Hard Rain by Tim Riley

Author:Tim Riley [Riley, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77304-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

For all of Greil Marcus’s liner notes’ talk about Americana in these sessions, the outtakes reveal a broader embrace of indigenous music running through these songs and would have rounded out The Basement Tapes with black styles—gospel and soul—had they been included. An uncanny Motown echo, “All You Have to Do Is Dream,” gets clipped by guitar strokes that point towards the soul-based revivals the Band excel at on their oldies revue, Moondog Matinee (1973), and in covers like the Four Tops’ “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” and Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It (Baby Don’t You Do It),” both available on To Kingdom Come (1989). “All You Have to Do Is Dream” is a finished Dylan song, a farm boy’s daydream with barnyard metaphors about unrequited love. The Band gives it the submerged feel of a lost B side, and Dylan sings with a teasing, affectionate quality that doesn’t lack for intensity—he sings almost as well as he does on “Tears of Rage.”

And if the Blind Boy Grunt and the Hawks bootleg culls tracks from different sessions, it shows how, despite their best efforts, the times did impinge on the world of Woodstock, New York. Tiny Tim, whose granny soprano patronized the establishment’s need for an emasculated hippie clown, drops in during the same period for vocals on four numbers with the Band, including an outsized, absolutely bloodless version of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” that defines rock camp (the others are Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” and Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” and “Sonny Boy”). There are working versions that show how the sessions toyed with a song’s makeup, tempo, and delivery: a slow, unformed version of “Too Much of Nothing,” an instrumental backing track to “Orange Juice Blues,” and several other instrumentais and Garth Hudson keyboard snatches that make it sound like these men killed time by making music the way some people play checkers. There are also half-finished songs that were abandoned: “I’m Not There,” a not-too-funky blues, “Down on Me,” and “One Man’s Loss”—an old saw that Paul Simon reworks in “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor” on There Goes Rhymiri Simon (1973).

But even some of the remnants grab hold of the ear and refuse to be labeled throwaways. A drumless run-through, “One Single River,” is a lost-love plea with a melody that’s all reconciliation, a soulful antidote to the chewings-out Dylan used to subject his lovers to: “How come you shut me out as if I wasn’t there / What’s this new bitterness you’ve found?” Along with “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” and “I Can’t Make It Alone,” it looks back with affection through shadows of pain.

Then, too, there are unfinished classics that beg for completion. As the Band’s instruments slowly join in on what sounds like a first run-through of Dylan’s ominous twelve-string saga “The Hills of Mexico,” the song becomes a Spanish-tinged narrative that resembles the later “One More Cup of Coffee” (from Desire). The journey that in three verses only

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