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.’”