Never say goodbye

When I saw Bob Dylan play in 2022, I felt that maybe it was time for him to give up singing live. In the studio he had developed of late a meditative voice of limited range but haunting depth; live, in an amplified setting, his 81-year-old voice was completely shot. I wrote a blog post around a song that summed up the feeling, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue‘. Two years later, having seen him live again when I had not expected to have the chance to do so, another song suggests itself, which has long been one of my favourites of his, if not the favourite: ‘Never Say Goodbye‘.

‘Never Say Goodbye’ appears on Dylan’s 1974 Planet Waves, the first album he made for Asylum Records and the first (and last) with The Band in the studio, as opposed to a basement. It’s a low-key collection of fine songs given somewhat cursory treatment in performance and production. Dylan wanted a live feel to the record but the results sound ragged at times. It’s never quite the album it might have been. Nevertheless, it is an album of great charm and lyricism, one characterised by an engagement with interweaving of past and present such as has become a preoccupation in Dylan’s latter years but in Planet Waves feels like something new. It also foreshadows the richer album that was to follow, Blood on the Tracks, in its focus on love and memory. Some of those Planet Waves memories are rooted in Dylan’s Minnesota upbringing. Such a song is ‘Never Say Goodbye’.

It begins with Dylan’s acoustic guitar sliding through chords that sound like we’re being set up for one kind of melody, only for another one to take over. Robbie Robertson’s tremulous electric guitar makes itself heard, then Rick Danko brings in the heavy, graceful bassline that unlocks the door to the song’s pattern and tone. A swirling, folk-like dance has begun, as The Band’s instruments build up the feeling. The first verse – or what we assume is a verse – begins with memories of the cold American North:

Twilight on the frozen lake
North wind about to break
On footprints in the snow
Silence down below

I cannot listen to ‘Never Say Goodbye’ without thinking of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th-century painting ‘Hunters in the Snow’. Three hunters lead their weary pack to the brow of a snow-covered hill, below which villagers are skating on a frozen river. Filled with the light of a winter’s day, the action is one of falling. The hunters are heading downwards; the line of trees point the way; a bird in the sky signposts their direction. Has the hunt been successful? What do the drooping heads of hunters and their dogs signify? Whether the message is bleak or hopeful we cannot say, for all is silence.

Such is the picture Bruegel paints, but from the start the tone of ‘Never Say Goodbye’ is one of expectancy. In Dylan’s view the heads of the hunters and their dogs would be up. What painting and opening words share is a moment between movement – the lake frozen, the north wind about to break, the footprints left behind anticipating footprints to follow, the silence below that awaits us. Time is held still, something only the imagination can achieve.

Thirty-two years later Dylan would cast a similar view over the landscape of memory in ‘Workingman’s Blues # 2’:

There’s an evening’s haze settling over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s getting shallow and weak

‘Workingman’s Blues # 2’, one of Dylan’s greatest songs from any period, takes the singer on a mysterious journey into the self, but musically is relatively conventional, with verse, chorus, verse. Not so ‘Never Say Goodbye’. A key change creates uplift as it appears to take us into a chorus, except that it will be a chorus without end in what is a song of mounting ecstasy.

You’re beautiful beyond words
You’re beautiful to me
You can make me cry
Never say goodbye

Are these words directed at the place or a lover? Is the vision of the frozen world something from the past, or now, and is the lover a memory or a lover now? There are suggestions throughout Planet Waves which point to the Minnesota of his youth as being there in the background, from the chilly settings of ‘On a Night Like This’ and ‘Never Say Goodbye’, to the specific mention of Duluth, Dylan’s birthplace, in ‘Something There is About You’, and the liner notes, which include the cryptic words “Duluth! Duluth — where Baudelaire Lived & Goya cashed in his Chips, where Joshua brought the house down!” The meaning for Dylan of this past place is clear in the thoughts he expresses in his creative memoir, Chronicles vol. 1:

The world I grew up in was a little different, a little more modernized, but still mostly gravel roads, marshlands, hills of ice, steep skylines of trees on the outskirts of town, thick forests, pristine lakes large and small, iron mine pits, trains and one-lane highways. Winters, ten below with a twenty below wind-chill factor were common, thawing spring and hot, steamy summers — penetrating sun and balmy weather where temperatures rose over one hundred degrees. Summers were filled with mosquitoes that could bite through your boots — winters with blizzards that could freeze a man dead. There were glorious autumns as well. Mostly what I did was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too. Without much media to speak of, it was basically life as you saw it.

But there may be no need to place the song in either the past or the present, as the setting, being frozen in time, could be of any time. That time is central to Dylan’s thinking follows in the stanza that does not follow:

Time is all I have to give
You can have it if you choose
With me you can live
Never say goodbye

These lines about the the gift of time are there in the copyrighted lyric, but not on the recorded song. Did Dylan find them superfluous, or simply forget about them? And do they belong at this point in the song? One of the mysteries underlying ‘Never Say Goodbye’ is that its words follow no logical progression. There is no narrative line. Once the locale has been established, what follows are a set of impressions that could be placed anywhere in the song. My sense is that the ‘Time is all I have to give’ stanza might have worked best at the end, since it repeats the ‘Never say goodbye’ line, but that is to assume that the song has an ending. The music, with a succession of choruses caught up in the musical swirl, suggests otherwise.

The Bob Dylan painting on the cover of Planet Waves has the legend ‘Cast-iron songs & torch ballads’. It seems to link the industrial setting on Dylan’s youth with the love songs he is singing. Hibbing, Minnesota, where Dylan lived from 1947 to 1959, was and remains an iron ore mining town, boasting the vast Hull Rust Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine. Iron seems to be a part of Dylan’s memories, but not in any literal sense. Rather it forms the solid core of a romantic feeling.

Because my dreams are made of iron and steel
With a big bouquet
Of roses hanging down
From the heavens to the ground

Has Dylan written a more extraordinarily poetic set of lines than these? What an imagination that can link dreams of iron and steel to roses. He is creating the lyrical out of the elemental. The image is so paradoxical as to be almost beyond visualising, and yet Dylan has gone to do exactly that, in his own ironworks. A few years back we learned, with amazement, that Dylan’s hobby is welding iron gates. That these have an extraordinary playful, even floral quality to them, seems a logical extension of the particular poetic imagination he makes use of in ‘Never Say Goodbye’.

And then the song takes us somewhere else. The frozen lake has gone, the iron landscape is lost, and Dylan is by the sea. Were we ever in Hibbing at all?

The crashing waves roll over me
As I stand upon the sand
And wait for you to come
And grab hold of my hand

From this point ‘Never Say Goodbye’ confirms itself as a rhapsody. The Oxford Dictionary of Music calls a rhapsody “an instrumental piece in one movement, often based on popular, national, or folk melodies … Rhapsodies may be passionate, nostalgic, or improvisatory.” Wikipedia says that “A rhapsody in music is a one-movement work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations.”

Musically and lyrically this is exactly what Dylan has done, albeit in miniature. ‘Never Say Goodbye’ is one of his most experimental works. In songs such as ‘I’m Not There’, ‘Murder Most Foul’ and ‘Key West’, Dylan has undone the conventional song, which is all the more surprising for someone who has for the most part worked within traditional forms. Every now and then, however, he must break free, the song becoming more a stream of consciousness than a conventional verse/chorus pattern of song. In the case of ‘Never Say Goodbye’ my sense is that he did not know how to end the song, or indeed what all of its constituent elements should be (or their order), but that what he had lyrically and musically opened up an imaginative world that he had to set down, for all its uncertainty. ‘Never Say Goodbye’ is like a song without an ending, because it was not possible to imagine one.

Oh, baby, baby, baby blue
You’ll change your last name, too
You’ve turned your hair to brown
Love to see it hangin’ down

But the recording must end, and lyrically it does so almost bathetically. The singer wants ‘baby blue’ (which must make us think of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’) to be his wife (“you’ll change your last name too”). He sees her hair hanging down, like the roses do, from the heavens to the ground. The stanza’s banality hardly matches the quality, or the mystery, of those that precede it. But in performance it is triumphal. Dylan’s voice rises with those of Band members to bring the song an exultant climax. Then the recording fades into the distance, the music swirling onwards, the dance continuing, the song never-ending except that after that after two minutes and fifty-one seconds we can no longer hear it. It’s a song that disappears, as it must, but which never says goodbye.

What, in the end, is the song about? I think it is a set of fragments of memories, or epiphanies; moments of heightened feeling that the singer recalls. They could be from any time, though they start in his youth, and they could be about one or more lovers. They are those points of joy when time is frozen still. It’s a song about what makes the heart beat hardest.

‘Never Say Goodbye’ has never been played by Dylan in concert, and it was never going to appear on the setlist at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 November 2024, when I saw him, who knows maybe for the last time (though I thought the last time would have been the last time). It was a good concert, but a challenge for the non-specialist. Dylan has a fine band behind him (including legendary fellow octogenarian Jim Keltner on drums) and some satisfying arrangements for songs old and new. He plays a vigorous piano and had enough puff for four harmonica solos. But his concert singing voice has gone. He wants to communicate the words, but unless you know the words beforehand (and of course many of the fans do), the delivery too often descends into the indecipherable. His voice has become a guttering combination of blurting and slurring, practically free-form in its stubborn unwillingness to carry a tune. He wants to communicate, quite urgently still, but who – apart from the faithful – is going to hear him?

One of the songs, played so quietly, rhapsodically in its way, was ‘Key West’, a song which makes picking up an elusive pirate radio signal as its metaphoric core. I thought of the days when I used to listen to short wave radio, when you could pick up the incoherent words of someone somewhere desperately trying to get their message from whatever corner of the world they were (maybe Key West), but virtually lost in the static. Which matters more, to be heard, or to have said what you had to say? Dylan will keep going for as long as he can think through song, because that is all he can do. The song can never end. He can never say goodbye.

Links:

• There is a handy guide to things Dylan has said, sung or written about Duluth and Hibbing, ‘Bob Dylan on Duluth and Minnesota‘, by Jim Richardson on his blog Perfect Duluth Day
• The ‘musical muddle’ that is the key changes in ‘Never Say Goodbye’ is covered in attentive detail by Tony Atwood on the Untold Dylan site (essentially there’s a point towards the end where some of those playing appear change to another key and others don’t).
• I wrote about Dylan’s gates in a blog post entitled ‘Dreams of Iron and Steel‘, back in 2013
• For different views of the same concert, possibly from better seats, see the enthusiastic and thoughtful report by John Mulvey for Mojo magazine, and Richard Williams’ second thoughts on his The Blue Moment blog after the disappointment he felt on seeing Dylan earlier in the tour in Nottingham (“The sound was perfect, the vocals were clear and perfectly balanced against the instruments…”