Learning to write great songs
By Stephen Pate
January 15, 2009
Copyright 2009 Stephen Pate
This article is dedicated to my friend T-Bone who does a terrific job of studying and re-creating Dylan’s early period and our conversations.
Want to improve your songwriting skills? Humber College in Toronto has a decent weeklong event in the summer. Want to start right now?
Study Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and the many bootlegs such as The Great White Wonder. While you’re doing that triple read Christopher Rick’s Visions of Sin and Bob Dylan, Performing Artist by Paul Williams.
Those two books hold more keys to songwriting than anything I’ve read. After one read, I found my muse and began writing songs regularly, at the rate of 30 per year. It helps to have writing skills, but I’d been trying to write songs since I was 15 without any success. The Basement Tapes are not just some wonky songs Dylan did with the Band. It’s Dylan teaching the Band how to write songs, right before your eyes. There is no lesson plan: it’s one-on-five direct teaching from a master songwriter.
Prior to that session, The Band was a decade-old rock group that had learned the ropes with Rockin Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan. But they were just a backup band. Robbie Robertson had mocked Dylan as using too many words and verses. While Dylan was recuperating from his motorcycle “crash”, he holed up in the Big Pink with the embryonic Crackers.
Most of the songs they wrote together are fragments, pieces with rough starts and stops but they weren’t meant to be songs. Dylan was teaching them what he knew about American blues and roots music. I’m not sure if Dylan and his students knew what was happening or if just happened.
The first two Band albums came from those sessions. The fact that The Band petered out can be attributed to excess with drugs and their missing connection with Dylan the musicologist and teacher. You must return to the wellspring of inspiration regularly and the Band didn’t remember.
Dylan, for his part, spent time studying new conceptual creativity with Norman Raeben son of the Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem. Aleichem was a Russian born writer beloved by Jews and the source of Tevye, the philosophical milk man of Fiddler on the Roof. The result of that relationship was one of Dylan’s best recordings, Blood on the Tracks. The Band petered out to dissolution a few years later.
From the Basement Tapes, listen to “Clothes Line Saga” a weird and cryptic tale with no start or end. Then fast forward to Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat”. One leads to the other. The real key is found in Ricks’ book Visions of Sin. “Man in the Long Black Coat” is actually a re-telling of a Child Ballad “House Carpenter” or the ghost lover from Great Britain, with a tip of the songwriter’s hat to his old friend Johnny Cash. Dylan was teaching The Band their roots.
Robbie Robertson learned well: he picked Levon Helm’s heart and soul later to create Americana like “Up on Cripple Creek” and the “Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Helm had the heritage as a deep Southerner. Robbie was a Canadian aboriginal but he learned how to create real American songs using Dylan’s techniques. Later on he would mine his own heritage less successfully.
Dylan never stops dipping back into the wellspring of white and black American music combining it with old world literature and the Bible. Some fans mistook Good as I Been To You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) as dull and useless CD’s. Wrong, they represent Dylan returning to his favorite blues, country and pop songs one more time.
He recorded Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times” and all of a sudden everyone was reviving Stephen Foster’s catalogue. Foster was the first American songwriter to make a professional career of it. We all know “Camptown Races”, “Swanee River”, “Nelly Bly” and “Old Kentucky Home”. Dylan learned from Foster to mix white and black music for more popular appeal among other lessons.
Dylan’s born-again period with Slow Train Coming and Saved are part of his creative use of the Bible. I’m not saying he didn’t convert to Christianity for awhile. But Christianity is just a next stage in Judaism, always a strong source for Dylan. Did Dylan become a Christian missionary? No, he became a Christian songwriter. Listen to Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan recorded by authentic gospel singers and ask: how does a white, Jewish boy from northern Minnesota write black gospel songs that sound authentic? Learn and absorb.
That’s why he’s still writing songs in his 60’s. He takes his background, researches what’s gone before while absorbing today’s culture to produces great songs. Want to learn songwriting. Watch Dylan.
Stephen Pate has been studying music for over 50 years and bought the first Elvis Presley 45 single and the first Bob Dylan LP as they were released. He has been singing, playing guitar and drums and writing about music since 1963. His influences are rock, jazz, blues, American popular and show music, folk, country, and classical music. When he has the time, he loves listening to complete Italian operas. He is a musician, songwriter, journalist, social advocate, business person and collector of life’s experiences.
