164: Bob Dylan, ‘Tangled Up in Blue’

‘Tangled Up in Blue’ — NY Sessions, Take 1
‘Tangled Up in Blue’ — NY Sessions, Take 2
‘Tangled Up in Blue’ — Minnesota, Official Release

Blue man. Painting by Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan, 1974, the man of a thousand faces, as multifaceted and puzzling as life itself.

After nine monolithic albums in eight years (1963-70) that not only described but actually prescribed the lives of an entire generation, then a creative drought of four years. After years of frenetic touring, then a seven year hiatus induced by a motorcycle crash. What was he doing in those interim years?

Well, he married in 1965 and had four children. In ‘Sign on the Window’ from “New Morning”, one of the greatest songs on the last in his string of great albums, he sings “Build me a cabin in Utah/Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout/Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”/That must be what it’s all about.”

Bob Dylan with brood

But then came 1973-1974. A new album for a new record company, “Planet Waves” for David Gefen’s Asylum, commercially mediocre, artistically uneven. The “After the Flood” tour with The Band, more shouted than sung.

In the midst of all this activity, Dylan began to study painting with 73 year-old Russian-born Norman Raeben, the son of Sholem Aleichem. He stressed perceptual honesty rather than conceptualization. “Bob”, Norman said to Dylan, “look at that round coffee table. Now, show me how you would paint it.” He thought the scruffy Dylan was destitute, and told him that if he’d clean up the studio after class he could crash there. Raeben berated his students in class, with a kill-or-cure indifference to their feelings.

Mortal Dylan

“He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt,” said Dylan. This metamorphosed into a songwriting technique employing a fragmented narrative of time, place and person. Events, personae, and sequences Bob and shift. It is left to the listener to struggle to reconstruct some coherence, some linear narrative. He never quite succeeds, because the images are built for slipping and sliding, defying mere denotations. But the energy generated in the leap between the given and the sought for creates a kinetic aesthetic experience, ever-changing, transcending time and place, forever young.

“I had met magicians, but this guy is more powerful than any magician I’ve ever met. He looked into you and told you what you were. And he didn’t play games about it.”

Painting by Bob Dylan. Bloody tracks.

The experience with Raeben seems to have brought trouble to Dylan’s domestic paradise. “Needless to say, it changed me. I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up. She never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking about, and I couldn’t possibly explain it.”  (‘Idiot Wind’: ‘Even you, yesterday, you had to ask me where it’s at. I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me better than that, sweet lady.’)

The technique and the trauma engendered an artistic achievement of monumental scale in the resulting 1974 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” It is a collection of ten songs, mostly written in D, employing lots of major seventh chords (giving the overall tone of sweet, pained wistfulness) and performed on an acoustic guitar in open tuning with minimal accompaniment – a bass, sometimes a steel guitar, sometimes a touch of organ (very reminiscent of the format he employed on the softer acoustic songs on Bringing It All Back Home). He first recorded the songs in New York City in September, 1974, with a shifting array of studio musicians in a series of sessions that took Dylan’s notoriously casual studio work to new levels of shoddiness. He would just start playing and expect the musicians to follow. Adding verses, extending breaks. At times, they pleaded with him to do another take. Then three months later, he redid the songs in Minnesota with a bunch of his brother’s buddies.

‘Motel Pool’, painting by Bob Dylan

The officially released version of the album is a mix, five recordings from New York (‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, ‘Meet Me in the Morning’, ‘Shelter from the Storm’ and ‘Buckets of Rain’), five from Minnesota (‘Tangled Up in Blue’, ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’). The NY takes are softer, gentler, more sincerely loving, more nakedly pained. The Minnesota takes have a harder surface, faster tempi, more aesthetically distanced. Uniformly, the New York takes are superior. Some of the Minnesota takes are respectable, none improve on the originals.

That would be impossible. They’re pretty perfect. “Blood on the Tracks” is widely considered a peak achievement for Dylan, for the music of our times. It was ranked number 16 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Bill Wyman (of The Rolling Stones) considered it “…his only flawless album… It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-1960s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years.” Logorrhea? Bill Wyman??

‘Opium’, painting by Bob Dylan

Dylan famously said, in a radio interview with Mary Travers, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying that type of pain, you know?” Well, ‘enjoy’ certainly doesn’t begin to encompass the rich experience which can be derived from “Blood on the Tracks”. If you’re going to revisit it or learn it, I urge you to seek out the bootleg New York sessions.

For our Song of The Week, we have the pleasure of saying a few words about the iconic, seductive, elusive, indelible song that opens the album, ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. All Dylan’s passion – both the love and the pain, strongly weighted towards the latter – and the wit and the wisdom and the humor are there. We often forget what a master craftsman of lyrics Dylan is. He’s not just deep or profound. He has a command of the technique of writing lyrics that is often obscured by his many other talents.

Tangled Up in Blue

Dylan riffed his writing abilities on ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. From the start, he invented new lyrics at every turn. Here’s Take 1 from New York. Here’s Take 2. In both, you can hear the clicking of his jacket buttons against the guitar. And you can feel the pounding of his heart. Here’s the official release, the Minnesota version. At the bottom, you can see the lyrics of Minnesota (mostly first person) juxtaposed with those from New York (mostly third person).

Serious people have made a study of comparing variant versions of the song.  Here’s one. Here’s another. Here’s a third. There are many more. And what is so remarkable is that every switch, every shift, works. They’re all great, they’re all legitimate. Do you get that? He writes a magnificent song, and then recreates the lyrics every time he sings it!! Not even Charlie Parker did that.

Tangled Up in Blue, the single

The song seems to tell a story, even though the details can’t be pinned down. Dylan plays with pronouns, with personae. ‘He’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ and ‘they’ are indecipherable, shifting, a dance of veils.

In the first verse, he’s remembering her: the song is a flashback. At the end, he’ll say that he’s going back to her. They wanted to get married, but her parents didn’t approve. He’s hitching East. Why? Who knows. Let your imagination work. The humor—I was wondering if she’d changed, if her hair was still red. Oh, Bobby.

Second verse. He extricates her, they run off, they split. ‘I heard her say over my shoulder’—he doesn’t even turn around. But he’s saying this all with unbounded love. Boy, is there a whole world right there.

Third verse. Lumberjack cook, the ax fell. Rhyming ‘employed’ and ‘Delacroix’. Jeez.

Painting by Bob Dylan

Fourth verse. She’s dancing topless in the spotlight. He’s gaping at the side of her face. Right. ‘Later on as the crowd thinned out, I was just about to do the same.’ It don’t get no better than that. ‘I muttered something underneath my breath.’ Ok, it just did. He ‘gets uneasy’ when this topless dancer hitting on him ‘bends down to tie his shoes’.  I have nothing to say, I’m just shaking my head in appreciation and enjoyment.

Fifth verse. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321, author of The Divine Comedy. In subsequent versions, this changed to Jeremiah and Baudelaire and others. This stoned, topless, brazen red-head introduces our Horatio Alger to Dante.

Verse Six. Who knows who is in the scene—2 people? 3? But the fragments are indelible: ‘There was music in the cafés at night/And revolution in the air.’ That is the 1960s encapsulated in a single image. ‘Keep on keeping on’. That’s life.

Last verse. What is ‘tangled up in blue’? It’s a chaotic pastiche, a vortex of glimpses of situations that makes absolute emotional sense. It’s a perfect union of fifty states of mind. It’s a song.

We know exactly where we are in every bar, be it a measure of beats or booze. Until the next one, then we’re somewhere wholly other. We’re on a six-minute road trip, in flux, heading for another joint at every moment. But we always feel the same, we just see it from different points of view. And we all know why. Because we’re all so tangled up in blue.

Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:

126: Bob Dylan, ‘Tears of Rage’ (The Basement Tapes)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In the Summer of Love, 1967, while the Beatles were busy overtracking “Sgt. Pepper”, Bob Dylan was holed up in the basement of a pink house in upstate New York with a bunch of friends, playing hokey old country and western music standards at a leisurely tempo while he convalesced from a motorpsycho-broken neck.

Fortunately, Dylan and his touring-band buddies, The Hawks (later The Band), turned on a home tape recorder.  The resulting “Basement Tapes” – a collection of songs which are hilarious, wise, passionate, and pained, and include several grave masterpieces – leaked out as the very first illegal bootleg records (“The Great White Wonder”, “The Troubled Troubadour”–I owned and treasured them both), and here and there in minor cover versions. Then a year later The Band recorded definitive versions of the three most serious songs on their first album “Music from Big Pink” (‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘Tears of Rage’). For an incredible, picaresque story about the house itself, see SoTW 049.

So “The Basement Tapes” had no direct impact on America when they were recorded in 1967. But they are The Watershed, the point at which the dominant aesthetic of the Western world turned from the supersonic to the simple. These recordings were seminal in shaping the way people view the world till today. They contained the seed for the mindset of the ‘organic’, the acoustic, the spiritual. “Strap yourself to a tree with roots, you ain’t going nowhere.”

June, 1966, America was exploding. Over 500 American soldiers died in Vietnam that month, the first race riots were breaking out in the Black ghettos of Chicago and other cities. Sympathizers of the nascent counterculture were listening to the new releases “Freak Out!”,” Yesterday and Today” (including the original release of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘Doctor Robert’, and ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’), “Aftermath”, “Daydream”, the debut albums of Love and the Mamas and the Papas.

But the acknowledged leader of the pack was Bob Dylan, popularly proclaimed ‘prophet of the generation’, despite all his disclaimers. He was touring at breakneck speed with his new electric band, rabidly booed by dozens, listened to passionately by thousands. “Blonde on Blonde” was released on June 27, shouting “Everybody must get stoned!” Dylan practiced what he preached, ingesting large quantities of amphetamines and “who-knows what else”. Two days later he broke his neck in a motorcycle accident and disappeared from the public eye for a year and a half, till the release of “John Wesley Harding” in December, 1967.

Critic Mike Marqusee: “At the very moment when avant-gardism was sweeping through new cultural corridors, Dylan decided to dismount. The dandified, aggressively modern surface was replaced by a self-consciously unassuming and traditional garb. The giddiness embodied, celebrated, dissected in the songs of the mid-sixties had left him exhausted. He sought safety in a retreat to the countryside that was also a retreat in time, or more precisely, a search for timelessness.”

©Elliot Landy

The Basement Tapes are rough, unpolished, rehearsal recordings. That’s okay. Perhaps it’s part of their charm, their intimacy. Many of Da Vinci’s greatest masterpieces have reached us only as sketches, right?

Guitarist Robbie Robertson: “One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room. So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn’t hear the singing, you were playing too loud.”

Organist Garth Hudson, “We were doing seven, eight, ten, sometimes fifteen songs a day. Some were old ballads and traditional songs … but others Bob would make up as he went along. … We’d play the melody, he’d sing a few words he’d written, and then make up some more, or else just mouth sounds or even syllables as he went along…It amazed me, Bob’s writing ability. How he would come in, sit down at the typewriter, and write a song. And what was amazing was that almost every one of those songs was funny.” Well, many of them. Not ‘Tears of Rage’.

Columbia Records released a 2-LP “The Basement Tapes” in 1975, questionable both in its audio quality and in its selection. A third of the tracks weren’t connected to Dylan, and a number of the major songs were omitted. In the 1990s a 5-CD bootleg set surfaced, “The Genuine Basement Tapes”, which includes virtually all the recordings from those months.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

But my mind always goes back to bootleg where I learned the core great songs from the session. There was a series of hilarious, comic psychodelerious virtuoso romps: ‘Million Dollar Bash’, ‘Open the Door, Homer’, ‘Yeah Heavy and a Bottle of Bread’, ‘Please Mrs Henry’, ‘Lo and Behold’, ‘Tiny Montgomery’.  Just one taste: “Well, I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist, I punched myself in the face with my fist. I took my potatoes down to be mashed, then I made it over to that million dollar bash.”

And there’s a series of brilliant, inspired songs flitting between the comic and the fantastic and the oh-so-serious: ‘Nothing Was Delivered’, ‘Quinn the Eskimo’, ‘Too Much of Nothing’, ‘Crash on the Levee’, ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’. The last of these is ostensibly humorous. But there was enough gravity in it to serve as a catalyst for a 180° change in my life, no exaggeration. We took our music seriously back then.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And there’s no music more serious than the three songs from that basement that The Band would record for their first album: the cosmic, apocalyptic ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’; ‘I Shall Be Released’, Dylan’s existential meditation on that little question: ‘What is the point of living a life of such pain?’; and our SoTW, ‘Tears of Rage’, a searing cry of the pain of betrayal.

L to R: Manuel, Dylan

If ‘I Shall Be Released’ is Dylan’s “Hamlet”, ‘Tears of Rage’ is his “King Lear”. Before this, Dylan had never collaborated. But bassist Rick Danko provided the music for ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, and pianist Richard Manuel the music for ‘Tears of Rage’.

Manuel: “He came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper … and he just said, ‘Have you got any music for this?’ … I had a couple of musical movements that fit … so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, ‘What’s this mean, Bob: “Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse”?‘”

I sure empathize with Richard. For most of my life I’ve been as puzzled by the lyrics to the song as I am moved by them. A strange thing, poetry–you can puzzle at it and puzzle at it, decade after decade, and you know you’ll never ‘solve’ it. If you could, if there were a Hidden Answer in there, it wouldn’t evoke that curiosity, that obsessive probing and plumbing and pondering.

Dylan has some great songs that can be parsed as allegory, stories directly paralleling something else–‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (a drug dealer), ‘Went to See the Gypsy’ (Elvis),  ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ (a straight guy at a gay party). But most of his great, evocative works defy such ‘solutions’. What does ‘As I Went Out One Morning’ mean? Well, who knows? And we’ll only diminish it by trying to tie it down to a specific reading.

©Elliot Landy

Dylan himself wrote a wonderful, wise spoof on ‘solving’ his lyrics as the liner notes to “John Wesley Harding”. I heartily recommend reading them. Nonetheless, I’m going to try to provide a running reading of ‘Tears of Rage’ not as a Cymbal symbol, but as scaffolding, a reading which will help us examine it closely, but needs to be dissembled when the work is through.

We carried you in our arms on Independence Day
And now you’d throw us all aside and put us on our way.
Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun would treat a father so–
To wait upon him hand and foot and always tell him, “No?”

A father addressing his daughter. His love is total, his intentions are pure. He will carry her in his arms to take her to participate in a public celebration of communion and community. She, in turn, fulfills her filial duties–but mechanically, denying him the love he has so unselfishly bestowed on her. With the cruelty of coldness, she won’t even leave him room to complain: ‘I do what is required of me by custom and tradition. But the most important thing can’t be legislated, and that you will not get from me.’ Why? What would move her to reject his love, to turn her back on his paternal dedication, to deny requiting him his unreserved dedication to her? There is no answer provided, only the acutest of pain, that of a child’s rejection, the betrayal of unadulterated trust and unbounded love.

Tears of rage, tears of grief, why am I always the one who must be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone, and life is brief.

What is he seeking that will impoverish her? Will she be diminished by returning his love? Au contraire. So why? The father is left with no avenue for response. It is a question which can’t be asked, let alone answered. Love cannot be dictated or demanded. The pain of senseless, inexplicable rejection. The speaker can only cry, rage, grieve, pitifully plead. He has no other response available to him.

We pointed out the way for you to go and scratched your name in sand,
Though you just thought it was nothing more than a place for you to stand.
I want you to know that while we watched you discover there was no one true
That I myself, I remember now, thought it was it was a childish thing to do.

Our narrative strains here. Who is the ‘we’? It seems to extend beyond the narrator (and the mother). The community in its role as educator? The amorphous society at large? The pointer they give her seems genuinely altruistic, if transitory. She misperceives it. It is a means, she understands it only as an end. The observers are accused of being childish—were they mockingly waiting for her to be disillusioned? Why is the loving father associating with a less-than-loving ‘we’? Albeit he distances himself from them; but he had nonetheless been party to their cynical stance.

Tears of rage, tears of grief, why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone, and life is brief.

Cry, Dad, cry.

It was all very painless when you ran out to receive
All that false instruction which we never could believe.
And now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse;
But, oh, what kind of love is this which goes from bad to worse?

Is this ‘instruction’ equated with the pointer from the previous verse, or contrasted with it? I could argue either case, and neither seems conclusive or convincing to me. In any case, a pyrrhic victory has been achieved: the heart is full of gold: her dutifulness. But the heart isn’t a purse, is it? It’s not gold that we’re seeking. It’s something much more precious.

Tears of rage, tears of grief, why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone and life is brief

This love the father treasures so–“why is my desire for it unlawful?” he asks himself. “What is my crime? I carried you in my arms, I ask for nothing in return other than a measure of the unconditional love I by nature gave you. But it is unnaturally denied me, and life is irretrievably passing.” Just as the love the father feels is more precious than gold, so the pain he feels is sharper than any physical blade. It is the pain of his inexplicable, senseless rejection.

Let’s take down the scaffold now. I don’t see the song as an allegory. When he wrote it, Dylan had only just become a father. He was presumably happy in his new marriage. So where did this come from? It’s been said that ‘Tears of Rage’ was the first expression of the pain of betrayal felt by many of America’s Vietnam war veterans, or by extension many of its young citizens. Perhaps this is the rejection being expressed, that of political disenfranchisement.

Who knows? Not Richard Manuel, not me, probably not Bob Dylan. But the song is nonetheless a work of profound passion, evocative of the deepest pain I can imagine.

Next week we’ll see how The Band reworked this sketch into a treatment incomparably more crafted, and no less impassioned.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy:

087: Bob Dylan, ‘Black Diamond Bay’

016: Bob Dylan, ‘Percy’s Song’

008: ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, Fairport Convention (Bob Dylan)

Tags: Basement Tapes, Big Pink, Bob Dylan, King Lear, Richard Manuel, Tears of Rage, The Band

087: Bob Dylan, ‘Black Diamond Bay’

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’ve had Panama hats on my mind recently (if not on my head), for reasons we won’t go into now. I don’t know what association pops into your Panama-hat-holder, but for me it’s Bob Dylan’s neglected masterpiece, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ from the last of his great albums, ‘Desire’ (1976).

It’s a cinematic tour de force, a dreamed narrative from a movie that you’ve never quite seen, hovering just beyond the horizon of your consciousness. You know every cliché, even the ones you’re aware Dylan is inventing as you watch.

“Art is the perpetual motion of illusion,” Dylan said. Well, this here song is a rolling series of wry and memorable images set against the backdrop of thunder in the distance.

Dylan had been honing his ‘gallery of rogues’ technique since the glory days of “Highway 61 Revisited” (‘Desolation Row’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’), and he was no stranger to riotous, surrealistic narratives (‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’, even ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’). But it seems to me that this mini-genre hits its peak here and in the sterling ‘Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ (a cowboy movie gone awry, with our masked hero, his band of robbers, the hanging judge, two heroines, and Big Jim, who ‘owned the town’s only diamond mine’). The two songs have a great deal in common – the dreamlike, half-logical narrative; the objective, cinematic descriptions; the brilliant use of hackneyed images; but especially the humor. On the one hand, every line is hilarious. On the other hand, it’s all deadly serious. And on the third, in the final accounting it’s only a dream, so it dissipates anyway.

But what a ride.

What do we have here? A hotel on a tropical island. Guests and employees: Our Lady of Panama Hat, the suicidal Greek, the desk clerk, a soldier finding manly love with a tiny hustler, a loser in the casino and his French-speaking dealer. And in the last stanza, our narrator watching the events on Cronkite.

We have the foibles of human Desire (compulsive gambling, suicide, street-corner bargains, back-room illicit sex), juxtaposed against the apocalypse – the volcano is exploding, the island is sinking, and the very stars are falling from the sky.

But, oh, how that doesn’t do the song justice! The embarrassment of the Greek needing to ask for a pen that works – so that he can write his suicide note – while the ground is literally caving in beneath his feet. Or check out the oblique humor in the vocal phrasing, the melody and the lyric of the penultimate line of each stanza: the Greek is about to hang himself, has put a sign on his door “Do Not Disturb” – “She knocked upon it anyway.” Chaos, chaos everywhere.

Jacques Levy (1935-2004), an American theater director (Sam Shepard, “Oh! Calcutta!”, the musical version of “Marat/Sade”), English professor (Colgate) and clinical psychologist, ostensibly co-wrote the song. But it’s 100% Dylan, so I don’t know how much room there was for collaboration.

The song is from “Desire”, the last of Dylan’s great albums. It comes after his masterpiece “Blood on the Tracks” (if you don’t know it, dig up the NY Sessions version, and go lock yourself in a room without any sharp items) and before the embarrassing “Hard Rain”. As uneven as “Desire” is, Dylan would never again scale these heights.

The album was made in notoriously disorganized circumstances. I’m not a historian of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the album to my ears has a uniform sound, notwithstanding the jagged collection of songs. Notable in the sound are prominent drums (Howie Wyeth), violin (Scarlet Rivera), and the then-unknown backing vocalist Emmylou Harris.

The album includes a surprising number of songs among Dylan’s best-known and most widely popular which yours truly considers to be utterly a waste of wax – ‘Isis’, ‘Joey’, and ‘Sara’, three headache-inspiring, long and dreary and utterly forgettable annoyances. And if someone wants to tell me what a heart-wrenching account of the breakup of his marriage “Sara” is, I refer him to ‘Dirge’ from “Planet Waves”. That’s a song that’s too intense and pained for me to listen to.

And I’m ambivalent about the hit ‘Hurricane’, and ‘Romance in Durango’ is a rather diluted blessing. But there are gems. ‘Mozambique’ is a charmer, and there are a handful of songs that rank with Dylan’s very best, most notably the companion pieces ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, ‘Oh Sister’, two songs that Leonard Cohen would have given his right angst to have written.

And our song, ‘Black Diamond Bay’, which I’m pleased as punch to present to you. So just put on a Panama hat and a grin, take a long, cool drink out onto the veranda, and be very thankful that the ground beneath your feet is solid.

And you know what, readers? Just because you’re so loyal, I’ll even toss in a couple of covers of songs Dylan wrote for the album which didn’t make the cut, and which he never recorded: ‘Abandoned Love’, here by none other than Don and Phil Everly, and ‘Rita Mae’ (for author Rita Mae Brown) by none other than Jerry Lee Lewis. A Jewish kid from a small town in Minnesota, with The Everly Bros and Jerry Lee scrambling for his scraps. Can you imagine?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Up on the white veranda she wears a necktie and a Panama hat;
Her passport shows a face from another time and place, she looks nothing like that.
And all the remnants of her recent past are scattered in the wild wind.
She walks across the marble floor
Where a voice from the gambling room is calling her to come on in.
She smiles, walks the other way
As the last ship sails and the moon fades away from Black Diamond Bay/

As the morning light breaks open, the Greek comes down and he asks for a rope and a pen that will write.
“Pardon, monsieur,” the desk clerk says, carefully removes his fez, “Am I hearing you right?”
And as the yellow fog is lifting the Greek is quickly heading for the second floor.
She passes him on the spiral staircase thinking he’s the Soviet Ambassador.
She starts to speak, but he walks away
As the storm clouds rise and the palm branches sway on Black Diamond Bay

A soldier sits beneath the fan doing business with a tiny man who sells him a ring.
Lightning strikes, the lights blow out, the desk clerk wakes and begins to shout, “Can you see anything?”
Then the Greek appears on the second floor in his bare feet with a rope around his neck.
While a loser in the gambling room lights up a candle, says, “Open up another deck”
But the dealer says “Attendez-vous, s’il vous plait.”
As the rain beats down and the cranes fly away from Black Diamond Bay.

The desk clerk heard the woman laugh as he looked around in the aftermath, and the soldier got tough.
He tried to grab the woman’s hand, said, “Here’s a ring, it cost a grand.”
She said, “That ain’t enough.”
Then she ran upstairs to pack her bags while a horse-drawn taxi waited at the curb.
She passed the door that the Greek had locked where a handwritten sign read, “Do not disturb.”
She knocked upon it anyway.
As the sun went down and the music did play on Black Diamond Bay.

“I’ve got to talk to someone quick,” but the Greek said, “Go away” and he kicked the chair to the floor.
He hung there from the chandelier, she cried, “Help, there’s danger near
Please open up the door!”
Then the volcano erupted and the lava flowed down from the mountain high above.
The soldier and the tiny man were crouched in the corner thinking of forbidden love.
But the desk clerk said, “It happens every day.”
As the stars fell down and the fields burned away on Black Diamond Bay

As the island slowly sank the loser finally broke the bank in the gambling room.
The dealer said, “It’s too late now, you can take your money, but I don’t know how
you’ll spend it in the tomb.”
The tiny man bit the soldier’s ear as the floor caved in and the boiler in the basement blew.
While she’s out on the balcony, where a stranger tells her “My darling, je vous aime beaucoup.”
She sheds a tear and then begins to pray.
As the fire burns on and the smoke drifts away from Black Diamond Bay.

I was sittin’ home alone one night in L.A. watching old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news.
It seems there was an earthquake that left nothing but a Panama hat and a pair of old Greek shoes.
Didn’t seem like much was happening, so I turned it off and went to grab another beer.
Seems like every time you turn around there’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear,
And there’s really nothing anyone can say.
And I never did plan to go anyway to Black Diamond Bay.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy these SoTWs:

008: ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, Fairport Convention (Bob Dylan)
016: Bob Dylan, ‘Percy’s Song’

SoTW is a non-commercial, non-profit venture, intended solely to promote the appreciation of good music. Readers are strongly encouraged to purchase the music discussed here at sites such as Amazon

Tags: Abandoned Love, Black Diamond Bay, Bob Dylan, Desire, Rita Mae

SoTW 16: Bob Dylan, ‘Percy’s Song’

A real good thing happened to a real good friend this week. Neal Hendel was appointed to the Supreme Court here in Israel. It’s a little hard for me to digest. I don’t know a lot about the judging business, but I have an awful lot of respect for his judgment about things like morality and right and wrong, and the subtle modalities thereof.

I trust him a little bit less on things musical. On the one hand, he does have some seriously quirky tastes (Whitney Houston’s high notes, Aaron Neville glissandos, and I’ve forgotten a few of the more extreme aberrations and blocked out some others), but he can also pick up on some really fine things as well. He’s a big Bob Dylan fan. So big that he chose to walk down the aisle to ‘I Shall Be Released’, Dylan’s masterpiece about escaping the pain of the world. Well, he married a lovely woman, so I guess he knew what he was doing.

In his honor, I would have loved to talk about Dylan’s newest CD, a collection of Yuletide songs entitled “Christmas in the Heart”, but it won’t be released till mid-October, so we’ll all have to just bide our time till then. So I figured this would at least be an opportunity to pay a visit to one of Dylan’s central recurrent metaphors: judges.

It seems Bob has a bit of a fixation on them. They appear directly in almost 30 of his songs (‘Angelina’, ‘The Ballad of Donald White’, ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’, ‘Brownsville Girl’, ‘Day of the Locusts’, ‘Delia’, ‘Drifter’s Escape’, ‘Frankie and Albert’, ‘High Water’, ‘Hurricane’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, ‘It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding’, ‘Jim Jones’, ‘Joey’, ‘Jokerman’, ‘Lily, Rosemary and The Jack Of Hearts’, ‘Little Sadie’, ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine’, ‘Nettie Moore’, ‘No Time To Think’, ‘Percy’s Song’, ‘Ring Them Bells’, ‘Seven Curses’, ‘Shake Shake Mama’, ‘She’s Your Lover Now’, ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’), not to mention the various judgment days, the “don’t you judge me and I won’t judge you”s, and the involvement with justice and the breach thereof, sin, the impingement of civil and emotional freedoms, and moral accountability.

Bob’s not a big fan of judges. He usually portrays them as symbols of all that’s heartless and fossilized in our society. Our SoTW is an atypical example of that motif. ‘Percy’s Song’ is from 1963 or 1964, the same period and very much the same place as a SoTW from a few weeks ago, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’. Neither was released on an official album at the time. And both are unusual in approaching some very harsh pain in a most gentle manner. ‘Percy’s Song’ makes me think a lot of ‘Blowing in the Wind’—all about the indignation of social injustice, but without the strident soapboxing that so often characterizes–I cringe as I write the word–’protest songs’. In a 1965 interview, Dylan was asked if he thought writing ‘finger-pointing’ songs was superficial. “No, it’s not superficial, it’s just motivated. Motivated. Uncontrollable motivation. Which anyone can do, once they get uncontrollably motivated.”

I think those are very, very wise words. I’ve thought about them often, quoted them, ever since back then when I read them. Words that early Bob should have listened to more often. ‘Hattie Carroll’, ‘Seven Curses’ and ‘Donald White’ (pre-1964) have certainly lost control. Not to mention ‘Joey’ and ‘Hurricane’ (1976). But Percy’s Song is a protest song of a different level. It masterfully avoids moral simplification, much more successfully I think than ‘Blowing in the Wind’.

The persona’s friend caused the death of 4 people in a traffic accident. The driver’s friend says to the judge, “He’s got a sentence to serve…, but ninety-nine years he just don’t deserve… What happened to him could happen to anyone.” Usually the Dylan persona would let loose a strident harangue at the cold-hearted judge. But the judge has closed the case, and the persona’s only recourse is to play the pained, wistful refrain “Oh, the Cruel Rain and the Wind.”

Well, it’s true that Dylan paints judges as heartless and haughty. But let’s keep in mind that the very fact that he harps on the point obsessively indicates how passionately he feels that such should not be the case. That the ultimate just judgment is what Godliness is all about, and that a judge having people’s fate in his hands is the closest to that that human society comes.

Just a year after writing all those songs about judgment, Dylan stepped back and wrote the memorable line “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Well, neither Neal nor I are so young anymore. We may still feel like denizens of the ’60s in some corner of our soul, but the fact is that somewhere along the way, while we weren’t looking, we’ve become adults. Well, Neal has, anyway. And I can’t help feeling that if Bob knew Neal and saw him sitting up there on the highest bench in the land, he’d chuckle to himself with no small degree of satisfaction that someone who howled along with “How does it fee-eel?” has grown up and grown into a place where he can actually effect the times a‑changing for the better.