100. Like a Ship

If the Traveling Wilburys hadn’t existed, it would be hard to think them up. “Hey, you know what a cool supergroup would be?” As if! The union was so improbable that I still often forget about the Wilburys when I think over Dylan’s career. It was a project contemporaneous with the beginnings of the latter part of Dylan’s career as live performer, and with the recording and release of Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky, two albums so unlike each other, and unlike most anything done with the Wilburys…

But Like a Ship sounds to me like a song that could have slid right onto Under the Red Sky, arranged by Don Was, had Dylan wanted that. Instead we have this bright, colorful, acoustic guitar-heavy singalong anthem with George Harrison, very recognizably, harmonizing along. Dylan’s rough, weary vocal presides over all that supergroup roughness and Jeff Lynne polish. It’s a bizarre meeting but, as with everything Wilburys, no matter how improbable, it works.

I like that Like a Ship was done with the Wilburys instead of Don Was, since it gives us a window into what the Red Sky material might have sounded like in different hands; not more capable hands necessarily, just different ones. Just about anything on Red Sky could be strummed along to as merrily as Dylan and the Wilbury crew strum along to Like a Ship. Was preferred to roughen the surfaces, to let Bob’s songs take a tumble in the dust first. And he preferred to let the bridges—or are they refrains? I can never tell; they (and I’m thinking also of Wiggle Wiggle, Under the Red Sky, Unbelievable, 2x2, Handy Dandy, and Cat’s in the Well... that’s most of the album right there) don’t seem to work the way refrains do, and the words always change—anyway, Don Was preferred to let the bridges explode onto the scene, rather than merely step up a little as the “standing on the white cliffs of Dover” and “the night is dark and dreary” sections do here. And Don wouldn’t have had anyone sing with Bob; there'd have been one extra voice, at most, rather than the group vocals on Like a Ship, which are put to their best use near song’s end, come the “oh to be like a ship on the sea” part, which I imagine is Dylan’s band members’ only contribution to the songwriting.

Like a Ship belongs with the Under the Red Sky songs both structurally and, I’d argue, lyrically. It has that sing-song pseudo-lullaby thing going on, the nursery rhyme veneer under which complicated emotions boil. The couplets are lovely and crystalline, much like Cat’s in the Well is (“and the leaves are starting to fall”). But they don’t add up to a straightforward love song. First of all, Dylan doesn’t sing them that way. And then, of course, and with such great sleight of hand, he undercuts each of them with the same (lyrical) refrain: “Go away, go away, let me be!” That sudden turn is something I think of as characteristic of the Red Sky songs, in which violence, humor, and tenderness all rub up against each other like winter morning horses.

Here in Like a Ship, the passive narrator (always passive: his lover is the ship, the willow with its down-reaching branches, and the wind; he is the sea, the ground, the leaf, which is to say, the party being trodden on or approached or shaken) describes “her love” using what we listeners are inclined to take for beautiful, peaceful, and harmonious imagery—nature imagery, no less; the most advanced piece of technology that comes up is the ship of the title, and no doubt it’s the old slow wooden ship of the folk corpus, of House Carpenter and its ilk; we’re not even talking trains here—only to be told that all these manifestations of love are offensive and burdensome. But indispensable, too? “The night is dark and dreary / The wind is howling loud / Your heart is hanging heavy / When your sweet love ain’t around.” Sweet, are you sure? But Bob the songwriter embraces the incongruity and, well, lets it be, thus treating the song as its narrator would like to be treated.

And though it’s not the right ocean, “standing on the white cliffs of Dover / staring out into space” calls Robert Frost’s Once by the Pacific to my mind. If Like a Ship is as close kin to the Armageddon-minded Under the Red Sky as I think it is, then this not-exactly-an-allusion is an apt one.