85. Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)

You know from the first few seconds of the studio version, with that ominous roll of Bobbye Hall’s hand drums, Steve Douglas’s mournful saxophone, and the overlapping electric guitars, that something heavy is coming. Señor is one of Bob’s finest premonitions of apocalypse in a career with no shortage of such, even if the Armageddon here referenced is, as I interpret it, one that exists only in the speaker’s ravaged mind. 

When the song became a staple of the live shows in late 1978 (which Columbia should really document in a Bootleg Series one of these years; the pristinely recorded At Budokan has some good things on offer but it’s just an intimation of the same band’s powerful autumn run, the difference in quality rather like that between the bombastic, shouty, and showy 1974 shows with the Band versus 1975’s still hard-edged but at the same time colorful and sensitive, not to mention bold and imaginative, Rolling Thunder Revue), Bob tended to introduce it at length, telling of a time when he was riding a train in Mexico, and a married couple with something like twelve kids left the compartment Dylan was in, to be replaced by a man wearing a blanket, with eyes made of fire and smoke pouring out of his nostrils.

I was reviewing the bootleg of the November 21^st performance of Señor as part of my preparation for this write-up, and it struck me that Bob’s wooly anecdote serves as a picture of his mindset, or his station in life (as on the front cover of Street-Legal, in which Bob leans out expectantly into the avenue, a conspicuous tanline where his wedding ring used to be), or the transformation he felt himself undergoing in 1978. For years he had been a family man: a husband: a father to several children. But now he was, figuratively speaking, venturing out into a new and barren landscape, alone and weathered by his experiences; and soon, very soon, as soon as the writing sessions for 1979’s Slow Train Coming, there would indeed be flames where his eyes were and smoke pouring out of his nostrils. “There was so much I wanted to ask him,” Bob’s monologue ends, and the song begins: “Señor, Señor, can you tell me where we’re heading?”

Initially the title character seems to be somebody with a minor or passing role in the narrator’s life: like a passenger on the same train, sharing the same compartment for a little while. “How long are we gonna be riding?”

Later, the figure of the one being questioned becomes a kind of guide at the place in which the narrator has arrived: “Can you tell me who to contact here?”

And in the final verses, Señor is a partner-in-arms, who will assist the narrator in the uprising that the narrator feels he needs to witness, or rather, initiate. Pointedly, and as has been often pointed out, the song ends before the decisive action is taken. Dylan’s voice rises into a scream for the final line, “Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, Señor?”

It’s as if this wise man figure, encountered on (let’s say) a train, or a wagon, or horseback in the wastes, slowly becomes internalized, until he or it is merely—or, shall I say, as much as—a fragment of the narrator’s own spirit; a resource of strength or wisdom that cannot yet be, but may soon be, drawn upon.

And since this is Street-Legal, the chaos the narrator rides through, although apocalyptic in its imagery, is the chaos of broken love. The narrator can’t forget the absent woman who once told him “forget me not.” At this point he is defeated, he has already “stripped and kneeled,” and there’s no longer any way to deceive himself about the severity of the situation: “Son, this ain’t a dream no more,” a gypsy tells the narrator, “this is the real thing.” The world has ended. Or, to put it another way, one particular world has ended.

And if so, what comes next?

Street-Legal, the album—thematically—is a holding pattern, and the lines in Señor encapsulate it: “Give me a minute, let me get it together / Just gotta pick myself up off the floor.” But that’s easier said than done.