Nico did ultimately release the song the following year, while Dylan was recuperating upstate, making it an essential part of her arresting debut long-player, Chelsea Girl, produced by the man who recorded Dylan’s most perfect rendition back in January 1965, Tom Wilson. With its belated release, it quickly gained acceptance as a real classic by Dylan fans and a good song for other artists to cover. The following year, Fairport Convention made almost as good a version of it as Nico had, releasing their more harmonic rendition on What We Did on Our Holidays. And while Dylan would go on to write his fair share of compassionate classics, Nico would go on to produce some of the most avant-garde and challenging material in the rock idiom. But then she learned her trade from New York’s finest.
{130} MY BACK PAGES
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—2 takes [AS—tk.2].
First known performance: Mountain View, CA, June 11, 1988.
I wrote the fourth record in Greece. . . . There was a change there . . . but the records before that, I used to know what I wanted to say before I used to write the song . . . and [in the end] I couldn’t write like it anymore. It was just too easy, and it wasn’t really "right." —Bob Dylan, San Francisco press conference, December 3, 1965
One can’t be 100 percent sure, but it would appear that "My Back Pages"—the working title of which was "Ancient Memories"—was the last Another Side song written. It was certainly the last song recorded, completed after a single false start at the end of a very long night. Among the loose-leaf pages of song drafts, it exists only as a final draft, albeit one that underwent a couple of crucial changes in the days leading up to that all-night recording session. It also seems to reflect what was on his mind that week, if his statement to Nat Hentoff as he arrived at the recording session qualifies as spontaneous: "There aren’t any finger-pointing songs [here]. . . . Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman."
"My Back Pages" is the song he wrote to make this new vantage point plain. The most dramatic change he made between Vernilya and Studio A was to alter the refrain that ends each verse. In the fair copy, Dylan tips his hat to one of his favorite traditional songs, that
seventeenth-century Scottish elegy, "Young but Daily Growin." At this stage he intends to sing, "Ah, but that’s when I was older, I’m growin’ younger now," a reference to his expressed desire to write like he used to when he was ten.
The change to ". . . I’m younger than that now" is part of a general tightening up of the whole song. In verse two, rather than the tongue-twisting "uncondemnable," he makes the line less of a mouthful, if more obtuse—with "Unthought of, though, somehow." Likewise, "those who insanely teach" has become "the mongrel dogs who teach," while the terms clearly defined in the song are no longer "right an wrong," but "good an bad." Such changes were made to facilitate singing, not to clarify. One suspects he may have still been uncomfortable with the song’s convoluted rhymes and wordplay, given that he didn’t sing it for the longest time. He later claimed that he sometimes "get[s] the rhymes first and . . . then [I] see if [I] can make it make sense in another kind of way." Yet he does not cite "My Back Pages" as an occasion when he failed to "make sense" at all. Yes, the song is a presentiment of future greatness, but it is still a flat-footed failure from a man who wanted to sprint when he could still only jog.
As such, it is astonishing that well-respected man and editor of Poetry Review, Peter Forbes, should select "My Back Pages" as one of just two Dylan lyrics for his anthology of twentieth-century poetry, Scanning the Century. Here is a song that merely reinforces the suspicion voiced by inferior poets that Dylan does not dally long on the meanings of words. On "My Back Pages," he teeters on the edge of gibberish with constructs like "confusion boats." A number of lines are clumsily executed or simply superfluous. "Unthought of, though, somehow" is the Dylanesque equivalent of "And I tell you no lie" in traditional ballads, a line put there to get from one thought to another without blowing the stanzaic pattern. Dylan has admitted that "there are [some] songs in which I made up a whole verse just to get to another verse." This is one such song.
Once Dylan entered the altogether more kaleidoscopic world that lay behind the gates of Eden, "My Back Pages" was rendered redundant. As he told Margaret Steen at the height of his midsixties fecundity, "My Back Pages" was a song written "in my New York phase, or at least, I was just coming out of it. I was still keeping the things that are really really real out of my songs, for fear they’d be misunderstood." "My Back Pages" still brought enough criticism raining down on the man. The mongrel dogs weren’t amused and tried to bark him down.
Thankfully, the Byrds came to his aid, emphasizing the song’s strong melody and not its half-baked words. Indeed, when Dylan decided that he was finally experienced enough to sing the song live, in 1988, it was to the Byrds’ template that he turned. Having made its live debut with a rousing G. E. Smith arrangement, stripped of some of its more risible lines, it subsequently passed through a wealth of electric and quasi-acoustic arrangements as Dylan grew to appreciate more of his own back pages.
{131} GATES OF EDEN
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004; [draft: The Bob Dylan Scrapbook].
First known performance: Philharmonic Hall, NY, October 31, 1964 [L64].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 15, 1965—1 take [BIABH]; Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970.
Dylan told Nat Hentoff, the week after the Another Side session, "I’ve been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That’s why I write a lot of poetry." Stretching at the very bounds of song itself, he could sense the line between poetry and song starting to dissolve. As his page-bound poems became little more than speed-screeds, the songs became so much more, lateral and linear, literary yet lyrical. The all-important "Gates of Eden" appears to have been composed at the same time as he was tapping out a number of rambling, nonrhymin’, vers libre poems for the jacket of his fourth album, circa late June/July 1964.
Given that a complete draft resides among the Another Side papers, "Gates of Eden" presumably predates "It’s Alright, Ma," even though its live debut came later. With it Dylan finally ventured beyond the "haunted, frightened trees . . . far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow." Sidelining songs about Suze, he willingly embraced that intensely creative nexus in which he may "not really know exactly what [a song] is all about, but I do know the minutes and the layers of what it’s all about," a sentiment he voiced the following year.
Perhaps the prosaic process by which he tapped out every crazy thought that came to him that summer, hoping to deliver a literary masterpiece of speed-writing—and perhaps trump Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me—played its part in attuning his hand to a chemically enhanced mind’s eye. However, this "naturalistic" approach to composition wasn’t adopted for "Gates of Eden" or "It’s Alright, Ma," two songs far beyond their rightful time.
The frustratingly clean draft for "Gates of Eden" gives the briefest glimpse of the writing process, suggesting that the song came with the dawn, and with a great deal more ease than either "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Chimes of Freedom." Eight of the nine verses are wholly realized. Just two verses change before the song arrives at its final form. In verse six, "All men are kings inside the gates of Eden" becomes "There are no kings . . ."; while in the eighth he ultimately prefers, "And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden," rather than the foreboding, "There’s nowhere t hide inside the gates of Eden"—a presentiment, perhaps, of the later dystopia, "Desolation Row."
Just the final verse requires completion, comprising two lines, both brimming with ideas. "At dawn my lover comes t me / an tells me of her dreams," is one train of thought he
completes easily enough. However, the suggestion that "there are no words, but these t tell no truths," needs unraveling. Eventually he arrives at, "There are no words but these to tell what’s true / And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden," a couplet that suggests time spent with the I Ching had not been wasted.
Though the song seems to have been written in time for his annual Newport appearance/s, the last week in July, he kept it back until his next New York showcase, on Halloween. On a night when he was struggling to focus on that sure vision of his, "Gates of Eden" is the stand-out performance. He also effortlessly unraveled the song in the studio the following January, recording it in a single take, while continuing to make it an exemplar of his new creed in live performance, when he nightly stirred the melting pot.
It would take the introduction of the Blonde on Blonde songs in the winter of 1966 for Dylan to feel he had moved beyond this particular "kingdom of Experience." After which it would take him another twenty-two years to return to this Eden—perfunctory acoustic versions in 1974 and 1978 notwithstanding. Only at the start of the Never Ending Tour, partnering an equally electric "My Back Pages" with an arrangement of heart-stopping intensity, would "Gates of Eden" come back into its own. Disappointingly, this dramatic reinterpretation was dropped after just a handful of performances. Thankfully, in the spring of 1995, it returned to join "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue" in laser-precise acoustic sets that acted as a crash course in the compositional quantum leap achieved three decades prior.
{132} IT’S ALRIGHT, MA (I’M ONLY BLEEDING)
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Philadelphia Town Hall, October 10, 1964.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 15, 1965—2 takes
[BIABH—tk.2].
What I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different[,] that had not been heard before. [Irwin] Silber scolded me in his letter [in Sing Out!] for doing this, as if he alone . . . had the keys to the real world. I knew what I was doing, though, and wasn’t going to take a step back or retreat for anybody. —Bob Dylan, Chronicles (2004)
If there is a single song that defines this "new set of ordinances," it is "It’s Alright, Ma." Written in Woodstock, where Dylan had retired for the summer, it is one of those songs over which the author felt he exercised very little conscious will. In recent interviews he has repeatedly singled out this song as the kind of breakthrough mysterious even to him: "‘Darkness at the break of noon / Shadows even the silver spoon / The hand-made blade, the child’s balloon . . .’ There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kinda magic. It’s a different kind of penetrating magic. And I did it at one time. . . . I did it once, and I can do other things now. But I can’t do that."
His own amazement undoubtedly explains why the song has never left the man’s live set for any sustained period, even if its performance is a travesty these days. Back in November 1980, finally accepting he needed to reintroduce some old songs after a year of gruelling Godliness, it even led Dylan back to a place former fans feared he had left for good. In conversation with Robert Hilburn, he picked this song out as one of those that still meant a lot to him: "I don’t think I could sit down now and write ‘It’s Alright Ma’ again. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but I can still sing it." And sing it he did, usually at night’s end.
Once again he was "outside society," commenting on its foibles and follies. As he had been back in 1964, when for the first time he was no longer content to "pick one of the thousand million little points I can pick and explode it." Dylan now had the whole of America’s way of life in his sights. As he informed Hentoff at the time, "There’s only one way to change things, and that’s to cut yourself off from all the chains." "It’s Alright, Ma" is the sound of a chain saw revving. Herein, he forensically dissects every societal ill to which, two years earlier, he’d devoted entire albums of songs. Like "Hard Rain," which comprises a line from every song he ever hoped to write, "It’s Alright, Ma" is a manifesto of all the protest songs he swore off writing ever again.
By song’s end he has confronted all three of the great taboos: religion, sex, and politics, putting more quotable lines into a single song than anyone before or since. No longer thinking he could change anyone but himself, he was at last prepared to let his "thought-dreams . . . be seen," at the exact moment when his worldview was becoming a whole lot darker, and the shadow of nihilism came creeping in his room. On "It’s Alright, Ma" there is an air of futility absent from earlier songs, even the apocalyptic ones. It seems he had finally got around to reading Sartre and Kierkegaard, for here is the first evidence of an existential strain that suffuses much of what he would write in the coming year. This was Dylan’s "life, and [his] life only"—the song’s original subtitle, an existential statement if ever there was one.
Like "Mr. Tambourine Man," "It’s Alright, Ma" was an idea he was prepared to linger over—and, with the imminent release of a stopgap fourth LP, he had time. And like that other breakthrough, "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall," the waterfall of images cascades down so quickly that one almost misses the intricacy of the rhyme scheme—five interlinked sets of triple-rhyming verses broken into six- and seven-line stanzas in Writings and Drawings, but clearly all six lines rhyme thus: AAAAAB CCCCCB DDDDDB, while a three-line refrain also rhymes AAB, as Dylan dared to be both poet and song-and-dance man.
Even on 1978’s Street-Legal—which generally features his most ambitious rhyme schemes—Dylan never again displayed such daring. As he told journalist Jon Pareles in 1997, "The alliteration in [‘It’s Alright Ma’] just blows me away." Unsurprisingly, the song occasionally sacrifices linear logic in its desire to maintain rhyme-upon-rhyme-upon-rhyme, while Dylan still has to use his voice to make "phony," "lonely," and "show me" alliterative, an effect he tried to mask in print. Thus, in the second Writings and Drawings verse, a strict end-rhyme reprint should read:
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
Whereas it has been set more logically, less effectively, as:
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words,
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
Dylan felt a real sense of accomplishment when finishing his most complex song to date (and with an original tune as compelling as any culled to date). What his house guests at the time—Joan Baez, her sister, Mimi, and Mimi’s husband Richard Fariña—thought has not been documented. He was now moving too fast for even these hip folk, determined to put distance between him and the Irwin Silbers of this world. Silber’s open letter, cited by Dylan in Chronicles, was published in the October/November 1964 issue of Sing Out! (which came out in September). "It’s Alright, Ma" may not have been Dylan’s direct response to Silber’s accusation—that his "new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious"—but it definitely demonstrates a singer-songwriter who ain’t marching to Sing Out!’s tune no more.
{133} IF YOU GOTTA GO, GO NOW
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Philharmonic Hall, NY, October 31, 1964 [L64].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take; January 15, 1965—4 takes [45 + overdubs] [TBS w/out overdubs]; Levy’s Recording Studio, London May 12, 1965.
Were I obliged to wager on a date when Dylan penned this early pop-song parody, I’d plump for some time shortly after August 28, 1964, and his auspicious first meeting with the Fab Four at the Delmonico
Hotel (though its inclusion in the Another Side section in Writings and Drawings suggests Dylan thinks it came earlier—whatever its actual recording dates). Dylan was smart enough to feel the wind of change the Beatles blew in on, and some part of him wanted to be part of the same mighty storm. But he wasn’t sure his current crop of fans would wear it. Hence a song like "If You Gotta Go, Go Now," which flexes those buried pop sensibilities in a song that itself pastiches the still-ephemeral genre.
After spending much of the previous season entertaining audiences with this compendium of innuendo, Dylan considered making "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" his entrée into the world of pop singles—after seeing the success the Animals were enjoying with a form of "folk-rock." By the end of January he had recorded the song in a folk-rock guise, at the last of the Bringing It All Back Home sessions (having recorded it acoustic at the first one), only to then record a bluesier version in London shortly after his May 1965 English tour.
He had somehow found out about John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Britain’s premier blues makers—probably from the Animals’ Alan Price or another member of the English pop pantheon who crowded his suite at the Savoy throughout his stay. And so a session was set up for May 12 to record this song. As further evidence of some serious intent underlying the exercise, Dylan’s producer, Tom Wilson, was flown over to supervise proceedings.
Revolution in the Air Page 25
