Eyolf Østrem
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thingsTT twice Eyolf Østrem Contents Preface vii IYou’ve Been With the Professors 1 1 Analysing Dylan Songs 3 Methodological Considerations The Object............................ 3 The harmony........................... 7 Analysing an Idea......................... 8 2 ‘Beauty may Only Turn to Rust’ 13 The Beautiful world of Bob Dylan................ 14 Beauty and the Beast....................... 16 Proportion and expression..................... 20 Expression and style........................ 22 3 ‘Going Through All These Things Twice’ 25 The Ritual of a Bob Dylan Concert The External Similarites: Ceremony................ 27 The Rolling Thunder Revue................... 30 The Gospel Years......................... 33 The Voice of a Generation.................... 33 Secular Ritual........................... 37 Functions and means....................... 41 Dylan and ritual revisited..................... 45 Postscript............................. 49 4 The Momentum of Standstill 51 or: Time Out Of Mind and the Blues Dylan and the Blues....................... 53 i ii CONTENTS In the Evening.......................... 53 I Pity The Poor Immigrant.................... 55 Standing (Still) in the Doorway.................. 57 Ring Them Bells......................... 62 Highlands............................ 65 II Harmony and Understanding 67 5 ‘What I learned from Lonnie’ 69 An exploration of some remarks in Chronicles Secrets in the back room..................... 69 Melodies out of triplets – Axioms and numbers.......... 71 Rhythm: The Link Wray ‘Rumble’ connection.......... 73 Numbers: Dylan the Pythagorean................. 76 Melody: Three times 2, and 7 and 4 ................ 80 Formulaicism: Inventive Redundancy............... 82 A translation........................... 84 6 Three Tambourine Men 87 Preamble: The Song – A carneval in sound............ 87 First Man: Drammenshallen, 1981 ................. 90 Second Man: Cascais, 1993 .................... 96 The Third Man: Vienna, 1999 ................... 101 7 Just Like A Woman Revisited 105 8 The propelling harmony of ‘Dear Landlord’ 109 Level 1 – the Dry Description................... 109 Level 2 – the Harmonic Analysis................. 110 Level 3 – the interpretation.................... 112 9 In the Garden 113 III Albums and Songs 117 10 The Uneven Heart 119 Bob Dylan the Musician CONTENTS iii Sponge Bob (1960–65)...................... 121 Perfection and Break (1965–66).................. 123 The Long Lost Weekend (1967–74)................ 129 Bloody Tracks and Rolling Thunder (1974–75).......... 133 Battling the Boundaries – Fighting the Form (1978)........ 135 Are You Ready? (1979)...................... 138 The Never-Ending Tour (1988–)................. 139 ‘Mathematical music’....................... 146 The Pre/post-modern Dylan................... 148 The Uneven Heart........................ 150 11 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) 153 12 It Wasn’t Bruce – Don’t Think Twice (1962) 155 A Musical Whodunnit 13 Hattie Carroll (1963) 171 14 Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) 173 15 Chimes of Freedom (1964) 175 16 John Wesley Harding (1967) 177 17 Self Portrait (1970) 179 18 New morning (1970) 181 19 Wedding song (1974) 183 20 Blood On The Tracks (1975) 185 21 Tangled up in Tangled up in Blue 189 22 Saved (1980) 193 23 Down in the Groove (1988) 197 24 World Gone Wrong — A Body in Sound 199 Not-a-one-man-band....................... 199 You speak to me in body language................. 199 Speaking Guitar.......................... 200 iv CONTENTS The Limbs of the Body...................... 201 Mouth language......................... 203 25 Can’t Wait (1997) 205 The story in brief......................... 205 “That’s how it is” – ok, but how exactly, and where does it lead?.. 206 From “Getting to you” to “controlling the thing”......... 208 Can’t wait – but for what?..................... 209 “Can’t Wait” and the Blood on the Tracks eVect.......... 210 26 ‘A day above ground is a good day’ 213 Bob Dylan’s ‘Love and Theft’ (2001) Dylan and Christianity, Woman, and Love............ 213 Analysing Dylan lyrics...................... 215 The Apocalypse.......................... 217 The River............................. 218 Love............................... 221 The Music............................ 227 IV Modern Times and Plagiarism 231 27 It’s Modern to Steal 233 Modern Times (2006) 28 The many ways of stealing 239 Academic borrowing....................... 239 Poetic language.......................... 240 The proof of the pudding..................... 241 Doubts and Benefits: Allusion or theft?.............. 243 29 Dylan: the Postmodernist? 247 Bricks and Images......................... 247 Death of the Author....................... 249 The Author Resurrected...................... 252 Ethics and Aesthetics....................... 254 Dylan’s deeds........................... 258 Dylan’s Message/“Message”/Message?/Message?!.......... 259 Flowers and failings........................ 262 CONTENTS v 30 Did Dylan steal ‘Dignity’? 267 V I’ll See Him In Anything 273 31 About Guitars and Kissing 275 Not a concert review of some fall shows, 2003 Oslo............................... 277 Copenhagen........................... 277 32 Genius, Guitars, and Goodbyes 281 I MISS FREDDY! Preface can’t hold Eric Clapton entirely responsible for this book, but neither is he entirely without blame. Being a musical scholar with a great love for IDylan’s music, I’ve taken his statement quoted in the first chapter – that Dylan’s music ‘doesn’t make sense musically to the scholar’ – as a personal challenge. The articles have been written over the past ten years, and they vary con- siderably both in style, in depth, in contents, and in quality. Most of them have been published on my website, www.dylanchords.com, either as inde- pendent articles or as introductory remarks to specific songs or albums. Some also come from my blog which has given name to this collection. Some are new in this collection. In the first part, You’ve Been With The Professors, I’ve gathered the heavier, more analytical articles which treat more general aspects of Dylan’s music making, in relation to aesthetics, to music history, to musicology, and to aspects of culture at large. Analysing Dylan Songs was the outcome of an initial attempt of defining a field of study. It was partly conceived as a sample chapter for a book that I had plans of writing together with Mike Daley. That book never happened, but re-reading it now, the chapter wasn’t so bad. ‘Beauty May Only Turn to Rust’ was written for Judas! and is an analysis of Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one!). The Momentum of Standstill started out as a reflection over Dylan’s use of time on Time Out Of Mind, triggered, I think, by some early commentator who was surprised to find that ‘Standing in the Doorway’ lasted as long as it does. It grew from there, however, and in its present state is a wider study of Dylan’s experiments with time and the blues. Finally, ‘Going through all these things twice’ is more about ritual and ritual theory than about Dylan. It takes the ritualistic elements of the concert culture around Dylan as a point of departure for a discussion of ritual in general. It has been published in Genre and Ritual ed. by Østrem, Bruun, Petersen, and Fleischer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). The second part, Harmony and Understanding, is the outcome of my belief that analysis of chord structures (or, to appease the non-structuralists: vii viii CONTENTS patterns) may be a valid path to understand what is going on in Dylan’s songs and performances. ‘What I learned from Lonnie’ is my take at an explanation of what Dylan means with his reference to a system of mathematical music which he allegedly has learned from Lonnie Johnson some time in the mid- sixties. A word of caution: That I’ve written about it, doesn’t mean that I think there is an explanation, but I do believe there is some sense behind it, and this is my attempt at bringing out some of that sense. This is put to practical use in an analysis of Three Tambourine Men. Just Like a Woman, Dear Landlord, and In the Garden are all subjected to a similar kind of analysis. If these chapters appear quite dry and tedious on paper, it is the unavoidable consequence of the violent abuse that writing about music necessarily is. My apologies for that. The tediousness may be alleviated by reading them while actually listening to the songs. The third part, Albums and Songs, contains discussions of single albums or songs. This covers the whole span from short reflections on prominent stylistic traits in some album, to the full-scale analysis of ‘Love and Theft’, ‘ “A Day Above Ground is a Good Day” ’. The last part, I’ll see him in anything, concerns Dylan’s live appear- ance(s). It contains my ‘farewell’ to Dylan. As this collection should prove, that farewell wasn’t as seriously meant as it was taken by some. I’ve been called a ‘pompous windbag mixed with deep knowledge’. I got the feeling that it was intended as an insult, but it is a description I can live with and even like. I consider questions about culture, music, society, identity, and communication important enough to deserve to be treated with some pompousness and gravity, especially in these dire times with Bushes and Blairs around every corner, when national culture is used as a means of oppression and not for edification and liberation. If I can use some of my ‘deep know- ledge’ to rock someone’s confidence in ‘eternal values’ geniuses, and icons, I don’t mind being a windbag. There may