Book Review

MILLION DOLLAR BASH: BOB DYLAN, THE BAND AND THE       BASEMENT TAPES by Sid Griffin

 
        Year by year the legend of The Basement Tapes grows. Here’s a few personal memories. I remember reading about the legendary Great White Wonder when I was at school in the late ‘60s. A little later, as a spotty teenager, I acquired a copy of The Little White Wonder, a white pressed bootleg album, in a flea market (or is that fleamarkt?) in Amsterdam whilst on a ‘cultural tour’ (ahem!)  At the time Bob’s muse seemed to have dried up - this was in the interregnum between New Morning and Planet Waves. But this… Of course it was wonderful. Music from another planet. Totally unlike anything you’d ever heard. Even though it sounded a bit like it was recorded at the end of a tunnel. I played it to all my friends. Hardly any of them could understand what I was raving on about. Was that really Bob Dylan singing in that weird voice? Just what on earth did he mean? …The comic book and the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus… … I can bite like a turkey/I can slam like a drake… guarding fumes and making haste/ It ain't my cup of meat … And so on and so on. And who the hell was ‘Tiny Montgomery’ anyway? And why why why had he not brought out these songs? I Shall Be Released… they cried!

            Just a few years later (in 1975) we finally got the ‘official release’ with a great picture on the foldout sleeve of Bob and The Band (and Ringo??) looking really cool in a real Basement surrounded by Mrs. Henry and Tiny Montgomery and a real life Quinn The Eskimo. Wow! I could hardly wait. Now we’d hear the songs as they were supposed to be heard. But… wait a minute… why were Quinn The Eskimo and I Shall Be Released, two of the greatest songs, missing? OK, Dylan had already brought them out officially in inferior versions, but that was hardly an excuse. And as for the rest of it… well a couple of tracks, like the fantastic Goin’ To Acapulco and the lugubriously surreal Clothes Line Saga were revelations. And the - as then unheard - ‘new’ tracks by The Band were pretty cool. Some of the tracks we knew sounded pretty similar to that weird white bootleg. But… sad to say… they didn’t really sound any better… The biggest disappointment of the official release was that many of the songs now sounded somehow ‘flat’. And perhaps the greatest musical element of all - the weird and wonderful vocal interplay between Dylan, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko - had been mysteriously suppressed.
            Over the succeeding years we’ve heard many new Basement Tapes tracks that weren’t on the official set at all - including the wondrous Sign On The Cross and, perhaps most beguiling of all, the ultra-mysterious I’m Not There (I’m Gone), not to mention hours and hours more of other Dylan compositions and a huge array of amazing covers. And as those scratchy bootleg cassettes were replaced by shiny new CDs and anonymous persons began to lay hands on these recordings with the magic of digital remixing at their fingertips, suddenly it became possible to listen to really clear, great-sounding mixes of the songs ‘as nature intended’, with those glorious harmonies restored. Now the music sounded newly alive and The Basement Tapes revealed themselves as something way beyond what we’d even imagined. Recently Todd Haynes’ film I’m Not There (whose soundtrack includes a beautifully clear mix of the title song, finally released after all these years) has placed The Basement Tapes even more in the spotlight.
            Sid Griffin’s new, lovingly-researched book Million Dollar Bash puts all this into context. He explains how and why the ’75 official release (largely masterminded by Robbie Robertson, not Dylan) sold The Basement Tapes short and he reveals that, although they were not recorded in a studio, they were in fact recorded in ‘wide stereo’ by The Band’s Garth Hudson (who Sid praises greatly as a recording engineer). He explains that, for the official release, the tracks were largely mixed down into mono and that much jiggery-pokery (including the addition of overdubbed parts and even a couple of complete new tracks) was actually done during the preparation of the album in 1975. Sid Griffin is a well-known alt. country musician himself, being a former member of The Lone Ryders, and this may have helped him with connections. The book benefits much from his access to Robertson and the other surviving members of the band as well as a number of other key players in the story. These interviews do much to bolster up the book’s credibility.
            Sid writes in an attractive, unpretentious way and structures the book cleverly, beginning with some background on the Woodstock area itself. We then get some well argued and detailed background as to how both Dylan and The Band came to end up together at Big Pink and the other locations where the Tapes were recorded. He gives us many illuminating details about these locations and pays particular attention to the technicalities of how the songs were recorded. We get a colourful picture of the scene in Woodstock at the time, although very little but supposition about Dylan’s private life.  But that’s perhaps how it should be… Sid also does an extremely well researched ‘track by track’ on all the Basement Tapes songs, giving full background on all the cover versions and their background. He also gives us a highly illuminating guide to who plays what and who is singing on every track. All this stuff is naturally of tremendous interest to Dylan/Band fans. He also discusses the musical qualities of the songs with some considerable skill and devotes much attention to the awesomeness of I’m Not There and Sign On The Cross. There’s also valuable background information on the origins of the many cover versions that grace the Tapes.
            We also get a detailed account of the ‘aftermath’ of the recordings, with quotes from many of those who were first privileged to hear and then even record the mysterious ‘lost Dylan songs’ as the original acetates from the sessions began to circulate. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the book is the way it puts The Basement Tapes in a musical/historical context, demonstrating how they really began the idea of ‘Americana’ as a form of music, how they helped The Band’s ‘country-funk’ sound emerge from the r and b of The Hawks, how they provided a counterweight to the contemporary excesses of psychedelia. Dylan, of course, never had a ‘Paisley period’…
            The one thing the book doesn’t really do, however - and this is perhaps strange for a work on Dylan - is to engage in much literary analysis of the songs on The Basement Tapes. This are doesn’t especially seem to be Sid’s strong point, and he does have a tendency to dismiss many of the lyrics as ‘nonsense’.  That seems a little bit of a copout to me - to my ears Dylan’s 1967 songs provide a wealth of literary and other allusions along with many elusive, shifting, but still; identifiable meanings. In his bizarre and sometimes wonderful Invisible Republic (namechecked by Dylan himself, no less, in Chronicles) the great Greil Marcus seems to be taking on this task of ‘decoding’ the songs, before he seems to forget he’s doing this and takes us off on his wild, colourful ride through ‘the old, weird America’. That book on The Basement Tapes has still to be written, perhaps. But, hey, nobody has a go ay Christopher Ricks or Aidan Day for concentrating solely on Dylan's lyrics. In Million Dollar Bash Sid Griffin has produced an absorbing work of Dylan scholarship for the benefit of present and uture generations.

           

            As Sid tells us rather tantalisingly, the powers that be at Sony or CBS or whatever they call it these days have hinted - just hinted - at the possibility of a proper Basement Tapes box set. Perhaps we should all bombard them with requests for this -The Complete Basement Tapes as the next Bootleg Series volume?  But if so we want the whole lot, including all the extra versions, weird covers etc, all beautifully, perfectly mixed, sounding even better than the best of today’s bootlegs.. It would be a six ort seven CD box set including, of course, the mysterious ‘lost’ studio version of Minstrel Boy which Sid refers to  - along with, perhaps, another bunch of unknown and terminally weird Dylan Basement songs, flashing with far out and extraordinary poetry that he just happens to be making up on the spot!

 

            All together now:

            Every boy and girl gonna get that bang/

            Cause Tiny Montgomery’s gonna shake that thing!

 

 

 DYLAN, THE BEATLES AND A HARD DAY'S NIGHT Part Two

 

   The movie A Hard Day’s Night, despite being made in monochrome on a tiny budget, is decidedly cool, witty and fast moving. It has an ‘improvised’ atmosphere that recalls the contemporary methods of French Nouvelle Vague directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. As such it avoids many of the clichés of framing and narrative that characterise the ‘classical Hollywood’ style, which most British films tend to imitate. It features some use of handheld cameras and sudden ‘jump cuts’ and borrows some of the intimacy of its style from television. The sequences where the group has to escape from hysterical fans are convincingly staged and filmed, in a way that appears to resemble contemporary news footage. The director, American Dick Lester, who was approved by The Beatles mainly because, like George Martin, he had worked with John’s hero Spike Milligan, shot and cut the film to emphasise the zestful, irreverent wit of its stars. The script, by Liverpool playwright Alun Owen, is sharp, biting and subtly funny without ever attempting to raise a cheap laugh or cast The Beatles as ‘comedians’. A Hard Day’s Night is the first successful translation of the irreverent spirit of rock’n’roll roll into the cinematic idiom. Avoiding the pitfalls which had made the movies of Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard so excruciatingly corny and conventional, it is constructed as a spoof cinema-verite documentary following the group’s journey to London for, and the preparations for and execution of, a live TV appearance. All the action in the film falls within one day. Along the way the group’s main preoccupation seems to be avoiding the attentions of massed hordes of screaming fans. Rather than attempting to create characters, the group appear as themselves, which creates a cleverly ‘knowing’ effect and allows the film to make sardonic comments on the hysteria of Beatlemania, which it simultaneously parodies and celebrates. The name ‘Beatles’ is never actually used, although it is naturally assumed that the audience knows full well who they are. The use of such smart, knowing, postmodern narrative devices in a ‘pop film’ was virtually unprecedented.

         Owen’s script cleverly catches the style of The Beatles’ own dry repartee, their irreverent attitude to the trappings of fame and their spontaneously witty exchanges with the press. In one rapidly cut sequence, the film features the members of the group responding to various press questions with characteristically Beatle-ish cheek. …How did you find America?… one reporter asks. John, not batting an eyelid, replies …Turn left at Greenland… The movie becomes a clever and oblique (if not too serious) commentary on fame itself - a phenomenon which The Beatles, though still near the beginning of their public careers, were already sussed enough to see many of the contradictions of. John, Paul and George are a little stiff in front of camera at times, but the film’s self-mocking style turns this into a positive strength. Most of the time they maintain deadpan expressions, as if the madness that surrounds them doesn’t really impress them at all. They are perhaps most effective when playing ‘straight men’ to Wilfred Brambell (old man Steptoe in the monumental TV comedy Steptoe And Son), who plays Paul’s curmudgeonly Irish grandfather. But it is Ringo, with his natural goofy charm, permanently put-upon expression and slightly loping, almost Chaplinesque gait, who steals the film, particularly in a poignant wordless sequence (backed by an orchestrated version of This Boy) where, having escaped from the treadmill of the group’s rehearsals, he is seen kicking cans about on some waste ground by the Thames.

         The Beatles’ music, with its zestful confidence and joi de vivre, is an ideal counterpart for the fast-moving monochrome sequences that make up the film. This is perhaps best illustrated by a scene which features the group running madly around a field in a kind of manic silent-movie fashion, to no apparent purpose other than to celebrate a temporary freedom from the confines of their professional life. Partly shot from above, it is the most exhilarating and purely cinematic sequence of the movie, and the buoyant, optimistic Can’t Buy Me Love, with its dramatic and effervescent stop-start rhythms, is the perfect accompaniment. The encounter which follows this scene, in which John bumps into a young ‘intellectual’ woman who appears at first to recognise him, provides perhaps the film’s most telling moments. A laconic John denies being ‘him’ (i.e. himself), despite her examining him closely and saying …You look just like him… He claims his ‘eyes are lighter’ and finally the woman is convinced, retorting that …you don’t look like him at all… The scene, with its self-referential, almost Pinteresque dialogue, neatly parodies the pretentiousness of the intellectuals who were already beginning to lionise The Beatles, while slyly reflecting on the absurdities of fame.

            Released shortly after The Beatles made their first historic appearance in the USA, the film demonstrates quite clearly that the group are highly intelligent, self-aware individuals who are not content to be presented in the exploitative way that had previously been the norm for pop stars in the cinematic medium. Even though it appeared at the height of the frenzy of Beatlemania, its showings in cinemas frequently accompanied by the screams of fans, it succeeds in satirising the processes of ‘showbiz’. Although the songs in the film are still rather limited in terms of any lyrical ‘messages’, the film holds out the promise that The Beatles may soon be able to become more forcefully articulate and artistically expressive. This was a promise that, over the next year and a half, would reach fulfilment in ways that, in early 1964, even its stars could barely begin to imagine. The film perfectly freezes the historical moment of Beatlemania, and subtly points to what will succeed it.

      

         The Hard Day’s Night movie had arrived at exactly the right moment for The Beatles, presenting a definitive picture of them on the cusp of their phenomenal explosion of popularity. Their breakthrough in America had produced a staggering, unprecedented level of instant success which no musical artist or artists had ever achieved in such a short time. American promoters were soon rushing to Britain to book the top British ‘beat groups’ for US tours, heralding what became known as ‘The British invasion’. By the end of 1964 Beatlemania had become a worldwide phenomenon. For most of the year they were on tour, not only in ballparks and sports stadiums on a coast-to-coast US tour but also in Sweden, Holland, Denmark, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Everywhere they went they were faced with civic receptions, TV cameras and press conferences and the inevitable screaming hordes of fans. Even their arrivals back in Britain from their foreign tours were met by huge crowds. At the Liverpool premiere of A Hard Day’s Night 200,000 people lined the streets to try to get a glimpse of them. But The Beatles were growing up fast. After the most intense and hard working year of their careers, they were already becoming jaded and disillusioned with being ‘pop idols’. Standing on a hotel balcony overlooking the thousands of fans at the Hard Days Night premiere (from which they were expected to dispense suitably condescending waves at their fawning admirers) John suddenly broke ranks and began giving Hitler salutes to the crowd - this in a city which, only two decades before, Hitler’s bombers had devastated in many bombing raids. Being John, the ‘cheekiest Beatle of all’, he somehow escaped any censure for this. The national press just seemed to think he had a weird sense of humour. But John was not stupid. He could see disturbing parallels between the ‘mob hysteria’ of Beatlemania and that of the Nuremberg rallies, and although his natural response to this was merely to ‘take the piss’, already the public were being shown aspects of his darkly cynical intelligence.

         At the same time, the group found themselves caught in a creative dilemma. With their series of ‘ecstatic’ singles they had perfected the ‘hit formula’ which had catapulted them to fame. But while the natural temptation of less creative souls would have been to stick with that formula, they were growing restless. From their first recordings, they had insisted on a high degree of creative freedom and control. And as their victorious tussle with George Martin over releasing only their own material on their singles had demonstrated, this insistence had been completely justified. It was one thing to be bigger than Elvis, but they certainly didn’t want to be Elvis. Their record company, EMI, were loathe to interfere with their work in the studio. After all, placing them with a non-mainstream producer like Martin, who was open to letting them have a great deal of creative freedom, certainly seemed to have worked on the commercial level. Indeed, record companies now began searching for groups who could write their own material. Through their own boldness, The Beatles had already changed the ground rules of the pop music industry. Now they were keen to explore the potential of the recording studio for creating newer sounds. This was not easy, as due to the constant pressure to keep touring they had little time to fit in recording sessions. But with the range of musical textures they had produced on the Hard Day’s Night album, they had already shown how rapidly they could progress in this area. At the same time, despite the perceived need to ‘feed’ their fans with songs they could fantasise over, the group were beginning to find the limitations of the boy-girl formula in lyric writing very constrictive. In mid-1964, John’s first book, In His Own Write - a collection of funny, often macabre little tales and vignettes accompanied by his own distinctive cartoons, which he had been working on since his schoolboy days - was published. It was acclaimed by many critics, who quite accurately identified the highly original way John played with language as being Joycean. John himself was rather bemused by this, as he had been by the attention some classical music critics had paid to his and Paul’s songs. He had never read Joyce, and his main ‘literary’ influences were Lewis Carroll and Spike Milligan. But the disparity between John’s highly creative and imaginative use of language in his book and his formulaic lyric writing was fairly glaring. Meanwhile, The Beatles’ encounter with Dylan’s work (and with marijuana) had, as we have seen, pointed them in the direction of  more ‘meaningful’ self-expression. In the Hard Days Night album they had achieved a consistent, varied and constantly exuberant summation of their early style. Over the next year and a half, as they attempted to forge a new, more ‘adult’ approach, the quality of their work was to vary wildly, from the contrived to the inspired.

 

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Please send any comments to me at chris@chrisgregory.org

                                   EXPLORING TELEVISUALITY...

 

              What is ‘televisuality’? The word has been bandied around rather loosely by media academics for a decade or so. Broadly speaking we can say that the word refers to the attempts that have been made to examine the fundamental nature of television as a form of communication. But there is little consensus between those concerned as to exactly why they are trying to do this. Certainly there has been a great lack of focus on what value the products of our most popular form of mass media have. One has to say that by and large television is still thought of as being ‘disposable’. If you venture into the average branch of Waterstones or Smiths or any other major book store, the chances are you will find reasonably well-stocked sections on Film and Popular Music. Although some of this stuff might be said to fall into the ‘facts and trivia’ and ‘picture book’ categories, there’s every possibility that you will find, say, a scholarly and well-researched volume on the films of Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles or the songs of Bob Dylan. Film Studies is a well-established academic subject with its own theorists and its canon of ‘great works’. And there’s little doubt that albums like Sgt. Pepper or Blonde On Blonde or Dark Side Of The Moon are generally thought of as being important works of art. Yet where are the books on ‘television studies’? Which television series could we call ‘the classics’? After nearly six decades of TV, why is it that the humble ‘goggle box’ (or, more likely these days, the 40-inch plasma screen) still somehow mesmerises us so that we cannot get any distance from it? Why hasn’t a way of assessing the aesthetic qualities of TV become generally recognised? OK, television is studied as part of Media Studies. And some experimental work has been carried out over the past couple of decades. For instance, you might like to have a look at the online New University’s interesting course on what it calls ‘televisuality’ HERE. The problem, however, with the Media Studies approach is that it makes little attempt to discriminate between TV programmes in terms of aesthetic quality. Students of Media Studies can quite happily spend huge chunks of their courses studying the mind-numbing trivia of ‘Reality TV’ shows, the sickeningly superficial slickness of Celebrity Dance Competitions or the absurdly hollow posturing of hopeless talentless would be Popidols. A dissertation on the National Lottery Draw show, anyone? A thesis on the Most Embarrassing TV Blooper Moments Genre, perhaps?

            And yet, and yet….  Despite the seas of crap in the overflowing mutichannel oceans, we do live in a kind of Golden Age of television. The fact that shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood or Shameless (to lick just a few off the cream of the crop) can actually get made and reach huge audiences is immensely heartening.  Over the last two decades the whole form and sensibility of series television has moved forward immensely in terms of sheer aesthetic quality. A great part of the reason for this lies in the fact that the multichannel environment leaves a space for shows to be made that can target a more educated, book-reading, cinema-literate audience. No longer does every major TV series need to focus on lowest common denominators, like in the old days of Network TV dominance. Not only does this give the freedom for characters to swear or for the series to focus on more adult themes, it also allows the programme makers to treat the audience with respect, to assume their intelligence and understanding of the actual semiotic and dramatic codes of the television medium itself, to glory in them and to celebrate them.  Some of the most impressive products of modern series TV are in fact recreations from rather limited source material. Witness the recreation of the Star Trek series by writers and producers who could see the great ‘televisual’ qualities implicit in the original 60s series, yet who wanted to link those qualities to a far more sophisticated and modern sensibility. In recent years Russell T. Davies’ glorious recreation of Dr. Who has achieved pretty much the same effect.  Also the way in which Joss Whedon took the basic premise of a corny movie and turned it into the extended examination of contemporary mores that was Buffy The Vampire Slayer and ex- Trek writer Ronald D. Moore reinvented the equally corny 70s scifi show Battlestar Galactica and turned it into a barometer of America’s place in the post 9/11 political world…  While mainstream Hollywood still churns out mainly ‘safe’ generic ‘product’, often based around mindlessly expensive SFX, the TV series has a form has largely outstripped it visually, dramatically and intellectually.  It is the form which most expresses the current zeitgeist, as film did from the 20s to the 50s and popular music did in the 60s and 70s.

            In Exploring Televisuality I’m attempting to come to grips with this phenomenon. I will be writing about the major TV series I’ve watched and been inspired by. And I will be attempting to identify the specifically televisual elements which these series employ. The series will develop the themes I’ve been exploring in my books Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner (details HERE) and Star Trek: Parallel Narratives (details HERE). In my view it’s time to move beyond the cold, distanced logic of postmodern aesthetics and put a new emphasis on quality. We live in the twenty first century, the age of the internet – of the blog and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and all these mediums by which individuals can express themselves without being mediated by ‘experts’. The postmodern perpective belongs to the latter half of the twentieth century. It is time to move beyond its stultifying emphasis on cultural relativity (and thus uniformity) which had become a mere excuse for and rationalisation of the apparent triumph of consumerist capitalist supposedly symbolised by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We live in a new cultural world now, one in which anyone can have a voice. Now that we can all make movies on cheap mobile phones, it won’t be long before televisuality moves into entirely new realms… but for the moment, let’s revel in the triumphs of contemporary series television, the most vital and relevant art form of our day….

            As Tony Soprano says “Whadda you gonna do?”

 

 

Exploring Televisuality 1:   THE TUDORS (SEASON ONE)

     The story of Henry VIII and his wives is pretty well known to every schoolkid in Britain. In fact it’s become a common complaint that school history these days seems to consist mainly of a diet of ‘Henry and Hitler’. Of course, there are some fairly sound historical reasons for the emphasis on our most celebrated serial bridegroom. During his reign England dropped its allegiance to the Catholic Church, setting in train a series of events that would lead to the Civil War, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, the pre-eminence of Britain in the industrial revolution and… well, all that stuff. However, the British audience could be forgiven for feeling rather jaded about the prospect of yet another TV version of the life of Henry. It’s been done before many times, and in recent years we’ve also had the story dramatically unfolded to us by stylish star historians like Simon Schama and David Starkey, shot against backdrops of Hampton Court and the like as they pace up and down, wringing their hands and gesturing dramatically as they try to pump new life into a story everyone already knows (and quite possibly has a GCSE in). But what a story it is. It’s got oodles of sex, murder, religion and loads of delicious intrigue, compared to which the lives of Charles, Diana, Camilla, Fergie and Andy and that modern bunch seem like an afternoon tea party.

            We all know about Henry, too, because we’ve seen him in a lot of movies and TV shows. We all know he’s a fat old git who slobbers over chicken legs as he tosses them over his shoulder (Thank you, Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII). We also know he’s a disgusting old pervert who shags his way around the kingdom, frequently divorces or chops the heads off his wives when he’s had enough of them and is riddled with so many STDs that his brain and body are destined to rot away in front of our eyes. But as it turns out The Tudors concentrates on Henry’s life when he was a strapping young chap. And there’s not a greasy chicken leg in sight. Though it has a largely British cast, it’s actually an international co-production aimed squarely at the more ‘specialist’ cable market in America. As such it’s a distinctly post-Sopranos enterprise, another story of the intrigues and corruption surrounding a family of power-hungry and violent go-getters led by a rather charming and personable sociopath. You don’t mess with Henry, just like you don’t mess with Tony. (Henry, however, could arguably use a loan of Tony’s shrink in order to get him to feel more OK with himself for causing all that murder and mayhem).

American TV series are pretty much all based around the notion of ‘family’. The main characters may comprise an actual family, as in classic shows like Peyton Place, The Waltons, Bonanza or The Simpsons. (Who can forget the elder George Bush’s publicly stated wish that ‘The American family be more like The Waltons than The Simpsons’?). Even shows like Star Trek (in its many incarnations), Cheers and NYPD Blue position their ensemble casts as surrogate families. TV is, after all, a ‘family medium’, largely watched in family homes, even if these days the kids are more actually likely to be upstairs watching the Extreme Sports Channel, playing Extreme Death Murder games or downloading porn. The ‘Waltons’ are probably still out there somewhere, but the ‘Simpsons’ are without doubt taking over… In the multi channel ‘televisual’ environment, the kinds of shows that tend to highlight dysfunctional families have, in the post-Sopranos era, worked extremely hard at stretching the limits of ‘taste’ that once kept all TV shows within the boundaries of what used to be called ‘family viewing’. Hob’s The Sopranos ingeniously and often brilliantly combines the Gangster genre with that of family Soap Opera, and in doing so constituted itself as both a commentary on Modern America and on contemporary mores.

The existence of cable networks in the US has meant that the over-riding ‘family viewing’ dictats of the major networks have been broken, so that censorship of explicitly sexual or violent scenes has been waived in the case of specifically adult post-Sopranos shows. Such a loosening of control has contributed greatly to putting such shows at the absolute cutting edge of popular media. It is a situation analogous to the break up of the monopoly of  studio system in cinema in the 1950s and 60s and the concurrent rise of independent film makers, allowing individual visions (such as those of David Chase, creator of The Sopranos) to be realised without them being watered down by generic and conventional compromise. A particularly impressive case in point was HBO’s magnificent Deadwood, a radical deconstruction and re-imagining of the Western genre in all its filthy, foul-mouthed, nakedly racist, rampantly-capitalist American ‘glory’. Like The Sopranos, Deadwood had a profoundly cinematic look and feel, combined with a freedom of expression generally denied to mainstream American film.

The Tudors is never as consistently foul-mouthed as Deadwood (and does not perhaps have the latter series’ wonderfully picaresque, sometimes even quasi-Dickensian use of language) but in many ways it applies the same principle to the ‘History’ genre as Deadwood does to the Western. Firstly it acknowledges in a similar way that its historical and cultural setting is one in which raw violence and blatant sexuality play a crucial part, and where a new openness and realism about these matters can be used to make a genre beset by clichés seem fresh and relevant. British TV critics (so many of whom are still sadly stuck in the Clive James ‘snigger, snigger; look how clever I am, treat everything like trivia’ mode which is increasingly irrelevant in the age of televisuality) have been rather sniffy about The Tudors, seeing its explicit ‘sexiness’ as a purely commercial device, complaining that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is just ‘too good looking’ to play Henry. This is a bit rich, really, for a story which centres so much about sex. Just the kind of thing, our silly critics might think, that the Americans might do with Our Henry. Perhaps we think that all kings should look like Prince Charles. One critic I was reading recently attacked the series for not giving Henry red hair. Do they want him to look like Prince Harry? (Maybe to prove where the Prince got those genes from!) If you look up the series’ entry in Wikipedia they’ll give you the lowdown on its other historical inaccuracies. It has quite a few, of course. But that hardly matters really. What does matter is that The Tudors drags the genre of the TV historical drama kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. The best historical fiction of any kind will always allow us to reflect on the contemporary resonances of the story. And the story of  the Tudors has plenty of that - battling religious fanatics, fundamentalism, official corruption, shifting alliances and devious conniving politicians.

The intense, brooding energy that Jonathan Rhys Meyers brings to his presentation of Henry as a kind of hyperactive man-child is a revelation. With his premier league footballer’s haircut and his range of quite stunning, tight fitting designer padded breeches and quilted jackets he’s young, he’s sexy and he loves to roar out for a spot of hunting with his mates. He doesn’t mind a spot of arm-wrestling before dinner, is a pretty dab hand at archery and even picks out a mean tune on the lute. In short he’s very Rock and Roll, and like any big rock star he’s surrounded by sycophants and groupies. He only has to cast his eye on some gorgeous young courtier and she’ll be instantly ready to cast off her expensive gown and service the royal member, crying …Majesty!… as he grimaces through another ten minutes of lust. This is a guy with absolute power who can have your head separated from your body as soon as look at you, who wants to declare war on various countries (France this week, Spain the next) largely because he thinks it would make him look good in the history books. You wouldn’t want to get in his way when he gets into a rage. Despite all this, however, he’s a kind of innocent. - a petulant, spoiled brat, maybe but still an innocent. He seems to care little for the minutiae of government, leaving the way open for his advisors to manipulate him at their will, while simultaneously scheming most deviously against each other. For most of Season One he lets his main Spin Doctor Cardinal Wolsey (played with smooth unctuousness by Sam Neill) do the real business of running the country. Wolsey himself is hardly Father Ted. He’s a big time political operator with ambitions to be Pope who keeps a mistress, expropriates loads of government funds and, if minded to do so, can be seen grabbing other aged cardinals by the throat and ramming them up against a wall. Yet compared to the others scheming around Henry he’s really quite loveable. When he finally falls from power (Sorry if I’m giving away the plot but this is history, you know - they haven’t changed it that much!) we genuinely feel for him. Just before the end, before he slits his own throat, we see him apologising to God for being, frankly, really quite crap at being holy. Of course, he knows perfectly well that God won’t forgive him. The God that he, and everybody else in The Tudors believes in, is hardly the ‘forgiving’ type.

         Scheming against Wolsey are the equally devious Duke of Norfolk and his brother Thomas Boleyn. Boleyn has the advantage of having two exceptionally ‘fit babes’ as daughters and he’s determined to use them to his own advantage, so he can gain as much power and wealth as possible. He’s had both of them brought up in the French court, which for him has the great advantage that this is where they’ll learn those ‘arts of l’amour’ which the English have always been a bit hopeless at. When visiting the French court in an early episode of the show old Thomas is mighty pleased when Henry’s roving eye settles on the older sister Mary and the old man encourages her to nip up to the king’s chamber where she immediately drops to her knees and demonstrates to the ever-horny English monarch her prowess in a particularly French technique she’s learned in her extensive period of education. Henry grunts and grimaces through this, but soon gets bored with her as she’s just too easy… After all, if you’re a king, you need a bit more of a challenge.

         The challenge arrives in the lithe form of little sister Anne, who abandons her lover, the poet Thomas Wyatt, for a studied and meticulously planned pursuit of Henry. Anne is a sultry temptress par excellence and a Grand Mistress of the (presumably French) art of  prick teasing. She drives Henry mad with lust, but only very gradually, as Henry gets more and more inflamed with her, does she let him have any access to her body. In reality, she’s a loyal daughter who has her family’s best interests at heart and as the king becomes more and more obsessed with her, she ensures that Daddy and Uncle get promoted to senior advisor’s posts, eventually becoming so powerful that they manage to fit up Wolsey and do away with him altogether. In one of the ‘climactic’ (though that is probably the wrong word!) scenes of Season One, Henry and Anne ride into a wood together whereupon they finally tear each others’ clothes of in a fit of lust and do the deed. But at the last moment Anne insists Henry withdraws, delaying the royal ejaculation yet again and he is left gnashing his teeth. Only when she is Queen will he finally be able to really satiate himself. In order to reach this long-delayed climax he’s quite prepared to ditch his long-suffering broody, sultry Spanish wife Catherine, abandon a thousand years of papal control over his country and quite possibly plunge the whole of Europe into bloody warfare.

         The Tudors depicts a world in which politics and religion are completely entwined, just as they are today in huge swathes of the world. It clearly demonstrates the consequences of religious fanaticism in all its forms. There are the Protestants, of course, neo-fundamentalists of their day, now gaining power and placing themselves everywhere, like the proverbial ‘reds under the bed’. There’s the scarily calm and calculating Thomas Cromwell, who has risen under Wolsey’s tenure to a senior position in the religious/civil administration. Really Cromwell is a Protestant infiltrator. At the opportune moment he begins to slip Henry books about how kings should only have to answer to God, not Popes. Given that the Pope and his Cardinals are refusing to swallow his rather ludicrous bullshit about his marriage to Catherine not being valid and grant him a divorce so he can finally complete that shag with the wily Anne Boleyn, Henry is well up for such ideas. The reformation, disillusion of the monasteries and all that stuff beckons for Season Two. The Protestants are a pretty scary bunch, decidedly unsexy and more concerned with talking directly to God while kneeling on plain wooden benches. They’re so convinced that the last thousand years of Catholicism have been a big screwup that they’re quite happy to get burned alive to prove the point. But the scariest of all the characters in The Tudors is Sir Thomas More (latterly, I believe, Saint Thomas More… you know, like Sir Paul McCartney) .

         If you remember that movie A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More was a Good Guy. He was Henry’s best buddy. (Henry was, as usual, a fat carrot-top in that movie). All More had to do was recant a few things he’d said and Henry would desist from chopping his head off. In the end Thomas does the saintly thing and refuses to drop his principles. Better dead than protestant. But seeing More’s head roll is something we’ll have to wait till Season Two for. Personally, I’m quite looking forward to that… As Season One ends he’s just been appointed Henry’s new Chancellor in succession to the deposed Wolsey. Highly principled, soft-spoken, without any of the worldly corruption of Wolsey, Thomas isn’t interested in making a single groat out of his new job. What he is really interested in is burning Protestants. For their own sake, of course. More is compassionate, civilised… a reasonable man. As he stands in front of one heretic he’s about to have burned he gives him until the last moments to recant. Of course he knows full well that the heretic, being one of those damned Protestants, will prefer being burnt to a crisp. As the fire is lit the saintly Thomas stands there, still quite calmly clutching his Bible. At one moment it’s all a bit much for him and he has to turn away. But then he makes himself look back as the heretic’s last screams are drowned out by the flames. It’s a seriously chilling moment, demonstrating in graphic terms exactly where religious fanaticism leads us to. At the end of the day, Thomas More makes Tony Soprano seem like a pussy. You wouldn’t catch Sir Thomas visiting a therapist to cure his panic attacks. Just like Bush and Blair after they launched their campaign of a different kind of burning of thousands and thousands of families in Iraq in 2003, his conscience, naturally, is clear. Some things have to be done. Some sins have to be purged, whatever the consequences.

         The Tudors also depicts a world in which people can regularly drop dead at any moment, in which plagues are rife and the art of medicine laughably hopeless. When one of the leading characters, Sir William (who earlier has had a steamy gay affair with long-haired court musician Thomas Tallis) catches one of these plagues, the physician’s only method of ‘treatment’ is to drive a mallet into his back. To, er… let the blood out, naturally… In the mindset the characters inhabit, though, it’s God who’s brought about the plagues, to punish the sinners. You may not know what sin you’ve committed but if you catch a plague then God must be angry with you. If you’re really lucky He might just let you pull through, as Anne Boleyn somehow does. But you probably won’t of course. You could try a little bit of medical treatment but not too much, of course, or you might be changing God’s will. And if God wants to rub you out… well, you don’t really have much choice. God is very much like an all-powerful mob boss. If he makes you an offer, you just can’t refuse it…

          Of course, if you know only a little bit about history, none of this is any great surprise. But what is so great about The Tudors is the way it makes all this barbarity so sexy (that’s ‘sexy’ in the modern vernacular ad-lingo sense). It pulls no punches. In an age when most rock and roll music is safe, tame and predictable a great Televisual series like this IS the rock and roll of NOW. The Tudors has also been criticised by the sniffy critics for its use of language - too modern, they say; not enough ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ – this is not history… Actually, as mentioned earlier, unlike the amazingly profane Deadwood, The Tudors keeps the vulgar language down to a minimum. But when it uses swearing it does it to great effect, with impeccable timing. My favourite moment in the entire First Season occurs when Cardinal Wolsey, appearing at one of the Papal Courts and charged with the hopeless task of trying to prove that Henry’s marriage to Catherine had never been lawful ‘in the eyes of God’, has had his pleas roundly rejected. He already knows that this is almost certainly going to bring about his own downfall. As he strides out of the courtroom he leans over one of the other cardinals who is sitting in judgement over him.

         “You cunt!” he whispers in his ear.

         Bless me father! Now that’s rock and roll!

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        Please send any comments to chris@chrisgregory.org

        

          

 

                       

 

 

DRUM FIRE

my restless fingers comb the surface

of this animal’s tight skin-

these fingers crack, these fingers flex-

sparks fly from my fingertips...

 

summoning the sullen beast’s power

into my heart, I can feel the ache

of its final mournful cry-

gentle bulk swaying,

great udders shaking,

final breath expelled in an anguished sigh

 

the fire builds up inside me,

the smoke fills my lungs,

deep oxygen breaths

catch the flickering flames

and lick them into life-

as living fiery words

that fall from my mouth

 

this rhythm that I build

is the rhythm of its heartbeat

but my heart is beating

to a different drum-

I close my eyes and dream

 

close my eyes and dream

close my eyes and dream

close my eyes and dream

of the fire to come….

BOB DYLAN’S SOUNDTRACK SONGS PART TWO:

WAITING FOR YOU

 
Happiness is but a state of mind.
Anytime you want, you can cross the state line….

 

  Waiting For You was written for the soundtrack of Callie Khouri’s 2002 movie, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a wryly bittersweet and avowedly feminist tale centred around the complex relationship between a mother and daughter. As with Things Have Changed, Dylan seems to have used the song as an exercise in rather oblique storytelling, which broadly follows the theme of the film. In the movie a well known female playwright Siddalee Walker (Sandra Bullock) engages the wrath of her eccentric and feisty mother Vivienne (Ellen Burstyn) when she appears to confess in a (somewhat doctored) interview to feeling rather unhappy about her childhood. Siddalee is subsequently kidnapped by her mothers’ life long friends in the ‘Ya Ya Sisterhood’ (a kind of proto-feminist ‘support group’ they had formed together in their youth) so that mother and daughter can be confronted with each other. Eventually, with the Sisterhood’s help, Siddalee comes to understand the ‘dark side’ of her mother’s character, so leading to an eventual  rapprochement between the two. The film is a warm, lightly comedic tribute to the potential strength of female solidarity.

            Waiting For You is a stately country waltz, dominated by plaintive steel guitar and backed by an oddly stiff, almost military drum pattern. Although it expresses a degree of anguish, its imagery and its delivery are playful, allusive and ultimately reassuring. Dylan’s voice begins by sounding cracked and bitter, but becomes increasingly warm as the song progresses and we sense a kind of optimism building …Hope may vanish… Dylan confides  …but it never dies…  

Dylan has always written love songs, of a kind. But only in his Nashville Skyline ‘romantic phase’ did he really seem interested in conventional romance. Mostly he has written songs that focus on particularly difficult or poignant moments in relationships. Often these are broken love relationships, where the singer looks philosophically at what has happened. …Don’t think twice… he tells the girl he is leaving ..it’s all right… as he wanders off down another dusty road, ‘one too many mornings’ and ‘a thousand miles behind’. … I am closing the book/ On the pages and the text/ And I don't really care What happens next… he sighs in Going Going Gone.  Other Dylan songs focus on different kinds of love. Dylan seems particularly interested in the joys and agonies of parental affection. This may be expressed sweetly and hopefully, as in Forever Young or poignantly, as in New Morning’s shimmering Sign On The Window  when the narrator sings ….have a bunch of kids who call me pa/ That must be what it’s all about… in a kind of faltering tone, as if trying to convince himself that what he’s saying is true.  In perhaps Dylan’s most tragic song Tears Of Rage (which quite deliberately echoes similar themes in Shakespeare’s King Lear) the anguished parent of a child who has turned away from his or her values rages against the dying of the light …Now the heart is filled with gold, as if it was a purse/But oh what kind of love is this, that goes from bad to worse…

Waiting For You can be seen as an address by Ya Ya Sisterhood’s anguished mother Vivienne to the estranged daughter. Like Tears Of Rage it deals with the dilemmas of parental love when the child has grown up. You can almost hear the parental sighs at the child’s wilfulness: …I’m letting her have her way…  the narrator sings, and …the poor girl always wins the day…  All this is a prelude to the meeting between mother and child that forms the core of the film’s story. Dylan builds this up towards the end of the first verse with some delicious allusion. As the music swirls, we seem to be in some kind of dancehall (on the ‘outskirts of town’ no doubt!) The dance appears to be increasing wild, erratic and drunken, with the …whiskey flyin’ into my head… The band is playing so hard that …the fiddler’s arm has gone dead… There is a suggestion of small-town claustrophobia: …talk is beginning to spread…  The second verse appears to deal in sentimental cliché, as the narrator cries self-pityingly into her whiskey bottle: …It’s been so long since I held you tight/ Been so long since we said goodnight…  and …The taste of tears is bittersweet/ When you’re near me, my heart forgets to beat…  But the third verse rescues us from this maudlin direction with perhaps the song’s most charming lines …Well the king of them all is starting to fall/ I lost my gal at the boatman’s ball… Dylan lets his tongue linger over these lines, which allude to a nineteenth-century minstrel song De Boatman’s Ball, written by Daniel Decatur Emmett, the composer of Dixie (covered memorably by Dylan in his own movie from the same year Masked And Anonymous) . The narrator now appears to be laughing at herself, having lost her daughter to the world of fame and entertainment. The next line …The night has a thousand hearts and eyes… alludes to the jazz standard The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, a song of the same name performed by Dylan’s early compatriot Bobby Vee and a famous short poem by the late nineteenth century poet Francis William Bourdillon:

The night has a thousand eyes,
              And the day but one;
           Yet the light of the bright world dies
                  With the dying sun.

 The mind has a thousand eyes,
                   And the heart but one:
           Yet the light of a whole life dies
                   When love is done.

Dylan tweaks this lovelorn line slightly to emphasise the steadfastness of the narrator’s ‘heart’, as she emphasises how she will …stay on top of things…  She will keep that ‘eye of the heart’ open, despite her estrangement from her daughter. In the last verse she begins to empathise with the daughter more strongly: …Another deal gone down, another man done gone/ You put up with it all, and you carry on… Clearly she admires her courage and steadfastness, as one woman to another, confessing that … I'd bet the world and everything in it on you… Finally she offers humble solace in the clever couplet … Happiness is but a state of mind/ Anytime you want, you can cross the state line…  The pun on ‘states’ is one many American writers have used from Whitman onwards. Here you can hear her bravely brushing away the tears and wishing her daughter the best, hoping that she will be able to give her comfort. Now the band has packed away its instruments and the mother sits alone in the deserted dancehall. In her drunken state she can still hear the waltzes playing and she is picturing her little girl as she was, small and helpless. The feelings of abandonment and betrayal have been resolved and despite her pride she is ready to give hope and comfort.

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 Next up will be the monumental Cross The Green Mountain. Watch this space!

Thanks as ever to Expecting Rain the best source for Dylan-related material.

As usual I welcome any comments in the box below or at chris@chrisgregory.org

ALISON

DYLAN, THE BEATLES AND ‘A HARD DAY’S NIGHT’ PART ONE

 

INTRODUCTION

            The idea that Bob Dylan was a key influence on The Beatles is very well-known and accepted one. Dylan is often credited with opening The Beatles’ minds to wider horizons and encouraging them by example to write more personal, meaningful lyrics. Yet most writers have approached this subject in a rather superficial and generalised way. Of course one can hear the influence of Dylan on John Lennon’s style in songs like You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away or Norwegian Wood. But Dylan’s influence worked, I believe, in more profound and complex ways than this. One of the challenges I set myself when writing Who Could Ask For More: Reclaiming The Beatles was to look more analytically at how Dylan’s song writing methods affected The Beatles’ work. One of the more surprising results of this was the discovery that Dylan had an equal if not greater effect on Paul than he did on John. After all, Dylan came to fame as a ‘storyteller’ who invented characters in his songs. The precision and economy Dylan displayed in writing songs such as The Ballad of Hollis Brown or The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is reflected in McCartney’s narrative songs like Eleanor Rigby or For No One. In such songs the story is told in a detached way, allowing the listener to form their own conclusions.

            Although John Lennon was clearly besotted with Dylan for a while, the influence here was more on Lennon’s ‘sound’ than on his actual songwriting technique (although songs like Norwegian Wood tell stories too). From 1964 onwards the main drift of Lennon’s song writing tended towards personal revelation. This can be seen in early songs like I’m A Loser and I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party. By the time The Beatles were folding up, Lennon had reached the point of writing quite specifically about himself (in songs like The Ballad Of John and Yoko). This, of course, is something Dylan hardly ever did.  Even when Dylan wrote an apparently autobiographical song like 1976’s Sara he claimed the woman in the song was ‘the biblical Sara’, not his wife. Dylan never wrote a ‘Ballad of Bob and Sara’!

            The extract here follows on from my fictionalised account of Dylan’s famous meeting with The Beatles (READ HERE) in New York in 1964, and discusses some of the ways in which Dylan influenced The Beatles’ early music. A summary of Who Can Ask For More can be found HERE and the book is available online HERE or by clicking on the banner at the top of the page

FROM 'WHO COULD ASK FOR MORE' CHAPTER TWO

  When a young, earnest-looking Paul is interviewed on the British TV pop show Ready Steady Go in early 1964 he is asked what he thinks he will do when The Beatles have fallen from popularity. Quite straight-facedly he informs interviewer Keith Fordyce, a rather portly and distinctly square-looking dude in a dodgy check suit, that whatever happens he and John will carry on writing songs and that one day they …hope to write a musical, maybe… It’s clear that Paul (no mean purveyor of show tunes himself) is still looking at his career potential in terms of the old, ‘Tin Pan Alley’ type thinking. Despite his great love for and belief in rock and roll as a musical form, the assumption he’s clearly making is that while the life of a ‘pop sensation’ like The Beatles is bound to be short, professional songwriters can hope to have long and successful careers. And there’s no doubt that Paul and John already regarded themselves as adaptable musical craftsmen. As well as their own singles, they’d already written hit songs for Billy J. Kramer And The Dakotas, The Fourmost, Cilla Black, Peter and Gordon, The Applejacks, even The Rolling Stones. During 1963-65 it was not uncommon for there to be three or four Lennon-McCartney songs in the top twenty. A song was something that they, as professionals, could turn out in a few minutes if need be. It was a matter of technique as much as talent. After all, pop songs didn’t have to be profound or complicated or anything. And as far as John and Paul were concerned, you didn’t even need to be able to read music to write them. All you had to do was knock about a bit on your guitars, maybe sling a few unusual chord changes in. And you certainly didn’t need to be Shakespeare to write lyrics. You just started off with some typical boy-girl situation. Or maybe some love-triangle type thing like in She Loves You, get a bit of a different slant on it. The kids didn’t want anything too complicated anyway. …The birds in the sky will be sad and lonely/When they know that I’ve lost my one and only… chirps Billy J. Kramer on the rather delightfully innocent Bad To Me, one of four top ten singles John and Paul wrote for their fellow Liverpudlian and Epstein protégée. …So let it rain/What do I care/Deep in your heart I’ll still be there… warbles Cavern coat-check girl Cilla Black in the melodramatic tearjerker Love Of The Loved. All John and Paul had to do, it seemed, was keep on knocking ‘em out.

         As it transpired, however, John and Paul were never to write that ‘musical’ (unless their bizarre ‘psychedelic home movie’ Magical Mystery Tour qualifies as such). When Paul was speaking, rock’n’roll itself was but a small branch of what was still popularly known as ‘showbiz’, an international entertainment industry centred in the US, and in New York and Hollywood in particular, and dedicated as much as possible to ‘wholesome’, bland, unthreatening fare. That was what, it seemed, kept the dollars safely rolling in. Adopting showbiz conventions allowed artists to keep what later became known as the ‘moral majority’ - the mass of religious, conservative middle class America - at bay. ‘Showbiz’ was the behemoth that had sucked The Beatles’ hero Elvis Presley dry of the angry, leather-clad smouldering youthful energy he had once oozed and had turned him into a dumb ‘B’ movie hero, a piece of soggy, undercooked Hollywood meat. The Beatles had already laid a number of concessions at the feet of the beast. The identical suits, the stage bows, the dutiful waving at fans, the appearance in front of the Queen Mum, their apparently happy participation in ‘variety’ stage and TV shows, their ‘cute’ boy-next door personas that those Yanks loved so much, were all signs that they were sailing safely towards a career as ‘all round entertainers’. The showbiz establishment drooled and slavered over them, anxious to incorporate them. Yet, by the epochal year of 1967, a remarkable change had taken place. Rather than cheerfully engaging themselves in fabricating pleasantries, rock musicians were now expected not only to write their own songs but to pour their souls out in poetic expressions of a personalised artistic consciousness or to ‘blow their listeners’ minds’ with new sounds that had surely only been heard before in interstellar space. Where guitars had once been tunefully swung in unison, they were now vibrating with feedback or being ritually incinerated. Rock music had suddenly, unexpectedly, become an art form which, like surrealism in the 1900s or Dadaism in the 1920s, was at the cutting edge of contemporary culture. It had sucked in the influences of modern art, the avant garde, the beat poets, Eastern mystics and gurus, and had rapidly spewed them out again at ear-shattering volume. In this, the decade where the world had almost ended in a conflagration of fire and deadly, invisible rays, rock music had adopted a language of suitably apocalyptic noise. And Tin Pan Alley was on the run.

         Two factors in particular had made this sudden revolution possible. One was the musical collision of the most influential popular songwriter/performers of the ‘60s (and by extension, of the late twentieth century), The Beatles and Bob Dylan. The other was the impact of the new kinds of drugs - all illegal or about to become illegal - that had rapidly spread in popularity during those years, and which were so radically to alter the perceptive mindsets of both the performers and their audiences. The most important of these were marijuana and LSD. Thus the story that when The Beatles first met Bob Dylan he turned them on to marijuana (‘proper’ marijuana, that is, rather than whatever inferior type of ‘shit’ John may have tried before) may appear to be apocryphal. However, although the above account is of course highly embellished, the story is - as the main participants have themselves testified - essentially true. On that day the ‘educated’, bohemian, middle class world of ‘folk’ (which Dylan himself had so dramatically connected to the American literary mainstream) and the commercial, working class world of teenage ‘pop’, which had seemed so far apart from each other, collided dramatically. The moment Dylan passed over that doobie, the cultural revolution of the sixties was kick-started into life. Marijuana’s effects were radically different to those of alcohol and speed, which had been The Beatles’ main indulgences thus far. First of all, it slowed the world down around you. It made everything seem interesting. Weird thoughts like you’d never dreamed of before kept occurring to you, about, say… the meaning of life, or the significance of the colour of your socks... It made you aware of what was going on in bits of your brain you’d never even known were there before, although now and again it might make you just a little paranoid. And it seemed to encourage a kind of ‘lateral thinking’ that in some way rewired your brain circuits and helped you make mental connections you’d never thought possible. Of course, if you were so disposed you could just smoke yourself into oblivion, scramble your brains, blot out everything... But if you used it creatively, it might, as jazz musicians had long known, help to stimulate spontaneous and rich creativity. The Beatles really went for it. For the next few years, they (along with millions of others) were stoned pretty much all of the time

         Within a year or so from this meeting, The Beatles had began exploring drug-influenced, Dylanesque wordplay in songs like You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Day Tripper and Norwegian Wood while Dylan had produced surreal, poetic rock’n’roll records like Subterranean Homesick Blues, Highway 61 Revisited and Like A Rolling Stone and had shocked the middle class ‘folkie’ audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by appearing backed by a noisy, raucous, rock and roll band. Meanwhile, The Byrds had taken their rock version of Dylan’s poetic ‘mind trip’ Mr. Tambourine Man to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks were all having hits with songs featuring sharp, streetwise social commentary. …Can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke/The same cigarettes as me… runs the satirical Stones classic Satisfaction. …Hope I die before I get old!…cries the teenage antihero of The Who’s My Generation. The Beatles and their contemporaries now wanted to be poets and philosophers rather than mere ‘craftsmen’, while Dylan now wanted to be a rock star rather than a folk singer. When he’d first heard I Want To Hold Your Hand Dylan immediately sensed that the energetic, rebellious spirit of the original ’50s rock’n’roll that had so inspired him as a teenager had been dramatically revived. In a way that surprised and shocked many of his bohemian intellectual contemporaries (who generally turned their noses up at ‘pop groups’ like The Beatles, regarding them as mindless teen fodder), he embraced the vitality of The Beatles’ music immediately, professing a great admiration for the chord changes in their songs, their vocal harmonies and the warmth and intimacy of their sound. 

         By the time they met Dylan, The Beatles were already pretty much in awe of him. When they heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), his second album and the one on which his talent as a songwriter really first emerged, they were totally (as they might have expressed it a year or so later) ‘blown away’. His voice was a shock at first. It was jarring, abrasive, harsh - decidedly not nice…you certainly couldn’t just have him playing in the background. You had to either turn him up or switch him off. Some people thought he was a genius, others screamed in horror at that screechy adenoidal racket that came out of his mouth. You took your choice. But it was hard to deny that Dylan wrote amazing poetry, in songs that might be up to ten minutes long. He wrote about racism and war and social injustice and what it was like to be young in a world gone fucking mad …You’ve thrown the worst fear… he sneered …that can ever be hurled/Fear to bring children into the world… How could you top that? What he was writing was light years away from I Want To Hold Your Hand or even Heartbreak Hotel but, as The Beatles stared out the window of that Paris hotel, replaying that LP over and over again, they realised that somehow he was expressing exactly how they felt. But Dylan, at this point, was nothing like them. First of all, he was a folk singer. He didn’t have a band, just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. He didn’t have anyone doing harmonies, or anything like that. His songs were mainly based on ancient folk ballads, and he often avoided choruses, middle-eights and other basic songwriting tools. Yet there was something about his attitude that they could immediately relate to, something very edgy and …rock’n’ roll… 

         A few weeks after their discovery of Dylan in Paris, The Beatles found themselves in Abbey Road studios, recording material for the soundtrack album for their first film. Already, Dylan’s influence can be heard. On the three albums they made between March 1964 and May 1965: A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles For Sale and Help!, The Beatles’ sound comes closer and closer to what they had heard on Freewheelin’. They had occasionally used acoustic guitars before on the earlier records but this had usually been on their non-rock’n’roll ‘cabaret turns’ like A Taste of Honey or Till There Was You. Now they begin to experiment with them more and more, using them to create softer sonic textures, so that the words they were singing could seem invested with more sensitivity. Rather than concentrating on finding ways to ‘thrill’ their listeners, as they had done so dramatically and successfully in their stage act and in their early ‘ecstatic’ songs, their songwriting begins to shift towards the expression of ‘authentic’ emotions. Increasingly, John in particular is frequently to be found playing acoustic rather than electric rhythm guitar. In fact, by the time of Help! the use of acoustic guitars has become the norm on most of John and Paul’s original songs. Two of Help!’s most memorable tracks, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away and Yesterday, dispense with the guitar-bass-drums format completely. On both these songs, The Beatles’ distinctive vocal harmonies, which more than anything else had defined their sound, are also abandoned. The emphasis is now on presenting a truthful and individual voice. They did not (as yet) try to emulate Dylan’s political and generational statements or imitate his complex use of imagery and metaphor in their lyric writing. But what Dylan (and their experience of marijuana) had shown them was that a songwriter should be dedicated to expressing his own inner truths, even if they weren’t really that pleasant or easy to deal with. Over the next few years Dylan’s example was to inspire a whole generation of ‘confessional’ singer-songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Tim Buckley, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Taylor, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, David Bowie, Laura Nyro, Melanie and many others; creating in effect an entire genre in which music and literature met. What makes these artists distinctive is not that they sound like Dylan - most of his musical imitators fell by the wayside - but that they sound like themselves. 

  It is worth mentioning here that the early Dylan wrote - in addition to his political and satirical material - what may be called ‘love songs’, although perhaps ‘songs dissecting relationships’ would be a more accurate description. Two examples from his second and third albums are Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and One Too Many Mornings, where he demonstrates eloquently that a ‘love song’ can be emotionally complex enough to go beyond the sense of sentimental or lustful longing that characterises the conventionalised approach to the form. In both cases the narrator is saying goodbye to the love-object in a tone of philosophical resignation. Rather than pleading with the girl, or wallowing self-indulgently in ‘misery’, the protagonists of the songs accept that what two people want out of a relationship may actually be very different. …I gave her my heart…he sings in Don’t Think Twice …but she wanted my soul…In One Too Many Mornings he concedes that …you’re right from your side/And I’m right from mine… The narrator of Don’t Think Twice even accepts that the affair was not really that important to him: …You coulda done better but I don’t mind… His fourth album Another Side of Bob Dylan, released in 1964 (in between A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale) was his farewell to political ‘protest’ singing and focused mainly on such ‘relationship’ songs, the most celebrated of which, It Ain’t Me, Babe, is a song of explicit rejection of a lover’s idealisation of him. The song’s refrain …No, No, No…has often been seen as a downbeat answer to The Beatles’ famous cry of  …Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!…

         It would, however, take some time for The Beatles’ songwriting style to absorb such a radically different influence. Almost all of their original compositions on their three ‘transitional’ albums are still based on a lyrical formula in which the narrator directly addresses (or, less frequently, reports the details of an assignation with) a female love-object who is never named. However, this approach needs to be seen primarily as a framing device for their songs. Their music always had, from their first recordings, certain qualities which transcended the simplicity of their lyrics. But prior to their encounter with Dylan’s music, they had viewed words largely as functional parts of the musical structures they were creating. In their ‘ecstatic’ songs the ‘innocent’ nature of the lyrics acted, as we have seen in the previous chapter, as a kind of ‘disguise’ for the expressively sexual nature of the performances. Above all, their success was based on the way their songs radiated a sense of joy at being alive. Such an approach was clearly at odds with the kind of cool detachment, political sensibility and wry understanding of the dynamics of relationships that they heard in Dylan’s work. Yet hearing Dylan had shifted the earth’s axis for them. They desperately yearned to be that cool… Elements of Dylanesque objectivity are already hinted at on a number of the songs on A Hard Day’s Night. This is less true of the songs especially written for the film that make up side one of the album, but even these (with their prominent acoustic guitars) are influenced by his ‘sound’.

         I Should Have Known Better, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You and Tell Me Why are three charmingly ‘professional’ songs written for the soundtrack with the teenage audience in mind. All three actually feature as ‘live’ performances in the film. Musically they are all characterised by the great audacity and exuberance The Beatles specialised in, and they fit well with the film’s bright, cheerful tone. I Should Have Known Better carries a faint sense of regret, but chugs along merrily, showcasing a dextrous vocal performance by John, who features on breezy harmonica. I’m Happy Just To Dance With You, written by John for George, fits well with George’s naive ‘kid brother’ persona and, like the earlier Do You Want To Know A Secret (from Please Please Me) conveys an appealing, humble innocence. Tell Me Why is supposedly about a lover who has told lies to the singer, but very little regret or remorse is conveyed by the song, to which George and Paul contribute enthusiastically breathless backing vocals. Along with the supposedly sad but actually pretty jovial-sounding I’ll Cry Instead (not featured in the film), these songs make light of the emotional troubles they supposedly recount. There is little of Dylan’s emotional realism here, although the presence of acoustic guitars successfully creates a far more introspective feeling than had been present on the raw With The Beatles album. These songs also work fairly hard at ‘telling a story’ and occasionally attempt some rather Dylanesque self-examination. …I got a chip on my shoulders bigger than my feet… John confesses rather chirpily in I’ll Cry Instead. Even such a simple, direct song as I Should Have Known Better is rather self-deprecatingly honest.

         These cheery rockers are balanced by two harmonically ambitious ballads, John’s If I Fell and Paul’s And I Love Her. Both feature clichéd lyrics, but somehow manage to seem sincere in the emotions they convey. If I Fell begins to hint at a ‘confessional’ style, with John and Paul’s harmonies on …I couldn’t stand the pain…being highly affecting. And I Love Her demonstrates Paul’s innate talent for composing very beautiful original melodies, even if the lyrics are rather jarringly twee. There is some attempt at natural imagery …Bright are the stars that shine/Dark is the sky… and the song has a certain unspoken regretful tone, even if Paul takes refuge in clichés about love that will ‘never die’. Similarly, John’s ‘revelation’ in If I Fell that he has discovered that love is about more than …just holding hands… while suggesting some emotional progression from the simplicities of I Want To Hold Your Hand, is hardly original or profound. Yet both songs represent attempts to take a more emotionally realistic stance, and both are led by acoustic guitars, with And I Love Her featuring a particularly attractive ‘Spanish’ flavoured acoustic melody. Even these ‘sad’ songs radiate a kind of sunny, youthful optimism, a bright, dizzy engagement with the world. The dynamic Any Time At All, which opens Side Two, is perhaps their most open and generous song, suggesting that The Beatles’ music is a kind of panacea, a way of cheering yourself up you can tune into any time you want. The two singles that open and close Side One, A Hard Day’s Night and Can’t Buy Me Love, frame this perspective eloquently; the first through its blunt sexuality and the second through its irrepressible exuberance.

         The A Hard Day’s Night album is far more than a mere soundtrack to the movie. Like the film, it presents the group at the height of their youthful self-confidence, at a moment when the pressures of fame have yet to become overbearing. It is the last Beatles album in which the zesty bravado that had fuelled their rise to fame remains a real motivating force. Never again would The Beatles sound so ‘up’. The album drives relentlessly through a number of moods, some more convincing than others, but it has an admirable unity of purpose. Already the coyness of much of With The Beatles and Please Please Me is gone, replaced by a remarkable degree of musical self-assurance. The group, now working smoothly and intuitively with their inspired producer George Martin, is already effectively manipulating recording studio technology to give considerable depth and variety to their material. The groundbreaking use of 12-string acoustic guitars, with their distinctive ‘chiming’ sound was soon to inspire and provide a musical template for The Byrds, the first influential ‘post-Beatles’ rock group to emerge on the US pop scene in late 1964. The Byrds’ style was an amalgam of Dylan-influenced folk music with three-part Beatles style harmonies and a rock beat. In itself it was a blueprint for the whole ‘West Coast sound’ typified by Jefferson Airplane, Love, Grateful Dead, Spirit and Quicksilver Messenger Service, which was to provide the essential soundtrack to the rise of the hippie subculture in California from 1965 onwards. In many ways the Hard Day’s Night album is the triumphant climax of the early Beatles’ style. It captures them in the full flower of their world-shaking optimism. While the lyrics of their songs may still say very little, the untamed spirit of their music is always inspiring.

          On the last four songs on Side Two, however, The Beatles are already showing signs of moving into darker, more emotionally complex territory. Paul’s Things We Said Today, which begins with, and is mainly focus