Revolution in the Air
Page 16
{93} RAMBLIN’ DOWN THRU THE WORLD
First known performance: "Gerde’s Folk City" Hootenanny, winter 1963.
If it wasn’t for the recent emergence of a low-quality audience tape from what sounds like an impromptu three-song hootenanny set in early 1963, one would continue to think this single-verse "come all ye" call was written especially for the Town Hall show in April. Perhaps the "hoot" was a dry run for Town Hall. Much like "Tell Me, Momma" in 1966, "Ramblin Down Thru the World" was probably intended to serve as an introduction to the persona Dylan presented on this occasion, and as such fulfilled its (limited) purpose.
{94} WALLS OF RED WING
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: "Gerde’s Folk City" Hootenanny, winter 1963.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 23, 1963—3 takes; August 7, 1963—1 take [TBS—tk.1].
On the face of it, "Walls of Red Wing" is an innocuous Times-era protest song Dylan performed for more than a year, but never released. However, it has recently invoked speculation regarding a possible autobiographical dimension. Red Wing was a reform school in Minnesota, just forty miles southeast of Minneapolis. As such, one is bound to wonder whether Dylan knew any one-time inmates. Or whether he was drawing on time spent at a "country-club reform-school" in Pennsylvania in the late fifties (see Behind the Shades Take Two, p. 28). Dylan’s disappearance from the face of the earth for much of the summer of 1959, plus the fact that he (in Chronicles) and his parents (in conversation with biographer Robert Shelton in 1968) construct wildly improbable chronologies to explain a prolonged absence from Hibbing, lends credence to the suggestion that he had been a naughty boy.
In 2006 such speculation was fanned by one Larry Haugen, who self-published a book called Red Wing, a Year and a Day, in which he claims Dylan was an inmate at the same time as him, not in the summer of 1959 but the previous year (Haugen says Bobby was there "no more than a month"). According to Haugen, it was possible to be sent to Redwing for such inconsequential infractions as truancy—though presumably not for breaking the high school piano’s foot pedal. Photos of Dylan at Camp Herzl in Wisconsin that summer cast doubt on Haugen’s dates.
An unpublished poem dating from early 1963—contemporaneous with "Walls of Red Wing"—was recently auctioned from Suze Rotolo’s personal archive. It deals with someone who has been sent to jail and there "met . . . ramblin college students / runnin high school hoboes," both of which Dylan had been. The narrator ends up "talkin to myself in a strange cell." As the auction catalog states, "Whether or not the poem . . . has any autobiographical significance, its message reflects common themes in Dylan’s early work: . . . [particularly] the different treatment meted out by the law to the rich and poor." In "Red Wing," Dylan again suggests the line between ending up a lawyer or a deadbeat could be a thin one.
As with "Girl from the North Country" and "Boots of Spanish Leather," Dylan seemed to write two separate sets of lyrics to this tune that winter. As Todd Harvey points out, "The first three phrases of ‘Only a Hobo’ and ‘Walls of Red Wing’ match, and the fourth phrase of [the latter] corresponds to the final phrase in the [former’s] chorus." A more diect source, however, is a Scottish bothy ballad (bothy ballads are songs of manual laborers), specifically Ewan MacColl’s rendition of the ballad, "The Road and the Miles to Dundee," released on his 1961 Folkways LP, Bothy Ballads of Scotland. Dylan was not averse to learning from those with whom he’d crossed swords back in December, and though MacColl was famously furious at him for playing his own songs at the strictly "trad." Singer’s Club, run by him and wife Peggy Seeger, Dylan was a fan.
Given the maudlin Scottish melody to which he grafted this possibly autobiographical song, one might have expected Dylan to put more emotion into its few performances. Perhaps he was still uncomfortable writing about that time and place. On his next North Country song ("North Country Blues"), he would need a sex change to put it across. Meanwhile, the arbitrary nature of justice continued to color a whole set of songs in the ensuing months ("Seven Curses," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," and "Percy’s Song" all being written before summer was done). The last documented performance of "Walls of Red Wing" would be at London’s Festival Hall in May 1964, where a few folk probably recognized the tune, if not the song’s already stale sentiments.
{95} BOB DYLAN’S NEW ORLEANS RAG
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Town Hall, April 12, 1963.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 6, 1963—1 take; August 7, 1963—3 takes; October 24, 1963—4 takes.
In 2004 Robert Hilburn, that reliable chronicler, got Dylan to talk about a Village friend—surely Dave Van Ronk—giving him a book of François Villon poems in 1963. In it he was delighted to discover "Villon talking about visiting a prostitute, and I [thought I] would turn it around. I won’t visit a prostitute, I’ll talk about rescuing a prostitute . . .
turning stuff on its head, like ‘vice is salvation and virtue will lead to ruin.’"
"New Orleans Rag" (presumably set in this town as a nod to "House of the Rising Sun") is the only original song from these "younger days" that addresses the oldest profession. It is slightly surprising that prostitution does not loom large in the Dylan lexicon, given his infatuation with the symbolists and fellow lowlifes. "Goin’ to Acapulco," with which "New Orleans Rag" shares a euphemistic way of talking about "working women," is the only other "brothel song" that springs to mind, though "Simple Twist of Fate"—in its draft form—implies a one-night stand with a lady of the night back in 1962.
Needless to say, the participant in "New Orleans Rag" does not save the lady in one-oh-three from a life of sin. Indeed, he is so intimidated by the dissolute look of her recent customers as they depart that he doesn’t even enter the premises. Rather, he "[runs] a bloody mile." Though tried out on guitar first, the October studio recording is set to a pounding piano accompaniment, and fits the song’s manic quality better.
{96} YOU’VE BEEN HIDING TOO LONG
{97} DUSTY OLD FAIRGROUNDS
Published lyric: Telegraph #5; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
{98} WHO KILLED DAVEY MOORE?
Published lyric: Broadside #29; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;
Lyrics 2004.
All songs, first known performance: Town Hall, New York, April 12, 1963 (#98—Carnegie Hall, October 26, 1963 [TBS]).
One of the extraordinary things about Dylan’s Town Hall performance is the number of songs he debuted there and then and never performed again or even recorded in the studio. "You’ve Been Hiding Too Long," "Ramblin’ Down Thru the World," and "Dusty Old Fairgrounds" all suffered such a fate. Even the perennially popular "Who Killed Davey Moore?" he refrained from recording in the studio.
Quite why Dylan never recorded "Davey Moore" in Studio A has never been adequately explained (he even copyrighted it from the live recording). Questioned by Elliott Mintz about the song on its first official appearance, in 1991, Dylan seemed at a loss to explain its absence from the canon: "[‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’] was done at the same time as the ‘Hattie Carroll’ song. . . . Those two songs kinda went together . . . One got left off the record for some reason. . . . To me these songs were never about blame. They were more about justice." Actually "Hattie Carroll" was written six months later, after he had begun to question the purpose of such "fact-based" topical balladry. However, the maid’s death occurred only a few weeks before Moore’s—hence, perhaps, the association in Dylan’s mind.
The boxing bout that claimed the life of Davey Moore occurred on March 22, 1963, in Los Angeles—a contest for the featherweight championship of the world between current titleholder Davey Moore and the Cuban "Sugar" Ramos. In the bloody contest, Ramos finally knocked Moore out in the tenth round. Moore subsequently lapsed
into a coma and died three days later. So Dylan was not hanging about, performing it less than three weeks later, even though he hadn’t quite worked up the tune.
The Town Hall performance relies heavily on the audience going along with the song’s premise—that no-one will accept the blame for what happened. Set to the fabled nursery rhyme "Who Killed Cock Robin?" it showed how such fables could be turned into contemporary songs (and vice versa—the sixteenth-century "Froggy Went A-Courtin," covered by Dylan in 1992, is believed by some to be a coded commentary on Elizabethan court politics). As for topicality, it confirmed that Dylan was still keeping his lyric notebook next to a copy of the morning newspaper.
Altogether more disposable is "You’ve Been Hiding Too Long," another two-verse talkin’ blues that, like "Talkin’ Devil," sails well wide of its target. Because this little song has as its punch line, "Let the world see what a hypocrite you are," there may be a relationship with "Talkin’ Hypocrite," the song he played to Tony Glover in August 1962. If so, a song rhyming "patriotism" with "boy in prison" had survived eight extraordinarily creative months. At the Town Hall its primary purpose seems to be as a prelude to the altogether weightier "With God on Our Side." That Dylan continued to harbor hard feelings about "hypocrites" (marked down for damnation as early as September 1961’s "I Hear a Train A-Rolling") was revealed in 1980, when he rapped about the origins of the word:
A long time ago they used to have those Greek plays. . . . Back then, they had actors too, but they called them hypocrites. There’d be like a play with thirty people in it, but actually there’d be only four. They’d all just wear masks. . . . There’s a lot of hypocrites [now]; they’re talking, using Jesus’s name, but . . . they’re still dealing with the world.
"Dusty Old Fairgrounds," probably a last-minute whim, complimented another outlandish account of his youth already included as part of the night’s program, "My Life in a Stolen Minute" (only later would that last word become "Moment"). The carnival that traveled from dusty fairground to dusty fairground had loomed large in some rather tall tales he had spun to the likes of Izzy Young, Cynthia Gooding, Robert Shelton, and Billy James, all "on the record," during that first year in New York, so such a salute had been a long time coming.
Note: "Dusty Old Fairgrounds" was one of the few omissions from Writings and Drawings. It was added to the published canon with the 1985 edition of Lyrics, having been recorded in the interim by Blue Ash for their 1973 album, No More, No Less.
{99} SEVEN CURSES
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Town Hall, April 12, 1963.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 6, 1963—3 takes [TBS—tk.3].
The recent emergence of the Town Hall performance of "Seven Curses" necessitates a reassignment of the song to the spring, not the summer, of 1963, and begs the question, Why was this masterful song not one of those Dylan attempted at a session, eleven days later, intended to reshape Freewheelin’ at the last minute? Surviving in the live set until October, "Seven Curses" is one of a trio of quasi-traditional original songs which refined to a quintessence the balladic conventions he had been purloining/emulating, and were performed for the Carnegie Hall crowd, only to be omitted from the album he was finishing up.
Whereas songs like "Bob Dylan’s Dream" and "Kingsport Town" self-consciously lean on the Anglo-American folk tradition, "Seven Curses" takes a more Eastern route. Dylan here adapts a Central European folk legend—concerning a judge who seduces a young girl by promising to save her father/brother from the noose, only to break his word—making it heartbreakingly real to a new audience. The stream of tradition from which Dylan here drew certainly took its winding way to reach him. By the time Dylan began singing "Seven Curses," Judy Collins was also singing a rather similar song called "Anathea."
Credited to Neil Roth and Lydia Wood, "Anathea" was Collins’s adaptation of a poem she had been given by Roth when she was in Paris a few years ealier. Collins’s song reiterated the exact same Hungarian legend. If a Mr. Roth conceived of such a poem, it was a few centuries back, and he was really a Hungarian Jew called Rothstein. The song was collected at least three times by classical composer Béla Bartók in the early 1920s when he was at work on his seminal study, The Hungarian Folk Song (1924). And though it has been suggested that the song was first translated into English by the postwar English folklorist A. L. Lloyd, there was an English translation of Bartók’s work as far back as 1931.
Dylan was knowledgeable enough to know that the story was not Roth’s. Indeed, he seems to have had some knowledge of its Eastern European source. Judy Collins, in a 1996 e-mail regarding the two songs, confirms that "the ‘Seven Curses’ are related to ‘Anathea.’ [But] there are old themes, world themes, centuries old dramas that get worked out in the creative process by artist after artist. . . . I see what Dylan has always done is to connect with this inner, subterranean river of the sub-conscious." So, no hard feelings here. Nor should there be.
The ballad has a number of names in its original tongue, though "Feher Anna" comes closest to its Anglo-American equivalent. In "Feher Anna," Anna’s brother Laszlo is in prison for stealing a horse (or six), so she races to the prison with "a bushel of gold pieces" only to be told by the judge, "I do not want a bushel of gold pieces, I only want a night with you." In the original the brother predicts that the judge will use her and betray him, whereas in "Seven Curses" the father pleads with his daughter not to sleep with the judge for more moral reasons: "My skin will surely crawl / If he touches you at all." I tend to prefer the brother’s more understandable suspicions, though Dylan’s portrayal of the father unquestionably displays its own psychological power. At the end of "Feher Anna," the curses are delivered directly to the judge, and there are thirteen of them:
Hearken Judge, Judge Horvat,
May your horse stumble on his feet.
May your horse stumble on his feet,
And you be thrown to the ground.
May thirteen cartloads of straw
Rot away in your bed!
May you for thirteen years
Lie upon it in cruel illness!
May thirteen doctors work
At dressing your wounds,
Thirteen shelves of drugs
Be emptied on your account!
Indeed, Judge, I wish you well!
May your washing-water turn to blood,
Your towel spit flames,
And God never bless you!
In making it seven curses, Dylan demonstrates that he already knew about the power the number seven held in Anglo-American folklore, evincing a knowledge of the well-known "Cruel Mother" (which has recently been covered by singer-songwriter Richard Thompson as "Bonny Saint Johnston"), in which the lady is told by the spirits of the children she murdered that she will spend seven years in hell serving one penance, then seven more serving another, ad infinitum. Having gotten the idea for the song, and a few lines, from the "Feher Anna" antecedent, Dylan comes up with his "own" tune, a variant on the "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" template.
{100} WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE
Published lyrics: Broadside #27; 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—5 takes; August 7, 1963—1 take [TIMES—tk.1].
By the time Dylan arrived in London in December 1962, he knew that Guthrie was hardly the only modern balladeer to have found a way to mint a new currency from old "penny dreadfuls." He had perhaps not yet realized just how immersed Britain was in its very own "folk revival," which had both a popular (skiffle) and a political (socialist) dimension. And the British breed of broadside bards were slightly ahead of their American East Coast cousins in the contemporary songs they were crafting.
Come all you young rebels and list while I sing,
For love of one’s land is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And makes us all part of the patriot game.
Powerful stuff, especially for a young Dylan who had found little competition among New York’s topical-song merchants. Apparently, he first heard Behan’s diatribe sung by fellow folksinger Nigel Denver at the Troubadour in the Old Brompton Road and afterward interrogated another folksinger, Jim McLean, about it. MacLean says, "In those days Dylan was a young man eager for new material, and I remember discussing the merits of the song, especially Behan’s use of the word ‘patriot,’ which agreed with Doctor Johnson’s belief that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’"