Dylan
once described Robertson as a ‘mathematical guitar genius’,
a charming though virtually meaningless phrase - and one that those
who have wrestled with capos and esoteric tunings might equally apply
to the 1966-model Dylan. Anyone attracted to patterns should check out
the system of keys and capos Dylan evolved for the acoustic section
of his 65/66 world tour; a system which if not exactly ‘mathematical’
demonstrates a pleasing symmetry. (Anyone unattracted should quit this
deadly article now).
The pattern, far from random, is created by the selection of keys and
the resulting capo movements (all downward). Unlike some of his later
shambles, Dylan didn’t simply pick up an acoustic guitar and strum
it in the appropriate recorded key for each song – e.g. ‘Johanna,
now lemme see... uhh... key of G ... yup G.’ – but devised
a logical sequence allowing movement from one song to the next with
minimum fuss or delay. To oversimplify slightly, this consisted of starting
the set (‘She Belongs to Me’) capo’d at the 5th fret
and then, with each song, moving the capo down one fret. Brilliant!
Why have I never seen anyone else do it? It’s elegant, simple
and possesses the sovereign virtue of being almost impossible to fuck
up, regardless of how many drugs you’ve taken.
This is always important though never more so than in ’66, since
Dylan was hardly using regular (EADGBE) tuning at all, preferring alternate
tunings adapted to suit individual songs. Of the 7 songs most regularly
performed in the 65/66 acoustic show, not one was played in regular
tuning and without a capo - thus there was plenty to attend to between
numbers.
Such tunings and capo transpositions can cause the performer a great
deal more trouble than the casual listener might suppose, at worst bringing
the entire show to a halt. Witness Keith Richards’ early attempt
to take his open tunings onstage, at Hyde Park 1969, where the resultant
confusion caused a reticent, teenage Mick Taylor to cross the stage
gingerly and offer to help The Great Man work out which fret to capo.
Strangely, this sequence has been excised from the film. Dylan’s
solution to a similar basic problem avoided the need for any emergency
Robertson aid.
Much of the distinctive sound of Dylan’s ’66 acoustic guitar
comes from his altered tunings. The two alt. tunings most commonly used
in blues, folk and rock are Open E (or D) and Open G. Open E is the
‘Elmore James’ style much used by 60’s British Blues
bands (done to death many would say, by Peter Green’s Jeremy Spencer-era
Fleetwood Mac) but also put to more original use on songs like the Stones
‘Gimme Shelter’. Open G (especially the 5 string variant)
became a staple of the Stones post-‘Honky Tonk Women’ sound.
It seems to have entered mainstream British use via Ry Cooder who played
on the Let It Bleed album filling Brian Jones’s chair and whose
guitar parts mysteriously vanished, only to re-appear, played almost
note for note by Keith Richards (a technique known in the trade as a
‘Sponge Job’). Though there are examples to the contrary,
Open E has come to be associated broadly with electric Chicago Blues,
while Open G is more of an acoustic, country blues tuning. Muddy Waters’
earliest recordings use open G - in fact is was said at one time you
could tell which Delta plantation a player came from by his tuning,
and a few key phrases indigenous to that tuning.
Although Open E features on a number of Blood on the Tracks songs (famously
confusing Mike Bloomfield when Dylan ran down some of the songs to him)
in 1966 Dylan wasn’t using open tunings but Drop tunings - ‘regular’
tuning with just the bottom (6th) string of the guitar down tuned down
from E. This produces a deeper bass sound, very suitable for solo performance
and can also be used to create a modal, ‘drone’ sound. On
some songs the bottom string is lowered one tone to D while on others,
believe it or not, it’s taken down two whole tones to C - quite
a drop. Much lower and you’re approaching the point where the
string gets so loose it begins to flap.
With a tuning as low as Drop C and a capo as high as the 4th fret you’re
making quite a radical change to the guitar’s tonality - yet the
casual listener, say to the Free Trade Hall CD, probably wouldn’t
hear anything out of the ordinary: I didn’t myself, until I started
playing the songs and trying to see where the tonality came from. The
tunings are so simple that anybody who can master a basic C chord can
try them and it’s then when you play the songs that you hear how
much of the sound lies in the small detail.
The best way to get a handle on all this is to try it yourself. The
good news about drop tunings is they’re dead easy. The easiest
example for the basic guitar-player is ‘It’s All Over Now
Baby Blue’, with its verse built on the two simplest chords in
the book, namely the C to G7 change which fuelled the whole of skiffle
(and many of Ray Davies’ songs too).
Forget about the capo (unless you want to use it) and make a regular,
3 finger, C chord. Next, detune the 6th string right down from E to
C - so it’s an octave below the 5th string. (If you want a visual
aid, watch the sequence in Dont Look Back where Dylan trumps Donovan
with ‘Baby Blue’). Whack the C chord. There you are.
The G7 chord has to be played slightly differently since you need to
lay off the 6th string (which you’d normally stop at the 3rd fret).
The solution couldn’t be simpler: forget about it! Make the regular
G7 shape - another 3 finger chord - and just take your 3rd finger off
the 6th string, so you’re playing it as a two finger chord. Less
notes! Always good. In drop tunings this principle applies to every
chord shape that would usually involve fretting the 6th string. Make
the chord normally, but leave off the bottom string.
For the technically minded, the tonality changes partly because those
G and F chords no longer have G or F at their root: they’ve in
fact become ‘G over B’ and ‘F over A’ (or, depending
how you play it, F over C). Also, no matter how cleanly you pick, that
low 6th string is going to ring out, providing a drone C on the bottom
of both (G and F) chords.
It’d be misleading, especially with Dylan who’s the most
practical and untheoretical of guitarists, to take too literally the
technical terms, Modal, ‘Celtic’ or ‘Eastern’,
nonetheless, them’s the terms. It would be equally misleading
to suggest that Dylan was doing something revolutionary here: acoustic
folkies have always used these tunings, nonetheless Dylan’s application
is neat and exceptionally well suited to the songs - in fact, it’s
probably integral. To judge from Bringing It All Back Home ‘Tambourine
Man’, ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ and ‘Love
Minus Zero’ were most probably written in drop C tuning.
The same holds true for Blonde on Blonde. ‘Just Like a Woman’
appears there in played in the C shape (a capo at the 4th fret puts
it into the key of E) but with one important change from the acoustic,
touring version; the 6th string is hardly used. Either Dylan avoided
picking it (much as he did at Manchester) or perhaps took the string
off altogether. (We can tell he didn’t use it from the way the
lowest note of each chord is played on the 5th string). There’s
good reason for this; the low drone that works so well to expand solo
playing is less appropriate in the context of a larger band, where it
sounds murky, clutters up the bottom end and encroaches on the bass
player’s territory. For the same reason, an experienced keyboard
player will avoid using his left hand (the low notes on a keyboard occupy
the same register as the bass). You can hear on ‘Just Like a Woman’
that Kooper is playing with the right hand only.
To cope with a variety of tunings in a single set, I’ve seen guitarists
take up to a dozen instruments onstage with them, each in their own
variant tuning. The reductio ad absurdissimum of this method was a late-70’s
Terry Reid show in Victoria where more than a dozen highly desirable
instruments caused the stage to resemble a vintage guitar fair more
than a concert. They also caused untold confusion as Reid fought an
unequal struggle to remember which instrument was set up in which tuning
[see paragraph 2, above.] A better result is commonly accomplished with
2 or 3 guitars and a busy guitar tech retuning the spares. The former
is a bore, as somebody has to carry all those instruments (and somebody
else is equally likely to nick them) and the latter is undesirable since
it leaves the performer at the mercy of an unfaithful servant.
In ’66 Dylan did neither of these things. With a flexibility developed
in the folk clubs he played a single acoustic guitar and, as noted,
devised a sequence whereby each song’s tuning and capo position
flowed comfortably from its predecessor. There would of course also
have been aesthetic and dynamic reasons for the precise running order.
A set needs to be paced so that it ‘breathes’ and so it
can build to a climax. When compiling a set, one avoids putting songs
in the same key next to one another. Even radically differing songs
- with different feels, different rhythms and wildly different tempi
- will start to sound ‘samey’ in sequence if they’re
all in the same key. From the chart below you’ll see the only
successive songs played in the same actual key(1) are
‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ and ‘Desolation
Row’. Both are in D, but because the capo is moved between the
two songs they have a different tonality or ‘flavour’ due
to one being played with the D chord shape and one being played with
a C shape. This may sound horribly complicated in words but it’s
actually terribly simple in music. Chords are made up of the 1st 3rd
and 5th note of the scale, but the physical arrangements of a guitar
fretboard cause different chord shapes to stack these components in
different orders or harmonic ‘voicings’. Thus the basic
C shape comprises (bottom to top) 1 3 5 1 3 - a very whitebread, ABC
voicing, whilst the root D shape comprises a more interesting -1 5 1
3.
When you listen to the Free Trade Hall show you hear how little time
was wasted between songs. Even the tired and emotional Melbourne show
(performed on a borrowed ‘folk-music’ guitar with its own
feelings about being subjected to such unexpected tunings) doesn’t
mess about. At both shows you can hear Dylan retuning the bottom string,
sometimes covering it with patter, sometimes just tuning to a mouth
harp. (In those days before stage tuners, he seems to have had a good
ear; the tuning is precise).
With occasional variations, the acoustic set seems to have remained
essentially the same from one hemisphere to another, even in such remote
backwaters as Manchester, running - She Belongs to Me / Fourth Time
Around / Visions of Johanna / It’s All Over Now Baby Blue / Desolation
Row / Just Like a Woman / Mr. Tambourine Man.
1.
In this context ‘actual’ means that if you play the CD
and strike D on a piano, you’ll find both songs SOUND in that
key. So the ‘actual’ key in both cases is D, but the capo’ing
causes the chords to be voiced differently.
