BOB DYLAN: JEWISH PERSPECTIVES ON HIS REPERTOIRE:
Themes of Prophecy and Redemption, 14 March 2021
(Contact Dr. Daniel Mackay regarding these conference notes and permissions, mackayd@lanecc.edu)
Music Program Notes
9:00 to 10:00 AM: Registration/Musical Interlude
1) “Forever Young” (recorded November 1973, Santa Monica), Planet Waves (1974)
We begin today with Dylan’s blessing of a child (some have said it was written for his youngest son, future Wallflower Jakob Dylan). Rabbi Matthew Leibl notes how the structure and pattern for this song is based on the Birkat Kohanim or the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24-26:
May the Lord bless you, and protect you –
יְבָרֶכְךָ יהוה, וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ
May the Lord make His face shine unto you, and be gracious to you –
יָאֵר יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ
May the Lord lift up His face unto you, and give to you peace –
יִשָּׂא יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם
Dylan included two versions of the song on Planet Waves, both recorded with The Band. We commence the conference today with the fast version to get things moving and as a lead-up to our keynote on Dylan’s apocalyptic vision by Dr. Wolfson. We’ll wrap up with the slower version from the same album later today.
2) “Everything is Broken” (recorded March 1989, New Orleans), Oh Mercy (1989)
One does not have to range far in Dylan’s catalog to find depictions of the world as broken, falling apart, and in turmoil. The late Michael Marqusee noted that one of the themes of Highway 61 Revisited (1965) is the difficulty or impossibility of prophecy in the contemporary world (see the notes for “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” below). This theme continues through John Wesley Harding (1967), where in “Wicked Messenger,” the messenger, who comes from Eli (G-d) is told, “if ye cannot bring good news then don’t bring any.” In “Everything is Broken,” written two decades later, there is the whiff of increasing turmoil to come (“hound dog howling” at danger approaching) even as the present world is revealed as a collection of broken bodies, voices, and vows signifying nothing except that whoever left the singer has left him in disarray (“Every time you leave and go out someplace / Things fall to pieces in my face”).
3) “Meet Me in the Morning” (recorded September 1974, NYC), Blood on the Tracks (1975)
“They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn / But you wouldn’t know it by me / Every day’s been darkness since you been gone.” Picking up the thread of everything falling to pieces when bosom companion, Divine inspiration, or combination of both departs, “Meet Me in the Morning” introduces us to the descending darkness. The singer has a morning rendezvous on his mind, but the sun is sinking fast. The singer has struggled through barb wire and been hunted by hound dogs; he feels that he has achieved righteousness, that he has earned the love of the person to whom he sings, but it could simply be vanity. We are on the outside, left to speculate whether there was anyone there to meet the singer once the morning arrived. In fact, to paraphrase Dylan’s rendition of the traditional “Two Soldiers” off World Gone Wrong (1993), maybe neither partner nor singer will be alive in the morning to follow through with the tryst.
4) “Not Dark Yet” (recorded January 1997, Miami), Time Out of Mind (1997)
The darkness is descending; it has not yet fully arrived…but it’s getting there. What strikes me about this song is how Dylan sings commonplace expressions in such a way that they assume startling new spiritual insights and fresh takes on language itself: “I was born here and I’ll die here against my will / I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still.” One would think “I’m standing still” merely proclaims that the singer is not moving, yet he sings as if he is still standing…a survivor. When he sings “against my will,” does he assert that his death is against his will, or was his birth too against his will?
“Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb / I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from.” Has there been a more succinct couplet capturing the consequences of trauma? Here the singer relates the confusion of identity that results when one realizes that one’s life has been a series of escapes so labyrinthine and confusing that they have continued not only long after the minotaur in the maze has passed from personal history to myth, but even after the beast is long-forgotten by both singer and audience alike. The trauma is represented only by the echo that resounds in its wake, and that echo is the night that is coming as surely as the shadows of evening fall.
5) “Night After Night” (recorded August 1986, London), Hearts of Fire soundtrack (1987)
And when the night arrives, it is not long thereafter followed by another one.
One of the great rewards of listening to Dylan is discovering the little-known gems that one comes upon even after listening to him for years. Famously, Tom Waits described Dylan’s body of work as a “planet to be explored.”
“Night After Night,” recorded for the Richard Marquand film, Hearts of Fire, in which Dylan starred, continues his preoccupation with an earthly world in chaos: “Everything around you seems to burn, burn, burn” and “Just another broken heart, another barrel of a gun, / Just another stick of dynamite, night after night.” Love, whether Divine, filial, or romantic, here is merely another means of helping the singer (to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson) make it through the night…and the night that follows thereafter: “Night after night, I think of cutting you loose / But I just can’t do it, what would be the use?”
6) “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” (recorded 20 November 1975, Cambridge), Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings (2019)
When the singer can’t let go, he lingers. Any excuse might work, even sticking around for one more cup of coffee. One of only two songs from Desire (1976) not co-written with playwright and lyricist Jacques Levy, Allen Ginsberg described Dylan’s singing on the album as lifting “in Hebraic cantillation never heard before in U.S. song” (Desire liner notes).
He continues to channel Hebraic cantillation in this live recording from a performance of The Rolling Thunder Revue at Harvard Square Theater in the autumn of 1975 when Bob Dylan was headlining the Revue and filming Renaldo & Clara (1978). The version of “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” that appeared in both Renaldo & Clara and Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) was from a performance at the end of the tour in Montreal on December 4, 1975. The version that appeared in the fifth volume of The Bootleg Series: Live 1975 in 2002 was from the night following this performance, in Boston on November 21.
The looming valley to which the singer is fated to descend most obviously represents death, but it also represents a descent away from shelter into a world of ominous mystery. A valley that he would describe in “Angelina” as the “valley of the giants, where the stars and stripes explode” and where a black Mercedes is “rollin’ through the combat zone.”
7) “Black Diamond Bay” (recorded July 1975, NYC), Desire (1976)
A valley or a volcano? One of Dylan’s most compelling and economical narratives, this one was cowritten with Jacques Levy and, like in all good stories, every detail is used to describe the characters and to propel the (surprisingly dense for such a short song) plot. A mysterious Panama-hat wearing woman, a Greek man, a desk clerk, a soldier, a man of short stature, all populate an island where a volcano is about to erupt. In the last verse the narrator telescopes out to his living room where he is hearing about the eruption on the news: just another hard luck story on the road to destruction and oblivion.
8) “Angelina” (recorded March 1981, Santa Monica), Bootleg Series vol. 1-3 (1991)
An apocalyptic vision as seductive as it is mysterious. The singer is conflicted, drawn to a woman who is not standing on the correct side of the line that G-d long ago drew for humanity (“I’ve tried my best to love you but I cannot play this game / Your best friend and my worst enemy are one and the same”). The tension culminates in a war-torn landscape where one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the conqueror who rides a pale white horse, rides as “pieces of men” (note the recurrent theme that everything is broken) try to “take Heaven by force.” The song climaxes in one of the most incredible of Dylan verses, this from a man who has written hundreds of songs marked with incredible verses:
Beat a path of retreat up them spiral staircases
Pass the tree of smoke, pass the angel with four faces
Begging G-d for mercy and weepin’ in unholy places
9) “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” (recorded April 1978, Santa Monica), Street-Legal (1978)
In “Angelina,” the singer evinces the hardship he has suffered by mentioning the wounds he has suffered: “blood dryin’ in my yellow hair as I go from shore to shore.” In “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat),” the yellow-haired figure is now a stripper who can turn back the clock but not prevent the imminent dissolution of not only the singer but of all that is earthly: “A longtime golden-haired stripper onstage” who “winds back the clock and she turns back the page / Of a book that nobody could write.”
If “Everything is Broken” describes a world in disarray because the person being addressed has left, if “Meet Me in the Morning” is hopeful of a rendezvous, if that optimism melts into pessimism in “Not Dark Yet,” if “Night After Night” exposes a world falling apart and the person addressed barely makes it tolerable, if “Angelina” demonstrates that the person addressed may, in fact, be part of the problem as the angels of the Apocalypse reveal themselves in time and space, then “Where Are You Tonight?” reveals that the absence of the person addressed has instigated the end, where the “lion in the road” and the “demon escaped” and ravaged landscape presage the end…but, the possibility of a new beginning, of a morning after the Apocalypse, is glimpsed:
There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
And there is the answer, four years later, to “Meet Me in the Morning”: the singer might make it to the rendezvous later in the morning, perhaps even the lover will too, but the long dark night’s separation of the two continues through the dawning of a new day for the singer, which will now consist of life on his own terms.
10) “Beyond the Horizon” (recorded February-March 2006, NYC), Modern Times (2006)
If you feel like we have been mostly alternating between the 1970s and 1980s with this early song selection, you are correct and it is not without purpose. Although the Dylan of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was proclaimed a prophet by many throughout the sixties, his work of the seventies and eighties, propelled by his emotional and creative turmoil, assumed a prophetic heft amidst personal distress with which criticism has not yet adequately come to terms. Here, we break away from those decades and turn our ear to Dylan’s 2006 masterpiece, Modern Times. His “Beyond the Horizon” is based on the melody of “Red Sales in the Sunset,” sung by Bing Crosby in 1935. The lyrics, though, are all Dylan. “Down in the valley the water runs cold,” yet “At the end of the rainbow life has only begun.”
11) “Father of Night” (recorded June 1970, NYC), New Morning (1970)
Another song with Dylan on the piano, hymning the Father of night and the Father of day. The builder of rainbows up in the sky – a reminder of the covenant between G-d and man – and the “Father of loneliness and pain.” The singer sings of the Great Father who is the creator and animator of the wind, trees, time, and dreams; he is the builder of mountains and mover of streams. One of Dylan’s earliest paeans to the Creator above all.
12) “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (recorded January 1965, NYC), Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
The end has come; the broken world has hit the singer with everything, but he remains and sustains. In a classic under-sell, the singer says, “It’s all right, it’s life and life only.” But one arrives at such acceptance – both part-resignation and part-affirmation – only once one has endured the “Darkness at the break of noon.” Take it away, Dr. Wolfson…
13) “Angelina” (instrumental) (recorded 2002), from the film Masked and Anonymous (2003), performed by Bruce Kaphan
Let’s walk the path to Dr. Wolfson’s talk serenaded by Bruce Kaphan’s instrumental version of “Angelina” that appeared (uncredited) in Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan co-wrote with director Larry Charles, and in which he also starred.
12:15 to 12:30 PM: Break (Musical Interlude)
1) “Long Time Gone” (recorded March 1963, NYC), Bootleg Series vol. 9: The Witmark Demos (2010)
One of scores of tunes Dylan wrote in the early 1960s that never made it to a studio album (perhaps, more accurately, I should claim one of a scores of lyrics set to folk melodies), “Long Time Gone” contains a declaration of the purpose behind songwriting for Dylan in his early twenties: to tell truth to power, to guide, to chastise…to prophesy; but don’t call him a prophet:
If I can’t help somebody
With a word or song
If I can’t show somebody
They are travelin’ wrong
But I know I ain’t no prophet
An’ I ain’t no prophet’s son
I’m just a long time a-comin’
An’ I’ll be a long time gone
2) “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (recorded July 1965, NYC), Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
If one were to pick a season for the Apocalypse, would it not be winter, when trees are bare of leaves, the fields are barren, and the land produces no fruit as seeds sleep in the Earth’s bosom? In “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” the singer continues to protest that he is not a prophet (“I wanna be your lover, baby / I don’t wanna be your boss”) even as he does that which prophets do – tell us what is coming:
Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across
Which critic was it who remarked that the singer cannot only get his message across to everybody, but that he cannot get “a cross”: the martyric end often suffered by prophets? Whoever it was, it changed my hearing of this verse, which Michael Marqusee explicitly connects to the crisis of prophecy in mid-Sixties America.
3) “I Want You” (recorded March 1966, Nashville), Bootleg Series vol. 12: The Cutting Edge (2015)
Blonde on Blonde (1966), amidst its couplets of frustrated desire, continues the theme of prophecy in crisis, which will continue into his next studio album, John Wesley Harding (1967). Here is a version of “I Want You” completed before the version that would end up on the album. On the path to “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and its reference to the “Sad-eyed prophet” and singer standing at the lady’s gates, we hear this denial of the mantle of prophet that many would thrust on the singer:
And the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin’ from my broken cup
And ask me to
Open up the gate for you
4) “Foot of Pride” (recorded April 1983, NYC), The Bootleg Series vol. 1-3 (1991)
In Surviving In a Ruthless World, published late last year, Terry Gans reveals that Dylan wrote ninety-six verses to this song and recorded forty-seven takes of it in the studio before ultimately excluding it from Infidels (1983) for which it was recorded. Here Dylan reaches the same lyrical heights of deconstructing “society’s pliers” that he achieved in “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”:
There’s a retired businessman named Red
Cast down from heaven and he’s out of his head
He feeds off of everyone that he can touch
He said he only deals in cash or sells tickets to a plane crash
He’s not somebody that you play around with much
Miss Delilah is his, a Philistine is what she is
She’ll do wondrous works with your fate, feed you coconut bread,
spice buns in your bed
If you don’t mind sleepin’ with your head face down in a grave
But, even more so than in “It’s Alright Ma,” here the fully mature writer teases out how a broken society leads to broken habits, those broken habits lead to passions, and those passions expose people to manipulation by those masters of society who make the rules and pull the strings: “But he drinks, and drinks can be fixed” and “They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young.”
2:00 to 2:15 PM Break (Musical Interlude)
1) “I and I” (recorded April 1983, NYC), Infidels (1983)
In “I and I,” a remarkable song from Infidels, Dylan pushes even further then his exploration of the internalization of societal poisons in “Foot of Pride.” In “I and I,” the world begins from the inside, not only is the singer making shoes for others to slip on – ideas with which to experiment as identity is explored – but the “I” of the self is in dialogue with the “I” outside creation that stands above and beyond the laws of man. Meanwhile, the lady reclines in bed back at the singer’s home. She has not stepped out and permitted chaos to enter. In Ancient Israel, she would have been muse to David:
In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed
To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams
2) “Hallelujah” (instrumental) (recorded November 2018, Famagusta, North Cyprus) performed by Rebeca & Estera Forogău.
It would be a miss today to have any song follow “I and I” – with its recollection of a “righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams” – other than “Hallelujah” with the “secret chord” “That David played and it pleased the Lord.”
A lunch meeting in a Paris café in the 1980s between Dylan and Leonard Cohen has cemented these two songs together. In conversation, each complimented the other’s song. Dylan asked Cohen how long it took him to write “Hallelujah,” “Two years” Cohen replied (Cohen’s son Adam later clarified it was closer to seven). Cohen complimented Dylan, “I really like ‘I and I,’ how long did it take you to write that?” Dylan replied dryly, “About fifteen minutes.”
During this interlude, we do not have time to listen to Cohen’s version, so let’s listen to part of this lovely piano-violin duet by the Forogău sisters, recorded in Cyprus in 2018.
In his 1985 interview with Cameron Crowe for the retrospective Biograph, Dylan told Crowe:
I mean if I had a choice I would rather have lived at the time of King David, when he was the high King of Israel, I’d love to have been riding with him or hiding in caves with him when he was a hunted outlaw. I wonder what he would have been saying and about who…
3) “Ain’t Talkin’” (recorded February-March 2006, NYC), Modern Times (2006)
…or maybe King David would not have been talking at all?
Here is a latter-day psalm for modern times. Here is the righteous king on the road. The singer is the Psalmist whose heart is “after G-d’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14) and whose “heart burns hot within me” (Psalm 39:3), for he continues to have “heart burnin’” and continues to be “still yearnin’” as he traverses a world “mysterious and vague” on the way to the “last outback at the world’s end.”
Closing of conference
1) “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” (recorded December 1961, Minneapolis), Bootleg Series vol. 7: No Direction Home (2005)
A traditional song first recorded by John Hammond, it would go on to feature in the Cohen Brothers’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) as well as the memorable concert film, Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis” (2013), which was filmed in New York City to celebrate more than the film, but the music of the Greenwich Village-based folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
2) “Forever Young” (recorded November 1973, Santa Monica), Planet Waves (1974)
“May G-d bless and keep you always / May your wishes all come true” as you go in peace.
Daniel Mackay
Eugene, Oregon
31 January 2021
Themes of Prophecy and Redemption, 14 March 2021
(Contact Dr. Daniel Mackay regarding these conference notes and permissions, mackayd@lanecc.edu)
Music Program Notes
9:00 to 10:00 AM: Registration/Musical Interlude
1) “Forever Young” (recorded November 1973, Santa Monica), Planet Waves (1974)
We begin today with Dylan’s blessing of a child (some have said it was written for his youngest son, future Wallflower Jakob Dylan). Rabbi Matthew Leibl notes how the structure and pattern for this song is based on the Birkat Kohanim or the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24-26:
May the Lord bless you, and protect you –
יְבָרֶכְךָ יהוה, וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ
May the Lord make His face shine unto you, and be gracious to you –
יָאֵר יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ
May the Lord lift up His face unto you, and give to you peace –
יִשָּׂא יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם
Dylan included two versions of the song on Planet Waves, both recorded with The Band. We commence the conference today with the fast version to get things moving and as a lead-up to our keynote on Dylan’s apocalyptic vision by Dr. Wolfson. We’ll wrap up with the slower version from the same album later today.
2) “Everything is Broken” (recorded March 1989, New Orleans), Oh Mercy (1989)
One does not have to range far in Dylan’s catalog to find depictions of the world as broken, falling apart, and in turmoil. The late Michael Marqusee noted that one of the themes of Highway 61 Revisited (1965) is the difficulty or impossibility of prophecy in the contemporary world (see the notes for “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” below). This theme continues through John Wesley Harding (1967), where in “Wicked Messenger,” the messenger, who comes from Eli (G-d) is told, “if ye cannot bring good news then don’t bring any.” In “Everything is Broken,” written two decades later, there is the whiff of increasing turmoil to come (“hound dog howling” at danger approaching) even as the present world is revealed as a collection of broken bodies, voices, and vows signifying nothing except that whoever left the singer has left him in disarray (“Every time you leave and go out someplace / Things fall to pieces in my face”).
3) “Meet Me in the Morning” (recorded September 1974, NYC), Blood on the Tracks (1975)
“They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn / But you wouldn’t know it by me / Every day’s been darkness since you been gone.” Picking up the thread of everything falling to pieces when bosom companion, Divine inspiration, or combination of both departs, “Meet Me in the Morning” introduces us to the descending darkness. The singer has a morning rendezvous on his mind, but the sun is sinking fast. The singer has struggled through barb wire and been hunted by hound dogs; he feels that he has achieved righteousness, that he has earned the love of the person to whom he sings, but it could simply be vanity. We are on the outside, left to speculate whether there was anyone there to meet the singer once the morning arrived. In fact, to paraphrase Dylan’s rendition of the traditional “Two Soldiers” off World Gone Wrong (1993), maybe neither partner nor singer will be alive in the morning to follow through with the tryst.
4) “Not Dark Yet” (recorded January 1997, Miami), Time Out of Mind (1997)
The darkness is descending; it has not yet fully arrived…but it’s getting there. What strikes me about this song is how Dylan sings commonplace expressions in such a way that they assume startling new spiritual insights and fresh takes on language itself: “I was born here and I’ll die here against my will / I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still.” One would think “I’m standing still” merely proclaims that the singer is not moving, yet he sings as if he is still standing…a survivor. When he sings “against my will,” does he assert that his death is against his will, or was his birth too against his will?
“Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb / I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from.” Has there been a more succinct couplet capturing the consequences of trauma? Here the singer relates the confusion of identity that results when one realizes that one’s life has been a series of escapes so labyrinthine and confusing that they have continued not only long after the minotaur in the maze has passed from personal history to myth, but even after the beast is long-forgotten by both singer and audience alike. The trauma is represented only by the echo that resounds in its wake, and that echo is the night that is coming as surely as the shadows of evening fall.
5) “Night After Night” (recorded August 1986, London), Hearts of Fire soundtrack (1987)
And when the night arrives, it is not long thereafter followed by another one.
One of the great rewards of listening to Dylan is discovering the little-known gems that one comes upon even after listening to him for years. Famously, Tom Waits described Dylan’s body of work as a “planet to be explored.”
“Night After Night,” recorded for the Richard Marquand film, Hearts of Fire, in which Dylan starred, continues his preoccupation with an earthly world in chaos: “Everything around you seems to burn, burn, burn” and “Just another broken heart, another barrel of a gun, / Just another stick of dynamite, night after night.” Love, whether Divine, filial, or romantic, here is merely another means of helping the singer (to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson) make it through the night…and the night that follows thereafter: “Night after night, I think of cutting you loose / But I just can’t do it, what would be the use?”
6) “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” (recorded 20 November 1975, Cambridge), Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings (2019)
When the singer can’t let go, he lingers. Any excuse might work, even sticking around for one more cup of coffee. One of only two songs from Desire (1976) not co-written with playwright and lyricist Jacques Levy, Allen Ginsberg described Dylan’s singing on the album as lifting “in Hebraic cantillation never heard before in U.S. song” (Desire liner notes).
He continues to channel Hebraic cantillation in this live recording from a performance of The Rolling Thunder Revue at Harvard Square Theater in the autumn of 1975 when Bob Dylan was headlining the Revue and filming Renaldo & Clara (1978). The version of “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” that appeared in both Renaldo & Clara and Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) was from a performance at the end of the tour in Montreal on December 4, 1975. The version that appeared in the fifth volume of The Bootleg Series: Live 1975 in 2002 was from the night following this performance, in Boston on November 21.
The looming valley to which the singer is fated to descend most obviously represents death, but it also represents a descent away from shelter into a world of ominous mystery. A valley that he would describe in “Angelina” as the “valley of the giants, where the stars and stripes explode” and where a black Mercedes is “rollin’ through the combat zone.”
7) “Black Diamond Bay” (recorded July 1975, NYC), Desire (1976)
A valley or a volcano? One of Dylan’s most compelling and economical narratives, this one was cowritten with Jacques Levy and, like in all good stories, every detail is used to describe the characters and to propel the (surprisingly dense for such a short song) plot. A mysterious Panama-hat wearing woman, a Greek man, a desk clerk, a soldier, a man of short stature, all populate an island where a volcano is about to erupt. In the last verse the narrator telescopes out to his living room where he is hearing about the eruption on the news: just another hard luck story on the road to destruction and oblivion.
8) “Angelina” (recorded March 1981, Santa Monica), Bootleg Series vol. 1-3 (1991)
An apocalyptic vision as seductive as it is mysterious. The singer is conflicted, drawn to a woman who is not standing on the correct side of the line that G-d long ago drew for humanity (“I’ve tried my best to love you but I cannot play this game / Your best friend and my worst enemy are one and the same”). The tension culminates in a war-torn landscape where one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the conqueror who rides a pale white horse, rides as “pieces of men” (note the recurrent theme that everything is broken) try to “take Heaven by force.” The song climaxes in one of the most incredible of Dylan verses, this from a man who has written hundreds of songs marked with incredible verses:
Beat a path of retreat up them spiral staircases
Pass the tree of smoke, pass the angel with four faces
Begging G-d for mercy and weepin’ in unholy places
9) “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” (recorded April 1978, Santa Monica), Street-Legal (1978)
In “Angelina,” the singer evinces the hardship he has suffered by mentioning the wounds he has suffered: “blood dryin’ in my yellow hair as I go from shore to shore.” In “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat),” the yellow-haired figure is now a stripper who can turn back the clock but not prevent the imminent dissolution of not only the singer but of all that is earthly: “A longtime golden-haired stripper onstage” who “winds back the clock and she turns back the page / Of a book that nobody could write.”
If “Everything is Broken” describes a world in disarray because the person being addressed has left, if “Meet Me in the Morning” is hopeful of a rendezvous, if that optimism melts into pessimism in “Not Dark Yet,” if “Night After Night” exposes a world falling apart and the person addressed barely makes it tolerable, if “Angelina” demonstrates that the person addressed may, in fact, be part of the problem as the angels of the Apocalypse reveal themselves in time and space, then “Where Are You Tonight?” reveals that the absence of the person addressed has instigated the end, where the “lion in the road” and the “demon escaped” and ravaged landscape presage the end…but, the possibility of a new beginning, of a morning after the Apocalypse, is glimpsed:
There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
And there is the answer, four years later, to “Meet Me in the Morning”: the singer might make it to the rendezvous later in the morning, perhaps even the lover will too, but the long dark night’s separation of the two continues through the dawning of a new day for the singer, which will now consist of life on his own terms.
10) “Beyond the Horizon” (recorded February-March 2006, NYC), Modern Times (2006)
If you feel like we have been mostly alternating between the 1970s and 1980s with this early song selection, you are correct and it is not without purpose. Although the Dylan of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was proclaimed a prophet by many throughout the sixties, his work of the seventies and eighties, propelled by his emotional and creative turmoil, assumed a prophetic heft amidst personal distress with which criticism has not yet adequately come to terms. Here, we break away from those decades and turn our ear to Dylan’s 2006 masterpiece, Modern Times. His “Beyond the Horizon” is based on the melody of “Red Sales in the Sunset,” sung by Bing Crosby in 1935. The lyrics, though, are all Dylan. “Down in the valley the water runs cold,” yet “At the end of the rainbow life has only begun.”
11) “Father of Night” (recorded June 1970, NYC), New Morning (1970)
Another song with Dylan on the piano, hymning the Father of night and the Father of day. The builder of rainbows up in the sky – a reminder of the covenant between G-d and man – and the “Father of loneliness and pain.” The singer sings of the Great Father who is the creator and animator of the wind, trees, time, and dreams; he is the builder of mountains and mover of streams. One of Dylan’s earliest paeans to the Creator above all.
12) “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (recorded January 1965, NYC), Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
The end has come; the broken world has hit the singer with everything, but he remains and sustains. In a classic under-sell, the singer says, “It’s all right, it’s life and life only.” But one arrives at such acceptance – both part-resignation and part-affirmation – only once one has endured the “Darkness at the break of noon.” Take it away, Dr. Wolfson…
13) “Angelina” (instrumental) (recorded 2002), from the film Masked and Anonymous (2003), performed by Bruce Kaphan
Let’s walk the path to Dr. Wolfson’s talk serenaded by Bruce Kaphan’s instrumental version of “Angelina” that appeared (uncredited) in Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan co-wrote with director Larry Charles, and in which he also starred.
12:15 to 12:30 PM: Break (Musical Interlude)
1) “Long Time Gone” (recorded March 1963, NYC), Bootleg Series vol. 9: The Witmark Demos (2010)
One of scores of tunes Dylan wrote in the early 1960s that never made it to a studio album (perhaps, more accurately, I should claim one of a scores of lyrics set to folk melodies), “Long Time Gone” contains a declaration of the purpose behind songwriting for Dylan in his early twenties: to tell truth to power, to guide, to chastise…to prophesy; but don’t call him a prophet:
If I can’t help somebody
With a word or song
If I can’t show somebody
They are travelin’ wrong
But I know I ain’t no prophet
An’ I ain’t no prophet’s son
I’m just a long time a-comin’
An’ I’ll be a long time gone
2) “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (recorded July 1965, NYC), Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
If one were to pick a season for the Apocalypse, would it not be winter, when trees are bare of leaves, the fields are barren, and the land produces no fruit as seeds sleep in the Earth’s bosom? In “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” the singer continues to protest that he is not a prophet (“I wanna be your lover, baby / I don’t wanna be your boss”) even as he does that which prophets do – tell us what is coming:
Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across
Which critic was it who remarked that the singer cannot only get his message across to everybody, but that he cannot get “a cross”: the martyric end often suffered by prophets? Whoever it was, it changed my hearing of this verse, which Michael Marqusee explicitly connects to the crisis of prophecy in mid-Sixties America.
3) “I Want You” (recorded March 1966, Nashville), Bootleg Series vol. 12: The Cutting Edge (2015)
Blonde on Blonde (1966), amidst its couplets of frustrated desire, continues the theme of prophecy in crisis, which will continue into his next studio album, John Wesley Harding (1967). Here is a version of “I Want You” completed before the version that would end up on the album. On the path to “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and its reference to the “Sad-eyed prophet” and singer standing at the lady’s gates, we hear this denial of the mantle of prophet that many would thrust on the singer:
And the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin’ from my broken cup
And ask me to
Open up the gate for you
4) “Foot of Pride” (recorded April 1983, NYC), The Bootleg Series vol. 1-3 (1991)
In Surviving In a Ruthless World, published late last year, Terry Gans reveals that Dylan wrote ninety-six verses to this song and recorded forty-seven takes of it in the studio before ultimately excluding it from Infidels (1983) for which it was recorded. Here Dylan reaches the same lyrical heights of deconstructing “society’s pliers” that he achieved in “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”:
There’s a retired businessman named Red
Cast down from heaven and he’s out of his head
He feeds off of everyone that he can touch
He said he only deals in cash or sells tickets to a plane crash
He’s not somebody that you play around with much
Miss Delilah is his, a Philistine is what she is
She’ll do wondrous works with your fate, feed you coconut bread,
spice buns in your bed
If you don’t mind sleepin’ with your head face down in a grave
But, even more so than in “It’s Alright Ma,” here the fully mature writer teases out how a broken society leads to broken habits, those broken habits lead to passions, and those passions expose people to manipulation by those masters of society who make the rules and pull the strings: “But he drinks, and drinks can be fixed” and “They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young.”
2:00 to 2:15 PM Break (Musical Interlude)
1) “I and I” (recorded April 1983, NYC), Infidels (1983)
In “I and I,” a remarkable song from Infidels, Dylan pushes even further then his exploration of the internalization of societal poisons in “Foot of Pride.” In “I and I,” the world begins from the inside, not only is the singer making shoes for others to slip on – ideas with which to experiment as identity is explored – but the “I” of the self is in dialogue with the “I” outside creation that stands above and beyond the laws of man. Meanwhile, the lady reclines in bed back at the singer’s home. She has not stepped out and permitted chaos to enter. In Ancient Israel, she would have been muse to David:
In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed
To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams
2) “Hallelujah” (instrumental) (recorded November 2018, Famagusta, North Cyprus) performed by Rebeca & Estera Forogău.
It would be a miss today to have any song follow “I and I” – with its recollection of a “righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams” – other than “Hallelujah” with the “secret chord” “That David played and it pleased the Lord.”
A lunch meeting in a Paris café in the 1980s between Dylan and Leonard Cohen has cemented these two songs together. In conversation, each complimented the other’s song. Dylan asked Cohen how long it took him to write “Hallelujah,” “Two years” Cohen replied (Cohen’s son Adam later clarified it was closer to seven). Cohen complimented Dylan, “I really like ‘I and I,’ how long did it take you to write that?” Dylan replied dryly, “About fifteen minutes.”
During this interlude, we do not have time to listen to Cohen’s version, so let’s listen to part of this lovely piano-violin duet by the Forogău sisters, recorded in Cyprus in 2018.
In his 1985 interview with Cameron Crowe for the retrospective Biograph, Dylan told Crowe:
I mean if I had a choice I would rather have lived at the time of King David, when he was the high King of Israel, I’d love to have been riding with him or hiding in caves with him when he was a hunted outlaw. I wonder what he would have been saying and about who…
3) “Ain’t Talkin’” (recorded February-March 2006, NYC), Modern Times (2006)
…or maybe King David would not have been talking at all?
Here is a latter-day psalm for modern times. Here is the righteous king on the road. The singer is the Psalmist whose heart is “after G-d’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14) and whose “heart burns hot within me” (Psalm 39:3), for he continues to have “heart burnin’” and continues to be “still yearnin’” as he traverses a world “mysterious and vague” on the way to the “last outback at the world’s end.”
Closing of conference
1) “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” (recorded December 1961, Minneapolis), Bootleg Series vol. 7: No Direction Home (2005)
A traditional song first recorded by John Hammond, it would go on to feature in the Cohen Brothers’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) as well as the memorable concert film, Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis” (2013), which was filmed in New York City to celebrate more than the film, but the music of the Greenwich Village-based folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
2) “Forever Young” (recorded November 1973, Santa Monica), Planet Waves (1974)
“May G-d bless and keep you always / May your wishes all come true” as you go in peace.
Daniel Mackay
Eugene, Oregon
31 January 2021