Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  "Down Along the Cove" has enjoyed less favor than "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight," from either Dylan or the cover merchants. A mere footnote

  to the era until 1999, it became the tenth song from JWH to receive a live debut and the fifth to be so revived since 1987. In 2003 the song received a further makeover before being reintroduced into the live set. This would barely warrant comment had Dylan not set this inconsequential incursion to new lyrics and then included them as an "alternate version" in the 2004 edition of Lyrics—the only such instance of a "live" rewrite featuring in any authorized edition of the man’s lyrics. This 2003 version, still unreleased in any form—unlike, say, the 1976 "Lay, Lady, Lay" or the 1984 "Tangled Up in Blue"—from a purely literary view barely warranted the effort expended transcribing it. Yet its inclusion was apparently at Dylan’s insistence. Shame that he allowed another half-wit to do the transcription, thus turning the famous gambling boat "the Jackson River Queen" into "Jacks and the River Queen." I trust it went down in the flood.

  {242} ODDS AND ENDS

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

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, summer 1967—2 takes [BT—tk.2].

  The basement reel that features "Odds and Ends," "Get Your Rocks Off," "Clothesline Saga," and "Apple Suckling Tree" is even more difficult to place in the order of things than its immediate predecessor, the "Tears of Rage" reel. The key question, again, is whether any of these songs predate the start of John Wesley Harding? Or had Helm returned to the fold? There is somebody pounding the kit with more than the timekeeping manner adopted on the basement bulletins that came before. Yet neither Griffin nor Marcus thinks this is Levon Helm, who found his way to Woodstock by early November.

  Helm himself suggests, in his autobiography, "When [Dylan] came back after Thanksgiving [i.e., after the last JWH session], we cut ‘Nothing was Delivered.’" And the only possible candidate for said recording of said song lies between the two takes of "Odds and Ends" (Helm refers to hearing "a great rock & roll song called ‘Odds and Ends’" on his arrival, just to confuse things further). Even if these recordings predate Helm’s return (in which case, hats off to Richard), methinks it is only by a matter of days. This reel probably still comes after activities moved from Big Pink to Wittenberg Road—which would make the inclusion of "Odds and Ends" as the opener to the 1975 double-album of "Big Pink" recordings an ironic choice indeed.

  The reel demonstrates that Dylan continued to revel in nonsense, whether in the folk-song mode of "Apple Suckling Tree," improvising a slow blues ("Get Your Rocks Off"), or writing his first basement ballad ("Clothesline Saga"). But "Odds and Ends," for all its musical spirit, suggests that when it came to spouting catchphrase choruses while espousing mock profundities in verse, the process had just about run its course. Dylan admits as much by singing, "I’ve had enough, my box is clean / You know what I’m sayin’ and you know what I mean."

  {243} GET YOUR ROCKS OFF

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

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

  A "Rainy Day Women" for the basement tapes, "Get Your Rocks Off" is the least successful of the "later" home recordings. Yet of those recordings, it, and it alone, was among the five songs copyrighted in January 1968, indubitable proof that the song—and companions of the reel—were recorded by early December at the latest. The perversity that suggested it should be copyrighted immediately—when "Clothesline Saga," "Odds and Ends," "Apple Suckling Tree," and "Goin’ to Acapulco" were cast aside—cannot be attributed to its "hit" potential. It was omitted from the publishing demo compiled from the other songs registered at this time.

  Nor was "Get Your Rocks Off" restored to favor when the official album appeared—though it featured all four of the songs overlooked in January 1968. As for the song itself, it is largely a way to riff on the double entendre "rocks"—as, literally, the kind of rocks used to stone someone, and also the testicular rocks inside a man’s pants. As such, a source of amusement to one and all after an afternoon spent sending smoke signals, but not something to savor through those Woodstock winters.

  {244} CLOTHESLINE SAGA

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

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, late summer 1967 [BT].

  The fabled "safety" of the basement songs was most likely compiled in the fall of 1969 from session masters—save for the four songs copyrighted in January 1968 [#226–9], which audibly derive from a generational copy. Its compilation also revealed four uncopyrighted songs worthy of preservation. "I’m Not There" was one of these. The other three were all to be found on the "Get Your Rocks Off" reel, notably "Clothesline Saga," another highlight of these sessions, and as deadpan a deconstruction of Bobbie Gentry’s "Ode to Billie Joe" as "Fourth Time Around" had been of "Norwegian Wood." Gentry’s account of how she came to write her song shows a particular kind of structural sophistication, similar to Lennon’s, that Dylan admired (the man usually only parodying something he liked):

  The story of Billie Joe has two . . . underlying themes. First, the illustration of a group of people’s reactions to the life and death of Billie Joe, and its subsequent effect on their lives, is made. Second, the obvious generation gap between the girl and her mother is shown, when both women experience a common loss . . . and yet Mama and the girl are unable to recognize their mutual loss or share their grief.

  As with "Fourth Time Around," "Clothesline Saga"—or, as it was called on the safety reel, "Answer to Ode"—has a lot more ambition in its lyrical loins than just parodying a crossover chart-topper. Dylan wanted to address country music’s capacity to develop a narrative about real people and still make people "think about it after [they] hear it." As he wrote decades later, in Chronicles, "Folk songs were the underground story. If someone were to ask what’s going on, ‘Mr. Garfield’s been shot down, laid down. Nothing you can do.’ That’s what’s going on. Nobody needed to ask who Mr. Garfield was, they just nodded, they just knew."

  "Clothesline Saga" thus functions as both a folk song and an underground story. In this version of the six o’clock news, an event in the wider world impinges—"The vice-president’s gone mad!"—but the response from these people who are entirely detached from world-shaking events is stoic: "There’s nothing we can do about it." It is the narrative of neighbors over the fence, people who just get on with their daily chores. This is not the Dylan of "Black Diamond Bay," where apathy has bred ignorance. He is on their side. Just as he is when Happy Traum endeavors to get an opinion on the Vietnam "police action" the following summer. Dylan responds by reinventing himself as Everyman: "I know just as much about [events] as the lady across the street does, and she probably knows quite a bit. Just reading the papers, talking to the neighbors, and so forth."

  But it is also the way Dylan delivers the whole "saga" in the most laconic manner imaginable that lets the song take root in the subconscious, planting its seeds. He had already test-run this persona on a number of songs that summer—notably "Sign on the Cross," "Nothing Was Delivered" (take two), and (one suspects) "Wild Wolf." But its archetype can be found on his cover of Hank Williams’s "(Be Careful of) the Stones That You Throw," a moralistic monologue Williams recorded using his Luke the Drifter alter ego. Dylan had been living with Luke a long time (as he recently wrote, "The Luke the Drifter record I just about wore out"). If learning to play the preacher would come in handy later, for now it allowed him to concisely capture the routine of country living at a time when he still believed that "this must be what it’s all about."

  {245} APPLE SUCKLING TREE

  Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, late summer 1967—2 takes [BT—tk.2].

  Back in love with his traditional roots, Dylan deci
ded it was high time he wrote his own folkloric nursery rhyme. And like Newton, he fell to musing "underneath that apple suckling tree," penning this delicious piece of nonsense around a melody line that had served for four hundred years or more at the behest of "Froggy Went A-Courtin." That song—obliquely mentioned in a 1549 Scottish text before becoming a popular seventeenth-century broadside—depicts a fanciful procession of animals invited to the wedding of a frog and a mouse. So it was bound to have the edge on "Apple Suckling Tree" in the surreal stakes. But Dylan doesn’t give up without a fight, coming up with the immortal sentiment on the second take:

  Aloysius was sold at seven years, uh-huh, [x2]

  If I die, bury me in the ground

  I’ll catch your mane by the hare and hound.

  Or words to that effect. It is this second take that appears, quite correctly, on the official album. The other take barely qualifies as a run-through, but it is from this "rehearsal" take that the song was copyrighted and the lyrics in Lyrics transcribed. Both lyrics are of the moment and largely slurred. But the rehearsal only has dummy lyrics, which are not greatly improved by transcription. At least in their original form, as published in The Songs of Bob Dylan 1966–1975, they are faithful to the original, the final couplet reading, "Who shall I tell, oh, who should I tell? / The forty-nine of you [can] go burn in hell." But by 1985 he’d been at the meat loaf: "The forty-nine of you like bats out of hell." I don’t think so. On take one, "Apple Suckling Tree" had yet to yield its crop, but the spontaneity and invention on take two comes through loud and clear. As Danko told Marcus, "We didn’t rehearse. One or two takes, from conception, on paper, to the finish."

  Like "Odds and Ends," "Goin’ to Acapulco," and "All You Have to Do Is Dream," "Apple Suckling Tree" has a drum accompaniment absent from earlier basement recordings. Marcus and Griffin credit Robertson with being the little drummer boy, relying primarily on their ears. The first take sure sounds sloppy enough to be a guitarist sitting in on drums. But the second take has someone who knows how to play in front of the beat and in swing time; it even has a proper drum ending worked out. Could it be Helm’s handiwork? Either way, take two captured all this tree was likely to yield—and they knew it.

  {246} GONNA GET YOU NOW

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

  A three-chord warm-up that warmed up sufficiently for Garth to hit record—albeit some way in—"Gonna Get You Now" is one song that never went from "conception, on paper, to the finish." Nor did it warrant a second, more measured representation on those precious dime-a-dozen reels. Another blurred snapshot that could have become something more—as a plaintive plea for a roll in the hay, it actively anticipates the equally licentious "Lay, Lady, Lay"—it again has that drummer boy barracking from the back.

  {247} GOIN’ TO ACAPULCO

  Published lyrics: The Songs of Bob Dylan 1966–1975; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [BT version: Words Fill My Head].

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, late summer 1967 [BT].

  It does seem that every time somebody has returned to the treasure trove Bob and The Band buried in the Big Pink basement, they have uncovered yet another remarkable Dylan original that he couldn’t be bothered to copyright, let alone release. In truth almost all the real gems had been excavated by the time Writings and Drawings codified these "lost" recordings for the first time in 1973. There are really only two exceptions—both songs of the first degree, "Goin’ to Acapulco" and "All You Have to Do Is Dream," which appeared in 1975 and 1986 respectively. Both are several notches up from the likes of "Bourbon Street," "Santa Fe," and "Don’t Ya Tell Henry," throwaways that had already been puzzlingly copyrighted.

  It was the fresh perspective of Rob Fraboni and Robbie Robertson, sifting through the reels for gold before the 1975 LP, that allowed "Goin’ to Acapulco" to appear in all its dissolute glory. But "All You Have to Do Is Dream" never made Fraboni’s "composite" reels, perhaps suggesting an even later composition date. I suspect neither song constituted part of the "basement tapes" proper, Dylan feeling he had already fulfilled his obligations to Dwarf Music ("Minstrel Boy" could also date from a post-JWH session—hence its Big Sky copyright).

  "Goin’ to Acapulco" is found on the same reel as that disarming "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," on which Dylan drops into his Nashville Skyline voice as if he’d been storing it up for years (which he had). This alone suggests John Wesley Harding is done and dusted, and we are heading toward the Guthrie Memorial Concert on January 20, 1968—his first post-accident performance—when Dylan was again backed by The Band. In every other way, though, it is a quintessential Big Pink song—featuring the usual debauched narrator, rambunctious harmonies, and euphemistic ribaldry.

  When it came time to copyright the song in 1975, though, on the verge of its release, Dylan backed away from such boozy bawdiness, rewriting two verses where on the original he’d let it all hang out. But then, as Robertson once told a Japanese TV crew, "We made the basement tapes with a freedom unknown to man. . . . [W]e thought nobody will ever hear this, so it doesn’t matter what we do." Such freedom had now been taken away, so Dylan saw fit to censor himself in retrospect.

  Thus, on the first verse he clearly sings, "I’m just the same as anyone else / When it comes to scratching for my meat," whereas, on the second, he finds a wholly original way to describe the opposite of popping her cherry: "I can blow my plums, and drink my rum, and go on home and have my fun." In The Songs of Bob Dylan 1966–1975, though, the former has been transformed into, "And I’m just the same as the Taj Mahal / When it comes to standing on my meat," while for the latter he substitutes a couplet he could have saved for another rewrite of "Tangled Up in Blue": "If the wheel don’t drop and the train don’t stop / I’m bound to meet the sun." Surreal stuff. Nor was this the last coat of prim paint he applied to the Big Pink original. By the time of Lyrics (1985), he’d decided to have another go at that first verse, which was still dedicated to the Eastern idol:

  It’s a wicked life but what the hell, the stars ain’t falling down

  I’m standing outside the Taj Mahal, I don’t see no-one around.

  Unless this is some covert reference to the finale of old friend Mason Hoffenburg’s novel Candy—in which Candy, having traveled to the Taj Mahal, ends up giving herself to the Buddah and her father at the same time—the rewrite hardly revels in the delicious degeneracy of the original. And having allowed the song to appear on the official double-album, where it attracted a great deal of attention simply by being the only song previously unknown to collectors, Dylan was wasting his time denying the good-time intent underlying that original, exuberant performance.

  {248} ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS DREAM

  Known studio recordings: Big Pink, West Saugerties, late summer 1967—2 takes.

  There are two known versions of "All You Have to Do Is Dream," both found at the end of the "roadie" reels that slipped into circulation circa 1986, and both of which seem somewhat divorced from the other contents—i.e., Red Room run-throughs and acetate songs. In keeping with other latter-day basement recordings, the two versions are quite different in approach, the first one relying on some Kooperesque organ fills, the second one driven on by a jagged guitar and a more assured vocal. (The latter cuts in part way through, Garth again caught unawares.)

  Unlike "You Ain’t Going Nowhere" and "Apple Suckling Tree," though, both takes of "All You Have to Do Is Dream" are clearly taken from the same lyrics page. That page contained a fully worked-out set of words, even if they make no more sense than previous songs. Dylan is still in "Acapulco" mode, at one point suggesting he’d returned North to a rolling-pin welcome: "Look at what an earful I get, when I go get a tickle." He also manages to apply an altogether cruder meaning to the ballad commonplace, "blow thy horn," which here becomes another way of going about blowing one’s plums:

  Destruction causes d
amage; and damage causes lust.

  Come little girl, blow this horn, hard as any horn I’ve seen,

  It’s very easily done, actually—all you have to do is dream.

  Some folk are also still arguing about what the hell "floorbirds" are, and why they "fly from door to door." One suspects these floorbirds were originally floorboards, or door birds, or what have you, but the smoke rings of Dylan’s mind suggested another candidate for the basement lexicon of nonsense. The drummer this time must be Helm, or someone who’d taken lessons from Levon. It is certainly not Robertson, who on the second take plays his guitar with the kind of attack last seen on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, when the Beatles shouted, "Shut up and let him sing!" (Not to Robbie, to the booing fans). And so, with this last enticing taster of what might have been, the Woodstock idyll fades to black.

  [1] According to Robbie Robertson, there were discussions with Dylan about him and Garth Hudson doing some overdubbing of the John Wesley Harding cuts, but nothing came of it. (See Behind The Shades: Take Two, pp. 287–8.)