Bob Dylan, now 80 years old, yesterday announced the resumption of his Never Ending Tour, which took its longest break since 1984 because of the pandemic. This probably won’t make the setlist this year — I’m not sure Dylan’s reduced vocal flexibility would do it justice, and the woman he wrote it for is now 10 years in the grave — but it’s near the top of my current playlist for personal reasons.
The genesis of the song is explained here by John Winn, a Greenwich Village folk singer who knew Dylan in his early New York days.
Though he wrote it in 1962, Dylan didn’t make a studio recording of it until a decade later, after dozens of other artists had already recorded it, and he ended up not releasing that version anyway. The first official release, on his second greatest hits collection, was a live version from his Town Hall concert in April 1963. It wasn’t until the Bootleg series that Dylan released his very first recording of the song, for a demo tape he made for his music publisher, M. Witmark & Sons, in December 1962, just months after he wrote it. He’s recorded it several times since, but I don’t think he’s ever matched the emotion in his voice when the feelings were still fresh. Notice that the second line of the song does not match its final form.
That Witmark tape wasn’t intended for public consumption, and many of the songs on it weren’t recorded for Dylan albums until years later — the publisher was interested in having other people record them, the better to boost sales of sheet music (yes, kidz, there used to be good money in that). Popular folk act Ian and Sylvia released it in 1963, and covers were common during the Great Folk Music Scare. Odetta recorded a slowed-down version in a 1965 session with Nashville guitarist Charlie McCoy, who had played on several Dylan songs (“Desolation Row,” “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”), who in turn introduced the song to Elvis Presley. Dylan once called the King’s 1966 version, released as a bonus track on the “Spinout” soundtrack LP, “the one recording I treasure the most.”
More than six dozen artists have covered the tune, most of them in the countrified blues style Presley employed. Like many people, I favor Rod Stewart’s cover from his 1971 multi-platinum No. 1 album “Every Picture Tells a Story,” which arguably did the most to place the song in the Dylan pantheon. Stewart manages to convey the heartache of the lyrics, but the fiddle-enhanced English-folk arrangement, Martin Crittendon’s inventive finger-picking and Stewart’s own impassioned harmony give the song an optimistic feel — we feel certain he will one day rest in his bed once again.
In real life, Suze Rotolo had been Dylan’s muse — she turned him onto political issues, and he wrote many of his most enduring love songs when she was in Italy, where she had fled to escape the pressure Dylan’s growing fame put on their relationship. After six months there she returned to New York, but their relationship was never the same. After an unplanned pregnancy, an abortion and Dylan’s affair with Joan Baez, they split acrimoniously in 1964, a story Dylan tells in painful, embarrassing detail in “Ballad in Plain D.” He’s written plenty of love songs since, but none with the heartsick innocence of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.”
I’ll give the last word to Nickel Creek, whose 2005 recording of the song revived its popularity after a fallow couple of decades.
