Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Unfortunately the session was something of a bust, producing no usable take of "If You Gotta Go, Go Now." But Wilson hadn’t given up on getting a releasable cut, and while Dylan jetted off to Europe with his new paramour, he returned to New York and, at a session on May 21, overdubbed a couple of unspecified musicians onto the Bringing It . . .

  version—possibly at the same time that he did something similar to Simon and Garfunkel’s "The Sound of Silence"—creating a composite version that he hoped Dylan might OK for single release.

  By the time Dylan heard the results, though, he’d already come up with a grander way to make his grandstand entrance into the pop charts: "Like a Rolling Stone." "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" would still find its way into the charts, though. The acoustic version Dylan performed at a session for the BBC on June 1—almost his last pass at the song—was made into an acetate by his music publisher and forwarded on to Manfred Mann, who promptly cut their own folk-rock version, replete with Britbeat harmonies. Mann’s mannered rendition promptly gave Dylan a Top Ten version, just not the one he’d originally intended.

  {134} FAREWELL ANGELINA

  {135} LOVE IS JUST A FOUR-LETTER WORD

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

  [complete version of #135: In His Own Words, vol. 2].

  Known studio recordings [#134]: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take [TBS].

  One can’t help but consider these two songs of a piece, and not just because they were both first released (and for decades, only available) by Joan Baez. They both seem to be songs Baez heard in the immediate aftermath of creation, and in the case of the former, at least, a song Dylan donated to her because he no longer needed it himself. As such, one must suppose both songs were penned in late November 1964, when Dylan was again hovering around Big Sur, playing shows in the Bay Area and beyond.

  "Farewell Angelina" does date from this visit, as confirmed by its appearance on a January 1965 recording session and its subsequent inclusion as the title track to Baez’s own semi-electric 1965 LP—with Dylan’s musical director, Bruce Langhorne, all over it. Again Dylan seems to have spent his time in Carmel rifling through Baez’s collection of Scottish ballads, leaning on another Scotch standard for Angelina’s mournful tune. "Farewell Angelina" borrowed elements of "Farewell to Tarwathie," a song about leaving Scotland for Greenland hoping "to find riches in hunting the whale," first collected in 1857. (A possible source may again be Ewan MacColl, who included the song in his 1960 collection, The Singing Island.)

  However, rather than trying to console the one he plans to leave behind, Dylan is telling Angelina it is time to go, even though she cannot see the portents ("the sky is on fire . . . is trembling . . . is folding . . . is changing color . . . is erupting"). One of those songs that acts almost as a glossary on a single line from "It’s Alright, Ma"—"He not busy being born is busy dying"—"Farewell Angelina" contained an additional verse when Dylan recorded it, making that connection clearer still:

  The camouflaged parrot, he flutters from fear

  When something he doesn’t know about, suddenly appears

  What cannot be imitated perfect, must die

  Farewell Angelina,

  The sky is flooding over, and I must go where its dry.

  It may be that Dylan added this verse post-Carmel, but it seems more likely that Baez exercised some editorial control and clipped "the camouflaged parrot" from her version. She was right to do so. It adds only atmosphere to what is, in either form, a classic "mid-period" Dylan composition. As I have suggested elsewhere, it was probably only because he duly wrote an even better song along similar lines ("It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue") that he set Angelina aside, leaving fans to think he never even recorded such a well-constructed song. (Though it appeared on a list of material in the CBS vault compiled in the early seventies, it was under the working title given it at the session, "Alcatraz to the Ninth Power," the true identity of which remained unknown for a quarter of a century.)

  In the case of "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word," there is more doubt concerning its composition date, simply because the first we hear of the song is in May 1965, when Baez insisted on serenading its composer with it in his Savoy suite. Dylan seemed slightly annoyed to be reminded of it, exclaiming, "You still remember that goddamned song?!"—which does rather suggest he already considered it an old (and best-forgotten) song. This makes it unlikely that it was composed in March, when the pair was last together, touring the East Coast. November seems the safer bet.

  As to why the song was not attempted at any of the Bringing It . . . sessions, Dylan’s assertion (to camera) that he never finished it fits the evidence. Baez retorted that he finished the song "eight different ways," before magnanimously offering to record it if he’d finish it properly. He did not take up her offer, but she recorded it anyway, albeit not until 1968. When she did disinter it, she sang a final verse that, though clearly Dylan’s, may not have been the one he had in mind. It is omitted from Writings and Drawings, perhaps because he meant it when he said he’d never finished the song; and though the opening couplet remains a classic, this conclusion on the wall does rather peter out:

  Strange it is to be beside you, many years the tables turned

  You’d probably not believe me if I told you all I’d learned

  And it is very, very weird indeed

  To hear words like "forever," "please,"

  Those ships sail through my mind, I cannot cheat

  It’s like lookin’ in the teacher’s face complete

  I can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard,

  That love is just a four-letter word.

  According to Joannie, Dylan had a different kind of ending originally in mind, one that he abandoned when she made fun of his tendency to make out at song’s end: "He’d just written it all out on paper, and he said, ‘Hey, can ya dig this?’ I read it off, he hadn’t finished the last verse yet. He said, ‘Bet ya can’t guess what’s gonna happen,’ and I said, ‘Sure I can, you’re gonna go back to the girl’s house and fuck her.’ And he said, ‘You bitch, how’d you figure that out?’ And I said, ‘’Cause that’s what you always do.’"

  I would be hard pressed to name even a handful of songs that end this way, but Baez’s snotty remark probably ensured the song stopped short of completion. Further evidence that the song never quite transcended its unfinished state comes in one of the rarer songbooks of the period, published to accompany the release of Don’t Look Back. This oddity contains a selection of items from the soundtrack, including "Four-Letter Word," which has a sheet of music with handwritten lyrics scrawled across it that one would have a hard time matching with the version in the film. They include a quite different third verse:

  I went on my way unnoticed in the winter driving rain,

  In and out of lifetimes unmentioned of my name,

  Searching for my double. Looking for

  Complete admiration to the core,

  Tho’ I tried and failed in finding anymore,

  I prob’ly . . . I prob’ly thought "There’s nothing more

  Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word."

  The song remains one of Dylan’s more worthy "lost" (i.e., unrecorded) compositions. Sadly there is no solid evidence he ever recorded it in any form. (Though according to one Internet source, I apparently have a demo of it. Mmm, wonder which box I keep that in?)

  [1] The Margolis and Moss manuscripts contain three songs, two in typescript ("I’ll Keep It With Mine" and "Phantom Engineer") and one in manuscript ("Liverpool Gal"), but none of these date from the same period as the various poems and play that make up the bulk of the collection, i.e. the fall of 1963 or the winter of 1964.

  [2] The performance in question, preserved as a soundboard tape, was at Wolftrap, Vienna, Va., on September 8, 1993, when D
ylan also played "Series of Dreams" live for the first time.

  { 1965: Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited }

  The year Dylan rewrote the book—and I don’t mean Tarantula (which he never tampered with after finishing it in early spring). Superlatives fail and comparisons disappear in a blizzard of inspiration. The Dylan of 1965 was making the most direct, powerful, and artistically important song-statements of the twentieth century. At the absolute epicenter of popular culture for an eighteen-month period when he, and he alone, was in the unknown region, he returned with regular bulletins of prophetic perspicacity. The thirty songs recorded in those twelve months, even in stark isolation, would make him the single most important singer-songwriter of the postwar era. Going from "Love Minus Zero" to "Visions of Johanna" in eleven months, Dylan was traveling at the artistic equivalent of the speed of light.

  Between these twin beacons he would find time to create the first true "rock" single, "Like a Rolling Stone." And on its live debut, he irrevocably rendered those divisions that still dominated popular song redundant. The Newport Folk Festival slammed the door on the past just in time. Dylan recorded his template for a modern music of the mind the following week and called it Highway 61 Revisited. What he had not realized was how far he still had to go before journey’s end.

  {136} SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [typewritten draft: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985]

  First known performance: Concord Pavilion, June 7, 1988.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take [TBS]; January 14, 1965, afternoon—3 takes [BIABH—tk.3]; January 14, 1965, evening.

  Between the end of November 1964 and the second week in January 1965, Dylan wrote the bulk of his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. Save for "Gates of Eden," "It’s Alright, Ma," and, lest we forget, the almost ancient "Mr. Tambourine Man," there is no evidence he had much else ready when setting out for the West Coast that month to undertake another successful set of shows. And yet by the first session of the year, six weeks later, he had nine spanking-new songs to record (as well as "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" and "I’ll Keep It with Mine," two songs of an earlier vintage).

  Of the eleven songs cut that first January day, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is the only one seen in draft form, appearing complete with coffee-mug stains in Writings and Drawings and the 1985 edition of Lyrics—though it has been mysteriously removed from the latest Lyrics, replaced by a single typed verse of "To Ramona." (Good one, Geoff!) It is a fascinating document for any number of reasons, the primary one being that it is entirely typed (save for one line: "to walk on your tip toes").

  Line breaks are indicated by a slash [/]. Evidently any line between his new songs and the rhetorical letters that punctuate the book of prose-poems he had almost completed was becoming rather blurred. Dylan admitted as much at the time: "The words [to ‘SHB’] are rather squeezed together. You could call it an unconscious poem set to music." In its draft state, he was not even sure what part of it might serve as the chorus and/or refrain (it would appear there were two main candidates: "careful if they tail you / they only wanna nail you," and, "don’t be bashful / check where the wind blows / rain flows").

  Missing entirely is its memorable opening: "johnny’s in the basement / mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement / thinking ’bout the government." Instead, "daddy’s in the dimestore / getting ten cent medicine." But it is there for take one, day one, bringing it all back at Studio A. This is the version on The Bootleg Series—which hardly sounds like a "demo," as has been suggested, even if Witmark initially used this acoustic version for transcription purposes (cf. the original Bringing It . . . songbook). Even acoustic, one hardly notices how Dylan has found a way to rhyme medicine (or medicent) with basement, pavement, and government.

  "Subterranean Homesick Blues" may have started as an acoustic rap-poem only to be made electric. According to Dylan, at the time, "It [just] didn’t sound right on guitar. I [also] tried it on piano, harpsichord, harmonica, pipe organ, kazoo. But it fit right in with the band." Well, I can’t speak for those other instruments, but the acoustic-guitar version recorded on January 13 sounds just fine. However, he had simply grown tired of the lack of dynamics in his music. As he said, looking back in 1977, "I couldn’t go on being the lone folkie out there, strumming ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for three hours every night. I hear my songs as part of the music, the musical background." No question, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" acquired a kick like a mule when Dylan returned to it the following afternoon, band in tow.

  Dylan had also abandoned, seemingly for good, the process that had served him well on Freewheelin’ and Times . . ., recording new songs in fits and starts and pruning an album’s worth from the resulting harvest. As of now he began recording an album in a block of sessions, relying on being fleet of foot and inspiration, trusting producer Tom Wilson to find the right alchemical mix of musos to come to his aid.

  And yet initially, at these hastily assembled sessions, Dylan was not sure of the right setting for a number of songs he planned to record—electric or acoustic. As such, some songs he recorded acoustic and electric, some resolutely acoustic. Just one was conceived only in an electric guise ("Maggie’s Farm"). Some combination of the two appears to have always been his intention, so one must assume that the all-acoustic session on the thirteenth was his way of hedging his bets.

  "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was electric all the way down to its obvious R & B roots. No traditional ballad provided this song with its underlying infrastructure. Acoustic or electric, it had been taken at quite a different clip from any folk ballad—or, indeed, the southern boogie Chuck Berry utilized when devising the template on April 16, 1956. And Dylan would be the last to deny Berry’s overt influence. As he told Hilburn recently, this first foray into folk-rock was "from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business,’ and some of the scat songs of the forties."

  A close examination of the original Berry lyrics suggests "Subterranean Homesick Blues" took a scintilla more than "a bit" of Berry’s teen anthem. Dylan even changed one typed line, "Says he’s got a bad bill," to, "Says he’s got a bad cough," in order to blur one particular debt found in verse one of the Berry original: "Runnin to and fro, hard workin’ at the mill / Never fail in the mail, yeah, come a rotten bill!" Likewise, it is hardly a leap from, "Same thing every day, gettin up, goin to school / No need for me to complain, my objections overruled," to, "Twenty years of schoolin / And they put you on the day shift"—great slogan that it assuredly is.

  Nor was "Subterranean Homesick Blues" the first time (that year) Dylan dipped into the work of rock & roll’s original poet for a musical starting point. Check out the opening riff to Berry’s 1960 recording of Big Maceo Merriweather’s "Worried Life Blues" and think, "I Don’t Believe You." It used to go like that, and now it goes like this! Berry might even have approved. After all, he had not been averse to a little borrowing of source material himself. His breakthrough 45, "Maybellene," had been a thinly veiled reworking of Bob Wills’s 1938 recording of "Ida Red."

  "Subterranean Homesick Blues" served an important purpose. As side one, track one, it was another of those statements of intent. The "ex rock & roll forbidden fruit picker" was back! He even fucks with the folkies a little by starting up with a little acoustic guitar strum before somebody tips a table’s worth of cROCKery on top of him. As windups go, it’s a good ’un. When he was accused of just having a laugh (as he is by at least one brave Liverpool gal in Don’t Look Back), he made it crystal clear that he saw this as the way ahead, telling Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman, "[It’s] NOT a put-on, like somebody said. Nobody is going to push me into writing rock & roll songs." But he would be pushed into making a promotional video for the song, not only going along with the wheeze, but adding some ancillary advice in sign language—like "Dig Yourself!" an
d "Watch It."

  Despite being a tad premature in inventing the "promo" pop video (and rap music into the bargain), "Subterranean Homesick Blues" gave Dylan his first Top Forty U.S. hit. But he hardly felt like replicating its amphetamine rush in concert, and the song was left on record only. Imagine the surprise, then, in 1988, when his forty-seven-year-old vocal chords opened every show with a rousing rockabilly arrangement of the song. As for Berry’s original template, it has continued to serve many a "forbidden fruit picker," notably Elvis Costello ("Pump It Up") and R.E.M. ("It’s the End of the World").

  {137} CALIFORNIA

  {138} OUTLAW BLUES

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

  #137—Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take.

  #138—Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—2 takes; January 14, 1965, afternoon—3 takes [BIABH—tk.3].

  Leaving aside the throwaway nature of a song like "Outlaw Blues" on an album of bona fide pearls, its relationship with another light-hearted piece of "improv" recorded for Bringing It All Back Home provides a valuable insight into the way Dylan built up "a rhythm of unpoetic distortion"—as he put it in the album sleeve notes—from building blocks of words and sounds. Ever since the inclusion of the oft-bootlegged "California" in 1973’s Writings and Drawings, where it is identified as "an early version of ‘Outlaw Blues,’" the assumption has always been that "California" was simply superseded by a superior version.

  Not so. The emergence in 2005 of the January 13 acoustic demo of "Outlaw Blues"—as a downloadable single on the official Dylan Web site—ended years of confusion about the identity of certain "mis-labeled" songs on this particular session tape; while laying to rest, once and for all, the notion that these two songs were ever interchangeable. On this solo prototype of "Outlaw Blues," recorded the same evening as "California," but listed on the session sheet as "Barb Wire," Dylan sings a previously undocumented fourth verse: