Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  "One for the Road" is lifted from Johnny Mercer’s memorable "One for my Baby (One More for the Road)," first featured in the Fred Astaire movie, The Sky’s The Limit (1945). Though the two songs couldn’t be more different, Dylan’s vocal does betray a despair similar to the one that had caused Astaire to single-handedly destroy a bar at the climax of his song-and-dance rendition of the song (on the verses, Dylan uses the kind of seductive vocal he would later use on the altogether more rarified "I’m Not There").

  "I Can’t Make It Alone" is another kind of catchphrase that has titled many a song. Of the likely debtees, P. J. Proby’s minor hit the previous year was probably one known to Dylan. "Try Me," a song title that had already given James Brown a chance to wail, here supplies Dylan with two song ideas, "Try Me, Little Girl" and "(Don’t You) Try Me Now." Likewise, "One Man’s Loss" nicks its nomenclature from Dick Thomas’s 1950 country pastiche, "One Man’s Loss Is Another Man’s Gain," but promptly swerves across to the darker side of that particular highway, Dylan garbling the verses but unmistakably enunciating its repetitive chorus: "One man’s loss always is another man’s gain / One man’s choice always is another man’s pain." Here is someone absolutely intending to even things up.

  However, the most intriguing song within this miniseries—and the most frustrating (because it cuts after two minutes, fort-seven seconds, just as an organ break threatens to raise the stakes)—is "Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby," which draws its title from the "(Won’t You) Be My Baby" high-school of songs, but takes it into uncharted territory. Blending those elements of pop he liked to pastiche, the odd traditional commonplace ("I looked east, I looked west / There was nothing I could see that I liked the best"), and a whiff of apocalypse ("East and west / The fire will rise"), Dylan starts plowing the furrow that leads to a bleak watchtower. He has also begun coining the type of aphorisms that will mark out the songs demo-ed for Dwarf later in the summer: "Drop your load / Don’t look back, it’s a dead-end road."

  As these songs make plain, one must be wary of retrospectively applying a seriousness of intent that a communal jocularity audible on the session reels repeatedly belies. They are having a ball, making a lot of this up as they go along. As Dylan later told two female inquisitors, "It was just songs which we’d come to this basement out in the woods and record. . . . These songs . . . were written in five, ten minutes" (to Mary Travers—of Peter, Paul, and Mary—April 1975); and, "I thought they were what they were—a bunch of guys hanging out down in the basement making up songs" (to author Denise Worrell, eighteen years later).

  Dylan once suggested they spent as much time "planting gardens and just watching time go by" as they did "making music." Actually, the only horticulture that really interested these backwood boys involved cultivation of weed. But then one must not forget that the first order of the day was healing some deep psychological scars formed over eighteen months in hell. Chronologically speaking, Dylan may be off the mark when claiming, "We’d just come off a ferocious tour," but his mind was bound to take its time catching up with a healing body. Hence why they were just as likely to spend an afternoon immersed in "homespun ballads" of a certain vintage as in trying to work up their own remake/remodel/s. But try they did and, praise be, a lot of the time the Uher was rolling.

  {201} KING OF FRANCE

  Known studio recordings: Red Room, Woodstock, spring 1967.

  Most of the basement-tape songs defy analysis because of the way Dylan contorts imagery, indulging in lateral shifts from nonsense to clarity and back again. "King of France" defies analysis for a more straightforward reason—the recording is hopelessly distorted. Which is not to say that its imagery wouldn’t be impenetrable if a state-of-the-art recording did exist; just that there is an insuperable aural obstacle stopping us from assessing this song. (If Dr. Marcus can find "dim echoes of . . . Child Ballad 164" herein, then we really are in trouble!)

  "King of France" does at least fit Dylan’s 1978 description of the kind of song he was trying out that summer: "At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and so we were singing these homespun ballads. . . . They said it was ahead of its time, but actually it was behind its time." The song purports to be just such a "homespun ballad" about the famous occasion (sic) "the King of France came to the USA," feeling "he had something to say." To these ears it contains certain messianic elements, reiterated on "Quinn the Eskimo," in its depiction of someone who claims to "know what it was all about" (a line Dylan repeats at the end of every verse). The king initially attracts an audience ("There was a whole lotta [folk?] waiting for him / Thinking he had something to say"), only for them to "walk out" when "he opened his mouth." Could Dylan himself be the King of France? Maybe we are in fact back at the Olympia, a year earlier, when folk-rock "was overtaking the universe," but paying Parisians were not amused.

  To add to the mystery, the song circulates from a generational dub of the compilation reels made by producer Rob Fraboni in 1975, when an official release was slated. It seems unlikely that such a poor recording was ever under consideration for a CBS record. Robertson later informed Marcus he wasn’t even sure it was a song, but the fact that it is the only one of the dozen or so sonically challenged Dylan originals recorded at Big Pink to appear on these reels suggests it had some significance to its compiler/s. However, the song got no closer to official release, nor was it ever copyrighted. Whatever the King of France had to say, Dylan has stayed schtum.

  {202} ON A RAINY AFTERNOON

  {203} I CAN’T COME IN WITH A BROKEN HEART

  {204} UNDER CONTROL

  #202–4 all recorded at Big Pink, West Saugerties, summer 1967.

  These three songs appear to have been recorded at a single session, all displaying the same distorted high-end that comes from pushing the levels a little too much. The needles may not all be on red, but they’re definitely a darker shade of pink. Aside from providing evidence that Dylan and the guys could still crank it up when so inclined, this particular trio of tunes largely serves to demonstrate that not every day spent in the basement crackled with creativity.

  The one song that threatens to get off the ground is "On a Rainy Afternoon," which (on tape) starts midway through, betraying something resembling a song structure, though dummy lyrics are well in evidence again. "I Can’t Come In with a Broken Heart" suggests that all those country covers are taking their toll, thankfully breaking down before Dylan does. What is not clear is the basis for the song title, written on the original tape box. The line in question is not a discernible feature of the song. "Under Control" is a throwback to, of all things, the "Why Do You Have to Be So Frantic?" / "Pilot Eyes" type of improvisation abandoned back in ’65, the singer unconvincingly suggesting that she is finally "under control."

  {205} THE SPANISH SONG

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, summer 1967.

  Now this is nuts. Were one looking to demonstrate the sheer perversity of Dylan’s decision making regarding which songs from Big Pink got documented and which didn’t, "Spanish Song" is evidence for the prosecution. Having told Garth Hudson to turn the tape recorder off as he grappled with the timeless "Hills of Mexico"—apparently because he felt they were "just wasting tape"—he proceeds to record not one but two "complete" takes of this drunken revelry on all things Spanish. What starts out as a parody of the Spanish ballad "Adelita" (a song Dylan later recorded for Planet Waves) quickly mutates into a cacophony of innuendo, as Band-member Richard Manuel goads Dylan into making farce from tragedy. A good time was had by all. Not copyrighted. I wonder why.

  {206} I’M A FOOL FOR YOU

  {207} NEXT TIME ON THE HIGHWAY

  {208} I’M YOUR TEENAGE PRAYER

  #206–8 all recorded at Big Pink, West Saugerties, summer 1967.

  Pop pastiches remain an integral part of "the process" for as long as Dylan shared time with The Band at Big Pink, achieving its full bloom on o
ne of the last songs recorded at Big Pink, "Clothesline Saga." On the pair of reels that provide the first three copyrighted songs of the sessions ("Tiny Montgomery," "Sign on the Cross," and "All-American Boy"), much tape is given over to songs that either start out as pastiches par excellence ("I’m Your Teenage Prayer" and "All-American Boy") or soon surrender to the impulse ("See You Later Allen Ginsberg," "The Spanish Song," "The Big Flood," and "Next Time on the Highway").

  "See You Later Allen Ginsberg" is more of a rhyme than a song, a little piece of spontaneous wordplay around the idea of "See You Later Alligator," changed to "See You Later Croco-gator" before they give the nod to the basement boys’ mutual friend, Allen Ginsberg, who had recently shared a stage with The Band in New York. "Next Time on the Highway" does more with the idea, even if it does little more than tie together a series of chain-gang commonplaces before collapsing in a drunken heap as Dylan (playing the kettle) accuses the piano player (a.k.a. the pot) of being "shit-faced."

  "I’m Your Teenage Prayer" is one of those pastiches that is so engaging it codifies all that is good about both these sessions and everything they are parodying. Like the (non-Dylan) song "Acne," a party piece at early New York gigs, "I’m Your Teenage Prayer" shows both an innate love of the form—the teen love songs he grew up on—and a delirious desire to lampoon said form. Though Dylan starts off with the basic idea, "Take a look at me, babe, I am a teenage prayer / When it’s cloudy all the time / All you gotta do is say you’re mine / I’ll coming running anywhere," it is Richard Manuel who becomes the child molester in the night, whispering lasciviously into the girl’s inner ear, upping the ante on the singer, until he too must raise his game. Finally Dylan becomes Luke the Preacher, intoning a middle eight while eight miles high and four sheets to the wind. One imagines lines like "I know what you need. . . . I can feel it on my throne" would have had the gals scampering for the hills. Yet there is just so much good humor in the performance, it is almost a shame Dylan did not claim the song for his Dwarfish own.

  "I’m a Fool for You," on the other hand, belongs more with the seven Red Room songs (#194–200), as it takes another popular song title and twists it till it snaps. Loosely based on those "Rolling Stone" chord changes that, lest we forget, had once been "La Bamba," the recording of the song provides a rare instance of Dylan allowing the tape to run while he makes changes to both the chord sequence and the tempo he wishes to take the whole thing at. The song itself has a certain amount of promise, as do the lyrics ("Every night when I come back, well, I don’t make my return / Every heart shall rise, every banner shall burn / I’m a fool for you . . ."), though one senses Dylan becoming frustrated with the thing, getting ready to toss it out. Which he duly does.

  {209} ALL-AMERICAN BOY

  Published lyrics: Words Fill My Head.

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, summer 1967.

  On the brink of another breakthrough, Dylan decided to record one last parody of a fifties pop song—and a specific one at that, country singer Bobby Bare’s "All-American Boy"—before letting Luke the Preacher gaze upon that ol’ "Sign on the Cross." Again he can’t resist making the song refer to his own predicament, as opposed to Elvis Presley, the all-American boy Bare himself had originally lampooned back in December 1958 when he first cut the song. As a result Dylan turns the song into the kind of morality tale that would have made Frankie Lee proud. Where Bare satirizes the standard "star is born" fare—"Up stepped a man with a big cigar / He said, ‘C’mon cat, I’m gonna make you star. . . . Sign here kid!’"—Dylan’s copyrighted lyrics suggest an altogether more Faustian pact: "Drink this sonny, it comes in a cup / Yeah, he’ll take you out to his farm / Where he’s fixing it up."

  Dylan had always distrusted the star-making machinery, tearing a strip off a bemused British reporter back in May 1965 for suggesting he had bought into the process by becoming a star himself: "Build up your own star! Why don’t you get a lot of money and bring some kid out here from the north of England and say, ‘We’re gonna make you a star. You just comply with everything we do. Every time you want an interview, you can just sign a paper that means we can have an interview and write what we want to write. And you’ll be a star and make money!’" This facet of the man is now given air using the Bobby Bare original he ostensibly adapts.

  In fact that Bobby Bare original did not bear its author’s name, having been cut as a demo for Bill Parsons as news of Elvis joining the army threatened to shake the very foundations of rock & roll (it was initially attributed to Parsons on the original single). After the songwriter sold all rights to the recording for fifty cents to Fraternity Records, it rose to number two in the charts. And Dylan’s debt to the original is evident throughout, though no more so than with Bare’s opening verse, from which he extemporizes at least four couplets of his own:

  Gather round cats, and I’ll tell you a story

  Of how to become an All-American boy.

  Buy you a guitar and put it in tune,

  You’ll be rock & rollin’ soon.

  Impressing the girls, picking hot licks.

  All that jazz.

  Written out like this, Bare’s "original" rings the odd bell of debt itself. This is clearly another talkin’ blues, and this is exactly how Dylan elects to do it, riffing on lines like "making the girls wiggle . . . in their socks / in their britches," while Richard Manuel again becomes the whispering devil in disguise. With a license to play around with the idea, Dylan really does create a very different song, one he felt fully justified in copyrighting solely in his name in September 1973—which, frankly, is going a bit far, Bare having provided the bare bones for his namesake, thus warranting a co-credit.

  When Dylan recorded it in the summer of 1967, it was a moot point because he had no intention of copyrighting the song at all. Remember, he was just passing time. But by 1973 he seems to have decided to fully render the song unto himself, rewriting his original reworking. As such, when offering to "tell you the story about how to become / an All-American Boy," he adds, as a glossary, "instead of a bum." And instead of playing "hot licks" over the ocean, he is "kicking up hot shit." And while rewriting some lines to lessen the debt, he adds a whole section to the first verse, which is rather basement-esque:

  Bought a hot dog and smelled it, and I smelled the crowd

  Everybody was a-down on this side of a cloud

  There was a holy cow and a medicine man

  And a sacred cow and an iron jaw that wouldn’t break.

  That is not all. When Dylan introduces his own cigar-chomping boss, the man has a wife who’s "there and in her way / She sure does like the things you play." This here ain’t no Colonel Parker. But it could be the manager still retaining a share of the publishing company to which this song was now registered. So who were these "1973 rewrites" for? Though Dylan made similar changes to certain lyrics in that year’s Writings and Drawings, "All-American Boy" was copyrighted five months after the book was published—and two years before The Basement Tapes double-album appeared (for which "All-American Boy" was not even short-listed). Weird.

  {210} TINY MONTGOMERY

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

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, summer 1967.

  At some point toward the end of August or, more likely, the beginning of September, Dylan chose to lodge ten of the songs written that summer with his current music publisher, Dwarf Music. He had evidently already decided these tracks would not constitute his next album, and having resolved his differences with his long-standing record label (for a while there he nearly skipped over to MGM), he no longer needed to supply the fourteen cuts he still owed them from his 1961 contract. As such, the songs in question were put up for grabs to other artists, much as his earlier publishing demos for Witmark had been, for he continued to recognize the commercial benefits of being covered. Henc
e his comment to SongTalk a quarter of a century later: "If you’ve got songs that you’re not going to do, and you just don’t like them [!], . . . show them to other people."

  Almost immediately a tape copy was made (in mono) from which acetates could be cut and sent to interested parties. The ruse was a rousing success. Dylan enjoyed one of his most successful spells as a songwriter thanks to the legions queuing up to cover a set of songs he didn’t rate highly enough to do himself. While "This Wheel’s on Fire" would be a number one single for Julie Driscoll and the Trinity, "I Shall Be Released" set about becoming Dylan’s third-most covered song. Yet with every band from Fairport Convention to Thunderclap Newman racing to record something from this new set of Dylan demos, there was one song that seems to have been largely ignored: "Tiny Montgomery." Which seems to be the song that kicked off the whole enterprise, as well as providing one of the most enticing performances from the whole Big Pink carousel of song.

  "Tiny Montgomery" is the prototype for a number of standout songs in a new-found style, utilizing the kind of wordplay that would have had Edward Lear reaching for the smelling salts. Lines like "Scratch your dad / Do that bird / Suck that pig / And bring it on home" demonstrate an even greater love for nonsense than the Highway 61 Revisited songs, and now Dylan was unabashed about it. All pretense of sense is scattered to the wind in this song of celebration, as Tiny Montgomery "says hello" to "ev’rybody down in ol’ Frisco" (great rhyme!).