Revolution in the Air
Page 34
A comment Dylan made on Bob Fass’s radio show the night of the last January 1966 session (the twenty-seventh) suggests he had originally hoped to record a good chunk of his next album at these sessions.[1] This was not such an outlandish idea, given that he had recorded Bringing It . . . and Highway 61 Revisited—"Like a Rolling Stone" excepted—in three days apiece. But in both cases he had arrived at the sessions with a locker full of songs. The three new songs recorded at sessions on the twenty-first, twenty-fifth, and twenty-seventh hardly suggested he had a similar-sized armoire of raw material.
"She’s Your Lover Now," the one major work recorded on this occasion, is shattering enough. Like "Visions of Johanna" in November, it was the immediate priority when he arrived at the January 21 session, and he immediately set about getting the groove right before all drama drained from this cathartic composition. After a successful West Coast tour, he had removed the safety net of session musicians, and it was with the Hawks (now on their third drummer, Sandy Konikoff) that he set about recording the song in all its raging glory, Konikoff’s rat-a-tat drumming driving the song forward on wave after wave of recrimination.
According to the studio logs, they worked at the song all night long, trying it nineteen times, five of them complete, one with just Dylan at the piano. In fact, we can be pretty damn sure there never was a "complete" "Band" version of the song. When it was finally released in 1991, compiler Jeff Rosen used (an edit of) the regular bootlegged take that breaks down on the final verse, as Dylan mixes his metaphors (he sings, "Now your mouth cries wolf," rather than, "Now your eyes cry wolf," though it sounds like someone has already dropped out before he trips over the words).
Wilentz, who before his talk on these sessions heard the session tape, never heard any full electric version. The session he describes suggests Dylan was rapidly running out of patience with his touring buddies: "The first take rolls at a stately pace, but Dylan is restless and the day has just begun. On successive takes, the tempo speeds, then slows a bit, then speeds up again. Dylan tries singing a line in each verse accompanied only by Garth Hudson’s organ, shifting the song’s dynamics, but the idea survives for only two takes. After some false starts, Dylan exclaims, ‘It’s not right . . . it’s not right,’ and soon he despairs, ‘No, fuck it, I’m losing the whole fucking song.’ He again changes tempos and fiddles with some chords and periodically scolds himself as well as the band: ‘I don’t give a fuck if it’s good or not, just play it together . . . you don’t have to play anything fancy or nothing, just . . . just together.’"
According to Wilentz, after the Bootleg Series take collapses, Dylan says he has had enough. When he complains, "I can’t hear the song anymore," it is his way of saying, "Pack up guys, and go home." However, he does have the presence of mind to run down the song solo, and Bob Johnston has the wit to set the tape machine going again, capturing all four verses, sung by a Dylan who knows that his voice "is really warm / It’s just that it ain’t got no form / It’s just like a dead man’s last pistol shot, baby." However, when the song was copyrighted in 1971, and published in 1973, it was missing that final verse, suggesting that the recording Dylan and/or Columbia referenced—the song being one of those pulled for the SW63115 project—did not contain that crucial concluding stanza. And what a stanza it is:
Why must I fall into this sadness?
Do I look like Charles Atlas?
Do you think that I still got what you still got, baby?
My voice is really warm,
It’s just that it ain’t got no form.
It’s just like a dead man’s last pistol shot baby.
Ah, your mouth used to be so naked,
Your eyes used to be so blue,
Your hurts used to be so nameless,
Your tears used to be so few,
Now your eyes cry wolf, while your mouth cries,
"I’m not scared of animals like you."
And you, there’s really nothing ’bout you I can recall,
I just saw you that one time and you were just there, that’s all,
But I’ve alreay been kissed,
I’m certainly not gonna get into this,
I couldn’t make it anyhow.
You do it for me, she’s your lover now.
Even the emergence of the solo piano take in 1980, on the Goldmine acetates, failed to convince the "editor/s" to add it to subsequent editions of Lyrics. As such, the published lyric remains crucially incomplete, as does the released take on The Bootleg Series. Without this resolution—in which the singer allows himself to remember a time when her "tears used to be so few"—"She’s Your Lover Now" comes across as just another demonstration of Dylan’s "verbal bayonet." Yet that exquisite solo take is tinged with genuine regret in his voice, as he sings of the girl he once knew. One can only imagine how frustrated he felt when the song broke down so close to its finishing end. Next time around, the safety net would be back in place.
{166} ONE OF US MUST KNOW (SOONER OR LATER)
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 25, 1966—19 takes [BOB—tk.19+insert].
First known performance: [Westchester, NY, February 5, 1966] Corpus Christi, May 10, 1976.
"I didn’t mean to treat you so bad / You shouldn’t take it so personal . . ."
is the seductive way Dylan opens this coda to the final verse of "She’s Your Lover Now." In keeping with his 1965 persona, though, "One of Us Must Know" ends up as nothing of the sort. Rather, it becomes a 1966 version of Dylan’s 1963 poem "Message to ECLC." Nineteen years later, discussing (his) songwriting with Bill Flanagan, he admitted, "A lot of people . . . come up with a line that sums up everything and then they have to go backwards and figure out how to fill it in. With me, I usually start right at the beginning and then wonder where it’s going." "One of Us Must Know" sounds like a song that started out as one thing and mutated into another. Here we can hear his more remorseful Blonde on Blonde self struggling to shed his "Positively Fourth Street" skin. He wants to make amends but can’t quite stop himself from remembering why things didn’t work out—"I didn’t mean to make you so sad / You just happened to be there, that’s all."
Now where did we hear that last line before? The answer, my friend, is in the last verse of the song he recorded just four days earlier. On "Sooner or Later," the spirit of "She’s Your Lover Now" has not quite dissipated. The final couplet of the third verse would hardly have been out of place in the former song: "An’ I told you, as you clawed out my eyes / That I never really meant to do you any harm." Dylan even holds onto that final word like a lovelorn leech.
Unlike either "She’s Your Lover Now" or "Visions of Johanna," Dylan had not quite located the song’s narrative thrust when he entered Studio A. According to Wilentz, "The title chorus did not even appear until the sixth take." Like previous installments from Dylan’s farewell to his footloose self, "One of Us Must Know" proved a bitch of a song to get down. It required nineteen takes, occupying three consecutive three-hour sessions in one single exhausting day, to capture Miss So and So. By the final session Dylan had fired most of his touring Band, recording the final two takes—both complete—with Bobby Gregg, Paul Griffin, Al Kooper, and William E. Lee—all veterans of those groundbreaking 1965 sessions. Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson are the only two Hawks who make the released cut.
As he complained to Robert Shelton six weeks later, the problem had been staring Dylan in the face all along: "It was the band. But you see, I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to think that." At the same time, he learned one shouldn’t try to make a single and an album at the same time. And he always intended to make "One of Us Must Know" (as) a single, as he made plain to WBAI’s Bob Fass. But recording his new single "took me away from the album. The album commands a different sort of attention than a single does.
Singles just pile up and pile up; they’re only good for the present."
Actually "One of Us Must Know" wasn’t even "good for the present." It failed to chart at all in the United States (though it did well enough in the UK), a failure that, coming hard on the heels of "Can You Please Crawl Out . . . ," convinced him to abandon the form. As he subsequently explained to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, "We cut two or three [songs] right after ‘Positively 4th Street’, we cut some singles and they didn’t really get off the ground. . . . They didn’t even make it on the charts. Consequently, I’ve not been back on the charts since [those] singles. I never did much care for singles, ’cause you have to pay so much attention to them."
At the time, though, he was convinced he had hit a righteous vein by combining his unique brand of folk-rock with a biting misogyny. But the times were a-changing, and even the Stones had started to tone down their single-minded brand of putative putdown. As with "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" Dylan failed to be convinced "One Of Us Must Know" slotted into the current live show. According to A. J. Weberman, he did perform the song at the first show that winter, in White Plains, New York, but if so, the audience-taper missed it by leaving early. He never did play it again with the Hawks.
Piqued by the single’s failure, he insisted on putting it at the end of Blonde on Blonde’s first side, between the twin beacons of "Visions of Johanna" and "I Want You." And there it remained until journalist Larry Sloman informed him, at the end of the first Rolling Thunder tour, "Most of the time I would much rather listen to you sing ‘One of Us Must Know’ than get a blow job." Dylan decided to test Sloman’s theory by (re)introducing it, alongside several other Blonde on Blonde songs, on the second Rolling Thunder leg the following spring, at a time when his marriage to Sara no longer restrained him from playing the field.
It remained a feature of almost every show on the Far East and European legs of the 1978 world tour, after separation had become divorce. Since then, this melodic melodrama has joined the forgotten few from this fertile period, making a single further appearance across thirty years of steady touring. At a show in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in August 1997, he introduced an arrangement of the song a lot more worked-out than the one he brought to Studio A in January 1966. Sadly, it proved to be another White Plains one-off.
{167} LEOPARD-SKIN PILL-BOX HAT
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 25, 1966—2 takes [NDH—tk.1]; January 27, 1966—4 takes; Studio A, Nashville, February 14, 1966—13 takes; Studio A, Nashville, March 10, 1966—1 take [BOB—tk.1].
First known performance: Westchester, NY, February 5, 1966.
Dylan has gone to great pains to stress that he wrote "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" with no one specific in mind, telling Scaduto in 1971 that he was "coming down hard on all the people, not just specific people." But the fact that he felt like insisting on such an abstract form of inspiration damns him. One suspects he was fully aware that people were suggesting the exact opposite (hence Scaduto’s question). Nico felt she knew the truth, telling oral historian Jean Stein, "‘Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat’ is written about Edie [Sedgwick]. Everybody thought it was about Edie because she sometimes wore leopard. Dylan’s a very sarcastic person. . . . It was a very nasty song, whoever the person in it may be." Having received an altogether kinder song from the man before arriving at Warhol’s Factory of stars, Nico knew all about Edie’s infatuation with the folk-rocker.
No one disputes that the newly married Dylan and Edie had been spending time together, after being introduced by a mutual friend. According to sidekick Bobby Neuwirth, that first meeting took place "in the bar upstairs at the Kettle of Fish. . . . It was just before the Christmas holidays. It was snowing." Assuming we are talking 1965, it seems more likely it was around Thanksgiving, rather than Christmas. Dylan spent most of December 1965 on the West Coast, as did Neuwirth. And so, perhaps, did Edie.
In his account of the period, Popism, Warhol describes how the three friends ended up sharing the Castle, a wholly incongruous "large imitation medieval stone structure in the Hollywood Hills . . . which rock musicians often rented for $500 a week." According to Warhol, he, Nico, and the Velvet Underground rented the place in the spring of 1966, after "Dylan had just been there with Edie Sedgwick." Warhol could have been talking about Dylan’s visit to the city of angels in early April (as his use of the word "just" implies), but that trip was a short one, and Dylan appears to have been accompanied by his wife.
If Edie and Bob shared time at the Castle the previous December, it might also explain the trio of songs Dylan set about recording at the January 1966 sessions. The subject matter of all these new songs seemed disturbingly similar—a cloyingly persistent female being detached from her vanity and ego brick by brick. None of them were the kind of song one might have expected from a recent honeymooner. But as Dylan spent ten December days buzzing around the L.A. music scene, he seems to have found himself caught in the middle of one lady’s meltdown. Never at his best around fragile egos, Dylan sped through the experience before dismantling the guilty party/s in song, probably after his return East. (And in "She’s Your Lover Now" he makes two separate mentions of the Castle.)
Edie was possibly the source of a falling out between Dylan and long-time sidekick Neuwirth, who was singularly absent from the world tour the following spring. The old friend apparently became quite infatuated with the gal. When Jean Stein was doing interviews for her best seller Edie, Neuwirth described Sedgwick as "always fantastic." It was also probably him who convinced Patti Smith that "she was the real heroine of Blonde on Blonde," a line Smith used in her first collection of poetry, Seventh Heaven. If Neuwirth was stuck on someone crazy about the other Bobby, it would explain a number of ménage à trois–like references in the 1966 lyrics (if not the psychodrama Todd Haynes extrapolates from that section of my biography).
Yet I doubt Dylan’s live-wire mind ever considered "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" to be "a very nasty song." Though he takes a certain delight in ridiculing the affectations of this nonspecific fashion victim, he does no more than the Kinks’ Ray Davies in the contemporary "Dedicated Follower of Fashion." Just like "On the Road Again," the song was another sarcastic blues that Dylan struggled to inject with the necessary feeling in the studio. Looking for something specific, he made four separate attempts at the song, two with the Hawks (and standby session musicians) in January, and one each at the February and March Nashville studio sessions.
The first of these forays served more as the warm-up for "One of Us Must Know." Recently released on No Direction Home, it is interesting, if unrealized. Taken at the tempo of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh," the song clocks in at six-and-a-half minutes, with Dylan electing to improvise extra verses after exhausting the usual five. The first of these additional stanzas has Dylan singing what sounds like: "I’m so dirty, honey / I been working all day in a coal bin." But as the pace picks up, he slips into the frame of mind required to parody his favorite pop band, the Beatles, who had only just released the infectious "Drive My Car":
Honey, can I be your chauffeur [x2]
Oh, you can ride with me.
I’ll be your chauffeur,
Just as long as you stay in the car.
If you get out and start to walk,
You just might topple over,
In your brand-new leopard skin pillbox hat.
This extended take allows the Hawks to demonstrate the kind of chops they’d begun to display live, Robertson unleashing a guitar solo in the class of Bloomfield for the first time. Dylan, though, does not persevere with the song, leaving it till he can play with some Nashville cats. As for the Hawks, as Dylan himself said in 1978, "We never did capture the Highway 61 sound on stage. What we did get on stage was something different, that we never recorded [in the studio]."
He still seemed d
isinclined to take the song seriously in Nashville, the new version providing mere light relief during both sets of sessions. According to Wilentz, "Numerous takes . . . reworked ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ into a sort of ‘knock knock’ joke complete with a ringing doorbell, shouts of ‘Who’s there?’ and car honks." It was only when the song was cut, in a single take, almost an afterthought at the final Blonde on Blonde session (March 10), that Dylan returned it to base, letting Robertson loose again, a gesture that prompted bassist Charlie McCoy to exclaim at take’s end, "Robbie, the whole world’ll marry you on that one."
Robbie was just getting warmed up. On each succeeding night of the resultant world tour, he seemed to get more and more steamed up in his playing, sending furious folkies scurrying for the hills. Dylan, though, clearly loved the results, and considered the song as much his guitarist’s as his own. On the first part of the Never Ending Tour, G. E. Smith got his bottleneck out and even dared to come up with a more modern variant on that "Highway 61 sound."
{168} TELL ME, MOMMA
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Westchester, NY, February 5, 1966.
In 1971 Dwarf Music, the music publishing company Dylan and Grossman formed after the Witmark deal expired at the end of 1965, belatedly copyrighted five unreleased songs from his midsixties heyday—"Long Distance Operator," "I Wanna Be Your Lover," the instrumental "Number One," "She’s Your Lover Now," and "Tell Me, Momma." As such, these songs constituted a part of the canon for which Grossman would continue to collect his pound of flesh even after their business relationship formally ended, also in 1971.