44. True Love Tends to Forget

Let’s look for a moment at the structure of Street-Legal.

On Side A are the mystical, time-and-space-exploding narratives of Changing of the Guards and No Time to Think, along with the, shall we say, otherworldy horniness of New Pony, and the mixed feelings of Baby Stop Crying, which in bringing the scope down to more recognizably or directly human situations and characters, paves the way for Side B. If Side A is about what the world outside of and surrounding the two embittered partners looks like when you’re deep inside the degradation of collapsing love, Side B has its focus on the details and dialogues of the experience itself. Even Señor, which stylistically recalls the more opaque of Side A’s songs, can be interpreted as the lovelorn narrator in conversation with himself. The two strains (the mystical and, for lack of a more appropriate word, the romantic) collide in Where Are You Tonight?, and there the album ends. By the time Slow Train Coming came around, Dylan had been pulled out of the fog, lifted out of the labyrinth. Street-Legal, meanwhile, is a map of the labyrinth; it’s incomplete but potent, and intoxicating to study.

True Love Tends to Forget, as the third track of Side B, is its literal center and its figurative heart. It shares the frustration and impatience of Is Your Love in Vain?, the exhaustion and self-analysis of Señor, and the dangerously extended tenderness of We Better Talk This Over, bridging all three modes with a glimpse into the past.

The first verse is, as a last.fm user, alias TheUselessGolem, puts it, “saturated with pain.” After the lovely fade-in, Dylan heaves a long sigh: “I’m getting weary looking in my baby’s eyes.” Not just “tired,” or “angry,” or “fed up,” or even “sick of,” but weary. There doesn’t seem to be, within those eyes, anything left for the narrator to be comforted or encouraged by. The two of them are too far gone. “When she’s near me, she’s so hard to recognize.” The lines imply that the narrator is still trying to recognize her, still searching for some hope-giving spark within her gaze, but it also indicates that looking at her is the only recourse left him now. Talking, it seems, is long over and done with. And even before the verse ends, there’s a shift away: “And I finally realize there’s no room for regret / True love tends to forget.”

In the second verse, the narrator abandons sight and figures he might try to discover whether touch will do any good: “Hold me, baby. Be near.” But even before any connection might be found in an embrace, the narrator is reviving old quarrels: “You told me you’d be sincere.” And bemoans, “but every day of the year’s like playing Russian Roulette / True love tends to forget.” So much for the hug.

As for that title phrase, it’s made to sound like the narrator taking a magnanimous step forward—“she will be as she will, but I will forgive”—but I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it better recalls the sense of the title of the song that seems to have, at least partly, inspired Dylan to write this one: Leonard Cohen’s True Love Leaves No Traces, from his and Phil Spector’s 1977 album Death of a Ladies’ Man (a powerful and desolate record, featuring Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg on folk-horrorcore anthem Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On). “As the mist leaves no scar,” Cohen sings, “on the dark green hill / So my body leaves no scar on you, and never will.” Likewise, I think that what Dylan’s narrator is preparing himself to forget isn’t his lover’s supposed cruelties or follies, but “true love” itself. It’s the personal realization that precedes the valediction We Better Talk This Over.

And so, maybe as a way of clearing out the old memory shelves, the bridge is a disturbingly forceful vision of the past, a metaphor of his and her meeting, or of the beginning of their love: “I was lying down in the reeds without any oxygen / You saw me in the wilderness, among the men / Saw you drift into infinity and come back again…” Musically, it’s the most powerful moment of the song, the band kicking up a storm, and Dylan shouting as if, in the act of remembering, he’s feeling once again, in the flesh, what it meant to be “lying down in the reeds without any oxygen,” without her—a place and situation to which, perhaps, he’ll now need to return.

But then, what’s the alternative? “Every day of the year is like playing Russian Roulette … This weekend in hell is making me sweat … Don’t keep me knocking about from Mexico to Tibet / True love tends to forget.”

How poignant, that “tends to.” Not “does,” not “will,” not “is bound to.” Merely “tends to,” the narrator hopeful but uncertain. And at the end of the song, when the refrain of “true love tends to forget” is lined up four times in a row, it’s as if the narrator is trying to convince himself, by beating the phrase into his own head, that his so-called realization is a true one. But of course no amount of repetitions, and no amount of backing singers singing the words with you, and no amount of awesome Steve Douglas saxophone fills, can make it so. No, it’s back to the wilderness for him.

I love the contrast between the frantic bridges, the smooth refrains, and the soft, agonized, gently sung verses. I love how Dylan builds each line out of a slow, elongated beginning (“you’re a teeeeearjerker, baby,”), a pregnant pause, and a stream of disappointed or resigned syllables at the end, set to a falling melody (“but I’m under your spell”), as if the narrator needs to equip himself with patience and fortitude before he can finish a single thought about the woman who’s got him “under [her] spell.”

In the final verse—with sight, touch, and the imperfect balance of contradictions all having failed to achieve much of anything—the narrator begins to beg: “You belong to me, baby, without a doubt / Don’t forsake me, baby, don’t sell me out! / Don’t keep me knocking about” (cue exasperated humor) “from Mexico to Tibet!” It’s an aggressive and eager-to-offend sort of begging, and not likely to be productive either.

Musically, the song is a marvel, the Street-Legal band rich and subtle. The star this time is Billy Cross. I love his guitar solo before the second bridge, and the profound little licks that fill the places in the verses where the vocals pause.

45. Blind Willie McTell

Or, as Peter Stampfel might have titled it, New St. James Infirmary.

Blind Willie McTell is a song that has generated so much discussion in Dylan circles that I don’t presume to have anything insightful to add. I can write a little about my personal experience with the tune, though.

I don’t think I was aware of it as a big deal until Jim Beviglia named it Dylan’s second best song, and was much celebrated for doing so. (Then the great debate began: what would his #1 be, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Jokerman? Which of the two would he spurn?). I hadn’t heard it yet, at the time, but I thought it was cool that a Dylan song from the ’80s should reach such a high position on Jim’s list.

When my chronological exploration reached Infidels, I listened to the Bootleg Series version and then to the electric outtake, so vehemently beloved by Clinton Heylin. Like Heylin, I was taken with the electric version: with the cough at the beginning, and with Dylan’s piano playing, and with his fantastic harmonica breaks, and with his far-out-on-edge singing. Maybe, if a full-band version had been polished to the sheen the other Infidels songs received on the album, I would end up preferring Blind Willie McTell in its electric guise. But as is, I remain spellbound by the dark and quiet, somber version that graced the original Bootleg Series, in which only Mark Knopfler and Dylan play. This is partly because I love Knopfler so much as a lead guitarist for Dylan, and nowhere else does he fill that role so completely as when he is the only other musician playing along. But it’s also because I think the song’s grim lyrics are scarier when they’re delivered hushed than when they’re shouted, even with the fearsome conviction that possesses Dylan on the electric Infidels outtake.

The Band (featuring three of five original members) recorded their own wonderful rendition on the 1993 album Jericho (and really, go listen to it if you haven’t! It’s got typically amazing singing, harmonies, drums, organ, and best of all, a long and striking instrumental riff-led outro), and supposedly that’s what got Bob playing the song live (four years later…). Praise be to the Band, then, not only for their excellent, majestic, rootsy interpretation, but for opening the doors to the intriguing versions Dylan has performed over the years. A few of these include:

August 5, 1997 — like an electric guitar suite.

April 15, 2007 — in which Bob plays the circus organ too tastefully for me, but the organ is nonetheless awesome when (at last!) it arrives, duetting with a guitar for a cool little riff that runs through one verse.

August 8, 2009 — George Receli does a great swaggering drumbeat and Dylan’s delivery has echoes of the tarnished prophet vibe of Precious Angel, Slow Train, and Gonna Change My Way of Thinking. Marvelous outro too, with the circus organ leading the way (mixed too low, but audible, so count me a grateful listener).

March 31, 2014 — which, suitably creepy harmonica solo at the end aside, sounds like a “Love And Theft” outtake that has crawled, loose-limbed but grinning, straight out of the 2001 time vortex.

June 17, 2017 — my favorite of this bunch because of the incredible organ and piano work. The runs of little organ melodies are reminiscent of the “eerie theme”/”creepy things are happening” music in the fantastic Japanese anime adaptation of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, which ran on Polish children’s TV when my siblings and I were young.

Each of these is sung with both force and sensitivity, and in the case of the March 2014 performance, all insinuating-like.

For all the impressive and varied live reimaginations I’ve heard, though, what endures most strongly in this listener’s heart is the lonesome, craggy, and haunted Dylan/Knopfler 1983 performance. I don’t think Bob has ever written or performed a ghostlier tune. Death Is Not the End comes to mind, but it doesn’t quite match Blind Willie McTell for what David Briggs, Neil Young’s old partner in crime, called spook—as in Will to Love, Don’t Spook the Horse…

Black Rider also comes to mind. So maybe Black Rider. But it’s too soon to tell.

46. We Better Talk This Over

Such a bright sound for such a sad song.

Well, not sad, precisely; the words are confident, but Dylan, delivering them, sounds deflated; and there’s sincerity and tenderness—though how deeply the tenderness runs is a question—and vestiges of toughness, so that I imagine him with a suggestion of a smile (or of a sneer?) curling half his mouth inbetween the lines. It’s a tell-off, ultimately, but a nuanced one, full of mixed messages and mixed feelings, since the narrator knows he is as complicit as the woman he’s trying to bid goodbye: a tell-off tinged with regret.

The Street-Legal band is (I’ve said it before, but it does bear repeating) amazing. You know what, I’ll let you hear it from Dylan too. In 1987, an interviewer asked him whether he thought the Band were his finest backing band, and Bob answered, “Well, there were different things I liked about every band I had. I like the Street-Legal band a lot. I thought it was a real tight sound.”

We Better Talk This Over is a showcase for Alan Pasqua (who, let it be known, reprises his role as Dylan's organist (well, pianist) on Murder Most Foul!), his mellifluent keyboard part commenting on and complementing the vocal lines. Handling the song’s grime is Billy Cross on is-it-rhythm?-is-it-lead? guitar. Ian Wallace’s drumbeat straddles the space between, giving the keys and guitar room to argue, and Dylan space to soar. I love the alternating hi-hat and snare beat that lights a fire under the B-section (the couplets). I also love the way Billy Cross’s electric guitar growls its way through the ending, into the fade-out, as if it wanted to pull the same trick it does in the closing minute of Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)’s closing minute; but it can’t, it must remain confined, since in We Better Talk This Over the narrator is still trying to keep a lid on the most intense of his emotions. So the guitar growls and paces, growls and paces, hungry and dissatisfied, as the song wanders away. Only then do we get Where Are You Tonight?

As in Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight, the opening lines of We Better Talk This Over cast us deep into the middle (or, rather, in this case, tail end) of a quarrel—“I think we better talk this over / Maybe when we both get sober,” said with appropriate caution, though I bet the caution was won through many a miserable drunken “talk”—but although the argument has been going on for some time by the time the song begins, We Better Talk This Over is track 4 on Side B of Street-Legal, so we more or less know what we’re in for. Actually, that’s what makes the—what shall we call it? timidity? amenability to reason? or tenderness?—so surprising. New Pony, No Time to Think, Baby Stop Crying, Is Your Love in Vain?, even True Love Tends to Forget: none of these songs lead you to expect the tone of We Better Talk This Over. So we’re back in the old fray, but in a new mood. Things are approaching their end. In the next song on the album, the lyrics will not be one side of a dialogue; they’ll be a monologue aimed at, not a living person, but a memory.

The second verse indicates a, for Street-Legal, unprecedented clarity: “This situation can only get rougher / Why should we needlessly suffer? / Let’s call it a day / Go our own different ways / Before we decay.” It takes a long journey through a shattering relationship to attain the certainty that all that’s ahead if a couple stays together is “decay,” that no reconciliation can achieve anything worth the keeping. It’s a desolate place to be, as the B-section elaborates: “You don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face / We’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase.” Both statements are at once, and impressively, ironic and  commiserating. There’s a sweetness in the first line of the couplet, the narrator inviting his interlocutor to a vulnerability they haven’t been in the position to allow themselves for a long time; the very sweetness of the invitation implies all the hatred and fury that has passed between these two sets of eyes before. The second line, too, expresses both a kind of tired sympathy (“Look, we’re almost done—let’s just finish up here and let time start to heal what it will heal, which, you know, is actually everything”) and still bottled-up anger (“Does my claim sound unbelievable? Yeah, I can hardly believe it myself—is it possible that all the pain we’ve heaped on each other is just going to be erased? No, it’s ridiculous!”). On paper, you can’t be sure which tone predominates; but the way Dylan sings it, we note, with relief, that it’s the resignation that’s stronger, the readiness for forgiveness, or if not forgiveness, then for a parting that, if it can’t be called peaceful or good-natured, at least makes a well-meaning half-step in those directions.

The B-section that closes the fourth verse (with its picture of late-in-the-relationship numbness: “I’m lost in the haze / Of your delicate ways / With both eyes glazed”) is also powerfully ambivalent: “You don’t have to yearn for love, you don’t have to be alone / Somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home.” On one level, these are lovely, well-wishing lines, not the kind you’d expect to meet in a harrowed break-up anthem. The narrator is giving his estranged partner a push towards the door, saying, “Go, find your happiness. Don’t stay here with me where there’s only pain.” That’s one interpretation. Another is that he’s chasing her out, in the inverted way we already met once in Walk Out in the Rain (where it was much more overtly angry). If that’s the case, then “somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home,” far from a sweet or comforting sentiment, conveys the narrator's wish that the woman disappear once and for all: “There’s a place that you can call home, but it sure as hell isn’t here with me.” A third interpretation is that the couplet’s tone is accusing, as in, “You’ve already decided that I’m not the one who can cure you of your yearning and loneliness; it’s not me you’ll make your home with,” and that the narrator is trying to cover up his bitterness by reformulating it as sweetness.

In the fifth verse we get real, if understated, or side-stepped, regret and reluctance. “I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow” (listen to Dylan’s sigh in the first two words), “If I have to beg, steal, or borrow.” Then there’s reckless imagination—“It’d be great to cross paths / In a day and a half / Look at each other and laugh”—followed perfectly by the in-built pause in the structure of the verses, a beautiful but hopelessly illusory moment to entertain the thought, after which the narrator must admit, “but I don’t” (poignant hesitation here, time enough for another sigh) “think that’s liable to happen / Like the sound of one hand clapping.”

The B-section here is the only thought in the song that seems untainted by bitterness, a brief peek of light that’s nevertheless so powerful that it’s followed not by another verse of lyrics, as every other B-section so far has been, but by an instrumental verse. “Don’t think of me and fantasize on what we’ve never had,” the narrator suggests, to the woman as much as to himself. “Be grateful for what we’ve shared together and be glad.” Note the pleasing, comfortable parallelism of “be grateful” and “be glad,” the consonant opening the two adjectives even matching up. But sure enough, after the light, after the instrumental verse that provides a moment of rest, we’re presented with the song’s cruelest image, as if rather than giving the conversation partners a chance to exhale and regroup, it merely gave them the time to prepare harsher invective: “Why should we go on watching each other through a telescope? / Eventually we’ll hang ourselves on all this tangled rope.”

The song ends with a decisive statement (“time for a new transition”) balanced—or rather overshadowed—by an admission of ineffectualness, of helplessness, teeth gritted because there is nothing that can ease the way through the suffering that lies ahead for both parties. “I wish I was a magician”—(but I’m not, and neither are you)—“I would wave a wand / And tie back the bond / That we’ve both gone beyond”—(but I won’t, because I can’t, and neither can nor will you.) The bond will remain, a tight knot, a blot upon the past, but those who it once bound together (“two trains running side by side, forty miles wide,” as a later song puts it) will walk in their opposite directions.

And there’s the major differences between the songs of pained love on Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire on the one hand, and those of Street-Legal on the other. Here we’re at the end of the road; there’s no ring left on the finger, only its tanline.

47. Idiot Wind

I’m not aware of a lackluster Idiot Wind. It’s great—

1. —as the studio acoustic performance (Disc 5, Track 10 on More Blood, More Tracks) chosen for Dylan’s original vision of Blood on the Tracks, the one based on the New York sessions. Dylan sings quietly, without the harsh emphasis we’d hear later. An eerie organ plays the part of the wind.

2. —as the full-band version done in Minneapolis and released on Blood on the Tracks; my go-to.

3. —live in 1976 with the Rolling Thunder Revue, as heard on Hard Rain. Ten minutes of vitriol. Howie Wyeth pulls the raggedy band along. The Revue’s arrangement sounds less intense and strange to me than the Minneapolis band’s, but it’s fun to hear Idiot Wind as a straight folk-rock song, and Dylan is deep in the performance, wailing and growling.

4. —live in 1992 with a gorgeous-sounding band—Bucky Baxter on pedal steel guitar, J. J. Jackson on lead, Ian Wallace on drums—for the prettiest arrangement of all, and though they follow a haphazard leader, who forgets lyrics and swallows or mutters whole lines at a time, that same wobbling leader also reworks the vocal melody in ways that match the backing band for beauty. The 1992 arrangement (for instance, see July 4^th in Genoa) is, of these four, my second favorite.

(For a fuller and better rundown of the different versions, I direct you to Tim Edgeworth's post on his Talkin' Bob Dylan blog.)

One summer, after legalization, the songwriter Henn Sie came to visit me in Bailey, Colorado, so that I could serve as producer for a new batch of songs he was at work on. As we took the two-hour drive from the mountains to the airport on his last day there, we played Devendra Banhart’s Oh Me Oh My and then a selection of favorites by various artists: the Minneapolis Idiot Wind, Keinan Abdi Warsame’s America, The Libertines’ Gunga Din. As I drove back alone in the deep darkness of streetlight-sparing US-285 I had my first good, loud listen to Swans’ The Glowing Man. Henn couldn’t bring his special biscuits with him on the flight, so he ate them all before boarding.

That drive from the mountains down to Denver brought home just how bizarre the Minneapolis arrangement of Idiot Wind is. It doesn’t sound like anything else in popular music, even though it sits right in the center of one of the classic LPs of rock and folk history. Play those first fifteen seconds and stop the song and (if Dylan’s voice weren’t so recognizable) you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were hearing something gnarly from Young God Records, from the psychedelic folk “revival” (in fact weird folk was always alive and well, if out of the limelight) in the new millennium’s first decade (from which so much incredible music emerged, and largely thanks to Michael Gira’s attentive ear and, often, his vast capabilities as a producer: Devendra Banhart, Akron/Family, Mi and L’Au, Larkin Grimm, and (the highest firmament) Fire on Fire and Gira’s own Angels of Light). I always get startled when the song begins, especially if I’m not listening to Blood on the Tracks straight through. Eventually my ear gets half-accustomed to the weird chord progression and the stabs of organ (and if that’s really Dylan who’s responsible for the latter, no wonder I’m drawn to the “circus organ” years of Dylan’s live career) but never completely; the Minneapolis musicians keep everything sounding beautiful and off-kilter.

The theme has changed, but in terms of musical paint-splattering and lyrical approach, I hear Idiot Wind as a tougher, harsher, and further-sprawling Tough Mama. I don’t think of Idiot Wind when I listen to Tough Mama, but I do think of Tough Mama when I listen to Idiot Wind. The lyrics are much more elaborate here, but they make similar jumps—“There’s a lone soldier on the cross / Smoke pouring out of a boxcar door,” and “The priest wore black on the seventh day / And sat stone-faced while the building burned / I waited for you on the running boards / Near the cypress trees as the springtime turned / Slowly into autumn.” There’s a song from six years later that, in turn, looks back to Idiot Wind: Caribbean Wind, which shares with Idiot Wind not only the structure of the title, but also choruses full of evocative references to the places from and through which the songs’ winds, idiot or Caribbean, blow.

I treasure Idiot Wind for its music, its imagery, and Dylan’s singing (decorated with great group vocals on the refrains live in ’76), but the emotional arc always catches me up too. It’s some trip to go from the blasé and laugh-out-loud funny first verse to the likes of “Someday you’ll be in the ditch / Flies buzzing around your eyes / Blood on your saddle” and “Idiot wind blowing through the flowers on your tomb … blowing every time you move your teeth / It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe,” and on somehow to the worn-out surrender of the final verse and refrain.

Here’s a four-point numbered list to match the one I opened with. This time it’s four captivating details of Bob’s phrasing on the Blood on the Tracks Idiot Wind:

1. The blustering disbelief of “Even you(!!) yesterday(!) had to ask me where it was at / I couldn’t believe after all these years you didn’t know me any better than that,” and then the hissed insult, “sweet lady.”

2. “I ran into the fortune teller who said, ‘Beware of lightning that might strike,’” Dylan shouting out “strike” like a bolt branching across the split sky, the incredible Bill Berg on drums answering with thunder.

3. The play on the rhythm of wheels on tracks in “Now everything’s a little upside down / As a matter of fact, the wheels have stopped,” Dylan’s notes climbing “as a matter of fact” and descending with “the wheels have stopped.” I also love the extended vowel in “wheels.”

4. A famous one, beloved of Allen Ginsberg: the heavy weight on the latter syllable in “capitol” so that it can rhyme more emphatically with “skull.”

48. Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody

Lava-spewing volcano of sound and transcendent singing in service of a “tremendous song” (Eyolf Østrem). It’s the spring of 1980. What else would you expect?

The versions from the final all-Gospel tour begin with one of the backing singers singing the title a capella, and the other backing singers joining in one by one, layering the harmonies, while Fred Tackett makes a bed of ringing notes for their heavenly/earthly voices to rise above. It seems like every element of Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody is directed upwards, including the smoke that “rises forever on a one-way ticket to burn.” The verses are a catalogue of the wrongs that the narrator is capable of committing, while the pre-chorus rejects the notion of committing them (“It don’t suit my purposes, it ain’t my goal / To gain the whole world and give up my soul”), and the refrain (and title) explains why. For good measure, the bridge goes into some detail about the destination the narrator is eager to turn his back on: “A place reserved for the devil and for all those that love evil / A place of darkness and shame, you can never return.”

For a song that’s almost all negative formulations (either the unpleasant things the narrator can do, or the things the narrator won’t or doesn’t want to do), the music is all positivity, celebration, delight. Listen to the little guitar-bass-organ riff that closes out the refrain. Listen to the lovely melody the song starts with, and which gets repeated every refrain by the backing singers while Dylan testifies with variations. And listen to the way, as the chorus is ending (the chord progression reverting to the Am / Bm / C that begins the pre-chorus, but then veering to a cathartic D and the G of the verses—and there’s the riff), Dylan speeds ahead of the backing singers to emphasize, at the peak of the blooming of the spirit, “No! Never! No way!”

It’s also one of the great examples of what I call the Gospel era Wall of Percussion, the backing singers armed with tambourines that, before video footage made me realize what was going on, made me hear Jim Keltner as some kind of eight-armed deity. Never underestimate the power of the tambourine—Big Blood, my favorite studio band, recorded several brilliant albums in which (I think) the only percussive instrument is a foot tambourine. I’m a nut for great and busy drumming (favorite drummers including Mike Najarian of State Radio, Barriemore Barlow of Jethro Tull, and Brian Blade of Black Dub) but I’ve never felt that those Big Blood albums lack anything in terms of propulsion or kick. And what do you get when you arm a band boasting a drummer as able as Jim Keltner (see, by the way, Neil Young's exquisite Peace Trail) with three or four tambourines shaken in unison? You get the gigantic, incomparable sound of Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody and its barnstorming older siblings (Gotta Serve Somebody, Solid Rock, Saved, etc.).

Trouble No More gives us three high quality versions of Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody (not that the song was really hurt by the warm hiss and din of the 1980 AUD tapes that I got to know it on, but it’s still a treat to hear Bob form and play with the lyrics so clearly, and to listen in to the separation between instruments, and thus experience the song in a way that approximates (or, rather, differently approximates) what people standing in those small concert halls forty years ago would have heard). The April 28^th Albany performance on Disc 2 has a great Fred Tackett solo that the April 18^th Toronto performance doesn’t, but it’s far tamer than Toronto, and the Toronto version has a fantastic organ solo instead (courtesy of who exactly? Spooner Oldham or Terry Young?). Toronto on the 18^th is my favorite of the officially released Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybodys. It blazes out in all directions.

That said, if I reviewed all 46 or so spring ’80 performances of the song, I’d probably be able to find something (or many things) to say in favor of each. After finishing the first draft of this write-up I went to listen to the May 20^th version, from Columbus, Ohio, and sure enough, it’s even better than the April 18^th, Dylan singing it with a voice that’s 85% of the way to my single favorite recorded Dylan singing voice ever (from the 1981 studio outtake of Heart of Mine).

Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody was rewritten for the Warfield residency and Musical Retrospective tour in the fall of 1980. The lyrics in the refrain and bridge remain the same, but the verses transform from personal ruminations into streams of strange, mystical, romantic, and anti-romantic imagery that sit well in the set alongside The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (and, in soundchecks, alongside Caribbean Wind) and that look a little forward to Angelina and all the way ahead to the folkloric spell of Jokerman. The fall arrangement is a lesser thing—no intro from the backing singers, and the end-of-chorus lines less intense—but the new words are engaging even in their not-quite-finished state, and Dylan sings them with invective. It doesn’t top the spring 1980 original, but it’s a worthy reimagination. And (as an additional point in its favor) it’s even got that wonderful, haughty “weeeeeell” that also features so memorably in live versions of The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar—“you can’t get bit by that same snake twice, well…”

49. Tangled Up in Blue

Among my favorite things to come out of the Infidels era is a song that’s neither on the album nor among the outtakes: the 1984 rewrite and rearrangement of Tangled Up in Blue, represented officially by a great seven-minute version on Real Live. Had this rewrite never come to be (and I should note that I haven’t yet fully or even glancingly explored the song’s long and storied live journey (Dylan having played it live almost two thousand times)) I would still treasure the song on the basis of (1) its Blood on the Tracks form, arranged gleamingly by the Minneapolis band, and (2) its crazy 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue incarnation, about which more later. If there were no 1984 rewrite, Tangled Up in Blue would appear on this list anyway, but significantly lower.

Tangled in 1984 is the most excellent evocation I’ve heard in song of the beauty, majesty, vulnerability, and inherent incipient pain of sexual love. A lot of early rock and its offshoots are about sex in a boring way (for one egregious example see Stephen Stills’ Make Love to You, on his nevertheless excellent collaborative album with Neil Young, Long May You Run) and a lot of hip hop is about sex in a raunchy way. Songs in the latter mode can sometimes be interesting, and the best I’ve heard—I’m In It by Kanye West—comes remarkably close to recreating the act using only sound, syllables, phrasing, and Justin Vernon. But I’ve heard nothing like the ’84 Tangled Up in Blue, which not only gets the physical side of things right, but also the feeling of the heart, the desire and the longing and the sweetness and the agony, the way all that complexity can, sooner or later, turn to ashes in your mouth; and it’s even got the vestiges, the lingering leftover emotions and memories that burden you long after the fact, and which hang around the more persistently the more you try to ditch them.

That’s how the song begins, after all, with one of the main characters waking up with a woman on his mind: “Early one morning, the sun was shining, he was laying in bed / Wondering if she’d changed at all, if her hair was still red.” Swept up in the mood of the morning, he casts his thoughts far back to a bright time, one of openness, promise, and determination: “Her folks they said that their lives together sure was gonna be rough / They never did like Mama’s homemade dress, Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough.” Then suddenly—in the time shifts that are characteristic of every version of Tangled—he’s remembering the aftermath of the separation: “And he was standing on the side of the road, rain falling on his shoes / Heading out for the old east coast, radio blasting the news, straight on through.”

Once, when I was nineteen and truly smitten for the first time, I had to drive three-hundred and sixty-four miles in the direction I least wanted to go, leaving my true love behind, against my will—a girl from what was locally known as the North Country, a fact that proved helpful when I got into Dylan a couple of years later. I don’t remember how the hours of that long drive passed, but I remember feeling like my mind was made of mud. “Radio blasting the news, straight on through.” No detour’s going to help in a situation like that, so straight on through is as good a way to proceed as any. What the radio’s playing doesn’t matter, either. Might as well be the news.

At the end of the next verse, we hear some words the two exchanged at the moment of their last parting, with her “[turning] around to look at him as she was walking away” (he just stands there, watching), and saying, “I wish I could tell you all the things that I never learned how to say,” a familiar enough kind of feint in the more sincere moments of lovers’ arguments; but his response is beautiful, sweet and generous as sometimes only the end of a relationship can let you be: “That’s all right, baby, I love you too.”

Next comes the glimpse of life in the middle of the rotting absence that is love gone wrong and not to be recovered: “He had a steady job and a pretty face and everything seemed to fit / One day he could just feel the waste, he put it all down and split.” The difference between the two lines is the difference between the inner world and the outer. “And all the time he was alone, the past was close behind”—so, in a sense, not exactly alone, and yet all the more lonesome for that ghostly companionship.

At the end of the verse, right in the center of the song, the first-person narrator shows up, suddenly addressing the same woman who we’ve heard about so far only in relation to “him.” And then a new love story begins… which if “he” had known about (and which he was no doubt busy tormenting himself imagining; “I don’t even care who you’ll be waking with tomorrow” as the line in an older song goes, the narrator’s saying so serving as proof that he is lying) would’ve made him feel still worse.

Not that the first-person narrator is much luckier. All we hear of his and her tale is the vividly remembered scene of their meeting, followed by reflections from the period of loss. Just like the man who in the first and second stanzas remembers the time “when they first met,” when “she was still married,” the narrator too fixates on their initial encounter, which Dylan paints tremendously, with details of color (“face so white”) and color’s absence (“the blinding light”), and snippets of seemingly mundane conversation, which under the surface (and as the singer reveals, singing the story out) couldn’t be farther from mundane. “What’s that you’ve got up your sleeve?” she asks, and he answers, terse but welcoming her attention, “Nothing, baby, and that’s for sure.” As Dylan sings it, you can feel the attraction blooming, the line not really “that’s for sure” but “that’s for suuuuuuuuure!” , all the turmoil of the heart bursting out in that howl. “I could feel the heat and pulse of her” (sung like “the heat and the pulse of HER”) “as she bent down to tie the laces of my shoes”—bent down to tie the laces, and also to—but the rest is left for us to imagine.

I love the interlude that the beginning of the fifth verse tells of: “I lived with them on Montague Street in a basement down the stairs / There was snow all winter and no heat, revolution was in the air.” No need to know who they were. Since they don’t stand out in the memories other than as the narrator’s landlords, or neighbors, or incidental friends, it wouldn’t change anything if we knew. I love how Dylan makes the weather and situation in town, so beautiful and so charged, feel like mere background for the main events, events that are confined to the narrator’s head and heart. Such, after all, are the inbetween stages of our lives. No matter what’s going on in the world outside, we go on living inwardly, remembering the past and (maybe) awaiting what’s next, as the narrator does as the song concludes.

But before the song ends, we hear about one more crisis, in which the first-person narrator relives (so to speak) what he from the song’s first half had suffered through when he was “heading out for the old east coast.” “When it all came crashing down,” the narrator says, “I was already south”—and though he might have successfully avoided meeting the catastrophe head on (“I was already south”), there’s no escaping the catastrophe’s aftermath: “I didn’t know whether the world was flat or round / I had the worst taste in my mouth that I ever knew.” That touchingly funny last detail, about the taste in his mouth, has brought me to tears before. The narrator’s heart is so overcome with sorrow that he can’t talk about the pain directly. What he can do is displace the awfulness to his sense of taste, and describe that instead.

There’s some resolution at the end—the song reaching so far through love and its timelines as to witness (partial) resolution—with the narrator “heading toward the sun” (or, in the classic ambiguity of the ’80s and on, “toward the Son” ?) “trying to stay out of the joints” (so as not to encounter another woman like the one on whose account he suffered?). He also says “I’ve got to find someone among the women and men whose destiny’s unclear,” which sounds to me like he hasn’t given up hope of love; he still wants someone whose fate isn’t wrapped up yet with another person’s, just like his isn’t. But the people he’s seeking seem to be moving in a different direction than the one he wants to go in: “Some are ministers of illusion, some are masters of the trade / All under strong delusion, all of their beds unmade.” An ambiguous ending, then.

Less ambiguous are the very last lines, in which the main character of the song’s second half thinks about the main character of the first: “We always did love the very same one / We just saw her from a different point of view.” It’s a reminder that there’s a curious part of the story which isn’t covered in the lyrics at all, but which is a prerequisite for their contents. Somewhere the narrator and the woman’s other lover, the he, must have met, and talked, and discovered that they had loved “the very same one.” Either that or the narrator is both a character and an omniscient narrator; how else, after all, would he know what he knows in the first verse, about the other guy’s thoughts upon waking? Or are both these men actually one man, and it’s just that the narrator draws a line between a former self, who drove with the woman to the west, and the later self who encountered her again “in the blinding light” ? I think these questions have been discussed and discussed and never worked out ever since Blood on the Tracks came out; and Dylan has always messed with the pronouns, from New York to Minneapolis and from stage to stage to stage. He talked in 1975 interviews about the influence of his painting teacher, Norman Raeben, on the songs he wrote that year (and, I think, thereafter). For me, that’s enough of a mystery to be glad about, that one art-form and way of creating (painting) can so fruitfully transform another (songwriting).

In the Real Live performance, the final verse is followed by a strange and terrific harmonica solo. I love the way the notes fall and collect.

Musically, the major differences between the 1984 arrangement and, say, the solo acoustic one from 1975, or for that matter from any full-band version that I’ve heard, are the long Am vamps added to the end of the (presuming a 13-line stanza) fourth and eighth lines of each stanza, which give the song a much darker tinge; and the long vocal wail on the last words of the ninth and eleventh lines (over the C chord). It may not sound like much when I write it out like this, but listen to Dylan play it and you’ll see.

A few words about my second-favorite edition of Tangled Up in Blue, full-band live with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, ventured only four times that year, and one of them at the legendary untaped tour-closing show in Salt Lake City, at which, in addition to giving this raggedy Tangled one more run, the Revue also supposedly performed Black Diamond Bay and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, two songs that you’d think would have been perfect for the Revue, whether in 1975 or 1976, but which had in fact never been played onstage before and were never played after. But back to Tangled. While I don’t doubt that there are a lot of worthy goes at the song in the “determined to stand” decades, I doubt that any of them could be as unusual as that worked up by the ’76 Revue. The arrangement takes the start-and-stop dynamic common that year (see also I Pity the Poor Immigrant) and uses it to “build a house made out of stainless steel” or something equally outrageous. It’s also constantly changing, constantly on the verge of totally falling apart—and lasts nine or ten minutes!

Some verses are done with the full-band, everybody playing fast, as if it were a punk song, and even (in classic British punk style... a year before British punk exploded into the mainstream) keeping each “song” (since, with all the dead air inbetween, each verse ends up sounding like a separate song) to about a minute or a minute and a half. Other verses are done solo by Dylan. He makes and breaks tentative rhythm after tentative rhythm with his electric guitar, sings and stops singing as he sees fit, as Howie Wyeth and maybe a couple others throw in a loose beat here, a stray note there. Finally, there’s a verse near the end done with the full band but slowly, as if it were now a blues song. And over all of this delicious chaos is the “raging glory” of Bob Dylan’s 1976 vocals.

No official edition of this Tangled Up in Blue is available (yet?), but the effort it might take to find a bootleg recording will be well rewarded. The relevant dates are April 21^st, April 22^nd, and May 23^rd. Get thee out there and hunt.

50. Baby Stop Crying

Shuhada Sadaqat’s concise take on Baby Stop Crying: “Dylan is talking about this girl who had a terrible life before she met him. She’s been dumped and had her heart broken, and she won’t stop crying. But it’s also about how Dylan’s gonna lose his fucking mind if she doesn’t stop crying. It’s a sweet and gentle song, the first lines are: ‘You been down to the bottom with a bad man, but you’re back where you belong.’ But then the next line is ‘Go get me my pistol.’ So it’s sweet but it’s witty too. If you listen to how he sings, you can hear in his voice how much his head’s gonna pop if she doesn’t shut up. He’s great at that kind of thing. He doesn’t try to be nice.”

It’s marvelous to think that this was a top-ten hit around Europe, and that when 1978 concertgoers came to see Dylan and his band play that summer, they would’ve been as excited to hear the performers launch into Baby Stop Crying as into the big songs from the ’60s or Blood on the Tracks stuff. Baby Stop Crying (and Street-Legal as a whole) deserves that kind of love. But especially Baby Stop Crying. It’s the warmest and probably catchiest song of the nine on the album, it’s colorful and wide-reaching, and though it doesn’t beg for you to admire it, it invites and rewards affectionate attention.

On the album it’s (if you’d believe it) arguably the least twisted of the twisted love songs—although, is it even a love song? I’ve always casually considered it one (with its terms of endearment, “baby” and “honey,” all over the place), but now that I think it over, I don’t suppose it is. At least, it’s not a romantic love song; the narrator cares enough for the woman he’s addressing that he considers murdering the man who hurt her, so it’s fair to say there is a kind of love there, but there isn’t any indication that the narrator wants to take that man’s place. “You’re back where you belong” sound like the words of a friend, of a protective older brother type of friend. He just wants to offer comfort. He’s not in much of a state to offer comfort, really, but he does his best. Maybe that’s why Baby Stop Crying comes off as Street-Legal’s least complicated song. The narrator’s reaction is definitely complex, but the driving emotion is simple: sympathy.

As Sadaqat notes, though, the song is only partly about her. The verses are about her, whereas the refrain, though addressed to her, is about the narrator, about how little of her agony he can endure. “You know and I know that the sun will always shine,” he tells her urgently, and then far more urgently, “but baby, please stop crying because it’s TEARING … UP …MY MIND!!!”

Writing about I’d Have You Anytime, I wondered what other great songs about friendship there were. Now I’m thinking that this right here is one. Because, at least in this point in time, theirs doesn’t seem a very likely connection. You’d think the girl could have found someone gentler and more patient to come share her grief with. But she didn’t, she chose to come to the narrator, though she must have known or sensed that his comfort would be of the unorthodox kind. And the narrator seems like someone with big things on his mind, maybe some kind of businessman or gang boss or pimp who, however, makes time on the side for maintaining his platonic friendships. And even if he’s no mogul, he’s busy and he’s on edge; if we identify him with Street-Legal’s other narrators, then we’d surmise he’s deep in the tangle of a miserable break-up of his own. But here’s one hurting person seeking out another hurting person; one hurting person drawing on his emotional reserves, however depleted, to try to make another hurting person feel better. “Broken mend broken,” as the prophecy in Ursula Le Guin’s Voices goes. And isn’t that how friendship works, most of the time? Both parties are struggling, each bent under their own weights; but at least the two of you are not struggling alone.

In the singing here, in the music, you can hear the affection and care—well, in the verses, you can. I love how Dylan’s voice soars for the last line of the third verse. It’s like he’s recalling, for himself, through his assurances, how much this girl means to him. “If you’re looking for assistance, babe / Or if you just want some company / Or if you just want a friend you can talk to”—and then rising to his own rhetoric, as if having convinced himself as well—“Honey, come and see about me!” (The line in Brownsville Girl comes to mind: “Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.”)

The refrains are wonderful too, in their different (and very Street-Legal) way. Dylan sings “stop crying” thirty-two times, and in the pre-chorus section, when each of his repetitions of the phrase is echoed by the backing singers, he lets his tone shift this way or that, the emphasis falling somewhere different each time: a tour-de-force vocal performance. And those repetitions make the narrator so desperate that he finally must take recourse in the high, dramatic refrain. The “you know and I know” line sounds more like a gambit than a consolation of any practical worth; when did telling somebody who’s heartbroken that things are or will be fine ever work? It’s more like the narrator wants to get out of the hard work involved in actually easing the girl’s mind, hoping a platitude will do the trick instead; but in fact, he does always manage to calm himself down and try for more meaningful communication again in another verse.

“The sun will always shine” may not mean very much, but the song’s other message, the unspoken one—“I will always be your friend”—does; that truth, once someone who needs it comes to possess it, is one of a very small handful of things that can make life, when life is at its cruelest, still bearable somehow.

I love the Street-Legal band. Ian Wallace, for instance, doesn’t have the exploratory instincts of a Howie Wyeth but he’s just as soulful, and by no means a worse drummer (at least in the studio; live in 1978 he’s a much smaller presence than Wyeth live in 1975 and 1976). He’ll have a heavy, classic or progressive-sounding rock beat in place and then take you aback with a lunge in a weird direction, or he’ll purposely hit something (or several things in a row) off the beat, and (also because the drums are given such prominence in the Street-Legal sound) each such variation will feel huge. One of my favorite examples is here on Baby Stop Crying, in the last lines of the refrain; Ian plays a tom tom tom tom tom snare pattern, letting the snare cap the sung lines (“youuuu know” snare “and IIIIII know” snare), but in the third line of the refrain—and only the third!—he goes for the crash cymbal instead of the snare, and then skips the first tom beat in the next measure. The effect is like dunking in your head in cold, clear water. I find these details of the drum part so exciting, even after seven years, that whenever I’m listening to Baby Stop Crying and the band comes to the refrain, my ears fix right on Ian Wallace.

I can’t finish this write-up without mentioning the great way the song begins, with the introduction (an instrumental refrain) resolving into Alan Pasqua’s long notes on the organ, like a breeze over the hillside that descends lightly to the river—or the great way it ends, with Steve Douglas’s saxophone solo, which sounds like the sunset.

51. Ye Shall Be Changed

I don’t think what appears on the Bootleg Series (and Trouble No More) is a finished recording, at least not by Muscle Shoals standards. I think that had Dylan slated Ye Shall Be Changed for inclusion on Slow Train Coming, Wexler and Beckett would have gone back to work, and we would have had overdubbed organ, horns, backing singers, maybe more guitar lines, too. But the incomplete arrangement that was left to posterity has the basic and essential ingredients: the sunny piano to lead the rhythm, Pick Withers drumming, Tim Drummond on bass, Mark Knopfler cycling lead and rhythm, and Dylan’s outstanding vocal performance. The mood of the song, its spirit, the lyrics, and the main melodies are all there. In fact, Ye Shall Be Changed sounds so rich already that it took me years to realize that it wasn’t ready to go on Slow Train Coming just the way it is.

Occasionally I’ll let myself dream of Ye Shall Be Changed, Trouble in Mind, and Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One being mainstays of the 1979 setlists, instead of the former two never getting live airings and the last only the one (what a performance, though!) with Dylan on lead vocals (and then, later in 1980, a couple headed by the incredible Regina McCrary—speaking of whom, if you have any interest in gospel music at all, any taste for it, listen to the McCrary Sisters!). Ye Shall Be Changed live, with all the reach and fire and adventurousness of Dylan’s voice in the Gospel era, and with Fred Tackett giving his spin on the lead guitar parts, and the girls singing along with Bob, and Terry Young on the piano, would have been something indeed.

But even without a polished studio take to admire, even without any live reworking to delight in, Ye Shall Be Changed is—well, it’s #51 on this list, for one thing.

For another, I can’t think of a happier Bob Dylan song. There certainly isn’t a happier song on this list of my hundred favorites. There are funny songs, warm songs, cheerful songs, celebratory songs, but nothing quite as exuberant, optimistic, and assured as Ye Shall Be Changed. The shimmering island pop arrangement encapsulates the joyful mood—and it may also be the reason the song was left an outtake. I can’t imagine where on Slow Train Coming it would have fit; not even Precious Angel sounds this dazzlingly bright.

“Don’t have to go to Russia or Iran / Surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand,” and “ye shall be changed.” “When you’ve decided that you’ve had enough / Ye shall be changed.” Not may, or might, or could, but shall. This is, in the literal meaning of the word Gospel, the good news. The four verses look at dismal and desperate situations, all of which I imagine the narrator having lived through himself, the “you” and “ye” standing in for “I” but at the same time extending hope outwards through the example of the narrator, whose blissful melodic yelp in the refrain shows just how far out of misery and hopelessness he’s been lifted: “In the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet blows / The dead will arise and burst out of your clothes” (among my favorite of all Dylan couplets). I imagine the narrator dancing with the skeletons who come up out of the ground clapping as the trumpet blows, and then the light arrives, and all is complete and redeemed.

Just goes to show what you can do with four minutes of jaunty island pop, if you’ve got the imagination.

Six highlights aside from the four refrains:

1. Dylan changing the vocal melody for “You drink bitter water and, oh, you been eating the bread of sorrow.”

2. The image of the uncertain future as “like a roulette wheel spinning.”

3. Dylan getting so passionate and caught up in his delivery of “surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand” that we wouldn’t know what the line was if we didn’t have the official lyrics. 

4. The instrumental break in the middle of the song, played as if on tiptoe, the guitar and piano and bass spending a few bars in conversation, before Pick Withers brings the third verse rolling in on the snare drum.

5. The indirect reference to It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (which reminds me of Christopher Ricks’ point about how the refrain of Slow Train plays with the refrain of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall). In the old song, “The lover who just walked out your door / Has taken all his blankets from the floor.” In this one, “All your loved ones have walked out the door / You’re not even sure about your wife and kids no more.”

6. Knopfler’s guitar solo over the fade-out.

52. Sara

Though all the available versions of Sara are 1975 vintage, and though you can’t go wrong with any of them, the studio version on Desire and the live recordings from the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue have their meaningful differences. The slower tempo on the album gives Howie Wyeth more time to do his wild end-of-measure fills and Dylan to add nuance to his rhythm guitar playing, while the main draw for me of the live versions is Rob Stoner’s bassline, darker and more melodic than on the album, sounding the way the indigo sky before a thunderstorm looks. The vocal melody/violin combination that provides the most moving melodies is intact in both arrangements, and the singing is always committed, always on edge.

A gloomy wind blows through the song, picking up fallen leaves from the street, casting them back down a little ways off, the prayers and pleas of the narrator never giving the impression that they’ll reach the place they’re aiming. Like Wedding Song, Sara is melancholy and brooding, heartfelt but uncertain, overcome but ambivalent about what exactly the overpowering feeling is. Is it devotion? Not exactly. Is it sadness and regret? Not only. Is it desperation? Rather something from a world beyond or outside desperation, or in the purgatory between one form of desperation and the next.

The way it’s sequenced on Desire, as the final track of Side B, doesn’t suggest that there’s much gladness in store. Joey is about struggle, and ends with death. Romance in Durango is about struggle, and ends with death. Black Diamond Bay is about struggle, and ends with widespread death. Sara is about struggle… and it doesn’t end with death, neither of a love, nor of a life, but don’t the circumstances encourage the listener to imagine the death very close at hand, maybe just around the bend? It’s conceivable that Sara was imagined as a dim light to set at the end of Side B’s tunnel of darkness, but then why should it have the saddest music of all four of these songs?

The lyrics sound to me like a man hunting in his memory for the sources of a love that has been gutted, who cannot imagine life without this emptied-out love, though he senses that there’s no return to the background of desire and harmony that color the scenes his memory turns up. So we begin with the recollection of a beach upon which their children play, from a time when the narrator’s loved one was “always so close and still within reach,” but we end with a “deserted” beach and an image of fragmentation, of destruction, of ancient things tossed up from great depths, “a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore.” There was something whole, once, something noble and proud; now it is broken and sunk. The narrator recognizes the situation on one level, but not on another. He ends the song with words that sound desperate although, with the rest of the song (and album) in mind, it’s hard to believe that they really are: “Don’t ever leave me. Don’t ever go.” And a lonesome, lonesome harmonica solo where the words no longer suffice.

The narrator’s references in the verses to the historical points of his and his Sara’s love—although they may seem pinpointed in reality, with their earthly addresses, Portugal, Jamaica, New York City, Long Island—are really as inaccessible to us listeners as the surreal list of the title character’s possessions in Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. When the narrator mentions “you in the marketplace at Savanna-la-Mar,” he and presumably Sara too know what the significance is. We don’t. Same goes for the “Methodist bells,” the “tropical storm,” the “moonlight on the snow,” and the “calico dress.” We’re allowed access to the late stages of this particular relationship, and to some of its common language or imagery (“sweet virgin angel,” “Scorpio sphynx,” “glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow”) but not to its stations.

No matter. For in its specificities, mournfully recalled, we can supply our own stories. Every love, every meeting of yearning between two people, has its geography (which gives the illusion of staying the same while the players who populate it change), its events that turn into tales that turn into increasingly unclear memories but still communicate something to and between the two who lived them. Lovers who stay together rehearse their histories, reinterpreting them each time they’re rehearsed. When love ends, the histories and images linger, and continue to be recast and reinterpreted by the estranged parties, until, maybe, someday, they’re forgotten, or sublimated into something else, or lost at last, when we finally encounter “a certain fellow whom we usually ignore though he never ignores us,” to quote S. Y. Agnon.

And just to listen to someone telling a story can tell you a lot about what happened (or what may have happened), about what was important (or what seemed important, or came to symbolize something important), even if you don’t understand the actual references in the story and don’t know the people. And so we have Dylan singing, and strumming that guitar, and blowing that harmonica; and we have the Desire band and the Rolling Thunder Revue, raising up Dylan’s chords, covering his footprints with theirs. And we get it; and the song is sad; and Desire ends, and the concert is almost through.

53. All the Tired Horses

The amount of distinct lyrics in a song doesn’t necessarily have any connection with how good or how powerful a song it is. Sometimes a couple of lines is all it takes, even with artists renowned for their lyrics. Look at John Lennon’s I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Neil Young’s Till the Morning Comes, Vic Chesnutt’s Rattle. And, at least equal to all of these, look at All the Tired Horses.

Christopher Ricks is characteristically brilliant about this song in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, so if you can, go and read what he has to say. The only insight I’ll borrow from him here is that the song is really three lines long: Not just “All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I s’posed to get any riding done?” but “All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I s’posed to get any riding done? / Hmm. Hmmmmm,” the narrator luxuriating in the problem but, as the tone of the line both written and sung indicates, not getting unduly worked up about it either.

Down the slope from the house in Bailey, Colorado, where Shelton Drive melds with Wilkins and becomes suddenly paved, there is a wide open swathe of green where someone keeps horses. Every time I’d walk or drive down from the house I’d see them there: in the stalls or out in the sun. Go on west towards where County Road 43 becomes unpaved and there’s more green, more horses. Granted, up in the Rocky Mountains it’s not all that often I would see them “tired … in the sun,” or for that matter anybody riding them—I was much more likely to find them wearing warm clothes, a lot of ‘70s Neil Young plaid, on summer mornings, which were dewy and cold before the sun broke over the peaks—but in any case they’ve always served as the representatives of Dylan’s Tired Horses. I need only stretch out the fields, lower the mountains, let the sun hang there over the horizon where afternoon and evening meet, splash some golden Prairie Wind front cover light over it all: the graceful, sensitive, noble animals sprawled out, glad to be resting, content in their ease, and then young bearded Dylan there with hands in his coat pockets, looking over his kneeling immobile steeds with some dismay but a lot of love, remembering that to ride the horses would bring wind howling around his ears, would bring words and melodies, would bring songs—and thinking, “Aw hell” …

I loved All the Tired Horses from the moment I hit play on my first listen to Self Portrait. I came to love it even more when I learned to play it on guitar. The chord progression and the elegiac melody line blend like milk and tea, and the lyrics lead so smoothly into the humming and the humming so smoothly into the lyrics that once I start playing I feel I can keep playing the song forever and not get tired. No wonder the song can run to 3:13, hinging on those repetitions and that progression, and never (unlike the title horses) run out of steam. As far as I’m concerned, the song could’ve gone on a lot longer still.

It begins with the vocals alone, distant, quiet but getting louder—Dylan messing with the indefatigably obsessive side of his fanbase (as if to say, “You want to know about me? You want to look up my address and come find me so I can be your prophet? Well here’s an album called Self Portrait, this is who I am” and so we begin with pristine, country-tinged, heavenly female vocals, a far cry from Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (“I paint landscapes and I paint nudes / I contain multitudes”)), but indulging in the beauty of the music too—and then, slowly, we get enough sound to fill the whole scene, the horizon, the sunlight, the horses, the field, the fences, the hay bales, with swells of melody from the strings and then leisurely relaxation into silence, the vocals gone, the strings plucked, the acoustic rhythm guitar prominent. I hate 97% of the string arrangements I’ve heard in folk and rock music, strings just not being my thing (in agreement with Steven Rineer: “guess I’m just a rock and roll motherfucker” … although Steven also draws the line at flute, whereas I, Ian Anderson fanatic that I am, don’t), at least in these two genres; but All the Tired Horses is part of the 3%. The minute-long Another Self Portrait edition, without strings, does nothing for me.

(However, Another Self Portrait is a wonderful release, and I don’t want my only reference to it in this write-up to be a dismissive one, so here’s Ralf Sauter commenting on the set in September 2013:

“Good Christ, this set is a total godsend which I just can’t get enough of. Made me feel as if I’d been asleep all year and suddenly woke up to some sunlight rays shinin’ onto my face. If I were told this music was gonna be taken away from me unless I sucked on a Minotaur penis, I would do it. Thanks Bob, Columbia, Sony and all involved.”

I love that Ralf capitalized Minotaur.)

If there’s anything to be said against All the Tired Horses, it’s that, as an album opener, it sets a standard that the rest of Self Portrait circles around but doesn’t meet again, except (as I reckon) right near the end, in Take a Message to Mary. That said, though, I find Self Portrait to be a great and fascinating work, worthy of the discography it belongs to. It was heartening to find this snippet of conversation recorded in Larry Sloman’s On the Road with Bob Dylan, while the two are discussing the blinkered reception of then-recent albums like Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and Planet Waves):

“ ‘Well, I didn’t come across the right way for those people[,’ Dylan says. ‘]They expected Blonde on Blonde. Ten years later, they’re still expecting Blonde on Blonde. I mean these people, they’re still looking in the same mirror. They look in the mirror and they don’t realize that they’re seeing somebody different than they saw ten years ago. Photographs have meaning for them.’

‘So an album like Self Portrait…’

‘Did you like that one too?’

‘Sure did.’

‘Well, that means more to me than all the fucking critics who say it was a bad album.’”