This video was taken by a fan in October 2006.

Bob Dylan wrote Blind Willie McTell in 1983 for the CD Infidels but it was left off the release. The song had been circulating in bootlegs for almost a decade when Columbia release it 1991 on the The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.

The song is a classic tale from Dylan and is one of his better long songs. The lyrics are cryptic and evocative, with rich images of the South, slavery and blues. The tune is largely snatched from St. James Infirmary which gets a mention in the last verse.

I was playing in a bar one night and a 22 year old young man asked me to play it. I couldn’t believe that this obscure Dylan song had reached into his age but it had.

Dylan said “I started playing it live because I heard the Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It’s like taking a painting by Monet or Picasso – goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are ‘Picasso fans.’”" (Rolling Stone 2006)

Blind Willie McTell named in the chorus line “No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell” was a blind blues musician from Georgia. While he is rated as influential, until Dylan wrote his name into a song, very few people talked about him. That’s of course Dylan’s sense of irony.

His song Statesboro Blues became a staple for the Allman Brothers.

Sources – Wikipedia and Blind Willie McTell

In memory of Suze Rotolo, immortalized on the cover of The Freewheelin Bob Dylan and in many of his early songs like Don’t Think Twice

Suze Rotolo with Bob Dylan captured on the cover of The Freewheelin Bob Dylan

Suze Rotolo, one of Bob Dylan’s most famous girlfriends, has died after a long illness at 67. “Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman wrote that she died in her New York apartment “and the arms of her husband of 40 years, Enzo Bartoccioli”. BBC

Immortalized in many of Dylan’s songs on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th albums, she was featured on the cover of The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, a scene brought back to life in the Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky.

Rotolo was the girl in Dylan songs like Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, Boots of Spanish Leather and Tomorrow Is a Long Time.

His later breakup with her was the source of Ballad in Plain D.

Rotolo was 17 when started a tempestuous relationship with Dylan in 1962. Dylan was barely in New York when they met at a party.

“Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles his autobiography. ”

She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blooded Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.”

Rotolo’s family were left-wing unionists who encouraged Dylan’s an early interest in social advocacy and civil rights.

“In the summer of 1962 Rotolo took a long trip to Italy, leaving Dylan alone and heartbroken in New York. During this period he penned “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” — all bittersweet love songs about Rotolo. She returned in January of 1963, and weeks later Columbia records send photographer Don Hunstein to shoot the cover of The Freehweelin’ Bob Dylan. The young couple walked up and down Jones Street for a few minutes while Hunstein snapped shots. “Bob stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and leaned into me,” Rotolo wrote in her 2009 book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. “We walked the length of Jones Street facing West Fourth with Bleecker Street at our backs. In some outtakes it’s obvious that we were freezing; certainly Bob was, in that thin jacket. But image was all. As for me, I was never asked to sign a release or paid anything. It never dawned on me to ask.” (Rolling Stone)

Rotolo was artistic in her own right and chaffed under Dylan’s rising star. The affair was on-again, off-again until it became apparent to Rotolo that Dylan was also seeing Joan Baez.

“I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed,” Rotolo wrote in her autobiography A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties.

Village Voice wrote “Suze Rotolo was a talented artist (the maker of artist books and delicate book-like objects), as well as an illustrator, a sometime activist, an erstwhile East Village Other slum goddess, a devoted wife, a proud mother, a poet’s muse, a good comrade, and late in her too-short life, a published author. She was intensely private but as the radiant young woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, she became a legendary figure and even a generational icon. Just writing that I can hear her annoyed chortle–although she did humorously allow, after years of dodging rabid Dylanologists, that she was some sort of “artifact.” Village Voice

Copyrights – video D.A. Pennabaker

What Was It You Wanted is a dark and witty narrative from Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy CD that show cases Mason Ruffner’s guitar. The song also features some funky 5th chords that make it usual. We’ll cover all of that.

A friend sent me a link to Mason Ruffner which I covered in Mason Ruffner insider’s view on Bob Dylan Oh Mercy

The story of the arguments between Lanois and Dylan on Oh Mercy are legends. Dylan was nursing a bad hand and case of writer’s block. He admits he was drifting musically. Dylan covered this story in his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One.

Lanois had cut his chops producing U2 and was well known for creating layers of evocative music. He was working in New Orleans, a locale he liked for the atmosphere when Bono suggested Dylan check him out. Lanois once said that the bass got deeper and better the further down South you went. 

Dylan came to the recording session with lyrics and not much in the way of tunes. Lanois helped him put the songs together but sparks flew.

The Oh Mercy CD credits list Ruffner on Political World, Disease of Conceit and What Was it You Wanted

Michael Krogsgaard in The Dylan Recording Sessions sheds more light on what happened. Dylan, Lanois and Malcolm Burns the engineer started in the studio on March 7, 1989 working on What Good Am I and Ring Them Bells.

March 8th they were joined by Mason Ruffner (guitar), Cyril Neville (percussion), Willie Green (drums), Tony Hall (bass) and Political World came from that session. Dylan also recorded Disease of Conceit on piano at that session.

Ruffner was missing until March 21st when he recorded What Was it You Wanted. His playing is the main groove of the song with the strong tremolo C#5, F#, A5, progression. This is the “explosive licks with funky edges, rockabilly tremolo-influenced” sound that Bob Dylan noted in his biography Chronicles: Volume One.

Ruffner adds new details in his Uncut interview

How did I get the job? Daniel Lanois called me. He didn’t tell me when he called that it was going to be a Dylan record, though. I was living in New Orleans, and I was basically in the right place at the right time, I guess. But I’d *heard* that he was doing a Dylan record, so I wasn’t too surprised when I showed up and Bob Dylan was there.

I’d had this record out in 1987 that made some noise in America and Canada, Gypsy Blood. And I heard later that that had been lying around the studio and Dylan had listened to it, and Dan, and that’s why they invited me on the session. So Dylan was aware of me when I showed up.

It was different. We were recording in an old house, we weren’t in a studio, and we were basically sitting around the living room in a circle, just sitting on chairs, with the drummer, Willie Green, just off to the corner a little a bit. There were no baffles or anything, we had monitors, and our amps were stuck off in the closest somewhere, kind of hidden. Bob had his little stand there with his lyrics, and we’d just cut off into something.

Seems like we were cutting these songs all kinds of ways. Rock groove, slow groove, a funk or folk kind of groove, just trying different grooves and different tempos to this stuff. He didn’t say much about what he was after. Nobody ever did point us in any particular direction or anything. Bob would just kind of put his head down and start playing, and we’d just tag along.

It just seemed like it was all a big experiment, try the song twenty different ways. I was a little bit surprised, thinking, “Why are we doing this?” There was a lot of experimentation, and that did surprise me. I had thought he’d come in with things a little more set in his head. But, with him, I guess he’d probably just doodled with these songs on the guitar or piano, and now that he was trying them with a band, it was up for us to try and create then, try different ways, and latch into one that he’d like. Then I guess it was up to Dan or Malcolm [Burn, engineer] or Mark Howard [engineer] to go through all those tapes and find the one that popped up.

We’d start around eight o’clock in the evening and finish whenever that was – two in the morning maybe. And after I left, they’d stay longer. I remember that song, “Man In The Long Black Coat”, we’d tried that with the band, and then Bob, Dan and Malcolm did it themselves after we left, and they used that version on the record, without the drums and all. I remember, too, that we were doodling with half of the songs that wound up on his *next* record, Under The Red Sky.

Bob was doodling a lot with the lyrics. He used a pencil. He didn’t use no ink-pen. And it was like he was always making changes and additions and subtractions as he went. I mean, an elephant could’ve walked in through the room and he wouldn’t have seen it. His concentration is really unbelievable. Dan and I actually commented on that later when we were chit-chatting about things. He can really concentrate.

One thing that sticks with me, I kind of got a wow-factor from Bob this one time. I played this little guitar solo on the end of this song “Disease Of Conceit”, he kind of gave me the wow-factor with that. He wrote me a letter after the session, saying that he’d played that recording for Eric Clapton, and Clapton was wondering if it was Mark Knopfler playing. I guess he was feeding me a compliment – I wasn’t sure – but I know he liked that.

For me, Bob was really easy to work for. But, in some ways, I think he was a pain in the ass to some people. Sometimes he’d argue with Lanois, looked like just for the sake of arguing. Y’know Dan’s a real nice, soft-spoken guy, smooth and easy. But I think, at first, before Dylan realised he had a record there, I think he was aggravated, maybe even a little nervous about the outcome of this project. At first. But I think at the end, he was a lot different. I remember he did a drawing of Daniel, and he brought it offer, but he wouldn’t sign it. But then, after he’d left, he came back and signed it. And he was pretty nice to Daniel at the end, but – not at first. Malcolm Burn told me that I was the only one Bob liked for the first couple of weeks – but you’d have to ask Bob Dylan if that’s true or not.

After reading his book, Chronicles, though, it seems that that was a crucial time in Dylan’s life. It was kind of like: shit or get off the pot in his music career. I think he was a little apprehensive about it, and he didn’t really know who Daniel Lanois was that much at that time, and if he could make him a record. But, after he realised that they were going to make a good record there, I think Dylan softened up a lot.Uncut

Lyrics

What Was It You Wanted is a kiss-off “leave me alone” statement to the fans who hang on Dylan’s every word and move. But it’s more nuanced than that.

In the song, Dylan is paying slight attention to someone, a fan a lover or everyone. He weaves the complaint into a narrative that flows naturally in a disconnected conversation.

What was it you wanted
You can tell me I’m back
You got my attention
Go ahead speak

What was it you wanted
When you were kissing my cheek?
Was there somebody looking
When you gave me that kiss
Someone there in the shadows
Someone that I might have missed?

The kiss on the cheek could be a superficial kiss or the Judas kiss of betrayal of Positively 4th Street. “The biblical texts behind these references to the betrayal of Christ by his disciple Judas Escariot Matthew 17: 22″

The biblical reference is typical for Dylan. He also likes to work the song on several levels. “Are they playing our song?” implies a lover. “Did somebody tell you /That you could get it from me / Do you want it for free” implies a sycophant.

The song and singer weave in and out of the conversation about “get it back on track /Is the whole thing going backwards / Are they playing our song?

There’s a fine, very different piece on the darkness of ‘What Was It You Wanted?’ and, ironically, he’s very human, within it, on the power of wordlessness, as against Dylan’s getting in, with this song, ‘the first word, the last word, and every word along the way.’

The Chords link What Was It You Wanted

The song is played in C# and the chords are mainly 5ths which gives the song its haunting sound. 5th chords are missing the major or minor 3rd note and often used as power chords in rock music. Dylan doesn’t have many songs that use 5th chords. We can guess this is Mason Ruffner’s influence. In this song, the chords are missing something which gives the song it’s pull but also makes it emotionally unsatisfying.

There is a good illustration of various 5th chord formations at Guitar Tutor Online.  You can pick whichever positions suit your style of playing. I prefer the sound of C5   – B5 rooted on the 5th string with 3 strings and G5 in the 6th string root with three strings.  The A5, G#5 and C#5 harp break can be played in the 6th root to keep as a descending line which simplifies playing harp at the same time.

Playing What Was it You Wanted is simplified in Dylan Chords as  C#m, F#m,  C#m with E, G#m, and C#m on the turnaround. The key is correct but the chords are simplified.

The Definitive Bob Dylan Songbook is closer although in the wrong key D. It tabs the song as D5, Gm, D5, F#sus……

Listening to the song you can hear the C#5 A5 /   F#m /   C#5 / /

Words and music copyright Bob Dylan, recording copyright Sony Music – both used for music criticism and commentary. Purchase the CD on Amazon.com. Oh Mercy.

Willie Nelson does a very credible, laid back performance on the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration.

Story copyright ABC News.com

It’s hard to believe this vituperative song got toned down over the decades but here is Dylan mellow.

Where is the spit, the venom, the anger and put-down?

All lost in the years.

When I’m feeling high I pound the keys just like it was 1966 all over again.

This is the third of three videos that were streamed from the Amazon.com company meeting in July 16, 2005. There are two reviews on Bill Pagel’s site.

I couldn’t find this on on YouTube either so I’ll call it “rare”.

Song and performance are copyright by Bob Dylan.

Performance data

The video is dated October 25th, 2006. Dylan appeared in Seattle on October 13th, 2006 at the Key Arena. Glen Boyd wrote a review Concert Review: Bob Dylan And His Band – October 13, 2006 at Key Arena, Seattle WA of that date.

Another entry says the performance was July 16th, 2005. Amazon 10th Anniversary Concert With Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.  Bill Pagel’s Bob Tour Guide doesn’t confirm either date.

Blind Willie McTell

Dylan’s tribute to old blues men and Willie McTell in particular was recorded for Infidels in 1983 but left off the CD. It was recorded on May 5th which is Willie McTell’s birthday.

It was heard in bootlegs throughout the 1980s and got official release with The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991. Dylan started to perform the song in concert in 1997.

The song is loosely based on the melody and chord structure of St. James Infirmary and Dylan includes a direct reference in the last verse:

I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Blind Willie McTell contains an evocative and depressing view of American mistreatment of blacks in the South, a remembrance of McTell and the narrator’s own appointment with death.

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

The song is operating on several levels as Dylan takes the listener from East Texas to New Jerusalem which could mean the literal city or the heavenly reward. This is typical Dylan song craft but he elevates it this time to a new level. Some critics consider Blind Willie McTell one of his finest creations.

Michael Gray in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: Revised and Updated Edition calls the song a “masterpiece.”

“The English ballad ‘The Unfortunate Rake’; its many variants, including the cowboy ballad ‘The Streets of Laredo’; the black standard ‘St. James Infirmary’; and BLIND WILLIE McTELL’s ‘The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues’: all these related songs end up wondrously transmuted into Dylan’s 1980s masterpiece ‘Blind Willie McTell’. What all these songs do is allow some articulation of a fundamental human problem: how to face death.”

In Song & Dance Man 3: The Art of Bob Dylan, Gray covers the song in a chapter of it’s own.

Performance copyright Bob Dylan.

Although the song is deeply religious, it took Dylan until 1989 long past his Christian period to write it.

It’s featured on Oh Mercy, his first collaboration with Canadian producer and musician Daniel Lanois. Oh Mercy is a gem of a CD with every song growing better over time.

The words are both soothing and apocalyptic in Dylan’s view of for whom the bell tolls. They ring for the poor man’s son, for the lost sheep because God is the one and only one.

In the second verse Dylan starts kindly with the blind and the deaf. Then he moves to the chosen few and the view in Revelation that the chosen ones will rule over the world. The bells toll not so kindly for those excluded from his evangelical point of view.

In the third verse he invokes St. Catherine who one critic maintains is an incorrect Christian reference. The writer misses many references to this saint.

St. Catherine of Sienna a Dominican and patron saint of Italy who stood by Pope Urbain VI during the Great Schism. St. Catherine of Alexandria was martyred for her faith and angels carried her relics to the site of the burning bush on Mt. Sinai. There stands the 2nd oldest monastery in the world, St. Catherine’s Monastery Mt. Sinai, the spot where God delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses.

Although St; Catherine of Sienna was a prolific and beautiful writer (for the lilies that bloom), to me Dylan is evoking St. Catherine of the Monastery with the reference to height (Mt Sinai) and a fortress (the Monastery is a secure fortress). It’s a wonderful invocation as Dylan intones it might be hard but we will “breaking down the distance between right and wrong” – an optimistic hope for mankind.

Live At the Supper Club 1993 was recorded in New York for a television project that never got finished. The performers are Bob Dylan, Vocals/Guitar; Tony Garnier, Bass; Winston Watson, drums percussion; John Jackson, guitar; and Bucky Baxter, pedal steel and electric slide.

Bootlegs of the audio have been around ever since. The three shows present Dylan in an excellent light, relaxed swinging and in control. Later in 1994 he would put on a similar performance for MTV Unplugged [LIVE].

Some of the tracks have been released on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8.

Words by Bob Dylan

Ring them bells, sweet Martha
For the poor man’s son
Ring them bells so the world will know
That a God is one
Oh the shepherd is asleep, where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled with lost sheep

Oh, ring them bells for the blind and the deaf
Oh, ring them bells for all of us who are left
Oh, ring them bells for the chosen few
Who will judge the many when the game is through
Oh, ring them bells for the time that flies
For the child that cries when innocence dies

Ring them bells St. Catherine
From the top of the room
Ring them from the fortress for the lilies that bloom
Oh the lines are long and the fighting is strong
And they’re breaking down the distance
Between right and wrong

Words, music and performance copyright by Bob Dylan, Sony/Columbia

From “In Performance At The White House”

Bob Dylan’s song Times They Are A Changing has been used to push everything from youth rebellion in the 60s to banking in the 90s. It never seemed more ironic than last Tuesday night at The White House when Dylan sang “Come Senators, Congressmen please heed the call. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.”

Bob Dylan who became the iconic if reluctant leader of 60s boomer children who wanted change is now 69. He was invited as one of the most prominent protest singers in the struggle for black freedom in the civil rights movement.

Dylan was there in front of the reflecting pool at the podium with Dr. Martin Luther King in the famous Freedom March in 1963. King realized that millions of young people singing songs of civil rights and freedom was a quantum leap in acceptance of black equality. Music and civil rights became inextricably linked.

Dylan and other white artists like Joan Baez might have gotten the glory by helping to turn white audiences to the plight of the American blacks but it was the soulful experience of the Freedom Singers and Blind Boys of Alabama that were the most moving performances.

Dylan allowed the bass and piano to carry the instrumentation of the song. He seem ill-at-ease with his guitar playing. He never really used the guitar for more than modest backing.

It was an historic performance of how far we have come in granting our fellow man his human rights.

This performance is in the public domain according the The White House.

From PBS American Masters 1990 John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen

The PBS special was released on VHS and Laser-disc in 1990. Both are out of print. Amazon is offering used copies of the VHS: John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen [VHS]

Text from DylanTube

This is a very special performance from Dylan and 3 band members Scarlet Rivera on violin, Rob Stoner on bass and Howie Wyeth on drums. They toured with Dylan in 1975 as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue. The tour began the following month after this performance. Dylan’s voice is awesome in this period bearing some gruff and tenderness. At this stage Bob is starting to really wave his voice around and if you listen to the album ‘Street Legal’ recorded in 1978 you’ll hear a transformation in his singing that began in the mid 70s. Bob Dylan just keeps on progressing if you ask me.

The band is highly dynamic with Howie Wyeth keeping a tight beat and Scarlet Rivera playing gypsy style violin. Rob Stoner is a fantastic bass player who seems to be able to do anything. Rob and Howie were an established rhythm section before they played with Dylan.

Video portion copyright PBS/CBS 1990 used under fair use / fair play as part of a news story or critique. We recommend users purchase their music and video.