Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Later that day Dylan performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" to a sell-out crowd unconversant with the facts of the case, at his first London concert. Just a couple of weeks later he sent his best in a letter to "good critic paul," at the same time that he began disavowing songs that pretended "life is black and white." The days of "Only a Pawn in Their Game" were numbered. But the outrage was not entirely forgotten.

  In 1991 Byron de la Beckwith found out he was to be retried for the murder of Evers, after Evers’s body was exhumed "amid allegations of tampering with evidence and jurors." In the interim, he somehow managed to get himself arrested for having a trunk full of dynamite, finally receiving the life sentence he so richly deserved. And yet, even on his deathbed, confessing to the murder, he remained unrepentant. As for Dylan’s prediction that he would be buried in an unmarked grave, Beckwith was given a hero’s funeral attended by thousands of rednecks. Indeed, according to Judas! editor Andrew Muir, "a number of websites . . . still hail him as a hero and martyr."

  {104} ETERNAL CIRCLE

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 7, 1963—4 takes; August 12—4 takes; October 24—4 takes [TBS].

  First known performance: [Community Theater, Berkeley, February 22, 1964] Royal Festival Hall, London May 17, 1964.

  To more attentive attendees at London’s Royal Festival Hall, the likes of "Eternal Circle" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" would have suggested Dylan was intending to celebrate the power of song on his next album. Imagine their disappointment when that LP appeared minus such songs, giving the world "Motorpsycho Nitemare" and "I Shall Be Free #10" instead. In fact, "Eternal Circle" took twenty-seven years to see the light of official day. Yet as the first song of its type to enter Dylan’s repertoire, it was that all-important springboard for "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" three months later, and the even more mystical "Mr. Tambourine Man" a further four months down the line. It was another song he was anxious to play that July night at Glover’s, a demonstration of the range of his songwriting.

  A song about Song, "Eternal Circle" shows a structural sophistication absent from his contemporary displays of tub-thumping topicality. In it the singer ostensibly describes the experience of singing a song, all the while wondering about its effect on one audience member, who "called with her eyes / to the tune I’s a-playin’." The "circle" in the title is clearly the circle of song, Dylan beginning with, "I sang the song slowly," and ending with, "I began the next song." Poet James Reeves called it The Everlasting Circle (1960) in his second anthology of English folk songs.

  Adding resonance, Dylan copped aspects of the melody from "Song to Woody," albeit radically rearranged. He even attempted to fingerpick

  the melody, but this approach was abandoned after a single session, all subsequent attempts at the song being flatpicked. After the two attempts to capture the song at August 1963 sessions, he returned to it at the penultimate Times session on October 24 (though it did not feature at Carnegie Hall two days later). The fact that he persevered with the song into 1964, it being performed at Berkeley in February and London in May, suggested that he still envisaged completing this circle one fine day. Only with the composition of "Mr. Tambourine Man," another lyric that fixates on the song process itself, does it appear that the fate of "Eternal Circle" was sealed. It would devolve to the bootleggers to champion this forgotten gem. Rock band McGuinness Flint also exhumed the song for their 1972 LP of unreleased Dylan songs, Lo & Behold, which opens and closes with it.

  {105} NORTH COUNTRY BLUES

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Ballad Workshop, Newport Folk Festival, July 26, 1963 [OSOTM].

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 6, 1963—4 takes [TIMES—tk.4].

  Given that "North Country Blues" was not one of the songs Dylan sang to Glover and friends on July 17, 1963—and yet he had the whole thing by the time he was playing a Newport ballad workshop nine days later—we can probably assume he wrote the song in the interim. Once again, a trip home seemingly inculcated him with nostalgia for his "younger days," when "the red iron pits ran plenty." The sight of his hometown gripped by irreversible decline, as it would have been by 1963, set off a whole set of memories, good and bad, prompting one of his most effective ballads.

  When Dylan wrote "North Country Blues," very little was known about the troubled troubadour’s Midwest background. He continued to pepper the truth with tales of hard times spent "ramblin’ down thru the world." Initially, he failed to own up to any autobiographical dimension to the song, hiding behind the female persona, a wife of a miner. His introduction to the song on its live debut at Newport merely stated that it was about "iron-ore mines and an iron-ore town." At Carnegie Hall in October, he was no less coy: "I’m sure you all know about the coal-mining countries, down in Virginia. This is a song that comes from the ore countries."

  But in the hallowed hall that night were a pair of proud parents who knew exactly of what their son sang, and which experiences he might be drawing on. Beattie and Abe had flown in to confirm for themselves that their son could sell out the most prestigious venue in New York. But even they were probably unprepared for this unrelenting account of a life in the North Country, written as if by a widow affected by all the economic travails the region suffered. And on some level, he was performing this ballad largely for them (as he would deliver "I Believe in You" to his mother and brother at the final Minneapolis show in 1992).

  Evidently Dylan had been storing away a number of formative experiences from his youth, and a trip home was all that was needed to trigger them. Perhaps the most profound one lodged in his memory was the time his father took him to see the town where this Abraham had been born. Except it was no longer there. As Mr. Zimmerman recalled in 1968, "I was born in a town twelve miles out of Hibbing called Stevenson Location, named after a man who went there to mine. . . . There is no more town there. It is an abandoned mine and the houses are all gone. It is just weeds and forest now. It is due west from here. We took Bobby up there once to show him the house, and there was no house. It was just a dead end." One can imagine the impact such an experience had on his deeply impressionable son.

  The song conveys that desolation in undiluted form. It is a ballad and a blues. "North Country Blues" would also be the last time he could hide behind the smokescreen of a carefully constructed, apocryphal "life in a stolen moment." A couple of days after the Carnegie performance, Dylan was brought down with a bump and his cover blown when Andrea Svedburg ran her Newsweek expose of the man’s North Country roots: "He shrouds his past in contradictions, but he is the elder son of a Hibbing, Minn. appliance dealer named Abe Zimmerman and, as Bobby Zimmerman, he attended Hibbing High School, then briefly the University of Minnesota."

  From here on he would have to talk about home in interviews, while disguising its influence in song. However, he never forgot what impelled him to write such a mother’s lament—even though he was one of the sons who was now beyond her command. As he told Nat Hentoff from the vortex of a later media storm: "Hibbing, Minnesota was just not the right place for me to stay and live. There really was nothing there. The only thing you could do there was to be a miner, and even that kind of thing was getting less and less. . . . The mines were just dying, that’s all; but that’s not their fault. Everybody about my age left there. . . . It didn’t take any great amount of thinking or individual genius. . . . So leaving wasn’t hard at all. It would have been much harder to stay." As for "North Country Blues" itself, it was resurrected just once, at a benefit for Friends of Chile in April 1974, when it was sung by a man who, like John Thomas the miner, "smelled heavy from drinking."

  {106} GYPSY LOU

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, August
1963.

  Copyrighted from a demo recording made circa September 1963, this is surely somewhat older than its copyright suggests. (Its companion piece, "Whatcha Gonna Do?" was almost a year old.) Dylan clearly thought so, because he included it with "Early songs" (i.e., 1961–2 compositions) in Writings and Drawings. The lyrics certainly conjure up that more derivative phase of his songwriting, reusing lines from the collective blues lexicon like "she’s a ramblin’ woman with a ramblin’ mind" with little of his later facility. The list of locations, à la "Dusty Old Fairgrounds," does equally little to retain its grip on the listener’s attention. One doubts the song detained its author long.

  {107} TROUBLED AND I DON’T KNOW WHY

  Published lyrics: The Telegraph #1; Words Fill My Head.

  First known performance: Forest Hills, NY, August 17, 1963 [RLC].

  Two months before Svedburg gave him a reason to be troubled, Dylan wrote his first song to reflect a discontent not brought on by romantic distress. As girlfriend Suze Rotolo once said, "Dylan seems to lack that sort of simple hope." "Troubled and I Don’t Know Why" is a minor song about a couple of major Dylan bugbears: the pressures of modern living (generally) and the burden of expectation (personally). Though this places it in the same part of the canon as songs like "It’s Alright Ma," "Idiot Wind," and "Most of the Time," it is an innocuous aperitif to such fulsome fare. The song targets soon-familiar Dylan concerns, like the tabloid papers ("it rolled in the door / and bounced on the floor / Said things ain’t going so well") and the television ("it roared and it boomed / And it bounced around the room / And it didn’t say nothin’ at all"). But this time it is strictly for laughs.

  Dylan was merely letting off steam, as suggested by the song’s solitary appearance on a short tour with Joan Baez in August. He was saving his real wrath for the likes of "When the Ship Comes In," written days later. The lady’s warbling on the only extant recording, from Forest Hills, provides the usual falsetto echo. It also ensured that the song was finally given an official release, on a 1993 Joan Baez retrospective box-set titled Rare, Live & Classic, which credits words and music to her erstwhile paramour.

  The tune, though, is a straight copy of that perennial, "What Did the Deep Sea Say?"—a song previously covered by the likes of the Carter Family and Bill Monroe. We know the melody was on Dylan’s mind because it was the one song he played to Glover and friends for light relief on that fraught July evening in Minneapolis. It evidently remained one of his favorites, too, because ten years later he used it again, on another so-called original, "Peco’s Blues," an instrumental originally intended for the soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

  {108} WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Washington Civil Rights March, August 28, 1963.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 23, 1963—4 takes [TIMES—tk.4].

  If we believe the Dylan who wrote Chronicles, he had been trying to write his own version of Kurt Weill’s "Pirate Jenny" (from The Threepenny Opera) for some time when he composed "When the Ship Comes In." Introduced to Bertolt Brecht and cowriter Weill by girlfriend Suze—who was helping out on a production of Brecht on Brecht in the early months of 1963 (it opened at the Sheridan Square Playhouse in April)—he claims to have penned a song that was a cross between Brecht and a murder ballad:

  Totally influenced by "Pirate Jenny," though staying far away from its ideological heart, I . . . took a story out of the Police Gazette, a tawdry incident about a hooker in Cleveland, a minister’s daughter called Snow White, who killed one of her customers in a grotesque and ugly way. I started with that using the [Brecht-Weill] song as a prototype and piled lines on . . . and used the first two lines of the "Frankie & Albert" ballad as the chorus . . . but the song didn’t come off.

  Whether or not this song ever existed, Dylan placed its composition improbably early (in the winter of 1962). Nor is it the only song he claims was inspired by the Brechtian ballad. In the Biograph notes, he states, "‘the set pattern’ to ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ also derives from ‘Pirate Jenny.’" Todd Harvey concurs, suggesting that they share "structural, melodic and lyric connections." But any melodic connection can only be accidental, Hattie’s tune having an altogether more ancient antecedent.

  It takes the merest of introductions to Weill’s black-hearted song to recognize a rather more direct parallel within Dylan’s canon. It is a song he composed in August 1963—a month before he wrote his other maid’s song—when the influence of Brecht was at its most profound. And we have firsthand testimony as to the immediate circumstances that inspired this song. It comes from Joan Baez, with whom he was touring when the song welled up inside:

  You know when he wrote "When the Ship Comes In"? That was amazing, the history of that little song. We were driving around the East Coast, we were out in the boondocks somewhere, and I had a concert to give. I don’t even know whether he was singing with me at that point, but he and I were driving together and we stopped. I said, "Run in and see if this is the right place," so he went in and came out and said, "Hey, there’s no reservation here." I said, "You sure?" and I went in and they said, "Hello, Miss Baez, we’ve been waiting for you." And I said, "Hold it a minute. I want an extra room please." And then Bobby walked in, and he was all innocent and looking shitty as hell and I said, "Give this gentleman a room." And they said, "Oh certainly," but they wouldn’t talk to him. He had said, "Does Joan Baez have a room here?" and they had said, "No." And he went out. So then he went to his room and wrote "When The Ship Comes In" . . . took him exactly one evening to write it, he was so pissed [off]. . . . I couldn’t believe it, to get back at those idiots so fast.

  "Pirate Jenny" is the song of a downtrodden maid who dreams of the uppance-to-come when a black ship shall descend on the men she has to serve daily. After the vengeful crew has destroyed the town, they give her the opportunity to decide the fate of those she waited on, and she duly commands their destruction:

  And a ship with eight sails and with fifty great cannon

  Sails into the quay,

  When folk ask: now just who has to die?

  You will hear me say at that point: All of them!

  And when their heads fall, I’ll say, "Whoopee!"

  In other words, this is another Judgment Day song, a celebratory "I’d Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day"—or rather, "I Can’t Wait to See You on That Dreadful Day." The symbolic "ship" in Dylan’s "When the Ship Comes In"—which will reappear in two equally seminal compositions twenty years later ("Caribbean Wind" and "Jokerman")—is part of the same fleet as Jenny’s pirate ship, sailing especially close in a verse like:

  Oh the foes will rise

  With the sleep still in their eyes

  And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’

  But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal

  And know that it’s for real,

  The hour when the ship comes in.

  By August 1963 Dylan had become too good a songwriter to simply vent his spleen on "those idiots" who thought him too scruffy to frequent their establishment. In his poetic sight are all neo-phobes, indeed any shadowy figure trying to apply brakes to the forward motion of history—the masters of war, the playboys and playgirls, the talkin’ devils. His inner eye was also on that great day, later in the month, when he would be sharing a rickety stage with Martin Luther King Jr. and his bandwagon of brothers at the Washington Civil Rights March, where he would be called upon to rally the troops with the lyrical equivalent of "I Have a Dream."

  Sure enough, he performed "When the Ship Comes In" with great gusto on this historic occasion, all the while doing his best to keep Joannie well away from the mike (a news telecast of this memorable moment surfaced recently and is available on assorted bootleg DVDs). He raised t
he song even higher at Carnegie Hall eight weeks later, three nights after cutting the album take, introducing it with an opaque allusion to the story of David and Goliath, suggesting there were modern Goliaths who were "crueller," but would also be slain. He was alluding to the song’s final verse, an apocalyptic prediction that would not be out of place on 1979’s Slow Train Coming: "Like Pharaoh’s tribe, they’ll be drownded[!] in the tide / And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered."

  "When the Ship Comes In" follows a familiar pattern in Dylan’s songwriting. An idea’s long gestation—in this case basing a song around "Pirate Jenny"—combines with the rapid-fire trigger of inspiration, enabling a song to spew forth with electric ease. Talking about the song to SongTalk’s Paul Zollo twenty-eight years after the fact, Dylan admitted, "That’s not [a case of] sitting down and writing a song. Those kind of songs, they just come out." And are then forgotten. "When the Ship Comes In" has been performed only once since 1963, at Live Aid in 1985, where the underlying message—"judge not lest ye be judged"—sailed over almost two billion heads.

  {109} THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

  Published lyrics: Broadside #39; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, October 1963 [TBS]; Studio A, NY, October 23, 1963—7 takes [L+T ver.1—tk.1]; October 24—1 take [TIMES].

  First known performance: Carnegie Hall, NY, October 26, 1963 [LACH].

  Anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song. I mean, it’s not going to come out the same message. After one or two of these unsuccessful attempts, one realises that his resultant message—which is not even the same message he thought up and began with—he’s now got to stick to it. —Dylan to Nat Hentoff, October 1965