Crumpled up in vein: The lyrics Bob Dylan threw away
A lot of the time, the work of someone like Bob Dylan can feel a million miles away. If you learn the chords that he knew and had the same vocabulary that Dylan had, if you sat with a guitar and a pen and paper, there is very little chance that you would write a song even close to that which Bob Dylan could put together. When you think about the genius behind some of his songs, it feels otherworldly that a fellow human could put something so beautiful together.
When you start thinking of all the great work that Bob Dylan did, you begin to pin it down to natural talent. The reason why you can’t write the sort of songs that Bob Dylan writes is because he has such a natural ability, and it’s impossible for you to ever match that kind of talent.
While this way of thinking might bring you comfort, it’s unfortunately not true. While Dylan might have had some form of natural ability, his work results from spending hours mulling over lines, trying to make words fit and ensure the lyrics are the best they can be. This means there are pages scattered about which contain discarded Dylan lyrics.
When you listen to a song like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, it’s hard to imagine what Bob Dylan was thinking about when he was writing the song. People have debated over the meaning of the track, as the track has been interpreted in multiple different ways. A lot of people think that the track is drug-influenced, as Dylan is under the spell of drugs throughout the track.
This could certainly be the case, as lines such as “Take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship” and “Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind” use terms that could certainly be interpreted as references to marijuana and LSD. That being said, Dylan has previously confirmed that the song isn’t about drugs and is instead about a folk musician named Bruce Langhorne, who Dylan found himself interested in.
A song of this magnitude didn’t just come to Dylan in a heartbeat; it took him a long time to write as he was constantly experimenting with different performance possibilities. Judy Collins has recalled hearing Dylan singing the song at a party at Al Gross man’s house. “It was late at night, and I heard him singing,” she recalled, “So I left my room and sat on the stairs by myself, listening to him write the song. What a magical moment!”
Al Grossman also says that the song was written at his house, as he was able to find some of Dylan’s discarded lyrics. These were early iterations of what would become a classic, and while there are many similarities to the track that ended up becoming a hit, there are some changes, as Dylan plays with sentence length and different terms to ensure that everything fits.
“It feels like there’s a stream of consciousness there – but you can also see from the drafts how carefully each word was crafted,” said Myles Aronowitz after unearthing the lyrics, “It gives you a feeling for what was going on in Bob Dyan’s head.”
Some of the most notable changes include substituting the word “bootheels” for “feet” as well as “magic” for “priceless.” The words have clearly been written quickly as they spill out of Dylan in brief moments of creativity. Lines like “tho you might hear laughin spinnin swingin madly thru the sun,” have been penned in a rush.
We will never truly know how Dylan came up with many of the lyrics he wrote, but the discarded pages are a good reminder that one of the greatest artists in the world was also human.
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