When Australian singer songwriter Mike McClellan set out to approach Bob Dylan for permission to use a line from Bob’s Not Dark Yet’ in his own ‘Letter To America’ he wasn’t confident of a positive response but it came quickly.
Mike’s ‘Letter To America’ ends with ‘not dark yet, but its getting there’. Dylan wrote the lines for ‘Not Dark Yet’ on his 1997 ‘Time Out Of Mind’ album.
Mike McClellan tells Noise11.com, “I had written the lyrics some time ago and struggled to find a way to deliver it musically. When I got to end of writing the lyrics I realised that I had borrowed a line from a Bob Dylan song of the late 90s, one of my favourite songs called ‘Not Dark Yet’. The last two lines of my song are “not dark yet, but it’s getting there’ and they were the last two lines of the verses in Bob’s song”.
Mike, who knows about the legalities of copyright set out to do the right thing and seek permission from the Dylan, himself. “I thought I’d check with the publisher who looks after Bob’s catalogue in Australia and find out if I could get permission,” Mike says. “So I sent them a note. They sent me back about three pages of forms to fill in and said ‘this will probably take a month to six weeks to get a response but it’s probably highly unlikely you’ll get permission so I thought I’d change the line ever so slightly and not quote Bob directly”.
Given the complex web of investigation Mike wrote an alternate lyric then called on a friend. “Then I realized that my old friend Danny O’Keefe, a wonderful American songwriter who wrote ‘Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues’ and ‘The Road’ which Jackson Browne recorded, is one of the few people who has co-written with Bob Dylan. So I sent him the lyrics and asked ‘mate, do you know anyone in Bob’s management or publishing company over there I could approach and seek permission. I knew it was a longshot but I tried. Danny sends me back an email that says ‘here’s Jeff Rosen’s email address. Jeff is Bob’s manager. He’s a really good guy but its highly unlikely you’ll get permission so I’d advise you to rewrite the last two lines. I gave it a shot.
“About 8:30 one morning I wrote Jeff Rosen an email with the lyrics asking permission saying ‘I know it’s highly unlikely but if you are not happy for me to do so I’ll change the line’. I got a reply back within one hour saying ‘hey Mike, I’m happy you can use Bob’s lyrics’. How amazing is that. He has been one of my songwriting heroes all of my life and for him to grant permission so quickly was astonishing. I proceeded to then work on the music and get it right and then recorded it remotely over the last five of six weeks.”
Mike says Bob would have most likely signed off on his song personally. “Almost everything in relation to Bob’s catalogue and songs have to go past Bob himself,” he said. “He’s probably seen it, I sent him the song when it was finished with a thank you note. As you can imagine, his publishers in Sydney were very surprised and said, ‘please us Jeff Rosen’s email’ and I’m certainly keeping his response to me on file”.
Listen to Mike McClellan ‘Letter To America’.
