That is all we did in those days. Writing in the back seat of cars and writing songs on street corners or on porch swings. Seeking out the explosive areas of life. —Bob Dylan, 1977
One of "the explosive areas of life" that Dylan was interested in exploring on the February 1964 road trip was the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Which is why he and his excitable entourage arrived in Louisiana on February 10—to hopefully catch some shut-eye before revelries began the following day and into (i.e., through) the night. The Dylan who spent the night of the eleventh as a largely anonymous party-goer, alternating between "weed" and wine, felt this constituted a necessary part of the systematic derangement of all senses that French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud had so eloquently endorsed a hundred years earlier, and which Dylan had now adopted as a cri de coeur.
Not surprisingly, he began to wax lyrical as the night wore on, informing Pete Karman, "Rimbaud’s where it’s at. That’s the kind of stuff that means something. That’s the kind of writing I’m gonna do." All the while he dismissed notions of freedom only recently addressed in song: "No one’s free. Even the birds are chained to the sky." It was a line that imprinted itself on Dylan’s mind long enough to become the final one of a song he was three months away from writing.
If "Ballad in Plain D" was first formulated in that moment, an evening spent wandering "the ancient empty streets" also provided ignition for a song that reduced to rubble the last vestiges of traditional song structures in Dylan’s constructs, reassembling them as pure poetry-in-song. The finished "Mr. Tambourine Man" would transcend even "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall" as a poetic statement. It even dared to draw comparisons with Rimbaud’s own "magic swirlin’ ship," "Le Bateau Ivre," which Arthur had described at one point as "a little lost boat in swirling debris," leaving the poet "heartsick at dawn."
For now, down in N’Orleans, in the "jingle jangle morning," Dylan experienced just the faintest flicker of what he was reaching for, not so much a poem as a sound—those "vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme" that would prove so mercurial. In 1977 he spoke to journalist Ron Rosenbaum of such moments: "Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn. . . . You get a little spacey when you’ve been up all night, so you don’t really have the power to form it. But that’s the sound I’m trying to get across." In November 1965, when he felt he had figured it out, he told critic Joseph Haas, "I can hear the sound of what I want to say."
By his own admission—in the Biograph notes—he "wrote some [my italics] of the song in New Orleans." Just that. "Mr. Tambourine Man" did not come with the same alacrity as those chimerical "Chimes of Freedom." Dylan was probably wary of rushing to finish the song, sensing he was venturing far into that unknown region. As he told critic Max Jones in May 1964, "[The songs] come up and stay in my mind . . .
sometimes a long time. I just write them out when the right time comes." The same still held true forty years on, when he informed journalist Robert Hilburn, "Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together."
Since it tore at the borderline between poetry and song, "Mr. Tambourine Man" needed a great deal of attention, lest such a sensual set of images should fail to form one cohesive whole. The song as initially penned "on the road" probably lacked its chorus. The young Dylan had generally not been inclined to abide by such pop conventions—burdens, yes, choruses, no. However, a particular image now lodged in Dylan’s head, helping to crystalize the Pied Piper figure who inhabits the song without making an actual appearance (like the later Johanna and her visions).
The specific Tambourine Man he had in mind was Bruce Langhorne, the magnificent multi-instrumentalist who would usher in Dylan’s electric era with some spellbinding guitar playing on Bringing It All Back Home (notably on "Mr. Tambourine Man" itself). Dylan told Cameron Crowe that his abiding image of Langhorne, whom he knew well from the Village streets, was of him carrying "this gigantic tambourine. . . . It was as big as a wagon wheel." Langhorne produced said tambourine when I interviewed him in 2000, confirming that he liked to brandish it whenever he strode those not-so-silent streets:
I used to play this giant Turkish tambourine. It was about [4"] deep, and it was very light and it had a sheepskin head and it had jingle bells around the edge—just one layer of bells all the way around. You play it with fingers on your left hand. I bought it ’cause I liked the sound. Hanza El Deen showed me how to play it. . . . I used to play it all the time, I used to carry it around with me and pluck it out and play it anytime. It had a bass tone, and it had an edge tone and it had jingles.
Maddeningly, there is no obvious way of extracting an exact date for the completion of this defining composition. It does seem to have been in New York. Suze Rotolo, in her memoir, suggests it was "written about a lonely night Bob had spent wandering the streets after the two of us had quarreled," but provides no concrete evidence that allows us to be sure that this is really her recollection (her reference to Langhorne as "Bob’s vision for the Tambourine Man" suggests she is relying on the very biographers she castigates earlier in her chronicle).
According to the New York Post’s Al Aronowitz—not always the most reliable chronicler—it was written at his house: "He stayed up all night listening to music and had it the next morning. He threw out all his reject slips in the garbage. I picked them up and put them in a file." Which he then lost. However, his memory once served Al well, and this was a period when the two were close. I’d suggest the song was completed shortly after the bitter breakup with Suze, probably some time in mid-to-late March, which would explain why Dylan would be haunting his friend’s house, the then-usual post-breakup pattern.
At this juncture Dylan was not shy of playing his latest song to those he wanted to impress. And he knew right away how good this one was. Judy Collins got to hear the song firsthand (she also claimed it was written at her home), as did Patty Elliott, the former wife of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who probably heard it in the company of Albert Grossman’s wife-to-be, Sally, and a friend of Sally’s whom Dylan seemed rather stuck on, Sara Lowndes. Patty was so impressed with the song that she memorized it and sang it to her ex-husband before Dylan had even recorded it.
Dylan also supposedly played it to singer-songwriter Eric Von Schmidt when visiting him in Sarasota Springs, Florida, that spring; though it is hard to see where he could have found the time. In fact, Von Schmidt later insisted Dylan never visited him there. Altogether more likely is that the Bostonian folksinger heard the song at his own home in Massachusetts when Dylan was touring New England in mid-to-late April. An undated tape of a Dylan / Von Schmidt home session does exist and features the song. So Dylan did play it to Von Schmidt somewhere that spring.
An April recording date would make it the earliest known performance. It would also confirm that he finished the song before experiencing LSD, which he apparently first took at the end of that road trip (sic). The song’s subsequent adoption by more hedonistic advocates as a "drug song" clearly annoyed Dylan, driving him to tell Musician’s Bill Flanagan, "I’m not going to write a fantasy song. Even a song like ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ really isn’t a fantasy. There’s substance to the dream. . . . You have to have seen something or have heard something for you to dream it."
The songwriter stayed in the grip of this particular dream. Even as late as May he couldn’t wait to blow old friends away with his extraordinary new song. Almost as soon as he landed in London on May 9, he was on the phone to Martin Carthy. As Carthy recalls, "He came around. And he sang . . . ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and it was [like], ‘Where [the hell] is this man going?’" The rest of London’s folk fraternity wouldn’t have to wait much longer to hear the song. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 17, he debuted it at the Royal Festival Hall.
The recording of that night’s performance ranks high in the pantheon of great Dylan live performances. He takes th
e song at a measured pace, phrasing every syllable with military precision, but it is the unerring "tonal breath control" he exercises on a set of lyrics he has never before sung in public that takes one’s breath away. A single harmonica break before the final verse is the only respite from a riveting vocal. The spontaneous applause confirms the power of the song, convincing Dylan he has another winner.
According to Dylan, he even produced a sister song. As he told friend John Cohen, "I tried to write another ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ It’s the only song I tried to write ‘another one.’" (There is no obvious candidate, so one must assume the song was hastily discarded.) And yet when he got around to recording his fourth album three weeks after its live debut, "Tambourine Man" did not make the final cut. He later claimed it was precisely because it was special: "I was just a kid [when I wrote ‘Blowin in the Wind’]. I didn’t know anything about anything at that point. I just wrote that, and that wasn’t it really. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ . . . I was very close to that song. I kept it off my third [sic] album just because I felt too close to it."
Actually, he simply failed to deliver the performance needed. And he knew it. As he disarmingly admitted to Robert Shelton in March 1966, when the album’s failure no longer smarted: "What I was trying to do on my fourth album . . . well, I was just too out of it, man, to come across with what I was trying to do. It was all done too fast." Not only did he make a perfectly serious attempt to record the song at the Another Side session, he made the peculiar decision to let Ramblin’ Jack Elliott duet on the chorus. Surprise, surprise, it didn’t work. He also fatally delayed cutting the song until the session was well under way, along with his consumption of Beaujolais.
After struggling to realize "Chimes of Freedom," he gave himself the briefest of breathers, tossing off the throwaway "Motorpsycho Nitemare," before attempting to capture his most complex vision to date. Though he got through the whole song after a single false start, he blew a line in the final verse, tripping over the adjective applicable to "leaves," singing "haunted leaves," then realizing that the next line is "haunted, frightened trees." (The adjective he had sung at the Festival Hall was "hidden." By Newport, six weeks later, it would be "frozen.") But this single slip was not the real problem with his performance (at least two other songs on Another Side used inserts to mask mistakes). It drags. At least he had the wit to recognize that releasing "Mr. Tambourine Man" in anything less than its realized state would fully warrant being hung as a thief.
The delay in the song’s appearance ultimately worked in its favor. This was, in part, because an acetate copy of the Another Side outtake found its way into the hands of Jim Dickson, who was trying to put together a band that would be a West Coast hybrid of the Beatles and the New Lost City Ramblers. By the time the Jet Set went from demo to record deal, they were in flight as the Byrds, and at their first session for Columbia, they cut a pop-confection single-length version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" that would give the songwriter his first number one, both sides of the pond.
For Dylan, though, "Mr. Tambourine Man" remained an acoustic song, pure and complex. It would take until the final show of the "comeback" tour in 1974 for him to attempt his own electric version, and until the final show of his 1980 residency at the Warfield for Dylan and a guesting McGuinn to produce an amalgam of the two strains. After 1981—when he came up with the one electric arrangement that actually worked—the song again reverted to its acoustic self, retaining such a hold on Dylan that he continued to discover previously unfathomed depths. Indeed performances given on the spring 1995 European tour saw Dylan nightly forsaking his guitar to stand at the microphone with only a mouth harp to help him, and the song came frighteningly close to its spring of ’64 self.
{118} I DON’T BELIEVE YOU (SHE ACTS LIKE WE NEVER HAVE MET)
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—5 takes [AS—tk.5]; Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970—1 take.
First known performance: Philadelphia Town Hall, October 10, 1964.
Songs from the spring of 1964 are the last ones for a decade in which a reasonably complete set of song drafts—both typed and handwritten—allows us to construct a credible chronology to their composition. Almost all of the songs that make up Dylan’s fourth album exist in such a form, probably because the bulk of the album was written in Europe in the last two weeks of May, and therefore these materials were kept together, unlike previous collections written at random moments in assorted coffee shops. It was the first time Dylan escaped New York to write an album’s worth of songs, even if he went to great pains to point out that "it was still an American album."
Any songs written in the months preceding the irrevocable wrench from Suze disappeared, save for "Chimes of Freedom" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," neither of which form part of the Another Side manuscripts. Three other songs exist only as typescripts, i.e., "final" drafts of finished songs: "I Don’t Believe You," "Motorpsycho Nitemare," and "Spanish Harlem Incident." These probably postdate Dylan’s ejection from the Rotolos’ apartment for the final time, in mid-March, but predate his overnight flight to London on May 8.
A well-crafted song, "I Don’t Believe You" relates an uncommon occurrence: a woman sleeping with the prince of protest, then spurning him in the morning (we know he slept with at least one obliging gal on his February jaunt, despite having someone on each coast awaiting him). One presumes our traumatized narrator has conflated a one-night stand with the exit of his "dream lover," who has just left his life for good, making this something of a dry run for "Simple Twist of Fate."
Though the typescript of "I Don’t Believe You" is faithful to its finished form, it is not given the name by which it shall become known. "She Acts Like We Never Have Met," like a handful of other Dylan subtitles ("Señor" and "Tight Connection," to name but two), has always been the song’s name in Dylan’s mind. Indeed, it still bore this title in 1984, when it appeared on a set-list for the European tour (though it went unperformed). Dylan also continued to rate the song highly himself, giving it magnetic makeovers in concert in 1965–6, 1975, 1978, 1981, and episodically on the Never Ending Tour, while sometimes struggling to fully recall the order of verses—as in 1964, when he famously forgot the first verse at a New York showcase, or in 1981, when an impromptu one-off performance in London stuttered to a premature conclusion.
{119} SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—5 takes [AS—tk.5].
First known performance: Philharmonic Hall, NY, October 31, 1964 [L64].
Untitled in its typed draft, "Spanish Harlem Incident" strongly suggests that the spurned songwriter had reverted to type, playing the field, home and away—as with "I Don’t Believe You" and "It Ain’t Me, Babe." Irrespective of whether there ever was a "gypsy gal" who, like Gypsy Davey, could "cast the glamor" over others, Dylan’s depiction of this female fortune-teller smacks of wish fulfillment in the aftermath of a breakup with the person he’d once called "the true fortune-teller of his soul." There is no verbal suggestion that this spellbinding lady is doing anything but reading the narrator’s fortune. Still, he allows himself to fall hopelessly under her spell.
Finding himself in her thrall, he experiences an unfamiliar and thrilling sensation ("come an make my / pale face fit into place (ah please)"). The finished song slightly blurs such neediness. Its first two verses, as typed, conclude by asking whether her palm-reading skills foretell a future together: "let me know babe about my fortune / hidin down along my palms." On record this becomes, "let me know babe, my hands’re askin / if it’s you my lifeline’s traced." In the final verse, he starts to wonder whether he is being suckered: "By your wildcat charms I’m swindled." Modified in the studio, this line becomes a more picaresque representation of his precarious state: "On the cliffs
of your wildcat charms I’m riding." At song’s end, in draft form, he makes one last plea, "I gotta know babe, will I be touchin you / So I can know if I’m really real." The song’s single documented live performance would take place sixty blocks south of "the hands of Harlem," on All Hallow’s Eve, 1964.
{120} MOTORPSYCHO NITEMARE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—4 takes [AS—tk.4].
Had Dylan (and producer Tom Wilson) exercised a little due thought before compiling Another Side, they would surely have nixed this nugget of fool’s gold. But CBS was breathing down their necks. The singer won’t feel he has to be this funny-ha-ha again until Love and Theft. Juxtaposing the folkloric myth of the farmer’s daughter with an off-kilter remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho, Dylan starts with a premise that has real potential, but almost all of its humor falls flat. Dylan’s vocal manages to make him sound like an overexcited schoolboy, a common problem on this album. At least he shows himself to be a proper film buff, name-checking Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a film released at almost the same time as Psycho (featuring, in a cameo role, the beguiling lady Dylan met in Paris that May). Unlike these two classics of modern cinema, though, Dylan’s audio account was never destined to become one for the ages.
{121} IT AIN’T ME BABE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: [Royal Festival Hall, London, May 17, 1964]. Newport Folk Festival, July 24, 1964 [LAN].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—2 takes [AS—tk.2]; Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970.
Of the ten Another Side songs for which Dylan’s handwritten lyrics definitely exist, six are on headed stationery, à la "Chimes of Freedom." The other five appear on Mayfair Hotel notepaper, suggesting that they were either started while he was in London, from May 9 to 18, or he had yet to exhaust his stationery supply as he traveled across mainland Europe, after his spellbinding Festival Hall performance. The Mayfair Hotel, off Piccadilly, would be Dylan’s chosen resting place in both 1964 and 1966. Of the songs penned on their emblematic paper, the one we can be sure Dylan "completed" during the week in London is "It Ain’t Me, Babe," since it constituted part of the Festival Hall set.
Revolution in the Air Page 22
