The Cockroach party…oh, wait…wrong country
I think I wanna do that as a cover but I have to examine how hard it is to play. It’s not hard actually. I just played it on the keyboards. The reason I’m even thinking about this is because I watched a Youtube video of Bob Dylan singing it last year at a concert. It was almost unrecognizable.
I don’t know what’s going on with Bob these days. He keeps doing show after show and people turn up because he’s Dylan, but it sounds (to me) like a rambling shambolic mess. The only way I’m going to hear Mr Tambourine Man played live the way I want to hear it is if I play it myself. It probably won’t happen, but who knows?
Dylan wrote the song in 1965 as the first track on the acoustic side of his album Bringing It All Back Home. The song was recorded in three different versions until it was eventually it was cut during the final Bringing It All Back Home session on January 15, 1965. It took ages to get it right in the studio requiring six takes.
The final session on 15 January session was momentous, with Dylan recording ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘On the Road Again’, ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’, ‘Gates of Eden’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ just as they appear on the album.
Dylan has denied the song is about drugs, although he was smoking marijuana at the time the song was written. Bob said he had taken the phrase “in the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you” from the Lord Buckley recording “Scrooge”. The allusion is to Buckley’s parody of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”:
“In came a long angular spook
He looked like seventeen gas-lighter stove pipes
Come together with jingle-jangle bells all over“
Lord Richard Buckley (born Richard Myrle Buckley; April 5, 1906 – November 12, 1960) was an American stand-up comedian and recording artist. In the 1950s, Buckley hit his stride with a combination of exaggeratedly aristocratic bearing and carefully enunciated rhythmic hipster slang. He was known for wearing a waxed mustache along with white tie and tails. He sometimes wore a pith helmet. Occasionally performing to music, he punctuated his monologues with scat singing and sound effects. His most significant tracks are retellings of historical or legendary events, like “My Own Railroad” and “The Nazz”.
“Many of Dylan’s songs (ie, ‘Desolation Row’) are full of Buckley’s absurdist characters who are unbound from time. Lord Buckley was the master of the low burlesque routine whereby some subject or work of art that’s held in high regard is driven into the ground by the use of comically inappropriate language.” There is an interesting story about the making of the album cover here. I believe there is a Lord Buckley album on the mantelpiece in the cover photograph if I’m not mistaken.
Well, we all leared something today.
Good Day