Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  I could tell you who Mr. Jones is in my life, but, like, everybody has got their Mr. Jones. . . . Mr. Jones’s loneliness can easily be covered up to the point where he can’t recognize that he is alone . . . suddenly locked in a room. . . . It’s not so incredibly absurd, and it’s not so imaginative, to have Mr. Jones in a room with three walls, with a midget and a geek and a naked man. Plus a voice, a voice coming in his dream.

  Try as he might to deflect such speculation, this fascination with finding out the exact person who triggered such a judgmental song continued to pique people’s curiosity. Dylan finally put the whole absurd game of naming names in its proper context in 1985, talking to Bill Flanagan: "There were a lot of Mr. Joneses at that time. . . . It was like, ‘Oh man, here’s the thousandth Mr. Jones.’"

  Dylan earlier claimed he had been running into Mr. Jones ever since his days in the North Country, in another in-concert rap, offered to audiences on the American leg of his 1978 world tour:

  In the mid-West during the Fifties, you’d have carnivals come through town, and every carnival would have what you’d call a geek. A geek is a man who eats a live chicken, he bites the head off [first]. Working a job like that, he got insulted most of the time by lots of people who would [then] pay a quarter to see him. I never did get too tight with him, but I did learn one interesting thing, and that was, he used to look at these people who came to see him as very freaky. I always remembered that as I traveled through some of the stranger places . . .

  For Dylan to feel an impulse to explicate any song to audiences in 1966, 1978, and 1986 suggests that the song "bothered" him as much as his ever-curious fans. And though the 1986 rap seems to address the real trigger for the song’s composition, the 1978 rap, which featured at a number of shows on the three-month U.S. tour, provides its own intriguing backdrop. One, it re-creates the young, rebellious Dylan who hung out with carnival freaks, a wholly fictional alter ego of the dutiful son, Robert Zimmerman. Two, it suggests that the whole song can be seen from the vantage point of the geek, specifically the one who, in verse three, walks up to Mr. Jones and asks him a line straight out of the "vomit version" of "Like a Rolling Stone": "How does it feel to be such a freak?" Three, it sends us back to a song Dylan says he wrote during his first few months in New York, "Won’t You Buy My Postcard?" about "this lady I knew in a carnival. . . . They had a freak show in it" (see #41).

  By July 1965 Dylan felt he was part of a mighty similar "freak show." As he told one journalist, the month after he recorded "Thin Man," "I don’t call myself a poet. . . . I’m a trapeze artist." At least he wasn’t one of the multitude of working stiffs represented by the journalist with pencil in hand in verse one, and/or the anonymous person who pays to "go watch the geek." And herein resides the true source of the depiction of a straight man lost amid a cavalcade of freaks. When, a couple of months earlier, he got into a heated debate with a Time reporter, Horace Judson (now an esteemed professor at George Washington University—really!), Dylan suggests the weekly magazine is aimed at "Mr. C. W. Jones, on the subway going to work." It is a characterization he repeats, almost verbatim, in another rant he directed at journalist Jules Siegel almost a year later.

  In keeping with other songs of the period, "Thin Man" dishes it out to the schools and universities that its author likened to "old people’s homes" in one interview (except that more people die in the former). Having questioned the purpose of college education as far back as 1960, he delivers the knockout punch in "Ballad of a Thin Man": "You’ve been with the professors / And they’ve all liked your looks." It really is not so very far to go from ridiculing someone for "going to school reading and writing and taking tests"—as Dylan did in one 1965 conversation—to becoming the preacher man at Tempe in 1979 telling attendant nonbelievers, "You’re paying a lot for your education. Get one."

  Whatever its immediate trigger, Dylan had been storing up such feelings for a long time. But when it came time to let it all out in Studio A, "Thin Man" came fast and furious. The album take came after a single false start and a full run-through. Unfortunately, Dylan (and/or Johnston) appears to have decided that Al Kooper was getting carried away with the old ghost-in-the-machine organ fills and stripped them from the album mix. It makes one concentrate more on the words and some percussive piano playing (that sounds like Dylan’s own), but it makes for a more monochromatic sound-picture. The original, rough mix can be found on the Highway 61 Revisited Again bootleg CD, and is well worth the price of admission.

  Naturally, such a forensic diagnosis of Mr. Jones’s doubts and fears made "Ballad of a Thin Man" the perfect prelude to "Like a Rolling Stone" at the shows on the world tour, which occupied Dylan for the nine months after Highway 61’s release. He even asked for hush at some shows, keen for the audience to hear every laser-directed word. And this time organist Garth Hudson was given free rein to embellish the song as much as he liked, as the (slightly histrionic) singer directed each performance from the piano, like some grand circus master.

  Even after Dylan calmed down, post-accident, this remained a song that lent itself to some demonstrative performances, complete with hand gestures. In 1978 he often sang the song with only a handheld microphone (something not repeated until 1995), and in 1981 at Earl’s Court he punched the air on every chorus like a man possessed. The song has rarely left Dylan’s live set for long; nor has that feeling that the world is inhabited by some "very freaky" people.

  {159} MEDICINE SUNDAY

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 5, 1965—2 takes.

  Dylan had allowed himself just two months’ respite from the studio when he booked three days of sessions in early October 1965, suggesting that breaking in two different live bands—the Forest Hills outfit and the Hawks—hadn’t stopped him refining some techniques explored on the latest album. However, those three days of sessions would prove an optimistic allocation of studio time. The results disproved the theory that the boy genius had only to turn up with any half-baked idea to leap ahead of the folk-rock fraternity once again.

  As with the June 15 session, the purpose of the October 5 session seems to have been twofold: to get another single to follow up "Positively Fourth Street" and to see how his new band, the Hawks, responded to his working methods in the studio. Like that June session, the results were mixed at best. Having turned up with three half-ideas for songs, Dylan seems to have simply jammed with the Hawks on each of them, before deciding which he would flesh out into a potential single.

  The two losers—"Medicine Sunday" and "Pilot Eyes" (a.k.a. "Jet Pilot")—would remain as one-verse workouts that never worked out. In the case of "Medicine Sunday," at least the punch line would be preserved, appearing five months down the line in an entirely different song, "Temporary Like Achilles," though I have to agree with author Paul Cable that "the one verse you get to hear [here] has a much more attractive melody than its successor." The lyrics, though, do rather suggest something scribbled on the back of a packet of cigarette papers:

  Well, that midnight train pulled on down the track,

  You’re standing there watching, with your hands tied behind your back.

  And you smile so pretty, and nod to the present guard.

  Well, you know you want my loving, but mama you’re so hard.

  One of those instances of Dylan "go[ing] into a studio and chat[ting] up the musicians and babbl[ing] into the microphone," f’sure.

  {160} JET PILOT

  Published lyric: Words Fill My Head

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 5, 1965 [BIO].

  If "Medicine Sunday" was the first half-idea that day to falter two feet from the well of inspiration, Dylan’s next foggy notion wasn’t even deemed worthy of a name or a CO number. The tape log makes no mention of "Jet Pilot" until a later hand has written beneath, "Jet Pilot 2nd leader on tape UNANNOUNCED. Has been lifted off on to SW 63115" (a project undertaken in 19
70 to catalog "interesting" unused Dylan studio material, for purpose/s unknown). And yet, according to Krogsgaard’s sessionography, there were seven attempted takes of this unlogged song, a claim I find rather hard to credit.[1] The version on Biograph sure sounds like a one-off, as Dylan again demonstrates a keen fascination with transvestism:

  Well, she’s got jet pilot eyes, from her hips on down,

  All the bombadiers are tryin’ to force her out of town.

  She’s five feet nine and she carries a monkey-wrench,

  She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch.

  She’s got all the downtown boys, all at her command

  But you got to watch her closely, ’cause she ain’t no woman, she’s a man.

  Was Dylan just flirting with something he considered transgressive? Or could it be that his desire to recast himself as a Rimbaudian seer—increasingly evident in all that he did—included getting familiar with a modern-day Paul Verlaine? (After all, what is one to make of his allusion to relationships "like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud," on 1974’s "You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go"?) Whatever the case, Dylan continued to introduce queer elements into his songs. She of the "jet pilot eyes," though, never got to use her monkey wrench. Dylan dispensed with the idea and turned his attention to another song that blurred the gender lines, "I Don’t Want to Be Your Partner."

  {161} I WANNA BE YOUR LOVER

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 5[–6?], 1965—7 takes [BIO].

  When Dylan began recording "I Wanna Be Your Lover," it was another half-idea called "I Don’t Want to Be Your Partner," and perhaps he was already despairing of getting anything useful from the night’s session/s. Aside from the two half-ideas that stayed that way, he had already attempted to record "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" with his new band, a song they apparently rehearsed in Woodstock in late September. They finally got this fully fledged song down on tape here (though possibly not until the following day).

  The portents for "I Don’t Want to Be Your Partner," another song that stalled after a single verse on take one, were not auspicious. At this point he hadn’t even gotten a chorus that worked—just, "I don’t wanna be your partner, I wanna be your man," sung twice. (Is he proposing?) And yet, a couple of hours/nights later, the song had four full verses and a largely revamped chorus, "I wanna be your lover, baby, I wanna be your man [x2] / I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yours," or "yerrrs" as Dylan sings it, a curious form of reassurance given the man’s polygamous lifestyle.

  As with "It Ain’t Me, Babe," Dylan took great delight in parodying a Beatlesque chorus, though it is doubtful that Lennon or McCartney would have had the audacity in 1965 to rhyme "hers" with "yours." The transformation justifies organist Al Kooper’s claim, in the Biograph notes, that "[t]he songs changed all the time. We would try different tempos, he would try other words. Most of the songs [even] had different titles."

  Presumably that hour-and-a-half break the band took in midsession on the fifth (from ten to half past eleven, according to the session log) allowed Dylan to do a "Takes a Lot to Laugh," turning "I Don’t Want to Be Your Partner" on its head and making it sing. He certainly demonstrated a remarkably rapid way with words, even assuming he sketched out the direction the song might go in advance. Unfortunately, its "success" convinced him he could do the same for half of the songs on his next album. The cast of characters he came up with by the time they recorded take seven—which ain’t the version issued on Biograph—share the same caboose with other personae from this remarkable year: "the rainman . . .

  with his magic wand," "the undertaker in his midnight suit," "jumpin’ Judy," and, best of all, "Phaedra with her looking glass." One can’t help but wonder why it never even made it onto a single B-side.

  Dylan wondered too, telling Cameron Crowe in 1985, "I always thought it was a good song, but it just never made it onto an album." What its inclusion on Biograph fails to resolve is whether the two full versions in circulation, one widely bootlegged, the other unknown till Biograph, both come from the session on the fifth, or whether—as Biograph itself claims—there was a further session later, at which the song was attempted again, along with "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" (Personally I’d go with a session on the sixth, with the tape log from the fifth carrying over, as had been the case with "Like a Rolling Stone." But I could be wrong.)

  {162} BABY LET ME FOLLOW YOU DOWN [1965]

  First known performance: [Burlington, October 23, 1965] Back Bay Theater, Boston, October 29, 1965.

  Dylan probably came to regret his spoken introduction to the first-album version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"—in which he verbally acknowledged his debt to Eric Von Schmidt—almost as soon as he recorded it. As a result it was not included in his first songbook, along with "rearrangements" of "Gospel Plow," "Man of Constant Sorrow," and "Pretty Peggy-O." Two years later the Animals displayed no such scruples, crediting their own 1964 Britpop revamp of his version, "Baby, Let Me Take You Home," to "B. Russel–W. Farrell," though neither were ever known aliases of the Reverend Gary Davis, its "original" source, or Von Schmidt, its conduit.

  By January 1964 Dylan decided to have another stab at copyrighting the song, recording a rather nice fingerpicked demo for Witmark. But the registration hit a problem (presumably because of prior registration by Von Schmidt, who had got around to recording it himself) and Dylan’s copyright was subsequently withdrawn. As of October 1965 he still had no claim on the song. But during rehearsals with the Hawks, he worked up a full-blooded electric arrangement that warranted the nightly introduction to "I Don’t Believe You" far more than that song: "It used to go like that, and now it goes like this!" He also extracted two new verses from his scrapbook of Highway 61 women:

  I’ll buy you a broken twine, honey, just for you to climb,

  I’ll do anything in this God almighty world, if you just once drive me out of my mind.

  I’ll buy you a purple shirt, I’ll buy you a velvet skirt,

  I’ll do anything in this God almighty world, if you just don’t make me hurt.

  This belated claimant to the "original" folk-rock template would remain part of the Dylan/Hawks set right up to those Royal Albert Hall meltdowns at the end of May 1966 without ever being copyrighted in its own right, even though Dylan could now stake a claim to a "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" that was largely his own. Indeed, according to a 1973 Rolling Stone interview, Carly Simon was given a copy of Dylan’s "new" version to record at some point in 1967–8 by Albert Grossman, who was probably still hoping to make the song the property of Dwarf Music. Her version, though, was never released, so it was left to Dylan to resurrect his "original" variant for The Band’s "farewell" performance, The Last Waltz, in November 1976, when he fondly but fleetingly recreated the sound of folk-rock for another generation.

  {163} LONG DISTANCE OPERATOR

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

  First known performance: [Arie Crown Theater, Chicago, October 26, 1965] Berkeley Community Theatre, December 4, 1965.

  The first time anyone not witness to the fall 1965 shows knew of "Long Distance Operator"—which came and went in the veritable twinkling of an eye—was when it appeared in Writings and Drawings among the set of songs marked "From Blonde on Blonde to John Wesley Harding," i.e., the basement tapes. Though not one of the nineteen "basement" songs to have been bootlegged before 1973, it did seem to contain the strange melange of pastiche teen lyrics ("Long distance operator, place this call / It’s not for fun") and Highway 61–like dislocation ("I’m strangling on this telephone wire"), which could suggest a kinship with the likes of "Lo and Behold" and "Million Dollar Bash."

  Not so. The song was one of those Dylan wrote exclusively for performance (like the long-forgotten "Who Killed Dav
ey Moore?" and "Tell Me, Momma," the immediate successor to "Long Distance Operator"). And it made its debut in late October 1965 during the electric set (the first documented performance was in Chicago on the twenty-sixth, when he evidently introduced the song, because local journalist Bruce Plowman mentions it in his Tribune review). In this incarnation the song served as replacement for "Phantom Engineer" and "From a Buick Six," allowing the Hawks to demonstrate their R & B credentials to those unfamiliar with their earlier work with Ronnie Hawkins and John Hammond Jr. And it ran to five verses, the fourth of which was later omitted from the published text:

  Well, she don’t need no shotgun,

  Blades are not her style, [x2]

  She can poison you with her eyes,

  She can kill you with her smile.

  Quite why the singer is so keen to get in touch with another woman capable of killing him alive, the song fails to explain. After all, he was about to become a married man for the first time (he and Sara tied the knot on November 22). Thankfully, "Long Distance Operator" survived to the West Coast jaunt in December when the handy tape recorder of Allen Ginsberg, in the front row of Berkeley Community Theatre, captured the only known Dylan recording. He had not taken the opportunity to cut a quick studio take during the November 30 "Freeze Out" session—when the Hawks were again his session mates. As such the song duly fell off the map until January 1971, when it was belatedly copyrighted by his music publisher, Dwarf Music.