Uncovering Unpublished Lyrics By Bob Dylan

Earlier this month, the auction house Christie’s announced plans to sell unreleased Bob Dylan lyrics for a 1963 song called “Go Away You Bomb." Dylan wrote the anti-nuclear song during the era of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan -- but it was never recorded. Billboard editor Joe Levy explains why the lyrics have surfaced now, and we hear an interpretation recorded by a fan. Plus, we dive into some well-known Dylan covers. 

Right now, Bob Dylan has a Top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, or at least part of one. "Wagon Wheel" started off in 1973, when Dylan was messing around with an idea for a song during the sessions for the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack. That snatch of melody floated around on bootlegs, where it was called "Rock Me Mama," and three decades later the throwback string band Old Crow and the Medicine Show finished the lyric and called it "Wagon Wheel."

Flash forward another decade to January of this year, and Darius Rucker — now a country singer — has turned it into his biggest hit since the days when everyone called him Hootie and asked where the Blowfish were at. The song is a No. 1 country hit, and currently it's at No. 16 on the Hot 100 with a bullet. Not bad for a 40-year-old sketch of a song.

As it turns out, it's actualy one of two Dylan songs in the news recently. A typescript Dylan dashed off 50 years ago will soon come up for auction at Christies in London. "Go Away You Bomb" was written overnight for Izzy Young, the man who ran the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street ("the citadel of American folk music," Dylan calls the place in Chronicles).

The manuscript is expected to fetch north of $40,000. Young will use the money to keep the Folklore Center open in Stockholm, where he's lived since 1973. Ultimately, it's a scrap of paper, not much more, and the lyrics don't really stack up to the handful of other songs Dylan wrote about his dread of the atomic bomb: "Talking World III Blues" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," -- both on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan -- as well as "Let Me Die in My Footsteps." But it's nice to know that Dylan artifacts retain their value.

Of course, the whole nature of those artifacts has changed a lot in the last few years. Rarity, sacredness and secrecy used have long been part of what defined Dylan — The Basement Tapes are supposedly the first rock bootleg, and the whole notion of bootlegging tapes made in someone's basement is so redolent of skullduggery and outside-the-law justice it's tailor-made for Dylan's mythos. But times have changed, and not for nothing did Greil Marcus retitle Invisible Republic, his book about The Basement Tapes, The Old Weird America in later printings  -- for one thing, all those hidden connections and mysterious recordings are lot easier to find in the digital era.

I first read about "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" years before I heard it. It was dropped from Freewheelin’, but a cover by Happy Traum (with Dylan backing him) surfaced in 1963 on a compilation album for Broadside, a flashpoint publication for the folk revival. Dylan contributed four songs to The Broadside Ballads under the name Blind Boy Grunt. One of them a stone classic: The blood-soaked "John Brown," in which a guy marches patriotically off to war, only to find himself terrified on the battlefield and pointing his gun at guy who looks just like him moments before a cannonball rips off one of his hands, takes away his legs, and leaves only enough of his face behind to allow him to tell the whole story to his mother when he gets back home.

Half a century later, the song still plays like a cross between a Civil War ballad and The Twilight Zone. When Dylan did MTV Unplugged in 1994, he broke out this obscurity, and, as it goes on, his plainspoken delivery turns suddenly pained and desperate, as if the song is becoming more real broadcast reporting in the telling, not his own invention.

In the dark ages before you could stream the The Broadside Ballads on Spotify (or find pretty much any Dylan bootleg online), "Let Me Die In My Footsteps" was just as much a legend as a song. It existed in print — I learned about it from Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan biography, and the words were right there in Dylan’s collected lyrics, a lovely hard cover book that Dylan's fully searchable Web site, bobdylan.com, has put out of business. But it wasn’t as easy to find on record, and the first time I listened to it was when it turned up in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1 - 3.

When Dylan's own recordings of songs like that were scarce, the versions of them commercially available rose in value. Before Columbia brought out the official version of The Basement Tapes in 1975, you could find a bunch of those songs on Lo And Behold, a 1973 collection of Dylan obscurities by Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, and Flint, four vets of the U.K. blues revival, which is, for my money, still the best Dylan covers album in existence.

There used to be a handful of Dylan songs I knew only through the covers. There's Nico's chilly and blankly sexy intoning of "I’ll Keep It With Mine;" Dave Van Ronk’s version of "All Over You," done with a Storyville-style jazz band, emphasizing the double entendre in one of the filthiest songs Dylan ever wrote; and Rod Stewart's ramble through "Mama You Been On My Mind," at once strutting and needy.

Now pretty much the only one left is by Jah Malla, a reggae band that that latched onto a song that never got cut during the Shot Of Love sessions in 1981, "Ain't No Man Righteous," which really hasn't aged all that well.

No Dylan take of that song has ever emerged, but in the 22 years since The Bootleg Series started, scores of not-so-closely guarded secrets are in plain sight. There are now two Dylan versions of "I’ll Keep It With Mine" within easy reach. (I could have lived without the rough take on The Witmark Demos). And great stuff still surfaces from patchy records like Oh Mercy.

Likely there’s plenty left in the vaults -- you hear rumors of a reel of The Basement Tapes that has never even been bootlegged, though there are five CDs worth of unissued stuff out there already. And I have a great three-disc set called The Genuine Bootleg series, packaged specifically to point out that the real stuff is still hidden from the public, that there are still cult items worthy of worship. Except that it came out in 1995, and since then a lot of those cult items have become available in the gift shop.  

So the "Go Away You Bomb" lyrics are a bona fide rarity; a Dylan song no one knew existed, had never even heard tell of. The few attempts to turn the words into a full fledged song that are on YouTube make it seem like there’s a good reason this song sat in a drawer for the last 50 years. The part where Dylan explicates what each letter in the hated b-word stands for is a little too reminiscent of Gary Busey dropping linguistic science on Celebrity Apprentice: "B that means bad, yer so bad that even a dead hog in the sun would get up and run. O that stands for ‘orrible, yer so ‘orrible that the word drops its first letter and runs."

Yeesh. It's possible, of course, that Dylan could have turned this into something urgent, or at least desperately goofy. But it's good to know we won't find out. Because no matter how much is uncovered, part Dylan’s ultimate value is the mystery itself, the sense that no matter how many times you return to them, these songs remain a puzzle you can work on without hoping, or needing, to solve.

Joe Levy is an editor at Billboard and a regular contributor to Soundcheck.