The Secret History of Songs

Anyone who's heard Bob Dylan play live (or heard live recordings) knows that he can be pretty mercurial in his reinterpretations of his own work (could that be what he meant when he spoke of "that wild mercury sound" in that famous Playboy interview with Ron Rosenbaum?)

A perfect example of this is "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," which he recorded so starkly with just voice, guitar, and a little mouth harp for color on "The Times They Are A-Changin'" in 1964, and then transformed it into a groovy rock number with the Rolling Thunder Review in 1975. Both are remarkable versions, with unique powers all their own.

Download '64 Hattie Carroll
Download '75 Hattie Carroll

I always get the sense that when Dylan is reinterpreting his work, he essentially re-writing it, as if his songs are never quite finished. (George Lucas, who thinks far too much of himself, says in a DVD special feature that "a great filmmaker once said that films are never finished, only abandoned." As far as I can tell, the only filmmaker to have said this is George Lucas. But I digress. The point is, I think it's actually an interesting idea: A work of art is never completed, only abandoned.)

As an artist, I think it's pretty humbling and instructive to think about this. It's easy to get wrapped up in your creative choices to the point where they seem like the only possible choices. You can spend so much time finessing details that you get attached to things that may or may not be worth holding onto. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard puts it this way:

"The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years of attention to these things you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls. They have to stay, or everything else falls down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it down. Duck. Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work. AND START OVER. You can save some sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves, or hard won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (The Writing Life, 73)…"

I've been thinking about all this today because on the way to work I was listening to the All Songs Considered podcast (Arum: consider this a sidebar link endorsement) and they played a track from the 'new' Stephen Stills release, "Just Roll Tape." The story is this: Stephen Stills and Judy Collins were a hot item in 1968. Stephen was hanging around the studio while Judy was recording. When she finished the session, Stills slides the engineer a couple hundred bucks to stick around, and he picks up a guitar, sits down in the studio, and says "Just roll tape." The tapes were left at the studio, forgotten, and only recently did they find their way back to Stills, who's released them, apparently after much cajoling form Graham Nash.

The recordings include early versions of CSN classics, such as "Wooden Ships" and "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" but it was the recording of "Know You've Got To Run" that caught my attention this morning. It's an early version of the closing track on CSNY's Deja Vu, "Everybody I Love You."

Both versions have much to recommend them (if you're into Dirty Hippy Music), and certainly the early version is as good or better than a lot of Stills work, or CSN work. But between the '68 version and the 1970 version that CSNY recorded, much changed, and it's fascinating to get a glimpse of a song's evolution, it's secret history.

Download Stephen Stills "Know You've Got to Run"

Download CSNY "Everybody I Love You"