Too Late – At Last!

"Too Late", the precursor of "Foot of Pride" was released on Bootleg Series 16. This text was published in the very first issue of Dylanology, and is revised, with new music examples.

The song “Foot of Pride” was one of the true gems of the first Bootleg Series compilation in 1991. It was originally recorded for Infidels in 1983 but left off the album in the end.

For a long time the song was called “Too Late”. This has been known from the recording sheets from the sessions. Recently, Dylan scholar Terry Gans was granted access to the Dylan Archive in Tulsa, where the original tapes are stored, for his book on the Infidels sessions, Surviving in a Ruthless World. What Gans could reveal is that “Too Late” was not just a different title but actually a quite different song from “Foot of Pride”.

The song has now finally been released to the world, first on a compilation CD coming with the June 2021 issue of UNCUT, then on the sixteenth issue of the Bootleg Series, Springtime in New York 1980–1985. This also makes it possible to study the creative process that led from the earlier to the later incarnation of the song – and perhaps also why it was eventually not included on Infidels, despite the 54 takes listed in the recording sheets.

Four questions present themselves:

• Is it a good song in its own right?

• Is the path from “Too Late” to “Foot of Pride” an interesting one?

• Does it get us closer to understanding the mysterious “Foot of Pride”?

• Why was it left off Infidels?

The TL;DR answers are: “Yes”, “Yes”, “No”, and “Who knows?”

Abandoned Ballads

Yes, it is a good song. And yes, it is an interesting Dylan song, not only lyrically but also musically.

Again, Dylan manages to take something very simple – in this case, a classical ballad form with an A-A-B+Refrain structure – and make it musically interesting, this time through a combination of the very loose verse structure (rhyme scheme, metrical patterns, the pulsating alternation between cascades of words and drawn-out phases of nothing) and something relatively unusual: a five-line structure:

   G                          D                     Em
a: Whether there was a murder I don't know, I can't say,
         C                    G 
   I was visiting a friend in jail.

              G                     D
a: There were only two women at the scene at the time
   Em                         C                        G
    Neither one of them saw a thing, both of them were wearing veils

                      C    
b: They said it was a natural situation
           C    
   that he reached too high, tumbled back to the ground

                      D
   You know what they say about being nice to people on the way up,
                             G                Am
   sooner or later you might meet them coming down.

                        G                     Em
C (refrain): Well, it's too late to bring him back 
                           C
             Too late, too late, too late,
             D                     G
             Too late, too late to bring him back

The first line is repeated, bringing the phrase count up to five.

The first block is repeated (line 1 in the music example), followed by a block that is twice as long in total and goes through the other main steps of the key (C and D) in static stages.

This long section, before the return to G in the refrain, which is a condensed and/or reordered version of the first block, so that:

G D | Em C | G

becomes

G Em | C D | G.