Chronicles - Bob Dylan [63]
This is definitely a style that benefits the singer. In folk oriented and jazz-blues songs, it’s perfect. I needed to play this way though I didn’t need to be conspicuous about it because what I’d be playing was primarily orchestral, and if it’s orchestral it would make sense that there should be a combination of instruments playing the part. I didn’t have the time to put into that. I wouldn’t be able to get that. I had to be more subtle. If my instrument was buried in the mix, where only I could hear it, I was thinking that it might be more effective. It wasn’t like I was trying to play lead guitar and wow anybody. What I needed to do was phrase my singing off the bone structure of what I played. Ideally, I would have liked to have taken a song, played it more than a few times for a musicologist who would then write the basic parts for an orchestrated version. The orchestra could even play the vocal line. I wouldn’t even have to be there.
What was different about this was that in the past on my records there is no kinetic arrangement to any piece. In the studio the songs had only been sketched out but never brought from the shadows. There’d always been too many problems — wrestling with lyric phrasing, changing lyrics, switching melody lines, keys, tempos, any number of things all the while searching for a song’s stylistic identity. Those who had followed me for years and thought they knew my songs might be a little confounded by the way they now were about to be played. The total effect would be physiological, and triplet forms would fashion melodies at intervals. This is what would drive the song — not necessarily the lyrical content. I had perfect faith in this system and knew it would work. Playing this way appealed to me. A lot of folks would say that the songs were altered and others would say that this was the way they should have sounded in the first place. You could take your pick.
Once I understood what I was doing, I realized that I wasn’t the first one to do it, that Link Wray had done the same thing in his classic song “Rumble” many years earlier. Link’s song had no lyrics, but he had played with the same numerical system. It would never have occurred to me where the song’s power had come from because I had been hypnotized by the tone of the piece. I’d also thought I’d seen Martha Reeves do the same thing. I’d seen her in New York a few years earlier where she’d been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn’t keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine were her entire band. A tambourine makes no melody lines, but the concept was similar.
When Lonnie had showed this to me so many years earlier it was as if he was saying something to me in a foreign language. I understood the etymology of it, I just didn’t get how it could be applicable in any way. Now it all clicked. Now I could start getting into it. With a new incantation code to infuse my vocals with manifest presence I could ride high, unconsciously drag endless skeletons from the closet. Thematic triplets making everything hypnotic. I could even hypnotize myself. I could do this night after night. No fatigue or weariness. I had all the technical theory I would need. My audience would stop being a shady army of face-less people. Of course, some of them would still only concentrate on the lyrics and they might be dismayed because the two-beat strum they’d been used to for so long would now be off rhythm, refocused and rushing the songs into the heart of unimagined territory. But that’s okay, they could handle it.
I had too long been freeze frozen in the secular temple of a museum anyway. It’s not a complicated thing. There are thousands if not millions of variations of these patterns so you never run out of ideas. You’re always at some unexploited fix point. It’s not a heavy theorized thing, it’s geometrical. I’m not that good at math, but I do know that the universe is formed