Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Other equally significant rewrites were also made between the Greatest Hits Vol. II take and the song’s "final" form. Some were just straight improvements. On Greatest Hits Vol. II, Dylan does not complete the thought, "Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory," content to just pen something that rhymes with the song title: "As the daylight hours do increase." By the end of the process, though, he has returned in his time machine to Hibbing, remembering a time when he "ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese." Likewise, when caught in a scrum at Brussels airport, he initially concentrates on finding a rhyme (with "side") and comes up with, "Everyone was there but no one tried to hide." Then he finds a line that truly expresses the curse of fame: "Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside."

  However, one rewrite is inferior. Perhaps Dylan thought he was being too cryptic—at a time when he was still looking for "the simplest way I can tell the story." Having landed in Brussels "with a picture of a tall oak tree by my side," he changed it to a "plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried." The reference to the picture was a specific one—presumably the well-known story of an old man who spent his whole life painting and repainting the same tree, a tale about the kind of artist Dylan could never be. The description of the plane journey is mere fluff—though Dylan makes more of it in 1975 when he rhymes it with, "Sure has been one hell of a ride!"

  Quite why Dylan elected to include what is evidently an early take of the song on Greatest Hits Vol. II is not obvious. The session log reveals that there were eleven takes of the song, including five complete vocal performances. That it was a last-minute decision to use the early take is clear from a CBS tape box marked: "Outs from Greatest Hits Vol. II." Aside from the stereo version of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"—which failed to make the final track listing—there are two separate versions of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" on the reel, one described as "piano version," marked DO NOT USE, and the other described as a "full band version." I think we can safely assume Dylan went with the latter, since no one could describe the released take as a "piano version,"

  However, when it came time to put the song as a final entry in Writings and Drawings, he used what might be described as the finished lyrics, i.e., the ones The Band used—complete with the "Coca-Cola" bridge. The Band may well have heard a slightly different version, for Helm sings about "a date with a pretty little girl from Greece," as opposed to "Botticelli’s niece." Since Dylan also sang this line at subsequent performances, we can probably assume this was not a spontaneous rewrite by some Band-member, but a last-minute Dylan "improvement."

  Nor was it the last such improvement he wrought on this little masterpiece. In 1975 he announced a return to that plane of inspiration by opening every show on the Rolling Thunder Revue with this song. Having demonstrated why he sang "When" and not "If I Paint My Masterpiece," Dylan reinforced the song’s renewed relevance by opening his four-hour docudrama, Renaldo and Clara, with the very same song (which only compounds the criminality of its omission from The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, sacrificed to make a corny joke out of "Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You").

  He also showed that the old lyrical dexterity was fully restored, making the streets of Rome full of "trouble," not "rubble"—which, for the narrator, happens to be the case—and remaking the "mighty kings of the jungle" as "those kings of the Vatican," a more apposite image. He also completely reordered the verses—now 1, 3, 2, 5, 6, 4—an audacious exercise that makes for a more effective narrative.

  If the 1975 performances indicated a restoration of creative powers, the song was one that could work from either vantage point—drought or flood. In June 1991, when he delighted a large Roman audience by opening a show there with it, the song was again coming from someone who was half-stepping up "the Spanish Stairs," wondering who turned the lights off. It survived in the set through the following year, even though no comparable masterpiece would come. Finally he decided to stop forcing it, though he continued "sailin’ ’round the world."

  {280} WATCHING THE RIVER FLOW

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

  Known studio recordings: Blue Rock Studios, NY, March 16–18, 1971 [45].

  First known performance: El Paso, TX, November 21, 1978.

  Two years earlier Dylan had been content to watch while "the river flows, flows to the sea / wherever it flows, that’s where I want to be." By March 1971 he was restless again, wishing he "was back in the city / Instead of this old bank of sand." "Watching the River Flow"—unlike "When I Paint My Masterpiece"—makes light of the amnesia that afflicts its author, suggesting he might just "stop and read a book" (a nice reference to one place he was increasingly turning for inspiration). Just the act of starting the song—both a single and an album opener in a matter of months—with the sentiment, "What’s the matter with me / I don’t have much to say," seemed intended to dispel the claims of those who, like Ralph J. Gleason, had recently proclaimed, "We’ve Got Dylan Back Again."

  "Watching the River Flow"— the last song recorded at Blue Rock—appears to have come together while the sessions rolled along. A detailed Rolling Stone report of the session unequivocally states, "The song was written and cut during the Russell-Dylan jams at Dylan’s New York studios." ("I remember Bob . . . had a pencil and a notepad, and he was writing a lot. He was writing these songs on the spot in the studio, or finishing them up at least." —Jim Keltner, Uncut, October 2008.) The magazine also claimed Dylan slipped some new lyrics into his Blue Rock recording of "That Lucky Ol’ Sun." The couplet quoted doesn’t sound at all like that gospel classic; it sounds more like a starting point for this new original: "What’re you gonna do when the fence needs mending / I just can’t sit around here pickin’ flowers."

  Dylan was not averse to picking out lines from old favorites with which to bolster his newest song. One barely notices the way he slips in a line from "The Water Is Wide"—"If I had wings and I could fly . . ."—or

  another from "Old Man River," among the catalog of desires that is "Watching the River Flow." But he knows he’s stuck, looking at "the river of no return," waiting on the next wave of inspiration. A good choice for a single, "Watching the River Flow" accentuated all the positives from his association with Leon Russell and provided fans with that old sardonic wordsmith again. Yet it was only a minor hit (peaking at #41), and Dylan did not work with Russell again.

  In fact, the song’s future status would be largely based on its inclusion as the opening cut on Greatest Hits Vol. II, an album with almost no hits, but a number of previously unreleased tracks that were hits, just not for Dylan. It took until November 1978 for him to remember he’d written the damn thing. But after a couple of soundcheck tryouts, he debuted it in Texas with a big-band arrangement that worked surprisingly well. And it was restored to the set in the nineties, when his very own bar band was willing to boogie on down to the river at a time when he again didn’t "have much to say."

  {281} WALLFLOWER

  Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, November 4, 1971 [TBS—tk.4].

  Evidently recorded as a potential B side to the "George Jackson" single, nothing perhaps exemplifies the dearth of inspiration that now ensnared Dylan than the reemergence of "Wallflower" the following October, as a half-hearted duet with Doug Sahm at sessions for a Sahm Band album on Atlantic. That Dylan should even remember such an insignificant song a year after he wrote it demonstrates someone largely working from a tabula rasa when it came to his songwriting. Reminded about the song during a radio special to promote the first Bootleg Series—on which it features—Dylan described it as "just a sad song . . . one of those pathetic situations in life that can be so overwhelming at times."

  {282} GEORGE JACKSON

  Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio B, NY, November 4, 197
1 [45—tks.9+13].

  Once again it took the reading of a book to inspire the songwriter in Dylan. The book in question was Soledad Brother, a collection of prison letters by a Black Panther named George Jackson. The fatal shooting of Jackson by a prison guard at San Quentin on August 21, 1971, while allegedly trying to escape, had prompted Dylan to pick up this collection. On finishing the letters, he apparently phoned up a CBS executive and booked a studio for the following day, aiming to record a quickly penned eulogy to the black activist.

  The results were just as hastily released, as a double-sided single, at the beginning of December. Though it would appear he had originally intended to put "Wallflower" on the B side, a friend pointed out that this might result in radio stations playing this innocuous country "miss" as the new Dylan single, rather than a statement of support for a violent radical. As a result, Dylan put an acoustic version of "George Jackson" on one side of the single and a band version on the other. The outcome was not any greater amount of radio play, and the single pretty much sank without a trace. No one was listening, it seemed. Just as Dylan suspected. (He had noted as much three years earlier: "No one cares to see it the way I’m seeing it now, whereas before, I saw it the way they saw it.")

  At the same time, Dylan incurred a remarkable degree of flak from those who already disparaged his civil rights record and questioned his general commitment to the Cause; they were now inquiring whether he intended to donate his royalties to the Soledad brothers’ defense fund. These angry young folk saw "George Jackson" as a sop to get them off the singer’s back, not a "return" to radicalism. The song was actually prompted by a series of conversations with filmmaker and friend

  Howard Alk, who had been working on a film about the Black Panthers through 1970–1, which made Dylan curious about the Panthers’ goals and motives, leading to a meeting with Huey Newton and David Hilliard the previous December.

  From this it was but a short step to their incarcerated brother. Unfortunately, Dylan appears to have once again bought into the counter-culture version of Jackson’s "execution." In the song he clearly suggests Jackson was shot by the guards during a riot, not as he was trying to escape, but because "they were frightened of his power / They were scared of his love . . . so they cut George Jackson down." Given that the volatile inmate had told Liberation News Service reporter Karen Wald on the morning of his death, "We’ve gotta . . . turn the prison into just another front of the struggle, tear it down from the inside," they were entitled to be frightened.

  The official report of the incident—which resulted in the death of three guards and two other inmates—suggests that Jackson summarily executed at least one of the guards, Jere Graham, with a smuggled

  9mm pistol, as he attempted to take over his tier in the Adjustment Center. While clearly demonstrating someone who "wouldn’t take shit from no one," one might also interpret it as evidence of a death wish. Earlier in the song, Dylan portrays Jackson as someone incarcerated "for a seventy-dollar robbery"; the law then "Closed the door behind him / And they threw away the key." In fact, the seventy-dollar robbery had been back in 1959, when Jackson was eighteen, and he served just a year for what was, after all, an armed robbery of a gas station.

  Jackson was soon back in jail, though, and in January 1970, he killed his first prison guard, John Mills, supposedly in retaliation for the deaths of three black activists. Quite where the "love" comes into Jackson’s philosophy Dylan never explains. He has never performed "George Jackson," nor has he included it on any LP or CD (save for a Japanese 3-LP set, Masterpieces), and he may have come to regret writing the song even more quickly than the one he wrote for another incarcerated black bruiser four years later. As for Jackson’s death, it has continued to exercise conspiracy cranks, convinced that he was executed not at the authorities’ behest, but at the Panthers’.

  [1] Recordings of a Farm Aid rehearsal on September 19 (on video); of the soundcheck the night before, September 21; and the concert itself all feature the song, and are all worth seeking out. One presumes the subject matter was chosen because of the nature of the benefit.

  { 1972–3: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; Planet Waves }

  Still in a befuddled state as far as songwriting went, Dylan managed to write two of his most enduring songs in the wastelands of Arizona and Mexico—"Forever Young" and "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door"—between the spring of 1972 and winter 1973, proving, I guess, that there are droughts and there are droughts. But he knew he needed to write more. And it would still be another nine months before he had enough songs to make a ten-track album of originals. Planet Waves, written mostly during a stint east in October 1973, suggested he’d finally called up a familiar phantom engineer to look at some of the internal wiring. Songs like "Dirge," "Tough Mama," and "Going, Going, Gone" at last suggested someone gearing up to peer over the cliff again . . .

  {283} BOWLING ALLEY BLUES

  {284} FIELD MOUSE FROM NEBRASKA

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings (endpapers).

  {285} ROUND AND ROUND WE GO

  Published lyrics: In His Own Words Vol. 2.

  Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve 1971–2, Dylan joined The Band onstage at the New York Academy of Music for a rousing five-song encore that included a powerful performance of "When I Paint My Masterpiece." It would be January 1973 before he would be heard from again, now in Durango, playing a bit part in a Western movie by that archetypal maverick, Sam Peckinpah. In between, he somehow managed to drop off the face of the earth. In songwriting terms, he achieved much the same trick.

  In fact, he had escaped to Phoenix, Arizona, with his family, where he continued to work on songs without success. According to a 1986 article by history teacher Bob Finkbine, who befriended Dylan at this time, one day he was "sitting in Dylan’s kitchen drinking coffee . . . [and] I asked him, ‘Bob, did you ever have a time when you had trouble writing?’ Sara turned from fixing sandwiches at the counter and quipped, ‘Try the last two years.’" The lack of any evidence to the contrary validates Sara’s unguarded aside.

  One way Dylan found to confront his ongoing problem of earning a living as a songwriter was compiling the evidence of a time when "everything had been like a magic carpet," published in the winter of 1973 as Writings and Drawings. Though the collection concluded with "When I Paint My Masterpiece," already almost two years old, the end papers to the volume included four pages of typed lyrics to what appeared to be new songs, two of which bear titles: "Bowling Alley Blues" and "Field Mouse from Nebraska."

  If these end papers have a lyrical equivalent, it is the 1963 Margolis and Moss manuscripts. Again Dylan seems content to let ideas fizzle out, failing to finish anything he started. A decade earlier he was taking a breather. But these half-formed lyrics were worrying evidence of stultifying stasis, either expressing the cloyingly mundane ("It was early in the evening, I was cutting up the bread / Man alive, that crust was hard") or detailing a series of vain attempts to parlay with paradoxes, which had been done so dazzlingly back at Big Pink ("When I was a boy on the Wagon Wheel / I married a false young maid / She was tender hearted and tho it showed / She kept her mood concealed"). Bookending a decade of innovation and inspiration, these unformed songs were omitted from subsequent editions of the man’s lyrics.

  As for "Round and Round We Go," this was a six-line fragment found in the Dylans’ trashcan by self-styled garbologist A. J. Weberman at the end of 1971 and published in Weberman’s autobiography, A Life in Garbology. Suffice it to say, there is a reason it was in the trashcan with all the dog shit and diapers. And there was also a reason why Dylan moved far from the crazies who were taking over the American asylum. He intended to follow the advice offered in this fragment—"round & round the mountain / play that guitar, man"—as he headed for Arizona, where he might yet hide from "unknowing eyes."

  {286} FOREVER YOUNG

  Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 200
4.

  Known studio recordings: Ram’s Horn demo, June 1973 [BIO]; Village Recorder, LA, November 2, 1973—1 take; November 5, 1973—2 takes;

  November 8, 1973—5 takes; November 9, 1973—1 take; November 14, 1973—5 takes [PWx2].

  First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.

  When I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72, the big song at the time was "Heart of Gold." . . . It bothered me every time I listened to "Heart of Gold." . . . I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away, and turn on the radio and there I am, but it’s not me. —Dylan to Scott Cohen, November 1985

  The nine months or so that Dylan spent in Arizona in 1972 remain shrouded in the dust of rumor. Even a 1986 article in a local Phoenix paper by Bob Finkbine has done little to fill this chasm in the chronology. The one solid piece of information Finkbine does provide is confirmation that "Forever Young" dates from this time. Dylan was proud enough to play it for his new friend, informing him, "I’ve been tinkering around with a new song. I wrote it for Jesse. It goes kinda like this." He then broke into that memorable opening, "May God bless and keep you always . . ."