With the typewriter on his lap, he again set about putting himself in "Homesick Blues" mode. We know Dylan was still tapping out many a Tarantula-esque "rhythm thing on paper." In Don’t Look Back he can be seen banging away at the typewriter in his Savoy suite before London shows, and we know what he was typing: a piece called "Alternatives to College," originally intended for Esquire magazine but not published until the 1985 edition of Lyrics. Anyone looking for evidence of "a rhythm thing on paper, all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest," I present Exhibit A: "yonder at your funeral, you will see this pauper—dressed like your face, he will have a wedding present for you—it will be a mirror & in it, you will see the world as it sees you?"
We have Marianne Faithfull’s "autobiographical" word that such a speed-screed was no exception. Whenever she visited his suite, "day after day . . . Dylan was constantly going over to the typewriter and pounding away. . . . In the middle of a conversation he would tear himself away and toss off a song, a poem, a new chapter of his book, a one-act play. It was a wonder to behold." Unfortunately, when she clumsily spurned his advances, "without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin. He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, which he let fall into the wastepaper basket." Which makes one wonder whether this girl on her "chrome horse" could be the Miss Lonely who, in rejecting the great poet-singer, prompted him to imagine some kind of pain she was "bound to meet up with." (And did.) His description of someone who had "gone to the finest school alright, Miss Lonely / But . . . only used to get juiced in it," concisely describes Marianne’s well-
documented convent-school upbringing.
But this broken English gal is hardly the only candidate for Miss Lonely. Joan Baez may have been no princess, but she fancied herself the Queen of the Folk Revival, and when her name came up in conversation with Robert Shelton nine months later, Dylan still described her as someone heading for a fall: "I feel bad for her, because she has nobody to turn to that’s going to be straight with her. . . . She hasn’t got that much in common with street vagabonds who play insane instruments." Or mystery tramps, I suspect.
There is another candidate Dylan only belatedly recognized as the song’s possible target—himself. As he candidly told his first biographer, it took the motorcycle accident for him to realize "that when I used words like ‘he’ and ‘it’ and ‘they,’ and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me." And he had, after all, sung, "I’m a rolling stone," to Pennebaker’s camera at an impromptu hotel room session earlier in the month—the opening line of Hank Williams’s "Lost Highway," which Dylan made a part of a twenty-minute "country" medley. Also, in conversation with an English journalist before the tour, he spoke of a time when he could be invisible again and have "no secrets to conceal": "In a couple of years I shall be right back where I started—an unknown."
"Like a Rolling Stone" on one level operates as just another interior mirror, at least while it remained "just a rhythm thing on paper." The moment when Dylan "thought of it as a song" came not in London but in "a little cabin in Woodstock, which we rented from Peter Yarrow’s mother," where he found himself "at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, ‘How does it feel?’" When the paper actually started singing perhaps the most famous line in rock, it was to a rather familiar tune. As he later said, "It started with that ‘La Bamba’ riff."
"La Bamba" was a frat-rock classic made famous by Ritchie Valens, whom Dylan had seen at the Duluth Armory three days before he became a footnote to the great Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash. He even instructed his 1978 band during tour rehearsals to do his most famous song "like ‘La Bamba.’" But the words he set in stone were a million miles away from the innocent world of frat rock: "How does it feel? / To be on your own? / A complete unknown? / Like a rolling stone??!?"
It was as another piano song that Dylan initially planned to record it. But this was no Golden Chords high school debut. He would be fronting the kind of band of "street vagabonds" who could make "the sound of the pictures" in his head. He hoped that the choice of musicians alone would ensure that the song acquired some necessary textural architecture. Yet its final shape would be as much of a mystery to Dylan as its intended audience. As he opined four decades later, "I’m not thinking about what I want to say [at this point], I’m just thinking, ‘Is this okay for the meter?’ . . . It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know [my italics] what it means."
Yet it was only after an afternoon spent auditioning the studio band on the likes of "Phantom Engineer" and "Killing Me Alive" that Dylan introduced the assembled throng of soundmen and sound men to the song. It is something of a mystery why he’d been holding back, but when Wilson finally did begin rolling tape, it is Bloomfield whom one hears directing the musicians, not Dylan. It is as if its auteur cannot bear to reduce this particular song down to mere chords, bars, and keys.
Thirty years later, Dylan told Kurt Loder, "I don’t think a song like ‘Rolling Stone’ could have been done any other way. What are you gonna do, chart it out?" Yet his reliance on serendipity—again—almost proved as much a disaster as his date with the Bluesbreakers had been. As it is, all five takes attempted on that first June afternoon—including the one in 3/4 time included on The Bootleg Series—petered out before the musicians got the sound of revolution in their heads. As Greil Marcus has recently written in his book-long study of the song, "At this point, ‘How does it feel?’ is very nearly the whole song."
Only on June 16—a session he probably hadn’t planned on, hence why the studio log continued to be dated the fifteenth—did "Like a Rolling Stone" acquire some flesh on its bare bones. And it only happened because Dylan held back from punctuating the song’s intro with that trademark harmonica whine, while surrendering the piano to the ever-capable Paul Griffin and switching to a barely-audible electric rhythm. Griffin, in turn, allowed himself to be supplanted at the organ by Al Kooper, a friend of Tom Wilson who had snuck into the session as a "stand-by" guitarist only to hi-jack it with a stopgap organ sound that proved unique largely because it was born of intuitive ineptitude. As Kooper put it in his own unreliable memoir, he was "like a little kid fumbling in the dark for a light switch."
Thankfully, he was allowed a couple of rehearsal takes and a false start to figure his part out before, on take four, lightning struck. The confluence of important words, that frat-rock melody, its steady rhythm of hatred, a happenstance of masterful musicians, and the hippest producer on the block fused together, and stayed together, for the six solid minutes it took to break all the rules. For all time.
Yet Dylan still wasn’t sure whether lightning might strike twice, so he put the band through eleven more takes, without even finishing the song a second time, let alone surpassing this one radical, nay revolutionary, moment. The song has already passed beyond his and their command, as take eight decisively demonstrates. Marcus’s description of that version suggests just how fortunate they had been to catch lightning in a bottle:
Dylan leads on harmonica, the bass is strong—and the drums have turned martial and busy, undermining the song from the start. It’s a mess, but it’s alive, scattershot, everyone reaching in a different direction. The more oppressively Gregg plays, Griffin plays more foolishly. "WHOOAA—you’ve gone to the finest schools," Dylan shouts, riding the bucking line. The second verse is crackling. . . . Dylan is flying solo. His rhythm guitar is pushing; Bloomfield is all but silent. Then Bloomfield picks up a theme from the piano—he has lost his own hold on the song. Budda bump, budda bump, say the drums, and by now that’s all they say. The take breaks off two words into the last verse.
Undaunted, Dylan drove yet more nails into Miss Lonely’s coffin, until everyone present had almost forgotten how great the song had been just an hour or two earlier. Even then he couldn’t resist seeing
if he might make up something equally mercurial on the spot, running through the never-to-be-finished "Why Do You Have to Be So Frantic?" Only when Wilson rolled the tape back, cutting an acetate of take four for the
songwriter to take with him, did what had been achieved truly sink in. As Dylan recalled twenty-two proud years later, "We [then] took an acetate of it down to my manager’s house on Gramercy Park and different people kept coming and going and we played it on the record player all night."
Dylan learned an important lesson that afternoon—never flog a song to death, eke out its essence, and, if it won’t yield it up, be stoic in the face of any resistance. It is another irony that he realized perhaps his most perfect studio recording by relying wholly on intuition, and then later found it nigh on impossible to get back to that feeling in subsequent performances. He has come close to redefining other breakthrough songs from the pre-accident era onstage. But "Like a Rolling Stone" has almost always proved beyond post-accident Bob.
Even its live debut at Newport teeters on the edge of disaster, despite Dylan’s best efforts (and the recent DVD shows just how much he is pushing himself). Thankfully the furor over the gesture itself, playing electric blues at a goddamn folk festival, soon overtook any question regarding the actual quality of the set. For a while afterward, though, "Rolling Stone" continued to scale the heights—just as long as Dylan had sufficient reason to focus on that "steady hatred" that originally inspired it, as he did at most stops along the way throughout his 1966 world tour. The legendary Manchester performance soars because he found himself compared to a false apostle (which made a change from the Messianic types he generally encountered) and so was again obliged to tell "someone something they didn’t know."
And the gobsmacking (to use a good Geordie word!) footage of his performance in Newcastle a couple of days later, included entire on the No Direction Home DVD, proves no less maelstromic. Here we can see he is visibly speeding out of his brains and probably more than a little miffed that the Mr. Jones puffing on his pipe in the front row thinks he’s attending a poetry recital. But of all the songs written within the vortex, "Like a Rolling Stone" is the one that should have been pensioned off along with the remains of the Triumph Bonneville he mangled on that back road leading up to the rustic retreat where he first heard a piece of paper singing to him, "How does it feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel?"
{149} WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE SO FRANTIC?
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 16, 1965—1 take.
Recorded last at a session that had become a series of frustrations after the sublimity that was "Like a Rolling Stone" take four (remake), this weird little one-verse fragment was assigned a CO reference number (CO 86449) and even circulates among collectors, yet was still omitted from Michael Krogsgaard’s online sessionography. Admittedly not a substantial addition to the canon, it nonetheless hardly deserves to be written out of history, providing a presentiment of all the problems that would dog Dylan in the studio in the months separating Highway 61 Revisited from its successor.
Dylan once told holy man Allen Ginsberg, as he started coming out of his post-accident haze, that he sometimes used to "go into a studio and chat up the musicians and babble into the microphone then rush into the control room and listen to what [I] said, and write it down, and then maybe arrange it a little bit, and then maybe rush back out in front and sing it [again]!" Such an approach seems like the only credible explanation for this babbling lyric:
Why should you have to be so frantic, you always wanted to live life in the past,
Now why [d’ya wanna] be so Atlantic, you finally got your wish at last.
You used to be oh so modest, with your arm around your cigarette machine,
Now you lost it all, I see, an’ all you got is your two-dollar bill and your hat full of gasoline.
From this veritable freefall of random words, maybe one line would have been worth transferring to one of the new songs he had started writing ("with your arm around your cigarette machine"). The whole attitude, though, would survive intact on most Highway 61 songs. Yet again he is laying into some "victim, swimming in lava," telling her/him, "Now you lost it all." Here is the same man who told the Bay Area press, later in the year, that he wrote such songs because he wanted "to needle ’em." The song, like the session, peters out, but the riff will hang around, as this "holy slow train" ultimately transforms itself, fourteen years on, into Slow Train Coming—for here, in the raw, I kid you not, is the "Slow Train" riff, writ rough.
{150} TOMBSTONE BLUES
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: [Newport Folk Festival, July 24(?), 1965] Forest Hills, NY, August 28, 1965.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 29, 1965—12 takes [H61—tk.12] [NDH—tk.9].
I’ve stopped composing and singing anything that has either a reason to be written or a motive to be sung. . . . My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing—only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called the Nowhere. —Bob Dylan, January 1966
Should it be true that Dylan wrote almost all of Highway 61 Revisited, plus his next two singles, in the six weeks that separate the "Like a Rolling Stone" session from the "album sessions," then genius is the mot juste for this man-on-the-edge. According to Dylan, all these songs were written in the new home he had acquired in Woodstock for him and his already pregnant partner, Sara (and assuming Jesse was conceived in May, he didn’t yet know he was about to be a father). As he told Shelton, "When I got back from England . . . I bought me a thirty-one room house. . . . I wrote Highway 61 Revisited there."
Dylan had been visiting Woodstock since 1963, staying either at the home of Peter Yarrow or in a cabin on the estate of his manager Albert Grossman. And he had already written some important songs there—especially the previous summer, when "entertaining" Joan Baez and her in-laws, the Fariñas. But he had yet to use Woodstock as a base for the rigorous regime required when writing an entire album in one inspirational spurt—as he had tried with Another Side (London and Vernilya) and Bringing It All Back Home (Carmel, Woodstock, and New York). Now, after "Like a Rolling Stone" opened everything up, he believed he could to do the same with his next offering.
Dylan later said he felt "inspired" to buy this extravagant edifice after a visit to the Lennons’ while in London. John and Cynthia’s suburban retreat, in Esher, Surrey, was full of the bric-a-brac of a compulsive collector. And though he did not share Lennon’s penchant for clutter, he had found a woman who understood his need for solitude; he needed the time and space to write a whole album of songs that not only rewrote the book, but ripped up a number of esteemed "how to write a song" textbooks.
"Tombstone Blues"—the one post–"Rolling Stone" song he tried out on the Newport throng (albeit during an acoustic workshop!), and the first song completed when work resumed at Studio A on July 29—was probably the first song he finished after being struck by lyrical lightning. Indeed, on Highway 61 Revisited he placed it directly after his new hit single. "Tombstone Blues" represents the formal unveiling of what would become the stock scenario for a midperiod electric Dylan song, or as Paul Cable put it, "the typical melee of totally unrelated events involving totally unrelated weirdo characters."
In this particular instance, these characters include the likes of Paul Revere’s horse (though not Revere himself), Belle Star (who reappears twenty years later on Empire Burlesque), Jack the Ripper (now enough of a worthy to join the Chamber of Commerce), John the Baptist (who is torturing a thief—possibly in the night), and Gypsy Davey (who carries a blowtorch, in case the "glamor" doesn’t work). The whole madcap menagerie culminates in an inspired deconstruction of the kind of moralizing coda he used to rely on:
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge.
Such magnanimity proves all too rare on the remainder of the album, as ever more Byzantine works poured forth in the weeks to come. Clearly feeling that "Tombstone Blues" was another important statement, Dylan used it as the opener to his electric set for the remainder of 1965, having found the bar band he’d always wanted. In 1984, when he reverted to the bar-band aesthetic with more mixed results, the song returned to live duties. And it enjoyed a third wind in 1995, when he rekindled the kind of punchy delivery that made such a methodology aurally apposite.
{151} DESOLATION ROW
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 29, 1965—1 take [NDH]; August 2, 1965—5 takes; August 4, 1965—4 takes [H61].
First known performance: Forest Hills, NY, August 28, 1965.
If I just came out and sang "Desolation Row" five years ago, then I probably would’ve been murdered. —Dylan to Nat Hentoff, October 1965
What does one do the month after inventing an entirely new form of popular song? One does it again. With "Desolation Row," Dylan manages something even he’d never pulled off before—writing a song as long as "Tam Lin" (and in that classic ballad meter) but without any such narrative thread. Instead, Dylan relies almost solely on placing familiar characters in disturbingly unfamiliar scenarios, revealing a series of increasingly disturbing canvases. Being Dylan, he unravels no ordinary tale. This is the same world he talked about in a number of interviews from the second half of 1965, at which he regularly claimed he’d "never written anything . . . as far out as some of the old songs," and how inspired he had been by "all these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels."
Revolution in the Air Page 29
