[song] "Abandoned Love" (Bob Dylan) Bob Dylan, Biograph/'75 (1985) Everly Brothers, Born Yesterday (1986); Wings of a Nightingale (1998) Sean Keane, All Heart No Roses (1993) The Beatles (performed by George Harrison), Artifacts I-The Definitive Collection of Beatles Rarities 1969-1994 (1995) Various Artists (performed by Chuck Prophet), Outlaw Blues, Volume 2 (1995) Michel Montecrossa, Born in Time (2000) Borb Jungr, Every Grain of Sand: Barb Jungr Sings Bob Dylan (2002)
Dylan wrote the brilliant "Abandoned Love" as he was putting together his Desire album and organizing the Rolling Thunder Revue in the summer of 1975. His one impromptu performance of the song-probably just days after he wrote it-was at the Other End on Bleecker Street in New York City's Greenwich Village on July 3, 1975, during a Ramblin' Jack Elliott gig. It was that live version of the song that Paul Cable, in his book Bob Dylan: His Unreleased Recordings (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980), described as "Beautiful, eerie, easily as good as Blonde on Blonde lyrics and a tune that is unusual and perfect."
Recorded for Desire but eventually dropped from that collection in favor of "Joey," "Abandoned Love" is an up-tempo lament about the rejection of a lordly woman whose manipulative ways have haunted the narrator for way too long. It is underscored by Scarlet Rivera's mournful violin, which perfectly captures the resigned mood and theme of this exotic song filled with loss and yearning. It proved to be one of the highlights of Dylan's Biograph retrospective package, on which it was eventually released a decade later.
Dylan composed "Abandoned Love" as he was in the early throes of his breakup with his wife Sara. And though he would usually steer clear of ever admitting any hint of autobiography in one of his songs, it is hard not to make that connection here. Our narrator plays the fool but does not lose his cool as he comes to terms with the dissolution of a relationship. He tries to come off as if he is the one making the decision to split, but the tracks of his tears are easily discerned. The song is not without anger and relief as he speaks of wearing a ball and chain and refers to his ex as a queen, implying that he's sick and tired of fulfilling her (and everybody else's) wishes and expectations.
Dylan's 1975 Other End performance of "Abandoned Love" is the stuff of lore. After backing up Elliott for a couple of famous songs (Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd" and Leroy Carr's "How Long, How Long Blues"), he then lit into his new baby, solo. The lyrics he sang that night did differ slightly from the Biograph release.
[song] "Abraham, Martin and John" (Dick Holler) Dion, Dion (1968) Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Greatest Hits (1968) Marvin Gaye, Hits of Marvin Gaye (1972) Harry Belafonte, This Is Harry Belafonte (1990) Mahalia Jackson, Great Mahalia Jackson (1991) Leonard Nimoy, Spaced Out: The Best of Leonard Nimoy (1997)
This homage to three assassinated leaders-Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy-was written in 1968, the year that the bell tolled for Dr. King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Dylan's torch song arrangement was sung as a duet with Clydie King in concert in late 1980 and 1981 and served as a kind of renewed commitment to and reminder of Dylan's interest in progressive politics after the distractions of his religious turn in the late 1970s and early 1980.
"Abraham, Martin and John" was originally and most famously recorded by Dion DiMucci, formerly of Dion and the Belmonts, in 1968. Musician and folklorist Tom Glazer, in the liner notes to Songs of Peace, Freedom & Protest, calls the song "a most affecting rock and roll hit.... From the look of this song, it seems too simple to be of much interest, but try to listen to Dion sing it on his hit record."
Biographical information on Dick Holler, the song's composer, is virtually nonexistent. Hearsay information suggests that he wrote songs with titles such as "Bob Dylan Request No. 1," as well as "Hey There Tricky Dicky," "Cole, Cooke and Redding," and "Greater Miami Subterranean Rock."
Indeed, the poignant song of martyrdom was a hit for Dion as 1968 drew to a close. It was a turbulent year in American history with the escalation of the Vietnam War facing strong opposition and the Robert Kennedy and King assassinations fresh in people's minds. The emotional Holler song was a perfectly timed stroke of genius-a lilting, folksy ballad that barely left a dry eye as it climbed to No. 4 in the U.S. charts. Holler devotes a verse to Bobby Kennedy at the song's conclusion ("Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?") that depicts the spirit of the slain senator joining his brethren over a hill. This verse, on at least a couple of the tapes of Dylan performing the song, appeared to elicit a particularly warm applause from the audience, who seem to be acknowledging his return from fundamentalist Christian doctrine to the old "protest" days.
Hopelessly naïve to the harsh truths of realpolitik, "Abraham, Martin and John" tries to act as a reminder of the best its subjects had to offer. The song also comments on history's cold and fickle hand, as one day we "just looked around and they're gone."
[song] "Absolutely Sweet Marie" (Bob Dylan) Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde (1966) Bob Dylan/Various Artists (performed by George Harrison), Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (1993) Flamin' Groovies, Jumpin' in the Night (1979); Groovies' Greatest Grooves (1989) Ola Magnell, Gaia (1983) Jason and the Scorchers, Fervor (1983); Midnight Roads and Stages Seen (1998); Wildfires & Misfits: Two Decades of Outtakes & Rarities (2002) Storing, Butter, Bread and Green Tsiis (1990) Rich Lerner, Performs Songs by Bob Dylan (1990); Napoleon in Rags (2001) Steve Gibbons, The Dylan Project (1998) David Nelson Band, Visions Under the Moon (1999) Various Artists (performed by C. J. Chenier), Blues on Blonde on Blonde (2003)
An elixir to those who found Dylan's mid-'60s songs a bit dour, "Absolutely Sweet Marie" is an exuberant, pure Beale Street, up-tempo skip complete with a slew of memorable lines that could be anybody's koan-most memorably, "To live outside the law you must be honest."
In addition to the one-liners, Dylan uses some intriguing stage props and characters in this tune, too: a ruined balcony, a yellow railroad, a Persian drunkard, and a riverboat captain. These either help set the scene or play roles as the narrator (an actual or figurative excon), bitter about the time he's done for Marie, is left empty-handed. He moves from one barely camouflaged symbolic expression of sexuality to another: from complaining of frustration ("beating on my trumpet" when "it gets so hard, you see") to boasting of potency (jumping the railroad gate, the six white horses, etc.) in the tradition of the old blues masters like Blind Lemon Jefferson. This song feels like an old Piedmont blues but with touches that are strictly Dylan (note the Persian drunkard)-even the allusion to Blind Lemon's six white horses seems to have found greener pastures. Sparked by a great organ introduction and driven by tight ensemble playing, the Blonde on Blonde "Sweet Marie" includes a pungent harmonica break.
During a 1991 interview published in Paul Zollo's book Songwriters on Songwriting, Expanded Fourth Edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), Dylan placed "Sweet Marie" in poetic context, with specific, almost rabbinical, deconstruction of the line "I stand here looking at your yellow railroad/in the ruins of your balcony" that, on the surface, might first appear to be a throwaway or at best poetic mumbo-jumbo:
[T]hat's as complete as you can be. Every single letter in that line. It's all true. On a literal and on an escapist level.... Getting back to the yellow railroad, that could be from looking someplace. Being a performer, you travel the world. You're not just looking out of the same window everyday. You're not just walking down the same old street. So you must make yourself observe whatever. But most of the time it hits you. You don't have to observe. It hits you. Like, "yellow railroad" could have been a blinding day when the sun was so bright on a railroad someplace and it stayed on my mind.... These aren't contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out.
The famous line about living outside the law may have been cribbed from The Line Up, an obscure early Eli Wallach film from 1958, directed by Don Siegel (with a great, pre-Bullitt car chase through the San Francisco hills), in which a curiously ambivalent drug trafficker explains the ethics of criminality thusly: "When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty." To bring this lineage full circle, the screenwriters of 1997's Titanic saw fit to insert yet another variation of the line in that film-coming from the lips of Leonardo DiCaprio, no less.
Speculation surrounding the origin of the title is pretty far-flung, with everything from a type of biscuit to a famous carnival "Fat Lady" to a popular nineteenth-century Irish song by Percy French (see "Mountains of the Mourne") thrown up for consideration.
Dylan didn't perform "Sweet Marie" live until his Never Ending Tour kicked off in 1988. It has remained in the playlist since as an intermittent, mostly early-concert inclusion.
[song] "Accidentally Like a Martyr" (Warren Zevon) See also Warren Zevon Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy (1978)
Just weeks after Warren Zevon announced that he had terminal cancer, Dylan hit the road to start his fall 2002 tour in Seattle. Dylan's memorable show that October evening included three Zevon compositions, an extraordinary, unprecedented tribute to a deserving if generally underacknowledged talent. "Accidentally Like a Martyr," an early Zevon hit dealing with the pitfalls of charisma and cults of personality, is a song that undoubtedly would have seemed all too familiar to Dylan.
[song] "Ache" (Unknown/possibly Eric von Schmidt) aka "Senior Prom," "Teenager in Love" Ramblin' Jack Elliott (performed with Bob Dylon and Danny Kalb), The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (soundtrack) (2000)
Dylan shared the vocals with Danny Kalb and Ramblin' Jack Elliott on this hard-on-the-ear coming-of-age spoof song every teenager should take to heart. The doo-wopish satire, about the narrator going to his senior prom, was clumsily handled by Dylan and company as a small part of a twelve-hour, multiact hootenanny at Riverside Church and broadcast in late July 1961 on the long-gone and still dearly missed New York City FM radio station WRVR. Ramblin' Jack's "doowahs" in the background, while augmenting the spirit of the song quite nicely, completely drown out Dylan's vocals at certain points on the lone, surviving performance of "Acne." Folkster Eric von Schmidt is sometimes given credit as the composer of "Acne" in various Dylan discographies but it is such a scrap of a song that any attribution seems suspect at best. Probably the most amazing thing about "Acne" is that it saw commercial release nearly thirty-nine years to the day of its original recording when it was included on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, a quirky documentary film about Jack Elliott, a great eccentric American troubadour who befriended Dylan early on. Dylan recorded "Acne" the following winter at the New York City apartment of radio host Cynthia Gooding, whose show he appeared on just around that time.
[album] Across the Borderline/Willie Nelson Sony Music CD 52752, CS 52752. Released 1993. Produced by Don Was.
Willie Nelson's grand tour of contemporary song finds him showcasing the works of, among others, Paul Simon, Lyle Lovett, Willie Dixon, Bob Dylan, and himself. In working with these artists, Nelson deftly mixes his brand of country swing with English art rock and South African-flavored folk rock. Nelson duets with Dylan on "Heartland," their collaborative piece inspired by Farm Aid (the annual series of benefit concerts to aid the American farmer), and he also covers Dylan's jaded complaint from Oh Mercy, "What Was It You Wanted?"
Even though he made a bold move by hiring rock producer Don Was to shepherd the album, Nelson remained wise to the folkways that underlie this music, infusing each gem of a song with his sympathetic personality as he creates as austere and clear-eyed a portrait of America as anything from the pages of novelist John Dos Passos.
[song] "Across the Borderline" (Ry Cooder/John Hiatt/Jim Dickinson) Ry Cooder, Get Rhythm (1987) Flaco Jimenez, Partners (1992) Willie Nelson, Across the Borderline (1993) Jim Dickinson, A Thousand Footprints in the Sand (1997) Miller Anderson, Celtic Moon (1998)
It's hard to determine where Dylan learned "Across the Borderline," a melodic if cynical piece of far-flung illegal immigrant romance with Old West and anti-Oz undertones. Written from the point of view of someone who seems to know firsthand that the streets of the U.S. are not paved with gold and that those who venture to the land of broken promises will encounter far more than they bargained for, the song was jointly penned by three great songwriters but wasn't officially released until about a year after Dylan started performing it during his 1986 tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Maybe Willie Nelson shared it with him during a late-night woodshedding session, perhaps he saw the movie for which it was written, or maybe it merely appeared on a demo tape that came in the mail one day.
Whatever the case, "Across the Borderline" remained in Dylan's set lists as a sporadic inclusion during the Never Ending Tours of 1988 through 1992 before disappearing for a while and then popping up again in the late 1990s. In Dylan's hands, the tune always came off as almost unbearably romantic and heartbreaking, the tragic hero depicted in the song about to walk to his inevitable doom.
"Across the Borderline" had its beginnings in the early 1980s, when British film director Tony Richardson charged Ry Cooder with coming up with a song for the three-and-a-half-minute opening sequence for The Border, which starred Jack Nicholson. In the scene, a young couple attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexican border.
Continues...
Excerpted from KEYS TO THE RAIN by OLIVER TRAGER Copyright © 2004 by Oliver Trager. Excerpted by permission.
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Overview