T Bone Burnett on the long-lost Bob Dylan song that hit out at fans
The headline read, “Bob Dylan Hurt in Cycle Mishap”. What followed was a period of exile. In truth, that slip away from the limelight had been coming for a while. As he said when his fans first rebelled against him at Woodstock. An announcer introduced him by saying, “take him, you know him, he’s yours.” Dylan electrically rallied against this notion, later saying: “What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.”
Nevertheless, his fans did try to claim him. Famously they found his house and wielded their pickets trying to summon him to join them on the protest line. This all began when he was merely a boy of 21, in August 1962 when his vagabond ways were snapped up by the savvy Albert Grossman who Dylan described as “like a Colonel Tom Parker figure.”
When things got a little too heavy, Dylan ran away from it. He set out to reclaim his youth. Nevertheless, as an artist to the bone, songs kept finding him. “The songs are there,” he said. “They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.” Thus, he’d scribble down lyrics and melodies haphazardly and leave them scattered about the place. Sometimes they’d be picked up by Joan Baez, but often they’d be cast to the ash heap of history until they rose like a phoenix and became known as The Basement Tapes.
The phoenix coaxer for some of these long-lost sheets was the one and only T Bone Burnett. The legendary artist and producer set out to bring them to life. Using unearthed handwritten lyrics and melodies The New Basement Tapes rehashed scraps of Dylan’s source material into ensemble pieces of music. ‘Kansas City’ is one of the finest singles that this project mustered. It sees Johnny Deep, Jim James, Marcus Mumford, Rhiannon Giddens, Taylor Goldsmith and Elvis Costello all join forces.
Burnett would later give The Daily Telegraph his interpretation of the track, stating: “In 1967, he had gone, in five years, from being an obscure folk singer to an international rock ‘n’ roll icon of the highest magnitude. And, in the process, his original supporters turned on him and it seems like he’s saying: ‘Just how long can I keep singing the same old song?’.”
Adding: “There’s a great line: ‘You invite me into your house, then you say you got to pay for what you break.’ I think that resonated very strongly with Marcus, because he has had a similar trajectory,” Burnett added. “He came out of the box very strong, became internationally successful and suffered an extreme backlash. ‘Kansas City’ is his song as well.”
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