One Dylan, one Dylan/Danko

Bob Dylan's contributions to the Band are probably greater than any other artist not actually in the group; according to both Levon Helm and Richard Manuel, after all, Dylan is the one who gave them their moniker. More important than that, their time with Dylan helped them cultivate their sound. Two sides of this sound are in two of their most famous tracks, both on Music from Big Pink. Those tracks are "I Shall Be Released", which is a cover from one of Dylan's albums, and "This Wheel's on Fire" (that's the name of this blog! Coooooooooool), which is an original track co-written by Bob Dylan and Band bassist Rick Danko.



They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here

(Chorus:)

I see my light come shinin'
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released

They say ev'ry man needs protection
They say that ev'ry man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Somewhere so high above this wall

(Chorus)



Now yonder standing there in this lonely crowd
A man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shouting so loud
Just crying out that he was framed



If your memory serves you well
We're going to meet again and wait
So I'm going to unpack all my things
And sit before it gets too late
No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell
And you know that we shall meet again
If your memory serves you well

CHORUS:

This wheel's on fire, rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode!

If your memory serves you well, I was going to confiscate your lace
And wrap it up in a sailor's knot and hide it in your case
If I knew for sure that it was yours, and it was oh so hard to tell
And you know that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well

(CHORUS)

If your memory serves you well, you'll remember that you're the one
Who called on them to call on me to get you your favours done
And after every plan had failed and there was nothing more to tell
And you know that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well

(CHORUS)

From Peter Viney's reflections:

During the 1965 / 1966 Dylan tours there was a double shock for the folkies. While they were still getting used to the electric sound of The Hawks, they were hit with someone actually joining Dylan on backing vocal in One Too Many Mornings when Rick Danko sang "… Behind!" When Dylan and The Hawks retired to the basement, it was at Big Pink, the house that Danko rented. When you listen through either the official set, or the five volume The Genuine Basement tapes, Danko's bass is omnipresent, loping its way loudly and proudly through every song. Danko is the voice who comes in behind Dylan most often, and like Dylan he had the encyclopaedic knowledge of folk and country music. It was fitting that like Richard Manuel he received the call to collaborate with Dylan. Danko also co-wrote Bessie Smith with Robbie Robertson.

Rick Danko
We would come together every day and work and Dylan would come over. He gave me the typewritten lyrics to 'This Wheel's On Fire'. At that time I was teaching myself to play the piano. … Some music I had written on the piano the day before just seemed to fit with Dylan's lyrics. I worked on the phrasing and the melody. Then Dylan and I wrote the chorus together.

Three basement songs made it to Big Pink, Tears of Rage, This Wheel's On Fire, and I Shall Be Released and in all cases they were radically improved; vocals, arrangements and backing all show a major leap from the basement versions. Half of Music From Big Pink was done in New York City over just two sessions - Tears of Rage, Chest Fever, We Can Talk, This Wheel's On Fire and The Weight. They were recorded on a four track machine (as was Sergeant Pepper). The Band laid down the instrumental live on tracks 1 and 2, put horns on track three and vocals and tambourine on the fourth track. Producer John Simon has mentioned the wonderful acoustics of A & R studio where it was recorded.

Levon Helm
Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ. Garth just hit that key when he wanted on that song. I thought we'd cut a pretty good take on it, but when we got back to New York from California, there were problems.

John Simon
The snare drum wasn't loud enough on our four track recording, so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare, an awful chore. When it was over, Levon growls at me, 'Don't lemmee ever have to do that again."

Greil Marcus has commented that This Wheel's On Fire and I Shall Be Released seem not to fit the mood and style of the album. He even says that they sound like fillers on an album that needs nothing of the sort. Hoskyns repeats the same criticisms. I entirely disagree. Perhaps Marcus had got fixed onto the basement interpretations with Dylan before he heard Big Pink. (The acetate was known, though the bootlegs weren't). I think that both Marcus and Hoskyns are showing (or repeating in Hoskyns case) the normal prejudices of Dylan snobs. Only an elite few can have heard the Dylan version first. For most of the world, the Julie Driscoll, Band and Byrds versions were familiar before they found someone to sell them a bootleg of the basement tapes.

My first meeting with This Wheel's On Fire was the Julie Driscoll / Brian Auger British #5 hit version, which I saw performed live twice in quick succession. Julie Driscoll (now Julie Tippetts) had been touring Britain for four years with Steampacket, a band that featured three vocalists, Driscoll, Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry, with Brian Auger on organ. I'm told Reg Dwight (aka Elton John) was on piano, and I guess I saw Steampacket four or five times. I didn't notice, but this was before the glasses and costumes. When the male vocalists left for fame and solo fortune, the remnant became Brian Auger and The Trinity, and they were one of the earliest fortunate recipients of the basement acetate. The Driscoll version gave the song a spacey, ethereal treatment.

Phil Johnson
If youy listen to her work with Auger now, it still sounds hip, and Julie's voice is quite outstanding. Even then the normal soul vocabulary of generic slurs and slides is made utterly distinctive by rough, throaty sandpaper-textured burrs that are as close to Celtic folk-music as they are to Memphis.

When I first saw that Big Pink cover and looked at the back, the inclusion of two favourites, this and The Weight pushed me to buy it. Because my first contact was with the Driscoll version, I totally fail to comprehend the carping by Marcus and Hoskyns. None of the other versions match the sweep of the Band's take on song nor especially do they match Danko's voice. Even so, the Julie Driscoll vocal also stands the test of time, and Brian Auger's backing is second-only to The Band. On The Band version, Rick's voice sounds as if it's at the end of a long session with many takes which adds to the atmospherics.

Paul Williams
"This Wheel's On Fire" - the album version adds some 1975 overdubs (drums, piano) to the original recording, but either way it sounds great - is a beautiful and chilling piece of double talk, or dream talk, working off the recurring phrase "If your memory serves you well" and punctuated by the fabulously dramatic "wheel's on fire" chorus (which works even though there's no obvious connection between the words of the verses and the words of the chorus). The song is really circular, chorus breathlessly tumbling into each verse and each verse opening and closing with the same words, rolling forward in an ever increasing tension, releasing again and again and yet still building, still unresolved. What does it mean? It's like a dream. It does and doesn't have to do with certain things that happened; does and doesn't refer to events that may still happen, or are happening now. What does it mean? Maybe nothing. Some songs don't have meanings; they overflow with feelings instead.

Robert Shelton
The title comes from the biblical prophet Ezekiel's vision, recounted in a black spiritual "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel." The image of man's life as a wheel of fortune appears in Chaucer and other medieval literature. Shakespeare described King Lear in decline as "bound upon a wheel of fire". Dylan's shadowy narrator is a returning traveller who develops a vague personal tale into a grim portent of the future - fire and explosion as the mysterious wheel rolls forward. A motorcycle wheel causing a personal explosion? In "Writings and Drawings" Dylan's jaunty sketches convert this wheel into a plaything. "Wheel" contains some of Dylan's most opaque writing, yet the song builds firmly in a series of tension-and-release peaks. Sometimes the words' sonoroties become more important than their literal sense.

Greil Marcus
As the men and women before the preacher crane their heads to place his words, he traces a rolling deliberate rhythm, with his voice, with his hands, stepping into his famous sermon on the Book of Revelation, a soliloquay the crowd knows as "This Wheel's On Fire." It's a story the preacher has told for years, but his listeners are rapt and still because neither he nor they have ever gotten to the bottom of it.

Greil Marcus also describes the songs narrator as a "squinting mystic", which I like. Re-read the last line of each of the comments above. They all return to the same point, you get the feeling, but you can't interpret what the lyrics are about. Andy Gill has a good attempt:

Andy Gill
Given suitably enigmatic melody by Rick Danko, Dylan's lyric draws again on Shakespeare's King Lear … itself inspired by the biblical visions of Ezekiel, possibly the Old Testament's nuttiest prophet - to offer what seems like a mea culpa for past transgressions, a moment of self revelation in which the singer realizes that in order to get to this, it was necessary for him to go through that. The road down which the flaming wheel rolls is of course the road of excess, which Rimbaud claimed, leads to the palace of wisdom. … The mood of the song is far more portentous, capturing a soul suspended on the cusp of torment and deliverance, unable to arrest its headlong drive towards destruction, yet aware of the tasks which have to be completed. It is virtually impossible not to see the locked wheel of Dylan's Triumph 500 in the title, the very wheel upon which his own accelerating pursuit of disaster was borne so swiftly, and then arrested so abruptly. The verses brim with unfinished business, anchored by the certainty that "we shall meet again."

Something else that becomes apparent is that all Dylan commentators read each other. "We shall meet again" / "This wheel shall explode" interests me. In American English, shall has a particularly strong sense of certainty attached to it, and is a favoured Dylan word. I was once told straightfaced by an American editor that "shall" does not exist in American English. I advised her to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while I played I Shall Be Released, We Shall Overcome and This Wheel's On Fire. I can't offer any sensible interpretation either. I always saw it as a companion piece to We Can Talk, full of memorable lines which create an idea, but which don't bear analysis. I've often been guilty of finding the biblical and Shakesperean links myself, but I don't get the connection with "being bound upon wheels of fire". I see a fiery vision, but the headlong rush of urgency brings the motorcycle to mind first, and more especially sudden success - hot, untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling forward, possibly doomed (but possibly exploding into success):

Please notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode

Notify my next of kin is a phrase from a last will and testament, or a police report - the next of kin have been notified . Shall shows inevitability. Open up the original Music From Big Pink cover, and that same legal phrase "Next of kin" is the label overprinted on the family photo.

Rick Danko
Those first royalty checks we got almost killed some of us. 'This Wheel's On Fire' was never really a hit, but it had been recorded by a few people, and all of a sudden I got a couple of hundred thousand dollars out of left field. This was half the writer's royalty from one song. We were all shocked at these windfalls we never dreamed existed. Dealin' with this wasn't in the fucking manual, man! If you've never made a million dollars overnight, like we did. You have no concept of what it can do. We saw it ruin people, kill them! Suddenly we had all the money we needed and people were falling over themselves to make us happy, which meant giving us all the dope we could stand. People wanted to turn us on for free, do favors, and some of us were happy to be taken care of like that. There wasn't anything real dramatic about it, because it was a fact of life, and probably still is. I'm here to tell you that it's a crying shame to see what success can do to some people. I'm sure it wasn't the best thing that could have happened to The Band.

Poignant, no?