Views & Reviews Boots Of Spanish Leather Bob Dylan

November 1, 2015, 1:11 am

"Boots Of Spanish Leather"

Oh I'm sailin' away my own true love
I'm sailin' away in the morning
Is there something I can send you from across the sea
From the place that I'll be landing ?

No, there's nothin' you can send me, my own true love
There's nothin' I wish to be ownin'
Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled
From across that lonesome ocean.

Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine
Made of silver or of golden
Either from the mountains of Madrid
Or from the coast of Barcelona ?

Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I'd forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that's all I'm wishin' to be ownin'.

That I might be gone a long time
And it's only that I'm askin'
Is there something I can send you to remember me by
To make your time more easy passin' ?

Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow.

I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin'
Saying I don't know when I'll be comin' back again
It depends on how I'm a-feelin'.

Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way
I'm sure your mind is roarmin'
I'm sure your thoughts are not with me
But with the country to where you're goin'.

So take heed, take heed of the western wind
Take heed of the stormy weather
And yes, there's something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather.

Bob Dylan – Boots of Spanish Leather

You don't need to have been jilted to be moved by this early Dylan masterpiece – just to have felt the pain of upheaval

Boots of Spanish Leather is comprised of ink-blotted, weather-beaten, coffee-stained scrawl; postcards that pine, exchanged by lovers separated by circumstance and sea. Part of Dylan's extraordinary penmanship is that the listener can relate to either side of its star-crossed script. It's both a song about the sticky guilt of leaving, and the swirling fear of being left behind.

Perhaps the highlight of the second side of The Times They Are a-Changin', it shares certain vocal and structural similarities with Girl From the North Country. Like the richest elements of Dylan's canon, the intricacies behind some of the words is disputable; it's a lyrical Rorschach test that reveals more about the listener's persuasion than it does about Dylan. However, it's heavily speculated that the ballad regards Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend and muse in the early 60s, who left New York in 1962 to study art in Italy.

"I'm sailing away, my one true love/ I'm sailing away in the morning." One doesn't need to be remotely romantic in order to empathise with Dylan here. Your "true love" could be the well-worn streets you grew up in, the ones you're exchanging for avenues further afield. I've moved around a lot, and the feeling that dawns on you the night before your sunrise flight – once the goodbye-for-nows and forget-me-nots have been handed out – is powerlessness. This split-second realisation is the point of no retur. Soon all of this will be gone. Dylan, with his tender guitar playing and raw vocal chords, expresses this emotion perfectly. Like the most important songs, in moments where words fail this song fills in the empty space.

By the concluding three verses, correspondence from his love has ceased and the dialogue has become a monologue. He mourns: "I'm sure your heart is not with me/ But with the country to where you're goin'." Distance tugs the heartstrings and pulls loose the thread that once sewed tightly bound fingers together. The man asks his once-sweetheart to send him back the titular boots, presumably so he can tie up their laces and walk away from his heartbreak. Regardless of whether you're the one sailing away or the one being marooned, Dylan's lament for his lost love is a song about moving on. It's an inevitably messy element of life scribed in the most beautiful handwriting imaginable.

Boots of Spanish Leather. The meaning of the music and the lyrics.

Posted on February 26, 2015 by TonyAttwood

I think I must have been about 15 when I first heard the “Times” album. The next day I went out and bought my first guitar (cost £10.00 I think – maybe $13.00), plus a copy of Bert Weedon’s “Play in a Day” and I started to learn.

This wasn’t quite as big a shot in the dark as it might sound. My grandfather was a piano maker in one of the many tiny piano making companies that existed through the big cities of the UK before the second world war, while my father was both a classical pianist and a saxophonist in a touring dance band. I was being touted as a potential professional musician at the time, but ultimately my sight reading let me down.

So going out and buying a guitar in the belief I could teach myself to play was not quite as odd as it might seem, and by the time I was 16 I was making my first tentative steps into the folk local clubs playing, among many other things, “Spanish Leather”

Even at that tender age the combination of power and simplicity in the message and the music struck me. Of course I had no idea about love and the devastation of lost love, but this song gave me insights.

Thus the plaintiveness of the lyrics combined with the simple chord sequence, poignantly plucked guitar and the searching voice was not only where I sought to take my music, but also a learning curve in terms of possible human emotions. Suddenly I could understand that eternal sadness of the one left behind and the excitement of the person leaving. Which is what I felt when my girlfriend, a year above me at school, left for university while I was still wearing the uniform and writing essays on the French Revolution and TS Eliot, while attempting to master Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

But such worthy matters meant little to me compared with Spanish Leather. I only heard the beautiful understated guitar playing. I was there, in the Spanish mountains (which by purest chance I had visited with my parents the previous year).

Strangely it was around this time that I first heard Robert Johnson – another life transforming moment, and from the “King of the Delta Blues” album learned about the crossroads. Which is what Spanish Leather is about – the crossroads: do the lovers stay together or take separate turns? There is a moment of choice – there are moments of choice throughout our lives, and here Dylan taps into one such poignant moment.

I was really, really full of all this in my teens, and must have been an impossible teenager trying to make sense of it on my own, for most of the kids at school thought Dylan was just weird. (This was Dorset, I should point out).

And just as I learned about blues falling down like hail from Robert Johnson, so I learned about songs that could be dialogues between a man and a woman – and of course this being folk it is the woman who leaves the man. I desperately wanted to feel and take on board the sadness of “I don’t know when I’ll be coming back again.” Goodness knows why – I got enough of it in the rest of my life – why did I want to start early?

The origins of the song are clearly (in part at least) in the traditional Black Jack Davey mould, which appears on Good as I Been to You – which I’ll come back to anon. There is also a sensational version by the White Stripes: Backjack Davey

But there is a review of Dylan’s performance of Spanish Leather which says it made the review “weak in the knees”. It certainly did that for me.

And when I came on to the many Dylan songs in which he identifies himself as the man leaving, the man moving on, how I wished I could be that too – if only I could find the courage to get up and go, confident that I’d be able to make a new life in the next town I tipped up in. But I had to wait some years to do that – whereupon I ended up in Algiers for year. Oh Bob – do you have any idea what you did to the lives of impressionable kids like me?

I so wanted those stars of the darkest night, and while Dylan was able to move away from such emotions – instead developing the Songs of Disdain with 4th Street, Crawl out your Window, and of course Like a Rolling Stone – I was left there, endlessly searching for the diamonds in the deepest ocean.

Even the very opening of the song brings us the poignancy of the occasion

Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love

I’m sailin’ away in the morning

Is there something I can send you from across the sea

From the place that I’ll be landing?

Why must she go? What is so important that she has to leave behind her loved one? Why does life have to be like this?

It is strange now, as a man looking back on my life, how much power some of these lines still have for me. They are so simple, just as the melody is simple, and the accompaniment (once you’ve learned how to pick a guitar) is easy to do and the chords are the standard folk chords. But the power never diminishes.

The same thing I want from you today

I would want again tomorrow

One could build a whole song out of those two lines, and it would be worth hearing.

And so she goes. And forever we are left with that poignant ending

And yes, there’s something you can send back to me

Spanish boots of Spanish leather

If you want to go exploring you can do worse than try this YouTube page which goes through several songs. And for a version that is very different there’s the Forest Rangers version. It doesn’t work for me, but I know some people feel it adds something. Perhaps I have heard the power of simplicity in the original too often to go for all the extras. I am happier with Dylan himself, live at Carnegie Hall.

Suze Rotolo was a lot more than Bob Dylan's 'chick'

Nathalie Rothschild

The artist and civil rights activist who featured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan worked hard to shake that role

Since her death on 24 February at the age of 67, Suze Rotolo has been commemorated as "Bob Dylan's muse" and the girl on the front cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan – Dylan's second album which propelled him to fame. Although it's not surprising that the obituaries highlight her relationship with the singer, "Bob Dylan's ex" is really not an adequate epithet for Rotolo. A trained artist and jewellery maker, she never sought the spotlight herself, but she was a fascinating woman who helped shape the rebellious 1960s and was part of the crowd that not only hoped, but made sure, that the times were a-changin'.

As a teenager Rotolo had a passionate relationship with Dylan and inspired some of his early, most romantic songs, like Boots of Spanish Leather and Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. In the first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles, Dylan wrote of their first meeting: "Cupid's arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard."

After the release in 1963 of Freewheelin', with the iconic cover photograph of Dylan and Rotolo walking together in New York's Greenwich Village on a freezing winter day, the pair became the poster children of a generation. Yet, as Rotolo wrote in her wonderful and unassuming memoir of Greenwich Village in the 60s, A Freewheelin' Time, she resented being cast in the role of a musician's "chick" and insisted that she was more than just a "string on Dylan's guitar".

Perhaps we can forgive even the freewheelin' Village for having failed to rid itself completely of this reductive take on womanhood – after all, most of America was still socially conservative and to know their place was seen as a matter of female intuition. But we should know better now than to buy into the image of Rotolo as Dylan's handmaiden.

After all, it was Rotolo, daughter of Italian working-class communists, who schooled Dylan in the politics of the left and who first made him aware of the labour and civil rights movements. She was only 18 when they met (Dylan was 20), but still introduced him to the work of a range of poets and writers, such as Rimbaud and Bertolt Brecht.

After the sudden death of Rotolo's father in 1958, her mother took to drinking. The teenage Suze began to take Sunday trips to Washington Square in the Village, joining the folk musicians, poets and political activists who took on the establishment in verse and propaganda. At 17, she caught the subway from Queens to the Village for a final time, "without looking back".

While still in high school, Rotolo volunteered for the Congress of Racial Equality, marching on Washington for civil rights and desegregation. At the age of 20, she made national news when she and four other students stood up for the "free travel of free Americans" by, in defiance of the government travel ban, heading over to Cuba. The group spent two months touring factories and schools and met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. It was an incredibly brave thing to do.

In A Freewheelin' Time, Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the Greenwich crowd, an image-conscious lot who spent much time in earnest conversation in smoky cafes, bars and basket houses (informal venues where musicians passed around a basket for tips). Nevertheless, they believed that they "could change perceptions and politics and the social order of things". "We had something to say," Rotolo wrote, "and believed that the times would definitely change". It was a time when reinvention was a virtue and families were baggage. Where you came from mattered less than where you were heading.

Reading her book it is clear that Rotolo tried hard to wrest herself out of her role as "Dylan's muse". Over the years, she has been featured in biographies, documentaries, fiction films and museum exhibits, but she has rarely given interviews and has been respectful of Dylan's and her own privacy. Even her book is more a tribute to an era that "spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it" than to her relationship with Dylan.

It was a formative experience, and came to influence her life in both wanted and unwanted ways. But it wouldn't be fair simply to cast Rotolo back into the very role she tried so hard to shake.

Suze Rotolo from Mary Beltz on Vimeo.

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