Real Life Rock (66 page)

3
“Moonshiner,” outtake from
The Times They Are A-Changin',
12 August 1963
“I hit all those notes,” Dylan said in 1965, in reply to an interviewer's mention of Caruso, “and I can hold my breath three times as long if I want to.” This ancient Appalachian ballad—five minutes of suspension, single notes from the singer's throat and harmonica held in the air as if to come down would be to bring death with them—must have been what he meant.

Skipping one track:

4
“The Times They Are A-Changin',” piano demo, 1963
Dylan presses hard, right through the song's instant clichés. Times are changing; events are physically present; the force of history is driving this performance, and you might feel like getting out of the way.

Skipping one track:

5
“Seven Curses,” outtake from
The Times They Are A-Changin',
6 August 1963
A horse thief is caught, his daughter tries to buy his life, the judge demands a night with her instead, she pays, her father hangs anyway—seemingly set in feudal Britain (that's where the melody comes from), this is a simpler, more elemental version of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” perhaps Dylan's greatest protest song, but with the position of the narrator impossible to place. The resentments and hopes in the preceding tunes of oppression and rebellion, “No More Auction Block,” “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” “Moonshiner,” “The Times They Are A-Changin',” or others someone else might choose from
the bootleg series
, all are present here, but with an ending: there is no such thing as change. That old melody turns out not to be the skeleton of the song, but its flesh; it carries its own, unspoken words, which are “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Skipping six tracks:

6
“Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence,” outtake from
Highway 61 Revisited,
15 June 1965
Chicago blues with a Howlin' Wolf laugh. All rhythmic hipness, especially the first time Dylan says “All right,” investing the words with more meaning—more stealth, more motionless Dean-Brando menace—than any of the number's real lyrics.

Skipping one track:

7
“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,”
Highway 61 Revisited
alternate, 15 June 1965
As if he'd waited one year too many to shake it up and put the Beatles in their place, a headlong rush. And after a minute or so, a heedless extremism, as with the last minute of the Velvet Underground's “Heroin”—which, when it was released in 1967, sounded too much like Bob Dylan was singing it.

Skipping one track:

8
“She's Your Lover Now,” outtake from
Blonde on Blonde
,
21 January 1966
An unforgiving, barely coherent rant, but less about the unnamed she than the rumble
that repeatedly builds up to an explosive convergence of guitar, piano, bass, drums, organ, lyric, and vocal—a convergence that never arrives in the same place twice. As for the piano, liner notes credit both Paul Griffin (who played on “Like a Rolling Stone” and Don McLean's “American Pie”) and Richard Manuel (of the Hawks, Dylan's touring group in 1965 and '66, later of the Band), but it must be Dylan. No other pianist could follow his singing; no singer could follow this piano without playing it.

Skipping 21 tracks:

9
“Blind Willie McTell,” outtake from
Infidels
,
5 May 1983
Between “No More Auction Block” and “She's Your Lover Now” there are barely 3 years; between “She's Your Lover Now” and this song, more than 17. Seventeen years of great work, bad work, endless comebacks, divorce, musical confusion, a terrible search for a subject producing hopeless songs about Legionnaires' disease and Catfish Hunter, a retreat into simple careerism, and, most shockingly, conversion to a particularly self-interested, middle-class, Southern California suburban version of fundamentalist Christianity, and then reemergence as a Full Gospel preacher with God on his side. “You came in like the wind,” he sang to Jesus in 1981, on “You Changed My Life,” a
bootleg series
number: “Like Errol Flynn.” And went out like him too, maybe; with three explicitly born-again albums behind him and sales plummeting, Dylan seemed to come back to the world with
Infidels,
and critics climbed on for another comeback, a return to form: “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” and “Union Sundown” sounded like . . . protest songs!

Perhaps they were, but “Blind Willie McTell”—left off the album, one can imagine, because it would have upended it—is much more. It turns all the old, sainted rebels and victims parading across
Infidels
as across Dylan's whole songbook to dust, then blows them away. Led by Dylan on piano, with Mark Knopfler in his steps on guitar, this piece claims the story: the singer finds not evil in the world but that the world is evil. The whole world is an auction block; all are bidders, all are for sale: “Smell that sweet magnolia bloomin'/See the ghost of slavery still.”

The song is detailed, the language is secular, the mood is final. It's the last day before the Last Days, except for one thing, one weird, indelible non sequitur closing every verse, every scene of corruption and failure, like a gong: “Nobody can sing the blues/Like Blind Willie McTell.” So the prophet answers his own prophecy with a mystery not even he can explain; the singer sums up and transcends his entire career; and the listener, still in the world, turns off the stereo, walks out of the house, and goes looking for an answer.

10
Blind Willie McTell,
Last Session
(Prestige Bluesville)
Willie McTell was born in Georgia in 1901; he died there in 1959. He first recorded in 1927, and ended his life frequenting a lot behind the Blue Lantern Club in Atlanta, where couples parked to drink and make love; McTell would walk from car to car, trying to find someone to pay him for a tune. In 1956 a record store owner convinced him to sit down before a tape recorder, and he talked and sang his life and times.