Revolution in the Air
Page 53
Dylan’s attachment to the song, though, proved altogether more fleeting, perhaps because he didn’t feel he had quite nailed that sense of youthful wonder. It was dropped from the 1974 tour after the first week and made just a single subsequent live appearance, albeit a fascinating one, part of opening night at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall in February 1978, Dylan delivering a whole new arrangement of the song.
Sung with an understatement rare for that tour, the song had been subtly changed. She does not remind him "of something that used to be," but rather of "something that one time just had to be." And he no longer suggests it would be cruel to "say that I’d be faithful." Rather, it would be "tragic." However, the most significant change is his omission of the final verse, always the weakest of the four, and probably written to highlight a single line, "I was in a whirlwind, now I’m in some better place." After writing (and performing) "Shelter from the Storm," this sentiment became superfluous. Indeed this later, greater song superseded "Something There Is About You" on the world tour, as the Planet Waves song disappeared from the set on day two (though a tryout at a Paris soundcheck in early July suggests it might have been on the verge of a recall).
{296} YOU ANGEL YOU
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [recorded version: Words Fill My Head].
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 5, 1973 [PW—tk.4].
First known performance: Penn State, January 14, 1990.
Paul McCartney once told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, "The last four songs of an album are usually pure slog. If we need four more we just have to get down and do them . . . [but at least] by that stage in an LP we know what sort of songs we want." For Dylan, all on his own in New York, fully aware that it had been three-and-a-half years since his last genuine LP, it was probably even more of a slog. "You Angel You" was one composition borne of a basic need to find an album’s worth of songs.
Using the "Lay, Lady, Lay" formula, he offers the usual platitudes of devotion, delivering his very best "love ya, honest I do" vocal to bolster lines like, "You’re as fine as anything’s fine," and, "The way you walk and the way you talk / I swear it would make me sing." He probably hoped the performance might salvage a rather slight song, and on Planet Waves it almost does. The Band play with all the chutzpah they can muster, while Dylan throws himself into the deep end of his vocal range, but his fans had already had enough of this kind of song on Nashville Skyline and New Morning.
It took Dylan sixteen more years before deciding to see whether it could stand up on stage. In the interim, he seemingly forgot the words entirely, and when he sang it one night in January 1990 at Penn State University, he was back in Big Pink, singing dummy lyrics to a song he never completed. When it made its second and last live appearance three weeks later in London, he still only seemed to know two phrases—"You angel you" and "I can’t sleep at night for trying"—substituting lines from other Dylan songs, like "Under Your Spell" and "Most Likely You Go Your Way" instead.
Further evidence that he had never been entirely happy with the lyrics can be found in The Songs of Bob Dylan 1966–1975, in which he introduced several new lines. "You’re as fine as anything’s fine" now goes with "It sure plays on my mind"; while "The way you smile like a heavenly child" shimmies up to "Is the way it ought to be." The rewriting process continued through the 1985 Lyrics, with the couplet "The way you smile like a sweet baby child / It just falls all over me" appearing from nowhere. Neither exercise convinced the song’s author to revisit it, and when he did, even these lyrics were but a blur.
{297} ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 6, 1973—7 takes; November 8, 1973—2 takes [PW].
Those who can remember the hours spent waiting for Dylan’s next masterpiece in the early seventies surely also remember how their hearts sank like a Mafia informant when first hearing this song. "On a Night Like This" was New Morning all over again, albeit with a top-notch Band enlivening proceedings. The playing swings, and Dylan’s voice sounds good, but there is nothing to suggest we’d got the boy back again. OK, there’s a witty take on Kerouac’s memorable "burn, burn, burn" phrase, used to suggest the exact opposite of what Jack had in mind. And "Let the four winds blow / Around this old cabin door" amusingly cross-references Fats Domino and "The Man in Me." But this was never going to be enough. Thankfully, he was just toying with us. Substance was just around the corner—"Going, Going, Gone" and, better still, "Tough Mama." "On a Night Like This" was a one-shot aperitif, not "The Man in Me" revisited.
{298} TOUGH MAMA
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 5, 1973; November 6, 1973—7 takes [PW—tk.5].
First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.
Here, at last, one starts to sense transmission has been fully restored. If any song sets up the splenetic rush that culminates, ten months later, in Blood on the Tracks, it is "Tough Mama." Addressing his muse, whom he gives four separate monikers—"Tough Mama," "Dark Beauty," "Sweet Goddess," and "Silver Angel"—in those first four verses, he finally turns to his audience, using the fifth to disabuse them of their own unrealistic expectations: "I ain’t a-haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore." Unfortunately for his muse, though, he still intended to turn up at market. As he told Maureen Orth two months later, "I’m not standing at an altar, I’m working in the marketplace. . . .
What I do is direct contact between me and the people who hear the songs. . . . It doesn’t need a translator."
Not here it doesn’t. He had always considered The Band to be the best translators of his musical ideas in performance. On "Tough Mama" they prove that they could just as easily translate those ideas in the studio. The Planet Waves recording is one of the very best examples of ensemble playing any Band fan could hope to find. Yet Dylan barely gave the song a chance to get out of the tour luggage before dispensing with it, performing it at just the first three 1974 shows. Perhaps it took too much out of him, early on in an exhausting two-hour set. There is no hint on the first live vocal, though, that he isn’t reveling in the song. It even features a slightly manic harmonica coda absent from its studio self.
It took until 1997 for him to get around to reminding himself that he had a song here with all the wordplay, resonance of vision, and liquid lyricism of Blood on the Tracks, celebrating a beauty "born of a blinding light and a changing wind," and not yet mourning her absence. Though it took him a couple of summer months to regain a full handle on the song, when he delivered it for the last time, at Wembley Arena in October 1997, it was a fitting son to the original tough mama.
{299} DIRGE
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 10, 1973(?)—1 take; November 14, 1973—1 take [PW].
After just four days in the studio in early November, Dylan felt he could start assembling his first album of original songs in more than three years. According to Rob Fraboni, "Bob, myself, Nat Jeffrey and Bob’s friend" all turned up on Saturday, November 10. The friend in question appears to have been actor Harry Dean Stanton, with whom Dylan had recently worked on the Pat Garrett film, and with whom he now recorded a version of the traditional Spanish song, "Adelita" (also cut with Eric Clapton in 1976).
Dylan also decided he wanted to record a couple of his new songs acoustic, "Wedding Song" and "Forever Young" certainly being attempted. Probably also done was a song listed on a later tape log as "Dirge for Martha." Though the released version of "Dirge" was not recorded until the following Wednesday, engineer Fraboni subsequently stated (in two separate interviews, given within six months of the sessions) that "we had recorded a version with only acoustic guitar and vocal a few days earlier." The tenth is the most logical date
for this solo version. (The only other possible position for such a recording is the fifth, for which the studio logs are missing.) The tenth was the only solo session; and I tend to believe—and Rob Fraboni concurs—that "Dirge" was written during the sessions.
I might even make the outlandish suggestion that he wrote it in direct response to the question Lou Kemp’s girlfriend made concerning "Forever Young": "Are you getting mushy in your old age?" "Dirge," now cast as torch ballad, presents prima facie evidence that he was not. Whether or not Kemp’s girlfriend was indeed the Martha for whom it was written (this fuller title appears only on the tape log—an inside joke, perhaps?), the positioning of "Dirge" directly after "Forever Young" was undoubtedly intended to be one of those classic Dylanesque juxtapositions.
In the end, the only song from the "all acoustic" session to make Planet Waves was "Wedding Song," as Dylan continued to brood on his new dirge for a few days more. Only on the fourteenth, as they began mixing the album, did he decide that he wanted to intercede one last time, and this time he wanted to play the piano. In fact, as Fraboni told Recording Engineer, "Bob went out and played the piano while we were mixing. All of a sudden he came in and said, ‘I’d like to try "Dirge" on the piano.’ . . . We put up a tape and he said to Robbie, ‘Maybe you could play guitar on this.’" He then requested Fraboni get "a kind of bar-room sound from the piano . . . rather than a majestic sound."
There was supposedly a single rehearsal without the tape running, which was immediately followed by the recorded version that can be heard on Planet Waves to this day. If it really is overdub-free, then hats off to Robertson, who demonstrates a real flair for flamenco-like flourishes. Dylan is also faultless at the piano as he stabs out this song to another wanton heartbreaker. At last the circle of passion is broken, as he dissects a relationship gone sour enough to curdle cheese. When it comes to "Dirge," the more cryptic the lines, the better they prove: "I hate that foolish game we played, and the need that was expressed / And the mercy that you showed to me. Whoever would have guessed?" Ouch.
One imagines Dylan had the idea for "Dirge" when walking down Fourth Street. If he really did attempt it first on the tenth, it again demonstrates Dylan’s aptitude for a little "negative capability." "Wedding Song"—another new song recorded that day, again written in L.A. as an album deadline closed in—came from the other side of the picket fence. The vocal performance on "Dirge" alone is acidic enough to strip layers of skin. Perhaps it is just too damn intense to be something he could repeat before unknowing eyes on his comeback tour. The one tour for which Dylan was really in a dirgelike frame of mind was in 1976, when Lou Kemp’s girlfriend/s wasn’t the problem. But Dylan left "Dirge" back at Village Recorder in that iridescent instance when he captured it on tape. I wonder whether Martha found "Dirge" mushy?
{300} WEDDING SONG
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 9, 1973—1 take [PW].
First known performance: The Spectrum, Philadelphia, January 7, 1974.
Some songs—like "Restless Farewell"—I’ve written just to fill up an album. —Dylan to Hubert Saal, February 1968
It may not be the final song recorded for Planet Waves—both "Dirge" and "Forever Young" being re-recorded at the first "mixing" session—but "Wedding Song" was assuredly the last song Dylan wrote for the album, and another song written to come last. His first solo closer since "Restless Farewell," "Wedding Song" serves a similar purpose, though this time he assures the woman to whom he is addressing this restless farewell that he shall be coming back. Like the sleeve note that accompanies the album, it presents a Dylan gearing up to hit the road, writing one last love letter to deny that the lure of the road is calling:
It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large,
Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge,
’Cause I love you more than all of that,
With a love that doesn’t bend.
The intensity of the song hinges on its very immediacy. Hence Dylan’s determination to cut the song rapidly and sparingly. As Fraboni recalled months later, the moment still imprinted on his mind:
Around noon, Bob said, "I’ve got a song I want to record later. . . . I’m not ready right now. I’ll tell you when." We were doing what we were doing, and all of a sudden he came up and said, "Let’s record." So he went out in the studio. . . . Usually he wouldn’t sing unless we were recording. That’s the way he was. You couldn’t get him to go out and just sing, unless he was running something down with The Band. . . . [This time] he asked, "Is the tape rolling? Why don’t you just roll it?" So I did, and he started singing, and there was no way in the world I could have stopped him to say, "Go back to the top." It was such an intense performance. If you listen to the record, you can hear noises from the buttons on his jacket. But he didn’t seem to care.
The performance is so strong that one can’t help but hope the guy in the song manages to win his bride over again. Yet that sense of being written in the moment, and a certain self-serving justification of his own actions, makes its closest kin "Ballad in Plain D," another song he wrote in haste and regretted at leisure. On Planet Waves, it certainly has a lot more fire than the few tepid renditions it received on the 1974 tour—its only live incarnation.
Unfortunately "Wedding Song"—a title culled from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera—is hardly another Song of Songs. It is not just a case of "methinks he doth protest too much." Hindsight—evidenced by the next song he would write—begins applying its marker pen to many lines before "the darling buds of May" have even begun to sprout. That final line, "I love you more than ever now that the past is gone," appears to be a self-conscious attempt to close the book on the sense of nostalgia which kick-started the album process. But the time when he needed shelter from the storm had passed. The next song he will write about "marriage" comes from a very different vantage point—"I married Isis on the fifth day of May / But I could not hold on to her very long . . ."
[1] The issue of when Dylan made his first vocal overdub in the studio is fraught with contention. Two vocals on "The Boxer" presupposes that Dylan dubbed one on to the other, but evidence is lacking. Perhaps he simply did the song twice, and left it to Johnston to sync the two. The "Going Going Gone" overdubs were abandoned, due to Dylan’s dissatsfaction with the process. Only with "Idiot Wind," which he recorded in New York on September 19, 1974, did Dylan actually "punch in" a new vocal on part of the song.
A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPY
I refer readers looking for a more complete bibliography of Dylan publications to my biography, Behind the Shades: Take Two (published in the United States as Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, 2000) and my chronology, Dylan Day-by-Day (published in the United States as Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments, 1995). The bewildering onslaught of new books on the man and his work has, of course, continued unabated since those two volumes, but so little of what I have read seems to justify the trees uprooted that I have confined myself here to the resources that have had a direct bearing on the text herein. Needless to say, the Internet has also provided endless opportunities for the unpublishable, self-appointed "expert" to pontificate on the man and his art, but I have felt little inclination to fuel their self-importance with a citation here. What is here, then, is just the wheat.
1. DYLAN’S OWN WRITINGS
"Good poem, bad poem," c. 1957 (Morgan Library exhibition, 2005)
Bob Dylan Himself: His Words/His Music. New York: MCA Music, 1965.
Varsity questionnaire w/ handwritten answers, c. May 1965 (unpublished)
Don’t Look Back. New York: Witmark, 1967.
Tarantula. New York: MacMillan, 1970.
Words to His Songs. Privately published, 1971.
Writings and Drawings. New York: Knopf, 1973.
The Songs of Bob Dylan fro
m 1966 through 1975. New York: Knopf, 1976.
In His Own Write (ed. M. Krogsgaard). Privately published, 1980.
Lyrics, 1962–1985. New York: Knopf, 1985.
In His Own Write 2 (ed. John Tuttle). Privately published, 1990.
Words Fill My Head. Privately published, 1991.
In His Own Write 3 (ed. John Tuttle). Privately published, 1992.
Drawn Blank. New York: Random House, 1994.
Chronicles, Volume One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Lyrics, 1962–2001. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956–1966. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
2. DYLAN INTERVIEWS
The primary resource for Dylan interviews is a four-volume bookleg collection published in the midnineties by "Dr. Filth." Entitled The Fiddler Now Upspoke, it covers 99 percent of the interviews given up to 1995. For more information, readers are referred to the Behind the Shades: Take Two bibliography.
The post-1995 interviews also utilised are as follows (in order of publication):
September 28, 1997. Pareles, Jon: The New York Times.
September 29, 1997. Gundersen, Edna: USA Today.
October 6, 1997. Gates, David: Newsweek.
November 15, 1997. Jackson, Alan: The Times Magazine.
December 14, 1997. Hilburn, Robert: Los Angeles Times.
February 1998. Kaganski, Serge: Mojo.
March 1999. Engleheart, Murray: Guitar World.
September 10, 2001. Gundersen, Edna: USA Today.
September 17, 2001. Farley, Christopher John: Time.
November 22, 2001. Gilmore, Mikal: Rolling Stone.
September 26, 2004. Preston, John: The Sunday Telegraph.