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.