Bob Dylan owes you nothing, but he loves you all the same.

“I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars,
Listening to the sounds of the sad guitars,
Been thinking it all over and I’ve thought it all through,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you…”
— Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” from Rough and Rowdy Ways

In 2000 I made my way to a slightly tired municipal hall on England’s South Coast. I had gone there to see Bob Dylan in the kind of provincial setting that he’d played on his now-legendary 1966 electric tour. He’d gone from Colston Hall in Bristol [now subject to an imminent name-change, post-BLM] to the Capitol Theatre in Cardiff, from the De Montfort Hall in Leicester to the Gaumont Theatre in Sheffield, and on to the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It was a nostalgic idea, perhaps, to choose not to see him in the yawning auditorium of Wembley Arena, but when he came on at the Guildhall in Portsmouth, it was clear that nostalgia was not on the agenda. With his killer band, Dylan tore the place up, with old songs reimagined in new settings, new songs given a turbo-charged delivery, and a setlist that wandered all over an, at that time, thirty-nine-year-old back catalogue. 

At one point, having left the crowd breathless with the menacing high-energy strut of Gotta Serve Somebody – featuring an intense, preaching vocal – the band downshifted a few gears for the gentle country strum of If Not For You. This innocuous song featured an extraordinary moment: after playing his solo right at the third attempt, Bob looked down into the audience with a piercing stare, a hint of a smile at the corners of his lips, and sung the middle eight straight at them – “If not for you, my sky would fall / Rain would gather too… / Without your love I’d be nowhere at all / I’d be lost if not for you…” 

It struck me as absolutely genuine. You felt that playing these songs live, night after night, gave Dylan a compelling reason to keep going around and around the world, on to another stop on the Never Ending Tour — another day, another year, another town. He once called himself a song-and-dance-man, implying that he saw himself as a working musician, in the footsteps of his early heroes. When he was 21, he talked of the tradition in which he wanted to do that work: “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people. You see, in time, with those old singers, music was a tool – a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points.”

“I’m giving myself to you, I am…
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham,
From East LA to San Antone,
I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone.”

When Love and Theft came out a year later, I was struck by a verse in the song, “Mississippi”. Aside from the intimations of mortality that had crept into Dylan’s work since 1997’s Time Out of Mind (” Every step of the way we walk the line / Your days are numbered, so are mine”), there was this, aimed at his bandmates, or his audience: “Well my ship’s been split to splinters, and it’s sinking fast / I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past / But my heart is not weary, it’s light, and it’s free / I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” On a late-autumn tour the next year, Dylan started including songs by Warren Zevon in his set. One cover was “Mutineer”, a song that some writers feel Zevon aimed at the fans who stuck by him: “I was born to rock the boat,” he sings, “Some may sink, but we will float / Grab your coat, let’s get out of here / You’re my witness; I’m your mutineer.” Dylan inhabited the song – made it sound like one of his own.

A year after that, I wrote a piece for The Guardian’s “Why I Love…” column as Bob was playing small London venues to round off a European tour. I tried to put in perspective how long he’d been doing this, and why it was still vital. “Last Saturday it was forty years ago that JFK was assassinated, yet by November 1963, Bob Dylan had already been performing in Greenwich Village for two years, since leaving his home in Hibbing, Minnesota. Think about that for a moment, as he finishes his European 2003 Fall Tour tonight at the Brixton Academy. Now in his mid-sixties, Bob’s been pretty much on the road for over forty years. As Leonard Cohen said, only Picasso has had such a career, making extraordinary art in so many creative periods.” It almost sounds like I think that career wouldn’t last much longer, but the next 17 years would bring exhibitions of paintings, drawings and welding, eight albums of new songs and covers, ten Bootleg Series Box sets, a Rolling Thunder Live box, an autobiography, a stint as a radio DJ and a touring schedule that doesn’t let up.

As Sean Wilentz has written, “People still have this idea that the record is the real thing and shows are just kind of the unreal thing, but, in fact, the shows may be the real thing.” Dylan told Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone, “Songs don’t come alive in a recording studio. You try your best, but there’s always something missing. What’s missing is a live audience.” And one of the strengths of not necessarily nailing songs down in the studio is that they become malleable. They can take different guises, different tempos, different tunes, even. If Coldplay sing ”Yellow”, or Oasis “Wonderwall”, or the Stones “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” or Bowie “Five Years”, they have to sound like the record, or they just don’t work. But “Visions of Johanna” works as a soft acoustic mumble, a mariachi waltz, even as an angular rock song, when Dylan tried it out with The Hawks in the studio in 1965. 

“My eye’s like a shooting star,
It looks at nothing here or there, looks at nothing near or far,
No-one ever told me, it’s just something I knew,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”

Five years ago, as he trod the boards of the Royal Albert Hall, forty-nine years after that ’66 tour, I felt he set out a manifesto by using the words of another songwriter, Cy Coleman. It came in the middle eight of “Why Try to Change Me Now”, sung on his then newly-released album of Sinatra songs, Shadows in the Night. “Why can’t I be more conventional?/ People talk, people stare, so I try / But that’s not for me, cause I can’t see / My kind of crazy world go passing me by…” After the concert, I kept thinking back to that verse. It struck me as both the fulcrum of that night’s set and his entire career. “I don’t think you’ll hear what I do ever again,” Dylan told Douglas Brinkley in 2009. “It took a while to find this thing.” 

“Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man,
Show me something that I’ll understand,
I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were,
I’ll go far away from home with her…”

Rough and Rowdy Ways is blurry like a polaroid, sharp as a sword, cool like a mint julep, creepy as a Charles Addams cartoon, and deeply strange. It’s also a record that could be made by no other performer. When it’s good, it’s really good, when it isn’t, well… who cares. It’s not a competition. All the tests have been passed. If you’re not signed up to Bob, you may not be convinced; if you are, then there’s much to enjoy. One song struck me as being particularly relevant to my theory, and its verses are scattered through this piece. “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” can be read as a song to the Deity, but I fondly think Bob’s singing it to his loyal audience. I love the gentle lapping waves of “I Contain Multitudes”, and the B-movie glide of “My Own Version of You” – I’m always game for songs that find room for St Peter and Bo Diddley’s maracas player in one line (“You can bring it to St. Peter, you can bring it to Jerome”). 

There’s Jimmy Reed, king of the slurred blues shuffle, as a touchstone. The r&b of “False Prophet”, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “Crossing the Rubicon” are all poked and prodded by the guitars of Charlie Sexton, Bob Britt and Blake Mills, just off-centre enough to keep true to the source while adding a pleasing angularity. There’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”, like a bizarre manifesto from a character in one of Carl Hiassen’s Florida novels. “Black Rider” starts like late Cohen and turns into a sinister and blasted song about fighting the Grim Reaper. 

I initially thought there were no songs other singers would attempt, but that didn’t stop an Italian with a guitar doing “Murder Most Foul” a day after it dropped. I thought that because these songs are mostly sui generis, lyrically unapproachable, and more spoken than sung. Then I heard Emma Swift doing “I Contain Multitudes” and recognised a melodic line direct from the Oh Mercy songs “What Good Am I” and “Most of the Time.” So it’s possibly not as weird as it sounds on first hearing. 

There have been long recitations before (“Highlands”,” Brownsville Girl”), songs that reference the Civil War or bloody battles (“Cross the Green Mountains”, “Pay in Blood”) – and late-night reveries (“Soon After Midnight”, “When the Deal Goes Down”). But here Dylan takes a more impressionistic tilt at all these types. Watching an arts programme the other night, our friend Susie came on, talking about JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. “Turner’s early work was all about the detail”, she said. “With late Turner, it’s all about the atmosphere and the light.” Yes, I thought, as late Dylan came into focus and out again, with Key West on the horizon line…

“Well, my heart’s like a river, a river that sings,
Just takes me a while to realise things,
I’ve seen the sunrise, I’ve seen the dawn,
I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone…
 
I’ve travelled from the mountains to the sea,
I hope that the gods go easy with me,
I knew you’d say yes, I’m saying it too,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”

NOTES

There are many fascinating and thorough reviews in the media, all easily found. Two of my favourites are Anne Margaret Daniel in Hot Press or Richard Williams in Uncut. Daniels also references “Mutineer” in her piece.

Bob’s live performance of “Mutineer” can be heard on Enjoy Every Sandwich, a 2004 Zevon tribute album.

Emma Swift’s “I Contain Multitudes” can be found here

For an insight into Dylan’s working methods, listen to the “Tell Ol’ Bill” sessions. In 2005 Dylan, during a tour, stops by a studio in Pennsylvania to record a song for a movie, North Country. Dylan changes tempos, keys and even the melody, through multiple takes and the song that comes out at the end is nothing like the one at the start.

Why I love… Bob Dylan is here.

“Why Try to Change Me Now”. Will Friedwald, in Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art, says that the last Sinatra Columbia recording was the first song of note by the twenty-three-year-old composer Cy Coleman. Coleman reported that, on the date, Sinatra slightly altered the melody of the original opening interval. “I listened to the record, and it sounded so natural, the way Frank did it, that I thought to myself, He’s right! So I left it that way. So I changed the music! That’s the first and only time I’ve ever done that.”

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For more by Martin Colyer on Dylan, music and culture in general take a look at Martin’s “Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week“