The Momentum of Standstill

This chapter started out as a reflection upon Dylan’s concept of time on Time out of Mind, triggered, among other things, by some early reviewer who was surprised to find that ‘Standing in the Doorway’ lasted as long as it does. The text grew from there, however, and in its final state it is a broader study of Dylan’s experiments with time and the blues.

Time Out Of Mind (1997) is a blues album. Dylan finally sounds like the old blues man he wanted to be when he was 20. In the beginning of his career – before folk music got in the way – he was considered a blues singer first and a folk musician second. His voice treatment and his phrasing, as well as the songs he performed and the models for the songs he eventually began writing himself – they’ve all got their roots deep down in the Delta. Robert Shelton wrote in his review of Dylan’s first major gig – the review that may have helped Dylan get his first record contract:

Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the ‘husk and bark’ are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap. He rocks his head and body, closes his eyes in reverie and seems to be groping for a word or a mood, then resolves the tension benevolently by finding the word and the mood.¹

The blues: twelve or eight fixedly patterned bars of three-chord music – on the surface it may seem like a low standard for excellence. But that depends on the perspective. One thing is that the twelve-bar scheme isn’t the one, never-changing cliché it is normally presented as; there are numerous variations within the pattern, and although the blues grid is one of the predominant forms that Dylan has used for his song-writing throughout his career, it is hard to find two songs that share the same pattern. The diversity within the seemingly rigid form is remarkable.

Furthermore, the real excellence of a good blues musician lies elsewhere: in the phrasing, in the tiniest rhythmical changes (which is what creates the ‘mood’, the ‘feeling’), in the timing. The blues – even when played instrumentally – always seems to give a nod to the rules of vocal delivery – and is plentifully rewarded for it. Sometimes it could be seen as a way of speaking more than a way of singing, with all the almost unnoticeable nuances of speaking available, to help achieving the goal of speech: to express oneself and to be understood. This is available to a large extent because of the freedom from the confines of notation that the blues enjoys. But at the same time, what gives the blues its peculiar power is the combination of the expressiveness of speech with that of music.²

Music can be defined as ‘organization of sound in time’. It possesses detailed systems for how this organization is to be brought about: rhythmical hierarchies, harmonic ‘laws’, frameworks of different kinds, upon which melodies are built.

One of the most fundamental features of this organized object called music, is the regulation of tension. It can be defined as that expectation of a release, a return to a level of rest (of a lack of expectation of something else to happen), that is created by a deviation from this level.

This is a very open definition, which must be supplied with extra information specific to each particular style, such as: what counts as a deviation, what counts as a return, which means are considered adequate to effect this return, and which musical parameters are involved?

So what is the neutral level for a blues melody? There is the keynote, of course. That’s where most melodies start and end, and what comes between is what is supposed to compel us to keep listening. If no deviation from this note occurs, we lose interest, of course.

Then there is the twelve-bar pattern itself, using some kind of variation of the three basic chords tonic (key note), subdominant (a fifth lower) and dominant (a fifth higher).

But there are other such neutral levels. The blues is an oral musical tradition, and like most of these, it consists of a highly developed set of standardized formulae – short snippets of melody that are appropriate in specific connections. They can range from the shortest lick to a complete melody. This is a feature that the blues has in common with both Indian raga and Gregorian chant. What separates an expert performer from the strummers and hummers is the ability to use these licks in an interesting way: to balance between the traditional material that defines the style, and the new, the inventive. As one harmonica tutorial puts it, after giving numerous examples of blues licks: ‘To play a blues solo, all you have to do is to put some of these licks together. To play a good blues solo – now that’s a different matter.’ To rephrase this using our terminology: the licks of blues may in themselves represent a neutral melodic level, complying with the expected, where a new twist to a well-known formula may suddenly give it that compelling character that keeps us seated (or perhaps: brings us to our feet, dancing).

Similar elaborations can be made concerning rhythm and hamony: what is musically interesting is (among other things) the interaction between the basic pulse and the tiny expressive deviations I’ve been talking about above, or between the twelve-bar scheme and whatever changes are made to it.

Dylan and the Blues

So how does this relate to Dylan’s music in general and Time out of Mind in particular? Let’s begin with the quotation from Shelton’s review: ‘Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap. He seems to be groping for a word or a mood, then resolves the tension benevolently by finding the word and the mood.’ Anyone who has heard ‘Rocks and Gravel’ from the Second Gaslight tape (The Gaslight Café, NYC, Oct 1962) immediately understands what Shelton is talking about. Here Dylan halts every phrase on some word, stretches it out and leaves it hanging in thin air for longer and longer time as the verses unfold.

Takes some rocks an-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-nd gravel, baby, make a solid road.

This is accompanied by an unchanging D chord in a monotonous fingerpicking pattern.

Gaslight Cafe (1962): Rocks and Gravel (beginning)

A long held note over an accompaniment where nothing happens – why would that be seen as something that creates tension? For two reasons.

One is that to hold a tone in this way is not normal procedure – it is in itself a deviation from the neutral level of melody, from the expected melodic behaviour.

The other reason is that you never know how long he’s going to hold the tone – there is nothing in the guitar part that says ‘now comes the turn’. The phrases differ in length, and there is no firm regularity in when the little filler figure occurs in the guitar part. In the transcription of the beginning of the song, I have deliberately not tried to change the time signature to try and fit the song into some kind of regular structure.

Compare that to his unsuccessful first single, ‘Mixed up Confusion’, also from 1962. The similarities are striking, but so are the differences. Even here there are long held notes once in a while, in much the same fashion as ‘Rocks and Gravel’. But this time there is a band involved, and that makes all the difference. For a band to function, the band members must know when to enter, when to change chords, when the verses end. So the long notes are of pre-defined length, and the same length every time. It takes exactly one verse for the listener to discover the trick, and that robs it of any tension-creating force it may have had. Predictability and interest never were close friends.

Mixed up Confusion (studio outtake, 1962; beginning)

In the Evening

He apparently liked this trick, especially early in his career. ‘In the Evening’ from the Minnesota Hotel Tape from December 1961 synthesises what I’ve had to say about this. ‘In the Evening’ is a standard twelve-bar blues tune (with a text that is so paradigmatically bluesy that once when I was howling my own on-the-spot improvised blues clichés to this tune while washing the dishes, I suddenly found myself singing exactly the same words as Dylan). Half-way through there is a harmonica solo that consists of one long note held during a whole twelve-bar verse, ending with a standard finishing lick.

The first time I heard this song, it struck me as a subtly brutal way of creating tension. With a single sweep, all the conventions of blues licks are swept aside, leaving us with an unfinished beginning. For it is normal to hold a note for some time – only not this long. And it is normal to begin a lick with a long note on the dominant, which is the note Dylan stretches here – but then only as a beginning of a lick that is supposed to end on the key note <ex: g f e c >, as it so often does in this particular style. In fact, one can say that melodically speaking this kind of descent back to the key note represents the neutral level of rest in this situation, and remaining on the dominant is a way of creating momentum through standstill.

Equally interesting is the end of the song. Another harmonica solo, another long held note. In fact the second solo is almost identical to the first – identical in all but one point: the effect on the listener. First time around, the listener (this listener anyway) is captivated by the single note – how long will he hold it? When does the expected ending phrase come? How much air does he have left? (was it true what he said, that he can hold his breath three times as long as Caruso?) – with all attention fixed on that single note.

Second time it falls flat to the ground. It’s like re-reading a crime novel. We already know who killed Mr Black. We know it wasn’t Mrs White, as the author would have us believe in chapter three.

The similarity with the crime novel is striking, because in both cases the effect hangs on a rather crude – in the case of the crime novel: literally brutal – technique, and the cruder the technique, the faster its aesthetic effect wanes, since everything depends on one single card. Once that card has been played, whatever power it had has been spent.

In musical terms, we may say that what was surprising the first time because of its defiance of stylistic rules, has already the second time become part of the ‘work style’ or the ‘idiom’ of the song. It loses its place in the centre of the listener’s attention, and slides into the background, while other things become more important, such as the guitar playing.

Thus, ‘In the Evening’ is an interesting cross between ‘Rocks and Gravel’ and ‘Mixed Up Confusion’. It demonstrates that the long note can maintain its effect even outside the very free declamation of Rocks and Gravel, but that there is a thin line between success and failure. If the effect is to be maintained throughout a longer song, the technique must be reshaped in different form – either more powerful or more subtle.

I Pity The Poor Immigrant

In 1976, I Pity The Poor Immigrant was sung in a similar manner. It was sung in duet with Joan Baez, and as so often was the case, this is just as much a duel. It all starts in the instrumental introductory verse: Guam, the band, plays through the whole song apart from the last line, but instead of tying up the whole thing with the expected reprise of the first line, everybody stops playing, except Bob himself, who does some odd strumming, as if to tune the guitar (that was my first impression when I first heard it: they have stopped, something went wrong, they have to tune the guitars) (maybe they should have …!). Then, suddenly, Guam breaks loose again for the final line, and the song starts again. This time with the vocals, one of the legendary Bob and Joanie duets.

The performance, preserved for eternity on the Hard Rain TV special, is very energetic, until they reach the same place in the song. Once again the instruments stop. But Bob and Joanie go on.

 

And on.

 

And on.

 

They hold their tones for three hours, twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds. Maybe a little less, maybe only for the fourteen seconds, but the point is: they cross a line, the line between what is a normally long held note, and what becomes abnormal.

It is easy to imagine it as one of Dylan’s little ‘breaking Joanie’ tricks, but upon second or third hearing you realize that the tones aren’t that long – he’s not out there to prove that he has bigger lungs than her. Besides, they did this on every show (and on other songs – the most wonderful moment of this kind is the final note of ‘Railroad Boy’ as heard and seen on the Hard Rain video), and although they obviously have their little on-stage skirmishes going on during the tour, it is not fought on this trivial level – in short: it’s not a trick.

The Renaissance music scholar Rob Wegman has commented on a passage in one of the masses of Jacob Obrecht (1458–1505), that is quite similar, mutatis mutandis, to the Immigrant case.³ One of the fundamental principles of Renaissance music is variety. It is therefore quite remarkable when Obrecht introduces a small motif, then repeats it one step lower, then repeats this procedure again. And again. The third or fourth time the whole situation is beginning to feel uncomfortable. But when Obrecht just continues and repeats the motif on every step of the entire octave, the situation is transformed. Just like Dylan, he crosses the line between the normal and the abnormal. This is a dangerous line to cross; the ice between what is abnormal and what is ridiculous or mad is thin. So what is this? Is it ridiculous, mad or something else?

Let’s examine more closely what is at issue here. What is he trying to prove? Or more generally: what does this mean?

First of all, the idea here is a musical idea of some sort. Musical ideas are generally more difficult to grasp than other ideas, because they are not connected with a conceptual system, they don’t automatically mean anything. Any talk of meaning in music must either relate indirectly to an external conceptual system, such as a programme or a text, or create its own meanings, which are then relevant only within the system: a purely musical meaning does not mean anything in the outside world.

The effects that are highlighted in this performance could be described from the point of view of both these spheres. At the musical level, Dylan creates a temporary point of rest in a cycle of hierarchical tonal relationships, but on a tone usually characterized by momentum rather than by standstill: he highlights an otherwise melodically unessential tone beyond the normal by stretching it out in time, and in doing so, he emphasises its directionality by singling out the potentionality which on the face of it nulls out that very directionality. By standing still on the dominant, he stops time, musically speaking.

What is going on at the extramusical level, is necessarily less clear to define. A striking element of the performance, as we can witness it on the TV special, is how tired Dylan looks during the first few songs of the show. The circumstances certainly sound exhausting: an obligation to produce a TV concert, unceasing rain, a soon-to-be-divorced wife on the set, and, for all I know, a drink or two the night before. I’m not trying to say that the musical effect of holding a certain tone in a certain song a little longer than usual is what brought energy back to the band and the bard, but still, the change from the beginning to the end of the recorded part of the show is so pronounced, that I would hardly have raised a brow had someone told me that this was a carefully planned, staged enactment of questions of fatigue and energy, all set to music and culminating in this particular line.

Another possible approach is through the comparison with ‘Lo and Behold!’, which, in Greil Marcus’ exellent interpretation stops and starts as if someone put another coin in the machine, with little or no regard for musical logic. Likewise with the Immigrant: it continues after the dissolution as if nothing has happened. No matter how exhausted the singer is, or how complete the break-down of musical material is, the end of the verse is splendidly unaffected.

Standing – still – in the Doorway

If ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ is stopping time by brute force, but thereby concealing (or revealing, both possible outcomes of pointing out) the delicacies of the process, ‘Standing in the Doorway’ is the direct opposite: subtly holding back time, only to brutally realize its power.

E                 /d#  C#m                 E/b
I'm walkin' through      the summer nights
E         /d#       C#m   E/b
the jukebox playing low
E                   /d# C#m                 E/b
yesterday everything    was goin' too fast
E    /d#                C#m    E/b
Today   it's movin' too slow
   A        D/a           A     D/a
   I got no place left to turn
   A                 D/a A     A  B
   I got nothin' left to burn
E               /d#                 C#m        E/b
Don't know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you
E                    /d#              C#m    E/b
It probably wouldn't matter to you anyhow
A           E       B               F#
You left me standing in the doorway cryin'
A                           E
I got nothin' to go back to now.

It’s all in the chords. During the first part of the verse, nothing happens. Nothing at all, literally – i.e. musically. What we have is basically an E major chord, sustained all through the first four lines. The only ‘ripple’ on this surface is the repeated, stepwise descent in the bass, but it doesn’t really change anything. This is a waiting progression, a technique for the prolongation of a chord, which is frequently seen applied to the dominant chord, as in ‘Friend of the Devil’, after the bridge, or in ‘Covenant Woman’, after the chorus. In both these cases, it works as a suspension: the tension that is associated with the dominant, is prolonged, until the bass finally continues the descent one more step and reaches the tonic, the key note, and we’re home again. But in ‘Doorway’? Here, the waiting progression takes place on the Tonic. Thus, what is prolonged is not a stage of elevated tension, but a stage of rest. Even here the fourth descent continues downwards, but this time we reach the Subdominant. This is quite in accordance with the general blues scheme, where the subdominant is indeed the first new chord to appear. Here, the subdominant (A) alternates with its own subdominant (D), in such a way that it can be regarded as a sustained A with an embellishment. This too is replicated exactly in the blues – it is what lies behind the commonest blues patterns of all:

 

  E (tonic)                      A (subdominant)
  .     .     .     .            .     .     .     .
|-------------------------|    |-------------------------|
|-------------------------|    |-------------------------|
|-------------------------|    |-------------------------|
|-------------------------|etc |-2---2-4---4-2---2-4---4-|
|-2---2-4---4-2---2-4---4-|    |-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-|
|-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-|    |-------------------------|

After this it is back to the tonic (E) again for the final four lines. So far – and with the reductions we have done – ‘Doorway’ and ‘In the Evening’ follow exactly the same structure.

But then it happens: the second time the waiting/sustaining bass line reaches the subdominant, it doesn’t stay there, as it did the first time. What happens instead is a straight and persistent line, up through the circle of fifths in the dominant direction: A – E – B – F#. Incidentally, this sequence occurs at the point which corresponds to the shift to the dominant in the standard twelve-bar blues. The rapid chord sequence can be likened with going up the stairs: each new step costs some energy, but also increases the potential energy in the form of a higher position. The energy it costs must be taken from somewhere, and in this case it is as if a lot of tension that has been held back during the first two parts of the verse is suddenly released and bursts out in one single, sudden and climactic effort. Then it is as if this was too much to take: in the last line we are back to the subdominant A again, which, after the rocketing of the previous line, seems like an anticlimax. We are back more or less where we started: to the motionless state of Well, what?

What kind of immobility does this song deal with? Is it a still summer evening at a lake, lying on the bank, with only the slightest ripple on the surface? Or is it a sultry day, flies buzzing around your ears as you lay in the grass, sipping at a cold beer, which is all you have the energy to do?

Neither. Let’s first have a look at the lyrics.

First verse: ‘I’ surrounded by signs saying ‘Nothing happening in here’. Here’s the heavy summer night and the quiet jukebox, streets where things move too slowly. But these are just the outer signs of what’s really at stake: the inner inability to act, because ‘I’ don’t know what is to be done. This is as exact a correspondence to what the music ‘says’ as one can possibly ask for.

In the last part the real protagonist in absentio enters the stage: ‘you’. And all of a sudden there are signs of activity, talk about kissing or killing – and leaving. The emotional climax of the text, the title line, which contains both ‘you’, ‘I’, action and emotions, coincides with the musical climax, followed by the deceptive return in the last line, of the music as well as the text.

The same pattern is repeated in the rest of the verses. Strumming a ‘gay’ guitar, which doesn’t sound very happy at all; the possibility of an ominous threat come true – only that it won’t happen, not here and now, anyway; then the church bells ringing, and fatalistically accepted, although chance is they’re ringing for ‘I’ himself.

Then meeting ‘you’ and the ghost of our old love, always at the beginning of the last part of the verses. As the verses unfold, it becomes clearer and clearer that the forced inability to act is caused by this ghost: its presence (it ‘will not go away’) is completely overpowering any initiative on the part of ‘I’ (‘Last night I danced with a stranger, But she just reminded me you were the one’) – to the point that any attempt to fight its influence is treated purely hypothetically (‘if I saw you’; ‘I would be crazy if I took you back’).

And the last line of each verse: always back to the mire of the first parts, made even more desperate by the recurring intermezzo.

Here are the entire lyrics, the ‘I’ world in boldface, the ‘you’ world in italics.

I’m walkin’ through the summer nights
the jukebox playing low
yesterday everything was goin’ too fast
Today it’s movin’ too slow
   I got no place left to turn
   I got nothin’ left to burn
Don’t know if I saw you
if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow
You left me standing in the doorway cryin’
I got nothin’ to go back to now.
The light in this place is so bad
Makin’ me sick in the head
All the laughter is just makin’ me sad
The stars have turned cherry red
I’m strummin’ on my gay guitar
Smokin’ a cheap cigar
The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon
You left me standin’ in the doorway cryin’
Under the midnight moon.
 

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t
But not tonight and it won’t be here
There are things I could say, but I don’t
I know the mercy of God must be near
I been ridin a midnight train
Got ice water in my veins
I would be crazy if I took you back
It would go up against every rule
You left me standin’ in the doorway cryin’
Sufferin’ like a fool.
 

When the last rays of daylight go down
Buddy you’ll roll no more
I can hear the church bells ringin’ in the yard
I wonder who they’re ringin’ for
I know I can’t win
But my heart just won’t give in
Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one
You left me standin’ in the doorway cryin’
In the dark land of the sun.
 

I eat when I’m hungry drink when I’m dry
And live my life on the square
And even if the flesh falls off of my face
I know someone will be there to care
It always means so much
Even the softest touch
I see nothing to be gained by any explanation
There’s no words that need to be said
You left me standin’ in the doorway cryin’
Blues wrapped around my head.
 

The last stanza is special. It seems conciliatory at first. The first part does not have the desperate apathy of the other verses – rather a reconciled contentment, a satisfaction with the small details of life (if you can call the softest touch a small detail). More than in the other verses, the words seem to be directed at someone – maybe ‘you’, maybe just ‘someone’. The effect is quite similar to that of ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Gates of Eden’: after a long tirade reflecting ‘the World According to “I” ’ through scattered images, the narrator sweeps all that aside and tells us (someone) what’s really on his mind.

But all the same: this time it’s different; the bottom line of this doorway is that it’s still no use – ‘there’s no words that need to be said’. Just as the presence of ‘you’ for the first time is discernible in the first part of the verse, this time the inactivity takes over the place in the verse where ‘you’ used to come in. And the two last lines are as desperate as ever before, and so is the singing.

Which brings us back to the music and the question that was left hanging: what kind of immobility. What is described – musically – in this song, is a way of stopping time, holding back time. Or maybe rather: disregarding time, saying that it doesn’t matter. And at the same time it is a realization that this can’t be done – time is too strong to be overlooked.

There are three elements in this musical story. First the long standstill itself. Just like in ‘In the Evening’ and ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’, the holding in itself creates tension. The longer the standstill, the more imperative it is that something just has to happen, and the stronger the focus on and attention to the standing itself.

The standstill is accomplished through a figure that is normally associated with suspense and preparation for a return – but a return to the point where we already are. I don’t know if this kind of restlessness – because that’s what it really is – has a name: the feeling that you ought to go somewhere, get something done, but you can’t think of anything else to do or to be than what you’re already doing, being. This is the kind of inactivity: the apathy that stems from a dissatisfaction with anything you’re doing, no matter what, because what you really want is too big to be wanted, but still standing in the way of trivialities such as happiness, trout fishing or the coldness of a beer on a warm summer evening.

And the third musical element is the consequence of this intense immobility. The dominant of the twelve-bar blues is stretched, beyond the breaking point. And when something is stretched that far, it breaks. It’s a crash on the levee, so to speak. In accumulated desperation you run up the stairs, too fast to notice that there are only four steps, and you fall flat, despite the effort.

The brilliance of all this is the way he uses a blues-pattern as a template for the writing of an elaborate song, where the various parts of the pattern contribute to the expressive force of the song, but where this force is not limited to the pattern, but draws on sources lying way beyond the simple pattern. This is to say: it is not the blues that tells the story, it’s the way the (purely musical) elements of the blues are combined with other elements (a descending figure, a chord progression) and – through a web of expectations, connotations and analogies – to the text.

Ring Them Bells

Dylan has used the same elements before, without telling the same story: the bridge in ‘Ring Them Bells’ is one of the most prominent examples. First: the same kind of standstill-like pendular alternation between C and Am that is used as an interlude between the verses earlier in the song:

C    G/b  Am
Ring them bells
              G/b     C
for the blind and the deaf,
     G/b  Am
Ring them bells
                  G/b C
for all of us who are left,

But then it all breaks loose in the kind of seemingly never-ending progression that brings a smile to your face, a tear to your eye and a strong conviction that man can fly. I’ve asked myself why this bridge differs so much from the bridge in ‘Shooting Star’ from the same album. Harmonically they are almost identical.

Ring Them Bells:              Shooting Star:

C    G/b  Am                  Am                          
Ring them bells               Listen to the engine        
               Am/g#          Am/g#                       
for the chosen few            listen to the bell          
                   Am/g       Am/g                        
Who will judge the many       As the last firetruck       
                 D7/f#        Am/f#                       
when the game is through.     from hell                   
          F                   F                           
Ring them bells,              goes rolling by,            
                  C/e         G                         C 
for the time that flies,      all good people are praying 
                   Dm7                 Am                 
For the child that cries      It's the last temptation    
               F/g               /g#                      
When innocence dies.          the last account            
                                       /g                 
                              The last time you might hear
                                  /f#                     
                              the sermon on the mount     
                              F                  F/g      
                               The last radio is playing. 

Again, the main difference seems to be one of pacing and phrasing. In ‘Shooting Star’, the whole chromatic bass descent is part of the same phrase, just filling out the interval between Am and F, in a fairly straightforward chord progression Am–F–G–C, which is then repeated. This ‘one-dimensionality’ applies to the melody as well: it is all one phrase, beginning and staying on the same, high note and ending with a cadential turn.

‘Ring Them Bells’ works differently, in both these areas. The downward chromatic progression is slowed down. Every step gets its allotted time. Every musical ‘sentence’ is given its own meaning. Every meaning is given enough time to work. It is almost like a paragraph with short sentences. All the sentences separated by a full stop.

This is another way of saying that the sense of direction (or directionality) is different. The passage in ‘Shooting Star’ goes back to the three chords that dominate blues, folk, and the rest of Western music since 1450 (roughly). Am is the pivot between C and F, closely related, harmonically, to both of them, but as a chord in its own right it can be disregarded. It works like this:

The Am and C belong to the same area, and the rest is a traditional cadence pattern, going through three fixed levels.

The passage in ‘Ring Them Bells’ works like this:

The one-thought-per-step character in the chromatic descent and the fact that the descent continues past F, relieves Am of its role as ‘just’ a pivot chord and gives it a character of its own, as the chord that sets a progression in motion that spans the whole bridge, a continuous progression through the whole scale.

This changes our perception of the first half of the bridge, of course, but the strongest effects are on the second half, after the F chord – the half where Dylan’s voice and delivery really takes off and leaves the ground, flying. It has to do with the F chord and where in the scheme of the bridge it enters, but even more with the G chord, which isn’t even there until it is hinted at at the very end of the bridge.

The F chord first: It enters after four measures that in other cases, such as ‘Shooting Star’, would have led back to C again. But here it is not just a stage on the way back to C. Instead, it takes the place of the stable chord and assumes its role. F becomes a second firm ground and a new starting point – like a landing in a staircase.

But G is the real beauty of this passage. In a sense, the second half is dominated by this chord, even though it is never really heard. It is the complete absence of this chord that explains the expansive character of the second part of the bridge – the feeling that the music just goes on and on without ever coming to rest, ever needing to. The last phrases hover around the resolution that we know has to come, the final turn to G and C. This hovering begins with D7/f#, whose natural resolution would be to go to G, as the first step in a chain of chords a fifth apart which would eventually lead to C again: DGC. But the expected resolution is delayed by the detour to the F with its freshly gained (but only temporary) stability. And it is this ambiguity between fixity and progression that lends the bridge its special character, its expansiveness and its transcendency.

Another reason for the effect of the bridge in ‘Ring Them Bells’ is the way it contrasts with the verses, like a twisted echo. The verses, too, are dominated by a descending bass line, but where they sweep through a whole octave in one breath, the bridge is a slow chromatic movement, where the melody on each step of the descent becomes a phrase of its own.

Seen in isolation, each of these mini-phrases sounds quite like all the others, but taken together, they almost form a musical narrative: there is a certain expansiveness to the whole bridge, the voice seems to wish to break out of the repetition of the same phrase. (Does it succeed? Sometimes when I hear the song, I think so, other times not.)⁴

Highlands

Time out of Mind ends with the seventeen-minute-long ‘Highlands’. It is the closest Dylan ever comes to a successful attempt at stopping time. It succeeds, not by trying to stop it in its tracks or hold it back, but by realizing that time goes on regardless of everything, and by tapping into its flow and disregarding it instead of fighting it.

For this, the blues is a perfect vehicle. Musically, the blues is not a fixed structure with beginning, middle, and end, but an infinite loop that can begin or end anywhere – or nowhere at all. The little riff that dominates the song is pronounced enough to be recognized as a separate entity, but unobtrusive enough to fade quickly into the background, like a clock ticking.

Time is an explicit topic in the song: turning back the clock, going back, stopping time. But more essential (to this interpretation, anyway) is its fragmented character, consisting of episodes without a combining narrative, interspersed with flashes of indefinite past and future.

A piece of wood drifting in a river does not move. An apple is completely still only when it falls from the branch. Free fall is weightlessness. ‘Highlands’ is free fall translated to music, freedom from the bonds of time, possible, in the end, only through complete submersion in time.

(2002)