Dylan has elsewhere suggested the song had a straightforward genesis, addressing the concerns of a family man: "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental. The lines came to me, they were done in a minute." He also admitted that he wrote the song in Tucson. His suggestion that it was "done in a minute" does not tally with what he told engineer-producer Rob Fraboni when he was finally ready to record the song in November 1973: "He told me he had carried around ‘Forever Young’ in his head for about three years. He gets an idea for a song sometimes, he said, and he’s not ready to write it down. So he just keeps it with him and eventually it comes out."
What seems to have prompted Dylan to let "Forever Young" come out was hearing that damn Neil Young song on the radio. "Heart of Gold" was a song Young himself had been carrying around in his head for a year or more (the gripping piano version he recorded at Toronto’s Massey Hall in January 1971 has recently been released on CD). Even Young was surprised to find the song becoming a number-one single shortly after its release in February 1972, its success proving to be a far greater curse for him than Dylan.
At a time when every label was searching for a "new Dylan," Young seemed to be assimilating the sound of the old Dylan. And though they may not seem obvious twins, it is clear from Dylan’s comment above—apropos this song—that "Forever Young" was his retort. He was doing Young doing Dylan. And yes, that is a pun in the title. Though it has passed most folk by, he was doing a Dylanesque Young, forever.
It must still make Dylan inwardly chuckle every time he sees the expression "may you stay forever young" appropriated for some mushy purpose (like a sickly sweet film, a bad Rod Stewart song, and the like). For although the phrase has something of the King James Bible about it, it seems to be one Dylan can claim for his own. Yes, the song title appears in "Ode to a Grecian Urn," by one of his favorite poets, Keats, but in quite a different context—"For ever warm and still to be enjoyed / For ever panting, and for ever young."
Which is not to say that the phrase was not transmitted, along with the nightingale’s code, from John to Bob; just that its purpose changed out of all recognition. And the Bible, though it is not the source of the title or sentiment, does provide its fair share of reference points in the song. When he requests his son to "be courageous, stand upright and be strong," it is to the book of Joshua he is sending him: "Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law" (1:7).
Having written the song "not wanting to be too sentimental," Dylan was worried lest the song be taken as evidence of someone who’d gone soft in the head. So, although he demo-ed the song in June 1973, already a full year after he wrote it, he had no burning desire to start a new chapter with it. That demo was a surprise bonus track on the 1985 Biograph boxed set, and it reveals a lilting, country feel and an earnest determination to hold onto the words. But still, the song sat around. He finally recorded it for Planet Waves in November, a full eighteen months after its composition, by which time he naturally wondered whether he had lost a handle on the song. As he admitted to engineer Fraboni at these sessions, "I been carrying this song around in my head for . . . years . . . and now I come to record it and I just can’t decide how to do it." He had already carried the song around longer than anything written before.
"Forever Young" occupied him more than any other song at Village Recorder studios, being recorded on no less than five separate occasions, and in at least three different ways (fast, slow, acoustic). And yet, as had happened so often, the one time he found its hymnal core, it was a first take—probably on the ninth—that rendered everyone speechless. Fraboni remembers it well: "We only did one take of the slow version of ‘Forever Young.’ This take was so riveting, it was so powerful, so immediate . . . [that] when everybody came in nobody really said anything."
And yet Dylan was initially going to leave this take off the album. Having insisted he was fighting sentimentality all the way down the line, he was mortified by the immediate response by one person who heard it the day he recorded it. Rob Fraboni was there as Dylan found his song critiqued by some wannabe rock chick: "Jackie deShannon and Donna Weiss came by one night and on the same night Lou Kemp and this girl came by and she had made a crack to him, ‘C’mon, Bob, what!? Are you getting mushy in your old age?’ about ‘Forever Young.’ It was based on this comment that he wanted to leave [the slow version] off the record."
Thankfully, Fraboni and Robertson knew that this was how the song was meant to sound, and they managed to persuade Dylan to ignore the opinionated outsider. Its future was thus determined—a modern hymn for anyone still "busy being born." Predictably, its finale status on the whole 1974 tour, and the decision to put the song on Planet Waves twice—as an act of closure (on side one) and as a new beginning (on side two)—meant the song quickly got away from Dylan, acquiring a life of its own, even as he let it be.
It finally received an arrangement ornate enough for this son of "Father of Night" in 1978, becoming one of those lighter-in-the-dark moments. But as the world tour progressed, he began to resent the way he was expected to emphasize the anthemic quality implicit in such a personal song, and again he sought to provide the song with the same interpretative elbow room as earlier anthems. He tried to communicate that original resonance when discussing it in September: "It’s all in your heart: whatever keeps you that way, keeps you forever young. . . . It doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t grow old, but you still have contact with what put you where you are." Shortly afterward, he began to strip the song of some of its hand-holding elements.
Only when he found himself born again did he find renewed meaning in the song. That opening line invoking Jehovah no longer seemed out of place, as "Forever Young" became one of the more applicable pre-Christian songs restored to a revamped set in June 1981. This time he drove home its kinship to "Heart of Gold," the song that had leaned so heavily on "that harmonica and guitar sound" Dylan himself had "just stumbled on." Filling European arenas with his own swooping harmonica, separating the final verse from its tether, he rang the harmonic changes each and every night. Much to Dylan’s delight, its renewed resonance was not lost on audiences. And though he has struggled to hit those same soaring notes in post-1981 performances, on the odd magical night—say, in Birmingham in 1987, at the Supper Club in 1993, or at the penultimate show of 1995 in Philadelphia—he has renewed that contact with the Lord unconsciously invoked in Arizona.
{287} BILLY (THE BALLAD OF BILLY THE KID)
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [Recorded versions: Words Fill My Head].
Known studio recordings: CBS Studios, Mexico City, January 20, 1973 [4 takes, inc. Billy 4]; Burbank Studios, CA, February 1973 [multiple takes, inc. Billy 1; Billy 7] [PG].
Dylan was hardly the first folksinger to come up with a ballad about Billy the Kid, the notorious gunslinger who was shot down by his old friend, Sheriff Pat Garrett, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in 1881 (Garrett subsequently published An Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, a book he was uniquely qualified to write). Yet it was a fortuitous confluence that brought him to this place where he could write a ballad in a traditional vein about one of his childhood heroes, and then go on to play his sidekick, Alias, in a film largely based on the account given by Garrett.
The script to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid had been written by a screenwriter Dylan already knew, Rudy Wurlitzer. It was a personal message from Rudy that convinced him to supply a song or two, little knowing at the time that the script he’d been shown would barely figure in the finished film. Dylan immediately responded to the challenge of writing a conventional cowboy ballad concerning a figure even more enveloped in myth than John Wesley Hardin. He was soon ready to play the result to the film’s director, Sam Peckinpah, while other participants in the process sat in the adjoining room, as James Coburn recalls:
The night we were over at Sam’s house and we were al
l drinking tequila and carrying on and halfway through dinner, Sam says, "Okay kid, let’s see what you got. You bring your guitar with you?" They went in this little alcove. Sam had a rocking chair. Bobby sat down on a stool in front of this rocking chair. There was just the two of them in there. . . .
And Bobby played three or four tunes. And Sam came out with his handkerchief in his eye, "Goddamn kid! Who the hell is he? Who is that kid? Sign him up!"
And that was that. Dylan was onboard, as was his ballad of Billy, one of the tunes played to Peckinpah that November night. Whether Peckinpah realized it or not, Dylan had done his homework. He knew that, while Garrett was giving his side of the story, popular balladeers were already singing the outlaw into the annals of American folklore. So although Dylan adhered to the script more than he woud on later "theme tunes" (Band of the Hand, Wonder Boys), he also made a number of allusions to the traditional ballad of "Billy the Kid," notably "Gypsy queens will play your grand finale / Down in some Tularosa alley / Maybe in the Rio Pecos valley," a reworking of the original third verse:
Fair Mexican maidens play guitars and sing
A song about Billy, their boy-bandit king,
How ere his young manhood had reached its sad end,
He’d a notch in his pistol for twenty-one men.
What we don’t know is how many verses the ballad had when Dylan played it to Peckinpah. According to the man responsible for scoring the film, the irascible Jerry Fielding, "Dylan had this song he’d written, for which he had a limitless number of verses that he would sing in random order." The various recordings and multiple excerpts used in the film (on both its 1973 general release and 1984 re-release) partially bear out Fielding’s claim. I actually prefer some of the lost lines. "Laying around with some sweet senorita / Into her dark chamber she will greet ya / In the shadows of the mesa she will lead ya" has the edge on what he sings on "Billy 7" and later put in Lyrics. "There’s mirrors inside the minds of crazy faces" is also more Dylanesque than "There’s eyes behind the mirrors in empty places."
Much of the confusion surrounding "Billy" would ultimately be caused by the decision to break the song up, interspersing verses throughout the film, a subtle juxtaposition of ballad and film. By his own admission, this was Fielding’s idea—not Dylan’s. According to the next film director to work with Dylan, Richard Marquand, the singer-songwriter was unhappy with the idea, and very hurt "that they took his music and they relaid it . . . so that Bob would write a piece of music for a particular sequence, and then the studio afterwards, in post-
production, re-edited the whole thing." Only at the end of the so-called "director’s cut" (put out in 1984) does "Billy" appear in something approaching its entirety (verses 1–5, 8, and 6, in fact), as the credits languorously roll. Just as Alias intended.
{288} GOODBYE HOLLY
Published lyrics: Words Fill My Head.
Known studio recordings: CBS Studios, Mexico City, January 20, 1973.
"Goodbye Holly" was one of the songs Dylan recorded at a January 1973 all-night session in Mexico City designed to fill out the film score. Having written a central "theme song" for the film, it seems to have been Dylan’s intention (probably at Fielding’s or Peckinpah’s prompting) to write either a different piece of music or a variant on the central theme for each of the many murders that punctuate Peckinpah’s requiem to the Old West. Thus "Billy Surrenders" plays over the shoot-out at Billy’s hideout, which claims a couple of members of Billy’s gang; while "And He’s Killed Me Too" was supposed to provide the background to Billy gunning down the righteous Ollinger (it was replaced by "Cantina Theme"). "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door" would serve a similar function for the death of Alamosa Bill. Finally, "Final Theme" would serve as an atmospheric backdrop to the ritual killing of the last young gun, Billy the Kid himself.
As such, "Goodbye Holly" is self-explanatory. For the death of Holly, gunned down by Garrett at Jones Trading Post, Dylan had written a song focusing on the plight of those he left behind: "Goodbye Holly, Holly goodbye / Your wife’s gonna miss you, your babies gonna cry." Not that he forgets the larger picture (sic). Singing "All your good times have passed now and gone," he is asking, on behalf of Billy, Where have all the good times gone? It is not clear why the song was not used in the film. Instead, the forgettable "Cantina Theme" was made to suffice twice—once for Holly and once for Ollinger—which I doubt was what either Dylan or Peckinpah intended.
{289} ROCK ME MAMA (LIKE A WAGON WHEEL)
Known studio recordings: Burbank Studios, Burbank, CA, February 1973—2 takes.
Dylan’s habit of riffing on song ideas between studio takes has produced its share of oddities over the years. One of the more memorable is a throwaway ditty he dropped in between Billy this and Billy that at sessions in Burbank, intended to give the producer of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Gordon Carroll, more material to work into the film. The "song," if we can consider it that—and it has now been covered by Old Crow Medicine Show and copyrighted as "Wagon Wheel"—lasts barely ninety seconds the first time around, and just two minutes on a second, more spirited take, with Dylan trying to bluff a verse or two. But the song remains little more than a riff attached to the following chorus:
Rock me mama, like a wagon wheel,
Rock me mama, anyway you feel,
Hey, mama, rock me.
Rock me mama, like the wind and the rain,
Rock me mama, like a southbound train,
Hey, mama, rock me.
Despite this, it is one of the better song ideas he plays around with at these sessions, and the spirit of invention is one his fellow musicians—including the likes of Bruce Langhorne, Jim Keltner, and Roger McGuinn—readily accede to. The ease with which the others venture into Dylan’s slipstream affirms that the song may be the singer’s, but the sentiment and structure is not. "Rock Me Mama" had long been a blues commonplace, or if you like euphemism, for, well, guess. And it is the title of at least two quite different songs, both from former talismans: Sonny Terry (found on his solo Chain Gang Blues LP) and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. In each case they were altogether more upfront about what it is they’d like to "rock."
{290} KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [live variants: Words Fill My Head].
Known studio recordings: Burbank Studios, CA, February 1973 [PG].
First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.
Returning to Durango, where filming continued after the Mexico City session, Dylan already knew the handful of songs recorded at the all-night session would not suffice for Sam’s purposes. He also knew they would not meet with the approval of Jerry Fielding, the man brought in to score the film. Indeed, he expressed a suspicion at the Mexican session that "this guy Fielding’s gonna go nuts when he hears this!" Fielding was used to working with people who could read music, not those who liked to reinvent it. He later complained, "Dylan never understood what I wanted."
Dylan actually did his best to oblige, if not humor, Fielding, who told the songwriter "that he [had to] write at least one other piece of music, because you cannot possibly hope to deal with an entire picture on the basis of that one ballad. So finally he brought to the dubbing session another piece of music- ‘Knock knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’ Everybody loved it. It was shit. That was the end for me." One must presume Mr. Fielding did not end his days in A&R.
The song Dylan had written to order was an exercise in splendid simplicity, containing one of the easiest melodies this rarely complex composer ever conjured, along with two four-line verses and a chorus that merely reiterated the song’s title. Asked to come up with a song on the spot, Dylan summarized the ethos of the entire movie in two-and-a-half minutes, all the while writing something for the ages. Indeed, outside cineast enclaves, the film is now largely remembered for this very song, written to express everyt
hing Alamosa Bill is unable to say as he goes down to the river. According to Dylan, it was also the only song the studio used in the right place in the general release version of the film. ("The [Pat Garrett] music seemed to be scattered and used in every other place but the scenes which we did it for. Except for ‘Heaven’s Door.’")
Bill’s "death" scene pulls no visual punches. While the gospel choir is calling Bill home, Mama’s eyes are blinded by tears of pain. As such the power of the song may have worked against the director’s, and perhaps the songwriter’s, intentions. When the film was reedited and rescored in 1984, the original, vocal version of the song, which works so well in context, was replaced by an instrumental take, utilized originally at a later point. One wonders whether there was evidence that Peckinpah preferred it this way, given that, in the decade separating the original from this new edit, the song had become a major selling point in its own right.
Back in late January 1973, when the song was presented to Peckinpah, it was just another piece of his jigsaw that the studio was trying to dismantle before the director’s angry eye. Only when Dylan recorded both versions at Burbank in February 1973 did he seem to realize how good it was, inspired as he was again by a tight deadline and a specific goal. Having assembled a who’s who of L.A. session musicians to lend a hand, Dylan found himself in a unique situation, recording a song while the relevant scene from the film’s rushes were projected overhead. Drummer Jim Keltner was particularly moved: "In those days you were on a big soundstage, and you had this massive screen that you can see on the wall, [with] the scene . . . running when you’re playing. I cried through that whole take."
Though the lyrics were straightforward enough, Dylan never quite settled on a "final" form. On the one documented vocal outtake, Dylan consistently sings, "That long black train is comin’ on round," (or "pullin’ on down")—not, "That long black cloud is comin’ down." He also seems to have consistently preferred the former image in performance, not the one he put on record. When the song received its live debut, less than a year later, it was "that long black train" that was again pulling down the track. He had also come up with an additional verse, which could well be his one and only public comment on the Vietnam war, then entering its final stages:
Revolution in the Air Page 51