71. Wedding Song

The clacking of the buttons of Dylan’s coat on the body of his acoustic guitar drove me nuts when I was first getting to know Planet Waves. I thought, “Such a beautiful song. Couldn’t he have taken a little extra care?!” At this point, though, the song wouldn’t feel right without the clacking, not only because nine years is enough time to get used to some accidental percussion, but also because I think the sound adds to the urgency at the heart of the song. As soon as the song got written (the buttons suggest), Dylan wanted to record it; it had to be immediately; he couldn’t even afford the time to take his coat off.

That’s not really how it went, else the button-clacking sound wouldn’t have returned when Dylan was recording Blood on the Tracks a few months later. But since Wedding Song is the only solo acoustic number on Planet Waves, and since it is the album closer, then hey, you know what, it makes a good legend.

I wrote before about how Planet Waves sounds like a snowy morning to me, but that isn’t exactly right. In about half the songs (Going, Going, Gone, Hazel, Side A's Forever Young, Dirge, and Wedding Song) it sounds like night has fallen, and the snow is heavy on the ground, and the frost that darkness brings is hardening the snow, and there’s a fire going in the fireplace beside which Dylan and the Band are playing. Somber night numbers, to balance the daytime tracks.

The loud but lonesome guitar sound, the carefully mixed harmonica breaks, and the passion in Dylan’s voice make Wedding Song sound small but luminous, like a little concentrated flame in the midst of a great darkness. On my first several listens, in addition to being annoyed by the coat buttons, I was taken aback by the power and commitment of this reiteration of wedding vows.

If for a moment we equate the narrator with Bob Dylan and the woman the narrator’s addressing with Sara Dylan, then the song's vows are made eight years after they got married—and less than a year before Bob wrote Blood on the Tracks, and four years before they divorced. I think the nearness in time of Planet Waves’ successor was what first made me listen to Wedding Song differently. I realized (eventually) that the song supports an entirely different way of looking at it. That alternate way is what that the folks who’ve published work on Dylan tend to emphasize. Michael Gray notes the song’s “chill desperation.” Clinton Heylin reads the narrator as having lost his woman and trying to “win his bride over again.”

In those earliest days of my and Wedding Song’s acquaintance, I couln’t have been listening all that carefully, probably distracted by how pretty the music and the performance are. “I’d sacrifice the world for you / And watch my senses die” sounds not like a heartfelt vow but like part of a lover’s spat, a passive-aggressive dredging up of an old problem, like: “Oh yeah, since you don’t want me to do this, that, and the other thing, I’m not going to,” while the tone clearly expresses how pissed off the sacrifice actually makes the speaker. And I’m not sure what “My thoughts of you don’t ever rest / They kill me if I lie” means, but it doesn’t sound cheerful; same with “Eye for eye and tooth for tooth / Your love cuts like a knife.” Quoth Ralf Sauter: “Wedding Song is sweet, but there’s a strange domestic brutality within the song that destroys the potential sexiness. I think it’s as depressing as it is beautiful.”

The most damning thing to me is just how many insistences the narrator piles on. Near the end, he begins pleading, “Oh, can’t you see that you were born / To stand by my side?” Just before the final line, “I could never let you go / No matter what goes on” makes it sound like the narrator has in fact carefully considered letting his lover go. I can think of only two reasons why the narrator should insist so fiercely: the first is that his lover is unwilling to believe him, and the second is that the narrator doesn’t quite believe himself.

But what I think makes Wedding Song beautiful and enduring is precisely that it has room for both love and skepticism. “I love you more than madness / More than dreams upon the sea” moves me to this day, as well as “Ever since you walked right in / The circle’s been complete / I’ve said goodbye to haunted rooms / And faces in the street,” as if the narrator was wont in the past to pass his time with ghosts and phantoms, but now has someone living to love. In the bubbling cauldron of human emotion, that latter sentiment brushes right up against “I love you more than ever and I haven’t yet begun,” which in retrospect—You’re a Big Girl Now et al mere months ahead—is a weak and defeated sort of line.

It’s all true: the anger and the love, the doom and the hope. And the harmonica breaks, sounding at once fervent and plaintive, played with naked emotion, strive to convey as much.