While the official version of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” was released on December 21, 1965, a different version was mistakenly released as the A-side of what was supposed to be the “Positively Fourth Street” single three months earlier on September 7, 1065.
As a kid I heard “Positively Fourth Street” on the radio, loved it and went to the record store down the hill from where I lived and bought a copy.
I was surprised to discover a different song on the A-side but it was just as great as “Positively Fourth Street.”
Lucky me.
Another cover for the single.
Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper both play on this version, which according to Clinton Heylin, was recorded on July 30, 1965 at Columbia’s Studio A in New York:
Here it is as well in better fidelity:
Forty-nine years ago, on December 21, 1965, the official version recorded with the Hawks on October 4, 1965, was released.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
This is the complete performance of “Like A Rolling Stone.” While it appears to be the Manchester Free Trade Hall show from May 17, 1966 because of the “Judas” quote, a fellow Dylan fan pointed out that the actual performance of the song is from the May 21, 1966 Newcastle concert.
Bob Dylan and most, but not all, of The Hawks, later The Band.
This was originally shot for “Eat the Document,” the never officially released documentary of Dylan’s 1966 tour of England. Later it showed up in “No Direction Home,” the documentary that Martin Scorsese put together for Dylan.
I’ve been listening to various unofficial and official audio of Dylan’s Europe tour shows beginning in the early ’70s and they never get old.
Incredible.
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.
Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.
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During Bob Dylan’s 1966 world tour he played at The Stadium in Sydney, Australia on April 13, 1966.
Here in all its glory, the music Dylan and The Hawks played that night.
Acoustic set
“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”:
Electric
Tuning
“Tell Me Momma”:
“I Don’t Believe You”:
“Baby Let Me Follow You Down”:
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”:
“Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat”:
“One Too Many Mornings”:
“Ballad of a Thin Man”:
“Positively Fourth Street”:
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]
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Bob Dylan and The Hawks, Hollywood Bowl, September 3, 1965.
Great performance!
Plus:
“She Belongs To Me”:
“To Ramona”:
“Gates Of Eden”:
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”:
“Desolation Row”:
“Love Minus Zero/ No Limit”:
“Mr. Tambourine Man”:
“Tombstone Blues”:
“I Don’t Believe You”:
“From A Buick Six”:
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”:
“Maggie’s Farm”:
“Ballad of a Thin Man”:
“Like a Rolling Stone”:
Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan)
Robbie Robertson (guitar)
Levon Helm (drums)
Al Kooper (organ)
Harvey Brooks (bass)
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]
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Forty-eight years ago, on May 10, 1966, Bob Dylan and the Hawks played Colson Hall in Bristol, England.
Among the songs they performed was this devastating version of “Ballad of a Thin Man.”
And this is from a different show in England:
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]
– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Forty-eight years ago, on May 10, 1966, Bob Dylan and the Hawks played Colson Hall in Bristol, England.
Among the songs they performed was this devastating version of “Ballad of a Thin Man.”
And this is from a different show in England:
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]
– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Fifty years ago, on February 5, 1964, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was copyrighted as a Bob Dylan composition, by Whitmark & Sons, Dylan’s song publisher at the time.
But as Tim Dunn details in his book, “The Bob Dylan Copyright Files: 1962 – 2007,” Bob Dylan didn’t write “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”
What’s odd about it is that at the beginning of Dylan’s recording of the song for his 1962 Columbia Records debut, Dylan credits Eric Von Schmidt as teaching the song to him.
“I first heard this from Ric Von Schmidt,” Dylan says before starting to sing the song. “He lives in Cambridge. Ric’s a blues guitar player. I met him one day in the green pastures of Harvard University.”
So Whitmark & Sons certainly should have known by February of 1964, more than two years after Dylan recorded the song, that it was not a Dylan original.
Dunn writes that the song can be traced to a 1930 recording by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy: “Can I Do It For You.”
Eventually Blind Boy Fuller recorded a version of “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” in 1938 that, in turn, was adapted by Eric Von Schmidt. Reverend Gary Davis claimed that he taught the song to Fuller, and in 1978 the song was copyrighted as a composition by Davis. (Davis passed away in 1972.)
When Dylan was hanging around Greenwich Village in 1961, he also heard Dave Van Ronk perform a version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”
In an article Von Schmidt wrote that was published posthumously in the Winter 2008 issue of Sing Out! magazine, he said that Dylan’s version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was “…a hybrid… probably closer to Dave’s version.” (Von Schmidt passed away in 2007; Van Ronk passed away in 2002.)
When the remastered version of Bob Dylan was released in 2005, the revised credits read: “Rev. G. Davis; add. contributions E. von Schmidt, D. Van Ronk.”
Bob Dylan, “Baby, Let me Follow You Down” off Dylan’s debut album, Bob Dylan:
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, 1930:
Blind Boy Fuller, “Mama Let Me Lay It On You,” April 1938:
Rev. Gary Davis, “Baby Let Me Lay It On You”:
Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow you Down,” Manchester Free Trade Hall, May 17, 1966:
Check out this version by Carly Simon with members of the Hawks backing her in 1966 — it’s not complete. The songs starts in at about 50 seconds into the clip:
Plus more versions from the 1966 World Tour:
Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” April 13, 1966, Sydney, Australia:
Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” April 20, 1966, Melbourne, Australia:
Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” May 14, 1966, Liverpool:
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Forty-eight years ago, on February 4, 1966, Bob Dylan and the Hawks kicked off their unprecedented 1966 world tour.
Unprecedented because never before had a popular artist so radically altered their art.
Less than a year earlier, in May of 1965, Dylan had completed a tour of England at the Royal Albert Hall. That tour was documented in “Don’t Look Back,” and during it Dylan remained the folk singer — playing harp and an acoustic guitar.
Dylan was known throughout the world in early 1965 as a folksinger. His first four albums found him playing guitar, harp and piano.
But 17 days after 1965 English tour tour ended, on May 27, 1965, Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, an album whose first half was a new kind of rock ‘n’ roll, one that mixed caustic poetry with bluesy rock and Dylan’s unique vocals.
Two months later the single “Like a Rolling Stone” was released, and Dylan was a full-fledged rock star.
“Like A Rolling Stone” was a hit, reaching #2 in the U.S. and charting in the Top 10 in a number of other countries including England.
Dylan blew minds when he performed electric rock ‘n’ roll at Newport on July 24, 1965. Dylan and the Hawks played Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York on August 28, and then Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan’s first total rock ‘n’ roll album, was released on August 30.
October, November and December found Dylan and the Hawks barnstorming through America.
The 1966 World Tour began in the U.S., but eventually hit Australia and then England, and it was in England, where fans had last seen Dylan with an acoustic guitar, that fans reacted with fury to Dylan going electric.
“They absolutely hated us,” Robbie Robertson said of a tour in which audiences didn’t comprehend some of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll every played.
As Greil Marcus wrote in his book “Invisible Republic – Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes”: “In America, this music was, in a way, prophetic. At the very least the sound and its reception prefigured an America that, soon enough, for everyone, would be all too familiar: a country split in half over race and war, with battles in the streets, guns fired on college campuses, ghastly riots in cities across the nation, leaders falling to assassins as if on a schedule set by public fantasy, screamers driven from meeting halls with clubs, common citizens driven from their streets with gas and bullets.
“But in the United Kingdom, where after eight months on the road the ensemble had likely reached the limits of their capacities, and reveled at the fact, the hatred for Dylan’s new music and for what he had become was somehow more abstract than in the United States, and more impersonal — uglier.
“It was as if he had betrayed not simply the Freedom Sinfgers, or Woody Guthrie, or the fan who was now shouting, but the Folk immemorial, the mystic chords of memory. The very instinct that history contained identity and one could claim it. In any case the response now made the controversies of the past seasons fade into their own abstraction. In the music Dylan and the Hawks sent off stages in May of 1966, absurdity wars with terror, terror with exultation, exultation with loathing. It was all too much, it couldn’t last and it didn’t.”
Below are live performances from the 1966 World Tour.
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” April 13 1966, Sydney:
“I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met),” APril 13, 1966:
“Positively 4th Street,” April 13 1966, Sydney:
“Tell Me, Momma,” May 14, 1966, Liverpool:
“Like A Rolling Stone,” May 14, 1966, Liverpool:
“One Too Many Mornings,” May 16, 1966, Sheffield:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” May 26, 1966, Royal Albert Hall, London:
“Ballad Of A Thin Man,” May 26, 1966, Royal Albert Hall, London:
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It was the fourth and final night of The Band’s four-night stand at the Academy of Music on 14th Street in New York.
Bob Dylan joins the group for a performance of “Like A Rolling Stone.” You’ll hear Dylan say, “We haven’t played this in… six years… 16 years,” and it might have felt like that to both Dylan and the guys in The Band.
Actually, they’d played it two years and four months earlier at the Isle of Wight.
Oh well.
Here’s Dylan and The Band two years earlier at the Isle of Wight, 1969:
Here’s Dylan and The Hawks, Manchester, England, 1966:
Dylan and The Hawks, Liverpool, May 15, 1966:
And three years after the Academy of Music show – Oakland Coliseum, February 11, 1974 – during the 1974 tour:
Elsewhere during the 1974 tour:
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Dylan in Columbia Studio A where both versions of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” were cut.
Along with “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street,” “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” was one of the first Bob Dylan songs I heard.
I was 12 years old and could totally relate to the anger and bitterness in Dylan’s voice.
The surreal lyrics, which have always reminded me of Salvador Dali and Picasso’s Cubist period, run through both “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”
And of course the sound on those records was unlike anything else going on at the time.
Bob Dylan first tried recording “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” on July 30, 1965 while working on Highway 61 Revisited with a group of musicians that included Harvey Brooks (bass), Al Kooper (organ) and Michael Bloomfield (guitar).
There were two takes recorded that day, the second of which was mistakenly released as “Positively 4th Street” on September 7, 1965. I bought that single and have long loved that version of the song.
On October 5th, 1965, Dylan and The Hawks rerecorded the song, and that version was released as a single on December 21, 1965.
I’ve included those versions below, but also a number of interesting covers.
Each of these artists — the Hold Steady, Jimi Hendrix, The Vacels and Transvision Vamp — make the song their own.
I think the Transvision Vamp version is quite good, especially if you don’t try and compare it to the Dylan versions,
Bob Dylan (version that was mistakenly released as “Positively 4th Street”):
Bob Dylan and the Hawks:
The Hold Steady:
Jimi Hendrix – Can You please Crawl Out Your Window (1967)
The Vacels
Transvision Vamp – Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window.flv
