by Andy Gill
CLOTHES LINE SAGA
‘Clothes Line Saga’ was originally recorded as ‘Answer To Ode’, the ode in question being Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode To Billie Joe’, one of Summer 1967’s most evocative hits, in which a family dispassionately discusses the suicide of Billie Joe MacAllister over dinner. Parodying Gentry’s downbeat, offhand narrative style, this is a back-porch gossip over the garden fence, occurring literally while taking in the washing—a reminder of how such basic forms of human contact cement a society together, however empty and pointless they may seem.
Nobody commits suicide in the ‘Clothes Line Saga’, although, we learn, the Vice-President did apparently go mad the previous night downtown, a minor interruption to the status quo greeted with all the excitement it deserves—“Hmm, say, that’s too bad”, sung as if Bob’s attention was already wandering—before folk get back to the important business of checking whether the clothes are dry yet. At the time, the Vice-President was Hubert Humphrey, who incited such paroxysms of apathy in the American people that when he stood as the Democratic presidential candidate at the next election, they preferred to vote for Richard Nixon instead.
The song’s essence is contained in its second line, “Nobody said very much”; indeed, ‘Clothes Line Saga’ could be read as Dylan celebrating his release from significance, enjoying the opportunity just to write songs without having to have them mean something. A few months earlier at the Royal Albert Hall concert, he had revealed how tired he was of having to explain his work when he lectured the audience from the stage. “What you’re hearing is just songs,” he fretted tetchily. “You’re not hearing anything else but words and sounds. You can take it or leave it. If there is something you disagree with, that’s great. I’m sick of people asking: ‘What does it mean?’ It means nothing!”
APPLE SUCKLING TREE
Built on the melody of ‘Froggy Went A-Courting’, the nursery rhyme Dylan would cover on his 1992 Good As I Been To You album, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’ opens with the composer’s tentative piano figure, feeling its way into the song, before the bass, drums and organ join in, with tambourine lending a touch of gospel revival-tent syncopation. The song’s galumphing feel is due to Robbie Robertson’s inexpert hand at the drum kit, one of the frequent occasions on which the musicians switched instruments.
“Everybody would play different instruments,” confirms Robertson. “I’d come down and somebody else would be playing guitar, so I’d pick up the bass or play the drums, something like that—somebody would pick up a horn or a fiddle or a mandolin, whatever, and just try their best to handle it! It wasn’t like anybody had a real idea for something, they would just look around, see an instrument sitting there, and start doodling around on it until something started to happen.” Since Levon Helm had not yet rejoined after quitting the Hawks before the 1966 World Tour, the drum seat was the one most in need of filling—usually by pianist Richard Manuel, since with both Garth Hudson and Dylan on hand, there was not such a shortage of keyboard operators as there was of drummers.
Another song whose recorded version bears scant relation to the lyrics as printed in Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–1985, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’ would seem to be a quickly extemporized, oddly light-hearted meditation upon mortality, the singer anticipating that time when it will be “just you and me” buried beneath the tree in question.
“A lot of them were made up as we went along,” agrees Robertson, “a lot were made up a few minutes before laying them down, just writing down an idea and trying it out to see if it’s going anywhere. Once you’d got it down, you’d say, ‘Okay, that’s an idea,’ and move on to something else. It was a very un-precious attitude.” The result here is one of the album’s most un-precious songs, poised in the shadows between celebration and admonition like a good-time ghost.
PLEASE, MRS. HENRY
A drinking song of authentic tipsiness, ‘Please, Mrs. Henry’ features a drunkard’s confused invocations to a barmaid, moving with intemperate randomness through an alcoholic fog of desires. First he thinks he’s had enough to drink and wants to be taken to his room; then as he wavers in the hallway, lustfulness overtakes him and he propositions her with a fanciful string of animal metaphors; rejected, he becomes sullen and truculent, waving her away; finally, poised for a piss, he’s trying to catch her eye again for another round of drinks, his penniless state notwithstanding. Rolling along on the back of bar-room piano and tiddly organ, it’s one of the more simple and good-natured songs in Dylan’s entire canon, buoyed with a light-heartedness that finds the singer corpsing into a chuckle as the final chorus begins.
TEARS OF RAGE
(Dylan/Manuel)
One of the three or four most complete—and intriguing—Basement Tapes songs, ‘Tears Of Rage’ is Dylan’s equivalent of the blind king’s wasteland soliloquy in King Lear, applied to his own nation. Wracked with bitterness and regret, its narrator reflects upon promises broken and truths ignored, on how greed has poisoned the well of best intentions, and how even daughters can deny their father’s wishes.
In its narrowest and most contemporaneous interpretation, the song could be the first to register the pain of betrayal felt by many of America’s Vietnam War veterans, who found their patriotic efforts, carried out with neither question nor compromise, squandered by a country that simply got fed up with caring about the conflict. As the national mood shifted, these men found their dead friends had effectively laid down their lives for nothing, denied even the dignity of dying for a righteous cause, so tainted had the war in question become. In trying to commemorate their comrades, they were routinely treated as if they were asking for something they didn’t deserve; the nation’s embarrassment over the matter made them unworthy claimants upon its compassion, always made to feel like thieves.
Certainly, from no other song of that era does one glean the sense of a nation split against itself. In a wider interpretation of ‘Tears Of Rage’, this song harks back to what anti-war protesters and critics of American materialism in general felt was a more fundamental betrayal of the spirit of the American Declaration Of Independence and the Bill Of Rights. Having, as one of its founding fathers, helped define the country, the song’s narrator watches sadly as his ideals are diluted and cast aside by succeeding generations, who treat them as “nothing more/Than a place for you to stand.” In place of idealism is rampant materialism, with a price placed upon even one’s emotions by a society that has come to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
With Dylan’s weeping delivery matched by the high, keening harmonies of Rick Danko and Richard Manuel and shaded by the stately tread of Garth Hudson’s wistful organ, ‘Tears Of Rage’ is the most affecting of the Basement Tapes performances. Richard Manuel wrote the music for it, having been handed a typewritten sheet of the lyrics by Dylan one day in the basement. Though he later admitted not fully understanding the song, Manuel instinctively settled upon the highly evocative melody which provides the perfect atmosphere of enduring, irrevocable lamentation. The next year, he would sing lead on the Band’s own version of the song—included on their Music From Big Pink debut—a reading made even more harrowingly funereal by the addition of Garth Hudson’s mournful horns.
TOO MUCH OF NOTHING
Ponderous and declamatory in the verses, frail and haunting in the choruses, this offers the earliest indication, with its references to “the day of confession” and everything having “been written in the book,” of the biblical slant which was creeping into Dylan’s songs, and which would cast a great shadow over his next album, John Wesley Harding.
During his retreat up in Woodstock, Dylan was reported to keep a Bible open at a lectern in his study. Its grim parables and sense of moral absolutism deeply inform ‘Too Much Of Nothing’, which serves as both lamentation of spiritual emptiness and warning of its dire consequences. As the melody rises through the latter half of each verse, one can visualize an evangelist berating his congregation, with the high chorus harmonies of Rick
Danko and Richard Manuel representing the angelic salvation which the preacher extends as the alternative to a life of sinful pleasure. Deriding the modern world as spiritually bereft, Dylan warns of the societal breakdown and ruthlessness that are bound to follow (which became a familiar theme through his recordings of subsequent decades), and advises seeking redemption through giving away one’s money (which, oddly, did not).
YEA! HEAVY AND A BOTTLE OF BREAD
Perhaps the most bizarrely inconsequential of the Basement Tapes recordings, “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread” is pure nonsense, its lines knocked together from offhand, random phrases with an instinct for the enigmatic that rescues the song from being forgettable. Dylan’s delivery is deceptively conversational, adding to the illusion of common sense, and though there’s something tentative and spontaneous about the recurrent little piano phrase that adds a soupçon of character to the song, the other musicians join in lustily enough on the choruses to dispel suspicions about its ultimate destination (though not, perhaps, in the case of the baritone harmony on the final “bread,” which fluctuates drunkenly before settling on its proper note). Ticking along blithely, as if it knows exactly where it’s going, ‘Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread’ winds up as one of the most engaging of the album’s songs, its appeal accentuated, if anything, by the fact that its meaning is unfathomable.
CRASH ON THE LEVEE
(Down In The Flood)
Initially called ‘Crash On The Levee’, but retitled ‘Down In The Flood’ in Dylan’s official Lyrics 1962–1985, this, of all the Basement Tapes songs, is the one which best carries the authentic spark of real history: a cohesive meld of mood, theme and delivery, it could easily have been written by some wary inhabitant of the Mississippi flood-plain, warning of the impending disaster in apocalyptic terms reminiscent of that earlier biblical flood survived by Noah.
This is due in part to the air of familiarity lent by specific geographical reference (to Williams Point), and in part to the antique mystery of lines like “Well it’s sugar for sugar/And salt for salt,” which in this case is indeed authentically antique, the line being adapted from Richard “Rabbit” Brown’s 1927 song ‘James Alley Blues’, a warning about one of New Orleans’ more dangerous thoroughfares, in which he sings “I’ll match you sugar for sugar, I’ll match you salt for salt.” (The song would be familiar to Dylan through its inclusion in Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music.)
TINY MONTGOMERY
Another trifle with more character than meaning, ‘Tiny Montgomery’ has an engaging boozy bonhomie, its eponymous subject sending out greetings to an impressive cast of characters that includes Skinny Moo, Half-track Frank, Lester, Lou, some monks and the entire CIO union organization. Tricked out in short, imponderable phrases—“Honk that stink/Take it on down/And watch it grow”—chosen more for sound than sense, it has the weird, hermetic logic of a private language, the kind of thing that members of cults or secret organizations use to communicate with each other.
Given the shady nature of the characters whom Montgomery hails, and the fact that he refers to San Francisco as “ol’ Frisco,” a term nobody—certainly not the town’s residents—has used for many a year, I suspect that Tiny has languished long in one of America’s jails, and is bidding farewell to a cellmate about to be released, asking him to send regards to his chums back in his old stamping ground.
YOU AIN’T GOIN’ NOWHERE
When The Byrds included ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ on their pioneering country-rock album Sweetheart Of The Rodeo in the summer of 1968, it provided confirmation of sorts that the country sound revealed at the end of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding earlier that year was more than just a passing phase, that there was more to his new rural outlook than just ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’. With ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, it seemed that following his years as the quintessential urban hipster, Dylan had followed his own instruction and strapped himself to a tree with roots.
On Dylan’s original version, however, the country flavor is somewhat less pronounced, present more as an undercurrent, though there’s an irresistible pull in that direction via the lilting chorus melody. Judging by an earlier, unreleased version—a bootleg version, as it were—whose verses are filled up with off-the-cuff nonsense about having to feed the cat, it seems likely that the chorus was the first part of the song devised, with the verses being filled in later.
Mind you, the completed song as it stands makes little more sense than its feline predecessor: while the brisk meteorological details—the frozen railings, rain and clouds—lend the first verse a stark rural cohesion, subsequent stanzas drift further away from logic until the final verse twists off into a non sequitur concerning Genghis Khan’s inability to keep his kings supplied with sleep. Not for the first time in the basement, the chorus is what gives drives the song forward, regardless of what’s happening in the verses. Robbie Robertson is the drummer.
DON’T YA TELL HENRY
More rustic shenanigans, with a lady love and a whole barnyard menagerie keen on keeping some secret from the eponymous Henry. Their recurrent rejoinder “Apple’s got your fly” sounds like nothing so much as a line from a children’s skip-rope rhyme, but the song as a whole plays as cowboy farce.
With Levon Helm taking lead vocals with characteristic Southern brio, ‘Don’t Ya Tell Henry’ could be viewed almost as a prototype for the sound the Band would reveal over the next two years on their own highly regarded albums.
Like the other tracks recorded solely by the Hawks without Dylan, ‘Don’t Ya Tell Henry’ is more polished than most of the Basement Tapes performances, with an arrangement that plays Robbie Robertson’s guitar off against Helm’s mandolin, while Garth Hudson plays rippling bar-room piano over a rhythm punched along by the dry snap of Richard Manuel’s drums.
By the time Levon Helm joined the rest of the group up in Big Pink, he was shocked—and a little worried—to find out how good a drummer Manuel had become. “Richard was an incredible drummer,” Helm acknowledged in his autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire. “He played loosey-goosey, a little behind the beat, and it really swung… Without any training, he’d do these hard left-handed moves and piano-wise licks, priceless shit—very unusual… I just realized that my mandolin playing was going to have to improve if I was to have anything to do onstage while Richard played drums.”
NOTHING WAS DELIVERED
Roughly based on Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’, this is a pedestrian, mournful blues pushed along by Richard Manuel’s piano triplets (there are no drums on the track). Dylan’s vocal and Robbie Robertson’s guitar are of a piece, dramatic but intimate, as if sharing confidences about the flunked deal covered in the song. It’s one of the most direct stories on the entire Basement Tapes album, with somebody being held to account for non-delivery; but it’s flexible enough to accommodate a number of interpretations, from a simple drug-deal gone wrong to more serious political deceit.
Whichever it is, the tone is more sad than angry, as if the betrayal hurts the singer’s sense of honor more than his pocket. “Take care of yourself and get plenty of rest,” he advises the reneger, an ambivalent salutation that’s part threat and part solicitous farewell.
OPEN THE DOOR, HOMER
Though the title and the version of the song included in Lyrics 1962–1985 address the instruction to Homer, the song as sung refers to Richard. It makes a little more sense when you learn that Richard Manuel’s nickname among the group was “Homer,” and that the invocation “Open the door, Richard” was a staple routine used by comics at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s as a kind of weekly running joke–the various confusions between the characters stuck on opposite sides of the door never being resolved by the door being opened, of course. In 1947, Jack McVea and Dan Howell wrote music to accompany burlesque duo “Dusty” Fletcher and John Mason’s comedy routine, the quartet enjoying a postwar novelty hit with the result.
Poised between irony an
d self-assurance, the song lopes along jauntily, tendering obscure bits of baffling advice, some commonsense, others with the cryptic power of folk remedies: value your memories properly, they won’t come again; flush out your house if you don’t want to be housing flushes; swim a certain way if you want to live off the fat of the land; and forgive the sick before you try to heal them. The sensible ones lend a sort of bogus credence to the less sensible, while the sheer conviction of the chorus vouches for the advisor’s bona fides: it’s good advice he’s offering, and not before time too, because, as the singer acknowledges, “I ain’t gonna hear it said no more”—so seemingly impenetrable are such folk remedies, old wives’ tales and rural wisdoms becoming, that we’re losing the ability to even understand them, let alone question their efficacy.
LONG DISTANCE OPERATOR
A funky blues extension (no pun intended) of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’ in the Chicago blues style, with Robbie Robertson’s strangulated guitar fills piercing the song’s fabric like arrows through the heart. Richard Manuel takes lead vocals, yearning to hear his baby’s voice down the wire, and wailing awhile on harmonica.
Simple and strident, ‘Long Distance Operator’ is half an idea fleshed out to a riff, but none the worse for that.
THIS WHEEL’S ON FIRE
(Dylan/Danko)