Category: dylan

Genius, Guitars, and Goodbyes

My previous post caused more reactions than any post on this blog so far, and I should probably not be surprised. At first I intended to comment on the things that were said in the thread, but it has been growing too long. Here’s an opportunity to continue in a new thread, where comments won’t be lost at #59. :-)

Things I was not intending to do:

To disrespect Dylan’s integrity.
To take away the enjoyment of anyone who goes to a show and enjoys it.
To claim that Dylan is too old to be good.
To profit economically from his work.
To say that anyone who like what they hear are stupid and ignorant.
To say that all Dylan does now is to go through the motions an profit economically from his past work.

What I did intend was to urge people to think about what they do, and what that does to the performance situation. This was not based solely on one show. Rather, I was taking that one show as a point of departure for formulating views that I’ve had for some time.

Genius is not inherent but something that’s constantly in the making. If an artist produces something of inherent beauty, profound expression, coming from a sharp eye on the human condition, a gaze which transcends everyday thoughts, that expression might be called genius, but to call the artist himself a genius would be to subscribe to a concept of divine inspiration which Dylan may or may not embrace, but I don’t. Genius isn’t what you are, but what you do.
OK, Dylan’s an icon, OK, he has a charisma which pours off the stage in gallons, even today, but still? It is amazing that he can still do it. But how can he ever get anything like a clear perception of when what he’s doing is good — how can he possibly develop criteria for judging this — when the feedback he gets is uncritical adoration? When stepping over the amp next to his piano and moving slightly closer to the centre-stage and blowing some “tut-tut-tut” on the same note in his harp, will harvest the same ovations every night, and when saying “thank you” — once — brings down the house?
Part of Dylan’s greatness lies in his integrity, his unwavering confidence that what he’s doing is right. Take the ’65/66 tour: night after night with catcalls, Judas!, the English leftists’ organized clapping (“If you only wouldn’t clap so hard”), the boos, the reviews — enough to break anyone’s back, but Dylan sucked energy out of it and produced classic performance art. Or the gospel tours. Again: boos, ridicule, and audiences numbering 2000 rather than 20,000 or 200,000 — and again: brilliant shows filled with fire and brimstone, and not only coming from the texts. Even the self-inflicted nadir around 1990 could be seen in this light: perhaps the ultimate act of artistic integrity: to self-destruct in order to rebuild.
But when was the last time Dylan was booed? Even when he put out a bad performance? When was he last given the opportunity of the reality check that an honest audience reaction is? If an artist puts out a performance which is sub-par, he should be greeted with boos, regardless of what he has done in the past, or will do the following night. He should not be deprieved of the chance of a reaction to what he does, and not to what he has done or has been (which is in effect the same thing as treating him as a has-been).
It’s not necessarily the booing I’m after (although that would probably bring out some long-lost fire and brimstone in mr. D), but a nuanced response from the audience, where the audience is able to see beyond the god-like iconicity of the man up there, and hear what they hear, instead of first passing it through the “he’s a genius, so this must be good”-filter.
I think this would do us, the audience, good, but it is also our responsibility towards the artist: he’s engaging in an act of communication, but if the answer is the same, no matter what he says, what good does it do him — what kind of respect towards him is that?
One of the most puzzling — perhaps saddest, but I’m not really sure about this — moments in my Dylan carreer was the first time I was up front and was able to see him at ten feet distance. The show was great, but the look on his face… It seemed to lie somewhere between complete unemotionality and some kind of bemused superiority. Whatever it was, it looked like a mask. At the time I thought: He is not taking us, this, himself, seriously. He doesn’t have to, of course, and again: that he does not succumb to that kind of emotional interaction with the audience which is so commonly seen, is a sign of his integrity. But how can it be otherwise, when he is greeted with hoorays whatever he’s doing? Mustn’t he be thinking, either: “Why on earth are they cheering — that solo wasn’t very successful, was it?” or “Hey, that must have been a great solo — look at how they’re cheering!” In any case, it might be time for another “If you just wouldn’t clap so hard.”

I MISS FREDDY!

Before you comment on this post, please read the follow-up post “Genius, Guitars, and Goodbyes” — what you wanted to say may already be said there.

So, I broke the promise-to-self, to let Dylan tour on his own, without my help. I decided, after the last Scandinavian tour, that this was it; the shows were decent enough, but nothing more. I hyped myself up to enjoying them, liking them even, perhaps loving them, and moments like Desolation Row in Karlstad (best D-Row ever? Best D-Row ever!) made it a whole lot easier, but I also knew that I wouldn’t follow another tour again. Enough singsong, enough mumbles, no more days at the office for me. NeverEndingTour-Dylan never got better than 1995.
But things have changed, and for reasons more related to Wedding Song than to Desolation Row I had to give him another chance. Since he decided not to play Copenhagen this time, it had to be Gothenburg, and I was on the road again.
For the first time in a very long time, I was quite unprepared too. I haven’t heard a new show in two years, and I was looking forward to the closest thing to a virginal experience that I would ever get again. I knew there were some new band members, but I didn’t even know their names, let alone their faces. I was ready. C’mon, Bob, surprise me.
And man, was I surprised. It was a time-stopping experience. Two years just vanished, everything was just as I had left it. Given that that was two years ago, and that the man has been out there doing it all that time, that was not a good experience. One would expect that something had happened, but if it had, I don’t know what it was.
Call me Mr. Jones, call me Judas, but honestly, I had hoped for some development.
And the band… The band… Some years ago, even though I couldn’t always say the shows were great, inspired, etc., at least one could stand proud and claim that Dylan was backed by the best and tightest rock combo in the world, who played Brown Sugar better than the Stones themselves did.
Not anymore.
Tight? Nah.
Exciting? Nope.
Hard? Hardly.
I don’t want to sound negative; the steel guitar player was quite good — at times, he made his instrument sound like something Bucky Baxter might have handled. The guitarist behind Dylan — I think it was Stu Kimball — had his moments too. I guess someone likes the new guy’s solos (that must be Denny Freeman, then) but don’t count me among them. Melodic in the bland, cover-band style that you might hear in light entertainment TV shows; and a repertoire of licks so vast that they reappeared every other song.
After a couple of songs, every taste bud in my aesthetic body yelled: “We miss Freddy!” Initially, I just had to agree, and joined the choir. After all, I summed up my last concert experience (at least I believed it would be my last), writing “About Guitars and Kissing”, my eulogy to Freddy Koella, the guy who plays in Dylan’s style, but actually knows how to play.
But being the rational academic I am paid to be, I had to pass beyond that kind of populist clamour from the lowly senses — I had to think about it. Why has Dylan let Freddy go (or kicked him out?!) and replaced him with this? Images flash by: Michael Bloomfield — savage (and dead, of course). Robbie Robertson — there is a second-and-a-half scene in Eat the Document, just a soundcheck, where Robbie plays a few tones in E major and proves what a tremendous guitarist he was. Fred Tackett — he may wear glasses (so do I), but don’t let that fool you; he could be mean too. G. E. Smith — not my favorite guitarist, but there certainly was a bite there, some rough edges which we haven’t heard again before the days of Koella, paired with a certain dexterity which could become quite furious. J. J. Jackson — probably my favorite NeverEndingTour guitarist before Koella…
And now…! Where in this lineage does the current band belong?! Why is it that I suddenly came to think of Hearts of Fire in the middle of the show?
Again: Why does he do it? He used to say, about the mid-eigthies, that he didn’t know what his songs meant any longer. Well, he doesn’t seem to now either. “Leledi-laaay“, “painting the passports brown“, “justlikea woman” — all sung to the same melody, with the same emotional character. He might as well have sung “two litres of milk“, or “upmg kfadl ksdfie ewok” — it wouldn’t have mattered more, or less.
I’m not going to analyse him or his motives — is he just doing it for the money? is it just this pact with the Commander-in-Chief? Is it, perhaps, just another day at the office? — but my impression is that he is no longer hungry, he is no longer nervous, he is tired and content. It may be a very long time since he last went to the beach and danced with one hand waving free, but up until recently he has sounded like he wanted to. Not anymore. He’d be afraid of getting dirt on his boots, he’d be repulsed by the fish, he’d be too tired to walk through the dunes. He was so much younger then. That bothers me, much more than the lack of melodic variety.
I’m not talking about age here, but about guts and hunger, interest and desire. If he doesn’t know what it’s like on the beach any more and by the way doesn’t want to either, then why on earth does he have to sing about it? Why doesn’t he give us something he’s interested in? He obviously loves old music, the kind of songs he rips off and records with new lyric collages, the kind of stuff he sings when he’s all by himself. That’s what he does amazingly well, so why not do it more? How about ditching the war-horses — they’re as tired as him — and playing a show once in a while, with Doc Boggs, Gene Austin, Johnny and Jack, Charles Aznavour, stuff we know he loves?
Why not? Well, because if he did, he probably wouldn’t fill the halls he plays in now. The popular response, which he finally seems to embrace and enjoy after years of resisting it an trying to destroy it, has become too pleasant, it seems.

I expect to be flamed for this. I don’t mind. I don’t either want to convince anyone who truly thinks his current shows are better than ever. I don’t have the time for that: I have boxes upon boxes of old tapes full of flame and nervous energy that I have to listen through again.
Bye, Bob.

Chimes of Freedom

Chimes of Freedom was, I think, the first Dylan song that I really made an effort to transcribe. This was before the days of the Internet and in my case also before the days of Lyrics, so if I wanted the words on paper, I had to write them out myself.
Which I wanted, and which I did.
I was spellbound by those words. The layer upon layer of different meanings connected to different sensual experiences: the thunder storm, the lightning, the sounds, the “we”, which is not explained in the song, but I imagined a loving couple, on their way home from a date, to . . ., well, you know – all these and more, working together, flowing in and out of each other and each other’s natural domains, lightning itself evoking sounds, not by laws of physics, through its companion, the thunder, but by laws of association.
And all this channeled into Freedom, even giving that flashing sound a political or at least social dimension. No wonder the post-pubescent me had to love it.
And I had to see it on paper, to savour it, possibly also to understand the bits that escaped me in their sounding form. I only had it on vinyl (of course, this was back in those days . . .), and it’s only owing to my quick (and illegible, to anyone but me) handwriting that there aren’t more scratches and dents in that track. Somehow, I managed to get through it, and even solve some of the textual mysteries.
For this and other reasons, I have quite a special affection for the album version. I don’t know if it is because of this, or because Dylan has never really done it better, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his live versions. They always leave me cold, don’t do it for me, and the result of having listened to all these versions that leave me cold, has been that the song itself has lost some of its attraction.
Then came No Direction Home. I won’t claim that this is the best version ever – it probably isn’t. The singing is the whining, slightly tense, 1964 voice – not his best year. I’ve even heard the track before, without any noticeable effect.
But this time, somehow, it worked.
I can’t explain why – probably a combination of circumstances (I was listening on headphones, walking around in our local grocery store, looking for some aubergines and some washing powder), and the thing that caught me was something as insignificant as the guitar playing between the verses.
It goes something like this:

  G
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .
|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|  etc.
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|
|-2---2---2---|-2---2---2---|-2---2---2---|
|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|

Nothing much, and yet…
At first, the performance disturbed me. Especially two of the between-verses passages, where he keeps strumming this one G major chord abnormally long. I thought, “Damn, he has forgotten the lyrics.” It has happened before. But this time, “phew”, he managed to get back on track again. Until next verse, same thing again, even longer this time. But both times, the following verse with all its intricate images and assonances followed without any hint of a problem, so relieved by this I ended up listening to the sheer sound of the guitar: never have I heard a more perfectly ringing, shimmering tone from Dylan’s hand. It’s not that it’s simple word-painting or anything – that would have been trite; they don’t sound like church-bells, those guitar chords – especially not the kind which are caused by lightning. But they chime alright.
And I started wondering, if he hadn’t forgotten the lyrics, perhaps there was a reason he did it like this? Playing the waiting-game like that – unless one believes it’s just a mistake, and all one can think of is how painfully embarrassing this is – it forces one to notice that which is going on in place of that one expected but which is not. And what goes on here, is sound – simply sound. “Only silence is more beautiful.”

One Too Many Mornings

Seven years ago, I wrote, in the first version of the tab of “One Too Many Mornings”:

The chords below are what he plays. I’m not sure about the fingering, though. I have a feeling that it is played in some kind of altered tuning, but I’m not sure yet. The low g’s that are sounding throughout most of the song would indicate an open string. I’m working on it.

This was one of the first songs I tabbed — or should I say: failed to tab. At that time, I only had the song on vinyl, and apart from the huge problem involved in tabbing from a vinyl player (moving the pickup five seconds back not only damages the record, it is also impossible). I thought about various open tunings — especially the consistent use of the G on the deepest string pointed in that direction, but also the many instances of two neighbouring strings with the same tone — but in the end I settled with an approximation in standard tuning, and the song remained in the “things to do” folder (only to prove that the last sentence in the quotation was a lie).
Today I finally sat down with it again, and it turned out to be played in open A, the same tuning that he used on the Freewheelin’ outtake “Wichita Blues”. It’s an interesting tuning, because the strings are tuned as closely together as possible. This may also be the reason why it has not been used much: the closeness gives a very homogenous sound, but this also limits the sonorous possibilities. Also, the two c# strings give the major third a very prominent place, which almost rules out any blues oriented songs at the outset (in Wichita Blues, the highest string is not c#’ but e’).
Anyway, the tab is ready.

“What I learned from Lonnie” pt. IV: Dylan the Pythagorean

[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]

“I’m not a numerologist”, Dylan says (Chronicles, p. 159). But before and after this statement, he builds up such a metaphysical web around the force of numbers, that the only definition of a numerologist that he does not fit into, is the kind who calculate a lucky number from the letters of their name. Alright, this is after all not a Rod Stewart blog.

In the Rolling Stone interview from November 2001, where he first mentioned the Lonnie Jonhson method explicitly, he says:

Lonnie Johnson, the blues-jazz player, showed me a technique on the guitar in maybe 1964. I hadn’t really understood it when he first showed it to me. It had to do with the mathematical order of the scale on a guitar, and how to make things happen, where it gets under somebody’s skin and there’s really nothing they can do about it, because it’s mathematical.

In Chronicles, he continues:

I had the idea that he was showing me something secretive, though it didn’t make sense to me at the time…

So we have an esoteric system, communicated to him in the secrecy of the back room or wherever he was taken aside, which works, regardless of what the player or listener know, understands, or thinks of it, solely on the force of the mathematical structure of the system — “because it’s mathematical.”

The Pythagorean Tradition of numbers

The belief that something can work simply “because it’s mathematical”, depends in some way or another on the idea that numbers have certain metaphysical qualities with a real influence on things in reality.
This is the foundation of the Pythagorean theory of numbers, which I’ve alluded to before in this series. Most people know the Pythagorean Theorem, about the relations between the sides in a right-angled triangle: a2 + b2 = c2 (Dylan knows it too, even though he got the formula wrong in the Rome interview, where he presented it as “a square equals b square equals c square”, which may reveal a truth on a more profound level, but which would do you no good in your calculus 101 class).
But the classic didactical myth, handed down in numerous treatises throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, tells of how Pythagoras walked by a blacksmith who was pounding away on his anvils, and Pythagoras discovered that some of the anvils produced harmonious sounds together, while others did not. He investigated this closer, and found that the mass of the harmonious anvils were in simple proportions to each other — 1:2, 2:3, or 3:4 — while those in more complex relations produced unpleasing sounds. An anvil twice as big as another, would sound an octave lower, whereas one 1.3658 times the size, would sound like… dunno, the Shaggs or something.
The physical facts of this legend have been proven wrong, but what matters is the belief (1) that harmoniousness depends on proportions that can be expressed in simple ratios, (2) that these proportions, which can be described in a purely mathematical form, not only govern harmony in music, but also in the universe as a whole, and (3) that there is some kind of connection between the different kinds and areas of harmony. Thus, playing a tune in a mode which emphasises certain intervals, will influence the balance between the body fluids, and can thus alter the mood of the listeners.
This discovery and the theoretical/religious system that was built around it, became essential to all ideas of harmony and beauty from Antiquity up until the eighteenth century. Plato considered this kind of mathematical harmony to be the fundamental property of the world. In his creation myth Timaios, the creator-god shapes the world beginning with unity, then extending it with ‘the other’ and ‘the intermediary’, and along the corresponding number series 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27, the whole world is created.
In the Middle Ages, this idea was adapted to the Christian frame of thought. In the apocryphical Wisdom of Solomon in the Bible, it says, “You have ordered all things in number, measure, and weight” (Wisdom of Solomon 11: 21), and this verse was quoted time and again in medieval treatises on music.
Thus, what at first sight may look like a dry and slightly tedious exercise in simple arithmetics, is of vast importance because behind the dry façade lies the notion that numbers and numerical relations are reflections of the divine principles governing the universe; that we find the same relations in the universe as a whole, in human beings, in musical sounds, and in visible beauty, and that by knowing the numbers, we can affect humans and glimpse God.
This is why the slight irregularities in the purely mathematical definition of the scale became such a heated topic. The theorists spent gallons of ink on discussing the problem with the division of a tone in two equal halves, which according to the Pythagorean system is impossible, because it is founded on ratios between natural numbers (the equal division of a tone requires the square root of 2, which was unknown to ancient and medieval thinkers).
The Christian heritage from antiquity was largely Platonic. One of the consequences of the humanistic re-appraisal of the classical traditions during the Renaissance, was that other voices from antiquity were added to the stew. Aristotle, with his less mystical and more rationalistic approach, was revived from the twelfth century, and in the field of music theory, Aristoxenos, whose theories were based on geometrical rather than arithmetical considerations, was more palatable to the practically oriented writers of the Renaissance, who were more concerned with actual sound and preferred the pure harmonies of just intonation to the theoretically “correct” but ugly-sounding harmonies.

Approaching Dylan again

If you object that this doesn’t seem to have much to do with Dylan and Lonnie, you’re absolutely right. I’m partly exerting my right to write whatever I want to do — this is my blog — but partly I’m also trying to demonstrate how important the concept of mathematical music has been, way back in history, and how widely the implications it carries reach.
In order to gradually work our way back to Dylan again, one might point to yet another element that entered the picture in the Florentine academies in the fifteenth century: an extension of the notion of the special mystical character of certain numbers. The mainstream medieval tradition had mainly been concerned with twos and threes, but — partly owing to influence from the cabbalistic tradition — a more extended array of meaningful numbers was established and systematized. The Fibonacci sequences and other similar number sequences, and all the sacred numbers of the Bible — just about every number seemed to have a secret meaning, a value beyond the numerical one.

This is the background for Dylan’s perception of the system he learned back in ’64. In the following quotation from Chronicles (p. 158), I have emphasised some words which highlights the strong dichotomy that Dylan sees between the world of 2 and the world of 3:

The system works in a cyclical way. Because you’re thinking in odd numbers instead of even numbers, you’re playing with a different value system. Popular music is usually based on the number 2 and then filled with fabrics, colors, effects and technical wizardry to make a point. But the total effect is usually depressing and oppressive and a dead end which at the most can only last in a nostalgic way. If you’re using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance automatically begin to happen and make it memorable for the ages. You don’t have to plan or think ahead.

What is most striking, I think (apart from the description of popular music as based on the number 2, which quite bluntly disregards the blues/jazz tradition, where a triple feel is predominant), is the statement that these are different worlds, different value systems, which have an automatic effect on the performance: it is not something the performer does, but something that is done through the performer.
Does Dylan believe all this? Yes, I would think so. He is after all a poet, a sponge, a mystic, a sage; he takes what he can gather from coincidence, mixes it all together, and out comes… well, sometimes Knocked out Loaded, but we can forgive him that, since he also produces Blood on the Tracks and Chronicles, which is a fascinating read, even though what he writes is less clear than what an academic might have wanted.

More to come…

(Those of you who have access to Judas! may want to look up my article “Beauty may only turn to Rust” in the 8th issue, where I go into these things in more detail, and relate them to Dylan’s liner notes to Joan Baez in Concert, vol. 2, his aesthetical manifesto.)

“What I learned from Lonnie” pt. III: The Link Wray “Rumble” connection

[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
In the discussion of the Lonnie Johnson technique in Chronicles, Dylan refers to Link Wray’s “Rumble” as one of the pieces that uses this method.
He says:

Once I understood what I was doing, I realized that I wasn’t the first one to do it, that Link Wray had done the same thing in his classic song “Rumble” many years earlier. Link’s song had no lyrics, but he had played with the same numerical system. It would never have occurred to me where the song’s power had come from because I had been hypnotized by the tone of the piece.

He then compares this to a performance by Martha Reeves where she “beat a tambourine in triplet form […] and she phrased the song as if the tambourine were her entire band”.
This is all very interesting, but it hardly sheds any light on the “Lonnie” system as he presents it. Well, let’s see.
“Rumble” is an instrumental, played by a combo of two guitars, bass and drums. It is easy to see how the raw intensity may have caught Dylan’s interest. The introduction goes something like this:

   D     D       E                                     D     D 
   .     .       :     .     .     .       :     .     .     .     
---0-----0-----|-0-----------------------|-------------0-----0-----|
---3-----3-----|-0-----------------------|-------------3-----3-----|
---2-----2-----|-1-----------------------|-------------2-----2-----|
---0-----0-----|-2-----------------------|-------------0-----0-----|
---0-----0-----|-2-----------------------|-------------------------|
---------------|-0-----------------------|-------------------------|
               |                         |                         |
               | :     .     .     .     | :     .     .     .     |
               |-------------------------|-------------------------|
               |-------------------------|-------------------------|
Bass           |-------------------------|-------------------------|
               |-------------------------|-------------------------|
               |-------------------------|-------------------------|
               |-0-----1-----2-----3-----|-0-----1-----2-----3-----|
               |                         |                         |   
               |                         |                         |   
               | :     .     .     .     | :     .     .     .     |
Cymbal         |-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
               |                         |                         |   
Bass drum      |-x-----x-----x-----x-x-x-|-x-----x-----x-----x-x-x-|

This is really all there is to the song, with the exception of a “solo” verse, which consists of violent tremolo strumming, and a turnaround figure after each verse, which adds two beats to the general four beats per measure, giving it all a limp that is certain to wake one up, should one against all likelihood have fallen asleep. 

   D     D       B7
   :     .       :     .     .     .      
---0-----0-----|-------2-----------------|
---3-----3-----|------0------------------|
---2-----2-----|-----2-------------------|
---0-----0-----|----1--------------------|
---------------|-2-----------------------|
---------------|-------------------------|

                                        E           D     D       E
  :     .     .     .     .     .       :     .     .     .       :     
|-------------3-0---------------------|-------------2-----2-----|-0-----
|-----------------3-0-----------------|-------------3-----3-----|-0-----
|---------------------2-0-------------|-------------2-----2-----|-1-----
|-------------------------2-0---------|-------------0-----0-----|-2-----
|-----------------------------2-0-----|-------------------------|-2-----
|---------------------------------3---|-0-----------------------|-0-----

It makes perfect sense that Dylan has liked this. There is the unpolished character of the whole thing, which reminds one of the best moments of Highway 61. There is the soundscape of sharply differentiated parts, each with its own distinctive rhythmic pattern:

  • a raw electric guitar, slightly out of tune, pounding three-chord patterns and a simple run at the end;
  • a muffled bass playing simple, chromatic ascending figures over and over again;
  • two widely different percussion sounds — the cymbals with their insistent triplets and the bass drums with their dump “tam, tam, tam, ta-ta-ta”;
  • and the rhythm guitar, which only plays the strong beats and nothing else.

Both guitars, in different ways, take the part of the drummer, as Dylan has described his own solo guitar playing on several occasions, whereas the drums do just as much “motivic” or “thematic” work as any of the others.
But what does it have to do with Lonnie Johnson and mathematical music?
At first sight: nothing.
At second sight: well, the number three is all over the place: the main line of the guitar is three chords — silence — three chords — etc, ended by a measure which is extended from 2×2 to 3×2 beats. The cymbals play different kinds of triplets all the time, and the bass drum plays three long and three short.
Hey, perhaps we’re on to something here? Triplets, what is it about triplets? He says earlier:

I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is.

There is a long line of thinking behind this, which of course goes back to the pythagoreans, again. I will write more about this in a forthcoming post, but as a teaser, the numerical system in Plato’s account is based on each number having its own metaphysical character, one being unity (and not really a number at all), two representing “the other” and three “the intermediary”. The difference between two and three has been central to all numerological systems throughout the history of ideas.
I’m not saying Dylan is a Platonist (and he says himself that he’s not a numerologist, so we better believe him, right?)(Right!), but it is not either unlikely that he has picked up some sort of idea along these lines, and why not from Lonnie Johnson? And if he believes the beauty of the system is that it works, regardless of artifice: the audience will go wild, no matter — if it works, then why not use it?
Be that as it may, the beauty of this explanation is that it works whether Dylan is right or not, whether there is a firm basis for the system or not. What Link Wray does, through his use of various permutations of threes, is to create a polyphonic structure with different layers of rhythmic activity in different instrument parts, all going on at the same time, and creating a remarkable complexity with very limited means. Whether it works because of the number three or because of the raw sound, the hypnotic repetitivity, and the underground Rumble of ominous ta-ta-ta in the drums and weird chromatics in the bass, barely audible as such, but mostly very disturbing — who am I to tell why it works?
And these elements: pared down resources, insistent repetition, sometimes weird “chromatics” (which one might — O horrible thought! — have mistaken for mistakes, but now we know better…), guitars playing drums and vice versa — these are precisely what characterizes Dylan’s band and his playing from 1988 and in the following years.
Now it remains to take a closer look at some of his own music making during those years, to see where the triplets went.

“What I learned from Lonnie Johnson” part II

[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]

I agree with the comment in the first post on this subject, that rhythm and a deliberately ambiguity between 3/4 and 4/4 time may be part of what Dylan is talking about. Some of the problem is that he seems to glide — at least in the way he talks about it — between pitch and rhythm as the topic. Some of it, which is the part that I emphasised in my previous post, makes sense as a descripion of a formulaic system of composition, where a set of generic rules can be applied in a variety of situations and produce the goods.
This has been described in the field of literature by Albert Lord and Milman Perry, who studied the formulaic composition of epic poetry in the Balkans, and compared it, as a (then, at least) living tradition, with the Homeric epics, and found the same fundamental traits. The conclusion that the Iliad and the Odyssey are written-out versions of improvised poetry, while upsetting some notions about the Genius who laid the foundation for Western Literature, is hardly surprising, since Homeros was supposed to have lived before the development of writing.
But apart from that, the Lord/Perry studies have been important for the development of a framework for studies of formulaicism in general. This has been taken up by the musicologist Leo Treitler who has applied some of it (but with major qualifications) to the medieval repertory of plainchant.
Anyway, I’m rambling; stop me. [Stop!][Ok, thanks].
The other side would be the rhythmic aspect, which is also clearly part of what he’s talking about. It makes sense, judging from his singing style in the late 80s and early 90s, that he has had considerations about various ways to circle around the various rhythmical strata in a song.
It reminds me of Levon Helm’s comment in the video about the making of “The Brown Album”, about people thinking that it must be difficult to sing lead and play drums at the same time. But for him, he says, it’s the other way around, because he can sing ‘around’ what he plays (or vice versa).
But in either case, there is no easy connection between what Dylan says he does, and what one can hear him doing. Especially when he gets concrete. When he says:

It’s a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes.

–there are a number of possible interpretations, but also a quagmire of possible mistakes, on Dylan’s part and on the reader’s. One is fairly easily taken care of:

  • “triplets” is a rhythmical term, denoting the subdivision of a beat in three instead of two units. What he probably has in mind, is triads, the units of three tones separated by major and minor thirds, which have been the foundation of Western harmony since the fifteenth century, and which is usually called “chords”.

But other points are less clear-cut:

  • “How [the notes of a scale] combine numerically” — is this a reference to the esoteric tradition of harmony-of-the-spheres which goes back to the Pythagoreans, or simply a way of saying that there are certain patterns in the scale?
  • “How [the notes of the scale] form melodies out of triplets” (i.e. triads). Is this a reference to the triadic nature of melody in the western tradition, where certain melodic tones get a particular emphasis because of their structural importance in the triads? In functional harmony, a certain sounding chord is described according to which function it fulfills, which means that the same chord can mean different things depending on the context (see the “D” in different versions of Girl of the North Country), or a chord can be called a G chord without even containing the tone G. (I know I have an example of that in one of the tabs, but I can’t remember where). As I’ve argued in some of my articles in the “Self-Ordained Professors” section, the skillful handling of these features can be observed in Dylan’s music, but I still doubt that that is what Lonnie told him.
  • “axiomatic to rhythm and chord changes”. Yes, again: the relationship between rhythm and harmony is close, even though they are different phenomena. The pivot is “structural importance”, which is decided in the interrelations between triad and rhythm: a structural tone is one which is placed on a strong beat, but in some situations, a weak beat may become strong because it is inhabited by a structural tone.
    This is fairly straightforward, but Dylan actually makes a much wider claim when he says that the notes of the scale are “axomatic to rhythm and chord changes”. “Axiomatic” would imply that the notes of the scale are the fundamental building blocks upon which the system is defined, without themselves needing any definition within the system. This would mean that rhythm is inconceivable without a structured pitch hierarchy, which — as a general statement — is pure bullshit. He may be thinking only of his own system, but for an artist working in a tradition based so heavily on rhythm, this becomes a strange statement, to say the least.
    Is this what Dylan means, then, or does he actually mean “triplets” when he says “triplets”, and hints at some direct, mystical connection between harmony and triple rhythm? If that’s what Lonnie told him, he lied…

“What I learned from Lonnie Johnson”

[This post belongs to a series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]

Well, what is it — the musical style that Dylan talks about in Chronicles?
I’ll be writing some more on this on the main site, but here are some less processed ideas about it, in preparation for the longer study. I welcome comments.

He’s been talking about this before. The first time was already in 1966, in the interview with Klas Burling in Sweden:

Well you know my songs are all mathematical songs. You know what that means so I’m not gonna have to go into that specifically here. [yeah, sure] It happens to be a protest song … and it borders on the mathematical, you know, idea of things, and this one specifically happens to deal with a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals, and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live, you realize, you know, you understand, you know. It’s sort of a North Mexican kind of a thing, uh, very protesty. Very very protesty. And, uh, one of the protestiest of all things I ever protested against in my protest years. But uh…

Not necessarily very clear, but he certainly had the idea about mathematical music already back then. It might perfectly well be true, that he learned about this from Lonnie Johnson in 1965.
But what was it that he learned? If one wanted, one could go as deeply into this as one wished. There is a long tradition, going back to the Pythagoreans in pre-ancient times, of a connection between music and numbers. It is my contention, however, that

1. what Dylan talks about in Chronicles has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pythagorean tradition,
2. Dylan’s method is less clear-cut and conistent than what he presents it as,
3. it probably has nothing to do with whatever Johnson may have told him in the 60s,
4. but that doesn’t matter, as long as it has worked for him.

All this stuff about even and odd numbers — well, I don’t think it makes sense. What does seem clear, judging from what he actually says and comparing it with what he does on stage, is that he’s talking about the peculiar guitar style that he has developed during the Never Ending Tour years: the little two-three-note figure solos that he has kept churning out and that at times has driven most of us crazy, but which also — in a strange way and to a surprisingly high degree — work, musically. Outgrowths of this is probably also the sing-song/”up-singing” style of the recent years: it all fits his description fairly well, of a system of infinite permutations of very simple formulas, nothing to do with improvisation or inspiration, but a schematical approach to the basic chords and melodic shapes, which can be applied to just about any song — which is what he does.
That said, I don’t think it is a system that someone else can learn to use — it is hardly insignificant that there are twenty years of touring and music making between the time he first learned it and when he understood how to put it to use. It has taken him those years to gain the musicianship (and perhaps also the need for routine which persistent touring must bring with it) which he then could cross-fertilize with what Lonnie Johnson had told him, to produce his new method. In other words: I think Dylan should receive more of the credit for it than Lonnie.

Help!

Once in a while, I am notified of lyric mistakes in the tab files. Sometimes there is no excuse, other times I can blame it on a lack of knowledge of idiomatic expressions in English, or just on bad pronunciation on Dylan’s part. But in a large number of cases the mistake is not mine: the error comes from Dylan himself, or at least from whoever has revised (or, as some would say: corrupted) the official, copyrighted lyrics, to be found, e.g., on bobdylan.com.
For a while, I made a habit of copying the lyrics from there when they were available, both because it was convenient, and because it was “right”. But eventually, I decided it was more useful to make new transcriptions from scratch.
This has resulted in a number of files with “wrong” lyrics. My plea to you all, then, is: if you come across one of these, would you please drop me a note, write a comment here, or use the form below and notify me about it (which also gives me the chance to try out yet another WordPress extension: the Contact Form)?

The Battle of Wichita — the full story

OK, here’s the full story of the battle of Wichita, as requested.

It sounds pretty easy at first — just a run down similar to so many other songs (The Wicked Messenger, Down the Highway, and quite a few others), but when it came down to figuring out the details…

One thing was for certain: the highest string had to be tuned to the tone that is ringing throughout — there was no way in the world that that was going to be a fingered tone, the dexterity that would have been involved in that, would have been quite alien to Dylan (no offense). So there was one string…

For the rest, I worked with the different tunings that I knew Dylan used at that time, and I worked on alternative tabs in each of them, but I never even got through the initial run. (I can’t — at least I don’t want to — count the hours I’ve spent, listening to 3-second segments at reduced speed.) The special things about the tuning that he actually uses are the fifth between the first and second string and the major third between the bass strings (4th and 5th). The second of these has the acoustic effect of producing a lot of clashes between overtones in the audible range, which might create the impression of a different tuning. This, together with the bassy/slightly distorted sound of the two Freewheelin’ outtakes, made me believe that the deepest sounding string was lower than it actually is. I had made a tab in open D, I think it was, which was acceptable, but still clearly wrong, both because it was impractical to play and because it had the wrong tones in it.

Now, working out a tab when you know the tuning, is fairly straightforward. It may take some concentrated listening and occasionally some extra technological aid, but it’s not that hard, once you’re used to it. Working out the tuning is usually also straightforward — each of the common tunings have their specialties (I’ve expanded on this elsewhere — in the FAQ section of the main site). But this was an unknown tuning, with specialties that pointed in different directions. The figure that is heard in the second bar of the downward run, on the 4th and 5th strings, sound like the common E-Esus4-Em-E figure in standard tuning (Baby Please Don’t Go, Lost Highway, etc.), but other traits pointed clearly to an open tuning. I had worked out which pairs of strings had to be at which distances from each other, but putting it all together…

The CD had another version, the live version he played in Cynthia Gooding’s appartment some time before he recorded it, but in the same arrangement. There, he used some other chord shapes more consistenly (the A7 chord 003300), which gave me hope that I might break it because of them, but again, …

The CD only has the song itself, but since it was originally from a longer tape, where this was the second song, there ought to be some useful information to be gained from what happened before and after the performance itself, I thought. So the other night I posted a request at the pool. The morning when I got up, there was indeed a file waiting for me.

With trembling fingers, tossed between Schylla and Charybdis, high hopes and deepest desperation, [etc. — building up to the dramatic climax] I played the file, and what do I hear, if not Dylan tuning the guitar, string by string… Exactly what I wanted. All I had to do was, then, to follow his tuning, put on the capo, and play along…

Tab Tools

After the story of the battle of Wichita, here’s some info on the tools I use when I tab.

  1. Ear. Couldn’t do it without it.
  2. Plain text editor. Well, not quite, but in principle. No fancy tabbing software, just typing. Tabbing is an ASCII art form…
  3. Occasionally, pen and paper, but nowadays, I can hardly write music on paper anymore. Although that’s where I come from, it now feels odd to write down a guitar part in standard notation. Only when there is doubt about the tuning, as in the Wichita case, do I write down the actual notes.
  4. Technical equipment 1. Ah, back in the good old days, back in the late nineties, when tapes were still the standard trading commodity (remember them? Small plastic things, with stuff in them that could come out and make interesting sallad-like patterns on your floor or in the car — cats used to love them). For the first few years, I would make most of the tabs from a lousy walkman. Even stuff I had on CD I would record onto a tape, because the rewinding function on CD players is usually horrible, for this kind of work, anyway.
  5. Then came Winamp, which made my life a whole lot easier, for one major reason: the back arrow. One press of a button sends you five seconds back in time. Excellent. No more rewinding of tapes, which would always go too far back, so that when I finally came to the tricky point again, I had lost concentration, and had to go back again, etc. Five seconds, that’s something even my attention span can handle. Also, no stupid mouse-clicking (the mouse is great for BreakOut and Quake, but for serious work I need a keyboard), and no ctrl-alt-comma-tilde-up combinations, just the back arrow. And it works with CDs as well.
  6. There is a plugin for Winamp called Chronotron which slows down the song without too serious damage to the sound quality (there are several that do the same trick, but this one works best for me). Sometimes it is very helpful to hear a passage in half speed. It’s cheating, I know, but what the heck.
  7. The ultimate tabber’s tool is Transcribe! You can fine-tune both the pitch and the tempo, but best of all, you can analyse the wave spectrum to hear precisely which tones are sounding during a certain time interval. Once you learn how to disregard the harmonics, you can actually work out quite exactly which tones are played. It was a surprise, e.g., that the deep sounding bass tones I was certain I heard in Wichita, weren’t there… It has a decent set of keyboard shortcuts too. A wonderful tool!

Wichita

Finally! Now I can admit it: Wichita Blues has been bugging me for years. Thanks to a CD from Thomas Romon, and a file from lowgen at the Pool (heartfelt thanks to both!), I’ve finally won the struggle. Turned out it was played in a tuning he has never, to my knowledge, used anywhere else. The tab is from the Cynthia Gooding Tape (Feb/March 1962).
The tab is fairly accurate for the intro and the beginning of the first verse, and all the chord shapes he uses throughout the songs are there.
There is one text line I couldn’t make out. If anyone has suggestions, please help me out.

Alex Ross: The Wanderer

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: The Wanderer

I’ve only recently gotten involved in the blog world, and this is one of the blogs I’ve realized I’ve missed. Alex Ross is known in the Dylan world as the author of one of the best recent articles about Dylan, and in the rest of the world as music critic in The New Yorker. His blog (mainly concerned with classical music) is one I frequently check out, and the Dylan article is available there too.