A Country Spin: the song that Bob Dylan wrote for Jerry Lee Lewis
Writing for other artists is normally really healthy for any songwriter. It’s easy to write a million tracks that sound like you, but if you try to write in the style of someone else, you’d be surprised about how many doorways you can open up that you thought had been closed on you. While Bob Dylan usually had to deal with a million people trying to copy his sound whenever he came out with a new song, he admitted that ‘To Be Alone With You’ was a deliberate attempt to sound like Jerry Lee Lewis.
By the time Dylan actually started working on Nashville Skyline, he was already in a much different headspace than the rock and roll troubadour that helped open our eyes in the 1960s. He had made some living after his fatal motorcycle accident, and this was the kind of country-inclined record that he seemed to never be that far away.
I mean, when you look at Dylan’s rock-leaning cuts, there are always traces of country music laced within the grooves. Folk has always been the sort of intellectual cousin of country, anyhow, and Dylan was more than happy to hop on songs that had him inhabit the same type of persona as a Johnny Cash-like figure.
If there was one person who knew how to blend country and rock, it was Lewis. He had already been raised in the South for most of his life, and his most celebrated songs, like ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, are half the reason why rock picked up its energy. Though there’s a case to be made that Lewis was one of the first punks of rock and roll, ‘To Be Alone With You’ is a much more downtempo affair from Dylan.
Make no mistake, there’s still some energy resonating between the notes, but compared to the manic energy of Lewis, Dylan tends to fall just a little bit short. Maybe it’s because of the style he’s working in, but it’s hard to really look at this song as a real potboiler when it’s sitting next to more introspective cuts like ‘Lay Lady Lay’.
When Dylan envisioned the song, he originally had plans to show it to Lewis but was talked out of it, telling Jann Wenner, “I wrote ‘To Be Alone With You’ – that’s on Nashville Skyline – I wrote it for Jerry Lee Lewis. He was down there when we were listening to playbacks, and he came in. He was recording an album next door. He listened to it. I think we sent him a dub.”
Granted, there’s no one on this Earth who could deliver a Bob Dylan piece better than the man himself. As much as he was focused on making a radical departure from his old sound yet again, Dylan still ended up turning in a decent performance on this song, as if the old rock and roll chops that he inherited on Bringing It All Back Home hadn’t quite worn out their welcome just yet.
Still, this felt more like a pit stop for Dylan, who was about to unleash the massive undertaking Self Portrait just a year later and alienate a good chunk of his fanbase in the process. If we had paid attention when he was adopting his country phase, maybe this was a hint that Dylan was feeling too confined in his folk-rock messiah position.
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