Yeah, Dylan did it a lot. He wasn't the only one (Leon Payne's "Lost Highway" comes immediately to mind--Hank Williams made that one famous), but Dylan's output is and was prolific, and he's an awful good writer. A lot of the songs from his folk-rock period do not have choruses--instead, the hook is buried in the verses, often in the final line. It's good to read his stuff and see how he did it.

The fixation on "you must have verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus" is a mostly Nashville affectation that is (my opinion) meaningless--even a lot of the Nashville writers seem to ignore it routinely. It is *convenient*, nothing more, to have the hook in the chorus--it's easy to ensure it gets repeated, and it's always expressed the same way. That's more difficult to do--but not impossible--if the hook is in the verses.

Plus side to not having a chorus is you can have more verses, or longer verses, or both, and that gives you more room for plot and/or character development if you want it. Hard part, I think, is you're dependent on that hook to tie everything together, like a chorus normally would if you had one.

I have done it myself; most recent effort was the Southern Pigfish song, "For Their Own Ends," which is kicking around these boards somewhere. It came out okay (though I'm no Dylan), and it was an interesting exercise. I definitely appreciated choruses more after that.

Joe

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