The lyrics to the songs in question were clearly transcribed from existing tapes, all save the first of these coming from Columbia. In the case of "Tell Me, Momma," it was a live recording made at Columbia’s behest, from the same Liverpool show as "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues" (already issued on single). This was less satisfactory than something with studio fidelity, but they had no option. No studio version had ever even been attempted. Which doesn’t excuse getting the lyrics transcribed by a cloth-eared illiterate with a hollow tin for a hearing aid. As a result the published lyrics feature couplets so silly they make basement tape songs read like The Wasteland:
Ol’ black Bascom, don’t break no mirrors, cold black water dog, make no tears . . .
Oh, we bone the editor, can’t get read, but his painted sled, instead it’s a bed.
Who, pray tell, is "ol’ black Bascom"? Yes, the song does present problems to the would-be transcriber. And some lines were simply never finished, even though the song constituted the nightly opener to the electric set from February through May 1966. But the opening couplet does not fall into this category, Dylan consistently singing the perfectly intelligible, "Cold black glass don’t make no mirr’r / Cold black water don’t make no tears."
Thanks to some very fine soundboards from Australia and England, it is possible to piece together the various lyrical stages with a degree of confidence, even if it is quite clear that of the three eight-line verses, just the first maintained a clear trajectory all the way through. As for the final verse, by the time Dylan got to Manchester in mid-May, Momma has stopped "pounding lead," as she did back in Sydney. The singer has also grown tired of her cries for attention. After singing, "Everyone sees you’re really on the edge," in Australia, he now tells her straight:
Everybody sees you on your window ledge,
How long’s it gonna take for you to get off the edge?
Dylan, it seems, had decided to stop using the studio to flesh out half-formed ideas, inflicting them on largely hostile audiences instead. And "Tell Me, Momma" is a perfect way to piss off the already alienated—it is loud and frenetic, and despite a perfectly intelligible pop chorus, it serves its immediate purpose: to disorientate the discontented while demonstrating the musical muscularity he had at his command with Mickey Jones now pounding out the beat.
Dylan’s failure to fully finish the lyrics may explain why he never even made a pass at the song in the studio, though it entered the live set before the Blonde on Blonde sessions. Fourteen years later he would repeat the trick, performing another song featuring an ever-changing set of lyrics, designed to alienate those imbued with Unbelief: "Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell (for Anybody)," which was also never subjected to a studio situation.
{169} FOURTH TIME AROUND
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 14, 1966—20 takes [BOB—tk.20].
First known performance: Hempstead, NY, February 26, 1966.
The first week of December 1965 saw the Beatles release their finest collection to date, Rubber Soul. Though the U.S. edition was again pruned of several songs on the British original, one song that stayed the course had a largely Lennon lyric. Originally known as "This Bird Has Flown," it was released as "Norwegian Wood." The song was an important one to Lennon (he later said of it, "I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair. But in such a smokescreen way that you couldn’t tell"). For the first time he was writing about something deeply personal—his clandestine affair with attractive journalist Maureen Cleave, whom Dylan also knew—using the kind of code the American had made something of a trademark.
Dylan undoubtedly recognized the influence and decided at some point to acknowledge it with his own version of "This Bird Has Flown." For the past eighteen months he had enjoyed dropping in the occasional lyrical nod with a wink to his new-found friends—a gesture they reciprocated on "With a Little Help from My Friends" the following year. But "Fourth Time Around" was also a way of showing he could raise the bar lyrically on Lennon, the one Beatle to have aspirations beyond being a pop poet. "Fourth Time Around" is an altogether darker, more disturbing portrait of an affair, though it emulates "Norwegian Wood" in its circular melody and structure.
At song’s end it turns out that Dylan has been telling his tall story to someone who knew both of the participants—the clue is a "picture of you in your wheelchair / that leaned up against / Her Jamaican rum"—and who still "took me in" and "loved me then." He informs said lady that his first offering to her came as a result of rifling through the dead girl’s drawers. In the song’s last lines, delivering his most deadpan "moral" to date, he reveals both of them to be cripples inside: "I never asked for your crutch / Now don’t ask for mine."
Presumably Dylan penned this impenetrable pastiche only days (or hours) before he began recording it in Nashville, Tennessee, nine days after returning to the road with the Hawks. Lyrics like these would have left most singer-songwriters tripping down their own stairs. But according to Wilentz, the song "evolved little in the studio," where synchronizing the lyrics to an archaic waltz presented the real challenge. Just three of the twenty takes make it to the end, most false starts breaking down before they’ve really begun.[2] Yet by the time he left Nashville, Dylan felt comfortable enough with the song to introduce it into the solo half of his shows, where it stayed to the bitter end at the Albert Hall in May.
There is one particular 1966 version one would pay a king’s ransom to hear: the occasion when he played the song to Lennon in the privacy of a hotel suite. Lennon’s response was predictable. Dylan asked, "What do you think?" and he replied, "I don’t like it." He never did learn to like it. Nor was he flattered by Dylan’s interest. But Dylan was not dissuaded from playing it to him again, along with the six thousand other souls who filled the Albert Hall for the final night of that whirlwind world tour. If Dylan said his farewell to the song that night, it was still subjected to a harpsichord overdub a couple of weeks later back in Nashville, making it both the first and last song recorded for the landmark LP his label got around to releasing in July.
Requiring the band to follow the words more than the melody made it a tough song to do electric, which presumably explains why it took until April 1999 for Dylan to attempt a band arrangement live. When he did, though, on April 18 in Granada, he delivered one of the great triumphs of the Never Ending Tour, caressing every line like he was back at the Royal Albert Hall playing to the gallery. He may even have improved the song by inverting the lines "You, you took me in" and "You loved me then."
Prior to this 1999 revisitation, though, "Fourth Time Around" had been a song Dylan only sang when he was in the mood. And that mood came upon him just thrice, post-accident. The one time he attempted it on the Rolling Thunder tours, at Augusta, November 26, 1975, he came caressingly close to its corrosive core. But one-off acoustic versions in 1974 and 1978 rank among Dylan’s worst-ever live performances, a drastic contrast to the way he put himself at the service of the song on each and every ’66 performance.
{170} SAD-EYED LADY OF THE LOWLANDS
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 15, 1966—4 takes [BOB—tk.4].
Journalist: Are you making up as many songs as you used to?
Bob Dylan: I’m making up as many words as I used to.
—London Press Conference, May 3, 1966
"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is a thirteen-minute one-trick pony of a song—quite literally just "chains of flashing images"—and possibly the most pretentious set of lyrics the man ever penned. It is also a captivating carousel of a performance, set all on its own on side four of the positively gregarious Blonde on Blonde. Transforming a veritable concordance of nouns into adjectives, Dylan sets out to describe the indescribable "sad-eye
d lady of the lowlands." After thirteen songs in which his new bride hardly seems to have featured, Dylan remembered to include his first wedding song.
And "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is very much his Song of Songs. Like that ancient lyric, his intent seems to be both to abase himself before Her ("Sad-eyed lady, should I wait?") and to suggest that no one else is worthy of Her ("How could they ever, ever persuade you?"). For once, there can be little doubt that Sara Dylan is the immediate subject of his paean. Dylan says so, albeit in 1975’s "Sara," a song that adheres to facts about as well as the first volume of his autobiography. Who can forget the roar that greeted those lines—"Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you"—whenever he sang them on the Rolling Thunder tour several weeks before the song’s release?
In fact there is an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence that suggests Dylan did nothing of the sort. He may have come up with that magnetic chorus at their Chelsea love nest, but the bulk of the song was written in Tennessee from February 15 through the wee hours of the next morning, while Nashville’s most expensive session musicians played cards and wondered what kind of songwriter turns up to record a song he’s not yet written. Bassist Charlie McCoy told biographer Bob Spitz, "When he first came in, he had his manager Al Grossman and his organ player Al Kooper. Everybody was introduced and he asked us if we’d mind waiting a . . . minute while he worked on a song. So we all went out and let him have the studio to himself. He ended up staying in there working on that song for six hours." Actually it was eight hours, but who’s counting?
Three years later, being uncharacteristically sincere, Dylan suggested he lost his way during the writing process and forgot what it was he had set out to do: "It started out as just a little thing, ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,’ but I got carried away somewhere along the line. I just sat down at a table and started writing. At the session itself. And I just got carried away with the whole thing. . . . I just started writing and I couldn’t stop. After a period of time, I forgot what it was all about, and I started trying to get back to the beginning."
He never figured out a suitable resolution, driven as he was by an all-consuming desire to stretch (beyond) the bounds of song itself. "Carried away" or not, it seems Dylan consciously set out to make the song something else. He had informed one press conference, two months earlier, that he was interested in "writing [a] symphony . . . with different melodies and different words, different ideas, all being the same, which just roll on top of each other and underneath each other . . . the end result being a total[ity]. . . . They say my songs are long now. Some time [I’m] just gonna come up with one that’s gonna be one whole album, consisting of one song." "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" was not quite "one whole album." Nor is "the end result" symphonic—it never departs from a single melodic idea—but it was nonetheless a daunting experience for the musicians when Dylan finally got them to put down their cards and start earning their keep, around four o’clock the morning of the sixteenth (the musicians had been there since six the previous evening).
Drummer Ken Buttrey explains the extent of Dylan’s instructions: "We’ll do a verse and a chorus then I’ll play my harmonica thing. Then we’ll do another verse and chorus and I’ll play some more harmonica,
and we’ll see how it goes from there." This being Nashville, no one supposed the song would last longer than your average pop song, though they should perhaps have considered the seven-minute song recorded the day before, "Visions of Johanna." Buttrey says, "After about ten minutes of this thing, we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing, I mean, . . . where do we go from here?" Yet keep going they did. The very first take is logged as complete, as are two of the other three versions recorded in just an hour and a half, after an exhausting day (and night) of inactivity. While the musicians crawled off to bed, Dylan began working on the lyrics to the next song he was hoping to record.
Initially, Dylan was convinced he’d pulled off something quite remarkable (which in a way he had). He told Robert Shelton a couple of weeks later, on a flight to Denver, "[‘Sad-Eyed Lady’] is the best song I’ve ever written. Wait till you hear the whole thing." (He would get a personal preview later that evening. Dylan pulled out his guitar and began to play it. After the second breakdown, he informed Shelton, "I hope you’re getting the idea.") When the acetates were cut for the (almost) finished album in Los Angeles in early April, the first song he elected to play was "Sad-Eyed Lady." Attendant journalist Jules Siegel recalls that when the song came on, "he said, ‘Just listen to that! That’s old-time religious carnival music!’ He was just thrilled with his own work."
Not surprisingly, though, it was never a song that lent itself to live recreation. Having written and recorded it in under a day, he simply couldn’t conceive of conditions auspicious enough to divine a similar inspiration. However, it was a song he occasionally liked to rehearse. There is a haltingly marvelous stab at it in Dylan’s 1977 movie, Renaldo and Clara, part of the lengthy "Woman in White" sequence. Derived from 1975 rehearsals with Rolling Thunder core musicians Scarlet Rivera, Rob Stoner, and Howie Wyeth, Dylan mixes up his lines, and slurs everything but the chorus, yet still seems on the verge of tapping into that wild mercury moment again. In January 1978 the song was again rehearsed for another traveling medicine show, though no recording of that moment is known. By then, the sad-eyed lady had returned all of her hero’s votive offerings.
{171} STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 16, 1966—20 takes [BOB—tk.20][NDH—tk.5].
First known performance: Pensacola, FL, April 28, 1976.
I used to have to go after a song, seek it out. But now, instead of going to it, I stay where I am and let everything disappear and the song rushes to me. Not just the music, the words, too. . . . What I’m doing now you can’t learn by studying, you can’t copy it.
—Dylan to Margaret Steen, January 1966
Generally the Blonde on Blonde songs recorded after "Visions of Johanna" do not take that song as a template for their own ventures into the unknown (what Rimbaud called that "ecstatic flight through things unheard of, [and] unnameable"), making it a breakthrough song he never took any further. Even Dylan felt he was fast approaching the outer limits of this particular region. Barely days before that inspired vision came he had told a friend, "I’ll continue making the records. [But] they’re not gonna be any better from now on. They’re gonna be just different, that’s all. . . . When I made my last record before this [one], I still knew what I wanted to do on my next record. I don’t know what I’m gonna do on my next record, but I know it’s gonna be the same kind of thing."
"Stuck Inside of Mobile" is the one song recorded in Nashville that suggested Dylan might still go further exploring both his own psyche and the form he’d made a habit of reinventing. A masterpiece of the first order, it was proof positive, were it needed, that his claim he’d given up any attempt at perfection (on the rear sleeve of Bringing It . . .) hadn’t stopped him pursuing it. And yet the surviving draft to the song—part typed, part handwritten, in keeping with most songs from this period—hardly suggests another "ecstatic flight." The page begins with "honey but it’s just too hard," an image Dylan had been trying to jam into a song since the previous October. Then, as Wilentz observes, "the words meander through random combinations and disconnected fragments and images (‘people just get uglier’; ‘banjo eyes’; ‘he was carrying a 22 but it was only a single shot’), until, amid many crossings out, there appears, in Dylan’s own hand, ‘Oh MAMA you’re here IN MOBILE ALABAMA with the Memphis blues again.’" The blue touch-paper had finally been lit.
Dylan still dared to think he could flesh out the song in the studio, before and during the recording process. In fact, the fifth take recently iss
ued on No Direction Home: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 (sic) suggests he was trying to do both. On a superficial level, it is the same song it would be fifteen takes later, minus the little organ fugue Kooper initially played between the verses, and with the refrain tightened up. "This might be the end / I’m stuck down in Mobile / with the Memphis blues again" becomes that most pregnant of queries, "Can this really be the end? / To be stuck inside of Mobile . . .," the change to "Stuck inside of Mobile" actually occurring midtake. (He starts singing this on the fourth verse of the take and never goes back.)
So despite using the studio as a writing lab—it was four in the morning before the record button got pushed again—it is the song’s arrangement, and not its lyrics, that occupies the musicians through the wee small hours. With a plane to catch, he knew he had just one three-hour session to get it right, but just as frustration begins to set in, they turn mercury to gold on the twentieth take (listed as take fourteen!).
Dylan knew "Stuck Inside of Mobile" was one of those fortunate instances where the song rushed to him when required. Like "Visions of Johanna," it was never going to be one that lent itself to the blunderbuss blast of the Hawks, and was never attempted live with them. It was only when Dylan realized he was a day or two away from playing a show in Mobile, Alabama, in the spring of 1976, that he decided to work out an arrangement with the Rolling Thunder veterans that would suit both the sound of Guam (the band’s nickname) and those psychedelic syllables.
Revolution in the Air Page 35
