VIDEO PODCAST 2: Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man

EXTRACTS

Mr. Tambourine Man is certainly one of Bob Dylan’s most famous creations; so much so that it has become a kind of ‘signature song’. If any one of the characters in Dylan’s lyrics can be said to represent the singer himself, it is this mysterious and enigmatic figure who inspires the song’s narrator with his musical genius. It might be said that every time we listen to Bob Dylan, we are under the ‘tambourine man’’s magical spell. With its emphasis on spiritual and artistic transcendence through hedonistic pleasure seeking, the song is also one of the most iconic expressions of the spirit of the 1960s – an era in which popular music became the most powerful channel of expression of a cultural ‘revolution’. To follow the ‘tambourine man’ you do not need to join a religious group, devote yourself to serious learning or offer him your devotion. The ‘tambourine man’ is not a guru. He represents no movement, cult or closed society. He is that voice inside every one of us that tells us that there really is more to life than the daily grind and that we can become deeper, more fulfilled individuals merely by unleashing the spiritual power that lies within us. Ultimately he encourages us to dance not only our troubles but our mundane everyday thoughts, worries and concerns away – to engage with an ecstatic experience in order to transform ourselves into more fully realised beings.

It is an unusual feature of the song that it begins with the chorus – a trick Dylan may have picked up from The Beatles, whose hits like She Loves You and Can’t Buy Me Love use the same technique, drawing listeners directly into the dialogue. The verses all operate in relation to this chorus, reassuring us that the narrator will indeed follow the musical path being laid out for him. Mr. Tambourine Man is above all a celebration of the power of music as a transformative force. It begins with a little contextualisation, placing us inside the narrator’s rather fevered consciousness. The initial metaphor …Well, I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand… places us on the beach on which the song will later reach its climax. It is as if the narrator is letting the grains of sand run through his fingers, perhaps contemplating Blake’s famous adage …To see the world in a grain of sand…. He pictures the ‘wild night’ he is yet to recover from as vanishing into the sand, an image which is reminiscent of Shelley’s Ozymandias in which …two vast trunkless legs of stone… remain in the desert as reminders of a long dead civilisation. The sand has perhaps appeared to him in a storm, temporarily blinding him. But sleep still will not come.

In the apparently contradictory line …My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet… we get the sense that the narrator is standing ‘outside himself’, looking down on his disembodied soul. The lines are an exquisite expression of how an individual may feel after a night of excess. The expression ‘branded on my feet’ may be taken to indicate that the tambourine man has somehow already taken possession of him, making him his ‘slave’. …I have no one to meet… he declares, indicating that the ‘trip’ he is about to take us on is one that he has no choice but to make. Thus the song already contains a feeling of an inexorable rush towards an ecstatic conclusion, although he concludes rather mysteriously that …the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming… The ‘street’, like the ‘empire’ is personified, giving us the impression that we are being swept into a world whose physical elements are fully alive.

Mr. Tambourine Man functions as a kind of declaration of independence for Dylan. It represents the key moment in which his writing shifts from the political to the transcendental. The song was written in mid-1964 and a version was tried out at the Another Side sessions later in the year, featuring Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on rather uncertain harmony vocals. But this rather unimpressive take was shelved and the song finally appeared on Bringing it All Back Home in 1965, shortly before The Byrds’ version was released. It has since been a feature of Dylan’s set lists throughout his career. Dylan has never changed the words. There are many outstanding performances of the song, and a few that are rather bizarre, as Dylan experimented with time signatures in the late 2000s. In 1966 the song was featured as part of the ‘acoustic half’ of the shows in which extraordinarily intense versions of the songs, featuring many drawn out syllables and extended harmonica solos. Dylan sounds desperately drawn here to join the ‘cosmic dance’.   In contrast, the mesmeric solo version Dylan performs in Boston on 25 November 1976, which is featured at the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019), is gentle and affirming.

There are actually surprisingly few cover versions of Mr. Tambourine Man. Many of them, like the warmly engaging ‘pop’ versions by Johnny Rivers and Stevie Wonder, tend to be styled more closely to The Byrds’ famous version than Dylan’s. Judy Collins recorded a straightforward ‘folk’ reading with some quite beautiful vocals and Barb Jungr gave the song a jazzy inflexion. One of the most distinctive covers is that of Melanie, who gives the song a particularly bitter sweet reading. But the song is not one for which it is easy to change musical arrangements, as its melodic development is already so strong. It is one of Dylan’s most perfectly realised creations. It allows the poet to step boldly and defiantly into ‘the dance’ of symbolist art. At the same time it displays a certain ‘pop’ sensibility which has turned it into a much-loved ‘golden oldie’. Mr. Tambourine Man has thus a unique status – both symbolist poem and classic hit single. Here Dylan invokes the spirit of musical poetry in a kind of declaration of independence from his role as a ‘public poet’.  It is the beginning, perhaps, of the exploration of inner consciousness and spiritual meaning that will loom large in much of Dylan’s long career.

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