Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  That performance, which was recorded by Pye Records for Columbia, has not circulated, so we have to rely on author Richard Mabey’s description of it in The Pop Process, with its "soaring ‘No, no, no’ chorus-line . . . [which] deliciously parodies the Beatles’ ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’" (on "She Loves You"). Bob and the Beatles were already forming a mutual fan club, though their first, fragrant meeting was still three months away. George Harrison’s purchase of Dylan’s second album in Paris the previous February was the start of a lifelong obsession. Dylan was at the same time driving through Colorado, hearing nonstop Beatles on AM radio stations and concluding, "In my head the Beatles were it. . . . I started thinking it was so far out that I couldn’t deal with it—eight in the top ten. It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn."

  What we don’t know about the song’s live debut was whether "It Ain’t Me Babe" was four verses long, the complete draft of the song containing an extra verse, which was later scrapped:

  Your talking turns me off, babe.

  It seems you’re trying out of fear,

  [Your terms are time behind]

  And you’re looking too hard for what’s not here.

  You say you’re looking for someone

  That’s been in your dreams, you say,

  To terrify your enemies

  An scare your foes away,

  Someone to even up your scores.

  But it ain’t me babe . . .

  The rest of the song was almost identical to its Another Side self (save for a slight tongue-twister in verse one, "t hold open for you each an every door," which managed to lose three little words). Yet Dylan must have worked on the song long and hard between bouts of socializing. An early draft of the first verse, also on Mayfair paper—and included in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook—suggests it was the phrase "it ain’t me, babe / it ain’t me you’re looking for" that sparked the song, making this an exception for a man who once informed Musician editor Bill Flanagan, "Most of the time the words and melody come at the same time, usually with the first line."

  The "no, no, no" certainly came later, perhaps as he gradually realized the sheer scale of Beatlemania in Britain. At this early stage it is the singer who is looking to leave, informing the "babe" at verse’s end, "I got t be going." Initially the song portrays a woman who wants someone "t protect you from all sadness . . . one you can count on not t leave," more closely resembling the figure in "To Ramona." Whereas in the final "It Ain’t Me Babe," her version of a picture-perfect romantic hero has been stripped bare.

  Having started with the refrain, Dylan only later went back to the starting point. When the first line does appear, the song spins around. Now it is she who must be going, and he who is on the balcony, telling her to leave—a hundred and eighty degrees removed from his own situation with Suze. That opening, enjoining her to "Go way from my window," is another traditional allusion. As he well knew, it was the opening line (and title) of a modern reworking of a sixteenth-century lyric (Dylan used to sing "Go ’Way From My Window" in St. Paul). Once he had this line, he knew he could reinforce its message with each successive verse, the recalcitrant ex-lover refusing to take a number of hints as the narrator tells her to "Step lightly from the ledge, babe," and finally to "go melt back into the nite, babe" (that "babe" becomes more insistent as the verses multiply).

  Yet Dylan does not utilize the lovely tune to "Go ’Way from My Window," preferring to develop Martin Carthy’s "Scarborough Fair" template for a third time, refining it to fit the eight-line stanzas à la "Boots of Spanish Leather." In fact, so close are the arrangements that on one occasion, in September 1993,[2] Dylan started performing "Boots of Spanish Leather"—which he’d already played at the show!—realized his error, and reverted to "It Ain’t Me Babe," as intended.

  Oddly enough, this devastating antiromance song struck a chord with Joan Baez—though she would be told to "go ’way from my window" soon enough—and so, whenever the opportunity arose for a Dylan/Baez duet, she insisted on letting her soprano cut the lyric to pieces. Dylan finally reclaimed the song for himself in September 1965 when the Hawks gave it the full electroshock treatment (an attempt to now reclaim it from the Turtles, who’d also desecrated this sacrilegious lullaby). Save for a faux-reggae arrangement ten years on—one of the absolute highlights of the Renaldo and Clara film—the song has usually relied on the sparsest of acoustic accompaniments in live performance, often serving as a set closer, which tempts one to suggest it addresses the audience—specifically that element that wants the man to stay the same. That ain’t him.

  {122} DENISE DENISE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—1 take.

  I think we can safely assume that there was no "literal" Denise for whom the singer was pining. Rather, Dylan is intentionally lampooning the title of a Top Ten single for Randy and the Rainbows the previous August (which, after a sex change, would become an even bigger smash for Blondie). In Dylan’s hands "Denise Denise" is not so much playing hard to get as hard to comprehend. The baffled suitor fires off a string of questions before realizing, in the final verse, that he is talking to himself: "I’m looking deep in your eyes, babe / But all I can see is myself."

  Dylan seems to have finished the song to his satisfaction while still in London. He wrote out all five verses with the usual crossed-out lines and rewrites (though not on hotel notepaper), and then subsequently wrote out a clean version—along with an equally "fair" copy of "Mama, You Been on My Mind"—on Mayfair paper. He then signed both songs (as if signing off on the songs?). However, the "Denise Denise" he wrote out is quite different from the one he recorded (and rejected) at the June 9 Columbia session. Verses two and three read thus:

  Are you some kind of genius or just playin cat an rat [x2]

  I know you’re laughin, but what’re you laughin at?

  With your eyebrows raised, babe, your mouth is pointin down [x2]

  If you show me what you mean, babe, I swear you won’t have t make a sound.

  The first and last verses, though—which are required to bear the brunt of the song’s raison d’être—survive intact to the studio, though Dylan can’t resist making one of those inexplicable changes to a lyric prior to its inclusion in Writings and Drawings, replacing the perfectly serviceable, "Denise, Denise, are you for sale or just on the shelf?" with the impenetrable, "Denise, Denise, you’re concealed here on the shelf." Either way, one suspects the song was always destined to serve as a warm-up exercise in both its hotel and studio settings.

  {123} MAMA, YOU BEEN ON MY MIND

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—1 take [TBS].

  First known performance: Forest Hills, NY, August 8, 1964.

  In compiling Times . . . Dylan knew he had a surfeit of strong songs. The same cannot be said of its successor, an album with more filler than any other pre-accident collection. Which makes it more than a little perverse that Dylan should decide not to include this superb love song, the best of a three-song suite directly addressing the situation with Suze: "Mama, You Been on My Mind," "Ballad in Plain D," and "To Ramona." These three would occupy much of his songwriting energies in Europe, encapsulating the three phases of this intense breakup: recognition of a great loss, a lashing out at everyone (himself included), and, lastly, rueful resignation.

  Dylan’s decision not to include this pivotal piece on Another Side, the ambiguous nature of some of his lyrical rewrites, and the fact that he ultimately donated the song to Joan Baez—who presumably only got to hear it in late July, on venturing east for Newport—all served to diminish what should have been an elevated position among the man’s breakup songs. It could also have acted as a necessary antidote to the coeval "Ballad in Plain D." De
monstrably, he always rated the song, performing it in 1974 and 1975, when it was known to fans only via Baez or bootlegs. Yet despite singing the song with Baez in 1964–5 and then in 1975, Dylan seemed to forget the song’s composition history, telling a radio audience in 1991 that it "was one of the California songs, Big Sur songs. There was a batch of them. . . . [Baez] drove me once from the airport to her house and that song might have been written during that trip in the back seat of her car." Not unless he had been keeping some Mayfair stationery in reserve!

  There are at least two drafts on Mayfair-headed notepaper, one containing three largely complete verses plus two more sketched out, the other being a clean, signed set. And though he made no claim on "Mama, You Been on My Mind" at the time, it is surely the song he had in mind (boom, boom) when he told Nat Hentoff, a week after the Another Side session: "When I’m uptight and it’s raining outside and nobody’s around and somebody is a long way from me—and with someone else besides—I can’t sing ‘Ain’t Got No Use for Your Red Apple Juice.’ . . . I have to make a new song out of what I know and out of what I’m feeling."

  "Mama, You Been on My Mind" in many ways mirrors "Girl from the North Country," another song written in Europe when the "Suze situation" seemed hopeless. However, that song both was and wasn’t about Suze, whereas there is no such doubt concerning "Mama, You Been on My Mind." In its original state, he even insists in verse two that he is "not pleading for lost love I can’t get," an overt admission that this relationship is kaput. And in the penultimate verse—subsequently cut—"she" seems to be refusing to take his long-distance call:

  Please understand you need not answer t my call,

  The world is too big for me t be that small,

  I am not putting any pressure on you t come back t me at all

  [But] mama you been on my mind.

  A remorseful Dylan ultimately decided he’d rather not stand quite so "naked under unknowin’ eyes," changing this verse dramatically by the time he wrote out a fair copy. Here he informs her, "I’m not calling for you t go / I’m just whispering t myself, tho which me’s talking I don’t know," a lovely couplet, but one he can’t leave well alone. Eventually it sinks into the same mixed-up confusion as its author, ". . . pretendin’, not that I don’t know / that mama you been on my mind."

  After this final rewrite, he recorded it at the June 9 session in a single, sublime take, as the penultimate song of this long, dark night. But then he decided to let Baez do what she wanted with it. At least Baez, to her credit, pushed Dylan to reembrace the song. They shared a terrific country-rock rendition on the first leg of the Rolling Thunder tour, when they had almost learned to duet with each other. And, after its inclusion on 1991’s The Bootleg Series, Dylan rediscovered its proper setting, as a gentle acoustic song of wistful regret, proving the truth of something he said to interviewer Lynne Allen back in 1978: "I never leave the songs behind. I might leave the arrangements and the mood behind, but the songs, I never leave them behind."

  {124} BALLAD IN PLAIN D

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—4 takes [AS—tk.4+insert].

  First known performance: [Ann Arbor, MI, July 1964].

  I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone. . . . It overtook my mind so I wrote it. Maybe I shouldn’t have used that. I had other songs at the time. —Bob Dylan, 1985

  Though described at the time by author David Horowitz as "not really a song at all . . . only the raw material for a song," "Ballad in Plain D" seems to be one composition that "enjoyed" an awfully long gestation. Dylan had quoted the last line of the song ("Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?") to Pete Karman at that year’s New Orleans Mardi Gras on February 11. He had also extemporized upon its theme to Suze over dinner at Emilio’s that winter, "all fired up about the concept of freedom."

  On the other hand, its most embarrassing line, "for her parasite sister I had no respect"—aimed foursquare at Suze Rotolo’s sister, Carla—postdates his visit to Berlin the last week in May, appearing on a page headed by the statement, "I went in t east berlin." It appears to be one of those songs mentioned to Max Jones a fortnight earlier, that "come up and stay in my mind . . . a long time. I just write them out when the right time comes."

  Between these stolen moments lies one mad March evening, when Dylan and his girlfriend had the last of several, increasingly heated rows about his possessiveness and philandering, during which Carla interceded on her sister’s behalf, thus exposing herself to the man’s verbal bayonet and personal enmity. When folk guitarist Barry Kornfeld, in the company of Paul Clayton, arrived at the apartment, he found "Carla practically foaming at the mouth, Dylan practically foaming at the mouth, and Suze sitting in bed, literally in shock. Suze had just sort of tuned out. Bob and Carla were still going at it—they were both totally incoherent."

  By then Carla knew all about the way Dylan could distort the truth. As she later said, "He could look at you and pick out a weakness and suddenly grab it and use it on you. Which is what he did with everybody. He’d find their vulnerable spots and just demolish them. At that time he was very vicious to everybody. . . . It was just devastating, the way he could twist somebody’s words back on themselves and make them feel he was right and they were wrong." "Ballad in Plain D" applied the technique in song, attempting to "twist somebody’s words back on themselves" in a medium where he was supreme.

  But he had yet to demonstrate that his undoubted dexterity when demolishing someone verbally could be transferred to a lyric. "Like a Rolling Stone" was more than a year away. Also, fatally, he had allowed himself precious little emotional distance. Still endlessly reliving the breakup in his mind, even thousands of miles away, he had forgotten, "Revenge is a dish best served cold." There is nothing levelheaded about Dylan’s depiction of events in "Plain D." The emotion of that evening was still red-raw when he wrote out the first line ("I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze") and the last verse ("My friends from the prison, they ask unto me . . .") on Mayfair notepaper.

  There is only one other verse on this sheet, detailing how he "took her away / from the mother and sister, tho’ close did they stay," but it points out where the song is going. He also had a tune, and this time it was the one that generally accompanied his opening sentiment. "I once loved a girl" is not only a folk commonplace but also one of tradition’s most familiar song types. "Once I Had a Sweetheart" (a.k.a. "The Forsaken Lover") provided the template for "a new song out of what I know and out of what I’m feeling." Along with its opening phrase and tune, he planned to adapt the closing-verse riddle that featured in at least one traditional variant:

  My friends, my friends, they say unto me,

  How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?

  And I answer them, with a tear in my e’e,

  How many ships sail in the forest?

  For once he failed to match the original’s grasp of grief. "Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?" hardly conveys the same sense of despair as this highly tractable floating verse—even though Dylan had been carrying his little riddle around for months, probably for as long as the idea of remaking "Once I Had a Sweetheart" held sway. One suspects he had been seeking solace in such songs in the days that lay between. And there was no shortage of them known to this one-man song-bank.

  If "Plain D" had stayed as a short lyric, it could well have made another "Girl from the North Country." It certainly benefits from a gorgeous tune and a surprisingly warm vocal on the album. But as soon as Dylan got to the Greek village of Vernilya at the end of May and started to "group" the material he planned to record on his return, he seems to have decided this personal tragedy warranted an epic ballad, and thus began raking over the coals of an affair while both ends were still burning.

>   Even here, though, cut off from the world, Dylan continued to allow his mind to wander. On each of the double-sided sheets where he worked painstakingly on "Plain D" can be found verses for the absurd "I Shall Be Free #10." One can’t imagine two more different songs, yet it would appear that this "bipolar" approach to songwriting—heartbreak and irony entwining like the red rose and the briar—was a technique adopted throughout his European jaunt. "Mama, You Been on My Mind" shares a sheet with "Denise Denise." "To Ramona" and "All I Really Want to Do" appear on the same back page.

  Less typical of other "Vernilya drafts" was Dylan’s decision to type out lines for "Plain D," though a fair copy remained a long way off. These he liberally embellished with handwritten alterations and additions, still an unusual approach for Dylan, though it would become the norm by the time of Blonde on Blonde. In this case he made three attempts to develop "Of two daughters, she was the young" into something more traditional sounding, akin to the common opening for "The Twa Sisters": "There lived twa sisters in a bower / The youngest o them, O she was a flower."

  Some of the lines he comes up with smack of the confession box. The lines, "t protect her from hurt / I thought to keep her from my reckless wild escapades," comprise a particularly original way of saying, "Hey, it was OK for me to party, but not you"; "we grew up at each other / in the most awful way," is another way of saying Suze was pissed off at Dylan’s cavorting, knowing full well he no longer had to work at the art of seduction. But he continues to reserve most of his deep reservoir of recriminations for "her paracite sister" and "her possessin mother," both of whom "overlooked her creative instincts . . . completely."