STUFF YOU GOTTA WATCH - Bob Dylan: New Morning

Bob Dylan's Underrated Albums Part One

By John V. Brennan
March 2007

"I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five experience, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice." --- Bob Dylan from his chapter titled New Morning, Chronicles Volume One

NEW MORNING

Recorded March through June 1970, New York
Released 1970
Bob Dylan: Vocal, Guitars, Organ, Piano, Harmonica
Al Kooper: Organ, Piano, Electric Guitar, French Horn
Dave Bromberg, : Electric Guitar, Dobro
Buzzy Felten: Electric Guitar
Harvey Brooks/Charlie Daniels: Electric Bass
Russ Kunkel/Billy Mundi: Drums
Hilda Harris, Albertine Robinson, Maeretha Stewart: Background Vocals
Produced by Bob Johnston ("Special Thanks: Al Kooper")

Side One: If Not For You | Day of the Locusts | Time Passes Slowly | Went to See the Gypsy |Winterlude | If Dogs Run Free
Side Two: New Morning | Sign on the Window | One More Weekend | The Man in Me | Three Angels | Father of Night

New Morning, released in 1970, was Bob Dylan's eleventh album (twelfth if you count the later-released The Basement Tapes, originally recorded in 1968). For reasons unknown, when New Morning was released on CD, it was with a white cover instead of the warm beige of the original LP. Further tampering occurred on the album's title track, which originally had a couple of seconds of musician chatter and clatter before Dylan started the song proper. On the CD, this chatter is now gone. Things like this bother me, because the beige cover and that studio noise added to New Morning's casual warmth and laid back "what the hell - the tape is rolling, let's play" feeling. Whenever I get ready to play this CD, I always picture the beige cover and am surprised when I pull it out of the Dylan rack and see that it is white. As I listen, I still see beige. This is Bob's "Beige Album". It's warm and rustic, unthreatening, and at times, a little bland. It is also my favorite underrated Dylan album.

New Morning was Dylan's second major "comeback" album in a career that has now seen more comebacks than anybody except possibly Friday the 13th's Jason. (1) In 1970, it wasn't that Dylan had been gone, it was just that what he had been doing recently was reviled by the rock intelligentsia. In fact, the previous album, Self Portrait, was long considered to be his worst ever, though time and stuff like 1980's Saved and 1988's Down in the Groove rescued Self Portrait from that ignominious spot in the Robert Zimmerman canon. Before New Morning came out, Dylan had not written a major song since the John Wesley Harding album, released at the tail end of 1967. Sure, 1969's Nashville Skyline had "Lay Lady Lay", "I Threw It All Away" and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" but they were not major songs, only expertly crafted pieces of countrified fluff that stood out against the rest of the simpler stuff on that album. Except for a handful of instrumentals, there were few honest Dylan compositions on the two-record followup Self Portrait, one of which was "All the Tired Horses", which went like this: "All the tired horses in the sun, how'm I supposed to get any ridin' done?". That's the whole song, repeated ad infinitum. It wasn't even sung by Dylan, but by a group of female singers over an acoustic guitar and Montovani-like strings. And it was the album opener! God, no wonder everybody hated this album when it came out! The other real Dylan song was a catchy ditty called "Living the Blues", which sounded exactly like a Nashville Skyline outtake and borrowed part of its melody from Hank Snow's "I Don't Hurt Any More". Nowadays, Self Portrait is undergoing a kind of reappraisal, and its eclectic weirdness is proving to be its salvation. It's still a bad album, but its bad in a fun way, even if for me, the fun still stops halfway through, somewhere in the middle of Dylan murdering "Blue Moon".

Still, whatever people may think of Self Portrait today, it was loathed back in the day, so when New Morning arrived, with twelve, count 'em, twelve brand new Dylan compositions, the album was greeted with a universal cry of "We've Got Dylan Back!". Funny thing is, New Morning still didn't contain any major Dylan songs - nothing to match the likes of "Mr. Tambourine Man", "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" or "All Along the Watchtower". The most well know song on the new album, "If Not for You", is slight country pop at best, although George Harrison and Olivia Newton-John both got good mileage out of it. It was, in fact, Newton-John's first international hit, and Harrison's tasteful, heartfelt version, tucked away on the massive All Things Must Pass, is one of my favorite Dylan covers.

Slim though it may be, "If Not for You" had just enough hooks to be a potential hit, as Olivia Newton-John proved, and Dylan seemed to know this too, recording it several different times, including at one session with Harrison himself. That take, little more than a rudimentary run-through, features Harrison's trademarked slide guitar, but the performance is lifeless, and Harrison's guitar is uncommonly annoying and much too high in the mix.

Bob Dylan could have followed down the road that Harrison take was leading him, and "If Not For You" could have been one of what I would call his "tedious classics" - songs that you know are good but are rendered dull by Dylan himself (think "Forever Young" or, if I may blashpeme, "Blowin' in the Wind"). But on the released take of "If Not For You", which opens the album, Dylan salvages the song from himself by riding it roughshod. Gone are the stately slide guitar riffs and the lilting melody. One of Dylan's most consistent habits is that, when given the choice between a perfect take and a sloppy one that has more spontaneity, he will choose the sloppy one time and again. You can lay money on it and win every time. The official version of "If Not For You" is not technically sloppy; the musicianship is superb. Its just filled with those little things that can bring a minor Dylan song to life, and it is noticeable immediately. Its about 25 percent faster than any previous version I've heard, and you can hear the band vamping on the same three chords at the beginning as they wait and wonder exactly when - if ever - Dylan will enter with the first line. He finally shows up about seven bars into it and, except for melody of the title phrase, he generally disregards the tune that George Harrison and Olivia Newton-John had fallen in love with and sings a kind of harmony line instead. He just sings it as he feels it at the moment, and if that means repeating the middle eight twice in a row in lieu of a harmonica or guitar break, so be it. He also adds a new chord just before the end of each verse, just for the hell of it.

It's the perfect album opener; he's made the song catchy instead of pretty, and for a minor Dylan song, the sound still grabs you and pulls you in immediately. It hints at kind of album New Morning will be, as in anything goes. Yet it sounds like nothing else on the album. "If Not for You" is guitar based, while most of the rest of the album is based around Dylan's piano playing, making it unique in his catalog. We're not talking gorgeous Elton John piano, or even rambunctious Jerry Lee Lewis piano. This is Dylan piano - pounding away at block chords, using the keyboard as a rhythm section, fingers flying away, creating little musical links between sections of the songs. He leads the entire band with his idiosyncratic keyboard playing, and to their credit, they follow with uncanny accuracy. This is a crack band, one of the best Dylan has ever assembled. There are no virtuoso moments, but the musicians are able to keep things tight and loose at the same time, like The Band anytime they backed Dylan, or like the musicians on the later Desire.

Most of the songs seem to have been composed on piano, which is much different from composing on guitar. Strumming chords on a guitar, there is the inevitable tendency to fall into familiar patterns. If you are playing an open C major chord, chances are you are going to next go to F, A minor or G7, but little chance that you will be going to E-flat or A-sharp minor any time soon. Guitars aren't made for that kind of unexpected composing. But a piano is eighty-eight keys laid out in front of you. Bang on any three random keys anywhere, and you've got some kind of chord. If Dylan did have a touch of writer's block during Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait, working at the piano turned out to be a temporary solution. Some of his New Morning songs go into harmonic and melodic areas Dylan was discovering for the first time.

To my ears, New Morning grew out of two covers of old songs Dylan recorded early in the sessions: "Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Spanish is the Loving Tongue". "Ballad of Ira Hayes", made famous by others including Johnny Cash, is sung around Dylan's I - IV - iii - ii piano pattern that he liked so much, he would use it to write two separate New Morning songs: "The Man in Me" and "Day of the Locusts". Also evident on "Ballad of Ira Hayes" is Dylan trying to sing with emotion, rather than croon his way through The Every Brothers "Take a Message to Mary" or sleepwalk through Paul Simon's "The Boxer", as he did on Self Portrait.

This is even more apparent on "Spanish is the Loving Tongue", which is simply one of Dylan's most amazing one-off performances. With the kind of pulsing piano playing you would only get from a primitive musician like Dylan, and a spontaneous vocal that is so full of warmth and life, it matters not a whit when Dylan goes off key, messes up a simple word like "alone" or is all together unintelligible ('lag-es-not, it's better so"??). "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" is one of ten Dylan recordings I would take with me to that proverbial desert island. It's got huge "Let It Be" like chords, including a descending pattern similar to the one Paul McCartney composed for that song. The difference is that whereas "Let It Be" was rehearsed and perfected through take after take (after take after take after take...), "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" sounds exactly like what it is - a one-shot deal. Paul McCartney composed that grand downward chord pattern once and played it the same way through every take. Dylan appears to have just picked his pattern out of the air, and he bangs away at it as if his fingers were speaking in tongues. As with most of his piano playing, he always sounds like he is about to hit a clunker and blow the take (or just keep going), but somehow avoids it.

His singing is similarly all over the place, using the song's original melody merely as a suggestion, the way Louis Armstrong used to attack stuff like "Stardust". Dylan, like Armstrong, sings what he feels, not what notes are written down on some sheet music somewhere. Up to this point in the sessions, Dylan was recording mostly cover versions and was planning a Self Portrait Part Two (that album had not yet been released at the time, so there were no scathing reviews as of yet to scare Dylan off this idea). Yet immediately after "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" and two takes of Jerry Jeff Walker's "Mr. Bojangles", Dylan recorded the versions of "If Not for You" and "Time Passes Slowly" that made the final cut. (2) The rest of the album came rather quickly.

New Morning, while lacking any real big hits save for "If Not for You", wound up as one of Dylan's most diverse collections. Beside the "Tex-Mess" of "If Not for You", you'll find slow piano ballads ("Time Passes Slowly", "Day of the Locusts"), a tribute to Elvis ("Went to See the Gypsy"), a silly waltz that somehow conjures up memories of Christmas, skating rinks and amusement park carousels ("Winterlude"), and a rocking blues ("One More Weekend"). There's also beat poetry set to jazz, complete with scatting and nightclub piano ("If Dogs Run Free"), a song that rips off its middle eight from "On the Street Where You Live" ("The Man in Me"), a poem set to music ("Three Angels") and a rollicking hymn to God Himself ("Father of Night"). You'll also find a smattering of French horn on the title track, some flute or recorder work elsewhere, and, for Dylan, a rare flown-in sound effect (crickets) before "Day of the Locusts".

Some of it doesn't quite work. "One More Weekend", the only rocker, doesn't sound like anything else on the album, and it was much more convincing when it was called "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat" on Blonde on Blonde and Live 1966 and would sound even more convincing later on as "Lonesome Day Blues" on Love and Theft. "If Dogs Run Free" is so weird, you gotta believe that Dylan did it as a parody. Ditto "Three Angels", which would be laughable if its lyrics didn't keep conjuring up such memorable images ("the dogs and pigeons fly up and they flutter around", "a truck with no wheels", "the whole earth in progression seems to pass by"). Dylan's delivery is just a hair shy of full blown sincerity - if ever there was a Dylan song Johnny Cash should have covered, it is "Three Angels".

But all those piano songs hold the album together and make New Morning one you can listen to again and again. Even today, it sounds as if Dylan is making it all up as he goes along. All those unexpected changes in key and tempo, all those clever little piano riffs, all those wandering melodies, as Dylan takes his voice where the piano tells him too. Each time I listen to the album, I realize I have forgotten many different favorite moments. It's an album that keeps coming alive with each new spin.

New Morning contains a Dylan performance that was overlooked for years but now seems to be coming into its own: "Sign on the Window" (3). Most of the album is about the joy and peace of domestic life, Dylan being married with kids at the time and living in relative seclusion. But "Sign on the Window" shows the cracks in Dylan's domestic facade, ending with one of my favorite Dylan verses ever:

Build me a cabin in Utah,
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout,
Have a bunch of kids who call me "Pa" ---
That must be what it's all about!

Like the last lines of each verse, "That must be what it's all about" is repeated, and the second time around, he sings it more powerfully, and, conversely, more unconvincingly. Even as he sings it, he is dismissing the idea of his own domestic happiness. Some sad realization about his home life seems going on here, a realization that would later be documented on albums like "Blood on the Tracks" and the very underrated "Street-Legal".

Dylan's piano playing is, for once on this album, light and airy, with some gorgeous fills that somebody (Al Kooper?) embellishes with some nice flute work. Dylan's voice is edged with a touch of resigned pain, as if this story is something he's been through and is remembering years later. The band itself holds back for the most part, coming only at the end of each verse. It's nearly a Dylan solo performance, one with a heartbreaking melody and melancholy feeling unlike anything else in the Dylan songbook.

There is nothing else after "Sign on the Window" that can match it, and the album slowly, but enjoyably, deflates over the next three songs, with "Father of Night" , with its wickedly rhythmic piano riffs snapping us back awake just in time.

New Morning was the comeback that wasn't. Dylan's next real album of all original songs would be 1974's Planet Waves, not counting the mostly instrumental soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. As such, New Morning was not the beginning of a new era (a literal new morning) but the end of one. As such, it is often overlooked or dismissed as second-rate Dylan. It may be that, for sure. But it is a second-rate Dylan album that proves that some second-rate Dylan albums are better than first-rate album by many another performer. ½ - JB

NOTES:

(1) A list of album's considered by many at the time of their release to be "the return of the real Bob Dylan" would include John Wesley Harding (1967), New Morning (1970), Planet Waves (1974), Blood on the Tracks (1974), Infidels (1983), Oh Mercy (1989) and Time Out of Mind (1998). Note that he actually had two comeback albums in 1974, making him one of the few people in history to comeback from a comeback. .

For the record, Jason has come back ten times as of March 2007.

(2) Unfortunately, both "Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" are difficult to track down in the U.S. these days. "Ballad of Ira Hayes" was released on the US album Dylan, a compilation of Self Portrait and New Morning outtakes in 1973 as a way of getting back at Dylan for signing with another label. But when Dylan's catalog was converted to Compact Disc in the Eighties, Dylan was deleted without much protest from fans. I imported my CD copy from the UK, where the album is known as A Fool Such as I. Most of it is just plain dull, but "Ballad of Ira Hayes" is one of the highlights. Part of the fun in listening to "Ballad of Ira Hayes" - a long song - is hearing how the entire band comes to a near complete stop, feeling, to a man, that the song has ended. And then Bob comes storming back with one more chorus.

Dylan/A Fool Such as I also contains a Self Portrait outtake of "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" which is as awful as the New Morning version is good. Dylan sings it in his syrupy crooner voice from Nashville Skyline, over some clichéd Spanish guitar work but it is relatively inoffensive until end of the first verse. At that point, a piano comes in out of nowhere playing the most insanely generic tango riff you've ever heard, and Dylan and the background girls literally go off to "la la" land. You can practically see him dressed in toreodor clothes and dancing, Rockettes style, with the backup singers. It is at this point that your brain will probably shut down, unable to comprehend how one of the most important figures in 20th Century Popular Music could even conceive of an arrangement this unspeakably abominable. The two versions are a perfect example of what makes Bob Dylan so fascinating - same song, two completely different performances, one for the ages, one for the trash can.

The good version of "Spanish is a Loving Tongue", the one recorded during the New Morning sessions, was originally released as the B-side of the single "Watching the River Flow" but never wound up on any American album or CD as far as I know. It can be found on a 3-CD set titled Masterpieces that must be imported from overseas. It's a fine collection of greatest hits and rarities, although some of the hits are pulled from the live Hard Rain album rather than the studio albums they originally came from. Which actually makes it cooler than listening to a standard greatest hits album.

(3) What's with all the footnotes? Anyhoo, "Sign on the Window" was used prominently at the end of a season of the mega-hit TV show Friends, perfectly underscoring a bittersweet scene between Joey and Rachel. "The Man in Me", from the same album, was used in a scene from the Coen Brothers The Big Lebowski. Just thought it was worth a note that songs from this particluarly album have been used this way at least twice.