56. Buckets of Rain

Dylan saves the prettiest and most soothing song from the Blood on the Tracks sessions for last. He must have known that anyone who’d listened through You’re a Big Girl Now, Idiot Wind, and If You See Her, Say Hello, as well as all the more gently conveyed pain elsewhere, would be aching, by now, for something pretty and soothing.

Now granted, there’s no reason to expect a happy song at the end of a record about love gone wrong, and Buckets of Rain doesn’t pretend to be a happy song for long (I mean—as with You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go—just take a look at the title), but it gives it a good try. In the context of some other album, even Planet Waves, the guitar melody could have come off as cheerful. At the end of Blood on the Tracks it sounds resigned. And Dylan sings like someone smiling because they’re all out of tears and what else are you gonna do, at the end of the day, really? The woman’s gone and, to reappropriate Robert Hunter, “nothing’s gonna bring [her] back.”

The song ends with what I hear as one of the album’s most lonesome cries: “I’ll do it for you / Honey baby, can’t you tell?” I’m not sure if that final cry is enough or merely almost enough to negate the exhausted wisdom just preceding the final lines: “Life is sad, life is a bust / All you can do is do what you must / You do what you must do, and you do it well.” It would have been a very different sort of song, and album, if Buckets of Rain had ended there. But no, there’s that one last scream of defiance. “Can’t you tell?” Well, evidently not.

But first we get a lot of smiles, a lot of teasing, a little bit of spring sun if only because the clouds that cover most of the sky have, at this point, emptied themselves of rain. There are jokes that hide unhappiness and confessions that, one last time, uncover it: “Buckets of rain / Buckets of tears / Got all them buckets coming out of my ears,” the narrator desolate but spirited enough to poke fun at himself, and even to go on and spin the images into a stranger poetry: “Buckets of moonbeams in my hand.” And an exhausted, admiring, deprecatory “You’ve got all the love, honey baby, I can stand.” Indeed, any more of that kind of love and the narrator is done for, flat on his back, in a coffin, in the ground…

Next, for a minute, we enter Abandoned Love territory. “I’ve been meek / And hard like an oak” (how gorgeous!—if you don’t entertain the raunchier interpretation), “I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke” (including present company, so to speak), “Friends will arrive / Friends will disappear.” The narrator makes this last remark as if it were ordinary, a fact of life… it is a fact of life, but it isn’t ordinary, it always hurts. You live long enough and you start to wonder how you can spare any love for the new ones who show: another lover, a friend, a child? How anybody who has had someone beloved “disappear like smoke,” especially the kind of disappearance that’s permanent on this earth, can bring a child into the world and begin to love it is beyond 30-year-old Sigismund Sludig, anyway… I mean, where do people get these reserves of love and belief in the future from? How brave!

But I digress, not having finished the verse. “If you want me / Honey baby, I’ll be here.” That, to me, is the human power of resignation in all its beautiful, flawed, illusory nature. “You go on, you do what you need to do—I’ll be here, I’ll wait for you.” I don’t think things actually often go that way. I think the message of Walk Out in the Rain is the more common, where one lover pretends to let the leaving lover go, maybe magnanimously on the surface, while feeling furious and offended underneath. Here in Buckets of Rain, the narrator’s been frayed to the bone by his love affair, and, having been worn down so hard, can speak out of a generosity of spirit that’s accessible in the moment, yes, and even true, for now; but unsustainable. Who really has that much spirit? That much patience? That much time?

No need to discuss the third verse, it’s a straight slap to the face, and surely an intensely relatable one for many. The fourth verse, too, employs a similar, if less obvious, contrast; the passion in “I love the way you love me strong and slow” is, unlike the words that the narrator has selected to describe that love, like an undertow, vicious and fast. That passion would like nothing more than to be “taking you with me / Honey baby, when I go.” Oh, it would love to. But it can’t, of course.

Stabs of the knife. Stabs of the knife. But the narrator has gone soft and vulnerable, the narrator feels like a snail whose shell has been pried off, the narrator is tired, so—well, you might turn to Keinan Abdi Warsame’s song Smile. I’ll quote the refrain in full (though since these are lyrics, you’ll only get the full effect if you hear the song… unless you’re Liam Paul O’Kell, who already knows it) and leave it at that:

“Smile (when you’re struggling) / Smile (when you’re in jail) / Smile (when you’re dead broke) / Smile (and the rent’s due) / Smile (you ain’t got friends now) / Smile (and no one knows you) / Never let them see you down, smile while you’re bleeding / Smile (when he leaves you) / Smile (‘cause, girl, he needs you) / Smile (plenty single mothers cry the tears you do) / Smile (despite the war) / Smile (despite the pain) / Never let them see you down, smile while you’re bleeding.”