Mama, wipe the blood from my face, I’m sick and tired of this war,
Got a black, lonely feeling and it’s hard to trace, feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.
By 1975–6, when the song formed the encore to every Rolling Thunder gig, the war was over. Dylan, though, was still asking his mama to wipe the blood from his face, but for a more prosaic reason: "I can’t see through it anymore / I need someone to talk to in a new hiding place / Feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door." The Revue rendition served not only as a rousing finale to every RTR show but also concluded both the Hard Rain TV special and that cinematic marathon, Renaldo and Clara.
Meanwhile, the song had been co-opted by an old friend, Eric Clapton, who inflicted a faux reggae arrangement on it in August 1975. This travesty was a surprising hit in its own right, so when Dylan was stuck for an arrangement on the 1978 "Alimony" Tour, he too decided to apply a lethal dose of reggae. Touring with a four-piece girl-choir for the first time ever, he denied the song its gospel heritage, instead playing it for kicks, thankfully dropping it from the set at the beginning of June.
When it was resurrected in June 1981, Dylan had found a way to blend the two strains, giving it a choppy, ska beat, but a gospel chorus. In the light of his conversion to Christianity, the song had naturally taken on an extra layer of meaning. Now, when asking Mama to remove his badge, he doesn’t "want it anymore." And when he arrives at heaven’s door, he is knocking "like so many times before"—suggesting that the door had been closed. He also adds another new verse, which suggests he’d found heaven on the high seas while sailing his new schooner, the Water Pearl:
Mama, tow my boat out to sea, pull it down from shore to shore,
Two brown eyes looking at me, feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.
In this apposite setting, at the conclusion of a set about the struggle for salvation, it endured to year’s end. It reappeared in 1986–7 when Dylan took to touring with the Queens of Rhythm, again serving as an encore that could be taken a number of ways. However, it took until August 6, 1988, at a show in Carlsbad, California, for Dylan to give one lucky audience (and author) a glimpse of how it sounded the day he played it to an unmoved Jerry Fielding and a highly emotional Sam Peckinpah as a solo acoustic valedictory. For others, the song has now become the anthem to end all anthems for anyone wanting to end an evening on a high moment. But only New York’s seminal punk outfit, Television, has come close to capturing the true spirit of the song in concert (and on The Blow-Up), with a version as instrumentally expressive as anything Dylan managed back in Burbank.
{291} NEVER SAY GOODBYE
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Ram’s Horn demo, June 1973; Village Recorder, CA, November 2, 1973—7 takes [PW—tk.7].
After landing in Los Angeles in late February, worried about one of his children—who needed medical treatment as a result of the months in Durango—Dylan decided to rent a home in Malibu and settle down there for a while. He was doubtless amused to see "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door" garnering nonstop airplay, making CBS, who had effectively let him leave the label, squirm into the bargain. But the songs were still not flowing, and again he resorted to a little communal composing. When Roger McGuinn came by that spring, they decided to see if they could come up with another "Ballad of Easy Rider." According to McGuinn, "We were trying to write a song together and I asked him if he had anything, and he said he had one that he started, but he was probably gonna use it himself; and he started playing ‘Never Say Goodbye.’"
The song he had "started" before McGuinn came along would be finished by June, when Dylan demo-ed it along with "Forever Young" and another new song, "Nobody ’Cept You," at an informal session in New York for his own music publisher, Ram’s Horn. That version remains unreleased, but it evidently had a verse which Dylan cut by the time he got around to recording it for his next album:
Time is all I have to give, you can have it if you choose,
With me you can live, never say goodbye.
The copyrighted lyrics also place the final verse’s reference to "baby blue" in the future tense: "You’ll change your last name, too.’ But Dylan clearly sings "You’ve changed your last name, too" on Planet Waves. Either way it seems safe to suggest that this "baby blue" is not that "baby blue." For the remainder of the song, Dylan allows himself to go back home again in his mind. "Twilight on the frozen lake / North wind about to break" represents a perfect evocation of Duluth in the still of winter. (As he told one local journalist in 1986, "I don’t remember much about Duluth, really. Except the foghorns.")
The childhood visions still remained, in dreams. As he informed one scribe in 2004, "The country where I came from—it’s pretty bleak. And it’s cold. And there’s a lot of water. So you could dream a lot. The difference between me now and then is that back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams." He told another interviewer around the same time, "I grew up in a very isolated place and throughout my boyhood years I felt like I was like a dog hunting in dreams, always looking for something, although I wasn’t sure what exactly." Duluth was in his blood.
In "Never Say Goodbye," he attempts to convey those dreams "made of iron and steel / with a big bouquet of roses." It may have been the recent purchase of a farm in Minnesota that prompted such reflection. Or it may reflect a more psychological source, reflected in what he later said about the contemporaneous "Forever Young": "It’s all in your heart: whatever keeps you that way, keeps you forever young . . . hav[ing] contact with what put you where you are." He was certainly in a nostalgic frame of mind that spring. As for "Never Say Goodbye," he carried it with him long enough to cut it as the first song out of the block at the November 1973 Planet Waves sessions. Just no further.
{292} NOBODY ’CEPT YOU
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Ram’s Horn demo, June 1973; Village Recorder, CA, November 2, 1973 [TBS]; November 5, 1973.
First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.
My work reflects the thoughts I had as a little kid that have become super-developed. —Dylan to Jon Bream, January 1978
"Nobody ’Cept You" is the second song in a trilogy of tunes that steered Dylan toward Planet Waves, the third one being "Something There Is About You." All three were written from the vantage point of someone trying to reconcile past and present through love for an unspecified muse. Connecting back to "I Don’t Want to Do It" (and maybe even "I’m Not There (1956)"), they lead on to the quasi-mystical breakthrough he shall achieve with Blood on the Tracks, where past and present are allowed to constantly interchange.
On "Nobody ’Cept You," he seems to feel it is only "you" who shares this connection to the past, specifically to a time when he would "play in the cemetery / Dance and sing and run when I was a child." He also connects the song to ones from his midsixties heyday, equating his feelings for her with a religious yearning inspired by "a hymn I used to hear / In the churches all the time / Make me feel so good inside / So peaceful, so sublime." In many ways, the song closes the book on songs of simple devotion from an amnesiac, and opens a new one in which desire has to be paid for with one’s blood.
Which makes "Nobody ’Cept You" the most personal of the three interconnected songs, and may explain why it was omitted from Planet Waves, though the song was recorded twice at the sessions—once with Manuel on drums, the other with Helm. But it would not explain why he ripped through the song at breakneck speed at the first half-a-dozen performances in January 1974, with just an acoustic guitar to guide him through. Or why at song’s end he added the line, "I’m still in love with you"—absent from the copyrighted version.
The song had by then been superseded by "Wedding Song," another protestation of constancy, but one couched in terms bound by this newer, more paradoxical frame
work, making it a likely replacement on the album itself. On a single night in January (the ninth, in Toronto), Dylan brought both elements together for the first and last time. After which it was left to "Wedding Song" to reclaim the present, "now that the past is gone."
{293} GOING, GOING, GONE
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004 [1976/78 versions: Words Fill My Head].
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 5, 1973—5 takes [PW—tk.5]; November 8—3 takes.
First known performance: Lakeland, FL, April 18, 1976.
Writing is such an isolated thing. You’re in such an isolated frame of mind. You have to get into or be in that place. In the old days, I could get to it real quick. . . . You’re always capable of it in your youth and especially if you’re unknown and nobody cares. . . . But once that all ends, then you have to create not only what you want to do, but you have to create the environment to do it in, which is double-hard. —Dylan to Kathryn Baker, August 1988
One constant during Dylan’s "amnesia" had been a forlorn quest for a place where he could write the kinds of songs he used to manage in that old "New York atmosphere." However, whether he was in Woodstock, on Fire Island, in Phoenix, Durango, or Malibu, the signals continued to come through only in fits and starts. So when he committed himself to a large national tour and a new album, both to be shared with The Band, he knew he needed to get back to writing like he used to whenever an album deadline approached.
With just three songs definitely written by September 1973, he headed out for the old East Coast. According to Rob Fraboni, "Bob went to New York by himself [my italics]. He stayed there for two to two and a half weeks and wrote most all the songs." "Most all the songs" appears to devolve down to six of the eleven originals recorded for the album, specifically "Going, Going, Gone," "Hazel," "You Angel You," "Something There Is About You," "Tough Mama," and "On a Night Like This."
He had presumably started sketching out some of these, "Something There Is About You" being one strong candidate. "Going, Going, Gone" would be another, with its telltale homily ("Grandma said . . . follow your heart") implying someone stuck in Malibu with the Minnesota blues. On the other hand, he could as easily have been enjoying Elvis Presley’s 1969 rendition of "Only the Strong Survive," another possible template for this depiction of his time as a "geographic"—someone who moves from place to place thinking the problem is location, location, location, but finds that their baggage always arrives first.
The recording of "Going, Going, Gone" is definitely soaked in an atmosphere of acute desperation. Maybe they turned the air-conditioner off for this one, because the guy really does sound like he is "hanging on the ledge." And though Robertson again excels himself, it is all about Dylan’s frayed performance. And yet the singer himself evidently didn’t rate it very highly, because when work on the album resumed, after a two-day break, on November 8, he turned up early to record his "first" vocal overdub.[1] According to the studio logs, there were three attempts, of which the DTLF (Dylan-Tape Liberation Front) recently located the third. At the end of another riveting performance, though, Dylan exasperatingly exclaims, "We could spend all day doing this, and I don’t even know if it is the right thing to do."
Ultimately, he goes with the unadulterated take they secured on the fifth. But he clearly wasn’t finished with the song, though, for now, he left it behind. He just needed to figure out where it needed to go. It did not feature on the 1974 tour, even in the early stages when he was almost promoting the still-unreleased album. Nor was it considered a suitable candidate for the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue campaign.
Only in 1976, when Dylan’s marriage was again teetering on the edge, and every show was a rambunctious wreck waiting to happen, did he decide to have another go, go, gone—not just toying with the arrangement but going to the song’s lyrical core. This new version was worked on extensively at pre-tour rehearsals in Clearwater, Dylan bouncing from new lyric to new lyric before unveiling it at the first show in Lakeland. And though he kept the original opening verse, little else of the 1973 lyric survives. Infidelity is rife, and this time he paints himself as the innocent party:
I’ve been sleeping on the road
With my head in the dust
Now I’ve just got to go
Before it’s all diamonds and rust.
I’m going, I’m going, I’m gone.
Perhaps the most important change, though, comes during the bridge, where his grandma is no longer preaching constancy ("Don’t you and your one true love ever part"). Rather, she dispenses a license to pursue the unattainable ("Don’t you and that lifelong dream ever part"), a line that survives every other rewrite on the month-long tour. Though the song never settled long enough to be featured on the Hard Rain TV special or the accompanying "soundtrack" LP, Dylan felt there was more there, and when he resumed rehearsals for another rolling revue, in the winter of 1978, it was ripe for another reconstruction.
The 1978 "Going, Going, Gone" proves to be both a dry run for the "so long, good luck and goodbye" portion of Street-Legal—meaning songs like "True Love Tends to Forget" and "We’d Better Talk This Over"—and an assertion of independence from "true love," in whatever shape or size it may stalk him. Included on At Budokan, the new lyrics were still not fully refined (nor do they resemble the ones in the LP booklet, taken verbatim from Planet Waves). When he finally decides he "don’t mind leaving" and he ain’t "afraid to go," it is to Robert Johnson’s "Four Until Late" that he turns for the perfect farewell putdown:
I’ve been hanging ’round your place too long,
Feeling like a clown,
You don’t know how to do nothing
But tear a good man’s reputation down,
I’m going, I’m going, I’m gone.
{294} HAZEL
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 5, 1973—8 takes [PW—tk.8].
First known performance: Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, November 25, 1976 [TLW].
"Hazel" is a song to which Dylan had been heading ever since "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight," with which it shares its economy of phrasing. Another captivating reaffirmation of desire for someone with "something I want plenty of," it seems to have come easily enough in the studio, with seven of the eight takes complete, though the thirty-two-year-old Dylan is struggling to hit those high notes on the bridge ("Oh, I don’t need any reminder . . ."). On the released take, when he says he’s "up on a hill," he sounds like someone gasping for air.
This may also explain why he has so rarely revisited one of his most affecting love ballads. And when he did attempt it at The Last Waltz, in 1976, he wrestled with the bridge twice, neither time entirely successfully. Indeed the song was omitted from the accompanying three-album document (though it subsequently appeared on the all-singing, all-dancing 2002 four-CD set, where we hear a new opening couplet: "Hazel, moondust in your eye / You’re going somewhere, but don’t say goodbye"). And when he slipped into it at the first MTV Unplugged performance, in November 1994, he didn’t return to it on the second night—or allow it to feature on the cut-up official CD—perhaps because he knew it sounded better in rehearsal, when he remembered it was supposed to have a harmonica break.
{295} SOMETHING THERE IS ABOUT YOU
Published lyrics: Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Village Recorder, CA, November 5, 1973; November 6, 1973—3 takes [PW—tk.3].
First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.
Though not demo-ed in June, along with "Never Say Goodbye" and "Nobody ’Cept You," "Something There Is About You" is the third such song to focus on a muse who is able to "remind" the songwriter "of something that used to be." It is also the most unabashed in its evocation of the Great Lakes and "old Duluth," openly referring to "the phantoms o
f my youth," while suggesting there is something about her "that brings back a long-forgotten truth," making for three contemporary cast-iron torch ballads where Dylan harps on about this gift of Hers. Could there be a more autobiographical relationship between such a muse, personified in his wife of eight years, and that other lifetime? Born and brought up in Delaware, it seems highly unlikely that Sara, née Shirley Noznisky, could have known Dylan before they both came to New York (at almost exactly the same time). And yet, according to a 1969 letter from a friend of hers, Sara was "always there," and "they re-met" [my italics] in New York.
Dylan was telling English journalist Ray Connolly at much the same time: "Sara and I grew up together in Minnesota. It wasn’t love at first sight. We met again in New York where she was working as a waitress. So we married and now we’ve got four children." OK, we might discount the first claim, but the last two sentences are both true. Even biographer Howard Sounes claims, albeit with his usual lack of solid evidence, that their early relationship closely resembled the account given in the second verse of "Tangled Up in Blue" ("She was married when we first met . . ."). "Something There Is About You," a precursor to that tale of star-crossed lovers, strongly suggests their lives intersected before he entered the whirlwind from which she saved him.
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