Throwback Thursday: One Too Many Mornings

"To love another human being is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The most refreshing aspect of Bootleg Series, Volume 9: The Witmark Demos was its reminder of the simple beauty of Dylan's early songwriting, unencumbered by layers of production. It brought me back to those early albums and made me appreciate again the rich wealth of material that preceded Highway 61 Revisited.

"One Too Many Mornings" was not part of this particular bootleg, but is of a similar species. Three verses, another lamentation.

When you look at the Dylan catalog the number of songs about relationships is a large one, perhaps in part because relationships play such a central role in our lives. Relationships are also one of the most challenging facets of our lives. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, which very few people plan for when proclaiming their vows.

Perhaps it's because there are so many situations that involve negotiations, as well as the difficulties of being objective in those many situations we're immersed in: money, family, time, expectations...

For this reason "One Too Many Mornings" touches a nerve. It's a song about movement... away from a painful present toward an uncertain future. Most people have experienced painful breakups even if not the married kind. Marriage only adds additional complications to the equation.

So the song begins with an evocative description of darkness setting in. Dogs are barking out there somewhere, but even that's going to fade. Nothing happening out there, but there's plenty happening inside his head.

Christopher Ricks, who devotes fifteen pages to this song in Dylan's Visions of Sin, points out that the song begins when it's not dark yet but getting there. Silence doesn't mean absence of sound, as Paul Simon pointed out. Words are formed even when no one listens or hears.

The second verse opens with the narrator gazing out toward a desolate street scene, but he doesn't see it so much as he is only looking in that direction. There's nothing really there, and when he turns to stare back into the room, there's emptiness here as well. So he turns again, looking back to the street, sidewalks, signs, a scene devoid of people, warmth or life.

John Hinchey feels the last two verses fail to live up to the first stanza, but I think it works because once you know the song you can't shake its melancholy effect. The second verse haunts, weighted with emptiness. The third verse plays out the root of it.

The couple had shared a space in time. Now that time was past. The narrator is alone, though it's possible his love is right there in the room when he looks back to the bed where they had lain. Except even if she is present, he is alone. Perhaps that is an even greater aloneness.

This is a very different story from "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" or "It Ain't Me, Babe." It's not all right.

To my surprise I'd already written about this song in 2012. Guess I'd forgotten that. Maybe I will write about it again sometime. Who knows? Tomorrow is such a long time...

Dylan performed the song 240 times in concert from 1966 to 2005.

One Too Many Mornings

Down the street the dogs are barkin’
And the day is a-gettin’ dark
As the night comes in a-fallin’
The dogs’ll lose their bark
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
For I’m one too many mornings
And a thousand miles behind

From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
As I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
An’ I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind

It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good.
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind

Copyright © 1964, 1966 by Warner Bros. Inc.; 
renewed 1992, 1994 by Special Rider Music

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 2015

Bob Dylan's Dream: A Poignant Lament

Interviewer: Do you read the Bible?
Bob Dylan: Of course. Who doesn't.
Interviewer: Do you read Shakespeare?
Bob Dylan: Yes
--Rome Interview, July 2001

Dylan is clearly a product of his time. What kind of music would he have produced had his career begun twenty years later instead of here in the 1950s Northland and Greenwich Village of the Sixties? Of course everything else would have been different, too. Peter, Paul & Mary would never have sung "Blowin' in the Wind." The Byrds would never have found fame with "Mr. Tambourine Man." The wild mercury sound of Blonde On Blonde... Could an album like that have been produced in the 80s? Paul, George and Ringo would never have been lured to Nashville to record after the breakup of the Beatles.

Had Dylan come along twenty years later he'd never have seen Buddy Holly at the Armory in Duluth just days before his music died. Dylan, or rather, Robert Zimmerman, would not have been born yet. His earth-shaking world tour with the Hawks, a.k.a The Band, would never have happened. He would have been four when he had his motorcycle accident and moved up to Woodstock.

No one knows what might have been had Dylan come of age into a different age. The only thing we really know is what actually did happen. The soil has as much to do with a seed's success as the seed, and in Dylan's case the fertile Greenwich Village scene could not have been better for a young 'un enamored with American roots music.

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I'm not sure exactly what it is about "Bob Dylan's Dream" that so resonates with us. Perhaps it's because Dylan so effectively captures the feeling of living inside what Hinchey calls "the cocoon of adolescence," before the realities of life and responsibility and the necessity of growing up force us to break out of that cozy security. What's striking is that he was himself but a youth when he wrote this, not yet 22. It's written as if he were an older man looking back on an idyllic earlier time, but it reminds me more of freshman year at college, hanging out in dorm rooms with new found friends.

While riding on a train goin' west,
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad,
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.


Those early years we often fail to appreciate or properly appreciate our friendships, taking so much for granted due to our lack of experience. When I moved away from Ohio, and later New Jersey, I never really stayed in touch with anyone. Social media has resulted in a few surprising contacts but the brevity of youth and our forward looking trajectory doesn't always cement these relationships for the long haul. I'm often impressed and even amazed when someone shares that she and her friend have been friends since kindergarten.

As we meet new people and encounter new ideas, we're often changed, our friendships re-arranged.

Unfortunately, like the Robert Frost poem about two diverging roads, many of the wonderful people who were once part of our lives get left behind. Occasionally it is due to our own neglect, or failure to value those treasured people. That is why this song is more lament than dream.

As we get older, and begin to understand ourselves a bit, we are less haphazard in our friendships. We begin to seek out like-minded people with values or interests similar to ours. It takes time. New interests or changes in geography test these friendships. And as we are flung forward by fate and circumstances, and choices -- for better or worse -- we disconnect and reconnect with many people of greater or lesser influence upon us.

Likewise as we get older we value the good in others more deeply, especially when there are those rare connections that seem like true gifts. But it is with great pain and dismay that I remember all the really special people whom I failed to value fully, and even sometimes hurt through my own insensitivity and self-centeredness.

So it is that in "Bob Dylan's Dream" the writer is drawn to a familiar Northern Minnesota scene, a memory of friends huddled around a wood stove on a chill winter day, warming up by the fireside on a day not unlike today where the thermometer reads 20 below zero and the packed snow squeaks from the cold.

* * * *
The first time Bob Dylan performed this song live was at Gerdie's Folk City on February 8, 1963. The last time, at the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barrie, PA, November 15, 1991. Just before performing it, during an acoustic set that included Desolation Row and Don't Think Twice, he said, "Here's a song right here that's autobiographical."

The song originally appeared on his breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. It has also been included on The Original Mono Recordings, released in 2010, as well as The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, which I've been listening to again this week. Finally, you can also hear it on Bob Dylan In Concert: Brandeis University.  (A 1963 recording.) Dylan has performed the song 50 times in concert.

The first time I wrote about this song was in September 2008.

It’s a song about old friends from his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. As I listen to it again I am impressed at the maturity he demonstrated in these early songs.

Bob Dylan’s Dream

While riding on a train goin' west,
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad,
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon,
Where we together weathered many a storm,
Laughin' and singin' till the early hours of the morn.

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung,
Our words were told, our songs were sung,
Where we longed for nothin' and were quite satisfied
Talkin' and a-jokin' about the world outside.

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold,
We never thought we could ever get old.
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one.

As easy it was to tell black from white,
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right.
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split.

How many a year has passed and gone,
And many a gamble has been lost and won,
And many a road taken by many a friend,
And each one I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
That we could sit simply in that room again.
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

If you have a friend whom you have known all your life since grade school, I consider you most blessed. If you have a friend whom you have not stayed in touch with because you moved away, get back in touch… and promise to meet again some day.

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Meantime, life goes on all around you. Don't let it pass you by.