Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  {22} CALIFORNIA BROWN-EYED BABY

  Extant in manuscript form only, the MacKenzie papers, circa spring 1961; typed version in Isis #44.

  By the time Dylan returned from Minnesota—via Connecticut—at the end of May, he had been away almost a month. Though she had told him of her plans to make her own trip home to San Francisco, he had apparently expected dancer-girlfriend Avril to hang around. Dylan duly discovered that the possessive streak residing deep in his internal wiring could be defied and disappointed by the kind of independent woman he was attracted to, but couldn’t control. Avril was gone. With only a cold, empty apartment to return to, he arrived at the MacKenzies, asking if he could crash there. It was the start of a long stay.

  Almost immediately he penned a song to Avril, his California brown-eyed baby. Still deriving most of his favorite tunes from Woody, he set the lyric to "Columbus Stockade Blues," one of Guthrie’s better-

  known political songs, and a song he had previously laid down on the so-called St. Paul tape. Dylan wanted to see if the song would do the trick and send Avril scurrying back into his arms. Eve MacKenzie remembers:

  He was insisting on using the telephone. "I’m gonna call her!" And I tried to stop him. He said he’d call collect, and I said no, that [Avril] was a poor girl and she couldn’t afford to take a call collect. . . . But he did call her—maybe it was the next day—and she took the call. And he said, "I have a song for you." And he sang "California Brown Eyed Baby." I held the phone for him, he sang it, and everybody cried. It was the first time we’d heard him sing one of his own songs.

  Avril apparently stayed put. But "California Brown-Eyed Baby" was one of those rare early originals that did make it into his club repertoire. He told Izzy Young in October that the song "has caught on," though, like "Song to Bonny," it was largely folk cliches. Dylan still preferred putting real feelings into the songs of others. In fact, when the chance came in early September to record some songs to garner label interest, "California Brown-Eyed Baby" was not one he elected to set down for posterity. (Terri Thal, girlfriend to Dave Van Ronk, taped a set at the Gaslight for such a purpose, incorporating three originals, but no song to Avril.)

  {23} DEAD FOR A DOLLAR

  {24} BIG CITY BLUES*

  {25} THE PREACHER’S FOLLY

  {26} RED TRAVELIN’ SHOES

  All songs extant in manuscript form only, the MacKenzie papers, circa

  summer 1961.

  Asterisked (*) item reproduced in typed form in Lyrics (2004).

  Despite collectors being reasonably well served by recordings of Dylan as a Village club act, it would appear from extant recordings that our callow singer-songwriter took few chances with what he played in the months leading up to his September signing by John Hammond Sr. Even May’s two-dozen-song Minneapolis "Party Tape" features just a single semi-improvised throwaway.

  When John Hammond sent Columbia publicist Billy James to interview his protégé after their first Columbia session, Dylan offered this explanation: "I write a lot of songs and I forget them. As soon as after I write them or sing them out loud. . . . I forget ’em. But . . . when I take the time to write them down I usually sing ’em once in a while."

  "Once in a while" just about sums it up. Most of the songs written at this time attempt to (re)create songs steeped in the dust of a prelapsarian America, the world described in Bound for Glory. As Dylan said in 1997, "There was an innocence to Woody Guthrie. I know that’s what I was looking for. Whether it was real or not, or whether it was a dream, who’s to say but . . . after him, it’s over." With those songs given their own clean, typed copy—and "California Brown-Eyed Baby," "Big City Blues," "Red Travelin’ Shoes," "Dead for a Dollar," and "The Preacher’s Folly" all received such benediction—Dylan would pencil in guitar chords above each song’s first verse, suggesting he did not immediately intend to forget them.

  The last of these songs has him satirizing a traveling preacher man who asks of others, "Have you found the way?" only to be struck dead by lightning during one such medicine show. The moral is unclear—God likes electrocuting those who seek to preach the gospel from place to place, perhaps?—whereas "Red Travelin’ Shoes" uses a simple D-A-G chord progression to convey the misery of being left behind by a green-eyed gal. Though he claims he "never knew a pain could hurt so hard," actual heartbreaks to date had been few and far between.

  "Big City Blues" is told from the vantage point of somebody who can’t wait to reach the Big City, not to see his debilitated hero, but because he believes that "the streets [really] are full of gold." In its penultimate line, the ingenue even claims he’s "gonna dig me up a [gold] brick / take it to the bank." Of course Dylan was self-consciously writing for a small urban audience who knew that the streets were really lined with dog shit. As one of the songs Dylan typed up, he probably envisaged "Big City Blues" having some kind of shelf life, though probably not making an appearance in his collected lyrics forty-three years after the fact.

  Of the four songs he typed to a tune, then left behind, "Dead for a Dollar" is probably the best of the bunch. It tells the tale of a lad who is about to be executed for having shot a man "for a dollar." Dylan makes the boy repeat the last words of the man he murdered as the hangman tightens the noose: "As he fell you could hear him holler / Oh Mary don’t weep for me." As with "Man on the Street," written at much the same time, he resists tagging on a moralizing verse, letting listeners reach their own conclusion concerning this dead man’s tale.

  {27} TALKIN’ BEAR MOUNTAIN PICNIC MASSACRE BLUES

  Published lyric: Isis #45 [draft]; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;

  Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Gaslight Cafe, New York, September 6, 1961.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 25, 1962—3 takes [TBS—tk.3].

  {28} TALKIN’ HAVA NAGILA BLUES

  First known performance: Gerde’s Folk City, September 26, 1961.

  Known studio recording/s: Studio A, NY, April 25, 1962—1 take [TBS—tk.1].

  Taken from a story in the New York Herald Tribune (June 19, 1961), "Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues" tells of a chartered boat trip to Bear Mountain that had been abandoned because thousands of counterfeit tickets had been sold to unwitting customers. Dylan told Izzy Young he wrote the song "overnight, because of Noel Stookey" (the "Paul" in Peter, Paul, and Mary). One presumes it was Stookey who brought the original story to his attention. Dylan promptly began to construct an altogether more traumatic version of the "massacre." Again he entrusted a handwritten version of the song to the MacKenzies, in which the ship actually sinks and the protagonist ends up on the shore, a little the worse for wear:

  As I got up and looked around

  There were people splattered all over the ground

  Some were on land, some were afloat

  Then I took one look at the boat—

  Looked like the planters had come.

  "Talkin’ Bear Mountain" became something of a party piece for Dylan that summer, allowing him to demonstrate his caustic wit in its raw state. Yes, he was sending up some rather easy targets, but the Village crowds loved the song, which provided Dylan with ample opportunity to come on like a folkie Charlie Chaplin. Far more than "Song to Woody," "Talkin’ Bear Mountain" was the song that got him noticed in the months preceding his fateful meeting with Columbia producer John Hammond.

  The Dadaist "Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues" started out as a response to absurd song requests. On a good day lasting almost a minute, it lampooned the folk revival and showed a rich absurdist streak running through the man long before he sped up those synapses. But what worked in concert was never going to come across on record. Though the song was recorded at the first Freewheelin’ session in April 1962, it was the kind of song that would only serve to rubber-stamp a tag like "Hammond’s Folly."

  {29} DOPE FIE
ND ROBBER*

  {30} THE GREAT CHICAGOAN

  {31} I’LL GET WHERE I’M GOING SOMEDAY

  {32} ROCKIN’ CHAIR

  {33} I HEAR A TRAIN A-ROLLING

  {34} RAMBLIN’ GAMBLIN’ BLUES

  All songs extant in manuscript form only, the MacKenzie papers, circa

  summer 1961.

  Asterisked (*) item reproduced in typed form in Isis #44 and In His Own Words, vol. 2.

  The bulk of the so-called MacKenzie papers appear to date from those summer days when Dylan was still just another scuffling young folksinger. Of the dozen or so songs—talkin’ blues excepted—he wrote down between May and September, just one ("Man on the Street") endured long enough to feature in the repertoire Robert Shelton raved about in the New York Times in the last week of September. However, Dylan continued working up songs, and sometime in September he compiled a list of a dozen original songs for purpose/s unknown (two versions of the list survive: the earlier appears beneath lyrics to a song called "Over the Road"; the later on the rear of the "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Blues" lyric).

  The list could be a wish list for a debut album, given that it was almost certainly compiled after he met John Hammond at an informal rehearsal for folksinger Carolyn Hester’s LP, around September 10. Or it could be that Dylan thought he might have a songbook in him (though Bob Dylan Himself, his first songbook, compiled less than six months later, contained just four of the songs listed here). But the most likely explanation to my mind is that he was drawing up a list of songs to play if and when he auditioned for Hammond, as it has long been rumored he did. If so, Hammond got to hear some or all of the following songs (as listed in Dylan’s hand):

  1. Dope Fiend Robber 2. Talking Bear Mt. 3. Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Blues 4. Over The Road I’m Bound To Go 5. California Brown Eyed Baby 6. I Hear A Train a-Rolling 7. Rocking Chair 8. Old Man (John Doe) 9. Get Where I’m Going 10. Woody’s Song 11. Talking New York Town 12. Great Chicagonian.

  The earlier draft omits "Rocking Chair" in favor of a song only identified by its initials—"B.U.P."

  Of these songs, 2, 5, 8, 10, and 11 were certainly all written by the end of August. The others (the mysterious "B.U.P." excepted) reside among the MacKenzie papers, but in no other known form. However, because one of them, "Over the Road I’m Bound to Go," would become "Sally Gal" by late September—when the latter was performed at Gerde’s—we can date the list with some confidence to that month. It suggests that Dylan at least fleetingly thought he might have an album of original songs in him. If so he was either disabused by the worldly producer or arrived at the realization himself soon enough.

  The six songs listed above [#29–34] contain a number of half ideas that later bloomed into song but are for now buried beneath a mountain of commonplaces and clichés. He knew he could do better and so he overhauled "Over the Road." Of the songs scribbled down in (or around) September, the time of the list’s compilation, "The Great Chicagoan" is rather more intriguing than earlier adaptations. An attempt to emulate and not just imitate Guthrie, it is based quite obviously on "Philadelphia Lawyer"—written around 1937, when Woody was singing over at KFVD in L.A.—which had been covered by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on the Topic LP Dylan had taken unauthorized loan of from folk music enthusiast Jon Pankake’s Minneapolis apartment back in 1960.

  "The Great Chicagoan" tells a slightly different, less lucid version of the same story. Whereas Guthrie set his ménage à trois involving a cowboy and "a Philadelphia lawyer in love with a Hollywood maid" in Reno, Nevada, Dylan sets his in Santa Fe. It features a fair-haired Indian maid, a man from Chicago ("in town . . . buying and selling some land"), plus the same "wild cowboy" of Guthrie’s version. Dylan even lets the lawyer spend a whole verse describing how cowboys are "a disgrace to all fellow men." Both Bobby and Woody let the out-of-towner try to woo the maid, unaware that the cowboy has "listened awhile at the window" and "could hear every word that they said." Rather than relating the inevitable showdown, Guthrie cuts straight to Act Five:

  Now tonight back in old Pennsylvania,

  Beneath those beautiful pines,

  There’s one less Philadelphia lawyer

  In old Philadelphia tonight.

  Dylan adopts the same "leaping and lingering" technique, save that in his song, it is "in Chicago City / Down where the lights are so bright" where they’re missing a citizen tonight. "The Great Chicagoan" is more than just the Guthrie song transposed to a new location; it shows Dylan trying to put his own spin on earlier morés. And the number of crossings-out suggests he took writing it very seriously. Yet he must have known that Guthrie was parodying a familiar murder ballad, "The Jealous Lover," and thus that he was writing a pastiche of a parody of a form he had yet to master.

  A second Guthrie-esque reworking demonstrates a greater sophistication and has a far greater bearing on the work to come. "This Train Ain’t Bound for Glory," as the song was initially known, took its premise from Guthrie’s adaptation of the traditional "This Train Is Bound for Glory" and reversed it. Like Guthrie, Dylan suggests that there is no place on the glory train for gamblers, hypocrites, or liars. However, instead of midnight ramblers, high flyers, "rustlers, sidestreet walkers [and] two-bit hustlers"—all of whom were named by Guthrie—Dylan finds a place on his hell-bound train for the cheater (who "robbed from all the poor"), the rich man (who "thinks he’s better than you and me"), and the parasite (who "likes to make his money / Off of all of me and you").

  Unlike Guthrie, Dylan also tells us why these individuals "ain’t bound for glory." Indeed, his description of the "lyer" (sic) comes scarily close to describing another wicked messenger: "Who lied to his fellow man / Who used them for his own needs / To strengthen his own hand."

  He opens "This Train" with another line from his favorite Johnny Cash song, "I hear a train a rolling." By the time he compiles his second list this has become the song’s title, while retaining the notion that the "glory train," recast as the "holy slow train" in later years, has a terrible twin running on an entirely different track. Indeed, just over a year later, he would record "Train A-Travelin’," another song that lists a retinue of damned souls on a train that is rockin’ and rollin’ all the way down to the pit.

  Of course, one shouldn’t read too much into the makeshift morality displayed in these tender-year songs. Dylan’s enduring capacity for holding a view in one song and the exact opposite in another, written only days later, is another facet he displayed in these September songs. Having portrayed a gambler in "This Train" as someone who will "play you against your brother," almost immediately thereafter he penned a song airily celebrating the rambling gambler ("Over the Road"), only to portray the life of a rambler as a lonesome one in "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Blues," a counterpoint to his own arrangement of Guthrie’s "Ramblin’ Blues" (a.k.a. "As I Go Ramblin’ Round"), itself a jaunty celebration of the "rambling" lifestyle. (The existence of a Dylan original called "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Blues," penned less than two months before he recorded his first album, makes it a faint possibility that the "Ramblin’ Blues" recorded at the Bob Dylan sessions, long assumed to be Guthrie’s, could be a Dylan original).

  Dylan arrived at his own "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Blues" via a couple of false starts. Like "Talkin’ New York," it began life as a "come all ye" folk song ("Come all you ramblers of the wide open road") that tells the story of a boy "I once knowed" who was killed on his way back to Utah to see his mother (thus introducing elements of "Ballad of a Friend" and "I Was Young When I Left Home," two other songs Dylan had composed by year’s end).

  Having put himself in a blue frame of mind, Dylan grabs onto any image that suits him. Indeed at one point, the song strings together images in such a way that it seems to be four songs at the same time: "Let me drift down your highway / Highway 51 / I might be gone a thousand years / Behind the rising sun." None of these lines lead anywhere. Likewise, when
he hooks together "Freight Train Blues" and "In the Pines," for the line "I’ll grab me a freight train a hundred coaches long," the verse peters out with him complaining about "these mean old nasty ramblin’ gamblin’ blues." And when he says he is "looking for a woman / To ease my ramblin’ mind," we can be sure he remains someone picking fruit from the tree of tradition.

  He shows a similar disregard for narrative sense—and a youthful inclination to (mis)appropriate traditional imagery—in two other songs on that September list—"Rockin’ Chair" and "I’ll Get Where I’m Going Someday." The former is almost a dry run for "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight," as he expresses a clear desire to "go riding in a rocking chair." Asking for his bottle and his rattle, he imagines someone willing to "rock and roll . . . fast and slow" in said rocking chair, emulating the kind of wish fulfillment found in Guthrie’s "I Want My Milk (And I Want It Now)," already done by Dylan on the May 1961 Minneapolis Party Tape. "I’ll Get Where I’m Going Someday" suggests he has already tired of such amusements. He insists he’s gonna get where he’s going—wherever that might be—in six verses, and he "ain’t gonna sit in no red rocking chair." Again, he envisages a rosy future. Just not yet.

  The other song written out at this time—heading the list above, though hardly on merit—is a seventeen-verse ballad told in the first person, concerning a "Dope Fiend Robber." This dope fiend robber is yet another innocent victim of an unfair system, an ex-soldier who had become addicted to morphine after getting shot "fighting for Uncle Sam." Unfortunately Dylan seems a little unclear as to what drug our fiendish robber is on, referring to "white gold" and "dust inside my bones," images that would be more apposite if it was heroin to which the ex-soldier was addicted. Needless to say, the dope soon loses his wife and robs a jewelry store. After being demonized by the press—and Dylan daring to rhyme "morphine" with "The papers said I was a dope fiend"—he is sent to jail.