Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  It took thirteen cathartic verses to get all of this out of his system, without Dylan ever transcending his material. "Plain D" remains an exercise in painful autobiography best worked out in therapy, not on the page. Ten years later, he did not make the same mistake. Yet he probably retained a sneaking fondness for the song. Though he never played it live, he chose to incorporate it into his 1977 celluloid experiment, Renaldo and Clara, sung by Gordon Lightfoot in a Toronto hotel room on the Rolling Thunder tour, and the song was rehearsed at Rundown Studios in January 1978, prior to a world tour dubbed the Alimony Tour by crueler critics.

  {125} BLACK CROW BLUES

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—3 takes [AS—tk.3].

  Aside from the five songs (# 121–5) he sketched out at the Mayfair—or on its notepaper—Dylan started at least three other songs he then abandoned. Certainly none of them made it to the one studio session or subsequent performance. One of these, concerning something he spied "one foggy morning / upon the phantom ship," never got beyond its unrealized opening verse. Another, "Oh Babe, I’ll Let You Be You," presumably provided the basis for a slightly less condescending song, "All I Really Want to Do." Yet another only ever amounted to a handful of stray lines and a single verse about a "fearless cop" whose "life is leased . . . t the system of evil." The prince of protest had not entirely abandoned griping about the status quo.

  On the reverse side of the last of these, Dylan started another song that seems to peter out after just two-and-a-half verses. Another Bob Dylan blues, it leaves little doubt as to the source of his blues: her absence. In fact, this song had already petered out once before. On another sheet we find not only draft verses for "I Shall Be Free #10" (the one about Cassius Clay) and "All I Really Want to Do" ("i don’t want t battle you / or shatter you / rat on you . . . i don’t want t advertize you / mesmerize you / analyze you") but also two stabs at an opening verse to this twelve-bar blues, starting with "In the wee wee hours, on the edge of the morning . . ." and ending up as "pretending with[out] a doubt / that my long lost lover’s gonna meet me an tell me what it’s all about." "Black Crow Blues" had begun its journey.

  It was probably just a day or two later when he returned to the Mayfair writing desk, took another sheet from his depleted supply of stationery, and took up where he left off, "wishing my long lost lover’d whisper from nowhere / an tell me what it’s all about." A second verse draws on the lines, "my wrist was empty / but my nerves were tickin’," originally found in the "wee wee hours" draft. After all the bravado of "It Ain’t Me Babe," the starting point for a third verse, "you can come back t me sometime daytime anytime you want," gives the game away, but the draft ends there.

  Dylan persevered. At some point, he finished the third verse and a further two, the final one of which invokes a painter "far beyond his rightful time" to express a concomitant romantic anguish. Van Gogh expressed his by cutting off an ear, then representing his distress pictorially in a painting of "black crows in the meadow" (the original working title, "Weird Consumption," perhaps alludes to another nineteenth-century artist known for his romantic anguish). One Mayfair fragment Dylan got around to finishing, "Black Crow Blues" at least provided a welcome example of his syncopated piano playing on record. Which is where it was laid to rest.

  {126} I SHALL BE FREE #10

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—4 takes [AS—tk.4+insert].

  As with its numberless predecessor, "I Shall Be Free #10" appears to have been composed in stages, as the whim took him, with verses two to five (of twelve) appearing among the Another Side papers (three of these verses appear on the same sheets as a draft of "Ballad in Plain D"). There are also two unfinished, indeed unrecorded, verses—one about wanting to live life "as a blond" and visiting East Berlin, the other admitting his unsuitability for a variety of public roles:

  now malcolm x is on my trail

  robert welch wants t throw me in jail

  bishop sheen says i got no belief

  rabbi greenbaum says I’m a thief.

  We can assume from all this that Dylan continued to add verses right up to the day of the session (and probably during it). He does seem somewhat unfamiliar with some of his own jokes on the recorded version, blowing the song completely when he gets to the woman who’s so mean she sticks him with buckshot when he’s nude. Producer Tom Wilson suggests he sing the rest of the song as an insert, but Dylan asks if he can start again. An argument ensues. Wilson gets his way, as the pressure of cutting an entire album in a night begins to tell on Dylan. He records the insert, but leaves out two of the verses and has to record it again. It hardly seems worth the effort, especially since the second time around, Dylan fluffs the little instrumental squiggle on the final verse, which is meant to be "something I learned over in England." It was presumably intended to have them rolling in the isles.

  {127} TO RAMONA

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—1 take [AS].

  First known performance: Newport Folk Festival, July 26, 1964.

  On a collection that lurches from peak to trough, "To Ramona" provides a necessarily impressive conclusion to side one. A song of resignation composed after getting "Plain D" out of his system, "Ramona" remains an occasional concert treat to the present day. Again the idea for the song seems to be one he stored away for his European travels. Though the song had been worked on initially in London, it was not completed until Dylan had removed himself from further distractions, save for the nubile Nico and the tavernas of Greece. Alongside "some other kinds of song," he began to type out a clean copy, only for dissatisfaction to set in, prompting him to wield his pen again.

  In London town the first identifiable element in the song appeared on the back of the sheet where Dylan first outlined that epitaph to a dead relationship, "Ballad in Plain D," suggesting that without "Plain D," there might be no "Ramona." Just two lines penned on the reverse of "Plain D" suggest the healing process has begun: "your cracked country lips will soon [blank] / tho they will twist it, don’t resist it." Allowing his mind to wander again, he proceeded with ribald rhymes that may or may not have been intended for "I Shall Be Free #10" (one of which is "the pin boy cried / you’re on another side"!). On another pristine sheet, beneath the returning phantom ship, Dylan scribbled three more lines. This time they come with a name:

  Ramona, you ask me t tell you about

  You speak about rocks in the road an you ask what they [be]

  An you capture any moment enough for me t say.

  On another sheet, where a skeletal outline of what shall be "All I Really Want to Do" has begun to form, Dylan finally began counseling Ramona "in line." Though still just jotted-down phrases circling around a central idea, recognizable elements are in place—the city versus the country; rejecting the opinions of others who just want "to hype you and type you"; the difficulty of staying true to oneself in a political world ("acceptance means nothing / as you’re bound t find out some time"). Some of these wild thoughts survived the writing process intact, like "the flowers of the city." Some would take shape during the process ("you’ll only be defeated if you go back t the south"). Some were simply sidelined ("your body’s your own, babe"), as he built around a series of internal rhymes ("breath like," "death like").

  By the time Dylan reached the taverna/s, he had all five verses—and presumably that gorgeous tune (which I strongly suspect has some little-known traditional Mexican antecedent, given that Waylon Jennings used the exact same tune the following year for "Anita, You’re Dreaming," without any kind of co-credit). He was still shy a couple of lines—"as to be next t the strength of your skin" and "there’s n
o one to beat cept the thoughts of yourself as you stand" being added in pen. But only the second half of verse five now needs a major fix, as its original form tripped over itself:

  Your sorrow is stemmin from forces an friends that define

  of hypin you typin (leadin needin you to know they’re alive)

  Dylan’s use of that bracket again suggests dissatisfaction. Sure enough, at the bottom of the page come two attempts at an improvement. First there is, "just to add talk t their time," and then, "making you feel like you have t be just like them." Got it. As the song and the process near their finishing end, the singer achieves an empathy with Ramona’s predicament, "torn between remainin’ and returnin’ back t the south." When it came time to cut the song in Studio A, it was realized in another flowing first take.

  Quite whom the singer is trying to mollify (and/or seduce) remains pure guesswork. One possibility must be Sara Lowndes, who became close to Dylan in the aftermath of his breakup with Suze. She could be said to have "cracked country lips," being a Delaware girl, and her bronzed skin and dusky features may have suggested Spanish ancestry—and the Mediterranean goddess status the name "Ramona" implies. "Ramona" could even be a feminine alter ego. He was certainly spending a lot of his time having "to deal with the dyin." And as he observed in 1978, "I’ve been to the city, and I can’t avoid that. So it does enter into my music—but the backbone of it comes from the country."

  {128} ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [1978 version: Words Fill My Head.].

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—1 take [AS].

  First known performance: Newport Folk Festival, July 26, 1964.

  At a time when Dylan was dishing out advice in song left, right, and center, "All I Really Want to Do" was his only real attempt at garnishing it with a little levity. The song’s constant triple-rhymes allow him to have some fun with the scenarios he has thought up. Even in its first draft—still not sure whether the song’s refrain should be, "All I wanna do is just be friends with [you]," or the inferior, "I don’t want t be your best friend"—he is insisting, "I don’t want t marry you / nor carry you / nor bury you." Nor does he "want t rob you blind / [or] steal your mind." The man is all heart.

  But its bam-bam-bam rhyme scheme also tied him down. By the time he wrote out a finished lyric, on the same page as a fair copy of "My Back Pages," the lines were exactly as he recorded them in a single take at the June 9 session. Written to make him and his audience feel better, the song kicks off an album intended to signify a change in direction. A quite different statement to his last album opener, "All I Really Want to Do" announces a set of songs written to get things off his chest.

  Dylan later claimed he didn’t want his fourth album to be called Another Side: "I thought it was just too corny and I just felt trouble coming when they titled it that." In fact, the album’s title appears among the album papers (twice); while "All I Really Want to Do" is just as much of a statement as its predecessor, disowning a mantle he had barely assumed. Only with the album’s failure—critical and commercial—did he start to cover his tracks, claiming to one supporter in the press, "the songs are insanely honest. . . . i needed t write them. . . . if i wasn’t so bloody famous, I’d look for rocks to kick down the street."

  And as a statement song, "All I Really Want to Do" was a regular feature of the sets to come, though early live performances have an unfortunate tendency to sound not so much ebullient as hopped-up on helium. It would take Dylan until 1978 to find the appropriate vocal tone to go with such an outlandish rhyme scheme, but when he did, it was with a devil-may-care attitude to someone else’s melody. The sing-along rendition played at the end of most shows on the year-long world tour took Paul Simon’s "59th Street Bridge Song" as its preferred accompaniment. Nor did Dylan feel tied to the original lyrics, hamming it up in true Vegas fashion on verses like:

  I ain’t lookin to make you fry,

  See you fly or watch you die . . .

  And I don’t want to drag you down,

  Chain you down or be your clown.

  {129} I’LL KEEP IT WITH MINE

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, June 1964; Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take [BIO]; January 14, 1965, Evening; January 27, 1966—1 take [TBS]; February 15, 1966—10 takes.

  Having left at least two classic creations off Times . . .—the beginning of a career-long trend—Dylan continued the practice on Another Side. Despite its Suze-centric subject matter, he donated "Mama, You Been on My Mind" to Baez, who probably enjoyed singing about his heartbreak over her main rival; while "I’ll Keep It with Mine" was written for, and apparently about, his traveling companion from Paris to Vernilya. Nico, Christa Päffgen’s adopted name, was introduced to Dylan by the French folksinger Hugues Aufray. An aspiring actress who had been obliged to take up modeling to make ends meet, Nico had a young son who was the apple of her eye. As with Sally G’s friend Sara and her daughter Maria, the young Dylan seemed to find it easier to relate to the woman/child package than just the woman.

  Dylan’s undoubted attraction to the imperious ice maiden cannot come as any great surprise (the Nordic blonde as statuesque Suze surrogate, discuss). Yet allowing her to accompany him all the way down to Greece when he had an album to write suggests he yearned for some female companionship. Their time together does not seem to have resulted in any great meeting of minds. As Nico later observed, "He did not treat me very seriously, but at least he was interested in my story. . . . As I was from Berlin, he asked me if I knew the playwright Brecht. . . . For a man who was preaching about politics he did not know his history too well. . . . We went . . . to Greece for a short time . . . and he wrote me a song about me and my little baby."

  And what an exquisite song it is. Author Paul Cable once described "I’ll Keep It with Mine" as "possibly the best thing he had written up to that point . . . [while] the lyrics form the least patronizing way I have yet heard of saying, ‘I’m older than you—therefore I know better.’" In just three verses, bound to a three-line refrain, Dylan manages to encapsulate so much of what he had been hoping to say in the trio of songs to Suze. In her case, though, he hadn’t got beyond his tangled feelings long enough to whisper words like, "If I can save you any time / Come on, give it to me / I’ll keep it with mine."

  Having apparently offered Nico the song on an "exclusive" basis, he refrained from releasing it on either Another Side or Bringing It All Back Home. Indeed, on June 9, Dylan elected not to record the song at all, even though his fourth album needed just such a song. When he later claimed, "I never even recorded ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine,’" an odd statement given that it accompanied the official release of a January 1965 studio outtake, he perhaps meant he did not record it at the time. For though he eventually made some three attempts to record the song "officially," these came after Nico blew her chance to turn pop diva.

  So when Nico called on him at the Savoy Hotel the following spring, it was still hers to do with as she wished. Instead, Nico wanted to talk about recording "Mr. Tambourine Man," not "I’ll Keep It with Mine," before proceeding to cut two songs suggested by Stoned impresario Andrew Loog Oldham ("I’m Not Saying" b/w "The Last Mile"). Hence why her first single sank like a stone. And Dylan hadn’t forgotten the song, which he had "demo-ed" at least twice—once as a demo for his music publisher and once as a piano "demo" for the fifth album. (There was also an aborted semi-electric Bringing It . . . version, the tape of which has been "lost," perhaps because the whole session was a disaster.) He demonstrated that he still remembered it well by pounding out the full tune on a stand-up piano backstage at the Albert Hall (included in the recent Dylan 65 Revisited documentary).

  When Nico hightailed it to New York in September 1965, she again sought Dylan out. Dylan, t
hough, was no longer the little boy lost she had met eighteen months earlier, and preferred to stand back as she attached herself to another trendy pop coterie, the one that centered around painter Andy Warhol. By the second week in January 1966, she would be rehearsing with a four-piece called the Velvet Underground. Much to the chagrin of Lou Reed and John Cale, she insisted they work up an arrangement of "I’ll Keep It with Mine"—which they did (a January 1966 rehearsal tape of it exists). But lacking the necessary business sense and already overburdened with gigantic egos, they refused to record it for their debut album.

  At the same time, Dylan seemed to be struggling to come up with a sufficient supply of songs worthy enough to succeed the groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited, and so, during a lull in a session he set up to record his next single, Dylan and his backing band (the Hawks) broke into a cursory rendition of "I’ll Keep It with Mine" (subsequently issued on The Bootleg Series). Reminded of the song’s undoubted quality, and with another set of sessions booked for February in Nashville, Dylan let the southern session musicians work through ten instrumental takes of the song at Columbia’s Music Row studio (perhaps as a stand-by song, in case he failed to come up with the goods). But he held back from recording a vocal, and that is the last we hear of the song from the songwriter himself.

  At least it is if we discount a certain unidentified song he sang to another "moon chick," Rosemary Gerrette. The Australian lady witnessed an all-night hotel session in Sydney in late April 1966, while Dylan awaited a flight to Copenhagen. Gerrette’s account of the evening includes Dylan playing one melody which he claimed, "I’ll never have it published [or] recorded. I wrote it for this way-out moon chick. We just sat on the floor on these mattresses . . . and like for two hours I spoke to her with my guitar. And she understood. . . . This isn’t quite like I played it, because it meant something to me at the time. But now it doesn’t." Presuming she heard something other than a lost 1966 song, then Nico might be a credible candidate for "this way-out moon chick," and "I’ll Keep It with Mine" a good candidate for the song he played.