87. Tough Mama

My favorite Band album is Stage Fright, but my second favorite is Northern Lights/Southern Cross, so it figures that I love the raggedy, clean, and full sound of Planet Waves. On Tough Mama, and the fast Forever Young, the players approximate the funky celebration groove that would be featured the following year on Ophelia. In some respects, they better it here. As Clinton Heylin notes, “The Planet Waves recording [of Tough Mama] is one of the very best examples of ensemble playing any Band fan could hope to find,” an electric whirl of sound that works Dylan up to great singing and harmonica work. Garth Hudson is responsible for the melodies and breaks I like best, the best of which he saves for the instrumental jam at the end.

Planet Waves is a good album for when you’re living in the mountains and daylight comes and the mountains are covered in snow. The lyrics of Tough Mama only match my image halfway (“I stood alone up on the ridge” but “it was hotter than a crotch,” which latter, in spirit, calls to mind another controversial favorite: “Satin blouse unbuttoning / Satin blouse unbuttoning / Time is a stripper, doing it just for you,” from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s Cats under the Stars) but the sound is real snowy. My impression is probably due to the black and white (mostly white) album cover, and because the best context I ever heard Planet Waves in was on a cold Colorado night, with a fire in the hearth in the house and the electric lights all switched off, the album playing loud through the stereo. I picture Dylan and the Band wearing fur coats and warm hats and standing out in the snow jamming while the sun illuminates the white mountains, the amplifier cables going over the window sill into the power outlets back home, where it’s warm and where hot tea is waiting: a sound that’s warm and cold at once.

The lyrics and the spirit of Tough Mama, however, are like an open fire. I agree with what I think is the accepted interpretation, that the song narrates Dylan’s reinitiation into the working life, his beginning once again to court the muse. That hot countryside day, when the narrator was up on the ridge, “all [he] did was watch.” Six years (from 1968 to 1973) Dylan had dedicated to home and family life, setting songwriting and performing live aside—not that he ever stopped altogether, but the pace and the scope weren’t what they had been. And a lot had happened in the music scene while Dylan was gone: the break-up of the Beatles, the rise of Neil Young, and Van Morrison, and Leonard Cohen, and David Bowie, and Brian Eno, and The Band themselves. All the while, “all [Bob] did was watch.” Soon, however—the lyrics imply—things will change. “Sweet goddess, your perfect stranger’s coming on in at last … It must be time to carve another notch.” And in the final verse, ominously, presciently, “The world of illusion is at my door.” But even recognizing it as such, the narrator is ready to cross the threshold. And how better, than with a song as imaginative as this?

I can’t catch the import of every line of lyrics, nor do I suggest that it all adds up neatly into a song about courting the muse. The way the vocals are structured, with three to five syllables of invocation or announcement, then a pause, and only later the rest of the line (“I ain’t hauling… … ...any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore”), followed by a change to minor key and a couplet unrelated to what was just said, invites the listener to register the meaning of the song piecemeal, as flashes of thoughts and events, and not as something integrated or whole. But each of these flashes is intriguing, and accompanying you on the passage through the storm of images is the Band, and Dylan their leader: six musicians so committed to the performance that you’d think Lone Wolf (or Dire Wolf?) was waiting to bite their heads off the moment they lagged.

My favorite live Tough Mama is not by Dylan or the Band but by Dylan’s friend Jerry Garcia, with the fantastic Legion of Mary, a covers-oriented band Jerry formed with his old stalwarts John Kahn and Merl Saunders and newcomers Martin Fierro and Ron Tutt. On an officially released performance from September 1^st, 1974, Tough Mama is seven whole glorious minutes long; fourteen months later (see the Garcia Plays Dylan compilation), it’s nine. Regarding Going, Going, Gone and Tough Mama, Jerry said, “Those are songs I wear really well. When I sing them I feel like I could have written them. I relate to them that well.” Listen and believe.