Being still and Bob Dylan don’t go together. He is always moving, changing, on the go, gone even before he gets there. Many of his songs are about moving on, being unable to keep still, being on the road again, wind blowing him up and down the street, freewheeling Bob, never able to gather moss, much like a rolling stone. But “still” as in continuous, as in rhyming Simon’s “still crazy after all these years,” is suited to Dylan much better. His self-dubbed never ending tour gets him into places where his appearance inspires, “Is he still around, still touring, still singing, still putting out records, still performing, still singing “Blowin In The Wind”? And the answer is yes to all—still doing what he’s been doing since he first arrived in Greenwich Village six decades ago.
“Still” examined as a Dylan rhyme word has the promise of revealing stillness and movement in his songs. I’m certain movement will win out, but maybe it sometimes will in contrast to what Dylan makes still for us. Each song is a like a photograph—movement caught in repose, sometimes deep repose as in the silence one finds in say the still of the night or in the “still” rhyme that begins “Life Is Hard”:
The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will
Still winds are no winds at all, just as losing your way and will suggests no way and no will at all, nothing to you at all. No wind, no way, no will. A chilly wind appears at the end of “Life Is Hard”:
The sun is sinking low
I guess it’s time to go
I feel a chilly breeze
In place of memories
My dreams are locked and barred
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me
Be still the song seems to say and then you can still move again.
At the end of the first verse in “Scarlet Town,” Dylan keeps the rhyming couplets alive (as he does throughout the song) but uses “still” as an internal rhyme kicker:
In Scarlet Town, where I was born
There’s ivy leaf and silver thorn
The streets have names that you can’t pronounce
Gold is down to a quarter of an ounce
The music starts and the people sway
Everybody says, “Are you going my way? “
Uncle Tom still workin’ for Uncle Bill
Scarlet Town is under the hill.
It’s the only verse that ends that way. The “is” in the middle of the last line also keeps the assonance maintained, “Bill,” “is,” “hill.” This all seems constructed by someone who knows his rhyming, not over the hill with use of it, not over the hill like Scarlet Town isn’t, described instread as being “under the hill.” Still plenty to do and experience when not over the hill. “All things are beautiful in their time” the last verse states. But Dylan’s time has not come, his bell still rings, after all.
Give a listen, with scenes from, Masked And Anoymous (thank you SYDHARTHA SHIVA whoever and wherever you are).
“Shake, Mama, Shake” has “still” in it the way I hoped and expected Dylan to use it, that is as a way to show the movement in stillness and the stillness in movement, as John Keats does so well in the last stanza of “To Autumn,”
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Such movement, such arousal of the five senses, but all so quiet, mellowed, lazy, and serene.
“Shake” is packed with three line verses all with line ending rhymes, the second verse with “still” repeated with “hill”:
Well it’s early in the evening and everything is still
Well it’s early in the evening and everything is still
One more time, I’m walking up on heartbreak hill
The speaker is walking, thus the movement, but everything is still, but just maybe everything is still including the speaker. Heartbreak hill may not be a place, but a feeling inside, not unlike the feeling of doing 21 miles and hitting heartbreak hill in Boston. Emotionally that is the feeling of heartbreak, but who would know, often heartbreak is kept inside relegated to a stillness of the mind and body while the heart is moving–just ask the Tin Man when he says goodbye to Dorothy.
Usually, I like to keep the audio and video of songs on this blog to Dylan himself, but I found a video of Canadian Ryan Boldt, lead singer and guitarist of The Deep Dark Woods (speaking of stillness) that is quite moving (pun not intended). I find his voice both penetrating and soothing; like the bow leaving the violin, his voice remains after the song is over:
“Still” is used 9 times in “Ain’t Talkin,” not surprising since it appears in the refrain of this long song. The short i vowel sound dominates the refrain with “still” echoing from all the “talkin” and “walkin” going on in it. There’s much “burnin” and “yearnin,” too, all working to muster a short i-fest throughout the song.
the 8th time “still” appears is the only time it links with a word to create a clean rhyme, and the rhyme is all internal:
Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
Walkin’ ever since the other night
Heart burnin’, still yearnin’
Walkin’ ‘til I’m clean out of sight
“burnin still“/”walkin til” is the full rhyme, not just “still” with “til.”
Much has been made of Dylan’s borrowing from Ovid in this song, from a text that Ovid probably wrote while exiled. Dylan sings it like an exiled wanderer, walkin, burnin, and yearnin.
Of “Positively Fourth Street.” Christopher Ricks says the song “has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.” Of the second line in the last verse of “Not Dark Yet” with “still” completing the couplet rhyme with “will,” Ricks says, “This as contemplation, not as confrontation.” So not so threatening then, but hard to conceive. It would be easier to conceptualize a person standing still but whose mind is moving; here Dylan says he’s moving or it looks that way yet he’s standing still. I guess we’re all moving since the earth we live on is and that kind of movement is against our will as well, just like being born and dying though not from suicide.
What Dylan does will in this song is many rhymes; each two lines are couplets, and he sings each one in such an unforced fluent and achingly beautiful tone. Yes, the next to last verse shows his movement from Paris to the sea, but the speaker’s mind is stagnant, numb even, he sings (love that “numb”/”from” rhyme):
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
Ricks observes the Keatsian influence in the song–namely to “Ode to a Nightingale.” Much heartache in both, much nearness to the end (not dark yet), fading, even half loving death. “Do I wake or sleep?,” Keats ends the poem, “not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Still moving but standing still.
By the time you get to the end of “Neighborhood Bully,” Dylan starts pounding away with questions. Not only is the message clear that we still have to endure bullying and being bullied, stereotypes, propaganda, politics, war, etc., but we still have to put up with having to ask these same damn questions. How much longer? How much longer? The “hill”/”still” rhyme in the last stanza is housed amidst questions and time as a factor:
What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully
Running out the clock while time stands still is a paradox–one that gets to the complexities involved with the Middle East. Both the bully on the hill and time are still, standing targets, the bully with time on his side, but the clock is ticking, how much longer?
Good collage of Bob with this 1983 recording session of “Neighborhood Bully” from vimeo:
“Heart of Mine” uses “still” as in calm down, suppress y0ur restlessness. Dylan commands his heart in this song, advising it to resist giving into passion and thereby deflecting the commitment, hurt, and guilt that will come from it. It’s a song that does not trust trust in a relationship. But while doing so it also accuses the heart, his heart of being “malicious and so full of guile,” not trusting it either or most of all. The first line uses “still” to set the tone:
Heart of mine be still
You can play with fire but you’ll get the bill
Don’t let her know
Don’t let her know that you love her
Don’t be a fool, don’t be blind
Heart of mine
A price will be paid if you are not still, at what cost passion, Dylan asks. There’s a pain to such resistance though–the kind you have to live with because you didn’t tell someone you love her or him. This I think is assumed in the song, though it is not given voice, just admonishment to the heart to keep still or else:
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime
Heart of mine
I’ve always loved the sound of Ron Wood’s guitar picking, like the heart scratching to get out of the coffin Dylan tries to place it in:
There is a presence of he said, she said in Dylan. Of course, all things said in Dylan are sung by him. It would be an interesting study to collect all the dialogue in Dylan songs to see it all as one big conversation, “said” included as a rhyme word done, marked, recorded as in a transcript . . . finality . . .
You can’t take back what’s been said in Dylan (you can go back, but not all the way, especially after what’s been said), it’s all there on the page, in the lyrics, in the air from his voice.
“said” ends “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.” “said” having the last word is ironic, especially since it speaks of “nothin” said:
My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said
The song ends as in an echo of King Lear to Cordelia, “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.” Anything but nothing please. yes, there’s much ado about “nothing” in that play, the word used more than in any other play of Shakespeare’s. In Dylan nothing said is serious business, nothing said, nothing sung, no never ending tour with nothing said. Plenty to say in that, saying “nothin’ said” I mean.
The “said“/”bed” rhyme in “Mississippi” is the opposite of an illogical eye rhyme, one that has words that look like they should rhyme but don’t, like “cough”/dough” “said” does not look like it rhymes with “bed” but it does, confirmed only through speech. Likewise, dreams are not reality, and so dreaming of sleeping in Rosie’s bed is one thing:
I was thinkin’ ’bout the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleepin’ in Rosie’s bed
The reality another. Of course, thinking can lead to dreaming. Rosie’s words stirred up in the mind can jingle a dream that puts the dreamer smack dab in her bed. The voice and the physical strange bed partners? Not in this song where staying one day too long can make you hear and dream things that later on you might say, that was the one thing I did wrong.
Odysseus knows a thing or two about staying too long. The day he does so with the Sun-god he falls asleep (dreaming of Circe? Calypso?) and while he does, his men eat the Sun-god’s sacred cows as depicted in this painting by Johannus Stradanus:
“Mississippi” ends with the message, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Odysseus’ men pay for their forbidden act with their lives, Odysseus for his sleep with the loss of his men. Yes, you can go back but not all the way back, as you thought of maybe dreamed. Dreams do affect reality, as do rhymes about saying and sleeping.
Lot of “he said” and “she did” in “Standing in the Doorway.” She (is it a she, is the speaker a he?) done left him in the doorway crying, but when it comes down to it (literally down the end of the song), the said rhyme says it all:
I see nothing to be gained by any explanation
There are no words that need to be said
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head
Yes, nothing to say, just tears and blues. And an excellent blues tune it is ending with nothing to say, but plenty to sing, not to say, but a need to sing the blues. Dylan singing, those blues, this song at Wembley, 2000 (no visual–”the light in this place is so bad”?):
Christopher Ricks hands us over eight pages on “Handy Dandy” in his chapter that focuses on Envy in Dylan’s Visions of Sin. He gives attention to the song linking him and Michael Gray to how they both find the song terrific. Ricks distinguishes himself from Gray in how he sees the song as scary, and he ties what he calls the “You’ll say / He’ll say routine” in at as part of the fright, “as if someone is being instructed in a code of behavior.” This makes the “said“/”dead” rhyme ominous, threading the motif of threat through the song:
You say, “What are ya made of?”
He says, “Can you repeat what you said?”
You’ll say, “What are you afraid of?”
He’ll say, “Nothin’! Neither ’live nor dead.”
Yes, as Ricks notes, what’s neither live nor dead is money, HD is made of money, and probably drug money, i.e. the candy that he’s just like with sugar (on top? over the top?).
Ricks refers the game handy-dandy, defined the OED as “A children’s game in which a small object is shaken between the hands by one of the players, and, the hands being suddenly closed, the other player is required to guess in which hand the object remains.” The expression has been used to mean “change of places, alternately, in rapid alternation.” Sounds a little like Dylan himself. Is Dylan the “hand-dandy” in the song? Here are a couple of turn of the century dandies:
In “Ugliest Girl In The World” “said” diverts attention away from bed, which might be good, especially if who’s lying in the bed is the ugliest girl in the world:
The woman that I love she got two flat feet
Her knees knock together walking down the street
She cracks her knuckles and she snores in bed
She ain’t much to look at but like I said
What Dylan has already said is the bridge, which gets sung four times in the song; after this verse it appears again for the third time:
You know I love her
Yeah I love her
I’m in love with the Ugliest Girl in the World
At the end of the verse ending with the “bed”/”said” rhyme completed is the image of a snoring woman, who we also learn in this verse has two flat feet (not good for a poem/song either), has a knee-knocking walk, and cracks her knuckles. So her ugliness is not relegated to her looks; sounds matter in Dylan’s depiction of ugly. And sounds matter with the rhyme that takes us from the image of the snoring woman to the bridge, “but like I said,” which brings us to “love,” three times in each chorus. Image of ugly, sound of ugly, rhyme, love. Vintage Dylan!
Another poet has something to say about an ugly woman, Shakespeare in his sonnet 130:
Ricks makes a fuss about “lines” in “Brownsville Girl.” “[M]uch is made of lines in this song,” he says. And, of course, songs/poems are made up of lines, as Ricks acknowledges. Dylan is hip to being at the end of the line or over the line as themes but also as phrases that pertain and bring attention to the lines on the page, which Dylan puts in the air when he sings them. “She studied the lines of my face” is a famous line of Dylan’s, and aren’t the lines of a song as personal as a songwriter’s/poet’s face? Be that all as it may, “said” is what matters on this page, and it s what’s over the line in “Brownsville Girl,” appearing 9 times to “line”‘s mere 3.
I recently tweeted that when I listen tom “Brownsville Girl” I feel like I’m at a pub overhearing Bob conversing with the bartender. What we remember most about “Brownsville Girl” is the unique conversational prose he pours into it. But there’s a great deal of rhyming in it, end of the line ones where we expect rhymes. And good ones, too, some over the line, over the top: “soft”/”off,” “soul”/”control,” “curls”/”world.”
“said” never ends a line, but it appears so often that it smacks of internal rhyming, perhaps to keep the prose in line; it’s a poem Dylan seems to want to remind us with the end of the line rhymes. When the prose gets going, “said” seems to reign it in. This verse is a good example:
She said, “Welcome to the land of the living dead”
You could tell she was so broken hearted
She said, “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt”
When Dylan was recently accused of sucking up to Chinese authority by agreeing to have his playlist censored there, included in the songs he performed was “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking.” The title alone suggests diversion from mind control. Dylan himself had this to say about the episode:
“As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.”
My bet is that if Dylan was forced not to play a song he would either have not performed or would have just changed the lyrics of accepted songs to sing what he wanted to anyway.
Speaking of lyric changes, that’s what happened in 2003 to “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking,” which Michael Gray calls a duet version of with Mavis Staples as “ferocious” “[pacing] menacingly between the spiritual and secular worlds.”
Missing from the 2003 version is the stanza with “said.” “said” in the 1979 original creates both internal rhyme and the presence of “Jesus” with the sounds in his name Jeee . . . suuus”:
Jesus said, “Be ready
For you know not the hour in which I come”
Jesus said, “Be ready
For you know not the hour in which I come”
He said, “He who is not for Me is against Me”
Just so you know where He’s coming from
e and s sounds abound, nothing much against those sounds in this verse. Jesus is coming from those sounds, watch out for them.
This verse is replaced in the 2003 version with a different Jesus presence:
Jesus is calling, He’s coming back to gather up his jewels
Jesus is calling, He’s coming back to gather up his jewels
We living by the golden rule, whoever got the gold rules
Here’s the ferocious 2003 version with Mavis, including dialogue between them:
Who gets to say what in “Hurricane” is lopsided. Bello and Bradley speak one time, but the cops and the D.A 4. Hurricane is silenced, a fitting gag on a man depicted in the song as a victim of a system Dylan is ashamed of:
Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops
Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just out prowlin’ around
He said, “I saw two men runnin’ out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”
And Miss Patty Valentine just nodded her head
Cop said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead”
I’ve always loved the way Dylan sings that last line. Perhaps an underrated quality of Dylan’s singing is how well he voices the words of characters in his songs.
Dylan singing “Hurricane” live, 1975 at Madison Square Garden:
She said, “Where ya been?” I said, “No place special”
She said, “You look different.” I said, “Well, not quite”
She said, “You been gone.” I said, “That’s only natural”
She said, “You gonna stay?” I said, “Yeah, I jes might”
and yes this is dialogue, not poetry, at least we read it that way. The sound of it though keeps “Isis” alive throughout the song, as in the last verse,
Isis, oh, Isis, you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzlin’ rain
s’s and i’s banging together and reverberating in memorable ways.
“said” also appears though at the end of a line finishing the rhyme with “wed” in verse 6:
How she told me that one day we would meet up again
And things would be different the next time we wed
If I only could hang on and just be her friend
I still can’t remember all the best things she said
“again” and “friend” don’t rhyme no matter how hard you try, but “wed”/”said” rhymes no matter how you say it. Yet, “again” looks like it has a better shot at rhyming with “said,” even a better chance as “Isis” rhyming with “I said.” But it doesn’t. Don’t trust your eyes, Dylan seems to be saying, trust the sound, trust what you hear, trust going to “the wild unknown country where [you can] not go wrong.” Trust a voice like this singing Isis in 1975, yes, it IS NECESSARY!!:
5 “saids” are sung in “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack of Hearts,” just enough for a hand of poker. The first “said,” beginning the second verse, comes up aces with the only rhyming “said” in the lyrics”
He moved across the mirrored room, “Set it up for everyone,” he said
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads
The other 4 “saids” are found in the middle of verses, the second setting up what the backstage manager says, the third what Lily says, the fourth what legacy or rumor says, and the fifth what a sign says.As Ricks says, this song is the “world of the Western,” where you better mean what you say, like when in a duel, as in this one with Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral, for you Tombstone fans:***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************”said” heralds a nice “head”/”instead” rhyme in the fourth verse of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat“:Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
It’s a doctor who is quoted, and by the end of the verse he’s wearing the hat, which bothers the speaker, not the being cheated on, but that he’s wearing the hat. Hilarious, the image and the absurd response.
According to bobdylan.com, Dylan has sung the song live 534 times. I find that lopsided, like “a mattress balances/On a bottle of wine.” Why has this song gotten so much attention from Bob? Maybe because he gets a kick out of it himself. Bob’s humor is underrated.
I write this on Bob Dylan’s 72nd birthday. Bob was 24 when “From a Buick 6” was released in on Highway 61 Revisited. It’s the fourth cut on a brilliant, landmark album that set him free from the expectations the folk community placed on him and defined the mark he would make on the sixties and his generation. How fitting that the album appeared right smack dab in the middle of the 1960′s. Arguably, it is the counter-culture epicenter with a distinct sound never achieved before and never to be again.
The “said” rhyme in “Buick 6” is a cascading one, with three words echoing the the “ed” sound in the song’s last stanza:
Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head
She brings me everything and more, and just like I said
Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed.
Each stanza has a rhyming word with the chorus’s “bed,” but the last stanza with “said” is the only one with two words rhyming with it, “dead” and “said.” The song ends with a reminder the the chorus has been sung before, “just like I said . . .” Choruses are reinforced in songs via repetition; here “said” is used for more reinforcement . . . remember what I said.
Bob has not gone “down dyin” yet; but if he does, well just like he said . . . Today though we celebrate his birth. Happy Birthday, Bob. Here’s to all those junkyard angels. Play this loud, very loud in his honor:
“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is a rollicking zany frolic, with the word “said” used 15 times. The one it’s used in rhyme, repetition of the word aside, is with the -ed sound in “exploded”:
I went into a restaurant
Lookin’ for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
The waitress he was handsome
He wore a powder blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said
“Could you please make that crepe”
Just then the whole kitchen exploded
From boilin’ fat
Food was flying everywhere
And I left without my hat
For over five decades much has exploded when Bob Dylan says something–it’s clever to have a rhyme be the trigger to one here. But the trigger is actually identified as “boilin fat.” It’s just a coincidence that when the speaker spoke the explosion happened. But we can take what we gather from coincidence, and I rather believe that words, spoken or written, have caused more explosions than fat throughout history.
“Man on the Street” is a poignant piece, one that makes you stop and think about the lives of the less fortunate. It is Woody Guthrie-esque in it what it forces us to look at and in its slice of life depiction of injustice. The “said“/”dead” rhyme comes from the mouth of an insensitive police officer whose beat perhaps has numbed him to scenes like this that maybe have been too numerous for his humanity to be maintained:
Well, the p’liceman come and he looked around,
“Get up, old man, or I’m a-takin’ you down.”
He jabbed him once with his billy club
And the old man then rolled off the curb.Well, he jabbed him again and loudly said,
“Call the wagon; this man is dead.”
The wagon come, they loaded him in,
I never saw the man again.
The policeman pronounces the man dead. What he said announces a death, the rhyme uniting the two contextually. Below is the outtake from Dylan’s bootleg; listen closely to how Dylan stretches out the word “dead,” just enough to underscore the harsh reality and the detachment present from both the policeman and the singer (though the singer somehow knows “he never done wrong”).
Turns out who killed Davey Moore is a really good question–I mean really good–the kind that gets to the very fabric of how a society is woven. The song is about accountability–and all the accused Dylan parades through it are in denial, refusing “to think ill of [themselves]” as Christopher Ricks asserts. The manager even blames the victim, the moment where the “said” rhyme sits:
“Not me,” says his manager
Puffing on a big cigar
“It’s hard to say, it’s hard to tell
I always thought that he was well
It’s too bad for his wife an’ kids he’s dead
But if he was sick, he should’ve said
It wasn’t me that made him fall
No, you can’t blame me at all”
“said‘/”dead” brings back the voice of the dead–he should’ve said, he, the dead that is. Well, Dylan speaks for the dead in this song, too. And we are all left to wonder who killed him, or are we, when after all it was you and me.
“Who Killed Davey Moore” live from the bootleg series:
On almost every one of his album covers Dylan’s head is displayed; in the case of several that’s all there is, just a head. He’s worn many hats for those many heads, literally so on his first album, Nashville Skyline, Desire, and World Gone Wrong. But most times it’s just his crazy, curly hair that adorns that strikingly familiar head:
In my Oxford American Minidictionary the word “head” as a noun has 15 different meanings, just a sample of the many senses this word has–as many perhaps as the number of heads Dylan has displayed for us.
In “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘” head means what sits on the top of one’s body, and a request is made to have a hand lay on top of it:
My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said
No demand for a head on a shoulder, hand to head please . . . better for this weary voyager, heading where nothin’ is or staying to avoid nothin.’ Love is always something,as the beginning of the songs says:
I love you pretty baby
You’re the only love I’ve ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own
Hand to head, such a touch will keep one together through life, but the album cover shows more than just that going on. Any touch between lovers, a world onto its own.
A lot of “heads” roll around in Tempest, rhyming with “bed” five times:
from “Duquesne Whistle“: “I wake up every morning with that woman in my bed/Everybody telling me she’s gone to my head“
“Pay In Blood“: “You get your lover in the bed/Come here I’ll break your lousy head
“Scarlet Town“: Mistress Mary by the side of the bed/Kissin’ his face and heapin’ prayers on his head“
“Tin Angel“: “The boss he lay back flat on his bed/He cursed the heat and he clutched his head” and “He crawled to the corner and he lowered his head/He gripped the chair and he grabbed the bed”
The rhyme finds itself in moments of sex, violence, pain, and death. Tempest is one of Dylan’s most violent albums, perhaps the one with the most deaths and threats. “head“/”bed” then becomes a thematic rhyme helping to weave sex and violence throughout the album as a motif.
The “Duquesne Whistle” video shows this emphasis. Watch the close-up of the would be lover’s head as it bobs and weaves, descends and rises, gets sprayed with mace, is covered with a hood, gets punched, accumulates more and more blood and scars, and comes near to a kiss, but no where near her bed . But most of all watch the hands in pocket Dylan leading a gang of all shapes and sizes, genders and ages through this narrative indifferent to the results of violence and unrequited love.
A friend of mine interprets “Narrow Way” as a dialogue between Dylan and Jesus. The lines with the “bread”/”head” rhyme lend support for such a theory:
You went and lost your lovely head
For a drink of wine, and a crust of bread
Theories only sometimes work in Dylan within a song, at most, most of the time. The pronoun references are too slippery to follow and attempts to build narrative, make sense of dialogue or time, well it’s a long and narrow way . . . you take what you need and you leave the rest when you try to interpret Dylan. But the attempt is worth it. When I hear the chorus blasting
It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I cant work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me someday
I’m both amused and stimulated by Dylan again whose defiance can include telling even Jesus what to do, the Jesus with lost his “lovely head,” . . . wait . . . that was John the Baptist . . . slippery Dylan at it again.
David Yaffe says Dylan recycled “a motif from a Memphis Minnie blues” with “The Levee’s Gonna Break.” Recycling is a relevant word when it comes to the constant identical rhyming found in the song. Each verse begins with a duplicate rhyme, “break”/”break”, “day”/”day”, “new”/”new” etc. “head” follows “bed”/”bed” in the third to last verse:
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I ain’t got enough room to even raise my head
Dylan loves to thieve. We all know that. But Shakespeare did, too. Most of his plays are created out of other sources. He may very well have plundered a contemporary’s The Taming of a Shrew to write his own The Taming of the Shrew. But it’s what he did with previous sources that matters. Theft, of the kind that involves lifting and then rewriting material from sources, is duplicating followed by invention. Dylan mirrors this in “The Levee’s Gonna Break” with duplicating rhymes followed by full rhyming words. “If I keep on writing the duplicate rhyme is gonna break, if I keep on writing the duplicate rhyme is gonna break . . .”
Call it “cultural plunder” (Lott)or “yoking” (Yaffe) “High Water” is an amalgam of allusions, references, borrowings, gleanings, and sifting. That said, the prophet in Dylan sure got it right that after 9/11 (Love and Theft released on 9/11) many people have lived feeling that their heads are just above water. The song is packed with messages of how tough, rough, and bad it is “out there.” The verse with the “head”/”lead”/”said” rhyme helps reinforce this sentiment:
High water risin’, six inches ’bove my head
Coffins droppin’ in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin’ into Vicksburg, don’t know what I’m goin’ to do
“Don’t reach out for me,” she said
“Can’t you see I’m drownin’ too?”
It’s rough out there
High water everywhere
There’s keeping just above the dangers and threats, almost drowning, not dark yet but getting there, and we’re in this together–this is all over the place, happening to me and you stuff in this verse. Coffins droppin like balloons is quite an image. There’s staying above but going over implied in these lines, too. Things go over like lead balloons. Greil Marcus notes that what drops harder than anything in this song is the word “care” and the way Dylan says it in the line, “Either one, I don’t care”/High water everywhere.” Dylan not caring goes over like a lead balloon. The finger pointing songs we grew up on made him seem to care so much. Now he “used to care but things have changed.” Staying above and going over, heady advice for our time though, downright caring, when we look again and see that what we saw is no longer standing there.
Love sick? That means your heart must be heavy; you might even feel it more in the stomach. Where’s your head in all this? Well, that’s what’s causing the heartache. I think Bob gets this, and that’s why we find the word “head” early on, almost right away in “Love Sick,” rhyming with “dead”:
I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping
In one verse, Dylan conveys the physical (tired feet), mental (brain is so wired), and emotional (to him even the clouds weep) impact of being sick of love–this kind of love (lust?). The rhyme suggests this is a kind of death, dead in the head, a whole other take on what it means to be a dead-head.
In a Victoria’s Secret commercial he depicted the kind of love he was talking about. Sell out? Well, he once told a reporter if he were ever to sell out lit would be for “ladies’ garments”:
Michael Gray calls “Standing In The Doorway” one of four major songs on Time Out Of Mind. David Yaffe puts it on his top 70 list in Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown. If you’ve ever been left alone, abandoned, tossed aside, rejected, well, this song resonates, finds its way into your heart, your broken one. Dylan uses “head” twice in the song, once in the second verse rhyming with “bad” and “sad”:
The light in this place is so bad
Making me sick in the head
All the laughter is just making me sad
The stars have turned cherry red
I’m strumming on my gay guitar
Smoking a cheap cigar
The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Under the midnight moon
How so? This is a wrenched rhyme, the way Dylan delivers the “ea” sound forces it to rhyme with “bad”/”sad.” The whole song is wrenching, the sadness is especially–captured so well with the tone of his voice, the highlight being the way he stretches out the word “head,” the last word on the song:
There are no words that need to be said
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head
The “said”/”head” rhyme ends the song. But it’s not the sound of that rhyme that lingers; it’s the way he stretches out the words that end the last two lines, ” crying” and “head.” The singer is not the only one the blues wrap around by the end of the song, the listener is, too. This is a blues song, and the lingering instrumental after the word “head” leaves you with nothing to say and maybe even tearing up if you let the song have its desired effect on you. The tone of voice and the atmosphere created by it may be unmatched in any other Dylan song.
You can head to a life shackled to cold irons, but if you’re heading out to find Cold Irons, forget it. The town doesn’t exist, at least not in the U.S. Chicago does though, and if the singer in “Cold Irons Bound” has gotten anywhere we know he’s passed through Chicago. He says, “the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds/Reality has always had too many heads.” Reality as the multiple-headed hydra is an interesting image. Lop one off and two others appear. If you’re going to try to lop off one of those heads anyway though, you’ll need a weapon, and that’s exactly what cold iron refers to, as in the poem named “Cold Iron” by Rudyard Kipling:
Gold is for the mistress — silver for the maid – Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.
“Good!” said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.”So he made rebellion ‘gainst the King his liege,
Camped before his citadel and summoned it to siege.
“Nay!” said the cannoneer on the castle wall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — shall be master of you all!”Woe for the Baron and his knights so strong,
When the cruel cannon-balls laid ‘em all along;
He was taken prisoner, he was cast in thrall,
And Iron — Cold Iron — was master of it all!Yet his King spake kindly (ah, how kind a Lord!)
“What if I release thee now and give thee back thy sword?”
“Nay!” said the Baron, “mock not at my fall,
For Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all.”Tears are for the craven, prayers are for the clown – Halters for the silly neck that cannot keep a crown.
“As my loss is grievous, so my hope is small,
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all!”Yet his King made answer (few such Kings there be!)
“Here is Bread and here is Wine — sit and sup with me.
Eat and drink in Mary’s Name, the whiles I do recall
How Iron — Cold Iron — can be master of men all!”He took the Wine and blessed it. He blessed and brake the Bread,
With His own Hands He served Them, and presently He said:
“See! These Hands they pierced with nails, outside My city wall,
Show Iron — Cold Iron — to be master of men all.”"Wounds are for the desperate, blows are for the strong.
Balm and oil for weary hearts all cut and bruised with wrong.
I forgive thy treason — I redeem thy fall –
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all!”Crowns are for the valiant — sceptres for the bold! Thrones and powers for mighty men who dare to take and hold.
“Nay!” said the Baron, kneeling in his hall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all!
Iron out of Calvary is master of men all!”
“shreds”/heads” is a good rhyme. Previous to it, “head” appears in the fifth verse:
There’s too many people, too many to recall
I thought some of ’m were friends of mine, I was wrong about ’m all
Well, the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud
Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood
Though not an internal rhyme, “head” works well with “road” in its d-ending accompanying the full “mud”/”blood” rhyme that ends each line. “head” used twice, two heads better than one, two that appear when you cut off one, from the hydra that is. You might start with cold iron but hot iron is the key to defeating the hydra. To stop the growth of more heads, Ialaos helped Heracles brand the stumps from the severed heads, stopping the heads from multiplying. Heady idea!
The first things broken in “Everything Is Broken” are lines, and the only “broken” line in the song is in the first verse, broken because it has the only unrhymed end of line word and because the verse has seven lines, not six like the rest (besides the two line bridge). The “heads“/beds” rhyme is in this verse helping to accentuate the brokenness in the verse from the line with “jiving,” left discarded by a rhyming partner:
Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken
Yeah, the -ings in “jiving” and “joking” have a ring to them, but they form a half rhyme, “broken” replacing “jiving” as the better sounding rhyme with “joking.” Dylan hints at what will be broken with the i in “lines” matching the one in “jiving.”
Neil Young and Tom Petty sang it together at a benefit concert in 1989, the year Oh Mercy was released, no jiving, no joking:
Dylan’s “dream” songs refute any theory that you can’t dream in color. Read any of them and you’ll see that what he shares is packed with vivid details, memorable visuals, and vibrant colors. “Had a Dream About You, Baby” is one of them, and the “red”/head” rhyme in it is one of those moments that has the kind of specifics more associated with reality than dreamland:
Had a dream about you, baby
Had a dream about me and you
Had a dream and I woke up cryin’
Well, I can try but I just can’t stop
And the time is draggin’ by, tick-tock
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you
Well, I’m high and dry and lonely
I’m as lonesome as can be
And I stare out of my window
Well, I can play but I just can’t win
And the weather’s lookin’ mighty grim
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart, it can’t love no one but you
My heart can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart can’t love no one but you
My heart can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you
Had a dream about you, baby
Had a dream about me and you
Had a dream and I woke up cryin’
Well, I can try but I just can’t stop
And the time is draggin’ by, tick-tock
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but youOh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you
I can’t see a thing, let alone a color. But I actually like this song better than I do Dylan’s so here it goes, have a listen:
“Johnnie Ray, he had some kind of strange incantation in his voice, like he’d been voodoo’d, and he cried, kind of, when he sang … it was the sound that got me, it wasn’t who it was … I began to listen to the radio, [and] I began to get bored being there [in Hibbing].”
The idea that a voice can have or create an incantation is thought-provoking. Perhaps Dylan’s voice has done that to me, put me under some kind of spell, can’t shake him, get him out of my head, just like what the woman in “Under Your Spell” did to him. In the next to last verse of “Under Your Spell,” he uses the “head“/”dead” rhyme:
I’ll see you later when I’m not so out of my head
Maybe next time I’ll let the dead bury the dead
The internal identical rhyme, “dead”/”dead” is like an echo, almost as if “see you later” could mean when I’m dead because that’s the only way I can get out my head and not under your spell. Death as the antidote for all lifetime spells. Well, maybe some spells were not made to be broken. If Bob has a spell on me, let it not be broken til I say the ultimate see ya later.
Here’s a performer who could put a spell on anyone and I think that was his intent. I saw Screamin Jay Hawkins in 1979 or at the Bottom Line in NYC–will never forget him; he’s seared in my memory; I’ll never get him out, and that’s a good thing.
Screamin Jay Hawkins, The Merv Griffin Show, 1966:
Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Dylan has several rhymes complete before the end of the second line in this song. The lilt of his voice makes it hard to notice this. Only in reading the lyrics can additional words in the same line after rhymes like “are glowing” be observed. His voice stretches out words and vowel sounds, and his gentle pauses after each rhyme accommodate the “extra” words in those lines to keep the song smooth and pleasing to the ear. I think it’s one of Dylan’s best sung songs.
Back to that idol . . . it is the idol of people who worship materialism, violence, greed . . . any inhumanity to man for personal gain. The bread being cast is a hope that in the midst of what nourishes this idol good deeds will and can be done and repaid in kind. Dualities dominate this song, “bread”/”head” being one of many. Here’s what that idol looks like in the official video of the song:
David Yaffe refers to the shot of love on Shot of Love as a “spiritual injection.” Poetically, what’s shooting at you on the title track are couplets, 12 to be exact, with “head” used in one of them, early, in the second verse:
What I got ain’t painful, it’s just bound to kill me dead
Like the men that followed Jesus when they put a price upon His head
The head, of course is Jesus,’ 12 couplets, one for each disciple that followed him, one of whom would benefit from the price on Jesus’ head, and that would be Judas. He’s the fifth one from the left, sitting, in Da Vinci’s painting:
The fifth verse, tenth couplet reads,
There’s a man that hates me and he’s swift, smooth and near
Am I supposed to set back and wait until he’s here?
Michael Gray calls Shot of Love’s “Lenny Bruce” “an endearing bad song.” The song is deserving of those conflicting comments. That the song can be both “endearing” and “bad” may be perfectly suitable for a song about Lenny Bruce. He too was “bad,” Dylan croakes, at the end of the song: “Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.”
Bad in a bad way would be someone who cuts off baby’s heads, something Bob says Lenny never did:
That shocking image stays with you for awhile though. It’s an extreme, as is robbing a church which would get you a noose around your neck in Elizabethan times. Why such exaggeration–well the line that finishes the “heads‘/”beds” rhyme returns to what he did for people. And the lines with that rhyme mirror the effect Bruce had–shocking but elevating and revealing. What do I mean? Well, listen to Bruce talk about the meaning of obscenity for just a couple of minutes and I think you’ll find it shocking (at least it was back in his time), elevating, and revealing:
“In the Garden,” Dylan’s “most performed song of his gospel period,” according to David Yaffe, asks 25 questions in 5 verses, questions Yaffe says, “about whether the people who crucified Christ knew who they were dealing with.” A statement is in the middle of each of the 5 verses except the first. The fourth verse contains the half-rhyme “Head“/”instead”, half because only one part of the second word rhymes with the first. In fact, all the rhymes with the statement lines are either half-rhymes or wrenched rhymes, i.e. “earth”/”worth.” Most of the lines with questions are auto-rhymes, merely repeated words, 4 times each as in “know”/”know,” “know”/”know.”
Some Psalms are structured this way. And I think that’s Dylan’s model here or his attempt to write a Psalm that he could sing. Psalm 118 is a good example:
Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
For His mercy endures forever.
2 Let Israel now say,
“His mercy endures forever.” 3 Let the house of Aaron now say,
“His mercy endures forever.” 4 Let those who fear the Lord now say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
5 I called on the Lord in distress;
The Lord answered me and set me in a broad place. 6 The Lord is on my side;
I will not fear.
What can man do to me? 7 The Lord is for me among those who help me;
Therefore I shall see my desire on those who hate me. 8 It is better to trust in the Lord
Than to put confidence in man. 9 It is better to trust in the Lord
Than to put confidence in princes.
10 All nations surrounded me,
But in the name of the Lord I will destroy them. 11 They surrounded me,
Yes, they surrounded me;
But in the name of the Lord I will destroy them. 12 They surrounded me like bees;
They were quenched like a fire of thorns;
For in the name of the Lord I will destroy them. 13 You pushed me violently, that I might fall,
But the Lord helped me. 14 The Lord is my strength and song,
And He has become my salvation.[a]
15 The voice of rejoicing and salvation Is in the tents of the righteous;
The right hand of the Lord does valiantly. 16 The right hand of the Lord is exalted;
The right hand of the Lord does valiantly. 17 I shall not die, but live,
And declare the works of the Lord. 18 The Lord has chastened me severely,
But He has not given me over to death.
19 Open to me the gates of righteousness;
I will go through them, And I will praise the Lord. 20 This is the gate of the Lord,
Through which the righteous shall enter.
21 I will praise You,
For You have answered me,
And have become my salvation.
22 The stone which the builders rejected
Has become the chief cornerstone. 23 This was the Lord’s doing;
It is marvelous in our eyes. 24 This is the day the Lord has made;
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
25 Save now, I pray, O Lord;
O Lord, I pray, send now prosperity. 26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
We have blessed you from the house of the Lord. 27 God is the Lord,
And He has given us light;
Bind the sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar. 28 You are my God, and I will praise You; You are my God, I will exalt You.
29 Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
For His mercy endures forever.
And naturally, all this repetition lends itself to song:
Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops
Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just out prowlin’ around
He said, “I saw two men runnin’ out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”
And Miss Patty Valentine just nodded her head
Cop said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead”
So they took him to the infirmary
And though this man could hardly see
They told him that he could identify the guilty men
In some “head“ rhymes two heads are better than one; the first is Patty Valentine’s and it’s nodding; the second is William Marins’, whose head had a bullet in it that went through his left eye. The nodding head and the head with the “one dying eye” united by rhyme offer a microcosm of Dylan’s effort to lay before us in this song at once violence and the denial of violence, at once violence and lack of culpability . . . accountability, at once violence and injustice, and the anger fueled by it all. The song uses rhyme to build on this anger, build and build until justice is served, not just a drink at the bar.
The ababc rhyme scheme is consistent throughout “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.” Christoper Ricks says Dylan loves to play with rhyme as much as he loves the complication of it. The “did him” “Jim and him” rhyme in “Lily” is one of those playful complications perhaps, but one set “in the world of the Western.” Likewise, Robert Shelton refers to it “a narrative ballad in the western tradition . . . filled with whimsy and mystification.”
The first rhyme to start the second verse is “said”/”heads”, an imperfect rhyme due to the -s in “heads“:
He moved across the mirrored room, “Set it up for everyone,” he said
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads
Much rhyme “imperfection” is in this song, but much “perfection” is present, too. The beat never stops though and Dylan’s voice never skips a beat, blending imperfection and perfection, both whimsical and mystifin’, like this guy:
4 “heads” pop up in “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,” but only one of them rhymes, even though 3 appear at the end of lines where we expect rhymes. Actually, there’s not a lot of rhymes in the song, and maybe too much “skin” and “hat” identical rhymes in the first verse:
Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
A perfect set-up for further discussion of what else is too much in the song is a line from Robert Shelton who said, it’s “a sustained joke about mindless excess.” Maybe true, but certainly not headless. And if the song is about Edie Sedwgwick as David Jaffe and many others support, then she’s the target of the “mindless excess” and many “heads,” “skin,” and “hats.” Here’s the one rhyming “head” rhyme–note it takes 5 lines for the rhyme to sound with “said”:
Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
And here’s the factory girl, dancing, smiling, living in her skin, with and without hats, and with that perfectly beautiful head, worth writing, as Michal Gray says, “a whole song about a hat” for.
Robert Shelton notes that the lyrics in “From a Buick 6″ are “traditional couplets.” And almost from the start Dylan gets the lead out to get the “e” sound charging up and down the highway of the song. “bed” starts it at the end of verse 1, but the “dead”/”head“/”said”/”bed” rhymes in the last verse drive it home:
Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head
She brings me everything and more, and just like I said
Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed.
Here’s what a Buick looked like in 1965, the year Highway 61 came out, the album Michael Gray called the “carving out of a new emotional correspondence with a new chaos-reality”:
The song Shelton calls an “abrupt shift towards whimsy and Dada nonsense” has some of Dylan’s most outrageous rhymes, with the likes of “Goldwater”/”daughter,” “scarf”/”barf,” and “Swimmin”/”women”, but the zaniest of all the verses might just be the one with the “head” rhyme in it:
Well, I set my monkey on the log
And ordered him to do the Dog
He wagged his tail and shook his head
And he went and did the Cat instead
He’s a weird monkey, very funky
Is there any better example of freedom: monkey is told to do the dog and he does the cat instead? Yes, freedom of choice, Bob; even the monkey gets it. And Bob’s a weird funky monkey, too–makin up these rhymes and all. Thanks, Bob, for all your funky monkeyness. Worth a listen, for comic relief and all:
Michael Gray calls “To Ramona” one of two songs off Another Side of Bob Dylan that comes “across as early flashes of the creative explosion” soon to be. It’s a five verse song with the rhyme “fed”/”head” beginning the third, middle verse:
I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
By worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
On back to the South
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one t’ defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad
The rhyme feeds images that last, a head twisted and foam from the mouth. The foam comes from others–worthless fodder, scraps of crap Dylan would get used to from the media, would come to know all to well what it was, and even more so how do deal with it–only self-pity could be the real crippling damaging force.
“head“/”fed” is the only rhyming couplet in that verse. But what I really like is how the ending -d sound is echoed later in it at other line ending words, “hand” and “bad.” “head” which begins the verse almost helps “hand” and “bad” become a rhyme, especially when Dylan sings it compressing just the right words to do it, with that “early flash” of “creative explosion”:
I’m amused by the irony that when Robert Shelton saw Dylan put on a show for his “Dinkytown” friends in 1962 Bob forget the words to “Bob Dylan’s Blues” and so sang “Corrina, Corrina” instead. The irony lies in the lyrics from “Bob Dylan’s Blues” with the “heads“/”dead” rhyme:
Oh you five and ten cent women
With nothin’ in your heads
I got a real gal I’m lovin’
And Lord I’ll love her till I’m dead
Go away from my door and my window too
Right now
Yup, nothin in his head when it came to the lyrics to that song that night either.
It’s an imperfect rhyme that “heads“/”dead” with the plural on “heads.” But imperfect rhyming adds to the ludicrous content of the song, perhaps another with comic relief intentions.
Those cheap women maybe don’t deserve that wisecrack, but Bob would make it up to them thirteen years later on “Simple Twist of Fate,” a deep, tragic song that glorifies a prostitute. But this song is just for funning and for enjoying the ride of it.
Shelton sees “I Shall Be Free” as a shirttail song–one of those tucked into the end of Freewheelin, a weak one amongst blockbusters. But Ricks sees some rhyming quality to it, namely the “heavy/levee” rhyme used by Bob for the first time. It’s a rollicking haymaker of a song again, and as such it’s not surprising that a good ole hit in the head happens, one with a memorable head rhyme:
I’s out there paintin’ on the old woodshed
When a can a black paint it fell on my head
I went down to scrub and rub
But I had to sit in back of the tub
(Cost a quarter
And I had to get out quick . . .
Someone wanted to come in and take a sauna)
This is slapstick and farce, mindless fun; but that poor head, right? Well, Bob gives it some attention again in the last of eleven verses,
Well, ask me why I’m drunk alla time
It levels my head and eases my mind
I just walk along and stroll and sing
I see better days and I do better things
The head and mind both pacified by alcohol. And he knows from the last line here (not of the song–more nonsense there) that he will do better things, but he already has on Freewheelin, so not such a gamble there–it’s all a stacked deck in fact, as to the art he will create, so if back then you were a better ready for betting days or better things, betting on Bob would have been a good bet. “I Shall Be Free” he names it. This is a song that helped him feel free from better days and better things, the kind that are like a kick in the head eased by drink or the high of real freewheelin’.
My favorite hit in the head with a paint can scene:
Bob tells us that the answer is blowing in the wind, so when he refers to specific winds we should pay attention. But “Caribbean Wind” was a song Dylan seems to have had as much problem wrapping his head around as we might trying to find answers in blowing in the wind. On Biograph he says about it “I just couldn’t quite grasp what it was about after I finished it.” Maybe he meant it when he created the “head“/”bed” rhyme in verse 7:
The cry of the peacock, flies buzz my head
Ceiling fan broken, there’s a heat in my bed
Street band playing “Nearer My God to Thee”
We met at the steeple where the mission bells ring
She said, “I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing
You can do about it, so let us just agree to agree”
The image of flies around a head appears as a threat in “Idiot Wind“:
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
In “Caribbean Wind,” however, the flies are buzzing a head, not flying around eyes. And the victim is in a ditch, not a bed, decay and death not prompting the flies, a buzz, buzz like confusion rather than real flies camping our for dinner.
Yeah, what’s this song all about . . . the answer is blowing . . . somewhere in the song, from Bob’s head to ours:
Rolling Stone called Dylan’s 1971 “George Jackson” a “return to social relevance.” Michael Gray reminds us in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia that it also marked the return of Dylan recording an acoustic guitar solo single, the first since the “pre-electric period, 61-64. What Gray also saw in the song was a “particular and special–pers0nalizing” of the “classic opening line of the song, “I woke up this mornin’.” The “head” rhyme helps summon the “personalizing”:
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground
The tears from the speaker he wakes to find in his bed collide with the shot in the head, a private response to public violence, Dylan at it again with rhyme to move its impact beyond sound and into emotional response and theme.
Often lost in the study of Dylan is what he teaches us by defending the people he writes about, revealing the injustice, the tragedy, and impact of their loss to us as memorable and palpable, the facts and circumstances of a victim’s death to be part of a truth too real to be true. For those of us who may not know who George Jackson was and what happened to him, let Dylan shed light via his song and motivation to learn more via the research Dylan inspires:
I find it fitting that this blog post on “head” would end with Woody Guthrie, whose head contained a mind Dylan loved and influenced so much. Dylan unites “mind” and “head” in the first line of the song:
So the last part of this “head” blog post will simply just do the same, focus on the mind, the revolutionary one, contained by the head that mattered so much and still does to so many, including Tom Morello covering Woody’s “Ease My Revolutionary Mind” for the Occupy Movement on Woody’s 100th birthday:
We spread everything from lies to disease to tables to the word. We can spread things beneath our feet, over our bodies, or across the sky. We can put spread on a cracker or tuck ourselves under one before we sleep. I’m confident enough in the English language that poets have explored the range of “spread” through the centuries in content and rhyme.
In the last verse of “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘,” the only song Dylan uses “spread” in a rhyme sails are spread:
My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said
Dylan rhymes “spread” with “head” and “said.” All four verses have a three word rhyming pattern, rhyme spread out nicely within the song, beyond it . . . well . . . there’s nothin.
For the record, William Butler Yates’ use of the word “spread” in “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is my favorite poetic moment with “spread.” Something about spreading your dreams that works for me”:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
“The music we play has to be tomorrow’s, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday“ -Pete Townsend- 1972
The past, meaning not today or tomorrow, is complicated with Dylan as it is with most writers/poets. I don’t think I’ve read anyone who speaks about Dylan and the past better than Michael Gray does in his comments about Blood on the Tracks. It
deals with the overlaying of the past upon the present . . . a profoundly felt understanding of our fragile impermanence of control, so that in dealing with the overlay of past upon present Dylan is dealing with the inexorable disintegration of relationships, and with the dignity of keeping on trying to reintegrate them against all odds.
The overlaying of the past Gray speaks of tied to understanding, disintegration and reintegration is throughout Dylan, not limited to relationships but history, the self, words, and rhymes.
I liken Dylan and the past to Willa Cather’s Thea Kronberg in The Song of the Lark who comes to the conclusion that hers is a “soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not recall.”
Dylan writes under the cloud of the past, sometimes recalling it, sometimes summoning it, many times rejecting it, and often making his listeners sense that its reality is not hinged on completely recalling it but feeling it, his and ours.
Before journeying to the “past” with Dylan, how about an old song from the past, done by Dylan in the not so “mountainous” past, and redone in the recent past by Pete Townsend, an old folk song called “Corrina, Corrina“:
The lines that rhyme “fast” with “past” in “Mississippi” hit home the mythological reference to Odysseus in The Odyssey:
Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinkin’ fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me
Odysseus’s ship is split to splinters in Book 12:
Zeus with thunder and lightning together crashed on our vessel,
and, struck by the thunderbolt of Zeus, she spun in a circle,
and all was full of brimstone. My men were thrown in the water,
and bobbing like sea crows they were washed away on the running
waves all around the black ship, and the god took away their homecoming.
Holding onto what’s left of the ship, Odysseus arrives on the island of Calypso, where he eventually sets sail on a raft and winds up on the shores of Phaecia where he is stripped to nothing, even clothes. It is here that he must feel that the past he wishes to return to, his home in Ithaka, where he is king, is lost. Dylan, conversely, as any study of his life will show, has tried to escape from his past, even lying about it to erase it, “pure hokum–hophead talk,” he calls it in Chronicles.
What Odysseus and Dylan have in common though are women who have come on the scene to save them. For Odysseus, when he arrives on the shores of Phaecia, Nausicaa, the daughter of the king and queen, pulls him out of the emotional depths (sinkin fast), guiding him to what results in his return home (nostos). Dylan’s savior women, Suze, Joan, Sara, Carolyn all have, in some way, pulled him out of one phase into another, pulled him out of a sinkin into a past that is a kind of death, one that would end his knack or talent for shape-shifting, from one music to another, one sound to another, one image to another, one personna, etc.
The ancient Greek myth of Nausicaa, by the way, has morphed into Japanese pop culture in the form of a protector of the environment. As such, she protects our past, the one where nature is not violated, kept unharmed by human greed. Some things, perhaps the myth and Dylan are telling us, should never become past, never even come to the point of sinkin fast.
Dylan overlays not the present with the past but the future in “Bye and Bye” with these rhyming lines:
Well the future for me is already a thing of the past
You were my first love and you will be my last
One of the reasons I admire Bob Dylan is for the unexpected places, the twists and turns to them, he takes my mind. Lots of good rhymes throughout this song. Christopher Ricks quotes the lines above in association with Philip Larkin’s poem, “Going, Going” . . . Here’s Larkin, another writer who invites satisfying mind shifting, reading his poem:
“past“/”fast” rhyme in “Political World,” too, but in an apocalyptic way:
We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last
I guess in in such a world the past becomes a different world, the future threatened to be no world at all.
At the Dodge Poetry Festival in the late 1990′s, reading “The Crying Poem,” Jimmy Santiago Baca asked the audience to STOP TALKIN’ POLITICS!” and instead create “a language made of whimpers and sniffles and sobs,cry out loud, louder, cry baby, cry! Cry! Cry!” “I’ll never forget it.
Clearly, Dylan has a thing for this “past“/”fast” rhyme. He uses it again on “Silvio” right from the start of the song:
Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Maybe he likes it for what it says about how fast time goes by. Time flies–future becomes present and then past. As I’m typing this what I just typed just became the past–what I’m thinking about writing, just became present, now BAMM past!
The song’s opening with this rhyme helps defy the standard investment clause that past performance is not an indicator of future results. In 1986, Greil Marcus felt that “Silvio” was evidence that Budweiser commercials had more of a future than Dylan’s music:
‘”Silvio” suggests he has so little left of his style he couldn’t make a convincing Budweiser commercial–there’s more musical freedom in the average Budweiser commercial than there is here. Dylan’s music now has meaning only as neuroticism.”
Well, again that was 1986. This is now. Dylan did have a hell of a past and now he still does, and a present and future. A better would have done well to put money down on Dylan in 86 based on Dylan’s past, good sense even, “better use your sense.”
Maybe some of us would still rather hear this Budweiser tune than listen to “Silvio“:
Interesting that “past” is not used by Dylan during his Christian phase. Perhaps he cut off his past so severely at this time that the word never came to mind, even in a rhyming way. The “past“/”fast” rhyme appears again in “If You See Her, Say Hello” and it helps convey regretting that time passes so fast:
Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast
If she’s passin’ back this way, I’m not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time
_________________________________________________________________________
Times spent in a relationship replayed movie style, movies of the mind, not out of mind, have that flash before your eyes effect, though it can cripple the present, that living in the past stuff. It has a way of splitting the self–keeping one from being fully alive in the present. Optima dies . . . prima fugit, writes Virgil, “In the lives of the mortals, the best days are the first to flee.” This is the epigram Willa Cather used for My Antonia. Better to let them go then, on their fleeting way, or they just might keep us too preoccupied with the past to be open to what occupies our present.
Robert Shelton senses a “sea-wave rhythm in the song.” Memories can go like that, sea-wavy, trance inducing, smoke coming up on the screen. Hard to resist the past when listening to this song:
In “Tough Mama,” Bob throws “last” into the rhymes of “past” with “fast,” saving it for last in the third of five verses:
Sweet Goddess
Born of a blinding light and a changing wind
Now, don’t be modest, you know who you are and where you’ve been
Jack the Cowboy went up north
He’s buried in your past
The Lone Wolf went out drinking
That was over pretty fast
Sweet Goddess
Your perfect stranger’s comin’ in at last
I want to play (and this might be lamely done) with a little Christopher Ricks-like analysis here. Under the study of “last” I blogged about this song’s White Goddess associations. This verse may be the most direct reference to her. In Chronicles, Dylan states, about the “poetic muse,” that he “[d]idn’t know enough to start trouble with it.” Well, maybe in 1974 he was ready to. Be that as it may, Ricks comes in here because I want to look at that word “last.” If that perfect stranger is Dylan himself “comin’ in at last,” maybe it is a statement of “I know this has taken awhile but I’m ready to invoke you now.” Or maybe, he means check out the last verse where you’ll see me “comin in at last.” The last verse is
I’m crestfallen
The world of illusion is at my door
I ain’t a-haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore
The prison walls are crumblin’, there is no end in sight
I’ve gained some recognition but I lost my appetite
Dark Beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight
Yes, the meeting time is set. Is this when Dylan finally decided it was time, at last, to have a tryst with the White Goddess? Well, again, Blood on the Tracks was next. Clearly, this meeting was a success if Blood on the Tracks is the payoff.
Want a glimpse of the White Goddess? A version of her appears as Jadis, the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia:
The laughter that begins “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” sets the tone for the whole song. It is a raucous, playful, “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free” romp of a song. And they rhymes enhance the fun. Robert Shelton in his entry on “115th” in No Direction Home, that Dylan’s “ear was always looking for the rhyme that would work, unsettle, and amuse.” The “mast”/”past” rhyme in “115th” is one of those:
Well, I got back and took
The parkin’ ticket off the mast
I was ripping it to shreds
When this coastguard boat went past
The rhyme standing by itself doesn’t tickle, you but when the rhyme hits, coming off the throes the image of a parking ticket on the mast of a ship, well, it’s all, as Ed Norton, Ralph Kramden’s pal, says, “good clean fun.”
“The Times They Are A Changin” is all about breaking from the past and the last verse hits this message home with the “past“/”fast” rhyme taking the lead from “fast” leading the charge:
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
I so admire Christopher Rick’s observation that “the refrain at the end of each verse is itself unchanging” . . . and so each time it is sung it sends the message that all things must change. This song, as Ricks says, “Was not enlightenment dawning once and for all” . . . “the times are still a-changin” and always will be. The present now will always “later be past“–this is a song of hope–for a change for the better–for forward thinking for being “younger than that now” all the time.
In Chronicles Dylan says, “Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change , but you can only feel it . . . but you don’t know it in a purposeful way.” Maybe this is why the farewell in “Restless Farewell” is a restless one. The speaker is uneasy, agitated, regretful, but finger-pointing, insinuating in his targets. The “fast”/”past” rhyme, maybe the first time Dylan used it, helps express the break to come, the need for change, the inevitability of it:
Oh ev’ry girl that ever I’ve touched
I did not do it harmfully
And ev’ry girl that ever I’ve hurt
I did not do it knowin’ly
But to remain as friends
And make amends
You need the time and stay behind
And since my feet are now fast
And point away from the past
I’ll bid farewell and be down the line
Robert Shelton says that “[t]ime is crucial in this song.” Time to go, time to leave the past behind, time to move on, time to cut ties, time to make the break.
Dylan chose to sing this song at Frank Sinatra’s 80th birthday celebration, a restless farewell of sorts, to a man whose time was to come (he died at the age of 82). Time goes by fast . . . the last time Dylan would sing this song live was near his own birthday, May 24, on May 21, 1998. Birthdays are celebrations of our years. “Restless Farewell” to them Dylan seems to be saying, so we can “point away from the past.”
This is Dylan’s first and only use of the “fast”/”past” rhyme with “past” not meaning relating to a former time. Still there it is again, a rhyme Dylan has used for over 40 years.
Eric Bulson says there’s joking “around about commies, fallout shelters, and nuclear war” in the song, but feels that Dylan “was seriously trying to come to terms with a very real fear about America’s future.”
In Chronicles, Dylan shares what he felt those fears can do to a child growing up in the midst of the threat of annihilation: “Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit.”
Maybe in 1950, William Faulkner had the spirit of children in mind when he wrote his Nobel prize speech, expressing hope for humanity even if we seem hell-bent on destroying ourselves:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
“last is one of those words with a broad sense scope. We are upset when we come in last but happy when something we enjoy lasts. Conversely, it’s been said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first–”what’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom,” sort of thing. Likewise, we rather not endure things that last too long or that we don’t like. After much delay, we may exclaim with exuberance, “At long last,” or demand, “This is the last straw.” “last” has a lasting presence in daily expression.
Dylan’s rhymes “last” with “past” in “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.”
Down every street there’s a window
And every window made of glass
We’ll keep on lovin’ pretty baby
For as long as love will last
Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past
Yes, the past lasts, like those mountains. American authors like Cormac McCarthy, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner come to mind as ones who would agree. Faulkner went as far as to say, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”
To me, the lasting effect of past inspired by rhyme is the perfect way to explore Dylan’s use of the word.
[Since "last" appears so many times in Dylan I only will blog about his use of the word in rhyme, though I will record Dylan's every use of it in the concordance.]
“fast”/”last” both refer to the passengers in the last moments of their lives, some wearier than others. With that phrase, Dylan captures the class status hierarchy that gave the more affluent better chances to live. All may have been mumbling, fumbling, and tumbling equally, but what may have wearied some more than others was the news that that not enough life boats existed for everyone. In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio opens the play by saying, “It wearies me, you say it wearies you.” Plenty of weariness to go around inside a sinking ship, more if you’re the last, alone, going down with the ship, or the last one on.
Shine your light, move it on, you burn so bright, roll on John
Slow down you’re moving too fast
Come together right now over me
Your bones are weary
You’re about to breathe your last
Lord, you know how hard that it can be
This verse is an enigma. While it recreates the moment of Lennon’s death it also is nestled in the context of describing him as if he’s still alive. But what’s alive here mostly is Dylan’s use of Lennon/Beatles lyrics or lines from covers the Beatles have sung to create each line. The third line is the obvious one from the first cut on Abbey Road, and the fifth is right out of “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Is there a better way Dylan could have written a tribute to Lennon? Yes, how hard it can be . . . took Bob 32 years to do it. Time to blast this if you haven’t in awhile:
“Bye and Bye” off Love and Theft is revered by many Dylan critics and scholars, Michael Gray and Christoper Ricks among them. Gray hears Dylan’s 2000′s live versions of “If Dogs Run Free” in it, and Ricks takes only three pages in to quote it in his Dylan’s Visions ofSin. Ricks quotes the first line of the couplet that ends with “last”:
The line echos Faulker’s quote that begins this blog page. The second line completes the rhyming with the word “last” sung by Dylan with a strong effort by Dylan to make it last:
Eric Lott calls the song one of those “soft shoe shuffles.” In such songs, some sounds are made to last. Listen to Billie Holiday make “tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime” last on Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger’s “Havin Myself a Time,” the tune David Yaffe thinks Dylan heard and “based some changes on”:
“Take what you gathered from coincidence,” says Dylan in “It’s All Over Baby Blue.” It is coincidence that on the day before the Mayans proclaim the end of the world as we know it, I would target these rhyming lines from “Political World”:
We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last
There’s that “past”/”last” rhyme again. Maybe it’s the perfect rhyme. Maybe it’s the duality these words create together. Maybe it says what he wants to say whether those words rhymed or not. In the world of this rhyme courage is gone–a thing of the past–without it we think things like tomorrow is our last. What would a non-political world be like? A place where there’s courage and where you don’t think or aren’t compelled to think that next days could be last ones. This is what Dylan does best. When he defines something at the same time he’s defining something else, which redefines what he set out defining. “Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine. Most of the time.” Most of the time defined, rest of time defined, too. Most of time redefined.
Dante has something to say about those who predict the future. They’re better than thieves and hypocrites, but worse than panderers and seducers. Their punishment? “[T]o have their heads turned backwards on theirs bodies and to be compelled to walk backwards (into the past?) through all eternity, their eyes blinded with tears” ( so they can’t see forward anymore?) (Ciardi). Perhaps they above all should hope that tomorrow is not the last day.
I’m going to take up David Yaffe on the thought that the tragic subject of “Shooting Star” is Richard Manuel. When you lament the loss of a friend the word “last” has a lingering effect, or rather one might start thinking of certain memorable “lasts.” In “Shooting Star,” the next to last verse contains a barrage of “lasts,” 5 to be exact, in 7 lines:
Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing
What was the last sound he heard, what was his last temptation, what was his last account, his last sermon, the last song he heard on the radio . . . when was the last time I saw him . . . especially if you’re mulling over
In “Seeing The Real You At Last,” Dylan rhymes “last” with “fast,” “pass” (2x), “mast,” and “fast.” “last” is part of the chorus, a changing one that keeps the title repeated. This is a finger pointing song of sorts–the target of his venom is someone who’s been hiding a real self or is being condemned to having his/her current behavior indicative of what his/her real self is. Any fan of Dylan would find this ironic, even hypocritical. Pinning down who the real Dylan is has been an obsession for many fans, and the subject of two major films, one that Dylan approved, I’m Not There (7 Dylans in that one), and one he starred in as Jack Fate (yet another identity) Masked and Anonymous. For my money, watching Cate Blanchett was like seeing the real Dylan at last:
If there isn’t a word for a rhyme that is really a word repeated with a letter in front of it, there ought to be. The rhyming use of “last” in “Joey,” is found in the second verse:
Larry was the oldest, Joey was next to last
They called Joe “Crazy,” the baby they called “Kid Blast”
Rhymes like “crush”/”rush,” “snap,”/”nap,” and “flush,”/”lush” are a result of a word consumed by the other, ccccccrush, ssssssssnap, and so forth. When this kind of rhyme is used I think it pushes the meaning association of each word forward even more. In the case of the “last/”Blast” rhyme in “Joey,” the reference to Joey as the next to last and then rhymed with “Blast,” presages how he is killed by a blast:
One day they blew him down in a clam bar in New York
He could see it comin’ through the door as he lifted up his fork
He pushed the table over to protect his family
Then he staggered out into the streets of Little Italy
This deadly blowing down or blast took place specifically at Umberto’s Clam House at 129 Mulberry Street in Little Italy. More specifically, the table in the foreground is where Joey Gallo ate his last supper.
The couplet that rhymes “fast” with “last” may be the moment in “You’re A Big Girl Now” that best illustrates Michael Gray’s comment that it is about “whether a decaying relationship can withstand the strains of time and other lovers”:
Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last
I can change, I swear, oh, oh
See what you can do
I can make it through
You can make it too
When a relationship is held together by its last thread time does seem to have gone too fast–what has so rapidly spiraled out of control to get us to this point? The tragedy of a broken relationship happens when even all that’s been shared won’t have the strength to fix it–Gray’s “strain of time” phrase is so aptly worded. The shame is when a relationship can’t withstand the strain of time past and time future, when the past has no lasting power to promise any future.
Robert Shelton writes about the song, “Rarely has his singing been more openly emotional.” The desperate promises and hopes that follow “last” in this verse help to achieve that rare effect. Shelton even goes on to say that the “oh” stresses throughout the song remind him “of the screaming mouth of the sufferer in Evard Munch’s painting”:
Listening to the song with that image in mind has an even more lasting effect:
“Tough Mama” uses “past” “fast” and “last” to help invoke the White Goddess, the mythological figure central to Robert Grave’s dense study of the same name. Dylan met Graves in 1962 and admits in Chronicles that “I wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn’t remember much about it.” Michael Gray asserts that “Bob Dylan has often cited Graves, specifying The White Goddess as a significant influence upon his own work.” The White Goddess, a poet’s muse, is associated with the North Wind, brightness (like the moon’s), and wolves:
Sweet Goddess
Born of a blinding light and a changing wind
Now, don’t be modest, you know who you are and where you’ve been
Jack the Cowboy went up north
He’s buried in your past
The Lone Wolf went out drinking
That was over pretty fast
Sweet Goddess
Your perfect stranger’s comin’ in at last
The song is threaded with other three word rhymes, crew/through/you, rise/skies/eyes, crotch/watch/notch, sight/appetite/tonight. This is an effort to pay homage to her as the poet’s muse. Once invoked, the White Goddess is one tough mama. As Graves says, she “may make [the poet] her instrument for a month, year, seven years, or even more.” But once she is done using him, the poet is spent, and writes as Graves adds, “in helpless attestation of this . . . whose love is never returned.” Blood on the Tracks was soon to follow the album “Tough Mama” appears on. Arguably, Blood on the Tracks is the expression of just this kind of “helpless attestation.”
In his Bob Dylan Like a Complete Unknown, David Yaffe discusses the revamped video version of “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” directed by Rupert Jones, musically enhanced by a group called the Dap-Kings. In the video the various phases of Dylan’s career are depicted, the Dylan look-alikes transitioning from one period to the next. Yaffe says that writing about Dylan now is like that video, “as if recalling a series of dreams.” The interpretation this video offers moves away from one that involves a break-up in a relationship, to one that is a shedding of one’s self for another self (“shedding off one more layer of skin”). This shift makes the bridge with the “last“/”past” rhyme repeated three times have new meaning, too:
I’m gonna let you pass
And I’ll go last
Then time will tell just who fell
And who’s been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine
The offer to go last seems kindly at first, gentlemanly even, right? But it becomes instead a competition for who will last once time has its say. The one self letting the other self pass while the other goes last is fascinating. The current Dylan whatever phase that’s in will always go last, but the one that will last may be up to every one of us. The 1965-1966 Dylan has much staying power what with the likes of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, and Blonde on Blonde. But that’s just one way to go. Dylan’s going his way.
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Christopher Ricks in his chapter on “Sad-Eyed” adds the word “resistance” to pockets when referring to the items the song “insists upon listing”: “her pockets of resistance.” The dimension Ricks adds with that word moves the “pocket” line away from a longing to be financially secure (“at last“) to one much less mundane–one that depicts this Sad-Eyed lady as someone who has always wanted to have her ability to resist protected, perhaps someone who has reached a place in her mind or emotionally where she can hold her desires in check. More than anything what this narrator is able to reveal about her speaks of how well he knows her. To know so certainly how deeply someone feels is to reach a place, too, “at last,” that says something about what lovers, like no other companions, can express to each other. I thank Ricks for that one word added, making the line so much more rich with meaning.
Joyce Carol Oats said that she had “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” on her mind when she was writing “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” She may have meant the sound of it or Dylan’s voice, but most likely she had the lyrics floating through her imagination. If so, the lines that start the song with the rhyme “fast”/”last” may have mattered most of all to her creative energy:
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Connie, the rebellious teen protagonist of the story only plays with danger until it comes knocking on her door in the form of Arnold Friend. Many “lasts” happen in the story for Connie as she no longer will be the same after her “Friend”ly encounter, and she is forced to have to think fast about what she has to grab fast to enter the world Friend forces her into:
“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.”
Christopher Ricks observed that “last” is used in the last verse of “The Times They Are A-Changin‘.” The same can be said of “Chimes of Freedom“: “As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look.” Though not in rhyme, but in repetition the word chimes for us in that last verse. But in “Times” the three rhymes with “last” chime incessantly:
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
Ricks and Shelton notice the Biblical link to the ending line of this verse, Ricks citing Matthew 19:30: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” Shelton, Mark 10:31: But many that are first will be last and the last first.” In “Chimes,” those in last, the “underdog soldier,” “the rebel,” “the luckless,” the gentle, and “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse” come first in the attention Dylan gives them. In “Times” the warning is that those in last will no longer be, predicting the demise of those who benefit from and exploit the status quo.
Here’s Bob singing it in 2010, at the White House, perhaps no better time and place for that song to chime about the last being first:
You cannot go a day or walk most streets without seeing glass. In fact, if you are reading this blog page, you are probably staring at the screen though glass. We can see through it, see our reflections in it, and drink out of it. It can be smooth or jagged. It can shut you in or shut you out. In Bob Dylan’s songs, the word “glass” plays many roles, its sense explored with a wide scope. Dylan likes to frame the perspective offered in songs—glass as something that you can see through while it obstructs you—invites while it hinders–provides the kind of opposition, paradox, and conflict his songs dwell in.
“Beyond Here Lies Nothin” kicks off the study of “glass” in a verse where two words rhyme with it:
Down every street there’s a window
And every window made of glass
We’ll keep on lovin’ pretty baby
For as long as love will last
Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past
Glass lasts, that’s why every window is made of it; it’s part of our lives just like those mountains of the past that are still with us now.
Tempest offers good examples of the variety of ways Dylan has used “glass” throughout his career. In “Long and Wasted Years” he refers to the kind we put on our face: “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes.” In “Tin Angel” is the kind we drink and toast from, “They looked at each other and their glasses clinked.” And in “Tempest” glass refers is from the famous chandelier on the Titanic: “Glass of shattered crystal/Lay scattered roundabout.” “glass” is not used for rhyming, but that’s coming. It’s his range with the word that impresses.
Here’s a sampler of Tempest from Sony Records. And here’s to you, Bob, my glass is raised, for creating an album for us at the age of 72 that American Songwriterranked as the number 1 album in 2012.
David Yaffe captured Dylan’s theft of the dialogue lines of Love and Theft‘s “Summer Days,”
She says,“You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You
can’t? What do you mean,
you can’t? Of course you can.”
from Gatsby’s response to Nick in The Great Gatsby: “”Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
Relevance to “glass“? Not much, except “past” is the only word that rhymes with “glass” in the whole song. “glasses” appears twice in the third verse:
Everybody get ready—lift your glasses and sing
Everybody get ready to lift your glasses and sing
Well, I’m standin’ on the table, I’m proposing a toast to the King
This is verse seven. Bit of a stretch to hear that “glasses”/”past” assonance, but I will say this. I’ve always associated Gatsby, the man of the past with a glass in his hand–just an image I’ll always have.
“Sweetheart Like You” is one of those songs that make you say, “This is it; this is the one that captured the sound Dylan wanted during this phase of his music. For me, “Someday Baby” is the song that did the same from 1997 to 2004. It’s where Dylan channeled all that he wanted his music to be at this time in his artistic life.
The line with “glass” in it is a classic onomatopoeia moment of Dylan’s, maybe his best:
Whatever crawling across cut glass would be like is the cr/acr/cut/ss sounds combined with Dylan singing them.
I put this up there with Paul Simon’s “sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon” or Eliot’s “pair of ragged claws scuttling across the sands of silent seas.”
No rhyming fame for “glass” in this song, but a brilliant sound effect, smooth as glass.
Dylan hasn’t rhymed “glass” in over three decades. When he last did it was in reference to that snake that he mysteriously does not name at the end of “Man Gave Names To All The Animals“:
The “glass“/”grass” last rhyme of the song is the last time Dylan will be responsible for the rhyming–he leaves us to come up with “snake” from the rhyme with “lake.” Clever. We have to name him from the sound Dylan gives us, but he won’t say it/sing it . . . a rather snake in the grass move, if you ask me. The -s sound helps, too, though; can you hear the snake slithering with all those s’s? We may not be able to see him, disappearing and all by that tree, but we can hear him and we can identify him so ingrained as he is into our psyche. Just a little help, Dylan seems to be saying, is all we need to point out the snake though we can’t see it.
For those of you who don’t like snakes in the grass, don’t watch this video:
Dylan is brilliant at using the s sound, and I think he knows it. His voice sounds like a hive of angry bees with some of his best moments with s stressed. Highlights for me are, “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press,” “Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives/I don’t know how it all got started/ I don’t know what they do with their lives,” and “You shouldn’t let others get their kicks for you!” One ways those memorable lyrics work is because of Dylan’s mastery of the s.
In “On a Night Like This,” “glass doesn’t rhyme with “kiss,” but Dylan emphasizes the s alliteration so effectively it’s as if the verse is right out of Chaucer:
Let the four winds blow
Around this old cabin door
If I’m not too far off
I think we did this once before
There’s more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this
There are those who worship loneliness, I’m not one of them
In this age of fiberglass I’m searching for a gem
The crystal ball up on the wall hasn’t shown me nothing yet
I’ve paid the price of solitude, but at least I’m out of debt
According to the OED, the word was first used in publication in 1937. In that year, American Dystuff Reporter stated, “There are many types of Fiberglas fibers. They vary in diameter according to their use.” 46 years later, fiberglass would define our age–maybe that’s something to write a dirge about.
The song titles on John Wesley Harding have six “I”‘s in them, two in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” And that first person perspective is part of the impact the song makes, especially at the end when “glass” appears. The song is an account of a dream involving participation in an execution. The speaker’s reaction to the dream, the culpability felt from being responsible for someone’s death, is profound, and it is captured immediately upon his return from sleep:
I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried
The reaction of the “I” in the song is accentuated by the “I” sound that appears ten times in eight lines. The personal response to the dream arguably is dramatized more than the dream, with the figure left caught in a freeze-frame leaning against glass (Robert Shelton asks, “What is ‘the glass‘ he touches before crying? A window, a telescope, or a mirror?) “glass” is left unrhymed, not peculiarly so as a pattern is present. The odd numbered lines do not have rhyming end words. Anger, loneliness, and terror combine to cause bowing and crying. “glass” plays a memorable role in the “I”‘s distraught condition. In all of Dylan’s “dream” songs this may be the one with the most emotion with the touch of glass the only support for a grieving man. In all, the response seems to be more about the “I” than St. Augustine’s, a self that has died, a self that was once “alive with fiery breath,” a self seen through a “looking-glass” of a dream, a self no longer.
“I Pity the Poor Immigrant” reminds me of Langston Hughes’ “Dream Deferred” in its escalating threat that oppression unabated can result in violent responses. “glass,” rhyming with “pass” helps provide the moment in “I Pity” at the end of the song when the violence erupts:
I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
“glass” rhymes with “grass” in the first verse of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Sun-glassed-eyed gentleman of the Zimmermans (isn’t this song really Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lownds, like Juliet is the star-crossed daughter of the Capulets?), would next rhyme “glass” and “grass” in reference to a snake in “Man Gave Names to All The Animals.” I won’t touch the irony (is it irony?) of that, because I’d rather aim at how Bob’s uses glass for description:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Since the smoothness of her face is identified by silk (smooth as), what role does glass play in comparing her face to it? I think it’s fragility or preciousness. Either would be challenging to carry, who among them willing to carry something so fragile or precious. The extended rhyme that’s so melodic in this moment is “place on the grass” with “face like glass.” I like more what “place” and “face” unite–a face can become a place if the face is of someone so cherished.
There are worse ways to spend 11:20 minutes of your time:
The first time Dylan uses the word “glass” is in “Outlaw Blues“:
I got my dark sunglasses
I got for good luck my black tooth
I got my dark sunglasses
I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’
I just might tell you the truth
No rhyme here, just the word repeated, as is “tooth,” a black one. Dylan tells us why he has the black tooth–for good luck. It would take him 47 years later in Tempest‘s “Early Roman Kings” to tell us why he wears sunglasses, “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes.” Mystery solved!
I think it’s because he knows just how damn cool he looks in them. Take your pick:
Interesting though that he only appears on two studio album covers wearing shades:
Infidels:
And on the album cover drawing for Blood on the Tracks:
In “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Dylan tells us to take what we have gathered from coincidence, and sometimes I do. One of my favorite short stories is “Powder” by Tobias Wolff. It’s about a hopeless romantic, impulsive, “never plans ahead” father who takes his “anxious about everything,” “always thinks ahead” son out skiing on Christmas Eve during a snowstorm. In one part of the story, the father starts humming, “Stars Fell on Alabama.” It’s a poignant moment, the father driving his son in a blinding snowstorm, “breaking virgin snow between a line of tall trees” while humming this romantic ballad.
One night after sharing the story with my students, I drove home and popped in a Bob Dylan’s theme-time radio show CD that my brother-in-law had recorded for me. On the CD, (I forget what the theme was–I’m thinking it was “stars”), Bob played that very song sung by Jack Teagarden. Because of that coincidence, I will always associate Dylan and Wolff’s story with this song. Here are the lyrics:
We lived our little drama
We kissed in a field of white
And stars fell on Alabama last night
I can’t forget the glamour
Your eyes held a tender light
And stars fell on Alabama last night
I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land where no one else could enter
And in the center just you and me
My heart beat like a hammer
My arms wound around you tight
And stars fell on Alabama last night
And here’s Jack Teagarden and the Chicagoans performing it live in Los Angeles in 1952:
This blog page will is dedicated to Dylan’s own use of the word “star.” Starting with “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” Dylan uses it as a rhyming word with “car”–just another thing I can gather from coincidence since for me this song, this story, stars, and cars all combine in meaningful ways.
I’m movin’ after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don’t know what to do without it
Without this love that we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ but the moon and stars
Daniel Mark Epstein calls “If You Ever Go to Houston,” his personal favorite” off of Together Through Life. He sees it as “a hip lecture on how to handle yourself in the hot towns of the Lone Star State. The lone “star” in the song is not in the sky but worn by a man:
If you’re ever down there
On Bagby and Lamar
You better watch out for
The man with the shining star
Better know where you’re going
Or stay where you are
If you’re ever down there
On Bagby and Lamar
Dylan has always done imaginative rhyming with names of places and people. One that comes immediately to my mind is from “Meet Me in the Morning“:
Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha
Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha
Honey, we could be in Kansas
By time the snow begins to thaw
Does rhyming get better than “Wabasha” and “thaw”?
In “Houston,” “Lamar” is one of the two words (“are” the other) rhyming with “star.” Apparently, you don’t want to be a shooting star on Bagby and Lamar (leave any shooting to the man with the shining star–by the way, the star is not shiny but shining–a notch brighter?); it’s better to stay there unless you know where you’re going? Better to stay there because the man with the shining star is often there–an authority figure for protection? Or is it better to be on the lookout for him if you’re “ever down there,” in a duck and cover sort of way? I guess that depends on who you are on Bagby and Lamar.
What’s on the corner of Bagby and Lamar? Houston’s Heritage Society Museum.
Things fleeting, things here and then not there, dominate “This Dream of You,” and maybe nothing captures that more in the song than in its last verse,
From a cheerless room in a curtained gloom
I saw a star from heaven fall
I turned and looked again but it was gone
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on
where a star has no rhyming value, but can last forever as if always there like Keats’ “Bright Star“:
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.
Wooing often results in promises we can’t keep, many including promises of possessing celestial entities. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Baily promises Mary the moon:
What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.
In “Tin Angel,” after his first threat doesn’t work, “the Boss” goes further in his efforts to get the wife who abandoned him to return
“Get up, stand up, you greedy-lipped wench
And cover your face or suffer the consequence
You are making my heart feel sick
Put your clothes back on, double-quick” (The Boss)”Silly boy, you think me a saint
I’ll listen no more to your words of complaint
You’ve given me nothing but the sweetest lies
Now hold your tongue and feed your eyes” (The Wife)”I’d have given you the stars and the planets, too
But what good would these things do you?
Bow the heart if not the knee
Or never again this world you’ll see” (The Boss)
Ah, but he undercuts the promise well–no romantic notion in this husband’s mind. He knows they (the stars and the planets) would not do her any good. “stars” does no rhyme good either in these lines, but the rhyming is in couplets, quite romantic even in this most unromantic Dylan tale.
“Mississippi” is one of my favorite Dylan songs. I love the tone of his voice and the atmosphere it creates. I somewhat playfully imagine that the speaker is Odysseus. I think the song can be interpreted that way with a little stretching. Odysseus has a knack for staying too long in places in The Odyssey, namely with Calypso and Circe:
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long
The verse with the “star“/”are” rhyme works with The Odyssey as well if you want to let it. Though Odysseus crosses the “wine-dark sea” to wind up with Nausicaa, a river is impressive enough to get to where you want to be with someone:
Well I got here followin’ the southern star
I crossed that river just to be where you are
That southern star also could be someone like Charlie Patton or Jimmie Rodgers, but if it’s a celestial one it could be the one over Ithaca, south of many of the places Odysseus stayed too long.
Under “car(s)” I gave attention to the “star” rhymes in “Summer Days” and “PoBoy,” but here they are again to be thorough:
Well I’m drivin’ in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, “You’re a worn-out star”
Poor boy in a red hot town
Out beyond the twinklin’ stars
Ridin’ first-class trains—making the rounds
Tryin’ to keep from fallin’ between the cars
On Time Out of Mind‘s “Standing in the Doorway,” “stars” is not a rhyming word, but they are colored by the speaker’s state of mind:
The light in this place is so bad
Making me sick in the head
All the laughter is just making me sad
The stars have turned cherry red
Bad light, feeling sick, and laughter that makes you sad all can add up to make you see the stars with cherry red glasses. Cherry? Well maybe needed to keep the 7 syllable second line in each of these two rhyming couplets alive. The speaker is sick, melancholy, yes? But not enough to keep those cherry red producing eyes away from lines that rhyme and balance.
Don Weiss in”Echoes of Incense: A Pilgrimage in Japan” writes, “Everything born will someday die. Even stars. Even worlds. Even cherry blossoms,” which by the way kind of look like stars:
Time Out of Mind has that Keatsian quality of how fleeting all of life is–”a song cycle,” Daniel Mark Epstein says, “about aging, love, and loss, where the lyrics of one ballad of angst bleed into the lyrics of the next.” Perhaps someone who can see sadness in laughter has a strenuous enough tongue to “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” or even turn stars cherry red.
“Make You Feel My Love” uses “stars” not quite as a rhyme, but then again . . .:
When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love
Something sneaky to the ear is going on here. When I first heard that line I thought “shadows” was a verb, as if the evening shadows something, but “and” joins “shadows” to “the stars” making that impossible. “appears”/”tears”/years” are the rhyming words. But “stars appear” with “your tears” does something else for the ear. I think it’s the t in “stars” as well as the r that accompanies the r in “your” and the t in “tears” that gives it a sing-ability, a tonal unity good for the singer, good for the listener, and distant for the reader. As Ricks says, “Every song, by definition, is realized only in performance.” I think this can be said of this verse–listen closely to the way Dylan sings it and I think you’ll hear the sounds from those letters mesh into words to create a tone that echoes throughout the song and perhaps the entire cd.
Stars are far, unbelievably so. This comes across in “Unbelievable” when “star” and “far” pair up for the rhyme in the first verse:
It’s unbelievable, it’s strange but true
It’s inconceivable it could happen to you
You go north and you go south
Just like bait in the fish’s mouth
Ya must be livin’ in the shadow of some kind of evil star
It’s unbelievable it would get this far
Unbelievable, too, is the notion that you could be living under an evil star, unless superstition is your thing. But if it is, Dylan undercuts it beginning the next verse:
It’s undeniable what they’d have you to think
It’s indescribable, it can drive you to drink
If I start believing that I’m living under an evil star, I think I will have a drink, indeed it would mean I’ve taken bad things that happen to me a bit too far, maybe as is done when we think of those lovers in Romeo & Juliet as “star-crossed.”
Something masterfully pleasing to the ear is happening in “Shooting Star.” The song consists of four verses, four of which have a shooting star, six because the verse with “star” appears at the beginning and end of each verse. In each verse with a shooting star, “shooting star” shoots through each rhyme. In the first verse, it breaks the “u” rhyme pattern: “you”/”knew”/”through”/”you,” breaking “into another world” in a sense; in the second, the “e” rhyme from “me”/”be”/”see”/”me”/; in the fourth, the “a” in “away/”day”/”say”/”away.” In each, the first and last words of each rhyme are repeated. What’s with the star-less third verse? Well, in it the speaker asks us to “Listen.” The only sight is of people praying. Otherwise, it’s all about what can be heard:
Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing
an engine, bell, the sermon on the mount, a radio. No sighting, just what can be heard. In three out of four verses, a shooting star was seen (“Seen a shooting star tonight”), but in each verse with a shooting star, we are invited to hear the rhymes that “shooting star” frames.
If you’ve never seen a shooting star, which by the way you can’t hear, here’s a video of one with a full moon:
In “Brownsville Girl,” “stars” refers to celebrities. Dylan recalls Gregory Peck, playing a character in a movie, shot in the back:
There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun
and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down
Dylan had his share of being torn down by fans and the media, and the 80′s may very well have been his time to recover from feeling beat down. But this verse, not totally rhyme-less, “bound”/”down” keeping it from being all prose, comes only five years after John Lennon was killed in front of his apartment in NYC, shot in the back by Mark David Chapman. The allusion to it gives the song a mournful feel or rather assists the mournful feel throughout. The mourning continues; forgetting that day is impossible. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be his friend . . . can’t . . . Imagine . . .
“Clean Cut Kid” says Robert Shelton “tells of the savaging of American youth by the Vietnam War.” It’s also a story of what could have been:
He could’ve sold insurance, owned a restaurant or bar
Could’ve been an accountant or a tennis star
The songs pummels the listener with rhymes (my favorite is “choir”/”wire”), and with a hard c sound that underscores the k in kill in each chorus:
They took a clean-cut kid
And they made a killer out of him
That’s what they did
Yes, they did, but based on the lyrics the only one we know he killed for sure was himself:
He was wearing boxing gloves, took a dive one day
Off the Golden Gate Bridge into China Bay
Are the rhymes made to battle alliteration in this song? Something’s at war. But if the only killing in the song is a suicide then it’s a battle inside that’s raging. Perhaps Dylan was telling us back then that a wall like this one would only grow and grow if we don’t stop sending our clear cut kids off to war:
“Jokerman” houses what might very well be the most Romantic (with a capital r) scene in all of Dylan and “stars” plays a role in it:
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face
The role is also a rhyming one, hidden, embedded, internally so with “carved” and “far.”
At the moment that the line with “stars” is sung by Dylan on the official video of the song, an image of Chief Joseph, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, appears. Below is his story:
In “Neighborhood Bully” the word “bully” bullies the rhyming couplets that proceed the ending line of each verse. The last verse, with the rhyme of “stars” with “scars” is no exception:
What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully
So the obvious answer to these questions is a resounding NO! But “bully” is in the neighborhood in this song, ruining the sounds of rhymes, 14 times to be exact, 6 in the first 3 stanzas. If he would just go away, right?, and leave the harmony of rhyming alone? Stop polluting words that just want to be left alone in their own little rhyming world? Well, as Christopher Ricks reminds us, words rhyme only by coincidence and “bully” is only discordant in this song because Dylan, not by coincidence, wants it to stand out even more from its lack of rhyming power. All this choice of words is behind Dylan’s efforts to play with structure to enhance the neighborhood bully metaphor. In this song, “bully” is the star with the scars.
So it was bound to happen that Dylan would refer to the North Star during his Christianizing phase. Here it is in the last stanza of “Man of Peace“:
Somewhere Mama’s weeping for her blue-eyed boy
She’s holding them little white shoes and that little broken toy
And he’s following a star
The same one them three men followed from the East
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace
“star” shines in the middle of the verse, unrhymed at the end of the middle line, like many end of middle line words in this song. Perhaps it shines that much brighter being unrhymed where rhyming is expected. According to EarthSky it, the North Star aka Polaris, is only about the 50th brightest star in the sky, but the organization admits, it “has gladdened the heart of many a lost traveler,”
the traveler in this song being the blued-eyed boy. Dylan, by the way, has blue eyes:
Johnny Cash’s were brown:
In 2003, when Cash died, Dylan called him the North Star, “you could guide your ship by him–the greatest of the greats then and now.”
Michael Gray says that “Covenant Woman” may be “an address of private gratitude to Mary Alice Artes.” If this is the case, she then would be the one who is like a “morning star” in the opening verse:
Covenant woman got a contract with the Lord
Way up yonder, great will be her reward
Covenant woman, shining like a morning star
I know I can trust you to stay where you are
Gray sees a “fusing of spiritual and earthly passion” in the song. I think the reference to “morning star” supports this view. The morning star is Venus who represents love, a love beyond platonic, an erotic love even, tied to fertility and beauty. Artes as the target of gratitude in the song is a figure of love of a different kind, a kind perhaps associated with a passion for “the Lord.” The “Lord”/reward” rhyme is followed by the “star“/”are” one. But all four of those words are linked by the r sound accentuated, too, by the surrounding words “contract,” “her,” “morning,” and “where.” Gray’s word “fusion” is perfect here as these words are fused together by the r sound enhancing a fusion of different kinds of passion.
“A pathway that leads up to the stars” is suggestive of a stairway to heaven, yet “Where Are You Tonight,” which includes that reference to stars offers no easy ticket to paradise, reach for the stars but expect scars:
There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise
Remind me to show you the scars
By rhyming “stars” with “scars,” Dylan conveys that one cannot be achieved without the other. The song goes like that. The forbidden fruit that results in the erotic juice running down his leg is paid for by meeting her boss. Beauty fades while he watches her undrape. A woman he longs for drifts like a satellite. Doubling, the this but that, the at what cost that ties to every pleasure, captured with a rhyme, “stars“/”scars.” There may be no other rhyme in Dylan so riveted to the theme of a song than this one.
The first verse of “One More Cup of Coffee” always has reminded me of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” and “stars” has a helping hand in it. When someone has to compete for someone’s affection life is hard–it’s worse when that competition involves stars:
Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don’t sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above
In Joyce’s story, Gabriel Conroy has to compete with the likes of his wife’s dead paramour, Michael Furey. “It was a person I used to know in Galway,” . . . “He died when he was only seventeen,” . . . “I think he died for me.” With all that revealed,
“a vague terror seizes” Gabriel, and by the end of the story “[h]is soul swooned slowly,” with “both the living and the dead” united by the falling snow.
Here’s the moment when Michael Furey returns to Gretta’ memory when she is at the top of a staircase listening to “The Lass of Aughrim,” from John Huston’s film version of “The Dead”:
In his chapter called “The White Goddess, Desire,” from No Direction Home, Robert Shelton sees “Black Diamond Bay” as a song that deals with the myth of “life as a movie,” that asks of us the questions, “Are we all global village idiots whom television has reduced to voyeurism, and are we “so deadened . . . to catastrophe that we can’t tell a real crisis from a fictional one”?
Then the volcano erupted
And the lava flowed down from the mountain high above
The soldier and the tiny man were crouched in the corner
Thinking of forbidden love
But the desk clerk said, “It happens every day”
As the stars fell down and the fields burned away
On Black Diamond Bay
“stars” has no say in the rhyming matter, but they do seem to be part of the fallout from the catastrophic volcano eruption, no a romantic falling on Alabama this time.
I was sittin’ home alone one night in L.A.
Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothin’ but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn’t seem like much was happenin’,
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear
And there’s really nothin’ anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay
Deadened we are, too, to the fall of stars of the celebrity kind, that also seems to happen every day. We forget though that such a fall is the fall of a man or women, a human being (“O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!). When we become dead to each other we are no longer human, Dylan seems to say in many songs. Maybe Shelton caught on quick to how Dylan keeps us human when are open to the questions his songs ask of us. Why then were we so obsessed with asking questions of the celebrity falling kind when he was always the one with the good questions of the uplifting, humanity elevating kind (“How many road . . .”). Dylan is master at asking questions or rather getting his songs to. His songs read us, his songs listen to us; sometimes we are too busy reading and listening to his songs that we miss how much they ask of us.
Christopher Ricks, in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, comments on Dylan’s love for rhyme– “he loves to play with it, and he loves the complication of it.” Not to be missed is the comedy of it. Ricks’ examples of Dylan’s most amusing rhymes includes one from “Goin’ to Acapulco,” “what the hell/Taj Mahal,” a rhyme that mutters itself, Ricks says, what the hell.
It’s a verse that captures the purpose of The Basement Tapes. The whole album smacks of , “What the hell?” Yeah, life sucks, but it could be worse–the stars are still where we want them to be–up in the sky, not falling down. So go have some fun:
I like Carrie Brownstein’s observation that Dylan’s voice in “Idiot Wind” grows “stronger and more dangerous with each line.” “stars” is used twice in the song, at the midway point and late, and this increasing danger is present in the lines with “stars”–the danger being the speaker’s increasingly damning finger pointing that paints him as the victim. The first time it appears is in the fourth verse:
I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Here “stars” is a rhymed word with “are.” Stars are not shooting here, the visions are, and they are sexual (chestnut mare, bare chest, or lower . . . chestnut hair?). These physical visions are tough to escape, but later in the song what hounds him is more abstract, more profound, harder to overcome:
It’s her memory, all of her, not just the attraction of her body, that he follows, and the stars are comprehensive–blanketing the world above him and around him, not relegated to his head, making him see stars. In this verse the stars are real. Real, too, was how he “came pretty close” to revealing his “personal life, he admitted to Bill Flanagan.
Dylan sang this song in a memorable performance at Colorado State University with Sara Dylan in the audience. The song becoming that much more dangerous:
Dylan wrote “Forever Young” in Tucson, AR around the time he was working with Sam Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He hoped to avoid sentimentality in the song, admitting he was, “thinking of one of [his] boys (Jakob?) and not wanting to be too sentimental. Christopher Ricks feels Dylan gets his wish since the song can’t avoid”sensing something dark that is in the air.” In the first verse, one such line with that sensing includes “stars”:
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young
Ricks argues that the William Blake poem “For Children” (which may or may not have been familiar to Dylan) contains the “dark sensing” that Dylan’s song alludes to. In the Blake poem, “A tiny man mounts a ladder propped against a quarter moon,” and in the background are seven stars, the caption under the illustration at this moment in the poem reads, “I want, I want.”
Better to build ladders directly to the stars, yes? And do it with some humility–Dylan’s song after all is about granting, not wanting (no “I want you” or any one or thing for that matter in this song). It’s about wishes, may you, may you, may you over and over again, and you will never want, in the sense of lack, for nothing.
An epithalamion is a wedding poem, and Dylan’s “Wedding Song” is no exception. More specifically it is a poem written for a bride on her wedding day. It can be written by someone else for a bride and groom on their wedding day or by a groom for his betrothed as is Edmund Spencer’s “Epithalamion.” The speaker will use hyperbole to praise his bride above all other things on earth and urge the time to pass so that bride and groom can consummate their love. Dylan’s song is for Sara, though they had been married for some time when he wrote it. Still what he pledges sounds like vows, freshly cut ones even, as if a page has been turned and the marriage will start anew.
I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love
I love you more than money and more than the stars above
Love you more than madness, more than waves upon the sea
Love you more than life itself, you mean that much to me
Brighter than the evening star (Hesperus) her eyes are. In Dylan’s song, his love for Sara is greater than than the stars, more than love and even life itself.
In No Direction Home, Robert Shelton informs us that “Time Passes Slowly” was written by Dylan for Archibald MacLeish’s play, The Devil and Daniel Webster, which Dylan later backed out of. Ricks says it’s a song whose “rhymes refuse to stay right.” This may be true, but “stars” has no part of any such refusal. The word appears away from any rhyming action in the second verse:
Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin’
We sat in her kitchen while her mama was cookin’
Stared out the window to the stars high above
Time passes slowly when you’re searchin’ for love
Ricks made me stare so much–or rather strain to here it that I noticed starring and star-ing have something going with the sounds in the song. “Stared” begins the line with “starts” in it. “stare is the second word in the line Ricks aims at. But look! Stare even . . . “stars” rhymes with “hard” and “high” rhymes with “right.” What happens when those lines become neighbors?
Not much in the rhyming vein, but the s-sounds become more prominent. s . s . s . s . s . s . s . s . Something’s ticking in this song, namely the s alliteration–time passing slowly. I should have been a pair or ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Yes, Eliot . . . time passes slowly and we fade away.
Robert Shelton says “One More Night” from Nashville Skyline has the feel of an old Bill Monroe song which turned out to be Elvis’s first recording. “Stars” appears in the first line of Dylan’s song,
One more night, the stars are in sight
But tonight I’m as lonesome as can be
Oh, the moon is shinin’ bright
Lighting ev’rything in sight
But tonight no light will shine on me
Neither has a rhyming role, but in both the brightness of stars are in opposition to the darkness the singer feels inside. The real light of their lives is missing or has gone away. They yearn for the return of the light in their lives that has gone out. In both, too, stars take a backseat to the moon. In Dylan’s song, the light in it won’t shine on him–or at least it won’t affect him, or worse, he’s resolved that he won’t feel the light of his lover, at least for one more night (but you know tomorrow can be a long time). In Monroe, there’s more hope, the light may be able to shine on his lover and bring her back. Listen to the quickening pace Monroe uses in this live version to inspire that hope.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
“hidden” and “hide” don’t rhyme though they look like they want to. “moon” and “stars” seem to always want to do something together in song and poetry, but the moon is always closer to the poet; stars are far away. So distance matters. In these two lines, “stars” is closer to the rhyme and gets bragging rights over the moon for being in the line that forces the first rhyme:
The rhyme jumps over the moon. “stars” has the inside track with the rhyme “hide”/inside” (Hide inside Desolation Row?) Not a rhyming starring role for “stars” but it shares the line with “hide.”
Both the moon and stars will be hidden soon (by clouds?, dawn?), but the moon is acted upon–”hidden”–”stars” get to hide of their own volition–they “are beginning to hide.”
Thematically, this fits with “Desolation Row.” Dylan refers to people throughout the song whose ultimate fate is a result of being acted upon (Ophelia) or an action taken (Einstein, Cinderella). I love things hidden by Dylan; I love when Dylan lets things hide.
What is Bob Dylan’s finest love song? Christopher Ricks, under the category of “Faith” (one of the “The Heavenly Graces”) in his book Dylan’s Vision of Sin, thinks it’s “Boots of Spanish Leather.” So I assume he’d give it four stars. The song though has only one:
Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’
It’s the fourth verse, one of the four that begin with “Oh,” and it may be the most heartfelt expression from the, shall I say, male lover who does not want his beloved to depart. Ricks is right that this song is doesn’t ask for anything, and in this verse, the lover would even give up great possessions like stars and diamonds if he had them for just one of her sweet kisses. They’d also be the shiniest stars since they’d be from the darkest night–perhaps the one coming once the Dear John letter arrives in verse seven:
When it comes to cars, where is your Dylan? In the backseat smoking a cigarette?
Behind the wheel?
(Photo by Brad Elterman)
Outside near a car?
Or where he makes things happen inside cars?
Well, whatever one, buckle up and start your engines, because this blog is taking a ride down all the twisting turning roads in all of Bob’s songs where “car(s)” appear.
In Dylan’s most recent videos, cars play prominent roles. In “When the Deal Goes Down,” the always double-barrel beautiful Scarlett Johansson is in a red convertible. A car is used by a woman as a weapon against her abusive mate in “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘” (“cars” is used to rhyme with “ours” in that song). And most recently, in “Duquesne Whistle” a van (okay, not a car) is a source of terrorism for the Charlie Chaplin-esque young lover. Cars are vehicles for many things in Dylan.
Cop cars appear in the next to last verse of “It’s All Good“:
Cold-blooded killer, stalking the town
Cop cars blinking, something bad going down
Buildings are crumbling in the neighborhood
But there’s nothing to worry about, ’cause it’s all good
It’s all good
They say it’s all good
No rhyme with “cars,” but the alliteration in “cop cars” hooks up well with the “Cold” in “Cold-blooded.” Daniel Mark Epstein quotes the same verse from the song to demonstrate how the song is “laugh-out-loud hilarious,” and how Dylan’s voice “was just the right voice for it. Agreed. Just right, too, is a cop car or two to hit home, if it hasn’t already, that “It’s all good” is exactly what it’s not.
According to Daniel Mark Epstein, Bob’s first car was a pink Ford Convertible given to him by his dad after his 16th birthday, “Abe sometimes spoiled his son with gifts.”
Maybe it looked something like this:
And then in 1961, Bob made his famous hitchhiking journey, with two college students, from Madison, WI to NYC, in a four-door Chevrolet Impala:
In 2001′s Love and Theft, Dylan puts Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in a street car named desire:
Well, they’re going to the country, they’re gonna retire
They’re taking a street car named Desire
The rhyme “retire/Desire” that comes from this street car creates an interesting contrast in Dylan’s life. Desire certainly drove him to NYC, becoming “the city that would come to shape my destiny,” Bob says. His desire to see Woody Guthrie, especially fueled him more than anything else. And Bob has never considered retirement it seems (motorcycle accident respite aside), the unending tour proof of his ardent-heartedness, desire countering any impulse to retire. Dee and Dum are two identities in one, two impulses, two roles to play, neither real or only real together, like Robert Zimmerman and Bob Dylan, but both with “their noses to the grindstones.”
“car” and “star” rhyme in “Summer Days.” The star, the celebrity kind that is, not the celestial type, is worn out, or at least called so:
Well I’m drivin’ in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, “You’re a worn-out star”
Later in the song, a car is getting worn out as well:
I got eight carburetors, boys I’m using ’em all
Well, I got eight carburetors and boys, I’m using ’em all
I’m short on gas, my motor’s starting to stall
Being on all cylinders will do that. Summer’s wearing out in this song, too, but the song isn’t, too much jump and energy for that to happen. And the speaker knows a place anyway “where there’s still something’s going on.” Maybe it’s here, the perfect destination for anyone, even a worn out star, drivin’ in the flats in a Cadillac car”:
In “Po’ Boy,” “cars” and stars” rhyme again, but this time “stars” are the ones in the sky and “cars” makes a shift in meaning:
Poor boy in a red hot town
Out beyond the twinklin’ stars
Ridin’ first-class trains—making the rounds
Tryin’ to keep from fallin’ between the cars
These are train cars. The poor boy appears to be jumping from car to car giving the ticket takers and conductors the slip. Yes
Some trains don’t pull no gamblers
No midnight ramblers like they did before
But maybe some still do. If David Mark Epstein is right and this is a ballad about wealth, then the Po’ Boy is the poster boy for poverty making the rounds, gambling, and rambling with the police at his back. Stars shine again in this song, at the end with the Po’ Boy washing dishes and feeding swine, the epilogue to, or worse, the mere afterthought of a knock-knock joke.
“Honest With Me” has “car” in it but it’s unrhymed:
I’m crashin’ my car, trunk first into the boards
The line is amusing though in the visual–intentional use of one’s trunk to crash into anything is worth a grin, chagrin for the recipient, boards it is in this song.
The 90′s is a “car“-less decade for Dylan. Three times the word appears in 1986′s “Brownsville Girl.” If I’m being honest (with me) I’d have to admit that when I first heard this song I thought knocked-out loaded was exactly the condition Dylan must have been in when he wrote it. I thought that for awhile. And then the likes of Michael Gray and Stephen Scobie set me straight, and I started to see why so many put this song on their list of his greatest. Gray’s observation especially that “uncertain crossings of one sort of another are a recurrent motif in “‘Brownsville Girl‘” raised my awareness of its depth.
“car” helps to make those “uncertain crossings” happen, geographically,
Well, we drove that car all night into San Anton’
with time,
Well, we’re drivin’ this car and the sun is comin’ up over the Rockies
and emotionally,
And she don’t want to remind me. She knows this car would go out of control
No rhyming with “car” but Dylan uses it well as a vehicle for those crossings Gray speaks of that make it a work of art.
Below is a terrific clip from Both Ends of the Rainbow with Ira Ingber discussing the making of it:
In 1983, Dylan once said about the song, “Shot of Love,” “It defines where I am at spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie . . . It’s all there in that one song.”
I always take what Dylan says with a grain of salt (every grain even, salt and sand), but If I pretend he meant this, “car“‘s place in this song ramps up a bit:
What makes the wind wanna blow tonight?
Don’t even feel like crossing the street and my car ain’t actin’ right
Called home, everybody seemed to have moved away
My conscience is beginning to bother me today
“car” is parked away from the rhyme, “”away”/”today” but it adds to the sense of being stuck and in need of a shot of love. The speaker can’t move while everyone else seems to be, away that is. Spiritually, this song smacks of an existential angst, a parting from the absolutes from Slow Train and Saved. Everything’s not broken, but they “ain’t actin’ right, that’s for sure. Musically and romantically? I get–the reggae/gospel sound he liked during this period, and who hasn’t been in need of a shot of love. Spiritually speaking though, this song and this verse are an indictment of a religion with all the answers or rather of religion that makes questions unnecessary. What makes the wind want to blow tonight? Maybe to keep those answers just far enough away from our mortal grasp.
Dylan live singing “Shot of Love” with his gospel gang:
In “Hurricane,” the car plays a major role as evidence against the defendant, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter:
Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops
Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just out prowlin’ around
He said, “I saw two men runnin’ out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”
And the cops are puttin’ the screws to him, lookin’ for somebody to blame“Remember that murder that happened in a bar?”“Remember you said you saw the getaway car?”
“You think you’d like to play ball with the law?”“Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw runnin’ that night?”
In the second verse, “car” rhymes with “bar,” linking arguably the two most important settings in this “movie” song together. “car” drives through the song as well what with the presence of it in the first three letters in Carter’s name.
Dylan knew the power words have. So did Carter. I’m going to let him have the final words here:
“Words are about the most powerful drugs knows to men.”
Carter’s Car: “a white car with out-of-state plates”
We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best
She turned around to look at me
As I was walkin’ away
I heard her say over my shoulder
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”
Tangled up in blue
The abandoned car sets up the splitting up between lovers that affects the pursuit throughout the song. As Carrie Brownstein says of “Tangled,” It is an American story of humble beginnings, with far-reaching hopes and colossal disappointments. At the start, the loves and the narrator himself occupy a cohesive space. But the context begins to shift and unravel . . . The song sets up the album [Blood on the Tracks] as a series of fractures . . .”
Michael Gray noticed the “rhyming spill-over towards the end of each verse.” He adds, “As we listen to the song, these short spill-overs become more and more stabbing in their emotional effect as they as they become at the same time more and more agile and clever as rhymes. “
In the above verse, I think “it”/”split” and “say”/”away are examples of what Gray means. “car” is not involved, but it does assist the theme of spilling over, or the inevitability of it when something is driven as far as it can go, over the line, right into the next.
When I hear “Idiot Wind,” the line, “Smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door” won’t leave my head for hours. It’s just the way Dylan sings it or maybe the image or the words arranged for blunt impact:
There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcardoor.
I’m singing it in my head now . . . and will the rest of the day, with no rhyme needed to keep it there. Here’s a boxcar:
In #Rainy Day Women” #12 & 35,” a car is just another place to get stoned:
Well, they’ll stone you and say that it’s the end
Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll come back again
They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car
They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar
Yes, but I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
Michael Coyle and Debra Rae Cohen remind us though that the “‘Getting stoned’ here is a public stoning, tied to musical performance.” “car” rhyming with “guitar” in this verse aims the stoning at Dylan. Dylan tells us that “Sometimes the ‘you’ in my songs is me talking to me.” That said, having performed this song often as the last of his encores, Dylan unites both the audience (those about to get in their cars and maybe come back again, with him saying it’s the end with his encore and playing his guitar while doing so–rhymes uniting words creating fiction that is life.
Here’s Dylan with The Grateful Dead playing it at MSG in 1994:
In the first stanza of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “streetcar” pulls up again in the sixth line, not as a noun though, but as an adjective describing the lady’s kind of visions:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
No hint of a rhyme, but if that streetcar is desire again, how beautiful to have visions of desire placed “on the grass.” According to the Oxford Dictionary of World Histories, the word “car” was mainly poetic and conveyed splendour and solemnity, from Latin carrum, carrus meaning a wheeled vehicle. I can only imagine with what splendour and solemnity this sad-eyed lady would place her desires on grass; with “flesh like silk” and a “face like glass” what an image that would be.
The speaker in “Talkin World War III” steals a car, a Cadillac to be exact:
Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown
And there was nobody aroun’
I got into the driver’s seat
And I drove down 42nd Street
In my Cadillac. Good car to drive after a war
We have the location, too, 42nd Street. “car” and “war” don’t rhyme, but to the eye they appear to internally in the last line. Good car to drive after a war? But “car” comes before “war” in this verse. Let’s turn it around: Good “war” to drive after a “car.” Just havin’ some fun, like Dylan did with this song.
Dylan live at Newport Folk Festival introduced by Peter Yarrow in 1963 (he sings “car” twice in this verse):
Walking is what Bob’s doing with Suze on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with cars parked on the streets of NYC in the background. On “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” he doesn’t even want a car–he prefers walking:
Lord, I ain’t goin’ down to no race track
See no sports car run
I don’t have no sports car
And I don’t even care to have one
I can walk anytime around the block
World War III changes things–he’s alone stealing a car in NYC in that song, where
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
In Bob Dylan’s Blues” “car” is unrhymed, “run” rhymes with “one,” but “one” refers to a car. On the cover he doesn’t seem to want to be “one,” “walkin around with no one else that is,” but together, smiling, walking with Suze.
In “Talking New York,” “car” rhymes with “guitar” again as in “Rainy Day Women“:
I swung onto my old guitar
Grabbed hold of a subway car
And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride
I landed up on the downtown side
Greenwich Village
Robert Shelton sees the song modeled after Woody Guthrie’s “Talkin’ Subway.” What I like about that is the connection between the two songs having subway cars prompting movement. Dylan grabs hold of one, Guthrie follows people running down to catch one:
Nothing more New York than its underground subways. I just really love that Dylan and Guthrie are united in making them a part of their NYC experience.
Below is a photo inside a NYC subway in the 60′s by Bernard Safran. Follow the link beneath it to see more photos from Safron of the NYC Dylan saw from 62-72.
“Midnight” is the next rhyming word from “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.’” I could see Dylan doing a theme-time radio show on it. Several like Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” Clapton’s “After Midnight,” The Rolling Stones’ “Midnight Rambler,” Lionel Hampton’s “Midnight Sun,” and maybe my favorite midnight tune, “Midnight Special” by Credence come immediately to my mind. (Dylan’s first professional recording experience was playing harmonica on the title track of Harry Belfonte’s album Midnight Special.)
I think Dylan would have a special place in his mind with “midnight” what with the liminal status associated with it from Cinderella. It was the time after all, when she returned to her former identity–perhaps a nightmarish thought for Dylan (midnight as death) who has spent his life stripping himself of one mask after another: “mask-erading.”
In “Beyond Here,” midnight comes across as the time that reveals more Cormac McCarthy-like desolation to what lies out there, out of reach. It’s rhyming partner is “without it,” or rather the “mid” in midnight is “without it”‘s rhyming partner, with the “t” sound like a bell tolling at the end of each line (a sneaky non-rhyme really), and at first it feels like he does not know what to do without midnight:
I’m movin’ after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don’t know what to do without it
An interesting fleeting thought–what would any of us do without midnight?–but it’s
“Without this love that we call ours” and all that that means (see the video) that would result in incomprehensible loss.
Tempest‘s “Soon After Midnight,” is the only Dylan song with “midnight” in its title. It took him fifty years to get it in one. It also is part of the chorus of the song, “It’s soon after midnight,” “It’s” added to force an internal rhyme. Something else is going on with it though in terms of rhyme as the song progresses freeing it from just the internal repetitive rhyme. “Midnight” is used four times in the song; the last three times, Dylan uses the words, “”eye,” “mink,” and “think,” to rhyme with both “i” sounds found in “midnight.” My favorite line in the song is “And I’ve got a date with a fairy queen.” Now this could just be plans to read Spenser’s epic (though it’s not capitalized), but as far as real fairy queens go, Titania fits the bill. In this song, she works, too, with an “i” sound that matches “midnight”‘s, the way an internal rhyme might. But she’s not there or her name isn’t, so her name is a rhyme not there, but there if “fairy queen” lets her enter your mind. The whole song for me is a bit dreamy, the ways things are in A Midsummer night’s Dream, where nothing is at it seems, especially Bottom’s Dream.
“When the Deal Goes Down” uses “midnight” as an adjective describing the kind of rain that follows the train: “The midnight rain follows the train,” assisting, too, another internal rhyme. This song that can’t get away from the “deal going down” (it ends every stanza)–death is the ultimate separation,
We live and we die, we know not why
But I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
Likewise, the train can’t stop a rain linked to at the very least to the ending of a day, but likely the end of our days.
Hard to avoid visions of paradise in “Beyond the Horizon.” The way Dylan describes it who’d not want to go there right now. There it’s easy to love, love waits forever for everyone, and people pray for your soul. Get me a ticket–no slow train. . . . Duquesne Express, please. “midnight” finds itself in the middle of a line again in this song, internally rhyming side by side with “side.” Midnight is when something’s gonna happen–entities separated will be united:
Beyond the horizon across the divide
‘Round about midnight, we’ll be on the same side
Down in the valley the water runs cold
Beyond the horizon someone prayed for your soul
What can’t ‘scape my mind is the word “chime” is also in this song. Shakespeare used “chimes” just once in all his plays and it’s linked up with “midnight” to form a memorable phrase from Falstaff:
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow. (HIV.III.II.2067)
Can’t help but think that the phrase was on Dylan’s mind when he used both words in the same song. Hearing those chimes at midnight with Falstaff meant some good, late night frolics. But Hal must separate himself from his drinking buddy to become HenryV. Beyond the horizon, maybe they hear those chimes together again.
Below is a link to the Orson Welles film on the Henry plays called Chimes at Midnight. Within the first 1:15 the phrase above is spoken. It’s worth a look just t see Welles, but note the nostalgia for good ole times–going back to them, dream-like . . . like a Bob Dylan dream where you’d hear
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that
“chimes” and “midnight” appear in “Chimes of Freedom,” too. In this song the sound of the bell is broken or maybe it’s “like the fading sound of bells in the distance” or “more of a knell than a chime,” as Dalton says, but the flashing replaces the impact of sound, sound illuminating, a synesthesia effect on behalf of but maybe also to reveal “the warriors whose strength is not to fight,” “the refugees on the unarmed road of flight,” and “each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night”:
Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Broken, too, is any end of line rhyming in those first four lines, but not the chiming of the short vowel sounds in “finish”/”midnight’s,” “ducked”/”thunder,” “Seeming”/”freedom.” . . . “bewilderment in the highest degree”? Sure, but in a good way.
“midnight” modifies the moon and a train on “Standing in the Doorway,” but (mid)–night train/my veins” may be the best damn rhyme on the whole Time Out of Mind album:
“Trying to Get to Heaven” is on my list of top ten Dylan songs. It’s tone is carried through so perfect and Dylan’s voice soothes while it aches from the “air is getting hotter” right to Sugartown. Fittingly, “midnight” appears in the last of five stanzas. Death may not the end but midnight is and for a person trying to get anywhere, let alone heaven, before the door is closed, midnight might just be the deadline. But “midnight” is not a specific time in this song; it just describes a rambler and it’s not involved in any rhyme:
Some trains don’t pull no gamblers
No midnightramblers like they did before
A rambler is an individual on a peaceful walk. A Middle Dutch derivation of the word though refers it to as animal wandering about in heat”–an interesting link to a song that begins, “The air is getting hotter.”
In his chapter on ‘Hope” in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, Ricks refers to “Can’t Wait” as one of Bob’s”how much longer” songs. From the title, how much longer he can’t wait clashes with the ending of just about every stanza when he either says “And” or “But” “I don’t know how much longer I can wait.” Can/Can’t what’s the difference, right? Well, when you say you can’t wait for something eager anticipation is involved, saying you can wait implies a kind of take or leave it, leaning on the leave it.
“midnight” appears in the first stanza where can’t and can waiting are both present, the first at the beginning (repeating the title) and the latter at the end:
I can’t wait, wait for you to change your mind
It’s late, I’m trying to walk the line
Well, it’s way past midnight and there are people all around
Some on their way up, some on their way down
The air burns and I’m trying to think straight
And I don’t know how much longer I can wait
The “can’t wait” seems more literal–he literally can’t wait–there’s an urgency, but not one tied to anticipation. Something’s about to happen. It’s way past midnight–and people going up or down suggest a waiting for judgment that’s a result of the tolling of the midnight bell. The burning air is ominous, portending a descent rather than an airlift. “midnight“‘s not involved with any rhymes, but each end of the line is, and this song seems about being at the end of the line or one’s line, or rope, though if the line’s long enough maybe he’ll just have to wait, or we will; it’s a long song, can’t wait for it to end . . . how much longer . . . or can’t wait for the end, can’t wait, can wait. Gotta go, can’t wait.
On Empire Burlesque, “midnight” appears twice, once in “Something’s Burning, Baby” and in “Dark Eyes.,” the last two songs of the album, the midnight of it, if you will. In “Something’s Burning,” “midnight” modifying”train” is not included in the rhyme, but “train” is:
Got to start someplace, baby, can you explain?
Please don’t fade away on me, baby, like the midnighttrain
In “Dark Eyes, a song Shelton calls “an affirmation of love’s transcendence in a painful world,” “midnight” describes the moon:
Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside
They’re drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide
“midnight“ helps perspective in both songs. A midnight train does fade for someone on the platform watching it disappear into the night. A midnight moon shines bright off the water when one sees it in the distance perhaps from a concert stage (Ricks makes much ado about the last line of the song referring to the eyes Dylan sees at every performance) near a, river (riverside) lake or park. And the singer is about to slide, slide out?, the crowd is thinning out, and he’s just about to do the same? On stage, removed, from another world (where one stands seems to matter in this song: “They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.), the world he sings to is separate from his:
I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls and all I see are dark eyes
In 1997, Dylan said, “When I’m up there, I just see faces. A face is a face, they are all the same” (Ricks 490). Singing about life and death every night, which truth be told he does, better sometimes to lift those eyes to that unique midnight moon above/beyond the sameness of dark eyes.
In “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “creep” rhymes with “leap,” two nicely juxtaposed contrasting movements. It’s “creep” that finds “midnight” in front of it though, not leap, which would make the lines with that rhyme less open to interpretation:
Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful, bounding leap
And, foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst
Really, it’s the word “make” that causes interesting problems. A person can make a low to the ground movement, because he would rather not be noticed. So “midnight” describes the time of the creeping. And this makes sense in the song, being that this is no home but a brothel Frankie Lee goes to (creeps) for sixteen nights . . . days, too. But Frankie may have turned those days into nights (“moral desert,” Shelton calls it), succumbing to temptations of the flesh. So Frankie Lee may have made his midnight go slower, move gradually, to the tune of 16 days worth of midnight.
Not sure if anything is revealed by this; even the little creep who carries Frank Lee’s body to its grave concealing his guilt while doing, says, “‘Nothing is revealed,’” just what someone who creeps or a creep would want, perhaps especially around midnight.
Here’s the audio of Bob singing it live in London in 2000 sometime within 24 hours of midnight:
I have listened to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” many a time; as an undergraduate, I even recall writing about it in a T.S. Eliot class with Christopher Ricks, so when I recently listened to it and then saw “midnight rug,” I think I just chalked it up as just one of those far-reaching psychedelia Blonde on Blonde moments that would evade me. Maybe it didn’t help that rug rhymed with drugs (“midnight” playing bridesmaid again to the rhyming word):
With your childhood flames on your midnight rug
And your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs
But then I googled “midnight rug” just to see what would happen. I was surprised to find that I could buy a midnight rug if I wanted to–midnight is a color. Now, who knows what Dylan meant by the phrase, but in any event for me he advanced the range of midnight‘s meanings–and I kind of like the color, it’s, wouldn’t you know it, dark, black, and look what it does for a rug:
Daniel Mark Epstein, in The Ballad of Bob Dylan reports that on the night Allen Ginsberg died Dylan, on stage at the time, sang “Desolation Row” on his behalf. He told his audience that it was one of Ginsberg’s favorite songs–perhaps especially for what it said to him in its eighth stanza about the education system , as Michael Gray puts it, “organized to enforce and perpetuate ignorance, a nightmarish machinery . . .”
I can’t find a video or recording of that moment (if anyone can, please let me know or feel free to post it in a comment) and I would someday love to hear it. I wonder for instance how Bob sounded that night when he sang that eighth verse,
Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
It’s got “midnight” in it, no rhyme involved, just the word perhaps tolling a bell this time, for his friend, rounded up that night, brought to the eternal factory, etc., etc. I just wonder what Bob’s own words meant to him when he sang them for his friend that night, probably not too far from midnight.
Christopher Ricks sees the darker side of “Love Minus Zero, No Limit” coming out in the last verse that begins with the image of that midnight bridge trembling:
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
Ricks asks, “[W]ho (it may be wondered with a slight tremble ) can be out there at this time of night?” Yes, there’s something deeply dark about the song’s ending,” and it is “midnight” that helps kick it off. Ricks aims at the un-rhyming of “perfection” and “hammer” as indicative of a feeling in the song that moves from admiration of the woman’s aloofness to “a need that she not be so strong.”
Though “midnight” is an un-rhymed word as well, short and long “i” sounds permeate almost every line in the verse, creating a dark blanket of midnight from beginning to end. Shelton doesn’t think the “ominous images . . . mar the tranquility that the love object exudes,” but Jean Tamarin observes how it “expresses a yearning that’s always disappointed.” “midnight,” real “midnight”–time of almost night “midnight” and Dylan seem to like going to the dark side together.
Here’s Bob singing it live from the Rolling Thunder Review:
