The Spanish Connection: the Influence of Spanish and Hispanic Culture on Dylan’s Work

Throughout his entire career, Bob Dylan has shown a deep connection to the Spanish-speaking world, from his artistic world even to his dressing habits. The reason is probably to be found in some kind of attraction felt by Dylan towards this culture, rather than in his own background.

In facts, the Zimmermans moved to the United States from what was then Russia. Part of his relatives, on his father’s side, were from Odessa (now in Ukraine). They settled down in Minnesota probably because they were used to that kind of climate. In fact, that part of the United States, from Maine all the way to North Dakota, is still inhabited by people who came to the US from the far northern and eastern parts of Europe, like Russia, Scandinavia and so on.

Besides, as Dylan is Ashkenazim and not Sephardim (1), he must have developed this Spanish interest on his own.

From his early works on, even the non-musical ones, he quotes Spanish and Hispanic influences in several different ways(2): there are songs which mention the word ’Spanish’ in the title ("Boots of Spanish Leather", "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "Spanish is the Loving Tongue", actually a traditional song), songs with Spanish words or names in them ("Something There is About You"- including a reference to Danny Lopez, a name of clear Hispanic roots, "Señor" and "Silvio", the last-named co-written with Robert Hunter), songs mentioning Mexico or a Mexican city or state ("Farewell", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" – the city of Juárez, actually also mentioned in Kerouac’s "On the Road"-, "Goin' to Acapulco", "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" again, with the mention of Sonora, "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", "Romance in Durango", "True Love Tends to Forget", "Caribbean Wind", "Something is Burning, Baby" – the last-named containing the phrase "Mexico City Blues", which is the title of a book of poems [242 choruses], again by Kerouac, who, in his entire production writes a lot about Mexico -, "Brownsville Girl", a song co-written with Sam Shepard, the author of "The Rolling Thunder Logbook", a diary of the first Rolling Thunder Revue), songs mentioning Argentina or Argentinian themes ("Farewell Angelina"- the tango (3); -, "Angelina"(4), "Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar" – Buenos Aires -, "Union Sundown"), songs mentioning Cuba or Fidel Castro ("Who Killed Davy Moore?", "Motorpsycho Nitemare", "I Shall Be Free No.10") and songs mentioning Central American states ("Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"- the Panamanian Moon -, and, again, "Union Sundown" – El Salvador).

There are also so many other references, to things with a distinctively Spanish character, such as the ‘Spanish manners’ of the Sad-Eyed Lady or the ‘Spanish moon’ in "Abandoned Love".

Last but not least we have to consider even his non-song works. So we find references to Spain and the Spanish culture and language even in "My Life in a Stolen Moment" - where he actually says he was able to speak Spanish and refers to New Mexico -, "Some Other Kind of Songs" – with Pancho Villa and Zapata named, though not in capital letters, as is typical of Dylan’s early style -, the "Bringing it All Back Home" sleevenotes – Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Aztec anthropology -, and the name Brunella(5) in "Alternatives to College".

Another thing to remember is that in 1973 Bob Dylan appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", a western filmed in Durango, where he was playing the role of Alias, Bonney’s friend and confident. He also composed the soundtrack, with all the many references and names in it.

Whether it’s true or not that Bob Dylan can actually speak Spanish, this culture is the probably most quoted and cited foreign one in his works(6).

The "peak" of this connection covers the period between 1973 and 1978. In 1973 Dylan, after filming and after the release of one of his most controversial albums, "Dylan (A Fool Such As I)", recorded "Planet Waves" and went touring with the Band, then worked on "Blood on the Tracks", took a brief vacation in Corsica where he met the Queen of Gypsies(7), started to work on "Desire", completed the Rolling Thunder Revue (first and second) and the 1978 tour and then recorded the "Street Legal" album.

Although "Blood on the Tracks" doesn’t reveal much about the Spanish connection, save for the mention of Mexico in "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", by the time the album was released Dylan had already been to Corsica, where he wrote "One More Cup of Coffee", actually one of the two "Desire" songs he wrote without the co-help of Jacques Levy, a song in a minor key using the so-called scala minore armonica(8), which gives it an authentic Spanish and Near Eastern feeling - elements obviously connected since Spain was long dominated by the Moors.

"Isis", with its 6/8 tempo (despite the fact that the sheet music says 3/4; listen to the drums!) is another example of this influence. Dylan has only rarely used this composed tempo (other examples are "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and "Sara", in which he refers to Portugal and Savanna-la-Mar, a town in Jamaica); where he has, it has been to give the songs a particular empathy. The fact that the two songs cited in parentheses are in the same tempo, considering the deep personal meaning of the words, confirms this theory.

The sound of the violin played by Scarlet Rivera actually gives all the album, and its outtakes "Golden Loom" and "Abandoned Love", an exotic, Spanish gipsy feeling. "Oh Sister" has a fine combination of violin and harmonica, "Romance in Durango" features mandolin and trumpet, a mandolin played in a totally different way from the style offered by Bucky Baxter in the live concerts. Actually even the shape of the instrument itself - a flat-bottomed one for Baxter - can explain the different sound.

The album "Street Legal" explores a different Spanish-related sound, actually that of Central and South America. Right from the beginning of "Changing of the Guards", with its continuously pecking mandolin and the use of backing vocals, half American and half gipsy style, and the mention of the market-place, so common a feature in Latin America and Spain, to the 12/8 tempo of "No Time To Think" characterized by David Mansfield’s violin (the same musician plays mandolin on "Guards"), the trumpet on "Is Your Love in Vain?" played by Steve Madaio, who is also the trumpeter on "Brownsville Girl", the percussions and mandolin on "Señor", it is obvious this is the most Latino-sounding of Dylan’s albums.

Concerning his live production, the first and second Rolling Thunder Revue show deep traces of this inclination. The way the band and their families lived during these two tours clearly recalls the gypsy way of life. Dylan himself, in the first one, dressed in a Mexican way – as he did, in a sense, during part of his 1978 World Tour, although somebody suggested he was dressing like Neil Diamond, giving rise to comments that Dylan had hit the "way to Vegas", as actually happened to Elvis Presley near the end of his career.

Another interesting connection arises from the recent Dylan-Simon Tour. Paul Simon’s most recent work, the controversial musical "The Capeman" - about the life of Salvador Agron, a Puerto Rican member of a gang called the Vampires that in 1959 killed a young boy, leading to Agron’s subsequent arrest - takes part in Spanish Harlem, the East side of Harlem - still on the island of Manhattan, where Dylan settled down two years later, at the other end of it, Greenwich Village.

The state of Minnesota, on the Great Lakes, near the Canadian border, is one of the coldest parts of the United States during the winter, while in the summer it gets very warm and humid.

Apparently, unlike other places like California or the southern part of the East Coast, this corner of the world’s third-biggest country, in terms of area, doesn’t really feel appealing as a place to live in. The Iron Range, the world’s biggest opencast mine, if on the one hand it could have offered a lot of job opportunities, on the other hand may have made the entire landscape look even more depressing, even in the warm months of the year.

Notwithstanding, Minnesota has given the world two major talents of this century’s American artistic production: in chronological order, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1) and Bob Dylan.

Their respective works cover more or less the entire century, with a blank between 1941 (Fitzgerald died in 1940, one year before Joyce and one year before Dylan himself was born) and 1960, when Dylan started to write his songs. Both of them can be considered as speakers for their generation: the Lost Generation for Fitzgerald and the 60s for Bob Dylan.

Their background and education, although apparently slightly different, actually have some points in common.

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, the state capital, on September 24th 1896. His father, Edward, originally from Maryland, represented the archetype of the southern gentleman, very well-mannered but full of obsolete ideas and philosophy: the typical character Margaret Mitchell described in her most famous work, "Gone With the Wind". His mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of an immigrant from Ireland, who fled his homeland because of its tragic condition, and whose activity as a wholesale dealer in grocery products made him rich. His family, then, fully represent the contrast between aristocracy and "nouveaux riches" that, from that moment on, would influence the transformation of American society: the archetype of a highly stratified society whose only parameter is richness.

Financial problems (the failure of a small furniture-dealing business) between 1898 and 1908 forced the Fitzgeralds to leave Minnesota and move to Buffalo, then Syracuse, New York, where Edward worked as a salesman; later they returned to St. Paul, to Francis’ disappointment, as his father started to sponge on his wife’s belongings.

Then Francis’ school studies, in Minnesota and New Jersey, were all but exciting; nevertheless, the school presses published some of his short stories and he also wrote some theatre plays.

In 1913 he entered Princeton University, fortress of the American tradition - an education he would never be able, because of several reasons, to complete. Inside of it, the Triangle Club, whose goal was to stage a musical each year, gave him the opportunity to write a libretto. On the heels of it, hoping to be nominated president of the club, he started his sophomore year, a very complicated one. The lack of success in his studies prevented him from becoming president of the club, causing him to become, in the end, prisoner of the frustrations he always tried to get rid of.

His most remarkable achievement in Princeton was the reading of the great writers: Whitman, Shaw, Mackenzie, Tolstoy and so on; something forming the backbone of his true education.

On October 26th 1917, the American Army accepted his application. Fitzgerald left Princeton without a degree, a situation he never remedied.

In 1919, as his service in the Army came to an end and after writing his first novel, "The Romantic Egoist" (later to become "This Side of Paradise"), he moved to New York.

On March 3rd 1920, more or less contemporaneously with the publication of his first novel, he married Zelda Sayre, sharing with her a life of parties and poverty.

The following years saw other novels: "The Beautiful and Damned", "The Great Gatsby", completed in France in 1925 where the couple began to have problems, even because of extramarital ‘dangerous liaisons’, and where the financial situation started to become precarious. Last but not least, the first symptoms of Zelda’s serious illnesses began to appear. But also during this European stay Fitzgerald had the opportunity to meet Ernest Hemingway (who had no good words for him) and James Joyce.

Back in America, he started working in Hollywood, where his screenplays received little attention. And with his commercial success his alcoholic problems began to get serious and serious.

His life was to get worse. In 1934 "Tender is the Night" appeared, and Zelda, in a critical state, was unable to get out of her mental illness (2).

Tuberculosis would make his health even more unstable and during a crisis the following year he tried to commit suicide.

At 39, Fitzgerald was a prematurely old man, a man who had experienced success, excess and frustration. He died at forty-four in Hollywood, while working on "The Last Tycoon".

Fitzgerald’s personal life has little in common with Bob Dylan’s: unlike the novelist, Dylan never really liked that glamour climax around his work, and the recent years, spent almost totally touring, are a confirmation of this trend.

Like Fitzgerald, he arrived in New York after an abortive higher education experience (3).

What really links them is their work. Although expressing themselves in different arts, they both represent, as previously said, a generation.

Fitzgerald’s characters are the personification of the Twenties, the will to give richness a new and more styled dimension, starting from old aesthetic values adapted to the changed times and supported by that (fake) economic boom which in 1929 exploded as a catastrophe, forcing him to leave for Europe. And there is the endorsement of Roosevelt’s New Deal, as the Twenties were followed by the Thirties, a decade of disorder and lack of direction.

New York, so much condemned as the grave of human relationships, a city living too quickly, too fast for the enjoyment of life’s pleasure’s, but also the one offering more cultural opportunities than anywhere else in the United States; Hollywood, the dream factory and the place of the decline of man, (and some of his screenplays were refused there).

Characters like the young girl in "Tender is the Night", fascinated by the people around her up to the point of falling in love with someone after barely seeing him a few times, the result being madness.

But the character that, more than any other, represents this decade, and at the same time seems very like an early Dylan figure, is Jay Gatsby.

Venerated as an icon, the wonderful host of parties lasting for entire weekends, this man is the personification of the American dream; someone who climbs up the ladder of society so quickly hiding his past (later we find out that Jay Gatsby is not even his real name, but one he chose during a cruise in Minnesota - Duluth to be precise - on a private yacht, as the man who he was working for gave him an extremely expensive coat and all his manners). And from that moment on, his life is a continuous escalation, right up to his murder and his funeral, where nobody shows up but his neighbour and one older man show up, in a reflection of what Jimmy Cox indirectly affirmed in his 1922 song "Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out". A life only apparently full of joys, but in reality dominated by a growing melancholy and his frustrated love for a woman married to someone else, all culminating in a murder made by mistake.

The thing distinguishing Dylan and Fitzgerald is that, while the novelist’s works are always autobiographical, Dylan’s ones are not, or at least the autobiographic aspect is not fundamental in his work, if not to be used a posteriori.

Like Jay Gatsby, Robert Zimmerman changed his name - to Bob Dylan; but the change was only external because, to paraphrase a line in Almodóvar’s most recent film, everyone is authentic as far as he represents the idea he has of himself.

Dylan in his lyrics chronicled the developments of the 60s in the United States: the fear of the nuclear menace ("A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall"), the witch-hunt mentality ("Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues", censored out of the Ed Sullivan show), the difficult relationship with Cuba, the absence of a historical background ("Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream") and the search for peace of mind (4).

And, as with Fitzgerald and the 20’s, the 60’s were followed by the seventies, a chaotic decade, characterised by the lack of direction and the repentance for a war that, impossible though it seemed, the Americans managed to lose.

Between Fitzgerald and Dylan came the Beats: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and others. After the war and the Great Depression came the cry for freedom, the myth of the frontier renewed in the journeys of Kerouac, a cult writer whose works, apparently defying all logic and influenced by the use of drugs and alcohol, hid an extremely sweet and shy nature.

Thus Dylan places himself as part of the sequence of the history of American society. After the prosperity of the Twenties, the disaster of the war and the massive energy accompanied by the rejection of the "money-god" of the Fifties, the country looked back, in search of its roots, its reasons, its goals.

Dylan, like Fitzgerald, had no recognition from the academy (5); like the novelist, at a certain point he tried to find a reason for his production in the past, later describing that time as the worst period of his life.

Unlike some of the above mentioned artists, Dylan has the merit to have survived the 60’s, re-emerged in the mid-seventies, and reinforced his figure in the late eighties, a decade otherwise full of "look" and little else. And he did it with his values, his awareness that, if one doesn’t know where he’s coming from, in the end the present is uncertain - and with his mistakes, but also the desire to get rid of all the labels people put on him and the mistakes he had committed because of that.

Notes:

"Infidels" came out in 1983, soon after another war, between Syria and Lebanon, shocked the Near East. After the peace in 1979 between Israel and Egypt, the promised land, after a series of conflicts, seemed to have acquired a definite shape. Notwithstanding, the political situation in that part of the near East was far from stable. This tendency seemed to confirm the status of the Jewish person, for whom nothing is really safe or stable. Surrounded by Islamic countries, its main city the centre of the three monotheist religions, the Israeli reality is, and has always been, a chapter of its own.

Had Bob Dylan returned to his roots at a different time, that moment wouldn't have been so deeply analysed, or wouldn't have been looked at as a turning-point in his career. The European tour with Santana which followed the release of the album, the filming of two videos to promote its sales, the fact that Bob Dylan actively produced the album as well (he previously co-produced "Shot of Love", with Chuck Plotkin), all clearly suggest a change in his attitude. The recording, for instance, is really accurate, as opposed to "Shot of Love", where it is in some places indeed rather approximate. Plus, "Infidels" is in a sense a concept album. The main figure in it is the Jewish culture, its identity.

The first three songs, "Jokerman", "Sweetheart Like You" and "Neighborhood Bully" should be enough to prove this . Just in case they are not, another brilliant (although a little cryptic) example is given by "Man of Peace" - not to mention "I and I".

After picturing past and present of the Jewish culture, with a dark reference to the Book of Revelation and apocalypse, Dylan adjusts the target on a particular subject, the Jewish woman.

"Sweetheart Like You", a superb song, with great musical input from Mark Knopfler and an extremely sensual atmosphere, is a very interesting creation. Five stanzas and two bridges, a great guitar solo in the end, the structure is quite classic in Dylan's production; nothing surprising, but the result is great.

According to Clinton Heylin's "Behind the Shades", the song was half improvised in the studio. Dylan started the song many times, developing it as the various tracks followed one another. However the genesis might have been, the final result is something remarkably homogeneous.

The song is about the Jewish woman, at every step of her life.

Starting from this, the lyrics follow, in spite of what one may think after knowing how they were written, a very interesting scheme.

The first stanza seems to be about the Jewish woman as a little girl, already obscured by a man's figure, in this case her father.

This aspect may be seen in a new light if one considers the information supplied in a very interesting article, published in "Time", Oct 25^th 1999, p. 42, about the Haredi (literally, the "fearful"), Israel's ultra-orthodox community. Haredi women live in the shadow of their husbands, who keep studying Judaism full-time until the age of 42, and then rarely find a job, lacking marketable skills. During all this time, it's the woman who takes care of the household, raising children and dealing with all problems - and yet still overshadowed by their husbands.

Another reference may be found in an interview in "Rolling Stone" from 1984. If anyone ever had a doubt whether he was pro-women, these few questions – and relative answers – should wipe away every possible doubt. Although his position about abortion was a little drastic, the meaning of his words was that the gender that really rules the world is the female one. Men find motivations and energies through women's presence and closeness. On the other hand, ever since "Hattie Carrol", Dylan had been examining woman's condition in a very detailed way. "North Country Blues", "My Back Pages", "Maggie's Farm", "Just Like a Woman" and "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands" are other interesting examples.

The first lines: "The pressure's down, the boss ain't here, he gone North for a while. They say that vanity got the best of him, but he sure left here in style".

The boss, the man, has left, going North, maybe to study. He left in style, though vanity seems to have taken the best of him.

"Vanity" is a very important concept in the book of Ecclesiastes. This book opens with a very arresting phrase, "vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas", something later repeated in chapter 12. A deep sentence: the one who pays attention to material things misses very important issues. So does the man who, spending his time studying the Torah, neglects his duties as a father and a husband.

All of a sudden, a nice figure comes out of the blue. A little figure topped by an attractive hat, whose smile is really innocent and at the same time impossible to resist. The question is obvious: "What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?"

Things and time pass in the second stanza, as the little girl has grown and is facing a relationship with someone of the opposite gender - something not necessarily sexual, actually I think not at all. It's the time of life when people begin to acknowledge what their future life will be.

A man is talking to this girl, telling her he once knew a woman who looked like her and was looking for a whole man, not just a half. A whole man may be someone who takes care of his family and fully fulfils his duties, and respects a hierarchy without claiming privileges. "You kinda remind me of her when you laugh" are words that seem to come directly from another Dylan interview, when he affirmed that, in spite of what men had done to women throughout the entire history of humanity, it was amazing that women still had a sense of humour. Maybe this humour represents an escape, a way of making things lighter.

The queen and the flick of the wrist appear like elegant metaphors to introduce the delicate issue of the Jewish divorce. The Jewish law allows men to divorce their wives by simply 'sending them back'. That said, to survive this game all they have to do is making the queen disappear. Again, what's a woman doing here?

The third stanza is another step forward: the girl has become a wife, and is now raising children. The affirmation that a woman should be at home because that's where she belongs doesn't sound to me as a declaration of the man's superiority, by reason of which a woman must be at his service. Actually, it seems ironic and protective towards the children, towards "somebody nice who don't know how to do you wrong". Indeed, this woman has to bring up these children trying to protect their innocence. It's as if – and the following lines indirectly confirm this – she has compromised her life by marrying this man, something she never expected the first time she kissed him.

The bridge changes the song's mood. It's no longer an analysis of the woman's situation, it's an encouragement. Whoever had to bear such frustration is able to start anew, and make a name for herself.

When the song gets back to the fourth stanza, the mood changes again. This time it's extremely sour. In my opinion, there could be two interpretations: this woman counts not for what she is, but for what her father is, and the ones around her pretend to be friends of hers, but as she turns her back on them they start saying bad things about her. The image of the fireproof floor suggests something able to resist even the hardest trials. Each of the many mansions has a floor like this, as if these mansions were in reality skills, resources. Thus the woman had better leave this environment before it gets too late, since even the other ones do not seem to be very reliable.

The second meaning could be that the woman has been married because of what she represents or where she comes from, not for what she really is. Again, the best advice one could give her is to leave.

From this fourth stanza we can see the point of view of the song is slowly changing. If, at the beginning, it was as if somebody was telling a story and talking to a woman, giving her advice and making her aware of particulars she never noticed before, from the second bridge all the way to the end the narrator is focusing his words on the outside, how people around this woman see society and how it must be seen from outside. The words "got to have your own harem when you come in the door" are not pertaining to the Jewish tradition. A Jewish man cannot be polygamous, unlike a Muslim, some of whom are. On the other hand, that doesn't mean he is not allowed to have mistresses while his wife is again at home 'taking care of somebody nice'; in the end, according to the third stanza, that's where she belongs and should be. The price for this is to play the harp until your lips bleed, that is to give all you have to a certain cause and never complain.

The first four lines of the last stanza are particularly strong and, alas, extremely real in so many cases. Patriotism seen as an absolute issue is, as well as pride, extremely dangerous and omnicomprehensive. Besides, being so extreme, it's something people can use to aim for their goals. Something to which a scoundrel clings when all the other possibilities didn't bring to any satisfying results. The consequence is obvious: get this kind of support, and even if you steal a lot you can be the King. This brings my mind, and many other Italian ones, to the early nineties, when a group of magistrates charged a large number of political leaders with corruption, in what is widely known as l'operazione mani pulite (clean hands operation). After an incredible number of trials and condemnations, the truth came out: almost all the political leaders used and put their hands on illegal money, being absolutely aware of it.

Although Bob Dylan declared, in the abovementioned interview, that his point of view about the Israeli and Palestinian question wasn't clear because he was living in the United States (although he had visited Israel a few months before, and went back several times afterwards), here he is taking a position and revealing his own opinion. Perhaps he is not talking about Israel, or not only about Israel, but it is clear he is speaking his mind.

If this is the situation, he continues, there's only one more level to descend before being in the land of permanent bliss - another severe and at the same time ironic statement, which is followed by the questions that closes every stanza : what's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?

Many different aspects concur to create the song's good result: the acoustic arrangement, the soft and slow accompaniment which allows Dylan's recitative to flow fluidly and, as previously said, Mark Knopfler's fantastic guitar.

A curious particular is that Knopfler worked with Dylan in two crucial moments of his personal life, which were about to influence his artistic iter: the Christian conversion and the return to Judaism. If we think about it, Knopfler's early writing owed a lot to Dylan, as well as his singing. Thus it was not surprising that Dylan should have asked for the services of the Scottish guitarist. In this second act of the collaboration, even keyboard player Alan Clark is listed among the musicians, as well as Mick Taylor, Knopfler, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, plus Clydie King on background vocal on "Union Sundown". The Dire Straits sound is well present in the entire album, and Taylor's guitar actually makes it a little more bluesy, to better fit it to Dylan's style.

The song's position in the album reveals an extreme accuracy. If in "Jokerman" Dylan inspects the different facets of the Jewish identity and fate, a destiny given to them by a God who, after choosing them as his representative people, condemned them to be spread all over the world and notwithstanding maintain their own identity, in "Sweetheart Like You" he shifts his focus to another subject, a particular one, in perfect accordance with the position of Schopenhauer's "38 ways to be right", by which, when somebody tells you you are wrong, all you have to do is to shift your focus from a particular to a general example, because generalisation is by definition not exact. Here, a contrariis, Dylan goes deep after introducing the question, and in the following song he analyses the State of Israel, the 'neighborhood bully', 'always on trial for just being born', and the archetype of the Jew, condemned to 'wander the earth, an exiled man'. Thus all the possible reservations people might have are neutralised by adjusting the target to the opposite feature and, before it gets too late, by totally changing it ("License to Kill").

From this point of view, we can consider "Infidels" a concept album, a declaration of belonging to a culture.

The original recording sessions also featured a large number of outtakes: "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart" was later to become "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)"; "Clean Cut Kid" was actually recorded at these sessions, but was later used on "Empire Burlesque"; "Lord Protect My Child" was released, together with the superb "Foot of Pride" and "Blind Willie McTell", eight years later on "The Bootleg Series volumes. 1-3".

A double culture, then: the Jewish and the American one. The genuine American side was kept out of the album, as "Clean Cut Kid" and "Blind Willie McTell" were finally not included. What remains in "Infidels" is, probably, the bad side of the American influence in the world: "Union Sundown" is about what, as Dylan says, was surely once a good idea … A confirmation of this could be found in the fact that a black woman, Clydie King, is singing backup on this song.

To write about Bob Dylan as a musician is, undoubtedly, a major challenge. A man able to deliver, in almost forty years, an incredible number of songs and whose style has changed throughout the years, in a process of evolution that differs from artist to artist and that rarely coincides with the artist’s personal life, being most often an escape, a "shelter from the storm", is extremely hard to classify, and, most of the time, every attempt made to cast light on a mystery still unresolved (to quote Sam Shepard), is also extremely hard.

Like all the others, Dylan has followed this path, along with his art, his songwriting, which over the years has become his exclusive art of self-expression.

The approach Dylan adopted towards music is, in the end, the same as millions of young people have always used and always will use: from a "passive interest", the art of creative listening, to the first practice on an old, rudimentary instrument and, for the ones who are not discouraged by the first, terrible barking that instrument diffuses in a once quiet neighbourhood, the final mastering. From the Golden Chords all the way to Greenwich Village, Dylan was able to absorb all the possible kinds of music he ever encountered: from rock’n’roll to folk and blues, sometimes winking even at gospel. Actually, if we take a backward glance over travelled roads, we should get a better idea of how Dylan created himself as a performer.

According to all his "major" biographers, Dylan’s first active performances, which he gave in high school, consisted mainly of rock’n’roll songs, although it is widely known that Dylan spent a lot of time awake listening to the Delta Blues singers on the radio.

Blues and rock’n’roll are two kinds of music which are extremely different if we consider them from a certain point of view, yet extremely akin to each other if we change the angle.

Both of them are strictly structured, and, in the end, use the same kind of scale and the same kind of chords. Although blues uses three different schemes, by which a stanza can feature 8, 12 or 16 bars, the second one is the most widely used.

Every stanza in RnR uses the same 12-bar pattern.

Even the chords both types of music use are exactly the same. Blues bases its harmonic structure on the first, fourth and fifth grades of the scale, as well as RnR, and the progression is in 99% of cases exactly the same.

What really distinguishes the two kinds of music is the conception behind each. Before Dylan, RnR was never really used as a vehicle to express a feeling, unless it was love or sexual attraction, while the blues, as the word itself implies, had focused on the darkest aspects of human nature. And considering it was a music that rose from the cotton fields and was sung by the people forced to work there, it couldn’t help but be like that.

When Dylan finally decided to become a musician, between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the decade which would establish him among the American music legends, he spent a lot of time trying to improve his guitar playing, as well as learning to play the mouth harp.

His story, in the end, is the same as that of any other young artist who, in search of fame and fortune, "docks" at the Big Apple. But unlike the vast majority of them, Dylan found that the early 60s light of the Village shone for him. Places like the Cafe Wha, Gerde’s and many others gave him the opportunity to grow as a performer first and then, as a natural consequence, as a singer-songwriter.

The folk scene, literally dominated by icons such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston, was living a renewed youth by that time. Singers like Dave van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Odetta (to name but a few) brought this old tradition to the small cafes of a cosmopolitan city, leaving all the dogmas almost untouched. Probably this was one of the reasons why the young Dylan attracted so much attention: listening to "House of the Rising Sun", as sung by Guthrie and then by Dylan, gives us a clear example. A slow ¾ tempo for the old hero; a "scratching" 4/4 with a guitar working on its bass strings for Dylan.

What really must have shaken the folk purist may indeed have really been Dylan’s approach to this kind of music. As a traditional form, folk was something which didn’t leave much room for a personal viewpoint or interpretation. For example, Joan Baez’s versions of the most famous ballads were really "within the norm", far from every attempt to make them different than how they really had to be. Notwithstanding, Dylan brought something new into it. Though the message was, in the very end, more or less the same, what was really innovative was the way he got to it, using a rhythm guitar with a tempo of its own, with a sense that really wasn’t part of the old folk tradition. This, though, didn’t exclude a return to tradition, as in the case of the version of "House of the Rising Sun", very different from the one Guthrie used to perform, actually in ¾).

Before going any further, I think a brief introduction to American folk music could be very interesting, in order to place it "where it belongs".

American folklore is not really homogeneous. Actually, it could be divided in four different categories:

None of these categories developed in complete isolation. As a matter of fact, they all influenced each other.

Historically, when the European colonisation began, almost a million Native Americans dwelt in that area. All the documents we have about their musical tradition come directly from those written by the first conquerors and the missionaries.

As in every "primitive" society, music had a clearly defined function, directly related to magic, with songs whose melodies were used to accompany the tale the performer was singing. Another interesting aspect is that this tradition features much more vocal than instrumental music. The storyteller-musician was very highly considered in the social hierarchy. Most of the tribal songs actually were meant as magical rituals, which means they were composed in observation of rigid rules.

Alongside these kind of compositions, there were many others largely linked to emotions, and the composition were mainly structured in nonsense language, marking the interdependence between words and music, something sometimes also favoured by the existence of tonic languages, such as those of the Navajos and Arapahos. In general, in these kinds of composition there is no rhyme.

The arrival of the European colonists represents another step in the American folk tradition. Their musical tradition and the local one merged only in the Northern part of the States; up to the point we can say that Native American folk music features two parallel aspects, the local one and the white European one (sometimes, in facts, traditional Native American music features lyrics in English).

The British folk tradition, which arrived here through the pioneers, is mainly based on the ballads, which are still very much present in the Appalachian Mountains and in the Eastern part of the country. The geographical structure actually allowed this almost totally oral tradition to be conserved throughout the centuries.

Not all these ballads are anonymous; some of them actually had a author (such as Robert Burns) or at least an "arranger", someone able to put it in rhyme. Whatever it was, almost all of these songs really penetrated into the popular tradition, to be defined as "traditional".

A ballad is, by definition, a song that tells a story, generally composed by a number of stanzas which can vary from five to twenty or even more. The prevalent metric structure is the quatrain, following the ABCB pattern. Some of them also feature a refrain which as a chorus repeats throughout the entire story.

Sometimes, there are differences between the British version and the American one, as happens in "House Carpenter": here, many of the British versions feature the devil in person, while in the American versions the ship is, typically, more naturalistically destroyed by a fierce storm. These differences reflects the different characteristics of the two cultures.

Musically, the melody and the chord progression is often independent from what the text says, producing a calm, straightforward style in which there is no dramatic participation in the story.

After the British one, the most important musical category is the Afro-American. Though only recently has advanced knowledge begun to be developed concerning this enormously important cultural treasure, there is no doubt it is the one that, more than any other, has influenced the so-called American "popular music".

The structure gospel and blues use is frequently a linear extension of the African-originated call-and-response structure. The offbeat rhythm, which also features a syncopated scheme, is a direct emanation of certain musical techniques found in western Equatorial Africa.

The blue scale is the result of the interaction between the African intonation and the white tempered scale, in which the third and seventh grades are altered in a minor way - in a sense such as it could happen in the melodic minor scale, save for the sixth grade.

The blues’ rigid structure is also influenced by the British ballads and the French chanson.

The form and the structure of the gospel, on the other hand, come directly from English-language sermons, hymns and spirituals.

The borrowing of these schemes and the different musical approach resulted in a new kind of music, which, as we have said above, gave birth to blues, gospel and, later, rock’n’roll.

Seeing them as an expression of a new culture but also a tradition (it was easier for the traditional ballads to remain intact in the Appalachian area than in Britain), the folk purists respected their unwritten rules very rigidly.

This could explain the way Dylan was received. The more intransigent ones, who endorsed the immutability of the folk tradition, didn’t fully consider him a folk singer. Others, like the late Robert Shelton, were fascinated by his distinctive style. Shelton was actually the first person to give popular credit to this distinctive approach to a sacred territory, in an article in the New York Times which dates back to 1961.

There are not many official recordings prior to the tapes taken for the first studio album. On the other hand, there are a lot of bootlegs. These are useful for examining the changes in Dylan’s musical style from the early 60s to when he "went electric" in 1965.

His guitar playing, in those days, was not that great, in terms of both tuning and tempo. Very often Dylan’s guitar was out of tune, and he could hardly keep the tempo during the entire performance.

In any case , in those days Dylan was using his guitar only as a vehicle for the lyrics, at least until he mastered the fingerpicking technique - which he subsequently abandoned, too early in his career.

The Gaslight Tapes offer fine examples of his approach. These include " Hezekiah Jones" and "Barbara Allen".

"Jones" is an almost totally spoken song. Dylan introduces it for a couple of bars, alternating -as in ragtime - the fundamental bass and the rest of the chords. As he starts to recite, the tempo leaves room to some kind of " colla voce " style which is neither recitative nor talking blues, simply something in between, something also allowing him to lengthen some words, especially those ending in "l" or those featuring the "ee" group. His confidence with the lyrics also permits him to extend the length of the stanzas at his own will, to point up some important points in the story, which would otherwise be hard to catch without careful and concentrated listening.

The musical result is poor, as would be expected in line with the British tradition. This is not something we can say about "Barbara Allen", an extremely well-known song in both Britain and America.

Here, Dylan adopts his fingerpicking style. This makes the song more vivid, also allowing him to try some vocal virtuoso techniques, similar to the ones Joan Baez made us used to.

The bass is always solid, marking the tempo, which is much more stable than in the previous song, and the highest notes are always in " levare ", producing a natural attraction towards the fundamental bass at every important accent within the bar.

Sometimes he makes the stanza a little longer, to put the key details in evidence ("for the looooooooooove of Barbara Allen").

Even the instrumental break between the third and the fourth stanza, is carefully introduced, to mark the conversation between William’s servant and Barbara Allen, as the descending bass gently accompanies the end of the narration and the effective beginning of the dialogue.

The meeting between the soon-to-be-dying characters is powerfully evoked, as she gets closer to his bed and says "I belieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeve you’re dying". Believe, something which always leaves room for a different result.

But what’s probably the best recorded performance from these days is "No More Auction Block", which was actually included in "The Bootleg Series vols.1-3".

The first aspect to stress is how Dylan inter-reacts between words and music. Unlike what happens in the static and canonical performing of the traditional folk ballads, in which, as previously said, music and words are carefully interdependent, Dylan works on another level.

Whenever he needs to mark something, and words are not sufficient to capture the dramatic tension, he simply extends the length of the stanza, holding the note and playing a more animated instrumental support. The music is no longer something to make the story more interesting: it is part of the song, something as important as the words. This means that sometimes he loses the tempo, but that is easily and deliberately scarified thanks to an improved performance, which also allows the less concentrated audience to actually follow the story he is singing.

Besides, as part of his deep attachment to the folk tradition, he often repeats, at the end of the song, the very first stanza, to close the circle finally.

His singing is still very immature; sometimes he is, if not out of tune, embarrassing, and the highest notes of his range are hardly reached unless by shouting, as happens in "Motherless Children", in which, it is true, singing louder makes the thing more dramatic, but the lack of a perfected vocal technique makes everything a little unstable.

Another aspect to notice is that the tempos he uses are often quite fast; the medium tempo, so typical of these kinds of performance, gives way to a brighter one, which, if it makes the songs shorter, makes them also hard to understand sometimes - especially if we also consider the slang terms he was using then and the bad recording quality. Sometimes Dylan also slows down in the middle of a song, as happens in "Ain’t No More Cane", where the fast tempo gets killed by the time he starts singing and slowly gets faster from stanza to stanza, especially in the humming parts and at the end.

Eventually, harmonica will permit Dylan to add a greater depth to the dramatic or joyful atmospheres he created in his performances.

Dylan’s with the folk repertoire allowed him to acquire a consistent background for his own compositions, and at the same time permitted him to develop traditionalism and then, later, to discover a truly personal vein.

"Up To Me" was deliberately left off the final version of "Blood On The Tracks". Whatever the reasons were, the song was released eleven years later, as one of the previously unreleased tracks on the 5-LP/3-CD anthology "Biograph". Another outtake from "Blood on the Tracks", "Call Letter Blues" was released in 1991, as part of "The Bootleg Series vols.1-3". But while "Call Letter Blues" could be considered a minor work, a sort of double to "Meet Me In the Morning", musically the lowest point of what many people consider the best Dylan album ever, "Up To Me" is indeed a great song. Thus, at first sight, it seems illogical that such a song should have been left off, as also happened to many other great songs, such as "Blind Willie McTell" or "Foot of Pride" from the "Infidels" sessions, "Series of Dreams" from the "Oh Mercy" sessions, and so on.

In his book "Behind the Shades", a title taken, in a strange coincidence, from the last but one stanza of "Up To Me", Clinton Heylin suggests that the song's inclusion as a final track, instead of "Buckets of Rain", could have completely changed the meaning of the album. BOTT may be seen as a concept album, starting with "Tangled Up in Blue" (a song wonderfully explicated by Chris Rollason in a two-part article previously published on this site), then moving through "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go", "If You See Her Say Hello" and ending with "Shelter From The Storm" and "Buckets Of Rain" (the last-named song was covered by the multi-talented Bette Midler on her "Songs For the New Depression" album). While, in fact, "Buckets of Rain" is a sad song, leaving little hope for things to get better ("Life is a bust,/All you can do is what you must"), "Up To Me" leaves a remote hope: "If we never meet again…" - in the same way as Stephen Bishop's "Separate Lives", a song written for the movie "White Nights" and sung by Phil Collins and the underestimated vocalist Marylyn Martin (who can be heard as a backing vocals in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Come Around Here No More", a song more famous for its interesting video than its musical structure, in which Dave Stewart played a fundamental role, as he would soon after for the Travelling Wilburys project): "someday I might find myself looking in your eyes but for now we'll go on living separate lives" - lines which seems directly borrowed from Dylan.

"Up To Me" can be read as one great hypertext, a song which epitomises the subjects of "Shelter From The Storm", "If You see Her Say Hello" (the New York version), "You're a Big Girl Now" and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go". There may be doubts whether the song was written before the abovementioned ones, or after, as a more complete and hermetic synthesis. The booklet to "Biograph" defines "Up To Me" as "a companion piece to 'Shelter from the Storm'". "Up to Me" is distinguished by the same kind of symbolism as Dylan used in previous songs, such as "Desolation Row" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". Figures like the old rounder in the iron mask, the people in the officers' club, Dupree, Crystal or Estelle could sit next to the blind commissioner, Cinderella, Romeo, the fortune-telling lady, Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, the Kings of Tyrus, the farmers and the businessmen, Shakespeare in his pointed shoes, Mona, the rainman and so on - a gallery of interesting, grotesque figures that act as a background to an ordinary story, like one of the many that occur on Desolation Row.

The song also reveals a deep connection with the theory of free will, according to which someone has the right and the gift of choosing their fate - to pay the price for it, and understand and accept other people's decisions (this takes us back to "If You See Her Say Hello", with its line, in the Minneapolis version: "whatever makes her happy, I won't stand in the way"). This concept, which is fully discussed by St. Augustine - whom Dylan dreamt about during the John Wesley Harding era - echoes the Sermon on the Mount, which the main characters in our song hear, and which they conclude is 'too complex'. That same Sermon comes back, as the symbol of the last chance, several years later, in "Shooting Star" - a song about a lost-but-never-forgotten love.

Free will is also connected to the desire to know how the future may be, and the possibility of knowing it before it happens - as in the references to cards in "Desolation Row", "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (where the deck of cards is 'missing the jack', a card which later shows up on "Blood On the Tracks", 'and the ace'), "Farewell Angelina", "Changing of the Guards", "Jokerman", "Series of Dreams", and the early version of "If You See Her Say Hello", whose third stanza originally read "I know it had to be that way, it was written in the cards" (it was later changed to the "whatever makes her happy" formula, as quoted above). If the cards, or the fortune-telling ladies who appearing in "Desolation Row" and "Idiot Wind" (as re-recorded in Minneapolis), are able to foretell the future, it is still up to any person whether to stick by it or not.

This also introduces the tarot topic: this particular deck of cards, a constant presence in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and in "Desolation Row" , is also present, as an instrument to predict the future, in "If you See Her Say Hello", as recorded in New York City in September 1974, and, as a symbol of reason, on the back sleeve of "Desire", where the Empress stands at the top of the picture.

All of this clearly explains how "Up To Me" may be in reality a hypertext to some of the songs in BOTT.

The first stanza ("everything went from bad to worse, money never changed a thing") fully depicts the whole album's atmosphere. The words: "now somebody's got to show their hand [...] I know you're long gone, I guess it must be up to me" define the situation more specifically as a relationship gone bad, or on the verge of going bad.

The subject of free will appears for the first time in the second stanza, which reads, in full:

"If I'd of thought about it I never would've done it

I guess I would-a let it slide

If I'd-a lived my life by what others were thinkin'

The heart inside me would-a died.

I was just too stubborn to ever be governed

By enforced insanity

Someone had to reach for the risin' star

I guess it was up to me"

This links to the lines that read:

"When you bite off more than you can chew

You've got to pay the penalty"

The situation is that of someone refusing to live in accordance to what the others think is good or at least safe: his will, or stubbornness, pushes him to choose his own way, though later he pays the price for that: he comes to realise nobody belongs to anyone else ("the girl with me […] she ain't my property"), and they split up, though still leaving room for hope ("and if we never meet again"), in the awareness that people play certain roles in life ("no one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me").

The main character's free will, however, seems to be negatively influenced by a dark personal situation: "in fourteen months I've only smiled once" - which lead him to a progressive unwillingness to care for himself "I've only got me one good shirt left". A dark period which, inside his own head, could be ended by the presence of this woman, who is apparently unable to love ("somebody had to unlock your heart […] it was up to me"), yet seems a figure to rely on ("it was like a revelation when you betrayed me with your touch").

The second aspect of free will comes in the following stanzas, as he, after unlocking her heart, sees her going her way, "into the officers' club", and waits for her until dawn, when he departs. Accepting other people's decisions is a form of respect for free will.

Whatever it is, this relationship seems to be born and to continue, as he tries to protect her "real identity", hiding her picture in the post office where he works. This fact may indeed have led to a bad result, since the woman looks "a little burned out", maybe overwhelmed by the man's over-protective attitude.

Free will, as the song goes on, leaves room for possession, dependence, the negative side of relationships, and hesitation. The seventh stanza ("she's anything I need and love […] it frightens me the awful truth of how sweet life can be") is an epitome of these contrasting feelings: the desire to have a nice life for both of them and the necessary respect for everybody's role, the initiative to make the first move, since the other one does not.

The stanza, with the Sermon on the Mount which is too complex to be fully understood, but gets fully explained by the following sentence ("when you bite off more than you can chew you've got to pay the penalty"), shows the huge effect misunderstanding and overprotection had on the story.

What comes afterwards is an explanation of how things went, addressed to a hypothetical audience. First, the awareness that the lover's absence leads to restlessness - both the price actually paid for acting in complete observance of free will, and the knowledge that, if he wants things to be settled, he must make the first move. This time he's not as sure as he was before: the verb preceding the words "be up to me" is "I guess", not "I know", "I thought", or "he said" . The verb "guess" actually occurs every time the situation is not clear or requires further details (the stanzas including "guess" are the first, second, third, seventh, eight, ninth, tenth, and eleventh).

In fact, the only thing he has left is a note in a bottle, an image suggesting an extreme attempt to be rescued: if even this attempt is unsuccessful, he will have no other choice than to cry some tears.

The two final stanzas seem like the moral of the song. The first of them is addressed to people in general, asking them to remember that life is just a pantomime, a dramatic representation in which the body plays the main role and in which there is never too much time - much as Woody Allen said, a couple of years later, at the beginning of "Annie Hall", using a nice joke to emphasise this sad aspect of things - and in which people never belong to anyone but themselves.

Notwithstanding, people always play a role in others' lives, a role nobody else can replace, and which could also be played in the future: "no one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me". This time the verb is "to know" - a concept which suggests this awareness, and the will to be a part of this endless game.

About Bob Dylan as a musician, many words have been expended. On everything from his early days up to his recording sessions, essays, critical books and bootlegs have been endlessly produced.

Before Bob Dylan was actually known as a performer, he gained a certain fame as a composer. Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, to name but few, were among those who appreciated and recorded his songs, bringing his name to the attention of a relatively large audience.

"My songs aren’t written for great singers, they’re written for me", said the man himself, sometime in the mid-80s. Notwithstanding, no one can deny that many other artists have offered very impressive and original interpretations of his songs, whether known or unknown to the many. Actually, we should talk about interpretations more than mere covers, since sometimes we witness a totally new conception if we compare the two performances. Examples include, at the 30^th Anniversary Celebration, Eric Clapton’s version of "Don’t Think Twice", the gospel version of "Emotionally Yours" by the O’Jays, and Sophie B. Hawkins doing "I Want You". The list could be endless, and it may be better to talk about these versions in due time.

Alongside these "re-inventions" stand the "classic" covers, which hardly add anything to the original product, but nonetheless could serve as a mirror to measure Dylan’s popularity and credibility over at least four generations of musicians.

Across the years, the covers of new Dylan songs have lessened in number. This is due to the different writing styles Dylan has developed during the many phases of his career. At the very beginning, his music was smoother, using so many (as I call them) continuous melodies, the musical phrases which spread through an entire stanza with virtually no repetition, a writing style which reached its acme between "Blonde on Blonde" and "John Wesley Harding". This allowed virtually any singer to be able to deal with the songs. As the years went on, this smoothness gave way to a more fragmentary kind of writing, marked by Dylan’s personal way of singing; that made covering possibilities much harder. Actually, "Tight Connection To My Heart" is really a hard proposition to sing for anyone who’s not Bob Dylan himself - even Lou Reed, who covered "Foot of Pride" perfectly, but at the same time could have had more than just one hassle if he had tried to remodel "Empire Burlesque"’s first track.

"Broadside" started publishing Dylan songs such as "Blowin’ In The Wind" and "Masters of War"; Joan Baez showed interest in recording "Song to Woody", beginning to create a certain curiosity around this young Minnesota folk singer, the "unwashed phenomenon" able to absorb different styles and being influenced by anything he found interesting. Sometimes, covers were released even before his own version. In other cases, as with "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word", there are no recordings by Dylan.

Peter, Paul and Mary’s recordings of "Blowin’ In The Wind" and "Don’t Think Twice" were huge chart hits. The structure of the songs, a melody flowing smoothly in the first case and a nice combination between a country feeling of a non-continuous melody and a classic fingerpicking, really contributed to a personal interpretation. The three voices on "Blowin’ In The Wind", two starting and a third joining the others in the final part of the stanza prior to the refrain, besides creating a sort of a cappella effect, actually enrich the original melody, making it sound like a hymn. Though this recording was somehow impressive, even topping the charts, the best result came, in the case of this trio, with the following cover, "Don’t Think Twice". Today, Dylan performs this song as a country standard, with mandolin and upright bass. In the early days, it was a bright example of fingerpicking style on record and a quasi-country strumming in concert. Peter, Paul and Mary treat this classic in a different way, a pattern which was to be followed years, even decades later, by Joan Baez and then the Indigo Girls. The finger style guitar sounds very different from Dylan’s version, more akin to Paul Simon’s style. The three voices during the bridge ("when the rooster crawls at the break of dawn") in a "piano" feeling definitely deliver this cover as one of the most beautiful ever.

"Tomorrow Is a Long Time" is another timeless classic. This song has no official Dylan studio recording to its name, only a live cut released eight years after its performance on April 12^th 1963: it was also covered by none other than the Late King of Rock’n’Roll, in a manner that took all the Dylan out of it, turning it into a Johnny Cash-Nils Lofgren production, thus making the blue notes lack any sense - something which, by contrast, was indeed very interesting in Dylan’s version, where the minor sevenths really hit the listener’s ear like a hunch on a smooth road made of an arpeggio played in major key. The song has no continuous melody feeling, since the first two parts of the stanza are exactly the same, and so is the bridge. Nonetheless, the words and the music are laid down in a very traditional and easy way, a thing that allowed the Kingston Trio to brightly sing it. A fingerpicking guitar which can remind us of the Mamas and the Papas’ "California Dreaming" (or should it be the opposite?) providing a background for three wonderful voices harmonising the melody in an almost spiritual – or somehow religious – way, a sustained note at the end of the chorus ("I’d laaaaaaay in my bed once again") and a brief pause before the last two words of each verse make one of the finest covers ever (if also one of the least-known).

A very interesting cover is the German version of "Blowin’ In the Wind" sung by the Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich. A soft arrangement turns the song into a cabaret gig number, with an accordion and a sort of recitative. A world-famous icon proved one more time that Dylan was a rising name.

As his career developed, covering Dylan’s songs was not only a way to stay in pace with the times, but even a way to sing something meaningful and interesting. In a music world where the major hits were "Jailhouse Rock", "Twist and Shout" or "Please Please Me", all the folksingers, and Dylan as one of the most representative ones, stood as an important alternative to those who wanted to say something more than the usual run-of-the-mill things. It is not a surprise if artists such as Sonny and Cher or, later, the Byrds, became Dylan aficionados, and it is actually hard to find an important artist who has never put him or herself to the Dylan test.

Unlike what happened with "Blowin’ In the Wind" (there’s also a soul version sung by a very young Stevie Wonder, in the typical Motown sound), the following "political" hit "The Times They Are a-Changin’" attracted an impressive number of covers as well, but only a few managed to last and be remembered in the following decades - like Richie Havens’ version, which raised a lot of eyebrows when it was used in a commercial. The strength of the tune, a 6/8 with a solid melody, the bass quickly descending in the bridge, the long note for the word "times": this song had all the features allowing it to be committed to memory. Another fact which contributed to turning it into a sort of anthem (a definition Dylan himself has always refused for his songs) lies in all the events that quickly followed the song: John Kennedy was murdered a few weeks after Dylan premiered it, the Vietnam war was in full fury, Malcolm X was about to spread his universal Muslim message, after setting himself free from Eliah Muhammad and his fake beliefs. Martin Luther King, Jr. had just had a dream which he made public during the Washington March, the Beatles shook the British establishment by singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Castro stood as the closest threat to democracy. Dylan was able to choose the right time, putting himself in the right position, able to detect as an expert weatherman where the wind was blowing.

The album "The Times They Are a-Changin’" featured other interesting songs, and new material which was soon used by other artists. "When the Ship Comes In", which Joan Baez recalls was written in a hotel after the reception refused to admit Dylan (it later accepted him under Baez’s pressure), was a perfect example of a popular Irish melody. No wonder, then, that the Clancy Brothers later did a very impressive and amusing version using traditional instruments. The smooth melody, with a bridge one third higher than the verse, allowed the performer to adjust the target to his way of singing. "Boots of Spanish Leather", with its wonderful fingerpicking and moving lyrics, offered another opportunity. Nanci Griffith’s 1992 version, with Dylan himself playing (overdubbed) harmonica, really captures the dramatic climax, with remarkable singing and a nice instrumental arrangement: a very fine interpretation, though, in my humble opinion, not comparable to Dylan's original or his revisited version of June 1998, brilliantly captured on the Japanese-released "Not Dark Yet" mini-CD.

"Restless Farewell", the album’s last track, has always been an impressive song. As far as I know, Dylan has performed this song in concert only a very few times, one of which was at the Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday tribute. Joan Baez recorded the song on her 1968 album "Any Day Now", illuminating the melody. Dylan really never showed much appreciation for this song, saying it was written to fill up the album. Still, the melody is indeed fabulous, even if borrowed from an old Irish standard, as may be confirmed from an Enya recording. The bridge is of a rare beauty, and the ¾ feeling really marks the thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure of the lyrics. It is a shame this little-known masterpiece hasn’t received all the attention it deserves.

The early Dylan years were interesting because his songs, which he himself always performed solo, were often covered using more than one voice and a group arrangement.

Some may claim the electric version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" was somehow responsible for the beginning of the "electric phase". Whatever the reason (there is an old studio demo with Dylan and Jack Elliott singing the song the way the Byrds did), by the time Dylan went electric all of those who kept their eyes on his songs were able to find even more interesting material. "Maggie’s Farm", "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (incidentally the "Bringing it all Back Home" album itself is known under that title in many European countries) and, later, "Like a Rolling Stone" clearly proved that the electric line-up wasn’t able to drown Dylan’s creativity under an ocean of high-volume sounds. Proof of this is Spirit’s cover of "Like a Rolling Stone", a very interesting reading, with half-spoken verses murmured in a very low voice that sounds like a whisper, which perfectly matched the famous sequence of chords, probably the most beautiful in rock history; Judy Collins also covered this song on her all-Dylan album, "Just Like A Woman". This album as a whole is somehow disappointing, save for a bright rendering of "Dark Eyes" that did full justice to this song some time before Dylan and Patti Smith re-invented it during their brief tour together. "Like a Rolling Stone" perfectly reflects the album. The intentions were indeed really good, but Collins’ use of her marvellous voice doesn’t have the requested swing, and the arrangements are a little too weak to be interesting: considering Collins’ enormous potential, this is a real pity.

The song "Just Like a Woman" provided what in my opinion is the greatest Dylan cover ever. This world-famous hit, written - according to its author - on the road on Thanksgiving Day 1965 when he had refused to accept some invitation, has been related to the late Edie Sedgwick, the beautiful New York actress whom Dylan met through Warhol’s famous Factory. A very dark and complicated character, she had, according to many, a big crush on Dylan, and her life began to drift seriously as soon as she knew that the Minnesota jester had secretly got married a few months before. Whoever the woman is (and there are reasons to believe she could be Sedgwick, especially looking at the lines "she finally sees that she’s like all the rest"), both the lyrics and the music, an endless flow of notes and chords which leads directly to the refrain first and the bridge thereafter, allow the song to be interpreted in many different ways. Dylan himself has tried different approaches: voice, guitar and harmonica as in his early days; adding a gospel choir backing to mark the bridge (in the Budokan version); or making it shine, as in the True Confession tour (documented in the underestimated "Hard To Handle" video), in the 1993 concerts in London when a great Bucky Baxter provided a wonderful pedal steel solo as Dylan’s acoustic guitar offered an impressive instrumental introduction, and also in the Woodstock 94 performance. All of these versions added new meanings to what is either one of the most misogynist or else one of the most pro-woman songs he has ever written, which has, curiously, attracted more female performers than male ones.

Richie Havens’ version was interesting, showing a side Dylan himself had kept partially hidden, while Nina Simone revealed all her of talent in her 1971 recording.

As was later confirmed in her 1987 cover of "My Baby Just Cares For Me" which brought Simone to the attention of the younger (or less old) generations, her approach is extremely creative, able to transform a song which at first sight seems hard to sing other than in the way it was originally intended into a deep personal and introspective vision - putting herself outside of the problem, as a great blues singer should do (according to Nat Hentoff). There is no doubt, as a matter of fact, that a woman might feel hurt or somehow insulted by the ferocious words Dylan uses in this song to describe "Queen Mary", a friend of his. What Simone did was to put herself out of range and yet at the same time analyse the song from a "sexless" point of view, in a way which could fit either a woman or a man. The final lyric changes - "I fake just like a woman", then all the remaining words recited in the first person - help reinforce this singular and personal approach. The instrumental aspect is very well treated too. The final result is an impressive jazz standard, beautifully played and likewise sung. The piano introduces the song, giving it a very jazzy atmosphere, and Simone’s voice, starting with the refrain, caresses this remarkable continuous melody with, at the same time, a deep respect and a personal approach, keeping the female subject and inter-reacting with the band in a rare and beautiful manner. The use of piano as the main instrument helps give the song a smoky jazz-club atmosphere, deep enough to accompany the listener for a long time after.

"Blonde on Blonde" was really, and still is, an album able to provide different artists with a great number of potential songs, at different times: a further proof is Sophie B. Hawkins’ version of "I Want You", recorded in the early 90s, a perfect there-is-no-time-to-live-all-we-gotta-do-is-work Wall Street broker epitome.

Dylan’s production after his motorcycle accident, between his recovery and the release of "John Wesley Harding", is in some cases little known: it is also extremely rich and creative. The informal atmosphere which characterised his music afternoons with The Band at Big Pink, documented in a five-CD unofficial box set which really reveals much more than the official, incomplete "Basement Tapes" does, authorised Dylan, newly a father, to try out different types of songs, using different kinds of chords, sometimes changing key during the different verses (as in "Going to Acapulco", where the passage to the fourth is marked by a minor seventh in the fundamental chord). He was able to rely on The Band’s support for this delicate kind of operation. Richard Manuel and Rick Danko clearly showed how a momentary change of key can help the melody be more effective and how to outline crucial moments in the words; "Tears of Rage" introduces a minor seventh during the verse and a major third during the bridge, leading the melody to a natural minor feeling and then returning it to the initial major mode. "This Wheel’s On Fire", using diminished sevenths, further enriched these possibilities. Both these songs were important because they showed Dylan that he could write songs with other people: this led to what many consider his best work, 1975’s "Desire", the words of which were written (in seven cases out of nine) with Jacques Levy.

"A shot in the dark": the title of this funny Blake Edwards movie, featuring an amazing Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, could be borrowed to describe the drastic change between "Blonde on Blonde" and the following album of new songs, "John Wesley Harding", released on December 1967 after The Band had just issued their debut album, "Music From Big Pink", featuring a wonderful cover of "I Shall Be Released". Later came their "Cahoots" album and their version of "When I Paint My Masterpiece"; this song is the brightest example of Dylan learning how to use key changes also using difficult progressions (the diminished seventh leading to the bridge, though that bridge was strangely omitted from Bob’s own version of the song on the "More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits" two-album set).

"John Wesley Harding" was the first album Dylan wrote starting from the words, and probably the only one, considering he has always said it’s difficult for music and words not to come out together. The mystical atmosphere was able to produce different kind of styles: the traditional acoustic folk of the title track; the wonderful piano swing of "Dear Landlord" (a song terribly covered by Joan Baez, who in spite of everything is always a careful observer of Dylan’s production); and the country ballad "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight", later interpreted by Robert Palmer à la UB40. Whichever of these might be the most interesting song, the same year a black left-handed American guitarist came out, ready to shock the world but unfortunately unable to pass the hardest trial: time. Jimi Hendrix understood Dylanese more than people may think. His outstanding version of "All Along the Watchtower" was so great that the song’s own author couldn’t help but play it like that himself - ever since. The fragmentary melody, the few chords implied were the ideal to turn the song into an amazing electric blues, using what remains, alongside Clapton’s and Vaughan’s, the best Fender ever. And once again it is curious to see how black singers or performers could take new meanings and force out these songs. In those years when Creedence Clearwater Revival put all of American music in a trunk, shook it and picked up the final result, students and young people came together in big massive happenings in the name of utopia: Hendrix on one side, the Beatles with Sergeant Pepper on the second, and Dylan with his restricted universe made of words and elementary sounds on the last, symbolised that climax, forming a triangle, the most rigid of the geometric figures, the same symbol Dante used to describe God. Gone was Elvis, trapped by Colonel Tom Parker, too predictable was Morrison and his overrated message, too brainy the wonderful blues Cream expressed in a brief but intense career: no one else could do it.

From "Nashville Skyline" on, the attention other singers paid to Dylan’s new songs started to decrease. Jeff Beck offered a particularly interesting approach to "Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You"; George Harrison covered "If Not For You" in a very imitative way, no doubt because he was there when the song was created and first rehearsed.

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"Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door" recaptured that lost attention. A song quickly written, full of intimacy and a resigned sense of fate (somehow resembling a Portuguese fado), of an outcome which it is impossible to avoid, as the cowboy presses his hand on his stomach preventing blood from flowing out wildly, taking a last glance at his wife before going to the river for his last ride: nobody was able to give it a more intense cut. Actually, lots of terrible versions followed, including that by Eric Clapton, who many years later, however, played an unimaginably beautiful "Don’t Think Twice" turned into a shockingly gorgeous blues standard, as well as a very delicate and tender "Love Minus Zero", sung in carnival mood. Guns’n’Roses did the most outrageous version ever; Randy Crawford turned the song into an easy-listening number for the endless traffic lines in cities like Los Angeles. Notwithstanding, this is probably Dylan’s most famous song.

"Planet Waves", save for "Forever Young" was largely ignored, but "Blood on the Tracks" provided lots of material for other people. Shawn Colvin did a nice "You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go", Joan Baez read "Simple Twist of Fate" in some kind of Rolling Thunder Revue style, in Italy Francesco De Gregori translated "If You See Her Say Hello" as "Non Dirle Che Non È Così", a nice translation keeping the meaning of the words, and the enormously talented Bette Midler hosted Dylan himself for a honky-tonk piano-bright version of "Buckets of Rain", a little-known interpretation which really deserves a careful listening.

The songs from "Desire" and "Street-Legal" were indeed too personal to be covered. The 1975 album showed a strong gypsy vein in Dylan. Scarlet Rivera’s violin helped give the album that kind of nomad-eastern feeling that perfectly matched the almost totally four-handed words: a big project which later gave birth to one of the most famous rock caravans, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The 1978 record, dark, discontinuous and sometimes very intense, has always fallen somewhere between being considered a great album or a minor work. There is a lot of energy around it, which doesn’t seem well directed, a collection of interesting material which isn’t correspondingly well delivered or produced.

"Slow Train Coming" and "Saved" gave rise to few covers, but are albums such as Dylan had never made before. If there is an album which faithfully reproduces the late 70s sound, in between the golden disco era, the Motown sound and Dire Straits, it is "Slow Train Coming". An interesting production, an amazing Mark Knopfler and the recording sessions in Alabama all contributed to the final result. With "Gotta Serve Somebody", not only did a new Dylan emerge but the first Grammy in a four-decade-long career reached his home shelves. The religious feeling which demarcates "Saved" was to many people embarrassing, and for many artists it had nothing worth covering, despite the most intriguing song "In the Garden", with its very well-directed changes of key, a complete circle bringing back the initial key at the beginning of every stanza - a very complex and impressive work.

"Shot of Love" allowed Nana Mouskouri, and, later, Emmylou Harris to cover Dylan’s "Every Grain of Sand" - in some ways the greatest of all Dylan’s lyrics, a very intense portrait of the human solitary self. Mouskouri's version captured the feeling of Dylan’s demo version as documented on "The Bootleg Series Volume 3", while Harris’ performance relied on the weaker 6/8 tune which appeared as the final track on "Shot of Love".

The rest of the 80s rarely offered new or old artists covering Dylan, who seemed to have become a survivor of himself, at least between "Infidels" and "Oh Mercy". While his singing style became more personal and for some reasons unsingable to the many, a few pearls came out, such as "Emotionally Yours", beautifully turned into a gospel number by the O’Jays, who really modeled the song in their hands, making it a shining example of how, once again, black singers were greater and more talented at finding ways of interpreting Dylan.

Joan Osborne covered "Man in the Long Black Coat", and Garth Brooks provided a wonderful version of 1997’s "Make You Feel My Love". Usually a country singer, Brooks showed a very sensitive and intimate vein in singing this slow and intense ballad. While Billy Joel treated it like a half-rock product, making it lack intensity, Brooks followed Dylan’s intentions; but while Dylan’s recording sounds a little stripped down, Brooks gives the song the production it deserves, a careful playing and an intense outlining of the melody, which uses interesting chords and the "continuous" structure as well.

So many different artists have measured themselves against the tough test of singing Dylan, but probably the words of the old Columbia commercial, "Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan", are almost completely true. Over the years, Dylan has shown that he is his own best cover artist. Sometimes the songs sounded better in their original versions, other times they were unrecognisable, at times the covers were so brilliant that they outshone the originals (who has never thought at least once that the version of "I Want You" from the Budokan concerts is amazingly gorgeous?) or, anyhow, provided new directing guidelines or interpreting solutions. The sad thing is that most of the time these re-editions have been performed live, and the non-bootleg- owning public has rarely had the chance to hear them. One example for all? "Cold Irons Bound", Milan, 28^th May 2000.

"Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?". With these weary words Dylan introduces one of his most cryptic and intriguing songs of the sixties.

"Visions of Johanna" was finally recorded in Nashville and included on the double album "Blonde on Blonde", the record which, according to many, closed a phase waiting for another one to come. And it would prove a long wait. A couple of months after the album's release, and after a brief world tour which covered Australia and Europe, Dylan had a motorcycle accident near his house in Woodstock, with several injures that caused him a forced stop which officially ended in December 1967, with the release of "John Wesley Harding" and his sudden appearance at the Woody Guthrie tribute concert in January 1968. In reality, this limbo was indeed one of Dylan's most prolific periods, as the entire series of the Basement Tapes fully documented. A very limited selection of these songs made by Robbie Robertson was officially released in 1975, while the greater part of the material still circulates, almost illegally, among the many Dylanophiles.

The Nashville recording was a follow-up to that made at the New York sessions which took place in late 1965/early 1966, most of them featuring Dylan and The Band: the same sessions which produced another unfinished and, for a long time, unreleased great song, "She's Your Lover Now", a tune with the same strength as "Like a Rolling Stone".

Many differences can be found in the two recordings. First of all, "Visions"' working title was "Freeze-Out" (or "Seems Like a Freeze-Out" or even "Just Like a Freeze- Out").

There are a few changes in the lyrics, especially in the last stanza, where two characters are inverted: the fiddler who speaks to the Countess in New York trades his place in Nashville with the peddler, giving him his turn to talk to this noble figure who "pretends to care for him". The final litany in New York describes the peddler like this: "knowing ev'rything is gone which was owed, he examines the nightingale's code, still left on the fish truck that loads, my conscience explodes" - lines which might somehow suggest a revision of Bill King's comparison to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn", shifting the focal point to the same poet's "Ode to a Nightingale" (see Bill King's doctoral thesis, "The Artist in the Marketplace").

Other differences between the two recordings can be found in the instrumental arrangements. The first one has the typical "Highway 61 Revisited" feeling, with an electric harpsichord that gives the song a very Gothic atmosphere, brilliantly sustained by Dylan's weary voice and his dry and tired harmonica, which really makes me think he only sings and plays the mouth harp in that cut. The final and official version, on the other hand, has a more acoustic feeling, with a Hammond organ backing the foggy and grotesque atmosphere that made "Blonde on Blonde" such a crucial album. It is clearly evident that the musicians weren't fully familiar with the song's text: in the last stanza the Hammond starts to play the bridge as Dylan keeps on with the litany.

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Different approaches can be adopted in order to attempt an extended, but probably still incomplete, analysis of this cryptic song.

The song reiterates the gallery of grotesque characters which the album "Highway 61 Revisited" inaugurated, with a strong and meaningful impact. These characters all play a role in this desolate, intriguing scenario.

Bill King's "The Artist in the Marketplace" compares this song (often considered Dylan's finest poem ever) to John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn", because of the attempt to transcend the physical world, in order to reach the ideal place where the visions become real.

It seems like Dylan and Keats, to reach the same result, use two different devices: the English poet reflects before a classical vessel, while the Minnesota jester relies on the visions of a woman or what the woman incarnates (Johanna is a Jewish name which means "God's gift"). In this assumption, paraphrasing King's conclusions, the place where the visions become real could be Johanna's arms or - more likely, given the name's etymology - Canaan, the promised land.

Using a more down-to-earth starting point, "Visions" epitomises the soon-to-come big mess the late sixties would lead to. In a labyrinth of weird and empty faces, the writer, forced into that picture (he has to play these "tricks" while all he longs for is to be quiet), tries to find a safe place, even attempting to explain the position he took ("it's so hard to get on"), finally coming to the conclusion that all that captures him is only visions, unreal things, the only things that remain in the very end. The scene obviously takes place in downtown Manhattan, but after the second stanza we could be in Italy, or France, or North America or, simply, down in limbo.

Reading Keats' ode, a few other connections with Dylan's song seem at least evident: the subjects in the first stanza of the ode ("What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?") seem to be taken up - by Dylan - in the second stanza, in the night-watchman who, using his flashlight to carefully browse the scene, wonder if it's him or them who is really insane. This irony, which has always been present in Dylan's writing, is most of the time used to mask his knowledge of classical literature and his unofficial education in general (in a 1985 interview Dylan declared new generations should forget about all the new things and get back to reading classical authors, such as Keats or Melville).

Keeping on with this thesis, Keats' words "She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair" link to the song's last line: "these visions of Johanna are all that remain", as is later confirmed in Keats' poem: "When old age shall this generation waste,/Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/Than ours". This actually recalls a previous essay of mine called "The women in Blonde on Blonde" (on this site; see Archive), when I wrote that the visions were actually the only real presence. Using different assumptions and points of view, the conclusions are more or less the same. It doesn't matter if you are an eighteenth-century English poet or a not-even-twenty-five-year-old American singer-songwriter: Salvation comes through visions. The capacity to abstract leads to Nirvana.

Last but not least, the Grecian vessel is also a find that could easily be placed, like "La Gioconda", in a museum where "infinity goes up on trial".

Another important work of Keats', on the other hand, emerges in the New York version. The nightingale, a European bird, is present in the last stanza, as the peddler examines its code. Actually, the image of the nightingale singing is indeed really complex.

"Ode to a Nightingale" is another famous ode, from whose lines Francis Scott Fitzgerald also borrowed in the title of his novel "Tender is the Night". The first words: "'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,/But being too happy in thy happiness, -/ That thou[…] Singest of summer in full-throated ease" reveal a mixture of joy in the bird singing and melancholy in the writer, the same strange atmosphere we can find in Dylan, "Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet", in "the empty lot where the ladies play/Blindman's bluff with the key chain", or even in the country music station's soft playing, suggesting at the same time the nightingale's environment, while there is "nothing to turn off" in that dark scenario lit only by a distant light flickering from a loft nearby.

The ectoplasm of electricity that howls in the bones of a young woman, where the visions of Johanna have taken the narrator's place, as well as the grotesque environment in the second stanza, could be easily replaced by Keats' words: "The weariness, the fever, and the fret/Here, where men sit and hear each other groan […]/Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies". Then, Keats' "Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget/What thou among the leaves hast never known," is another confirmation of what links his poem to Dylan's song, whose atmosphere and meaning could be epitomised by the ode's fourth stanza:

"Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Clustered around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

If we carefully select some verses from this stanza, we could end up with: "I will fly to thee on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night". What are the visions of Johanna doing to the singer, if not conquering his mind, taking his place, keeping him awake obfuscating his thoughts, making all he sees seem so cruel and being all that remain?

"I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,/Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs," introduces the poem's fifth stanza, and Dylan replies in his own fourth stanza, in which the jelly-faced women sneeze as the primitive wallflowers freeze and jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. Where Keats has boughs from which incense hangs, Dylan sees jewels drooping from the head of the mule. This is another ironic ,image which recalls "Gates of Eden" and the "utopian hermit monks" seated on the "golden calf". Of all their promises of paradise, Dylan said in 1964, you wouldn't hear a laugh - a reaction that "Visions"' fourth stanza indeed suggests.

The last connection with Keats comes from the song's last verses. "Fled is that music: - do I wake or sleep?", wonders Keats, while Dylan answers: "The harmonica plays".

"Visions of Johanna" has a title that could be - way too easily? - compared to those of two of Kerouac's novels, "Visions of Gerard" and "Visions of Cody". The first is about all the images evoked in Kerouac by the memories of his late brother, Gerard. "Visions of Cody" can be defined as an addendum to "On the Road", whose final words would fit Dylan's song's atmosphere very well. Kerouac's never-ending travelling, as well as his associated research for a new linguistic expression, are really "all that remain".

On the other hand, Bob Dylan had already showed signs of appreciation of Kerouac's works in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", a rewrite of the Lowell-born writer's most famous book.

"Visions of Johanna" is a group song, like "Bob Dylan's Dream", showing people gathered around doing different things. While "Dream" revealed the innocence of youth, the awareness that all is easy that slowly leaves room to resignation ("our chances really were a million to one") and the cognisance that nothing could be the same again ("ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat, I'd give [..] gladly if our lives could be like that"), "Visions" is the portrait of a group of people, "a generation lost in space" (to use Don McLean's words). Louise seems the only person fully conscious of being down-to-earth, the one who constantly reminds the singer that Johanna is not there, making it even too obvious she is not there. But even she, in the end, surrenders to nothingness, to the "not-parasite" whose identity is still unknown, as the empty cage corrodes waiting for a figure to re-establish normality, with no-one really paying attention to whether she is "Madonna" or anyone else.

The comparison to "Bob Dylan's Dream" is useful to introduce another possible reference: both "the way we were" in "Dream" and the Gothic scenario taking place in a house whose address could be Desolation Row evoke "The Big Chill", a film in which a group of college friends who had drifted apart over the years gather together for the funeral of one of them. The same kind of atmosphere exists in Kenneth Branagh's "Peter's Friend", which some critics have called "the British 'Big Chill'".

But most of all, this gallery of weird characters - from Louise to the fiddler - seems to have come out of a Bosch painting. Behind an immaculate facade, like the ones painted by Edward Hopper, is a parade of grotesque figures and deformed faces similar to those produced by the Flemish painter.

The genesis of this song was indeed very long, but far from complicated. From the working tracks called "Freeze-Out" recorded in New York to the innumerable live versions performed through 2000, a common main theme can be found almost all the time.

The working track was much more electric than the "Blonde on Blonde" version. A dry harmonica broke the silence as some keyboards, like a disquieting electric harpsichord backed by an obscure electric guitar, sustained Dylan's singing during the entire performance.

The Nashville recording, though acoustic, is not in the end that different from the New York one. In perfect syntony with the sounds of the entire album (the only less coherent track is "One of Us Must Know", recorded with the Band in New York two months before the sessions in Tennessee), an acoustic rhythm section and a discreet electric guitar play, alongside the organ, a smooth background for Dylan's weary and intense singing, half-whispered but always very expressive.

Dylan must have had the song model very strongly in his head, as even the solo-performed live acoustic versions of 1966 have the same atmosphere as the record.

From the early '90s on, "Visions" became a very dilated acoustic song, with a deep dialogue between the guitar solos and the voice, often skipping one of the middle stanzas (generally the third, replacing the "jewels and binoculars" bridge with the "how can I explain" one), and also sometimes skipping the "my conscience explodes" line. A particularly impressive version was performed in 1999, as Dylan sang "Visions of Madonna are… Johanna are all that remain", thus giving it the lack of perfection a masterpiece deserves.

The Spring 2000 European tour delivered a more dilated instrumental version than the previous year, a 8:30 version with a long instrumental introduction, the acoustic guitar playing an arpeggio brilliantly performed but less steady than the 1999 one, which perfectly supports the voice (especially "the all-night girls whisper of escapades out on the D-train", as if to say "where in the end are you escaping?"), a soft drum pacing the rhythm and a cryptic vocal which really underlined this almost apocalyptic scene, marking the comeback, in Dylan's repertoire, of a song at the same time extremely deep and too little performed after its release.

"New Morning", released in late 1970, is the archetypal early 70s album, a post-Woodstock witness to the circumstance that what really remains in the end are the songs, or, as somebody else said, "The Songs Remain the Same".

Recorded in New York in May, June and August 1970, though "Went To See the Gypsy" was already cut during the last "Self Portrait" session the previous March (as a further proof that that album, which left many people - including Greil Marcus - horribly horrified, was, in Dylan’s mind, nothing but a joke, something like a way of saying "Leave me be"), the album is a brilliant collection of almost totally forgotten interesting songs. From "If Not for You" all the way to "Father of Night", the songs bring Dylan back to New York, after more than three years’ recording activity in Nashville, a location chosen for "Blonde on Blonde" and then reconfirmed for three more albums.

If "Blonde on Blonde" allowed Dylan to bring all the New York obsessions to Nashville, in order to get an impressive result, "New Morning" offered the then twenty-nine year old singer-songwriter to be back where he belonged, not letting the Big Apple overwhelm the almost totally Woodstock atmosphere of this piece of work.

The recovery from the motorcycle accident, the Guthrie tribute, "John Wesley Harding", "Nashville Skyline" and "Self Portrait" are all epitomised and present in "New Morning". Some of the pictures taken from the recording sessions show a comfortable environment, but it is also totally different from the 1965 Seventh Avenue sessions which gave birth to "Bringing It All Back Home" or "Highway 61 Revisited".

Twelve musicians, including the impressive Al Kooper and David Bromberg, are credited on the back sleeve of the album. Some of them are indicated as playing more than one instrument - including Dylan himself on guitars and piano. Kooper is also mentioned as playing French horn (on the title track "New Morning").

The ghost of The Beatles flutters all around this work. Some rehearsals, released more than twenty years on "The Bootleg Series, vols. 1-3" featured the fab-four lead guitarist, George Harrison, playing his mournful slide guitar on an early version of "If Not for You". Harrison himself was later to cover the song on his epic album "All Things Must Pass", with a different arrangement, and using the May session words (different from those on Dylan’s version). That triple album also featured a four-hand-written song, "I’d Have You Any Time", for which Dylan is known to have written the bridge.

"New Morning" closes a phase in Dylan’s career, leaving him in sort of a limbo until 1973, when he and the Band, while planning a comeback tour, recorded "Planet Waves".

The recording philosophy is more or less the same as that which characterised works such as "Subterranean Homesick Blues" or the entire "Highway 61 Revisited" album: Dylan and a few musicians play, accompanying him relying on the few notes he scribbled, and then the song is done. "If Not For You" has this kind of feeling, with introductory guitar and then the band joining in, with the keyboards replacing Harrison’s slide guitar as recorded in the rehearsals sessions and somehow in the cover the British singer recorded for "All Things Must Pass".

A delicate love song written for his wife, the ideal beginning for a complex album in which Dylan’s voice sounded a little weird because of a heavy cold he got shortly before the beginning of the sessions.

"Day of the Locusts" is about Dylan’s honorary degree awarded by the prestigious University of Princeton in April 1970. The school where Albert Einstein ended his days honoured the Minnesota-born singer a degree in music. The benches stained with tears and perspiration; the absence of conversations; the locusts (one of the plagues of Egypt) sing in the distance a sweet melody for him. Dylan’s piano leads the song, as the special effect of the insect sounds in the background and a Hammond organ and a drum keep the atmosphere alive. His singing is very impressive, and traces of his cold can be heard in the dental consonants, perfectly matching the piano playing. This is the first great piano playing on the album.

The first time we ever heard Dylan on the piano on an official recording was on "Black Crow Blues" on "Another Side of Bob Dylan", though he recorded "When the Ship Comes in" and "The Times They Are A-Changin’" for Witmark in piano versions in order for the songs to be copyrighted using the keyboard. The sleeve of"Highway 61 Revisited" shows a picture of him on the piano, and many Kramer photographs shot in January 1965 for "Bringing It All Back Home" as well. But it’s probably in the unfinished version of "I’ll Keep It With Mine", recorded with the Band in January 1966, that he shows his potential on this instrument. The instrumental coda reveals a deep sense of tempo and melody in his still hardpressing playing.

"Dear Landlord" is another big performance. But it’s probably with "New Morning" and almost twenty years later with "Oh Mercy" (on "What Good Am I?") that Dylan reveals himself as a shining pianist. Of course, nothing to be compared to Billy Joel, Bruce Hornsby or the early Elton John.

Dylan has never been a virtuoso of any instrument, if not harmonica, but his playing has always had something distinguished about it, a personal sense of rhythm and a way of tightening it with the singing and the melody. During the Never-Ending Tour he was to develop his solo guitar playing, but in the previous decades he saved his most interesting instrumental inventions for the piano.

The piano following the voice on "Day of the Locusts" is a brilliant example, as it is on "Time Passes Slowly" with its beginning "in levare", the crescendo before the voice begins to sing, the quick alternation between right and left hand during the voice silences, and the instrumental breaks between stanzas and bridges.

"Went To See the Gypsy" is another song that must have been scarcely rehearsed. The beginning should be enough to prove it, with Dylan on piano, a shy guitar and then the drums keeping rhythm as soon as the voice enters the first stanza. The deep dialogue between voice and piano is always present, especially in the bridge, as he sings "how are you he said to me I said it back to him" or "he did it in Las Vegas and he can do it here". His hands are also a bright guide for the group to follow him ("outside the lights were shining", and all the group, save for the drum, stops and waits for him to start playing again).

"Winterlude" is a song not too many people know, though many Italians may notice that it sounds quite like Francesco de Gregori’s "Buonanotte Fiorellino", probably the most beautiful lullaby ever written in Italy in the last forty years.

De Gregori, coming after Dylan, owes him a lot: the song structure, the three-section stanza and the feeling in general. As Alan Rinzler rightly says in "Bob Dylan, an Illustrated Record", it is music for ice-skating. The waltz, anticipating James Taylor’s beautiful "Sweet Baby James", is a little, alas too early forgotten jewel. The delicate words, backed by a smooth music confirm what Dylan says in "Sign on the Window": that must be what life is all about. A man slowly recovering from an accident and all the pressures that it caused, shortly before coming back to New York, in the Village, before A.J. Weberman started to browse his garbage and a scarcely creative time put his fame into serious discussion, long before he could bring his talent back with the Band, "Planet Waves" and the 74 Tour.

The circle is complete: Dylan is finally back to the starting point, way before "Planet Waves". As Indro Montanelli always said "to understand your present you have to know your past". And that is what "New Morning" represents: a perfect synthesis before a new creative phase.

Dylan’s piano is once again the best instrument for his singing: the symbiosis is perfect, and so is the instrumental final.

"If Dogs Run Free", recently unearthed by Dylan for his last European tour and, now, his 2001 Japanese and Australian tour, recalls his early talking blues, with a great jazz piano and a nice jazz guitar to accompany a recitative in which the oldest unanswered question of all time dominates the entire lyrics.

As if in answer, side B (of the original vinyl album) opens with the title track. "So happy just to be alive", sings Dylan on this song entitled "New Morning", with a weird French horn that, soon after the bridge, dissolves the fog before all the possibilities that seem to come true – "this must be the day when all my dreams come true" - in the final stanza. This song was also used as the opener for the 91 European summer tour, before an electric, stripped down "Lay Lady Lay" shattered a stormy night in Bologna, the city that, six years on, saw Dylan meeting the Pope.

"Sign on the Window" offers, once again, the piano-voice recitative, with some hammered high notes to mark the rhymes and the bass notes introducing the group and the backing singers. The escape to California, the eternal myth of the frontier. A piano dominating the entire song, as a matter of fact giving all the rhythm, the accents and the different moments, backing a military-like flute, as used by Paul McCartney years later for "Let ‘Em In". And the simple wish, as opposed to the continuous escape to new Canaans that are neither in California, Connecticut or anywhere else if not in one’s mind: the simpleness of family life.

"The Man in Me", in contrast to earlier songs like "Leopard Skin Pill-box Hat", is another paean to a man-woman relationship. And once again Bob Dylan sits in front of a piano, confidentially playing, feeling all the silences in the voice and getting all the attention of the group throughout the entire stanza, marking the descending passages and thus dubbing the bass, allowing the organ to emerge in the bridge and then playing soft solo in the coda. It seems like guitar, at this point of his career, is not enough to explain this kind of atmosphere. What was obvious for "Lay Lady Lay", "Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You" or even "If Not For You" is not longer valid now. The instrumental final is another proof of his ability with the most famous keyboard instrument.

"Three Angels", as "Winterlude" did on side A, puts a break in the atmosphere, preparing for the final, "Father of Night", a song originally written for a Broadway show - a steady boogie with another great guiding piano played by Dylan himself. A careful and accurate listen to the piano should convince even the most sceptical that here more than on any other album Dylan shows a deep confidence in the art of playing the piano. Nobody, of course, would even dare to compare him to other great musicians who could be rightly defined as virtuosi, like Bruce Hornsby, Harry Connick, Jr., or even Billy Joel or the early Elton John. But it is obvious and beyond every reasonable doubt that, from "I’ll Keep It With Mine" (in both "Biograph" and "Bootleg Series" versions) all the way to "Ring Them Bells" and "What Good Am I?" on "Oh Mercy" in 1989, Bob Dylan shows another side of his skills, giving a deep and personal imprint to the piano. The immediateness of the phrasing on "New Morning" makes the piano a great replacement for the guitar, by far the most "intimate" of Dylan’s instruments. It is curious to notice that this time the real boost came from the piano. Using an instrument toward which he is less confident, the result is always the same: he is still alive and kicking, ready for other challenges.

Tuesday, April 11^th, 1961.

Downtown Manhattan, all the brokers from the financial centre filled up Nassau Street and the most famous bastion of world capitalism, as the old church on the other side of Wall Street seemed to remember that past and present are always linked together.

Further away, some lovers must have met in Battery Park before their respective ferries led them to their private homes.

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island announced the new world, and the ships sailed from Lisbon, where Victor Laszlo sent a desperate Ingrid Bergman, finally ending their long, troubled journey.

A cold, snowy winter, like many others in the Big Apple, kept everyone's heart in hibernation, and spring was waiting for something, another "talk of the town" to appear in the city's most famous magazine. Long after that February that "made me shiver", later remembered in what is a modern standard and remarked by Paul Le Mat as John Milner's in what is probably George Lucas' most meaningful and surprising work, shortly before those days that kept the world on a string and that hot Washington August afternoon and that polar freezing Texan November morning that put out the lights in Camelot, New York, the world capital, was preparing for another quiet ordinary evening.

Somewhere in Greenwich Village, a group of singers carried on their mission of rediscovering the ancient roots, know where you come from to know who you are. Old intellectuals, singers in their forties, dark-haired lovely girls with heavenly voices filled the most fascinating streets of Manhattan, not far away from where Edgar Allan Poe had lived and observed the world from a window, just as the multi-talented (and multi-schizophrenic) Fernando Pessoa had done in Lisbon, thus linking the two sides of the ocean. All the way from Cascais (where the former Italian King had retired after his country was proclaimed a republic) to Ellis Island, those little cafés and hang-out spots produced remarkable phenomena of extreme interest, most of the time unobserved by the masses.

That night Mike Porco, an emigrant from southern Italy, needed a guest artist to open for no less a person than John Lee Hooker. For several reasons, most of which will remain unknown to everyone who is not Porco himself, his choice fell on a young troubadour who had just arrived in town coming from who knows where. "Everything was so big that I couldn't even see the sky", he commented sometime later.

As every romantic fairy tale deserves, that skinny, myopic, curly-haired little boy from the Midwest arrived in New York on a stormy morning in late January, with nothing but a small knapsack and his guitar, plus a bunch of invisible luggage that would have filled the world in a kaleidoscopic odyssey.

However that story really was, he spotted Gerde's Folk City and soon established himself as one of the most promising entertainers in the city. When it was time to give him a chance, Mike gave him one: opening artist for a blues legend. Thus his name could appear alongside the great artist's: Bob Dylan, not yet 20, only one previous paid appearance in a café in Washington Square, the heart of the Village.

As the scenery slowly changed, a figure emerged. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the President of the United States: a foretold triumph for the next elections, still far ahead. The civil rights movements were mushrooming, the Rome agreements sealed the birth of the European Community, an old man from Bergamo ruled over moral and religious philosophy, also offering his diplomatic status to solve more than one problem and to proclaim salvation as every believer's right.

A few miles south of Miami, a bearded man, after overthrowing the previous regime, stood between the striped and the red flags, to the point where the United States had been forced to break off diplomatic relations, earlier that same year. The red curtain was about to build the physical division between two worlds. Where had all the flowers gone?

Leonard Bernstein and his movie-translated "West Side Story" won the Academy Awards, as Sophia Loren did as best actress, Ivo Andric won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Harper Lee, with "To Kill a Mockingbird", was awarded the Pulitzer, while Walter Pistons, with his Symphony No 7, got his award for music. All of these characters, save maybe for Pistons, are either still alive or their memory is widely known.

So is the little boy that opened that show.

All happened so quickly. In an age where the media went really slow compared to today, Dylan's rise was extremely fast. From the Village all the way to the Washington March, up to shaking the Pope's hand and the Academy Award for "Things Have Changed", Dylan literally measured forty years of history. With his eyes focused mainly, at the beginning, on the American scene, his works became more cosmopolitan as the years passed by.

The day after he made his debut, the Soviet Union announced the putting of the first human into orbit around earth, Major Yuri Gagarin. Four more days and the Bay of Pigs was a name sounding worldwide.

Ever since, Bob Dylan has applied his particular, officially uneducated, sharp and ironic point of view to whatever was surrounding him. From an ordinary everyday New York scene happening in a café late at night to a sun rising twice within minutes when you are flying on a polar route, his vision grew as his experiences expanded throughout the years.

Backed by a self-imposed education which ranged from T.S. Eliot to the Bible and the folk treasury, his view has always been totally unconventional and personal, able to add new shades of meaning to whatever he was talking about.

One year after, as the dust of rumours covered us, a silent, skinny boy sat on a cafe "across the street from the Gaslight", stripping down casual words in a notebook which eventually saw their definite shape over an eternally sought answer which, to our supreme misfortune, is blowing in the wind. Long before the song was recorded, the words and music rose in the sky of Manhattan, then a little farther, in Washington during the March the following year.

The same answer which must have haunted all the people looking at James H. Meredith when on October 1^st 1962, escorted by federal marshals, he registered at the University of Mississippi - a tale which Dylan summarised with extremely ironic coldness in "Oxford Town", a song which may have inspired a scene in the film "Forrest Gump", as the anti-hero shows his face among the Alabama students booing at their black colleagues for daring to enter 'their' college.

"My name it is nothing, my age it means less": in a country that in some kind of miracle succeeded to forge such a high national spirit - something totally extraordinary for a country of immigrants, the El Dorado of those seeking relief, peace or simply new opportunities - this counterstream voice, more American than many others, faithful only to himself, sang the contradictions and the massacres perpetrated in the name of patriotism, the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings, and God.

A voice lucky enough to sing "The Times They Are a-Changin'" a month before the King of Camelot got killed in a never-yet solved mystery in Dallas ("In the street the children screamed the lovers cried and the poet - maybe Dylan himself?- dreamed", sang Don McLean in "American Pie") - a song, ironically, included on the album that also featured "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", a kitchen maid killed by William Zanzinger, who was sentenced to six months and, almost thirty years later, was tracked down for collecting rents he no longer had the right to.

A voice able to jump at all the opportunities that presented themselves, such as turning the banned appearance on the Ed Sullivan show into a personal victory, or defending his freedom at Newport as an entire army of purists vomited their boos on him. Anyone who was there, raise their hand, let history declare who won.

Looking back on such a long, glorious career, it is very hard, to those who have always lent a ear to listen to what he said and how he said it, to imagine a world without Dylan's filter. The March on Washington, the murder of J.F. Kennedy, a generation's hopes and wishes, Judas Priest opposed to Charles Manson, the Watergate scandal (brilliantly foreseen seven years before, in an image of the President having to stand naked), the killing of one of the last black leaders in jail and the blaming of a crime on a boxer, the monopoly on oil of the Arab world, the Jewish question and the difficult relationship between Israel and its Near Eastern neighbours, the declaration "I ain't gonna play Sun City" a few years before Nelson Mandela, not so lucky as Meredith, was set free after a sentence of life imprisonment in 1964, the attending of a poetry symposium in Moscow as perestroika showed the times were really changing, his punk band shattering "Masters of War" as the Desert Storm turned into an instrument of death in the world's most fascinating show. Who would not have thought of the line "four persons killed and he was at the wheel" when, waking up, we heard the Princess of Wales had died in a car accident?

All of this is epitomised in just one line: "I've made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot."

***

Dylan's career has no equal in the history of popular music. After the death of Frank Sinatra, he is probably the last single remaining music icon in the United States, and, alongside Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger and a few others, the last in the world.

Unlike those others, he has been named for the Nobel Prize for Literature, though so far he has had to surrender - to another jester, Dario Fo, the first time, and then to Portuguese writer José Saramago and to Günter Grass.

A musician able to win music awards, important academic prizes, and a high-level French award also given to, among others, Charles M. Schulz.

What those two have in common is the ability to tell the times they were living in.

Schulz died on the day his very last strip was published. Dylan is still on the road, showing his face at the four corners of the world, always committed to himself and that restless feeling.

In the winter of 1964, Dylan spent a couple of weeks at Albert Grossman's mansion in Woodstock, working on a few songs for his new album, which was eventually recorded in the city over a three-day session in January 1965. The result was "Bringing It All Back Home", his first "electric" album.

For the first time, this album saw Dylan backed for the first time by a group (save for "Mixed Up Confusion", "Corinna, Corinna", and an electric version of "House of the Rising Sun" made available years later as an audio track on the "Highway 61 Interactive" CD-ROM). Under the supervising production of Tom Wilson, this fifth album placed him halfway between the early acoustic years and the "electric revolution": two sides, one electric and one acoustic, in order not to disappoint anyone. From the shining spontaneity of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("I think we never rehearsed it", said Dylan in the "Biograph" sleevenotes) to the unexpected laughter in "Bob Dylan's 115^th Dream", the half-hallucinated images in "Mr. Tambourine Man" (performed for the first time the previous July), the echoes of Blake in "Gates of Eden" and the apocalypse in "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", the album is a journey through what people then called folk-rock, but also a gallery of weird characters, not yet comparable to those developed in "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde" but already well shaped and configured.

During that self-imposed two weeks' isolation, Dylan wrote eighteen new songs, of which only a few appeared on the album. Others, like "Mama, You Been On My Mind", "Farewell Angelina" and "Love Is Just a Four Letter Word" were either covered by other artists or left somewhere until those birds of prey called bootleggers put their hands on them. Notwithstanding, tracks like "Denise, Denise" and "California" are extremely hard to find, scarcely available even to the most hard-headed of collectors. And no recording exists by Dylan of "Love is Just a Four Letter Word".

While the Newport 1964 festival and the album "Another Side of Bob Dylan", recorded in a rush in an all-night session in summer 1964, already showed certain innovations, especially topic-wise, hardly anyone could have imagined what the next album would reveal.

Yet its cover had a totally different impact. As for "Freewheelin'", a female figure was present. But if in the second album she was walking arm in arm with him, attempting to get some warmth on a cold New York wintry afternoon, the woman in the background in BIABB has the glamour of the femme fatale, coldly staring into the camera's artificial eye, while holding a cigarette in a very charming position. All topped by a flaming red dress. If we are to play with that stereotype, Sally Grossman, Albert's wife, was actually responsible for introducing Sara Lowndes to Dylan in late 1964, as the relationship between him and Joan Baez was slowly disintegrating.

Grossman is not the only other being present in the cover. Dylan is in fact holding a cat on his lap. A black cat and a woman, two archetypal figures for the devil, or a negative presence in general according to medieval beliefs. The lyrics, as we'll see, also speak of a raven.

"Bringing It All Back Home" deals with the theme of femininity in a new way. If the previous albums expressed either bitterness for an affair gone bad or a generally ironic approach towards the opposite sex (among the few exceptions are "To Ramona" and the tender memories of "Girl From the North Country"), the 1965 lyrics show a different, stronger determination. The affirmation of the second track leaves no room for interpretation: "She Belongs To Me". Same thing for the very last song, in which the message is clear as can be.

The greatest possible interest arises with the album's fourth track, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit": "It's a fiction, really", said Dylan in England later that year.

Not very prominently featured in compilations or tribute albums, it is still one of his most outstanding songs.

I myself, from time to time, think it is the best he ever wrote.

Joan Baez and Judy Collins – to name but few - have covered that song, though the results weren't really interesting, unlike Eric Clapton's recreation of it at the 1992 Bobfest. Apart from any other reasons we may find to justify this, one seems very concrete: it is a very male song.

Strategically placed, between an hymn to freedom - "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more" – and "Outlaw Blues" – "don't ask me nothing about nothing, I just might tell you the truth" (the anti-hero à la James Dean) – the song reveals the mystery of the opposite gender.

After dealing with those who "[want] you to be just like them" and the unbearable Maggie (that song was reappropriated in Britain under the Thatcher regime!), and before acknowledging that it's hard to stumble at 3 p.m. when it's extremely cold, Dylan takes a break and tells us how impressed he is by a certain woman.

If the bosses on Maggie's farm screamed and shouted orders, if the "woman in Jackson" is just fine as she is, now, this woman "speaks like silence". This sentence already opens up a world of interpretations: biblical concepts and Yiddish wisdom (even a fool could be mistaken for a wise man, as long as he keeps his mouth shut).

It is as if the woman is able to take the male narrator away from chaos - something that Dylan accepts, not being sure whether it accepts him. "Experience teaches that silence terrifies people the most", he perceptively says in the sleevenotes. Yet, here he seems to say that silence is the best way of finding some peace of mind - at least, this face of silence, which speaks without ideals of violence, the quintessence of purity.

Who else but a "sweet virgin angel" could bring such a message? Many think Sara was actually the inspiration for this song. If she is, this song was written at the very beginning of their relationship.

The sources do not agree about the exact time they met. For sure Sara was a good friend of Sally Grossman's. They may have met in late 1964, while Dylan was still in a sense with Baez, as she confirms in her autobiography "A Voice to Sing With". Then Sara got through to Dylan at the end of the "Don't Look Back" British tour in 1965, following which they left for a brief holiday in Portugal.

As the song was written in late 1964, if it is about Sara it may be a declaration of intent, or else an unconscious series of expectations from a not-yet-shaped relationship.

Whoever the real muse may be (and in the final end we shouldn't be that curious, since to our intention what it really matters is that the song actually was written and recorded) "Love Minus Zero" remains one of Dylan's early masterpieces, unfairly underestimated by being left off the compilations which Columbia/Sony have released over the years in what seems to me nothing but a clear attempt to sell a few more CDs and try to grab new buyers while offering only a very small piece of the cake.

LMZ is one of the few songs which, in live performance, Dylan has never really changed or chopped off lyrics from. In all the versions I have been able to listen to, in concert or tape, I always heard the entire song, always arranged in the same way. This is dome kind of an exception, especially in the case of the late seventies and early eighties, when even "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" was turned into a reggae sketch, unshaped and unfinished.

***

"She doesn't have to say she's faithful/Yet she's true like ice, like fire". This is one of the first examples of Dylan's use of dualities, which would be widely developed in the years to come for the most different subjects (relationships, religious visions, damnation and apocalypse, redemption and many more). Ice, water in its solid state, can be melted by fire, but is also able to put the same fire out once it is melted.

"People carry roses/Make promises by the hours/My love she laughs like the flowers/Valentines can't buy her". What really strikes us about this figure is her awareness of her being, her self-confidence. She does not need flowers or other flamboyant tinsels. The image strongly anticipates the third stanza of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", with the kings of Tyrus waiting in line for their geranium kiss, leading the narrator to ask: "who really wants just to kiss you?

The value this figure brings is thus evident. She is a ray of stability in a world of people who would do everything to attract attention even for a few minutes, hoping to get any kind of favour, direct or indirect, from her.

This is a person suitable for everyday life, a safe haven to rely on.

The figures in the second stanza are painted with extraordinary ability. It's a portrait of ordinary life, images of people talking of casual things, quoting other people's thoughts, most of the time taking them out of their original context, misinterpreting them, leading to clumsy conclusions that sometimes are drawn on walls, as if to give them a shape. Dylan himself was not immune from this syndrome. Through 1965 and 1966, as we will see, he picked up characters and images one after another, re-placing them in totally different situations.

The image "conclusions on the wall" - later used for the title of a book on Dylan – also brilliantly describes the objectionable habit of drawing concepts and graffiti on walls. A nice activity for the suburbs (the cover of "Oh Mercy" is a beautiful mural!), this habit has too often spoiled monuments and facades; it is, though, also a suitable vehicle for testing the temperature of certain phenomena. Everywhere there are places in which one can read graffiti dating back several years, reflecting a particular situation. I found these lines particularly suitable for the early nineties in Italy, when the students tried to raise another wave of protest and the first hiccups of contestation of the mass movements (e.g. the football World Cup in Italy in 1990 – the ancestors of the Seattle folk?) caused many walls to be full of words of disdain.

To all this chat, the woman's reactions are simple. While before she laughed like the flowers, now she smiles softly, bearing in mind that in the very end "there's no success like failure/And that failure's no success at all".

Again, her capacity not to be touched by anything ordinary or earthly makes her something special, a well of wisdom, something that seems brought directly from another age. No wonder the third stanza seems as if it's happening at Camelot or the court of Charlemagne. Again, in the crowd the figure is aware of herself, and "knows too much to argue or to judge".

Many have seen the influences of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" in this song.
The final stanza features a raven "at my window with a broken wing", and the general atmosphere in that stanza is indeed quite dark, but in my humble opinion is in no way similar to that of Poe's poem.

For sure Dylan has read Poe. Many clues point to that, from the use of certain words ("tapping" for "knocking" occurs in both "The Raven" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue") to the mention of "Rue Morgue Avenue" in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, echoing the title of Poe's most famous stories - as well as, over thirty years later, the name "Miss Mary Jane" (in "Tryin' To Get To Heaven", on "Time Out of Mind" – an album whose title is given by a phrase used by Poe himself, as well as Walt Whitman, Shakespeare and Marion Zimmer Bradley), which may recall either Jane Stanard, who inspired Poe's poem "To Helen", or Maria Clemm, Poe's paternal aunt who actually had a house in Baltimore (the city where Poe died, which is named, together with his birthplace Boston, on that multi-award-winning album of 1997).

We may conclude that Dylan read Poe by 1965, and has also returned to him over the years: it is more than legitimate to assume that Poe has influenced him.

In "Love Minus Zero", however, the only point in common with "The Raven" is the actual mention of the bird, standing at Dylan's narrator's window "with a broken wing", while in Poe the bird is "sitting/On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door", speaking only one word "Nevermore", which may be either its name or the only message it can bring.

First of all, a raven (or a crow) was believed to bringing the dead souls to the Kingdom of Death or was portrayed as an attribute of the god Cronos (in Latin, Saturn). Originally white, it was turned into a black bird by Apollo. A white crow actually had to guard Coronis, Apollo's beloved, who got pregnant. This raised Apollo's wrath, and the god turned the white crow black, thus giving it a negative connotation.

The raven in Poe has numerous inner meanings. It seems to be a messenger of darkness and death, or - even worse - may represent the confirmation that the narrator's beloved Lenore is lost to him for ever: the raven is fated to stay put on the bust above his chamber door, to remind him eternally of the lost love.

The raven seems unable to enter Poe's narrator's room because the bust of Pallas protects it. The Greek myths actually say that statues granted protection to a city. It was thanks to the theft of the statue made by Ulysses and Diomedes that the Greeks were able to conquer the city of Troy.

If the raven in Dylan's "Love Minus Zero" had the same qualities, it would be a symbol of disgrace or bad luck, in total contrast with the security and wisdom expressed in the previous stanzas.

Another difference is that Dylan's raven has a broken wing: it needs help. A detail not to be forgotten is that a raven is a bird of prey, and a broken wing could easily lead it to death.

I therefore conclude that, while Dylan had certainly read Poe's "The Raven" and other poems of his, the image of the bird in this song has nothing to do with the nineteenth-century poem in terms of identity of meaning. In 1965 and 1966, Dylan borrowed and reinterpreted large numbers images (such as the pictures of the hanging in "Desolation Row", or, in the same song, the insurance men from the castle - a reference to Franz Kafka, who actually lived in the castle precinct in Prague and worked as an insurance agent), taking them out of their original context.

A raven with a broken wing needs protection. The logical conclusion seems to be that the wise human being is in the end, though wise, also as weak as a raven with a broken wing, thus requiring protection for the most elementary things. In this perspective a relationship between the two could be mutually rewarding.

The original recording of the song is in E. Ever since, Dylan has played it mostly in different keys, such as G, D or C. On the guitar, the descending progression at the end of the first line is best emphasised in G (in the "Budokan" live version the song is in D and the progression is played by the wind instruments).

The fact Dylan has never changed that song in 35 years makes it quite an exception: if not the only such song, it is certainly one of the very few. The only changes have been the instruments used: sometimes a dobro (in 1994 on the "Unplugged" album, on which it is probably the best track, even though it was, surprisingly, left off the US version), other times a mandolin (1998) or pedal steel guitar (2001).

Whatever the key or the instruments, the song remains the same. No stanzas are omitted, and it has always been played the same way. Of all the covers one may cite, I do still recommend Eric Clapton's 1992 performance at Madison Square Gardens - a revisit faithful to the original, featuring a wonderful guitar solo which at no point drowns the melody or reduces it to a second-plane affair.

***

Author's note: when using expressions like "birds of prey" for bootleggers, or defining writing on the walls as a bad habit, the author (who is not an English mother-tongue speaker, but tries to do his best to write in a decent way, thanks also to the assistance of Chris Rollason) did not mean to hurt anyone anyway.

Actually, if it wasn't for tapers it would have been indeed very difficult for him or whoever ever wanted to write about Dylan's songs to be able to even try to write something approximate about such a complex subject.

The young man had just got off the subway at Astor Place. When he subsequently emerged in the thin, fresh New York City morning air, he sent out a glance to Barnes & Noble, and then stood by the traffic light between Broadway and Weaverly Place.

The purple flags of New York University lazily showed a little evidence of the wind, and as he crossed Broadway he could see Garibaldi's statue in Washington Square, as well as the arch, now fenced.

As he cut across the square, headed to the far corner, he stood at the crossroads. MacDougal Street on the left, Washington Square right and West 4^th Street straight ahead. A few steps later, he crossed the Avenue of the Americas, quickly taking in the Empire State Building to his right, and in less than five seconds he was in Cornelia Street. A few steps down to the basement, and he entered the record shop.

A few minutes later, he could be seen carrying a paper envelope, crossing the street again and standing in front of 161 West 4^th Street.

There, exactly forty years ago, a young guy had rented an apartment.

There were piles of snow in January 1961, one of the coldest winters since the end of the war. And for sure there were less tourist spots or sex shops. Greenwich Village was sure a different environment at that time.

Today it still is one of New York's most fascinating places. If anyone has enough time to hang around the Streets, even the most apparently insignificant ones, he could spot a little piece of Europe.

Walking down MacDougal Street from Washington Square to Bleecker Street, it's easy to see Cafe Wha?, and turning right into Minetta Street you could experience a nice view, with small houses, no cars and silence all around. A feeling that only London, among the biggest European metropolises, was able to give me.

Bob Dylan must have absorbed this atmosphere, which undoubtedly was even better when he arrived. And his journey - from the Midwest to the East Coast, through trafficked highways and casual stops - has surely been impressed in his memory.

The young man made his way back, recrossing the Avenue of the Americas. He turned right again, and he didn't see anything.

It had been that way since "Love and Theft" was released.

Tuesday, September 11^th, 2001.

That was exactly what the young man was thinking: "Love and Theft runs the risk of being remembered as the album that was released on that dreadful day".

His thoughts went back to 1998, as he and the lovely red-haired girl were hanging around South Port on a lovely evening, as Fieldston shone on a bright autumn morning, as that little hummingbird somehow made its way through an open sixteenth-floor window, and got confused looking at its reflection in the mirror. His continuous attempt to find a decent copy of the complete Basement Tapes; that big, wonderful Chagall painting in the foyer of the Metropolitan, the wonderful inner structure of the Guggenheim Museum. The little pond near Central Park South, the absent geese. The reservoir, Dustin Hoffman, Alec Guinness………..

The terrorist attack had devastated a young yet very united country. The Mayor had taken total control of the situation, encouraging people not to lock themselves in their houses, to return to their old habits.

More than ever, America needed to know where it had come from, to fully understand its present.

Oddly, "Love and Theft" sounds like a journey back to a lost America.

***

"Love and Theft" is an American album. The impression the music and the lyrics give change drastically between the Old World and the New World.

When I first listened to it, I thought it was a very good album. When, a couple of months later, I listened to it again, from a 17^th floor apartment in midtown Manhattan, overlooking the Park on my left and the Carlyle hotel in front of me, I had a totally different feeling. It wasn't just a very good album, it is an excellent one.

It was the first decade of November. People like Woody Allen and Henry Kissinger had just shot commercials to encourage people to visit and enjoy New York. I found the atmosphere very different from what I had experienced the previous times I had visited this city in the past few years. And it was not because of the fall. New York is beautiful in autumn, with the leaves changing colours in the park and the green grass of Cedar Hill showing the first cold nights. The museum mile is always a nice walk, and when you "emerge" on Fifth Avenue with the Guggenheim in front of you, you know you are in a special place.

All around there was some "heavy air" such as I had never witnessed before here.

"Summer Days" is literally fed by the view of the town houses on the Upper East Side. All the city shone with a new light, and the window I was standing by, with a view I knew by heart, seemed reborn, after two months of grieving. "Po' Boy" sounds great while you are rambling through Minetta Street and the uncrowded Village Street. "Moonlight" is the music you want to hear if you feel like having a late-night dance in Central Park or if the little lake tempts you at night-time.

***

In order to review this album, a few preliminary observations are needed:

1. This is Dylan's best played and best performed album since "Slow Train Coming" in 1979
2. Although "Jack Frost" is credited as producer, the album sounds like a piece of teamwork
3. The smoothness and purity of the sound is due to the fact it was recorded using the touring band
4. In terms of cohesion and atmosphere, only "Planet Waves" could be compared to this album.

Musically, this is one of Dylan's finest albums, quite superior to the acclaimed "Time Out of Mind". Dylan seems finally comfortable in a studio. There are no fumblings, the sound is really smooth and continuous, everybody knows exactly what to do.

The presence of Augie Meyers on keyboards (and on percussion on "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" and "Honest with Me") adds a more complete sound to certain tracks. The rest is just the touring band at its best, with Larry Campbell playing several instruments and Tony Garnier embracing his upright bass, sometimes also using a bow.

There is a lot of energy circulating and the songs feel very intense. "Summer Days" seems to last hours, while it's only a matter of minutes. There isn't a note out of place, everything is perfect, from the well-balanced guitars to the drums and the voice, perfectly in time in a way we don't so often experience with records and concerts. This is one of Dylan's most remarkable studio recordings.

Some might object, saying that the inclusion of "Mississippi" - recorded at the TOOM sessions but left off the released album, and later covered by Sheryl Crow on her '70s-sounding album "The Globe Sessions" - demonstrates the sparse nature of Dylan's productivity in recent times. Notwithstanding, the two versions of this song sound completely different from each other, and there are a few changes in the lyrics as well. Once again, Dylan (save for some isolated, extraordinary episodes, such as Nina Simone's and Roberta Flack's covers of "Just Like a Woman") proves to be the best artist at covering himself.

The sound and the feeling suggest that the album was recorded "live in the studio", which is the technique Dylan is most suited to. Dylan started recording forty years ago when to cut an album all you had to do was sing and play facing a microphone, and the majority of his most successful recordings were actually cut using his touring band of the time. "Planet Waves", "Desire" and "Street- Legal" followed this scheme, and they are all brilliantly performed records. "Oh Mercy" is another one, though it required strong attention and supervising production by Daniel Lanois; and probably, for that album Dylan was fully aware of how the songs should have sounded like, much more than with "Time Out of Mind", on which some tracks sound really stripped down (e.g. the organ on "Dirt Road Blues", the entire group following the piano on "Make You Feel My Love", and several instruments on "Standing in the Doorway").

The point is that here with "Love and Theft", the entire album is really well played.

This band suits Dylan very well: at least as much as that which backed him in 1993-1996, if not even better. Tony Garnier, the man who stood beside the 60-year old Minnesota musician in more than a thousand concerts, is a secure presence in his entourage, the figure to whom he turns at when he's losing the timing (sometimes also to David Kemper who provides a steady tempo, with a safe timbre, something suitable for both acoustic and electric sets. Winston Watson, who was a great drummer, was better for the electric sets. At any rate, Kemper and Watson - with the only possible exception of Stan Lynch - have been Dylan's best drummers ever). Larry Campbell, initially with some problems, gradually succeeded in replacing both J.J. Jackson and Bucky Baxter, also adding - with his multi-instrumental skills - an important piece to Dylan's puzzle. If his pedal steel is less "piercing" than Baxter's (and I said if), his mandolin is a fair bit more incisive, and provides a very solid and bluegrass-style backup during the acoustic concert sets ("To Ramona" and "Hallelujah I'm Ready To Go" wouldn't sound as good as they do without that mandolin). Charlie Sexton is an excellent guitarist, performing an indispensable function which, if at first sight it might not seem that important, comes to the fore whenever the band swings into country and/or rock'n'roll mode, not to mention electric blues (just think of "Country Pie" in the European spring tour 2000). David Kemper, as I previously said, is really useful and not as intrusive or featureless as some studio drummers Dylan has used in the past (I'm always surprised whenever I read Jim Keltner's name credited among the musicians. Keltner is, without a doubt, a perfectly decent drummer; his playing in Eric Clapton's superb album "From the Cradle" is shining. Nevertheless, whenever he gets a chance, an invitation or a request to play with Dylan, his contribution is really sterile, and sometimes plain irritating, as on "Standing in the Doorway").

With such a group and with great songs, the final result is guaranteed.

From the moment when the record starts and "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" emerges from the eerie silence, you can feel there will be a lot to enjoy.

"Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" shows the guitars at their best. If the recording line-up is the same as he uses in concert (though one could hear Campbell playing the violin in the left channel, unlike what happens during performances), while Larry Campbell keeps the rhythm, Charlie Sexton enlightens the pauses between the lyrics.

"Mississippi" follows. This is totally different from Sheryl Crow's version, and the careful production turns this discard from the "Time Out of Mind" sessions into a charming, slow ballad. The slow tempo allows Dylan's voice (in good shape throughout the entire record, nasality almost totally absent) to mark the lyric's most meaningful passages, such as "I was raised in the country, I been working in the town / I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down", denoting the uneasiness of those who, during the boom years, moved to the city ("Hard Times in New York Town"). The lines "Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long" can be juxtaposed with "Tryin' to Get to Heaven", where the other "big river" (also the name of a Confederate State, too!), Missouri, is mentioned ("I only saw what they let me see"). Musically, the mandolin adds a typical ballad swing, putting the song halfway between "Hazel" and the traditionals performed in concert.

"Summer Days" is an absolute jewel. Again, if the playing line-up is the same in concert, the lead guitar to the right should be Larry Campbell. He introduces the classic, first brilliant riff and sustains the melody throughout the entire song. It is barely four minutes long, but it is so intense it seems like half an hour. For sure, the best recording since "Slow Train Coming".

This also links back to an old 1989 interview, when Dylan said that, although people live in the shadow of what they've previously done, they have to overcome that fact. The answer he provides is, one more time, ambiguous.

At all events, this song strongly recalls the fifties, the post-war optimism and the different approach the new generations had towards life and consumerism in general ("I got eight carburators and boys I'm usin' 'em all"), freedom of speech, political corruption, the search for spirituality - until the final stanza takes us back to the starting-point, as another generation confronts the values of the old one. Though Fitzgerald did not live to see war's end, his works clearly span the illusions and disappointment of an entire generation, from goldrush to burnout, with no time to enjoy what you created. The music on this song has exactly the same feel: so intense and quick, but so full of concepts and notes. There is everything you need to make a great song: good music and beautiful lyrics.

"Bye and Bye" could have been a Rogers and Hart song. The melody is really akin to "Blue Moon". Again, the standard line-up (guitars, bass and drums) is more than enough to sustain such a melody, with only the Hammond organ to fill the silences of the voice, a proof the album is really well-arranged. Dylan is showing a rare ability to write very intense and "traditional" bridges, in total accordance with the jazz and old-time traditions. His writing has enormously improved. More than other recent albums, "Love and Theft' reveals highly-developed skills, in spite of the small number of songs published or recorded by Dylan in recent times. And all this despite the youth of some of the musicians. Charlie Sexton's semi-acoustic playing is really interesting, while Campbell's rhythm gives the entire tune a late '30s feeling.

If, at the very beginning of his career, Dylan forged his songwriting on the heels of old folk tunes, and later tried to develop a more personal vein which touched its acme with "Blood on the Tracks" and "Desire" to later turn to gospel, this time he chose the blues. And the result is that he can do that, master this only apparently easy form of songwriting. Writing a blues tune is, if we take the basic rules, an easy job. What is really hard is to write something which has "a soul". Dylan has proved himself able to do that.

"Lonesome Day Blues" has a steady drive provided by a lightly saturated electric guitar and supported by a great bass. The two guitars follow each other with extreme precise regularity, answering each other with rare perfection. Years of electric blues on-stage clearly reveal themselves as fruitful.

"Floater (Too Much To Ask)" could have been a Betty Boop Cartoon song, something coming directly from the ponds of Louisiana, with a nice violin, played either with a bow or pizzicato and the same semi-acoustic guitar we heard on "Bye and Bye". These two songs have a lot in common, including the instruments and the bridge, which follows on in perfect respect for the Delta blues tradition. The right-hand guitar, with its typical jazz chords, follows the melody carefully. Some of the characters who hung around Desolation Row are back again. Romeo has finally found his Juliet, but their conversation is not kind at all. There is no Desolation Row itself this time, nor is there the bored but courteous moon which accompanied the young Venetian in an early Eliot poem. The atmosphere is really dark.

"High Water" could have featured on T-Bone Burnett's soundtrack for the Coen Brothers' excellent film "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". The dedication to Charlie Patton clearly pays a deserved tribute to the folk and blues tradition. Chris has often joked about the fifth stanza, thinking he and I could be "the Englishman" and "the Italian". If that is true, we really are "in trouble deep"!

"Moonlight" pays another tribute to the forties. The melody is extremely interesting. It is what I call "a continuous one", one that develops throughout the eight bars with no repetition.

"Honest with Me" breaks this quiet atmosphere, recalling "Highway 61 Revisited" with a steady slide guitar.

"Po' Boy" could be seen as the album's most interesting track. A finely played acoustic guitar, very ironic words, and a nice singing. Irony is very strongly present over the entire song, right from the beginning, when the main character, when asked about his wife, answers "she's busy in the kitchen" and then adds in a lower voice "cookin'", to prevent us from thinking of the famous scene from "The Postman Always Rings Twice"! Literary references are back again: in the album's second Shakespearean reference, we meet Othello and Desdemona, and this time the Moor is the first to die. There are also characters from Mark Twain (the mother) and Arthur Miller (the salesman). The instrumental finale, with upright bass with a bow, marks a sudden break in the song's smoothness.

"Cry A While" is a remarkable song. Its changes of tempo, the perfect drums, electric guitar and dobro make it one of Dylan's most successful performances ever - in total contrast to the line in the song "I'm keeping a low profile"!. The Don Pasquale here does not seem to come directly from Donizetti's opera: he seems more like a character from Scorsese's "Goodfellas". But the words are absolutely secondary to the music, which is so well performed one cannot hear a single defect in it. From the tempo changes to the dobro solo, every musician will find something to learn from this track.

"Sugar Baby" has been defined as a farewell song, in the mode of "Restless Farewell", the concluding song on the "Times They Are a-Changin'" album which, alas, Dylan has performed live on only a handful of occasions. The first I heard this new valedictory number, I was extremely disappointed. I thought it was the worst performed on the entire album, too fragmentary and too much dilated in space - all in all, over-long. Listening to it over and over I changed my mind a little. It is really a farewell song, where the instruments play to great effect, an accordion in the background. Mark Twain's respectable character Aunt Sally, from "Huckleberry Finn", is here among smugglers, bootleggers and prostitutes: everywhere the atmosphere is one of "corruptible seed", and the attempt at the end to convince people to redeem themselves before time ends seems really hopeless.

***

If we look at "Love and Theft" as a whole, the atmosphere, is definitely lighter than that of "Time Out Of Mind", with its sense of oppressive loneliness and difficult communication. Here, the music expresses the joy of playing, and considering that this band played hundreds of concerts it is really a big achievement.

Considering the unfortunate coincidence of the day of its release, "Love and Theft" could serve as a thermometer to measure Americans' identity, to help people rediscover their roots and to fully understand their presence, to further develop that extraordinary sense of cohesion and patriotism which makes the United States an unique example in the entire world. Another work which could lead the way in that sense may be the already-mentioned film "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" by the Coen Brothers, another journey into the heart of America.

"Love and Theft" initially appeared in a limited two-CD edition, with an extra disc featuring two previously unreleased tracks, both recorded in the early '60s: "I Was Young When I Left Home" (a traditional song never before officially released by Dylan in any version), and an alternate version of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" with an out-of-tune guitar. Both tracks were, apparently, chosen by Dylan himself to complement the album.

The traditional number is very well performed, with Dylan's famous finger-picking style as used on his first three albums and the suffering voice we know from "House of the Rising Sun", "Song to Woody" and "Moonshiner", to name but few.

Unfortunately, the packaging of "Love and Theft" is not really well conceived. The sleevenotes are hidden in a pocket inside the front cover, and the paper tends to wrap upon itself a little too much. If only the album had been packaged like the "Live '66" CD or the remastered "Sgt. Pepper", it would have been an added bonus.

The lack of the lyrics, which haven't yet appeared either on the official site, is a big shame, considering how interesting they are. The cover photos show a country gentleman and a stick-in-the- mud dandy reading a Spanish-language newspaper. It is really nice to think Dylan may have had some fun shooting these pictures.

Finally, this album has shifted large numbers of copies. In Italy, for instance, where Bob Dylan had in recent times been only a minority interest for a few initiates, it stormed straight into the album chart at number two and stayed in the top twenty for over a month. Its release was also supported by a lot of interviews, in newspapers and weekly magazines (in Italy, in "La Repubblica" and "Il Venerdì di Repubblica"). A very interesting interview, with photos by none other than Herb Ritts, has also just appeared in "Rolling Stone" (November 22 2001 issue).

New York City - Firenze, November 2001

Back in 1974 Bob Dylan - after a period of relatively low creativity which saw only one 'real' new album (the soundtrack to 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'), plus an anthology and the notorious 'revenge disc' issued by Columbia in 'punishment' for Dylan's (brief) defection to Elektra - went back on the road with the Band, the same musicians who had accompanied him in the mid-60s, with Levon Helm back on drums. During the genesis of the tour, they recorded 'Planet Waves', the first of a series of three records to hit #1 in the American charts. Recorded in Los Angeles, it shows Dylan right back on top.

The tour was really well received. Starting in Chicago on January 3^rd and ending on the other side of the country one and a half months later, it put Dylan back in the spotlight.

Back in New York, Dylan attended a series of painting and philosophy lessons with Norman Raeben, another person of East European origins. As he later commented, that was the beginning of the end of his marriage. According to his words, his wife, Sara, really couldn't understand him anymore after he attended these classes, where he learnt to do consciously what before he had always done unconsciously.

The results of this teachings can be found (and heard) on the following album, 'Blood on the Tracks'. According to many, this is the most beautiful album Dylan has ever made.

The initial recording sessions took place in New York in September 1974, but some tracks were re-recorded in Minneapolis later that year. The official release is, in fact, a mixture of material from both recording sessions.

It is widely believed, and I am part of this wave, that 'Blood on the Tracks' would have been still better if it had featured only the material from the New York sessions.

The atmosphere and the inspiration is so really tangible on the New York cuts; the rearrangements made in Minneapolis ended up suffocating the real essence of the songs, some of which were quite harshly rewritten.

A very small backing group, with two (sometimes more) guitars, bass and a Hammond organ (although a full group features on 'Meet Me in the Morning') provided one of the clearest and purest sounds Dylan has ever produced in the studio. The entire New York sessions lasted only a bunch of days, but the result was remarkable. Today, interested collectors, listeners or the merely curious can hear it through the widely bootlegged 'Blood on the Tapes' album, as well as another bootleg featuring other songs cut during those days.

With the one possible exception of 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts', the Minneapolis leg of the sessions delivered a lower level of product, especially on 'You're a Big Girl Now' - a real masterpiece in New York but an ordinary song in Minneapolis, over-arranged and in a higher key that makes Dylan's singing less appropriate and intimate than before.

The mixing of acoustic instruments, a quiet Hammond organ and slide guitar clearly demonstrates that great songs really do not need a big band to work.

'Tangled Up in Blue' was a natural follow-up to 'Wedding Song', the great acoustic number which concluded 'Planet Waves'. The song evokes different parts of the United States, places with different landscapes, events and mentalities, but the feeling is always the same, including Dylan's jacket buttons knocking on the guitar's body.

In the New York version, the magnificent telling of the story (which has been brilliantly analysed by Chris Rollason in an article on this site) - partly in the third person, unlike in the Minneapolis version - is never drowned by the sound of the instruments; by contrast, when one listens to the official recording sometimes it's hard to keep one's ear on the words. The story is so well unfold and told with so much passion that it is almost impossible to notice it is extremely long. As with 'Desolation Row' many years before, the listener is literally captivated by the 'mathematical' evolution of the song, following a tried and tested pattern which leaves nothing to improvisation.

The open tuned guitar, as well as the sliding of the chords along the neck in the opening progression, soon captures every careful and interested listener. The echo provided by the almost empty studio adds another interesting element to a unique atmosphere. Dylan's singing is perfectly understandable, with the obvious homophonic coincidences which the English language provides (at a certain point it is not that simple to understand if he sings '[Heading out for] the ol' East coast' or 'the holiest coast'). The bass matches perfectly with the voice.

Dylan himself told John Hammond that he wanted to record something simple and direct. The result of these sessions proves he absolutely reached his goal. It is extremely strange that he decided to re-record some of the songs - as a matter of fact those whose words were really the most intense.

Another interesting particular, which will be outlined in a soon-to-be-completed book, is that the second versions really showed significant changes in the words.

The harmonica at the end of TUIB provides a natural conclusion to this seven-minute song. No need of fading, cross effects or anything else: the take is perfect as it is. It's not even a big deal if the guitar is a little out of tune, as one can hear from the very final chord.

The worst result of the Minneapolis sessions was, without any doubt, 'You're a Big Girl Now'. A heavy arrangement with a multi-instrument backing group literally chokes the song.

'Biograph' in 1985 offered the official release of the New York version of this song, which remains, in my humble opinion, an absolute masterpiece. Played in E instead of G, it allows Dylan to be more expressive. The first stanza, with only acoustic guitar and bass, a shy steel guitar backing Dylan as he vocalises, leads directly to the second, where a soft Hammond organ on the right channel enriches the atmosphere. Pedal steel follows in the third stanza, whose lyrics are held back in the official version. The last stanza, before the instrumental coda, is absolutely beautiful, with the pedal steel guitar filling the blanks left by Dylan's voice with an incomparable and inimitable series of notes and a masterful use of sostenuto and vibrato. The harmonica again closes one of Dylan's most polished and successful studio performances.

'Idiot Wind' sounds like a second 'Tangled Up in Blue', with the Hammond organ outlining the refrain. The New York version is a fine recording of one of Dylan's most revealing songs (as he himself declared in an interview), showing connections with the I Ching (as already evoked in 'It's All Over Now Baby Blue') and exposing what seem to be the difficult relations a man has with the press and with his wife (in reality hiding other messages), with a marvellous minor fourth chord at the very beginning, followed by the dominant leading naturally to the key chord and an interesting progression of minor third and second grades leading to the suspended (this time major) fourth culminating in the refrain where the organ outlines the words 'idiot wind'. This has nothing to do with the version, ten thousand times worse, which was recorded in Minnesota. During the course of the years, especially in the nineties, Dylan progressively returned to the original version (a beautiful revisit was performed in San José in May 92). The singing is something anticipating the beginning of the new bar, with an imperceptible delay which makes the whole thing even more fascinating. The echo is still present, and the atmosphere captures the listener in a long, almost endless fascinating journey into human feeling and esoteric implications.

Besides, no matter how people may like the official version, none of the new words sounded better than these, from the last stanza of the original text:

The last four lines return to the I Ching, revealing a complex process which requires careful study.

The harmonica again provides the finale to a nine-minute song. Rarely has Dylan's mouth-harp been so precise in dealing with minor chords, without running the risk of playing some notes totally out of context.

Another version exists, with an out-of-tune guitar and looser bass; the cut issued on 'The Bootleg Series' has to be the definitive choice.

'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts', a very complex song whose sources can be found variously in North American literature (as Chris Rollason has shown in another article published on this site), Jewish roots and the quest for the Holy Grail, employs a similar formula. Here, the Minneapolis version could stand on the same level as this earlier one; the New York version is better performed, but for the telling of such a long and amusing story the arrangement Dylan chose in Minneapolis could be as suitable as this one. The New York version features a stanza which is omitted in the final release.

'If You See Her, Say Hello' continues with the esoteric implications of the album, at least in the New York version. Every reference to divination, children and separation (this, up to a certain extent) was wisely excluded from the final version, which is, nonetheless, poor compared with this one, with Dylan unable to keep the same tempo throughout the song, changing it with every stanza. There is another version, a little stripped down, with Dylan shifting in and out of tempos - a result which – it's hard to tell – may be intended to be as it is, or may simply make it clear that this take is simply a piece of work-in-progress.

The New York version, included on 'The Bootleg Series', is played with four guitars, giving a ripieno sensation and suitably backing Dylan's sensitive and beautiful narrative. Again, behind Dylan and Sara, somebody else is hiding.

Even in 'Shelter from the Storm' - a song used many years later as the final number in the mediocre movie 'Jerry McGuire' starring Tom Cruise - one stanza was omitted between the out-take (as finally released on the film soundtrack and then reissued on the European release 'The Best of Bob Dylan') and the official BOTT version. The reason is more or less as with 'Idiot Wind': the deleted words are too revealing. The atmosphere is more like that of 'You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go', with Dylan yelling for the tempo, hitting his shoes on the floor. At any rate, the version included on BOTT is from the New York sessions.

Those interested in coming to a final judgment could create their own CD of the 'New York sessions', combining the New York takes that were officially used on BOTT with those that were not (as available on the various subsequent official releases or, if not, on bootleg).

Dylan has said, in the notes to 'Biograph' and in other interviews, that 'Tangled Up in Blue' or 'Idiot Wind' could be seen as a big painting, a fresco on a large wall, where the entire scene has one meaning and the individual parts another, but in the end everything contributes to the final result. This perspective can be applied not only to those two songs, but to 'Blood on the Tracks' as a whole. In this sense, Raeben did a remarkable job in teaching Dylan to organise his ideas so as to come up with an articulated finished product, or what might be called, in the language of the late '60s and early '70s, a 'concept album'.

by Nicola Menicacci

Along with Joan Baez, Judy Collins was among the multitude of those who crowded the streets of New York's Greenwich Village between the end of the 50s and the first half of the 60s.

The bunch of streets adjacent to Washington Square formed by MacDougal Street, Bleecker Street and W4 Street produced, over a very few years, more musical riches than the ambitious and ruthless record producers who have dominated the industry since the late 1980s could even imagine. The contribution of those years, which culminated in the Rolling Thunder Revue, remains impressive in terms of both quantity and quality. Not even the charming faces of New Kids On The Block or the Backstreet Boys, or the scantily clad images of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera (even if her vocal skills are still largely underestimated) or the inflammable Mariah Carey could make us forget that extraordinary season. As Leonard Cohen might have said, 'I remember them well in the Chelsea Hotel'.

Something of the spirit of those years when creativity did not yet obey the rules of profit and the market, but was indeed the mainspring that pushed those artists to produce more, is brilliantly epitomised in David Hajdu's excellent book "Positively Fourth Street – The Lives of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña" (Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001; paperback edition - North Point Press, a division of Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux).

The star-system would have shattered (to use F. Scott Fitzgerald's words) "this side of Paradise". Only a few survived that money machine which automatically discharges what does not sell and enhances who does it as long as he does. The late Dave Van Ronk went on living in the Village, but by the late 80s could be considered a ghost from the past. Phil Ochs had already paid the price in 1976; Odetta is still a cult figure. Joan Baez is a living icon to the folk purists and those who champion civil rights.

One could easily run into Judy Collins along Madison Avenue's Italian Mile, many blocks east of the Greenwich Village, in one of those shops for absolute millionaires looking for a pair of shoes or another dress, with clerks intent to please her all the time: Absolutely, Miss Collins, Without a Doubt, Miss Collins, Thank you, Miss Collins…

Collins wrote the foreword for Steve Matteo's own biography of Bob Dylan ("Dylan", MetroBooks 1998), a run-of-the-mill life which has the merit of featuring some beautiful and interesting photographs. Those few, sweet words evoking a deep nostalgia for a time that's gone follow another personal tribute offered by Collins to the Minnesota-born singer, namely her 11-track CD, released in 1993 by Geffen Records, entitled "Judy Collins Sings Dylan … Just Like a Woman" (GED 24612).

Earlier in her career, Collins had covered a long string of Dylan songs, including "Masters of War", "Farewell", "Tomorrow Is A Long Time", "Mr Tambourine Man", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", "I Pity the Poor Immigrant", "Time Passes Slowly", and more. Those, though, were stray tracks scattered across a lengthy discography, and this "dedicated" album of Dylan covers was a new venture for her. Judy Collins' Dylan project came almost twenty-five years after Joan Baez's own Dylan tribute, "Any Day Now" (originally released as a double album on Vanguard); Baez, too, had recorded a large amount of Dylan material on earlier albums before deciding to dedicate an entire piece of work to the master's songwriting.

These two works by Collins and Baez have many resemblances and some differences.

First of all, both singers use their voices in a similar way, so typical of the folk canon which Dylan radically altered after mastering it and finally desecrated at Newport in July 1965, as his companionship with the Queen of Folk Music ended up drowning in a sea of hatred and resentment. On Collins' album, we find songs which Joan Baez had already covered (not necessarily on "Any Day Now"), such as "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", "With God on Our Side" or "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" which a 24-year Joan sang in a car, peeling a banana, in the film "Don't Look Back".

In producing this album, Judy Collins had at her disposal a much longer list of songs, and her choices sometimes appear questionable, to say the least. Save for one excellent achievement and one interesting rendition, her album leaves the listener bewildered more often than not.

The track list is as follows:

1. Like a Rolling Stone

2. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

3. Simple Twist of Fate

4. Sweetheart Like You

5. Gotta Serve Somebody

6. Dark Eyes

7. Love Minus Zero/No Limit

8. Just Like a Woman

9. I Believe In You

10. With God On Our Side

11. Bob Dylan's Dream

At first sight we can see how, although Collins could choose from more than twenty-five years of music, there are only five songs written after the appearance of Baez's "Any Day Now" (Baez covered "Simple Twist of Fate" after the release of that album). This leads to an interesting consideration: if it is true that Dylan's best albums were written and released between 1974 and 1976, all that bunch of work (with the sole exception of "Simple Twist of Fate") was ignored. For Judy Collins' beautiful voice and exceptional skills (with a timbre that recalls Baez's own), songs like "One More Cup of Coffee" or "You're a Big Girl Now" could have received an excellent interpretation and offered an interesting challenge. Rather than doing that, Collins rolls into "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Gotta Serve Somebody". If this seems to be acknowledging elementary market rules ("Like A Rolling Stone" stands as an all-time classic and "Gotta Serve Somebody" brought Dylan his first-ever Grammy Award), on the other hand we must observe, to give the devil his due, that none of the tracks features a really innovative arrangement or an extraordinary rewriting - there is nothing to compare with what happens in the versions of "Just Like a Woman" by Roberta Flack and Nina Simone (the latter is the greatest Dylan cover ever made), or the O'Jays' gospel re-creation of "Emotionally Yours".

"Like a Rolling Stone", with its slurred words and with the bitterness and revenge which Dylan literally spit out at the legendary session of 15 June 1965 at Columbia's 7th Avenue recording studios – located a few steps from the place where both Collins' own cover and the "Freewheelin'" pictures were shot – hardly fits Collins. She has drive, and sometimes her own version seems to follow the interesting one by Spirit from 1975 where the famous refrain follows whispered words, but the end result is far from being exciting. The piano introduction seems to lead us into the hall of a luxury hotel, where a pianist is paid to lighten up the guests' conversations. The harmonica plays as if to remind us of Dylan, but in reality he couldn't be farther away. The drum has the typical 80s sound, there's an organ which is light-years away from Al Kooper's legendary instrument, the guitar sounds a little too baroque, and the final atmosphere really does not match the song. Collins is great when singing "you've gone to the finest school aaaaaaaaaaall right Miss Lonely", but her voice is drowned by a wall of sound that falls totally out of context. Similarly, the following phrase, "nobody taught you how to live on the street" is excellent, but this superb drive dies like an autumn leaf as soon as it reaches the bridge, "you said you'd never compromise". The voice is still interesting when singing "when theeeeeey all did tricks for you" and "you shouldn't let other people get your kiiiicks for you", phrases preceded by a small pause in levare before the words "you never understood", the result of a sensibility and musical sense increased by time. This is the reason why it is sad to hear Judy Collins, whom we heard many years ago doing a timeless version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" – another product by a Village "son" – trapped in what so far sounds more like a commercial deal. In this version, the chord progression, probably the most famous and beautiful sequence in rock history, is totally set aside, in favour of a rather kitsch atmosphere. The attention could still somehow be held by Collins' voice, and by the way she sings the first part of the fourth stanza, preceded by that "ooooh" which Dylan too intoned in 1965. The only difference is that, while Dylan's rendition here sounded impromptu, Collins' is too much in tempo and with the right falsetto to come across as any kind of episode of creative madness.

The album continues with "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", thus reversing the album sequence of 1965 ("Baby Blue" concluded "Bringing It All Back Home", and "Like a Rolling Stone" was "Highway 61 Revisited"'s opening track). The result is, sad to say, even more embarrassing. Collins' voice is once again wonderful, worthy of the Queen of Folk Music herself, but this arrangement too is dreadful, reminding the listener far too insistently of Céline Dion. It is weird (to say the least) to hear something like this from a woman singer who has, in the end, so much in common with the author of the songs. In particular, the guitar at the end of the song is very disappointing; if in theory, its sound echoes Roger McGuinn's famous Rickenbacker, one still can't help but wonder why it's there.

We do have to add that Judy Collins fully respects Dylan's textual intentions and never changes the gender of the song situations from male to female.

"Simple Twist of Fate", with its fretless bass, reminds the listener more of Lou Reed's "Trade In" than of "Blood on the Tracks"' second track. The piano makes it sounds like a stripped-down version of a Chopin nocturne. The vocal arrangement is again charming, and notably the rendering of the second stanza, with the pause before the words "freight traaaaaaaaaaaaaain". The mandolin, however, makes the song extremely boring, and we can hardly believe this is the same singer whose version of the Beatles' "In My Life" stands as a classic masterpiece. Following the song's own logic, the instrumental break at the beginning of the third stanza keeps some appeal.

"Sweetheart Like You" is the album's first surprise. The song was also covered by Rod Stewart, who failed to live up to his name doing it. The problem is, in my opinion, only one. The way the song is structured, the sequence of the words and the way they are pronounced are all too particular to permit easy reproduction. Thus, one faces two options: either a rendition follows exactly what Dylan did in "Infidels", or an innovative approach is required. Once more, Collins places herself in between. The initial recitative, and the piano outlining the falling chord progression, could lead the listener into thinking this is actually a new experience, but from "by the way that's a cute hat" on the album version is back in auge. To tell the truth, I have to admit that the dialogue between voice and piano is extremely interesting. In the second stanza Collins seems to realise that an excessive lyricism is overdoing things, thus confining herself to a more sober type of singing and reaching an interesting result. Keyboards spoil the atmosphere a little as the song reaches the bridge, making us think the result could have been way better if she had relied on piano and voice alone. In fact, behind an electronic background, the pause Collins takes when singing "you know you can… be known" is not fully underlined. But what's worse is the drum, which is like a punch in the eye. Once again, the singer relies on her breaths and breaks, but the electronic "wonderwall" empties the performance of all meaning.

"Gotta Serve Somebody" has an interesting rhythm and groove, but a fake piano and a blameworthy guitar. A mix of new wave and gospel really sounds like an outrageous blasphemy. In the end it really seems Judy Collins is "the rock'n'roller prancing on the stage".

"Dark Eyes" is the first track on this album that is truly worthy of Judy Collins' name. This little jewel, performed only by voice and piano, finally delivers us a forgotten masterpiece - a song which Dylan himself ignored for too long, introducing it in performance only in the late 90s when he sang it with Patti Smith, thus making up for his performance of it in a terrible drunk mood on "Empire Burlesque". The choice of a faster tempo matches Collins' falsetto in a perfect way. There is nothing else to say.

"Love Minus Zero/No Limit" follows, making comparison with Baez's version almost impossible to avoid. Both versions are far below the level of Dylan's original. Baez gives the song a dancing waltz feel, and if the electric sitar sounds a little ridiculous, we can always remember that it was 1968. The pedal steel guitar somewhat anticipates "Nashville Skyline", keeping the pace with what Dylan himself was doing at the time. Collins uses a dobro, and reproduces the progression which Dylan has developed and used ever since his "Budokan" version. The final result is a song which sounds as if it was written in the same period as "Simple Twist of Fate" (as performed on this album). Collins' voice is always magnificent, yet Baez's version, even if worse recorded and more approximate, finally seems preferable.

What again leaves me astonished is the excess of production, to the point where we hear a sound worthy of a ball in the Waldorf Astoria main ballroom, light-years from Dylan's own.

About "Just Like a Woman", all words are superfluous. Until someone finds a way to outshine the Simone and Flack versions (or even Richie Havens' cover of this song), every effort is bound to be worthless. The dark atmosphere of Dylan's song, which is most likely dedicated to the late, beautiful and unlucky, Edie Sedgwick, is perfect for both Simone and Flack, while Collins seems totally outside the spirit of the song, as if she were Boris Karloff in Woody Allen's "Play it Again, Sam".

"I Believe In You" lacks both the pathos and the arrangement of Dylan's original. It would have been interesting to hear the version that Sinead O'Connor could have offered, but didn't, at the Dylan tribute in 1992. Here Collins is unable even to outline the upward movement of the stanza ("how I know I'll make it through"), or actually does it with too excessive artistry making the whole thing too little interesting.

"With God On Our Side", with its a cappella vocal, leaves little to say, unless that it reminds the listener of Baez's version of "Tears of Rage".

The best track, a beautiful cover of a too long forgotten and underestimated masterpiece (which Chris Rollason has brilliantly revisited in an article published on this site), is the album's closing number, "Bob Dylan's Dream".

Here, every connection between Dylan and Collins is fully present. The guitars, though a little too modern, match perfectly with some kind of harpsichord, and even the drumming, akin to the rolling of the train on which Dylan was travelling, is excellent. As with "Dark Eyes", here Judy Collins gives us the possibility to fully discover the wonders of a song, its hidden treasures - such as the harmonic structure, which Dylan didn't fully bring out in his 1963 recording.

The bridgeless structure of an intense song, almost too intense to have been written by a young man in his early twenties, and whose melody owes much to the tradition: all of this fits Collins like a glove. She, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are all children of those days and streets that even today (despite the endless series of sex shops along W4 Street) haven't lost their atmosphere.

The beauty of the New York University houses on Washington Square North, the corner where W4 Street, Washington Square and MacDougal Street meet, the small, pretty Minetta Street next to the Cafe Wha entrance, Bleecker Street, and Sheridan Square, where the photographer Fred McDarrah caught a glimpse of Dylan sitting on a bench that no longer exists: all are perfectly epitomised in this song. The sweet tone of the voice, reminding us that "many a year has passed and gone" and lamenting "many a road taken by many a friend", is there, vivid and present, delivering a rendition that deserves to be considered one of the best Dylan covers ever.

In the end, we too wish - in vain - that our lives could be like that.

Unfortunately, anyone who does see it that way must have been distracted by the video - distracted by the subliminal seductions offered by the visual aspect which a video inevitably bears - instead of listening to the music.

Norah Jones is fortunately not a Canadian pin-up, not a 'sexy lady' who has simply lent her face and body to music. She is actually quite the opposite: a very promising singer and piano player who happens to be gifted with attractive looks, like the older and more famous Diana Krall, whose musical merit was fully appreciated as soon as people became aware of her merits as a model.

During her promotional tour, Jones performed in Bronx, New York, on March 3^rd 2002. One of the .mp3 files available on her website and recorded during that performance is a cover of "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight".

This song seemed, at the time, a very surprising number to have come from Bob Dylan. A country ballad featuring Pete Drake (later a faithful session man on Neil Young's country records) on steel guitar, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" was the closing track on "John Wesley Harding" – released on December 22^nd 1967 – and appeared as a foretaste of "Nashville Skyline" (JWH, like "Blonde on Blonde" before it, and, obviously, its immediate successor, was actually recorded in the Tennessee capital). It was resurrected live thirty years on after the "illness" pause of the Never Ending tour, and showed up frequently in the 1997-98 setlists.

A nice intimate portrait of a happy couple, a sort of foreword to "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" or, even more so, "On a Night Like This" - where the description did not feature any external element as in the 1969 song - it faithfully showed the quiet and happy life that Dylan, Sara and the children were living near Woodstock in upstate New York, where the family had retreated after the famous 1966 motorcycle accident. Far from the biblical content of the rest of the album (which has been defined as the first example of "biblical rock", though actually JWH was everything *but* rock!), lighter than "Dear Landlord" and "I Pity the Poor Immigrant", it was the ideal tune to end the album, leaving the listener happy and in the mood to hear more.

Backed by drums, bass and pedal steel guitar, Dylan sang and played harmonica and an improbably tuned acoustic guitar, revealing the mellow and richer voice he developed after giving up smoking while recovering from his physical pain. Charles McCoy's bass and Kenny Buttrey's drums (the latter has also worked with Neil Young) kept the rhythm as Pete Drake enriched Dylan's expressive vocals as he emphasised his middle range-singing (the song is in F, the same key Dylan used for "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now Baby Blue"; given his different breathing, the general effect is that the voice is lower, even when singing notes as high as those sung on the above- mentioned numbers).

Norah Jones' approach is a little different. Replacing steel guitar with acoustic guitar, and Dylan's acoustic guitar with a piano, she sets the song as a jazz standard, slowing the tempo (the total length is 3:18) and raising the key a fourth up (Bb). The final result, in spite of these "changes", fully respects the intimate setting Dylan established - unlike Robert Palmer's 1990 version, in which the song was turned into a reggae divertissement. The song's structure remains more or less the same, with some additional features thanks to the jazz cut: an instrumental introduction, the first two verses followed by the bridge, the third verse, instrumental fourth and fifth 'stanzas', another bridge, the closing verse, the closing line repeated twice, and an instrumental coda.

The differences are in the arrangement. Not only do replacement of the pedal steel guitar and the addition of the piano in themselves give the song a different feel, but the tempo, as I said above, is slowed, and a eight-bar instrumental introduction (a nice guitar pedale with pointed chromas later joined by the piano) leads into the first stanza. What we first notice is the tempo change, and not only in terms of speed. While the Dylan songbook shows a 16-bar stanza with a 2/2 tempo - and by listening to the drums on the record it is easy to tell it is a 4/4 with bass playing two notes per bar, Jones opts for the typical 8-bar structure and 4/4 tempo. Thus, the pauses between lines are almost totally cut off, and the melody flows in a more gentle way, given the tempo slowing. The lines "close the door / you don't have to worry" follow one another without any vocal tacet. The bridge breaks after less than one minute (57 seconds to be precise, more or less the time in which Dylan ends the first stanza). The first objection a listener could move is that Jones' version is actually faster than Dylan's, but it is only appearance. Dylan in 57 seconds has played 32 4/4 bars (the instrumental introduction and the first sung stanza); Jones plays the introduction and two stanzas for a total of 8+16=24 bars.

The reason is simple: with a longer structure, the vocal part would have been inevitably longer, and the two instrumental 'stanzas' after the third verse would have been awfully long and inappropriate for such a "compacted" melody. In the end, only 44 seconds separate the two performances.

Statistics apart, Jones' singing emerges from the beginning. After she has played the same chord for six bars and has begun to sing in levare, there is almost no superposition between the voice and the piano, except where the harmony leads to a nota lontana (in Bb, a C chord should be minor, to obey the major scale rule). In the second stanza, the piano plays a little more noticeably, marking the words "shut the shade", and then leading the melody naturally to the bridge. Unlike in Dylan's version, there is no instrumental tacet at the end of the bridge, where the voice sings "We're gonna let it / You won't regret it": Jones purses the entire line up and marks the third and fourth quarter of the final bar ("kick your shoes off"), then gets back to the normal verse pattern.

The instrumental solos showcase Jones' skilled piano playing, which perfectly fits this kind of music. The bridge reprise and final stanza lead to a finale in which the last phrase, which is also the song title, is repeated twice, before the band ends with a four-bar instrumental coda topped by the guitar harmonics.

I have written on "Blood on the Tracks" on at least two previous occasions, and have dedicated further study to it while working on my book. Nevertheless, the complex structure of the album, which is only apparently simple, deserves closer attention in order to try to glimpse all the possible implications behind this work. No doubt "Blood on the Tracks", "Desire" and "Street Legal" are Dylan's most complex and multi-layered works.

As I have said in the past, the album was greatly influenced by the lessons on philosophy and painting which Dylan attended with Norman Raeben, an old man of East European origins. According to Dylan himself, what he learnt was the beginning of the end of his marriage, saying that Sara started not to understand him any more. Clinton Heylin, in his book "Behind the Shades" starts the second part with the making and recording of this album. That part is called: "Learning to do consciously". Dylan in fact said Raeben taught him to do consciously what he always did unconsciously.

Whoever the responsible for this phenomenon was, it had an enormous impact on his works. First of all, BOTT bears a lyrical quality largely superior to that of the previous albums of the decade, a more introspective way of writing than in 1965 and 1966, and a less biblical and prophetic approach than on "John Wesley Harding". Whatever Raeben taught Dylan, the album is structured in a very organic way. Considering the lessons focused on philosophy and painting, it is no wonder the lyrics have a very strong visual impact, with great attention to the particulars around the main characters. Unlike the grotesque, violent and multi-layered visions of "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde", "Blood on the Tracks" leaves room for descriptions of personal situations. There is no sign of Cinderella, the Phantom of the Opera, Napoleon in Rags or chrome-horsed diplomats, and the characters in "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" – as those in "Shelter From the Storm" - obey another, deeper and more complex structure which I have analysed in depth in my book, to which I refer as soon as it's published. As a confirmation, Dylan, commenting on "Tangled Up In Blue", affirmed (in the notes to "Biograph") that the song was structured "like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it", and so catch different impressions.

The first important difference that sets BOTT apart from other albums is not the partial return to a simple, stripped-down arrangement, mostly based on acoustic instrument, but the writer's approach to the lyrics.

There is no doubt that the words play a major role in this work, regardless of its effective content and meaning. Unlike with "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited", "Blonde on Blonde" or even "John Wesley Harding", it is the use he makes of them that really makes the difference. While the above-mentioned works (save, maybe, for the last-named) focused on a strong visual element, BOTT is a complex merger of representational systems.

The classification of human perception into three groups called "representational systems" is due to Richard Bandler and John Grinder, discoverers and founders of a discipline known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming. According to their researches, every person structures their own personal experience - as well as the representation of the outside world - depending on the preponderance of one system over the remaining ones. The three systems are the visual, aural and kinesthetic (the latter class englobes the senses of smell, of touch and of taste). In at least three of the four previously mentioned albums, the predominant aspect is, of course, the visual one. Songs like "Gates of Eden", "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" from "Bringing It All Back Home", "Tombstone Blues" and "Desolation Row" from the subsequent work, or "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" from "Blonde on Blonde", show a marked preponderance of this representational system. The descriptions are so detailed that every other element ends up being superfluous. "John Wesley Harding" shows a different use of the systems, but it is only in "Blood on the Tracks" that the use of each one of the three ways of description is regularly used in alternance with the remaining two in practically every song.

Starting from the very beginning, in "Tangled up in Blue" first sentence all the three elements are present:

The first two lines clearly bear a visual aspect, while the third involves both an aural (internal auditory mode: asking himself the question) and a kinesthetic aspect (which relies on the words wondering if, as to say he asks himself the question being not sure about what the answer may be).

This is more or less the first time such a complex structure is deliberately used in Dylan's lyrics. Even the following lines confirm it:

Here the systems involved are the aural, the kinesthetic (roughness or easiness of life, but also the disliking of the man's clothes) and the visual (one can clearly see the dresses are homemade by the way they look).

The difference between this lyric and "Desolation Row" soon stands out if we compare the 1965 song's first stanza:

Save for a brief trace of the kinesthetic representation (the restlessness of the riot squad) all the stanza is literally imbued with a strong, visual aspect. There is actually no trace of the aural element, which is in practice totally absent in this song. Cinderella saying "it takes one to know one" is not as relevant as the description the narrator makes of her, the way she looks or seems to be feeling.

On the other hand, from the NLP point of view English is a very precise language which actually allows a deep analysis of a phrase structure. In a neo-Latin language such as Italian, verbs like to look, to feel, to seem, to taste or to sound are simply translated with the same word, sembrare. What really makes the difference is that Italian, having a deeper and more structured grammar, relies on the sentence complexity in order to give one simple word its intended meaning, whilst English requires a more detailed vocabulary.

The story of the never-ending search in "Tangled Up in Blue" develops by itself as the telling goes one, thus not requiring the aural part as necessarily as the other two. A perfect and very well structured combination of the visual and kinesthetic systems allows the song to be a complete description of the situation it brilliantly epitomises. The recourse to the aural aspect is anyway necessary in the stanzas about the meeting-up with the woman and the subsequent life they spent together.

The aural aspect is totally absent in the second song, "Simple Twist of Fate". The incipit is a perfect combination of the visual (V) and kinesthesic (K) modalities:

The second stanza actually resumes this pattern, with a closer alternation of the two systems

The visual element totally disappears in the last stanza, in which a weak hint of the auditory system is clearly shown. Nevertheless, the phrase "people tell me it's a sin to know and feel too much within" - in the light of what comes after - could be read as an indirect reference to a state of mind, such as "despite what people say, I'm not so sure if it's like that".

If "You're a Big Girl Now" combines the three systems again (the feeling the conversation leaves in the man, his standing in the rain, the girl's dry situation and the man's wonder at how she could make it - all of this just in the first stanza), "Idiot Wind" brilliantly sums up all the representational elements, with extraordinary strength:

Again, here the auditory element appears as the least relevant. It is not, however, like that in the second half of the same stanza, where the line "Even you, yesterday you had to ask me where it was at" introduces us to the kinesthetic world: "I couldn't believe after all these years….."

The beginning of the second stanza show another use of the three elements within the same sentence:

What it is interesting to note is that the two mostly-used systems are, as we can easily see, the visual and the kinesthetic, and that generally the two are used in a very simple pattern, in which the visual always leads to the kinesthetic. It is actually very rare to find the opposite case. The auditory element, on the other hand, is used where the others wouldn't make the entire thing accurate enough.

Sometimes the kinesthetic element ends up being figuratively enclosed in the visual one, as in "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go", in which the first stanza - only apparently totally visual - implies kinesthetic elements (the act of shooting in the dark, and the relative awareness that when something is not right it's wrong are the most arresting examples). In this song, save for the phrase "crickets talkin' back and forth in rhyme", the auditory system is completely absent (and yet it is very hard to say it is present at all, unless we accept the thesis that crickets do actually make a sound).

The songs which leaves most room to the auditory system is "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts". In this song, the resort to dialogue is essential in order to understand how the entire plot develops. There was actually no way, using the other two systems, to create such a climax and detail of particulars.

"If You See Her Say Hello" reopens (reintroduces?) the alternance of the three systems. Actually the first line covers them all:

The second stanza starts with a kinesthesic representation and then leads to a visual one, though an objection could be raised considering the song is actually the telling of an event, and thus the fight could be seen as the description of a disagreement rather than the feelings coming out of it.

The three elements together appear in the fourth stanza:

The last two songs on the album do not add too much to this analysis, but what emerges from the reading as a whole is that this is the first time that, consciously or not, Dylan uses a more complex structure for his lyrics. The shattered visions of "Highway 61 Revisited" and/or "Blonde on Blonde", the morality and deep "religious introspection" of "John Wesley Harding" succumb to a multi-layered text, in which he is finally able to use all the channels people have to experience things.

This new inclination of his reappears in his following works, "Desire" and "Street Legal", only to appear sporadically in the many that followed.

By Nicola Menicacci

It must have been either 1999 or 2000. The latter is more likely, since it was, as far as I remember, a very clear and light early evening. But, as many of you know, New York City has one of the bluest skies one could ever see, so it could have really been February 1999.

We were sitting in the back of the car, as usual. Charlie was driving the big four-wheel drive Mercedes along the West Side, as the frozen traffic made our trip back to the Upper East Side a very long one.

It must been along Broadway, because as far as I can remember the Beacon Theatre is there. It is, though, not far away from the Dakota, the building where Lennon was shot and where the recent Oscar winner Roman Polanski set his scary "Rosemary's Baby", starring a very young Mia Farrow (who was later to become one of the most talked-about figures in the metropolitan area, especially after the Woody Allen affair).

The Beacon was exactly to our left. We were headed south, the traffic was really a serious business. The Theatre was announcing its programs in a streaming display right above the main entrance. Ringo Starr, if I remember right, and Nina Simone.

"Look, there's Nina Simone", I told Joanna, who was seated next to me, as usual.

"When is she playing?", Charlie asked with both curiosity and enthusiasm

"Next week"

"Hope I can go", said Charlie.

I knew what it meant. Working for Joanna was not an easy business. Not that she was a rude person, on the contrary. Most of the time, she wasn't even aware of her agenda. She had one of the craziest schedules I had ever seen, and visiting her had always been a very intense and interesting experience. Charlie did not have the least idea of what might happen next week, and if he had the tickets to the concert, he might still miss it. His job was simply to take care of Joanna when she was out of her house: to drive her to school, pick her up, find stuff for her and have long, funny conversations with her. Indeed, more than just a driver, he was a very devoted friend. Charlie loved Joanna, he had always loved her. He had a son who was the same age as she was.

But he also loved the New York Yankees, he liked Malcolm X, Michael Jordan, Martin Luther King, Al Gore and Nina Simone. And it really felt as he was sincerely looking forward to seeing her.

I stared at the theatre. I remember Giulio Molfese telling me about Bob leaving the theatre one evening to go home, to a house which was therefore supposed to be nearby.

"Who is she?", Joanna asked.

"God", I said, "you don't know her? She is an extremely gifted singer. She did the most beautiful cover of a Dylan song ever. Her version of Just Like a Woman is really second to none".

I studied the situation: I had to leave in a few days and could not extend my stay to see her in concert. On the other hand, I knew she lived in the South of France, so I thought it could be possible to see her somewhere in the Old World, maybe even in Umbria, where a lot of major musicians showed up for the local jazz festival.

But Simone was not only jazz: she sang a lovely version of "Mr. Bojangles", with a lot of pathos, something I had never found in other artists. With that weird timbre that made her sound like a metallic thing, something in between a woman and a man, and a graceful yet very skilled way of playing the piano, she really added something to the idea of mingling jazz with other popular music forms.

And, as often happens, she started singing by chance. Hired in an Irish bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the then Eunice Waymon was told by the owner she had to sing as well. She then changed her name into Nina (little one) Simone (after the acclaimed French actress Simone Signoret).

Her first hit was a version of "I Loves You Porgy", by the Gershwin brothers and Du Bois Heyward, obviously taken from "Porgy and Bess". She also supported the civil rights movement, raising her voice when needed (as in the 1963 "Mississippi Goddam") and also showing her talent as a pianist (she was studying classical piano when her career, surprisingly and suddenly, took off).

I first heard of her in 1991, when one of my then main squeezes gave me as a present the "United Artists for the Poet" compilation, released by Columbia to celebrate the then 50-year old Bob Dylan. It included Nina's "Just Like A Woman". Her version of the 1966 song really struck me, but it was not until 1999 that I first bought a record by her. I really was disappointed not to be able to find that song in any compilation, since the old tape was by now completely unlistenable after hours of listening.

I also discovered brilliant versions by Nina of "I Shall be Released" and "Balled of Hollis Brown". She is also known to have covered other Dylan songs, on an album in which she sang accompanied only by herself on piano.

But it would be unfair to recall Simone only for her interpretation of Dylan standards. I think that her contribution to the music of the twentieth century should be considered as equal to those of the more famous Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Mahalia Jackson and so on. Hardly none of us has never heard that timeless version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which brought her back to success in the mid eighties.

The traffic begun to roll, and the streaming display of the Beacon theatre rolled her name and the others in a mechanical routine.

Charlie did not see that concert.

Nor I.

"It's mighty funny,/The end of time has just begun", sang Bob Dylan in "Can't Wait", the last-but-one track on his much-lauded, prize-winning album "Time Out of Mind". That was in 1997.

When, five years later, I became aware of the existence of coded messages across the sequence of albums from "Blood on the Tracks" to "Under the Red Sky", revealing Dylan's deep knowledge of the Western esoteric tradition, I was sure that I'd begun to tap a potentially rich vein which, at the very least, was bound to mark a vital revelation in the context of Bob Dylan's relationship with ancient wisdom.

The following year, a friend told me about a discovery by an Israeli mathematician and two books that commented on that discovery - and I found that a new adventure was unfolding for me.

Number 9 of the journal Statistical Science (August 1994) carried, on pages 429-438, an article entitled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", signed by Doron Witztum, Yoav Rosenberg and Eliyahu Rips. It examined a strange phenomenon, first identified by the (blind) Rabbi Weissmandel, who, over fifty years ago, was the first to notice the following strange circumstance: if one removes the spaces between the words and then adds together every fiftieth letter of the (original Hebrew) Book of Genesis, what is spelt out is … the word TORAH.

The sages say that the original copy of the Torah, handed down by God to Moses, consisted of an uninterrupted sequence of letters making up a total of 304 805 characters, without spaces between the words and written on a sapphire scroll.

The work of Rips and his fellow scholars effectively proved the existence of a code in the Book of Genesis. On the basis of this complex code and a given set of regular intervals between letters, it is possible to extract from "under" the text whole phrases that make sense and together form a huge "crossword puzzle".

Confirmation that this is a full-blown code was supplied by the discoverers themselves - who looked for similar properties in the letter sequences of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and other classic texts, but in vain - as well as by mathematicians and cryptographic experts.

Michael Drosnin, a journalist who had earlier secured a reputation writing for the "New York Times" and "Washington Post", has published, with the cooperation of Eliyahu Rips, two best-selling books on the subject, "The Bible Code" (1997) and "The Bible Code Two: the Countdown" (2002).

It appears almost uncanny to note that at least two passages to be found on Dylan's "Time Out of Mind" seem to refer to the Bible Code (or, more accurately, the Torah Code - what Drosnin is concerned with in "The Bible Code" is the first five books of the Old Testament, i.e. the Torah, not the rest of the Old Testament - barring the Book of Daniel and, possibly, Isaiah, which he thinks may be separately coded - and not the New Testament).

**

Dylan has been exercised over long years by the threat of apocalypse. In numerous interviews of the 1980s he declared that it would come, this time - in line with scripture - by fire and not by flood (no doubt thinking, alas, of a possible nuclear holocaust). In "Jokerman", his vision of apocalypse unfolds under skies coloured "slippery gray": "A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet". Before that, in "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)", on the album "Street Legal", he spoke of Armageddon, the place named in the Book of Revelation as the location of the final battle between the forces of good and evil (Armageddon is also mentioned by name in "Are You Ready?").

In the Old Testament, the theme of apocalypse appears in the Book of Daniel, where it is stated that the words dictated to the prophet have been written in a sealed book, to be opened at "the time of the end" ("But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end" - 12:4): salvation, it is said, will be the lot of those whose names are written in that book.

***

As a final word, I suggest a further, uncanny confirmation, supplied by the album "'Love and Theft'" - which came out on 9-11-2001, the very day of the attack on the World Trade Center which is also the subject of the first chapter of Drosnin's "The Bible Code Two: - the Countdown".

The film "Masked and Anonymous", released in 2003, marks Bob Dylan's nth comeback to the movie industry. After Pennebaker's cinéma verité, Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid" and the relatively brilliant soundtrack, "Renaldo and Clara", "Hearts of Fire", one of the biggest flops in his career (the mediocre soundtrack perfectly epitomised the ill-fated production), and a few cameo appearances, the new film now, once again, shows the man himself (now sixty years old) in front of a movie camera. With Dylan in the role of Jack Fate, an imprisoned singer who leaves jail for a benefit concert, the movie features a very interesting, if not weird soundtrack. Save for a couple of traditionals, all the songs (12 out of 14) are by Bob Dylan himself (one, "City of Gold", has never been released by Dylan), but he appears in person on only four tracks (two of them cover versions), all recorded live during the film shooting. What follows in this article is a review not of the film but of the soundtrack CD, considered as a listening experience.

The weirdest aspect of the CD is that it mostly features Dylan songs covered by other artists, some of which are wholly or partly performed in languages other than English (one track is sung in Japanese, rewritten rather than translated; two are in Italian, of which one has been part-rewritten, and one is rendered in a mixture of English and Spanish). The international, or, indeed, multicultural character of the project is confirmed by the presence of two other English-language covers by international artists (from Sweden and Turkey). A possible "encyclopaedic" intention behind this release might be confirmed by the interesting circumstance that, of the 11 Dylan songs on it that have been previously recorded by Dylan himself on official albums, every one is from a different album.

The album opens with a Japanese version of "My Back Pages". The experts have established that this three-stanza version (Dylan's original has six verses) is more of a rewriting than a translation. What is interesting is that alongside a typical American arrangement, featuring a great Hammond organ, stands the rough and musically alien-sounding Japanese language. The result is very pleasant, a gentle harmonica plays in the middle, and, save for the language, one could easily think the song was a typical American product, made by one of the many garage bands. The interesting bass at the end recalls "Most of the Time", from "Oh Mercy". The Japanese idiosyncrasy makes it one of the most unusual Dylan covers ever, while it is a curious irony of Dylan history that the album should open with a track sung in Japanese, so soon after the mini-scandal (in the eyes of some) over Dylan's reappropriation on '"Love and Theft"' of material from Junichi Saga's book "Confessions of a Yakuza"!

Next comes Shirley Caesar's "Gotta Serve Somebody", just as we heard it on the eponymously titled tribute CD "Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan" (which Chris Rollason has reviewed elsewhere on this site).

Then Dylan himself follows with "Down in the Flood". For those who have heard the Prague 1995 version of this song, the result here will inevitably sound poor, but those to whom that version is unknown may find it of some value. Campbell and Sexton cast a very interesting spell with the guitars. Meanwhile, the drums… well, the drums! It cannot be said often enough that, ever since Winston Watson's departure, Dylan lacks a good drummer. Many people were happy when David Kemper left the band last year, but George Recile's timbre and sound come over as weak if compared to Watson. The great merit of this track, anyway, is that it was recorded live, during the film shooting. Some stories report Dylan complaining about the excessive amounts of wires that electric music makes indispensable, but in the end we're all very happy to hear him! Meanwhile, this version of "Down in the Flood" is certainly an improvement on the ramshackle, under-rehearsed Dylan-and-the-Band performance of the song from New Year's Eve, 1971-72, which appeared in 2001 on the expanded-CD reissue of The Band's "Rock of Ages" album.

Next up are The Grateful Dead, with their version of "It's All Over Now Baby Blue". Clinton Heylin has said that the Dead were able to play only one kind of tempo. If that is indeed true, this song is a clear example. The intense dialogue between the drums and the guitar (those unfamiliar with the Dead had the opportunity to hear the live album "Dylan and the Dead", from 1987) is the most listenable aspect of the song. Sometimes the bass marks the vocal silences, but in general (even maybe thanks to the mixing) the entire songs relies on the drum/guitar dialogue. The late Jerry Garcia provides another of his solos, those which made his sound so popular and unique. The song is slower and more drawn-out than in Dylan's original or his usual live interpretations.

The next track is the Swedish contribution, and Sophie Zelmani's "Most of the Time" proves to be the highlight of the album. Starting only with acoustic guitar, later joined by a full band (the third stanza features and intense and wonderful piano arpeggio), this interpretation gives the song the depth and personality that it always deserved. Zelmani's rendition is very different from Dylan's original, but no less valid. She delivers something much more concentrated than the earlier, and also remarkable, version by Ani di Franco (featuring banjo), with a vocal line that makes all the words completely intelligible. If any criticism is to be made, it is that, once again, we have a female singer changing the gender of Dylan's pronouns - a practice that not everyone will approve. At any rate, she deals with the situation right down to the bone.

Los Lobos, with "On a Night Like This", bring a carnival atmosphere to the album. Performed in an English-Spanish macaronic version, the song is a perfect example of the Latino band's sound, and the overall feel is not that much different from the original on "Planet Waves", which found both Dylan and the Band in wonderful shape.

The following track is the first of the two Dylan-performed old-time numbers: "Diamond Joe", a bluegrass number which is definitely not the same song as the traditional song of the same name about a Texas rancher which appeared on "Good As I Been To You" (this "Diamond Joe" may also be heard on a Jerry Garcia album from 1988, "Almost Acoustic"; it is credited there to Tex Logan, but here it is down as "trad. arr. Dylan"). Larry Campbell on banjo provides the guiding line for an old-time song on which Dylan is perfectly at ease.

Next comes a complete change of mood, with Articolo 31, a rap group who are very famous in Italy. They have previously specialised in rearranged versions of Italian 1940s standards, and so it seems a logical development for them to do "Like a Rolling Stone". This track, originally recorded in 1998, was earlier released, in 2001, on the German-issued tribute album "The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2: May Your Song Always Be Sung Again". An Articolo 31 member has said that Dylan heard the track when in Germany and wanted it to be included on the album. The Italian lyric is not that far from the Dylan original, but has been "enriched" by allusion to more contemporary topics, such as immigration (a reality Italy is facing now, long after the United States did).

Then, the Turkish female singer Sertab (full name Sertab Erener) performs "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)". The strings playing the ostinato background usher in a very beautiful and clear voice, but the arrangement leaves the listener somehow perplexed. Alongside the strings, the "dump sound" provided by the percussion makes the entire thing rather weird, and sometimes inappropriate to the delicacy of the subjects Dylan treats in the song. However, the "Oriental" arrangement is, at least as an idea, in keeping with the deliberate exoticism of Dylan's gypsy melody.

Next, "Non Dirle che non È Così" ("If You See Her, Say Hello") is sung by Francesco de Gregori, a very sophisticated and talented Italian singer-songwriter, who has, over his 30-year-plus career, paid enormous tribute to Dylan. "Buonanotte Fiorellino", one of his most famous songs, is heavily indebted to Dylan's "Winterlude": not only the tempo, but even the song structure sounds like a total translation of the "New Morning" waltz. Now, the Italian translation (by De Gregori himself) of "If You See Her, Say Hello", offers a respectful arrangement and a quite faithful lyric (although Tangier becomes Tunisia, apparently for the sake of the Italian rhyme). The song appears in the film whenever Jake Fate makes his appearance, in a strategy reminiscent of Richard Wagner's use of the Leitmotiv concept.

Another change of mood intervenes with "Dixie", the second of the album's two old-time numbers, and possibly the most famous song of the American South (credited here as "trad. arr. Dylan"). Dylan offers a very slow version, making it clear and comprehensible but, it has to be said, not terribly effective or memorable. Even so, there is an interesting link to the Dylan canon: in the first stanza of "Man of Peace", on "Infidels", Dylan offered the phrase "The band is playing 'Dixie''', which was itself quoted from a song performed by the Carter Family called "My Heart's Tonight in Texas". With Bob Dylan, there's no escaping the musical tradition!

Jerry Garcia's version of "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)" is in much the same vein as the Grateful Dead's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": Deadheads will no doubt be satisfied with these two contributions to the album by their favourite band and its late leader.

Next comes the final Dylan track, a version of "Cold Irons Bound" which is adequate, but less powerful than the live performance from Los Angeles, 16 December 1997 which appeared on the Japan-released compilation CD of 2001, "Bob Dylan Live 1961-2000: Thirty-nine years of great concert performances". As in that version and as is standard in his live performances of this song, Dylan compresses the lyric from five stanzas to four, telescoping the original fourth and fifth stanzas into one.

Finally, and after an interpolated sermon from the film, comes "City of Gold", a song that Dylan performed live in 1980 and 1981 on his born-again tours but has never recorded. Here it is interpreted in full gospel mode by the Dixie Hummingbirds. Many will find this a beautiful song, and it is certainly a strong performance - albeit made a little too excessive by the different kinds of styles used to interpret each stanza. The song is, surely, a vision of the heavenly city or New Jerusalem, from the Book of Revelation ("There is a city of love /  Far from this world"): it is an example of Dylan's gospel writing at its best - simple, clear and refreshingly unhectoring, the only reservation being that some might demur at his use in the first stanza, not for the first time, of the cliché'd expression "rat-race". For the rest, whether one is a Christian or not, the bells of conviction ring out loud and clear, and this powerful track provides a fitting conclusion to the album.

**

This CD may disappoint on first hearing: the Dylan tracks themselves may give the initial impression that Dylan has reached the point of no return, delivering songs in a monotone way and relying on a quite mediocre group (since then, the replacement of Charlie Sexton has, many believe, confirmed this further). However, part of the disappointment over "Down in the Flood" may reflect the fact that this is an official recording which will be bought by "official purchasers" who are unaware of the classic Prague version. For sure, this soundtrack is not on the level of "'Love and Theft'", but standout tracks are still provided by the Japanese "My Back Pages", Sophie Zelmani and Francesco de Gregori. Meanwhile, the broad multicultural, and even multilingual, sweep and range of the performances certainly reminds the world that Bob Dylan's music has become, by now, a truly international phenomenon, ringing out eloquently over what he once called "the whole wide universe"!