Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Another Blonde on Blonde song that Dylan seemingly forgot for two decades, "Pledging My Time" was revisited in September 1987, when Dylan again seemed in the grip of "a poison headache," but was refusing to hold back. Subsequent Never Ending Tour versions have been little more than an excuse for a blues jam, though the debt to Jimmy Reed’s "Bright Lights, Big City" has become a lot more obvious with these later live incarnations.

  Note: The only real loss on the album take is that dynamite harmonica coda, which has been needlessly truncated. A longer fade can be found on the Dutch Greatest Hits Vol. 3.

  {178} MOST LIKELY YOU GO YOUR WAY (AND I’LL GO MINE)

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

  First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 9, 1966 [BOB].

  Another song that Dylan name-checked on one of the draft song lists, "Most Likely You Go Your Way" constitutes part of the "Rich Man’s Son" typescript, Dylan again tuning his receiver to this song’s setting while musing about another. When the song comes through, it is slightly scrambled. He has most of the second verse ("you say you disturb me and you don’t deserve me") and the fourth ("you say you’re sorry for telling stories"), plus one key element from its chorus ("let you pass / time will tell / who has fell"). But just like "Just Like a Woman" and "Sweet Marie," he refrains from revealing the song’s punch line—already listed as "You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine."

  The released version was recorded on March 9 as part of another marathon session. According to the session sheets, the studio was block-booked from six in the evening to seven the following morning. In that time Dylan recorded five new songs, while also finding time to cut a satisfactory "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat." Unfortunately, we lack studio logs from the session/s, but "Most Likely You Go Your Way" was recorded between six and nine in the evening. And it made a perfect opener for the third side of the double-album Dylan was now able to produce.

  It also served as the first and last song on most nights of the 1974 tour, which announced his live return. Between that false dawn and the start of the Never Ending Tour, fourteen years later, it was only tried out during rehearsals for a TV "in concert" in April 1976 and at rehearsals for the 1978 world tour, never gaining live relief. It was eventually restored to performance duties in 1989, initially as a show opener. By then time had telled who’d been felled.

  {179} TEMPORARY LIKE ACHILLES

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 9, 1966 [BOB].

  There is plenty of evidence that Dylan had been looking to write a song containing the double entendre "Honey, why are you so hard?" as its refrain since at least October 1965. As for the line, "Hungry like a man in drag," Dylan used that very expression in conversation with a listener on Bob Fass’s radio show in late January 1966. Both lines appear on the draft list of possible songs before Dylan connects the two, initially typing, "(you’re so hard) man in drag," then adding, as a second image, "helpless like rich man’s child." On another typescript he had already chanced upon the couplet, "like a rich man’s son / like a poor fool in his prime," lines he now adapted to Achilles’ cause. Not only is "Mama you’re so hard" put down as a working title, but Dylan also adds a beautiful telegraphed description of the song he’s planning to write: a "guilty for being there (or else—man feel down—) ‘song.’"

  By the time the song was recorded on the ninth, Dylan had four verses and a bridge, every line of which is riddled with guilt and depression. He also had a title, "Like Achilles." But what becomes another ménage à trois song, with a dose of that faintly debauched BOB atmosphere, still awaits last-minute changes. A clean copy of the finished lyrics has Achilles "pointing to the flag," not "the sky" (thus rhyming with "hungry like a man in drag"). And the narrator, who begins by "lean[ing] against your window"—asking, "How come you send me out and have me barred?"—ends up on the receiving end of far worse treatment: "I get beat up and sent back by the guard." Also, when the narrator encounters Achilles "in your hallway," he demands of Her, "How come you get him to be your guard?"

  Even here, though, the patriotic-transvestite Trojan is destined to win the day. We are back in "Fourth Time Around" territory—the protagonists even share the same hallway. And this time, the narrator finds himself on the wrong side of "your velvet door." Once the song has used up a number of stray sexual innuendos—even the scorpion from "When You Walked Away" makes an appearance—Dylan moves on. Of the Blonde on Blonde songs, "Like Achilles" is the only one that has never even appeared in tour rehearsals, being left alone "like a poor fool in his prime."

  {180} RAINY DAY WOMEN #12 & 35

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 9, 1966 [BOB].

  First known performance/s: Isle of Wight, August 31, 1969.

  It may open his seventh album, but "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" always seemed like one of those songs Dylan largely made up on the spot to fill out the double-album he now seemed set on. Using a fairly lame pun to avoid being banned on the radio—the idea of being physically stoned for committing a sin, as opposed to being stoned on "powerful medicine"—it represents his first overt drug song. This gives him leave to construct a series of activities, both banal and bizarre, on which he can hang the song’s simple but subversive message, "Everybody must get stoned!"

  According to Al Kooper in Backstage Passes, it was not actually Dylan’s idea to turn the song into a revivalist sing-along: "Dylan was teachin’ us [the] song one night when [producer Bob] Johnston suggested it would sound great Salvation Army style. Dylan thought it over and said it might work. But where would we get hornplayers at this hour? ‘Not to worry,’ says Charlie McCoy and grabs the phone. It’s 4.30 a.m. when he makes the call. . . . At 5 a.m. in walks a trombone player. . . . He sat down and learned the song, they cut three takes, and at 5.30 he was out of the door and gone." Actually the song appears to have been cut around one in the morning, but that’s close enough for Al.

  Given its Old Testament connotations, the "Salvation Army style" backing served to make the joke that much better. And Dylan reinforced these connotations with the assigned song title. He knew he could never get away with calling it "Everybody Must Get Stoned!" The Byrds were about to get wiped off the airwaves for calling their latest masterpiece "Eight Miles High." And the working title, "A Long Haired Mule and a Porkepine," was probably not a serious contender. He culled its eventual title from chapter 27, verse 15, of the book of Proverbs, which contains a number of edicts for which one could get genuinely stoned, one of which reads, in the King James version, "A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are [much] alike." Ever the wit, Dylan does not actually call the song "Rainy Day Women #27 & 15," though we clearly have another "mathematical song" here.

  Amazingly, this afterthought to the sessions duly became the man’s biggest hit. Climbing to number two in the U.S. singles chart, it would provide a soundtrack of sorts to the silence that ensued after the accident. After he returned to the stage in 1974, it received a raucous Band arrangement at every single show on that tour, as Dylan mixed his metaphors up some more. Even after he wrote the song’s sequel, "Gotta Serve Somebody," in 1979, the song continued to enjoy sporadic favor. Indeed, on one occasion in 1992 (Warfield Theatre, San Francisco, May 4), he decided not to sing any of the lyrics but left it as one long instrumental opener. On another occasion, in 1991 (South Bend, Indiana, November 6), he even sang the lyrics to "Watching the River Flow" over the original 1966 tune (I kid you not).

  {181} OBVIOUSLY FIVE BELIEVERS

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 9, 1966—4 takes [BO
B—tk.4].

  First known performance: Palm Springs, May 15, 1995.

  A handwritten "working manuscript" of "Obviously Five Believers," auctioned by Christie’s in the early nineties, provides another valuable scrap from the Blonde on Blonde hoard. Again the song is largely complete, though there are plenty of crossings-outs, including an abandoned sixth verse. He also refrains from mentioning "five believers." At this stage he confines himself to "just on[e] midget" and "sixteen jugglers dressed like men," who are "all [his] friends." The final line of the first verse also makes a more direct plea—"I could make it without you, but I do wish you’d come home." But rather than continuing the first rumination (and indeed the chorus to "Rainy Day Women"), he ends up recording, ". . . if I just didn’t feel so all alone." Otherwise, the scrawled lyrics are pretty much as Dylan recorded them, under the working title of "Black Dog Blues."

  The third "straight" blues recorded at the March sessions, "Five Believers" was the one that occupied him least, being the kind of song he could write while not quite asleep, but on the nod. Though every song recorded in Nashville is to some extent reliant on the Music Row musicians for its magic—even "Visions of Johanna"—"Five Believers" is entirely dependent on them. Dylan wasn’t prepared to get hung up by the song, and when it initially broke down, he told the musicians, "This is very easy, man. . . . I don’t wanna spend no time with this song." The musicians pick it up almost immediately, and in four takes we have "Five Believers," one of three songs recorded from midnight to three on that final morning (along with "Rainy Day Women" and the released "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat").

  Twenty years on, Dylan finally decided to play the song—on the radio phone-in show, Rockline—claiming it was one of his favorites. Yet he had not felt the slightest urge to run through a live version during a decade of almost solid touring. It would take another ten years for a concert performance to occur, but when it did, it was in good company, alongside equally welcome restorations of "Tombstone Blues" and "Pledging My Time."

  {182} I WANT YOU

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, March 9, 1966—5 takes [BOB—tk.5].

  First known performance: San Antonio, May 11, 1976.

  "I Want You" was apparently the last song recorded for Blonde on Blonde, occupying the last four hours—from three to seven a.m. on the tenth—as the clock ticked down to Dylan’s departure for St. Louis to resume his American tour. After recording loose-end blues and a "Sally Army" sing-along, Dylan finally returned to the kind of edgy excursion that had occupied him with songs like "Just Like a Woman" and "One of Us Must Know." "I Want You" certainly has that three a.m. feel about it, as he admits to a physical desire previously kept abstract ("Sad-Eyed Lady") or asexual ("Love Minus Zero").

  According to Kooper, it was a song Dylan had been playing around with for some time, deliberately leaving it last "to bug him." The existing manuscript suggests, rather, that Dylan was still working on the song, containing lines like, "The deputies I see they went / Your father’s ghost . . . to ha[u]nt / Just what it is that / Want from you," indicating a sketch in progress. When he does start recording, however, the lyrics are largely in place, and it takes just five takes to wrap up his latest, substantive dream.

  "I Want You" suggests someone still tempted to love the one he’s with, even when he’d "like to be" somewhere else. Again he can’t resist introducing a queen to the proceedings, "the Queen of Spades," who along with her chambermaid provides displaced solace for the lonely narrator. Nor does he refrain from reinstating the archetypal "other suitor"—this one a "dancing child with his Chinese suit"—who dogs his steps throughout.

  Dylan’s lyrical depiction of the "dancing child" has fueled the theory that he is describing Brian Jones of Rolling Stones fame. The "Chinese suit," the "flute" (Jones being the Stones’ multi-instrumentalist), and the reference to how "time was on his side" ("Time Is on My Side" being the Stones’ first U.S. hit) lends some substance to this supposition. Dylan had spent a great deal of time with Jones the previous November, finding out firsthand how insecure this fellow pop star could be. So whom did "the dancing child" take "for a ride"? Both Jones and Dylan were still friendly with Nico. Or are we back to "the real heroine of Blonde on Blonde"? Intriguingly the verse has generally been omitted in its live incarnations, as if no longer relevant.

  The Dylan who delivers the chorus is hurtin’. The need is real—real enough for Dylan to generally give the song an inflection of real interest when he performs it. The gorgeous tune helps, being a perfect illustration of what he was talking about when he told one reporter, as he started work on Blonde on Blonde, that he tended to "think of [a song] in terms of a whole thing. It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words. . . . [It’s] the words and the music [together]—I can hear the sound of what I want to say."

  It would take Dylan ten more years to resurrect "I Want You," which he finally did on the second Rolling Thunder stint—a series of shows that could qualify as the Blonde on Blonde tour (he performed seven of the thirteen songs at these shows). Here it is given more of a clippety-clop arrangement, with pedal steel and audible acoustic guitar providing more of a Nashville feel than the original. Two years later he stripped the song back down—much as Bruce Springsteen had in the winter of 1975—making a torch ballad of it. Then, in 1987 it was sped up again. Throughout the early stages of the Never Ending Tour, Dylan veered from soulful to speedy, before deciding it (and his vocal chords) might prefer the song as a ballad. By the time of the Supper Club shows in November 1993 (and Unplugged shows in 1994) he had returned to doing it in a way that emphasized the agony and ecstasy of his need: "I wasn’t born to lose you. . . . I want you sooooooo bad."

  {183} DEFINITIVELY VAN GOGH

  Recorded by Robert Shelton in a Denver hotel room, March 13, 1966.

  Having started recording the "last" Blonde on Blonde song around three a.m. on March 10, Dylan set about recording more new songs just three days later, at a quite different three a.m. session. This one was in a Denver hotel room, designed to impress would-be biographer Bob Shelton, who had already interrogated the singer for a couple of hours on their flight from Lincoln to Denver. The session provides the first audio evidence of a process Dylan had first adopted the previous fall. As he told one December 1965 press conference, "Robbie, the lead guitar player, [and I], sometimes we play the guitars together . . . something might come up. . . . I’ll be just sitting around playing, so I can write up some words."

  Frustratingly, we have just two audio vérité documents of such sessions, though both come after the "completion" of Blonde on Blonde, as Dylan continued to use this method to generate new ideas. Australian Rosemary Gerrette has also described a session from Sydney in April 1966: "I was able to listen to a composing session. Countless cups of tea; none of the group drinks. Things happened, and six new songs were born. The poetry seemed already to have been written. Dylan says, ‘Picture one of these cats with a horn, coming over the hill at daybreak. Very Elizabethan, you dig? Wearing garters.’ And out of the imagery, he and the lead guitarist work on a tune."

  The session that Shelton was privileged to witness followed similar lines, Dylan extemporizing around three distinct "song-ideas." He also uses it to play Shelton two of the more personal songs just recorded in Nashville, "Just Like a Woman" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." The first of the brand-new songs he plays for his old buddy is also almost realized. Though it has no obvious title, he ends each verse with a different reference to the painter Vincent Van Gogh ("can he paint like Van Gogh," "if she ever sat for Van Gogh," and so on).

  For all his extemporizing skills, it seems quite clear that this quixotic song, which runs to six eight-line verses, cannot be another on-the-spot invention. When he trips over the opening line of verse five—"It was either her or the straight man who introduc
ed me . . ."—he starts again from the same point, without changing the line. Even when he tries a different melody line he sticks to his earlier account, which he prefaces by telling Shelton, "This is a great part here. This is the part about Camilla." The rhymes also sound generally too sophisticated ("Kathleen" with "half-breed" and "over" with "four-leaf clover") to be spur of the moment.

  This is a song, and a long one, that Dylan has worked on before Shelton was allowed to hear it. Which could mean it was a song he had started, but not finished, before the March sessions (was Camilla a close relation of Julietta?) or that he carried on writing songs even after he boarded the plane for St. Louis. Could it be that Dylan had not yet finished working on his seventh set of songs? According to Shelton, Dylan phoned Grossman from the Denver hotel room to inform him, "I’ve got five new songs to tape," which must have taken Albert by surprise. It had been less than seventy-two hours since his folk-rock phenomenon completed eight songs in three days of recording. Yet there was a session booked in Dylan’s name at Columbia’s L.A. studio—now with eight-track capability—for the end of the month (March 30). The session was subsequently canceled, perhaps because Dylan realized his latest glass of water was brimming over.

  For now, though, he continued to stockpile "song ideas" for this album—or its successor. And stylistically, "Definitively Van Gogh" stands foursquare with other songs of the period, right from its evocative opening line, "And I’d ask why the painting was deadly," down to the unfinished sixth verse, in which we learn that "Camilla’s house stood out of bounds for you / How strange to see the chandelier destroyed." The relationship between Maria the cook, the half-breed boy who "makes trips to the north," and "a very crooked straight man" is left typically opaque. One senses that Dylan has almost finished the song when the tape cuts (after recording the first four verses at 3 3/4 ips, Shelton knocked the speed of his tape recorder down to 1 7/8, reducing the sound quality of the second part of the tape dramatically). However, it will not be done in Denver. If it ever did make it to the finishing end, no tape recorder was there to capture the moment. When the tape starts up again, Robbie Robertson is making his presence felt, and the pair have started working on another song entirely.