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.”