The words of the songs are quoted here in the form in which he sings them on the officially released albums on which they initially appeared. The Index of Dylan’s Songs and Writings, at the back, is supplemented by a General Index and by a list, Which Album a Song is on.
The new edition of the lyrics, Lyrics 1962–2002, unlike the original Writings and Drawings and the later Lyrics 1962–1985, is apparently not going to include Dylan’s Some Other Kinds of Songs . . ., or his other poems and miscellaneous prose, so for these I give references to the earlier collections.
The discrepancies between the printed and the other versions (whether officially released, studio out-takes, or bootlegged from performances) are notable. Sometimes they are noted in the commentary here. Clearly they are of relevance to Dylan’s intentions or changes of intention, and I have to admit that sometimes one performance decides to do without an effect that another has, and that I had thought and still think exquisite – for instance, the plaiting of the rhymes at the end of If Not For You. Oh well. I think of Shakespearean revision. Sometimes I read (or rather, listen) and sigh and wish.
Songs, Poems, Rhymes
Songs, Poems
Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master than he or she is their servant. The triangle of Dylan’s music, his voices, and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking.
One day a critic may do justice not just to all three of these independent powers, but to their interdependence in Dylan’s art. The interdependence doesn’t have to be a competition, it is a culmination – the word chosen by Allen Ginsberg, who could be an awe-inspiring poet and was an endearingly awful music-maker, for whom Dylan’s songs were “the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the ’50s & early ’60s”.16 Dylan himself has answered when asked:
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
[Pause] “Because I don’t know anything else to do. I’m good at it.”
How would you describe “it”?
“I’m an artist. I try to create art.”17
What follows this clarity, or follows from it, has been differently put by him over the forty years, finding itself crediting the words and the music variously at various times. The point of juxtaposing his utterances isn’t to catch him out, it is to see him catching different emphases in all this, undulating and diverse.
WORDS RULE, OKAY?
“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.”18
“It ain’t the melodies that’re important man, it’s the words.”19
MUSIC RULES, OKAY?
“Anyway it’s the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song. I only look at them musically. I only look at them as things to sing. It’s the music that the words are sung to that’s important. I write the songs because I need something to sing. It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into the air, the paper stays.”20
NEITHER ACOUSTIC NOR ELECTRIC RULES, OKAY?
Do you prefer playing acoustic over electric?
“They’re pretty much equal to me. I try not to deface the song with electricity or non-electricity. I’d rather get something out of the song verbally and phonetically than depend on tonality of instruments.”21
JOINT RULE, OKAY?
Would you say that the words are more important than the music?
“The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.”22
“It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words, there’s nothing that’s exploited. The words and the music, I can hear the sound of what I want to say.”23
“The lyrics to the songs . . . just so happens that it might be a little stranger than in most songs. I find it easy to write songs. I have been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren’t written out for just the paper, they’re written as you can read it, you dig? If you take whatever there is to the song away – the beat, the melody – I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can’t do that with either – songs that, if you took the beat and melody away, they wouldn’t stand up. Because they’re not supposed to do that you know. Songs are songs.”24
What’s more important to you: the way that your music and words sound, or the content, the message?
“The whole thing while it’s happening. The whole total sound of the words, what’s really going down is –”25
– at which point Dylan cuts across himself, at a loss for words with which to speak of words in relation to the whole total: “it either happens or it doesn’t happen, you know”. At a loss, but finding the relation again and again in the very songs.
It ought to be possible, then, to attend to Dylan’s words without forgetting that they are one element only, one medium, of his art. Songs are different from poems, and not only in that a song combines three media: words, music, voice. When Dylan offered as the jacket-notes for Another Side of Bob Dylan what mounted to a dozen pages of poems, he headed this Some Other Kinds of Songs . . . His ellipsis was to give you time to think. In our time, a dot dot dot communication.
Philip Larkin was to record his poems, so the publishers sent round an order form inviting you to hear the voice of the Toads bard. The form had a message from the poet, encouraging you – or was it discouraging you? For there on the form was Larkin insisting, with that ripe lugubrious relish of his, that the “proper place for my poems is the printed page”, and warning you how much you would lose if you listened to the poems read aloud: “Think of all the mis-hearings, the their / there confusions, the submergence of rhyme, the disappearance of stanza shape, even the comfort of knowing how far you are from the end.” Again, Larkin in an interview, lengthening the same lines:
I don’t give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, take it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don’t like hearing things in public, even music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the “score” that doesn’t “come to life” until it’s “performed”. It’s false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that is needed: the reader should “hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page.26
The human senses have different powers and