Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock - essay - Mike Daley

Land of the Free:
Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Bethel, NY. 18 August 1969
Mike Daley

The first histories of rock, Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City and Carl Belz's The Story of Rock, appeared in the late 1960s, at a time when rock journalism was in its first full flowering and the music itself had entered a period of consolidation. Rock, for better or worse, had reached its first stages of maturity with the development of the album as an artistic unit, and endorsements from the likes of Leonard Bernstein and the British musicologist Wilfrid Mellers were lending a certain legitimacy to the work of those artists and groups in the vanguard of mainstream popular music making. The time was ripe for rock literati to bestow rock with a historical narrative; rock needed a historical thread to make sense of its unprecedented popular success and its rapidly splintering stylistic branches.

But histories can never be innocent of the human need to mythologize, and these early histories of rock set a process in motion whereby the short history of this music would be understood in terms of a creation myth and a linear model, derived from Renaissance-era historiography, of style development as a tripartite model of primordial beginnings, classic flowering, and a final period of decadence and decay. Both Gillett and Belz saw this period of decadence stemming from the stylistic fragmentation and increasing commercialism of late 60s rock, the period in which they were writing. This is common among writers of contemporary histories of artistic movements, the urge to see the present as the denouement of the narrative. Predictably, this model has been somewhat stretched in later histories of rock, with the final part of the model dragged along closer to the writer's present.

This brings us to the historical moment that is the subject of my chapter, Jimi Hendrix's appearance at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair on 18 August 1969 at Bethel, New York. In recent years, Hendrix's set has come to synecdochically represent the Woodstock festival's mythos as a cultural signpost in rock history. This assessment of Hendrix's impact qua Woodstock, is, I will argue in this chapter, a relatively recent formulation, fueled by the pervasiveness of the Woodstock film and retrospective judgments about Hendrix's overall artistic importance in the grand scheme of rock history. More specifically, Hendrix's symbolic heft has come to be focused on one particular song from his set, “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

The story behind the Woodstock festival has been oft told, so I summarize it only briefly here. Michael Lang, a twenty-four-year-old former head shop proprieter, had organized the successful Miami Pop Festival in 1968, which had featured the Mothers of Invention, John Lee Hooker, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and a host of others. Spurred on by the triumphant Monterey Pop festival of 1967 (where Hendrix made his American debut after forming his trio and recording Are You Experienced? in England), large-scale rock festivals were big business in 1969. Lang, after a move to Woodstock, had conceived of an alternative recording retreat based on the "Recording Farm" and "Operation Brown Rice" collectives in California. Woodstock, long established as an artists' colony, was home to a strange admixture of moneyed rock stars, struggling musicians, and conservative farmers. After meeting with investors Joel Rosenmann and John Roberts, Lang decided to launch the recording facility with a gala concert in the area. This concert idea was soon to expand into a plan for a large scale festival.

By the summer of 1969, the Hendrix Experience had completed their last American tour. Bassist Noel Redding marked the occasion by resigning from the band and Hendrix began to formulate plans to put together a new band. His evolving Electric Church concept was freer and more experimental, more communal, than the tight Experience power-trio had been. Feeling burned by his clashes with Redding, Hendrix sought to create a supportive, fluid backdrop for his music, unmarred by ego clashes. He was concerned with surrounding himself with trustworthy compatriots, which meant for him musicians that he had known pre-fame. Mike Jeffrey, distrustful of Hendrix's new direction, nonetheless rented an eight-bedroom house for his charge near Woodstock, at the end of Tavor Hollow Road near the villages of Shokan and Boiceville. Hendrix, in turn, put his old army buddy Billy Cox on notice to step in on bass, who at Hendrix's request looked up another old friend, guitarist Larry Lee. Jerry Velez was a Puerto-Rican born, Bronx raised percussionist that Hendrix had met at the Scene club in New York. He was one of the first to be invited to stay at Hendrix's Shokan retreat. Another percussionist, respected for his work around Woodstock, was Juma Sultan, and he was quickly pulled into the fray. The new group, to be dubbed Gypsy Suns and Rainbows, was almost complete.

While Hendrix vacationed in Morocco, his newly minted band tentatively rehearsed at the Shokan house. After Hendrix's return, the lineup was consolidated, after some waffling over the choice between Mitch Mitchell and Buddy Miles, on Hendrix's old Experience partner Mitchell. By all reports, rehearsals proceeded fitfully. As Hendrix's road manager Gerry Stickells recalled:

Rehearsals, as I remember they called them, consisted of getting stoned and talking about how great it was going to be. The fact that they kept adding people to the lineup proved to me that it wasn't together. They went along because someone else was paying the bills.

As the Woodstock gig drew closer, Hendrix taught the band to play some old hits like "Purple Haze", "Fire" and "Foxey Lady" as well as working up some newer songs and some jam-based instrumentals.

As the August 15 opening day approached, the organizers of the Woodstock festival found matters reeling out of control. The venue changed twice, only becoming solidified when a local dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, offered to rent 600 acres of his prime farmland to the organizers for $75,000. The site was 100 miles north of New York and 70 miles west of Woodstock, the originally projected home of the festival. On August 7 the promotion company held a pre-festival concert for the workers preparing the site. One of the performers, the Earthlight Theatre, stripped naked for their set, which prompted eight hundred local residents to sign a petition to stop the festival. But by then, the mass pilgrimage to Bethel had begun. An estimated 30,000 people were on site before security, food service or medical aid was in place. The Woodstock Festival had begun. With little in the way of security or fencing, most of the concertgoers simply walked on in, and soon enough it was declared a free festival. Only about 60,000 of the 400,000 who attended Woodstock paid to get in.

The talent roster at Woodstock was one of the most impressive ever assembled. Beginning with Richie Havens, the Friday show included Country Joe McDonald, John Sebastian, The Incredible String Band, Sweetwater, Tim Hardin, Bert Sommer, Ravi Shankar, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez. Saturday brought Quill, Keef Hartley Band, Santana, Mountain, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Who and the Jefferson Airplane. Sunday's lineup consisted of Joe Cocker, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, the Band, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Johnny Winter, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Sha Na Na, with Hendrix taking the final slot.

By the time the concert had gotten underway, the site was virtually impossible to reach by car, and many performers flew to the site by helicopter. Hendrix and his band ended up making the trip in two station wagons. He was unhappy about the media reports of the size of the gathering, and by 4:00 on Sunday, was refusing to play. The fee, $18,000, was small by his standards, though he was the highest-paid performer at the festival. In any case, Mike Jeffrey stepped in and convinced Hendrix to play on the basis of the prestige of the engagement.

With rain delays and poor planning, Hendrix and his group didn't take the stage for their festival-closing set until 8:00 Monday morning. By then, fewer than 30,000 audience members remained. The Woodstock film depicts well the haggard hordes, the scattered garbage, the hard morning air, the grey skies. The camera focuses on Hendrix's guitar with an astringent clarity, his guitar notes sharp and clear.

One of the abiding images of the place and time of Woodstock is Jimi, in white-beaded leather jacket, blue jeans, gold chains and a red head-scarf standing centre-stage alone sending out 'The Star-Spangled Banner' as a series of shock waves across the audience in the early-morning light.

The performance, to put it lightly, was loose and somewhat confused, the band showing its lack of rehearsal and perhaps the unreadiness of some of the musicians. In any case, the contributions of the two percussionists are inaudible to this listener, at least in the released mixes of the concert. Larry Lee's guitar, when it is audible, is usually horribly out of tune, and his abilities are not up to the task of trading licks with Jimi Hendrix. Even Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix's longtime cohort, Mitch Mitchell, sounds confused and unfocused. This is perhaps due to the nonexistent stage monitoring more than anything. Hendrix himself seems to be struggling himself, though still playing at a level that few have equaled. Charles Shaar Murray is decidedly more damning in his assessment:

Never in his two and a half years with the Experience had Hendrix exhibited such disregard for professionalism, not even during that band's formative weeks when, with a paucity of original material, cover versions of songs had been performed with as much enthusiasm as could be mustered. On stage at Woodstock, the same Jimi Hendrix who had refused Noel Redding the opportunity to perform "She's So Fine" - even when fans had shouted requests for the number - allowed guitarist Larry Lee to traipse off-key through two songs, “Mastermind” and the Impressions' “Gypsy Woman”4.

Listening to the Hendrix:Woodstock CD, which is more complete than previous releases but still missing Larry Lee’s two vocal turns, the encore of Hey Joe and other elements, as well as being partially reordered, there are some sublime moments here. “Voodoo Chile”, “Villanova Junction” and “Izabella” stand out for me. But surely the highlight of the set, and the portion that has come to symbolize Hendrix at Woodstock as well as a few other things, is “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

Coming out of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)/Stepping Stone”, Hendrix plays the opening salvo of “The Star Spangled Banner” in the lowest position on the neck, using open strings where possible, his new Univibe rotating-speaker effect pedal warbling the pitches. Mitch Mitchell is filling in the background with tom and cymbals builds in free rhythm. The crowd, roused to their greatest excitement of the set, cheers wildly. Hendrix adorns the simple anthemic melody with scoops and articulations like a lone gospel singer. This vocal interpretation continues through the first two stanzas, with some trumpet-like trills appearing later on. With feedback beginning to encroach on the held notes, Hendrix engages the wah pedal to up the treble ante. He follows the B section line “and the rockets’ red glare...” with the wail of a falling bomb and its subsequent explosion, mashing his Stratocaster’s vibrato bar to its lowest position. Some rolling confusion follows, screaming voices, machine gun ratatats, unearthly strangled cries, a mother’s futile wails. Then the line “the bombs bursting in air”, followed by a low-toned siren, some unplaceable sounds of unreality, another bomb assault, twisted metal and bodies, a trickle of blood. “Our flag was still there” leaps up to a keening, pure-toned quotation of “Taps”. The final stanza beginning with “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave” is given a straight treatment but is filtered through ululating pickup toggle switch effects, with the word “wave” held through successions of fed-back harmonic overtones. With a strangled stop, Hendrix resumes with “o’er the land of the free”, with the final note of the line again left for dead to have its fundamental pitch leached out by the feedback decay, and a final bomb’s fall to earth. After a short serious of portentous, incongruous chords, Hendrix segues into a perfunctory “Purple Haze”.

In early journalistic accounts of the Woodstock Festival, not much attention is given to Hendrix’s appearance. He doesn’t rate a mention in Charlie Gillett’s 1971 revision of Sound of the City, and Greil Marcus merely namechecks him in his eyewitness account, preferring to focus on Country Joe MacDonald and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. As late as 1986, the writers of Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll mentioned Hendrix only to report his performance fee. It seems that in the years immediately following the festival, the music was dwarfed by the perceived social importance of the event. But around 1989, Hendrix’s appearance starts to take on a new profundity. Not coincidentally, this date was the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, when reassessments of the festival and the ensuing years of rock history were placed under some journalistic scrutiny. Likewise, the rerelease of the Woodstock and Woodstock II concert compilations on CD caused some critics to see Hendrix in a new light vis-a-vis the festival and its symbolic meaning. In a review of this CD issue, Steve Sutherland of Melody Maker opined:

...the best of all the participants captured here is Jimi Hendrix, whose “Star-Spangled Banner”, bleeding into “Purple Haze” is among the most staggering of the live excursions he left to posterity. While his stuff on Woodstock II is mainly pedestrian by his blinding standards, “Star-Spangled Banner” blasts the American Dream to tatters and his “Haze” falls like nuclear confetti, both bitter and celebratory

Harry Shapiro, in his excellent Hendrix biography Electric Gypsy, offers a cogent analysis of the meaning of “The Star-Spangled Banner” vis a vis the revolutionary spirit of the times. He comments on the white, affluent audience demographic, pointing out that “just being at Woodstock was as close to an act of revolution as most of the audience ever came Shapiro also notes that Hendrix’s own attitude towards the war in Vietnam was rather ambivalent. He had served as a paratrooper some years earlier, and in interviews Hendrix expressed some worries about the encroaching “yellow danger” in Southeast Asia.

Did you send the Americans away when they landed in Normandy? That was also interference...but that was concerning your own skin. The Americans are fighting in Vietnam for a completely free world. As soon as they move out, they [the Vietnamese] will be at the mercy of the communists. For that matter the yellow danger [China] should not be underestimated. Of course, war is horrible, but at present it’s still the only guarantee of peace

Clearly Hendrix had a more conflicted view of the war in Vietnam than would be suggested by many of the commentators on the semantic meaning of “The Star Spangled Banner”. Charles Shaar Murray, in his beautifully rich Hendrix biography and 60s cultural history Crosstown Traffic, makes a case that Hendrix’s performance articulated the complexities of the Vietnam problem more acutely than any other artistic expression.

The “Star Spangled Banner” is probably the most complex and powerful work of American art to deal with the Vietnam war and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American psyche. One man with one guitar said more in three and a half minutes about that peculiarly disgusting war and its reverberations than all the novels, memoirs and movies put together. It is an interpretation of history which permits no space for either the gung-ho revisionism of Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris or the solipsistic angst of Coppola and Oliver Stone; it depicts, as graphically as a piece of music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to themselves.

In any case, though, Hendrix’s rendition of the anthem pushed some powerful buttons in the years following Woodstock, as that festival increasingly came to symbolize the last hurrah of the love and peace era. The Altamont festival later that same year, with its air of dread, was itself filmed and released as Gimme Shelter, complete with an on-camera murder. It provided a bitter bookend to the idealism and naivete of the 1960s. Woodstock has come to represent a unique moment of community, and Hendrix’s appearance in particular symbolizes the freewheeling spirit of the era as well as the troubled heart of the antiwar movement.

Mike Daley - essay - Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock

Vocal performance and speech intonation: Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone".

Vocal performance and speech intonation: Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone".

Michael Daley, York University, Toronto

During my thesis research, I studied the vocal style of Bob Dylan from 1960 to 1966. In that six year span, I found that four distinctive sub-styles could be delineated. The last of these, beginning in 1965 and continuing up to Dylan's motorcycle accident in July 1966, is probably his most well-known sub-style. This sub-style seems to lie in a middle ground between song and speech, with a great deal of sliding pitch and rhythmically free text declamation. This is also the time period when Dylan had his greatest commercial and critical success, peaking with the release in July 1965 of "Like A Rolling Stone". In addition to the song's commercial success, a number of commentators have pointed to it as an artistic peak, many of them citing "Like A Rolling Stone" as the most important single performance of Dylan's 44-year (at the time of writing) recording career.

My intention here is to analyze a recorded performance of a single verse of one of Dylan’s most popular songs, observing the ways in which intonation details relate to lyrics and performance. The analysis is used as source material for a close reading of the semantic, affective and ‘playful’ meanings of the performance, and this reading is compared with some published accounts of the song’s reception.

For this analysis, I have drawn on the linguistic methodology formulated by Michael Halliday. Halliday has found speech intonation, which includes pitch movement, timbre, syllabic rhythm and loudness, to be an integral part of English grammar and crucial to the transmission of certain kinds of meaning. Intonation patterns are shared by the fluent speakers of a given language, and the understanding of basic intonational gestures precedes words both in infant language acquisition and in evolutionary brain development. That is, intonation is a lower brain function than word recognition, thus developing as a perceptual tool much earlier. Speech intonation is a deeply-rooted and powerfully meaningful aspect of human communication. It is plausible that a system so powerful in speech might have some bearing on the communication of meaning in sung performance. This is the premise by which I am applying Halliday's methods to this performance.

The musical object in question is the originally released studio recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”, a performance that has generated much discussion among Dylan’s commentators and fans. I begin with a short history of the song’s reception among critics and fans, as well as the assessments of Dylan himself.

“Like A Rolling Stone” was recorded on June 16, 1965 and was released as a single on July 20, later appearing on the album Highway 61 Revisited. It was an immediate success, eventually climbing to #2 on the Billboard pop chart and #1 on the Cashbox chart. The song was somewhat different from the top ten fare of the time, though. At a length of over six minutes (it was chopped for radio play) it was significantly longer than the two-and-a-half or three minute standard length then dominating pop radio, with a raucous guitar and organ based arrangement and four verses of dense, rapid-fire verbiage. It is generally agreed by commentators that the lyrics, at least on the surface, recount the privileged upbringing and subsequent fall into desperate poverty of a second person “Miss Lonely”. The narrator’s accusations and unflattering observations are couched in a series of declarative statements and questions, culminating after each verse in the famous refrain: “How does it feel…to be on your own…with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone” (there are slight variations in the refrain from stanza to stanza). Perhaps the most strikingly unique aspect of the record is Dylan’s vocal performance, with its use of nasal, sliding pitches and a speechlike, highly rhythmic declamatory style. Dylan later described, in somewhat stylized terms, the genesis of the song:

“I wrote it as soon as I got back from England. It was ten pages long. It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper – all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred. Revenge, that’s a better word. It was telling someone they didn’t know what it was all about, and they were lucky. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on paper it was singing ‘How does it feel?’ in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion. It was like swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Skipping, kicking the tree, hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet with. I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight (to Jules Siegel, quoted in Scaduto 1973:244-5).

Whether or not one chooses to take Dylan’s comments at face value, they provide us with a sense of the artist’s own perception of his creative process and the degree to which the endeavour succeeded. They also give us a glimpse into the visual and gestural correlatives of Dylan’s sonic sense; he refers here to outward movement, directed towards a specific point. These metaphors, I suggest, are not arbitrary. They are in fact strongly indexed to the metaphorical constructs of much of the reception of “Like A Rolling Stone”, as well as the gestural aspects of Dylan’s use of vocal pitch in the performance.

In addition to the popular acclaim accorded to Dylan’s recording shortly after its release, a steady procession of commentators on Dylan’s life and work have offered their own assessments. The larger works from which the following quotations are drawn include Dylan biographies as well as short articles about Dylan and more scholarly analytical works (in the cases of Mellers and Bowden):

Anthony Scaduto:

When you heard ‘Rolling Stone’ back then it was like a cataclysm, like being taken to the edge of the abyss, drawn to some guillotine of experience…[Dylan was] biting off a word, spitting out venom, spreading a virulent emotion, infecting the listener (Scaduto 1973:245).

Patrick Humphries:

…steamrollering all that had gone before and spiraling onwards through outrageous rhymes and meter, lyrics flung like accusations, affronting yet compelling, that age-old fascination which lures unwary travelers right to the heart of darkness (Humphries and Bauldie 1991:57).

John Herdman:

Rock bottom intensity of feeling…he tells us what he feels himself, he projects himself with eerie immediacy into the feelings of others, and in so doing he shows us what we feel too (Herdman 1982:14).

Paul Nelson:

The definitive statement that both personal and artistic fulfillment must come, in the main, by being truly on one’s own (Nelson 1966:107).

Betsy Bowden:

…the absence of any personal pronouns (sic) sucks the listener into the song…the song’s ‘you’ gets thoroughly conquered in both sense and sound (Bowden 1982:104).

Wilfred Mellers:

Although the words are dismissive, the music – with its jaunty repeated notes and eyebrow-arching rising thirds…is positive in total effect (Mellers 1985:140).

“Hugh Dunnit” writing in The Telegraph (a Bob Dylan fan magazine):

…his birth cry is the primal demon voice that whoops out the surging refrains of this song…each is a searing, vituperative taunt, designed to needle to the bone. But the tone of the words (as sung) and music is unmistakably joyous, celebratory. [Dylan] is exultant, free, on his own, ecstatic that he is as he once was, a complete unknown – unknown because unknowable (quoted in Williams 1991:153).

While these assessments are rather broadly variant in tone and content, some recurring themes are discernible. I have grouped some salient metaphors and descriptors from the critical history of “Like A Rolling Stone” (including Dylan’s own commentary) into five main thematic areas below:

Thematic area 1:

Strong antagonism
“venom”
“dismissive”
“affronting”

Thematic area 2:

Attractiveness
“sucks the listener in”
“lures unwary travelers”
“compelling”
siren song metaphor
“drawn to some guillotine of experience”

Thematic area 3:

Positive message
“joyous…exultant…celebratory”
“personal and artistic fulfillment”

Thematic area 4:

Projecting
Thrusting outward
“spitting out venom”
“lyrics flung”
“directed at some point”
“whoops out”
“spiraling onwards”

Thematic area 5:

Sureness/effectiveness
Virtuosity
Intensity of feeling
Expressivity
“I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight”

Thematic area 1 parallels the mood and content of the lyrics as they appear on paper – a strong antagonism is conveyed through the constant, invasive questioning and damning judgments of the invisible first person (who may or may not be identified as Dylan himself). I would doubt, though, that the lyrics alone create such a strong mood of condemnation. Dylan’s overall vocal timbre here is quite hard and nasal, the kind of vocal sound that might accompany a ‘tongue-lashing’ by someone who clearly feels that they are in the right, perhaps directed at a child or some other person in a position of lesser power. Such a tone suits this classic monologic text, whre the life history and inner thoughts of the “you” are co-opted by the narrator who is himself invisible, that is, not named, not described: an inviolable, inscrutable disembodied voice. Much of Dylan’s expressive output around the time that “Like A Rolling Stone” was recorded displays a similar style of interpersonal communication.

Thematic area 2 groups together references to the ‘attractiveness’ of the performance, its power to draw the listener towards something which, when it is named at all, is vaguely dangerous or forbidding. Humphries seems to refer to the ancient Greek myth of the Sirens, who lured travelers towards destruction with an irresistible song. Scaduto, perhaps specifying the nature of the destruction, refers to a “guillotine of experience”, which might suggest that the listener experiences some irrevocable change in worldview once drawn into “the abyss”. These types of metaphors are difficult to reconcile with the sense of the lyrics as written, so it seems that this theme of ‘attractiveness’ might be connected in some way with thematic area 5, which is concerned with virtuosic control. The “abyss” might be the potentiality of the listener herself being targeted for this kind of vitriol, while at the same time she is drawn to the source by the sheer mastery with which the antagonism is delivered.

Thematic area 3, headed by “positive message”, primarily comes from Paul Nelson’s 1966 essay, which suggests that all of the characters in “Like A Rolling Stone” are actually in some way Dylan. This theme was taken up in the Telegraph, whose author connects the performance with a projection of Dylan as triumphantly breaking the chains of his safe, successful ‘folksinger’ career in favour of some new, uncharted musical terrain in the rock milieu. Thus the ‘story’ of the verses is just a scaffolding upon which to hang the exultant chorus. Rather than chalking up this interpretation to creative critique, though, I would suggest that this, too, is an impression based on performative factors more than lyric sense. The band’s performance certainly helps matters along in this regard. There is nothing careful about the way the studio musicians barrel through the song, in spite of Al Kooper’s famous story (found in his autobiography, Backstage Passes) that this song marked his first ever try at organ. Dylan, too, contributes sloppily transcendent rhythm guitar and harmonica flourishes. The harmonic structure of the song itself can also be seen as a series of affirmations, with the verse consisting primarily of stepwise climbs from the I to the V chord, which is held until a satisfying return is made to the tonic I. The inevitable perfect cadences that begin each line of text are contradicted only once in the form, when a IV chord intervenes at the prechorus. This IV chord then reverses the movement of the previous lines, falling stepwise down to the I until the upward movement is restored with an extended II – IV – V climb. The choruses condense the stepwise climbs of the verses into terse I – IV – V statements which Dylan might have associated with the irony-free rock’n’roll aesthetics of “Twist and Shout” and “La Bamba”. I submit, then, that the commentators who associate “Like A Rolling Stone” with joy, celebration and liberation might be hearing these values primarily as embodied in the music, despite the fact that their critical faculties might impel them to look to the lyrics first.

Thematic area 4 might be fruitfully compared to thematic area 2 in that they both seem connected to gesture, space, movement and energy. Whereas area 2 contains metaphors of attraction, area 4 refers to outward projection, ostensibly from the same source that attracts. The references to “spitting out” and “lyrics flung” directs our attention towards the mouth, and indeed Dylan referred to this song on a number of occasions as “vomitific”. Could this thematic area, along with area 2, be related to various listeners’ connections with the corporeality of the performance? We hear Dylan’s mouth as he sings, but we can also envision his facial expression, perhaps his body movements as well. This we deduce from the aural landscape of the recording, which gives us information about Dylan’s vocal timbre, the speed of enunciation, and other details, but I believe that it is in the area of pitch that we will find the greatest correlation to gestural metaphors. As we will see, much of Dylan’s vocal pitch use in “Like A Rolling Stone” finds him taking a syllable and describing a kind of arc, with medium or short rise and a longer fall. This parallels somewhat the spatial path of an object thrown into the air. And since Dylan performs this arc repeatedly, sometimes several times in a single line of text, it follows that a listener might hear the words as “flung”, or even “spiraling outwards”, as each arc is succeeded by another.

Thematic area 5 contains metaphors of ‘sureness’ and ‘effectiveness’, connected with what might be though of as virtuosic expressive control. Robert Walser has traced the 18th century origins of the term “virtuoso”, a word that is popularly though of as referring to technical mastery. Walser points out that this technical mastery was always in the service of expressive and rhetorical control (see Walser 1993). The ways that this virtuosity is manifested in “Like A Rolling Stone” are twofold. As I hope to demonstrate, Dylan uses vocal pitch to emphasize the lyric sense – this may be interpreted as a rhetorical use of performative virtuosity. But his division of phrases does not always serve the ‘sense’ of the discourse; on the contrary, his re-alignment of points of emphasis in the lyrics, again through pitch use, can be understood as playful. The virtuoso makes meaningful performances, but he also shows off what he can do. By sometimes obscuring meaning, he displays his mastery.

A close reading of Dylan’s vocal performance in “Like A Rolling Stone” will allow for a better understanding of the metaphorical constructions that followed in its wake, in the form the critical responses recounted above. This close reading will consist in the main of an analysis, based on Michael Halliday’s linguistic method, of pitch use in the second verse and chorus. First, a word on Halliday’s method.

Through much of the history of linguistic inquiry, the written word has occupied a privileged place as an object of study. Languages are traditionally analyzed primarily in terms of their grammars; this reflects the popular belief that words and sentences constitute the essential part of human verbal communication. As such, spoken language is routinely transcribed to written form for analysis. Of course, popular knowledge also tells us that ‘how you say something is often as important as what you say’. Every native speaker of English performs the language in some way that communicates things that the written word can not. The scientific understanding of this ‘sonic sense’ of speech, however, has developed slowly and fitfully until recent years.

As early as the 1930s, work began to be undertaken towards the understanding of speech intonation, the universe of sonic details that accompany every utterance. These details include large and small gradations in pitch, timbre, amplitude and rhythm. The British linguist Michael Halliday has formulated a cogent system for understanding speech intonation in the context of a “functional” English grammar in his 1970 monograph A Course in Spoken English: Intonation and his larger work from 1994, An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Since Halliday’s work on the nature of speech has constituted one of the starting points for my own research, I include here a thumbnail explanation of his theory as it applies to the present work. The following short explanation is a paraphrase of some of the ideas put forth in Halliday’s 1970 and 1994 publications, with an aim towards setting the stage for the analysis here.

Tonality

Intonation in English is organized in units Halliday calls tone groups. Halliday says of the tone group:

The tone group is one unit of information, one 'block' in the message that the speaker is communicating; and so it can be of any length. The particular meaning that the speaker wishes to convey may make it necessary to split a single clause into two or more tone groups, or to combine two or more clauses into one tone group (Halliday 1970:3-4).

The pattern by which tone groups are distributed throughout speech, called tonality, is crucial to the sense of an utterance. The speaker divides up the stream of spoken words into groups, and this reveals to the listener how to mentally organize the information. Almost all of the time, tonality follows a predictable course, with tone groups basically corresponding to grammatical clauses. But when it is disrupted, as in Bob Dylan’s 1965 studio performance of "Like A Rolling Stone", grammatical sense can be fundamentally altered.

Tonicity

Each tone group has a tonic syllable, a place of prominence which the speaker seeks to mark as most important and which carries the most pronounced pitch change. It often carries the burden of "new information" in the clause and as such the normative place of a tonic syllable is on the last word in a clause. Placement of the tonic syllable in places other than this is understood to be contrastive. The placement of tonic prominence is referred to as tonicity.

Tone

Halliday has identified five basic tones, or pitch contours, in English. Tone interacts with tonality (distribution of tone groups) and tonicity (placement of tonic prominence) to create meaning in English intonation. Following are the tones identified in Halliday's system:

simple tone groups:

tone 1 falling
tone 2 high rising, or falling-rising (pointed)
tone 3 low rising
tone 4 falling-rising (rounded)
tone 5 rising-falling (rounded)

I have transcribed the lyrics of the second verse and chorus of “Like A Rolling Stone” using an adaptation of Halliday’s notation for speech intonation. The second verse is not dissimilar to the other three verses in style, but I chose it because it seemed to me to contain the widest variety of playful inflections and pitch gestures. The tones themselves (the numerals which begin each tone group) were chosen on the basis of their resemblance to Dylan’s use of sung pitch, as shown here. Each tone group is set off in a separate line of text and framed in double slash marks; syllables with tonic prominence are underlined and rhythmic feet are divided by single slash marks.

a) //5 ah you// (rising, then falling, tone)

b) //1 gone// (falling tone)

c) //1 to the/ finest//

d) //1 school//

e)//1 all//

f) //1 right//

g) //1'^miss/lonely/but you/know you/only/used to/get//

h) //5 juiced in/it//

i) //1 ^no/body's/ever/taught/you/how to/live out/on/the street//

j) //5 ^and/now you're/gonna/have to/get/used to//

k) //5 it//

1) //1 ^you/say you'd/never//

m) //1 compro/mise//

n) //1 with the/mystery/tramp but/now you//

o) //1 realize//

p) //1 he's not/selling/any//

q) //1 alibis//

r) //1 as you/stare in/to the/vacuum/of his/eyes//

s) //1 and say//

t) //1 do you/want to//

u) //1 make a/deal//

v) //1 how does it/feel//

w)//1 how does it/feel//

x) //1 to be/on your/own//

y) //1 '^with/no di/rection/home//

z) //2 a com/plete un/known//

aa) //2 like a/rolling/stone//

Below I have transcribed the same verse and chorus "grammatically", using line breaks to mark off likely clause divisions:

ah you gone to the finest school all right miss lonely

but you know you only used to get juiced in it

nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street

and now you're gonna have to get used to it

you say you'd never compromise with the mystery tramp

but now you realize he's not selling any alibis

as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

and say "Do you want to make a deal?"

How does it feel?

How does it feel to be on your own

with no direction home

a complete unknown

like a rolling stone?

The verse begins with a tone 5 (line a). This being a tone group unto itself, it would be plausible to refer to this speech function as an initiating call; tone 5 in this case has a meaning of "insistence". This is the second verse, after all, which can be thought of as constituting an expansion of the ideas begun in the first. Thus the highly tonicized first pitch gesture of this verse might be interpreted as a kind of fanfare; musicologist Philip Tagg characterizes such strong upward pitch sweeps as "a call to attention and action, a strong movement upward an outwards...energetic and heroic" (Tagg 1979:14).

What follows is a rapid-fire series of Tone 1s. The use of the Tone 1 pitch fall here is unremarkable in itself, but it is the tonicity characteristics that are unusual here. The listener is bombarded with a series of tonicized words (tonic prominence is used in normal speech as a pointer to the new information in an utterance) and Dylan gives tonic prominence to nearly every word in the first part of the first line. This overloading of new information pointers renders the text as forceful and intrusive upon the listener. There is a sense of an intoxicating sensory overload.

Right away a general non-alignment of tone groups as sung with the grammar of the written lyric is evident. This manifests itself in the distribution of tone groups in many different places within the grammatical clause, as well as the placement of tonic prominence on syllables other than the last lexical item in the clause. In tone groups e) and f) this unusual, seemingly indiscriminate use of tonality breaks up the cohesion of the phrase "all right", a phrase that has become fused, or indivisible, through popular use. The phrase is rendered contrastive to its usual meaning and marks the word "all" as a piece of new information. This would force the cliched phrase to be processed in terms of its actual meaning, rather than as a purely 'textual' conjunctive phrase, which it has become in popular usage. Thus the listener hears "all right" as an emphatic confirmation of the text immediately preceding. This technique seeks to renew the cliche, something that Dylan has done lexically in other songs by substituting unexpected words in common phrases (see Ricks 1987).

It would be grammatically plausible to segment the first line of this verse into two clauses as follows:

ah you gone to the finest school all right miss lonely
but you know you only used to get juiced in it

The second clause would usually be distributed over one tone group. This does not happen here, though not because of the overloading of tone groups that occurred in the first clause. Instead, the last part of the first clause ("miss lonely") is included in the second clause's tone group, which itself cuts off at "get" rather than being completed with "juiced in it". Thus the normative placement of the tone group on the clause is shifted backward by one phrase. This has the effect of presenting a grammatically incoherent group of words as a single package of information. This clouds the meaning of the clause somewhat, but perhaps more importantly it constitutes a poetic strike against grammar, at least as it appears in straight written narrative. Clearly Dylan, like Chuck Berry and others before him, is reveling in his virtuosic masterof the medium of sung text here.

The next couple of lines contain relatively little in the way of pitch playfulness, even though symmetry would suggest that the pitch falls should continue at the same rate. Dylan, though, refuses to do the expected. When the chorus begins, tonic syllables seem to be in their proper places. But Dylan throws in a few more curveballs. Curiously, the last two lines are sung in contours similar to tone 2. This would seem to introduce a mood of questioning – tone 2 indicates uncertainty, most often. But this coincides musically with the melodic resolution to the tonic, or home note, so the overall effect is that of closure.

Close reading of the vocal performance of a song, as I have attempted here, can yield a good deal of information about how meaning is handled beyond the lexical and grammatical levels of the lyrics. In the case of the second verse of "Like A Rolling Stone", these prosodic details can be seen in the context of that song's reception; intonational play and emphasis in the performance might be connected to perceptions of virtuosic expressive control, a sense of 'expressivity' or 'intensity of feeling', and gestural metaphors such as "flung" and "spiralling outwards". On the other hand, certain aspects of reception can be more precisely connected to other facets of the musical object: a sense of strong antagonism might be traced mainly to the lyrics, while a feeling of celebration and joy may be connected to the general raucousness and energy of the band's performance.

Though I am certain that pitch in sung language does mean in a significantly patterned way, I am also aware that singing is not speech, and other factors do enter the semantic and affective landscape of musical expression. Nonetheless, a look at Dylan's use of pitch in this song, through the lens of linguistic speech intonation, goes a long way toward explaining the precise nature of Dylan's communication of meaning in sung performance. One need only observe the many gestural and metaphorical correlations between the linguistic aspects of the performance and the effects of that performance (as recounted in the reception history) on listeners. A certain thoroughgoing nature of Dylan's aesthetic is suggested here, with musical, linguistic, gestural and (perhaps subsuming all of these) metaphorical aspects all articulating a cohesive, deeply embedded system of drives and directions. Postponing any further investigation into this broader inquiry for now, this analysis of vocal performance in the second verse of "Like A Rolling Stone" reveals much common ground between speech and song in the transmission and reception of meaning, though the precise nature of this shared sign-system may only be understood through further interdisciplinary inquiry.

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In the Garden - IN THE CONTEST ‘Dylan’s strangest song’, there are few that can challenge In the Garden.

In the Garden

IN THE CONTEST ‘Dylan’s strangest song’, there are few that can challenge In the Garden. Dylan himself has expressed some bewilderment as to how it all came about, and upon first hearing, one can only agree: The chord changes seem to go randomly in any direction, but strangely, it doesn’t fall apart, and somehow it even seems to make sense. What’s going on here?

The whole ‘mystery’ of the song hinges on the chord at the end of the first phrase. For the sake of simplicity, in the following explanation I have transposed the song up a semitone, to C.

When they [C] came for Him in the [G] garden, did they [Am] know? [?]

To begin with, it is all plain and easy chords, well within the C tonality. The last chord, however, is the pivot. When it first enters, if one judges it according to what comes before it, it should either be seen as a Ammaj7 (i.e. G♯mmaj7 465444 in the song). The logical continuation would then be Am7 – D, which could eventually lead back to C again, either directly or by way of G7 – something like this (the next few examples are of course constructions, just to provide possible, working continuations):

When they [C] came for Him in the [G] garden, did they [Am] know? [Ammaj7]

When they [Am7] came for Him in the garden, did they [D7] know? (etc.)

Or it could be regarded as a variant of E, which would work as the dominant of Am, with possible continuations to F or back to Am again:

When they [C] came for Him in the [G] garden, did they [Am] know? [E]

When they [F] came for Him in the [D/f♯] garden, did they [G7] know?

It could even be seen as a variant of C itself, which might have continued like this:

When they [C] came for Him in the [G] garden, did they [Am] know? [C/g]

When they [F] came for Him in the [C/e] garden, did they [D7] know? [G7]

The reason for this wide array of possible interpretations is that the chord I’ve called [?] is an augmented chord, i.e. a chord where the fifth step – G in this case – is raised a semitone (one fret). This gives a chord which consists of three equal intervals – major thirds or four semitones – and they may in principle be stacked whichever way you want. The tones in the chord are c, e, and g♯, and depending on which tone is given priority and is interpreted as the key note, it can either be heard as a C (c-e-g) , an E (e-g♯-b) or a G♯ (or A♭) (g♯-b♯-d♯, or A♭-c-e♭). In each of the alternatives, the fifth is altered, for extra flavour. The Ammaj7 option is basically a variant of the C interpretation.

Now, the C and E interpretations are both well within the limits of the main tonality, as the examples above will show: they don’t really stand out, and they don’t cause major disturbances in the tonal fundaments of the song. This is because they are both united to C through their common ‘relative’, Am.

What Dylan does in In The Garden, however, is to choose the third alternative, G♯, which is a much bigger step. True, it is ‘just’ a matter of going in the opposite direction of E, and, true, it is used, occasionally (the James Bond theme comes to mind), but the effect is much more spectacular than the turn to E.

Once the augmented chord has been interpreted as a G♯, the whole trick is done: we are now in the key of G♯ – for a little while. But first the chord is reinterpreted again. In the following line:

[G♯aug]

When they [C♯m] came for Him in the [G♯aug] garden, did they [E] know? [F♯]

both of the G♯aug chords could be played as plain G♯, but as an augmented chord, it is already almost an E, which is where it immediately goes to. So one might say that Dylan repeats the trick: he has shifted the whole key of the song down in two leaps, first from C to A♭/G♯, then further down to E – both times in the unexpected direction. The rest of the song is laboriously working its way up again, step by step, whole tone by whole tone: E, F♯, G♯, A♯, and finally back to C again.

The E doesn’t live long enough to take on the role of ‘tonal centre’ on its own – it appears as an episode within the larger G♯ episode. But one might call it, slightly figuratively speaking, the collecting of the energy necessary for the ascent through the keys back to C again.

If we stay with the ‘energy to run up the stairs’ metaphor, this will account for the end as well: the melody has reached the top, but needs an extra step in order to gain balance and to really be able to come to a halt – it is not enough just to rush up through the keys – an ending ‘needs’ something more to be felt like an ending, and the final flourish, after the singing is over, is what accomplishes that.

Thank you for your attention, will the last one to leave please wipe the blackboard.

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Vincent Van Gogh

Words and music Robert Friemark
Sung with Bob Neuwirth on various dates and places during the second Rolling Thunder II, 1976

Tabbed (if it can be called that...) by Eyolf Østrem

---

    D       G          D
I'd like to tell you a story
     D        G         D
of a man that you might know.
    D           G          D
His parents all called him Vincent,
     D        A       D
his last name was Van Gogh.

He started drinking and painting
and living a life of sin.
He fell in with evil companions,
a man named Paul Gaugin.

They went to the city of Auvers,
pursuing their carnal delights.
They painted all during the afternoon
and they played music all night.

Now the people of that small city
thought he was a little bit queer,
to prove his love for mankind,
he chopped off his outside ear.

So they put him in an institution
but they could not keep him there.
He picked up his paints and his easel
and he went out to take some air.

He picked up his paints and his easel
and he went out to paint some crows.
They found him face down in a cornfield,
shot right between two rows.

    D         A           G    D
Now where did Vincent van Go?

Vincent Van Gogh

cocaine

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