Often over the years, this tune has conjured up a very specific gig memory for Floodsters.
It dates back to a weekend when the band was invited to the top of West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain to be part of a rather swank do (“a wine and cheese affair,” as the late Joe Dobbs liked to call such jobs).
We were on a stage under a huge event tent on the grounds of Snowshoe ski resort in Pocahontas County. The summer evening breeze was sweet. The glasses were tinkling. Then, toward the end of the night, a jolly gypsy troupe of motorcyclists rolled and crashed the party.
We didn’t know what would happen next. For a moment there, it looked to some of us like that edgy turning point in a Tarantino picture.
But just as suddenly, the guys in leather and the guys in suits started mingling together, laughing, drinking, swapping stories. Deep in The Flood’s memory banks to this day are images of that eclectic crowd of bankers and bikers singing along as one on this song.
“Ohhhhh, MAma! Ain’t you gonna miss you best friend nowww!”
About the Song
As reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, Bob Dylan’s “Down in the Flood” was one of many songs that would fill the world’s first great bootleg albums, like the unforgettable Great White Wonder, which made the rounds from 1969 onward. (Nearly all those tracks later were officially released by Columbia Records as The Basement Tapes.)
It turns out that “Down In The Flood” (also known as “Crash on the Levee”) evolved during a specific 1967 jam session at the Woodstock, NY, in the house that the guys dubbed “Big Pink.”
As The Band’s Robbie Robertson remembers it, at that session Bob and the boys started fiddling with an old John Lee Hooker song called “Tupelo Blues,” about the historically devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood.
That tune apparently triggered Dylan’s memories of another song, one from his repertoire in the early years, called “James Alley Blues,” based on a 1927 Richard “Rabbit” Brown recording. Significantly, that song uses the phrase “sugar for sugar, salt for salt,” a line that would find its way into Bob’s own lyric.
For more on the song’s history, click here to read that earlier article.
Our Latest Take on the Tune
Bob Dylan once famously spoke in another 1960s song about “a thousand telephones that don’t ring.”
But that’s hardly a problem for us in our new millennium. On the contrary, we’re all walking around with phones in our pockets that are apt to sound off at the most inopportune moments.
Like in the middle of this track from last week’s rehearsal when Sam St. Clair’s phone chimes in. But our Sam’s an especially cool lad, so you’d that expect even his phone’s ringtone would contribute something special.
And it does. Wait for it: at 02:43, a nifty xylophone audition at mid-song!
More Bobby? Step Right Up!
The Flood does a lot of Bob Dylan tunes, of course. We even have a special playlist of them that we put together for a Dylan birthday observance a few years ago. Click below to read all about it.
