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NONSENSE SONGS FROM ‘THE BASEMENT TAPES’: SOME EXTRACTS…
Tiny Montgomery… Nonsense?
The first song to be recorded in the basement of Big Pink which displays these characteristics is the bizarre Tiny Montgomery.The song does not have a chorus as such but Dylan’s vocals are backed by high pitched harmonies by Manuel, Helm and Robertson which act as a counter melody to the main tune. This is highly rhythmic and infectious and is driven mainly by Dylan’s acoustic guitar. The song thus has a kind of ‘unsung chorus’ and each verse ends in a refrain indicating that the character will be soon be coming to ‘say hello’. Dylan affects a deeper vocal timbre than usual, which contrasts against the backing vocals to create a mood of considerable uncertainty. This is highly appropriate because we cannot be certain as to what kind of character Tiny Montgomery actually is. The song maintains an ambiguous balance between light hearted banter and a potentially threatening tone.
A nickname like ‘Tiny’ is often given ironically to persons who are extremely tall – a technique known as antiphrasis. One example was the 6ft 1 inch performer Tiny Tim, famous in the late 60s for novelty hits like Tiptoe Through the Tulips and other show tunes from the pre wear era, delivered in his distinctive falsetto. Tim had been a friend of Dylan in his Greenwich Village days and actually visited Woodstock in 1967 where he recorded some songs with The Band as backing musicians. The name also conjures up an image of a circus strongman. The use of such a nickname at once infantilises the character but also has a vaguely threatening nature. It is clear from the song that Mr. Montgomery is not a character to be messed with.
The Mighty Quinn : nonsense?
In the succeeding verses Dylan adopts the voice of a first person narrator who begins with a kind of personal declaration. He begins with the self-effacing statement …I like to do just like the rest/ I like my sugar sweet… In the first of the two Basement Tapes versions, he cackles memorably ...I likes to do… as if he is some cynical old timer watching the whole shebang from the sidewalk, perhaps spitting in the gutter as the parade goes by. The delicious paradoxical ambiguity of the second line can be read as a childish statement but also as a coded reference to sex or drugs. The next lines feature some of Dylan’s most memorable absurdist images: …But guarding fumes and making haste/ It ain’t my cup of meat… Here, as elsewhere on The Basement Tapes, he creates a comic effect but substituting an unexpected word for the obvious one. The expression he works around is the quintessentially British ‘my cup of tea’, usually used to indicate that whatever is being referred to is not what the speaker likes. The rhyming of ‘sweet’ and ‘meat’ is particularly comically effective here, suggesting that whatever the supposedly beneficent Quinn will bring will be more substantial – and potentially indigestible – than his followers might expect. The narrator then observes, a little caustically, that …Everybody’s ‘neath the trees/ Feeding pigeons on a limb/ But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here/ All the pigeons gonna run to him… suggesting that Quinn’s followers are nothing more than dumb ‘birds’ who are only interested in who is providing the most ‘crumbs’.
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