92. Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight

These last few years, an LP of Infidels—the first vinyl record I ever bought—has hung on the wall of my living room, Bob Dylan in his early ’80s shades presiding over whatever musicmaking my songwriter self might get up to. It won’t necessarily spoil much to admit I think Infidels is a terrific record. I won’t tell you where exactly I’d rank it in the discography, at least not until later. But whereas most of the discussion online and in books like Clinton Heylin’s or Michael Gray’s centers around which songs didn’t make the album, I am well pleased with the eight that did. As one Chris F commented on Eyolf Østrem’s website, “To anyone who only knows Infidels as the album that doesn’t have Blind Willie McTell, I would respond, ‘But it DOES have Jokerman.’” I would add, “and Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight.”

It's an excellent closing track. After all manner of protests (Neighborhood Bully, Union Sundown), prophecies (Jokerman, License to Kill, Man of Peace), and sleights of hand (Sweetheart Like You), the album wraps up, unburdening itself, with a declaration of faith (I and I) and this declaration of need. “I need you, ah, I need you!” are the lasts words we hear on Infidels, before a harmonica solo that’s as calm as the singing isn’t.

The song begins with a holding action: “Just a minute ‘fore you leave, girl / Just a minute ‘fore you touch the door.” The words launch the listener into the scene, into the argument, which has been going for a while and will continue not for one more minute, as the narrator claims, but for five (and beyond). Cleverly, since the song is an album closer, the first lines are also a metafictional address to the listener: “No, hold on, we’re not done here yet! Just a minute. One more song.”

The one record in Dylan’s catalogue that I think beats Infidels for sheer volume of great one-liners is “Love And Theft”. Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight is full of them, concerning, variously, vipers, the Vatican, worldwide desolation, idle wishes for a change of career, a painting in the Louvre, the King of Hollywood, “mudcake creatures,” and an affluent drummer. Leave it to the Bob Dylan of 1983 to throw all these things together and still come out with a coherent and largely comprehensible song.

I think of it, to some degree, as Street-Legal five years later, or as Street-Legal post-encounter with the divine. In the earlier album, you can find a narrator positing an outward apocalypse based on the desolation in his own heart, but the narrator in the story of Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight is inhabiting an actual apocalyptic wasteland, with him and the girl stuck in a dwelling located somewhere deep in the dust of ultimate endings (“The only place open is a thousand miles away / And I can’t take you there”—how’s that, by the way, for contemporary relevance?). Yet even in this sort of setting, even in the end times, he’s still fighting—after his fashion—to win the woman’s love, and he continues to fight even though his own nerves are on edge: “Don’t fall apart on me tonight / I just don’t think that I can handle it.” It is especially in this regard that I hear the song as kin to Street-Legal. It’s not a big step, emotionally, from Baby Stop Crying to this song; the difference is in the imagery, in the fact that there are three (so-called) Gospel albums inbetween.

And wow, what to say about the music. Much like the album that holds the song, it sounded too weird and murky (talk about mudcake creatures) for me to enjoy much the first, oh I don’t know, twenty or twenty-five times. Actually, the sounds do cohere, if you’re patient with them; but then part of the appeal of the arrangement is the uncanny way it suggests that each of the musicians is playing for a different bar band, and that all these bar bands are playing different songs, and that they're all playing in the same little bar at the same time. How anybody ever thought that Dylan’s harmonica lines and Knopfler’s guitar part sounded good together is beyond me, and even further beyond me is that this anybody was, in fact, correct. Anchoring the chaos (from the corner of the bar nearest the rowdiest drinkers and gamblers) is Sly Dunbar’s drumbeat, the classic mid-’80s echoing snare put, for once, to solid artistic use.