Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Perhaps it was some residue of such an idea—that a force of will is sometimes required to turn things around—that prompted Dylan to introduce the song live for the first time as an opener to shows in the spring of 1991, when he found himself at his lowest ebb in twenty-one years. He certainly demonstrated almost no knowledge of its lyrics. Most performances have more slurred lines than "I’m Not There." At a train wreck of a show in Stuttgart, he failed to sing a single intelligible syllable. Thankfully, by the fall, "New Morning" began to mean something positive again, as he rediscovered his performing self.

  {273} THREE ANGELS

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

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

  One can usually measure the degree of faith Dylan has in a given song from this fraught period by counting the number of girl-singers he dollops on, and how high they have been placed in the mix. "Three Angels" began life as a spoken-word piece, itself no great leap for the man. He had, after all, first made his reputation in the Village performing talkin’ blues. And perhaps his single most mesmerizing performance given back then was a spoken rendition of Lord Buckley’s "Black Cross." But "Three Angels" is a very self-conscious performance of a plainly moralistic piece, perhaps inspired by the idea of putting songs in a play. The result speaks for itself.

  {274} IF DOGS RUN FREE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, June 5, 1970—3 takes [NM—tk.3].

  First known performance: 2002.

  How low can one man get? A chihuahua, perhaps? "If Dogs Run Free" is a wretched way to start the "final" day of work on a "comeback" album. But what a day! Fully half of the released album comes from this single six-hour session, during which six Dylan originals were executed, mostly with aplomb (especially reworkings of "Went to See the Gypsy" and "Sign on the Window"). Dylan is enjoying himself so much that he even runs down a couple of takes of "Lily of the West" at day’s end, to wind down. "If Dogs Run Free," though, seems more like a hangover from the previous day, belaboring the point that this boy could have been a rapper and a poet. Yet even when toying with releasing another album of part covers, part originals (a common enough practice in country circles), Dylan continued to short-list "If Dogs Run Free."

  I suspect the part-covers premise was pulled after Dylan saw the reviews dished out for Self Portrait. Surely word of its reception was already starting to filter back as these sessions progressed. After all, the album was ostensibly released on June 1, so it would certainly have been generating airplay and comment by the time the final session rolled around. Was it this that convinced Dylan he needed to jettison the covers he’d industriously worked on earlier in the week, and give life to whatever dog of a song he might have lying around? As for "If Dogs Run Free," having failed to figure in any fan polls of Dylan songs they’d like performed live, it made a wholly unanticipated appearance on the 2002 European leg of the Never Ending Tour. By then it was probably the best way to use that gnarled crag of a voice. And this time he was word-perfect. Woof, woof.

  {275} THE MAN IN ME

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [1978 version: Words Fill My Head].

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, June 5, 1970—2 takes [NM—tk.2].

  First known performance: Budokan Hall, Tokyo, February 20, 1978.

  Once again, a Dylan song demonstrates that context is all. In the context of the 1978 world tour—or the Coen Brothers’ finest workprint, The Big Lebowski—this is one damn fine song. On New Morning, propped betwixt "One More Weekend" and "Three Angels," it does not sound so great. The girls don’t help. Nor does Dylan’s cold. This time that voice breaking up all over the place sounds like someone trying too hard. There is the arid aroma of unfinished business here. However, barely has he begun to entertain doubt—"Storm clouds are ragin’ all around my door / I think to myself I might not take it anymore"—before he feels compelled to revert to the plangent platitude, "Take a woman like you / To find the man in me." The working title, "A Woman Like You," explains exactly whom he was trying to impress.

  But then, as part of the unreality of the Dude’s daydream existence in the Coens’ celluloid vision, the sentiment seems entirely apposite. Even better is the 1978 rearrangement/rewrite. This time Dylan ain’t trying; he’s succeeding. Rather than worrying about "storm clouds," he is "lost on the river of no return," a wonderfully evocative way of describing both a fated affair and his "former" amnesia. Worked up in stages during the January 1978 rehearsals, the new "Man in Me" remained part of the set till the end of summer, surprising one and all with its level-headed use of the girl-singers and a delightful duplicity underlying those lyrics. Having set the song up as a replay of the slightly sickly original, he pulls the rug away:

  I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it’s true,

  I’m lying next to her, but I’m thinking of you . . .

  I know you got a husband, and that’s a fact,

  But, ah baby, turn me loose or cover my tracks.

  Perversely, though, "The Man in Me" was not one of the songs picked for the live At Budokan LP, despite becoming a highlight at his first series of Japanese shows. Subsequent, sporadic Never Ending Tour performances have reverted to the original lyrics, perhaps a homage to the Dude in us all.

  {276} WINTERLUDE

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, June 5, 1970—5 takes [NM—tk.4].

  I gotta think this one came quick. Dylan the wordplay merchant is back in town. Repeating the "Santa Fe" trick, Dylan hits on a whole new word, winterlude, to describe an interlude in winter. Save that this "Winterlude"

  is a person, a time, and a place all rolled into one—kind of like the Holy Trinity. Determined to see if he still has what it takes to make a rhyme outlandish, he goes with, "Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine." And this guy was about to get a doctorate from Princeton?!?!

  {277} DAY OF THE LOCUSTS

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, August 12, 1970—7 takes [NM—tk.7].

  It is hardly unusual for Dylan to continue working on new songs long after the bulk of a new album has been completed. On many occasions he has actually written the last song of the album "to order," thus bookending the process. Which is what he had done on both John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. This time, though, when he wrote "Day of the Locusts," he left it so late that he had to set up a special recording session to record it, after sessions in New York and Nashville had applied overdubs to the songs he recorded in March, May, and June.

  Yet "Day of the Locusts" would not be the album’s closer. That, one suspects, was a position long assigned to one of the spoken-word pieces. Recording it, though, allowed Dylan to rethink what he wanted the album to say. He cast aside all the many covers that had occupied him at previous sessions and instead re-recorded two originals—"Time Passes Slowly" and "If Not for You"—both already attempted a number of times.

  "Day of the Locusts" completes his account of real experiences that he drew on to make this slim volume, depicting in metaphorical terms his trip to Princeton to collect a doctorate in music in June, in much the way "Went to See the Gypsy" had depicted the winter trip to Vegas. During the actual "Day of the Locusts," Dylan was in a weird frame of mind. Nerves were getting the better of him when the missus, Sara, and an old buddy, ex-Byrd Dave Crosby, convinced him to get in the car.

  To calm him down, Crosby passed the would-be scholar a joint that, he says, "we smoked . . . on the way, and I noticed Dylan getting really quite paranoid behind it. When we arrived at Princeton, they took us to a little room and Bob was asked to wear a
cap and gown. He refused outright." Dylan’s account of what happened next is a feature of the song: "I was ready to leave, I was already walkin’ / But the next time I looked there was light in the room."

  Like "Went to See the Gypsy," this song hardly claims to be a prosaic version of the day. One presumes the man standing next to Dylan did not actually spontaneously combust ("his head was exploding"). But when Dylan says he "sure was glad to get out of there alive," we can probably take that assessment at "white face-value." As he wrote when he was over sixty, and had received more awards than he could shake a joint at, "After whispering and mumbling my way through the [degree] ceremony, I was handed the scroll. We piled back into the Big Buick and drove away. It had been a strange day."

  What undoubtedly contributed to the surreal nature of the experience—exacerbated by the heightened sensory awareness Crosby’s mighty fine weed triggered—was the din that greeted Dylan when he came to the campus, for it was year seventeen in the life cycle of that most remarkable of insects, the Magicicada. The best known of the hundreds of cicadas around the world, the Magicicada has an extremely long life cycle. Every thirteen or seventeen years they emerge in vast numbers and make a noise that is a spectacular backdrop to any summer. The summer of 1970 was one such year for the Magicicada, known sometimes colloquially as locusts, though they are nothing of the sort (true locusts are part of the grasshopper family). Dylan thought he had walked into a Nathaniel West novel, and at the end of the day he was very happy to walk out of it, too. But the Princeton "locusts" would sing all summer long, even as Dylan returned to New York to record his latest diary entry, closing the book on another false dawn.

  {278} SHIRLEY’S ROOM

  Published lyrics: Isis #45 (handwritten lyrics from auction catalog, circa August 1970).

  A draft of an unfinished song scrawled in Dylan’s hand, along with an envelope addressed to him dated August 25, 1970, was offered for sale at a 1992 Christie’s New York auction. The telltale microscopic handwriting, with arrows and lines spiraling to the outer edges of the page, confirms it as his work. The date of the envelope—which one assumes relates to the draft lyric—suggests he was still trying to shake off this phase of forgetfulness and find some fresh thoughts to represent this particular New Morning.

  Like "Day of the Locusts," this is a narrative song, but the narrative is fractured. The second verse could almost be evocative, if one were able to discern the whole thing. But what is legible is still mildly intriguing:

  It had been a long blind night,

  Lot of heavy drinking and [. . .] until dawn

  Bongos played [across?] the street from the hotel

  Where lonesome men were holed up in Shirley’s room.

  Shirley—the true name of his wife, Sara—is a most unexpected incursion. Whether the narrator was one of the "lonesome men" holed up in her room is never explained (a great deal of crossing out suggests even its author may not know). In fact, the song suggests the narrator-self remembered very little after he "woke up on the fifth in the middle of the day / [And] vowed never to pass that way again."

  Unable to decide which way to go, the narrator finally concludes, "It didn’t matter—the road wouldn’t have no end." The last image, written at the bottom of the page with an arching arrow attached, suggests this is another place he is grateful to get out of alive: "I grabbed my rucksack and headed out of town." Without a session, or a tour, on the horizon, and without a clear idea of where this vignette might lead, Dylan left this lyrical scrap behind, little suspecting it would be snagged by someone who knew it was a curio worthy of preservation.

  {279} WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [recorded version: Words Fill My Head].

  Known studio recordings: Blue Rock Studios, NY, March 16–18, 1971—11 takes [MGH].

  First known performance: Academy of Music, NY, December 31, 1971 [ROA].

  It was . . . very disorientating. In the early years everything had been like a magic carpet for me—and then all at once it was over. Here was this thing that I’d wanted to do all my life, but suddenly I didn’t feel I could do it anymore. —Bob Dylan to John Preston, 2004

  When, for the first time, Dylan booked an independent Manhattan studio to record some new song/s in March 1971, it had been more than six months since he last entered a CBS studio. Blue Rock Studios had been a suggestion of pianist and producer Leon Russell, whom Dylan had asked to help him get a new sound. The sessions, which spanned three days, only resulted in two Dylan originals, and one of those appears to have been partially composed during the sessions. So much for shaking himself from his creative torpor.

  Repeating the pattern of the June 1970 sessions, Dylan started off recording a series of covers, including a supposedly magnificent "That Lucky Ol’ Sun" (a song he nailed for good fifteen years later, at the first Farm Aid).[1] Only after he had gotten these songs out of his system did he turn to "When I Paint My Masterpiece," and then, finally, to "Watching the River Flow."

  "When I Paint My Masterpiece" was probably a song Dylan lingered over. It addressed issues that had been brewing ever since he wrote the equally troubled "Went to See the Gypsy," a year earlier. And like that song, it drew upon a literary model. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night concerns itself with the writer Dick Diver, who finds himself at the end of an affair, wandering the streets of Rome, past the Spanish Stairs, coming to terms with a former love and lost inspiration. Again making such an influence explicit—"On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs"—Dylan demonstrates he has embarked on a course of reading designed to inspire and illuminate.

  The narrator of "When I Paint My Masterpiece," though, has a far greater burden to carry than Fitzgerald’s antihero—Fame. The description of landing in Brussels only to witness newspapermen having to be "held down by big police" shows just how heavy this burden had become. And it wasn’t getting any easier. When Dylan chose to visit Jerusalem with his wife, "on a sort of [second] honeymoon," two months after the "Masterpiece" session, "It was miserable for us. . . . Photographers would come up with the room service and they would catch us on the beach, and all we wanted was to relax a bit."

  This narrator has convinced himself that he might derive inspiration from experiencing some of the artistic achievements of humankind, traveling from the New World to Europe’s ancien régimes only to find himself thirsty for a home whose greatest legacy to the world is a sickly sweet soft drink ("Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"). Rome’s ancient thoroughfares only reinforce the void in his soul. In Chronicles, he refuses to admit how much it hurt: "Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care." This is not what he told John Preston on the book’s publication (see above).

  "When I Paint My Masterpiece" is the song of a man who cares a great deal—who longs to return to a time when it all came "smooth as a rhapsody." And Rome was a city Dylan knew well. The memorable couplet, "Oh the hours that I spent inside the Coliseum / Dodging lions and wasting time," probably drew on a real experience, if not a recent one. Back in October 1965 he had told Nat Hentoff, "The first time I was in Rome, I was standing there and digging that Coliseum. . . . The second time I was there, it just distracted me." That second time may have been in May 1965, when he and Sara escaped the madness of British Dylanmania by heading for mainland Europe.

  Was Dylan making an incantation to lost inspiration? Spring 1965

  had been a time when he had almost quit singing, unable to see a way ahead. A couple of weeks later, "Like a Rolling Stone" came to him, and things changed. "When I Paint My Masterpiece" rides on a similar hope—"someday, everything is gonna be different." But by 1971 he knew that getting back to a similar point would take more than mere willpower. As he had learned, this road was long. He famously told aut
hor Jonathan Cott in 1978, "It took me a long time to get to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously . . . and the records I made along the way were . . . [me] trying to figure out whether it was this way or that way . . .

  what’s the simplest way I can tell the story and make this feeling real." He is talking about "Masterpiece," more than any other song of the era.

  By reaching for a way to "make this feeling real," Dylan succeeded in writing his second masterpiece of the new decade. Which he promptly gave away to his friends in The Band, as he had back in 1967, when it seemed like the tap would never be turned off. By 1971 The Band needed all the help they could get, quality songs having dried up with them, too, ever since their hugely influential first two albums, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969).

  According to Rob Bowman’s notes to the expanded reissue of Cahoots (2000), Dylan had called at Robbie Robertson’s house that winter—probably some time in late February/early March—and Robertson asked "whether he had any material that might be appropriate for the album. Dylan proceeded to play an embryonic version of the still unfinished ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece.’ Inspired by Robbie’s enthusiasm, Dylan completed the song shortly thereafter."

  One suspects the song had not come easy. As he told biographer Robert Shelton just weeks later, "A few years ago, I would write a song in two hours, or maybe two days at the most. Now it can be two weeks . . . maybe longer." In this case Dylan did not fully finish the song until after entering Blue Rock Studios—indeed not until he had already recorded the version that ended up on Greatest Hits Vol. II. Whatever embryonic version of the song Robertson heard, it was not the one that would provide the template for The Band’s. They heard a later version, after Dylan reworked the lyrics and wrote a bridge. Absent from Dylan’s released recording—but there in Writings and Drawings and on Cahoots—is the captivating couplet, "Sailin’ ‘round the world in a dirty gondola, oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"