Dylanology No. 2 (preview)
Highway 61 Revisited Revisited - If that is only Most Of The Time, what about all the other times - The Column: Who to meet In The Summertime - Digging for the origins of Foot Of Pride
Dylanology No. 2 takes off with the first in a series of revisits to Dylan’s albums. It seemed impossible not to begin with Highway 61 Revisited. Eyolf Østrem goes through the studio sessions trying to see how, why, and what Dylan chose as he did in putting the album together.
Jakob Brønnum looks into the lyrics of Most Of The Time, asking what it says about the other times, and looks into “In The Summertime”, which opens Chrissie Hynde’s new cover album Standing In the Doorway.
Plus: Look out for the last part of Eyolf Østrem’s search for The precursor of “Foot of Pride”, the Infidels outtake that can be heard in the CD accompanying the June issue of UNCUT.
This is a preview of the issue. To read the whole thing:
Highway 61 Revisited Revisited
by Eyolf Østrem
What is Dylan’s best album? If you answer Highway 61 Revisited, you’re not alone. In most “Best Albums” lists, it is in the top three, and for good reason. Not only does it contain several of Dylan’s most iconic songs – including the greatest song of all time, according to Rolling Stone – it is also the album that cemented Dylan’s status as something more than a sophisticated folk singer with charisma and an attitude.
In the “Revisited” column, we will revisit Dylan’s albums, one by one; look back at them with fresh eyes, but also, where possible and in line with the purpose of the visit, use the available studio sessions as a background for actually revisiting the albums, following them from start to finish and beyond.
First Visit (c. 1982)
Highway 61 Revisited was my first Dylan album. I think I was fifteen or sixteen. At that time, I would regularly haul my classical guitar with me on the bus from the little hole I grew up in, where there was no such thing as a record store (the local gas station sold ABBA cassettes, though), to the slightly bigger hole where I took guitar lessons – and where there was a record store.
I knew that Dylan was great, I just didn’t know why, since I had never heard his music. What I did know was that it was supposed to be more than simple pop, better than the Beatles, even. It was sophisticated and advanced, raw and brutal – it was grown-up music. I wanted that.
So after much deliberation, I ended up buying Highway 61 Revisited. I had done some investigation between two visits, and I knew that it was a classic.
In confessions such as this, the sentence: “I was quite unprepared for what I was about to hear” usually appears at this point. It may then go on to describe the shock of the initial gunshot of “Like a Rolling Stone” and conclude that “It changed my life”, “I could never listen to music the same way again”, etc. Bruce Springsteen’s version goes like that. He was in the car with his mom when “on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.”
Not me. What I recall from my first encounter with the album is that I was puzzled by the badly tuned instruments and the strange sounds and riffs on several of the songs. I loved the irreverence of referring to the Patriarch as “Abe” in the little chit-chat between God and him in the title track, but mostly the lyrics just whooshed past me. I couldn’t really make any sense of them, but they left behind just enough fragments of meaning that I understood that this was it – this was actually the adult music that I had wanted. I knew it was great, I wanted it to be great, and so I worked on its greatness until it appeared and I could hear it and feel it myself too.
I also knew that “Desolation Row” was important, I had read that. What surprised me was that it was so quiet, almost with a classical guitar feel to it. So if this was what the coolest guy in the world plays on the most important album in the history of rock, then maybe there was hope for a fifteen-year-old nerd with a guitar case too?
But romantic recollection aside: while this is the Dylan album that I've had with me for the longest time, it has never really made it to the top of my list. The jarring piano and the need for tuning have always been standing in the way.
It is therefore the perfect object for a revisit. Will I be able to hear it with fresh ears? Will the studio sessions on the Cutting Edge compilation add something to an album I know so well? Let’s see.
[ For the remainder of the argument, you’ll have to
but here’s the conclusion: ]
The Reverdict
So there you have it: the result of the revisit can be summarized:
(a) Highway 61 Revisited is more of a folk album than meets the eye/ear; but
(b) it becomes what it is through a much more fundamental symbiosis between the genres that are represented by the musicians than was the case with Bringing It All Back Home; and
(c) the secret sauce which turns it into the novelty it is consists of errors, serendipity, mud, chance, missed chord changes, tremendous expressive force, and all held together by exceptional musicianship.
And if I had had a say in the final compilation of the album, so that the track sequence would have been: Side A – 1: Like a Rolling Stone, 2. Tombstone Blues, 3. It Takes a Lot to Laugh, 4. Sittin’ on a Barbed Wire Fence, 5. Ballad of a Thin Man; Side B – 1. Queen Jane Approximately (take 5), 2. Highway 61 Revisited, 3. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (take 2), and 4. Desolation Row,
– then it might even have been Dylan’s best album.
If that is only Most Of The Time, what about all the other times?
By Jakob Brønnum
In 1989 Dylan put out an unexpected masterpiece, the album Oh Mercy. It was the first album in a few years that instantly presented itself as a work by the artist of the highest ambition and the strongest expression of his vision and capabilities. It is pointed in its existential themes evoking death (The Man In The Long Black Coat), apocalypse (Ring Them Bells, Shooting Star) and it has a roaring critique of civilization (Political World, Disease Of Conceit).
One song is less existential in a biblical or religious way and more directly psychological in its observations than many Dylan songs. It is the somber “Most Of The Time”, which opens the B-side of the original vinyl album, where the text is shrouded in the producer Daniel Lanois’ signature sound, the dark flow of notes and understated rhythm.
At first glance, “Most Of The Time” seems to return to the narrative of Blood On The Tracks:
Most of the time
She ain’t even in my mind (verse 4) …
Most of the time
I wouldn’t change it if I could (verse 2)
This is reminiscent of lines in If You See Her Say Hello, like:
I’ve never gotten used to it
I’ve just learned to turn it off
A passage in verse 4 even maybe touches on the Kabbalistic play with time and eternity that Dylan has made several times:
Most of the time
I can’t even be sure
If she was ever with me
Or if I was with her
Time has ceased to exist. “Shelter From the Storm” rewrites a passage from Genesis 1.2 about the creation of the world to depict somebody that was not existing in time, much the way the narrator of “Most Of The Time” is not sure:
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form
The Genesis passage reads like this: Now the earth was formless and empty (the wilderness), darkness was over the surface of the deep (void of form).
In “Oh Sister” (Desire, 1976) time again ceases to exist between the two lovers:
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved
And in “She Belongs To Me”, Dylan places the beloved beyond ordinary existence, into the realm of the unborn (nobody’s child) and thereby eternity:
She's nobody's child, the law can't touch her at all
But “Most Of The Time” does not pursue these metaphysical trails. On the contrary it goes further into the depths of the individual mind in time. “Most Of The Time” is an unusually detailed psychological account of somebody’s difficulties in holding together life on a day to day basis.
For the rest:
The column: Who to meet in the summertime
Some people have style that comes so naturally that it is hard to even see that it is style. Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders is one of those people: What to get Bob Dylan for his 80th birthday? Dunno – he is surely a man who has everything! I have it! I’ll get him a cover album!
By Jakob Brønnum
It came out in May to good reviews. “The results are rewarding and often illuminating,” writes American Songwriter. The album Standing In The Doorway contains 10 songs – as a Dylan album should – all of them ballads, to the mild disappointment of a couple of critics. Two songs have not been officially recorded by Dylan, and none of them are among Dylan songs previously covered by Chrissie Hynde.
Hynde’s connection with Bob Dylan dates back at least to 1986 when she was performing in The Royal Albert Hall at a concert for the victims of the Columbian earthquake, singing the rarely heard “Property Of Jesus” from Shot Of Love, one of the most pentecostally biblical of the works from the evangelical albums, talking about the concept of giving up your own personal identity claiming this will bring not imprisonment but freedom. On her new album of covers of Dylan songs, she surprisingly revisits the album Shot of Love, as I shall get back to.
In the 1992 30th-Anniversary Bob Fest, Hynde was chosen to perform the revered “I Shall Be Released”, one of Bob Dylan’s universally misunderstood masterpieces.
When, as in the Human Rights Concerts in 1986 “I Shall Be Released” is identified with the message of Amnesty International and the organisation’s work for the release of prisoners, it is overlooked that the release is an existential release equivalent to the Christian concept of being saved. Rarely has Bob Dylan paraphrased the Bible closer:
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
Matthew 27.24:
For as lightning that comes
from the east is visible even in the west
so will be the coming
of the Son of Man
Read on:
The Dig: About Time for “Too Late” (2:2)
The precursor of Foot of Pride is finally being released to the world, on a compilation CD coming with the June issue of UNCUT. Eyolf Østrem digs into the song and its strange genesis. The first part can be found in Dylanology, No. 1.
By Eyolf Østrem
[ This is only the end of the article; for the rest: ]
A Dream Not Come True
Those so inclined might then go on to read significance into the changed verb tenses, from “I will love him” to the resigned “I guess I loved him too”, at a time when there was speculation that Dylan had left Christianity and moved on.
I am more interested in the glimpse that this cluster of texts and motifs may give into the creative process – Dylan’s, and in general.
Huge metaphors and archetypal stories have a way of living their own lives, thanks to their portent and the breadth of associations that combine them, internally and with other stories – including the stories of our own marvelous and mundane day-to-day lives.
The way a thematic cluster like the Easter narrative can weave in and out of a text like “Too Late”/“Foot of Pride” to me stands as a concrete illustration of Dylan’s own description in Chronicles of his view on songwriting:
A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true.
This to me is the most perfect description of why Dylan’s songwriting has such an effect. In a dream, motifs mix and mingle, with complete disregard for logical consistency and coherence, but for as long as the dream lasts, everything that happens seems natural. In the best Dylan texts, images and themes flash by in ways that resemble this kind of dream-like, ungraspable obviousness.
This is not to say that his lyrics are just written-out dreams. Cases like “Too Late”/“Foot of Pride” demonstrate that there is hard work involved too – in shaping the final fabric of the thematic weave. In this case, this has involved the stronger “up”/“down” theme, the emphasis on the Lucifer element, the more devilish businessman, and the broader range of biblical references in “Foot of Pride”.
And perhaps also a reworking of an Easter theme.
Does this make it more clear what “Foot of Pride” is about? Definitely not. I would say: on the contrary: the introduction of the Easter theme is if anything a disturbance, and possibly completely wrong. But I can’t help but think that it makes sense, even though it makes the meaning of the song even more confused than it already was.
The quotation from Chronicles may also, ultimately, contain the answer to my last question: why was the song left off Infidels? The 50 plus takes demonstrate clearly that he tried to make the song come true, but in the end he apparently didn’t think he had succeeded – it turned out to be a dream not come true.
This also, incidentally, means that there still isn’t an official Dylan song with the beautiful G-D-Em-C progression, despite three attempts.
Luckily for us, we have it all on tape.