73. Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You

The Nashville Skyline song is all well and good—and it really is good—but Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You appears in my top hundred because of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

The performance that opens Columbia’s fifth volume of the Bootleg Series (though it never actually served as a concert opener; that was always the more easygoing When I Paint My Masterpiece) is more of a scream, more of a cataract flinging itself out over the rocks of a mountain, than it is a song. Indeed it contains what I think is Dylan’s finest recorded scream, “I can hear that lonesome whistle blow” the second time he sings it, after the sparkling Mick Ronson-led instrumental breakdown between the (lyrically identical) ultimate and penultimate verses. Throughout the song Dylan’s voice is bursting and crackling like the “rolling thunder” he ascribes to his audience, shooting for the aether on “I left my dreams on the riverbed” or the “lonesome” in the first “I can hear the lonesome whistle blow,” but he keeps his voice always just under control, balancing every explosive vocalization with a return to melody.

It is a tour de force vocal performance, and must be one of Dylan’s best, and we’re really lucky to have it professionally recorded from the soundboard. It’s the only 1975 performance of Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You so captured; the one counter-example I have in my iPod classic storehouse of bootlegged live Dylan is much tamer, so we’re all the luckier that Dylan’s heart and vocal cords just so happened to align with the presence of the recording crew on December 4^th in Montreal.

It’s also a near-total rewrite of Dylan’s 1969 original. On Nashville Skyline, the narrator was a man addressing a woman, whereas in 1975 he’s clearly a performer addressing those who’ve come to hear him play. “I could have left this town by noon,” the narrator says, like a veteran of the tour circuit, “by tonight I’d have been to someplace new. But,” he goes on, “I was feeling a little bit scattered / And your love was all that mattered / So tonight I’ll be staying here with you.” The audience in Montreal goes crazy. And Dylan adds, as if in response, “Get ready! ‘cause tonight…”

Of all the different kinds of love that Dylan has sung about throughout his career, this is the one that I can only imagine, never having experienced it myself and almost certainly never going to. I think of the line in Tough Mama, “the world of illusion is at my door.” How ought we put that winter ’73 line together with these from summer ’75? Dylan sings Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You to the Rolling Thunder Revue crowds without a hint of reservation. Is he deep in that world of illusion, then? Or was the illusion he was afraid of a year and a half before not as total as he expected? Is there something indeed to be said for the love between the crowd and the star? Or is Dylan taking the love he feels for his band and infusing it into lyrics addressed to the audience? “Is it really any wonder / The changes we put on each other’s heads? / You came down on me like rolling thunder,” Dylan proclaims with all the passion he can muster; “I left my dreams on the riverbed.”

Are the dreams he’s leaving behind those of married life, of life at home? If that’s so, the rewritten version of Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You carries the exact opposite message of the Nashville Skyline song. Remembering what happened to poor Lay, Lady, Lay in 1976 (see Hard Rain: “Forget this dance / Let’s go upstairs! / Let’s take a chance / Who really cares? … It’s all in your eyes and the way that you move … You can have love but you might lose it”), I’d say it’s not unlikely. Speaking of world-beloved, once-tender songs rewritten to turn against their originals, see George Harrison’s disillusioned and debauched Something (“…in the way she moves it”) live in 1974 on the fantastic (for listeners, if not for the hurting frontman) Dark Horse tour.

My iPod Classic turns up a late performance from New Britain, Connecticut, on August 29th, 2006. The lyrics have reverted to the Nashville Skyline text. It’s a calm performance, but beautifully played, with Dylan’s wonderful organ lead all through the song, and a terrific gritty guitar break courtesy of Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman, and a cool swinging drumbeat from George Receli, and great vocals. If the Rolling Thunder Revue Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You sounds twenty times better to me than the Nashville Skyline original (so numerical value = 20), I’d say this Connecticut performance is a solid eight.