Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

2025's year long Saturday series Soundtrack Saturday has reached the final reel but before the credits roll it seemed that a Sunday mix of various songs and scores from the various film soundtracks I've written about would make a good Sunday mix. This is the result, seventeen tracks from sixteen films, sequenced with something approaching a narrative arc- it starts out in the desert with Harry Dean Stanton tramping round the dust, stays out west for while and then shifts to Tokyo, sleeplessness and jet lag. We jump around some other locations- Long Island, France, Memphis- and have visions of a post- apocalyptic USA before the climax, a death, some levity and then Rutger Hauer in the rain. 

The photo at the top is of Stretford Essoldo, a former cinema just up the road from me, a beautiful 1930s building that has been sadly empty and unused for decades. 

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

• Ry Cooder: Cancion Mixteca
• Ennio Morricone: Watch Chimes
• Bob Dylan: Billy 7
• Joe Strummer: Tennessee Rain
• Tom Waits: Jockey Full Of Bourbon
• Kevin Shields: Intro- Tokyo
• Kevin Shields: City Girl
• Mick Jones: Long Island
• David Holmes: I Think You Flooded It
• John Lurie: Tuesday Night In Memphis
• Gabriel Yared: 37 Degrees 2 Le Matin
• Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: The Road
• John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
• Brian Eno: Deep Blue Day
• Son House: Death Letter Blues
• B.J. Thomas: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
• Vangelis: Tears In Rain

Cancion Mixteca is from Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' 1984 film, a Ry Cooder soundtrack with some dialogue from the film that stands up as an album in its own right.  

Watch Chimes is from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, the second installment of the Dollars trilogy, released in 1967. 

Billy is from Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Western, Bob Dylan contributing the soundtrack and appearing in the film. 

Joe Strummer did the soundtrack for Walker, Alex Cox's 1987 Western- one of Joe's best 'wilderness years' songs. 

A Jockey Full Of Bourbon appears in Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film- Tom Waits is one of the three stars of the film as well as being a key part of the soundtrack. 

Intro- Tokyo and City Girl are from Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson lost in Tokyo. 

Mick Jones provided three tracks for the 1993 film Amongst Friends- Long Island is the most complete, a Jones solo song. 

I Think You Flooded It is from Out Of Sight, the first of many David Holmes- Steven Soderbergh soundtrack collaborations, released in 1998. 

John Lurie's score for Mystery Train had to compete with some big hitters- Elvis' Mystery Train for one, Roy Orbison's Domino for another. A second Jim Jarmusch film in this mix- the use of music is central to Jarmusch's films. 

Gabriel Yared's guitar playing is from the soundtrack to Betty Blue, another late 80s film that made a deep impression on me- Beatrice Dalle made quite an impression too. 

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack work spans all sorts of movies and documentaries. They began with the soundtrack to 2009 film The Road, a harrowing version of Cormac McCarthy's equally harrowing novel. 

Theme From Midnight Cowboy is gorgeous, a John Barry highpoint from a composer who recorded dozens of soundtracks. That harmonica. Stunning. 

Brian Eno's soundtrack work is wide and varied and an Eno only soundtrack mix would definitely work- Deep Blue Day is from the 1996 film Trainspotting but originally on Another Green World, Eno's 1975 album. 

Son House's Death Letter Blues is from 1965, just Son and a metal bodied resonator guitar. It's a stunning song and performance, Son's lyrics and performance can chill to the bone. It appeared on the soundtrack to On The Road, the  2012 version of Jack Kerouac's novel. 

B.J. Thomas' Raindrops Keep falling On My Head was a worldwide smash following its appearance in the 1969 film Butch Cassady And The Sundance Kid. The song is probably what the film is best known for, along with the two stars- Robert Redford and Paul Newman- and the famous shoot out ending. 

At the end of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci fi/ film noir version of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Rutger Hauer sits on top of a crumbling building in the rain, holding a dove and improvises a farewell speech as Harrison Ford slumps in front of him, his life saved. 'All these moments will be lost in time', Hauer says as Vangelis' synth score plays. But they're not are they- they replay endlessly, equally moving each time. 

Soundtrack Saturday

In 1973 Sam Peckinpah's revisionist Western Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid hit the big screens, a retelling of the story of Billy and Pat starring James Coburn (as lawman Pat) and Kris Kristofferson (as outlaw Billy). Peckinpah had a track record of Westerns behind him by 1973, depicting violence explicitly and graphically, stories about outsiders, loners and losers. Ride The High Country. The Wild Bunch. Major Dundee. The Ballad Of Cable Hogue. 

Pat Garrett And The Billy The Kid is famed for the behind the scenes rows with the studio MGM and a mangled version that was largely disowned by cast and crew. In 1988 a re- edit by Peckinpah was released and widely praised as the film the 1973 one should have been. 

Peckinpah saw the film as a chance to complete a trilogy (after Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch), to make a definitive statement about the Western and complete his revisionist perspective of the Old West. He fell out with everyone while making it, suffered budget cuts and technical problems, re- shoots and crew illness, some of this caused by the director's own drinking and argumentative nature. The 1988 version is a gem though, Peckinpah's original vision of the film restored. 

We're here for the soundtrack though and the soundtrack was by Bob Dylan. Peckinpah, unbelievably, had never heard of Dylan- Kristofferson brought Bob down, Bob played him a song, and Peckinpah hired him straight away. Dylan appeared in the film too, as an enigmatic character called Alias. In 1973 Bob was a background presence. Self Portrait, released in 1970, seemed a deliberate attempt to shed fans, to get people to leave him alone and to lose the Spokesman for a Generation tag. 'What is this shit?', Greil Marcus famously wrote when reviewing it. It was followed by New Morning, Bob sounding more like Dylan again but still for many a little tame. In 1972 and 1973 there was nothing though, radio silence, until Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. 

The Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid soundtrack is an overlooked Dylan album- or rather, nine of the songs are overlooked and the other is Knocking On Heaven's Door, a worldwide hit, with Roger McGuinn and Jim Keltner on guitar and bass, a song which has suffered from being covered by too many people, usually badly. The other nine (of the twenty four recorded at various sessions, fourteen still unreleased) include four versions of Billy, any one of which is as good as much of what Dylan released in the 70s. This one is Billy 7...

Billy 7

Billy (Main Title Theme) is an instrumental (with Booker T Jones on bass) and none the worse for it. Billy 1, Billy 4 and Billy 7 all have words, slightly different versions and lyrics, different takes on the film and its themes. 

'Spend the night with some sweet senorita
Into her dark hallway she will lead you
In some lonesome shadow she might greet you
Billy you’re so doggone far away from home

They say that Pat Garrett's got your number
Sleep with one eye open when you slumber
Every little sound just might be thunder
Thunder from the barrel of a gun

Maybe you will find yourself tomorrow
Drinking in some bar to hide your sorrow
Spending the time that you borrow
Figuring a way to get back home'

Rocks And Gravel

This year started with Bob Dylan and the film A Complete Unknown and he's coming around it's tail end too with the release of Through The Open Window, the eighteenth edition of The Bootleg Series, this one covering the years 1956- 1963. It includes his earliest recordings but the main focus is the years when he arrives in New York and soaks up folk music, the pre- electric Bob Dylan making his name in the clubs, bars and hangouts. It also includes a full concert from Carnegie Hall, 26th October 1963. There's an eight CD deluxe version (probably let's be honest a bit too much) and a double CD/ four LP edition with a more manageable number of songs. A while ago Rocks And Gravel (already previously released) came out as a trailer for the album...

Rocks And Gravel was recored during the twelve months of sessions for the album that became The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, his second album, released in May 1963. It's difficult to see why Rocks And Gravel didn't make the cut but also hard to work out what could have been dropped from the final album to make way for it (some very early promo editions of Freewheelin' included the song along with three others but these were replaced on all subsequent releases- needless to say early editions are both rare and expensive. The other three songs were Let Me Die In My Footsteps, Rambling Gambling Willie and Talkin' John Birch Blues). Rocks And Gravel has Dylan's voice and finger picking guitar style in full 1963 flow, the folk and blues of the early '60s filtered into is own style. People who knew him at the time he arrived in New York say he moved so fast and got so good so fast, it was breathtaking. 

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was a step up from his debut, with several songs that became Dylan standards- Blowin' In The Wind, Masters Of War, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright and A Hard Rain's A' Gonna Fall, not to mention Girl From The North Country. The cover, Bob (brown suede jacket and jeans) and Suze Rotolo (coat and black boots) walking down the snow covered Jones Street, West Village, New York, is as famous as the songs. 

Dylan's songs from Freewheelin' have been covered by all and sundry, with degrees of success.  In 2003 Johnny Marr covered Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, and does a decent job of it, acoustic guitar, piano and harmonica and a Marr vocal. Bob wrote Don't Think Twice... while Suze was in Italy, some distance between her and Bob, possibly instigated by her mother who didn't care for Dylan. He wrote the song 'to make himself feel better'.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

Reflections In A Crystal Wind

I read Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric! recently, the book that the film A Complete Unknown is largely based on. Wald is a veteran of the folk scene himself, an author and teacher. The book builds up to Bob Dylan's pivotal appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric band and the moment they crashed into Maggie's farm and then Like A Rolling Stone. Wald acknowledges their are multiple accounts and perspectives of what happened next- the boos, the shock, the applause, the disappointment, the reactions of Pete Seeger and his axe, whether the booing was in reaction to Dylan's electric guitar and band or to the poor sound quality and overloaded live mix... all this and more.

Wald goes back to the start though and looks at the American folk movement and the split in it that became crystallized by Dylan's arrival, the split between the purists who thought that folk music should only be the songs of the traditional American communities and working people of the previous decades/ century and the modernists who were happy with topical songs. The notion of seeking commercial success also split the folk scene, the view that anything gimmicky was abhorrent and a sell out versus chart success bringing new people to folk music who might then appreciate the 'real folk music'. 

With God On Our Side

Reading all of this you realise of course that this story and schism has split every music scene ever since. As the reader follows Wald through the stories of Seeger and Dylan between 1961 and 1965 you also realise this- that in Wald's view, Dylan didn't go electric, Dylan was always electric. 

Wald's storytelling is first rate and his description of the various Newport Folk Festivals and their line ups is superb. I'd never really known much about the Mimi and Richard Farina and was sent to YouTube several times looking for their music. Richard Farina was a folk singer, songwriter, poet and novelist. His only published book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, is a 60s counterculture cult classic. He met Mimi Baez, the seventeen year old sister of Joan in 1962. She was already an accomplished singer and guitarist. They married and became a performing couple, Mimi and Richard Farina, appearing at Newport and recording two mid- 60s folk albums, 1965's Celebrations For A Grey day and 1966's Reflections In A Crystal Wind, both on Vanguard Records. Richard was killed in a motorbike accident in April 1966, on the day of Mimi's twenty- first birthday. I've become a little obsessed with some of their songs since reading the book although neither album seems easy to get hold of on vinyl this side of the Atlantic. Here's a song, one from each album. The first was written about three white college students murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on their way to a peace march in 1964. The second is the title track from their second and final album. 

Michael, Andrew And James 

Reflections In A Crystal Wind

Someone Who Has Had You On His Mind

My dive back into Bob Dylan's back catalogue took me into the triple CD release The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961- 1991, released in January 1991. Across three CDs, presented chronologically, there are fifty eight at the time previously unreleased Dylan songs. Some are offcuts, songs abandoned partway through- in the case of Suze (The Cough Song) because he started coughing. Some are embryonic versions of songs that were finished differently (there are alternate versions of Like A Rolling Stone, The Times They Are A- Changin' and Tangled Up In Blue for example). And some are songs that for whatever reason, didn't make it onto the album that came out of the period of time that Dylan recorded them. There was always a bootleg industry around Dylan, lost and missing songs passed around on illicitly pressed vinyl and cassette. In 1991 Dylan and CBS decided they may as well have a cut of the action (previously, in 1985, with the release of the Biograph box set, eighteen then unreleased songs saw the official light of day). Of the fifty eight songs on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3, forty five are session outtakes for Dylan studio albums including these two which I've been pressing play on repeatedly. 

Worried Blues is from an April 1962 session for his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Bob playing in the fingerpicking style he used at the time and subsequently abandoned. Worried Blues was written by Hally Wood, a singer, musician and folk musicologist, who was part of the New York folk scene of the 1950s and 60s, and who played with Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. The line 'I'm going where the climate suits my clothes' appears, a line that later on crops up in Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy. Worried Blues is a good song that just didn't make the cut for the album- it wasn't alone, there are a further twenty three songs recorded during the sessions that didn't get onto Freewheelin' also. 

Worried Blues

This is the song that jumped out at me most during my immersion into The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3 is this one from disc 2, a heartfelt and genuinely great 'lost' Dylan song...

Mama, You Been On My Mind

There are loads of covers of Mama, You Been On My Mind including one by Joan Baez, various live versions, another demo on piano and a 1970 version with George Harrison playing along, but this is the one, recorded in 1964 during a studio session for what became Another Side Of Bob Dylan. It was written while on tour in Europe after breaking up with Suze Rotolo, probably while on holiday in Greece after a tour of England in May. Dylan's words, five verses each ending with the title of the song, are perfectly weighed and measured, poetic and colloquial- 

'Perhaps it's the colour of the sun cut flat
And covering the crossroads I'm standing at
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind'

The descending chord sequence and vocal melody are gorgeous, yearning for lost love and maybe containing an admission of responsibility for the break up. It's a truly great Dylan song. 

I Feel Just Like Jesse James

Seeing the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown sent me spinning into Dylan's back catalogue again- Bringing it All Back Home mainly but also Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, bits and bobs from The Bootleg Series, songs from the 70s that maybe I've overlooked before, Another Side Of Bob Dylan from 1964. I haven't had a Dylan phase for a long time and I don't think Dylan is something one ever finishes or gets to the end of, there's always more, always another way in. 

A Complete Unknown star Timothee Chalamet appeared on SNL (Saturday Night Live) last week playing three Dylan songs. In the film he is Bob Dylan. Apparently he signed up for the role in 2019 but then Covid delayed everything, giving him ample time to learn to play guitar and harmonica for the film and to sing like Dylan, Dylan's particular intonations and stresses. On SNL he plays two songs as a medley, Outlaw Blues (from Bringing It All Back Home) coupled with Three Angels (from 1970's New Morning, a deep cut). Outlaw Blues is an amazing song, Dylan giving it everything, charging out of the traps and amped up with the band, 'ain't it hard to stumble on the black side of the lagoon' and howling the lines at the end of each verse, 'when it's nine below zero and... three o 'clock in the afternoon'. In 1965 an album song like Outlaw Blues was better than many contemporary band's best singles (see also Love Minus Zero/ No Limit also from side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home). Chalamet doing Dylan but not in costume, doing Dylan as himself. I think it's pretty meta.  

He also sang and played Tomorrow Is A Long Time, the beautiful acoustic song that first appeared on the Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II album, released in 1971, a fairly randomly sequenced double album of Dylan singles and album songs. Tomorrow Is A Long Time was originally recorded in 1962 live at New York's Town Hall. Chalamet nails it again, the band playing quietly behind him (including James Blake on keys). 

Here's the Dylan version, always worth hearing. 

Tomorrow Is A Long Time

To Be On Your Own

We went to see A Complete Unknown on Saturday night. When we came home I dived into No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese's 2005 documentary (currently on the iPlayer) and since then have set about cherry picking my way around Bob's mid- 60s back catalogue. A Complete Unknown was really good. Timothee Chalamet is totally convincing as Dylan, the young Dylan arriving in New York in 1961 and the Dylan we see by the film's end, 1965 Dylan, gone electric. The attention to detail in the film- the sets, clothes, New York- are superb, early 60s New York brought to life vividly. The rest of the cast are good too- Ed Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie (as disguised Suze Rotolo) all stand out. There are some inaccuracies, the director taking a few artistic licences with what happened and where but it really doesn't matter (the famous shout of 'Judas' happened at Manchester's Free Trade Hall not the 1965 Newport Folk Festival). If 'print the legend' applies to anyone it's Bob Dylan.

A Complete Unknown is an exercise in velocity. Dylan is fast, in permanent motion, speeding his way through the city, through people and through scenes. He leaves people in his wake- the folk scene, Suze, Joan, the Newport folk purists, New York high society- living in a blur of forward momentum. When he becomes famous and is recognised in the street he retreats behind sunglasses, arming himself with barbs and sneers and protected by a few close to him (Bob Neuwirth). He rides a motorcycle- more speed (and we all know how that ends)- and though there's no drug taking seen in the film, his speed freak persona can't just fuelled by cigarettes (and everyone is smoking all the time). The only times he slows down slightly are when he's with Sylvie. Sylvie introduces him to the struggle for civil rights and CORE. He takes from that, writes songs, and then keeps moving. 

His relationship with Joan Baez is spikey and combative- 'you're kind of an asshole', she tells him and later on kicks him out of her room in the Chelsea Hotel. The songwriting and performance scenes are totally convincing too, Chalamet more than able to portray the transition from 1961 folk Dylan and 1965. The scene in A Complete Unknown where he sings The Times They Are A- Changin' at Newport is genuinely moving. The furore around Dylan Goes Electric looks even more quaint now than it did in the past, the folk gatekeepers desperate to keep the future- rock 'n' roll, The Beatles, electricity, drummers- out of their world. The archive footage in Scorcese's film of British folk fans in Sheffield and Manchester complaining about Dylan's touring with his band as 'corny' and inauthentic is hilarious. Looking back at Dylan's songs in the 60s, it's clearly one perpetually moving body of work, from Song For Woody to Like A  Rolling Stone. 

Here's a folk era Dylan song (not actually in the film), One Too Many Mornings from 1964's The Times They Are A- Changin'.

One Too Many Mornings

I first encountered Bob Dylan in 1988, the autumn term in my first year at Liverpool university. We were hearing new music every day, every hour almost and much of it was revolutionary at the time. I heard Like A Rolling Stone on the radio and went out and bought three Dylan albums- all were available at CBS's Nice Price! promotion (less than a fiver). I bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (a 1967 compilation with a cool cover photo and ten classics) and the pair of albums he made in 1965, released four months apart from each other- Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Between them, those two albums are a pair of game changing records that re- wrote what music could be. Dylan's words are enough in themselves, a cast of characters, allusions, rhymes and imagery that are unequalled (in an end of year politics exam, a module on US politics, I quoted Dylan's line from It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) about the president of the United States sometimes having to stand naked. I was that kind of nineteen year old I'm afraid- I quoted Chuck D in the same essay. Pretentious, moi?! They let me progress onto the second year of the course too). He skewered culture, politics, society, consumerism, modern life. The music- some still based in acoustic guitar folk and some full electric mid 60s rock- is wild, alive and endlessly moving. 

I'm not sure I can pick between Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. The former contains Maggie's Farm, a song Dylan nailed in a single take in the studio. At Newport it was the  motherlode, the moment Dylan plugged in and pissed off the purists. Too loud. Too much. Mike Bloomfield's lead guitar. Pete Seeger and his supposed attempt to cut the power with an axe. It's the climax of A Complete Unknown. It's in Scorsese's documentary too. And it's here, introduced by Pete Seeger...

Maggie's Farm (Live at Newport Folk Festival 25th July 1965)

Jokerman

One of the joys of Bob Dylan's career/ story is the droplets and sidesteps scattered throughout the last seven decades of music making- not just the giant, canonical albums or the times he changed the course of popular music, but the ginnels and alleyways he ventured down for a few minutes/ days before diverting again. One of those moments happened on 22nd March 1984 when he appeared on Letterman to promote a new song and album with a three song set backed by a trio of total unknowns, The Plugz. The song he was promoting was his new single, Jokerman... 

As this is Dylan there are different versions of how Dylan met The Plugz, an unknown Californian punk/ New Wave band. In one version Dylan saw them at a club, in another his son Jakob tipped him off. However it happened, at some point drummer Chalo got a phone call and was asked to bring some musicians down to Bob's house to jam. Chalo, bassist Tony Marsico and guitarist J.J. Holiday (who had a decent knowledge of blues guitar) trouped down to Bob's and after a couple of weeks had knocked a load of songs around, rarely playing the same ones twice (as is Dylan's habit). One day Dylan came in and asked the trio if they knew of Letterman and did they want to play on it. 

Jokerman was the lead single from 1983's Infidels, an album that saw Bob come out of his Born Again phase and return to more secular music. The album was produced by Mark Knopfler, had ex- Rolling Stone Mick Taylor on guitar and Sly and Robbie as rhythm section- nevertheless, it's 80s Dylan and must be approached with caution. But, Jokerman has become top level Dylan, a song that features in all the lists, with multiple verses of dense Dylan lines, with finger pointing as relevant to 2025 as it was in 1983- 

'Freedom just around the corner for you/ But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?' 

'You're a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds/ Manipulator of crowds, you're a dream twister'

'It's a shadowy world, skies are slippery grey'

The rock reggae rhythm and slick production jar at first but Jokerman settles into its groove, the song creating it's own sense of time, understated guitar lines peeling off against each other and supported by an organ. Jokerman grows as it goes, riding the reggae bass and drums, Dylan delivering mystic wisdom and barbs into the supposed perpetual sunshine of Reagan's America. 

Jokerman

The Letterman performance of Jokerman is something else, a true one off, Dylan and Plugz all in slim cut black and pointy boots, the reggae replaced by a driving urgency, the clipped guitars and thudding bass matched by Bob's vocal delivery. Dylan's harmonica solo that takes them all through to the song's end is priceless. For me this is the definitive version of Jokerman, and it provokes questions, a whole load of what if? type questions. If you're interested there's a free download of all three songs Dylan and Plugz played on Letterman, an entirely unofficial bootleg at Bandcamp. 

In true Dylan style, Plugz only heard from the man once again- Bob turned up at the studio Plugz (by then renamed Cruzados) were recording in, blew some harmonica for them, and disappeared into the night. 

Monday's Long Song

'They're selling postcards of the hanging/ They're painting the passports brown/ The beauty parlour is filled with sailors/ The circus is in town...'

So begins Desolation Row, the final song on Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, an album that has a claim to be Dylan's greatest (it opens with Like A Rolling Stone and each song that fellows matches that song for songwriting). It was the second album Dylan released in '65. The second! He put out Bringing It All Back Home in March which was recorded in a few days in January. Highway 61 Revisited took a little longer to record- a few weeks from the middle of June before an end of August release. In a world where bands/ artists take years to write, record, release and then promote and tour an album the fact that Dylan put out these two within six months of each other is staggering. To prove he was on a roll, he recorded the songs for Blonde On Blonde in January 1966 and released that one, a double, in June. 

Desolation Row is eleven minutes long and eleven verses  and packs an entire world of characters and scenarios into it, a portrait of a world on the brink and breaking down. Dylan responded to an interviewer by saying Desolation Row was in Mexico, 'just across the border', but this was at a 1965 press conference and we shouldn't take anything he said at a 1965 press conference at face value. Al Kooper reckoned it was in Manhattan, a rundown stretch of Eighth Avenue. Kerouac's lonely mountain top fire watching hut that inspired Desolation Angles may have been in there too. The cast of characters in the song includes a blind commissioner, Cinderella, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Noah, Einstein (disguised as Robin Hood), a jealous monk, Dr. Filth and his nurse, the Phantom of the Opera, the hunchback of Notre Dame, Casanova, Nero, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, the agents and the superhuman crew, and the passengers on the Titanic. There are riot squads, people making love or expecting rain, electric violins, heart attack machines, insurance men, broken doorknobs, kerosene, people being killed with self confidence, people's faces being re- arranged and new names given to them... it's a vast song, panoramic and kaleidoscopic, Dylan's mid- 60s urban poetics that may mean everything and may mean nothing. 

Desolation Row

Charlie McCoy's guitar parts add so much to Dylan's acoustic strumming, a pretty addition that seems deliberately at odds with the roll call of horrors in the lyrics.

Cat Power, never one to shy away from an ambitious cover version, covered Desolation Row in 2022 and released it a year ago, December 2023, extending Dylan's eleven minutes into twelve. 

Desolation Row

Cat didn't just cover Desolation Row. She covered the entire 1966 Dylan concert (long thought to be the Royal Albert Hall but actually Manchester's Free Trade Hall, the famous gig where Dylan goes electric in the second half and an audience member shouted 'Judas' at Dylan). 

As a bonus, sort tying the two artists together, this is a fan made video of footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucian Carr and others on the streets of New York in 1959, with Cat Power's Good Woman as the soundtrack, a song that packs an emotional punch in the vocal performance, the words and the guitar playing. 

Please Don't Put A Price On My Soul

One of our evenings in Fuerteventura we were sitting round on the patio, playing cards, drinking some wine and watching it go dark. Eliza said she didn't know any Bob Dylan. I started playing some through my phone, starting with Tangled Up In Blue, a song I never get tired of, Dylan zig- zagging his way through his real or imaginary past with enough killer lines to write several films around. From there I picked my around some late 60s and 70s songs, eventually arriving at this one...

Dear Landlord

There is something  about Dear Landlord (from 1968's John Wesley Harding) that is unfathomable, so rich and mysterious it's completely unknowable. Dylan plays piano and sings while Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey (bass and drums respectively) follow him (but lead at the same time). The playing is simple and melodic and mesmeric- Dylan's musicianship isn't seen as his biggest talent but his piano playing on Dear Landlord is superb. Lyrically, there is debate that the landlord is God or maybe Albert Grossman or perhaps a totally abstract landlord. Who knows? It doesn't matter. 

Dylan's 70s are a mish mash but much better than his 80s. Planet Waves and Desire are both good with several stand out songs. Blood On The Tracks is rightly legendary. New Morning has its moments, definitely. Self Portrait a few gems in the among the WTF? songs. On social media Davy H, the man who used to write the much missed Ghost Of Electricity blog recommended this to me, from 1978's Street Legal, late 70s apocalyptic, south of the border, Old West, Biblical, mythic country rock, a song I've overlooked before

Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)

 

May Your Song Always Be Sung

Isaac's headstone was fixed in place at the cemetery yesterday. It's been a long road to get to this point. For a long time we couldn't do it. There's a finality about a headstone we just couldn't face- it'll be there long after we've all gone and it had to be right. We had a planter and two flower pots which have done the job for the last two and a half years, the various plants, shrubs and flowers changing with the seasons, different colours coming and going, and for a long time they were enough. The sunflowers became part of it too, bought from the supermarket down the road and bringing a big splash of sunshine every summer. A year ago we got to a point where we felt we needed to get him a headstone. It's taken a year since then to get it as we wanted it. We wanted a natural stone- at first we wanted slate but it was prohibitively expensive and very difficult to get hold of, so we went for grey sandstone instead. Ordering the stone, getting the wording right, getting everything as it should be, has taken a year but it's been worth the wait, to get it right, for us and for him. Mainly now, it feels like a relief, that it's done and in place and that it looks so good and so right- and maybe it feels like the end of something too, or at least the end of a part of this whole thing. 

The inscription at the bottom comes from the Covid memorial in London, written on the wall by a friend in the days that followed Isaac's death, 30th November 2021. It has felt for a long time now that that these were to be the words for his headstone. 

Isaac's middle name Neville was the name of my maternal grandfather. He died the year before Isaac was born and it seemed right to pass the name on. In one of those coincidences that could never be planned, one of my younger brothers has become a father this week for the first time. His son is four days old today and has also been given the middle name Neville, passing it on again, which is lovely and very moving. 

Forever Young

For those are are interested in the details, this is demo version of the song, recorded by Bob Dylan in June 1973 while visiting his publishers in New York. The song then appeared on Planet Waves in two versions, one slow paced and like a lullaby and the other faster and rockier. Dylan became a parent for the first time in 1966 and wrote it while in Tucson, presumably early in 1973. According to the liner notes of Biograph, he wrote it, 'thinking about one of [my] boys and not wanting to be too sentimental... I certainly didn't intend to write it... the song wrote itself'. The demo version is my favourite and I've been waiting for an occasion to post it.  

'May your heart always be joyful/ May your song always be sung/ And may you stay forever young'

Forty Minutes Of The Jesus And Mary Chain

The Reid brothers William and Jim announced their return to action last week with a new album, Glasgow Eyes (their first since the rather good Damage And Joy from 2017), a tour kicking off in Manchester in March and a new single jamcod. The video opens with a warning about strobe lights and then the hissy synth kicks in, reverb and distortion are everywhere, William plays a signature guitar riff and Jim sings and snarls, a vocal that could have been put down at almost any point between 1984 and three weeks ago.  

To coincide with this new song I thought a Bagging Area JAMC Sunday Mix was in order, one that throws in some rarities and some singles, an edit and some covers, ending at the beginning. 

Forty Minutes Of The Jesus And Mary Chain

• Nine Million Rainy Days (Los Lopez Club Edit)
• Snakedriver
• Coast To Coast (Alt Take with William vocal)
• Crackin' Up
• The Hardest Walk
• Head On
• All Things Pass
• Everything's Alright When You're Down
• If You Gotta Go
• You Can't Stop The Rock
• Upside Down

Nine Million Rainy Days was on Darklands, 1987's follow up to Psychocandy, an album that got them a proper hit (April Skies) and a bigger, slightly more polished sound.This edit by Los Lopez from 2012 has a juddering synth bassline not too far from the sound Jim and William have cooked up on jamcod. 

Snakedriver was a 1992 single, a shuddering, scabrous, noisy blast of self loathing that will give your eyes a good clean out and make you feel like you've bene dragged through William's FX pedals backwards. In a good way. 

Coast To Coast was one of the highlights of 1989's Automatic, Jim, William and a drum machine, with more reports from the frontline of the USA, Jesus and Coke. At the time Automatic felt a bit flat, a bit like they didn't know what to do or where to go. Now it sounds like a great Mary Chain album. This version with William singing instead of Jim came out on the Power Of Negative Thinking box set, a rarities and B-sides release from 2008.

Crackin' Up was the lead single from the album that broke them back in 1998, Munki. A William sung song with a riff that isn't a million miles from the one in jamcod. The band broke up on stage in Los Angeles. Alcohol and sibling rivalry played their part. When the brothers re- united for Damage And Joy and recent tours they had a new set of rules. Jim had given up drinking completely and William stopped drinking on stage. 

Punk trumpeter Terry Edwards with his The Scapegoats recorded an entire EP of Mary Chain covers in 1991. He then went on to play trumpet with the band. His cover of The Hardest Walk is a blast. 

Head On was a single in November 1989 and is one of my favourite Mary Chain songs. When they reformed and played Manchester Academy a few years ago, playing Psychocandy in full, they did an encore set first, seven songs, then a brief pause and then Psychocandy. They opened with Head On. Endearingly they messed up the beginning of You Trip Me Up twice, finally getting it right on the third go. Yes, I could have included Pixies cover of this song here instead.

All Things Pass was on their 2017 comeback album Damage And Joy, made with Youth on production and containing several songs the brothers had recorded separately in the period the band were broken up. All Things Must Pass dated from 2008, a different recording done for the TV superhero series Heroes. Two chords. Fuzz. Sneering vocals. It was like they'd never been away.

Everything's Alright When You're Down was the B-side to 1987s Happy When It Rains. Three minutes of Reidian perfection dissolving into feedback. 

If You Gotta Go was on a Jim Reid solo single, Dead End Kids, released in 2006, a cover of a Bob Dylan song. After the Mary Chain ended Jim formed Freeheat with Nick Sanderson and Ben Lurie and then reverted to using his name, recruiting Loz Colbert from Ride and Phil King from Lush for a tour that included a very low key gig at Night And Day in Manchester. 

You Can't Stop The Rock was on Little Pop Rock an album by Linda Reid, Jim and William's sister, who recorded as Sister Vanilla. Both brothers contributed songs and performances separately- they weren't taking at the time. You can't Stop The Rock then re- appeared on Damage And Joy. Little Pop Rock is a good album, a hidden gem in the Reid family back catalogue. 

Upside Down was The Jesus and Mary Chain's debut single in 1984. It gave the Reid's overdriven feedback to the world and gave Alan McGee and Creation Records a kickstart. Bobby Gillespie thumps the drums, standing up. It all started here, so it seems a good place to finish this mix. 

Tomorrow Is A Long Time

It's funny how you can be in the midst of something and a song can stop you in your tracks- in this case not even the song I'm posting here but a flicker of acoustic guitar that sounded like it and straight away in my head it turned into this one. The second or two of folk guitar in the background on TV propelled me to my CDs, pull this out and play it. 

Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Bob Dylan recorded Tomorrow Is A Long Time sixty years ago on 12th April 1963 while playing a gig at New York Town Hall. Just the young Bob, an acoustic guitar and a microphone very close to his mouth, three verses, each finishing with these lines-

'Yes and only if my own true love was waitin'/ And if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin'/ Yes, only if she was lyin' by me/ Then I'd lie in my bed once again'. 

I put the disc into the tray and pressed play, sat back, listened and then played it again several times. A song about loneliness, love and waiting, sweetly sung, a few fingerpicked chords with a capo on the third fret, over half a century ago.  

Dylan chose not to release the song until 1971. He recorded a demo of it in December 1962 but went no further. Joan Baez played it live. Elvis did a cover in 1966 as did Odetta and Judy Collins, Dorris Henderson and The Kingston Trio. In 1970 and 1971 there was a dearth of new Dylan product, Bob having retreated from fame and generational spokesperson status. The head CBS records suggested a new Bob Dylan Greatest Hits double album, eventually titled More Greatest Hits. Dylan agreed and said he'd compile it himself with an entire side made up of unreleased archive recordings of which Tomorrow Is A Long Time was one. In September 1971 Bob went into a studio and re- recorded several songs that eventually came out on The Basement Sessions in 1974- I Shall Be Released, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere and Down In Then Flood. They closed side four of More Greatest Hits, along with When I Paint My Masterpiece (also unreleased and dating from March '71), sequenced following two previously released songs, If Not For You (from 1970) and It's All over Now Baby Blue (from 1965). The latter jumps out stylistically, upsetting the flow of side four a little, but the other songs are as good a run of songs as any Dylan put out in the 1970s with 1963's Tomorrow Is A Long Time sandwiched in and somehow fitting perfectly. 

Monday's Long Songs

Mrs Swiss (real name Lou) and I (real name Adam) have been in the Lake District for the weekend and it's proved to be just what we needed- a break away from here and everything that goes with it in a place we hadn't been to before (The Western Lakes and Cumbrian coast, a bit further than the tourist honeypot places round Windermere) and a place that had no associations with Isaac. We'd been to the Lakes with Isaac several times, camping and visiting, but not the area round Whitehaven and St Bees.  Driving home down the M6 as we approached Preston I felt the knot of anxiety that I've had in my stomach on and off since Isaac died reappear for the first time since we left Manchester on Friday night. I've had a lot of physical symptoms of grief/ stress recently- tinnitus and clenching my jaw/ grinding my teeth being the two main ones with a more general physical feeling of tension and stress- and I've tried to accept them as a part of the process but I think I'm going to do something about them this week and see a doctor. The tinnitus and jaw clenching was still there this weekend but the anxiety left me for longer periods. The bracing winds at Ennerdale Water (above) blew the cobwebs out a bit. On Saturday afternoon at St Bees Head (below) the sun came out and we walked on the beach, climbed on the rocks and sat in the sun for a while, coats and scarves on but clearly feeling the sun for the first time since whenever, taking in the sound of the waves crashing on the beach. Walking up to cliff at St Bees in the March sunshine felt good and at the top looking north, over the headland, the Solway Firth and south west Scotland was visible. One of the cliches is that a change is as good as a rest. I think this weekend that was definitely true- being somewhere else, not at home, was good for us. Being somewhere else for a couple of days where nobody knew us was also good. 

We also took in a stone circle, the eleven stone ring called Blakeley Raise, sitting on a plateau above the village of Ennerdale Bridge. The circle was 'restored in 1925 after an 18th century farmer took many of the stones to make his gatepost and wall. The restorer, Dr Quine, claims to have replaced the stones in the holes left behind but the accuracy of this stone circle is open to debate. 

On Friday night in the cottage we were staying in, sitting by the log fire and flicking thorhg the channels I found a Bob Dylan documentary, Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, 1964 and 1965. The 1965 appearance, Sunday 25th July, is legendary, the moment he went electric to the displeasure or fury of the crowd who had come to hear acoustic folk singer Dylan, not amped up, electrified Dylan accompanied by a band with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield on board, snarling and ripping their way through Maggie's Farm, Like A Rolling Stone, Phantom Engineer and It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry. Dylan had made the decision on the Saturday afternoon, apparently on the spot after what he took to be condescending comments made by Alan Lomax about the Paul Butterfield Blue Band. According to roadie Jonathan Taplin, Dylan's attitude was 'well, fuck them if they think they can keep electricity out of here...' Like A Rolling Stone changed the world of popular music, a 7" single that clocked in at over six minutes long at a time when two to three minutes was the norm. It doesn't sound like a big deal now but fifty seven years ago it changed the format and ripped up the conventions. 

Maggie's Farm, not as long but thrillingly alive, five minutes of confrontation, Beat poetry, the art of wearing a leather jacket and holding a Stratocaster at exactly the right angle. Confidence, self assuredness, cocksure in the face of opposition. He ain't gonna work for Maggie's Pa no more. And Mike Bloomfield's guitar is as electric as it could be. 

Dylan was no stranger to the longer song, even in the mid 60s and on albums that came in at less than forty five minutes in total running time per disc he'd chuck in a longform song like Desolation Row (eleven minutes) or this one a year later on Blonde On Blonde- seven minutes of rhymes and riddles, with 'Shakespeare in the alley/ With his pointed shoes and his bells/ Speaking to some French girl/ Who says she knows me well', Grandpa, railroad men, Mona punching cigarettes, senators and preachers, Main Street, Ruthie, neon madmen and Bob, stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again. 

It all sounds like it was never quite finished, a song constantly in a state of flux, that more verses could be added or taken out, more characters put in or lines changed and switched around. The group are raucous and on fire, electrified and on the edge. In the end at some point, it had to be recorded and that was the finished version as it went down on tape there and then. 

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again

Twelve

Bagging Area is twelve years old today, a blog that started out as being something I thought I'd try for a year is now only one year short of being a teenager. There aren't many songs with the number twelve or 12 in the title. There are obviously hundreds/ thousands of 12" mixes or versions but that seemed like cheating. The best is this one from Bob Dylan, the opening song on 1966's Blonde On Blonde...

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35

I saw Bob Dylan once, part of his Never Ending Tour, at Manchester Arena (then called Nynex). I'd struggle to tell you exactly which year it was but the internet tells me it was 9th May 2002- the setlist from that gig looks familiar. More familiar than some of the songs on the night some of which were well under way before they became recognisable. I know that's all become part of the fun of a latter day Dylan gig but it does lead to some head scratching moments and then laughter as you suddenly realise 'oh, it's  Visions Of Johanna!'. On the night we saw him he finished his set with Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 and it was one of the songs which was identifiable fairly instantly. 

Some brief 'research' into the number twelve reveals that it is significant numerologically- it represents perfection or completion and cosmic order. It crops up in mythology, religion and the zodiac. There are twelve months and twelve lunar cycles. Twelve is also the number of years for a full cycle of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system and one of the brightest in our sky. The Jupiter 4 is a vintage Roland synthesizer and gave a name and a sound to this Sharon Van Etten song, a dark, moody, obsessive love song written on the distinctive synth. 

Jupiter 4

And with those two songs we're off into 2022. More stuff incoming no doubt. 

Monday's Long Song

Today Bob Dylan turns 80, so let's start the week by wishing Bob a very happy 80th birthday. Bob Dylan, it almost goes without saying, is an artist who set the pace in the 1960s, burning through the decade at a pace even he couldn't keep up with. He showed exactly what could be done with the artform of popular music, the marriage of words and poetry to electricity. His political songs in the early 60s (Masters Of War, It's A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall, Blowin' In The Wind) put him in the position of being hailed as the voice of his generation, the leader of the young, and then had to spend years to get away from it. Bob himself said if he wasn't Bob Dylan, he'd probably think Bob Dylan had all the answers too. 

I vividly remember hearing Like A Rolling Stone on the radio, 1987 or '88, that snare crack at the start and the band lurching in, especially the wheezy organ, and then the tumult of words in that speedy, nasal voice- I went out and bought some Dylan the following day, probably the Greatest Hits album originally released in 1966 (available for under a fiver with the mid price sticker attached to the front) and then from there heading out in all directions- Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (second hand shop, £1.00), Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Blood On The Tracks, The Basement Tapes, Another Side..., Desire (an album that used to litter second hand shops and charity shops nationwide), Oh Mercy (bought on release in 1989, a world away from what else I was listening to in 1989), some really cheap iffy Dylan 80s releases (I owned at one point both Down In The Groove and Empire Burlesque, neither among his best work, both bought in Our Price for pennies), New Morning, Planet Waves... and so on. Anyway, enough blather, best to stick to the music and the words. This song, Visions Of Johanna from 1966's Blonde On Blonde, is a masterpiece, seven and a half minutes of wonder that starts with these three lines that are as good as anything written by anyone...

'Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?/ We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it/ And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it'

And it closes with these...

'The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain/ And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain'

Happy birthday Bob.

Visions Of Johanna

From Nashville

I don't know if it was yesterday's Nashville Ambient Ensemble post that implanted the word Nashville in my mind or complete coincidence but out of nowhere I found myself humming a song from Bob Dylan's 1969 album Nashville Skyline. This one...

Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

Recorded in Nashville with Dylan deep into country music, a clear higher register voice (due to a temporary giving up of ciggies) and with some of Nashville's top musicians on board- pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake and drummer Kenny Buttrey are all over the album (as well as Johnny Cash). It's a new Dylan, not the thin wild mercury man of 1966, not the voice of a generation any more, but calmer, more reflective family man. At the time many felt he'd abdicated his responsibilities, given up his crown at a time when he was needed most- 1969 was a tumultuous year in the USA- but he couldn't keep going at the rate he was and had to slow down and stop. 

The previous year Dylan had released John Wesley Harding, a stripped back, low key, almost lo- fi album, short songs recorded in Nashville (almost on a whim) full of historical and biblical imagery (the outlaw of the title, St Augustine, Tom Paine, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, landlords, drifters and hobos). John Wesley Harding was the opposite of what everyone else was recording in 1967 and this makes it all the more a standout album of both the decade and Dylan, Bob doing something else entirely as everyone else was chasing the psychedelic dollar. This song, recorded in Nashville has Pete Drake's pedal steel all over it, Bob's laid back, folky acoustic guitar and country backing from Kenny Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. Meanwhile Dylan croons. 

I'll Be Your Baby Tonight

Let Me Follow You Down

One of the things I like about blogging is that you can chuck in a curveball with no build up, lead in or preparation. After a week of ambient, electronic, early Balearic, early 90s dance remixes and B-sides and 21st century techno/house, today I'm offering you a Bob Dylan song from 1961.

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

Nearly 60 years ago Bob Dylan was a kid in Greenwich Village, an up and coming folk singer with a corduroy cap, a guitar and harmonica and a deal with CBS. As Bob says at the start of the song, he learned it from Ric von Schmidt, but it was also played by Dave van Ronk, who may have learned it from Rev. Gary Davis. There's something about the guitar picking, the rhythm and Dylan's vocal that makes it just right for Sunday morning.

Lindsay Was My First Love

I was never a massive fan of The Waterboys- I appreciate what Mike Scott was doing, the Big Music and Celtic influences, and I've danced to The Whole Of The Moon just like the rest of you have- but when Fisherman's Blues came out I was never able to play it all the way through and fully enjoy it. Having said that I love A Bang On The Ear. I'm a sucker for those rat-a-tat-tat narrative songs, where the rhythm and the rhyme rattle along, telling stories, especially in this one where Mike looks back at the girls in his past he's loved.

A Bang On The Ear

To pick a verse almost at random-

'Deborah broke my heart 
And I the willing fool
I fell for her one summer
On the road to Liverpool
I thought it was forever
But it was over within the year (oh dear)
But I send her my love
And a bang on the ear'

I like the way he throws in the homely and prosaic (chicken soup say). I like the reflective quality of the words, the lightness of touch and the wordplay. It's also in the way the song fades in and out, like it could have started earlier and carried on longer.

I suppose the daddy of these songs is Dylan's Tangled Up In Blue, a tour de force in painting pictures with words, rhyming couplets describing a life lived (whether it's Dylan's actual life, an imagined life or a composite of people's I don't know). Tangled Up In Blue switches between tenses, the present and the past, while Dylan narrates a number of scenes that got him to where was then-

'She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam I guess
But I used a little too much force'

and later...

'I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the axe just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin' for a while on a fishin' boat
Right outside of Delacroix'

and later still...

'I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air'

What both these songs have is an authority and the voice of experience. What we get is the rush of words, a pile up of images and autobiography that becomes universal but with different names and places. And you can picture them being written- once the first line is there and the rhythm gets going, it all coming out in a flood, fingers banging away at typewriter keys.

Tangled Up In Blue

Then there is 88 Lines About 44 Women by The Nails, an obscure 1984 single from a US post-punk band. Over a pleasingly basic Casio backing track Marc Campbell delivers deadpan narration, describing each one of 44 women in 2 lines, (some  he admitted were real and some imaginary). In a 2018 light you could argue that reducing women to a single characteristic, often based around sex, in a list for comic effect is a little sexist but this is so well done with so many good lines that I think it stands.

An excerpt from the middle-

'Pauline thought that love was simple
Turned it on and turned it off
Jean-Marie was complicated
Like some French film-maker's plot
Gina was the perfect lady
Always had her stockings straight
Jackie was a rich punk rocker
Silver spoon and paper plate'

88 Lines About 44 Women

John Peel loved it. In a nice twist, 30 years after writing the song, Campbell got in touch with one of the women in the song through Facebook (Tanya Turkish, she of the leather biker boots) and they became a couple.

Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Watching Martin Scorcese's Bob Dylan documentary on Friday night was a bolt from the blue. I'd seen it before but not for a long time and it's ages since I've properly listened to any Dylan. There doesn't seem much doubt to me that he completely changed the form of popular music in the early 60s and carried on doing so through to late 60s, more so (single-handedly) than anyone else- the words mainly (but not only) and what a song could be about, the fusing of street poetry and beat poetry to firstly folk music and then to rock music (for want of a better term). He set the standards and in 1965 and 1966 he looked sharp as fuck too (which is not the only thing but is important). This song was recorded live in April 1963 at New York Town Hall but not released until the strangely compiled Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II in 1971. I've loved it since I first heard it sometime in the late 80s.

Tomorrow Is  A Long Time

It sure is.