The Master’s Hand
In September, Bob Dylan released another in his long line of bootleg albums: Springtime In New York. It covers a period of Dylan’s catalogue that, quite frankly, I’m not a huge fan of. It was the 80s, Dylan was, for better or worse, passé, and he was stuck in the middle of that 80s sound, white reggae (what a bad idea!), and New Wave. He was past those great “born again” records and stumbling toward some distant musical frontier. (It’s not his fault, by the way, that most music in the 80s sucked.) Don’t get me wrong, there are some real gems on albums like Shot of Love, Infidels, and Knocked Out Loaded. “Every Grain of Sand” is one of his best songs, and “License to Kill” is a masterclass in narrative songwriting. But, in general, the songs seem less cohesive, too distracted, disaffected even. Of course, Dylan ends the decade with the Daniel Lanois produced Oh Mercy which brings him back to form. But I digress.
On the latest bootleg, “Too Late (Band Version)” proves that Dylan was still working at the height of his abilities. I say this with a full understanding of how blasphemous this will be to every Dylanologist out there — “Too Late (Band Version)” may be one of Dylan’s greatest songs ever. Let me explain.
The musicians. Dylan gathered together a who’s who of virtuosos: Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits) and Mick Taylor (formerly of The Rolling Stones) on guitar, Sly Dunbar on the drums, and Robbie Shakespeare on the bass — the best of the best. Dylan’s genius, though, has never really been about musicianship or arrangement. It’s the lyrics (shocker) that make ”Too Late (Band Version)” one of Dylan’s best songs.
I’m in awe of the song’s structural and thematic conceit. We are interlopers thrust into the middle of a series of conversations. But, we only get one side of each conversation. In the first verse, it’s a conversation where one character is seemingly implicated in a crime. The first thing we hear is an alibi: “Well, whether there was a murder I don’t know I wasn’t there/ I was busy visiting a friend in jail.” Who are these people? Who denies being a witness or accomplice to a murder by claiming to have been visiting a friend in jail? Some serious people, man, that’s who! From there we’re tossed around from conversation to conversation encountering a wide range of loose-lipped, shady characters.
Dylan’s songs have always curated a menagerie of strange personalities, and “Too Late (Band Version)” is no different. What we have here is scintillating voyeurism. It’s juicy gossip, and we just happen to be sitting next to these folks at the bar. I love that we never get the full story, that we have to fill in the blanks, that we get an astoundingly full sense of who someone is by hearing them utter just one sentence. We learn more about the people gabbing away than we do those being talked about. Sure, some nameless guy “reached too high/ and tumbled back to the ground.” But who cares? I’ve heard that story a million times: Oedipus, Hamlet, the Prodigal Son, Marilyn Monroe, Kanye (maybe/hopefully). It’s the bitterly jealous clamor of those on the outside that pulls you in. They’re the ones we saddle up next to as we sip our beer.
One more thing. Dylan writes irritation better than anyone except, maybe, Larry David. Here’s a different way to look at the song’s dialogue: Imagine you’re stuck in the middle of one of these inane gossip sessions and would rather be anywhere else in the world. One of Dylan’s characters says what we all think in those moments: “In these times of compassion/ where conformity’s a fashion/ say one more stupid thing to me/ before the final nails driven in.” Larry David couldn’t say it better. We’ve all been there.
It’s likewise essential not to miss the barbed irony that secures the song’s pre-chorus: “You know what they say/ about being nice to people on your way up/ you might meet ‘em again/ on the way back down.” (Listener Beware: This isn’t a straight line.) You can count on no hands the number of people who have reached the zenith of fame by being “nice to people on [their] way up.” Nice people are not good capitalists. They make for even worse idols because, well, they’re boring. Plus, you’re not famous, and neither am I. Again, this isn’t a song about the famous guy falling down; it’s a song about the bloodthirsty audience of hoi polloi salivating as they watch him fall. It’s about us! How much do we love seeing people knocked off their pedestal? It was Aristotle, after all, who established early on that tragic heroes must be "larger and better" versions of us. They have to be rich and famous. That’s why we take such enjoyment watching them taken down a peg or two. We quietly relish that it’s “too late, too late, too late, too late/ to bring him back.” Spite binds us together.
I’ve saved the best for last. Dylan’s unpredictable meter and phrasing is what makes this song representative of his true genius. Each line feels improvisational. Anyone who has ever tried to write a song obsesses over getting the right number of words and syllables to fit the established meter of the song. Most songs set the lyrical rhythm with the first line or two and never deviate. (Picture me counting the number of syllables in a line on my fingers to make sure the song is perfectly square). Why? Because art — for a long time and in all of its iterations — is about the attempt to mirror perfect forms. (I know art and music history majors. This has not been the case for decades in sculpture, painting, or classical music; the avant-garde class rewrote the playbook). In pop music, however, this addiction to perfect meter (and don’t even get me started on perfect rhyme) has been harder to break. And let’s not forget that Dylan was one of the first to shatter this barrier successfully! What Dylan does with the lyrics of “Too Late (Band Version)” strikes against all norms of pop lyricism. Sure, there’s some metrical predictability in spots (like the pre-chorus and refrain), but the verses are Hobbesian. No rules. No comfort. There’s nothing fencing us in.
Check this out. The first lines of one verse go as such: “You’ll arrange to see your man tonight/ who tells you some secret things/ you think might open some doors.” That’s 23 syllables for those of us counting. He follows that with: “How to enter the gates of Paradise/ no not really/ more like how to go crazy/ from carrying a burden/ that’s never meant to be yours.” 35 syllables! Same number of bars, same musical space to get the line out. Most songwriters would labor to make both lines exactly the same metrically (or at least get them close). Nope, not Dylan. His lines meander and abide by no metrical expectation.
It’s hard to emphasize how much this laissez-faire approach goes against established songwriting principles. They don’t teach this in Pat Pattison’s Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure. But Dylan is more interested in the line than the rule. He’ll squeeze as many words as necessary into a line to get the image or sentiment right. It’s a different (if not better) artistic intention.
And that’s what makes Dylan one of the greatest songwriters ever. He’s working by a different set of rules, by a different standard. He’s operating somewhere far removed from the listener’s expectations. From concept to writing to phrasing to tone and so much in between, the poetic architecture of “Too Late (Band Version)” is uncanny. For those who don’t “get it,” his writing here might seem incomprehensible or (worse) sloppy. But, for those of us who see the master's hand at work, it’s too late to bring us back.
