the prisoner: episode by episode

                                introduction

    

This series of blogs is intended as a companion to my book Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner, which was originally published in 1997. It is also written in anticipation of the new TV remake of the series, and in tribute to The Prisoner's primary creator Patrick McGoohan, who died recently. While the book contains detailed commentaries on each of the seventeen episodes, my purpose here is to present a more impressionistic view of the series and to concentrate more on its visual and cinematic qualities.

 

In the years since Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner was published The Prisoner has certainly not disappeared from view. In recent years American action-adventure series television has reached new heights of sophistication with series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes and Lost, which have helped to create a new sense of televisual aesthetics and have very often proved to be far more challenging and imaginative than anything Hollywood has been able to offer. Many of the creators of these series - which fully utilise cinematic techniques - have paid specific tributes to McGoohan's creation within these series. The Prisoner, which was shot at a time when colour TV was still a relative novelty, was the first series to make full use of the possibilities of taking a more 'cinematic' kind of TV. The story goes that McGoohan (with typical bitingly ironic wit) actually banned the use of the word 'television' during the production of the series. The standards of production quality, especially in terms of set design, camerawork and the creative use of incidental music which The Prisoner set were rarely equalled during the 1970s and 80s. And in perhaps the most naturally collaborative artistic medium of all, The Prisoner stands as one of early TV's most clearly authorial texts. Patrick McGoohan's extraordinary performance as Number 6 still resonates as a powerful representation of the archetypal character of the rebel hero, the seeker after truth... Number 6 represents the nameless force we each feel inside ourselves whenever we feel the forces of oppression, of mindless conformity and of suppression of freedom to think pressing in on us. He is a modern Everyman. The Prisoner's use of philosophy, politics, surrealism and social satire is remarkable, especially for a TV series of its time, but what really drives it is McGoohan's extraordinary energy as performer, writer, director and conceptualist. In one scene in the opening episode Arrival Number 6's birthday - 6 March 1928 - is revealed. It is also McGoohan's real birthday. The Prisoner is an intensely personal story, in which only Number 6 himself appears every week. He is onscreen almost all of the time. The other characters - like the ever-changing Number 2s - seem to float before his eyes with an increasingly intense, dream-like logic. It is often difficult to tell whether what is happening is real or whether it's all going on in Number 6's head.

Wherever he goes, Number 6 is under surveillance. His masters in the Village watch him, we watch them watching him... Even the statues have watching eyes. ...My life is my own!... he roars. But nobody appears to be listening. McGoohan's dedication to his central socio-political prophecy - that technology will, in the future, be used for many forms of subtle social control, which will be delivered to us in the sickeningly bland tones of politicians who will keep reassuring us that it's all for our own good - is all-encompassing. In episode after episode, he shows us how this control will be exercised. The Prisoner is carried forward towards its utterly bizarre and tantalisingly open ended conclusion, by McGoohan's incredibly driven, monomaniacal conviction. And in this age of mass surveillance, when intrusive voyeurism has become enshrined and fetishised as a national pastime through a seemingly interminable series of excruciating 'Reality TV' shows, while outside millions upon millions of camera eyes are watching and cataloguing our every move, the prophetic force of McGoohan's vision becomes more potent with each passing year. While some of its visual iconography and use of dramatic conventions (especially its fight scenes) dates The Prisoner as very much a product of the 1960s, the central message it conveys becomes more and more relevant with each passing year. Hopefully the new series will do some justice to this vision. But McGoohan's Prisoner can only continue to grow in stature as the years go by.

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                             one: arrival

 

Arrival is, at least for the first two of its three sections, an astonishing piece of visual art. Such is its visual power that its distinctive imagery alone tells all the essentials of the story. The locations - consisting of familiarly iconic parts of London and the eccentrically cosmopolitan setting of the Portmeirion Hotel in North Wales - are especially distinctive, and work in sharp contrast against each other, taking us from an extremely familiar setting into one which is mysterious and strange. The studio sets, in particular Number 6's house, Number 2's residence inside The Green Dome and the Village's main surveillance centre are meticulously designed modernist interiors which reflect the rulers of The Village's use of the most up to date technology. These provide another contrast with the old-world architecture of Portmeirion, indicating that beneath the facades The Village represents a technologically controlled and totalitarian future. Every aspect of the episode's mise-en-scene has been utilised to reinforce this contrast. The (superficially) comforting environment of Number 6's house features muted, soft greens and yellows while inside The Green Dome everything is dark blue, purple and metallic grey. The black blazers, casual slacks and colourful striped tee shirts worn by the inhabitants of The Village suggest a kind of 'holiday camp' atmosphere but the clothes themselves are all so perfectly and immaculately clean, and the actions of the Villagers - as they take part in contrived 'fun' - are awkward, nervous and completely desexualised. There is plenty of contrasting colour here, the visuals tell us, but precious little passion. The styles of the Portmeirion buildings, which are drawn from many different parts of the world and which seem to be arranged in an almost random way, add to the sense of dislocation which both Number 6 and the viewer increasingly come to feel.

Central to the design strategy of the series, as revealed in Arrival, is the imaginative positioning of rounded shapes, which appear in sharp contrast to the rectangular frame of the TV screen. Number 2's 'office' is circular, with built in monitor screens all around. Number 2 himself rises up from below, with measured amusement, in a strange chair shaped like half an egg. In the middle of the room is a large round control console. In the surveillance room the operatives swing round on a kind of wheel with their heads bent down over their equipment. And most memorably of all there is what later becomes known as 'Rover', the mysterious and terrifying white balloon which appears to be both Village guard and instrument of punishment. Even the ubiquitous typescript which all Village signs and notices are written in is heavily rounded.

The opening sequence, which appears here in fully extended form, tells the story of Number 6's incarceration in a completely visual way. The sequence is poetically cinematic, beginning with the cracking of thunder and long a shot of an anonymous deserted airfield. It is as if he comes out of some elemental place. We then see our hero's stylish Lotus 7 crashing towards us. The dynamic music is, here as elsewhere, crucial to the effect, rising to a series of climaxes as we see him driving through London, entering a secret underground location, smashing his fist down on hiss boss's desk and then storming back down the corridor. The music is slightly orchestrated, but a driving rock beat features throughout, like a racing heartbeat, slowing down to a slower rhythm as he returns to his London home, rising in tempo as he struggles with the effect of the knockout drug that his been posted through his letterbox by a tall, spindly man dressed as an undertaker, then petering out he collapses, the buildings racing around in front of his eyes. When he wakes the music is calm but slightly eerie as he opens up the blinds to reveal his entrance to his 'new world'. His apartment in The Village has been set up as a replica of his London flat, as if to further disorient him and to display the apparently effortless omnipotence of his captors.

Most high budget TV series use music in a similar way to mainstream Hollywood movies which follow the pattern of classical Hollywood narrative. We accept the presence of non-diegetic background music for dramatic effects as one of those conventions which we don't really think about. This convention was satirised memorably in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, where an orchestra suddenly appears in a Western setting. But most incidental music in film or TV is meant to be 'invisible', and its effect on creating mood and emotion is often underestimated. In The Prisoner music is used in a very deliberate way, sometimes for satirical effects (as with the 'cheerful' but bland brass band music used in Village parades and celebrations) and at others in various conventional ways during fight scenes and action sequences. But the series also contains a number of distinctive 'themes' which are first established in Arrival. The first section of the opening episode has rather minimal dialogue, as Number 6 explores the Village and we are introduced to its distinctive if bizarre mixture of architectural styles. One of the main themes, a slightly jaunty but suggestively eerie brassy piece, accompanies our hero's first ride in a Village taxi. As he approaches Number 2's residence in The Green Dome another key theme, based on the tune of the nursery rhyme Pop Goes The Weasel, appears for the first time. The apparent banality of the theme is set against the strangeness of the visual setting, creating a discomforting, defamiliarising effect. It also symbolises Number 6's impatience and frustration with the patronisingly 'childish' tone of much of the Village's communication with its citizens.

The appearance of the mute, midget butler, who we see for the first time here, is another unsettlingly strange visual component which will be a constant factor throughout the series. The butler greets Number 6 and escorts him to the entrance to Number 2's 'office'. Here the music changes abruptly into an eerie, 'futuristic' theme appropriate to the remarkably distinctive design of the large circular room, with its surrounding hi-tech screens which initially are filled with the floating blob-like shapes which are a distinctive feature of the series. We also get our first glimpse of the penny farthing bicycle, a symbol of redundant and outmoded technology which is in distinct contrast to its highly technological surroundings. As Number 6 makes his first key statement of resistance: ...I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed , debriefed or numbered... my life is my own... we see his face in stark close-up, the weird floating shapes circling behind him. This is perhaps the most iconic image in the whole series, with McGoohan's face set in firm, angry defiance. Our hero's direct language contrasts with the exaggerated all-knowing politeness of his host. Later Number 6 is asked to answer a 'questionnaire' at the Village 'Labour Exchange', another circular-shaped 'futuristic' interior, conducted by a mild mannered bureaucrat spinning a wheel on an oddly constructed wooden child's toy which our hero smashes in frustration before exiting. The iconography of the Village is dominated by circles and wheels. And as with the Penny Farthing bicycle, there are Big Wheels and Little Wheels....

Costume is another key visual element of the series. After Number 6 has been taken by Number 2 for a helicopter tour of the Village, we see him strolling through the grounds to the sound of a brass band, who are all dressed in multicoloured capes and slacks. Other Village inhabitants wear striped blazers, straw boaters and carry colourful umbrellas. The effect, combined with the jaunty music, is that of exaggerated, forced 'sporty' jollity. In perhaps the episode's most surreal and sinister moment, we suddenly see how completely manipulated all the Villagers are. Number 2 appears on a balcony and cries 'Wait! Be still!' whereupon almost all the participants in the scene suddenly freeze. The white balloon emerges from a fountain in the middle of the scene, pursues and then smothers the one young man who attempts to escape. After 'Rover' bounces away, the scene jolts out of freeze-frame and everything returns to 'normal'. The deliberate use of the cinematic effect here lends a dreamlike quality to the scene. And we get a distinct impression that the entire scenario has been stage managed for Number 6's benefit. The stage has been set for the continuing psychological tussles between Number 6 and the various Number 2s which will dominate the series.

One scene in particular illustrates Number 6's utter frustration with his 'comfortable confinement'. As he examines the contents of his room, the horribly syrupy background music rises in volume until, driven to rage, Number 6 picks up the radio set that the music is apparently emanating from and smashes it into tiny pieces. The music, however, merely continues. As with the earlier use of freeze frame in the scene with Rover, here we see another deliberate disjunction between set up between our conventional expectations of cinematic technique and what appears to be happening. We are unsure at first as to whether the music (perhaps 'muzak' would be a better description) is actually diegetic - i.e. it is meant to be the actual music being piped into the room by the Village authorities – or non diegetic (the 'soundtrack' added for effect). And even when Number 6 smashes the radio we are still not sure. By the blurring of the boundaries between what is 'real' (within the 'world' of the series) and what is not, The Prisoner ‘s allegorical significance is already being hinted at.

Most of the rest of the episode becomes more melodramatic, divided between the Village's attempts to get information out of Number 6 and his efforts to escape. A pretty girl, assigned to Number 6 as his maid, breaks down in front of him and begs him to give her some information to stop her being punished. He can clearly see he is being manipulated and refuses to fall for it, giving her short shrift. After his futile attempt to escape via the beach are defeated by the arrival of Rover, a whole mini-drama unfolds when Cobb, a former secret service colleague of Number 6, appears in the Village hospital and appears to sympathise with him. The authorities then fake Cobb's suicide in order to manipulate Number 6 into a plot by which he has to gain the sympathy of a young woman who had apparently been in love with Cobb in order to gain access to the Village helicopter. However, both the woman and Cobb are actually working for the Village and Number 6's escape attempt in the helicopter is cynically curtailed by the replacement Number 2. The point of the exercise seems to have been merely to show Number 6 just how futile any effort to escape would be. Here, as in several places in the episode, the 'spy plot' of the episode is emphasised. It appears that The Village is some kind of international prison where ex-spies will be taken to have any valuable information extracted from them. The viewers may even assume that McGoohan's character is actually John Drake from Danger Man, especially as in many ways McGoohan appears to be still acting the part of this character. At this point the influence of script editor George Markstein, who envisaged the series as basically a sophisticated version of a spy drama, was still strong. In some ways the more surreal aspects of the episode, which are largely executive producer McGoohan's own creation, sit uneasily with this. The 'spy plot' is in fact utterly bereft of defining detail. We do not learn why Number 6 has resigned, which organisation he has really resigned from or what his motives were. These elements become the enigmas that keep us watching through the succeeding episodes. But as the series progresses, the quest for this apparently basic information becomes not only that of the viewer but that of his captors. Gradually the 'spy' elements recede, Markstein himself resigns and McGoohan's vision comes to dominate the series.

Such was the originality of The Prisoner that it soon built up impressive viewing figures as spectators were drawn in more and more by desire to know the answers to the series' unanswered questions. As the series developed, the nature of these questions began to subtly shift. This use of continually evolving enigmas is an especially distinctive trait of long running television series, which must continually provide reasons for their audience to keep watching. The elements of the secret agent genre which dominate the last third of the episode were comfortably familiar ground for an audience attuned to both the fantasy of James Bond, and the relative realism of Harry Palmer from The Ipcress File or the John Le Carre novels. The apparently seamless transition of McGoohan’s character from his Danger Man persona only adds to this effect. As Cobb leaves Number 2 says to him …Give my regards to the old country… Already the viewer suspects that The Village is the creation of some kind of secret multinational organization, perhaps like Spectre in the Bond films. Or maybe it is run by the Commies, or quite possibly, by Our Lot. Arrival sets up all these generic expectations in the audience. Yet in its setting, and the strange dream-like logic with which events occur, it already hints at the ‘mind trips’ it will soon be taking its audience on. British TV audiences were already accustomed this kind of ‘proto-psychedelia’ in more ‘lightweight’ ‘spy spoof’ shows like The Avengers. But in Arrival there are already hints that we are in far darker territory. In the Village ‘hospital’ waiting room, signs written in the heavy, childlike ‘Village script’ declaim slogans such as … a still tongue makes a happy life… The ‘patients’ engaged in what Number 2 blithely calls ‘therapy’ appear to be the subjects of Nazi-like experimentation.

Arrival is a tour de force in televisual terms, an utterly compelling, beguiling and outlandish episode which crams an amazing amount of information into its fifty minutes. It clearly establishes the highly distinctive visual world of The Prisoner and begins to outline its philosophical position. At the same time it retains many of the conventions of action-adventure TV, such as highly choreographed chase scenes and fight scenes. But even these are conveyed with a kind of visual inventiveness in terms of both set design (mise en scene), editing and camera work that had rarely, up that point, been seen in any form of television show. The episode sets out the dramatic and visual boundaries of the series, creating stunningly original and literally unforgettable visual and verbal juxtapositions with the use of costume, scenery and highly distinctive props such as ‘Rover’ and the Penny Farthing bicycle. Its visual qualities show its creators’ delight in what was for TV the new medium of colour, while its script creates delicious layers of enigma, in which we as viewers are already relishing the process of immersing ourselves.

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I would welcome any comments in the box below. Or you can write to me directly at chris@chrisgregory.org

BE SEEING YOU: DECODING THE PRISONER can be obtained through Amazon HERE

                         DIGNITY

                                       …Soul of a nation is under the knife…

 

            Dignity, like Series Of Dreams and God Knows, was originally written and recorded for Oh Mercy. It was eventually released in remixed form as a single some five years later and also appeared on the MTV Unplugged album in 1996. Tell Tale Signs features two radically different versions of the song from the Oh Mercy sessions. The song has also been performed live on many occasions, with a number of lyrical variations. In Chronicles Volume One Dylan describes how all the attempts at recording the song for Oh Mercy, including an evening spent with a local Cajun band, ended in apparent failure. But by looking at the different versions of the song we can trace a different story. What the various versions of the song have in common is their wild juxtaposition of images. In searching for such an indistinct inner quality we are taken on a mad ride through another ‘series of dreams’. The singer is a kind of Don Quixote figure, rushing madly at disappearing windmills and inviting us to ride, like Sancho Panza, at his side.

          Speaking of knights on quests, the first released version of the song brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s poem El Dorado, itself constructed like a song, and written very much in the clipped, nuanced style Dylan adopts on Oh Mercy. One can easily imagine Dylan himself singing these words in his nasal style, stretching out the syllables for effect, and with Lanois’ distinctive atmospherics in the background:

 

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old
This knight so bold
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

            The point of the poem is that - as with the search for the Holy Grail - it is the quest itself which is the important thing. Indeed, the quest is Eldorado. So it is, perhaps, with the quest for Dignity. That’s ‘Dignity’ with a capital ‘D’. The poetic technique utilised here - that of personification - is one which Dylan has used very rarely.  In the originally released version we are presented with a parade of archetypal characters, identified as ‘fat man’, ‘thin man’, ‘hollow man’ ‘wise man’, ‘blind man’ ‘sick man’ and finally ‘Englishman’, all of whom are presented in the present tense engaged in various activities connected with finding some kind of meaning in their lives. These moments of potential revelation pass by as if we are looking out of a moving car window as Dylan follows the jaunty tune. There is little emotional involvement in his voice. This is a picaresque travelogue. We go to ‘the land of the midnight sun’ (Finland, perhaps?), we meet someone called Mary Lou who … Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew/About Dignity… and later the mysterious’ Prince Philip at the home of the blues’, who appears to be some kind of ‘super grass’ who … Said he'd give me information if his name wasn't used/He wanted money up front, said he was abused/By dignity…. Dignity, it seems, is a secret, an unknowable condition which you will search ‘every masterpiece of literature’ for in vain. Dignity is an enigmatic and playful song, yet it has a personal resonance. Perhaps its most telling lines come in the penultimate verse: … Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed/ Dignity never been photographed…  a rather cynical aside from one who has been photographed so many times since the start of his career and perhaps a veiled comment on the difficulty of maintaining artistic credibility when one is a famous celebrity.  The narrator never finds what he is looking for. What he seeks is a chimera, an Eldorado without a name.

          The Oh Mercy outtake version of Dignity which appears on Disc Two of Tell Tale Signs is heavily rewritten, its music reduced to a simple repetitive guitar riff. Dylan still plays the role of the confused ingénue. The characters have been jumbled up. ‘Prince Philip’ now meets ‘Mary Lou’. A conversation between ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Don Miguel’ outside the Gates of Hell is recounted. Here Dignity is quite explicitly feminised. She is …a woman that knows/ a woman unspoiled/ a woman that’s light/ a woman that bleeds… The imagery is even more bizarre and confusing than in the released version. There are a few remarkable poetic snippets, especially in the evocative lines …Cities in a mess of jackhammer beats/ Buses roll by with burned-out seats/ A child's eyes look through the creeping streets/For dignity…  But despite the dark undertones of this, Dylan still delivers the lines blithely. Towards the end it’s made quite explicit that ….Dignity got no starting-point/   No beginning, no middle, no end…  The final verse leaves us stranded with no definite answers …Looking at a glass that's half-filled/ Looking at a dream that's just been killed…

Perhaps the reason Dylan never originally released this song is that the appropriate combination of words and music for the song proved as elusive as the search for ‘Dignity’ itself.  The search for ‘Dignity’ is in many ways the quest which Dylan set himself in the 1990s. He came to fame as a precocious young man, howling bittersweet poems at the world. Later he sought solace in love, in religion, and in what his ubiquitous concert intro calls …a haze of substance abuse…  By the late 1980s his loss of ‘Dignity’ was most eloquently demonstrated by his performance as the burnt out rock star Billy Parker in Hearts of Fire, a dreadful mess of a movie featuring two new original Dylan compositions, Had A Dream About You Baby and Night After Night, which were almost excruciatingly banal. He was playing a part, right? Well, maybe… It was not long after Hearts of Fire that, as Dylan later claimed, he experienced his ‘Determined to Stand’ epiphany which led to the Never Ending Tour and his eventual transformation into his current ‘wicked old man’ persona. The dilemma he was facing in the late 80s was how to reinvent himself, how to remake his art, as a much older person, in late middle age. Achieving the kind of ‘Dignity’ which was so clearly missing in his embarrassing attempts at 80s production values on Empire Burlesque and on the vacuous songs like Knocked out Loaded’s Got My Mind Made Up or Down In The Groove’s Ugliest Girl In The World became an absolute necessity. And so, on Oh Mercy, he began this process. Yet both the eventually released version and the version of Disc Two of Tell Tale Signs suggest a lack of resolution and of real emotional engagement. ‘Dignity’ is occasionally glimpsed, but never found. Of course, that in a way is the point of the song. Yet there is a sense in which Dylan never quite seems to take the song seriously. In live performances in 1985 and 2000 he shuffles the verses around as if they are interchangeable, which perhaps they are. The song is mildly engaging, a kind of clever intellectual game, but it is rarely revelatory or in any way moving.

The ‘piano demo’ version of Dignity on Disc One of Tell Tale Signs is, however, a very different matter. As shockingly stark as the versions of Mississippi and Most Of The Time which precede it, here the song is stripped down to its essence. Whereas in the other versions it seems to meander happily, here it is sharply focused and performed with a raw, tortured emotional edge. The bouncy riff is absent, replaced by Dylan’s stabbing solo piano which perfectly complements the tone of the performance. Here the song has a clear structure, rising to a crescendo of bitter irony. The journey being depicted is scary, intense - a voyage into inner pain in search of inspiration, a graphic description of the struggle of the artist’s creative soul to come into being. Dylan’s enunciation of the lyrics is precisely honed - he is fully engaged with the pain he is feeling.  Here his vocal performance, with its strange dips and hoarse expression, prefigures the ‘new voice’ he would begin to adopt on the Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong ‘return to roots’ albums of the mid-90s. This version is, just like its predecessors on the album’s track list, ‘merely’ a first take, a ‘demo’ version of the song. But it is here, rather than on subsequent versions in the studio or live, that he really nails the song.

And he really nails it. Here there is a real effort to place discordant emphasis on certain words. In the first verse his voice jerks and falls at the mention of the three ‘men’: ‘fat’, ‘thin’ and ‘hollow’. The piano has an eerie, gospelly quality which is matched by the extraordinary vocal.  …Wise man looking in a blade of grass’ … he intones deeply. Then before the next line there is an odd semi-stutter …Er… young man looking in the shadows that pass… as if he is ‘testifying’, letting out guttural shrieks involuntarily. The first five verses follow the lines of the released version, but it is in the later (presumably later rejected) verses that we really get to the meat of the song. The ‘stranger’ in verse six … stares down into the light/From a platinum window in the Mexican night…  Suddenly the song has a location, somewhere hot and sticky and drenched in Catholic guilt. The stranger is engaged in … Searching every blood sucking thing inside/ for dignity… These lines give the descent into the land ‘where the vultures feed’ far more resonance than when the same lines appear in the ‘original’ version. This search for Dignity is no search for Eldorado. The singer has no hope of paradise. He has opened the gates of hell. Dylan’s acidic pronounciation of the killer line in the last verse …. Soul of a nation is under the knife… universalises the singer’s predicament. We then get another piece of personification as the Grim Reaper himself appears … Death is standing in the doorway of life…  The irony is grim and unmistakeable. There is a heavy, violent threat hanging in the air, a sense of extreme existential despair, now vividly contrasted in the final lines with domestic violence … In the next room a man fighting with his wife/ over Dignity…  Then the song abruptly peters out, as if the singer’s sustained drawn breath (which began with his stuttering testifying in verse two) has finally evaporated. The Dignity he has found is a cruel illusion and its exposure has opened up a spiritual void. Thus this version of Dignity dramatises the pain involved in the loss of religious faith which Oh Mercy songs like What Good Am I?, Ring Them Bells and What Was It You Wanted imply, no more so than in the despairing lines which here are thrown into the sharpest relief … Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men/ It all sounded no different to me…

The mood of this early, supposedly ‘unfinished’ yet devastating powerful version of Dignity is less reminiscent of Poe’s idyllic quest than T.S. Eliot’s bleakly modernist view of the ‘meaninglessness’ of human existence in the first verse of perhaps his most despairing work:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Dylan’s own ‘hollow man’ appears in the first verse of Dignity , but really all the characters in this version of the song are hollow men. As such they are projections of the singer himself, whose search for the chimerical ‘Dignity’ has become a futile search for meaning in the humid atmosphere of a symbolic desert landscape. His faith has evaporated and he has, as yet, found nothing to replace it. Later Dylan will take as his touchstone the foundations of the cracked voices of singers like Dock Boggs, Hank Williams and Ralph and Carter Stanley. He will take from these men the foundations of a new kind of ‘faith’ from which will flow a new kind of inspiration. But here, it sounds like he has downed a bottle of tequila and has smashed it against a wall. As he stares out of that ‘platinum window in the Mexican night’  his own soul is naked, exposed and ‘under the knife’. And finally, in reaching down into his inner depths and dredging out his true feelings, he has surrendered all artifice and pretence. It is the only way he can hope to find Dignity.

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Any comments always appreciated - use box below or send  to

                           chris@chrisgregory.org   

 

                                      MOST OF THE TIME

 

   I don't cheat on myself, I don't run and hide,
   Hide from the feelings, that are buried inside...

 

    

       The ‘Drawn Blank Series’, the exhibition of Bob Dylan’s paintings currently showing at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, provides a valuable insight into Dylan’s creative and imaginative processes. The paintings are based on a series of drawings Dylan completed in the late 80s and early 90s. In what the exhibition catalogue describes as ‘an intense burst of creativity in 2007’ Dylan began applying paint to blown-up versions of these black and white, impressionistic images of scenes he’d experienced or imagined in the early stages of his Never Ending Tour.  Many of the drawings (like ‘Train Tracks’ above) are presented in their illuminated form in a series of different versions. The effect of the addition of colour is akin to his ‘going electric’ with his music, illuminating the harsh outlines he has drawn and creating a means by which his basic template can be the subject of endless variation. This is a similar process to the one being enacted on Tell Tale Signs, wherein we get an intimate glimpse into the evolution of Dylan’s songs. Tell Tale Signs makes the ‘secret’ that Dylan bootleg collectors have pursued from the legendary Great White Wonder onwards public - namely, that there really is no definitive ‘final’ version of any Dylan song. Sometimes what are arguably the most memorable versions of Dylan’s songs may only exist on the ‘cutting room floor’ of his recording studio. Just as the three versions of Mississippi featured here demonstrate three different moods and types of emphasis, so the three versions of Train Tracks take us from blazing desert sunshine to the vibrancy of spring to the darkening storms of late summer.

The version of Most Of The Time which follows Mississippi on Disc One of Tell Tale Signs is perhaps the album’s most startling surprise variation on one of his existing ‘templates’. A solo guitar and harmonica take with a style highly reminiscent of the early Blood On The Tracks sessions, it sounds utterly different to the familiar Oh Mercy version, with its swampy, spooky background ambience deriving from Daniel Lanois’ trademark production traits. The version of Disc Three of Tell Tale Signs is quite close to the Oh Mercy version, though it sounds a little less ‘produced’. The lyrics are identical to the earlier-released version though the instrumentation is more muted, and more emphasis is placed on the vocal. Most Of The Time is an exercise in irony and rueful self-deprecation from an artist engaged in the severe self-analysis that permeates the album (which could well have taken its title from the self-explicit song What Good Am I?  In each verse the singer enunciates a long list of his own positive traits, which the repetition of the title line at the end of each verse immediately deflates. We soon realise that the singer has been deserted by his lover and is conducting a supposedly defiant internal dialogue. … I don’t even notice she’s gone… he tells us.  … I don’t think about her… and, more graphically, …I don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine…  In the original version Dylan sounds tight lipped, with a clear edge of bitterness. He delivers the lines sardonically, barely letting those constrained emotions out. The performance is a kind of dark study, with the narrator apparently drowning in self-delusion. Lanois uses muted bass and drum patterns with swirling, heavily treated guitar sounds to emphasise the singer’s predicament.  The overall effect is somewhat dreamlike, as if the narrator is both inside and outside the action. The prevailing mood is a kind of reflective gloom. Written at a time when Dylan was struggling for inspiration (on his last album Down In The Groove he had produced no new lyrics whatever), the song displays the mood of an artist struggling with a muse whom he fears may well have deserted him ‘most of the time’. The ease in creativity he once had has gone. He is bent in contemplation, hoping for the rare moments of clarity to come.

The ‘new’ version on Disc One has a very different ambience. In spirit if not in form, that same ambience is often found in the work of  blues singers like Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie Johnson and the Mississippi Sheiks, who describe the hard times they experience with a light touch which lifts the listener onto a different plane. In what was presumably a ‘demo’ version Dylan presented to Lanois before the song was rerecorded and treated, this version has the spirited intensity of Dylan’s best solo work.  The breezy harmonica in between the verses adds to the tone of optimistic resilience which makes the song a description of a defiant struggle rather than a glum wallow in despair. So when Dylan sings … I can handle whatever I stumble upon.. we really believe him.  In this version the self-reassuring doubt in the lyric works against the singer’s tone.  It is a similar effect to the Blood On The Tracks songs like You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go and Buckets Of Rain, taking us on a kind of emotional roller coaster which we somehow feel we may fall off at any moment. The singer maintains a delicate balance between prevailing optimism and underlying despair.

As with most of the Oh Mercy material the language is spare, terse, lacking in obviously ‘poetic’ imagery. The major lyrical difference from the recorded version comes in the second verse, where instead of the resignation of …it’s well understood… I wouldn’t change it if I could… we get the more pithy …I’m cool underneath… I can keep it right between my teeth… (a neat reference, perhaps, to the harmonica which does not feature on the Oh Mercy version. The self-analytical heart of the song comes in the third verse, which begins with the skewed self mockery of …most of the time/my head is on straight… (after which the retort of …I’m strong enough not to hate…is a little disappointing). In the Oh Mercy version the verse contains the song’s most remarkably ‘twisted’ couplet …I don’t build up illusion ‘till it makes me sick/ I ain’t afraid of confusion no matter how thick…  Here we get the far lighter and more positive…I got enough faith and I got enough strength/I keep it all away, way beyond arm's length…

The fourth verse is a kind of bridge, varying the rhyme scheme and striking a note of reticence. The singer  begins to express doubts about whether his encounter with the unnamed lover even took place: …Most of the time/I can't even be sure/If she was ever with me/Or if I was with her…  It is a sentiment that will be echoed again in Red River Shore, which takes on the same themes in a deeper, more tragic manner. Most Of The Time  is an almost ‘textbook’ example of one of Dylan’s ‘anti-love’ songs, a tradition that goes back to Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right , It Ain’t Me, Babe and Mama You Been On My Mind. Here for a moment the singer questions even the validity of his own feelings. In the final verse he admits to being …halfways content…. before building up his bravado in the final verse: …I don’t cheat on myself /I don’t run and hide/ Hide from the feelings/ That are buried inside / I don’t compromise or pretend… And finally, with apparently complete defiance: … I don’t even care if I ever see her again… Of course, by now we hardly believe him and the final equivocation of the last repetition of the title phrase demolishes all this huffing and puffing very neatly.

Most Of The Time is a song of psychological self-examination. As many great blues songs do, it adopts the stance of a jilted lover to explorer deeper inner themes. The singer appears to be reassuring his audience but we soon realise that he is only reassuring himself. The real subject of the song - as of so much of Oh Mercy - is Dylan’s own inner spiritual turmoil, his struggles with what in Street Legal’s Where Are You Tonight he called …my twin/the enemy within… To Dylan, spirituality and creative inspiration are inseparable. Only by truly facing up to this ‘enemy within’ - manifested as a lack of inspiration - can he overcome it.

The unexpected revelation of the Disc One performance of the song (it was unknown on the bootleg circuit before the album’s release) also raises the question as to whether Dylan was wise to accept the ‘production values’ foisted upon him by Lanois in Oh Mercy. In Chronicles Part One Dylan devotes a whole chapter to the recording of the album, relating how previous to making the album he had not written for some time, but then found himself pouring out the songs that later appeared on it. He seems to arrived at Lanois’ home studio in New Orleans uncertain whether the songs he had written were really worthwhile or not. Chronicles also hints at the tensions between artist and producer over the type of sound they were striving for. It seems that at the time Dylan felt so lacking in confidence that he felt he needed ‘producing’ (He claims that Bono had recommended Lanois to him one night when they were demolishing ‘a crate of Guinness)’. Yet the strength and originality and the brave self-searching nature of the Oh Mercy songs shows that Dylan’s fears of his own creative death were totally unfounded. Dylan brought back Lanois for Time Out Of Mind in 1997 (though on the latter album Lanois’ trademark production sound is considerably less pronounced) but all subsequent recordings he has produced himself (under the mischievous pseudonymn of ‘Jack Frost’). Much of Tell Tale Signs presents ‘de-Lanoisised’ versions of the material from these two albums, and it is tantalising to imagine what Oh Mercy would have sounded like if Dylan had recorded it as a solo acoustic album (as he later did with the ‘roots’ albums Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong). Here, on what may well have been the first recorded version of the song, he nails its tone of wavering emotions perfectly, with a masterful example of what his great supporter Allen Ginsberg referred to as his ‘breath control’.

 

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For more on the Dylan exhibition check out this page

Check out some really great writing on Dylan by Lawrence J. Epstein here

 

 An unsual perspective on Dylan and other stuff here  

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In the first verse Dylan begins with a simple statement of his intention to pursue his faith in his muse, combined with clear intimations of mortality which seem to motivate him. From the beginning the use of the pronoun 'we' involves the listener intimately in this process. ...Every step of the way, we walk the line... he sings, echoing Johnny Cash's I Walk The Line, that powerful statement of the intention to remain faithful which is so pronounced in its intensity to be 'true' that we begin to doubt whether the singer can truly remain on this path. The effect here is similar, especially as we are instantly cast into the arena of self-doubt: ...your days are numbered/And so are mine.... This line, with its admission of the effect of the ageing process, echoes Dylan's own ...every hair is numbered/ like every grain of sand... , with its fatalistic overtones. The next few, wonderfully compressed, lines add to the effect - the singer is telling us that we are trapped by fate, our spirits confined by the constraints of time and age: ...Time is piling up/We struggle and we scrape/All boxed in/Nowhere to escape... These lines eloquently express what so many people feel when they reach middle age. Our past histories 'pile up' on us, creating a kind of prison of the mind for ourselves. The line 'struggle and scrape' uses the 's' alliteration that recurs throughout the song, most notably in the 'hissing' sound of the title word itself. The next lines begin to explore the classic blues dichotomy between city and countryside, which here takes on a symbolic dimension. The city is seen as a 'jungle' in which both singer and audience are trapped, continually trying to escape from. The 'country' which the singer was 'raised' seems in comparison to be a place of freedom, of inspiration and the singer tells us, in a wonderfully resonant phrase (again using the 's' alliteration) that his problems have come from him becoming trapped in the 'city': ...I've been in trouble since I set my suitcase down...

The nature of the spiritual and inspirational crisis that Dylan describes is deepened in the next lines, which again resonate powerfully with some of his own previous lyrics: ..Ain't got nothin' for you/ Had nothin' before/ Don't even have anything for myself anymore... Again the expression is clipped, terse, and very world-weary. In Like A Rolling Stone the cry of ...When you ain't got nothin', You got nothin' to lose... had been triumphant, symbolising how young people were shaking off the shackles of older kinds of morality. In contrast, in the later Too Much Of Nothing Dylan warns of the dangers of throwing off received wisdom, suggesting that such actions lead to...the waters of oblivion....

Here Dylan seems - as he will suggest in more detail later in the song - that he is drowning in those waters. The next lines intensify this effect – sliding from the poetic into the colloquial with a resigned grace: ...Sky full of fire/pain falling down... is another skilfully compressed couplet. It is 'pain' that is 'falling down' from the sky, not 'rain'- though of course, the sky itself is on fire. The singer's suppressed, fiery anger turns into the cynicism of ...There's nothing you can sell me/I'll see you around... the cursory brush-off of 'I'll see you around' suggesting that he is trapped in an inspirational void. This sense of a lack of inspiration is made explicit in the following ...My powers of expression and thoughts so sublime/ Could never do you justice/ In reason or rhyme... Here the singer decries his own poetic abilities before leading us into the first refrain of ...Only one thing I did wrong/ Stayed in Mississippi a day too long... Clearly 'Mississippi' is the place where he feels trapped. The suggestion seems to be that his inspirational crisis has been caused by hesitancy, a fear of 'moving on' from one 'state' to another, perhaps in this case from youth to middle age, or from one mindset to another. In any case, a great 'rolling river' seems to yawn between the narrator and the freedom to be inspired that he so desires. Here the 'state of Mississippi' symbolises 'the state of the blues' that the singer finds himself in. The Mississippi Delta is generally referred to as 'the cradle of the blues'. So the singer regrets that he has let himself 'drown in his own tears' for just a little too long.

In the second verse the singer seems to fade away from us, as if he is a kind of ghost. Again symbolism is contrasted with rather cynically colloquial phrases. We begin with some quintessential blues imagery indicating the singer's mind set: ...The devil's in the alley/ Mule's in the stall... he mutters, before further indicating his world-weariness: ...Say anything you wanna/ I have heard it all... He seems distracted now, making a few mysterious references to wishing he was ...in Rosie's bed... He tells us he feels like an invisble 'stranger' and sounds lost, dejected... So many things we never may undo... and, rather pitifully, ...you say you're sorry, I'm sorry too... He seems lost in a kind of existential despair. ...I need something strong... he darkly hints ...to distract my mind... hinting at some potential plunge into 'substance abuse'. He declares that he was guided towards the subject of the song by some cosmic or heavenly force, stating that ...I got here following that Southern Star/ I crossed that river just to be where you are... In Version One, Dylan performs this verse with a kind of resigned your somehow courageous tone, making it perhaps the most moving section of the performance. This is the blues in all its nakedness, a soul crying out in the wilderness. The singer has followed his muse across the wide river and now he seems stranded, looking back regretfully on the past mistakes.

Yet as Dylan has always known, the true magic of the blues lies in the way it can posit hope through adversity. In the song's climactic final verse he depicts himself as broken, yet strangely carefree. He is still 'stuck in Mississippi' and, having absorbed the pain fully, he has plumbed the deepest emotional depths. Here he graphically depicts the feeling of being 'beyond pain', when the soul has suffered so much that nothing else can touch it or make things worse. The metaphor he follows here is that of being drowned in this pain, as if he has reached that point of near-death semi blissfulness where the pain has finally begun to ebb away. Employing more alliteration he memorably begins: ...My ship's been split to splinters/ I'm sinking fast... He tells us he's sunk into a kind of timeless void. ….I'm drowning in the poison/ Got no future, got no past.... And now, as the waters of the great river overcome him, his transcendence begins. The pain is numbed. He feels calm, reflective. ...My heart is not weary... he whispers, ...it's light and it's free... And, neatly completing the nautical analogy: ...I got nothing but affection for those who sail with me... In this transcendent moment the narrator's 'heavy' self pity and anguish is replaced by 'light' compassion. He surveys the frantic stressfulness of modern life from a distance of calm detachment: ... Everybody's movin if they ain't already there/ Everybody's got to move somewhere.... Ceasing to struggle, he begins to float to the surface. Now he reaches out his hand, to his lover or to his audience: ...Stick with me, baby/ Stick with me anyhow... Then, in another dramatically ironic juxtaposition of the colloquial with the metaphorical, he declares, with beautifully measured understatement: ...things should start to get interesting right about now... so drawing us into the present moment he's experiencing.

The next lines again delicately set metaphor against self-effacing wit: ...My clothes are wet/Tight on my skin/ Not as tight as the corner I've painted myself in... Dylan's use of the classic blues technique of using self-deprecating wit to counterpose and fight despair has rarely been so refined. The sense of emotional ambiguity here reflects the classic lines from Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (1963) : ...thinking and wonderin'/Walkin' down the road/I once loved a woman/ A child I'm told/ I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul... Here again the singer deploys ironic humour to con us into thinking that he’s really OK. But we know better. Now he attempts to resort to romantic cliché, clutching out to his lover’s hands in the hope of rescue: …I know that fortune is waiting to be kind/ So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine….  But just as he appeals to his lover, or perhaps his saviour, for rescue, we know that he cannot be saved from drowning. The song’s last lines confront death head on: …the emptiness is endless/cold as the clay… followed by the deliciously enigmatic …you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way…  before the final ‘stayed in Mississippi’ kicks in. These lines seem to sum up the emotional price of the turmoil that the singer depicts. As he sings in Shelter From The Storm (1975) …something there’s been lost…

Perhaps Bob Dylan’s greatest quality as a performer is his willingness, even as he grows old, to continue to search for some elusive notion of perfection. In concert he continually remodels and rephrases the expression and emotion in his songs, as if continually grasping for the perfect way of using the words and music he has conjured to express what is in his heart. In the first version of Mississippi on Tell Tale Signs he comes as close as he ever has. Yet it’s quite possible that this version was merely the first complete performance of a song which he later rerecorded for Love And Theft and then reworked in concert many times over. Over the years there are many instances where a version of a song he has appeared to pass over for official release has, in retrospect, become virtually definitive. Here, as with the version of Blind Willie McTell released on The Bootleg Series 1-3, the simplicity of the musical arrangement throws the nuances of Dylan’s vocal expression into the sharpest relief. As he sang in 1964’s Restless Farewell: ….. it's not to stand naked under unknowin' eyes/ It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung….

The version of Mississippi on Disc Two adds bass and drums, attempting to  build the song towards a series of musical climaxes at the end of each verse. The vocal is more restrained and controlled, tinged with a more consistent sense of regret. The players seem a little hesitant and the song never achieves the sense of uplift of the Love And Theft version, though its musical structure clearly presages the final recorded version. It loses the sense of vulnerability that characterises the first version, though it is interesting as a ‘work in progress’.

The third version is quite different. A number of lines are omitted and others substituted. Some are rearranged. Of course, this may actually be an earlier version of the song. But its use of fuller instrumentation (though the rhythm section is more restrained here) suggests that this was an alternative development of the ‘naked’ original. The rhythm is slightly jauntier, almost veering towards a reggae beat, and organ is prominent featured. Dylan’s vocal is more expansive here - he stretches out phrases confidently. There seems to be an attempt to make the song less obviously ‘poetic’ and more direct in the manner of other Time Out Of Mind songs like  Standing In The Doorway and Not Dark Yet. The tone of this version is more obviously confessional: … I'm standing in the shadows with an aching heart/ I'm looking at the world tear itself apart…  he begins. In the alternate second verse he begins …. Well I been loving you too long, I know you ain't no good/It don't make a bit of difference to me, don't see why it should… The first line here echoes an Otis Redding song and there’s a more direct reference to the ‘woman done me wrong’ theme than occurs elsewhere. The most memorable change of lyric is in the final verse, where the singer depicts himself as so spiritually bereft as to be ‘invisible’:  ….Winter goes into summer, summer goes into fall/I look into the mirror, don't see anything at all…  The third version is the one closest to the general tone of Time Out Of Mind, yet it still somehow does not fit with that album’s overall sombreness and intention to communicate by stripping back metaphor. Mississippi is ultimately too ‘poetic’ for that collection of songs and fits more neatly into the playful ambiguities of Love And Theft, although even there it seems to stand alone from the other material.

What makes Mississippi such a triumph is its universality, its emotional openness and honesty. Here Dylan bares his soul for all the world to see, yet he carries it off with supremely graceful aplomb. His dilemmas and despair are those which all of us in the ‘jungle’ of modern life all share. The song is a metaphorical summation of the struggle which Tell Tale Signs dramatises, summing up the plight of the outsider poet: ‘a stranger nobody sees’. The poet weighs the burdens of the earthly life and sees himself drowning in it all. He foresees the inevitability of his death, mourns the death of his youth, yet despite it all he is determined to carry on. Mississippi is perhaps his most eloquent summation of the aesthetic of the blues - that of the transmutation of suffering into a means of spiritual survival. And in the version which begins Tell Tale Signs we are allowed in to experience that process in a way that is sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, but always expressively and uncompromisingly intimate.

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This series will continue very soon. Naturally I will be devoting more space to the album's 'original' songs rather than the live versions.

Check out the great Dylan website VISIONS OF DYLAN 

At Jamsbio online mag there's an article about best Dylan sites . If you've enjoyed my stuff here why not contact them on the form at the bootom and mention this site!

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

My books WHO COULD ASK FOR MORE: RECLAIMING THE BEATLES and BE SEEING YOU: DECODING
THE PRISONER  can be bought from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on these links (OK well you have to pay a bit of money too!)

I am now working on a book on Bob Dylan which will be called DETERMINED TO STAND. Thought I'd mention that before someone else nicks the title! The book concentrates on Dylan's work of the 1990s and 200s.

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                                     Things should start to get interesting right about now...

 

Despite his difficult relationship with the recording process and his focus on live performance, Bob Dylan has always conceived his albums as expressive units - groups of songs arranged in a particular order for specific effects. This is obvious in the case of albums as diverse as Blood On The Tracks, Nashville Skyline or Slow Train Coming, each of which has a clear thematic unity. But even in his early acoustic days Dylan's albums were also arranged, to some extent, as continuous narratives. The Times They Are A-Changin', for example, is a kind of Whitmanesque socio-political manifesto, beginning with the poet fervidly extolling the virtues and power of youth (in the title track) and ending with the defiant exhaustion of a much older narrator in Restless Farewell. During this period of his life Dylan was outpouring large numbers of songs, many of which never found his way onto their records. Listening to the Times They Are A-Changin' outtakes on the first part of The Bootleg Series (and the earlier Biograph), one is struck by the difference in tone of those 'rejected' songs. Pieces like Eternal Circle, Percy's Song, Lay Down Your Weary Tune, Seven Curses and Moonshiner present a more relaxed artist, whose singing is less harsh and who seems to be seeking a kind of elusive lyrical vision of beauty which, on the official album, is sublimated to the harsh irony of the politicised individual stories of Hattie Carroll, Hollis Brown and Medgar Evars. In 1967 Dylan threw away an entire collection of the wildly brilliant songs of The Basement Tapes because none of them would have fit in with the surreal quasi-Biblical moralism of John Wesley Harding. Throughout his career he has rejected many songs which - however good they might be on their own terms - have not seemed to him to fit in with the tone of a particular album. Thus Blind Willie McTell was omitted from Infidels and Caribbean Wind from Shot Of Love, even though their 'replacements' were arguably vastly inferior.

The Bootleg Series has scooped up much of this material, along with many widely differing alternate takes of the songs from the original albums. Since its first volumes were released in 1993, it built up into an impressive corpus, presenting an alternative picture of Dylan's work which is often looser, softer and more expressively emotional - more 'musical' - than the harsher, less uncompromising tone of much of his 'official canon'. Tell Tale Signs - which concentrates heavily on the outtakes from Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind - breaks from the pattern of previous releases by abandoning a chronological approach and thus takes on the challenge of becoming a 'proper' Bob Dylan album - one with its own story, its own approach to the way it presents the material. As one familiar with Dylan's more obscure work of the last few years I could bemoan the exclusion of a number of brilliant cover versions such as the lip smacking precision of his version of A Red Cadillac And A Black Mustache (from a Sun Records tribute) or the taut irony of his reading of I Can't Get You Off My Mind from a Hank Williams tribute album or his extravagantly tongue in cheek updating of Dean Martin's Return To Me from the Sopranos soundtrack . There are also only brief tasters here of the hundreds of live covers of folk and blues material he performed throughout the earlier periods of the 'Never Ending Tour. And of course the many widely different variants on Dylan's own songs performed during this period. But Tell Tale Signs has its own agenda - an exploration of Dylan's creative journey to bring his songs to realisation. And the three album set certainly has a story (in fact, a number of 'parallel' stories) to tell - that of Dylan's creative renaissance from Oh Mercy onwards, of his newly intense immersion in and fascination with the blues in all its diverse forms, and of the way he treats each song as a malleable, ever-changing entity.

Without prelude, we are launched into the heart of this creative process. The stunning, heart-stopping version of Mississippi (a Time Out Of Mind outtake) that kicks off the album is one of Dylan's greatest performances, ranking with the 1983 rendition of Blind Willie McTell as perhaps his most moving and captivating expression of the transformative power of the blues. The accompaniment is similarly spartan - just a lone, echoey guitar - as Dylan uses shifting geographical and historical metaphors to express what appears to be regret over a lost love while simultaneously tracing an exploration of the artist's struggles with his own creative processes. This struggle is itself the story that Tell Tale Signs relates. Dylan's vocal modulates between pained harshness and whispered transcendence. The recording is so intimate that you can hear the singer's breath between the lines, catch his moments of hesitation. The combination of all this produces spine-tingling moments of great intensity as Dylan takes us on a roller coaster ride through different emotional states. It's a near-perfect fulfillment of Dylan's long-stated ambition to be able to use the form of the blues to uplift both himself and the listener from despair towards joy, just as the old blues masters he so admires were able to do. Many commentators have been puzzled as to why Mississippi was omitted from Time Out Of Mind when lesser songs (like Million Miles or Dirt Road Blues) were included. But Time Out Of Mind is conceived as – to use an earlier Dylan phrase – a 'journey through dark heat', an artist confronting both his own mortality and the darkest depths of his psyche. It is an album which begins with the burnt out cynicism of Love Sick, progresses through the hellish despair of songs like Cold Irons Bound and Can't Wait, toys with a kind of surrender of spiritual struggle in Standing In The Doorway, Tryin' To Get To Heaven and Not Dark Yet until it ends in the bizarre moment of existential release that concludes the extraordinary closer Highlands. Time Out Of Mind tells the story of an artist's struggle to release his own inner creative energies after years of under-achievement. Mississippi does not belong on that album, because in terms of spiritual and creative freedom (which, for Dylan, are very much the same thing), it's already there.

In many ways Tell Tale Signs presents an alternative picture of Time Out Of Mind, including as it does various outtakes from the album, alternate versions and live performances of its songs. It tells a similar story on a broader canvas, dipping into and out of Dylan's history of the past two decades, hinting at some of the major influences on his latter 9and, of course, earlier) years – Ralph Stanley, Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family – pioneers of the distinctively pre-rock and roll American art that Dylan has come to embrace as his 'prayer book'. There are a few alternate versions of the spiritually wracked Oh Mercy songs, a couple of very different variants of the recent Modern Times tracks and some of his diverse work for film soundtracks. Then there are three quite different Time Out Of Mind versions of Mississippi holding the whole thing together, each one taking the song to a different place with variations in instrumentation, phrasing and expression. There have been complaints about the album repeating itself with so many versions of the songs being present, but the purpose of the presence of the variants is to show how, in Dylan's hands, a song is forever malleable; that no two performances are exactly the same, as anyone who has been to more than one Bob Dylan concert will testify. In the fullness of time it may emerge that this need for endless variation has been Dylan's most profound contribution to song craft and performance art. Through this method of presentation of his songs, which relies on spontenaiety, on filtering the emotion of a song through how the artist is feeling at that precise instant - in giving the illusion of 'stopping time', if only for a fleeting 'stolen moment' - Dylan ensures that his work can never become mere 'background music', the stuff of empty nostalgia.

At an age where many artists of his generation are content to bask in the reflected glory of their youth in hugely lucrative 'comeback tours', Dylan continues to reinvent his song catalogue every time he opens his mouth to sing. Sometimes the results are a long way from 'perfection' - the sound that comes out of his mouth may be an ugly croak, a disgusted wheeze. Sometimes a completely new arrangement of a song will meander into a dissatisfyingly discordant mess. At other times he will suddenly throw up a way of expressing a line which gives a song he may have sung thousands of times an entirely new slant. Such moments are those which his most devoted fans treasure. They may occur in concert, in the studio or in rehearsal – in front of tens of thousands of listeners or just a handful. Sadly, they rarely find their way onto official releases. Tell Tale Signs goes a little way towards redressing the balance.

Volume One features Mississippi as a stark country blues, while Volume Two uses a slow back beat and some swirling keyboard passages to build the song towards several crescendos. This is the take that most resembles the version finally released on Love And Theft in 2001. Volume Three features a completely different first verse and a number of lyrical variations. Though the lyrics are less poetic than the released track, its more personal and 'confessional' focus takes it close to the overall tone of Time Out Of Mind. One line in particular ...Winter goes into summer/Summer goes into fall/I look into the mirror/ Don't see anything at all... recalls the spiritual 'hollowness' of songs like Not Dark Yet and Standing In The Doorway. I would venture a guess that this version of the song was recorded later than those on Volumes One and Two in an abortive attempt to mould the song's emotional textures to bring it more into line with the emotional resonances of the album.

Ultimately, though, Dylan shelved the song and it found a more appropriate home on the zestfully energetic and playful Love and Theft. The version on that album features a full band and indulges in the musical virtuosity and intensity that characterises the album's 'freewheeling' sensibility. But on Tell Tale Signs Volume One we are privileged to witness a performance that, though one could regard it as a basic run through of the song, is incredibly rich with nuance, subtle shades of feeling and - most powerfully of all – a sense of personal liberation. It is a performance that at times makes you want to cry and at others to weep. Sometimes it makes you want to do both at the same time. In its sense of spontaneity, its complete immersion in its subject matter and with Dylan's mastery of vocal phrasing, it captures the absolute essence of what the blues can be made into as a medium for the most heartfelt, playful and meaningful poetic expression.

It is not surprising that - if my earlier assumption is correct - Dylan returned to the original lyric of Mississippi. The words of the song are already fine tuned to near perfection, each line rich in signification, combining richly suggestive poetic intensity with colloquial aphorism in a mysterious alchemy that Dylan has made his own. The song concerns a typical 'lost love' situation and the lyrics focus on the singer's regretfulness regarding his own 'bad timing' in 'blowing his chances' with the woman he is addressing. Yet, as in so many other Dylan songs, this scenario merely sets up a structure for wider observations and concerns, both personal and universal. Central to the whole piece is the use of American geography as a metaphor for both the failed relationship and - on a deeper level - for the artist's personal struggle to achieve a new kind of creative freedom. In using the Mississippi river as a motif, Dylan grounds the geographical elements of the song in the mythology of the blues, just as he did with Highway 61 in Highway 61 Revisited and East Texas in Blind Willie McTell. In American literature, film and popular song the 'sense of place' has always been a dominant motif, from the Long Island of The Great Gatsby to the highways of On The Road to the dustbowl of The Grapes Of Wrath to the landscapes of Monument Valley in John Ford's westerns to the delicious roll call of American place names in Bobby Troup's joyous anthem Route 66 and Dylan's own wonderfully tongue-in-cheek Wanted Man. The Mississippi is the largest river in the United States, running from Dylan's home state of Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, literally 'dividing the country in two'. It naturally figures large in American history, culture and mythology. Mark Twain's brilliantly mischievous Huckleberry Finn, echoes of which permeate Dylan's song, features a contrary journey downriver by its boy hero and a runaway slave, so turning the river itself into a metaphor for America itself, in all its mad variety, extreme prejudice and rich colour. The Mississippi Delta is also famously the 'home of the blues' and its relevant place names feature heavily in the expansive canon of blues material on which Dylan so often draws.

What makes Mississippi so especially effective is its use of a kind of language in which natural speech patterns slide with apparently effortless ease into poetic metaphor and alliteration. Throughout his career Dylan's work has attempted to fuse the vernacular - especially the characteristic patterns of certain forms of colloquial American speech - with the consciously poetic. Certain songs like Gates Of Eden or Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands or Changing Of The Guards seem to inhabit the deliberately 'poetic' mode whereas others (like Lay Lady Lay, Is Your Love In Vain or I'll Be Your Baby Tonight) use a deliberate kind of 'plainspeak'. But Mississippi belongs to the group of songs such as Don't Think Twice, It's Alright or You Ain't Goin' Nowhere or You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go which seem to utilise both modes simultaneously. When Dylan is working like this, even the simplest lines can take on a considerable wealth of potential meanings. Mississippi is full of poetic imagery, but its most effective moments occur when Dylan slips into a more conversational tone. This is especially fitting as Mississippi is in some ways a song about songwriting, about how the process of inspiration itself occurs, about the artist's troubles in 'loving' his poetic muse. In another sense Mississippi is addressed to Dylan's audience, a 'lover' to whom he declares his undying devotion. Here Dylan addresses the crisis of inspiration - which, to him, was a spiritual crisis – which bedevilled him in his post-'conversion' years. To Dylan, the 'state' of Mississippi (to use a Whitmanesque metaphor) represents a state of immersion in the imagery and mentality of the blues itself. Dylan has always drawn on this as a source of inspiration but here his over reliance on it is seen a kind of prison for him (although ironically the song, like most of Dylan's work, is clearly focused through the form of the blues). So it is surely not accidental that Mississippi begins Tell Tale Signs and that we find a version of it on each of the three albums, as the story it relates is the story of the album itself, and by implication of the last two decades of Dylan's creative life - the story of personal reinvention and re-engagement with his original muse, the 'Tambourine Man' himself.

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Well hello again! It's been some time since I've had the time to continue these pieces but I hope to be going pretty much full steam for a while now!

Part Two of this should be following extremely soon. Some of the songs on TTS have already been covered in the 'Soundtrack Songs' Section, which this series seems to have superseded

As ever, I'm happy to receive any thoughts or comments in the box below or directly to me at chris@chrisgregory.org

Some time ago,. Michael Gray asked me to mention his upcoming lecture tour' Bob Dylan And The Poetry Of The Blues' . Michael's the author of 'Song And Dance Man' and 'The Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia'. Sadly he didn't like MODERN TIMES very much but hopefully reading my blog may have encouraged him to listen again. His website can be found HERE

Here are the dates:

Thu Feb 19, 8pm Colchester Arts Centre, UK
Church St., Colchester, Essex
Box Office: 01206 500900 / www.colchesterartscentre.com
tickets £10, £8 concessions

Fri Feb 20, 8pm Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, Ireland
temporarily at 36 Cecil Street, Limerick, Eire
Box Office: ticketline 061 319 866 or:
boxoffice@belltable.ie
tickets €15, €12 concessions

Fri Mar 6, 7.30pm Birkenhead Pacific Road Arts Centre, UK
Pacific Road, Birkenhead, Wirral CH41 1LJ
Box Office: 0151 666 0000 or:
http://www.pacificroad.co.uk/webpages/booking.asp
tickets £10, £8 concessions

Tue Mar 31, tba Daemen College, Amherst NY, USA
4380 Main Street, Amherst NY 14226
Box Office: n/a; free admission (may be campus members only)

Thu Apr 2, 4.30pm Washington College, Chestertown MD, USA
The Rose O’Neill Literary House, 300 Washington Avenue,
Chestertown, Maryland 21620
Box Office: n/a; free admission (may be campus members only)

Fri Apr 3, 7.30pm Nyack Village Theatre, Nyack NY, USA
94 Main Street, Nyack NY 10960
Box Office: [001] 845-367-1423
tickets $20

Fri Apr 17, 8pm Buxton Opera House, UK
Water Street, Buxton, Derbyshire SK17 6XN
Box Office: 0845 127 2190 / www.buxtonoperahouse.org.uk/booking
tickets £8

Thu Apr 23, 7.30pm Herne Bay Little Theatre, UK
Box Office: 01227 366004
tickets £12, £10 concessions

Wed Apr 29, 4.30pm Farmingdale State College, State Univ. of New York, USA
English & Humanities Department, Farmingdale State College
2350 Broadhollow Road, Farmingdale (Long Island)
NY 11735-1021, USA; Tel: [001] 631-420-2050
Box Office: n/a; free admission (may be campus members only)

Sat May 2, 8pm Bridgwater Arts Centre, UK
11-13 Castle Street, Bridgwater, Somerset TA6 3DD
Box Office: 01278 422700 / www.bridgwaterartscentre.co.uk
tickets £12, £10 concessions

Sat May 9, 8pm The Market Theatre, Ledbury, UK
Market Street, Ledbury, Herefordshire HR8 2AQ
Box Office: c/o Tourist Information Office 01531 636147 /
www.themarkettheatre.com/
tickets £10

Wed May 13, 7.30pm Uppingham Theatre, Rutland UK
32 Stockerston Road, Uppingham, Rutland LE15 9UD
Box Office: 01572 820820 / upp.the.arts@uppingham.co.uk
www.uppthearts.co.uk / or in person at Uppingham Bookshop
or at Stamford Arts Centre
tickets £8.50

Fri May 15, 7.30pm Cotswold Playhouse, Stroud, UK
Parliament Street, Stroud GL5 1LW
Box Office c/o Stroud Tourist Office: 01453 760960 /
www.cotswoldplayhouse.co.uk/jm/
tickets £12, £11 priority booking, £10 concessions

Sat May 16, 7.30m Festival of the Spoken Word, Berwick-on-Tweed, UK
The Main House, The Maltings Theatre & Arts Centre,
Eastern Lane, Berwick upon Tweed TD15 1AJ
Box Office: 01289 330999 / www.maltingsberwick.co.uk
tickets £10, £8 concessions

Fri May 29, 7.30pm Exchange Studio, Hazlitt Arts Centre, Maidstone
Earl Street, Maidstone, Kent ME14 1PL
Box Office: tel 01622 758611/
www.hazlittartscentre.co.uk/pages/booking.html
tickets £12.50, £10 concessions

Sat May 30, 8pm Bridport Arts Centre, Dorset UK
South Street, Bridport, Dorset DT6 3NR
Box Office: 01308 424204 / www.bridport-arts.com/
tickets tba

PATRICK McGOOHAN 1928-2009

The recent death of the creator of The Prisoner Patrick McGoohan was given surprisingly little publicity. One of those items towards the end of the news where the newsreader adopts an appropriately nostalgic, slightly reverential tone. Some fairly muted obituaries in the newspapers, with the standard shots of McGoohan in his iconic striped blazer as No. 6. ... Front page news this was not. The death of John Mortimer, creator of 'much loved' courtroom drama Rumpole Of The Bailey seemed to attract more attention. By an odd coincidence the star of Rumpole was the brilliantly garrulous Australian actor Leo McKern, perhaps McGoohan's most prominent collaborator in The Prisoner. Yet while Rumpole was an intelligently written, entertaining and occasionally challenging series, The Prisoner was much more. It was it a ground breaking, iconoclastic and revolutionary use of the medium of television which managed to hold onto a mass audience even as it became increasingly 'weird', morphing from what seemed to be a rather 'offbeat' take on the then-prominent Cold War spy genre into a piece of Orwellian, Kafkaesque prophecy and cold-eyed, dark social satire; culminating in the bizarre theatricality and surrealism of its visionary final episodes Once Upon A Time and Fall Out.

In some ways, however, the relative lack of comment is unsurprising. In terms of his public persona and his impact on popular culture, McGoohan was very much a figure of the past. For the past forty years or so he had remained mostly in seclusion in Los Angeles, directing and making guest appearances in a few episodes of Columbo in the late '70s and making the occasional film appearance - most notably in David Cronenberg's Scanners (1980) and Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1996)). Only the rather obscure independent film Kings and Desperate Men, made in collusion with his Prisoner cohort Alexis Kanner in 1981, featured the talents as a writer which had been so clearly showcased in the key episodes of The Prisoner. Over the years, as interest in the seventeen-episode series grew through continual re-runs, widely available DVD box sets and the activities of its own 'Appreciation Society', The Prisoner has become established as a televisual classic which now stands out prominently from much of the forgotten morass of 1960s television. Yet sadly there was no significant 'follow up' to the series from McGoohan, who found his subsequent ideas for scripts and film projects would be rejected by major film and TV producers as too avant-garde or 'uncommercial' for a mass audience. In this way McGoohan can be said to resemble Orson Welles. Like Welles' Citizen Kane McGoohan's The Prisoner managed to 'buck the system' of the major mass entertainment medium of his day to produce a work that was an extremely quirky, highly challenging, brilliantly realised and highly individual vision. And, as with Citizen Kane, the full impact of The Prisoner only emerged in posterity while its creator languished in increasing obscurity. Just as Citizen Kane influenced generations of film makers around the world by demonstrating the immense artistic possibilities of popular film as medium, so The Prisoner – which marries action/adventure with a philosophical fable for our times - became seen by subsequent TV 'auteurs' as a model for what a TV series could achieve. The makers of sophisticated modern series such as Lost have paid explicit tributes to The Prisoner, citing it as a key influence.

McGoohan was an Irish-American who, with his clipped, upper class accent and suavely cynical persona nevertheless seemed quintessentially English. It was in England that he made it as an actor, firstly in the theatre and then in the long-running and increasingly quirky British 'secret agent' series Danger Man which ran from 1963-1968, making him a household name in Britain. From here on McGoohan could easily have gone on, like his contemporary Sean Connery, to a long and 'glittering' Hollywood film career playing edgy,'intelligent' action heroes. Despite how tempting this must have been, McGoohan had his own agenda, and his own, highly uncompromising, intransigent and often downright belligerent attitude to popular culture in TV and film. He had principles. Principles which must have rather baffled his paymasters, TV moguls such as Lew Grade who viewed TV shows merely as popular entertainment. Towards the end of Danger Man's run, McGoohan exerted more and more influence on its production, writing a number of scripts himself and continually insisting that his character John Drake (the basis for the persona he later took into The Prisoner as No. 6) remain 'the spy with no guns and no girls', who would succeed through wit and intelligence alone. McGoohan was scathing about the use of what he called 'sex and all that rubbish' in popular genre dramas and argued that John Drake should not be seen to be having casual relationships with women as to do so would be irresponsible given the level of danger in his job. Such a comment may have seemed rather bizarre in the midst of the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s but in retrospect both Danger Man and The Prisoner now seem very sensibly respectful towards women while the contemporary James Bond series looks rather nastily (if sometimes laughably) misogynistic.

Sticking to these principles, McGoohan twice turned down the extremely lucrative offer of playing the role of James Bond. Instead he preferred to move on from Danger Man to create a series in The Prisoner in which he could express his own specific concerns about what he saw as the squeezing out of individuality and a growing culture of mindless conformity in contemporary society, cleverly disguised as a 'spy thriller'. The series centres around a British spy who (after his resignation from the service) is kidnapped by an unknown organisation and held captive in a bizarre location known only as 'The Village' populated by former spies and officials from around the world. In the early episodes the eponymous hero tries various unsuccessful attempts to escape before eventually putting his efforts into subverting The Village itself. As in Orwell's 1984, The Village is a society in which every citizen is under constant surveillance by cameras – the TV watches you rather than you watching it. Yet while Orwell's vision of the future is grey, monotonous, impoverished and bleak - what Orwell's hero Winston Smith refers to as' a boot stamping on a human face forever' - the residents of The Village are well fed, well dressed in smart, colourful, informal 'uniforms' and superficially happy with their lot, left to enjoy innocent pleasures as long as they conform. Residents are known only by their alloted numbers, not their names, which have been 'forgotten' in this supposed utopia. In reality The Village maintains control over all its residents by a regime of mind-control involving brainwashing, torture and the use of new computer technologies and psychotropic drugs. The system is one of totalitarianism with a smiling face, characterised by the Village's cheery public address system which markedly resembles the mindlessly superficial blandness of similar systems used in Butlins and other holiday camps of the day. Throughout the series our hero - who we know only as 'Number 6' - has to resist the many attempts which The Village makes to 'break' him, to make him like the other citizens, whom Number 6 contemptuously refers to as 'a row of cabbages'. As Number 6, McGoohan radiates anger and defiance. His refusal to explain the reasons for his resignation to his captors becomes symbolic of the individual's defiance of society's strenuous attempts to make him conform.

The Prisoner is thus an allegorical story and one which has many resonances with contemporary society and political culture. Much of its appeal to contemporary audiences today lies in its prophetic satirical vision of a future Britain which has - particularly under the rule of 'New Labour' in the last decade - come to pass. The chatty, informal , self-deprecating personal style of the ever-changing 'Number 2s' who rule The Village bears an uncanny resemblance to that of 'call me Tony' Blair and his acolytes and successors. Under 'New Labour' Britons have become subject to a regime of surveillance which covers virtually all its public spaces - town centres, roads, railway and bus stations, shops, libraries, cinemas, concert halls... the list is almost endless. Signs outside shops tell us we must 'remove hats and headgear' before entering (as if the wearing of hats is now illegal!). Everywhere we go the cameras watch us. Crazed New Labour bureaucrats dream up schemes whereby every car journey we make is monitored so that the authorities know exactly where we are going at all times. Announcers on trains blandly repeat that 'CCTV cameras are in place for your security'. Britain, in short, has become The Village. Just as in The Village, our 'masters' have become extremely keen to use every form of new technology they can to control and monitor us. There are plans to monitor every phone call, every email... not to mention the centralization of data implied by the creation of New Labour's ultimate totalitarian fantasy, the National Identity Card. Significantly, the activist organisation opposing the Identity Card is known as NO 2 ID, a direct reference to The Prisoner.

Two incidents I witnessed recently brought home to me just how prophetically accurate McGoohan's vision was. One was when I attempted to buy a 'family ticket' at the entrance to, of all places, Blackpool Tower. I was asked first not for my name, but for my postcode, as if my postcode was indeed 'my number'. Another time I was standing in a railway station in London. A man was standing on the stairs next to me, rather idly staring into space, when a disembodied voice from above suddenly ordered him to move, as he was 'blocking the steps'. At first the man ignored the order, before it was barked back at him. Then he looked up, startled, as if suddenly realising that the voice was directed at him. Of course, after that, he moved immediately. The scene was eerily reminiscent of several in McGoohan's series. In one episode of The Prisoner our hero suddenly finds himself shunned by his fellow residents who keep calling him 'Unmutual!'. Today he'd probably be arbitrarily given an Anti Social Behaviour Order.

The most shocking thing about all this is the way in which the British population has so quietly acquiesced to this intense level of surveillance and social control. Indeed, you could almost argue that we have brought it on ourselves by our passivity and natural acquiescence. These days, the training starts early...This is a country in which almost every child in the country is forced into a school uniform at the age of four. Until a few years ago school uniforms were only usually imposed in secondary schools. Now even primary schools adopt them as a corporate badge of identity. The change swept through the country unheralded. Who complained? The ease with which the British Government introduced its smoking ban and measures by which anyone 'seeming to be under 25' is likely to be 'IDed' when attempting to buy alcohol (when the relevant legal age is all of seven years younger) are further examples of the British public's cowed acceptance of whatever its masters declare is 'necessary'. Indeed, we seem to actively fetishise surveillance and control - witness the huge popularity of the reversed Orwelllianism of Big Brother and other so-called 'Reality TV' shows, where the act of surveillance becomes a national pastime (you can even watch the contestants in these shows as they sleep, just as if you are No. 2 himself!). Then we can take pleasure in controlling the inhabitants by a 'democratic' eviction process until only one stupefied 'victim' remains. As No. 2 tells No. 6 on his helicopter ride over The Village ' we have our own Town Council here. Democratically elected, of course....' Thus The Prisoner, though it was made over forty years ago now, stands as a brilliantly caustic, funny and very scary picture of our modern life and culture. Though he was influenced by Orwell, McGoohan's vision is more accurate as a prediction of the future. What McGoohan got especially right was the essential nature of passivity in British culture which he saw as inevitably leading us towards the kind of 'soft totalitarianism' which dominates our culture today. 'A row of cabbages' indeed...

Soon a new production of The Prisoner is to hit our screens. This will apparently be a six part mini series and has been filmed in, of all places, Namibia. It features an American actor, Jim Caveziel as No. 6 and Ian McKellan as No. 2. Initial reports are promising. For years a Prisoner sequel was mooted and various disparate rumours of film and TV versions abounded. Many of the proposed remakes were quashed by McGoohan, who was naturally protective of the work he will always be remembered for. It is sad that he will not be around to see this new version. Maybe the new production will add further contemporary relevance to the story and even open up the possibility of future Prisoners. Or maybe it will be a mere footnote to McGoohan's masterpiece. Despite his failure to follow the series with anything equally substantial, The Prisoner will - whatever its contemporary relevance to future generations- always stand as a landmark in television; the first time the medium of the TV series was used to express a clear authorial vision and a personal philosophy. Its imagery, set design and use of locations - particularly the Portmeirion Hotel in North Wales - have become iconic. And some of its key phrases have survived as still-powerful statements of defiance against the attacks on personal liberty which 'our masters' have seen fit to impose upon us. In particular, No. 6's most famous declarations are ones we might well repeat as we cast those National Identity Cards into the flames where they belong. They also stand as a testament to McGoohan's own defiant individuality and his refusal to be cowed by 'the system'. 'I am not a number' he tells us, 'I am a free man!' And 'I will not be pushed, filed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own!'

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CHRIS GREGORY is the author of BE SEEING YOU: DECODING THE PRISONER, the only full scale analytical work as yet published on THE PRISONER. It can be obtained directly  HERE
or through amazon.co.uk HERE

Every copy is personally signed and dedicated by the author.

Chris' new series of blogs THE PRISONER EPISODE BY EPISODE will be appearing here very soon.

Watch this space!!!!

The following review of WHO COULD ASK FOR MORE:
RECLAIMING THE BEATLES appeared in Rock 'n' Reel
magazine this month....




REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF SEAN McGHEE (EDITOR)

Check out their website HERE

WHO COULD ASK FOR MORE is available through this site.
Just click on the red banner above

BOB DYLAN'S SOUNDTRACK SONGS PART THREE:

CROSS THE GREEN MOUNTAIN

 …All must yield
To the Avenging God…

     In the mud and the blood of the makeshift trench, the soldier boy from Belvedere, South Carolina, is about to breathe his last. The Yankee bullet which had pierced his groin had come from some anonymous source, from the other side of the swirling mist mixed with the sulphurous battle smoke. The soldier boy had never had much chance to be a hero. He’d enlisted with the rebs at sixteen after his family farm had been burned out by Union raiders, killing his mama, his grandmama and his five year old little sister Ellie Mae. They were dirt poor. Couldn’t even afford a single nigger slave.  The soldier boy had been in town with his pa, getting supplies. By the time they got back the Union troops had come and gone. They stood on the hill next to the farm, as the sun went down, both open mouthed as they saw the smoke rising. Neither of them could speak. From that day on all the soldier boy had wanted to do was kill as many of them damn bastard Yankees as he could. The recruiting officer must have known he was under age, but it was said that the word had come down from Richmond not to be too particular about such things. The soldier boy never had a chance to kill no Yankees, though. This was his first battle and he’d been thrown right into the front line. As soon as they’d obeyed the order to charge, a hail of Yankee bullets had hit them. They seemed to come out of nowhere. Maybe they’d just sprung up from the bowels of hell. The soldier boy is losing consciousness now, the memories of his life before the war flashing before him. Milking Jemimah, their only cow, at six in the morning. Raking in the corn. Digging and digging them seeds into the ground…
            But now the everyday memories disappear and all the soldier boy can see is a dark and angry red sky, out of which snarling demon Yankees keep falling and falling and falling, swords flashing and guns a-blazin’. As his eyes glaze over for the last time, he is pulled away into the depths of a fiery, monstrous dream…

            One of Bob Dylan’s thematic and sartorial obsessions in his music of the new millennium has been with the American Civil War. Onstage he seems to inhabit the persona of a southern riverboat gambler, dressed in fine silks and bowties. His songs frequently reference Henry Timrod, the ‘poet of the confederacy’. This lacing of contemporary material with apparently random nineteenth century phrases gives much of his modern writing a strangely timeless resonance. Dylan has stated publicly that he seems a great number of parallels between the US today and the Civil War period. This might seem like one of Bob’s deliberately gnomic utterances, designed perhaps to throw us off the scent of what he’s really thinking…  But the major theme of Dylan’s recent work is that of the shadows the past casts on the present. When asked about his view on the Iraq war Dylan merely shrugged and muttered … there’s ALWAYS a war on somewhere… His bizarre 2003 film Masked And Anonymous presented a vision of modern America as a kind of civil-war-torn banana republic. Dylan seems to take a heavily fatalistic view of history. By constantly referring to images and phrases from various stages of the past, he contextualises what is happening in the present as a kind of inevitable repetition of deeply inbuilt patterns, as if as a race we humans are acting out some kind of horribly predestined series of negative and destructive impulses.
            This is not to suggest that Cross The Green Mountain, written by Dylan for the soundtrack of the 2003 American Civil War epic Gods and Generals, is a song ‘about’ Iraq, or the ‘War on Terror’ or any of our other modern wars. Any attempt to read it as some kind of direct comment on contemporary politics can only struggle with superficial wish fulfilment. Dylan made his name as a singer who was not afraid to comment on the perverted morality of modern ‘Gods and Generals’. Many of his most powerful early ‘finger pointing’ songs commented directly on how religion is twisted to justify carnage on a vast scale - most obviously With God On Our Side, with its polemical and scathing view of such justifications through history, ending in the unambiguous …If God is on our side/ He’ll stop the next war…  In the greatest and most viciously scathing of these early ‘protest songs’, Masters Of War (still performed regularly in the post-millennial live shows) he adopts a tone of righteous spiritual outrage: … All the money you made will never buy back your soul… he spits. And later, most drastically of all …Even Jesus would never forget what you do…  As befits a man in his sixties, the modern Dylan has a less obviously ‘angry’ tone. Cross The Green Mountain progresses slowly, like a stately funeral march, with its sadly reflective narrative and tone. Yet, here perhaps more than in any other Dylan song of the 2000s, a potent and ultimately highly disturbing view of the basic corruption of human morality is suggested. But Dylan no longer needs to sneer. He’s ‘younger’ than that now.  In this song events are recounted with humility, even tenderness. The narrator does not cast judgements. Yet the horror of what he recounts cannot fail, if we listen closely, to chill us to the bone…

            The American Civil War was the first really modern war; the first to feature trench warfare on a major scale and the first in which new technology such as mines, torpedoes, rifles and ironclad ships were used, in which the existence of railways speeded up the movement of troops and the telegraph sent news and communications rapidly across the country. It was also the first war to be photographed.  For the first time, war became a truly industrialised process, a factor which resulted in far more widespread and efficient methods of slaughter than had previously been possible. Industrialised warfare also of course creates the opportunity for highly merchandised war-related industries and vast profits for the ‘Masters of War’ who owned and controlled them.  Perhaps this is why Dylan appears to view all modern wars as extensions of this model. So while it is fanciful to suggest that Cross The Green Mountain is ‘about’ Iraq or Afghanistan, by writing about the Civil War Dylan sets up poetic and historical resonances that make the feelings he expresses equally relevant to the conflicts of today.

  Cross The Green Mountain is a kind of slow, deathly waltz, dominated by highly evocative violin (presumably played by Larry Campbell), military-style drums, swirling organ and Dylan’s beautifully-paced, underplayed vocal. The ragged edges of that cracked voice set up a tension against the smooth, unhurried progression of the song’s distinctive and evocative melody. This ancient-sounding voice is steeped in a harshly-preserved dignity of tone which recalls that of the great mountain singers like Dylan’s hero Ralph Stanley. It is of this world, yet somehow not of it. This is highly appropriate as the events the song describes are simultaneously a depiction of grim reality and a terrible dream. The song’s circular timelessness and wistful quality recalls a previous Dylan epic Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands. At times we can imagine him singing with eyes closed, completely enraptured in this meditation on death and spiritual transcendence.

            The poetry of the song is precise and very carefully constructed. Each line is short and perfectly regular, without any of Dylan’s characteristic metre-bending. Much of the language is deceptively simple - there is no ‘chain of flashing images’ here. In accordance with Dylan’s contemporary poetic method, many of the lines allude to or quote from a wide range of other sources. Not surprisingly, some of the phrases Dylan uses recall those late nineteenth century American poets who wrote about the Civil War itself. Consider the tone of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Killed At The Ford, describing the death of a young soldier…

             Sudden and swift a whistling ball
            Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
            Something I heard in the darkness fall,
            And for a moment my blood grew chill;
            I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks
            In a room where some one lying dead;
            But he made no answer to what I said.

             One can almost imagine Dylan singing those lines in the same tone of hushed awe to the tune of Cross The Green Mountain. And here are some lines from Herman Melville’s poem Running The Batteries, describing the sinking of a ship:  

            The barge drifts doomed, a plague-struck one,
            Shoreward in yawls the sailors fly.
            But the gauntlet now is nearly run,
            The spleenful forts by fits reply,
            And the burning boat dies down in the morning's sky.

            Again there is a tone of reverent wonder so common in reactions to the Civil War, which even its main protagonists recognised as a terrible (and avoidable) tragedy. It’s possible to hear this tone not only in Timrod’s work but in that of the greatest of American poets of the era, Walt Whitman.  Whitman’s post-Civil War poem When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d might be seen as a kind of model for the near-death dreamscape of Cross The Green Mountain:

              Come lovely and soothing death
             Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
             In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
             Sooner or later delicate death.
             Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
             For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
             And for love, sweet love- but  praise! praise! praise!
             For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

             As with so many of his other modern songs, Dylan laces Cross The Green Mountain with quotes, allusions and half-references from a range of other works. This further helps in positioning the song’s lyrics in a kind of timeless space. Several of the references are from Civil War poets. The phrase …dim Atlantic line…  occurs in Timrod’s Charleston (1861). The line …the foe had crossed from the other side… can be found in Nathaniel Graham Shepherd’s Roll Call. Dylan’s lines  …Something came up/ Out of the sea… recalls Longfellow’s poem Daybreak, which begins …A wind came up out of the sea… Dylan’s references to the ‘Captain’ as …the great leader laid low… seems to be a deliberate reference to Whitman’s lament for the murder of Abraham Lincoln O, Captain, My Captain! And the lines in the song’s penultimate stanza, where the mother is offered false hope about the son’s recovery directly recall Whitman’s Come Up From The Fields Father

              O a strange hand writes for our dear son –
             O stricken mother’s soul!
            All swims before her eyes- flashes with black-
                       she catches the main words only;
             Sentences broken—gun-shot wound in the breast,
                        cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
             At present low, but will soon be better.
            Alas poor boy, he will never be better…
            While they stand at home at the door he is dead already…

             There are other non-Civil War references. Dylan’s phrase …Stars fell over Alabama.. refers to the title of a 1934 jazz standard composed by Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish, later recorded by (among many others) Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Ricky Nelson. The title refers back to a renowned meteor shower which occurred in 1833 and the phrase itself has now been incorporated into Alabama license plates. Dylan’s …Heaven blazing in my head…clearly recalls W.B. Yeats poem Lapis Lazuli, written about the coming of World War One, which includes the phrase ….Heaven blazing into the head….  Then, as ever, there are the Biblical allusions. A beast ‘rises from the sea’ in Daniel 7 and another, the ‘Great Beast’ in Revelations 13. The phrase …all must yield/ To the Avenging God… recalls Nahum 1:2:

… The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD is avenging and wrathful; the LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies…

            In Cross The Green Mountain we see a ruined, devastated landscape. Although the narrator - presumably a soldier on a battlefield in his death throes - has very pious hopes and dreams, the God which rules his world is a cruel one. Only death, like the ‘lovely and soothing death’ in Whitman’s poem above, brings relief. Everything is being swept aside by the hand of a malicious deity. Dylan’s tone is wistful, regretful, without a shred of anger. His narrator sounds like he has accepted his inevitable fate. Yet this otherworldly detachment only adds to the power of the bitter indictment of human corruption that the song presents. There are no graphic descriptions of carnage, but much betrayal and disillusionment. As the narrator descends into the spirit world beyond the ‘green mountain’ his hopeless resignation to his destiny only throws the harsh revelations he experiences into sharp relief.
            The first verse begins with the narrator sitting in a place of repose, by a stream which may well by the river of death. The mountain has been crossed and now is the time for reflection. In contrast to the water is the fire of …Heaven blazing in my head… Immediately we are thrown into his ‘monstrous dream’. The use of ‘monstrous’ suggests that whatever it is that …came up out of the sea…. is in fact some kind of monster, a Great Beast that will sweep all before it. The final lines here are perhaps the most telling. The ‘monster’ has … Swept through the land of/ the rich and the free.… The USA is often referred to patriotically as the land of ‘the brave and the free’. The adaptation suggests great cynicism about how the ideals of America’s founding fathers have been compromised. To some these lines have suggested that the song has a direct correlation to the attack on The World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Such a resonance does seem to be implied, but the Great Beast we see rising here can also be taken to symbolise any kind of ‘monster’ that humanity’s folly may create.
            In the following lines the narrator’s closeness to death is made explicit. …I look into the eyes… he sings …of my merciful friend… Death itself is that ‘merciful friend’ who will soon release him not only from his physical pain but also from the sickening awareness of the awful nature of the great insanity that rages around him. He can taste the …sad yet sweet… memories of his life on his tongue, but already he is looking forward to a release into heaven. Yet right now he seems to be subsumed in a kind of hell on earth, where …altars are burning… The line …the foe has crossed over from the other side…, while it may on one level be a description of the movements of the enemy, also seems to suggest that the Devil is walking the Earth. …We can feel them come… he tells us, as if this is an enemy ‘within’ as well as without.
            The fourth verse is perhaps the most graphic and evocative in the song, and the most suggestively powerful. By borrowing Timrod’s …dim Atlantic line… Dylan places an authentic nineteenth century phrase into the song, conjuring up a vision of a line of troops in the distance with a …ravaged land… behind it. Yet the picture of part of East Coast America in ruins has strong resonances of the 9/11 attack. The next lines then take an extraordinary turn. …The light's coming forward/ And the streets are broad… Dylan sings …All must yield to the Avenging God… Is this ‘Avenging God’ the same ‘Great Beast’ which comes out of the sea in the first verse? Is this a kind of ‘God of War’? Certainly it seems to be the kind of God that the pious narrator believes in - one whose main purpose is to enact vengeance and destruction. The final line seems to be the key to the whole song - as if it is being suggested that the state of war is one which is brought about by human belief in a vicious, unforgiving deity, the existence of which justifies mass slaughter. The Old Testament Jehovah, perhaps, who slaughters the first born… or the version of Allah who rewards suicide bombers who an eternity of bliss for destroying the infidel… The fact that the narrator seems to accept such a deity so calmly only adds to how chilling these lines are, especially in the post-9/11 context.
            The rest of the song is less frightening, and shows the narrator preparing for death with a great degree of self-possession. The next lines …the world is old/ the world is gray… suggest that he knows there is no black and white morality here. At no point in the song does he suggest that one side in the war is more evil than the other. He narrator waxes philosophical: …Lessons of life/ Can't be learned in a day… he tells us, as he begins to drift into listening to …the music that comes from a far better land…  Already, heaven is calling him. His consciousness begins to drift and splinter. In the next verse he tells us the story of the ‘Great Leader’ who is killed by his own men. …Close the eyes of our Captain… he tells us. The allusion to Whitman’s Captain, O Captain is fairly clear here, suggesting that the ‘Great Leader’ refers to Abraham Lincoln, although the reference could be to one of the narrator’s own military commanders.
            The next four verses see the soldier preparing himself to meet his Maker. … I feel that the unknown world is so near… he tells us.  He asserts that he was …loyal to truth and to right… and that  …virtue lives and cannot be forgot…, so staking his claim to heaven (or at least reassuring himself that it’s where he’s headed). He contrasts himself against those who have …blasphemy on every tongue… and tells himself, despite his predicament to …Serve God and be cheerful…, while paying tribute to his brave companions, who …never dreamed of surrendering/ They fell where they stood… In the last of these verses he already seems to see himself ascending to heaven. … Stars fell over Alabama/ I saw each star/ You're walking in dreams/ Whoever you are… he tells us, contrasting this with a description of the frozen ground he lies on and his knowledge of the finality of defeat: …the morning is lost…
          In the penultimate verse, which again (as we saw earlier) references Whitman, there is a sudden shift away from the soldier’s perspective. Maybe the soldier is imagining the scene, though, as the mother receives the telegram saying her son is wounded but will recover soon. …But he'll never be better… he tells us, now so detached that he is looking down upon his own dead body. …He's already dead… The last verse sees our hero ascending into heaven, being …lifted away/ In an ancient light/ That is not of day… The final, rather strange and ambiguous lines  … They were calm, they were blunt/ We knew them all too well/ We loved each other more than we ever dared to tell… seem to imply that the war has been between members of the same family (which in the American Civil War was often the case). This adds a poignant coda to the epic lament, suggesting just how unnecessary the entire conflict was.
            It may seem odd that such a major piece of work is hidden away on a relatively obscure film soundtrack. But throughout his career Dylan has always kept some of his best songs in partial obscurity, the most famous example being The Basement Tapes. Discovering such songs has always been part of a Dylan fan’s most joyous experiences. Cross The Green Mountain is, like Dylan’s other ‘soundtrack songs’, specifically written for a purpose - to illustrate the theme of a particular film. As with the other ‘soundtrack songs’, though, this process seems to have functioned as a creative spur, because here he takes us much further than the song’s origins might suggest. Although it could be called an ‘anti-war’ song, it is certainly not any kind of ‘protest song’ and though it may have resonances with current events it is more concerned with deep, universal themes. On one level it is a meditation on death. The narrator’s humble piety is immensely moving, as is his awe at the power of the ‘Avenging God’. But the way in which Dylan deliberately makes the narrator so naïve suggests that such unadorned faith may actually be insufficient for those of us who have to live in the real world today, in which we are caught up in a kind of ‘Civil War’ between apparent opposing but ultimately very similar religious world views. So the song does relate to the present human condition, although its conclusions could equally apply in say, 1914 or 1939 or 1962. Cross The Green Mountain stands with other great Dylan epics like A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall or  Chimes Of Freedom or Idiot Wind  as being both contemporary yet applicable to many other key moments in the unfolding of the tragically flawed human story.

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