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.