Electric Blues and Mystery

One of the most interesting things about listening to the sequence of demos, alternative takes, and live versions featured on the No Direction Home soundtrack (just where did they get that title? I'd like to know*) is that you realise how basically simple so many of Dylan's songs are. Which is something you'd know anyway, if you've ever downloaded a tab and tried to learn one.

Simple chords, yes, but also a traditional blues structure. Dylan uses folk/ballad format for writing songs, or he uses the 12-bar blues. The key difference being, that instead of singing,

Woke up this morning, and I felt so hungry I could die
Woke up this mo-orning, and I felt so hungry I could die
Well I gotta get me a woman
Make me a blackberry and apple pie...",

He sings,

Well, I see you got your brand new leopardskin pillbox hat
Yes I see you got your brand new leopardskin pillbox hat
Well you must tell me baby
How your head feels under something like that
Under your brand new leopardskin pillbox hat

Or, as he put it more succinctly, "Listen to the words..."
So much is obvious. Less obvious is the way that the songs morphed, between rehearsal and first take, into something that sounded incredibly different on the final take that made it onto the record. Listening to these tracks, you can hear the musicians struggling with the lexicon, struggling to make their music sound as different as the lyrics; struggling to make the music worthy of the words.
I was disappointed, when I first heard Bringing it all Back Home, because the "electric side" of that record sounded a bit thin and weak to me. I thought "Maggie's Farm," in particular, sounded like a slowed-down "Subterranean Homesick Blues," that they really didn't quite know what to do with the material. You could hear, basically, that it was a bog-standard 12-bar blues.
Listen to Take 9 of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" on this record, and you can hear a tight (and obviously talented) band chugging away at a 12-bar blues song. Listen to the version on Highway 61 Revisited, however, and it's laid-back, opened up, gloriously different, and yet it's the same song. These records, when they appeared in 1965 and 1966 sounded like nothing that had been heard before. In the studio, between successive takes, Dylan and the musicians invented an entirely new kind of music.

Everything that came after was affected by this, which is why your old dad is always trying to get you to listen to his Bob Dylan records. He wants you to know, to understand, the sheer magic that meant you weren't aware, any longer, of listening to the traditional blues form. You were listening to the words, and to musicians who had realised that they needed to play in a different way in order to even get through these songs. That anything other than what they did would simply grate and get in the way.

Dylan has struggled ever since, to find musicians as sympathetic as this. He's signed on some Big Names (Knopfler, Sly and Robbie, Slash, Mick Taylor), but he's rarely managed to find a group of musicians who could settle back and twist reality in the right way, to open a portal to the alternate universe that Blonde on Blonde came from.

The important lesson here is that the electric blues can be twisted into myriad forms, and made to sound wondrous and strange. But first you gotta learn to play the electric blues.

One of the most extraordinary things about the sponge-like life-form that is Bob Dylan is that he was totally steeped in folk and blues tradition at an age when he didn't have to shave every day.

*irony