Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  The 1976 arrangement, almost as raucous as a contemporary "Lay, Lady, Lay," might have suited a basement-tape song better, but at least it reminded Dylan of the song’s enduring allure. He was further reminded of the need to coax the song’s charms out in July 1987, when the Grateful Dead defused all the drama at the half-a-dozen shows they shared with a curiously disembodied Dylan. The Heartbreakers gave it some much-needed resuscitation at European shows three months later. And then, for the first six years of the Never Ending Tour, Dylan tried to give it that onstage Highway 61 sound. Generally, though, these versions resembled a phantom engineer struggling to get back to Memphis.

  {172} WHEN YOU WALKED AWAY

  {173} YOU CAN’T GET YOUR WAY ALLA TIME

  {174} LIKE A RICH MAN’S SON

  #172—Published in Isis #46 in Xerox form; photographically reproduced in Isis #120.

  After the February sessions, Dylan had just three weeks before another ninety-six-hour block of studio time, in which he was determined to complete Highway 61 Revisited’s successor. In that period he would write the eight songs that bulk up Blonde on Blonde and start at least three others, listed above, none of which ever got onto tape. Initially he concentrated on typing out "song ideas," perhaps hoping to ensure there would be a thematic balance to the material released.

  What we have here, on three separate sheets of paper, are jumping-off points for songs. I’ve put the number at three, but one could easily double that. We also get a verse apiece to two songs he would record and release ("Absolutely Sweet Marie" and "Most Likely You Go Your Way") scribbled across the typed pages, along with stray lines later found in "Obviously Five Believers" and "Temporary Like Achilles." These sheets thus form part of the same set of papers as drafts of "Stuck Inside of Mobile," "Absolutely Sweet Marie," "Just Like a Woman," "I Want You," and "Obviously Five Believers" known to collectors—plus the "clean copy" of "Temporary Like Achilles" auctioned in the mideighties (reproduced in my 1987 edition of Stolen Moments: Dylan Day-by-Day).

  The person who acquired all of this material chose, for financial reasons, not to keep everything together, preferring to break it up and sell it off piecemeal at assorted auctions, spanning almost a decade, doing something of a disservice to any future Dylan scholar. Like the Dude, the suspicion abides that these papers were obtained surreptitiously. Perhaps Dylan left them behind at his hotel (or had them stolen from his room) on his second trip to Nashville in March. Nowhere near as complete as the Another Side materials, the drafts are either the product of a single waste-bin or Dylan really did write a lot in the studio.

  Two sets of ideas can be found at the bottom of one typed page, headed by what was probably a provisional song title, "You Can’t Get Your Way Alla [i.e., all of the] Time." Whether this title relates in any way to a first set of disconnected lyrics is unclear, but none of the lines link to any known completed song. Each line of thought is left hanging, including, "I’d go all the way with you, but . . .," and, "when the dawn comes, i am not alone anymore." Perhaps he is already taking too much "powerful medicine" (to use his own phrase). One line reads more like a shorthand diary: "vibrate / chemicals . . . lazy afternoon"; another couplet is pure country: "I’m sitting here thinking / after doing [some] drinking."

  Below this he begins to type not lyrics per se, but rather possible titles and themes for songs (presumably not yet written). These begin with "PLEDGING MY TIME" (capitalized) and "mama youre so hard" (lowercase) and are followed by "White Love & . . . song," "Yellow Monday . . . Song" and "i did it so you wouldnt have to (do it) SONG." Things get stranger still as he types out what appear to be six further song titles, numbered:

  1. Corss fire [Cross fire]

  2. Hey Baby

  3. Jullieta

  4. You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine

  5. Love Will Endire [Endure]

  6. Little Baby

  One might be inclined to discount these song-titles were it not that one of these became a known song (#4). I’d be curious to know what happened to "Jullieta" and friends. Meanwhile, another scrawled couplet at the top of the page reads, "Going down to [?tractor] parts / Fix all these women broken hearts to run." At the bottom of the page, Dylan has written out by hand the bridge to "Absolutely Sweet Marie" ("the riverboat captain" section). Further evidence of a mile-a-minute mind.

  All of this would be tantalizing enough in its own right. But there is another typed sheet, headed by the couplet, "like a rich man’s son / like a poor fool in his prime"—a recognizable prototype for what became "Temporary Like Achilles" (the "rich man’s son" being converted to "a rich man’s child"). Yet the song in question no more became "Temporary Like Achilles" than "Medicine Sunday" did. A reference to "five fevers / & fourteen believers" suggests he is still crossbreeding lines to various songs. The first image appears in "Absolutely Sweet Marie," the second in "Obviously Five Believers."

  He then sets about developing something around a repeated refrain that informs some unfortunate lass, "You know I’m running with the devil / running with your lover." Still being cruel to be kind, he reminds "her" of her once-virgin charms: "it’s nothing to be ashamed about . . .

  when you lost your innocence." The idea peters out, though, or perhaps migrates to another song, for at the bottom of the page is another random couplet, "you say disturb me & you don’t deserve me / well honey sometimes you lie"—a starting point for "You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine."

  A third sheet from the same cache of papers, offered for auction shortly before the others (circa 1991), confirms that a lot of the ideas he generated in this manic phase wandered down dead-end streets. It also suggests that like the Another Side songs two years earlier, Dylan was starting songs on one sheet then wandering off at a tangent, only to return to the original idea on another piece of paper. The 1966 page comprises a typed set of verses on one side, the first two numbered, and a handwritten lyric bearing a familiar refrain ("how does it feel?") on the reverse. (The use of this familiar refrain led to the sheet in question being auctioned as an unknown lyric circa 1965, but it clearly comes from 1966.) The first handwritten verse is perfectly intelligible, suggesting a song that still has somewhere it might go:

  When you walked away, I just excused you,

  Tho’ you said you’d stand by me,

  When I had to tell the people

  Cho[o]se between the ground and the sea.

  The opening line to another verse continues the same thought flow, "I must cho[o]se between the forest and the ocean"—an allusion to the coda from "Once I Had a Sweetheart" previously adapted for "Ballad in Plain D." But after this the song quickly loses all sense of direction, meandering off into the woods, as Dylan tries to tie together images of "my home . . . carved in wood" and "setting fire to the water."

  Over the page Dylan continues typing paradoxical couplets similar to those that had served him well in the past year. "[N]ow the scorpion & the sandmen . . . when they find their eyes can’t speak" (a promising train of thought) becomes "i got a bluebird with one lonesome scorpion" (less promising), only to descend into the kind of recrimination/s he could slot into any old song: "I’ve followed your instructions & I’m here now / just like you told me to be / for seeing things they say i do not see. . . ." Left there, it becomes another tantalizing thought dangling in the breeze.

  {175} ABSOLUTELY SWEET MARIE

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

  First known performance: Concord Pavilion, June 7, 1988.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 7, 1966—3 takes + insert [BOB].

  The musicians who awaited Dylan’s return to Nashville three weeks on from the first set of grueling sessions must have been pleasantly surprised to find that this time he had a more traditional set of songs he hoped to record. "Absolutely Sweet Marie," the first of these, recorded in a single session on the
evening of the seventh, also exists in manuscript form. Entirely handwritten on a single page, the lyrics are largely complete, save for the first verse, which lacks its "railroad gate," having "your eagle’s teeth" instead (the line survives to the first studio take, when Dylan sings, "And the eagle’s teeth / Down above the train line").

  He also had yet to figure out how to make "the promises you left, that [he] gave to me" less of a mouthful, while "Yes, I can see you left him here for me" is clearly intended to rhyme with that redoubtable refrain, "Where are you tonight, sweet Marie?" Indeed each verse ends with the -ee rhyme, and the song is logged as "Where Are You Tonight, Sweet Marie?" Yet the line appears nowhere in the manuscript or on that first, tentative take.

  Also absent from the initial draft is a four-line bridge invoking the riverboat captain, though he suggests it’s there in his head by scribbling two lyrical prompts: "they all know my fate" and "they gonna have to wait." And as we know, the bridge appears on another draft page (see above), so it presumably came to him while he was thinking about other songs. With the bridge in place, he cut the song with minimum fuss at the first March session. Though the band changed keys between takes, it took just four takes (and an insert) to realize one of Dylan’s most melodically inviting songs.

  Despite its obvious pop sensibility and compulsive melody (so compulsive it served Steve Harley for his own number-one single, "Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile)"), Dylan duly left the song behind in Nashville, refraining from playing it live for some twenty-two years. In that time it acquired garage-punk status thanks to two memorable cover versions. The Flamin’ Groovies put it on 1979’s Jumpin’ in the Night, and five years later Jason and the Scorchers kicked off their debut mini-album Fervor with their compulsive cow-punk rendition. The Scorchers’ radio-friendly revival probably reminded Dylan just what he had discarded, because on the opening night of the Never Ending Tour, at Concord Pavilion on June 7, 1988, he finally took his own Marie out of the garage.

  {176} JUST LIKE A WOMAN

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 8, 1966 [BOB].

  First known performance: Vancouver, March 26, 1966.

  "Just Like a Woman" is another song found among the Blonde on Blonde papers, though this time it is some way away from the finished song, with no evidence of a chorus to be seen for love nor money. What Dylan does have is most of the first verse (minus "from her curls"); a single couplet from the second ("nobody has to guess / baby can’t be blessed"); another from the final verse ("when we meet again, introduced as friends / don’t let on you knew me when"); and just a single line of the bridge: "I’m dying here of thirst . . ." All of these lines he tapped out on a single sheet, the last of which is typed the other way up, apparently part of a separate set of lyrics—for yet another ménage à trois in song—to which the lines, "how come you both lied to me," and, "he never said he’d live forever / he’d just make a fuss over all of us / but it’s just you and me," also apparently belonged.

  Rather than going further with this line of thought, Dylan takes the "dying here of thirst" line, turns the page over, takes up a pen, and begins to write out what he clearly marks as "(bridge)": "it was raining from the first / And I’m dying here of thirst / what’s worse is this pain in here / I won’t stay in here," to which he attaches an unrelated couplet, "she’s my friend / see her again." But there is still no sign of that memorable chorus, "She takes / aches / breaks just like a woman / little girl."

  In all likelihood, "Just Like a Woman" was one song Dylan continued writing in his Nashville hotel room (from whence said papers probably came) as Al Kooper sat at the piano playing the melody over and over again. If the draft does come from Nashville, then the song’s chorus was another last-minute formulation. Wilentz’s recent lecture on the Blonde on Blonde sessions seemingly confirms this. He describes an early take in which Dylan is singing what can only be described as dummy lyrics. As he states, "On several early takes, Dylan sang disconnected lines and semi gibberish. He was unsure about what the person described in the song does that is just like a woman, rejecting ‘shakes,’ ‘wakes,’ and ‘makes mistakes.’"

  As with his "first" electric session fifteen months earlier, Dylan refused to get bogged down by just one song, and around two in the afternoon, he took a break from "Just Like a Woman"—after trying "a weird, double time fourth take, somewhere between Bo Diddley and Jamaican ska." Only after recording "Pledging My Time" does he return to "Just Like a Woman," around nine in the evening. But the song still needed work, being fifteen takes away from the finished version.

  Dylan has never felt inclined to elucidate what exactly it is "Baby" can learn from "Queen Mary." The reference to Baby’s penchant for "fog . . . amphetamine and . . . pearls" (which he originally sang as, "I gave you those pearls") again suggests Sedgwick, or some similar debutante. Queen Mary herself certainly could be a confidant of the androgynous Queen Jane. And the one time Dylan prefaced the song in concert with a short rap, at the Warfield in San Francisco in November 1980, he implied the song’s subject was another "woman" with jet-pilot eyes:

  The other night I was standing out backstage, and this guy came up to me and said, "Do you remember that woman that came up to you about an hour ago with long red hair?" And I said, "Yes, I remember that woman." He said, "She sure was pretty, wasn’t she?" "Yes, she was alright." He said, "That was me." . . . "Nobody feels any pain. . . ."

  The theory that the "woman" in "Just Like a Woman" is actually a man has been around since the early seventies, appearing in the crank theories section of Michael Gray’s (very first) Song and Dance Man. And one should never discount the possibility Dylan was having a little fun at fans’ expense in his 1980 rap. But the song was completed within days of "Temporary Like Achilles," which explicitly refers to one character as "hungry like a man in drag."

  Something risqué is clearly going on in the song, but Dylan ain’t saying what. Even thirty-eight years later, he firmly told Robert Hilburn, "Even if I could tell you what [‘Just Like a Woman’] was about, I wouldn’t. It’s up to the listener to figure out what it means to him. . . . This is a very broad song. . . . It’s like a lot of blues-based songs. Somebody may be talking about a woman, but they’re not really talking about a woman at all. . . . It’s a city song. . . . I don’t think in lateral [sic] terms as a writer. . . . I always try to turn a song on its head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time."

  One thing is apparent: Dylan felt a personal connection to this song from the first. As late as 1995 he was singing it with all the passion and persistence of a still-hungry man. And though it is one of his most-

  covered songs, he told old friend Mary Travers on a 1975 radio show, "Personally, I don’t understand why anybody would want to do [‘Just Like a Woman’]—except me." And yet barely had he written the thing when he turned up at the Whisky a Go Go in Hollywood, hoping to convince Otis Redding he should record it. Sadly he never did, though the little organ intro Redding uses on his version of "White Christmas" sounds awfully familiar.

  "Just Like a Woman" is also one of just two Dylan songs Van Morrison has consistently performed live. Intriguingly, every time the c*** elects to sing it (and he was still singing it in 2000), he sings, "There’s a queer in here," instead of, "I can’t stay in here." Does he know some scuttlebutt about the song’s composition that he can’t resist alluding to? He did, after all, spend a lot of time hanging with the guys from The Band in Woodstock, circa 1969–70.

  Any whisper Morrison heard would surely have come from Robbie Robertson, who accompanied Dylan to Nashville and was there when he played the song to Robert Shelton in a Denver hotel room four days after recording it. None of the other Hawks were at the Nashville sessions, nor were they party to any of the 1966 live performances, which were solo acoustic (and intensely introspective). A recent additio
n to YouTube has been a complete performance of the song from Dublin (the one on the famous While the Establishment Burns bootleg). Anyone who doubts that this is a Song of Experience should just watch this particular harmonica break, which really does sound like a little girl sob-sob-sobbing.

  {177} PLEDGING MY TIME

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

  First known performance: Modena, September 12, 1987.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 8, 1966 [BOB].

  "PLEDGING MY TIME if nothing comes outa this, you’ll soon know" is just one of the single-line "song ideas" on the "You Can’t Get Your Way" sheet. It is perfectly possible that all Dylan had at this stage was the title (surely a knowing reference to the Johnny Ace classic, "Pledging My Love"); a single couplet he could incorporate into a third verse ("And if it don’t work out / You’ll be the first to know"); and the idea of making a pledge to a girl, hoping she’ll also come through. Another song constructed from leftover strands from the blues, this song came together with no great birth pangs, being cut in four takes while the band took a breather from "Just Like a Woman."

  Yet "Pledging My Time" was not what the song was called when Dylan and the Nashville musicians made their first pass at it, after struggling to extract l’essence de jusqu’ à la femme (sic). According to the studio log, the song was called "What Can You Do for My Wigwam?" which would be weird enough were it not the name of the very song country-picker Pete Rowan recalled witnessing Dylan record in Nashville, when interviewed in July 1966 (the interview was not published until December 1978, and the studio logs were not accessed until the midnineties).

  Rowan said that when he arrived, Dylan was recording a long blues, with one line that went "the lady took a trip with a tramp, that’s a hobo," and that Dylan’s wife was at the session, as were two drummers, one of whom was badly out of time. And he remembered Dylan calling out the title of the song, "What Can I Do for Your Wigwam, Right?" Wilentz makes no mention of an alternate lyric or two drummers, but he does confirm that the song was quite different at the outset, being a "boogie-woogie piano number" before Robertson and pianist "Pig" Robbins started pledging themselves, too. I presume the song took shape before any tape started rolling, so what Rowan heard may well no longer exist.