Well, I paid fifteen cents,
I did not care if I was right or wrong, [x2]
Then I saddled up a nightmare
And I rode her all night long.
Meanwhile, as the final take on another marathon evening in Studio A, Dylan cut another humorous little blues at the piano, listed simply as "Tune X," the fourth and final verse of which he sang as:
Well, I got my dark sunglasses,
I got for good luck my black tooth. [x2]
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’,
I just might tell you the truth.
The song in question proves to be "California" (as the timings on the studio log confirm). The following afternoon, when Dylan (with Wilson’s help) brought a band to lend a hand, he re-recorded "Outlaw Blues" with a lethal dose of electricity. By then he had decided to dump "California," save for its final verse, which he transposed to "Outlaw Blues." It was a wise decision. With this switcheroo, he swiftly got the take he wanted. He also unwittingly bequeathed the world forty years of arguments over the exact status of "California."
{139} LOVE MINUS ZERO / NO LIMIT
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—3 takes; January 14, 1965, afternoon—3 takes [BIABH—tk.3]; January 14, 1965, evening.
First known performance: Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, March 27, 1965.
By January 1965 Dylan was no longer content to let the song’s refrain equate to its title. Rather, as he claimed to Ray Coleman the following May, "The lead for the listener will lie in the title of the song." Presumably, listing "Farewell Angelina" as "Alcatraz to the Ninth Power" told us it was one of his mathematical songs. And not the only one. The session sheet for January 13, 1965, suggests money and mathematics had begun to preoccupy the wealthy young man, with songs logged as "Dime Store," "Bank Account Blues," and "Worse Than Money" (or "Love Minus Zero," "I’ll Keep It with Mine," and "She Belongs to Me"—as they are generally known).
Of these, "Dime Store" is the most prosaic, since there is a dime store (and a bus station) in the song in question. In fact, "Love Minus Zero" became the only song released with a more cryptic title than the one on the log sheet. The original label to the album remains the only place where that song title appears correctly:
LOVE MINUS ZERO
NO LIMIT
When Dylan began to talk about writing "mathematical songs" at a number of year-end press conferences, he wasn’t joking—even if it was useful as an act of obfuscation. He could have called this song "Sara," but he wanted to save that one. Sara Lowndes was the woman he now depicted in song as "true, like ice, like fire," as he confirmed to Robert Shelton the following March, saying he knew "just two holy people. Allen Ginsberg is one. The other . . . I just want to call ‘this person named Sara.’ What I mean by ‘holy’ is crossing all the boundaries of time and usefulness."
If the young songwriter still displayed a tendency to see all women as Earth Mothers, Madonnas, or whores (or to use more Gravesian terminology—lover, mother, or hag), the woman in this song combines the first two. Ten years later Sara would complain that, after all this talk about Goddesses and Madonnas, she should end up playing a whore in her husband’s celluloid vision, Renaldo and Clara. By then she had perhaps stopped "crossing all the boundaries of time and usefulness."
On the evidence of this song, her Zen-like detachment—commented on by everyone who knew her—was catching. For here Dylan begins to speak in irreconcilable opposites: she "speaks like silence," all the while managing to be "like ice" and "like fire." Most memorably of all, "She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all." John Keats, a poet Dylan grew to greatly admire, had a term for such mental balancing acts—"negative capability"—a notion he defined as "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Dylan actually offered to explain the above couplet to a (doubtless attractive) lady journalist later in 1965, in terms she might understand: "When you’ve tried to write this story about me, if you’re any good you’ll feel you’ve failed. But when you’ve tried and failed, and tried and failed—then you’ll have something." Which is as close as he came to explicating what would drive him toward that palace of wisdom over the next eighteen months. From the other side of the divide (1977 to be precise), he would define failure differently: "You fail only when you let death creep in and take over a part of your life that should be alive."
"Love Minus Zero" seems to be one of those songs he is still proud he wrote. Ultra-keen to perform it live, he has made it an acoustic evergreen from this point forward, save for its one incarnation with the not-so-magic flute on the 1978 World Tour. When he entered Studio A in January 1965, though, he still wasn’t sure how he wanted it to sound. Hence the two acoustic versions recorded on the thirteenth, when it was one of two songs remade at the end of the session. Both remakes—"Love Minus Zero" and "She Belongs to Me"—appear to have been serious contenders for the album; until, that is, he got an understated, on-the-money band version the following afternoon.
{140} SHE BELONGS TO ME
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—2 takes [NDH—tk.2]; January 14, 1965, afternoon—2 takes [BIABH—tk.2]; January 14, 1965, evening.
First known performance: Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, March 27, 1965.
The songs I was writing last year, songs like "Ballad in Plain D," they were what I call one-dimensional songs, but my new songs I’m trying to make more three-dimensional, you know. There’s more symbolism. They’re written on more than one level. —Bob Dylan, April 1965.
One cannot discount the possibility that "She Belongs to Me" and "Love Minus Zero" derived their inspiration from two entirely different dames (after all, while falling ever more under Sara’s spell, the man still invited Baez to come up and see him sometime). But it would be entirely in keeping with this new-found duality if each song was an equal and opposite depiction of the same "gypsy gal" (as per "Abandoned Love" and "Sara," both recorded at the same 1975 session—with the lady in question in attendance).
Each certainly received due diligence and a real attention to detail at the January sessions. After acoustic remakes on the thirteenth, they acquired instrumental embellishment the following day, as Dylan attempted to record them with a full band. He then got rid of most embellishments when, in the evening, he laid the songs down with just guitars and bass. On the released album—where the songs are separated from each other by a single female farmer—the performances reflect each other lyrically, vocally, and instrumentally.
The words, though, tell entirely different tales. On "Love Minus Zero," his "love" comes to him at song’s end "like some raven / at my window with a broken wing," whereas the artistic alter ego who belongs to him (actually vice versa) continues to demand that he should "bow down to her on Sunday" and "salute her when her birthday comes." This altogether more capricious lady would introduce proceedings on every night of the 1966 world tour, the singer’s devotion expressed in a series of soaring harmonica breaks. After this, though, it became an altogether rarer incursion into other nightly rituals. Finally, in 1992, it became a soft-shoe shuffle. In the meantime "She" spawned many a daughter, as Dylan’s attraction to "witchy women" continued unchecked.
{141} IT’S ALL OVER NOW, BABY BLUE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take [NDH]; January 14, 1965, evening; January 15, 1965—1 take [BIABH].
First known performance: Les Crane Show, NY, February 17, 1965.
After Another Side fell flat, Dylan abandoned recording entire albums in a si
ngle session. But he was still confident enough to cut the entire second side of BIABH in a single afternoon—January 15, 1965. And as he told a Nashville journalist in 1978, "I used to do [a] song live before you ever made a record, so it would evolve." Which was assuredly the case with "It’s Alright, Ma," "Gates of Eden," and "Mr. Tambourine Man," all recorded the same January afternoon. But "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue" was an exception that became the rule. An equally exemplary song, it was one he’d "taken into the studio before I was too familiar with [it]."
Still unsure how to give "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue" the best possible opportunity to "evolve into something else," Dylan recorded it acoustically (on the thirteenth), in a semi-electric guise (on the evening of the fourteenth), and finally, in a single superlative take the afternoon of the fifteenth, completing his most wordy album to date. Whatever possible deficiencies "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue" suffered as a result of Dylan delaying its live debut until the LP was completed, it has proven one of those rare midsixties works that could flit lightly from acoustic to electric and back again.
At the same time, it established a new way to say farewell to someone who was once a close friend but now on another wavelength. This would become something of a forte in the coming eighteen months. Its admonitory tone would even start to become a little wearing by the time of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" and "One of Us Must Know." But, for now, he still wanted to let the subject down gently but firmly, personally springing for a box of metaphorical matches.
Inevitably, because of its intensely personal tone, the song has been seen in an autobiographical light, and a number of names have been put forward as Angelina’s kid brother. "Blue" has even been taken as a pun on David Blue’s (né Cohen) adopted name. However, the most persistent candidate for these words of wisdom has been Paul Clayton. Clayton has generally been portrayed as just another faded folkie who stood too close to the man’s flame—a gross oversimplification. And Dylan failed to fully set the story straight even when he came to write Chronicles, though he treated Clayton generously, both in terms of space assigned and in evident affection for the man.
The old friends had parted company at the crossroads of Dylan’s electric apostasy, not because Clayton disliked Dylan’s new direction, but because Clayton’s amphetamine abuse had made him impossible to be around, a warning Dylan chose not to heed himself. Hence, perhaps, why Dylan still finds it a song to which he can relate. As for Clayton, he did not stick around long enough to recognize the quality of the advice Dylan was dispensing. Indeed, barely had Dylan begun the first leg of his 1966 world tour when the news came through that he had killed himself. Already part of the nightly ritual, "Baby Blue" was now pushed to ever greater levels of intensity, as Dylan skirted his own, individual precipice.
{142} BOB DYLAN’S 115TH DREAM
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—2 takes; January 14, 1965, afternoon—2 takes [BIABH—tks.1+2]; January 14, 1965, evening.
First known performance: Tower Theatre, Philadelphia, October 13, 1988.
When Dylan told journalist Jules Siegel in April 1966, "I see things that other people don’t see. . . . They laugh," he could have been talking about "115th Dream." Of course in the case of "115th Dream," he meant for them to laugh. He had, after all, produced in under six minutes a 1066 and All That version of American history that takes a baseball bat to literature, history, and religion. As kaleidoscopic as "Mr. Tambourine Man," as off-beat as "Talkin’ World War III Blues," as anarchic as "I Shall Be Free," the song begins with the narrator on a version of the Mayflower that doubles as Herman Melville’s whaling ship, and ends with him getting the hell out of there just as Columbus sails into the bay. Between such totemic occurrences, he truncates the early history of his homeland into one withering sentence: "Let’s set up a fort / And start buying the place with beads." As for those Puritans, he demolishes them in a single vignette:
Well, I rapped upon a house with the U.S. flag upon display
I said, "Could you help me out, I got some friends down the way."
The man says, "Get out of here, I’ll tear you limb from limb."
I said, "You know they refused Jesus too," He said, "You’re not Him."
Hard on the Cuban heels of "Outlaw Blues" and "On the Road Again," "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream" leaves them laughing before they flip the record over (as we used to do) to an altogether more existential side. He even leaves a little joke at his own expense etched in vinyl. Providing an insight into the entirely new experience of working with a band, he keeps the falsest of false starts, the first take on the afternoon of the fourteenth, which collapses when nobody joins in on cue.
Dylan and his band were quick learners, though, as "115th Dream" duly demonstrates. They nail the song on the very next take, even at the fair ol’ clip they take it (it still takes them a half-minute more than it took Dylan on his own, the previous evening). When Dylan
resurrected the song, at his eldest son’s behest, during a week-long New York residency in October 1988, such sureness is long gone. At Radio City the song became something of a drag, perhaps reinforcing the truism that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat its mistakes.
{143} ON THE ROAD AGAIN
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965; January 14, 1965, afternoon—4 takes; January 15, 1965—13 takes [BIABH—tk.13].
Sandwiched between the lightweight "Outlaw Blues" and the panoramic insanity of "115th Dream," "On the Road Again" has not really received its fair due. It is something of a minor masterpiece. And Dylan himself clearly felt there was something worth preserving in this account of a home life that reads like some long lost episode of The Addams Family written by Luis Buñuel. Having run the song down acoustically on the thirteenth, when it came to its electric cousins on the fourteenth and fifteenth, something kept tripping the man up. Of the thirteen takes at the final Bringing It . . . session, just three were complete (including the first, as it happens). But he remained determined to make it work, and when he did, it sprang the springs of his kaleidoscopic mind. He never chanced his arm again, though, and the song remains just one of two songs from this truly groundbreaking album never performed in concert.
{144} YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THAT
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965—1 take.
Dylan must have been working on the songs for Bringing It . . . until the very last minute, for here is one song idea he never quite finished up. (And there may have been others, now lost. Photographer Daniel Kramer says Dylan "brought eighteen new songs with him," yet he apparently only recorded sixteen.) Recorded as the eleventh song on the thirteenth, "You Don’t Have to Do That"—or as it is logged, "Bending Down on My Stomach Looking West"—is clearly a work in progress (at best), and/or proof positive that sometimes there really is no success like failure. Dylan’s commitment to the idea seems fairly marginal. He calls out to Wilson at the song’s start, "I’m not gonna do it!" before vamping a verse about someone who runs around "piking / like a chicken with his head off."
After less than a minute, he’s had enough and announces he’s "going to play on the piano." Which is rather odd, because the only song Dylan definitely performed at the piano on this day was "I’ll Keep It with Mine," which he’d already recorded (as "Bank Account Blues"). To add to the mystery, CO85280 (a.k.a. "Bending Down . . .") times out on the session sheet at two minutes and forty-two seconds, about two minutes longer than the fragment in circulation. So either he recut the song at the piano, or there is another "lost" song yet to be discovered on the session tape, one that also conjured up that unique perspective accorded by anyone on his stomach, looking west.
{145} MAGGIE’S FARM
Published l
yrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, January 15, 1965—1 take [BIABH].
First known performance: Newport Folk Festival, July 25, 1965 [NDH] [OSOTM].
A central song in Dylan iconography, "Maggie’s Farm" may well have been hastily penned the night before the final Bringing It . . . session. It was overlooked on the thirteenth, when the remainder of the album—acoustic epics excepted—got a test run. If so, it was heaven sent. He cut the song in a single take, knowing any further foray would be futile. According to Daniel Kramer, "When the playback of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ was heard over the studio speakers, we were all elated. There was no question about it—it swung, it was good music, and, most of all, it was Dylan."
An electric reworking of the traditional "Down on Penny’s Farm," "Maggie’s Farm" (re)inverted the country/city dynamic of "Hard Times in New York Town," making the lady’s farm a place where exploitation is rife, rebellion is imminent, and escape to the city a dream. The one song not cut acoustically at these sessions, it was nonetheless tried in an acoustic setting a few months later, at a June 1 rehearsal for his solo BBC-TV special. Unconvinced it worked that way, Dylan held off playing the song live until fronting the Elston Gunn Blues Band at Newport, where it was largely lost in the feedback off and on the stage (though not on the recent DVD, where it soars).
Revolution in the Air Page 27