Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  The March version of "Time Passes Slowly" may be another pleasant surprise, if and when it is unearthed. It could well be another song recorded with just piano and/or guitar, given that it is sandwiched between "Went to See the Gypsy" and "All the Tired Horses." As it is, Dylan decided to make all subsequent versions full-band performances. As a result he spent almost the entire June 2 session working his way through fourteen takes (and a very bad cold). Finally, in August, when an LP sequence had already been approved, he used one last session to have another eight goes at demonstrating that time passes very slowly when you’re stuck in a studio.

  {264} FATHER OF NIGHT

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, June 5, 1970—11 takes [NM—tk.11].

  In Chronicles, Dylan says he "composed a few things for the [MacLeish] play bearing in mind the titles that were given me." "Father of Night" was one song title MacLeish suggested to Dylan at their first meeting—along with the likes of "Red Hands" and "Lower World." The songwriter also alleges that he took the songs up to the play’s producer, Stuart Ostrow, who had an office in the Brill Building, "and recorded them. He sent the acetates to Archie." If so, these unique recordings have never turned up, or even been logged.

  All this activity presumably dates from the fall of 1969. Yet it would be the following June before Dylan got around to recording "Father of Night" in the studio, and when he did, it was hardly representative of a play "full of midnight murder." Rather, it was a solemn prayer to a Judeo-Christian deity, apparently inspired by an already ancient French-Canadian Jesuit priest who resided at the Meads Mountain church, near Woodstock. Father Francis was someone with whom Dylan had been discussing spiritual matters since 1964, when his breakup with Suze caused a great deal of soul-searching (in an April ’64 letter to the lass, he admits "the only person I’ve spent any time with is father francis at his church on the mount"). By 1969 his concerns had changed, but he still found solace at this "church on the mount," even if his first hymn was hardly a humdinger.

  {265} WENT TO SEE THE GYPSY

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, March 3, 1970—1 take; March 4, 1970—5 takes; March 5, 1970—1 take; June 6, 1970—4 takes [NM].

  I asked him about "Went To See The Gypsy" and he told me it was about going to see Elvis in Las Vegas. —Ron Cornelius (guitarist on New Morning), Melody Maker 1971

  In the winter of 1970, Dylan and his wife took a trip to Las Vegas, where his uncle Vernon may or may not have still been living, apparently scouting out possible places to relocate his clan in Nevada and/or Arizona (where they would settle for a while in 1972). While there, the couple caught one of Elvis Presley’s shows at the International Hotel, part of a four-week residency at the famous watering hole. Elvis was one of the few living legends who could still inspire awe in the boy from Minnesota, and Dylan seized the opportunity to go backstage and meet the singer without whom—as he observed on the man’s death—"he would never have gotten started."

  Back in January, Elvis seemed to have pulled off the most difficult trick in the book—a comeback that restored his critical standing and commercial preeminence a decade after he had turned the world upside down, doing the hip shake. He had consolidated all the good press a Christmas 1968 TV special had accumulated with two albums of pure Memphis stew, while producing a pair of chart-topping singles culled from that crop: "In the Ghetto" and "Suspicious Minds." So when Dylan ventured backstage, part of him was doubtless wondering how he might do the same himself.

  Long before a posthumous cult grew up around the man, Dylan imbues this "gypsy" with mystical powers—specifically an ability to "drive you from your fear / [and] bring you through the mirror." Afraid that he might never be able to do consciously what he used to do unconsciously, he perhaps feared a future as a Vegas act, playing the old hits to baby boomers with corporate credit cards. The result is his first song to address the creative drought that now had begun in earnest.

  At least one late editor of a Dylan fanzine believed the "mirr’r" of "Went to See the Gypsy" was a direct allusion to Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, in which the hero, Harry, another Gemini character—half man, half wolf—is shown a looking glass at a magic theater so that he may be brought "through the mirror" and made to face his fearful other self. Mr. Bauldie was surely right, given the two references in the song to the "pretty dancing girl." This pretty dancing girl is Hermine, the "heroine" of Hesse’s novel (Dylan later mimics the first meeting between Harry and Hermine in "Tangled Up in Blue"). So when he starts writing about the kind of "fear" that has driven him to seek out the gypsy, he is alluding to both a real-life meeting with the man who made all things possible in Pop and a fictional meeting with the mystical Pablo.

  Not surprisingly, Dylan considered "Went to See the Gypsy" an important song, which he was anxious to record right. He tried out the song each day of the three sessions he booked at his familiar Columbia stomping ground in early March 1970, doing it first with the pick-up band who were having to pick their way through a couple of dozen traditional songs, one or two takes at a time, and then recording it with just Al Kooper at the electric piano, a stark performance that almost lit up New Morning.

  Though it was one of at least three originals recorded at these sessions, "Went to See the Gypsy" was never intended to be part of the album he was finishing off. Self Portrait did not show a man driven by fear or trying to break through the mirr’r; rather, it was an album of smoke and mirrors. He just wanted to see how it sounded. Ultimately dissatisfied, and returning to "The Gypsy," he recast it in the style of New Morning at sessions the first week in June. It was this phlegmatic performance that he felt finally gave him a reflection of what he had in mind.

  {266} ALL THE TIRED HORSES

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, March 5, 1970—1 take [SP].

  I guess if one considers "Went to See the Gypsy" as Dylan’s first song about writer’s block, "All the Tired Horses" would have to be his second. Relying on a fairly obvious pun—the words "riding" and "writing" sound awfully similar—Dylan set this three-minute song to a single couplet: "All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done?" Repeating this terse sentiment ad infinitum, as an opener to a sprawling self-portrait (that was nothing of the sort), is positively Warholian.

  Recorded in a single take, back in New York, "All the Tired Horses" was then layered with some eighteen musicians and female singers at two sessions later that month in Nashville. He removes himself almost entirely from his own song, leaving no vestige of his own voice on the finished recording. However, given that the song, cut in a single take at the end of the last Self Portrait session, is given this title (whereas other instrumental originals he recorded then, like "Wigwam" and "Woogie Boogie," were given titles like "New Song #1" and "Piano Boogie"), one is inclined to think a Dylan vocal resides on that multitrack, underneath all the gunk plastered across the track by Bob Johnston.

  Hopefully, it started as a solo performance, just a Dylan guitar/vocal riffing—perhaps spontaneously—on this one phrase until Kooper joined in part-way through. The subsequent application of Buttrey and McCoy as a rhythm section in Nashville suggests as much, as does McCoy’s comment to Bob Spitz: "I . . . figured it was only a work-tape." The original session log times the New York version at three minutes, fifteen seconds, longer by a minute than the released version. If, as one suspects, it began life as another "Rock Me Mama" (see #289), it was probably a fun song before Johnston got all baroque.

  {267} MY PREVIOUS LIFE

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, March 5, 1970—3 takes.

  The most mysterious of the thirty-plus songs Dylan recorded over three days in March at his old New York homestead is a song listed on the studio logs as "My Previous Life." Record
ed toward the end of a three-and-a-half-hour session and timing out at two minutes and fifty-nine seconds on the one complete take, it is followed by attempts at "Went to See the Gypsy," "Time Passes Slowly," and "All the Tired Horses," all Dylan originals. However, it comes after four cover versions, three of them traditional. If it is a cover song, it resembles no song title on any popular-song database I can find. Could it actually be one of those song titles suggested by MacLeish? An intriguing thought.

  {268} IF NOT FOR YOU

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970—5 takes [TBS]; June 2, 1970—2 takes; August 12, 1970—5 takes [NM—tk.5].

  First known performance: Sydney, April 14, 1992.

  There are three separate Dylan recordings of "If Not for You" in circulation. The one with George Harrison from the May Day sessions appeared on The Bootleg Series, while an August re-recording made at the "Day of the Locusts" session is the one that finally appeared on New Morning (after initial reports suggested he would use the version with Harrison). Aside from these, there is a bootlegged version from the pukka New Morning sessions in June, which was subsequently sent to Nashville to acquire violin and pedal-steel embellishments (once thought to derive from the March sessions, it was only assigned a CO number at the overdub stage, making dating it by this method impossible). Of the three, the most melodic is the June recording; the most experimental, the May version; and the least satisfying, the released take.

  Dylan suggests on Biograph that he "wrote the song thinking about my wife" but was reaching for something he failed to find: "It seemed simple enough, sort of tex-mex . . . [but] it came off kind of folky." Originally, he may even have become dissatisfied enough to consider sidelining the track, which does not feature on early New Morning sequences. Three weeks after he and Harrison tried to inject some life into the song, Harrison demo-ed it at Abbey Road for his own album, and found the spirit of the song solo. He presumably had Dylan’s blessing to record the then-unreleased song, and proceeded to record a full-band version for All Things Must Pass. By then, Dylan had sent the June version to Nashville to see if they could make it sound closer to the border.

  By August, he no longer seemed sure what he was reaching for, embarking on a rather cluttered reworking, against which his vocal was no match. Harrison’s version, included on an album that appeared alongside Dylan’s in December, beating New Morning to the #1 spot on the charts, generated further recognition for a song that started out as a simple serenade for Sara. There was enough of the song’s simple charm in Harrison’s version for Olivia Newton-John to find it, too. She recorded her own, hit-single version, released the following April. Given its Dylan/Harrison association, the song also seemed like an obvious selection when it came to the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971. But a run-through the previous day with Harrison convinced Dylan to stick to what he knew. Yet this performance, which recently appeared as a bonus cut on the revamped DVD edition of the concert film, is not at all bad.

  Surprisingly, Dylan continued to keep away from it in performance. Even in 1978, when the song was extensively rehearsed and appeared as an "alternate" on set lists for a number of Japanese and Australian shows, it failed to make the final cut. It was 1992 before it was finally released from its New Morning prison, appearing at a number of shows that spring, occasionally with a nice harmonica intro, and delivered with a hint of country cookin’.

  {269} SIGN ON THE WINDOW

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970—5 takes; June 5, 1970—8 takes [NM].

  [After the accident] I started thinkin’ about . . . how short life is. I’d just lay there listenin’ to birds chirping. Kids playing in the neighbor’s yard or rain falling by the window. I realized how much I’d missed. —Dylan to Sam Shepard, August 1986

  "Sign on the Window" is one of those overlooked masterpieces that can still be found in the nooks and crannies of Dylan’s lesser albums—and there’s a few of them. Few, though, as gorgeous as this. For one, it surely ranks as Dylan’s finest piano playing on record (his classically trained brother must have been impressed). And, as with most examples of Dylan at the stand-up, it was almost entirely done using the black keys, where he found his own sound. As he told Paul Zollo, "On the piano, my favorite keys are the black keys. . . . The songs that go into those keys right from the piano, they sound different. They sound deeper. . . . Everything sounds deeper in those black keys."

  Whether it sounded this good when Dylan began recording it on the afternoon of May 1, one of five originals he was working on with guru-loving George, must be in doubt. According to the Rolling Stone report of the session and the AFM sheet, it was producer Bob Johnston, not Dylan, who played piano at that session. I fear to suggest quite how the song would have sounded if it received the same bass-heavy, guitar-

  oriented arrangement as "If Not for You" and "Working on a Guru." But it sounds just fine a month later, Dylan leading the band a merry march, while crooning clear through his cold, "Sure gonna be wet tonight on Main Street / Hope that it don’t sleeeeeeeeeeet."

  As for the song’s sentiments—"Have a bunch of kids who call me Pa / That must be what it’s all about"—he had been testing the theory to its fullest extent, and finding it wanting. This was no longer the man who told a Chicago reporter in November 1965, "Getting married, having a bunch of kids, I have no hopes for it." He had been there, done that. And still it was not enough.

  Having written a song straight out of the Brill Building, Dylan then decided to give it the full orchestral treatment—or at least allowed Al Kooper to score it to see how it sounded. Ultra-gorgeous is the answer. But the strings might have reminded folk of Self Portrait—freshly out and widely panned. As such, it was the stringless June original that gave New Morning its one uncut pearl (though it retains Kooper’s little organ/flute fugue during the bridge).

  So bound up with Dylan’s performance was this released jewel that few dared to cover it. It took until 1979 for Jennifer Warnes to brave these waters—and she was rewarded with an opportunity to demo "Every Grain of Sand" with the man himself. As for Dylan, he never felt like catching the same cold again, and allowed the once-resplendent "Sign on the Window" to fall into disrepair.

  Note: Michael Krogsgaard, in his online sessionography, seems to think Dylan recorded a song called "What It’s All About" at the June New Morning sessions. As a result he attributes the May 1 version of "Sign on the Window" to the album. Needless to say, the "two" songs are one and the same, and the official version dates from June.

  {270} WORKING ON A GURU

  Published lyrics: Words Fill My Head; In His Own Words 2.

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970—1 take.

  Cut in a single take on May Day, sandwiched between "Time Passes Slowly" and "Went to See the Gypsy," this sounds like something Dylan and Harrison worked up the evening before, but never quite finished. The lyrics are not so much elusive as plain elliptical. Dylan may have been "working on a guru before the sun goes down," but the rest of the words suggest little purpose in perseverance, a conclusion he presumably reached himself, since he ran down the song just once and then forgot it. His music publisher, though, did not. In a clearing-up exercise in January 1985, they copyrighted it, prior to its inevitable appearance on bootleg.

  {271} ONE MORE WEEKEND

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, June 3, 1970—2 takes [NM—tk.2].

  Despite the real work on New Morning being assigned to begin the first week in June, Dylan didn’t seem to feel he had an album’s worth of originals in him, devoting the first two days of sessions to cover versions, à la Self Portrait, while re-recording two originals he’d already tried
with Harrison in May. Even at the third session, he spent the bulk of the two three-hour sessions working on arrangements of four covers, two of which ("Can’t Help Falling in Love" and "Lily of the West") ended up on the Dylan LP, a spiteful spoiler released by CBS in December 1973, ahead of Dylan’s real "comeback" album, Planet Waves. Only at the end of proceedings does Dylan run through two complete takes of "One More Weekend," an innocuous, everything’s-hunky-dory addition to Nashville Skyline part 2—minus the twang.

  {272} NEW MORNING

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, June 4, 1970—3 takes [NM—tk.3].

  First known performance: New Orleans, LA, April 19, 1991.

  The June 4, 1970, session continued the New Morning pattern of covering previous songwriters, with only the odd diversion into something new. Among the things he borrowed were Lead Belly’s "Bring Me a Little Water, Sylvie," Joni Mitchell’s "Big Yellow Taxi," and, from a lifetime away, his own "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." Just two new originals were attempted, of which "New Morning" would be the only one to suggest light at the end of the tunnel. Dylan told Crowe it was one of the songs left over from the MacLeish project, but this strikes me as unlikely. Its author is attempting to convince himself that the sun is shining again—hoping such an act of will can make everything right.