One might reasonably presume that Dylan’s adaptation of "The Leaving of Liverpool"—from which he took the lilting melody and fare-thee-well theme for "Farewell"—was another product of his trip to its island home. After all the song was played to Village friends less than a week after he returned from London. Indeed, over the next couple of months he rarely passed up an opportunity to pull out this "moving on" lament, recording it for both Broadside and Witmark, where it was copyrighted under three separate titles (including "Farewell Pamilina," fourteen months before "Farewell Angelina"). Though not a part of the Town Hall showcase, he opened with it on Studs Terkel’s radio show a fortnight later, and he attempted it at the first Times session in August, rather than another song with a Liverpool connection, "Liverpool Gal."
Given its lowly status among collectors, one wonders why the song had this hold on its author. Perhaps it was simply its lilting tune, which in its original guise was a staple of the Clancy Brothers’ live set. Liam Clancy seems in no doubt that they were Dylan’s source, putting him in good company with the likes of Paul Clayton and Jean Ritchie.
Fellow Clancy Brother Pat, though, made an altogether more extraordinary claim in a 1984 interview with Patrick Humphries: "There was a little folk club here in London, down in the basement [presumably the Troubadour]. . . . Anyway, Albert Grossman paid somebody and gave them a tape-recorder, and every folk-singer that went up there was taped, and Bob Dylan got all those tapes."
Quite why Grossman would go to such lengths when Dylan had ample opportunity to hear similar fare in the Village, Pat fails to reveal. However, the Minnesotan could well have heard the song "in London, down in the basement"—just like "Lady Franklin" and "Nottamun Town," two songs he also knew from the Village. The generally reliable Carthy recently suggested Dylan heard Louis Killen sing it in England, and it was Killen’s rendition of "The Leaving of Liverpool" that set these wheels in motion, though the end product stopped somewhere short of official status.
{88} TALKIN’ DEVIL
Published lyrics: Words Fill My Head.
Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, January 19, 1963 [BB].
It would be easy enough to dismiss this two-verse rant as an unimportant fragment in Dylan’s canon (its exclusion from every edition of Lyrics suggests as much). Yet "Talkin’ Devil" appears to demonstrate a belief in the literal existence of the devil sixteen years before its author read Hal Lindsey’s Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. Dylan even introduces the song by saying, "This is all about what the Devil is. Some people say that there is no Devil. . . ."
In January 1963 it would appear that his demon was the devil of the delta, who enticed Skip James to do dark deeds and came to Robert Johnson’s door and said, "I believe it’s time to go." If so, his horned self doubled as a member of the KKK, hiding his head under a "snow white hood," while busy learning "to kill, with his face well hid." Personified in "Talkin’ Devil," he is anyone who "wants you to hate, wants you to fear."
{89} ALL OVER YOU
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: "The Banjo Tape," Gerde’s Folk City, February 8, 1963.
Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, New York, Winter 1963.
"All Over You"—or as it perhaps should be known, "If I Had to Do It All Over Again (Baby, I’d Do It All Over You)"—demonstrates that Dylan’s interest in American roots music embraced everything from bluegrass to ragtime. A substitute of sorts for the "talkin’ blues," which were beginning to sour on his pen, "All Over You" was another way for Dylan to demonstrate his lyrical wit. Here he shows an early penchant for Old Testament allusions, referring to the time when David "picked up his pebbles" and to Sampson’s predicament "after he went blind." And for all its light-hearted tone, he has rarely bettered his description of the kind of heartbreak recently experienced:
Well, you cut me like a jigsaw puzzle,
You made me a walkin’ wreck,
Then you pushed my heart through my backbone,
Then you knocked off my head from my neck.
{90} GOING BACK TO ROME
First known performance: "The Banjo Tape," Gerde’s Folk City, February 8, 1963.
A seemingly improvised piece of nonsense Dylan put down for posterity during a fairly loose after-hours session at Gerde’s in early February, "Goin’ Back to Rome" decisively demonstrates that the man never forgets a good rhyme. Who’d have thunk anyone would rhyme "see ’em" with "Coliseum" not once, but twice! Yet there it is again, on 1971’s "When I Paint My Masterpiece."
{91} BOUND TO LOSE
Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, New York, winter 1963.
All that is now extant from this "lost" song is the chorus, which Dylan laid down on tape during one of his Witmark "pop-in" sessions. In this denuded form, it bears all the hallmarks of another "walking down the road of hope" song, à la "Paths of Victory" and "Walkin’ Down the Line." Suspecting that "bound to lose, bound to win, bound to walking the road again" did not constitute a song, Dylan told engineer Ivan Augenblink that he had a bunch of verses to go with said chorus, which he said he would give him in due course. One must presume he changed his mind or, like as not, just forgot. Either way, the song was never copyrighted, remaining an afterthought on one more disorganized Witmark reel.
{92} ONLY A HOBO
Published lyrics: Broadside #22; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Broadside session, New York, February 1963 [BB].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 12, 1963—2 takes [TBS—tk.2]; September 24, 1971—5 takes.
Ever on the lookout for a traditional template to tweak, Dylan decided to tackle the "Only a . . ." family of songs shortly after returning to New York. Leaving the likes of "Only a Cowboy" and "Only a Brakeman" well alone, Dylan took his notion from the well-known "Only a Miner," specifically the variant of this native ballad "composed" by activist Aunt Molly Jackson in the thirties. The chorus of "Poor Miner’s Farewell"—as she liked to call it—runs thus:
Only a miner, killed under the ground,
Only a miner, and one more is found,
Killed by some accident, there’s no one can tell,
Your mining’s all over, poor miner, farewell.
The one time Jackson came up in recorded conversation, it was on the 1984 "Dylan on Dylan" Westwood One radio show, when Dylan bemoaned those rigid folkies who "didn’t want to hear it if you couldn’t play the song exactly the way that Aunt Molly Jackson played it. I just kind of blazed my way through all that." It is curious that Dylan should cite Jackson as an examplar of "pure" tradition. Jackson herself played very free with those traditional songs she adapted to the Cause. As a union organizer of fierce and fixed opinions, her primary concern was never the preservation of tradition.
It could be that Dylan did not take this song firsthand from Jackson’s ver
sion, but from John Greenway’s 1961 Folkways recording (prefaced by an Aunt Molly interview). There are at least two other influences at work on "Only a Hobo" as well. The more intriguing is the 1939 country "classic," "Tramp on the Street" (a song that had already left its mark on the early Dylan song "Man on the Street"), of which "Only a Hobo" is just a better-written version, even down to its culmination, which is still "to lie in the gutter and to die with no name."
"Tramp on the Street"—a variant of "Only a Tramp"—was a staple of Hank Williams’s forties radio repertoire, and though Hank’s version was not released in Williams’s lifetime, there is a good chance Dylan heard Williams’s version on the On Stage Vol. 2 LP, which was released at the turn of the year, around the time Dylan composed "Only a Hobo." Or he could just as easily have been listening to the version on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s 1961 album. "Tramp on the Street" references the ballad of "Dives and Lazarus," a possible template for "I’d Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day" as well:
Only a tramp was Lazarus that begged
He who laid down at the rich man’s gate
He begged for the crumbs from the rich man to eat
He was only a tramp, found dead on the street.
But the greatest melodic debt "Only a Hobo" has is to Sara Carter’s "Railroading on the Great Divide," performed by Dylan at Gerde’s in September 1961. Despite a couple of half-hearted studio takes during the first batch of The Times . . . sessions, it was left to Broadside (in tandem with Folkways) to release "Only a Hobo" on the Broadside Ballads LP in the summer of 1963. It languished in relative obscurity until 1970, when it was memorably revived by Rod Stewart on his second solo album, Gasoline Alley. The following year, possibly reminded of the song by Rod’s rasping re-working, Dylan re-recorded it for Greatest Hits Vol. II. However, the version he cut with musician Happy Traum didn’t work out, and it became one more song done and gone.