Dylanology No. 6 (2021/10): Springtime in New York and the timely sound of Duquesne Whistle
1: Springtime in New York: Dylan and the lost years - 2: Listen to that Duquesne Whistle blowing - The song and the video - 3: Mr. Tambourine Man as poetics: The second verse
In the sixth issue of Dylanology, Eyolf Østrem discusses Springtime in New York, the 16th installment of The Bootleg Series, as a window to Dylan’s musicianship. Jakob Brønnum is looking into “Duquesne Whistle” and its accompanying video – to try and see if their respective narratives actually do correspond in any way. The third part of the reading of “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a possible poetics finds that “the refrain is a kind of chant – or even charm – and the verses, too, with their repetitive phrasing, not all of them equal in length, have this character of a magic spell.”
Springtime in New York: Bob Dylan and the lost years
by Eyolf Østrem
What fascinates me most about Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles, is the time periods that he chose to focus on. Of the three main sections, one is about the period before his breakthrough in 1962, the next deals with the time around the recording of New Morning (1970), and the third begins in 1987, with a badly injured hand and serious doubts about the future.
What the three main sections have in common, then, is that they take place in precisely the periods when Dylan was a nobody, either because he hadn’t yet become somebody, or because he was away from the public eye: after the motorcycle accident in 1966, and in the lost years in the mid-eighties.
Most people will probably agree that the third of these periods is the deepest down Dylan has ever been, both in terms of the quality of his work, the reception of it, and perhaps also in his own self-esteem – symbolized in Chronicles by the mangled hand.
It has therefore been interesting to see the new focus on the material from the eighties thanks to the Bootleg Series issue Springtime in New York with gems from the vaults from Dylan’s “lost weekend”. The questions that it raises, and which I will attempt to answer, are:
What does this material say about Dylan’s work during his least appreciated period? Can we expect even more gems to surface? Does Springtime in New York redeem Dylan’s eighties?
(As is usually the case with the Bootleg Series issues, Springtime in New York comes in a standard 2CD edition and a deluxe 5CD version. I will discuss the whole 5CD version.)
Dylan’s Musicianship Revealed
The songs that interest me most are those that in some way or another illuminate his songwriting and his performance style.
From the musical point of view, a couple of songs stand out. I would particularly like to emphasize “Let’s Keep It Between Us”, which not only has the brilliant line about “backseat drivers”, but is also one of Dylan’s most intriguing songs, harmonically speaking.
I will discuss this song more closely in a separate text (to be published in Dylanology No. 7), but here, in the broader context of the album, it is worth pointing out the links to some of the other songs in the collection, cover songs that may be regarded as cute fillers, but may also represent more than that: songs such as the 1978 soft rock hit “This Night Won’t Last Forever” (not quite the song you would expect Dylan to want to record, but he actually did something similar with another soft rock hit, “Just When I Needed You Most”, which he recorded for Down In The Groove a few years later), Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” (where Dylan out-Diamonds even Diamond himself), the Motown classic “I Wish It Would Rain”, and the unfinished gems “Almost Done” and “To Fall In Love With You” from the same period.
What they have in common is a flirt with contemporary pop, especially in the extended use of 11-chords in “Let’s Keep It Between Us”, and the far from obvious use of non-traditional chord connections within the song – to the extent that at times it is even unclear what key the song is actually in.
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