Martha Quinn: Will this tour help you reach a new generation? Bob Dylan: I don’t reach anybody. They find me. They find me. It’s not for me to go out and reach
somebody. If they can find me, they find me, and if they don’t, they don’t. That’s the
way it’s always been. I don’t think it’s gonna change now just because I’m such an old
man and it’s nineteen-eighty… what is it?
– Martha Quinn interview for MTV, backstage Wembley Stadium, 7 July 1984
Highway 61 Revisited (video from Wembley, London – Real Live performance):
The children cry for mother
I tell ’em, “Mother took a trip.”
Well, the children cry for mother
I tell ’em, “Mother took a trip.”
Well, I walk on pins and needles
I hope my tongue don’t slip.
~Bob Dylan (Call Letter Blues)
Such self-consciously autobiographical imagery probably told for it in the end. I just can’t imagine Dylan releasing the line ‘Children ask for mother, I tell ’em mother took a trip’ into the world back in 1974. But at least he got as far recording this one with Weissberg’s band on that first night, cutting it in three takes, before deciding that he would rather replace it with an entirely fanciful morning blues, a.k.a. ‘Meet Me In The Morning’. The tune, he kept. Literally. As the 1991 release of ‘Call Letter Blues’ fully revealed.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)
it’s been such a long long time
since we loved each other when our hearts were true
one time, for one brief day, i was the man for you
last night i heard you talkin in your sleep
saying things you shouldn’t say, oh baby
you just may have to go to jail someday
New Jersey Performing Arts Center Newark, New Jersey 26 November 2014
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