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.