reviews – things twice

Black Rider – Dylan’s most complex song ever

DISCLAIMER: To some extent, this text is still a draft, in that there may or may not be too much or too little music theory in it. I intend to revise it, so if you have comments that may be useful in that respect, I would be very grateful. Use the comment section or send me a mail

From a musical perspective, there is one song on Dylan’s recent album, Rough And Rowdy Ways, that stands out: Black Rider. One may not initially notice it: on the surface the song fits nicely in with the rest of the album: rather slow, melodically nothing much more than a monotonous recitative, a nicely sounding canvas for a fairly wordy set of lyrics. But harmonically speaking, it is in fact probably Dylan’s most complex song ever (that is: if he has written it himself, which obviously can’t be taken for granted these days, given his track record of musical thievery. But for the sake of argument: his most complex song).

Among the candidates for “most complex song” – In The Garden is the most obvious one, but Ring Them Bells and Dear Landlord also come to mind – it is also the most interesting one in this respect, since the very nuanced harmonic progressions are not immediately perceptible as complexity – they feel very natural, and yet they contribute very strongly to the expression of the song. A comparison with In The Garden underlines this: there, the complex harmonies sound slightly contrived – interesting, but in a way that draws attention to itself and not to the song. Here, one hardly notices them. And yet, they are an important aspect of why the song seems to suck the listener in. I’ll try to show how.

The material description

If one follows the traditional division of the musical material into melody, harmony, and rhythm, Black Rider is all about the harmony.

Rhythmically, the whole song consists of a sequence of chords with no fixed rhythm, just calmly strummed, two chords for each line of text, from beginning to end, with no change, no development. Just the chords.

Dm       A/d       Dm      A/d
 
      Dm                 A7
Black rider, black rider, you've been living too hard
     D7                    Gm
Been up all night, have to stay on your guard.
    E7/d                          A7/c#
The path that you're walking, too narrow to walk,
D7/c                    Gm/bb
 Every step of the way, another stumbling block.
Dm/a                           A7
 The road that you're on, same road that you know,
Dm6/a
Just not the same as it was
A'         Dm       A7/d       Dm      A7/d
 a minute ago.

The melody to which the lyrics are sung is not really a melody. It is more like a recitative, basically with one tone per chord, repeated with a consistency that is surprising given Dylan’s incapability of sticking to one note (at least when he’s supposed to – unlike the unbearable one-note samba impersonations he used to do back in the day, whichever song he was singing). So no melody to speak of, just the words.

Which leaves us with the harmony.

In the following I will go through the song, chord by chord, verse by verse. There will be some music theory; I’ll try to make that as brief as possible.

Verse 1: Same road, just not the same that it was a minute ago

The song begins with the four chords

Dm – A7 – D7 – Gm

(In the following I use bold for chord names, Uppercase Italics for note names, and Bold Italics for the abbreviated functional harmony names that will show up here and there.)

Bar .1-4, with the chords Dm – A7 – D7 – Gm

In these chords lies the seed of all the developments that lie ahead. Here is why:

The three chords in a “three-chord song” are the keynote (also called the tonic), together with the chords on the fourth and fifth steps above the tonic (the subdominant, and the dominant, respectively). In a song in D major, these chords would be D, G, and A.

Minor keys differ from major keys in some important aspects. One is that the dominant is almost always a major chord, even though a minor chord might have been expected. The reason for this is that we absolutely want that halftone-step leading from the third of the dominant chord (c# in this case) back up to the keynote of the tonic. That halftone is the glue that keeps all western harmony together.

Going from Dm to A7, then, is expected, since these are the main chord functions of any key: the tonic and the dominant. Returning to a D chord is also expected; after all, the A7 is there to build up tension so that the return to the tonic feels even more satisfactory.

But here, we don’t return to a regular tonic. Instead, we get a D7. What difference does that make?

Quite a lot, actually. The added seventh transforms the chord from a tonic – the bringer of rest and stability – into a dominant – the bringer of tension and trouble. That tension needs to be resolved, and in principle, the resolution of a dominant always happens the same way. A7 resolves to Dm because of the halftone step from c# to d and the step from g to f in the lower voice. And, correspondingly, D7 resolves to Gm, which is exactly what happens here.

And Gm is not a stranger in a song in Dm. In fact, as indicated above, it is the subdominant, the last of the main functions in any key, together with the tonic and the dominant.

The core of traditional functional harmony is the progression T-S-D-T, and the notion that these chords represent different functions in a musical narrative. We begin and end with a Tonic, the stable foundation; the Dominant is where the action takes place; and the Subdominant is a preparation to get away from the calm quiet of the Tonic.

It could be likened to the Lord of the Rings: the Tonic is Hobbiton and the Shire, the Subdominant is Frodo’s first hesitant steps on the road that leads from his cozy hut with the round door, out into the wide world; and the Dominant is Nazguls and orcs and Mordor and all that; and in the end, we’re safely back in Hobbiton again. In other words: T-S-D-T. You have heard that progression thousands of times. It is e.g. the first line of Blowin’ in the Wind.

This means two things for the story of the Black Rider: after Dm–A7–D7–Gm, we have been through all the narrative steps in the story, so we might in principle be ready for a return to T again. The problem is that we have gone the wrong way. Which means: we are not done yet – we have only just begun: what we thought was Mordor back there in the second bar, turned out not to bring us back to Hobbiton after all; in hindsight we can see that it was really part of the preparation to get to Bree, the little village just outside of the Shire, or in more technical terms: the subdominant (Gm) in the fourth bar.

Thus: (a) only now are we ready for the real Dominant step, and (b) we may not have traveled very far, but we’re already a long way from home. (Or as Sam expresses it: “If I take one more step, I’ll be the farthest from home I’ve ever been.”)

Exactly how long, is determined by several things. It would have been perfectly possible to continue: Dm-A7-D7-Gm-A7-Dm:

In other words: tack on the two remaining functions, in the correct order, and be done with it. As we have said: A7-D7 is just an inserted preparation for Gm, so the longer progression is just a slightly embellished version of the plain Dm-Gm-A7-Dm.

There are two problems with this. One is that after such an elaborate preparation just to get to Gm, it would seem a little anti-climactic with just a sudden return to the tonic. We are led to expect more than that.

The other is that most music in most musical traditions organize phrases in groups of four. If we perceive our first four chords as one unit, we would expect things to happen in similar groups. The suggested, longer sequence only adds half a unit. With the added preparation to Gm, the short option Dm-Gm-A7-Dm is no longer an option; and adding -A7-Dm at the end disrupts the four-unit phrasing. Apparently, we’re in for a longer haul.

To understand what is happening here, let’s have a look at the bass line of the whole verse:

Verse 1, bass line and chords

In the first four bars we oscillate between the tonic and the the keynotes of the D and S, respectively. Bar 5 brings us back to the keynote d again. Then follows a mostly chromatic descent from D down to A, which looks like a slowed down and stretched out echo of the first two bars, as if to say: “Whoa! You were going way too fast there, buddy – we weren’t ready for Mordor just yet, but now we are! Bring on the orcs!”

Once a has been reached – the first chord of the third four-bar unit – the bass stays there throughout the whole unit, until the return to d and the end. This Dm chord is extended into a four-bar interlude, which brings the total chord count up to sixteen, divided into four regular units of four.

The harmonic “narrative” of the first verse could be represented like this:

Verse 1: four-bar units and phrases. The symbols below the music indicates the high-level functional analysis: after the initial t–s (lower-case letters denote minor keys, upper-case letters major keys), the whole second unit leads up to D, which is in effect all through the third unit.

We have a slightly elaborate way of getting from t to s; then a long build-up to an extended D; followed by a well-deserved rest on t.

But what about the chords? The bass line may return to d in bar 5, but that’s not a Dm chord, and the A7 that I claimed was dominating the whole passage from bar 5 to 12, is hardly there until the very end. What’s going on here?

First of all, if we leave out the bass tones, we may notice that the progression A–D–Gm from b. 2–4 is repeated in the second unit. This time it is preceded by E7 instead of Dm; this expected Dm instead follows after the progression.

To make a long story short: In the first unit, Gm was prepared by its dominant, D7, in turn prepared by its dominant, A7. In the second unit, the chain starts one step earlier, in that A7 is in turn prepared by its dominant, E7. In technical terms, a dominant that prepares for something other than the keynote, is called a secondary dominant. What we have here, then, is a chain of secondary dominants, and this whole passage, E7–A7–D7–Gm, is a way of saying, in music: “wait for it… wait for it … wait for it … Now!”

And finally we are ready for a real Dominant. One little detail emphasises its arrival even further: This second time, the Subdominant is not played as a regular Gm chord, but with Bb in the bass. As mentioned, its function is to lead up to the dominant, and the halftone-step in the bass strengthens this effect. Halftones do that, as we have seen: they are like magnets, pulling the chords on either side towards each other.

So everything in the second four-bar unit works together to fulfill the promise of the dominant that has been delayed for so long, and when it arrives it is only natural that it enters as strongly as possible: on the first beat of the third unit.

And yet: after all this fanfare and preparation, it may seem a little disappointing that what follows after Gm is not a straight A, but a D minor chord with an A in the bass – Dm/A. In music theory, this is called a “double suspension” – a sus4 chord on stereoids, where not one but two of the chord tones have been temporarily displaced.

In a regular Asus4 the third, C#, is replaced by the fourth, D, which dissonates with E for a while until the tension is resolved when D drops a half-step back to C#. In a double suspension, even the third tone E is suspended to F and released back to E again, all in the service of heightened tension. So while it would be notated as a Dm chord, it functions as an A chord – a prolonged dominant.

One last observation can be made before we continue the song. It is as if the bass line and the chords tell slightly different stories, or present different perspectives on the same story, so that we are made to expect one thing but get something slightly different. The bass line of the first unit leads us to expect a D of some kind, and we do get that, but “only” in the form of a twisted tone in an E7 chord. Then, after the second unit, we strongly expect an A of some kind; and again, that is what we get, but this time in the shape of a Dm – the chord we expected earlier.

This is in fact a recurring theme throughout the chord progression of the song: things aren’t always what they seem; we’ll get there, but in time, and not always in the time you were expecting. Same road, but different.

Verse 2: You fell into the fire
and you’re eating the flame

Which brings us to the second verse. It can be dealt with much more quickly, since the basics are now in place:

      Dm                 A7
Black rider, black rider, you've seen it all
       D7                  Gm
You've seen the great world and you've seen the small
    E7/d                          A7/c#
You fell into the fire and you're eating the flame
D7/c                    G/b
Better seal up your lips if you wanna stay in the game
Bb6                    F/a
Be reasonable, mister, be honestly fair
     E/g#
 Let all of your earthly thoughts
A    Dm       A7/d       Dm      A7/d
be a prayer

It begins just like the first verse, and one might listen through the whole thing without really noticing that something has changed – at least that’s what I did, until I sat down to write down the chords. When I got to “… if you wanna stay in the game” in the second unit, I had to go back to the first verse to check if I had misheard something or just made a typo, for clearly, that’s a B in the bass, right, and not a B flat?

Right. G/b here. And Gm/Bb in the first:

This is the first in a series of changes with long-reaching consequences. As we saw in the first verse, the bass Bb at the end of the second unit was a strong indication that next up would be the strong effect of a dominant, deserving to enter on a strong beat, i.e. the first bar of the unit.

But this time, we get a B instead in that spot. And this is not just any spot: we are in the middle of a pronounced chromatic descent, going slowly but steadily from D to A. So what to do?

Dylan does the only reasonable thing: insert the Bb anyway and prolong the descent, so that it now fills every halftone in the interval between d and a. Here’s what it looks like:

Verse 2 with four-bar units and phrases (audio from b. 5).

What this tells us is that since the descent has been prolonged, it disrupts the regular structure of four-bar units: the awaited A no longer enters on the first beat of the third unit where it belongs, and the descent actually continues past A.

Dylan’s solution is simple and consistent: the structure that was established in the first verse calls for a full unit of a. This has been prevented by the inserted B, but there are more ways than one to accomplish the goal. One can for example circle around the tone, so that its presence is felt even when it is not actually sounding, something like this:

How to fake a continuous presence of a tone.

This is of course an interpretation, but if we accept the bass tones Bb-A-G#-A of the third unit as a continuous presence of A throughout the unit, we may say that the chromatic descent in the second unit and the sustained A in the third overlap, as indicated with the slurs in the graph above.

The changed bass line calls for changes to the chords as well. G# is easy: it is the third of E major, which – do we notice a pattern here? – is the dominant of A. Thus, the last three chords (E-A-D) echo the beginning of the second phrase, just as the last three chords of the second phrase (A-D-G) echo the end of the first:

Verse 3: I’m walking away,
you try to make me look back

The third verse is remarkable:

      Dm                 A7
Black rider, black rider, all dressed in black
    Gm           Dm
I'm walking away, you try to make me look back
Bb                               F/a
My heart is at rest, I'd like to keep it that way
E7/g#               A7/g
I don't wanna fight, at least not today
D/f#                  Em7-5
Go home to your wife, stop visiting mine
Bm7-5/a                   A7        
 One of these days I'll forget to be 
Dm       A7/d       Dm      A7/d
kind

Verse 3, phrase structure with full harmonic analysis. “(D)” denotes a secondary dominant, i.e. a dominant to anything **other** *than the* tonic.

In a way, Dylan tries to cheat, but harmony strikes back.

The first unit does exactly what I hinted at in the discussion of the first verse: we have a t, a D, and an s, we’ve been through the main functions, so why not just go straight back to t again, and we’re done?

Because the Dominant needs to be the last thing that happens before the end. Here, we go Mordor–Bree–Hobbiton – A7-Gm-Dm – which is a strange narrative.

And sure enough: We have reached the tonic too soon, and payback is a bitch.

Dylan’s solution is quite advanced. If we look at the verse as a whole, we recognize all the elements we have discussed so far: the D-A-G-D oscillation in the beginning, the chromatic descent in the middle, and the prolonged A–D in the end. But things have changed: the oscillation is shortened, the descent no longer goes from D to A, but from Bb to E, and the quick and simple A–D ending is now a two-step action E–A–D. What has happened?

First, we notice that the bass line Bb-A-G#, which used to belong to the third unit, as part of the circling motion around A, now instead is what sets the chromatic descent in the second unit in motion. The chords are the same, the bass line is the same, but the function is different.

We may also notice that just as the Bb in the second verse was “actually” sort of an A, insofar as it belonged to the circling around that note, we might consider it as an auxiliary to A even this time: we have established that the function of the second unit is to descend slowly from D to A; in the third verse, it seems, we descend from a to e instead, but the interval through which we are descending is the same in both cases: a fourth.

Everything seems to be logical – except: how did we get to Bb this time, and by the way: what is the E at the end of the descent doing there anyway? This seems to go against the narrative that we have established so far: we thought we had reached the height of action and tension in unit one, we then realised that we had only just begun, therefore the dominant, A, had to be carefully prepared, to make sure that the resolution of the tension was consistent and clear.

Now, however, if we take the descent to be doing the same thing as in the second verse, the role of the dominant seems to have been taken over by E instead of the real dominant A. But this would mean that we have built up tension – and our justified expectation of a resolution – around the wrong chord: if E is the dominant we’re preparing for, that means that we are anticipating a calm and peaceful return to … wait: to Mordor! to A, the dominant!

That seems wrong.

And it is. Not because the tones are wrong, but because we’ve been fooled. Here’s what is happening:

The Bb doesn’t appear out of thin air. Tonal theory operates with two central concepts: the three main functions that should be familiar by now (T, S, and D), and the notion that a major chord has a relative minor – a cousin with the same genes, but slightly more sombre (and vice versa). The easiest way to determine the relative chord is to look at the number of flats or sharps in the key signature: the relatives are the chords with the same configuration – of black and white keys on the keyboard, if you like. A minor and C major use no black keys, so they are relatives.

Relatives share properties, and one can sometimes stand in for the other. I discovered this for myself when as a kid I was learning to play the guitar and had serious problems with the F barre chord, which seemed to be used everywhere. I could not play it, because my index finger was only nine years old and unable to press down all those strings. I fooled around with the other chords I had learned, and I figured out that, miraculously, I could often use Dm or Am instead.

Only, it wasn’t a miracle: Dm is the relative minor of F – that is why.

G minor uses two b’s in the key signature, and so does B flat major, so they are relatives, functionally. Thus, when Dm enters prematurely after Gm and then continues to Bb, this is a way for the tonic to say: “Fine, I came in too early – I’ll let your cousin take over.” Bb corrects the “mistake” made by Dm, and since an important function of the relative is to indicate that we are not quite ready yet, it is doubly appropriate there, at the beginning of the second unit.

And since Bb has also already been established as a legitimate way of getting to A with emphasis, once we’re there, the progression that follows is unproblematic.

But what about the E at the end of that progression?

Let’s have a closer look at that chord. In the tab at Dylanchords I have written it as Em7-5, since that is the name and shape that is probably most familiar to most people, and since it also corresponds well with the bass note.

But as is the case with many of these complex chords, it can be spelled in many different ways. It consists of the tones E, G, Bb, and D (Bb being the lowered fifth, the -5, from E, and D being the seventh). Bb is not naturally a part of the Em chord – it has been violently, surgically altered from the B that would have been the natural inhabitant of the chord. Altered chords are strong medicine; you do that to them for a reason.

But look at the tones again: G is the keynote of the subdominant; Bb is the parallel of Gm as well as the third in that chord; and D is the tonic, as well as a natural member of the G minor chord – the very same chord that was carrying the protagonist’s hat for a moment back there. Let’s call it “Sam Gam-Gee Minor” (and recall the brief period when Sam was the Ring-Bearer). In other words: Em7-5 can also be spelled Gm6/e.

And then everything falls into place: the chromatic descent, which so far has worked as a preparation for the dominant, turns out instead to be a prolongation of the subdominant that was so rudely cut off a couple of bars earlier. The E that so far in the song has appeared only as a pseudo-Mordor (or as the theorists call it: a “secondary dominant”) to the dominant A, turns out to be nothing more than a colouring nuance of the subdominant Gm.

This in fact also means that the circling motion that was introduced in the second verse, as a way of accommodating the slightly longer chromatic descent and merging it with the sustained dominant, is now shifted forwards a couple of bars and down a couple of steps, just in time for the now extended subdominant to give way – subordinately, of course – to the dominant.

This gives the following simplified chart of the third verse:

The first unit really ends with the subdominant, Gm, which is in effect all the way through the chromatic descent until the Em7-5 chord, including the circling motion, where it gives way to the dominant for the last two bars before the end of the verse.

Verse 5: you’ve been on the job
too long

The fourth verse is mostly a repetition of the second verse, and the fifth verse a repetition of the third. Or is it?

Not quite. It begins the same way, with the Gm cut off prematurely by Dm, but there is one trick left up someone’s sleeve. First, have a look at the third unit:

We are back where we started in verse one! The whole third unit is taken up by an extended A, which resolves, as always, to the final Dm.

Then have a look at the second unit: The circling is back where it started in verse two, as a prolonged A, but this time shifted one whole unit to the left. That is the price one pays for disrupting the natural flow of events, jumping in with a happy ending before it is due: Mordor – the dominant A – takes over the entire verse.

Or does it? Towards the end of the verse there really isn’t much of Sauron’s destructive force left. There is a limit to how long you can sustain dramatic tension, and now there is hardly any energy left. This is perhaps most clearly heard in the chord that now begins the third unit, at “some enchanted evening” (incidentally a reference to wizardry and magic – quite fitting, given the Lord of the Rings metaphor – but also to the song by that name, which Dylan released on Shadows in the Night, the melody of which begins, aptly enough, with a circling around the first note). It is not really a chord, in the sense that it doesn’t have a tonal function at all, it is just an A where the whole thing is shifted down a semitone while the bass tiredly hangs on to its A.

Other lines

So there it is, a complexity that is unheard of in Dylan’s oeuvre, consisting of a consistent manipulation of a few blocks and gestures, and exploiting the niceties of functional harmony.

The lines that I have singled out in the analysis are not the only ones at work in the song. Below is a four-part setting of the first verse – not to suggest to anyone that a choral arragement of Black Rider would be a good idea, God forbid, but to highlight these implicit lines in the other “parts”. Most prominent is the chromatic ascent in the beginning of the “soprano” part, but also the start of the “alto” part is clearly audible as a characteristic chromatic line. In addition I could also have pointed out the run of parallel sixths between soprano and tenor in the third unit.

Four-part version of the first verse, with the main outline of Dylan’s recitative as a solo part at the top.

Lyrics and Music

One final question: Does Dylan know all of this? Probably not.

Are the musical complexities reflected in the lyrics, and vice versa? Possibly. At least the first verse ends: “The road that you’re on, same road that you know, / Just not the same as it was a minute ago,” which could be interpreted as a parallel idea to the ever-changing harmonies which seem the same but aren’t (that it could doesn’t mean that it should, though). The second verse, which is where the harmonic complexities are most dominant-oriented, also has the most dramatic lines, such as the one quoted in the heading: “You fell into the fire / and you’re eating the flame” (and again: the topical similarity with the Lord of the Rings is completely unintentional). And the last verse ends “Black rider, black rider, you’ve been on the job too long,” a quotation from Duncan and Brady, a song that Dylan used to sing, about a guy whose dominant powers are waning.

There is no doubt that such connections can be made, but this is no surprise: the greater the complexity, the greater the opportunities to find parallels and correspondencies, even unintended ones. Dylan has always been lauded for the complexity of his lyrics, open to a wide range of interpretation. Harmonically – not so much. There is only so much one can do with three chords in fixed patterns. I have made some attempts at harmonical analysis of Dylan songs over the years – Dear Landlord, Just Like a Woman, and Mr Tambourine Man come to mind – but I readily admit that they have been made to a large extent out of spite, in opposition to the tendency in popular music studies to study everything but the music itself.

It is therefore unavoidable that part of the conclusion must contain an opening towards suspicion. The sudden appearance of a song like Black Rider, where harmony takes centre stage for the first time in his 60 years as a song-and-dance man, at time when Dylan has spent a decade deep-diving into the repertories of the highly skilled harmonicists of the Sinatra era, must make one wonder if there isn’t a sheet of music somewhere out there among the millions of songs from the first half of the twentieth century with a complex chord sequence in D minor which changes from verse to verse. The fact that there is one verse which is simply repeated, without any change, actually points in that direction.

We may never know. If someone does indeed dig out the original, I will not be surprised. Until then, I am going to enjoy Black Rider, more and more each time I play it.

Murder Most Foul (2020) – An American Litany

Not since 2012 has Bob Dylan released a self-penned song. The past decade has been strange days indeed, with album upon album with Sinatra-covers, paired with gems from the vaults, bringing the Bootleg Series up to vol. 15.

And then, one late evening in March, this song materialized, out of the blue, announced on twitter, of all places:

“This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you”.

The song was Murder Most Foul – seventeen monotonous, monumental minutes of recitative about the killing of Kennedy, Dylan’s longest song ever.

It turned out to be the tip of an iceberg: two more songs followed, False Prophet and I Contain Multitudes, and then, eventually, the full album, Rough And Rowdy Ways.

Murder Most Foul is not the best song on the album by far, but it holds some of the keys to it.

First Impression: Perfected Nothingness

On first hearing, it sounds like an endless rattling of more or less loosely coherent images and motifs connected to the murder of Kennedy, but also to the USA since the 60s, especially the musical side to the country’s history – the Great American Songbook that Dylan has loved and cultivated, which brought him the Nobel Prize in the end.

The impression of a formless, quietly flowing flood of visual and textual images is being underpinned by the music. The melody – if that’s indeed the right name for it – is a steadfast recitation on one single tone, alternating at times with new recitatives one note higher.

It is as if the fight against musical development that Dylan has been pursuing over the past couple of decades has finally come to an end: finally, nothing happens!

Verses Great and Small

And yet: The song seems formless and tedious, but at the same time it is strictly structured.

The top level is marked by the title of the song, which occurs as a textual refrain, in total four times during the seventeen minutes the song lasts. Each time it is followed by a brief instrumental interlude. The interlude is heard one extra time, without the refrain, so the song can be divided into four or five “great verses”.

Each “great verse” consists of two to six “small verses”, again of varying length, but following the same structure. The first “small verse” goes:

         C                            F
It was a dark day in Dallas, November '63
 C                               F
A day that will live on in infamy
C                                  
President Kennedy was a-ridin' high
F        
Good day to be livin' and a good day to die
      C
Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
          F
He said, "Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?"
G                    
 "Of course we do, we know who you are"
          Fmaj7
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car.

First an alternation between C (I) and F (IV), repeated a varying number of times from verse to verse, while Dylan and the bass both recite monotonously on C.

Then, as a “climax” of sorts, the chord shifts from F to G and Dylan’s voice rises one tone to D. The F–G turn can be repeated ad libitum, until the “small verse” ends, with a return to F, and we’re ready for the next round.

Each “great verse” consists of 2–6 “small verses”, the last of which ends with the refrain “Murder most foul”, some times – but not always – with a return to the keynote C.

That’s it.

A Music Analysis of Three Chords and Two Tones

It may seem trivial and exaggerated to start off with a musical analysis of a “song” that uses two tones and three chords in simple combinations that are repeated perpetually.

But that’s what I intend to do, since the principles that are revealed through this analysis, are central not only to this song, but to the quest that Dylan has been on during the twenty-first century.

1. The chord structure in the “small verses” is closely related to the twelve-bar blues structure. There, too, we start out with an alternation between I and IV and end with the V–IV turn that we find in Murder Most Foul. The pattern is handled more freely here than in most blues songs, but it is clearly recognizable all the same, especially to those familiar with Dylan’s production: the blues goes as a red thread through his entire catalogue of songs.

2. The variability in length is also a known trick with Dylan, from his “talkin’ blues” songs of the sixties, where the V-step, leading up to the punchline, can be stretched for as long as one likes; as well as single lines with a varying number of syllables (not-so-subtly parodied by Tom Lehrer in his Folk Song Army: “The tune don’t have to be clever, / And it don’t matter if you put a coupla extra syllables into a line.”) Murder Most Foul is on a whole other level: there’s a huge difference between adding an extra syllable here and there, and to embark on a quarter of an hour’s formless recitation, without the signposts that a recognizable verse structure might give.

3. “Refrain” today means “chorus”: an extra verse with a fixed text that is sung between the regular verses. But in the ballad tradition that Dylan is also part of, going back to the sophisticated courtly songs of the Middle Ages, the refrain was primarily a recurring textual element towards the end of a larger unit of text, not necessarily with its own music or singled out as a separate verse, but structually part of the verse to which it stands. This is a musico-poetic form that Dylan has used just as consistently as the blues, e.g. in The Times They Are a-Changin’. The four refrains, “it’s a murder most foul”, can thus stand as the structural pillars upon which the song rests.

4. The extended refrain structure is a style of writing that Dylan has been working on at least since the turn of the millennium. Its first major appearance was in the song ’Cross the Green Mountain, written for the soundtrack to the movie Gods and Generals (2003) about the American Civil War (once again a freestanding, grand, epic ballad, which is thematically tied to dramatic and violent episodes from American history). There, there is no refrain, just occasional verses with a slightly different chord sequence, interspersed between the regular verses. Nettie Moore and Workingman’s Blues #2 off Modern Times (2006) have a similar construction, with a sequence of verses followed by a refrain. In these cases, the number of verses is fixed. Mississippi is related as well, with long verses consisting of shorter units that are repeated, and a contrasting section – this time not as a refrain.

One more thing is worth mentioning about all these songs: the repeated sections, that work as “regular” verses, are not very exciting, harmonically speaking. Some of them have an ascending or descending bass line over more or less static chords, some have some kind of alternation between static chords – almost a standstill, which the “refrain” sometimes breaks, sometimes not.

5. So we may ask: is this really a form? Is it not simply a formula, a loose frame for recitation? And, yes, that indeed seems to be the point: this song structure that Dylan has been working with, is in itself not very exciting – what makes it worth a closer look is what he does with it. It all has to do with phrasing. It is not controversial to call Dylan the master of phrasing in general – in the sense of shaping a melodic line to a text in a way that uses the sound elements of speech to make the melody seem more immediate, like speech; this is what I’ve elsewhere referred to as “prose singing”.

But on Murder Most Foul he takes this to a new level – literally speaking. It is no longer a matter of aligning the syllables of the text to the musical grid of emphases, but of aligning the lines of text to the large-scale patterns of a chord sequence and a verse structure.

Compare for example some of the G–F passages that end the “small verses”. In the first verse, we find the normal situation: each new chord goes with a full line of text:

G                                        
 "Of course we do, we know who you are"
F 
 Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car

In the second verse, the F part of the pattern is generally very short, only as a brief pause before the next line hurries in – this is the only part of the song that breaks the calm river-like flow:

G                                                      F
Shoot him while he runs, boy, shoot him while you can
G                                      F
See if you can shoot the invisible man

Whereas in the third “great verse”, it’s just as much the G part that is short:

G                                 F
I'm leaning to the left, I got my head in her lap
G                                          F
Hold on, I've been led into some kind of a trap

And in the long “Play it” final section, the phrase structure more or less collapses at times:

G                           F                          
Play Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and all that
G                           F                                 
junk                        All that junk and "All That Jazz"

Here, three lines of text are fitted to two G–F sequences.

The Dylan Trick

How much of this that is planned, I would not dare to guess, and perhaps that is precisely the point: the steady sequence of C–F, C–F, G–F, etc. is not even a song structure, it is more like a sounding greenscreen that may or may not serve to emphasise something other than the tune itself, shape the narrative, let other aspects of the vocal delivery come to the fore than those normally associated with a melody; a systematized irregularity, if you like: the phrasing is not entirely loose, but definitely not fixed.

Where I do dare a guess is here: the musicians have not had a detailed score or chord chart in front of them; Dylan has probably not had a clear plan about where to change chords and verse lines before they pressed “record”; and it may not even have been obvious where the verses, small or great, should end. There are places where other dividing lines than those that ended up on the track would seem more logical. I imagine Dylan sitting there with a stack of papers in front of him, with a long string of lines on them, with no given verse structure, other than those given by the refrain – and a group of musicians on their toes to guess where he’s heading and when he’s changing from chord to chord and from section to section (and it is obvious that at times they don’t guess the same thing).

It’s Dylan playing his usual trick: “Let’s mix it all up and see what happens!”, as his musicians have commented since the 60s, and which still seems to be his way of working e.g. in the studio work for Tell Ol’ Bill from 2015, where he says to the band “Maybe we should just change it all, totally. Change the melody, change everything about it. You know, put it in a minor key, I mean, everything!” And as usual, the result is quite rewarding.

The Narratives of a Dead Kennedy

Both the sheer length of the song and the seeming eventlessness makes it difficult to survey the song while listening to it. The refrains are of great help here: if we allow ourselves to assume that the four/five refrains can indeed be used as markers in the long text mass, and that the texts between the refrains are somehow united, where does that lead us?

The first “great verse” sets down the historical framework. The storyteller holds the microphone. The events in Dallas on that fateful day in November 1963 are narrated, with references to conspiracies (“You got unpaid debts, we’ve come to collect … We’ve already got someone here to take your place”), to the mysteries captured on the Zapruder film (“Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing”). The verse is full of historical references, e.g. to the attack on Pearl Harbour (“A day that will live on in infamy”, cited from Roosevelt’s “Infamy” Speech), but also subtle self-references: Kennedy’s line “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?”, will be recognized from Dylan’s own song Hurricane, dealing with yet another huge and traumatic issue in American history: racial injustice.

The second “great verse” begins: “Hush little children”, and this sets the tone for the entire verse: the quotation from a childrens’ song continues with holding hands, sliding down the bannister, being ordered to go get your coat, and a series of admonitions that a child might hear, some of which sound like actual commands that could have been shouted in Kennedy’s car but that might also double as general sayings (“try to make it to the triple underpass”), others that sound like general sayings but may be much more concrete (“When you’re down on Deep Ellum, put your money in your shoe”), some that are definitely general statements but get a wider significance in this particular context (“Don’t ask what your country can do for you”).

The narrator has put on a different hat: it is no longer the storyteller speaking, but the tutor, the “wise old owl” who observes the events cooly and communicates to us children what he sees, in short sentences, clichés, commands. There is no condemnation or moral indignation, just observation and orders. “Business is business, it’s a murder most foul”.

The third “great verse” is mindblowing, both metaphorically and literally. We are inside the head of the President while it is being blown to pieces – a unique insider perspective from a dying man, and we witness his surprised hallucinations while he observes his own death, partly as a very close observer (“Ridin’ in the back seat next to my wife, … leaning to the left, I got my head in her lap”), partly as a detatched soul, hovering over the scene, following the events depicted in the Zapruder film closely, before leaving it at 2:38 when the president’s dead and Johnson is sworn in.

The drug references that the verse is full of make complete sense as the blurred haze of a brain about to go out: it starts out with two nods to The Who’s rock opera Tommy, dealing with drug-induced hallucinations (“Tommy, can you hear me”, “Acid Queen”), then continues with brain damages, dizzy Miss Lizzy, and the famous “magic bullet” that has “gone to my head” – this time very concretely.

Play for Us – Pray for Us

Which leads into the the long final sequence of “Play it” lines, formulated as calls to the radio DJ Wolfman Jack.

A lot of effort has tbeen put into deciphering the codes behind the selection and the brief characterizations that each song or cultural item is given in the song, and thereby (re)constructing Dylan’s world view (and record collection).

In this respect, Murder Most Foul is a textbook example of the literary genre that Dylan himself has created: Bones to the Vultures – flinging around obscure references, secure in the knowledge that someone out there will dig it out some day. (And if you have found a deeply buried bone, it surely proves both that the idea behind it is deep, and that you are, too, since you’ve found it.)

Murder Most Foul is a smorgasbord for the Indiana Joneses of the literary world.

I prefer to go in the opposite direction: to disregard completely every single reference and rather see them as a whole – as one huge “great verse” where a seemingly endless row of characters pass before our eyes and ears in a procession. One by one they step into the light before they recede into the multitude again, but the remaining impression is that of the procession itself, not of the individual participant.

The closest parallell I can think of is the litany of saints, the liturgical celebration where all the saints of the church progress, one by one, to let us pray for their intercession before God:

V. Sancte Stéphane.
R. Ora pro nobis.
V. Sancte Ignáti.
R. Ora pro nobis.
V. Sancte Polycárpe.
R. Ora pro nobis.
V. Sancte Iustíne.
R. Ora pro nobis.
V. Sancte Laurénti.
R. Ora pro nobis.
V. Sancte Cypriáne.
R. Ora pro nobis.
V. Sancte Bonitáti.
R. Ora pro nobis.

And so on, indefinitely. “Pray for us!” we sing in the litany. “Play for us!” Dylan says – the effect is the same.

The litany of Saints; the organ accompaniment is a modern creation.

It is not very important who Saint Polycarp and Justin were, or what it is about “Stella by Starlight” that appeals so much to Lady Macbeth. They are all there – they have all made their contribution to making the world a little more bearable, especially when it gets tough, be it because the president has been shot or because the world is sick in one way or the other, or just because one needs something to keep one’s head above water. It is like walking along a bookshelf, reading the titles: one doesn’t even have to have read the books to feel a certain comfort: they are there, standing in line with their contents ready to enthuse us, whether we will ever read them or not.

This is also why the song’s finest moment is its last: when the last member of the procession is the song itself, when the long line of “Play …!” admonitions ends with “Play ‘Murder Most Foul’!”. This is not hubris or self-aggrandizing on Dylan’s part – on the contrary. He steps into the procession together with all the others. And by doing so, he also makes sure the song lasts forever: every time the Wolfman has worked his way through the playlist, he will have to start all over again. It’s the Great American Songbook version of the eternal heavenly praise of the angels.

(A Slight Reservation in F Sharp)

Which in the end makes me turn a blind eye on the many clichés and forced rhymes the song is marred by (and why would the Moonlight Sonata be played in f sharp and not in c sharp minor as Big B wrote it? Just because of the rhyme with “harp”?).

Worst in this respect is the pompous and stilted religious language. True enough: when Kennedy is sanctified and gets a litany in his honour, a little religious varnish might be acceptable. But Dylan goes further: the site of the assassination is referred to as “the place where Faith, Hope and Charity died”; Kennedy is slaughtered “like a sacrificial lamb”; and we hear Pilate’s words before Jesus was sent to be crucified: “What is the truth?” – here, clearly, we are no longer dealing with just a saint; it was virtually Christ himself who was shot in Dallas on that November day.

Platitudes like “But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at / For the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that” make Dylan sound precisely like some voice of that generation which can be so annoying to the rest of us: the dreamers who were seduced by the idea that for a brief moment in time we were holding salvation and the future in our own hands, but then it was shot to pieces, annihilated by the dark forces of the establishment and not seen again ever since.

That’s my least favourite side of the 60s. But I don’t mind. Just play “Murder Most Foul” again – just once more.

“What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good”: What I failed to mention about Another Self Portrait

There is one thing that I didn’t mention in my review of Another Self Portrait: that these songs are not masterpieces that redefine the history of popular music. In my review, I have downplayed the possible negative aspects. So just to make it clear:The album starts with three songs where Dylan’s guitar is painfully out of tune (thankfully, it gets better, but that sequencing would get you kicked out of album-sequencing class if I were the teacher); many of the songs are not quite well rehearsed or even known — even by Dylan, not to mention poor Bromberg (guitar) and Kooper (piano) who struggle heroically but not always successfully to follow Dylan’s eccentricities and to layer some musical substance over them; Dylan’s vocal inflections are interesting, and most of the time convincing, but he balances dangerously close to the thin line where the listener’s constant fear of a deadly crash overshadows the thrill of the balancing act.

In short, there’s plenty here to be annoyed about, should one be so inclined.

So why am I not? Why have I, in a review of the early incarnation of possibly the worst album in Dylan’s catalogue, not made a single negative remark about it?

Stressors

It’s all about stress. Stressors, rather.

Nassim Taleb, American-Lebanese scholar living in New York, gives a possible clue. It’s hidden in a recent Freakonomics podcast about why, among the most successful people in all the richest countries of the world, there is always someone from Lebanon.

He says:

The idea that anything natural, anything organic, anything biological up to a point reacts a lot better to stressors than without. So in other words, now for example, I’m talking to you now on this [telephone] line. If the line has some noise on it, a little bit of mess here and there, then the listeners will grasp the message a lot better and remember it longer. A little bit of adversity, a little bit of strain, of stress, results in a little more performance on anything.You switch from what Daniel Kahneman calls system one to system two. One system where you’re passive and not making an effort to an effortful one. And that switch takes place via a stressor.

Dylan’s infamous voice is such a stressor — even here, where the iconic raspiness is replaced with a mellow country-croon. But what little stress the voice itself can contribute, is abundantly amplified by the way he uses his voice: His quirky singing. His rhythms, which sometimes are limping, other times just give the impression of being so. His out-of-tune guitar.

Bob Dylan – the Lebanon of Rock’n’Roll

I don’t mean by this to say that Dylan’s music is equivalent to the trials of emigrants from a small country ridden with civil war, but I find the comparison interesting: that a little bit of strain heightens one’s attention in general.

At least the parallel struck me: what Taleb describes — concerning the Lebanese people, but also in general — seemed to correspond well with how I hear a track like “Pretty Saro”. I’m generally allergic to mistuned guitars. So naturally, I cringed when I heard the start of the song for the first time. But I can’t remember having noticed it when the song ended. What I did notice was a narrative. I had been drawn into the song, the lyric universe, the whole musical and textual edifice.

It can work this way because the other elements of the performance are good. But just like with Lebanon, there are situations where the stress becomes destructive. One is when the stressor drowns out the message entirely. The misery of a civil war may have made the inhabitants of Lebanon more focused, as Taleb argues, but there is a limit. If the whole country is bombed to pieces, progress is a long way away.

And it is not the case that a really bad performance gets the message through really well.

The other situation is the Chinese water torture kind of stressor: when the listener gets more focused on waiting for the next slip than on what happens between the slips. The performance can be as good as it gets — it doesn’t matter, if focus isn’t on it. That’s the point of the “balancing act” metaphor above.

I have this experience occasionally, most often with classical musicians: a wrong note here and there doesn’t necessarily matter, but if the flow is broken — and it doesn’t take more than a moment for that to happen — the listener has to be brought back into the flow again. His trust must be regained. And if it happens repeatedly, chances are that the flow goes on without him.

The nightmare: stress-free music

The idea of a slight stressor as something that stimulates experience does not become less interesting if one consider the opposite: the stress-free music. Be it elevator muzak, slick pop, or the most perfect orchestral sound a recording studio can muster: the more effort one makes to remove the mess, the strain, the stress, the more it also flows effortlessly — right through to the other side, without leaving a trace.

Am I grateful for the mistuned guitar? Not at all. Dylan has so many stressors in store that this particular one, I could have done without. But if there is one thing that I’m grateful of, in my relationship with Dylan, it is that he has never gone down the road to perfection.

Another Self Portrait — a review in sonata form

Slow intro, setting the theme

One reviewer of this latest release in the Bootleg Series asks: “Remember the first time you heard Blonde On Blonde, or John Wesley Harding?” He is somehow implying that Another Self Portrait is the same kind of experience, having to do somehow with reinvention, recreation.

Well, what can I say? Yes, I remember very well.

When I first heard Blonde on Blonde, I had already read so much about the album and how great it was, that my first reaction was: “Oh – Was THAT it?” I didn’t think it was a bad album by any means, but I was definitely underwhelmed. Compared to Highway 61 Revisited, for example – the first album I ever bought, before my expectations had been contaminated by public opinions – Blonde on Blonde seemed to be a light-weighter.

As for John Wesley Harding, I just didn’t like it, mostly because of the title track, but that’s another story.

HWY61, however. And Freewheelin’. And BOTT. And GAIBTY. And TOOM. And Planet Waves. And New Morning. etc. Those are albums that struck me. Not because they complied with any notion of Dylan recreating himself (maybe they did, maybe they didn’t), but because they combine immediacy of expression with conscious attention to musical detail.

And even though Another Self Portrait pales to most of these albums, it does have some really bright moments – including, perhaps most importantly, the long “moment” that stretches from June 1966 to, say the 1974 tour with the Band.

The Artist as Creator: What’s Great About Another Self Portrait

And what’s striking about the songs on Another Self Portrait is precisely the immediacy of expression that I mentioned. The new tracks from the Self Portrait sessions are perhaps the most exquisite examples in Dylan’s entire catalogue of one of his most spectacular abilities, which with unironic bathos can be called: to blow life into dead clay.

His ability to take a simple tune, two–three banal chords, and a cliché-filled text, and make you feel that you’re listening to the most important thing anyone has ever told you, and to make you love the people that he’s creating, right before your eyes – and in this case even using borrowed words; this ability is demonstrated to its fullest extent in the ”throwaways” from the Self Portrait sessions.

To Play in Prose

This is not Dylan the storyteller. Nor is it Dylan the interpreter or Dylan the truth-teller (or Dylan the genius, the Bard, the Voice, etc.). I’ve been searching for a phrase to describe that particular aspect of Dylan’s art for a very long time, and ASP has given me a decisive clue. It’s Dylan the inflector, Dylan the variator, Dylan the prose musician.

A song is a strange construction. Part fixed structure, part fluid language, part ineffable mental images, part sensory enjoyment. On all these points, the interpretation can vary from the loose to the fixed. Hearing a song can sometimes be like watching someone solve a sudoku or read from a do-it-yourself handbook – other times, it’s like hearing someone mumble in their sleep. And sometimes the performer hits the soft spot between rigid pattern and loose boundlessness.

There is nothing magical about this soft spot. We all hit it, all the time – because that’s how language works. Any communicating human being is so skilled in this wondrous art, that we don’t even think about it. But it’s really amazing, how good we are at detecting and interpreting even the slightest inflections in the tone of a voice when we’re talking. And how little it takes for us to detect any interruption of the free flow of spoken sound. That’s what good actors are good at: either to make us forget that everything they say comes out of the rigid framework of a manuscript, or to make us disregard that fact or even turn the rigid boundary that we perceive, e.g. in a poetry recital, into an advantage, by drawing attention to its character of not being ordinary language, despite appearances.

This is what Dylan does in Pretty Saro and in Annie’s Going to Sing Her Song, in Thirsty Boots or in These Hands. We are aware, of course, that this is not just a person talking freely to us – there is a melody, a fixed metre, rhymes, etc., all fairly obvious giveaways – but through small variations and inflections, imprecisions and oversights, we are led to forget this, without even noticing.

Take These Hands as an example: the first strums and words are so square and inflexible that it’s almost parodic – the way he sings ”gentleman”, for example, sounds almost tongue-in-cheek. He seems to exaggerate the corny character of the song, holds it up in the listener’s face as if to say: ”Yes, I know it’s a corny song.” And by that admission, the issue is out of the way.

Jump a couple of minutes in, and it’s a completely different song. It happens through tiny little details, which are futile to describe in analytic detail: the slightly off-key ”people have power”, the downward figure on ”grieve”, the three or four different ways he fingers the G chord and how he never plays the same figure the same way twice, the little vocal ornaments that resemble both the pitch-variations that occur in ordinary speech and, well, little vocal ornaments – that kind of things. Sometimes there’s an expressive purpose behind them, but it’s just as much a way to create fluidity and variation – the same kind of ”purposeless” variation that we use when we speak (as opposed to when we recite a sonnet).

I’ve described this almost as if it were a conscious thing that Dylan does. I don’t believe it is — on the contrary, its effect depends on the technique and style to be entirely automatic, effortless.

That’s why we can endure four minutes of Dylan strumming slowly to a simple chord sequence we’ve heard a million times before: he plays prose, and by playing prose, he overcomes the obstacle to direct communication that the artfulness of a song – even the most artless song – brings with it.

Self Portrait redeemed, then, or what?

With the new songs as a key, the songs that did end up on Self Portrait open up as well, once they are stripped of the stale coating of overdubs reeking of commercial record industry that the original Self Portrait is dripping with.

So, does this mean that Self Portrait itself, in perspective and in context, wasn’t such a bad album after all?

Well, I hate to break this to you: if for some reason you’ve always loved Self Portrait, and you see Another Self Portrait as confirmation that you’ve been right all along, despite what people like Greil Marcus (“What’s this shit?”) and myself have said … then – no, you were wrong then and you’re still wrong: Another Self Portrait does not redeem Self Portrait as an album.

What’s great about this collection is not that it proves Greil Marcus wrong (it doesn’t), nor that every single track on it is a cherishable gem from a genius (it isn’t), but that it adds to the perception of an artist in development. It allows us a more nuanced picture of the project (or less pompously: the development) that Self Portrait is a witness of.

This means two things in particular. One: the fascinating merge of delta blues, rock, and country that is evident on House Carpenter, but also on the entire Isle of Wight show. In addition to the stylistic developments he goes through, it also involves a reshuffling of fixed and fluid elements in a melody (more on this in a later post).

Two: an artist willing to go into development when he was standing on top of the world. The album, together with all the outtakes, demonstrates that he wanted to get to something great, perhaps even (but nobody knew, not even himself) greater than what he had already accomplished. Even at the cost of pissing off a lot of fans. Even at the cost of abandoning, yet again, a well-tried recipe for success (and there is no doubt that Dylan has always kept an eye on the bottom line).

But when a father-of-four who probably hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in four years goes into a studio and fools around with some oldies, that may be a sign of an urge for greatness, but not necessarily of greatness per se.

Self-annihilation: What’s not so great about Self Portrait

Thanks to Another Self Portrait, we can now ask the correct question to Self Portrait. Not “What is this shit?” but “Who on earth thought this album was a good idea?!”

This question can actually mean two very different things, both of which, in each their way, are central to the failure of Self Portrait: ”Who on earth had the idea that THAT could be a Dylan album in 1970?”, and ”Whose brilliant idea was it to add slick orchestral arrangements to rough and intimate demos?”

Many commentators have compared Self Portrait to the two acoustic cover albums from the early ’90s, Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. The comparison is apt, not only because of the similar character of the songs that are on these albums, but also concerning the singing and playing style, the way to use the musical an textual language in order to create a ”prose” feeling, that I have indicated above (and, incidentally, also in my review of World Gone Wrong).

Productions like these could work in 1992, when we had just come out of the dreadful 80s and everybody was longing for the Golden Age of acoustic Dylan. They can also work today, when we have a better view of the process in general – we know what happened next, both the Rolling Thunder Revue, the Never Ending Tour, and everything in between. We have the Basement Tapes and the Harrison and Cash sessions. We’ve heard the hotel room clips from Eat the Document, which prove that Dylan was using the mellow crooner voice already in 1966.

But in 1970? Even after John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, the general audience would have been unprepared for a World Gone Wrong-like album. Imagine the best possible version of Self Portrait, containing the best recordings, presented in all their low-key and bare glory — I find it very difficult to see how even such a hypothetical album would have found an audience in 1970.

That’s the first point, which may be of a mostly a commercial character.

The second point takes it from there: What’s apparent from the tracks on Another Self Portrait is that whatever he’s up to, his project is not commercial: he’s not out there to sell us something – no used cars, no snake oil, no “the first joint is free” enhanced escapism – he’s just having a good time with some friends, playing songs that he likes – or perhaps just enjoying a couple of days away from five screaming kids back home.

Whatever the reason, the stew that he mixes depends entirely on the prose-like looseness that the small combo can provide; where Dylan spontaneously can say: ”Let’s just take this one” and start singing ”Little Sadie” with little or no preparation for his co-musicians, who just have to do their best to tag along, to add a lick here and a wrong chord there, and thereby create all the uneven edges that give the final recordings surface and character.

But this is precisely where the released Self Portrait fails capitally: to add overdubs to these tracks is like trying to mix oil and water.

An orchestral arrangement requires everything that the original tracks don’t have: precision, regularity, focus on the musical element.

That’s also one of the things the Nashville musicians Charlie McCoy and Ken Buttrey, who did some of the overdubs, have complained about: Dylan just sent a tape to Nashville for them to add some tracks to, and ”the tempos didn’t really hold together real well, and he wasn’t real steady with the guitar […] he wasn’t even there.”

And that’s the main problem with the original Self Portrait: it sounds, well, as if someone has added a lot of overdubs to a simple tape. The regularity that the overdubs impose on the final mix makes the original tracks seem unfocused and untight rather than loose and leisurely, prosey. In other words: the very thing that we can now perceive as the greatness of the originals, is annihilated and contradicted by the overdubs.

These hands and Thirsty Boots are to Another Self Portrait what Belle Isle and Days of ’49 fail to be to Self Portrait. The former illustrate that “conscious attention to musical detail”, which I started by calling the other leg of what makes a great Dylan album; the latter are proofs that this attention has been neglected, somewhere in the process that ended up with Self Portrait. Thanks to Another Self Portrait, the attention can now return to where it belongs.

The Obligatory “Another Self Portrait — First Reactions” post

I thought I’d make the “First Reactions” post short and sweet:

1. Time passes slowly #1 & 2 are definitely keepers.

2. The new piano version of Spanish Is The Loving Tongue is nice too, but nowhere near the circulating solo piano version. It’s a step in the direction of its consummate cousin, but it comes nowhere near it on any scale.

3. Another Self Portrait does not redeem Self Portrait (“What’s this shit?”) as an album, but the new tracks do add to a more nuanced picture of the project (or less pompously: the development) that Self Portrait is a witness of.

4. The Isle of Wight concert is the first and probably the most radical re-invention Dylan has made in his entire career. Going electric was nothing in comparison.

5. Who will be the first to find the source from which Dylan has stolen the cover image? A flickr account? An underrated b/w photographer from the 30s? A Barnes & Nobles commercial delivered to the tour bus in Stirling Castle during the ~~2003~~ 2001 tour?

More to come. Tabs too.

Can’t Wait

Two things in particular make Tell Tale Signs a god-send for the Dylan analyst. One is that it shows how tightly interconnected Dylan’s last three albums are, not only musically but also lyrically: text fragments and themes float between them as if they were part of the same triple album. The other is that it gives an opportunity to study the process that so many musicians who have worked with him have mentioned: that songs can change radically from one session to the next or even between takes. The three versions of “Can’t Wait” are particularly revealing in this respect.

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Dylan At His Very Best

When is Dylan at his best these days? When he pulls out his guitar once and again? Or perhaps delivers a blistering harp solo? Or when he soars to the top of his vocal register in a beautifully raw rendition of an old warhorse? Or is it on his albums, the three great artistic and commercial achievements Time Out Of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times?

Neither. No matter how great his studio albums are, his greatest artistic achievement during the 2000s comes from a different kind of studio. A small one, by the sound of it. I recently became the proud owner of a true gem: the complete recordings of the first season of his wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour.

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A Norwegian Bestseller

“Agora: Journal for Metaphysical Speculation” — sounds exciting, right? If one is not thrilled by the prospects of 450 pages of metaphysical speculation, it may make it more interesting to know that well over 300 of them are about Bob Dylan. . .

Agora is a scholarly journal of philosophy, which in my early university days was a major source of inspiration. It was therefore a great honour to be asked to write an article for it for an upcoming special issue about Dylan. Now it’s out, and apparently it is sold out already, at least in the Oslo area.
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it looks good, with articles about the lyrical project in the Basement Tapes; about the borrowings from Ovid on *Modern Times*; Dylan’s relationship with various American poetic genres (blues, Allen Ginsberg); his voice; his meandering path around folk music; and about the reception of “his” tradition in Norway. There is also an article by Christopher Ricks in Norwegian translation, and translations of the Playboy interview from 1966 and of some song lyrics.

All in all a very nice collection of essays. The bias towards lyrical and “sociological”(-ish) analysis is somewhat balanced out by the article about “Dylan the Musician” by yours truly.

Thus, if you can read Norwegian and want something to lighten up the September evenings, this might be it.

If you can get hold of a copy, that is.

Modern times in Copenhagen

It was time to order tickets again, for yet another last Dylan show I’d ever go to. I usually do that, and probably will for as long as he stays on the road. Thinking that it’s the last time, adds a certain nostalgic undertone to the experience.
After the past few years of mediocrity, the expectations were low. I can’t say I was overly prepared either, but at least I knew that the band was the same as the one I’d seen a year and a half ago, and that didn’t bode well.
Then there was the new album… A good one, for sure — must be, since it could bring the old bard to the top of all the charts in the world. Some people had voiced misgivings about the legitimacy of the phrase “All songs written by Bob Dylan”, but hey, he’s a genius, right, so he must be right, right?

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