Can’t Wait (1997) by Jochen Markhorst I That dog song In the connection between Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd, there seems to be a well working diode; the current only goes in one direction. From Dylan to Pink Floyd, that is. And the current already flows even before Pink Floyd exists: somewhere at the end of '64, beginning of '65 the founder of the band, crazy diamond Syd Barrett, writes his "Bob Dylan Blues". We know the background to this almost lost song thanks to then girlfriend Libby Gausden. On the fansite sydbarrett.com, Libby is kind enough to release parts of Syd's letters: “I have written a song about Bob Dylan. Yeh! Yeh! Soul, God, etc. It starts off I got the Bob Dylan blues and the Bob Dylan shoes and my hair an’ my clothes in a mess but you know I just couldn’t care less. In fact a bit satirical and humorous. Ho! Ha! Hee! Tee! for Syd.” And Libby also tells about the background; how Syd took her to a Dylan concert in London in May '64; how fond they both were of The Freewheelin', The Times and Another Side; how Syd's eyes began to sparkle when she had her hair bubbled (“done in that image of Dylan on the cover of 'Blonde on Blonde', which we had endlessly listened to, and identified with”) and how glad she was that David Gilmour still had the song on tape somewhere. Syd Barrett – Bob Dylan Blues: https://youtu.be/9DO59okB7EY The song was recorded in 1970, on the second day of recording for Barrett, Syd's second and last solo album. After that, the song was lost for years, and was eventually found in the garage of producer and guitarist Gilmour. “I probably took it away to have a listen and simply forgot to take it back. It wasn't intended to be a final mix. Syd knocked it off, I took a tape home.” When he finds it back, some thirty years later, it is a welcome enhancement to the 2001 compilation The Best of Syd Barrett: Wouldn't You Miss Me? With Gilmour's comment: “Bob Dylan Blues is a bit of fun. He was quite a Dylan fan, though there was a bit of jealousy there, too.” 1 CAN’T WAIT “A bit of fun” is a good description, indeed. Loosely based on the melody and chords of "Chimes Of Freedom", references to "Blowin' In The Wind", "Masters Of War", "I Shall Be Free #10", and in the title, obviously, and the song is mainly what the title promises: a tribute. Gilmour was also hooked on Dylan at the time of Syd's song conception. Way before Syd even, if we should choose to believe him in the BBC documentary Wider Horizons, March 2016 (and we may, up to a certain point). His parents have moved to New York for work, he tells us, to Greenwich Village (“They could see the end of Bleecker Street out of their window”) and also support their son's musical dreams from a distance: “I got Bob Dylan's first record for my sixteenth birthday, which they sent me from Greenwich Village.” Which can't be entirely true... Gilmour turned sixteen on 6 March 1962, thirteen days before Dylan's first album was released. He must mean a seventeenth or an eighteenth birthday then. The Dylan love, however, is real and lasting. When he is the castaway in BBC 4's Desert Island Discs in 2003, Gilmour calls Dylan “fabulous” and “wonderful”, and his second Desert Island choice is a Dylan song, though a surprising one: "Ballad In Plain D". “I’ve lived through a lot of his heavy protest stuff. This was another side I’m very keen on, this sort of love song approach.” In the trailer for the unreleased Italian documentary Who's Ever Met Bob (2012), people like Bernardo Bertolucci, Pretty Thing Phil May and Joe Boyd talk about their encounters with Bob Dylan. Dream Academy frontman Nick Laird-Clowes tells how he and David Gilmour were admitted to the dressing room just before a gig in London, presumably sometime in the 1990s. “There’s Bob. Seeing David – he doesn’t know who I am – seeing David coming towards him, he’s trying to get his silver lame trousers over his motorcycle boots, and you could see it’s a thankless task, they are much too… ah! And then he sees us and he launches himself towards us, trips as he comes and it’s like my God he’s gonna break his arm! […] And then we stand, and he suddenly says: Hey Dave, I love that dog song. And David says: Dog song, Bob? What dog song? I say: Dogs Of War, your song! And he goes: Ah, thanks Bob. And Bob says: We should really write together sometime. “Yeah”. And then Bob goes: I better get ready for the show but it’s great you guys stopped by. And we say: Sure! We shake him by the hand. He squints up at us, and we leave.” David Gilmour also speaks in the same documentary, and the interviewer comes back to that story of Nick Laird-Clowes. Gilmour remembers, and remains, as usual, modest: 2 CAN’T WAIT And he liked Dogs Of War very much? So he said, yeah. So it’s like mutual fans. You’re fan of his, and he’s fan of yours Well, I don’t know if he is. But he certainly… he seems remarkably well-informed. It's a bit hard to imagine. "Dogs Of War" (1988) is a fairly archetypal Pink Floyd song, not particularly loved by fans, and in many ways a kind of "Money" rip-off. But then again, content-wise the lyrics are a clone of Dylan's "Masters Of War", and the basis of the music is a pretty successful variation on the structure of a twelve-bar blues in minor (Gilmour goes from C minor to E flat minor rather than F minor) - both pillars could appeal to Dylan indeed. In addition, Dylan often expresses dissenting, highly unorthodox preferences, such as in the 2020 New York Times interview, in which he qualifies The Eagles' "Pretty Maids All In A Row" as “that could be one of the best songs ever”. Still, other candidates do seem more obvious. Dylan compliments “that dog song” and Laird-Clowes hastily fills in for Gilmour: “He means Dogs Of War!” That is quite questionable. For one, it's pretty unlikely that the “remarkably well-informed” Dylan, with his uncanny memory for songs, would recall the striking title of a recent song like "Dogs Of War" as that dog song. A better candidate is already "Dogs" (from Animals, 1977), but Pink Floyd's only real dog song is the most obvious: "Seamus", the funny little throwaway that closes side 1 of Meddle (1971). Pink Floyd – Seamus: https://youtu.be/k3u5E8XKPjg Just as reviled by the fans, but for the non-Pink Floyd fan a charming country blues, and for the dog lover (as Dylan is) a witty leading role for the howling of Steve Marriott's border collie Seamus – by all standards a ditty that Dylan would remember a quarter of a century later, and which he would quite possibly remember as that dog song. Too generic, though, to be qualifiable for an upgrade to influential song. That, Pink Floyd influence on a Dylan song, is really only indisputable one single time: on the rejected "Can't Wait", alternate version No. 2, which can be found on CD3 of the DeLuxe Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006, illustrating the one single time when the diode falters and the current flows in the other direction: https://www.needsomefun.net/bob-dylan-cant-wait-alternate-version-2-time-out-of-mind/ By the way, the Live at Pompeii version of "Seamus" is re-titled "Mademoiselle Nobs" because the howling is now done by the beautiful, white Russian wolfhound Nobs. In a 3 CAN’T WAIT drastically changed arrangement, with David Gilmour on harmonica. “He'd introduced the harmonica,” says Gilmour in that same trailer, “not, obviously, as a new instrument, but a new way of using the harmonica.” In this particular song, Gilmour’s approach is quite traditional, though. (Pink Floyd - Mademoiselle Nobs: https://youtu.be/hMFP0dg97nI ) II Has he got a passenger service vehicle license? Dylan does not only get under the skin of David Gilmour and Syd Barrett. Drummer Nick Mason counts Dylan, just like Gilmour does in Desert Island Discs, among his all-time favourites, when Jools Holland asks him in 2020 to compile a Top 5 for a radio broadcast of Later... With Jools Holland. Mason calls Dylan “still the greatest songwriter in rock music history” and chooses The Freewheelin' as number 1 in his Classic Albums Top 5. “There's an abstraction to some of them,” Nick explains, “that means that you can interpret them in the way it means the most to you. I think that's one of the great skills of great songwriting.” But equally remarkable he considers the fact that Dylan often gets behind the wheel of the tour bus himself. Mason: He does like touring and actually driving the bus. Holland: So why does he do that, then? Mason: Well, I never actually had the opportunity to ask him, but it’s not something that ever appealed to me. Holland: Has he got a passenger service vehicle license? Mason: I haven’t checked his credentials, I’m afraid. But it’s obviously something we should do, straight after the show. More explicit and, as always, unambiguous about Dylan's influence is Roger Waters. When he is the castaway in Desert Island Discs in May 2011, he still pays his respects in the well-known clichés (“Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were the two men who allowed us to believe that there was an open door between poetry and song lyrics”), but eight months later, in January 2012 in the radio studio of Howard Stern, he does not shy away from the Big Words, bordering on melodrama: 4 CAN’T WAIT “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands sort of changed my life. When I heard that, I thought, if Bob can do it, I can do it. It’s twenty minutes long. It’s a whole album. And in no way gets dull or boring, or anything. You just get more and more engrossed, it just gets more and more hypnotic, the longer it goes on.” With which Waters quite specifically defines Dylan's influence on Pink Floyd: the courage to deviate from three-minute songs, to let songs expand into whole album sides (okay, Sad-Eyed lasts a little over 11 minutes, not “twenty minutes”, but still a whole album side), and the encouragement to allow poetry into song lyrics. Opinions differ as to the poetic qualities of Waters' lyrics, but we can at least agree that the Pink Floyd catalogue contains a considerable number of exceptionally successful oneliners. There's someone in my head but it's not me ("Brain Damage"), "Careful with That Axe, Eugene", "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", sometimes even with a Dylanesque quality: “So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell?” for instance ("Wish You Were Here") or You pick the place and I'll choose the time And I'll climb That hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. And as I rise above the tree lines and the clouds I look down, hearing the sound of the things you've said today (“Fearless”, 1971) Although the most Dylanesque verse was not written by Roger Waters, but by Rick Wright, for that bloodcurdlingly beautiful opening to "Summer of '68": Would you like to say something before you leave Perhaps you'd care to state exactly how you feel We said goodbye before we said hello I hardly even like you, I shouldn't care at all We met just six hours ago, the music was too loud From your bed I gained a day and lost a bloody year The one time we hear Pink Floyd in a Dylan song, it is - of course - not due to some Floydian poetry in the song lyrics. "Can't Wait" is a beautiful song, and the lyrics are larded with shiny, Dylan-worthy one-liners, but in essence the lyrics are not that spectacular; a classic blues lament of a rather desperate man tangled up in a one-way love - the lady apparently finds him much less desirable than he does her. Large parts of the text are interchangeable. Literally; in the three officially released versions (on Time Out Of Mind and on Tell Tale Signs) and in the live versions, it's a coming and going of verse lines, some moving to other songs 5 CAN’T WAIT (Well, my back is to the sun because the light is too intense moves eventually to "Sugar Baby", for instance) and really only the opening (I can't wait / Wait for you to change your mind) is fixed in all versions. The tone does shift, though; in the final album version it is desperate and sombre, as illustrated by the closing words: Well I'm strollin' through the lonely graveyard of my mind I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate I don't know how much longer I can wait ...in other versions the tone is reproachful, such as: Loneliness around me diggin’ at me like a ray What a piece of work she is to cause my heart to pray I thought somehow that I'd be spared this fate And I don't know how much longer I can wait. That's what Dylan sings in "Alternate version #2", the second version that can be found on Tell Tale Signs. Which is also the version that for the sake of convenience is called the “psychedelic version”, but would even more deserve the nickname “the Pink Floyd version” – on account of the arrangement, obviously. And there we have it – the one time Pink Floyd shines through in a Dylan song. From the first bar, it is unmistakable: "Us And Them". Same organ sound, half a tone higher, identical, mesmerizing larghissimo tempo. Drums and hypnotic bass as subdued and tasteful as in "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Breathe". And the guitar parts adapt almost automatically to the Floyd mode; sharp, guiding accents like in "Echoes" and "Money", and as a bonus a slide guitar with the unsurpassed elegance as Gilmour plays in classics like "Breathe", "Us And Them" and especially "The Great Gig In The Sky". Incomparable, at any rate, with the mosaic parts Lanois puzzles together on the album version and the Dr. John/New Orleans voodoo vibe he puts underneath. Or with the Chicago/Albert King's "Stormy Monday" colouring of "Alternate version #1" on Tell Tale Signs. The same goes for the many, many arrangements Dylan chooses in the many, many live performances of "Can't Wait". I'm looking for anything that will bring a happy glow, as Dylan sings. Colours and sounds from every corner of the canon, but never again does Dylan 6 CAN’T WAIT switch back to the engrossing, hypnotic (in Roger Waters' words) cadence and colouring of that one time Pink Floyd penetrated a Dylan song. A pity, perhaps. But comparing the restless shuffling with accents, verse fragments and arrangements is a fascinating consolation. What Tony Attwood demonstrates in his article exploring the arrangements of the live versions: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/12498. Tony does have the credentials to do so, by the way. A song arrangement exploration license, so to speak. Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle: ▪ Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue ▪ Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece ▪ Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978 ▪ Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965 ▪ Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967 ▪ Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece ▪ Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits ▪ John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville ▪ Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse ▪ Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978 7