Comments on: Tuesdays on 92nd St, We Do Not Abjure Educated Rap

By: Lucas S.

Lucas S. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:36:09 +0000

We had some delays in post-prodcution. We are at the finishing end, as somebody once said. We will have it published by year’s end. Sorry for the delays. We’ll mail you a contributor’s copy as soon as we get them from the printer.

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:47:38 +0000

Lucas:

Ha! No problem. Boys will be girls, as the feller says! Glad you liked my piece.

But if it’s not out of order to ask, what’s the prognosis on Montague Street? When can we expect to see it in the flesh? Or when are you going to announce it to the world?

By: Lucas S.

Lucas S. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:58:50 +0000

Hi John. I’m the Dylan fan formerly known as Dorothy Amigo. I apologize for the alias, just an chat-room force of habit. I recently re-read you wonderful piece on Oh Mercy for Montague Street. Thank you so much for the contribution.

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:42:34 +0000

Dorothy–you’re right, of course. I missed that–perhaps because I was thinking about the lyrical songs, which is where almost all his use of the bridge occurs–and not his other genres, including whichever one “Ballad of a Thin Man” belongs to (prophetic rant?). But in any case, I sure did overlook it.
Makes me wonder if I missed some others, and if I didn’t, what prompted Dylan to first use a bridge in a kind of song that–no matter who’s writing it–just never has a bridge, which is a pop song technique–one that apparently goes back to the Italian sonnet. (In his A Test of Poetry, Louis Zukovsky prints a 16th-century English sonnet that he says is the “best English equivalent of the Italian sonnet,” which he prints, following the rhyme scheme, as 2 quatrains, a couplet [bridge], and a final quatrain,” and he praises this poem for its superior “melodic invention” to the familiar English sonnet, which he calls a “degenerat[ion] into a short discursive verse form dealing with moral subjects.”

By: Dorothy Amigo

Dorothy Amigo — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:11:59 +0000

Interesting, John. Isn’t the “You have many contacts” in Ballad of a Thin Man a bridge or is that a false bridge again? In later version he always kicks it up a notch and belts in out, and it leads into another verse, not a chorus.

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:43:11 +0000

Thanks for another absorbing report. This does sound like it was an especially rich talk. I would take issue with one thing, though. I don’t think Dylan started skipping the 3rd verse because there was anything problematic about it. For one thing, for a while in the mid 90s or so (I think it was then) he regularly sang the 3rd verse–but dropped the 2nd. I think the issue here is 3 verses rather than 4. In a number of his early 4-verse lyrical songs, the 3rd verse is actually (structurally) a bridge. Dylan never used a musical bridge until Blonde on Blonde, and I think he eventually came to find those early 4-verse songs musically unsatisfying to sing. So he would drop a verse, usually the pseudo-bridge. (The 3rd verse of “Love Minus Zero” is another one, as I remember, that he often drops in performance.) But the 3rd verse of “Tambourine Man” is too brilliant to banish altogether, so tries making it the 2nd verse of 3 and–since a bridge is a kind of superhighway, or downtown bypass, in the structure of the emotional narrative–he gets (I think) a more breathtaking song.
Interestingly, the 3rd verse of “Baby Blue” is not a bridge–it is more like a bog–and he never skips that. (I just heard him sing it tonight–the performance did not take off until the last verse, where his singing–for the first time I can recall hearing–wonderfully brought out the empathy that underlies the song’s compassion. In other versions I’ve heard, his singing is all tough love, with or without a hint of sadism.)

By: Dorothy Amigo

Dorothy Amigo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:09:49 +0000

It was a great class. I never notice the self-reflexive elements in the song before. The ending talk regarding Visions of Johanna was also enjoyable. In retrospect, I never realized how similar Brownsville Girl it to Visions of Johanna, both songs being about a romanticized woman, and the singer is with a woman who he does not love.