Most Of The Time by Bob Dylan |
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Melbourne, 1989, Midnight
I am sitting in a blue Laser sedan under a streetlight in a back-street in Brunswick. A man called John Ewbank is in the passenger seat fiddling with a cassette and the car’s tape player.
“Listen to this,” he might have said, in his northern England accent. “Listen to this song.”
That night John Ewbank had performed at an upstairs venue in Brunswick called The Troubadour. It was born a folk club but welcomed various performers. (Paul Kelly had played a stirring set one night with The Coloured Girls. Left-wing comedian Rod Quantock had the full house laughing another night.)
Ewbank was as much a talker as he was a singer. A white northern England rapper, I suppose. (Via Sydney – Ewbank’s family emigrated to Australia in the early 1960s when he was a boy. Much later he moved to New York.) Ewbank mixed music with satire, his Australian tour including a spot on a hot ABC TV comedy show of the time, The Big Gig. Ewbank knew how to work and play with words, how to turn them into wry stories.
And it’s a fair bet he knew his Dylan. I was giving him a lift after his Troubadour gig, having gone to the show to review it for Juke, an Australian music newspaper.
And there I am sitting in the near dark with a virtual stranger who’s holding back his enthusiasm so that I can listen to a new Dylan song, and a new Dylan album. Even within the confines of the little car and its tinny tape player I could sense the greatness of Most of the Time.
It’s a brooding song, about holding things together after love’s gone wrong. It’s a simmering song, where disappointment and remorse bubble away without ever evaporating. It’s got a haunting bass line (‘that booms through the canyons of loneliness’, said critic Toby Creswell) and some searing but never overbearing guitar.
It’s a song that’s not about most of the time at all, but really about the times in-between.
Most of the time
I’m clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path
I can read the sign
Stay right with it when the road unwinds
I can handle whatever
I stumble upon
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time.
It’s a song that, inevitably, you use as a mirror: maybe about a love gone wrong, or a job or a career or a family or a life or a dream that’s gone, if not wrong, then at least astray or adrift or awry.
Most of the time it’s well understood
Most of the time I wouldn’t change it if I could
I can make it all match up
I can hold my own
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone
I can survive and I can endure
And I don’t even think about her
Most of the time.
John Ewbank played me other songs that night from his tape of the Oh Mercy album: Man in a Long Black Coat, Ring Them Bells, What Good Am I, Disease of Conceit. All wonderful moody songs. He might have played all 38 minutes of the album. Mostly, though, I remember the haunting self-denial of Most of the Time.
I bought my own tape of Oh Mercy soon afterwards – and played it over and over again in that little blue car – and then a CD of the album. Dylan recorded at least one other version of Most of the Time, with a dash of harmonica. Almost jaunty by comparison to the Oh Mercy recording. It’s on the Tell Tale Signs official bootleg.
Alt-folkie Ani diFranco weaves banjo through the song in a live version. Stockholm-born singer Sophie Zelmani opts for melancholy piano in another take on the song. And veteran soul singer Bettye Lavette does a fine restrained version on the Amnesty International Chimes of Freedom Dylan tribute album released in 2011. There are presumably other covers of the song.
But the version that stays with me through thick and thin is the Oh Mercy version, the one I first heard in a Brunswick back street courtesy of a performer, a very good performer, who thanked me for the post-gig lift and then disappeared into the night. I wrote my gig review the next day but never heard, or heard of, or saw John Ewbank again.
Postscript
Johm Ewbank to Stereo Stories (via email), June 2012
Hi Vin
Thanks for the article about Most of the Time. I remember the evening. You know, I was only just talking about Oh Mercy the other night, with a fellow songwriter here in New York. He was agreeing that it is one of Big Bob’s most under-rated albums.
I heard a very good version of Most of the Time by Willy Nelson a while back…
I’m writing a lot and have my own recording set-up now, so I’m champing at the bit to record the new songs and to get out and start playing regularly again. I’m still in New York, the live music scene here is very active, but the quality of most of it is a bit sad.
More about John Ewbank
See John Ewbank's website Johnewbankmusic.com
I am sitting in a blue Laser sedan under a streetlight in a back-street in Brunswick. A man called John Ewbank is in the passenger seat fiddling with a cassette and the car’s tape player.
“Listen to this,” he might have said, in his northern England accent. “Listen to this song.”
That night John Ewbank had performed at an upstairs venue in Brunswick called The Troubadour. It was born a folk club but welcomed various performers. (Paul Kelly had played a stirring set one night with The Coloured Girls. Left-wing comedian Rod Quantock had the full house laughing another night.)
Ewbank was as much a talker as he was a singer. A white northern England rapper, I suppose. (Via Sydney – Ewbank’s family emigrated to Australia in the early 1960s when he was a boy. Much later he moved to New York.) Ewbank mixed music with satire, his Australian tour including a spot on a hot ABC TV comedy show of the time, The Big Gig. Ewbank knew how to work and play with words, how to turn them into wry stories.
And it’s a fair bet he knew his Dylan. I was giving him a lift after his Troubadour gig, having gone to the show to review it for Juke, an Australian music newspaper.
And there I am sitting in the near dark with a virtual stranger who’s holding back his enthusiasm so that I can listen to a new Dylan song, and a new Dylan album. Even within the confines of the little car and its tinny tape player I could sense the greatness of Most of the Time.
It’s a brooding song, about holding things together after love’s gone wrong. It’s a simmering song, where disappointment and remorse bubble away without ever evaporating. It’s got a haunting bass line (‘that booms through the canyons of loneliness’, said critic Toby Creswell) and some searing but never overbearing guitar.
It’s a song that’s not about most of the time at all, but really about the times in-between.
Most of the time
I’m clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path
I can read the sign
Stay right with it when the road unwinds
I can handle whatever
I stumble upon
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time.
It’s a song that, inevitably, you use as a mirror: maybe about a love gone wrong, or a job or a career or a family or a life or a dream that’s gone, if not wrong, then at least astray or adrift or awry.
Most of the time it’s well understood
Most of the time I wouldn’t change it if I could
I can make it all match up
I can hold my own
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone
I can survive and I can endure
And I don’t even think about her
Most of the time.
John Ewbank played me other songs that night from his tape of the Oh Mercy album: Man in a Long Black Coat, Ring Them Bells, What Good Am I, Disease of Conceit. All wonderful moody songs. He might have played all 38 minutes of the album. Mostly, though, I remember the haunting self-denial of Most of the Time.
I bought my own tape of Oh Mercy soon afterwards – and played it over and over again in that little blue car – and then a CD of the album. Dylan recorded at least one other version of Most of the Time, with a dash of harmonica. Almost jaunty by comparison to the Oh Mercy recording. It’s on the Tell Tale Signs official bootleg.
Alt-folkie Ani diFranco weaves banjo through the song in a live version. Stockholm-born singer Sophie Zelmani opts for melancholy piano in another take on the song. And veteran soul singer Bettye Lavette does a fine restrained version on the Amnesty International Chimes of Freedom Dylan tribute album released in 2011. There are presumably other covers of the song.
But the version that stays with me through thick and thin is the Oh Mercy version, the one I first heard in a Brunswick back street courtesy of a performer, a very good performer, who thanked me for the post-gig lift and then disappeared into the night. I wrote my gig review the next day but never heard, or heard of, or saw John Ewbank again.
Postscript
Johm Ewbank to Stereo Stories (via email), June 2012
Hi Vin
Thanks for the article about Most of the Time. I remember the evening. You know, I was only just talking about Oh Mercy the other night, with a fellow songwriter here in New York. He was agreeing that it is one of Big Bob’s most under-rated albums.
I heard a very good version of Most of the Time by Willy Nelson a while back…
I’m writing a lot and have my own recording set-up now, so I’m champing at the bit to record the new songs and to get out and start playing regularly again. I’m still in New York, the live music scene here is very active, but the quality of most of it is a bit sad.
More about John Ewbank
See John Ewbank's website Johnewbankmusic.com