{ 1968–9: Nashville Skyline; Self Portrait }
Plenty of singer-songwriters would consider a couple of years in which they wrote the likes of "Lay, Lady, Lay," "I Threw It All Away," and "Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You" to be something of a golden era, but for the preeminent singer-songwriter of his time, these were dark days. Those songs, none of which were exactly "Like a Rolling Stone," were the cream of a very thin crop. On the verge of becoming a parody of his former self, Dylan turned off the tap, preferring to parody others, beginning work on a most unbecoming Self Portrait . . .
{249} LAY, LADY, LAY
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [1976 lyrics: Words Fill My Head].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 13, 1969—4 takes; February 14, 1969—5 takes [NS—tk.5].
First known performance: Isle of Wight, August 31, 1969.
At some point during the summer of 1968, the producers of a film about two small-time hustlers, Midnight Cowboy, got in touch with Dylan to ask if he had some songs they could use. He did have one song he’d been tinkering with, but by the time he played it to John Schlesinger, the director had already settled on Fred Neil’s "cover" of Harry Nilsson’s "Everybody’s Talkin’" (which then went on to win an Oscar for best song). Quite how much Dylan knew at the time about the film’s subject matter is not clear, but the idea of writing such an overtly romantic song for a would-be gigolo might well have sent
cinema-goers mixed messages.
All the evidence suggests Dylan was not even thinking about another collection of songs through 1968, demonstrated by his appearance backstage at an Everly Brothers Carnegie Hall concert that fall. Still looking for someone to lay the song on, he played Don and Phil the same composition, hoping they might cover it, but was spurned by these one-time teen idols (they later covered "Abandoned Love" as a form of recompense). The song, which ultimately received one of his most memorable melodies, at this stage probably sounded quite unlike the released version, which would itself define another dramatic switch in style. Dylan again credited happenstance in conversation with Ron Rosenbaum in 1977: "I recorded it originally surrounded by a bunch of other songs on the Nashville Skyline album. That was the tone of the session. Once everything was set, that was the way it came out. And it was fine for that time."
Actually, it was the other way ’round. This song defined the Nashville Skyline sound and set the agenda for these sessions. It was also the only song he went back to at consecutive sessions, feeling that he had a song with some real potential, one of only two compositions he had been sitting on since the previous year. And so, despite cutting three complete takes at the first session, he returned to it at the end of the following day’s exertions, presumably to remind himself that "Country Pie" and "Peggy Day" did not represent the extent of his range, even as a country crooner.
According to drummer Kenny Buttrey, they then began experimenting with different kinds of percussive sounds, but nothing seemed to work until Dylan suggested bongos. Producer Bob Johnston topped that with cowbell. The fifth and final take on the fourteenth has both, and as a thoroughly skeptical Buttrey now admits, "[When] we started playing the tune . . . I was just doodling around on these bongos and the cowbell, and it was working out pretty cool."
Despite "working out pretty cool," "Lay, Lady, Lay" was not Dylan’s choice for his first new single since 1966 (which would be "I Threw It All Away"), only being issued in July as an afterthought, after picking up extensive radio play as an album track. But it quickly outstripped its predecessor in chart position, peaking at number five in the U.S. and at number seven in the UK. It also received one of the biggest cheers of the evening at the Isle of Wight in August.
Over the years the song has come to define this era for every classic rock "jock." Ever the Gemini, though, Dylan seemed faintly embarrassed by the song’s startling success, even though it validated his country persona in a way that the album (and initial single) failed to do, reaching an audience his earlier, more complex work had not reached. As such, when he returned to the road in the winter of ’74, though he preserved the song’s original, coaxing lyric, he gave the song a vocal that could have stripped paint. His excuse at the time? "You’ll always stretch things out or cut [an old song] up, just to keep interested."
But he still felt he hadn’t gone quite far enough to erase the sickly sweet original from people’s minds, and in 1976 he gave the song a real rollicking, combining a caustic vocal with a set of words that suggested he had run out of patience with the song and its subject—making it more "Please Mrs. Henry" than "To Be Alone with You":
Forget this dance, let’s go upstairs,
Let’s take a chance, who really cares.
Why, don’t you know, you got nothin’ to prove,
It’s all in your eyes and the way that you move . . .
No longer content to let love (or lust) take its course, the Dylan of 1976 took the song to another level—albeit one lower on any scale of nobler emotions. And he was happy enough with the rewrite to let it appear on the official live album, Hard Rain, even boasting to Playboy the following year, "I rewrote ‘Lay, Lady, Lay.’ . . . A lot of words to that song have changed. . . . I always had a feeling there was more to the song than that [original]."
Having explored his own emotional response to the song thoroughly, Dylan dispensed with it, only returning to it on a magical night in Barcelona in 1984, when he played it as a request and remembered even less of the original lyric than eight years earlier. On Never Ending Tour performances Dylan has generally remembered more of the words, but a whole lot less of the tune, one of his most beautiful, and therefore one he seemingly wishes to strike from the record—a reminder that he is still the man who wrote many moons earlier, "The symbol ‘beauty’ still struck my guts / But now with more a shameful sound / An I rebelled twice as hard an ten times as proud . . ."
{250} I THREW IT ALL AWAY
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 13, 1969—4 takes [NS—tk.4]; Studio B, New York, May 1, 1970.
First known performance: Isle of Wight, August 31, 1969.
"I Threw It All Away" is one of two songs on Nashville Skyline that demonstrates enough attention to lyrical detail to suggest that he had lived with it for more than a week. He had even remembered what it was like to coin an image that shone like the sun: "Once I had mountains in the palm of my hands / And rivers that ran through every day."
On the release of the recording, he told Newsweek’s Hubert Saal that, before Nashville Skyline, "everyone expected me to be a poet so that’s what I tried to be." In truth the amnesia had now set in, and "I Threw It All Away" was one last, self-conscious flash from the old gun. Dylan was clearly proud of the song after he wrote it because he played it to George Harrison when he and wife Patty came to visit in November 1968. Harrison was sufficiently impressed to learn the song himself, breaking into a version during one of the terminally tedious Twickenham sessions with his fellow Beatles the following January. It was presumably at Harrison’s request that Dylan did the song at their joint May Day session the following year, while warming themselves up for an evening of proper work by running through (and, in most instances, over) some old favorites. (This version was later offered as a download by Sony, trumpeted as a previously unknown outtake—a full decade and a half after it was bootlegged.)
But this was one song Dylan did not feel like donating to Harrison, or the Everlys. Instead, he was looking to record it right out of the block on February 13, 1969, when he resumed his recording career in Nashville—having warmed up with the tepid "To Be Alone With You." And in just four takes, he had set this luscious lyric to a tune even Hank would have been proud of (though I don’t think he’d have done it this way). Bob was enthusiastic enough about h
is own version of the song—the kind he grew up listening to—that he performed it on Johnny Cash’s TV show. He also couldn’t wait to sing it second at the Isle of Wight, having raced through a quite different portrait of his muse, "She Belongs to Me."
Writing a song about a true love in the style of his first musical love was something he had been threatening to do for a while. Hence all those covers of country songs like "I’m Guilty of Loving You," "You Win Again," "Confidential to Me," "Still in Town, Still Around," "I Don’t Hurt Anymore," and "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" recorded by Garth at Big Pink. Unfortunately the style did not suit him as well as traditional folk, something he only realized part way through recording Self Portrait.
Proving that he had not stayed in such a place very long, he was reluctant to re-explore similar territory throughout the seventies, when reestablishing himself as one of the great contemporary live performers. When he did go back there, he would lacerate his larynx jolting such songs out of their bobby sox. He gave "Tonight I’ll Be Staying with You" a sturdy Rolling Thunder rock-out, in addition to the lashing he gave "Lay, Lady, Lay" in 1976. As for "I Threw It All Away," it personified the raging glory unleashed on the second Rolling Thunder tour, as he put the song out on the ledge and left it there, awaiting Hard Rain. And yet, somehow, as he sang it that May night in Fort Worth, with his marriage to the muse who originally inspired it in tatters, it never made more sense.
A less frazzled Dylan worked up a more musical arrangement for the world tour he embarked on in February 1978. And he got playful with the lyrics, trying out his Street-Legal persona on this earlier song. In self-reproach mode, he asked rhetorically, "What did I do? I started looking at you," doing away with the cliched "cruel/fool" rhyme in verse one. At the finishing end, love no longer made "the world go round" but rather felt like a disease: "One thing’s for sure / You won’t find a cure / If you throw it all away." Disappointingly, "I Threw It All Away" departed from the set after the Australian leg (save for a rearranged two-gig reprise in September). It would take a return to Oz, twenty years on, for him to revive the song again, a worldly-wise gravel voice replacing the tenor’s twang he’d imposed in February 1969.
{251} I DON’T WANT TO DO IT
Published lyrics: In His Own Words 2.
Dylan presumably informed Harrison—while they were swopping songs after Thanksgiving turkey—that he had earmarked "I Threw It All Away" for his own use. But he was still in a song-giving mood, and he had another for which he had no use himself. "I Don’t Want to Do It" suggested an interesting direction, a bridge between the past and present that would lead on to Planet Waves and Blood on the Tracks. But its autobiographical elements did not suit its author, who was backing away from releasing anything that reflected real life.
Here is a song that from line one is "looking back upon my youth," cross-referencing the "wish in vain" of "Bob Dylan’s Dream"—which materializes as "To go back in the yard and play / if I could only have another day"—with those 1963 Joan Baez in Concert/2 liner notes: "in my younger days I used t kneel / By my aunt’s house on a railroad field." This time he remembers things clearly:
To go back on the hill beside a track, and try to concentrate,
On all the places that I want to go,
You know it shows you that I could not wait.
When he sings the chorus, "I don’t want to do it / I don’t want to say goodbye," one can’t help wondering whether he is more determined to cling to a lost youth than to his present love. It seems like even he is not so sure. Finally, though, he surrenders to the moment, and her: "So come back into my arms again / This love of ours, it has no end." Happily ever after. Yet he still can’t resist thinking about a time when he "always knew the truth."
All in all, an important demonstration of abiding concerns, and proof that those "amazing projections when I was a kid"—as he later put it—were still sometimes "strong enough to keep me going." Yet the song was not one he ever recorded himself, and though Harrison demo-ed the song, along with "If Not for You," for his first solo album, he had more than enough of his own songs for such a symbolic statement. Only in 1985 did Harrison come upon the demo again, which he decided to re-record for a film about youthful hijinks, Porky’s Revenge. Though Dylan gave his blessing, he still omitted the song from that year’s edition of Lyrics (and indeed its 2004 successor).
{252} I’D HAVE YOU ANYTIME
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
By November 1968, when he shared a notepad and a couple of guitars with his friend Bob, George was no longer the quiet Beatle when it came to songwriting. Indeed, he was becoming rather vociferous about the boys recording more of his songs, one of many festering issues making the decade’s biggest stars no longer much of a going concern. The others had found room on The White Album for McCartney’s risible "Rocky Raccoon," but not Harrison’s acidic "Sour Milk Sea," and by the time of the January 1969 Let It Be sessions, Harrison knew he was bringing as many songs of quality as either Lennon or McCartney.
One of these could have been the song he’d cowritten with Dylan, still an idol to the others. Yet through all the mind-numbing filming sessions, Harrison did not play "I’d Have You Anytime" once. He’d happily pull out a basement song or two, even "All Along the Watchtower," in between pushing for the likes of "All Things Must Pass" and "Isn’t It a Pity" to make the final cut. But he had evidently earmarked this co-composition for his first (proper) solo album, already in the planning stages. And sure enough, "I’d Have You Anytime" opens that ambitious debut, All Things Must Pass. By the time he recorded the song with producer Phil Spector in the summer of 1970, he had been sitting on it for eighteen months or more. Yet the song itself had come easily, Harrison describing its composition in his book, I Me Mine:
I was hanging out at his house, with him, Sara and his kids. He seemed very nervous and I felt a little uncomfortable—it seemed strange, especially as he was in his own home. Anyway, on about the third day we got the guitars out and then things loosened up and I was saying to him, "Write me some words." . . . And he was saying, "Show me some chords. How do you get those tunes?" I started playing chords . . . and the song appeared as I played the opening chord (G major 7th) and then moved the chord shape up the guitar neck (B flat major 7th). . . . I was saying to Bob, "Come on, write some words." He wrote the bridge:
All I have is yours
All you see is mine
And I’m glad to hold you in my arms
I’d have you anytime.
Beautiful. And that was that.
Dylan continued to provide bridgework for friends, contributing a few more lines of a similar hue to a Roger McGuinn song the following spring. But he remained some way short of a full album’s worth of original songs when he began his first set of sessions in fifteen months, in mid-February—less than a fortnight after the Beatles "completed" their own, failed, "basement-tape" experiment, Let It Be.
{253} TO BE ALONE WITH YOU
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 13, 1969—8 takes [NS—tk.4].
First known performance: Tower Theatre, Philadelphia, October 15, 1989.
Nashville Skyline was barely in the shops when Dylan informed Jann Wenner, "The first time I went into the studio I had, I think, four songs." Sure enough, he and the band cut four songs on the first day in Studio A, February 13. Of those four songs, two date from 1968. The other two—"To Be Alone with You" and "One More Night"—sure sound like they were written on the way down to Tennessee, as had been the case with parts of John Wesley Harding. The previous afternoon he had met with producer Bob Johnston at his hotel to discuss the upcoming recording sessions. He had even booked a session for the evening, attended by bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenny Buttrey, those stalwarts of previous Nashville sessi
ons, perhaps to run through a few songs, or even indulge in a spot of impromptu songwriting a la Blonde on Blonde. (Sadly no tape was running.)
But he was no longer in that Big Pink basement, and the songs he’d been writing were not "right on target, so direct," just plain simplistic. As he later put it, he had "never [previously] gone and done something with no tradition behind it. When I finally broke [away from] it at John Wesley Harding, I started out again." So here he was writing the kind of song he could have given to one of his high school bands, or Bobby Vee. "To Be Alone with You," the first of the four songs he recorded on this session, took eight takes as Dylan expanded his sound, if not his horizons, to include dobro, piano, organ, and at least three guitars. Though he was sleepwalking most of the time, it would take a decade, and the penetrating interview technique of Jonathan Cott, for him to admit, "I was trying to grasp something that would lead me on to where I thought I should be, and it didn’t go nowhere."
Imagine the surprise, then, two decades after one whole section of fans chucked in their hand upon hearing Nashville Skyline, when he opened a show in Philadelphia designed to highlight the terrific new songs on Oh Mercy with "To Be Alone with You." And, divorced from the soppy lyrics by a spotty sound system, and from Skyline’s treacly tenor by fifteen years of almost solid touring, the song threatened to go somewhere real. One wonders what that night’s support act, cow-punkers Jason and the Scorchers, might have made of it. As it is, it became the first of a number of Never Ending Tour debuts for the lesser Skyline songs.
{254} ONE MORE NIGHT
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 13, 1969—6 takes [NS—tk.6].
First known performance: Sunrise, FL, September 29, 1995.
Revolution in the Air Page 46
