Salut! Live

To my ears the cartoonishly macabre lyrics have a definite young-Dylan feel, with echoes of the off-kilter humour of some of his early work. It may be that Jones wrote some words and then Dylan, as has always been his wont, reworked them. Either way, the song is simple, catchy and utterly charming.

The backstory to all this is a curious piece of entertainment history and also an example of corporate myopia. The corporation in this case being “Auntie” BBC. Madhouse on Castle Street, written by Jones and directed by Philip Saville, was televised January 13, 1963, as part of the BBC’s Sunday Night Play series.

It’s set in an English boarding house where one of the lodgers locks himself in his room, saying he’s “retiring” from the world. His sister and other lodgers try to persuade him to come out.

Saville had seen Dylan performing in New York City in 1962, the year his first album was released, and thought he’d be perfect to star in Madhouse in spite of Dylan’s complete lack of theatrical training and experience. His fee was 500 guineas – £525.

He came over for three weeks in December but either could not or (most likely) would not show up on time or learn his lines, insisting he would rather sing than act.

Instead of putting him on a plane home, Saville and Jones rewrote the play, giving the lead role to David Warner with Dylan punctuating the action with songs. They included two traditional folksongs, Hang Me, O Hang Me and Cuckoo Bird – both with Dylan rewrites – The Ballad of the Gliding Swan and Blowing in the Wind, which opened and closed the play.

The story goes that Dylan was staying at Saville’s house where the director heard him singing the song to two Spanish au pairs and immediately dropped the Jones composition he’d planned to use.

The play was broadcast to mixed reviews – some critics simply didn’t understand it. They’d be of my parents’ generation. I remember having a stand-up fight to stop them turning off the TV halfway through the play, which baffled and annoyed them.

Nowadays, of course, it would be cinematic gold. Had the Beeb only possessed the foresight to preserve it. But, as was standard at the time, the tapes were destroyed in 1968.

Fifteen years ago, the BBC searched its archives in case someone had missed a copy, but all that came to light were audio recordings of the four songs. There are also a few still photographs in existence and the playscript. Apparently, the full audio of the play might exist on some amateur
reel-to-reel tape recordings. I remember trying this myself. It was not a success.

Okay, with that out of the way, here are the other two versions. The words in both of them are in places markedly different from Dylan’s. There appear to be a variety of additional verses, written after the event by who knows who.

Ken Will Morton grew up in Connecticut before moving to Georgia to become a musician including with the 1990s “power pop” trio Wonderlust. He recorded the song as Swan on the River.

The rasp in his voice reminds me a bit of Dave Van Ronk and it’s very effective here. Good instrumental work, too. A nice rendition.

That’s more than I can say of Stuart Turner’s effort. The English “alternative blues” singer’s voice is raspy to the point of parody. It doesn’t work for me at all.

In the final analysis, though, I’ll take the Dylan (or Dylan/Jones) original – short and bittersweet. And the swan on the river goes gliding by ...