Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Generally, though, this twelve-bar blues has struggled to recapture the spark ignited at Newport, it being dropped from the set shortly after the Hawks, a.k.a. The Band, came on board in September 1965. It didn’t even pass muster when Dylan worked up an arrangement for the British leg of the 1981 European tour, surely as a nod to then–Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher. But with Mr. D one can generally find an exception to any rule. So when, in September 1985, it was tagged onto the end of an exhilarating set at the first Farm Aid, a massive TV audience was reminded why he wrote the song in the first place, and, indeed, what words like, "They say, sing while you slave," were meant to mean. It proved a temporary reinvigoration. When the song reappeared in 1987, he again sang, "I just get bored!" like he meant it.

  {146} PHANTOM ENGINEER

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 15, 1965—10 takes [TBS—tk.10] [NDH—tk.9?].

  First known performance: Newport Folk Festival, July 25, 1965.

  [= IT TAKES A LOT TO LAUGH, IT TAKES A TRAIN TO CRY]

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 29, 1965—7 takes [H61—tk.7]

  First known performance/s: Madison Square Garden, NY, August 1, 1971 [CFB].

  The pace of Dylan’s helter-skelter existence and scale of personal fame may have accelerated at an exponential rate through the winter and spring of 1965, but he seems to have reached something of an impasse when it came to further songwriting. He admitted as much to Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman at the end of his first English tour in May: "I have these things ready . . . nothing’s finished. . . . I know I’ll write a lot of stuff, but exactly what shape it’ll take has yet to be decided." He was fully entitled to take a breather. After all, he’d completed Bringing It All Back Home just four months earlier. And he was clearly not worried about any temporary drought. He had experienced a similar three-month respite after The Times They Are A-Changin’, following it with two breakthrough songs in rapid succession.

  Ideas still crowded his head. A wealth of new footage from the English tour, released on the deluxe DVD edition of Don’t Look Back, suggests he still couldn’t walk past a piano without vamping a tune (two hours of outtakes also appeared on a Japanese bootleg DVD beforehand, which director Pennebaker decided to leave in the bootleg domain). It would appear that Dylan was increasingly inclined to work out melodies on the ol’ stand-up. When Tom Wilson came to call at his Savoy suite at tour’s end, Dylan sat at the stand-up and played him (and D. A.’s camera) a new song he was hoping to record—"Phantom Engineer." Wilson, delighted at the thought of a Dylan R & B single, soon set up a session in London.

  The tape log for the May 12, 1965, session at Levy’s Recording Studio, backed by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, is now lost, so we cannot know for sure whether Dylan attempted to record this new song at this west-end studio (we do know the Bluesbreakers were paid £28 for the session). But "Phantom Engineer" was just the kind of electric blues the Bluesbreakers could play in their sleep; and the one contemporary report of the session, in Record Mirror, states that they recorded two songs—along with some (unspecified) blues material—until "one of the huge tape reels . . . was almost filled."

  The guitarist on that session was a young Eric Clapton, whose own memory is that "it was just a jam session. . . . We played for about two hours. There was a lot of stuff down on tape. . . . We did a lot of blues songs which . . . [suggested] he was making it up. He was sitting at the piano and we just joined in." This sure sounds more like "Phantom Engineer" than "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"—especially if one applies some significance to the fact that Dylan and Clapton decided to do a joint version of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh," as the song became, at the October 1992 "Bobfest" concert. (Though the song was cut at the last minute, video exists of them running the song down a number of times at the dress rehearsal the previous day.) I suspect they’d been down this road before.

  As for Clapton’s suggestion that "he was making it up," parts of "Phantom Engineer" sound like Dylan is doing exactly that. Having already transposed a pair of lines—"Don’t the clouds look lonesome across the deep blue sea / Don’t my gal look good, when she’s coming after me"—from "Alabama Woman Blues" to "Rocks and Gravel" back in 1962, it was but a short journey from there to here. However, there is no doubt that the final verse is all Dylan, including a second couplet that wouldn’t have been out of place on "From a Buick Six":

  I’ve just been to the baggage car, where the engineer’s been tossed.

  I’ve stomped out forty compasses, God knows what they cost.

  Well, I wanna be your lover baby, I don’t wanna be your boss.

  I just can’t help it if this train gets lost.

  The May 12 session may have been a bit of a bust, but it taught Dylan something—he need not hijack entire blues bands, just elements thereof. When he and producer Tom Wilson met again at their usual stomping ground, Columbia’s New York Studio A, a month later, Dylan brought along guitarist Mike Bloomfield from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a white Chicago bluesman who had done his apprenticeship when knee-high to the great Joe Williams.

  As at the May 12 session, Dylan elected to play piano, leaving Bloomfield to let rip with the electric guitar. He attached just one caveat, instructing the young bluesman, "I don’t want you to play any of that B. B. King shit." Bloomfield had already been shown the ropes, having spent a weekend in Woodstock letting Dylan demonstrate his new songs to him. Bloomfield found the whole experience "very weird, he was playing in weird keys which he always does—all on the black keys of the piano."

  And though June 15, 1965, may have gone down in history as the day Dylan recorded the fabled "Like a Rolling Stone," that song proved a mere afterthought that spilled over to the following day. It was "Phantom Engineer" that occupied most of the first afternoon, requiring ten takes—six complete—as Dylan worked at getting a new sound outta his head and onto tape. No longer "making it up" on the spot, he was still not happy with the opening to the second verse, which at this point read, "Don’t the moon look good, shinin’ down through the trees / Don’t the ghost child look good, sitting on the madman’s knee."

  Seemingly happy with the final take, he continued to tinker with the song as June turned to July. A typed version of the song from this period, which somehow ended up among the Margolis and Moss papers, along with "I’ll Keep It with Mine," showed he had yet to give up on either song. "Phantom Engineer" is how it is identified at the top of the page. On this typescript, that "ghost child" couplet has been changed to fit the rest of the song’s train motif—"Don’t the break [sic] man look good / Being where he wants to be"—which is how he sings it on its live debut, at what the organizers still thought of as America’s premier annual folk festival.

  The Newport version in every other way remained the dose of R & B

  medicine recorded back in June (listen closely between songs and you can hear someone onstage call out "Phantom Engineer"). It would take until a lunch break at the third Highway 61 Revisited session, four days later, for the song to slow down to an uphill crawl, for the brakeman to "look good / Flagging down the double E," and for the windows to be "filled with frost." Before that break Dylan recorded three more takes of "Phantom Engineer" (while also running through another song debuted at Newport, "Tombstone Blues").

  According to eye-witness Tony Glover, who stayed on in New York after Newport: "As most of the musicians and [studio] crew split [for lunch], Bob sat down at the piano and worked over ‘Phantom Engineer’ for an hour or more. When the crew was back in place, Bob ran down how he wanted it done differently—and in three takes they got the lovely version on the album . . . with some tasty guitar and piano builds in it." It also got a new name, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," though the studio engineer continued to log the song by its original title.

  "Phantom E
ngineer" continued waiting in the wings, and when the song was restored to the live set as a roustabout replacement for an electric "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall" on the latter stages of the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, it reverted to the kind of up-tempo midnight stomp that rattled sabers at Newport. Since then Dylan has occasionally allowed blues guitarists to cut their teeth on the song, giving Mick Taylor the opportunity to have a wail at Nantes in 1984, allowing G. E. Smith the same privilege in Spain in 1989, and even letting "E. C." show the world what he might have done back in 1965 at the 1992 "Bobfest" rehearsals. Said train, though, has recently got lost.

  {147} SITTING ON A BARBED-WIRE FENCE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 15, 1965—6 takes [TBS—tk.6].

  The song title "Barb Wire" appears to have been used for "Outlaw Blues" at the first Bringing It . . . session—probably because it (originally) featured a line, "Well I paid fifteen dollars . . ." which is similar to the first line of this song, "I paid fifteen million dollars . . ." Evidently, that shorthand title was written at a later date, probably in 1970, when these tapes were reviewed by the record label. There are no (other) allusions to "Sitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence"—or, as it is listed on the studio sheet, "Over the Cliffs Part One"—before its appearance at the June 15 New York session.

  Personally, I have always preferred the title under which it was bootlegged, "Killing Me Alive." But whatever its actual title, this song is very much in the vein of "Outlaw Blues" and "On the Road Again"—a series of scrambled lines, interchangeable at will (the Arabian doctor is destined to reemerge as the best friend in "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues"). It also shares the driving barroom piano of the studio version of "Phantom Engineer." And as with that song, the so-called Goldmine acetate, from the June 15 session—which sounds like a monitor mix, with Dylan’s piano being mixed way to the fore—allows one to hear just how our aspiring bar pianist is coming along. In all likelihood, the song was penned at the same Woodstock piano where Dylan had played his new songs to Bloomfield the weekend before.

  What convinces me to put it "ahead" of "Like a Rolling Stone"—also apparently composed at that piano—is the way it fits Dylan’s description (to Coleman) of something whose "shape . . . has yet to be decided." The words, like the tune itself, are "just a riff." Dylan is grappling with a new methodology that is still only coming through in dribs and drabs. Even the defining line, "The girl I’m loving, I swear she’s killing me alive," can’t help but recall the earlier "Hero Blues." If anything, the direction in which he’s heading ends up being put on hold by the synaptic swerve toward Miss Lonely, only truly blooming on the Big Pink basement tape, after the midsixties madness had abated. Consider this verse, from one of the earlier takes on June 15:

  I was walking down the street one day,

  And saw her sitting all alone on the shelf,

  Right away she gave all my shoes to her mother,

  But she kept all the bread for herself.

  The earlier take lacks any barbed-wire fence. Rather, at song’s end, he is trying to avoid falling over "any screwdriver cliffs." Actually, none of the lines have been nailed into place, and one senses Dylan was using the song largely to establish the credentials of the band, since he evidently intended to make this sixth album a belated collection of the kinda Bob Dylan blues that owed as much to Arthur Rimbaud as Robert Johnson.

  Note: The version in Writings and Drawings has received a revamp, and not a particularly good one. She is no longer killing him alive, she’s "thrilling me with her drive"; and instead of being "not even twenty-five," he has a woman who calls him "Stan" and "Mister Clive." "Gotta Serve Somebody" awaits.

  {148} LIKE A ROLLING STONE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 15, 1965—5 takes [TBS]; June 16, 1965—15 takes [H61—tk.4].

  First known performance: Newport Folk Festival, July 25, 1965 [OSOTM].

  I wrote "Rolling Stone" after England. I boiled it down, but it’s all there. . . . I knew I had to sing it with a band. I always sing when I write, even prose, and I heard it like that. —Dylan to Ralph J. Gleason, December 1965

  In March 1965, speed-rapping with Paul Jay Robbins, full-time hipster and part-time L.A. journo, Dylan openly admitted he still hadn’t got where he wanted: "I’ve written some songs which are kind of far out, a long continuation of verses, stuff like that—but I haven’t really gotten into writing a completely free song." It was a theme he was now warming to, telling others about these "songs which are . . . a long continuation of verses," without ever demonstrating what he had in mind. One suspects he didn’t know himself. He probably had in mind a song that distilled elements of "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall," "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "It’s Alright, Ma."

  Earlier Beat aspirations now became attached to the tutorial he’d already had in tradition. Making a musical Molotov cocktail of the two, he jettisoned page-bound poetry for good. He now knew one could be a songwriter and a poet utilizing the same medium. As he told Nat Hentoff privately, a matter of months after he cracked the code, he could still "remember . . . writing those [other] things. The other stuff I was doing didn’t even resemble those [earlier songs] at all. They resembled more what I’m writing today, in terms of songs." The schema adopted for Tarantula by the summer of 1964 contained its fair share of song-like rhythms. Refusing to be hidebound by line breaks, Dylan wrote screeds of speed, all amphetamine alliteration, as he demonstrated in a short correspondence with the late Tami Dean:

  An god’s own pillars’ve even turned t rust

  sugar tastes bitter. Salt is sweet

  ramming bali ligosi girls on the tails of mice

  rats ring the bells

  truth don’t lie in the alley dead

  bums don’t die

  cleopatra’s sister opens her mouth at the manhole

  tries t grab mayor wagner’s son.

  Just as John Lennon needed to write two books of offbeat poetry to get to "Nowhere Man" and "In My Life," Dylan’s year-long jag of speed-writing helped him adopt a more intuitive approach to the song form, integrating everything around the malleable framework of a tune and arrangement. As he told Nat Hentoff the second time around, "‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all; I didn’t care any more after that about writing books or poems or whatever. [Here] was something that I myself could dig. . . . My songs are pictures and the band makes the sound of the pictures."

  Dylan did not arrive at this defining song easily. Shortly after completing the Highway 61 set of songs, he described the tortuous process: "Every time I write a song [now], it’s like writing a novel . . . [but] I can get it down, you know . . . down to where I can re-read it in my head." "Like a Rolling Stone" was his first song to condense the whole life story of a Miss Lonely down to just four verses. At this stage, if we are to believe things he said in the day, Dylan wrote the whole thing out longhand. And again, if we attach credence to contemporaneous utterances, it came after he decided he’d gone as far with song as he could: "I’d literally quit singing and playing, and I found myself writing this . . .

  long piece of vomit about twenty pages long and out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ . . . And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that that was what I should do."

  This admission rings a lot truer than his 1991 claim to Elliott Mintz that the song in question "is not any better or worse than any of the other songs I’[d] written in that period. It just happened to be one of the ones that was on the Hit Parade." Actually, it was the one that opened the doors of perception. In the months immediately after its composition, he felt no shame communicating its importance a number of different ways: onstage, when he sang it with an intensity and gusto he never came close to
again; in interviews, whenever he felt he had a sympathetic ear; and on the radio, where he aimed to reach those (at)tuned. For now, it was everything he thought a song could be. As he told writer Jules Siegel in one of the more memorable interviews of the era:

  It was [originally] ten pages long. It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. . . . I never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, "How does it feel?" in a slow motion pace. . . . It was like . . . in your eyesight you see your victim swimming in lava . . . in the pain they were bound to meet up with. I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight.

  All this fevered activity provided Dylan with the very shape he told Ray Coleman, in mid-May, had "yet to be decided." The process itself probably occupied much of the five weeks that separate Dylan’s aborted "single" session on May 12 from the successful "single" session/s. Having "quit singing and playing," his overactive mind puked up a "long piece of vomit" between ten and twenty pages long, quite possibly a conscious effort to emulate Kerouac’s fabled "scroll version" of On the Road, and composed in a similar span of time. Having set about turning said technicolor yawn into a song, he taught it to Michael Bloomfield. Only then did he turn up at Columbia’s Studio A ready to create a thing called rock music in a single afternoon.

  In all likelihood, Dylan started on his original "piece of vomit" while laid up in his $500-a-day hotel suite in London the last week in May, suffering from a bout of "food poisoning" acquired on a trip to Europe with Sara. (Respected rock historian Peter Doggett points out that the pair attended the same Parisian party that resulted in rock & roller Vince Taylor acquiring a messianic delusion, and suspects that Dylan was also "dosed" with some bad acid.)