WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH ME?
During 1971 and 1972 Bob Dylan’s writing and recording activities were few and far between. He was now back in the relative anonymity of New York City, having been driven away from his rural retreat in Woodstock by the unwanted attention of fans. But he seemed to show little interest in returning to touring and would release no new albums of completely original songs until 1974. It seemed to many that his muse had permanently deserted him. His own uncertainties about his future direction were reflected in the four songs he wrote and recorded in 1971. While these four very different songs did not attempt to replicate the symbolist poetry of his 1965-66 output or the mysterious proto-Americana of The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding, they represented a decisive step away from the fragile pastoral dream world of the previous year’s New Morning. Each of them could be said to Dylan’s current situation from a different perspective.
Wallflower, which was recorded in November of that year with Kenny Buttrey on drums, Leon Russell on bass and Ben Keith on steel guitar, is both his purest country song and his last sustained attempt at the genre. The recording remained unheard until the release of the first Bootleg Series compilation some twenty years later, although a slightly rougher, more raucous version (featuring Dylan on shared vocals) appeared on the album Doug Sahm and Band in 1972. An alternate take was later featured on Another Self Portrait. Both takes are dominated by Keith’s steel guitar, giving the song a sound that is closer to the ‘Nashville sound’ than the songs Dylan had actually recorded in Nashville. It is a slow country waltz and perhaps the closest Dylan came to emulating his ‘first hero’ Hank Williams. The persona he adopts is, like almost all of Williams’ narrator, a ‘lonesome guy’, for whom romance does not come easily – although Dylan never attempts to plumb the depths of despair of songs like Cold, Cold Heart or I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Wallflower is certainly a sad song, but its emotions are conveyed with gentleness and sensitivity.
Although Wallflower can be regarded as an obscure Dylan track, it has since been covered by a host of other performers such as Buddy and Julie Miller, David Bromberg, Elvis Costello and Diana Kraal. Although the lyrics are very minimal, Dylan achieves an authentic country feel, so much so that one can certainly imagine Hank Williams singing it. The tone of the song is graceful and restrained. It begins with the chorus line: …Wallflower, wallflower, won’t you dance with me… This is repeated three times with variations in the following line. Firstly Dylan establishes the character of the narrator: …I’m sad and lonely too… We then get the (highly expected)…I’m falling in love with you… followed by the rather despairing …The night will soon be gone… The choruses are punctuated by short, plaintive verses; the first of which establishes that the narrator is as nervous and unsure of himself as the shy girl he is singing to: ..Just like you I’m wonderin’ what I’m doin’ here/ Just like you I’m wonderin’ what’s goin’ on… Later, as he begins to become more desperate, he cries, perhaps hopelessly, that …you’re gonna be mine, one of these days… In the final chorus he pleads for her to …Take a chance on me… and begs …Please let me ride you home…
What’s the Matter with Me?
The rather maudlin tone of the song suggests, however, that the narrator’s loneliness will not be assuaged. It may well be that he has been too shy to even approach the girl. In fact he admits that he is very much a ‘wallflower’ himself. Although the song is clearly an exercise in writing a tearful country romance, the way Dylan’s narrator positions himself here is far from the positive declarations of love in New Morning songs such as If Not For You and Time Passes Slowly. He appears to be ‘sitting on the fence’, as if he fears making any positive move. At a time when other singer-songwriters like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor were building considerable public profiles, he presents himself here as if he is a mere ‘wallflower’ in the music world, sitting on the sidelines and being ignored. This is of course a great exaggeration. Despite his relative silence, his three song headlining appearance at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh a few months before had demonstrated his massive public profile. In some ways his absence from ‘the scene’ had only increased his legendary status.
Earlier in the year Dylan had entered the studio with Leon Russell and his band. They recorded two new compositions, both of which appeared to many at the time to be rather slight efforts. These songs, however, went on to become staples in Dylan’s live shows over the next few decades and both were covered by a wide range of artists. Neither can be said to display the poetic complexity of his most celebrated work but both are genuine experiments in song texture and composition. Although it is usually highly perilous to identify Dylan’s narrators with his own voice, the narrator of Watching the River Flow can easily be seen as that of Dylan himself, self-consciously explaining to the public why he is prevaricating about his future direction and why he remains detached from the rapidly changing music scene. The opening line …What’s the matter with me, I don’t have much to say… is disarmingly honest, especially coming from a singer who so often hides behind assumed personas. Dylan appears to be using the song both to test his own mettle and to ask himself whether he is truly capable of returning to the fray of being a full time performer.
The sound of the song is perhaps surprising, given its lyrical content. While the narrator may appear to be rather passive, the music is highly energetic and uplifting. Leon Russell’s dynamic honky tonk piano playing dominates the track, with Jesse Ed Davis supplying prominent fuzzy guitar licks. The music reaches several moments of great energy, then slows down almost to a stop before recommencing, very much in Russell’s characteristic style. This allows Dylan to deliver a lyric in which he veers between energy and apathy. We first glimpse him in an all night cafe. Dawn is coming up as he walks …to and fro beneath the moon… Outside the cafe …the trucks are rolling slow… rather like the singer himself, as he takes his position up on the river bank to sit and …watch the river flow… He seems somewhat indecisive, directionless and unmotivated. Although he tells us he wishes he was …back in the city/ ‘Stead of this ol’ bank of sand… fantasises about being reunited with his ‘true love’ and claims that if he had wings and could fly he would follow this urge, he is actually quite ‘contented’ just to stay where he is.
As he sits by the river, he retreats into negative thoughts. The imagery Dylan presents is, however, particularly vague, demonstrating quite clearly that he really ‘doesn’t have much to say’. All he can think of is …People disagreeing about just about everything/ Makes you stop and wonder why.. Later the same thought encourages further passivity, making him just …wanna stop and read a book… He recounts instances of two people he saw on the street on the previous day, one who …couldn’t help but cry… and another who…was really shook… In the last two verses he repeats the lines …This ol’ river keeps on rolling though/ No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow/ And as long as it does I’ll just sit here and watch the river flow… Despite these rather lazy, negative thoughts the rising and falling music seems to be trying to encourage him to ‘get off his ass’ and motivate himself.
One paradox of the song is that, although the narrator is supposedly content to let the world go by, in reality we feel that he will never actually be happy or fulfilled if that is all he continues to do. Here the lyrics tell one story and the music tells another. It seems that he is actually quite desperate to return to a state of full engagement and creativity, but something is holding him back. In concert the song is frequently played at the beginning of the show, as if Dylan is challenging himself to explore the musical textures and limits of whatever band he is playing with .A further paradox is that there are times in an artist’s life when ‘watching the river flow’ may actually be the best thing to do. Inspiration is, of course, a difficult spirit to grasp. If an artist tries too hard to keep producing ‘masterpieces’ then his or her unconscious mind can become blocked and the art itself can become merely repetitive and uninspired. Popular music is full of examples too numerous to mention. There are times when the best thing for an artist to do is merely to sit in contemplation and wait patiently for that ‘river’ of inspiration to begin to flow again.
One of the many pressures that Dylan had needed to face since his breakthrough in 1963 had been the weight of the immense praise that had been loaded onto him. While other popular music stars were celebrated as entertainers, Dylan had frequently been labelled a ‘genius’. Having established his career at a time when record companies expected artists to produce two albums a year as well as singles and continuous live performances, he had channelled his creativity at such an astonishing rate that, by his mid twenties, he had already produced a huge number of songs – such as A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Mr. Tambourine Man, Desolation Row, Visions of Johanna and All Along the Watchtower – which had been widely celebrated as poetic and musical ‘masterpieces’. In retrospect it is hardly surprising that, as he approached thirty, he needed to ‘step back’ and take stock by making music that was less demanding. But Dylan was still a young man and the urge to create more ‘masterpieces’ was clearly a strong one.
These concerns are dealt with in a more satirical way in the other track which Dylan recorded with Leon Russell’s band – When I Paint My Masterpiece. In many ways this highly self reflective piece was the most lyrically ambitious song he had written since the John Wesley Harding album, even if it lacks the self consciously poetic language that he had once frequently used. Like Watching the River Flow, Dylan has frequently turned to it in his live shows, often adapting or changing the lyrics to suit has current frame of mind. On the 1975 leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue it was used as the set opener, perhaps as an ironic message to an audience which naturally expected him to keep pumping out works of genius. On its initial release by Dylan, however, it was relegated to the end of a new ‘Greatest Hits’ album.
Masterpiece was also the first song Dylan had written for several years in which he adopts the role of storyteller. It relates the story of a highly celebrated and popular artist – who may or may not be Dylan himself – on a ‘whistle stop’ tour of Europe which is so exhausting that creating a masterpiece is the last thing he has time for. It is never made clear whether the artist is a musician, a painter or a sculptor. In later years part of the reason for the song’s increased resonance may have been that, by then, Dylan was actually working in all of these mediums. The story – light hearted in tone though it is – dramatises how difficult it is to balance the demands of creativity with the pressures of fame. At this point in his career – as an artist working in a mass medium – Dylan was caught between these two forces and was trying to find a way to balance them in order to do full justice to his immense creative capabilities, while remaining connected to the more mundane basic human needs for love, companionship and family relationships.
The song has three eight line verses. It relates its story, which is told in the first person, with considerable economy. The opening lines are especially humorous, as they appear to present a tourist’s-eye view of the site of classical antiquity …Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble/ Ancient footprints are everywhere… the narrator proclaims, as if the many ruins of Ancient Rome are merely so much useless ‘rubble’. He complains that …You could almost think that you’re seeing double/ On a cold dark night on the Spanish Stairs… Despite being in a location crowded with ancient ‘masterpieces’ (so much so that he almost pictures a double image of the city as being both modern and ancient at the same time) his main concerns are everyday ones. Having visited the famous Spanish Steps in rather inclement weather, all he wants to do is to return to his hotel room where, in another comical aside, he tells us that he has a …date with Botticelli’s’ Venus…
The allusion here is to The Birth of Venus, an early Renaissance masterpiece in which an unfeasibly beautiful woman has emerged fully formed from the sea. But as Venus is the goddess of love, we can assume that he will really be hooking up with a woman who he regards as especially desirable. Thus he is anxious to forego his ‘cultural activities’. When he tells us that …She promised to be there with me/ When I paint my masterpiece… this is surely another piece of ironic self justification. In The Band’s highly atmospheric version on the album Cahoots, which was released before Dylan’s recording, ‘Botticelli’s’ niece’ is replaced by the rather more prosaic …pretty little girl from Greece…
The narrator continues to outline his attempts to view the city’s ancient monuments: …Oh the hours that I spent inside the Coliseum… he complains…Dodging lions and wasting time… Through his ‘double vision’ he now jokingly pictures himself as a historical martyr who is about to be fed to the lions. In reality, however, he feels that he is just ‘wasting time’. Then he declares…Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see them… The real ‘lions’ he has been dodging and who are clearly bugging him are the intrusive paparazzi who – as the next verse reveals – are constantly hounding him. He complains that …it sure has been a long hard climb… Clearly tired from travelling, he then pictures …train wheels running through the back of my memory/ As the daylight hours do increase… concluding, with more studied irony, which invokes classical music, that …Some day, everything’s gonna be smooth like a rhapsody/ When I paint my masterpiece… But right now, ‘painting masterpieces’ is the last thing on his mind.
In most versions of the song, there is a short and especially funny bridge, which runs …Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola/ Oh to be back in the land of Coca Cola!… For some reason this does not appear in Dylan’s original. These lines lampoon the narrator as something of a philistine, who despite being surrounded by so much ‘high culture’, yearns for home and its distinctive ‘junk culture’. In the alternate solo piano version later released on Another Self Portrait, the second line becomes …Sure wished I hadn’t sold my old victrola/ Ain’t nothing like that old rockanrolla… A victrola is a portable record player which travelling musicians often took with them on such journeys abroad. Here the decidedly lowbrow narrator longs for some ‘good old rock and roll’ to lighten his journey, rather than a classical ‘rhapsody’.
In the final verse we are given more explanatory context. The narrator leaves Rome and lands in Brussels, where he is harassed by …clergy men in uniform…,who presumably want to preach to him …young girls… who are …pulling muscles… in an attempt to reach him and …newspaper men eating candy… who …had to be held back by big police… The characterisation of the ‘newspaper men’ experiencing their ‘sugar rush’ when he appears is especially funny. The childish description ‘big police’ reinforces the infantile insanity of the whole situation. Even though he tries to reassure himself that …Some day everything’s gonna be different/ When I paint my masterpiece… this is hard to believe. The song is one of Dylan’s comic gems but it is also a sardonic commentary on his current situation. In a year or two – when he finally returned to touring on his ‘mega tour’ of arenas with The Band – he would have to, perhaps reluctantly, plunge himself back into the public limelight. But right now, he clearly has no intention of doing so. ‘Masterpieces’ will have to wait.
The other song Dylan wrote and recorded in 1971 was perhaps the most surprising. The single George Jackson was quite unequivocally a protest against the very recent death in prison of a leading Black Power activist and featured Dylan alone on acoustic guitar and harmonica. On the B Side he presented a gospel-flavoured ‘big band’ version featuring Leon Russell and a trio of female backing singers. It was the first time since 1964 that Dylan had released such a song. One might imagine that such a surprising move would have generated considerable publicity. But the culture had moved on since 1965/66 when Dylan had taken such a firm stand against diehard folkies who lamented him moving away from such material. Like Watching the River Flow it was only a very minor hit. Dylan, still in retreat from the media circus, made very little effort to promote either record.
In releasing such an unequivocally romanticised defence of the dead prisoner, Dylan was courting greater controversy than when he had sung about the deaths of Emmett Till, Medgar Evars or Hattie Carroll – all of whom were innocent victims of racist murderers. George Jackson was a far more divisive figure. He was a member of the militant Black Panthers, an organisation which the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had declared to be enemies of the state. Jackson had been in prison for over ten years, having been given an indeterminate sentence for a relatively minor robbery when still a teenager. In jail he had educated himself to a high level and later became the author of The Soledad Letters, which analysed the way that young black men were incarcerated in the US penal system for minor crimes as a manifestation of well established institutional racism. Like other Black Panthers, however, he did not rule out violence as a means of reclaiming the rights of black people. His death occurred during a prison riot in which several fellow prisoners and a number of wardens were also killed. To his supporters, he was a hero but to more conservative elements, he was a representative of a dangerous ‘terrorist group’.
There was no doubt which side Dylan came down on. He describes Jackson in glowing terms, portraying him as an unblemished martyr and victim of oppression. The song, which was supposedly written in one day and recorded the next, certainly lacks the subtlety of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll or Only a Pawn in Their Game. Based around a simple repeated guitar figure, and delivered in a voice not so far away from Dylan’s early protests and featuring harmonica breaks, it begins with the quintessential opening of a blues song: …I woke up this morning/ There was tears in my bed/ They killed a man I really loved/ They shot him through the head… This is followed by the first chorus, which is repeated verbatim in the next four short verses and which simply states: …Lord, lord, they cut George Jackson down/ Lord, lord, they laid him in the ground… The following verses are similarly straightforward. Dylan informs us that ..They sent him off to prison for a seventy dollar robbery/ They closed the door behind him and they threw away the key… The use of the simple accusatory pronoun ‘they’ is the kind of generalisation he had avoided in his early songs of social protest.
GEORGE JACKSON
In many ways George Jackson resembles Woody Guthrie composition like Pretty Boy Floyd, in which a rebellious outlaw figure is heavily mythologised, than Dylan’s earlier protest material. He is not concerned here with analysing the real life details of Jackson’s life. No attempt is made to provide any kind of biography of the man. It is arguable that the song could just as easily have been about the murder of Martin Luther King some three years earlier. When he delivers the lines …He wouldn’t take shit from no-one/ He wouldn’t bow down or kneel/Authorities they hated him/ Because he was just too real… it is something of a shock to hear Dylan, who had always avoided profanity in his songs, use the word ‘shit’. But here, of course, he is speaking in every day ‘plain speak’, just as Jackson himself might have done, which gives the utterance considerable power. Rather than outlining any actual evidence of the murder, Dylan makes a generalised statement that identifies what the effect of such a killing would be: …Prison guards they cursed him/ And they watched him from above/ They were frightened of his power/ They were scared of his love… He is sickened by the apparently endless persecution of Black people and their leaders and he expresses this with great clarity. The song is a cry from the heart.
In the final verse, Dylan then delivers one of the strangest, most equivocal statements of his entire career …Sometimes I think this whole world… he sings …Is one big prison yard/ Some of us are prisoners/ The rest of us are guards… This is a strong philosophical and existential proclamation which lifts the song out of its immediate context. It is arguably a very simplified and perhaps naive assertion. But Dylan is not attempting to produce an intellectually coherent statement here. This highly ambiguous pronouncement may also relate to his own position. He may feel ‘imprisoned’ because he does not consider himself free to really express himself for fear of being judged or (in a society like the USA which freely allows individuals to arm themselves with deadly weapons) of becoming a target himself. He also seems to be implying that, in the case of tragic events like the death of George Jackson, we are all responsible.
Although the songs of 1971 may have ‘disappeared under the radar’ at the time as far as the wider public were concerned, they were important stepping stones in Dylan’s development. The fruits of these experiments would be delivered in his great albums of the mid-1970s, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, Desire and Street Legal, which included material that was – like this fascinating group of songs – sometimes sentimental, sometimes comic, sometimes political and often philosophical.
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