|
GATES OF EDEN
Robert Shelton
The quest for salvation. Ultimately, the promise or dread of heaven and hell faces everyone. In The Orphic Vision, Gwendolyn Bays, “A barrier between the rhelm of sleep and waking was perceived by both Homer and Virgil – both made a distinction between the two kinds of visionary experiences. In the celebrated imagery of the gates of ivory and the gates of horn they represented this fundamental poetic insight – through the portal leading into the realm of the dead, came nothing but truth, whereas through the gate “of gleaming ivory” false dreams often came to men. Thus, the ancients wisely saw that dreams can be the bearers of both truth and error.”
Gabrielle Goodchild, “He is not really talking about Eden, but about what is not Eden. He is talking about “this” world, a lying illusion of destructiveness, savagery, false promises, prophets and pimps, false security. The only comfort is that “It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden”. It will all end and oblivion will come. If oblivion is the only thing to hope for, what a terrible world this is.”
The crowning glory of Gates Of Eden is that heaven is more and less than we have been taught to believe. In Dylan’s hands, belief in a life after death without worry or care is the ultimate myth because it takes us past the ugliness of life. When we are there, we are dead, and what is more restful than eternal sleep? Carolyn Bliss, “Eden is inside. Any other paradise is a sham, and pursuit of it is potentially deadly to the spirit.”
In verse two, the metallic, mechanical city covers the cries of babies, the longing for Eden’s silence. Verse three, savage soldiers and deaf hunters await their mythic boat ride. In verse four, the magic of Alladin and the magic of cloistered monks promise a paradise that no one laughs at until he is in Eden. Verse five portrays the Marxists whispering from the wings, awaiting one king-leader to succeed another, while their audience escapes the political-philosophical struggle, knowing that there are no kings in Eden. Verse six finds the motorcycle hipster and his antonym, the gray-flannel businessman-mental midget, equally appauling and equally concerned with sin, which is nonexistent in death and in Eden. History, implies cynical verse seven, does not teach us all that much, for Blakean “kingdoms of experience” just rot in the wind. The poor battle for what other paupers have, while nobility talks on – none of it matters, in Eden. More gloom as “friends and other strangers” try futilely to change their fates. No matter, inside the Gates of Eden. Finally, even his lover’s dreams should not be scanned for meaning or truth. No truth but in Eden, in sleep, in death.
In 1793, Blake issued a series of pictorial emblems titled The Gates Of Paradise. In 1818, he reworked many of the plates and added a text called The Keys Of The Gates. The emblems traced man from cradle to grave, through various states of the soul’s desire and mortal frustration. To Blake, the grave was not a place of death, but of spiritual mystery, echoing the Bible, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Swedenborg. Is Gates Of Eden both a Blakean song of innocence and of experience? Coleridge said the best way to know poems is to make them “generally, but not perfectly understood”. Compare “the ships with tattooed sails” to the timeless metaphor of a ship as the vehicle to death. The monks sitting side-saddle on a golden calf recall that ancient Hebrews worshiped a golden calf until Moses delivered the ten commandments.
Clinton Heylin
Published lyrics: Writings And Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004; {draft: The Bob Dylan Scrapbook].
First known performance: Philharmonic Hall, New York, 31 October 1964 [L64].
Known studio recordings: Studio A, New York, 15 January 1965 – 1 take [BIABH]; Studio B, New York, 1 May 1970.
Dylan told Nat Hentoff, the week after the Another Side Of Bob Dylan session, “I've been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That's why I write a lot of poetry.” Stretching at the very bounds of song itself, he could sense the line between poetry and song starting to dissolve. As his page-bound poems became little more than speed-screeds, the songs became so much more, lateral and linear, literary yet lyrical. The all-important Gates Of Eden appears to have been composed at the same time as he was tapping out a number of rambling, non-rhyming, vers libre poems for the jacket of his fourth album, circa late-June and July 1964.
Given that a complete draft resides among the Another Side Of Bob Dylan papers, Gates Of Eden presumably predates It's Alright, Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding) even though its live debut came later. With it Dylan finally ventured beyond the “haunted, frightened trees / far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.” Sidelining songs about Suze, he willingly embraced that intensely creative nexus in which he may “not really know exactly what it is all about, but I do know the minutes and the layers of what it's all about,” a sentiment he voiced in 1965.
Perhaps the prosaic process by which he tapped out every crazy thought that came to him that summer, hoping to deliver a literary masterpiece of speed-writing – and perhaps trump Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me – played its part in attuning his hand to a chemically enhanced mind's eye. However, this “naturalistic” approach to composition was not adopted for Gates Of Eden or It's Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) two songs far beyond their rightful time.
The frustratingly clean draft for Gates Of Eden gives the briefest glimpse of the writing process, suggesting that the song came with the dawn, and with a great deal more ease than either Mr Tambourine Man or Chimes Of Freedom. Eight of the nine verses are wholly realized. Just two verses change before the song arrives at its final form. In verse six, “All men are kings inside the gates of Eden” becomes “There are no kings”; while in the eighth he ultimately prefers, “And there are no trials inside the Gates Of Eden,'” rather than the foreboding, “There's nowhere t hide inside the gates of Eden” – a presentiment, perhaps, of the later dystopia, Desolation Row.
Just the final verse requires completion, comprising two lines, both brimming with ideas. “At dawn my lover comes t me / an tells me of her dreams,” is one train of thought he completes easily enough. However, the suggestion that “there are no words, but these t tell no truths,” needs unravelling. Eventually he arrives at, “There are no words but these to tell what's true / And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden,” a couplet that suggests time spent with the I Ching had not been wasted.
Though the song seems to have been written in time for his annual Newport appearances, the last week in July 1964, he kept it back until his next New York showcase, on Halloween 1964. On a night when he was struggling to focus on that sure vision of his, Gates Of Eden is the standout performance. He also effortlessly unravelled the song in the studio the following January 1965, recording it in a single take, while continuing to make it an exemplar of his new creed in live performance, when he nightly stirred the melting pot.
It would take the introduction of the Blonde On Blonde songs in the winter of 1966 for Dylan to feel he had moved beyond this particular “kingdom of experience.” After which it would take him another 22 years to return to this Eden – perfunctory acoustic versions in 1974 and 1978 notwithstanding. Only at the start of the Never Ending Tour, partnering an equally electric My Back Pages with an arrangement of heart-stopping intensity, would Gates Of Eden come back into its own. Disappointingly, this dramatic reinterpretation was dropped after just a handful of performances. Thankfully, in the spring of 1995, it returned to join Mr Tambourine Man and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue in laser-precise acoustic sets that acted as a crash course in the compositional quantum leap achieved three decades prior.
Andy Gill
Dylan admitted to Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston that his writing style was influenced by William Burroughs ("a great man") and claimed that, like the beat author, he too collected photographs which illustrated his songs. "I have photographs of Gates Of Eden and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," he said. "I saw them after I wrote the songs. People send me a lot of things and a lot of the things are pictures, so other people must have that idea too."
It is hardly surprising that Gates Of Eden should inspire visual responses, as the song contains some of Dylan's most vivid, unsettling dream imagery, and may itself have been inspired by William Blake's pictorial sequence The Gates Of Paradise. Like A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, each verse – virtually each couplet – stands on its own as a discrete tableau, combining to offer a devastating evocation of societal entropy. The song sets up hopeful expectations with the title Gates Of Eden, but it is actually about an Eden from which paradise has been eroded – there is a terrible stench of decay and corruption about the imagery, and Dylan's portentous delivery of each verse's closing line offers a warning rather than a welcome. This Eden is a place to be avoided, where the best that can be expected is oblivion.
When he debuted the song at his New York Philharmonic Hall concert on 31 October 1964, Dylan introduced the song as "a sacrilegious lullaby in G minor," a light-hearted description nevertheless borne out by the depiction of "Utopian hermit monks" sharing a saddle on the Golden Calf with "Aladdin and his lamp." Religion, he seems to be suggesting, is composed of equal parts piety and magic, an unhealthy combination of morality, smoke and mirrors, whose protagonists' "promises of paradise" raise only hollow laughter from Eden's inhabitants.
Elsewhere in the song, small-minded, gray-flan-neled citizens are shocked by biker molls, impotent paupers chase materialist goals, industrialized cities remain impervious to babies' cries, secretive kingmakers determine power relations and "friends and other strangers," in an elegant twist on the notion of resignation, "from their fates try to resign." Throughout, the catalogue of hardship and debasement is recurrently wiped clean at the end of each verse, rendered meaningless by the looming specter of the Gates Of Eden.
Finally, the narrator is woken from his nightmare visions by his lover, who, like the beatific woman of Love Minus Zero / No Limit, reports her own dreams without trying to decipher them; perhaps, he thinks, that is the best way to deal with his own visions, which seem somehow truer, more revealing of life, than strict narrative interpretations. After all, as he concludes, "there are no truths outside the Gates Of Eden."
With its ponderous delivery, methodical strumming and bare arrangement—the only embellishment is a single windswept wheeze of harmonica planting a full-stop at the end of each verse – Gates Of Eden is the closest Dylan had come to an outright sermon since The Times They Are A-Changin'; but compared with the clarity of that song's well-targeted attack, this one offers only a troubling perception of general unease, a glimpse of a hell which we may already inhabit.
At almost six minutes long, the song was the perfect B-side partner for Like A Rolling Stone, adding extra layers of dense imagery to the A-side's oblique character-assassination, and making it, at nearly 12 minutes in total, by far the longest single that had ever been released – a factor which added to the perception of Dylan as a serious young man with a lot to say.
Paul Williams
The lyrics of Gates Of Eden go over the edge into the impenetrable a number of times (shadows metal badge?), but the music and overall mood of the song are so moving it does not matter; in fact Dylan seems to address this issue directly in the last verse when he says,
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means.
We are forewarned, in effect, that it is uncool to analyze or be concerned with "meaning." More helpfully, he suggests that what he is working with here is dream imagery, and the idea that perhaps it takes the unselfconscious perception and communication that occurs in altered states to cut through the illusion of everyday reality:
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.
The phrase Gates Of Eden might be a sort of free-form, not-to-be-pinned-down combination of Huxley's "doors of percep¬tion" with the biblical myth of a perfect state from which we are all fallen, plus some other things I can't identify. (Am I shoveling glimpses into ditches yet?) The essence of the song lies in the feeling of the lyrics rather than their specific content, and in the mood evoked by the odd droning accompaniment and by the way Dylan's voice wraps itself around selected words. Somehow he does in fact create a dream-state that seems keenly relevant to our emerging common awareness of the way the world really is (and is not); and again individual phrases emerge to dazzle the listener: "the motorcycle black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen" and "upon the beach where hound dogs bay at ships with tattooed sails / heading for the Gates of Eden." The repetition of the title phrase has a particularly hypnotic effect.
Note, please, the cameo appearances Dylan-the-singer makes in each of these epic songs – as a clown in Mr Tambourine Man, "And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme (those four words make a perfect description of this particular song) / to your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind / I wouldn't pay it any mind...", as a sort of demagogue in It's Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), "one who sings with his tongue on fire...cares not to come up any higher / but rather get you down in the hole that he's in," and as a minstrel in Gates Of Eden, "I try to harmonize with songs / the lonesome sparrow sings." Like many of our finest visual artists, Dylan enjoys including a little caricature of himself, often ironic, somewhere in each of his energetic portraits of the carnival of life.
50 Cult Dylan Classics – Q Magazine 2006
He caused earthquakes by going electric on its parent album, but this all-acoustic track quietly hypnotised with its meandering structure and surreal lyrics.
Mojo 2005 Readers Poll #76
Marc Carroll – Mojo 100 Greatest Dylan Songs #69
I was initially struck by the sheer weightiness of the song, the biblical imagery and incessant rhythm. The whole song is so powerful it is actually unsettling, almost frightening. Dylan often refers to the imperfect human state, the fall from grace and exile from Eden. Here, it on centre-stage. When he sings about the “motorcycle black Madonna, two wheeled gypsy queen”, it is such a powerful, sexy image. Dylan is a very sexy writer who empowers the listener, which is why women love him.
Oliver Trager
Dylan once introduced this song as “a sacrilegious lullaby in D minor” and that is about as apt a description as any of Gates Of Eden. An epic with Blakean overtones (the visionary poet and artist’s sequential painting The Gates Of Paradise is pointed to as an influence) and discomforting William Burroughs-esque spleen, Gates Of Eden concerns itself with salvation (or what salvation is not) and, untimately, the universal promise and lies of dreams of heaven and hell.
A vision of a vision postponed – man’s expulsion from paradise – Gates Of eden still stands as a powerful example of Dylan as a reluctant prophet in his sad-eyed peak at the highlands. The musical accompaniment is spare, embellished with a sour harmonica flourish at the end of each verse as if to emphasise the distaste for what he has to say. In Gates Of Eden, Dylan declares that blind belief in a forgiving afterlife is the ultimate lie because it creates complacency in this one. This compendium of harsh imagery flows brittle and surreal from the blue-eyed son who was caught in a hard rain on Rue Morgue Avenue and came back with a cosmic weather report – no kings, no sins, no trials inside the gates of Eden; no laughs, no truths outside the gates. Oblivion is the only logical destination for all mortal souls, so get used to it, Dylan suggests upon his return from the portal the ancients claimed provided poetic wisdom. And that horrifying revelation is no less than a glimpse of the hell we may already partially occupy.
But Dylan is not the only one searching for the truth on this barren, threatening landscape of entropy – a cloud-riding cowboy angel uses a black wax candle to ferret out the sun; babies wail in a vacuum; a savage soldier makes like an ostrich with his head in the sand, oblivious to the baying hound dogs and freedom-seeking ships; Utopian hermit monks ride the golden calf side-saddle and, with Aladdin (his dormant lamp close by), promise paradise; the narrator tries to sing with a lonesome sparrow in a world with no leaders, as a motorcycling black Madonna and her phantom henchman torment a gray-flanneled, bread-crumb-sinning dwarf and the local vultures spy their prey. At the song’s end, the narrator is awakened by his lover, who tells him of her dreams. But he knows that the words he has to describe his night visions are the only truthful ones.
A nice portrayal of Dylan performing Gates Of Eden from his 9 May 1965 concert in London can be seen in the film Don’t Look Back. While not a common song in Dylan’s onstage repertoire, Gates Of Eden has, nonetheless, appeared with a certain degree of regularity since its debut in 1964. While Dylan’s previous concert presentations of Gates Of Eden came in the form of a solo acoustic display, his early Never Ending Tour renditions had a martial, heavy-metal edge worthy of Guns ‘N’ Roses. Dylan returned to an acoustic-band adaptation of the song by the mid-1990s, when he delivered some stunning, Django Reinhardt-style performances of this dark fever dream.
Roger Ford
The mono mix has a quite different guitar sound for this song. It is mostly pounding mid-range, but there are some delicate high frequencies too, which the mono Mr Tambourine Man lacks.
The stereo LP mix sounds as though it was produced by a different engineer than the other acoustic tracks. When compared with the mono mix there is the same thin sound to both guitar and vocal, but the stereo LP gives no lateral separation of voice and guitar; in fact it barely sounds stereophonic at all. Only the slightest hint of ambience is detectable when switching the playback amplifier from mono to stereo.
On the old CD edition the guitar sounds just as monophonic, but the vocal has noticeably more ambience; presumably this was added as part of the remixing for CD.
The new SACD mixes give the guitar a lot more depth and clarity than on any of the earlier releases, and also reveal textures in Dylan's vocal that just weren't discernible before. In the stereo mix the guitar is once again resolutely central, right behind the vocal and harmonica; but in 5.1 its ambience gets spread around a just a little more.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
