Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  {184} DON’T TELL HIM

  {185} IF YOU WANT MY LOVE

  Both songs recorded in a Denver hotel room, March 13, 1966.

  As Shelton presses record on his reel-to-reel again, Dylan and Robertson have moved onto a bluesier piece, with a simple enough refrain: "Don’t tell him, tell me." When that "song idea" is exhausted, they start on a similar one, "If you want my love." The quality of the recording, combined with a great deal of lyrical bluffing from Bob, all but defeats analysis, making a rather frustrating listen. Both songs suggest his muse is back on cruise control, demonstrating no real surges of imagination. Neither song was destined for greater things, and were it not for Shelton’s trusty Uher, both would doubtless have been forgotten in the cold glare of a Denver day. Dylan, meanwhile, seemed surprisingly blasé about those songs that slipped away with the dawn, telling one set of pressmen at the time, "The songs I don’t publish, I usually do forget. . . . I have to start over all the time. I can’t really keep notes or anything like that."

  {186} WHAT KIND OF FRIEND IS THIS?

  Recorded in a Glasgow hotel room, May 19, 1966.

  Dylan’s decision not to "keep notes or anything like that" means we have very little idea what kind of songs he continued composing between Denver and the "last hair-pin curve," five months away—the same amount of time it took Dylan to write Blonde on Blonde. Even touring with a camera crew throughout May failed to yield a great deal, perhaps because filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker felt that, "unlike Don’t Look Back . . . this film centred on the stage—he came to life in the middle of that stage and . . . that was really the kind of film we started to make."

  The one exception, a hotel-room session on a rainy afternoon in Glasgow before another night’s catharsis, was not filmed by Pennebaker, who was returning from a couple of days in Europe, but by second cameraman and editor, Howard Alk, who had quite different ideas about what they should be filming (it was Alk’s idea to interrogate the audience as it left the Free Trade Hall). Thanks to director-for-a-day Alk, Dylan and Robertson are caught on camera working on three "song ideas" together. And like the Denver hotel session, the first song idea they are working on seems to be fairly fully developed, with a clear structure, just requiring some lightly seasoned lyrics.

  Perhaps this is because Dylan acquired the basic idea from Koko Taylor’s 1964 recording of "What Kind of Man Is This?" as Michael Krogsgaard suggests in Twenty Years of Recording. I’m not entirely convinced. Original or not—and the song was copyrighted to Dylan alone—it has its share of archetypal themes for a midsixties Dylan composition: betrayal ("What kind of friend is this? / Laughs at me behind my back"); an inability to take a hint ("Make me holler to and fro. . . . Who wants to go everywhere I wanna go"); and the destructive capabilities of women ("I give her everything and she come back with it all to bits"). Hardly the kind of themes Koko made into a trademark.

  Yes, the recorded lyrics are slightly garbled, but nowhere near as garbled as the version transcribed and copyrighted in December 1978 (when Eat the Document was due to be broadcast for the first and last time). The transcriber manages to transmute one line into, "Well, she ain’t good-looking but she keeps on turtle-doving in the backyard bed." Very Highway 61, but not remotely what Dylan sings ("Well, she ain’t good lookin’ / But she knows how to get [a turtledove] / In a pack of beans"!?). OK, not a whole lot more cogent, but then Dylan is making most of these lyrics up, as indicated by the fuller version available on audio, where he and Robbie can be heard doing a dry run of the first verse, which is merely the sound of syllables clashing, before running the song down for the benefit of Alk’s camera.

  {187} I CAN’T LEAVE HER BEHIND

  {188} ON A RAINY AFTERNOON

  Both songs recorded in a Glasgow hotel room, May 19, 1966.

  Like "What Kind of Friend Is This?," both these "songs" were copyrighted in 1978, in readiness for broadcast. And like that song, the transcripts are hopeless. Yes, Dylan slides in and out of coherence on both "songs," particularly "On a Rainy Afternoon," but like "Tell Me, Momma," there are telling phrases that shouldn’t have defeated His Deafness. In fact, copyrighting them as two separate songs is a slight swindle. They are two streams drawn from the same river, as a more complete tape of the session—acquired from The Band’s own booty and bootlegged in the nineties—makes clear.

  The Eat the Document version of "On a Rainy Afternoon," it turns out, is only the first half of the performance, which continues in a slightly more coherent vein after Dylan suggests that Robertson play the same chords but "twice as slow," moving ever sooooo slowly toward "I Can’t Leave Her Behind." Even the "lyrics" are now leaning in that direction: "I’ll be on my way to get it to you / I’ll be with my sister, too / I can’t find [?] what to do / I’m trying to get a message to you."

  When they finally get to the fragment later copyrighted as "I Can’t Leave Her Behind"—which apparently only exists as the minute-long snippet seen early on in Eat the Document—Dylan has decided that, even though she "leads me where she goes," he can’t live without her. If necessary he will "stay here night and day," but he just "can’t leave her behind." The similarities shared by both "songs" proved sufficient for Martin Scorcese to include what purported to be a complete "I Can’t Leave Her Behind" as a bonus feature on the No Direction Home DVD. Unfortunately it is no such thing—it is the version of "On a Rainy Afternoon" already featured in Eat the Document. Oops.

  [1] Dylan tells Fass, on his radio show, that they have just done three days of album-sessions, but that they have just a single to show for it.

  [2] According to the studio log, just takes five, eleven, and twenty (incorrectly labelled as nineteen) were complete, with ten long false starts, and seven short false starts.

  { 1967: I—The Basement Tapes }

  "When it all came crashing down / I became withdrawn," the man later claimed. Just not yet. 1967 is qualitatively, and may even be numerically (if we ever get our hands on those missing basement reels), Dylan’s most productive year as a songwriter, topping even 1965. It is so creative that I have divided it into two sections, one covering the spring and summer, the other the fall. The basement tape sessions—which began some time in the spring and ran for several months—seem to have taken place in stages, first in Dylan’s Red Room, then at the fabled Big Pink house The Band were renting in West Saugerties, and, finally, on Wittenberg Road.

  Any order applied to these songs is speculative, though at least in my case it is based on the reels themselves and the order they came in. But, oh, for Garth taking a pen and putting a date or even a number on those precious boxes. No less confusing is how many basement songs there were. Certainly somewhat more than the sixteen songs released officially in 1975. Ten of the fourteen acetate songs, copyrighted pre–John Wesley Harding, form the cream of the year’s homegrown output. Some of these acetate songs—"I Shall Be Released," "The Mighty Quinn," and "This Wheel’s on Fire"—would become signature songs for other artists, but the original versions stayed underground. Then there are those eternal mysteries, "I’m Not There" and "Sign on the Cross," seemingly among the earliest of the Dylan originals which qualify as more than bacchanalian jams. All in all, a mystery in need of unraveling . . .

  {189} YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR NAME

  Rumored to be recorded in Woodstock, circa spring 1967.

  The Dylan of Chronicles may well suggest he couldn’t get no peace post-crash—even in Peacenik Central, a.k.a. Woodstock—but it actually took nine months after his motorcycle accident before any reporter bothered tracking him down to ask, What gives? It is hard to imagine a figure as central to today’s zeitgeist being accorded the same respect, if that’s the right word. By the spring of 1967, though, the natives were becoming restless, and two New York journalists did make the trek upstate. One was an old friend, Al Aronowitz, and the other a workaday scribe for the Daily News, Michael Iachetta, who had interviewed the man once
before, four years earlier.

  Both found a Dylan talking about writing songs again—but not admitting to recording them! To Iachetta, Dylan proved surprisingly forthright, claiming, "Songs are in my head like they always are. [But] they’re not goin’ to get written down until some things are evened up." Evidently, he had been spending some of his down time reading the contracts he’d signed with his record label and manager. But whereas Dylan had told the Daily News reporter he was going to "have to get better before I do any singing on records," he was already soliciting Aronowitz’s opinion about two songs he had in his head that he’d not yet "written down."

  Only one of them, though, seems to have had a title—or at least the nub of a song in the making. The lines quoted in Aronowitz’s article "A Family Album," published in the short-lived Cheetah, suggest a re-evaluation of personal goals had definitely occurred during Dylan’s recuperation. "You can change your name / But you can’t run away from yourself" sounds like the same man who just told Iachetta, "What I’ve been doing mostly is . . . thinkin’ about where I’m goin’ and why am I runnin’ and am I mixed up too much and what am I knowin’ and what am I givin’ and what am I takin’." When Aronowitz expressed a preference for the unnamed song over the one quoted, Dylan told Robertson, "We shouldn’t keep any music critics around here. We just lost another song."

  The songs Aronowitz heard firsthand that spring were played to him solo by Dylan, "sitting at an electric piano . . . [in] a rambling American chateau of mahogany-stained shingles that clung to a mountaintop," i.e., at his Byrdcliffe home. As an intriguing aside, Aronowitz states elsewhere in his article that "Dylan [is] writing ten new songs a week, [and] rehearsing them in his living room with Robertson’s group [sic], the Hawks," providing confirmation that Dylan and the Hawks were already working in the Red Room, as it was called, rather than the Big Pink basement (actually a garage), where they would relocate later in the summer.

  One presumes Aronowitz heard evidence of these "ten new songs a week" on tape. Hence his enthusiasm. Yet despite allowing Garth’s trusty portable reel-to-reel recorder to roll some of the time, Dylan stayed true to his word, refusing to let the new songs "get written down until some things are evened up." As a result, quite a few more song ideas would slip through the cracks.

  {190} WILD WOLF

  {191} BETTER HAVE IT ALL

  {192} YOU OWN A RACEHORSE

  All songs rumored to have been recorded at either Red Room or Big Pink, West Saugerties, Spring/Summer 1967.

  Although rumors of further basement tape excavations won’t go away (nor should they—there are more reels, at least another nine), there have been no more surprises since the early nineties, when the five-volume Genuine Basement Tapes bootleg set first appeared. Alternate mixes, yes. New songs (or takes), no. However, at least two more songs from this period have been copyrighted by Dylan’s music publisher, Special Rider, bearing the titles, "Better Have It All" and "You Own a Racehorse." The existence of a recording of the latter was confirmed during a 2002 interview with Band archivist, Garth Hudson, who tantalizingly told one reporter, "There may still be some things in there. There’s one by Bob called ‘Can I Get a Racehorse?’ He thought I had it and I thought he had it. It’s there somewhere." (Sid Griffin, in his Million Dollar Bash, adds another title, "Chilly Winds," though he does not provide the basis for his information.)

  Of other songs covered in this ferric dust, there’s just one more we can be pretty sure resides somewhere safe (and hopefully dry). "Wild Wolf" was one of five "basement tape" songs copyrighted by Dwarf Music in September 1973 (along with "Bourbon Street," "Santa Fe," "Silent Weekend," and "All-American Boy"). Quite why these particular songs were copyrighted at this juncture is not clear. Columbia had no rights to the recordings, so it can’t have come from them. And as far as we know, Dylan wasn’t looking to revisit this material. (When he did revisit the tapes—to dig The Band out of a financial hole of their own making, in June 1975—none of these five songs made the released

  double-album. "Wild Wolf" wasn’t even one of the thirty-five songs pulled to "composite" reels producer Rob Fraboni and Robbie Robertson compiled, probably as a short-list of sorts for the projected album.)[1]

  "Wild Wolf" sounds like one of the more enticing oddities of the era, though. Clearly copyrighted from tape, it includes the instruction, "(spoken throughout)," which suggests a relationship to "basement" songs like "Stones That You Throw" and "Clothesline Saga." It also shares with other original basement-tape songs a tenuous hold on linear thought, making explication all but impossible, though at song’s end it would appear that the "wild wolf" is "howling his way to morning," ready to descend into the ruins of a lost city. Meanwhile the singer renounces his role as savior of said city, suggesting, "If I was a missionary leader, I would attempt to laugh and rage / Yet the wild wolf he’s still bubbling under, and not a babe." All very ominous, and decidedly left field, even for a cave song.

  {193} MINSTREL BOY

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

  First known performance: Isle of Wight, August 31, 1969 [SP].

  Known studio recordings: Basement Tape?

  "Minstrel Boy" appears to be one basement-tape song that took a couple of years to "get written down," Dylan performing it as an encore at the 1969 Isle of Wight festival (that live version appearing on Self Portrait the following summer). It seems to be very much about getting "things . . . evened up," with a number of lines in its two verses lending themselves to autobiographical interpretation ("With all of them ladies, he’s lonely still"; "With all this trav’lin, I’m still on that road"). But it is the thrice-sung chorus that really acquires extra resonance by being applied to its author:

  Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?

  Who’s gonna let it roll?

  Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?

  Who’s gonna let it down easy to save his soul.

  A few months later, Dylan would be asking some unspecified "landlord" to please not "put a price on my soul." In the interim he began copying some songs down, but not this one. Whether Dylan even played the song to his erstwhile personal manager, Al Grossman, to whom he was still bound contractually, is not known. Grossman was noticeably absent from the Isle of Wight jamboree at which it received its one public performance. And the song was not copyrighted by Dwarf Music, the music publishing company Dylan and Grossman jointly set up at the end of 1965, to which all other known basement-tape songs were copyrighted. Indeed, "Minstrel Boy" was only registered at the time of Self Portrait, and then to Big Sky Music.[2]

  And yet when he came to compile Writings and Drawings in 1972, Dylan placed "Minstrel Boy" in the "basement tape" section—a clear indication that this is where he thought it belonged. (Needless to say, he has second-guessed himself in subsequent editions of Lyrics, where the song has been reassigned to 1969.) The fact that it went uncopyrighted at the time hardly sets it apart from the likes of "I’m Not There" and "Sign on the Cross," both (also) composed early in the process, when Dylan was not yet acknowledging a growing pressure to deliver "something" as he continued seeking refuge from the world. Though he began copyrighting some songs in September, he told one journalist a decade later, "When I stopped working, that’s when the trouble started. . . . When you stop working, they want more—those people always want more. It’s not what have you done for me yesterday, but what can you do for me today. They always want more." "Minstrel Boy" may have been his idea of a righteous retort.

  {194} LOCK YOUR DOOR

  {195} BABY, WON’T YOU BE MY BABY

  {196} TRY ME LITTLE GIRL

  {197} I CAN’T MAKE IT ALONE

  {198} DON’T YOU TRY ME NOW

  {199} ONE FOR THE ROAD

  {200} ONE MAN’S LOSS

  #194–200—Known studio recordings: Red Room, Woodstock, spring 1
967.

  These seven "songs" had all gone undocumented when they appeared in toto on a set of reels passed to collectors by a former Band roadie in 1986. This should not really be surprising, given that none of these songs had been copyrighted in 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971, 1973, or 1975—when various batches from the basement were registered with Dwarf. All seven betray varying stages of incompleteness, as one might expect, from the half-minute fragment "Lock Your Door" to the almost-realized

  "I Can’t Make It Alone" (which Dr. Marcus intimates is "perhaps a sketch of ‘This Wheel’s on Fire.’"—maybe not).

  As I have suggested elsewhere, what we have here are snapshots from an ongoing process, as Dylan eases himself back into songwriting via a panoply of musical styles that directly influenced him, all the while showing The Band how they might integrate such influences themselves. In all seven instances, probably recorded at two or three sessions in Dylan’s living room early on in said process, he seems to be grabbing his ideas from song titles—not his own, but others lodged in this land’s lexicon.