To the valley below

Leave the present moment and enter the world of Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” from Desire (1976). Here I talk about the gypsy-like town in Arizona where I happened to be staying when I first got into this album.

The concert performances of this song are not successful in my opinion. The only version that really works—and the only version where Dylan sings in the “ancient Hebrew cantillation,” as Alan Ginsberg describes it on the liner notes of the album—is the original recorded version. (The sound balance on the YouTube audio is a bit off, with the percussion too loud, and the violin muted.)

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Jim N. writes:

Thanks for that link to “One More Cup Of Coffee.” It brought to mind this verse from U2’s heavily Dylanesque “Bullet The Blue Sky”:

In the howlin’ wind
Comes a stingin’ rain
See it drivin’ nails
Into the souls on the tree of pain.

From the firefly
A red orange glow
See the face of fear
Runnin’ scared in the valley below.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 12, 2008 09:11 AM | Send