It’s Dylan season again! The European leg of his tour kicked off in Prague on Friday and arrives in the UK on 1 November, climaxing with three nights at the Albert Hall. The latest official Bootleg release, meanwhile, comprises 27 CDs thoroughly documenting – to put it mildly – his raucous 1974 North American tour with the Band. A selection of highlights, recorded near the end of that tour, was released as an instant souvenir on Before the Flood. So the items of chief interest from this new flood are songs that didn’t make it on to the earlier double album, as opposed to slightly different renderings of songs already featured there. From this marathon haul of 417 songs – more than 24 hours of listening – I want to zoom in on just one, easily accessible via Spotify’s 20-song sampler and almost certainly not to be reprised on the current tour.
The Dylan long song has long exerted a special fascination, from Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (occupying an entire if shortish side of Blonde on Blonde) through to Highlands and the slightly longer (and infinitely worse) Murder Most Foul. Nobody ’Cept You is from the opposite end of the audio spectrum. Clocking in at under three minutes, including applause, it was recorded in Chicago on 3 January. A double first then: opening night of the tour and the first known live performance – solo, acoustic guitar – of a song from the second tier of Dylan rarities.
The top tier comprises those he never completed, which were not officially released and have never been performed live, the summit of which is I’m Not There. Next come songs that, though unreleased (until the Bootleg series), have been occasionally performed. At the other extreme are hardy perennials that can be heard from their gestation in the studio, through multiple rehearsals, in finished form on an album, and which have since been done (sometimes to death) over years of touring.
Nobody ’Cept You was originally meant to be part of Planet Waves, didn’t make it on to the record and was performed only eight times on the 1974 tour before it was permanently dropped. If I’m Not There benefits from being incomplete, not being fully there, it’s appropriate that Nobody ’Cept You does not survive ’cept on these recordings.
A strange song, even by Dylan’s standards, it opens with the reiteration – “Ain’t nothin’ round here to me that’s sacred” – of a sentiment from the middle of an older favourite he played immediately afterwards at the Chicago gig, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “Easy to see without looking too far/ That not much is really sacred.” That’s a kind of public pronouncement; here it’s a rapt declaration of personal malaise, enhanced by a subtlety of vocal modulation which, as the grind of the tour takes hold, will give way to a tendency to yell. It’s not just that nothin’s sacred; there’s nothing he desires, nothin’ worth living or dying for, nothin’…
Isolated by overwhelming popularity and renown, by the world’s relentless curiosity about every nook and cranny of his life and work, this condition becomes increasingly familiar as Dylan ages: the result of his having been the focus of a unique experiment, simultaneously social and intensely private, investigating the peculiar effects of… being Bob Dylan.
Many of us are more interested in Dylan than he could be in anything, even himself. It’s not just a question of fame. Embracing ultra-celebrity, Mick Jagger adapted quickly to the luxury of being welcomed everywhere – except, it seems, at a studio where Dylan was too wrapped up in the recording of Blood on the Tracks to pay him any mind. So many of the things people dream of – the Nobel prize! – are regarded by him as intrusions. “Everybody wants my attention/ Everybody’s got something to sell,” the song concludes. “’Cept you,” of course. According to this song, composed when he was just 32, he fell prey to the kind of disillusionment and ennui with everything that, though it can afflict certain individuals at an early age (Hamlet’s “man delights not me”!), tends to take up residence later in life. After listing more of the ways in which nothing interests him – ’cept you – and repeatedly reaffirming his desire for this “you”, the song takes an unconventional turn into the past:
“There’s a hymn I used to hear in the churches all the time
Make me feel so good inside, so peaceful, so sublime
Now there’s nothing that reminds me of that old familiar chime
’Cept you, yeah you”
There may be nothing to remind Dylan of that old familiar chime but it reminds me, instantly and unmistakably, of an essay by DH Lawrence. In Hymns in a Man’s Life, Lawrence reflects on how the hymns he heard as a child “mean to me almost more than the finest poetry”. I’ve no idea if Dylan had read that essay but the overlap between it and the song is extraordinary. For Lawrence, “a child’s apperception is based on wonder”. By contrast, “modern people” are “inwardly and thoroughly bored”; they “experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man, he is dead.”
Dylan is in exactly this state of accidie diagnosed by Lawrence. There is just the wonder of the woman he finds himself wondering about, not as he will claim in a later song “most of the time”, but the whole time. The hymn he used to hear sends Dylan further back into a world of lapsed but remembered wonder:
“Used to roll in the cemetery
Dance and run and sing when I was a child
And it never seemed strange, now I just pass mournfully
By that place where the bones of life are piled
I know somethin’ has changed
I’m a stranger here and no one sees me ’cept you, yeah you”
Hmm, so it seems there is a place round here that’s sacred, if only because – as a bored and uninformed Philip Larkin puts it at the end of his poem Church Going – “so many dead lie round”.
Lawrence’s essay was written when he was in his early 40s, about 10 years older than Larkin and Dylan when they wrote their respective poem and song. Part of the poignance of this essay comes from the fact that he could feel himself being torn prematurely from the life to which he clung tenaciously. It was written as part of a series of short pieces to honour Hans Carossa, a poet and physician who examined Lawrence in Germany in September 1927. His verdict, never revealed to Lawrence, was astonished and unflinching: “An average man with those lungs would have died long ago,” he told a friend. “Maybe Lawrence can live two or even three years more. But no medical treatment can really save him.”
The prognosis was cruelly accurate. Lawrence died in March 1930, aged 44. In Nobody ’Cept You, Dylan – who turned 83 in May – suffers a kind of death-in-life. In 1932 Bing Crosby had a hit lamenting that he didn’t have a ghost of a chance with you; Dylan has become a ghost whose only chance or hope of being restored to life is a phantom “you”. “Something’s changed,” he sings, a sentiment looking forward 26 years to – and contradicted by – Things Have Changed, written for the film Wonder Boys, in which he claims: “I used to care, but things have changed.” Actually, nothing has changed since he evidently had trouble caring about anything – ’cept you – by 1974. Dylan became disillusioned, it seems, without experiencing illusions in the first place. Well, as he later put it in a very long – frankly interminable – song, he contains multitudes.
The love interest in Nobody ’Cept You is devoid of the physical attributes lovingly inventoried at unprecedented length in Sad-Eyed Lady, or glimpsed in vivid detail in songs such as You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go – “crimson hair across your face” – or One More Cup of Coffee: “Your back is straight, your hair is smooth on the pillow where you lie…” On the one hand this love is so disembodied as to be – and given all the talk about hymns, churches and cemeteries how could it not? – almost religious, overbrimming with what Lawrence calls “the natural religious sense”. On the other, it is, he insists over and over again, entirely person-specific. Either way, the redemptive power of this love can’t be overestimated.
We all know the feeling of being intensely alive when falling in love. And here we can tie the Lawrence/Dylan connection still tighter. Just as Lawrence finds that those old hymns mean more to him than the finest poetry so, in states of heightened emotion, I find Dylan speaks more directly to me than any of the finest poets. Whether your heart is bursting with happiness or has been smashed into pieces by a break-up, no one articulates the feeling better than Dylan. And not only that. Being Dylan he even provides a caption or commentary on that effect in Tangled Up in Blue. Back at the home of the woman he sees working in a topless place where he’s stopped in for a beer – which still strikes me as a rather odd thing to do – she hands him a book of poetry by an Italian poet from the 13th century. “And every one of them words rang true/ And glowed like burnin’ coal/ Pourin’ off of every page/ Like it was written in my soul from me to you”.
That’s how it is listening to Dylan. The songs pour off the records like they’re written in my soul from him to me, from him to us.
So, addressing Dylan directly we might say, nobody ’cept you – not Shakespeare, Donne or any of the rest – makes me feel this way. A habitual and sometimes careless reviser, his approach to his craft seems characterised by a kind of obsessive indifference, leaving us to ask, over and over, how he has managed to do what he has done. It fills you with a sense – this is Lawrence again – of “undimmed wonder”.
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Geoff Dyer’s memoir, Homework, will be published by Canongate in May next year
Source: theguardian.com
