6. Highway 61 Revisited

I saw parts of a documentary on Dylan the other day, spanning mainly the first five years of his career. To me it was amazing to notice how much emotional involvement I have built up the past year, listening to his first six CDs. (By the way, in this tempo it will take me some seven or eight year to finish my project...)

I write this to remind myself that the aim of this blog-project is not to write music criticism. It is to report to myself about my particular experiences getting to know the work of Dylan. As those particular experiences involve - in my case, but maybe in yours too - a lot of comparison (it seems to me that in listening to music I am constantly busy to build a 'fit' between my new experiences and my older ones) the result inevitably looks a bit like music criticism, I must admit. But where the critic is supposed to have a sort of de-personalized, professional frame of reference, mine is purely personal. For a music critic, it would matter if he would know the later work of the Beatles much better than the early work; for me it doesn't, it simply is a fact of life making up my personal music biography.

Just a couple of observations on my listening to Highway 61 Revisited. This is a fully band-driven CD; Dylan the singer-singwriter is largely replaced by Dylan the band frontman. The music is heavily blues-oriented (I must remind myself that this album appeared roughly in the same time as the Beatles' Help; the Beatles were on their way to musically grow up, Dylan was grown up by his second album and already had taken a sort of U-turn in his career).

The lyrics are, to my ears, very impressionistic and associative, up to the point of being incomprehensible. As I am a non-native English speaker, this may matter to me in different ways than to native speakers. One of the things happenig to me is that I pick up particular phrases and remember them, rather than orient myself on the complete song or on the exact and deeper meaning of the words.

"They're selling postcards of the hanging" is one of those I pick up (first sentence of Desolation Row). Retaining such a sentence is more meaningful to me than trying to figure out who exactly 'Mr. Jones' from Ballad of a Thin Man is (however much I like the "Do you, Mr. Jones?"-phrase).

Musically, I love the band sound; it sounds fresh and improvized, but that may be because I know - because I have read so - that Dylan didn't rehearse much but simply played through the songs once or twice with the band and then recorded it.

One of the things irritating me is the Siren used in the title song Highway 61 Revisited. It is one of the few things that sound outdated to me in Dylan's work so far - it reminds me of cheap 1960s psychedelics too much (it also reminds me of the one song on the Dylan sampler I won I really don't like, Everybody Must Get Stoned - also because its message is so outdated by now). Indeed the remarks I read in Sounes' biography of Dylan that Dylan avoided references to specific persons and places (singing about "the president" rather than giving him a specific name) in order to make sure his songs would not be too specifically tied to contexts makes sense. As does Dylan's remarks that A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall is actually nót about 'atomic rain', so nót about the actual threat of nuclear fall-out after a nuclear war.

For the rest, it was a joy to listen and relisten to this one. Onwards to the next one!

5. Bringing It All Back Home

Watershed.

Suddenly, Dylan's music becomes rock 'n' roll. Well, suddenly... Of course I hear the continuous line in the albums thus far, but still, the full band on most of the songs of the album is a shock. I guess the upheaval about his appearance with an electric guitar on the Newport festival, some months later, was not so much because the electric guitar was a big surprise - everybody could have heard that coming - but rather because it was an insult to a folk audience.

May I suggest, by the way, that 'the folk audience' - which I know extremely well because I have been part of it for such a long time now - may be the perfect illustration of Adorno's 'Ressentimental Listener'?

I read somewhere this album was recorded in three days only, and that Dylan did not like to rehearse but rather just started playing and hoped the band would play along. Maybe that gives this album its fresh sound. It also makes that there is a false start at 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream', and that I seem to hear in the opening song, 'Subterranean Homesick Blues',  that the bass player (I always focus on the bass player while listening to pop and rock music) really has to grope his way around, waiting for the exact moment when the chords change. Dylan is a master in writing lines of uneven length, but playing such lines in a session is quite a nightmare, especially if you are supposed to lay a firm foundation as a bass player.

Lots of 12-bar blues forms. Check the timing of the mouth harp substituting the 4th line of every 6-line verse in 'On the Road Again' - clever. Check the piano on 'Bob Dylan's  115th Dream' - great.

And again hardly choruses - Dylan doesn't seem to like choruses.

Dylan sings with two voices: one high, the other low. The high-voice songs are driving along with great power. The low-voice songs are more reflective - I love that sound of 'She Belongs To Me' or 'Love Minus Zero/No Limit'.

Of course, great lines: "You don't need the weathermen to know hich way the wind blows" is surely one of my favourites. ''She knows too much to argue or to judge". "He not busy being born is busy dying". Sometimes I catch myself listening to Dylan as if being a 15-year old schoolboy listening to records of my favorite artists and drinking in their words as if they are the gospel.

Some Dylan songs for me are less attractive to listen to. On this album 'Mr. Tambourine Man' - an incredible song, but I have heard it too often, I guess, to be able to really concentrate.

And one song stands out for me: 'It's Allright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. The descending melodic lines in the guitar accompaniments of the verses below the sustained singing line; the chord changes in the 'chorus'; the extremely long lines with lots of alliteration. It is chilling.

By the way. I bought a ticket for Dylan performing in Amsterdam in November. Egoistically, I secretly pray he holds on till then... I might also have chosen to go and listen to Paul McCartney; the Beatles are my favorite band of all times, surely. But I decided for Dylan - I guess the only musician I would have preferred over him would have been John Lennon, really.

And by the way. This afternoon I was in an asylum seeker's centre, they had open day and my son has friends there. I was sitting, drinking tea with my wife and looking around, and saw a - probably - Syrian young man walking around wearing a Dylan T-shirt. The man is everywhere.

4. Another Side of Bob Dylan

Another Side? Really?

I've been listening to this CD quite some time, and what stays with me most is the steady musicianship. The way Dylan sings songs in such a steady intermediate tempo. The lines of irregular lengths he produces within one song, which give his music an air of plasticity and improvisation. In 'To Ramona': Dylan as a singer; in the final syllable of each sentence a little descending cascade of 3, 4 or 5 notes. It comes back in some of the other songs on this album.

Of course there are strong messages, for me tied to who Dylan essentially wants to be: himself, rather than his image in the eyes of his audience. In 'All I Really Want To Do' he says: no need to try to be like me. And in 'It Ain't Me Babe' (one of those songs so harsh they are hard to swallow for me in the beginning): if you think I can be your hero, forget it.

Apart from that, some of those lines Dylan writes stick in my head. In 'My Back Pages': "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Or in 'Motorpsycho Nitemare' (which I would like to cite complete here because it has such funny lyrics, but I'll cite just one line): "Just one condition... That you don't touch my daughter and in the morning milk the cows." 'One condition', yeah - selling the daughter with the cow, as it were. And, in 'I Shall Be Free No. 10', the sarcastic:
"I'm a poet/
and I know it/
hope I don't blow it".

I know the first songs much better than the last songs because I listened to the CD in the car often, starting at the first song but never getting to the end really.

And in 'Chimes of Freedom', I hear, for some reason, Dave Rawlings' 'Bells of Harlem'. I promise I will, at some point, report exactly on how I link the two. If I can, that is: I don't really believe that the outrageously complex grid of musical connections embedded in my body (of which my brain, mind and soul are 'parts') can be explained, generally - far too complex for that.

It dawns on me that Dylan doesn't sing stories. He only sings about "me" and "you". That is: about himself, about his others, and, maybe, about me. As for the last thing, adding: if you think I can be your hero, forget it.

3. The Times They Are A-Changin'

This project is going to take a long time.

I've listened and relistened to Dylan's third album in all kinds of places. Mostly in two places, though: at home in the living room, and in the car (places that in my research about other people's musical lives here and now turned out to be the two most important places to listen to music today). At home, while ironing kids' clothes, or when I was alone on an evening (kids asleep, wife gone somewhere) - sometimes in the background, sometimes meant for concentrated listening, often something in-between. Never trust listening typologies using the dichotomy concentrated/background, it is the usual kind of simplification researchers use to make the fluid and messy reality of daily life manageable for their own purposes. In the car, while driving long ways (see 'Í like songs' on my other blog) or while driving to the rehearsals of my shanty choir - in the latter case, when I would start at song number 1 when leaving home, I would invariably end in the middle of song nr. 7, 'Boots of Spanish Leather', when I would return home; the song for some time will for me have the connotation not only of being related to 'Girl of the North Country' and 'Scarborough Fair', but also of sitting in my car in front of the house in the dark of Tuesday evenings, engine off but CD-player on, allowing Dylan to finish that particular song.

That's one of the points of keeping this blog; finding out how I - and maybe you, and others - build up a listening history with all the specific and very personal connotations, such as the memory of listening to Dylan's first album intently over the headphones while sitting on a plastic chair in a tent on a camping site in Zeeland province, summer 2014. Or how the songs on the Dylan compilation I bought earlier will keep being connected to those same Tuesday evening drives in the car, especially when I just became a member of the shanty choir and tried frantically to figure out what singing in this choir not only meant to those guys I just started to know, but especially what it did with me, personally, Dylan becoming the soundtrack to all that intensely personal questioning and thus acquiring deep meanings for me on a level that I consider close to the religious.

I have now grown accustomed enough to Dylan's third album to write something about it and then embark on listening to his fourth. So just some words about this third album. I am not going to enumerate all the songs and what they do with me. Somehow at this point of time that doesn't seem appropriate - my listening relation to this album somehow seems to be fragmented, picking up snippets of some songs while having a good feeling of the completeness of other songs.

As I write this sentence, 'When the Ship Comes In' plays - I don't know what it is about, but I love the image of ships coming in, and have the impression that it functions as a semi-religious metaphor, pointing towards later work of Dylan where he sings about his conversion to Christianity. And while writing the last sentence, the Ship-song finished and the next song has started, 'The Lonely Death of Hattie Carrol', which in the chorus addresses the listener directly - "You who philosophize disgrace ... now ain't the time for your tears", turning in the last chorus to "... now is the time for your tears". Such a clever song, so well done, with a verse where Dylan allows himself to end three or four consecutive lines with the word 'table', a kind of rhyme only a master of text-writing can allow himself (what did it mean for him, being a master in his early twenties?).

Many songs are what would be called 'protest songs' - either direct or, by telling stories from life, indirect - but I think that's not the essence of those songs. The essence for me is a deep poetry, which unites the protest songs with the more personal ones such as the lovely last song 'Restless Farewell'. I love the integration in all those songs  of folk song qualities such as starting the famous opening/title song with "Come gather round people wherever you roam" and North Country Blues with "Come gather round friends and I'll tell you a tale".

The record sleeve contains no information on the songs, or song lyrics, but Dylan poetry - "11 Outlined Epitaphs". I haven't read it yet. Will let you know when I've done so.

While listening and relistening to the CD, I renewed my contact with an old acquaintance: a school teacher who supervised my first educational placement when I was about 19 years old. He turns out to be a Dylan fan and sent me a document with some personal remarks combined with prose of writer Martin Bril about his Bob Dylan listening experiences. Just a week ago, a colleague who seems to follow some of my blogging sent me an article from an American newspaper about a speech Dylan recently made, a speech in which he also says things about what he considers his songs to be. I guess my personal Dylan experience will incorporate Ed and Hein in this ever-changing amalgam of my listening biography, which may make my musical behavior maybe a little bit understandable by hindsight but completely unpredictable future-wise.

2. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

I must have listened to 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' over a twenty times now. Is that much? I remember playing the white and the black Queen LPs every other day when I was 15 or 16, I must have heard them at least a hundred times, all in all.

But still. This second Dylan album to me sounds enormously matured since the first one. Starting off with 'Blowin' in the Wind', that anthem, at the age of 21 of course is incredible. But the second song is 'Girl From the North Country' - Scarborough Fair, yes; it shows how Dylan uses existing songs and tunes to make new repertoire, standing in a folk song tradition which makes ideas of copyright and plagiarism simply ridiculous (and, by the way, is a very living phenomenon if only you think of the birthday parties where new texts are sung to existing melodies). But also a simply beautiful song. Followed by 'Masters of War', about which I wrote earlier about it, in connection to 'Don't Think Twice, It's alright', also appearing on this album.

You see how tempting it is to write about all the songs on the album. I am not going to do that. But I want to point out a couple of things. For example that the guitar still is very untuned, occasionally - check out 'Down the Highway' or 'Oxford Town'. As I wrote before, I like that untuned guitar. Or that there is a quasi-'unbalance' in many of his songs; it is often unpredictable how many bars a sentence exactly is going to have, and within a song the same line my be fluid in that respect in different verses. I imagine playing with him, and the flexibility you would need to stay 'in form' with him. The same for 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall', where you never know how many sentences there will be in each verse. In that song, he daringly writes verses without rhyme; that is to say: there are no rhyming syllables at the end of sentences (or halfway, for that matter), but rhyme is there in alliteration and especially in the (sometimes very biblical) images and metaphors he uses:

"I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded in hatred"

Would you dare to write song lyrics like this? I wouldn't.

And that is another thing to point out: the anger and fear in this album, connected to war, to violence, to the threat of nuclear disaster. To me that is still very imaginable, to the point of re-feeling what I felt a long time ago; having nightmare-ish dreams about nuclear explosions in the 1970s and participating in anti-atomic warcraft demonstrations in the 1980s, all part of a very palpable anger and fear of this lovely but also monstrous world we live in. And although later my connection to those kinds of pacifism dwindled so much that I only really became aware of the horror of the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when I started to visit Sarajevo around 2010 (shame on me), in the days we live in now, with wars and violence raging in the middle east, Ukraine, and many many other places, anger and fear are as present, I guess, as they were in the early 1960s when Dylan wished for the death of the 'Masters of War'.

There are two songs I particularly love, probably because I am basically a romantic-emotional old sod. The first one is 'Bob Dylan's Dream', about his friends of past times and the innocence of all that:

"And our choices there was few

so the thought never hit 

that the one road we traveled 

would ever shatter or split."

The other one is the lovely 'Corinna, Corinna'. The first song with a band, I believe. A cover. And a real beauty.

1b. Bob Dylan - part two

I am looking forward to hear the second CD in the collection, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan with the iconic record sleeve and the even more iconic 'Blowin' in the Wind' as its first song. But I have forbidden myself to listen to a new CD when I have not yet finished writing about the old one, so I have to wait a bit. A waiting that, as always in such cases, reminds me of the verdict (was it Norbert Elias?) that culture basically is the postponement of satisfying one's needs - something I guess children need to be trained in: not only do they, aged nine, want to become a DJ once they have discovered there exists something like a DJ mix set, they also want to buy the set tomorrow.

But anyway.

I find myself also becoming a  bit tired with listening to the first album. I don't know why - it is nice enough, inspiring enough, with enough variation to keep listening to it every now and again, I guess. But still, I feel I want to listen to the next record. Is it because of that deeply human (or western?) need for progress - the trait of not being satisfied with playing three chords on the guitar if it would also be possible to play four? And then wanting to learn the fifth chord too? One of my dreams is to live in a simple house and sit on a simple chair and be satisfied with that, rather than longing for another kind of chair or fantasizing about another place where the simple house could stand. I am not sure if I will ever reach even a tenth of this Buddhist level of satisfaction. But I promise I'll keep trying (a true Buddhist would tell me that it is exactly the trying that stands in my way, of course).

But anyway.

What I wanted to write about Bob Dylan. That I like Dylan's guitar playing here, which is very functional, even when the guitar is slightly out of tune or when there is an occasional mistake (great to hear a mistake on a record - Sounes' biography learned me that Dylan usually did not rehearse with his bands but just wanted them to play along as he went and often was satisfied with the first take of a new song). That I hear some of Dylan's later voice foreshadowed in this album - the way he pronounces "dove" in the sentence "a lady like a dove" in 'Pretty Peggy-O' (a song which is very much an English ballad - I even know one or two Dutch equivalents to the song, content-wise).  That I hear the famous 'Beatle-chord' in 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down'. That Dylan's control of voice in his version of 'House of the Rising Sun' (the version that has become the standard - listen to the very different version of Woody Guthrie here - it reminds me slightly of the famous song John Henry, which I know from a very old recording (not available on YouTube, I guess) I used when I was teaching music in a secondary school) is stunning to me, as is his control of voice (falsetto!) in 'Freight Train Blues'. That 'Man of Constant Sorrow' reminds me, of course, of the Coen-movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou (receiving a Grammy for its soundtrack -check out 'Man of Constant Sorrow' live by Alison Krauss and Unions Station here from 2.40, but also look at the start of the clip and check out Krauss with Emmylou Harris and my favorite female American singer Gillian Welch in the middle - and if you like it, check out the Down from the Mountain-concert with live performances of the music from the movie; which then might lead me to refer you to Dolly Parton's  the Grass is Blue album, et cetera). That the title of 'Fixin' To Die' reminds me of the 'Fixin' to Die Rag' - in my mind is the idea that the 'Fixin' to Die Rag' was played on the Woodstock Festival (where Dylan was very absent) but I am too lazy to check this idea or to listen to the song. And so on, and so forth (a saying which reminds me of Wilco's Dawned on me again because they use it in a song...).

And what comes to mind also: that Dylan, a Jewish boy, sings a traditional repertoire in which religion, God and Jesus are present in every song, sometimes in every verse, in an often very moving way. It's the same with the Cash repertoire, maybe with American repertoire in general - maybe the very fact of singing this repertoire for decades eventually ripens the soul for a conversion to Christianity?

And now I can finally start listening to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

1. Bob Dylan - part one

So I read Dylan's biography by Howard Sounes, and have been hesitant to start this little piece about Dylan's first LP, simply called Bob Dylan. I am not sure if both are related. From Sounes' biography I learned that Dylan is a not-always-nice and intriguing person. From listening to Dylan's first album I learned he was, at age 20-or-so, already an intriguing singer.

It is tempting to listen to this first recording in the light of his later biography. It is also tempting for me not wanting to do that; wanting to write a review as if I was living in 1962. Trying to relive the 'authentic experience' of 1962. Nót taking into account (my knowledge of) his later work.

But I am not going to strive for such an 'authentic' review, ignoring what I have learned from 1962 onwards (I was born in 1964, by the way). In the first place because that is, of course, impossible anyway. When I write, I write now. But also because the point of this blog is not to write 'authentic' reviews - if you want them authentic, search the web for reviews written in 1962 (but be aware that you will not be able to read them in 1962...). The point of this blog is to trace what listening to Dylan, here and now, brings me. The fact that I listen chronologically to Dylan's albums is not very meaningful - I could have chosen listening alphabetically (starting with his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan) or by color (starting with his 1988 Down in the Groove with a nearly all-black sleeve).