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.