As the September deadline passed, he began to play around town again, reworking heartbreaking ballads like "Barbara Allen" and bruised blues about capricious females like "Kind Hearted Woman." But "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" was left for moments of quiet reflection. He even overlooked the song when imposing his blues persona on Columbia tape at several sessions in November and December. And it is almost an afterthought when he agrees to demo it for his music publisher, Witmark. Yet as soon as he began the song, the emotion he’d been bottling up for months came flooding out, Dylan proceeding to deliver the single most powerful performance on the entire set of Witmark demos.
Upon the return of Suze the following January, one might have expected Dylan to drop the song entirely. But he performed a surprise version on Skip Weshner’s radio show some time that winter, and then made it a part of the Town Hall showpiece in April. There had apparently been a row between the reconciled lovers beforehand, so he could have been trying to contritely convey how lost he’d been without her. One wonders if Suze was actually hearing the song for the very first time. The fact that Dylan included this version on a second collection of greatest hits in 1971 suggests some personal significance to the performance.
Yet he still refrained from capturing the song’s quixotic essence in the confines of Studio A, even when he was obliged to tape more selections for Freewheelin’ the week after the showpiece. By August, when he started work on his third album, the song had been quietly forgotten. By him. But that magnetic Witmark recording would result in the song being covered by the likes of Ian and Sylvia, Harry Belafonte, and Odetta in the next eighteen months, even as Dylan was dismissing the song during a long interview in Toronto in early February 1964:
I’ve only written one song, to my mind, that I don’t believe in, one song that puts me uptight and gets me embarrassed when I hear it. . . . There are just a few lines in it that aren’t really true. . . . I’m only speaking of one verse in the song, and the song is "If Today Were Not a Crooked Highway." It’s a beautiful song, the only verse I can’t make in it is the last verse that goes: "There’s beauty in the silver singing river / There’s beauty in the rainbow in the skies / But of these nothing else can match / The beauty I remember in my true love’s eyes." It’s pillow-soft, it’s not me. . . .
I don’t think that way, that way has been spoken for a million times. . . . The second verse is my words, and the first verse is my words.
Such sustained analysis of his own work is a rare bird indeed, though one would have to say he is spot-on. The lyrics he quotes are "pillow-soft," and as such the antithesis of everything he’d written to date. However heartfelt those first two verses may be, the song, like "Blowin’ in the Wind" before it, struggles to resolve itself; which is perhaps why it was ultimately passed over in favor of the more acerbic "Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright."
Thankfully, that magical publishing demo and the early cover versions above ensured the song would live on, ultimately inspiring some of the greatest performers of the rock era—Sandy Denny, Rod Stewart, and Elvis Presley—to tackle its tender underside. By the time Elvis cut the song in just two takes for 1966’s Spinout, Dylan was caught up in a different kind of storm. But when Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner inquired, in 1969, as to his favorite cover of one of his songs, he singled out Elvis’s version of this.
And whatever his misgivings about that third verse, Dylan never rewrote it. Even when he finally got around to recording the song properly, cutting a Presley-esque rendition at the June 1970 New Morning sessions. In the end, he again decided not to include the track on the released album—perhaps because it suggested that he lacked enough songs to make a wholly new album. But the song was never far from his mind, and when it came time to compile another greatest hits collection the following summer, he chose that in-the-moment rendition to the Town Hall throng, placing it alongside "When I Paint My Masterpiece."
Nor was this the last such demonstration of a songwriter more sensitive than soft. The song he dismissed as "pillow-soft" in 1964 retained a firm hold on the man’s psyche, appearing when he was most troubled by "witchy women," as in 1978 when it made its electric debut; and in 1987, when a lovely piano-guitar arrangement was a nightly highlight of the European tour. Rare Never Ending Tour incarnations have generally reverted to an acoustic guise—once, spellbindingly, as a request at a 1990 show in Toronto. He replied, "It sure is. Awfully long," and began to revisit some thirty-year-old feelings in song.
Note: The second line of the demo, "If tonight I could finally stand tall," is omitted from all subsequent performances. The published lyrics are not taken from the demo but from the version performed at Town Hall and released on Greatest Hits Vol. II.
{61} AIN’T GONNA GRIEVE
Published lyrics: Broadside #11–12; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recording/s: Witmark demo, August 1963.
{62} LONG AGO, FAR AWAY
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: [Tony Glover’s, Minneapolis, August 11, 1962].
Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, November 1962.
Though Dylan had been drawing another kind of inspiration from spiritual fare since his college days in Minneapolis—when he adapted "Sinner Man" and "Every Time I Feel the Spirit"—it took until 1997 for him to articulate what he generally found there in an interview: "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. . . . The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs."
After performing fire ’n’ brimstone renditions of "Gospel Plow" and "Wade in the Water" in December 1961, he temporarily halted his exploration of the genre. But "Quit Your Lowdown Ways" got him back in the mood, though, and "Ain’t Gonna Grieve," composed during the same summer, was the first time he turned a spiritual into an out-and-out civil rights anthem, the chorus of Dylan’s song being a revivalist revamp of "Ain’t Gonna Grieve My Lord No More." Rather than outlining the many ways "you can’t get to heaven," as the original did, Dylan exhorts everyone "brown and blue and white and black" to "raise the roof until the house falls in"—an early demonstration of the way he transposed revolution from songs of redemption. "Ain’t Gonna Grieve" would appear in Broadside 11–12, for which it was almost certainly written, before being demo-ed for Witmark. But it was never earmarked for Columbia.
"Long Ago, Far Away" also sees him questioning modern humanity’s moral compass. Like "Blowin’ in the Wind," it hangs upon a rhetorical question. After listing some atrocious things that happened "long ago, far away," he wonders aloud whether "things like that . . . happen nowadays." Dylan also demonstrates an early fascination with Christ, talking of a man who "preached brotherhood / Oh, what might be the cost?" His answer: "They hung him on a cross." For now, though, He would remain in Dylan’s mind "some dead man who had a bunch of good ideas, and was nailed to a tree."
Note: The version of "Ain’t Gonna Grieve" published in Broadside in August 1962 and excerpted in Sing Out! in October contains a fifth verse, which is absent from the version later printed in Writings and Drawings, as follows:
There’s a time to plant and a time to plow
Time to stand and a time to bow
There’s a time to grieve, but that ain’t now
I ain’t gonna grieve no more.
{63} LONG TIME GONE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: [Tony Glover’s, Minneapolis, August 11, 1962].
Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, November 1962.
Of a slightly higher caliber than most other songs demo-ed for Witmark, "Long Time Gone" suffered a similar fate—dispensed by Dylan to the dark halls of song-publishing even as he was recording the likes of "
Mixed Up Confusion" and "Whatcha Gonna Do" for his record label. There is something both affecting and affected about a twenty-one-year-old almost celebrating his own devil-may-care approach to death and decay:
You can have your youth, it’ll rot before your eyes
You can have your beauty, it’s only skin deep and it lies
Just give to me a tombstone with it clearly marked upon
I’m a long time coming and I’ll be a long time gone.
"Long Time Gone" is the song of a man who yearns to see the world through world-weary eyes, like the bluesmen he so admired. Something of a minor gem.
{64} TALKIN’ HYPOCRITE
First known performance: [Tony Glover’s, Minneapolis, August 11, 1962].
"Talkin Hypocrite" continues to be something of a mystery. We are reliant on a single description of the song from that unreliable chronicler, Robert Shelton, Tony Glover having been more successful sitting on his last two Dylan home tapes (August 1962 and July 1963) than his first two (May and December 1961). According to Shelton the song asks, "What kind of a hippo is a hypocrite?" which does rather suggest that this was another talkin’ blues Dylan conceived as a passing whim, while on the way to something better.
{65} GATES OF HATE
{66} THAT CALIFORNIA SIDE
Both songs have survived only on paper and each only as a single verse, but they appear to date from the summer of 1962.
#65 published in Sing Out! Oct./Nov. 1962.
#66 published in Isis #28.
Here are two more lost songs written within weeks of a WBAI radio interview with Pete Seeger, in which Dylan claimed he wrote songs before breakfast. "Gates of Hate" is mentioned (and quoted) in Gil Turner’s Sing Out! profile, whereas "That California Side" was written on a scrap of paper—the other side of a shop receipt dated June 22, 1962. "That California Side" contrasts the joys of California with the East Coast, a subject he would tackle again on "California" (cut at the first Bringing It . . . session in January 1965 and frequently bootlegged). Dylan’s repeated crossings-out suggest a general dissatisfaction with where the song is going, and it probably died there and then, as he sat in a cafe scribbling to his heart’s content.
On the other hand, "Gates of Hate" probably was finished, though all that is known of it derives from Gil Turner’s Sing Out! feature. According to Turner the song was about John Henry Faulk, who was then married to folksinger Hedy West. On June 28, 1962, Faulk had been awarded $3.5 million in damages in a libel suit against AWARE, a "clearance" service that vetted people in the entertainment industry for any left-wing inclinations or Communist affiliations. The chorus of the song, quoted in Turner’s piece, suggests Dylan was closing in on "Masters of War":
Go down, go down you gates of hate,
You gates that keep men in chains,
Go down and die the lowest death,
And never rise again.
It also suggests a likely source for any tune, Ewan MacColl’s "Go Down You Murderers"—a favorite as far back as his student days in St. Paul.
{67} A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL
Published lyrics: Sing Out! December 1962; Writings and Drawings;
Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Carnegie Hall, New York, September 22, 1962.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, December 6, 1962—1 take
[FR—tk.1].
I wrote it at the time of the Cuban crisis [sic]. I was in Bleecker Street in New York. We just hung around at night—people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I. Would one o’clock the next day ever come? . . . It was a song of desperation. What could we do? Could we control men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast, very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness. —Bob Dylan, 1965
My seemingly original observation, made back in 1991, that Dylan clearly wrote this song before the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis—adopted uncredited by certain American writers—has now become common enough knowledge for Dylan to observe in a recent interview: "Someone pointed out it was written before the missile crisis, but it doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you." And this from a man who spends most of his Theme Hour radio show reciting the history of songs, and singers, he is about to play.
As he knows rather well, it matters a great deal "where a song comes from"; especially when the song seemingly comes from nowhere. Because nothing in Dylan’s canon leads up to this example of wild mercury poetry. It is so unexpected that it takes its author another eighteen months before he mines the same rich vein of poetry again. The main question arising is, Where had Dylan been hiding all this erudition? With "Hard Rain" he abandoned any pretense that he was just a worried man with a worried mind and grabbed hold of a word that has haunted him ever since—"poet." Given that he here imagines the fate of such a man is to die "in the gutter," he was probably right to shy away from the word.
We have Dylan’s biographical word—given shortly before he revisited "Hard Rain" at 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh—that he wrote "Hard Rain" "at the bottom of the Village Gate, in Chip Monck’s place. It was his apartment, a real cruddy basement apartment but it had wall-to-wall carpeting and the carpeting even ran up the walls." He has been flatly contradicted by Tom Paxton, who informed Robbie Woliver that "there was a hide-out room above The Gaslight where we could hang out. Once Dylan was banging out this long poem on Wavy Gravy’s typewriter. He showed me the poem and I asked, ‘Is this a song?’ He said, ‘No, it’s a poem.’ I said, ‘All this work and you’re not going to add a melody?’"
In a 1993 interview, Wavy confirmed the essential reliability of Paxton’s account: "Dylan wrote the words to ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’ on my typewriter. A lot of Bob’s early stuff would start with him singing and strumming upstairs [in my room] at the Gaslight, then running downstairs and doing it on stage." Incredible as it may seem, Paxton also appears to be sound in asserting that the song began life as a poem on the page. Talking to Melody Maker’s Max Jones in May 1964—sufficiently close to its composition to not be shrouded by the myth—Dylan suggested that "Hard Rain" was not the first or the last time he adopted such a technique: "I’ve written a lot of things with no structure. . . . I wrote the words of ["Hard Rain"] on a piece of paper. But there was just no tune that really fit to it."
Another of Dylan’s friends, John Cohen, told him in 1968 that the first time he read the lyrics, he couldn’t see how it could be sung. According to this dialogue:
John Cohen: I had just come back from Kentucky and you showed me "Hard Rain," at Gerde’s or upstairs from the Gaslight. . . .
Bob Dylan: I believe at the time you were wondering how it fit into music. How I was going to sing it.
John Cohen: That was my initial reaction. . . . The question I asked you on seeing this stream of words was, if you were going to write things like that, then why do you need Woody Guthrie? How about Rimbaud?
The only other known instance of something similar was when Dylan read out the lyrics to "Isis"—which he’d just completed with songwriter Jacques Levy’s help—at the Other End one night in July 1975. And yet the whole structure of "Hard Rain," as has often been observed, is clearly based on a very specific song, Child Ballad #12, "Lord Randall," in which a lord returning home finds he has been poisoned by a lover/stepmother/witch (take your pick). As he is asked where he’s been, what he ate, and the like, it becomes clear that he is done for, though generally for reasons left unexplained.
The same balladic convention—the pregnant question succeeded by a cascade of unhelpful responses—served other hoary ballads, like "Edward" and "The Cruel Brother." In each instance, after some terrible crime is revealed (generally incest or patricide), the son tells his mother what he is going to do now—usually leave and never return. Though
this is exactly what Dylan does at the end of "Hard Rain," it is not a feature of "Lord Randall," unless it has somehow comingled with "The Cruel Brother." And, as Harvey points out, "It would be consistent with Dylan’s [early] compositional process that he [borrow]
melodically as well as lyrically" from "Lord Randall." But in this instance he does not.
Dylan was now drawing on an entire language of song. As he told Gargoyle magazine less than eighteen months later, "From folksongs, I learned the language [my italics] . . . by singing them and knowing them and remembering them. . . . You have to use [folk music] to learn about you, and whatever you want to do. English ballads, Scottish ballads, I see them in images . . . it goes deeper than just myself singing it."
The sturdy, balladic framework here allows Dylan to encapsulate all he wants to say using the broadest of canvases, even if the imagery of "Hard Rain" more closely resembles a ballade Dante might have written than any anonymous "knitter i’ the sun." Even its ostensible song structure cannot hold him. The five verses are irregular in length and number of line breaks (totaling five, seven, eight/nine, six, and twelve respectively). The third verse soon lost one of its better lines—"I heard the sound of one person who cried he was human"—in order to provide an element of structural consistency.
The rapt way audiences hung on every word of this audacious work also taught Dylan that a song need not be short to hold people’s attention. And, as he reveals in Chronicles, the epic ballads had shown him the way: "A lot of the songs I was singing were indeed long . . . at least lyrically. ‘Tom Joad’ had at least sixteen verses, ‘Barbara Allen’ about twenty. ‘Fair Ellender,’ ‘Lord Lovell,’ ‘Little Mattie Groves’ and others had numerous verses. . . . I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems. . . . I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems."
Revolution in the Air Page 11