Handle with Care - The Traveling Wilburys

SONG Handle with Care

WRITTEN BY George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty

PERFORMED BY The Traveling Wilburys

APPEARS ON The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (1988)

I love this song; it's a joy to listen to (and a joy to watch the video) because it's obvious that the musicians were having a blast performing it. It's also so celebratory: things have been bad in the past, but now it's all looking up, so let's celebrate. The pure joy of being together and having a great time is all over this piece.

This song was the birth of the Wilburys, and the story of its creation is as follows... George Harrison had just come out of a long stretch of depression and hiding away from the public. He'd been slowly emerging from the shadows in 1986 and '87, sitting in on other people's gigs and playing in some all-star charity gigs. As he was getting his mojo back, he thought of recording again, and Dave Edmunds suggested that Jeff Lynne was the ideal producer for the project. He was right; the two clicked, and the result was Harrison's 1987 album Cloud Nine, which was both a critical and a financial success, and brought Harrison back into the public eye in the best way possible.

In April 0f 1988 Harrison and Lynne were in Los Angeles to clean up some loose ends associated with Cloud Nine's success; Warner Brothers wanted to release "This Is Love" as a single, and they needed a b-side. At dinner with mutual friend Roy Orbison, the three thought it might be fun for them to rent some studio time and come up with a collaboration to use for the b-side tune. Someone suggested they use Bob Dylan's Malibu studio, and on the day of the recording session Harrison stopped by Tom Petty's house to borrow a guitar and ended up inviting Petty along for the ride. And the rest is history at its magical best.

Lyrics:

Been beat up and battered 'round
Been sent up, and I've been shot down
You're the best thing that I've ever found
Handle me with care

Reputations changeable
Situations tolerable
Baby, you're adorable
Handle me with care

(Chorus)
I'm so tired of being lonely
I still have some love to give
Won't you show me that you really care

(Bridge)
Everybody's got somebody to lean on
Put your body next to mine, and dream on

I've been fobbed off, and I've been fooled
I've been robbed and ridiculed
In day care centers and night schools
Handle me with care

Been stuck in airports, terrorized
Sent to meetings, hypnotized
Overexposed, commercialized
Handle me with care

(Chorus)

(Bridge)

I've been uptight and made a mess
But I'll clean it up myself, I guess
Oh, the sweet smell of success
Handle me with care

The tune itself sounds very much like a Harrison/Lynne idea, with classic Orbison on the chorus, but everybody contributed to the lyrics, calling out more ways to be abused as they went along, and apparently cracking up as they did; reports of the session include tales of everybody falling on the floor laughing as the called-out suggestions got more and more ridiculous. But oddlt enough, the final version of the lyrics seem to mirror what George Harrison's life had been like up to then, including that last verse: "I've been uptight and made a mess/ But I'll clean it up myself, I guess/ Oh, the sweet smell of success..." The last two years had certainly been a time of cleaning up and regrouping for him, and Cloud Nine smelled very sweet indeed.

When Warner Brothers heard the final product they thought, quite rightly, that no way was this a b-side. The decision to go back into the studio and record a full album was an easy one, and the result was The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, recorded in May of 1988 and released in October. Unfortunately Roy Orbison passed away on December 6 of that year, so the full group would never assemble again. The remaining Wilburys recorded another album in 1990, but it just wasn't the same.

This video is the official Warner Brothers music video to promote the song. You get a pretty good idea of how much fun they had with this; the video is every bit as celebratory as the song. Enjoy!

Bob Dylan: All Along the Watchtower

SONG All Along the Watchtower 

WRITTEN BY Bob Dylan 

PERFORMED BY Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix 

APPEARS ON John Wesley Harding (1967); Electric Ladyland (1968) 

NOTE 1 Dylan was so taken with the Hendrix rendition that he performs that arrangement in concert to this day. NOTE 2 The melody and lyrics to "All Along the Watchtower" played a critical role in the final season of the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica. NOTE 3 Sony has removed from YouTube all videos all Dylan's original acoustic arrangement, so I can't include that here.

Many Dylan fans and scholars conclude that "All Along the Watchtower" is a middling song that achieved classic status only because of Jimi Hendrix' epic cover version. The lyrics, they argue, are impenetrably cryptic and depend on metaphor that makes no sense: Dave Van Ronk wrote -- irrelevantly and incorrectly, it seems to me -- that "a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can't go along it." Van Ronk believed that Dylan's reputation allowed him to get away with lyrics that anyone else would have pilloried over.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree, starting with the obvious point: The lyrics are quintessential Dylan and no one else could have written them. Dylan recorded "Watchtower" in Nashville as part of the sessions that produced John Wesley Harding, the first album released after his 1966 motorcycle accident. Although the details of the accident remain obscure, it apparently inspired Dylan to turn to the Biblical and apocalyptic imagery that populates both John Wesley Harding and The Basement Tapes, the sessions for which actually preceded Harding. The succinctness and directness of "All Along the Watchtower" stand out on an album of songs notable for their elliptical symbolism and elusive meanings that often seem just barely out of reach.

Dylan's original acoustic version (unavailable for linking) is ominous and evocative, with its last line ("the wind began to howl") giving way to a stark and icy harmonica solo.  The song emphatically rejects the nihilism that Dylan sees at the heart of commerce:

Businessmen, they drink my wine. Ploughmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth

The joker and thief are outsiders who recognize that modern life creates "too much confusion,"  Cassandras warning the rest of us that "the hour is getting late." In fact, the song is laden with portent: "There's too much confusion," "let us not talk falsely now," "princes kept the view," "a wildcat did growl."

Who are the mysterious two riders? I see them as a tabula rasa upon which listeners can impose their worst fears of a society that defines success by wealth and position. For no reason supported by the lyrics, I've always imagined Dickens' children Ignorance and Want grown up, mounted, and on the offensive. But that's the marvel of the song: It conjures your most acute dread, which in turn impels you to not talk falsely and to pace the watchtower of your existence, ever alert for the two horsemen.

LYRICS
"There  must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief
"There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine. Ploughmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief he kindly spoke
"There are many here among who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate.
Let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching; the wind began to howl.

Bob kicks butt around the mid-90s:


Jimi at the Isle of Wight in 1970:


Battlestar Galactica Watchtower montage here...

See That My Grave is Kept Clean

SONG: See That My Grave is Kept Clean

WRITTEN BY: credited to Blind Lemon Jefferson

PERFORMED BY: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, Mavis Staples, & lots of others

APPEARS ON: Blind Lemon Jefferson: Anthology of American Folk Music, vol. 3, Songs [Smithsonian/Folkways]; also The Best of Blind Lemon Jefferson [Yazoo], & other compilations; Dave Van Ronk: The Folkways Years [Smithsonian/Folkways]; Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan [Columbia]

I may be giving folks the impression that I have a thing for kind of eerie songs—writing about “Country Blues,” & then following that up with “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”! At any rate, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (AKA “Two White Horses,” AKA “One Kind Favor”) is a harrowing evocation of death, just as “Country Blues” holds very little back in its portrait of dissolution. & to my mind, if we’re going to talk about “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” we have to talk about the great Texas bluesman, Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Blind Lemon Jefferson was born in the 1890s (the exact year isn’t certain) in a town called Coutchman, TX (since abandoned) & died in 1929 in Chicago. Blind from birth, Jefferson began his performing career in his early teens, & later moved to Dallas, where he befriended both Leadbelly & T-Bone Walker. He traveled to Chicago in the 1920s, where he recorded for Paramount Records, & later Okeh Records. His death apparently remains a bit of a mystery—he may have suffered a heart attack after being disoriented in a Chicago snowstorm, or he may have frozen to death.

What we have ifor certain is Jefferson’s recorded legacy, which has in turn been passed down by some greats who’ve been influenced by his style—not just Leadbelly & Walker, but also the great Lightnin’ Hopkins, for instance. Jefferson had the voice of a street singer—his voice was powerful, & he tended to pitch it high (a street singer’s strategy—if you want your voice to carry, pitch it up a tone). His guitar playing was extraordinary, both in terms of the rhythmic backing (check out the drive of the damped chords behind his singing in the music clip below) as well as in the characteristic runs he’d perform as the “response” (between the sung lines) on both the treble & the bass strings.

The lyrics to “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” are straightforward but poetic in their starkness. I particularly like the “long lane” verse, which seems to suggest a whole lot of darkness—the long lane is presumably death, but what’s the “bad way that never change”? Damnation? A life lived wrong? I’ve transcribed the lyrics from Blind Lemon’s singing as best I could. You can find the lyrics on-line, but while most of the sites say these are Blind Lemon’s lyrics, they actually are the ones sung by Bob Dylan on his self-titled debut album. Dylan’s lyrics vary from Jefferson’s in some significant ways.

Because of this, I thought I’d take a paragraph to consider “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” as an example of the folk process. While the song is credited to Blind Lemon, I’ve also seen sources that claim it’s a traditional spiritual that Jefferson re-worked as a blues song (e.g., Fred Sokolow in Ragtime, Blues & Jazz for Banjo). Of the versions I know, Van Ronk’s follows Jefferson’s quite closely—both men were masterful guitarists with powerful voices, & while Van Ronk changes the order of the verses, he keeps the words largely the same. Interestingly, Van Ronk doesn’t sing the “My heart stopped beating and my hands got cold” verse, the last line of which I can’t make out despite repeated tries. I can only tell for certain that it can’t be the same words as Dylan sings, “Now I believe what the Bible told,” tho it could be something quite like that. Both Jefferson & Van Ronk seem to concentrate on the eeriness of directly evoking death. Dylan’s version, which (with apologies to Dylan fans) I do find to be the least satisfying, seems to concentrate instead on anger. His tempo seems to race & he seems to almost spit the words out. I do like some things about the guitar part, tho; & hey, I sing this song accompanied by 5-string banjo, so it’s not like I’m against re-interpretation.

& I like Mavis Staples’ re-interpretation. If “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” ultimately has spiritual roots before its blues transformation, Ms Staples version really hearkens back to these, & while Dylan adds an edge, she softens the song as we know it from Blind Lemon Jefferson, singing about redemption rather than “a bad way that never change.”

I couldn’t find information about a recording of this either by Mavis Staples or the Staples Singers, tho I thought I remembered that one existed (in addition to this YouTube version, which has such splendid instrumentation). There also doesn’t appear to be a YouTube clip of Van Ronk’s version, but hey, that just means you ought to check it out on the cd or as an mp3, either of which is very much worth doing. Here are the lyrics, followed by the video clips.


Well, there's one kind of favor I'll ask of you
Well, there's one kind of favor I'll ask of you
Lord, it’s one kind of favor I'll ask of you
It’s see that my grave is kept clean

It’s a long lane that’s got no end
It’s a long lane that’s got no end
It’s a long lane ain’t got no end
& it’s a bad way that never change

Lord it's two white horses in a line
Well it's two white horses in a line
Well it’s two white horses in a line
Goin’ take me to my burying ground

My heart stopped beating and my hands got cold
My heart stopped beating and my hands got cold
Well, my heart stopped beating, Lord my hands got cold
It wasn’t [???] that bible told

Have you ever hear that coffin sound
Have you ever heard that coffin sound
Have you ever hear that coffin sound
Then you know another poor boy’s in the ground

Dig my grave with a silver spade
Dig my grave with a silver spade
Dig my grave with a silver spade
You may lead me down with a golden chain

Have you ever hear that bell moan
Have you ever hear that bell moan
Have you ever hear that church bells moan
Then you know another poor boy’s dead and gone

Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero/No Limit

SONG Love Minus Zero/No Limit

WRITTEN BY Bob Dylan

PERFORMED BY Bob Dylan

APPEARS ON Bringing It All Back Home (1965); At Budokan (1979); The Concert For Bangla Desh (2005, DVD only)

I've been pondering the meaning of this song for more than thirty years. LMZ/NL is one of my favorite Dylan songs (and therefore one of my favorite songs), although a precise interpretation has long eluded me. But, writing about a song uncovers meaning. Even the act of copying lyrics has an effect: I grasp much more from typing them instead of cutting and pasting.

For example, the meaning of this aphorism closing the second verse--

She knows there's no success like failure,
And that failure's no success at all

--perplexed me. Was Dylan being deliberately enigmatic, laughing up his sleeve as fans sought a profundity where none existed? Then I wrote it down and Dylan's point suddenly became clear: Since we learn more from our failures, they are more important than our successes ("there's no success like failure"). Thus, failure is nothing like success ("no success at all"). Dylan sets up the lyric nicely with an account of banal conversations and speculations irrelevant to what actually happens.

Dylan often deals in punch lines. LMZ/NL typifies this propensity, where the imagery of each verse sets up a clearly stated conclusion. Thus in the first verse, love's elemental nature renders mere store-bought valentines as an inadequate expression. In the surreal third verse, iconic figures ("madams," "horsemen," "pawns," and crumbling "statues") intermingle and destroy each other while love watches bemused ("My love winks"), not judging because it's all small stuff anyway.

In the climactic fourth verse, the banker's nieces' ideal of "perfection" (the "gifts of wise men") echoes the Nativity story. Compared to love, though, religion is a relatively earthly matter subject to corruption (hence the financial imagery). Love in all its forms -- romantic, platonic, brotherly -- is Dylan's higher power. We can see this by the way he invokes love's strength in the face of everything from the quotidian ("dime stores and bus stations") to the mystical ("ceremonies of the horsemen").

All which leads to the doozy of the finale:

The wind howls like a hammer,

The night blows cold and rainy,

My love she's like some raven,

At my window with a broken wing.

The power of love notwithstanding, human indifference can break it. The elements suddenly turn dangerous, reducing love to a futile exercise of battering at the window separating it from an unresponsive lover. And so, love can in the end fall victim to the banalities of human nature. Which is why we must strive to be "true, like ice, like fire" lest we lose love's great capacity to heal, bind, and reveal.

LYRICS

My love she speaks like silence,

Without ideals or violence,

She doesn't have to say she's faithful,

Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.

People carry roses,

Make promises by the hour,

My love she laughs like the flowers,

Valentines can't buy her.

In dime stores and bus stations,

People talk of situations,

Read books, repeat quotations,

Draw conclusions on the wall.

Some speak of the future,

My love she speaks softly,

She knows there's no success like failure,

And that failure's no success at all.

The cloak and dagger dangles,

Madams light the candles,

In ceremonies of the horsemen,

Even the pawn must hold a grudge.

Statues made of match sticks,

Crumble into one another,

My love winks, she does not bother,

She knows too much to argue or to judge.

The bridge at midnight trembles,

The country doctor rambles,

Banker's nieces seek perfection,

Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.

The wind howls like a hammer,

The night blows cold and rainy,

My love she's like some raven,

At my window with a broken wing.

Newport, 1965:

From the Concert for Bangla Desh, with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Leon Russell:

A gorgeous version from 1994:

Woody Guthrie: Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

SONG Deportees

WRITTEN BY Woody Guthrie

PERFORMED BY Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston

APPEARS ON The Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie (1972)

NOTE This song, one of Guthrie's most memorable, has been covered many times. I couldn't find a version of Woody singing it, so I've included renditions by the Boston folk singer Antje Duvekot, Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris, and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

The agreement of 1947 [between Mexico and the U.S.]... contained a novel provision which established amnesty through deportation. Under its terms, undocumented Mexicans who were sent back across the border could return to the U.S. as temporary contract laborers; during the life of their contracts, they could not be again deported. In practice, employers often called Border Patrol stations to report their own undocumented employees, who were returned, momentarily, to border cities in Mexico, where they signed labor contracts with the same employers who had denounced them. This process became known as "drying out wetbacks" or "storm and drag immigration." "Drying out" provided a deportation-proof source of cheap seasonal labor...

Dick J. Reavis, Without Documents

Sometime during 1948, Woody Guthrie read an account of plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. The plane was returning anonymous undocumented migrant workers to California, human beings that the newspaper article identified only as "deportees." He then wrote his great song "Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" in which he humanized the dead migrants as only he could. To Guthrie, they are not merely deportees: They have names (Juan, Rosalita, Jesus, Maria) and families:

My father's own father, he waded that river

They took all the money he made in his life

My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees

And they rode the truck till they took down and died

To Guthrie it is the "they" who took the money, who "chase us like outlaws," who are the anonymous ones, hiding behind legalisms to rob and exploit the migrants until there is nothing left but "dry leaves to rot on my topsoil." The use of the word "my" implicates all of us in the fate of the migrants, for it is we who eat "the good fruit."

Last week, I read this account of the customers at a Rocky Mount, NC drug store who couldn't afford all of their medications and as a result had to pick and choose. One two-time heart attack victim could not afford $160 anti-clotting medicine. A mother skips inhaler refills for her asthmatic son. A man passes on prescriptions for heart disease and emphysema. Reading the article brought to mind this verse from "Deportee":

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we cab grow our good fruit?

Surely, Rocky Mount is one of our American orchards and the people who live there are our good fruit, now deportees in their own land. And surely we -- their amigos, their fellow countryman -- can find a better way to care for them.

LYRICS

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

The Boston-based folk singer Antje Duvekot sings the first version of "Deportee." BTW, Antje has an outstanding new CD called The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer.

Here, Woody's son Arlo and Emmylou Harris sing "Deportee." Emmylou's harmomy vocal is, as always, peerless:

Finally, here are Bob Dylan and Joan Baez from the 1976 Rolling Thunder Review tour:

Bob Dylan: This Dream Of You

SONG This Dream Of You

SONGWRITER Bob Dylan

PERFORMER Bob Dylan

APPEARS ON Together Through Life (2009)

NOTE Stupid And Contagious contributed this insightful essay about one of the ballads on Bob Dylan's outstanding new album

From Bob Dylan's latest meisterwerk Together Through Life comes the gorgeous, yearning, classic "This Dream Of You".

"This Dream Of You" is actually the only song on the album composed entirely by Dylan alone. Although nine of the ten tracks from the album were co-written by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, both the music and lyrics for ‘This Dream Of You’ were composed by Bob Dylan.

"This Dream Of You" is a beautiful ballad of powerful, sculpted, existentialist poetry meshed with wonderful, delicate, Tex-Mex instrumentation, embellished by the magnificent accordion work of Los Lobos frontman David Hidalgo.

One of the best songs on the new LP, "This Dream Of You" harks back to the themes and tone of Dylan's previous album, the majestic Modern Times from 2004.

The song simply and sublimely explores themes of love, loss and mortality.

Like a rueful flawed existentialist character in perhaps a Shakesperian tragedy or perhaps a classic film noir - a genre that Dylan loves (we read a report that most if not all the DVD's Dylan takes with him on tour are Noirs!) - a desperate man - "I'm lost in the crowd, all my tears are gone" - sits alone in the desolate enigmatic "Nowhere Cafe" watching another night end, warily awaiting a dawn he doesn't really want to see.

In this grim, lonely location, he meditates upon his life, which is almost ended, and upon the many things lost down those long hard years ... "Everything I touch seems to disappear."

We don't know if this character's weakness has been a tendency for over-ponderance instead of direct action, like Hamlet, or perhaps a tendency for rapid action without thinking, like Macbeth. Regardless, he rues whatever weaknesses have led to his current dire plight.

He's had chances to make things better but opportunities were wasted and he knows there will be few if any more such opportunities ... "There's a moment when all old things become new again, but that moment might have come and gone."

This is expressed most poignantly and beautifully in the evocative poetic lines "From a cheerless room, in a curtain gloom, I saw a star from Heaven fall. I turned and looked again but it was gone."

Nevertheless, hope is still alive in his heart. Hope for love at last. Hope for some sort of a future. Hope etched out in the haunting refrain "All I have and all I know is this dream of you which keeps me living on."

However, the hard lessons of life cause him to have some serious doubts ... "Am I too blind to see? Is my heart playing tricks on me?"

Despite these doubts, he still believes. This hope - regardless how realistic - may be all he has, but it's powerful enough to give him the strength to greet another bright dawn of another dark feared day.

LYRICS

How long can I stay

In this nowhere café 'fore night turns into day

I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn

All I have and all I know

Is this dream of you which keeps me living on

There’s a moment when

All old things become new again

But that moment might have come and gone

All I have and all I know

Is this dream of you which keeps me living on

I look away but I keep seeing it

I don’t want to believe but I keep believing it

Shadows dance upon the wall

Shadows that seem to know it all

Am I too blind to see

Is my heart playing tricks on me

I’m lost in the crowd, all my tears are gone

All I have and all I know

Is this dream of you which keeps me living on

Everything I touch seems to disappear

Everywhere I turn, you are always here

I’ll run this race until my earthly death

I’ll defend this place with my dying breath

From a cheerless room

In a curtain gloom, I saw a star from heaven fall

I turned and looked again but it was gone

All I have and all I know

Is this dream of you which keeps me living on