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Dylan, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’ — 1964 Witmark Demo
Dylan, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’ — 1965 Bringing It All Back Home Outtake
Dylan, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’ — 1966 Blonde on Blonde Outtake
Fairport Convention, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’
Judy Collins, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’
Nico, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’
All photos: Don Hunstein
Completely Unknown
“A Complete Unknown” just reached our fair shores, and my Dylanophile buddies dragged me to it.
I’m not a good candidate to enjoy the movie. I’m not interested in Timothy Chalamet mimicking Dylan’s snide, distant nervousness. For that I’ve got the real thing in Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Don’t Look Back”.
I know the originals of all the songs sampled in the Chalamet movie, all the verses, not just the first verse and a half. Why would I want to listen to an imitation?
I know enough of the backstories to feel the absence in the film of drugs and his crass exploitation of Joan Baez.
Heck, I even met the guy back then and got to taste his evasiveness first-hand.
The best I could hope for in a biopic of someone I’ve followed as closely as I have Dylan is for some glimpses into the person’s inner clockwork. The Dylan of the film remains just so, a complete unknown. The only moment that did peek behind Bob’s Masked Marauder persona is when he tells Joan Baez that he learned “funny chords” from a cowboy named Wigglefoot while living in a carnival. To which Joan replies “You’re full of shit.” That would be interesting if I thought it were true, but I’m guessing it’s a product of the screenwriter’s imagination.
I’ve heard of a lot of people reveling anew in Dylan’s 1962-65 music, and that’s a great thing, because there’s so much there to treasure. So kudos to the flick for getting people to listen. But in the end, the Dylan in the film remains Dylan, enigmatic and out of reach. The songs, in contrast, look you in the eye.
I’ll tell you what I did enjoy about the movie—their choice of songs, focusing on the minority of warmer, more melodic and most accessible songs from the period, avoiding the shouters and finger-pointers which were the mainstay of even the acoustic albums, not to mention the electrified ones.
For our Song of The Week we’re offering up an obscure gem that makes a fleeting appearance late in the movie, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine”.
Another Side of Bob Dylan
The soft one.
Young Bob Dylan didn’t often write gentle songs. Those addressed to a girl were usually and condescending and dismissive, if not abusive. Hate songs more than love songs.
Of course we think first of ‘Like a Rolling Stone‘. But even his early acoustic albums were full of vituperation. Take one example from each pre-Hiway 61 album: ‘Don’t Think Twice‘, ‘One Too Many Mornings‘, ‘I Don’t Believe You‘ (She acts like we never have met), ‘She Belongs to Me‘ (She’s got everything she needs).
But hidden here and there in those early years, there are chinks in the armor, fleeting glimpses of vulnerability, the soft underbelly of the hate songs – she did, after all, get to him. There are these few songs where the chip slips off his shoulder, his guard down, his sunglasses in his pocket, his heart open and vulnerable–the well-known ‘Girl from the North Country’; the wrenching, under-appreciated ‘Boots of Spanish Leather‘; and this week’s SoTW, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’.
He’ll Keep It with His
‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’ is notable for at least three reasons:
It’s a fine song, and a relatively obscure one. (That’s two reasons right there.) He never recorded it himself for an official album. Three versions of it eventually appeared in the Bootleg Series.
(Quick, name two other major non-love relationship songs from the same period that he didn’t record officially! That’s right – ‘Love is Just a Four-Letter Word‘ and ‘Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind‘, both taking a hilarious and cynical look at him/her relationships.)
‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’ is enigmatic and flawed. What the heck does the title mean? Why is he ‘loving you not for what you are but for what you’re not‘? What isn’t she? What’s the subject of the song, anyway? Where the heck did that train engineer come from in the third verse?? But Dylan is Dylan, and somehow it all hangs together on a level I can’t and don’t care to try to ‘explain’. Fact is, all these years later I’m still rolling it around my brain and over my palate.
As Dylan himself said on his Theme Time Radio Hour show with so much disarming charm, “You can never tell why someone’s gonna stick something in a song. You just gotta remember that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. You can’t expect to understand everything in every song.”
They’ll Keep It with Theirs
Oh, right, there’s a third reason to take a listen to this song. It’s the only Dylan song I can think of from the 1960s that he misrecorded. Just flat out missed the point of the song. He bangs away at the piano and shouts the lyrics at way too fast a tempo. (Of course, ten years later he began several decades of rapid-fire shouting of what should have been whispered slowly).
There were several early cover versions our SoTW, though, one of which hit it on the head.
Not Judy Collins’ version. She was first to record it. She even said he wrote it for her.
Not Nico’s version, though many people seem to believe he intended it for her.
Fairport Convention are the ones who nail it. They were a leading voice in the English folk movement transmogrifying towards rock in the mid-60s, along with Pentangle and John Martyn. Their lead singer is Sandy Denny. I sure like Richard Thompson’s acoustic guitar leading a rock setting. Their treatment here really isn’t anything spectacular, just a tastefully wistful, properly laid-back rendition of a lovely and puzzling song.
I guess when all the sound and fury and high-falutin’ talk is over, what we’re left with is one darn pretty song, perplexing and bewitching like so much of Dylan’s best.
And if anyone out there understands it, please let me know.
Wow, Jeff. I love the way you write!