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.