Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006 by Clinton Heylin

Author:Clinton Heylin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History & Criticism, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Pop Vocal, Music, Folk & Traditional, Rock, Biography & Autobiography, Genres & Styles, Composers & Musicians
ISBN: 9781569767597
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2010-07-01T21:26:16+00:00

{464} I ONCE KNEW A MAN

{465} WHO LOVES YOU?

Published lyric [#465]: Words Fill My Head.

Known studio recordings: [#464]: NBC Studio, NYC, March 22, 1984; [#465]: ?Garage studio, Malibu CA, March 1984; Delta Sound, NYC, July 26, 1984.

When, in the winter of 1984, Dylan began jamming with wannabe West Coast musicians hungry to make a name for themselves, it had been nine months since he said farewell to the Infidels songs. These rehearsals provided a necessary release for the middle-aged icon still searching for spontaneity, as everything he tried on the young guns came as a surprise – whether it was an old song of his, a ‘real old song’ or a new song. (Unfortunately, the recollections of these ill-informed musicians give very little indication of the breadth of material rehearsed/recorded.)

Just one of these rehearsals is known to collectors, and though the recording quality is decent, Dylan seems to be singing off-mike (presumably, this is deliberate). Aside from this one garage session, there is just a single-camera run-through for the March 1984 Letterman performance which provides a flavour of the kind of material they had been working on. This runthrough includes an otherwise undocumented Dylanesque reworking of an old blues, ‘I Once Knew A Man’, that still defeats attributionists. The lyric, such as it is, revolves around the couplet ‘I once knew a man / Seemed like only yesterday, he done passed this way/ I once knew a man’, but the song does not make it to the telecast itself.

And at least one of the previous ‘garage’ jams appears to have led somewhere, mutating into a song recorded at New York’s Delta Sound in late July, when studio work began on Infidels’ successor. ‘Who Loves You More?’, as it is logged on the track sheet, already suggested Dylan’s decision to relocate to Tin Pan Alley might be a mistake. He is trying way too hard to force platitudes into the lyrical threshing machine (‘you’re the answer to my every prayer’), hoping they might come out the other side as archetypal expressions. The song’s repeated refrain, ‘Who loves you more, who loves you true / Baby, I do’ establishes a worrying pattern he will repeat for the next couple of years.

Mind you, it might have helped if he’d bothered to finish the lyric before they rolled tape. Much of the song is unadulterated gibberish – ‘I shall fulfill my soul, if you’re the one / Face the day and the brightening sun’, anyone? – and what isn’t, might as well be. All of which merely confirms that Dylan never intended to do more than lay down demos at Delta, secure in the knowledge that a digital vocal overdub was now a ready recourse. At least the head of steam he’d (belatedly) built up in Europe carried over to the end of the month. Despite that lyric, the ‘Who Loves You More?’ vocal almost convinces.

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