PODCAST: BOB DYLAN: A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season 2:12 Tears of Rage: The Heart Is Full of Gold

Chris Gregory discusses TEARS OF RAGE, the BOB DYLAN/RICHARD MANUEL SONG from THE BASEMENT TAPES and MUSIC FROM BIG PINK

EXTRACTS

In its tone, singing style and subject matter Tears of Rage is a radical shift for Dylan. On the Basement Tapes his voice is mellower and deeper than on Blonde on Blonde, which had been recorded just a year before. Like all the 1967 songs, it is concise, with only three verses and a repeated chorus. And whereas the final shows of ’66 had needed to be defiantly loud and raucous to drown out the ‘naysayers’ in the crowd, the musicians now play quietly, with considerable restraint. But it is the subject matter of the song which represents the biggest change. It is a kind of dramatic monologue, sung in the voice of an anguished parents who react to the actions and attitudes of their rebellious daughter. Whereas once Dylan had rallied the cause of youth against the older generation, proudly declaring that …Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command… now he focuses on the incomprehension that so many parents experienced in the 1960s at their children’s attitudes to patriotism, war, sex, drugs and personal freedom and frames it within a tragic context.

In many ways, Tears of Rage can be seen as a kind of ‘answer song’ to The Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home, one of the outstanding tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in May 1967; just as Dylan and The Band began recording in the basement of Big Pink. The album was instantly acclaimed as the group’s piece de resistance and is still revered today as the apex of the short lived era of psychedelic music. Dylan was later quoted as indicating that he was not impressed by the layers of production tricks and techniques that could be heard on the album. Grounded as he is in the ethos of the blues, he has always preferred a rawer, more spontaneous, approach to recording, so that his songs can be developed in live performance. It seems that, as soon as he heard Sgt. Pepper he decided that his own music would proceed in a radically different direction. Rather than adding psychedelic effects to his songs or producing classically-influenced ‘mini-symphonies’, as both The Beatles and the Beach Boys had done, he was now digging deeper and deeper into his own musical roots as he and his musicians worked through many covers of folk, blues and country songs. All of these were recorded, not on professional studio equipment, but on Garth Hudson’s trusty reel to reel tape recorder, for an uncertain posterity. The Basement Tapes were not released for another eight years, during which their existence spawned the nascent bootleg industry. Even then, only a selection of the songs appeared on the album, which was poorly mastered and left out a number of the key songs.