69. Drifter's Escape

I don’t think there’s anyone out there as good at interpreting the meaning of Bob Dylan songs as Bob Dylan. I say this on the basis of two songs. First is Under the Red Sky, about which Dylan gave Don Was a brilliant one-sentence account. The second is Drifter’s Escape, concerning which Dylan gives two (or three?) different explanations, both ingenious, and neither of which I would ever have come up with myself. In Masked and Anonymous, as Jack Fate and Simple Twist of Fate launch into Drifter’s Escape, Uncle Sweetheart asks Bobby Cupid, “You got any idea what this song is about?” Bobby Cupid does, and says so. Then Uncle Sweetheart tells him he’s wrong, and why.

Cupid first. “It’s about trying to get to heaven. You got to know the route before you start out.”

Well, shit. Of course that’s what the song is about. The drifter has somewhere he wants to get to, else he wouldn’t be out wandering. But he doesn’t know how to get there, else the narrator would call him traveler, or wanderer, but not drifter. And “you got to know the route before you start out” lest you end up in the kind of township that Dylan’s song portrays, with its ineffectual judge and bloodthirsty jury. At song’s end, the drifter escapes, and we listeners rejoice for him; but according to the Cupid line of thinking, he’s not totally safe; the same thing could happen again later. Indeed, in a world like John Wesley Harding’s, it’s bound to. (“‘And my time it isn’t long’” looks forward thirty years to “I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door”—or is it that the latter song looks back thirty years to Drifter’s Escape?)

And then Uncle Sweetheart: “No, it’s not about that at all. What strikes you about the song is the ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ quality. The song is written from Hyde’s point of view … It’s about doing evil and trying to kill your conscience - if you can … It’s about doing good by manipulating the forces of evil.”

No kidding. How come that never occurred to me? That whatever crime the drifter ends up on trial for was a crime he really committed, and that he’s a man with two souls inside him, one that boldly and gleefully does wrong and one that, after the fact, cannot understand what happened. Who doesn’t have these two souls inside them?

Doing evil and trying to kill your conscience: that could apply to the judge as well. It’s Pilate washing his hands, it’s the judge ascribing ignorance to the condemned instead of culpability to his own self: “‘You fail to understand,’ he said, ‘why must you even try?’”—if that line is addressed to the drifter instead of himself, which latter understanding I lean to personally, since it seems like the judge is alone now, after the fact (like Ruby taking the dye out of her hair, or like “his honor” in Chad Stokes’ Gunship Politico: “Another day’s over and the decision still stands / His Honor is in his chamber, still washing his hands / You know he’s been fiddling in his room all day / Just trying to wash all his conscience away”).

Incidentally, I hear the first verse of Drifter’s Escape as addressed to God, and not to any mortal listener—the narrator overhears, but it's God who answers, two verses later; as the Leo Tolstoy story goes, “God sees the truth but waits.”

What I don’t understand in Uncle Sweetheart’s understanding is how the song is simultaneously about “trying to kill your conscience - if you can” and “about doing good by manipulating the forces of evil.” Is there a link I’m missing or is Uncle Sweetheart offering two different interpretations, and I just don’t comprehend the latter?

In any case, something tells me Dylan could come up with another three or four pithy sentences about Drifter’s Escape, or almost any of his songs, and each would be as fruitful as these.

Personally I lean toward Bobby Cupid’s idea. I think the drifter is a sympathetic guy. But then, the person I have loved most in the world was called a drifter.

Drifter’s Escape is among my favorite band performances on John Wesley Harding, Charles McCoy on bass and Kenny Buttrey on drums chasing each other, fast as the drifter on the run, and Dylan giving counterpoint to their rhythms with strange, wistful melodies on harmonica.

It’s also the beneficiary of cover versions by two artists who, on the basis of the two album songs each tapped, I wish would have recorded entire John Wesley Harding cover records: Jimi Hendrix and Patti Smith. The version by Jimi and his band (see South Saturn Delta) embodies the thunderbolt that “struck the courtroom out of shape,” Jimi slipping into the role of the characters, first when he appends several repetitions of “more” to Dylan’s original “for more,” and second when he gives a whoop of delight after the song’s last line and shouts, “So long!” The electric guitar shoots through the song like flaming arrows. The bassline is catchy, addictive.

Patti Smith gives a more melodic, thoughtful reading (turning “my trip hasn’t been a pleasant one” into the lovely, weary, forthright confession of “my trip has been a heavy one”) that leans into and drinks from the mystic spring that flows through song and album. Lenny Kaye and Jack Petruzzelli provide the beautiful ringing guitar lines, which don’t have the flair of Jimi’s lead but do share something of its presence. As it happens, Patti and her band recorded their cover of Dylan’s song in Electric Lady Studios. Granted, Patti has often recorded there, but given who she is, I imagine that, in the case of Drifter's Escape, the tribute was intentional.