Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Now I have enough time to write the song and not think about being in it. —Bob Dylan, June 1968

  "One More Night" stands as the best of the songs Dylan wrote in haste to fulfill his (nonexistent) contractual obligations in the days/hours leading up to the Nashville Skyline sessions. Unfortunately, the vocal utterly fails to convince us that there is even the slightest heartache underlying the singer’s claims. When he sings, "Oh I miss that woman so / I didn’t mean to see her go," he sounds like someone "not think[ing] about being in it." Detached is the word.

  In September 1995, when he revived the song for a single performance with Alison Krauss, another soft-shoe surprise on the receiving end of a Never Ending Tour treatment, he still failed to sing it like it was "written in my soul / from me to you." The one man who could have done the song justice—and for whom it was probably written "in kind"—by then had been eighteen years in the ground (there is even a nod to one of Elvis’s fifties classics, "One Night with You," in the title). When Dylan said he always wanted to be Elvis, here is the evidence. Elvis always epitomized country-rock for the boy from Minnesota, as he had explained to Nat Hentoff three years earlier, when the term was unknown: "Country-rock was Elvis Presley. . . . You listen to Elvis Presley’s first records. . . . There isn’t a better name."

  {255} COUNTRY PIE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 14, 1969—2 takes [NS—tk.2].

  First known performance: Anaheim, March 10, 2000.

  {256} PEGGY DAY

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 14, 1969—3 takes [NS—tk.3].

  {257} TELL ME THAT IT ISN’T TRUE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 14, 1969—8 takes [NS—tk.8].

  First known performance: Anaheim, March 10, 2000.

  The crooner in Bob must have been happy with how the February 13, 1969, session had gone. Every one of the four songs he sketched out in advance had been captured on Columbia recording tape. He could now return home and work on enough "simple songs" to make a worthy successor to John Wesley Harding. But return home he did not. Instead, as he put it to Rolling Stone, "I pulled that instrumental one out. . . . Then Johnny [Cash] came in and did a song with me. Then I wrote one in the motel. . . . Pretty soon . . . we had an album. . . . It just manipulated out of nothing."

  Actually, the recordings of the instrumental ("Nashville Skyline Rag"), the song with Cash ("Girl from the North Country"), and the motel-composed song ("Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You") all postdate the second Nashville Skyline session, when Dylan recorded three more originals, re-recorded "Lay, Lady, Lay," and really did conspire to produce "an album . . . out of nothing." And boy, does it show. "Peggy Day" and "Country Pie" are, frankly, embarrassing. One can’t help but wonder what the Nashville cats thought about such un-Dylanesque drivel. They could tell a B side when they heard one, and it must have struck them that Dylan was stockpiling a whole slew of ’em (actually, "Peggy Day" became a B side—to the hugely successful "Lay, Lady, Lay").

  "Tell Me That It Isn’t True," the one song introduced on the fourteenth to suggest any kind of ongoing career for this forgetful songwriter, was probably finished in the Ramada Inn the night before (or in the afternoon—the session on the fourteenth didn’t start until six in the evening). At least Dylan spent a great deal longer recording this eminently singable song than the two other examples of this new country schtick. He subsequently suggested to Wenner that he’d been obliged to rearrange it, having written it in the style of all those Hibbing polka bands: "‘Tell Me That It Isn’t True’ . . . came out completely different than I’d written it. It came out real slow and mellow. I had written it as a jerky kinda polka-type thing. I wrote it in F. I wrote a lot of songs on this new album in F. That’s what gives it a kind of a new sound."

  What he didn’t tell Wenner was that the song represented another of his little pop parodies, in the same vein as "Answer to Ode," though lacking the latter’s grasp of dialogue. It was also patently inferior to the hit single he was emulating this time around. Marvin Gaye had been at number one for a staggering seven weeks in December/January with his recording of the Whitfield-Strong classic, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." Dylan could hardly have escaped it. Thus, like one of those Brill Building refugees he ridiculed on "Bob Dylan’s Blues," he decided to write a country version of the same song.

  "I bet you’re wond’rin how I knew / ’Bout your plans to make me blue" becomes, in Dylan Country, "I have heard rumors all over town / They say you’re planning to put me down." But the chunka-chunk non-arrangement and a vocal delivery that sounds like it was phoned in make "Tell Me That It Isn’t True" a wholly appropriate companion to "Country Pie" and "Peggy Day." And it was as a companion to the former that it resurfaced in March 2000. Dylan decided to debut both songs at a two-show residency in Anaheim. The band had even been briefed, delivering the original stop-start ending without a trace of irony. One suspects the same could not be said of Nashville’s finest, in the days of ’69.

  {258} TONIGHT I’LL BE STAYING HERE WITH YOU

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004; The Telegraph #7 (1975 lyrics).

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 17, 1969—11 takes [NS—tk.5].

  First known performance: Waltham, MA, November 22, 1975.

  Having decided to stay on in Music City USA for one more weekend, awaiting the arrival of his old friend Johnny Cash, Dylan thought he might yet pad out the seven songs already recorded with enough material to make up a full album. However, after two days at the hotel stationery, he had just one more song, albeit a good ’un—"Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You" (a handwritten copy of the lyrics, on Ramada Inn paper, is extant). And so he turned to his own back pages, planning to plaster over the gaps with countrified arrangements of "One Too Many Mornings" and "Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright," both of which had already been released in versions as perfect as any recording has a right to be. Neither of the Nashville takes proved good enough to make Self Portrait, let alone John Wesley Harding vol. 2 (as Nashville Skyline was almost called).

  Maybe he had this original album title in mind when he wrote "Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You," which constitutes a marginal rewrite of the previous album’s closer, "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight." A song of reassurance for a woman who knew all about that "restless, hungry feeling," "Tonight . . ." became the third single from the album and a minor hit in its own right. However, it had to wait until the fall of 1975 to receive its first live outing, by which time it was almost unrecognizable (though the fake, looped whoops of recognition on The Bootleg Series vol. 5 seem designed to make listeners think otherwise). An exuberant full-on arrangement and a superior set of lyrics, name-checking the tour itself ("You came on to me like rolling thunder"), provide a double delight:

  I could have left this town by noon,

  By tonight have been in some place new,

  But I was feeling a little bit scattered,

  And your love was all that mattered,

  So tonight I’ll be staying here with you.

  New words or not, its message of reassurance remained, addressed to the same concerned lass for whom the Rolling Thunder tour was further evidence that she had lost her man to the lure of the world, wedding songs (and vows) notwithstanding. One doubts it was a coincidence that the revamped song was introduced after Sara elected to tag along. But, whereas Dylan undoubtedly meant every word in February 1969, the man (in him) singing in 1975 of an enduring devotion comes across as someone trying to convince himself almost as much as his suspicious spouse. And, save for a spontaneo
us one-off, minus a lyric sheet, at the final show of his landmark February 1990 Hammersmith Odeon residency, the Revue proved to be the last time Dylan tried these lines on any credulous ticket holder.

  {259} WANTED MAN

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, February 18, 1969—1 take.

  Given the dearth of new songs coming from his pen, it is somewhat surprising that Dylan should abandon this new original after a single false start at the final Nashville Skyline session. "Wanted Man" was presumably already earmarked for a Johnny Cash concert scheduled in six days’ time at San Quentin, having been written by Dylan as a gift to his old friend—and the "lucky" convicts. They certainly showed their appreciation of some of Bob’s lines; "Went the wrong way into Juarez with Juanita in my lap" got so many yells that Cash temporarily lost his way.

  Interestingly, Cash’s introduction[1] at the penitentiary suggests the song had been cowritten: "Last week in Nashville, Bob Dylan . . . was at our house and he and I sat down and wrote a song together." Yet the song ended up being copyrighted to Dylan alone. Presuming he didn’t stiff Johnny of a song credit (unlikely), Cash probably meant he had had an idea for a song, but it was Dylan who ran with it. The song wouldn’t have sat easily on Dylan’s latest platter of platitudes, having some of the old sharpness in the lyrics, notably, "I went to sleep in Shreveport, woke up in Abilene / Wonderin’ why the hell I’m wanted at some town halfway between"—another couplet bound to ring a few bells with the bad boys down front. It also reached an audience for whom even Nashville Skyline sounded too much like pop, and that audience was a large one. Johnny Cash at San Quentin did what Nashville Skyline could not, removing Hair! from the Billboard top spot and staying there for four whole weeks.

  {260} CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS

  Published lyrics: The Telegraph #2; Words Fill My Head.

  Another song Dylan donated to one of his teen idols during that February sojourn in Nashville, "Champaign, Illinois," was given to Carl Perkins. The author of "Blue Suede Shoes" was now working with Johnny Cash and was probably at the Cash residence the night Dylan worked up "Wanted Man." And this time its recipient did get a co-credit. In all likelihood, it was left to Perkins to finish it off, after he and Dylan had a little fun writing a song about the most unlikely place in the universe. I’d like to think it was Dylan, though, who kicked off that opening verse:

  I got a woman in Morocco,

  I got a woman in Spain,

  Woman that done stole my heart,

  She lives up in Champaign.

  The song was recorded by Perkins later in the year, appearing on his 1969 LP, On Top. Sixteen years later Dylan made it to Champaign to render aid to U.S. farmers, but he failed to make the appropriate gesture.

  {261} BALLAD OF EASY RIDER

  No known recording, circa April 1969.

  By the spring of 1969, Dylan had seemingly got the hang of this co-writing lark. Having spent years letting unfinished songs stay that way, he now found himself collecting some nice royalty checks from "This Wheel’s on Fire" and "Tears of Rage." And so, when Roger McGuinn asked him to help write a ballad for the Easy Rider movie, he obliged. Having already demonstrated the art of bridge building, Dylan gave McGuinn another, which was then transplanted to the outset of this evocative eulogy—"The river flows, flows to the sea / wherever it flows, that’s where I want to be." According to McGuinn, Dylan subsequently asked for his co-credit to be taken off "because he didn’t like the movie that much. He didn’t like the ending. He wanted to see the truck blow up in order to get poetic justice."

  Fortunately for Dylan’s accountant, the song did not become another "This Wheel’s on Fire." However, it was recorded by the post-accident Fairport Convention for their landmark Liege & Lief LP—then left off, along with "Down in the Flood" and "Open the Door Homer"— making it the first Fairport LP to not contain a single Dylan cover. Their version has favored a few retrospective sets by now, so hopefully Dylan has heard to what divine purpose his little lyric was put by Denny and fellow Dylan devotees.

  Note: Though it is not known precisely when Dylan and McGuinn indulged in their little songwriting stint, the Byrds’ recording of "Lay, Lady, Lay" in mid-April perhaps occurred after Dylan played his old friend an advance copy of his latest fab waxing, curious about what the Byrd thought of his own brand of country-rock.

  {262} LIVING THE BLUES

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, April 24, 1969—6 takes [SP—tk.6].

  When Dylan returned to Nashville in late April, a mere two months after he manipulated an album out of some very thin airs, he decided to reinforce his new direction by recording an album of country covers and an "original," nonalbum single. "Living the Blues" was the single in question, and when he appeared on The Johnny Cash Show the following week—his first appearance on national TV in four years—it was with the intention of promoting both his current single ("I Threw It All Away") and the forthcoming one.

  The song in question was a fairly weak rewrite of Guy Mitchell’s "Singing the Blues" ("Without you, you got me singin’ the blues" versus Dylan’s "I’ve been living the blues every night without you"). And the new country twang continued to do this kinda song few favors. Presumably, it was feedback from radio stations that ultimately resulted in said single being nixed, "Lay, Lady, Lay" taking its place. One would be hard pressed to believe "Living the Blues" would have enjoyed similar success, even given its nonalbum status. As such, it found a more suitable slot among the covers that he crooned in June, cluttering up the Self Portrait smorgasbord.

  [1] Johnny Cash’s spoken intro to "Wanted Man" does not appear on the original San Quentin album, but has recently appeared on the two-CD+DVD Legacy boxed set of that fabled concert.

  { 1970–1: Self Portrait;

  New Morning;

  Greatest Hits Vol II }

  By the winter of 1970, when Dylan bought a townhouse on McDougall Street, decamping the family from Woodstock to Greenwich Village, he was desperate to rekindle the same kind of inspiration that had fueled his initial ascendance. It had been a long, long time since he had felt impelled to write songs, but he hoped that the close proximity to studios and fellow musicians might initiate a new phase. Sadly, this would not be the case. The songs just would not come. Even when that former flame did fitfully flicker, it concerned itself with aspects of the bucolic existence he had left behind or the curse of a now-dormant creativity. A commission from playwright-poet Archibald MacLeish to write songs for a new play merely exacerbated these newfound insecurities. In the end New Morning was nothing of the sort. It was, instead, a diary of what he had written while his mind was on other things. And though the few songs written in 1971 showed a greater attention to detail, only one, "When I Paint My Masterpiece," suggested an awareness of what he had lost, and the cost should he feel compelled to reclaim it.

  {263} TIME PASSES SLOWLY

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, March 4, 1970—1 take; March 5, 1970—3 takes; May 1, 1970—4 takes; June 2, 1970—14 takes; August 12, 1970—8 takes [NM—tk.3].

  According to Dylan, "Time Passes Slowly" was one of a handful of songs written for a play by Archibald MacLeish, loosely based on The Devil and Daniel Webster, called Scratch. He informed Cameron Crowe in 1985, "I recorded some stuff based on what he was doing." The three songs he cites are "New Morning," "Father of Night," and this one. When exactly he undertook the commission, and when he abandoned it, has never been entirely clear.

  He claims in Chronicles that he was asked shortly after his father’s death (in June 1968), but that cannot be the case. Initial contact took place no earlier than the summer of 1969. Using some persuasive
prose, Dylan’s memoir describes an initial meeting with MacLeish in which he and his wife drove over to Conway, Massachusetts, and MacLeish gave him some suggested song titles to work with, of which "Father of Night" was apparently one, but "Time Passes Slowly" was not. He says, "I intuitively realized that I didn’t think this was for me," and yet he agreed to work on these ideas. But on Biograph he says he "went up to see Archibald MacLeish with the songs [my italics], and with the producer. He lived up in Connecticut." He also claims it was because he and MacLeish "didn’t see eye to eye on" "Father of Night" that the collaboration never happened.

  MacLeish mentions the project in a letter to his publisher dated October 7, 1970, by which time the play had been produced without any new Dylan songs. In his letter, MacLeish baldly states that Dylan "proved simply incapable of producing new songs." MacLeish’s account, both contemporary and (originally) private, bears the stamp of authenticity. I think we can assume Dylan only came up with a couple of songs —probably "Time Passes Slowly" and "Father of Night."

  This would make "Time Passes Slowly" both the earliest song written for New Morning and the one he worked on the longest. In the studio it gave him a fair share of headaches, attempted at all the four sets of sessions—spanning a six-month period—from which New Morning was culled. This was a return to a working method not really tried since The Times They Are A-Changin’ (I discount John Wesley Harding because the gaps between sessions are so brief, and the songs are obviously of a piece).

  In that time we can probably assume "Time Passes Slowly" underwent a transformation, though none of these many outtake versions circulate. It remains the one credible candidate for a line quoted in a Rolling Stone article at the time: "Air to breathe and water to wash in," the song containing this line apparently being recorded at the May 1, 1970, Dylan/Harrison session. We have complete documentation of the sessions that day, and there is no such song—unless it comes from one of two New Morning songs recorded that day, "Sign on the Window" or "Time Passes Slowly," and the lyrics were later changed. The image (which appears verbatim in Charles Williams’s first published novel, War in Heaven (1930)), was partially reused by Dylan in conversation in 1984: "If I was starting out right now I don’t know where I’d get the inspiration from, because you need to breathe the right air to make the creative process work."