73. Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You

The Nashville Skyline song is all well and good—and it really is good—but Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You appears in my top hundred because of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

The performance that opens Columbia’s fifth volume of the Bootleg Series (though it never actually served as a concert opener; that was always the more easygoing When I Paint My Masterpiece) is more of a scream, more of a cataract flinging itself out over the rocks of a mountain, than it is a song. Indeed it contains what I think is Dylan’s finest recorded scream, “I can hear that lonesome whistle blow” the second time he sings it, after the sparkling Mick Ronson-led instrumental breakdown between the (lyrically identical) ultimate and penultimate verses. Throughout the song Dylan’s voice is bursting and crackling like the “rolling thunder” he ascribes to his audience, shooting for the aether on “I left my dreams on the riverbed” or the “lonesome” in the first “I can hear the lonesome whistle blow,” but he keeps his voice always just under control, balancing every explosive vocalization with a return to melody.

It is a tour de force vocal performance, and must be one of Dylan’s best, and we’re really lucky to have it professionally recorded from the soundboard. It’s the only 1975 performance of Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You so captured; the one counter-example I have in my iPod classic storehouse of bootlegged live Dylan is much tamer, so we’re all the luckier that Dylan’s heart and vocal cords just so happened to align with the presence of the recording crew on December 4^th in Montreal.

It’s also a near-total rewrite of Dylan’s 1969 original. On Nashville Skyline, the narrator was a man addressing a woman, whereas in 1975 he’s clearly a performer addressing those who’ve come to hear him play. “I could have left this town by noon,” the narrator says, like a veteran of the tour circuit, “by tonight I’d have been to someplace new. But,” he goes on, “I was feeling a little bit scattered / And your love was all that mattered / So tonight I’ll be staying here with you.” The audience in Montreal goes crazy. And Dylan adds, as if in response, “Get ready! ‘cause tonight…”

Of all the different kinds of love that Dylan has sung about throughout his career, this is the one that I can only imagine, never having experienced it myself and almost certainly never going to. I think of the line in Tough Mama, “the world of illusion is at my door.” How ought we put that winter ’73 line together with these from summer ’75? Dylan sings Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You to the Rolling Thunder Revue crowds without a hint of reservation. Is he deep in that world of illusion, then? Or was the illusion he was afraid of a year and a half before not as total as he expected? Is there something indeed to be said for the love between the crowd and the star? Or is Dylan taking the love he feels for his band and infusing it into lyrics addressed to the audience? “Is it really any wonder / The changes we put on each other’s heads? / You came down on me like rolling thunder,” Dylan proclaims with all the passion he can muster; “I left my dreams on the riverbed.”

Are the dreams he’s leaving behind those of married life, of life at home? If that’s so, the rewritten version of Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You carries the exact opposite message of the Nashville Skyline song. Remembering what happened to poor Lay, Lady, Lay in 1976 (see Hard Rain: “Forget this dance / Let’s go upstairs! / Let’s take a chance / Who really cares? … It’s all in your eyes and the way that you move … You can have love but you might lose it”), I’d say it’s not unlikely. Speaking of world-beloved, once-tender songs rewritten to turn against their originals, see George Harrison’s disillusioned and debauched Something (“…in the way she moves it”) live in 1974 on the fantastic (for listeners, if not for the hurting frontman) Dark Horse tour.

My iPod Classic turns up a late performance from New Britain, Connecticut, on August 29th, 2006. The lyrics have reverted to the Nashville Skyline text. It’s a calm performance, but beautifully played, with Dylan’s wonderful organ lead all through the song, and a terrific gritty guitar break courtesy of Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman, and a cool swinging drumbeat from George Receli, and great vocals. If the Rolling Thunder Revue Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You sounds twenty times better to me than the Nashville Skyline original (so numerical value = 20), I’d say this Connecticut performance is a solid eight.

74. This Wheel's on Fire

There’s something in the ominous tone of the Basement Tapes version of this song—and the music is not Dylan’s but Rick Danko’s, making the song, incidentally, something of a prototype for T Bone Burnett’s Lost on the River—that brings to mind late Murakami Haruki novels. Maybe it’s how, in the verses, it’s clear that there’s a looming threat, but unclear where exactly the threat lies, as if sinister things were happening just out of sight. I think of the great climax in the middle of 1Q84, when Aomame and Tengo are living through the same storm, one deep in enemy territory and one peacefully at home and in good company, yet both seized by the same tense, frightful, and mysterious mood. In that scenario, the verses of This Wheel’s on Fire would be Tengo’s: nothing much seems to be happening, nothing wrong you could point to exactly, but there’s something heavy going on somewhere, something you should know about.

Come to think of it, another reason 1Q84 comes to mind is the ending of the third verse: “And after every plan had failed / And there was nothing more to tell / You knew that we would meet again / If your memory served you well.”

The nearest we get in the verses to an outright threat is in the beginning of the third: “You’ll remember you’re the one / That called on me to call on them / To get you your favors done.” But even that is rather distant, the narrator only a middleman. More threatening is “I was going to confiscate your lace / And wrap it up in a sailor’s knot / And hide it in your case”—or not. Instead we get images of waiting (“I’m going to unpack all my things / And sit before it gets too late”), of uncertainty (“If I knew for sure that it was yours… / But it was oh so hard to tell”), of defeat (“every plan had failed”). You’d think it’d be a song of calm, like Open the Door, Homer, or I’m Not There (1956), but it isn’t, it’s a song of creeping gloom.

But the refrains are another thing entirely. They offset the murk and confusion of the verses with stark imagery: “This wheel’s on fire / Rolling down the road / Best notify my next of kin / This wheel shall explode.” Lyrically, it doesn’t explode altogether, it only will; musically, there’s a clear exclamation in the final line. Something is building: rolling, gaining speed: and soon to peak in intensity, to reach its culmination, and to go up in smoke. And the refrain is as bright as the verses are dark. The verses recall Ballad of a Thin Man, and the refrain, well, Like a Rolling [Wheel].

As a listener, I don’t need the Basement Tapes songs to cohere lyrically, since I love the alternate way they communicate, in glimpses, suggestions, non sequiturs, and jokes, and since musically they are very much whole. Here the atmosphere and the wording of the refrain seem to call up Dylan’s 1966, his drug-fueled tour, the pace he could no longer maintain, and above all the motorcycle accident that gave him the time and the excuse to get away, to be with his family, to gather the Band and play in Big Pink. But it’s all done with a wink of the eye and a tip of the hat towards some masked or faceless guest. If it’s just a motorcycle, why only one wheel? Where’s the rest of the machine? Might this not also have something to do with the flaming wheelwork of Ezekiel 10:6? John Wesley Harding was mere weeks away, after all.

The Band, with co-writer Danko on lead vocals, do a hopped-up version that sits well as the penultimate track of Music from Big Pink, Robbie Robertson’s distinctive guitar licks climbing all up and down the walls, the upbeat arrangement clearing the air like a good clap of thunder before the album closes with I Shall Be Released.

For me, though, better than either the 1967 Basement Tapes runthrough with Bob or the 1968 studio version without, is Ray Padgett’s favorite version of This Wheel’s on Fire, live in Burlington, Vermont on April 17^th, 1996. The five-piece band play like ghouls, hobbling towards the darkness of the song and leaving the light behind. J. J. Jackson and Bucky Baxter sing the refrain together with Bob but do it low and slow and hazy, so that the explosion sung of is no bigger than the last swath of bright color in a fading sunset. The electric guitars crunch through the performance like giants leaving footprints in the snow.

As someone unfamiliar with the latter years of Bob onstage (but this will be changing!) I don’t see why Winston Watson has a reputation of banging through songs. Here he treads carefully, loud when the ghouls are hungry and soft the rest of the time, especially when Dylan begins the verses with a lonesome, quiet howl; at those moments Watson sounds like Dylan’s shadow, or echo.

Grandest of all is Dylan’s harmonica, which keens like the lost soul of the company’s foremost ghoul, the one who had the most to regret in the life he left behind. The long harmonica solo, the centerpiece of the performance, is off-kilter and sharp like the mountaintops on the wasteland horizon, and the band trundle after it desperately, helplessly, and the mixture is sublime.

So thank you very much, Ray Padgett. And if you reading this happen to be a Dylan aficionado who's not aware of Ray's Flagging Down the Double E's series, I recommend it: brief, thoughtful, and inventive reflections on interesting and often unheralded corners of Dylan's career.

75. Mr. Tambourine Man

This write-up is dedicated to Isaiah Hoffman.

I value my ethereal impressions of this song as a sort of collective idea more than I do any particular version, as I’ve never heard one that takes me to the place I can imagine an ideal version of the song taking me. Lacking a go-to, I resort to the Bringing It All Back Home take, with Bruce Langhorne on electric adorning Dylan’s performance with unobtrusive high notes. Mr. Tambourine Man was played solo on the ’75 Rolling Thunder Revue with a strumming pattern that I don’t find especially effective, and with a voice too weary to convey the openness to life and its potential wonders that animates the song. By 1975, Bob sounds like he’s been on that “magic swirling ship,” and decided that what he’d seen from up there wasn’t all he’d expected it to be. (Ralf Sauter points out that by 1997, the “magic swirling ship” has “been split to splinters” and is “sinking fast.”)

Considering, however, that Mr. Tambourine Man has been played seven hundred times in the “determined to stand” years alone, and another two hundred before ’88, there’s probably some absolutely immaculate rendering out there somewhere. I expect I’ll find it one day. I think Eyolf Østrem's favorite is from autumn 1978. If the Bootleg Series people mine that rich vein down the line, maybe they’ll pre-empt my years of searching.

Mr. Tambourine Man was, arguably, Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, in the traditional sense of the word: “a piece of work presented to a medieval guild as evidence of qualification for the rank of master.” Stunners like Blowin’ in the Wind and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall had been set, approximately, to music by others, but Mr. Tambourine Man is an all-Dylan original, the music and words both his. That fully original style of songwriting (insofar as anything is ever fully original) is what Dylan would stick to from the mid-’60s until the turn of the century, when he decided to loosen the musical side of things again. As far as I’m aware, the only exception in the thirty-five years between was Blind Willie McTell.

I hear Mr. Tambourine Man as simultaneously an invitation to the muse (the narrator asking to be consecrated, as opposed, in Tough Mama, to re-initiated) and as a mission statement. It’s the narrator saying, “I’m ready”—or as the song beautifully puts it, “I’m not sleepy / And there is no place I’m going to,” none but that to which the title character, the embodiment of the spirit of music played for its own or for joy’s sake, will lead him.

It’s a young man’s song. “My weariness amazes me,” which is true, but comparing the songs in years ahead—Love Rescue Me, Standing in the Doorway, Highlands—puts this weariness in perspective. The narrator is tired of everything but his own destiny. Fate is a mantle that the narrator understands has been prepared for him (“Well, I knew I was young enough,” Dylan would write two or three years later, “And I knew there was nothing to it”), and he understands that right now is the time to pick it up and wear it.

It’s a song that lays out the plan Dylan never veered too far off from in the years to come: “Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun / It isn’t aimed at anyone / It’s just escaping on the run / And but for the sky there are no fences facing.” His days of being a prophet, a protest singer, a spokesman for his generation, were done; henceforth (with one exceptional break in 1979-1980: “I don’t particularly regret telling people how to get their souls saved. I don’t particularly regret any of that,” he told an interviewer in 1983) he would be just a musician, a “ragged clown” that you needn’t “pay … any mind,” chasing a shadow.

It’s a redemptive song, for though the journeys that the music will send the musicmaker on may take him through “the smoke rings in my mind / Down the foggy ruins of time,” and though along the way will be “frozen leaves” and “haunted, frightened trees,” the destination is out beyond all of these, “far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.” It’s a vision of music as something that can scoop its maker out of the darkness and into a moment when the maker can “forget about today until tomorrow.” As any musician who’s ever been transported by the music they were creating knows, that's exactly what can happen.

The melody line in the verses is a wonderful construction, wandering down as many times as Dylan wants it to, and indeed stretching out longer in both halves of the final verse than in any of the verse-segments before, so that the listener hangs on every phrase, on every image, until the lines finally reach the alternate melody that finishes the thought.

76. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

When I first heard You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere, in the company of its Basement Tape brethren, I was twenty-one years old, nursing a two-year-old heartache that would last another three years. I was certain I would be alone always, unmoved by my mother’s well-intended recital of the old Polish proverb, which went something like, “Do każdego śmierdziela przyjdzie w końcu niedziela,” which might be translated as “For every foul beast, there will come a feast,” or else, “Even for a rank thing, the church bells shall ring”—you get the idea.

To hear Dylan sing “Oo-wee, ride me high / Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come” was welcome, and immensely touching. Though it felt like a kingdom closed to me, I was glad of so pure a glimpse.

That refrain line is the ecstatic high point of a song in which the narrator repeatedly assures his bride, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” a phrase that though in ordinary circumstances has something of a threat in it (as in the angry father speaking to a child who wishes for the scolding to end, “Excuse me, where do you think you’re going?!”), here it’s a warm invitation, and a promise that the narrator will be faithful and true—“You ain’t goin’ nowhere” because you’ll always be right by my side—an inversion that recalls When I Get My Hands on You from Lost on the River.

Elsewhere we have “Strap yourself to the tree with roots,” and the entire beautiful run of opening images, which anticipate one of the crown jewels of Abbey Road, Here Comes the Sun, a song that, as Tom Petty put it, has “that little bit of ache in it that makes the happiness mean even more.” In Harrison’s song, the lyrics are, “It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter … it feels like years since [the sun]’s been here.” In Dylan’s economical phrases, we have “Clouds so swift / Rain won’t lift / Gate won’t close / Railings froze,” then a glorious unspoken but, and “Get your mind off wintertime / You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” The narrator has been waiting for his bride a long time—all (both literal and figurative?) winter long. But tomorrow—as soon as tomorrow—tomorrow!—she’ll be here.

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere has a little masterpiece of a verse: “Genghis Khan, he could not keep / All his kings supplied with sleep / But we’ll climb that hill, no matter how steep / When we come up to it.” There’s the soundplay, first of all. You have the ‘k’ sound traveling along from ‘Khan,’ on through ‘could,’ ‘keep,’ ‘kings,’ ‘climb,’ all the way to ‘come.’ Then you have the ‘keep-sleep-steep’ end-rhyme, and the internal rhymes, which are marvelous: the ‘ghis’ of ‘Genghis’ meeting its mate in ‘his’ and near-mate in ‘kings;’ the ‘up’ of the first syllable in ‘supplied’ reaching over to the ‘up’ of ‘come up;’ the ‘lied’ of ‘supplied’ answered with assonance in ‘climb.’ Then there is the playful hiding of ‘lie’ (as in ‘lie down’) in ‘supplied,’ a chance to lie down being precisely what the emperor is unable to supply. Equally frustrating for the kings—for whom I personally read the warlords Genghis gathered under his banner rather than the foreign monarchs he subdued—is that, having outlined their plight, the narrator goes on to tease them with images not of the horizontal surfaces on which they would like to lie down, but of near-vertical ones, “no matter how steep.” Finally, “come up to it”—say that phrase at a clop, over and over, and what will you hear? The gallop of the horses the kings ride at their emperor’s behest.

A separate issue is how moving “We’ll climb that hill, no matter how steep / When we come up to it” is in the context of “Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s going to come.” The assurance in these words is not weak optimism, or procrastination, but an encouragement to take heart, like “Get your mind off wintertime.” There will be hills to climb, the narrator tells his bride; but not quite yet. First it’s time for the wedding, and perhaps a spell in the easy chair—later, there will be hills, but no need to worry even then, for we will climb them together, “no matter how steep.” Not an isolated “I” or an isolated “you” anymore but “we,” and that much stronger and more capable for the union.

Our narrator understands that marriage is not a single smooth road. But this understanding doesn’t keep him from celebrating what it is now time (or, more accurately, will tomorrow be time) to celebrate.

For another take on this theme, see the song Dreamer, a hard-won masterpiece, by Keinan Abdi Warsame.

The classic Take 2 from the Basement Tapes is my You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere go-to, but the farm porch pickers’ 1971 edition, recorded for Greatest Hits Vol. II, is also wonderful. Happy Traum provides lovely light accompaniment on banjo and harmonies, while Dylan significantly improves the vocal melodies and shuffles around the lyrics, adding a wink and a poke at his friend Roger McGuinn. My old iPod classic has a live performance in Nashville from April 26^th, 2003, featuring Dickie Landry on unexpectedly fitting tenor saxophone. Strike another notch in favor of the “determined to stand” era: this 2003 version is every bit as bouyant and charming as the original version with the Band.

Oh yes, one more thing I want to say. As Nick Cave put it, “Songs are divinely constituted organisms. They have their own integrity. As flawed as they may be, the souls of the songs must be protected at all costs.”

Take a song like this, with all its breathtaking faith in the power and joy of marriage. Then take Idiot Wind, take You’re a Big Girl Now, take If You See Her, Say Hello, or take Is Your Love in Vain?, songs that are separated from You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere by approximately a decade. Hold up these latter songs of heartbreak and misery, and point to You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere, and say “Well?” To that I quote Nick: “Songs have their own integrity.” It’s a remarkable thing and a lucky one, that the beautiful flights of spirit created in an old song are not canceled by the later negation of the realities that old song addressed (or vice versa: the misery of an old song is not wiped clean by the joy of a later one; both Dress Rehearsal Rag and If I Didn’t Have Your Love are true). I don’t know how this works, other than to explain it as Nick did, that songs are “divinely consituted.” I do not think any power has leaked away from “We’ll climb that hill, no matter how steep / When we come up to it” even though there someday came a hill too steep for the (probable) real-life referents of the song (Dylan in ’67 was, effectively, a newlywed) to climb. The old song remains as a signpost, as a truth, from which another reality later branched out, towards sadness and parting; but it needn’t have, You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere swears, it needn’t have. And I believe it.

We see this all over the place: Heart of Gold and Old Man remain touchstones of love and longing no matter how painfully Neil Young’s road with Carrie Snodgress came to wind; his Weight of the World, Looking Forward, and When I Hold You in My Arms are beacons of light and faith and gratitude even though, all those years later, Neil and Pegi Young divorced. Songs hold on to what is their own, to their “souls” as Nick Cave calls them. And that they do so is a miracle to me, so merciful and beautiful a miracle that I find it hard to contemplate.

77. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Not a very lofty placement for Jim Beviglia’s #1 favorite Dylan song (and come to think of it, how many songs have appeared on both our lists so far? Three?), but that’s how these things go, and it’s great that they go that way. Only in this manner can a variety of songs find its designated listeners. Dylan wrote Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for—Sara Lowndes, yes, if we’re to trust the lyrics of the song Sara—but also for me, and even more so for Jim.

In S. Y. Agnon’s novel A Guest for the Night, the narrator sits in a beit midrash and reads. He reflects:

“I sat silent before the book, and the book unsealed its lips and revealed to me things I had never heard before. When I was tired of studying I thought many thoughts, and this is one of them: Many generations ago a wise man wrote a book and he did not know of this man who sits here, but in the end all his words prove to be meant for him.”

In 1966 sometime, Bob Dylan wrote a song, and as he wrote it, he thought the thoughts he thought, but the song speaks to whom it will, through all the years that it exists, accessible, somewhere in the world. Sad Eyed Lady may speak less to S. Sludig than it does to J. Beviglia, but the last thing this fact makes Sad Eyed Lady is a worse song. Where music’s concerned, I think subjectivity beats (supposed) objectivity way more than half the time and, when I was a new fan peeking into the world of Dylan scholarship, it frustrated me to find how often published writing on our bard (or popular music writing in general, for that matter) makes use of distended opinions masquerading as informed judgements, statements like “this song is a travesty” or “clearly one of Dylan’s greatest achievements,” etc. Nonsense. I say take the gifts you’re given and be glad, and leave the others to those for whom they’re intended. (Christopher Ricks in Dylan’s Visions of Sin is a paragon for all us music-minded scribblers in this regard.)

Dylan sings Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in a voice too drawling and leisurely for me to love, but unlike, say, the vocals on much of Before the Flood or Real Live, the singing never crosses over into the territory where it would interfere with my enjoyment of what I’m hearing. I do like how the slow stretching of syllables interacts with the light-footed band (all praise the great Kenny Buttrey), and I love how the band plays this particular cut. They sound like the lowlands Bob sings of, on a misty day.

Since I picture those lowlands as wide and open, it’s wonderful that the song is eleven and a half minutes long. The band can play and play and play. The way Buttrey’s beat shifts from the tapping on the ride cymbal in the verses, to the kick and snare work of the swells of the refrain, to the hi-hat flourish with which he returns to the ride tapping, and the very occasional variations in the ride cymbal rhythm—the way the drumbeat morphs, then, is all the variety I need, and there’s still the guitars, the soft and gorgeous organ… what not-quite-satisfied fan of Dylan’s singing on this track could really demand more of him when the band is this subtle, this angelic, and has this much room to explore—when there’s this much else to pay attention to?

Having said so, I’ll add that although I am endlessly fascinated by the technique that Peter Mills, the formidable, calls “through-composition”—in plainer terms, I’m an album guy, who if time allows will listen to a full album rather than a playlist of single tracks, and who if time doesn’t allow will usually listen to an album side rather than a few songs selected at random—I love listening to Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands on repeat.

I may not understand what the verses say about the person the narrator loves (Ralf Sauter: “Is ‘midnight rug’ what I think it is or would that be too crude…?”), but I’m impressed by how much he has to say, and I do enjoy attending to the stream of incomprehensible images. Besides, what the narrator doesn’t communicate, the band does, and what the band doesn’t communicate, the fantastic harmonica solo at song (and album)’s end does.

I do think I catch the spirit, if not the exact import, of what Dylan has to say in the refrain. The title phrase is mellifluous, and in its case I like the delay with which Blonde on Blonde Bob enunciates his words. It’s a beautiful image, too, which posits the beloved as a kind of queen, but a queen with worries, with a troubled heart, with something unfulfilled at her center. And not only the queen, but the whole court, and the court prophets, are sad eyed too. “No man comes” to that land; does that mean that none is supposed to come? But the narrator does, or at least approaches, and approaches with quiet confidence, because he believes that he may be the one who belongs there (“Thanks for the sadness you took from her eyes,” sings L. Cohen of Famous Blue Raincoat, who doesn’t share the confidence of the narrator of Sad Eyed Lady, “I thought it was there for good so I never tried”), but also with loving humility. Humility is not an easy state to maintain. It tips over so easily into falsehood, so that one keeps the appearance of being humble while something other seethes beneath the surface. But not here; here I’m convinced. “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Shall I leave them at your gate / Or, sad eyed lady, should I wait?” (Just typing these lines sent a chill down my spine!)

The narrator brings the gifts; he poses the question; but he understands, and without sacrificing his own dignity, accepts that the answer is his lady’s to make.

78. Man of Peace

I think Man of Peace is better enjoyed as track 5 (or B1) of Infidels than as a stand-alone listen. On the album, its inconsistent approach to vocal melody is nicely sponged up by the lusciously melodic ballad License to Kill behind it and the melodic rocker Union Sundown ahead. It’s understandable that Dylan gets too excited to keep the melody steady and often just shouts away instead. I mean, “He can be fascinating, he can be dull / He can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull”—when words like these are coming out of your mouth, who has time for melodies? Besides, you can get your fill of melody if you hone in on Mark Knopfler, whose bouncy, poppy, lead-guitar-as-rhythm-guitar line (or riff? Eyolf Østrem calls it a riff, and he would know) is the buoyant surface upon which the whole song floats.

Barring Dylan himself, Mark Knopfler is my favorite of Dylan’s lead guitarists. It’s too bad that the Dylan-Knopfler partnership only lasted two albums (like the Dylan-Lanois partnership, come to think of it), but it’s marvelous to me that those two albums exist.

I used to find it perverse that Dylan and Knopfler, having brought Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar on board, didn’t give them a bunch of reggae songs to play (Infidels only has two, although Clinton Heylin mentions that a reggae arrangement of Foot of Pride is in the vaults somewhere). Instead, the two were handed rockers in 4/4 ala Neighborhood Bully, Union Sundown, and Man of Peace. “You just don’t get the best rhythm section in reggae,” Björn Waller mourns, “and tell them to play a straight blues shuffle any 18-year-old kids could play.”

That said, I’ve learned to appreciate what resulted from that perversity. While I would surely enjoy Infidels more if it had an album’s worth of reggae arrangements, the slinky touch that years of playing reggae gave the rhythm section does color the rockers uniquely, and not only on the sticky pile of mud that is Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight. Here on Man of Peace, too, I’ve figured out that the heavyhandedness of the rhythm section can be pretty cool in its own right.

The solos in the instrumental breaks (Mick Taylor’s, Alan Clark’s, and Dylan’s on harmonica) might seem to blend into the arrangement at first, but note how well they complement Dylan’s vocals and also how good they turn out to be if you give them your attention.

Dylan sings Man of Peace as if he were staring Lucifer in the face. The lyrics are witty, baffling, and haunting all at once. The opening verse is so cinematic that it could have been written with Jacques Levy. None of the rhymes with “peace” is a bland or predictable one. “Nobody can see through him / No, not even the Chief of Police” has the wonderful anti- or pseudo-logic of “It ain’t even safe no more in the palace of the Pope” or the songs on Under the Red Sky.

Both of my favorite lyrical moments on Infidels are on Man of Peace. The first follows the Niagara Falls image: “I can smell something cooking / I can tell there’s going to be a feast,” sung while the band goes on celebrating. The lines are delivered with the knowing, superior eye-glint of someone who will not be fooled by appearances. They’re deliciously ambiguous. Is the fire actually hellfire? Is the food that's being cooked actually the flesh of sinners? And are those partaking actually the ranks of Satan’s army? Or is this a reference to the Antichrist in his glory as a ruler on earth, leading the happy human populace in rites of joy, and only presaging the depradations to come?

My other favorite is a full verse, sung in a tone half scornful and half solicitous, but in any case extremely urgent: “The howling wolf will howl tonight / The king snake will crawl / Trees that have stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall / Want to get married? Do it now / Tomorrow all activity will cease.” (Admirers of the song will no doubt be recreating Dylan’s delivery in their heads as they read the lines; Man of Peace, despite its lack of melody, is among the great showcases of Dylan’s phrasing.) This is the self-assured righteous prophet of Slow Train Coming back again, so spookily certain of what he’s saying that a listener attuned to the singer’s voice might well start feeling nervous. It’s a marvelous evocation of natural worldwide catastrophe, cast in the language of fables: wolves, snakes, thousand-year-old trees, and marriage.

The final verse shifts the perspective to the grieving mother of the earth’s charismatic destroyer, the images of “them little white shoes and that little broken toy” hearkening back in tone and color to Jokerman. The final verse also provides the finest of Dylan’s inventive phrasing, as he sputters out, with a slight delay to every word, “the same one the three men followed from the east.”

Man of Peace is excellent live on August 31^st, 1990, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It opens with a catchy guitar riff that the bass also soon takes up. Bob sings the first verse hesitantly, thoughtfully: “Might be the Fuhrer / Might be … / …might be the local priest,” as if he’s looking out the window and weighing the possibilities aloud. There’s a great guitar solo courtesy of G.E. Smith (another of Bob’s standout lead guitarists) and an ending over which Bob adlibs variations on the song’s final line, tugging the melody in various directions: still weighing the possibilities.

In the song’s final live appearance a decade later, on September 19^th, 2000, in Newcastle, there’s superlative singing and another different, catchy, descending riff that marks the end of each verse.

It’s curious: years ago, in the glow of my discovery of Dylan—in that first long obsession—I downloaded a variety of shows and selections of live performances from 1988 and onwards, but barely listened to any of them. For some reason, despite having listened to plenty of concert-boots from 1975 to 1987 (including everything then available from ’75 to ’80), I didn’t feel eager to test the waters of the later live Dylan. Maybe the sheer volume of material was daunting. As I listen now to the late live versions I found back then of the songs that I’m writing about, I’m finding so much more to love than I expected! And now I’m beginning to suspect that by the time I’ve written up my #1, I will have unwittingly plunged myself into the deep and dark, in fact what amounts to bottomless, hole that some people call the Never Ending Tour. But we’ll see. As yet, it’s too soon to tell.

79. Unbelievable

Among my favorite songs ever is the Syd Barrett composition Matilda Mother, from Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Soft-voiced Rick Wright sings the fairy tale verses, about “a king who ruled the land,” a “[silver-eyed] scarlet eagle,” and a “thousand misty riders.” Rick Wright and Syd Barrett, singing together, deliver the child’s lament when storytime is over: “Oh, oh, mother / Tell me more.” Rough-voiced Syd takes over for the incrimination in what I guess I'd call a bridge: “Why’d you have to leave me there? / Hanging in my infant air, waiting?” to which comes the mother’s rejoinder, still in Syd Barrett’s voice, “You only have to read the lines / They’re scribbly black and everything shines.”

Halfway through the song comes a musical interlude which carries the fairy tale stories into the realm of sound, then the band starts building up to some kind of shift, and suddenly we're back in the chords and melody of the verse. But where the first two verses were given to Rick Wright to sing, the third is all Syd Barrett, as if he were now taking possession of the memories that, for the purposes of the song, he had leant Rick. The narrator looks back on that old time, urgently, seriously, attentively: “For all the time spent in that room / The doll’s house, darkness, old perfume / And fairy stories held me high on / Clouds of sunlight floating by.”

It’s an incomplete sentence, drifting away into those passing clouds, the narrator departing along with them. For all the time spent in that room—what? We expect some kind of contrast to follow. But no contrast does, only stories and clouds, and more stories, “oh mother, tell me more.” The last thing we hear in Matilda Mother is a sing-song melody, like a boat of leaves floating down the stream. Off the song goes, around the bend, somewhere out of sight, deeper into the forest...

The Matilda Mother atmosphere is what I hear recreated throughout Under the Red Sky, with the caveat that Bob tempers the intense innocence of Syd’s song with humor (sometimes) and dread (often). The near-psychedelia wrought by the Under the Red Sky band might even be called distant kin to Matilda Mother, if one is being fanciful and squints just right, only that the “tempos are postpunk like it oughta be, springs and shuffles grooving ever forward,” to borrow Robert Christgau’s words.

If you look at things in terms of sheer rock and roll kick, Unbelievable is the best song on the album. It starts with a massive riff from a vast-sounding overdriven electric guitar, accompanied by a few emphatic notes from the piano. When the band gets going, the guitar switches to the gnarly riff that undergirds the verses. The drums gallop like they’ve been saddled up, with snare-heavy breaks that mark the briefest of separations between the B and A sections of each verse. The organ gives the song a progressive rock flavor, hearkening back to something like the “See there! A son is born” section of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. Also courtesy of the organ come the three descending notes that, answering each of Bob’s phrases in the refrain, form the refrain’s melodic hook. At a couple of moments, harmonica notes mixed to sound like thunderclouds float above the commotion below.

Lyrically, Unbelievable is one of the many Dylan songs in which individual lines or sections connect with me, but were someone to ask me, “So what is this song is about?” I would have to answer, “Uhh…”

The narrator seems to be somebody who saw the present state of the world coming and had always been dismayed by the contents of his visions. Now that those old visions are coming true, he feels disappointed that no one in his generation rose up to stop the onset of the flood… but this interpretation is a rough estimate, at best.

I love this sinister image and great mouthful: “You must be living in the shadow of some kind of evil star.” The second half of the second verse could, perhaps, be a reflection on Bob’s own rise from folksinger poverty to a regrettable stardom, maybe an echo too of Thomas Pynchon’s vision of the ’60s as wrecked by those who had dreamed it up: “They said it was the land of milk and honey / Now they say it’s the land of money,” and with disgruntled irony, “Who ever thought they could make that stick?” Then shifting the focus self-deprecatingly to himself, “It’s unbelievable you could get this rich this quick!”

Awesome, too, is the nursery-rhyme rhythm and unpredictability of the series of violent and aggressive injunctions in the third verse, preceding the awed whisper, “It’s unbelievable the day would finally come,” which is not angry or frightened, sounding in fact rather glad, which, if it is, contradicts my own earlier appraisal of the narrator’s attitude. If the prophet is interpreting the chaotic state of things as the opening act of the apocalypse his faith has long warned is coming, then perhaps the gladness makes sense; if that’s the case, see also Something’s Burning, Baby.

I love the frustration found in “There’s always someone who understands / It don’t matter no more what you got to say.” The lines sound to me like a lashing out at the cheapening of culture, of talk, of friendship and connection, and a longing for a link between two people forged in a greater fire than “oh sure, I hear you man, I understand.” (We’re ten years on from “I told her about Jesus, told her about the rain / She told me about division, told me about the pain / That had risen from the ashes and abided in her memory.”) How could you understand, Unbelievable’s narrator seethes, of course you don’t understand. It’s a humane gesture, a claim flung out against the inanity at large out there (see T.V. Talkin’ Song) that there are true and deep and profound depths to experience, and that these are not reducible, not to be shrugged away.

As I was thinking about the song over the last few days I struck on a solution to a problem that had long puzzled me. I’m bad at logic, or for that matter any manner of abstract thinking, and I never had a clue what Dylan was up to in the lines “All the silver, all the gold / All the sweethearts you can hold / That don’t come back with stories untold / Are hanging on a tree.” What confused me is not the way that the final image feels like a stab from a friend’s dagger; that’s one of the song’s best moments, death suddenly blooming. But “[sweethearts] that don’t come back with stories untold” ? What does that mean? Do the sweethearts not come back, and since they don’t come back at all they certainly don’t come back carrying… untold stories, of all things… or is it that the sweethearts do come back, bearing stories to tell or stories they already told to others on the way? Either case seems hopelessly confusing. Clinton Heylin called it “plain clumsy.”

Playing the song over in my head one evening, though, I suddenly thought, what if there’s a comma missing in the official lyrics? That would seem to solve the problem: “All the silver, all the gold / All the sweethearts you can hold / That don’t come back, with stories untold / Are hanging on a tree.” As in, they don’t come back, and because they don’t come back, their stories remain untold. If that’s what Dylan had in mind, it piles on the poignancy at exactly the right moment, just before the conclusive announcement of their (obscurely Christian-tinged) death by hanging.

80. Romance in Durango

“Ecstasy feels like dirt after listening to this song,” says Last.fm user forsakethd.

It begins with one of the best opening lines and images in Dylan’s catalogue, the bright, alliterative, enveloping snapshot of “Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun.”

The summer Desire was recorded is said to have been an extremely hot one, and you can hear the languor in the way the musicians play. Romance in Durango has the most langorous sound of all, which is appropriate, since it has the most musicians playing. Little wonder, too, that by the time temperatures started cooling down in autumn, and the Rolling Thunder Revue was touring, everyone had a lot more energy to muster for performances. Romance in Durango live with the Revue is an entirely different kind of beast, sinuous and brave. Clinton Heylin argues that familiarity probably also had something to do with the change, the lyrics being almost entirely a Jacques Levy rather than Dylan/Levy affair, and Romance in Durango a product of the earliest Desire sessions, Bob singing the recorded version from a lyric sheet.

As in Diamond Ring, the pathos of Romance in Durango lies in contrast. On the one hand, there’s the narrator’s charm and bluster. It’s worth remembering that he has murdered a man, and was probably quite aware of what he was doing while he was doing it, since the scene can recreate itself so vividly in his dreams;  for all that, he’s endearing in his optimism (“Sold my guitar to the baker’s son / For a few crumbs and a place to hide / But I can get another one”), in the tenderness of the tone with which he comforts and encourages his companion, and in the gorgeous colors and sounds and shapes he is sensitive to, not only as he crafts his dreamed-up Durango for Magdalena’s benefit, but even among the dusty, uninspiring landmarks of the present desert journey (“Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people / Hoofbeats like castanets on stone”). And he’s a responsible man, a level-headed man, not the immature youngster of Diamond Ring. When he reflects on the murder that set him on this trail of flight, he thinks, “The dogs are barking and what’s done is done.” And what will come will come.

On the other hand is the threat of pursuit, which at song’s end materializes into reality. This underside of the song is remarkable in that the music gives no indication of looming darkness. In Goldsmith’s arrangement of Diamond Ring, he injects some sadness into the refrain; here there’s nothing but major chords and good cheer, and in the Desire version, there’s even one final chorus after the fateful final verse. This is Dylan as trickster, as Coyote, teasing the listener with the music he set to Levy’s unhappy tale, like Roger Waters leading Pink Floyd through the frolic that is Free Four, one of his most abject lyrics. In the Rolling Thunder performances, the only chill Romance in Durango has is the one that comes as the band sings out “We may not make it through the night!” and, just like that, with one more chord change over the stretched-out “night,” the song ends. This is Dylan outdoing himself, realizing that he can grab a listener by the throat even harder if he omits the last refrain.

What makes the ending of the live versions even more affecting is that Dylan & co. don’t sing “we won’t make it through the night” or “we’re not gonna make it through the night,” but “we may not make it through the night.” Fatally shot, the narrator still wants to keep Magdalena’s heart up, still refuses to admit—to her at least, while he himself wonders, “Oh, can it be that I am slain?”—that a bad end has come, that it’s happening right now, that this is where his life ends. No, in his last moments he is guiding Magdalena’s aim as she grabs hold of his gun: a futile gesture, surely, for the killing of Ramon doesn’t seem likely to have landed the narrator only the single pursuer. But he’s still trying to proffer hope, no matter how thin, and as he dies he continues to thinks about Magdalena, not about himself.

It’s a Shakespearean tragedy in miniature: if the narrator had cared with all his heart about his woman, he would not have killed Ramon; but having made that one mistake, the only thing he can do is try to outrun his fate, and then accept it when outrunning it proves impossible; and as he accepts it—like King Lear, like Antony—he wins the listener over completely. “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Even if they’re angels as ragged as the Rolling Thunder Revue.

I don’t want to close this write-up without pointing out how many delightful details the Revue performances hold, from Dylan’s shout of “BELLS!” to Howie Wyeth and Rob Stoner mimicing the lethal gunshot after Dylan sings “Was that the thunder that I heard?” , to the way Dylan brings in each rollicking chorus with a full-throated, open-hearted “Nooooooooooooo LLORES” while the backing singers roar away alongside. I don’t think a lyricist could hope for a more sympathetic rendering of their words. Jacques Levy must have been thrilled.

81. Mozambique

It’s often been pointed out that the nation Mozambique circa 1976 was not a nice place to be, but the ahistoricity of Bob Dylan’s song doesn’t bother me any more than the facts about Joey Gallo do. I believe in the rights of fiction to tell the stories it wants to tell, and believe in the capacity of those who engage with works of fiction to think and investigate the relevant facts for themselves.

Here’s something for those of us who’ve played Final Fantasy VII: this song reminds me of the first time the party arrives in Costa del Sol. It’s a moment of relaxation after a fraught journey (Jehova and Sephiroth shipboard, etc.).

In addition to being one more travelogue on an album of travelogues, Mozambique plays the Costa del Sol role for me on Desire. Hurricane is an intense opening and Isis a grand adventure; up ahead will be One More Cup of Coffee and Oh, Sister and their weighty, lovesick ruminations; the valley, the sea. How good, then, to stop for three minutes in Dylan and Levy’s jointly-conjured Mozambique, “Lying next to her by the ocean / Reaching out and touching her hand / Whispering your secret emotion / Magic in a magical land.” And what’s wrong with that?

Musically the song is light and quick and easy (like the playful words) but far from spineless. Scarlet Rivera’s violin, not the sort of instrument to fade out of attention, is the channel for the main melody. Howie Wyeth, having sat out the first verse, makes a thrilling entrance in the break before the second, sounding like the first morning waves breaking on the shore. The song is the album's biggest showcase for Emmylou Harris, who sings every word with Dylan, and whereas elsewhere on Desire she’s clearly the backing or supportive singer, Mozambique is a true duet. And now that I investigate, it turns out that Emmylou Harris included Mozambique on a duets compilation released under her own name—for which tidbit, thank you, Michael Gray.

But this is not, like If I Don’t Be There by Morning-via-Eric, a truly accomplished laid-back song; it’s too musically involved for that, the melodies in verse and bridge both too striking. This is not something you can absentmindedly nod your head along to. The shift to the Bm chord for “Lying next to her” catches me by surprise every time, after which I anticipate and then relish Bob and Emmylou’s “laaaaaand” leading over to the final verse. The Desire band evokes the breezy atmosphere, the suggestion of sun and sand speckled by cloud shadows. I love how during the fade-out Dylan’s acoustic guitar suddenly starts working double-time.

While the lyrics are of no great thematic import, neither are they to be scoffed at. In them the mighty Christopher Ricks locates one of his favorite of Dylan’s rhymes, “‘Mozambique’ with ‘cheek to cheek’ (along with ‘cheek’ cheekily rhyming with ‘cheek’ there, a perfect fit).”

I like the visual correspondence of “aqua” (as in "The sunny sky is aqua blue") with the title, the ‘a,’ ‘q,’ and ‘u’ inside ‘Mozambique’ all accounted for in aqua too.

The more-than-ordinarily flighty attitude of Dylan’s narrator toward relationships makes me laugh; right after saying “and maybe fall in love, just me and you,” he observes that “there’s lots of pretty girls in Mozambique.”

There’s a densely-rendered atmosphere of romantic questing in the second verse: “Everybody likes to stop and speak / To give the special one you seek a chance / Or maybe say hello with just a glance”—a chance to do what exactly left for the listener to puzzle out, the narrator already on to the next thing, as quickly as he’s likely to flit from girl to girl—and all those alliterated ‘s’s, ‘p’s, ‘sp’s, and ‘k’s.

In the final verse, the narrator takes “a final peak” and sees “lovely people living free / upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.” This completes the picture of bliss presented by Mozambique the song but not by Desire the album, in which, five songs later, we’re brought to another tourists’ paradise. And there’s a beach landscape near the end of Sara, too. But…

82. One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)

I’ll go with a numbered list for a change, and cover (1) the lyrics as an ode to the unknowability of other people, (2) the narrator’s weariness, (3) the ominousness of his destination, and (4) outstanding musical elements of the Desire recording, which, alongside if not surpassing the 1978 arrangement (available in an early and relatively tame manifestation on At Budokan), is my favorite version of the song.

1. The difficulty of crossing the void between oneself and another is a vast theme, of course, and a fruitful one. Nick Cave, to give one example, has written numerous great songs about the unknowability of his own wife. (Rings of Saturn!)

One More Cup of Coffee, which I see as Bob’s most concentrated take on the theme, originated (according to Dylan’s introductions at autumn ’78 concerts, which are best taken with about a kilo of salt) in a week he spent at a gypsy festival in southern France, where he had the chance to meet a vagabond king. Dylan does dedicate a whole verse of the song to the larger-than-life sovereign, but the main character is the princess, whose love the narrator can taste (“Your hair is smooth on the pillow where you lie”) but not keep.

The narrator is aware that they won’t stay together long: “Your loyalty is not to me, but to the stars above.” He’s been aware from the opening couplet, in which her “eyes are like two jewels in the sky,” the jewel-stars to which he perceives her allegiance adhering. He longs for her—“Your pleasure knows no limits / Your voice is like a meadowlark”—but resignedly. There is no room for him in her future. He’s an adornment to her days or a source of brief joy, perhaps, but her path leads wherever her father, the “wanderer and vagabond by trade,” goes, while the narrator’s will take him to the “valley below,” towards which he must walk alone.

The loveliness of One More Cup of Coffee is in the narrator’s forthright respect for the girl and for the fact that she doesn’t need him. He lists his grievances, but not angrily, and with no expectation that things could be otherwise. She is over there, in her world; he is over here, in his; and they have met, and that is good; but ahead there is only divergence and parting, and so be it.

Incidentally, that none of the girl’s words or thoughts are reported is either part of the way that Desire works (see also Oh Sister, Romance in Durango, Sara, and Abandoned Love, in all of which the main female character remains silent) or indicative, as the situation leads us to imagine, of the lovers’ not being able to speak the same language.

2. I hear the narrator’s weariness more in the singing than in the lyrics per se. Each refrain is delivered as with a heavy sigh, a telling pause between “before I go” and “to the valley below,” as if the narrator needs a moment to gird himself for the fact that his journey is far from over, and that his time with the wanderers and the princess was but a momentary and unsustainable respite. That the “valley below” appears in both the title and the chorus indicates that it is of central importance in the song, despite its never being mentioned in the verses.

I love the mixed modesty and determination that the narrator employs as defense against his weariness when he requests “One more cup of coffee, for the road / One more cup of coffee before I go.” Modesty, because he is not making any great demands; he has had coffee already (“one more cup”) and hopes, touchingly, only to stall a little before he sets off. And determination, because in both lines of lyrics he brings up the road ahead.

3. What kind of road? It isn’t clear from the lyrics, other than a suggestion-by-placement that the way through the valley will be like the girl’s heart, “like the ocean, mysterious and dark.” The music, particularly Scarlet Rivera’s violin, suggests as much. In 1978, the saxophone, percussion, and guitars all speak to the hazards ahead, though as befits the shifted priorities in Street-Legal, the emphasis of that arrangement is more on the danger and uncertainty of the road than on the narrator’s unwillingness to set off. On the refrains in Desire, you might catch a glimpse of the excitement, or challenge, or adventure of the journey, but mostly what you hear is the shuffling of the narrator’s feet.

The title phrase is ambiguous. A valley is usually a safe place; at least it’s not the high mountains, not the thick forest, nor the boundless ocean; and there’s no valley without a river, which means there’ll be water to drink as you journey. Probably sunlight too, at least here and there. Whereas “below” means descent, and in mythical terms, descents are perilous—see Inanna, Adon, Orpheus, Heracles.

4. It’s uncommon for me to feel that songs which the Rolling Thunder Revue band performed in 1975 have better versions elsewhere, but One More Cup of Coffee is among the exceptions: I like it more in its studio guise than live. For that matter, I prefer it live in 1978 to live in 1975; and in general this seems to be a song that Dylan has had difficulty performing poorly. I just found a brilliant and haunting performance from September 19^th, 1993 in Raleigh, NC, on my decade-old iPod Classic.

The secret weapon of the Desire and Rolling Thunder Revue bands was drummer Howie Wyeth (whose life was unfortunately at too low a point in 1978 to join the Street-Legal band, to which he had an invitation—the mind boggles), and his fluid beat and unpredictable fills open the song and carry it forward, not very steadily, but beautifully, like a small boat riding the waves on a windy day. Emmylou Harris’s vocals in the refrain underline the loneliness of the lyrics, while Dylan employs a voice that Allen Ginsberg called “Hebraic cantillation” and “ancient blood singing,” and which Dylan only ever used here, on this one recording of this one song; the wavering was already less pronounced by the time the Revue hit the road. Scarlet Rivera’s winding and melancholy violin lines are as suggestive as Dylan’s singing. And I love the metallic percussion instrument that you can hear in the right channel. It gives the impression of someone drumming along on a huge bar of gold.

83. I Pity the Poor Immigrant

My two favorite versions of I Pity the Poor Immigrant, neither of them on John Wesley Harding, treat that wonderful melody with respect, keeping it intact and weaving the matter of their reinterpretations around it. That’s what makes Take 4 off of last year’s Bootleg Series release, Travelin’ Thru, fascinating. I never even thought to imagine the song without that classic melody, but Bob did, and that short fast version, with its almost completely different melody, is excellent too. Had Take 4 been the one on the album (and John Wesley Harding, the opener, rearranged to fit, lest the two sound too similar), I Pity the Poor Immigrant would still have been a powerful song, and future covers and rearrangements would have used Take 4’s strong melody as their core instead.

But given the album as we know it, Bob made the right selection. After I am a Lonesome Hobo, the dustiest song on the album, the stately, sad procession of the album arrangement of I Pity the Poor Immigrant is just what's needed, and The Wicked Messenger, next on the tracklist, likewise thrives by contrast.

Of the two versions of I Pity the Poor Immigrant that I like even more than the album take, one locks in on the original’s stateliness and intesifies it. It’s by Angels of Light, from the period when the Angels were simultaneously an independent band called Akron/Family. Of all the singers in rock and folk music who have aspired at times to sound like prophets from the Hebrew Bible, the one who does it best, as far as I’m concerned, is Michael Gira. He’s got a deep, bloodied voice that, somewhere around 1995, in the Great Annihilator era, began to rise out of the somewhat affected or stylized (though still cool) voice of the earlier Swans albums, and turn into something more open, more vulnerable, and (in allowing these softer elements in) also harsher. By the time New Mother, the first Angels of Light album, came out in 1999, this fuller and more expressive voice had been perfected, and that’s the voice we hear lead Akron/Family aka Angels of Light through I Pity the Poor Immigrant.

Gira, as a songwriter, was no stranger to haranguing the subjects of his songs, so he’s well-trained in that too; and his harangues usually came from a place of degradation, so the tender moment in the song when the first person narrator suddenly becomes an object of the main character’s attention (as in, it’s not just “I pity the poor immigrant who…” anymore, but when the poor immigrant “turns his back on me”)—that moment feels appropriately painful, and it becomes clearer than in any of Dylan’s versions that both these figures, the narrator and the immigrant, are hurting. The difference is that the immigrant, in the midst of his misery and need, indulges in meanness despite, at some level, understanding the direction it’ll take him (and his town, and his neighbors), while the narrator, despite his own misery and need, understands the danger the immigrant is in, yet cannot warn him off his course.

As for the instrumental side of the Angels’ arrangement, it’s a fuller-bodied folk-rock, more countryside than the wasteland where John Wesley Harding is set, with the lead guitar adapting the role Dylan’s harmonica plays on the original album. Fuller does not, of course (especially where John Wesley Harding goes), necessarily mean better; but it’s an interesting alternative, and in any case, the most significant factor is the singer.

My single favorite incarnation of the song returns possession to Bob’s hands: it hails from the 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue. I love the way the song seems to begin, work through the entire melody instrumentally (or rather, as Eyolf Østrem notes pointedly, not quite entire: the final line is purposefully left out), and then crash, slow-motion, to a halt. The little piece is immediately recognizable as I Pity the Poor Immigrant, and the Revue delivers the melody so winningly you could even think, “actually, sure, that’s all we needed”—but then the band comes back to life, you realize the pause was planned, and the vocals, those magnificent ’75/’76 vocals, come to the fore.

In the Revue’s hands, the song is a party number (recalling the mid-’70s fate of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall). Treating it this way lovingly lifts up the melody, but you wouldn’t think it could work with the lyrics, except that the penultimate lines of each verse come, and the band slows down and drops out, and Dylan and Joan Baez hold the long notes, and right there, the sadness is back. But then the band gets going again and, once more, it’s a party—until the next break.

The lyrics, like all of John Wesley Harding, are playful, deceptive, gnomic, poetic, a mixture of the King James Bible and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a railroad-crossing of tones and vantage points. Like everything on the album but The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, the lyrics are very concise; and yet they create an entire world, an uncertain world, on the brink of ending, or of being recreated anew. There’s a painful paradox there, since an immigrant is traditionally a figure who leaves the old home and comes to a new one so as to start a new chapter of existence, whereas the poor immigrant here—and he is poor only as in “pitiful,” not in the material sense; he has power (but uses it to do evil) and he has food to eat (but is not satisfied) and enough wealth to fall in love with—the poor immigrant is eaten by rancour and regret and is soon to bring his own life (and has all the while been busy bringing many others’ lives) to ruin: a Cain figure, who is bound to say at the end of all this that “My punishment is too great to bear.” But as with Cain, the realization will come too late: the gladness will have been achieved, the glass shattered.

And if the return to the old home that the immigrant wishes he hadn’t left has become, for some reason, a physical or psychological impossibility (money, at least, couldn’t have been the issue), soon the return to an untarnished, undegraded soul will be what’s impossible, the bridge from there to here exploded behind him.

84. Diamond Ring

Taylor Goldsmith knows his way around a tune. He is also a keen and sensitive interpreter. If you listen to Lost on the River a few times with an open mind and with your attention on the songs, and you don’t reach the same conclusion, well then, I don’t know what to tell you.

In the interviews and documentary that accompanied the album, it was said that Goldsmith wrote music to almost all the songs that Dylan’s camp shared with producer T Bone Burnett. This unreleased stash of Dylan/Goldsmith co-writes is about as holy a grail to me as Neil Young’s Homegrown (now out!!!), Islands in the Sun, or the David Briggs edition of Tonight’s the Night. For years now I’ve been dismayed that Burnett’s talk of a Lost on the River Vol. 2 came to nothing. I don’t make my own music seeking success or fame, but let me tell you, if the universe sneezed and I happened to be vaulted up to the pedestal of mildly prominent modern-day rockers, the first fellow star I would try to make friends with is Taylor Goldsmith, in large part because he seems like a really cool guy, and then also so he could play me all his other Dylan co-writes.

But given their absence, let me emphasize how glad I am to have Diamond Ring.

The song is arranged, like much of the album, in the ethereal and theretofore theoretical meeting ground between New Morning and Desire, with touches of the ’75 Rolling Thunder Revue plus, of course, each individual songwriter’s predilections. Goldsmith’s arrangement and melodies, and the band’s contributions (I love the drums and backing vocals), are eminently gorgeous, and perfect for the words.

Offhand, I can’t think of a single other Dylan song in which he tenderly and unjudgmentally inhabits a grievously deluded narrator. The songwriter knows he’s deluded, and so do we, but the narrator himself has no clue. Romance in Durango also has a narrator who, in adverse circumstances, dreams of a safe haven, but he is not very certain whether he will arrive there. While awake he has to comfort Magdalena, which is why the song stays cheerful, but when he dreams he sees Ramon.

In Diamond Ring, there is no hint that the narrator shares the reserve of the gunfighter in Romance in Durango, or that he ever questions the veracity of his visions. True, he’s not altogether convinced he’ll reach St. Louis, either—each verse begins with a big old “if” and a qualifying “ever”—but each time, once that “if” and “ever” pass, it’s all “gonna,” “will,” “gonna,” “will” … and the chorus is a marvelous, passionate, deluded “Diamond ring / Diamond ring / Shine like gold / Behold! / That diamond ring.” Incidentally, this chorus is the only place in the song where I hear the cadences of the Basement Tapes; the rest is vintage Lost on the River, which… but no, I don’t believe this is the time to expound on my own delusions regarding the genesis of the Lost on the River lyrics. Let’s put that aside.

The confessional tone of the narrator's words puts us is in his shoes, even as, being privy to insights he can’t grasp, we hover above and to the side of him like a sad angel (go listen to the excellent late Fleetwood Mac track by that title: it’s Lindsey Buckingham’s, one of the artists Bob lovingly mentions in Murder Most Foul).

I can’t help but smile along with this guy as he dreams. It’s so typically human to feel the way Diamond Ring’s narrator does. But we who listen to the song know the pain of the world and know that things won’t be anything like what the narrator thinks; he dreams it all far too beautifully. Yet Dylan doesn’t give us the chance to laugh at the narrator’s delusion, either; the boy’s visions are too tender, too homesick. I can’t say that they border on the regretful, because this guy has too much bravado to feel regret; but for the sort of person he is at this stage in time, it’s probably as close as he can get to the feeling.

As the song opens, the narrator is acting like he’s in charge, strutting in fact, talking like a big man: “If I ever get back to St. Louis again / There’s gonna be some changes made.” But the next two lines show us that his main thought is not to become Big Jim; actually, he’s just thinking of a girl. “I’m gonna find old Alice, and right where I left off / It’s gonna be just as if I stayed.”

Now, already we understand more than he does. “Old Alice,” he says, right? So it’s been a while. The thing is, young women don’t always sit around waiting for young men who have gone, whatever the reasons for their leaving: war, imprisonment, or the man’s own whim. (For a great take on this notion, see a song called Hit the Bell with Your Elbow, by Chadwick Stokes & The Pintos.) And things are definitely not going to be “just as if I stayed,” because the world doesn’t work like that. Time’s march has no mercy.

Homesickness surfaces in the first verse’s second half, with charming evocations of St. Louis as the narrator remembers it: “That old organ grinder’s gonna wind his box / And that knife sharpener’s gonna sing.” But actually, there’s no guarantee that these guys are gonna be around any more than old Alice is, let alone unchanged, and what the narrator is dreaming of here is a town frozen in time, and all its occupants frozen too.

The next lines are “When I get back to St. Louis again” (what happened to “If I ever”?), “I’m gonna buy that diamond ring,” and the ecstatic refrain. So we gather that the narrator wants to propose to his old flame, but not to a flesh and blood Alice so much as to a ghost living in his mind. Good luck with that. (Remember Walk Out in the Rain?)

In the second verse, the bliss of the narrator’s dreaming expands: “Everybody’s gonna smile.” And he tells us why he left happy old St. Louis in the first place: “One of the Mack girls dragged me up to Washington / I got stuck there for a while.”

This is a statement both evasive and telling. Dragged him? Really? The Mack girl dragged him to Washington? That’s some distance. I have a feeling the narrator’s own decision had something to do with it, too. And then there’s that hedging, manly “I got stuck there for a while.” Not “I gave it a shot and it didn’t work out, so I’m on my way back.” What we hear instead is passivity and irresponsibility: “I got stuck.”

Thus we learn that the reason the narrator left “old Alice” was not the outbreak of war, as in Jack-a-Roe (my second favorite song on World Gone Wrong, behind Lone Pilgrim) and not because he killed someone and got sent to prison, as in Take a Message to Mary (my favorite song on Self Portrait), and not because he shot down a rival for his girl's affections and had to go on the run, like in the Grateful Dead's Mexicali Blues. If this Alice happened to be exceedingly stout-hearted, and really fixated on the narrator, and if no one more likeable happened into her world while the narrator was gone, then war or even imprisonment might cut it as reasons for her to wait for him and take him back (which, remember, is what our narrator dreams—no, expects—will happen). “It’s gonna be just as if I stayed” ? Of course it’s not. He abandoned her.

And if “I got stuck there” is not quite honest, I bet “for a while” isn’t either. I think it’s been a long time indeed, or at least what amounts to a long time when you’re twenty, twenty-one, like I guess this narrator is—mid-twenties at most (Dylan would've been about 25 when he wrote Diamond Ring) if the narrator is exceptionally slow on the uptake.

In the second half of the second verse we have the lines, “She gave me more misery than a man can hold / And I took her bad advice” (“she” being “one of the Mack girls” who “dragged [him] up to Washington”). There’s some accountability there, more than we’ve glimpsed so far, and the listener’s heart accordingly softens to the fellow. Most of us are unfortunate enough to know what misery in love is. We know what a mistake in that realm amounts to. It does feel like “more misery than a man can hold.” So we know that the hurt that the narrator feels is real, and it's no wonder that he’s longing for what he left behind. With Alice, in St. Louis, with the organ grinder and the knife sharpener, with all those friendly and familiar people, things might have gone better.

“Now I don’t aim to bother anyone,” the narrator continues, “I have paid that awful price.” So he’s learned something, perhaps. But… “don’t aim to bother anyone” ? What about Alice? Of course in his mind, he’s only coming to reclaim what’s his, and the ghost-Alice won’t mind. Far from it, she’ll be delighted! As for what the real one will think…

After "awful price" comes a second refrain, that diamond ring reverie, the imagined proposal, the happy ending.

The third verse: “If I ever get back to St. Louis again / That diamond ring is gonna shine.” We might wonder, incidentally, what the narrator had gotten up to in Washington that he can suddenly afford a diamond ring. Typically, when love goes wrong, the rest of life disintegrates alongside. I don’t suppose the narrator was a rich man when he left St. Louis, else he wouldn’t be rhapsodizing the street types, the organ grinder, the knife sharpener, a burlesque dancer. Besides, the way this verse begins suggests he’s penniless. He’s skipped over the purchasing of the ring. He told us “I’m gonna buy that diamond ring” without saying how, or with what money—and now look, it’s already bought, already in his possession: “That diamond ring is gonna shine.”

But again the tenderness comes to balance the fantasy: “That old burlesque dancer’s gonna bum around / And everything is gonna be fine.” This “everything is gonna be fine,” whenever I listen to the song attentively enough, sends a chill down my spine. We know enough to be quite certain that the return to St. Louis will be disappointing. See, then, the pathos in how Dylan has structured his song: “dramatic irony,” as the high school English term goes, constantly mingles with the sweetness of the narrator’s recurring and expanding dream.

And it’s got some way to expand yet, unfortunately, and in ways we might not have expected: “I’m gonna settle up my accounts with lead / And leave the rest up to the law / And I’m gonna marry the one I love / And head out for Wichita.”

Whatever happened to not bothering anyone? It seems that the lesson we thought the narrator had learned in Washington wasn’t learned at all. Not only does he think he can ride into town and reclaim the love of the girl he abandoned, he’s convinced that he can solve all the other problems he left behind in St. Louis (which we didn’t even know about until now) with violence. “Leave the rest up to the law”—more irresponsibility. Show up, get the girl, blow the bad guys away, and leave: like a bad-ass, right? But the narrator in Diamond Ring is no Jack of Hearts, popping in with a posse that breaks the bank while he steals a kiss from Lily, gets Big Jim killed, and literally leaves the rest (that is, Rosemary) up to the law. Our narrator thinks he can pull this all off alone,with no plan and no money, only a bundle of dreams.

What an awful (and moving) contrast, too, between the first two lines of this section and the last two: the brazen violence and the romance. It’s not “old Alice” anymore, it’s “the one I love.” It’s not just buying a diamond ring to propose with, it’s actually getting married. And—here comes the clincher—he and Alice are both to flee St. Louis once “justice” is meted, and go seek fortune elsewhere: and the narrator knows where: in Wichita. Because, surely, things will be beautiful there. Everybody’s gonna smile. Everything is gonna be fine.

Thus it turns out that the narrator hasn’t learned even the lesson which the pain of nostalgia teaches, the pain he feels right now: that, for the most part, you’ve got to look for the good where you are. But he, no, he’s gotta be off to the next town, the one he hasn’t been to, the girl he hasn’t had, the diamond that shines like gold.

Lord, how this boy will suffer.