World Gone Wrong (1993) is a body. Not just a great body of work, but a body.
The greatness of this album of folk and blues classics is that there is one voice speaking on it and one person speaking with this voice, whether he speaks guitar, harmonica, or English.
I’ll try to make it a little clearer. Continue reading World Gone Wrong — A Body in Sound
Wired News: Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology
Kinda interesting, this one… Especially the last couple of paragraphs.
Beginning in January, the Music Publishers Association, of which Warner Chappell is a member, will begin pursuing a campaign against 5 to 6 such companies, according to MPA CEO Lauren Keiser.
“Lost revenue for rights holders is in the millions,” said Keiser, “We’re not going after fan clubs, but websites that make money.”
True, I do have that “small donations welcome” link hidden away at the bottom of some frame, but I guess that doesn’t really count — I’m a small potatoe here (sob! my ego is hurting!).
Anyway, for various reasons, I will not make any drastic changes quite yet, but stay tuned.
Thanks to Per Egil at www.chordie.com (another Norwegian in the tabbing trade) for the link.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Song sites face legal crackdown
Before you act: there’s no point in writing comments like: Where’s the zip file? I want the zip file. Can you please send me the zip file?
well well… What can I say? Several people have sent me links to this and other similar news reports, concerned about what is going to happen to dylanchords.
I understand the concern — I share it, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
On the one hand: I don’t want to go to jail, and I can’t afford a 500,000$ lawsuit. Those are two good reasons to shut down the site right now.
On the other, I keep telling myself that I don’t have much to worry about: all the lyrics are already freely available from bobdylan.com; all the tabs are my own interpretations and “intellectual property” in some sense of the word, I haven’t copied them from anywhere, and god knows I haven’t cast so much as an eye on the official chord books — heaven forbid! (in fact, had the publishers done a decent job on those, I would never have started this site); to my knowledge, chord charts in the form and with the contents you will find on dylanchords.com have not been copyrighted; etc. All in all, if I were the judge, I couldn’t really say that the site is much of an infringement.
Then again, I ain’t the judge.
The Australian Copyright Council writes:
If you own copyright in a musical work or lyrics, you are generally the only person who can:
- reproduce it: for example, by recording a performance of it, photocopying it, copying it by hand, or scanning it onto a computer disk;
- make it public for the first time;
- perform it in public;
- communicate it to the public (including via radio, television and the internet);
- translate it (for lyrics); or
- arrange or transcribe it (for music).
That would mean that I would need Dylan’s permission to arrange the songs, even though the “arrangements” (i.e. tabs) are my own.
However:
Unless a special exception applies, copyright is infringed if someone uses copyright material in one of the ways set out in the Copyright Act without the copyright owners permission. The special exceptions include fair dealing with copyright material for research or study, or for criticism or review.
The disclaimer about “research, study, personal use” etc. is a standard mantra in headers of tab pages, which I’ve never really taken seriously, and I doubt that anyone has — especially not the publishers and copyright holders. Whether or not a use is fair depends on four factors, listed in the US Copyright Act:
• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyright work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright work as a whole; and
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I’d say I score a point on #1, but I lose on the other three.
All in all, the situation is too unclear for me to see through it, but also to just sit and wait. I have therefore decided — actually while writing this — to take down the potentially offensive parts of the site until the situation has become clearer. There will be a solution, I’m sure, but until then: have patience! This is not a goodbye, but a “We’ll meet again”
And — not that I think it will have any effect whatsoever, but there’s a petition one can sign at http://www.petitiononline.com/mioti/petition.html
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.”
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.
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…
After the story of the battle of Wichita, here’s some info on the tools I use when I tab.
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.
See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Another little gem (or at least almost-gem) from the McKenzie Tapes. Differs from the standard version by using the E class of licks instead of the Drop D class of the recorded version. But the most prominent feature is the uneven rhythm, with 5/4 bars alternating with plain 4/4.
