The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

June 7, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives 

 The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time Richard Nixon became President in 1969.

MR. TAMBOURINE MAN by BOB DYLAN

Bob Dylan’s first —eponymous— album, released in 1962, was a mix of original material, arrangements of traditional folk songs (“House of the Rising Sun,” “Pretty Peggy-O,” “Man of Constant Sorrow”) and a couple of blues classics (Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train Blues,” and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”).

Dylan had traveled from Minnesota to meet his idol Woody Guthrie, and his heartfelt “Song To Woody” was typical of the album’s sound and feel.

The stripped down acoustic guitar/harmonica arrangements and the powerful melodic and lyrical content of the folk-protest songs —among which was “Blowin’ in the Wind”— made 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan the Ur-albums of the 1960s folk revival/renaissance.

But Dylan was creatively and personally restless, and he was already being drawn by the opportunities —and the liberties— offered by rock and roll.

In 1964 he performed at the Newport Folk Festival.  Among his set was an early version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

In 1965 he returned to Newport.  At the end of his folk set, he plugged in his guitar and played three songs (“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry”) with a rock band as backup. 

The result was no less electric (no pun intended) and only marginally more decorous than the uproar that greeted the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, when the outraged patrons trashed the theater and rioted in the streets outside.

Robert Shelton, the late music critic and Dylan biographer, described the scene:

From the moment the group swung into a rocking electric version of “Maggie’s Farm,” the Newport audience registered hostility. As the group finished “Farm,” there was some reserved applause and a flurry of boos. Someone shouted: “Bring back Cousin Emmy!” The microphones and speakers were all out of balance, and the sound was poor and lopsided. For even the most ardent fan of the new music, the performance was unpersuasive. As Dylan led his band into “Rolling Stone,” the audience grew shriller: “Play folk music! … Sell out! … This is a folk festival! … Get rid of that band!” Dylan began “It Takes a Train to Cry,” and the applause diminished as the heckling increased. Dylan and the group disappeared offstage, and there was a long, clumsy silence. Peter Yarrow urged Bob to return and gave him his acoustic guitar. As Bob returned on the stage alone, he discovered he didn’t have the right harmonica. “What are you doing to me?” Dylan demanded of Yarrow. To shouts for “Tambourine Man,” Dylan said: “OK, I’ll do that one for you.” The older song had a palliative effect and won strong applause. Then Dylan did “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” singing adieu to Newport, good-bye to the folk-purist audience.

 

Backstage, there had been almost as much excitement as out front. At the first sound of the amplified instruments, Pete Seeger had turned a bright purple and begun kicking his feet and flailing his arms. (A festival official said later: ”I had never seen any trace of violence in Pete, except at that moment. He was furious with Dylan!”) Reportedly, one festival board member–probably Seeger–was so upset that he threatened to pull out the entire electrical wiring system. Cooler heads cautioned that plunging the audience into the dark might cause a real riot.

 

Dylan’s next LP —1965’s Bringing It All Back Home— straddled the old and new worlds by offering one electric and one acoustic side.  Among the tracks on the acoustic side was the finished version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship,
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin’.
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun,

It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run

And but for the sky there are no fences facin’.

And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme

To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind,

I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow you’re

Seein’ that he’s chasing.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,

Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,

The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,

Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,

With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,

Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

There have been various accounts of the song’s composition and exegeses of its meaning(s).  According to one version, it was written on a marijuana-fueled cross-country road trip (during which new supplies were picked up at post offices to which they had been mailed in advance).  What else could “take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind” mean?  And the vivid and apparently disconnected imagery of the song have led to its being claimed as one of the earliest LSD-inspired hits (not to mention the exhortation to “take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship”). 

But experts —and where Dylan is concerned, there are experts of every kind including the chronology of his alleged drug consumption— claim that “Mr. Tambourine Man” was completed at least several weeks before the first putative Dylan dalliance with lysergic acid diethylamide.

Dylan himself has debunked any drug connection. “Drugs never played a part in that song… ‘disappearing through the smoke rings in my mind,’ that’s not drugs; drugs were never that big a thing with me. I could take ‘em or leave ‘em, never hung me up.”

Indeed, the Tambourine Man, far from being a figment of Dylan’s imagination was a very real person — who was frequently among Dylan’s backup musicians.  Bruce Langhorne was a greatly-admired guitarist and a ubiquitous session man on many of the most important and influential folk albums of the early ‘60s.  His work can be heard behind Dylan, Odetta, Joan Baez, Richard and Mimi Farina, Peter, Paul & Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Carolyn Hester.

The Tambourine Man himself: Bruce Langhorne with his Turkish frame drum.

Langhorne was also known for playing a distinctive Turkish frame drum — in effect a supersized tambourine.  As he described it, “It was about [four inches] deep, and it was very light and it had a sheepskin head and it had jingle bells around the edge - just one layer of bells all the way around…I bought it ’cause I liked the sound…I used to play it all the time.”

Thus both the Tambourine Man and the jingle jangle morning are poetic riffs on real inspirations.

Cover art for The Byrds’ debut album Mr. Tambourine Man.  The single of the title song quickly rose to Number One on Billboard’s Hot 100.  The album stayed on the charts for four months and reached Number Seven.

In 1965 the seminal folk-rock group The Byrds covered “Mr Tambourine Man” (or at least the two verses that would fit the three-minute rule for radio air play).  The single shot up the charts to Number One (Dylan’s only song to reach that top spot). As Dylan is said to have said after his first hearing of the Byrds’ cover, “Wow, man, you can even dance to that!”

In the fall of 1964, when I had just started graduate school in London, I read about a young American folk singer who had just been signed by the British record powerhouse Decca.  A couple of weeks later, sitting in the a smoke-filled basement club in the Tottenham Court Road, I heard Julie Felix for the first time. 

Cover art for Julie Felix’ 1964 debut album, which  included two Dylan tracks — “Masters of War,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

Unlike the often ethereal and affectless presentation of many of the folk purists then popular, Julie Felix used her brain to find the guts as well as the hearts of the songs she sang.  Her commitment was complete and her performance was compelling.  Her repertoire included traditional folk songs to Dylan  to the work of new young writers like Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, and Donovan.

That night began a friendship that now spans forty-four years, during which her talent has grown even richer and deeper.

Last spring a fan recorded her singing “Mr. Tambourine Man” at a folk club in Hertfordshire.  Even in this candid low-tech capture, it is a revelatory performance.  

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