65. Something's Burning, Baby

Empire Burlesque is not among the Dylan albums people tend to spend a lot of time with, and given the vagaries of Arthur Baker’s of-the-times production, this is understandable. But it’s also a pity, because there’s a lot to appreciate if you give it the time.

The album has some pretty interesting champions, or near-champions: for Robert Christgau, Empire Burlesque is the most meritorious stepping stone between Blood on the Tracks, which Christgau loves, and Under the Red Sky, which Christgau loves; it’s also a big favorite of Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s; and much admired by Ralf Sauter. You won’t quite find Sigismund Sludig in this estimable company, but you can count me interested, and open to the way time will continue to work on me and it. (Also, now that my eyes have been opened to Dylan’s “determined to stand” years, I’m eager to discover what happened to the several Empire songs that got live airings in the ’90s and after.)

Something’s Burning, Baby is not one of the Empire Burlesque songs graced with an onstage afterlife. It wasn’t even performed in 1986, when the four tracks that fell away soon after that year (Trust Yourself, When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky, and the two Infidels outtakes re-worked for Empire) were still being performed. All we’ve got for Something’s Burning, Baby is the studio version. Fortunately, the studio version is essentially unmarred by the trendy mid-’80s touches that complicate most of the rest of the great material on the record.

Empire Burlesque, I might add, is a carefully and successfully sequenced album. Each side has its slow ballad (I’ll Remember You / Emotionally Yours), each its straight-ahead rocker (Clean-Cut Kid / Trust Yourself), and each ends on an emotional highpoint: on Side A, it’s Never Gonna Be the Same Again, and on Side B, it’s an entire apocalyptic triptych. In this triptych, the first song-panel, When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky, is set in a time before the end days, but looking forward to them. Dark Eyes (song-panel 3) is set in the before-days, too, but with death or apocalypse as a backdrop (“time is short and the days are sweet”). In the center is Something’s Burning, Baby, the action of which takes place just as things are shifting, just as the world begins to change utterly. “Something is burning” already, “there’s smoke in your hair … something’s in flames / There’s a man going ‘round calling names.” Doesn’t take much, I think, to guess what man Dylan has in mind—Something’s Burning, Baby (like Trust Yourself, for that matter) being one of the Empire songs that’s not as far removed from Slow Train Coming and Saved as, say, Seeing the Real You at Last.

Of the panels, Something’s Burning, Baby is the most cheerful and the most equanimous. Dark Eyes sounds like the calmest, but then there are the lyrics... whereas here in Something’s Burning, Baby, the narrator is clearly delighted that his Lord has come, and is worried only whether he may still bring his love, or once-love, to what in such circumstances is the safe side of the divide. Listen to that marching drumbeat, as of a procession of conquering angels, and listen to how Dylan and singing partner Madelyn Quebec stay in step with the triumphant approaching forces, keeping their syllables tightly to the rhythm (except when they don’t, which moments are among the song’s most striking and most thrilling, like the way Dylan holds “fade” in “please don’t fade away on me, baby, like the midnight train” and then has to rush the rest of the line to fit). In the mid-’80s, righteous Bob is fearsome Bob, and fearsome Bob is where it’s at.

Ralf Sauter used to raise the question of what one’s favorite sung word on any given Dylan studio album is. That may sound like a goofily specific thing to ponder, but I bet most diehard Dylan fans, should they listen to any album they know well and keep Ralf’s question in mind, would recognize at once which word that is for them, when they hear it. Take me, for instance: on Planet Waves the word is “blood” (in Wedding Song), and on Empire Burlesque it’s “strange” (here in Something’s Burning, Baby). Listen to the way Dylan’s voice seems to founder, to be crushed under the weight of memory and love, as he comes to the end of the relevant line.

Notice also how the synth—the one that’s so prominent as the song begins—sounds like it’s been transplanted, with some loss of presence but otherwise intact, from the title track of Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds.