It is interesting that a t the 30th Anniversary Tribute Concert in 1992, Dylan performed “My Back Pages”, using the Byrd’s approach, with George Harrison , Eric Clapton , Tom Petty ,Neil Young, and Roger McGuinn all taking on a verse. Dylan has to try and do all this with the words while fitting them against a never varying tune. Donne called this famous poem a “song” but it remains for us just words. To illustrate my point, consider John Donne who could take us into as many dimensions as he wanted with “Go and catch a falling star” through writingīut he wasn’t trying to get 3D out of music and lyrics. The song is a song we remember, therefore, because the melody itself works its magic around the chords, and is the vehicle for a set of lyrics we only half understand.ĭylan also said in May 1965 that he was trying to write three dimensional songs, not one dimensional songs – a worthy aim indeed, but one which takes us into all sorts of problem areas. The song is simple, the chord sequence offers no surprises (any regular folk or rock musician could sit down and play it without thinking as a warm up). In one sense Dylan criticising Dylan is a half way house between Blowing in the Wind (all the answers are out there, you only have to look) and Subterranean Homesick Blues (everything is so screwed we can’t even see what the question is, let alone the answer). Or, to go a different route, do we take the fact that Dylan himself didn’t perform the song on stage until a quarter of a century after he wrote it, as a sign that he felt it didn’t really mean anything? That can’t be the music, because this is an acoustic album. If you want the song to survive and be remembered it needs something else. Say it simply and you have no song – just the chorus. Now he is older he knows nothing.Īnd maybe that is all there is… because … if that is the meaning, then what better way to express it than with a set of words where the meaning is completely obscured. The simple meaning comes from the chorus lines – that when he was younger he thought, as the young often do, that he knew everything. He also makes the point that because of the Byrds recording of the song we have a different view of the song now – and the fact that they recorded only a portion of the song and that Dylan didn’t seem to mind, suggests that either he really didn’t have a deep meaning expressed in the song or he didn’t care about the song too much. But in so doing he has made the meaning of the lyrics more obscure – and that gives an interesting effect. We see it happening throughout his songs, but it is particularly interesting in My Back Pages because of the other issues that Dylan is seeking to resolve here.Ĭlinton Heylin adds to this perspective on the song the notion that Dylan changed quite a few of the lines as he worked on the piece just prior to recording, simply to make it easier to sing, and to make the words easier to understand. This is the dilemma all artists face with all works – and it is what Dylan was referring to in his comment. The resultant book was not the novel I imagined when I started. And I gave the journalist and the fictional characters he met lives – during those nine months they became real people. I knew more or less what happened that year, but during the nine months it took to write the book I discovered a lot more and those discoveries forced me to twist the actions of the characters quite a bit. When I wrote the novel “Making the Arsenal” for example, I knew it was going to be the story of a fictional journalist in London in 1910, and would trace the events of what was a momentous year.
I would never in a 100 lifetimes suggest that I am a creative artist of singular note, but I can give the briefest explanation of this from my own experience as a novelist. In this comment Dylan notes the two opposing routes between which all creative artists make a choice – plotting and planning the work (in whatever form it is) before one starts, or letting it happen. The implication is that he started writing and let the song itself direct where matters were going.
In 1965 Dylan made a comment to the effect that he used to know what he wanted to write about before starting a song, but that since then he has taken a different route.
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