[00:00:00] Speaker A: This show is a part of the FM podcast network, the home of great music podcasts. Visit
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Hey everyone, I'm Jim Salvucci of the Dilentaunts, and welcome to the latest installment of million dollar Bash.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: It's that million dollar bash.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Last time we discussed just the covers that Bob Dylan and the members of what would become the band recorded during the 1967 basement tape sessions. Today we are back with part two to explore the Bob Dylan originals recorded during those sessions. The common explanation is that Dylan was cranking out new compositions during what was otherwise his bucolic hiatus in Woodstock, New York, in order to sell them to others to record. If that is true, then the recordings we have scattered across various bootlegs, Columbia's 1975 release entitled the Basement Tapes and 2014 the Bootleg series volume eleven. The basement tapes complete consists largely of rehearsals and demos. Of course, both Dylan and the band released some of the numbers themselves on separately recorded albums, including the band's debut, Music from the Big Pink. Whatever the rationale for composing these songs, performing them, and even recording them, we are fortunate to have this trove of musical delights. The songs range from the pretty but treacly all you have to do is dream takes one and two to the deceptively traditional feeling apple suckling tree takes one and two to this silly get your rocks off to the playful see you later Allen Ginsburg to the magnificent yet incomprehensible I'm not there to the magical you ain't going nowhere to the surreal yay. Heavy in a bottle of bread takes one and two to the magisterial I shall be released. And on as I list these songs, each jingles about my head, and I'm sure they are rattling around the noggins of most of our listeners now, so you're welcome. I would be remiss if I did not mention the evident influence these songs had on Todd Haines 2007 metabiopic I'm not there. Haynes has reportedly claimed his movie was greatly inspired by listening to a yde a basement tapes bootleg over and over during a cross country road trip, and many themes, snippets of dialogue, settings, and imagery directly evoke the big pink sessions.
Now I'm going to stop here so we can maximize the conversation with our million dollar bash whizkid collective, and I'll introduce them. First up we have Erin Callahan.
[00:02:35] Speaker C: Hey everyone. Thanks for having me. Jim.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Straight from heaven, Nina Gossip hello.
[00:02:43] Speaker D: Nice to see everyone.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Greylee Heron hello.
[00:02:48] Speaker E: Glad to be here.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: And rock and Rob, Virginia.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: All right, Jim, thanks very much.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Unfortunately, Court Carney had a bailout at the last second, so we'll have to catch him next time, but we'll get going with this discussion I have prepared. No questions whatsoever. I just want this to be a wild take. So, what are your thoughts? Who wants to open this?
[00:03:12] Speaker E: Well, maybe because it's such a segue from your intro, I could just say that in listening again many times to the basement tapes, prepping for this show, among the many things that strikes me, it's just the range. There's just so much stylistically and vocally and musically going on in the basement tapes. And though we've always known that Dylan has a wide range, and you could say, well, look at this album then. Look what he's doing on this album then. This album. For it all to be in one big bundle like that is just remarkable. We talked last time about the ways in which Dylan may or may not be a kind of professor, conducting an advanced level seminar to his pupils, the Hawks, later to become the bandaid with my favorite class clown, Richard Manuel, trying to crack the teacher up all the time. And there is that. But there. But that's the kind of breadth the man has here. Just. It is an entire curriculum of music that he's compiled in this collection in such a brief time. It is remarkable.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: That's a really insightful comment, really, about the. Because just the songs that Jim listed off at the top of the show that are now ringing around in my head, as they have been for the past couple of weeks, it is remarkable to move from this wheels on fire to you ain't going nowhere to. And it's not just the tone or the surreal, gay heavy in a bottle of bread that Jim was talking about. It's not just the tone that changes, right. It's the structure of the song. It's the poetics of the. Of the song, the diction, the attitude towards it. It's like one after another.
So that's really brilliant, and I absolutely agree.
And therefore, one can make the argument that he's not. That he is reconnecting with his roots to a certain degree, but he is searching for a new sound as well, perhaps one informed by those roots. But he's, as he always does, mutates and changes those roots to fit his own reflections on what's happening around him.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: I think. Yeah, I agree with both of you. And I think what always strikes me about listening to those, especially the 2014 release, is, you know, and I guess with any of the bootleg that we get to hear him in process. But this is such a. Because it's such a departure from blonde and blonde to John Wesley Harding. We're seeing him in that transition and kind of work through that transition. And I think that's what's something that I love so much about going back to the basement tapes, is that you see, you know, how he's working through that sound, like you said, to create his new sound and not just mimic the roots music, but also create something that is so distinctly Dylan. And I think I see that primarily, like, sort of that shift inside of the props where we see something really beautiful happening lyrically, but also with his vocal and then just the different movements in that song as well.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: So what else about the range here? This is a rich topic because, you know, some of these songs are just sometimes I'm a little surprised which ones are Dylan numbers. I'm your teenage dream, right? You don't really think of that as a Dylan number. He's having fun there. Or, you know, all you have to do is dream, which I mentioned before. That sounds like something right out of the fifties, right? It sounds like something maybe you heard somewhere, and then you realize, no, Bob Dylan wrote that. He wrote that for these sessions. What do you make of that? Why is he sort of going after these genres that are, frankly, in some cases, flat out hokey?
[00:07:01] Speaker D: I think it's his way of writing and singing and writing his singing. His way out of 1966, out of Bondon Blonde, he's dead.
He sings and writes his way into new states of being. I don't see that the songs aren't the result of some transformation that's occurring in him outside the recording studio. He's transforming through the songs, and that's what I find so fascinating about these, about the something like tears of rage, which is really ant sign of the cross. These are really complex, resistant, difficult songs where he's shifting tones and really trying to work out a new relation to the listener, to the audience, and he's really feeling his way through in such complex ways. So I really hear them. And I also think, at this point, completely irresistible to see these, as Aaron is saying, as transitions to John Wesley Harding. And I don't know any way to avoid that. He didn't know that they were transitioned. That sign on the cross was a transition to the, you know, the scriptural landscape of John Rosalind. He didn't know that. But there's just no way for us to avoid that narrative. Do you think, I have no way of listening to these songs without hearing them as stages in the pilgrimage to get to John Wesley Harding.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: I think that's the benefit of the hindsight that we have now, is that we see him working through that in a way that he may not have been conscious of at the time. But then we are able to make that link as we're looking back on it. And I agree. I don't know that we can clearly, I see that narrative, but I think that we're in the position now that we can see how that works.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: I'm obviously obsessed with John Wesley Harding, the album, and I agree, Nina, that you can't.
Listeners at the time had this. They didn't have the basement tapes unless they had the great white wonderous. So you had blonde on Blonde then John Wesley Harding, and I know an artist like Dylan, revels in that kind of profound juxtaposition of Stiles, and I really love the way that you put that, the scriptural landscape of that. He's not, he didn't have that idea. He's working towards it. But you get this sense that that clutch of songs, John Wesley Harding came in a rush, and there was something in writing tears of rage, perhaps, writing this wheels on fire, perhaps, that lit a spark of some sort, where he decided to double down on that particular tone, that particular conglomeration of various references and languages and put that out. And then, of course, he leaves that kind of really intense poetic investigation aside, and this is me slagging off Nashville Skyline for something like Nashville Skyline that comes after. So John Wesley Harding stands out as this weird thing, but I definitely see these songs in the shadow of what comes after that. He's kind of searching here that there's not some sort of, like, automatic transformation, as you said. Right.
[00:10:46] Speaker E: I like Nina's point, too, that it's impossible to listen to these basement tapes in a vacuum. It's impossible to divorce what we know or think about what came afterwards from what we. How we re experienced these songs, listening to them again in 2024, there's the immediate aftermath with John Wesley harding and the Nashville skyline. I'm sure court would have jumped in here to defendezheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheh and red Nashville skyline. I will not. I will let it drown.
Whether it's waving or drowning, I'll let it sink. But he also didn't know that 1968 was come, and that's a year that is very resonant for us in 2024. I think. And yet it feels like he did know. It feels like his songs are anticipating exactly where that's going and tapped into the zeitgeist in a way that's lessen literal, you know, less explicit than his earlier songs, you know, his Emmett till and his only upon in their game and his lonesome death of Hattie Carroll. And yet equally, Phil's eloquent in capturing the mood, the anxiety of the period. And John Wesley Harding, of course, does that. Brilliant. But the other thing I was thinking of in listening to this is how much I love Dylan's voice in the sixties. It's. He can do so many things with it. And though I love Dylan's voice now more than anything, I've been immersed for the last couple years in rough and rowdy ways, and both on the album and the rough and rowdy ways tour. And I love Lake Dylan's voice and songwriting. I love the depth and the subtlety, the nuance, the pathos of late Dylan's voice. But you go back to basement tapes and realize he had so many more clubs in his bag back then, and he. He uses them with the expertise of Tiger woods at the top of his game, right, which is not. There are things that Dylan could not do in the sixties that he can do now. So I'm in no way shortchanging late Dylan. Our Dylan. Our current Dylan. But God, his best instrument has always been his voice. And he can do so many more voices in the sixties. And that's great to dive back into that very deep. Well.
[00:13:01] Speaker D: I wish I could remember the first time I ever heard sign on the cross. Because that, like Karen mentioned, that vocal is. Where on earth does that come from? And he just hits that and he holds onto it for the entire song.
It's really extraordinary. I wish I could remember the first time I had that experience.
Jeers of Rage also is another one. How does he get then?
[00:13:34] Speaker A: So that raises a good question. What was your first experience with the basement tape recordings?
How did you encounter them and how did you react?
[00:13:46] Speaker D: When I was a super new to this world, and I just bought the, you know, the official cd, and I was so horrified that they had those bands. So, like, who wants to hear this shit? The band songs. And then I redid the CD, taking all their songs off. So it was only.
I was shocked that I had. That they were going to force me to listen to this other songs. But yes.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: So what did you think of the Dylan song?
[00:14:21] Speaker D: Oh, I loved apple suckling tree so much, I thought I never heard anything so wonderful. And I thought that they were timeless, that they were timeless in a way that nothing that I had been listening to up to that were.
That they felt like folk tales. They felt like ancient, timeless folk tales. And then the dirty songs were shocking to me, like, please misses him. That's a very dirty song. Can we just get that out on the table? So, yeah, they were just sides. They were.
And they were sides that were ramped up. The playfulness and the raunchiness are so fresh. And to this day, they're fresh and rich, I think.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And I guess that timelessness, I like that idea. The fact that these. So many of these songs seem like they're just from a different era really kind of informs the feel of John Wesley Harding as well. Right. Because that has a very similar ethos.
Who out any other. Or actually, I'll tell you, my first encounter with it was the 75 Columbia album, maybe when I was in college. I think I just bought it. It heard about the basement tips, had no idea what it was.
And I couldn't believe what I was hearing. You know, I was a pretty good Dylan fan, but I wasn't real in depth. I'd seen him play once and I was absolutely blown away. I had no idea what I was. I couldn't even figure out how to get my brain around these songs. They were just so crazy. The lyrics were so crazy. I loved the raunchy ones. And I was a big fan of the band. And I had little love hate with the band song. Some of them I actually liked. But, yeah, just as a whole, the Dylan numbers just were just. They just opened my eyes in a way and really made me look at all of literature very differently. Really kind of opened me up to a lot more. And I had already been pretty wide open by then.
[00:16:26] Speaker D: Have you read tarantula before?
[00:16:30] Speaker A: I hadn't even heard of it.
I wasn't aware of its existence. Yeah, no, I had no idea. I was, you know, not a very informed Dylan fan. Who else, you know, remembers their first encounter with this was. Did anyone encounter through a bootleg? Or was it the 75 album or. Or what?
[00:16:47] Speaker C: I can tell you it was bootleg. And my friend Carrie Winscott, who led me to most things, Dylan. He. We were probably not sober. And we were listening to Dylan out on his porch. And it was million dollar bash was the first thing, the first song I heard. And that sort of became our sort of theme song for all of our adventures. But I remember, like you, Nina, and you, Jim, I wasn't so thrilled with the band songs. Everything Dylan loved, did I loved. I did also love the raunchy songs. And since it's post world, I saw sort of the connection to dirty worlds.
[00:17:23] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:17:24] Speaker C: You know, of course. Which is. And so it's just like I. They. I guess at the time, the thing I used to say was they bent my brain. Like, I just was like, this is one of the best things I've ever heard. All of the Dylan stuff, just literally, I wanted more. And you're right, the word play and the range of, you know, the word play in it, the strangeness of it, it made me kind of see things differently as well.
And maybe because I wasn't sober.
I'll take that. I accept.
[00:17:56] Speaker E: It must have been strange.
None of us were Dylan fans in the sixties and seventies. We came to him at various stages, but later.
But if you were a Dylan fan back then, well, I guess you probably would have already heard the great white wonder or some form of bootleg version of the basement tapes before they were officially released. But how weird it would be if you didn't. For it to be a contemporary of blood on the tracks and desire for you rather than this, you know, rather than reinserting it back into the timeline that we always knew right of when it actually came and how. It's really more the sister album of John Wesley Harding than it is, has anything to do with blood on the tracks or desire. So that would have been. That would have twisted your mind in a different direction to experience it in the order it was officially released.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: I got from a friend of mine, the tree with roots bootleg that we talked about, that we talked about last time. But I did come into contact with these songs through the official 75 release previously. And I have to go back to Greely's statement about the stylistic range again. And I think that's what Aaron and Nina have been talking about and Greely right now been mentioning as well. Talking about as well is that this cornucopia exists, that it's just the surface, the 75 recording of record. It's just the surface and the shift in tone between something like too much of nothing and yay heavy in a bottle of bread. The two songs that open up the second disc, I got the cd of the 75 recording that opened up the second disc, which was always, always my favorite. It was just, again, stunning to me, as Aaron said, bent my brain. I was like, why in 1967 is he writing these incredibly playful, dirty, raucous songs? And then interpolating into that catalog something like too much of nothing. Just wanting song to me. Just an incredibly haunting song that. And this wheel on fire. This wheels on Fire, which ends the second disc of the 75 re release on cd. Those songs have just stayed with me as just incredibly haunting songs that I can't. And I. They've got this almost this aura found them that, you know, I can't pierce their complexities because there's. They hit me in that kind of. That incredibly haunting way. The waters of oblivion. Too much of nothing just resounds in this way. Right. And, yeah, that was my first experience with these songs, seemed to correlate with the others.
[00:20:53] Speaker D: The urbanity is gone. The urbanization, the veneer of urban cool is gone. And I think that the emotion that emerges is what is alarming to us.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: That's a really great point. That's a really good point. Because you got.
[00:21:11] Speaker E: Imagine any of these songs being sung at the Andy Warhol's factory, right?
[00:21:15] Speaker D: No, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:19] Speaker C: Maybe it's a vulnerability, Nina, that we're seeing.
[00:21:21] Speaker E: Oh, absolutely.
[00:21:22] Speaker C: Like, stripped down and pared down.
[00:21:25] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: Going back to what court and what I was alluding to in Denmark is just like, there's just. He's freer to be vulnerable, I think, because of the people he's around and that maybe they were just demos and he was just, you know, they were just riffing and having fun. But he gets to that point of really a stripped bare emotional state that we see, and tears of rage is the one that always gets me. Like, why must I always be the thief? Like. Like, I don't know why that line hit me when I was younger, but it still does. I still go back to the first time I heard it. Like, it just. It hurts in a way. I don't know why. But, yeah, he just. He works to that place of emotional vulnerability there.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: There's nothing thin, wild or mercury about this, any of these recordings, right? Yeah. That's amazing. So what about individual songs? What song?
Did anyone bring a song they want to talk about, as you often do?
Are there too many?
[00:22:30] Speaker B: I did, and it was this wheels on fire, which I see as a precursor song to the landscapes and world and concerns and emotions of John Wesley Harding. Actually, all along the watchtower is somewhere there in the anxiety, let's say, that pervades that song. It begins with that ticking of the hi hat, which is like a ticking of a clock. This time is running out, which has really caught my ear when I first heard it. And I think that what I love about that song is he does this typical Dylan move where he takes a plain or commonplace idiom and then imbues it with this profound extra significance, right? If memory serves, that's just a throwaway phrase. We just say it. Oh, well, if memory serves, I think it was actually in, you know, 1985, where he recorded Julius Nethel or whatever, if memory serves, right? But here, that word memory, and that word serves take on this incredible. It becomes almost an indictment, right? You know, we shall meet again, if your memory serves you well. And that. That is just brilliantly constructed, the repetition of that line. And you get this sense of, like, the joker and the thief of two dislocated figures, right? The singer is totally alone, sending out a line to. Casting out a line to this other song's addressee. So it's not. It's interesting in this song that he's not. This wheel's on fire, this wheel shall explode. It's apocalyptic. He's. But he's not. He's talking about grand historical change, but he's not doing it in the way that he did in the times. There are changing. Right. Where we also get wheel imagery, right? Don't speak too soon cause the wheel still in spin, the wheel of bait. But we know in that song that the wheel is this, you know, turning of history, right? The senators and congressmen are gonna be overturned, and there's a turning of history going on here. And what's remarkable about this song, in contrast with it, is that this notion of a collectivity that can sustain that kind of change has just vanished. It's like Dee Dee looking for Astragon from waiting for Godot, because the landscape of these songs are barren. And so it's not a collective, but just one person that he's asking to remain true to recall, right? If your memory serves, clearly in a time of disruption. And then that line, no man alive will come to you with another tale to tell, I think is kind of symbolic. Not symbolic or it's a microcosm of how the entire kind of song looks, right. Because it's indeterminate, that song. Right. It's as if no other tale to tell is all men.
I'm using Dylan's language here, right? No man a lot. No men will bring this. All men will bring the same story is one way of interpreting the line, right. No man will I come to you with another tale to tell. Men that are alive, however, will bring the same story to you. And it's your job to find a common collective memory from these heirlooms or scraps. Or half finished tales of american culture. Cause I really see in this song this kind of, like, stripped or barren landscape. But then again, no man alive, indeed, the dead, the specters of the past, will return with other tales, right? So no man alive will come up to you with another tale to tell. But the line has this ghostly, following interpretation to it, and that's where the kind of comes to me. And then this indeterminacy, therefore, of this particular line expresses this kind of fraught relationship to time and the past. And I think that the wheel exploding, it's kind of like this prospero, like, casting aside of the circle maker's magic craft, like, in times that are changing, he had this magical ability to create these circles that would bind collectives. And here he's kind of, like, rejecting that. Like, I can't do it. I just want one person to remain true. Right. If your memory serves you well. And so that's where. That's my take on a song that I find is a kind of precursor to John Wesley Harding's concerns and poetics.
[00:26:58] Speaker D: And don't you think it's also one of his vexing self accounting of prophecy songs? He's the one that's implicated. Notify my next of kin when this wheel of fate that's on fire is rolling down the road I'm the one another man isn't going to tell you a tale listen to me hearken to me and the burden and vexation of having that voice. I hear that in this. In this song over himself. It's his voice and his. That's central here. And his tale and his.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a kind of desperation, and it goes back to what Aaron said about this kind of vulnerability. There's a profound vulnerability in that kind of expression.
[00:27:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it kind of leads me to. Well, when you were talking, I was thinking of other muses. When he says, man, I could tell their stories all day. And also what Nina was saying, like, his voice.
I argue about wicked messenger, that he can't say anything. He doesn't say anything because. Or he's saying. Or he doesn't say in wicked messenger, you know, like, he can't speak, but in false prophet, because you have the crossover and the lyrics. He can say what he couldn't say at 26, at that point, at this point in his career. And so I see a lot of crossover between Ruff and Rowdy and John Wesley Hardy and the basement tapes. There's a lot of investigation we could probably dig into there. But I was thinking, when you were talking about mother of muses, because he's talking about war in generals, and he's talking about, essentially, the wheel being on fire in terms of global politics and whatnot, not just cultural stuff. So it just struck me. But that was my tangent. I'm going to stop now.
[00:28:51] Speaker E: I'm glad you got the wheel going down the road there toward this wheels on fire, Rob, because there's so much going on in there. And it's a great example, a specific example of something we were more nebulously talking about earlier in our discussion, which is this is example of Dylan groping for language and a voice and a form to say something he's not quite said before or not said in this way. And that he's also looking for antecedents for it from scripture, especially in John Wesley Harding, from other forms of music, be it more nostalgic, 1950s sounding works, or older, rougher and rowdier, traditional musical sources, but literary ones, too. You mentioned Beckett, which I think is a comparison that holds up on several songs here, that kind of barren, existential landscape. But you mentioned Shakespeare, too. You mentioned Prospero. And the play, you won't be surprised to hear that I hear, echoing the most throughout basement tapes, is King Lear.
There is that great image of carrying the child in the arms in tears of rage, which always makes me think of Lear and Cordelia. There is that early in the first scene scene between Lear and Cordelia, nothing will come of nothing. And the use of that word nothing throughout the play in interesting ways. And you can hear that Dylan too much of nothing. Nothing was delivered.
And in this wheels on fire, the image itself maybe has multiple sources, but the one that resonates most with me is from Lear. When he finally re encounters Cordelia and doubts that it's real. It must be a dream. She can't actually be here. He says, I am bound upon a wheel of fire. That mine own tears do scald like molten lead. And Dylan surely is consciously alluding to that image in the song. And then another line. You were quoting from the song, rob, and I've forgotten the exact Dylan line, but it made me, for those of you who might be watching this on video, roll out of screen briefly and roll back. Because my office. I wanted to grab my Shakespeare, because the last lines of Lear are spoken by Edgar. The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most. We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long. And that sentiment, I feel is interwoven into multiple songs on this, on the basement tapes, but maybe nowhere better than in this song.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: That's a really. Yeah, I think I thought about Lear as well. The bound upon a wheel of fire. Right. And I like that he's in another world than he's in hell. And Cordelia is this angelic figure. Right? And so there's this dislocation that's going on. And this song, for me, is all about that kind of dislocation, series of dislocations, specifically temporal ones. And going back to Aaron's point about prophecy, and there's a political valence to this as well, where 68 was a hell of a. But 67 was also a year that was incredibly traumatic for the country. Right. And Dylan is perhaps in this particular composition, and maybe across some of the songs in the basement tapes that you've just been mentioning, grayly is kind of questioning, and going back to Nina's wonderful point about this notion that he indeed is not able to take on that prophetic mantle or is rejecting that. And absolutely. I see those. And those are big, major shakespearean themes. And of course, Greeley would know G. Wilson Knight's title of his book, the wheel of Fire to talk about the tragedies. So that's where my mind went first. But I don't think that's where Dylan draws his wheel of fire.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: And what about Johnny Cash's ring of Fire, which is a whole nother thing, which I never thought of before this moment. So I have nothing to say, this topic, you know, but it's another. It's another hell imagery, right? He's being drawn into the ring of fire.
I don't know. I'm speculating wildly here.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Only court was here.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: You would know. He would know. So what other songs?
[00:33:20] Speaker E: I mean, a song I feel like I've never fully understood and don't want to because I don't want to dispel whatever that enigmatic quality is. Clothesline saga. I know that it's a response song to ode to Billy Joe, old ode to Billy Joe, and that people sometimes read some kind of creepy psychosexual subtext into whatever's going on in this family. And maybe that's there, and maybe there's something going on, but I don't know what it is.
And there's a great line about the vice president going mad. We're recording this on July 22, the day after Joe Biden announced he was not going to seek the democratic nomination, as Lyndon Johnson announced in March of 19. As of July 22. All the momentum seems to be behind Kamala Harris. We'll see. By the time you listen to this recording, dear listener, who knows how the winds of political change will have blown and where it will lead us? But yeah, that's that line about the vice president going mad. There's a sense that the family is vaguely aware of what's going on outside the home and in the broader world, and that it's bad, it's foreboding, but there's a kind of sticking their head in the sand quality of wanting to ignore it. I guess it's sticking your head in the sand. Or maybe it's just practicality that even when the world is on fire, the laundry doesn't do itself, meals don't cook themselves, that the mundane things of life must go on. But yeah, it's just. And Dylan's vocal delivery on that song, it feels like he's nodding and winking at us and implying so much more than is said, but I'm not sure what it is. And like I said at the top, I'm not sure that I want to know. It's more the quality of vaguely ominous, but also kind of funny to implication in the song that I love. And I don't think the song would be strengthened if I could somehow look below the surface of the water and see the full iceberg. I think that its a magical quality lies in its indecipherability.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Clothesline saga was one of my favorites. When I first heard this album, I loved that song. Having absolutely no awareness of the existence of Bobby Gentry or the ode to Billy Joe, I had no idea. And when I did hear that many decades later, it blew me away. The parallels, the tonal powers is what it is. That notion that he's telling this narrative about nothing and there's momentous stuff going on around it. The vice president going mad. And that's exactly what happens owed to Billy Joe, except almost the opposite way. They're talking about something momentous, but it's in this banal setting. And it is that idea that the world goes on, right? This is just how we interact. And you're not singing about, look at this big thing, you're just singing that, well, normal conversation, right? And that's what it is. But it's so funny. It is winking the whole time. Every note he delivers in that song, the lyrics are just bizarre. You know, the pants that nobody wants to touch. Why? I don't know. Maybe there's something sexual going on. I don't know. Or maybe they're just lazy. They don't want to bother with them. Who knows? But I absolutely love that song, so I'm glad you brought that up.
Any other songs.
[00:36:48] Speaker D: I want to put in a pitch for I'm not there, because I think that is a work of absolute magnificence. And one thing that's, as I found a way to frame what's brilliant about it, there's a mode of visual art called asemic writing. If you've ever heard of that, you should look it up. It's really fascinating. It's artists who play with language and I can't really describe it. It's the way we're able to inscribe lines and inscribe what looks like writing and gives a glimpse or an invitation to semantics that isn't really there. And that's what I think is brilliant about I'm not there, is that what's possible we can hear? What's audible emerges from these, the words, the phrases that are not audible in a way that you get this sense of feeling and narrative and character going on, but you don't. You'll never know what it is. And I really think that everyone, namely Clinton Haling, who has attempted to identify the words that are. That are incoherent. That is the mark of philistinism to me. If you can't be moved and entranced by this song as it is, then you're a philistine. Look up asemic writing and you'll see. You'll hear that I'm not there. It's the audible. The musical version of this.
[00:38:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you for bringing up that song and thank you for being on AC writing, which I never heard of. I'm scanning the Wikipedia page on it right now.
[00:38:44] Speaker D: Oh, Rick Danko is the. I couldn't remember. I'm sorry. I looked up. I called up the lyrics. Wheels on fire.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yeah. He co wrote.
[00:38:55] Speaker D: I forgot it was Rick Danko. I thought it was Richard Manuel. And do you know the last time he performed the song was twelve years ago today?
[00:39:05] Speaker B: This.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: Wheels on fire.
[00:39:06] Speaker D: Oh, yes.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:39:09] Speaker E: Wow.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: Prophetic.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: Any more thoughts on I'm not there? Because I think that's a. It's a song that was always interpreted or not always interpreted, but is often interpreted as. Those were just throwaway lyrics he was making up as he went along. But there's multiple. But there's multiple versions of it.
[00:39:28] Speaker D: Moving and beautiful.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. It's gorgeous.
[00:39:30] Speaker D: It's voice. The vocals are infused with.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's tremendous. And it's. You know, and there are. There's more than one version with virtually the same lyrics. So obviously they're not just throw away lyrics.
[00:39:41] Speaker D: Right.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: But I love this idea of ac Mc. No, it is. I think it's. The vocal performance is really extraordinary. It's a beautiful song. And some of the lines are gorgeous. I don't know what the hell they mean. Christ forsaken angel, the one he delivers. That. So crisp, so beautiful. Yeah. What is that? I don't know.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: And to balance that against the asemic, to borrow Nina's word, to balance that shockingly clear image. Christ's sake.
[00:40:12] Speaker E: And angel against me.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: The purely emotive vocalizing is in itself. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's what he's perhaps. Could we argue this was not just him laying down some dummy tracks?
[00:40:28] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:40:35] Speaker E: Am I saying that right lens is an interesting one? I never thought of to look at the song through, but I love that. Nina, if you were to put down that lens and pick up one of the ones we've already looked through, a more kind of religious lens. It feels almost pentecostal. It feels like speaking in tongues. It feels like it is speaking a deep truth, but in its own language that we don't know. And we pick up pieces of it, and it feels so true to us that we sense that we understand what he's communicating, even if semantically we couldn't explain it.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: That's beautifully put.
So it's the language of Babylon here.
All right. Any other thoughts on I'm not there or another song you want to talk about before we wrap up?
[00:41:32] Speaker E: One thing I wanted to add before we run out of time, like all of us, I'm sure at times I was distracted in prepping for this episode because so much is going on in the world. And, you know, I would put down the earbuds and turn on the news.
Because, like I said, dear listener, this is being recorded on July 22.
But then I guess maybe that started to seep into what I was hearing in the basement taste when I would put the earbuds back in. And not just because of all the uncanny parallels between the late sixties and the era that we are struggling through right now, though I'm. That's part of it. But last time I said that, the professor in me loved the fact that these tapes were recorded in the basement. Or at least many, most of them were, because it jives so well with that sense of a descent. A descent into the underworld. Or as I was saying last time, a descent into the unconscious. It feels like we're entering Bob Dylan's mind, what it sounds like in there when we're entering the basement tapes. But maybe because of the context and listening. Re listening to the tapes this time around, it felt more like going into the bunker. You know, it felt like going into seeking sanctuary in a place to try and wait out the siege going on outside and try to survive it. So that, weirdly, my mind skipped to one of my favorite movies from the sixties. Very dark satire, Doctor Strangelove, right? Where the masters of war screw it all up and turn the Cold War into a hot war and unleash nuclear apocalypse and destroy the world. But no sooner do they do that than they go into its bunker mentality, right? We have to save ourselves so humanity can be perpetuated, so we can repopulate the planet like Noah after the flood, right? And there's a kind of siege mentality, bunker mentality to these songs, too. That sort of sense that if nothing else survived from a lost civilization, you could do worse than starting over with the basement.
Or to go back to the timelessness that Nina referred to early in the episode. That sense that you've. That something's been unearthed, excavated from a lost time, like a time capsule, right? In this. In the basement tapes. And that these shards and fragments from all over the place that you can try to piece together to try and recreate. What must that civilization have been like? What were its values? What did they love and what did they hate? What did they dream for? And what did they dread? It feels like it's all in there, in this very long lost ark of the covenant, in this reliquary of songs, in the basement tapes. And so it feels timeless, but it also feels like something that has been preserved from some lost civilization.
[00:44:40] Speaker D: I totally agree with that. I just myself want to be careful to remember that.
You're very lucky if you end up in the bunker. That's a real place of privilege, you know? God, Dylan could afford to take a break from the late 1960s in a nice house with a spacious basement in Bu College, upstate New York. So I like to remember that.
[00:45:06] Speaker E: Totally fair.
[00:45:07] Speaker D: We're all lucky. Yeah. If we end up in a bathroom.
[00:45:12] Speaker B: I think he recognizes that in some.
[00:45:14] Speaker D: Yes, I think some of these songs.
[00:45:16] Speaker B: I think he definitely does. The song that I'm obsessed with, to go back to it again, this is on fire really is a song about memory. And of course, what you get in any sort of grand historical narrative that unifies a collective is the erasure of those people who didn't get to their bunkers. Didn't have a bunker. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:45:41] Speaker A: You're suggesting that there's a mineshaft gap.
[00:45:45] Speaker D: A what?
[00:45:47] Speaker A: One of the final lines that doctor strange loves.
[00:45:50] Speaker D: Oh, right, right.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: Aaron, do you have any. You haven't.
Do you have a song for us?
[00:45:57] Speaker C: You know, I don't. I didn't really. I was. No, I don't.
Tears of rage. I listened to tears of rage over and over again. I think I talked to you about that a little bit earlier, and so when you ask for songs that specifically, I really didn't have much to add to that. So I think I. That was the one song that I think I go back to over and over again just because of the vocal performance, and I was listening to the different takes, and I'm like, okay, it's this take that I like the best, and then I listen to the next, you know, take drain. Okay. It was. Vocal is a little bit more honest and pared down on this one. So I think that it's just. It's the honesty and the sincerity and then the lyrics that I love in that song, and I'm just. You know, I think I kind of covered the things that I liked earlier, and so I had. That's why I was quiet. And when you were talking about Lear, Greylee, I was hoping that Rob would bring in Edward Lear. A different lear. And I know that you've covered there.
[00:46:52] Speaker B: The nonsense poet.
[00:46:53] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. With the nonsense poetry. But I think that was, you know, what I was thinking while everyone was talking more so that I'd already kind of talked about the song that I wanted to talk about. So apologies.
[00:47:07] Speaker A: No apologies necessary. What I love about all this is there's just so much to talk about, you know, think about what we haven't talked about.
Just the list goes on and on, and now all these things are flowing through my head, and I have to read about asymmetric writing. Anything else for the good of the order?
[00:47:27] Speaker C: I was just wondering, and not that I'm advocating, but when I was tapping for it, I was thinking, did we need a third episode of covers? And then sort of more of the lighthearted, nonsensical songs and then the more serious songs? We could have pared this down a little bit more, but we didn't, so.
[00:47:44] Speaker A: I guess it's a next time we cycle through with basement tapes.
Well, thank you, everyone. This has been fantastic. Really exciting. It's been a blast to listen to this stuff over and over again. I've been really enjoying it.
[00:48:00] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: Thanks for the opportunity.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Jim.
[00:48:03] Speaker E: Great.
Thanks, everyone.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: And see you later, crocodiles.
[00:48:09] Speaker D: Bye bye.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: Bye bye, everyone. Be well.
[00:48:15] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Dylan Tons podcast.
[00:48:18] Speaker B: Be sure to subscribe to have the.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Dylan tons sent directly to your inbox and share the Dylan tons on social media.
