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.