Continuing the Dylanology, this is an early composition that I thought was utterly forgotten and was going to post this week as an obscure novelty… but to my astonishment I just saw A Complete Unknown and Timothée Chalamet plays a brief snatch of it. Anyway…

Like pretty much everyone who knows this, I learned it from Dave Van Ronk’s In the Tradition LP, recorded in 1963 with the Red Onion Jazz Band.In our book, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave told the story of its composition:

One night we were sitting around in the Kettle of Fish, and by that time Bobby had already acquired quite a reputation as a songwriter, though only among the local crowd. A bunch of us were sitting at a table, and this guy came in and walked up to us, and he looks down at Bob and snarls, “So you’re the hot-shot songwriter, huh? All right . . .” And he reaches into his pocket and slaps a twenty dollar bill down on the table, and says, “I’ll bet you can’t write me a song called ‘If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You.’” That was an old joke title, one of those things like “When the Bed Breaks Down, I’ll Meet You in the Spring” or “Take Back Your Heart, I Ordered Liver.”

Bobby looked down at that twenty, and at that point in his career it must have seemed as big as a windowshade. So he looks the guy in the eye, and says, “Oh, yes I can.”

We agreed that the money would be deposited with Babe the bartender, and that the guy would come back around the same time the following night. Sure enough, the next evening the guy comes in again, and Bobby reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sheaf of paper, and he has not only written a song to the title, it has six long verses. So what could I do? I had to record it.

Actually, it only has four verses, which are enough — when I’ve performed it live, I’ve tended to cut one, because it’s a long song, though of course Dylan would go on to write far longer ones. (I also cut a couple of verses when I do “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and honestly don’t think I ever learned that one all the way through, much less “Gates of Eden” or “It’s All Right Ma…” and that’s before we get to “Visions of Joanna,” which I’m not sure I’ve even listened to all the way through. Mea maxima goddamn culpa.)

Dylan performed this at his 1963 Town Hall Concert, introducing it as “a 1930 ragtime tune I just wrote last week.” It’s not one of his masterpieces, but he was obviously having fun — though the theme calls for the standard disclaimer that the sentiments expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the present performer.

(Incidentally, I just checked Youtube to see if anyone else had posted versions of this, and found that Paul Revere and the Raiders not only recorded it but released it as a single. They only sing two verses, though they could have managed a third if they hadn’t filled a bunch of space singing “la, da, da, da…,” ad infinitum. Yuck. As Dave would say, “The poor we have always with us.”)