Tag: Bob Dylan

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On Dylan’s First Album

One of the most astute comments I ever did see on early Dylan:

“These debut songs are essayed with differing degrees of conviction,” writes music critic Tim Riley in 1999, “[but] even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he never sounds like he knows he’s in over his head, or gushily patronizing … Like Elvis Presley, what Dylan can sing, he quickly masters; what he can’t, he twists to his own devices. And as with the Presley Sun sessions, the voice that leaps from Dylan’s first album is its most striking feature, a determined, iconoclastic baying that chews up influences, and spits out the odd mixed signal without half trying.”

From “Inside the World of Rock” posted to Facebook, 2024-03-20.

My second quote of the day, from the NYTimes, on South Dakota Governor Kristi Noemi, who appears to be grooming herself for a shot at Trump’s VP:

This approach to political image-making has its roots in the pantomimed femininity of Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin, where the promise of a powerful woman was defanged by her participation in the pageantry of traditional gender cosplay.

NY Times

Wonderful.

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Worried About the New Dylan Biopic

“It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young, 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with like two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years — first being embraced into the family of folk music in New York and then, of course, kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief,” Mangold said. “It’s such an interesting true story and about such an interesting moment in the American scene.”  Indiewire

And becoming “a worldwide sensation”?  Like, a star?  A celebrity?

That’s a pretty disturbing comment to hear from a director preparing to make a movie about the most provocative, original, and compelling singer-songwriter of his era.

It’s a great story because he became rich and famous?  That’s the American dream!  Soon, he is wearing the clothes that stars wear and eating in restaurants frequented by Barbara Walters and Henry Kissinger!

I am not a fan of Timothy Chalamet.  I just can’t find gay actors romancing young women in a movie convincing.  In the back of my mind a little voice keeps telling me “he’s not interested in a girl.”   Worse, Chalamet is one of those actors who, like Leonardo Di Carpio, calibrates his performance to other actors’ performances, to what they think a real actor would do– what has received critical opprobrium and public esteem– rather than to the psychological reality of the character they are playing.

Christian Bale is a great example of an actor who does dig deep into the character and brings out unexpected nuance and subtlety.  His performance in films like “American Psycho” and “Shame” are brilliant.

I wish he had been chosen for this role.

But, my wife says, he doesn’t look like Bob Dylan.

C’est la vie.

 

 

 

 

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Joan Baez’s Vanity

Joan Baez: I am Noise was showing at the Princess Theatre this week so my wife and I went to see it.  Up until about half way through, it was not too annoying.  It was narcissistic and self-serving, of course, and Baez always sings as if the audience has an obligation to express convincing and polite approbation or else, but I found it tolerable until she began to relate how broken down she was for a period in her life.  It’s hard to describe what she meant because the whole thing was amorphous and, I think, purposely vague, but it emerged that her sister Mimi, who also experienced these disorders, claimed that her father had French-kissed her once in the back yard by the clothesline.  Then Joan Baez– also, of course, in therapy– began to recover her own memories of abuse about which she was decidedly vague.

Aside from the obvious controversies, one must immediately acknowledge that she admitted to being desperately addicted to quaaludes at the time.  One must also sadly note that her career was in decline and she was no longer as important or celebrated as she once had been and that can be, for someone admittedly addicted to public adoration, a tough pill to swallow.

Think about it:  she was massively doped up on quaaludes (so badly so that she approved the stupidest album cover photo of her career–in a space suit– during this period for the stupidest album of her career — a desperate attempt to maintain her relevance by embracing rap), depressed about the loss of her prominence on the activism circuit (the Viet Nam War had ended) and possibly even more depressed about her own failures as a mother (she continued to tour leaving Gabriel in the care of others).  The cover of Time Magazine (an awful, ugly graphic) must have seemed so long ago by then.  And David Harris didn’t turn out to be that great of a husband after all.

There was a reference to hypnosis in there but I’ll say no more about that because I can’t recover a memory of the details of context.  But some of the content of the tapes she played in the film reminded me of the suggestive tactics of the “therapists” involved in recovering memories of abuse by the victims of the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax.

I remained puzzled by several things.  As is often the case, one allegation begets another and, sure enough, the zombie “recovered memories” reared it’s ugly, festering head and Joan claimed that she also had been abused.  Of course, there is no specific date or time or location, and of course her father is deceased and unable to defend himself.  Of course, she had been heavily into quaaludes for eight years– which, I suppose, offers an explanation of just how many layers of shit covered those hidden memories.  Of course.  What astonished me is that no editor or producer thought fit to either excise the questionable allegations or at least do a little more to acknowledge that recovered memories are “controversial”.  Because they are not “controversial” at all.   They are the product of junk psychology and have been thoroughly discredited and debunked.  They were promulgated by books like “Sybil” and “Satan Remembers” which have been convincingly shown to be hoaxes.

But then again, this is a vanity project, not a documentary.  We saw nothing that was not approved of for us by Joan Baez herself.

Add to that the issue of hypnosis, which was also part of her therapy…  look, it’s 2023.  Wake up.

Things come to a crux when Mimi tells of being French kissed by her father, a recollection that leads Joan to pursue her own path of thrice-weekly therapy, including hypnotism, which has her remembering her own inappropriate experiences with her dad — which the film does not go into great detail on. The doc includes letters and voice messages from her father in which he accuses Joan of having fallen prey to false memory syndrome, but Baez tells the filmmakers today that if even 20% of what she remembers is true, that’s damning enough.

Twenty percent of nothing is still nothing.  This is throwing mud onto the wall and believing that some of it must stick.

I will not be polite about this issue under any circumstance.  A good deal of damage has been done by credulous individuals who don’t care about science or evidence or facts and are willing to believe something because they just “feel” it must be true– as Joan Baez suggests in this vanity piece.  She even suggests that her father might have “felt” that it wasn’t true.  And that both feelings are valid.

Really?

 

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Five Perfect Songs

There are five perfect songs. Here they are:

  • Sam Stone (John Prine)
  • All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
  • Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
  • I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
  • You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore)

That’s it.

About Sam Stone:
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local heroe’s hill

“Suspicion” (Elvis Presley) comes close, but no cigar.

Other Honorable Mentions:

“Reelin’ in the Years” (Steely Dan) A truly awesome recording but I can’t overlook the pettiness of “the things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand…”

“Homeward Bound” (Simon and Garfunkel) a fine, fine song, but “all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity” is a little precious.

“Four Strong Winds” (Ian & Sylvia) is a bit slight, so you have to repeat the chorus and that gives it a bit of a sense of aimlessness and repetition and violates the rule of economy.

The Beatles’ best song is “Girl”:

Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said,
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he’s dead?

But “Eleanor Rigby” is also very nearly perfect.

“Go Your Own Way” (Fleetwood Mac) is too slight.

“Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits is very, very good.

“Echo Beach” (Martha & the Muffins) Actually, this song is darn near perfect as well. Darn near.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (The Band) Great, great song, but a bit murky, and the Band’s own recording of it is not as perfect as the song. As is “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Tears of Rage”. I do actually like the cover version of “Dixie” by Joan Baez, featuring crack Nashville session musicians. It’s from an album that appeared to be an effort by Baez to reach out to the alienated silent majority of Americans who seemed to despise her.

Levon Helm (who wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) despised her version, but one suspects that that is because Levon Helm despised Joan Baez.

“Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) Okay. So this one is perfect too. Six perfect songs. But it has to share with “Light My Fire” (Doors).

“Like a Rolling Stone” (Bob Dylan) Violates rule of economy, but also a great, great song. “Tangled up in Blue” might actually be a better song.

“Thunder Road” (Bruce Springsteen) Can’t sustain that great take-off, “you can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain” though he tries, brilliantly. In the end, it’s just a trifle indulgent, a trifle too self-consciously monumental. A trifle. On some days I prefer “Jungleland”.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (Bob Dylan) is as good or better than any other song on the list. All right, seven.

“One of These Days” (Emmy Lou Harris) Lovely, enchanting piece, reminds me of “As I Went Out One Morning” (Bob Dylan): both are elegantly economical, tight, balanced.

“Someday Soon” (Judy Collins) Okay– another one. Eight.

All right: 9– “The Hammond Song”, by the Roches. Actually, this song is obviously flawed, but there are moments when it does sound just perfect to me. So 8. Wait — 9. I forgot about one of the most perfect, crystalline, renditions ever: “Wayfarin’ Stranger” by Emmy-Lou Harris with that absolutely wonderful lead by Tony Rice and mandolin by Albert Lee.

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Oh My But You Have a Pretty Face: Jesse Winchester’s “Brand New Tennessee Waltz”

Oh my but you have a pretty face,
You favor a girl that I knew.

Oh my.

Jesse Winchester’s lyrics starts out with that expression of startled awe: oh my!

It’s not “holy cow” or “my goodness” or “wow”. “Oh my” is that quick feint with polite astonishment, an involuntary gasp of amazement, too spontaneous to be refined or vulgarized: oh my.

Jesse Winchester was writing about his experience as a draft-dodger. He moved to Canada in 1967 to avoid service in the Viet Nam War. Obviously, he left someone behind. From “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (1970):

Well I left Tennessee in a hurry dear,
The same way that I’m leaving you
For love is mainly just memories
And everyone has him a few
When I’m gone, I’ll be glad to love you.

That line deserves a thought or two: love is mainly just memories? That’s not a shocking idea, really. It’s much the same as saying “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”. It’s certainly much easier to be in love with a memory than with the person who wants you to throw out the garbage and stop switching channels. It leaves aside the issue of whether that kind of love can be real. He’s feeling “like one of your photographs\caught while I’m putting on airs”.

I don’t mind the Joan Baez version of the song, though I find her generally harder and harder to enjoy the older I get. She’s really not a very good singer at all– she just has a lovely voice. Well, she has a voice that would be lovely if she weren’t so damn obsessed with trilling it. Her best work is her slightest: the vocals on “Diamonds and Rust” nicely get under the lyrics instead of on top of them, like thick creamy icing.

When I was about 14, I biked down to Queenston Heights one summer day and climbed up Brock’s Monument, a tall, narrow cement column that culminated in a series of viewports embedded in a coarse sculpture of General Isaac Brock, the hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights, who was shot by the Americans when they spotted him on his white horse in his scarlet tunic.

The stairs up the monument were very, very narrow. I was on my way down when I encountered a small group coming up, so I stopped and stood against the wall and waited to let them pass.

The first person in this group was a girl about my age. She stepped level with me and turned to look at my face. We were just inches away from each other. That was 40 years ago, and I still remember thinking, “oh my, but you have a pretty face”. Not exactly in the words of the Jesse Winchester song, but the sentiment was the same: oh my.

I can no longer actually remember what she looked like. What I remember– and this is true of a lot of our memories, I think– is the intensity of the feeling I had about that face. In my catalogue of a lifetime of memories, of all the pretty girls I’ve ever looked at, I still remember it as one of the most startlingly beautiful faces I have ever seen. She had red hair and freckles and green eyes and beautiful full lips. The average blonde may be more beautiful than the average red-head, but a really beautiful red-head with green eyes is peerless. Her skin seemed luminous. I was so taken aback that I couldn’t avert my eyes and she seemed so startled by my stare that she stared back. She stepped away, up the stairs, and looked back once.

I waited at the bottom for a long time for her to come down, just to see that face again. She emerged a time later, supremely indifferent to my existence. She walked by me and left my orbit forever.

“Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez deserves a mention somewhere, if only for these lines:

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles, and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.

For me, autumn has always been the most “real” season– the cold winds, the warm coats, the sound of dried leaves under foot, the stilled conversations, the sense of diminished opportunity. Memories of summer can drift into haze, ennui, an indeterminate place and time.

And then, Baez sings,:

Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic/
then give me another word for it/
you were so good with words/
and at keeping things vague

Vague, I suppose, and non-committal. “You were so good with words” is both an accusation and a lacerating confession: I believed you. I may have been a fool, but I believed you, and even with the advantage of hindsight, yes, I’m nostalgic– I wish I could believe again.

The Baez song also has a great opening: ”

Well I’ll be damned/
Here comes your ghost again…”

In case you didn’t know, the song is presumed to be about Bob Dylan. I believe she has confirmed that.

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Dylan’s Back Pages: Lies that Life is Black and White

There is a video on Youtube, taken from one or another of the many Dylan tributes over the years, in which Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison, all together on stage at the same time, take different verses of Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic “My Back Pages”.

“My Back Pages” is a rarity. There a great songs and there are great summations and there are great insights, but rarely are they combined into a single unified work– if you could call the mad sequence of disjointed images and ideas “unified”.

You have to hear “My Back Pages” in context. When Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961, he quickly established himself as the voice of the protest movement– funny name, isn’t it?– and wrote several defining songs of the civil rights era, including “Blowing in the Wind”, “The Times, They Are A’Changin'”, “A Hard Rain”, and so on. The intensity and power of his words moved people. He became a messianic figure, a prophet of change, and figure upon which an entire generation seemed to pin it’s hopes for remaking the world.

Had Dylan been a politician, he might have found this role congenial (see Obama). But as an artist, it alarmed him. First, he didn’t entirely believe in “the cause” of the protest movement– he embraced it’s values, but he was all too aware of how the cause could become corrupted, and how individuals within any movement can become “pawns in the game”. And with the death of John Kennedy, of course, he saw what was really going down.

It’s hard for anybody to admit they were wrong. It is impressive to see anyone embrace the idea that he was completely wrong about anything. But that’s what “My Back Pages” is about: “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.” A line of sarcasm. I was “wiser” when I embraced dubious causes. Now, I am younger, less confident that I get it. Less sure that this path leads to anywhere but disillusionment.

In some ways, “My Back Pages” could be construed as a neo-con’s lament: I used to believe in noble causes, that the world could be made better with grand schemes and revolutionary movements. Now I have come to realize that man’s nature itself is corruptible, and that causes become ideologies, and that evil must be addressed.

Dylan sings, “lies that life is black and white/spoke from my skull, I dreamed”. Pure Dylan– “spoke from my skull” and then, “I dreamed”. He doesn’t even offer you the consolation of thinking you should read his lips, or that he actually spoke the lies. Is this Dylan’s real, and most amazing, contribution: that truth is more important than any cause or dream? Of all the movements and causes that have come and gone, the most persistent outrage in the eyes of the world is to hold truth above all else. That communism failed. That humans really only seek after themselves. That victims can be complicit.

I don’t object that much to the term “protest movement”, though it sounds like it means to reduce visionary political action to “protest”, as if were defined only but what it was against, or by the act of being against anything at all. Why should I object? When you look at the state of American society and culture in the 1950’s, anybody with any kind of independence of spirit and sense of curiosity would be, by definition, in opposition to the prevailing values of that generation.

One of the best lines in any Dylan song: “Fearing not I become my enemy/ in the instant that I preach”.

The Who’s contribution (Pete Townshend): “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss”. (Won’t Get Fooled Again)

The Beatles: “When you talk about destruction/don’t you know that you can count me out” (Revolution)

Creedance Clearwater Revival: “Five-year plans and new deals/wrapped in golden chains”.

10 Years After Undead: “Tax the rich/feed the poor/’til there are no/rich no more” (I’d Love to Change the World)

Updated November 2008, in the cusp of an Obama victory.

What if Obama turns out to be a stooge of the establishment, a man who talks big but ultimately plays by the rules, compromises with mediocre corporate and military apparatchiks, and starts a war so he can look tough for the next election?

What if the Bush Administration– desperate– brokers a deal with Obama to relieve those soldiers and CIA agents who participated in the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo– and, of course, all the administration officials who authorized them to do it? What if Obama signs it, fearing divisions in the government, or the possibility of hard-right Republicans blocking the rest of his agenda?

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A Sweetheart Like You – Guy Davis Covers Dylan

If you have never heard Guy Davis’ version of Bob Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” you’re really missing something.

Unfortunately, I can’t make you sit down in a seedy bar with a glass of watery American beer and a plate of stale pretzels and a cloud of smoke and a worn-out sagging beauty eyeing you from the bar and the smell of urine and bacon drifting over the tables like yesterday’s politics so the song can start out at you just right, from the unbalanced jukebox in the corner, accordion and lead guitar poking through the din, and Guy Davis’ gravelly voice:

by the way, that’s a cute hat you’re wearin’
And that smile’s so hard to resist
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in dump like this?

All right– so that part is not so new. How about:

You know, I once knew a woman who looked like you,
She wanted a whole man, not just a half,
She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child,
You kind of remind me of her when you laugh.
In order to deal in this game, got to make the queen disappear,
It’s done with a flick of the wrist.
What’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this?

That’s better. I like that line about “whole man”, not just “half”. What is the missing half? Sexuality? Manliness? Why is he “only a child”? Because he doesn’t understand that this woman, this “queen”, is ready to immolate herself for something that baffles even his royal Bobness, but which Guy Davis sounds like he understands better than anyone.

A “whole” man?  “I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul”.   (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”).

Bob being Bob then announces:

You know, a woman like you should be at home,
That’s where you belong…

It boggles the mine that the same expansive mind that wrote “Only a Pawn in the Game” and “Masters of War” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Tangled up in Blue” could drop a dud like this on the listener. A woman belongs at home with her husband!

Well, it’s not really a “dud”. It’s an alive line. It’s a dumb idea, but a live one. So it’s a bad line, but not a dud. It’s poetry.

But she is out to make the Queen disappear, which means, she wants to get rid of all the dignity and prestige and meaningfulness that comes with being “at home” with her husband (who is himself probably out sitting in a bar with an assassin on his lap– wondering why she’s not at home where she belongs) and to that end, she makes herself subject to a man’s trivial whim, the flick of a wrist. That’s all it takes to persuade this woman to immolate herself.

Regrettably, Dylan doesn’t see women as whole persons. They only exist in halves, and always half of whatever the man in the lyric is doing. In “Things Have Changed”, he isn’t even fully evil because, after all, she is sitting in his lap, drinking champagne, so she is merely an accessory to the narrator’s despair. Her only hope for salvation is to rush home, grow some flowers and do some sewing, and wait for her man to arrive for dinner to validate her existence.

That does not mean it’s a bad song. No, it doesn’t.

You know you can make a name for yourself,
You can hear them tires squeal,
You can be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal.

Wow. You really owe it to yourself to hear Guy Davis scrunch those lines into that lovely bridge, without missing a half-breath or letting the tension slack, so that the “cut glass” really is a shock and the “make a deal” is inevitable.

 

The liberated Bob Dylan:

Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain?
Are you ready to risk it all,
Or is your love in vain?

“Is Your Love Is Vain”, from Street Legal.

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Bob Dylan Live: London, Ontario, 2006-11-03

I saw Bob Dylan and the Band in 1974 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. I was 17 and it was my first major concert. Our music enrichment class at Beacon Christian High School went, with Lambert Zuidevaart, our music teacher. I believe we stayed overnight at his friend’s apartment. We visited Kensington Market, ate at a Chinese restaurant, then walked to Maple Leaf Gardens. That’s what I remember. It was 32 years ago.

I remember vividly the opening chords of the first song: “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I go Mine”. The Band may well have been the greatest back-up ensemble Dylan ever played with. Their performance was incredibly rich, textured, and vibrant. (“Before the Flood”, a double-album of performances from that tour, is worth having.)

Thirty-four years later, my son and I attended a Dylan concert in London, Ontario, at the John Labatt Centre. Like Maple Leaf Gardens, this is a hockey arena, so the acoustics were not great. His backup band was good, but not as good as The Band.

In 1972, Dylan and the Band played the complete concert, with the odd Dylan solo on acoustic guitar, and a few songs performed by The Band without Dylan.

The John Labatt Centre is a newer arena, well-furnished and gleaming. The staff seemed unduly concerned with stopping people from recording the concert with cameras or cell phones. This was a little baffling: who cares if someone creates a 160×80 grainy mpeg of this performance? Are they out of their minds? But the attendants stood guard near our seat, watching intently. When it looked like someone was using the camera on their cell phone or a real camera, they stepped in and asked the person to stop. I had to be clever to snap the few shots I did, and most of them are blurry.

The men sitting in five seats to the right of us seemed to have a dire need to go for beer or to the bathroom about once every song– that is not much of an exaggeration. The seats are so close together, I had to stand up to let them pass each time. It was annoying. Whey they weren’t drinking or peeing, they were yakking away, or making fun of Dylan’s incomprehensible voice.

The voice– unlike old copper or English gardens or Tom Waits– has not taken on an atom of patina or richness. If anything, I think he has become more shrill and spastic, and less coherent, than even in his “Street Legal” or “Saved” days. If I hadn’t already known most of his lyrics by heart I wouldn’t have been able to make them out.

Dylan played a keyboard exclusively – he didn’t touch a guitar– and every song featured the entire band.

Dylan’s encore was generous: four songs, including two of his most revered: “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the Watchtower”. He sounded better singing these two than almost any other song of the night.

Dylan apparently is not content to simply perform the same songs over and over again as originally recorded. Several songs were radically restructured, musically, especially “Desolation Row”, “It’s All right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”, and “Girl From the North Country”. He performed a generous mix of classics and more recent works. His voice is problematic, but give him credit for investing in his own work, taking risks, and reinventing himself.

Memories

I am fascinated by memory issues and this recollection of mine brought up a few.

I was able to determine that the concert was in 1972. Let me see if I can find the exact date: no it wasn’t 1972. It was in 1974, January or February. Surprisingly, I’m having a hard time googling the exact date.

Okay — it was exactly January 10th, 1974. I know because though he played two dates in Toronto (both at Maple Leaf Gardens), I vividly remember the first song I heard: “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll go Mine”, and only the January 10th concert began with that song. (The January 9th set began with “Rainy Day Women”

Where I found the info: www.bobdylan.com

What I don’t remember: how we got to Toronto. Who drove. I don’t remember anything about sleeping over other than the fact that we probably slept over somewhere. Or maybe not. I vaguely remember that the idea of sleeping over was vetoed by a parent. I seem to remember that we ate out at a Chinese restaurant in Kensington Market and then walked to Maple Leaf Gardens.

One person who claims to have attended the concert reported that Dylan came out in a Toronto Maple Leaf’s jersey. I think I would have remembered that. I think this person possibly has the wrong night.

Who came with? Janie Lou Kannegieter — I see her in the picture in the beige coat. Pauline Hielema. Our teacher, Lambert Zuidevart. A smart, cultured student from the grade 11 who liked to write — Gertie Witte? I think that was her name. I am not sure about her.

I think the girl with the long brown scarf in the picture is Pauline.

So I was in grade 12. I graduated a few months later and then went to college.

As you can see from the pictures, oddly, I sat in roughly the same location at both concerts: high up on the left side of the arena looking towards the stage. The first is from 1972, the second from 2006. The third picture is Pauline Hielema, and Janie-Lou Kannegieter, and someone else walking ahead of me somewhere near Kensington Market. The picture is blurred, but I am fond of it, because it looks like dusk in winter in Toronto.

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“That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me”

…is a song by Gordon Lightfoot which falls into a kind of genre of “love ’em and leave ’em” songs. These are songs about (usually) a man who romances a woman, seduces her, hangs around for a short time, but then gets restless and can’t help it but hit the road again. The woman, of course, always wants him to stay. What fun would it be (for the man) if the woman said, “Okay. Well, I guess you feel the urge to go, you should go.  It was nice meeting you. ”

I’ve had a hundred more like you, so don’t be blue
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.

Here’s a list of some of them:

  • For Lovin’ Me (Gordon Lightfoot)
  • I’m Not Saying (Gordon Lightfoot)
  • Green Green (New Christy Minstrels)
  • Greenback Dollar (New Christy Minstrels)
  • We’ll Sing in the Sunshine (Gale Garnett – odd reversal: here the
    girl announces she will hang around for one year, and then leave)
  • Ramblin’ Man (Allman Brothers Band)
  • Freebird (Lynyrd Skynyrd, with pale imitation “Travelin’ Man”)*
  • Rose of Aberdeen (Ian Tyson)
  • Heard it in a Love Song (Jimmy Buffet)
  • Baby, the Rain Must Fall (Glen Yarborough)

That last one– after explaining why he must desert his girl, with a booming, incontrovertible voice:

Baby, the rain must fall
Baby, the wind must blow,
Where-ever my heart leads me,
Baby I must go,
Baby I must go.

This was a very popular song in it’s day, around 1965, and also gave it’s title (and theme) to a movie starring Steve McQueen as an aspiring singer. Wow. Weirdness prevails. Anyway, this guy, in the song, is telling his girlfriend– or maybe, in these enlightened times, his boyfriend– that he can’t stay. He has to go. He just has to. It’s not that he’s a no-account bum who exploited her, took advantage of her feelings, and is now setting out to cheat on her. Oh, no no no. He just, well, has to go. It’s a force of nature, the incontrovertible will of God, fate, destiny– all of that. Like the wind must blow. Like blowin’ in the wind, which is where the answer to the question, “did you know this before you seduced me” is.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. If some guy feels an utterly compelling urge to travel and see the world, hey, more power to him. And if he is able to convince some woman that he would be a fine, temporary lover– hey, go for it. It’s just that I suspect that most of these rambler-gamblers are probably a little less than forth-right about those facts at the start of a relationship.

Or maybe they’re just gay. Maybe I’m missing some code here. Maybe the whole thing fits better into the “Brokeback Mountain” sort of scenario. Can’t you just picture Jake Gyllenhaal singing, “Baby, the Rain Must Fall” as he gets back into his little pickup truck to head back to Texas? And Heath Ledger weeping in his trailer?

In that respect, the first song on the list, “For Lovin’ Me”, by Gordon Lightfoot, is refreshingly frank:

That’s what you get for lovin’ me,
Everything you had is gone, as you can see
That’s what you get for lovin’ me.

…I’ve had a hundred more like you,
So don’t be blue.
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.

That’ a refreshing tone. It’s like 2:35 seconds of so long, sucker.

Dylan wrote a few, but they’re different. Try “It Aint Me Babe”. He doesn’t have that bitchy God told me to see the world tone that the other songs have, which may make you suspect that that God-told-me-to-see-the-world tone is largely bullshit.

You say you’re looking for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you and more

How good of a lyricist is Bob Dylan exactly? “Someone who will die for you and more” is brilliant. So is “close his eyes” and then “close his heart”. He is unparalleled as a lyricist.

Not one of these other so-long-baby songs can hold a light to the greatest “I’m a-leavin’ yah” song of all time, also with one of the greatest put-downs in the history of popular music, also by, of course, Bob Dylan:

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (Bob Dylan)

Now I aint saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better,
I don’t mind.
You just kind of wasted my precious time,
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Whoa! Wasted his precious time! A line that makes Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” sound like Florence Nightingale, with her: “I’m disappointed in you…”

Love sucks.

* added 2014-04-20

SCTV’s brilliant “Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Written“

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Bob Dylan: “As I Went Out One Morning”

 

We have been thinking of possible band names for the last few days. How about:

  • The Taliband
  • Fractal Mode or Fractal Chords
  • Mortuary Beserck
  • Phantom of the Oprah

Enough. I was also thinking about a Bob Dylan song from “John Wesley Harding” (1967), and album which may well be his finest. The song is “As I Went Out One Morning”.

Like all of the songs on that album, the arrangement is clear, sparse, simple, economical, and crisp: drums, bass, and acoustic guitar, and harmonica. Dylan’s nasal voice is confident and nuanced.

As I went out one morning
To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s
I spied the fairest damsel
That ever did walk in chains

Tom Paine was a celebrated pamphleteer at the time of the U.S. war for independence, best known for his tract “Common Sense”, written in 1776, which advocated an end to the British Monarchy. Paine provided Franklin and Jefferson with some of the inspiration for their own theories about the state and authority and the individual, and these worked their way into the U.S. constitution and Bill of Rights. Paine himself later returned to England where, among other things, he advocated the creation of pension plans, and progressive taxation. The man was ahead of his time.

I offered her my hand
She took me by the arm
I knew that very instant
She meant to do me harm.

The girl seems to represent religion. She is enticing, with promises of spiritual reward, and he offers her his hand. But then she demands more: she takes his arm. In the economy of this song, we waste no time: he immediately suspects she is up to no good.

“Depart from me this moment,”
I told her with my voice
Said she, “But I don’t wish to.”
Said I, “But you have no choice.”
“I beg you sir,” she pleaded
From the corners of her mouth
“I will secretly accept you
And together we’ll fly south.”

Religion? Or utopianism? Does she represent Dylan’s brief faith in the idea of human progress? Unfortunately, we’re not likely to get a straight answer from Dylan anytime soon, so our only clue is her suggestion they “fly” south. To paradise?

I love the amazingly stripped down lines, especially the first four of the verse above, with that inverted “said I”.

Tom Paine comes to his rescue. The spirit of liberty himself? Or the spirit of “common sense”, of a kind of rational agnosticism?

Just then Tom Paine himself
Came running from across the fields
Shouting at this lovely girl
And commanding her to yield

Why did I think the girl represented religion? I believe it was a review by Greil Marcus that came out shortly after the album that first made that suggestion. That makes less sense to me now, and given subsequent developments in Dylan’s religious views, it does seem more likely, now, that the girl embodies utopianism or socialism. Alluring, but basically a means of enslaving the individual in favor of the collective.

On the other hand, “ever did walk in chains”, suggests that her true spirit was constrained in some way, shackled by something. That is more suggestive of religion, strait-jacketed by the spirit of conformity and collective ennui, though it could also evoke the idea that a socialist utopia is always accompanied by the chains of authoritarianism.  Tom Paine represents just plain old common sense: the illusion of utopia is contrary to what we see and know about human nature.

And as she was letting go her grip,
Up Tom Paine did run
“I’m sorry sir,” he said to me.
“I’m sorry for what she’s done.”

It’s a strange, very beautiful song. If you’ve never heard it… you haven’t, have you?

Modestly revised Februrary, 2007.

The entire lyric of “As I Went Out One Morning”.