62. Nobody 'cept You

The studio version we have of this song, from the first day of the Planet Waves sessions, and presumably the first time Dylan ever played the song with a group, is a beautifully tentative thing. The song is obviously a finished one, written and constructed with care, but the Band is still feeling it out, and Levon Helm’s not in Santa Monica yet which puts Richard Manuel on drums. Robbie Robertson’s lead guitar appeals more to me with its tone than with the notes he’s playing. This leaves Garth Hudson’s organ and Dylan’s vocals to bring the melodies, which they do generously.

The shambolic vibe rubs attractively against the full-heartedness of the words and tune. Best of all in this regard is when Richard stops drumming twenty seconds before the end, leaving Dylan’s rhythm guitar to carry the drifting band through the final lines. The tenderness and beauty of the lyrics is inadvertently highlighted: “Nothing hypnotizes me or holds me in a spell / Everything runs by me just like water from a well / Everybody wants my attention, everybody’s got something to sell / Except you / I’m in love with you!”

Thinking biographically for a minute, it’s puzzling that Nobody ’cept You and Wedding Song were (probably) written the same year. The former is as pure, light, and joyous as the latter is confused, laboured, and barbed. The proximity of Nobody ’cept You to so many songs of broken love (Wedding Song, Blood on the Tracks) on the one hand and to Planet Waves’ songs for the Muse (Tough Mama and, as Björn Waller suggests, Dirge) on the other makes me suspect that it might not have been written to any particular woman so much as to the Spirit of Song. One of the chief links the narrator locates between his present love interest and the composure he once knew is the memory of an “old familiar chime”—and what is a chime if not music? Of course there’s nothing that says you can’t liken a woman to a song, but comparing one song (or the Spirit of Song) to another makes plenty of sense, too.

As a love song, it’s the most devoted and passionate one that Dylan wrote between Lost on the River and the Gospel era. “Nothing ’round here to me that’s sacred / Except you / Nothing ’round here to me that matters / Except you.” Anyone who has been in love knows what that feels like; when you’re way in, there’s absolutely no one and nothing that can satisfy or move you but the one you love, and it’s laughable to think that there might be. And this narrator is, in the present, not only committed to but rescued by this love: “Nothing ’round here I care to try for / Except you / Got nothing here to live or die for / Except you.”

The narrator was once, as a young man or a child, in touch with what’s beautiful in the universe (and those among us fortunate enough to have had happy childhoods can no doubt conjure up our own equivalent experiences and loves), whose soul was full when he heard the church bells chime or when he went to play in the graveyard (“and it never seemed strange”). Part of the reason that this song is so dear to me is that I grew up near chiming church bells myself. I didn’t like the Sunday ones because they reminded me I’d soon have to spend an hour at Mass, but I cherished the ones that were rung at 6PM every day, as their sound seemed to blend so rightly with the fading day. And as soon as I was old enough to take walks by myself, I was always at the cemetery: when I was a teenager we had a beautiful one in the neighborhood, lovelier than any local park. I’d wander it in the daytime if I could, and often go stand at the stone fence and look inside in the evenings, and could spend hours that way. Not quite the same as to “dance and run and sing,” but the pull of the heart and the comfort were the same.

So when the narrator says, “There’s nothing that reminds me of that old familiar charm / Except you,” or “Now I just pass mournfully by the place where the bones of life are piled,” I’m right there with him, struck by the sorrow and the loss, and convinced by it. How powerful, then, must be that rescuing love of which the narrator tells.

There’s a wonderful (and maybe accidental) detail in the way Nobody ’cept You is structured. The workings of this detail eluded me for months and months as I was first getting to know the song. “I’m a stranger here and no one sees me” is, technically, based on the structure, the first line of the song’s final verse. But, lyrically, it’s directly connected to the bridge that has just finished. There’s no musical pause to speak of between “I know something has changed” and “I’m a stranger here and no one sees me.” I always heard “I’m a stranger here and no one sees me” as a resolution and illustration of “I know something has changed,” as in, this is exactly what has changed: no one sees me anymore, I’m like a stranger now. So, imagining “I’m a stranger here” as actually the final line of the bridge (and indeed the vocal melody is different than the first two verses’ first lines, which are alike; and the words are different too, not following the “nothing ’round here” pattern) I couldn’t figure out how the hell Bob and the band slipped so smoothly into another verse. I think it took seeing the lyrics or Eyolf Østrem’s tab to realize what was going on. It’s a brilliant sleight of hand—or else exactly the kind of fruitful, blossoming accident musicians live for.

I love how “Everybody wants my attention / Everybody’s got something to sell” can refer either (or both) to a nasty aspect of Bob Dylan’s being a world-famous celebrity (“People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act / Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts” as a song from the following year goes) or to the perfidious world of advertising that impinges on all citizens of our so-called modern society.