Fluxblog 499: Oops! all Bob Dylan
Including a playlist of Dylan's music interpreted by Black artists
This is a special all-Bob Dylan edition of the newsletter, with two new posts about his songs along with four older posts from my archive. This week’s playlist is also from the archive – BLACK INTERPRETATIONS OF BOB DYLAN 1963-1977, a collection of Dylan classics performed by his African American contemporaries, including Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, Tina Turner, Richie Havens, The Staple Singers, and many more. This is something of a sequel to my very popular BLACK BEATLES playlist and I think both show an interesting cross-cultural exchange brought on as much by commercial considerations as a genuine respect for Dylan and The Beatles as songwriters. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I Feel Like A Stranger Nobody Sees
Bob Dylan “Mississippi” (Outtake from Time Out Of Mind Sessions, Version 3)
A lot of great songs have a very defined architecture, and are specific to a particular palette, arrangement, and production style. A lot of the music I love the most is like that. But then there’s other types of songs that are more like a floating set of alluring lyrical and musical ideas that resist a permanent shape or strict form; ideas that are open to endless interpretation. This is Bob Dylan’s lane, and it’s a lot of why his music has lent itself to being covered by a wide range of artists from the start of his career in the early 1960s. But it’s also how he’s approached his own body of work – songs going through many revisions before he settled on a studio arrangement, songs being reinvented for the stage, songs taking different shapes as his voice has changed through his life.
Bob Dylan worked on “Mississippi” for a long time before landing on the version that appears on “Love and Theft” in 2001. This means there’s a lot of recordings of the song at different stages of Dylan’s writing and arranging process, and this one from the Time Out of Mind sessions is my favorite. Other iterations of “Mississippi” lean more folk or country, but this one feels lighter and sweeter than the others. Of the three recordings of the song from the Time Out of Mind sessions, it’s the one that’s most obviously the work of producer Daniel Lanois. You can hear the Lanois-ness in the sharp tonal contrasts – warm, womb-y bass offset with a crisp, bright tone in the lead guitar and a trebly organ part that guides a few dynamic shifts as the song moves through a long series of verses.
Simply put, this recording feels amazing. It’s the kind of track that can immediately change the atmosphere of a room or cleanse your mood. I figure Dylan thought this version was too Lanois-ish and not quite what he was reaching for, but I think it’s one of the finest recordings in his massive body of work. Or maybe he just wasn’t set on what the song was yet, as about 40% of the lyrics are different from the final studio recording for “Love and Theft.” But I think I prefer the lyrics in this form too.
“Mississippi,” like “Tangled Up in Blue” before it, is essentially a love song that exists on a very long timeline in which the lives of the protagonist and the object of his affection only seem to sporadically intersect. It’s a portrait of a guy who’s been through a lot of turmoil, and has spent a lot of time alone. You don’t really get a sense of this woman, only just that she’s been a safe port in a storm and something for him to hold on to as he makes his way through the world. The beautiful and sad thing about this song for me is that his love for her seems to be more important to him than having a proper relationship with her. But he’s yearning for that, and by the end of the song he’s practically begging her for the stability.
Buy it from Amazon.
A Different Point of View
Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue”
There is no timeline in “Tangled Up in Blue,” just scattered memories of small moments burned into the mind of the narrator, who could be singing about one woman or several different women over the course of his life. It’s all deliberately unclear, to the point that sometimes he might be a different person too. Some sections seem like vivid recollections, and others feel more like fantasies. But memory is shaky and unreliable, and is mostly just the story you tell yourself to make sense of your life and define yourself. People change over the years. I prefer to hear this song as being about just two people drawn to one another but almost always out of synch. It’s more romantic that way, and more tragic.
In “Tangled Up In Blue,” love is easy but life is complicated. Every moment of profound connection is fleeting, and every commitment is subject to change. Love gives him focus and purpose but it’s inevitably thwarted, and he’s often complicit in the failure. The music moves in circles, mirroring the way these people orbit one another, and suggesting that they will eventually connect again. There’s a brightness in the notes, a glimmer of hope. She may be gone for years on end, but she never escapes his mind. His lingering love for her and regret about losing her flattens and scrambles his timeline. It’s always her, somehow. And in his heart, it’s always her, someday.
Buy it from Amazon.
Curtain Risin’ On A New Age
Bob Dylan “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”
“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” written and recorded in the tail end of Dylan’s Christian era, is a chugging, manic blues rock song with scattered images and anecdotes that add up to a sense of impending apocalypse. And not “apocalypse” as we tend to think of that word today, but more in the original sense – apocalypse as the revelation, and the arrival of a new order. The song doesn’t convey dread so much as anxious excitement for what’s about to go down. Amidst the violence and chaos, Dylan tracks his character’s relationship with a woman named Claudette. He can’t make up his mind about her, and she seems just as indecisive about him – “finally had to give her up ’bout the time she began to want me.” By the end of the song he’s lost track of her completely, and in context, pondering whatever had become of her is a stray thought as he’s observing Judgment Day.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Enemy Of The Unlived Meaningless Life
Bob Dylan “False Prophet”
The verses of “False Prophet,” but most especially the fourth, contain lyrical sentiments that are pretty common themes in rap: performance of a grandiose persona, declarations of greatness and theatrical disdain for rivals, boasts about street knowledge and underworld associations. The music is jacked from a rare 1954 blues b-side by Billy “The Kid” Emerson – not an unusual move for blues or folk, but another echo of a genre initially built on samples. I don’t think Dylan is necessarily trying to draw a direct comparison to rap here, but he’s certainly aware of the lineage, and the larger process of art as a tradition and communicative medium. He insinuates a lot in his lyrics and arrangement choices, and I think one of those things here is nudging the listener to hear a historical through line. Formats and styles come and go, but a lot of creative impulses don’t really change much through time.
“False Prophet” is playful and sly, and you can hear the delight in the gravelly remains of his voice when he hits each of his punchlines. He’s lived in this version of his voice long enough to have mastered its limited range, so he’s surprisingly nimble and nuanced in the phrasing of every line of this song. He’s always been the singing equivalent of a character actor, but Very Old Man Dylan voice has a different weight to it, even when compared to the Somewhat Less Old Man Dylan of his late ’90s/early ’00s run of albums. He’s keenly aware of when this voice sounds profound and when it sounds funny, and this song is the perfect vehicle for playing to both strengths. You can always hear the jokes in this one coming as the music rolls up to the punctuation of the riff, but the deeper lines mostly hit you when you’re off balance.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Moon Is In My Eye
Bob Dylan “Soon After Midnight”
“Soon After Midnight” is a gentle ballad with touches of doo-wop and country music, and sounds like a scene lit with Hollywood moonlight. It starts off rather romantic – “I’m searching for phrases to sing your praises / I need to tell someone” – but as the song moves along, his words become increasingly sinister. I didn’t notice this at first. It’s so easy to get caught up in the enchanting effect of this song that even a phrase like “they’re lying there dying in their blood” seems lovely in context. The irony is intentional, of course: Dylan’s selling the earnest sentimentality and soft side of a brutal man. So even if it’s preceded by a cruel and dismissive line, the concluding phrase “it’s soon after midnight and I don’t want nobody but you” still comes off as a moment of genuine tenderness.
Buy it from Amazon.
Bringing Me Ecstasy
Bette Midler & Bob Dylan “Buckets of Rain”
I only recently learned of this Bette Midler cover of a Bob Dylan classic recently, as a result of working on the 1970s surveys. This version, which she performs as a duet with Dylan himself, was recorded around the same time as the original on Blood on the Tracks and came out only a few months after that album in early 1976. It’s an incredibly charming recording, and has the feeling of something the two of them decided to throw together on a lark.
Whereas the Dylan version is an earnest acoustic ballad, this is more of a cheeky honky tonk barroom piano tune that plays on Midler’s strengths as a campy cabaret act. They sound like they’re flirting and goofing around – like, why did they change the word “bucket” to “nuggets” here other than to be silly? Midler’s ad libs are both beautiful and hilarious, especially when she sings “Bobby, Bobby, hey there Mr. D, you set me free!” The playful spirit continues through the fade out in which Bob and Bette have a bit of charming banter that ends with him noting “you and Paul Simon should have done this one.” I disagree, that could not have possibly been as cute as this.
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Vish Khanna interviewed Bob Nastanovich of Pavement and the filmmaker Lance Bangs about the new Pavement documentary Pavements, which was has helmed by Alex Ross Perry but completed by Bangs. This interview goes to some very interesting places and both Bob and Lance are pretty blunt about the problems they faced working with Perry on this project. This is a paywalled episode, but it's well worth paying $6 for access to this episode and many other great paywalled episodes in the Kreative Kontrol archives.
• The New York Times published a rave review of my friend Julia Gfrörer’s forthcoming book World Within the World. It’s an anthology of her work and a great introduction to her distinct aesthetic. Definitely buy a copy when it’s out in late January!
Great Dylan selections
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnnogowski/p/gregory-peck-brownsville-girl-and?r=7pf7u&utm_medium=ios