13. Under the Red Sky

Dylan plays the accordion here, and it sounds amazing. Don Was was a strange producer: genius despite himself? He continues to be unsure of whether he did a good job, though I think the most recent interview to bring up Under the Red Sky has him realizing what a great album it is. He’s on record as saying he should never have allowed Dylan to slather the record with accordion at the last minute, but me, I think that’s one of the best touches. Dylan knew what he was doing. I think he almost always does. 

Also, if not for Don Was, Dylan’s interpretation of this song wouldn’t be on public record, so I tip my wide-brimmed hat to the producer for that reason as well. The story is well-documented online, and I won’t repeat it here. I’ll just quote the most relevant words: “[Under the Red Sky] is about people who got trapped in [Dylan's] hometown.”

As with what Masked and Anonymous has to say about Drifter’s Escape, I never would have thought of that interpretation myself. Of course the writer has no monopoly on a song’s meaning, but I think that what Dylan told Was deepens and beautifies the song. And it suggests, by extension, that the other songs on Under the Red Sky, however obscure their lyrical content may be, probably came from equally meaningful places. The “key to the kingdom” may be hidden from us, but that doesn’t mean the locked door doesn’t lead to paradise.

Jim Beviglia’s #1 (Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands) got a lot of fascinating comments (now lost, unfortunately; Jim wiped the old blog when his Dylan countdown was published) from fans all over the spectrum about what their #1 was. Being the sort of person who likes poking around in the dustiest catacombs of artists’ discographies, eager to find buried treasure, I was fascinated to see that one commenter said his favorite was a song that, at that point, I hadn’t heard yet, and that I had heard no acclaim for either: this very one, Under the Red Sky. I remember that he gave a compelling explanation why, or at least put across his passion well. I wish I could quote him. And I wish he were reading this series of mine: a #13 placement certainly cleaves a lot closer to his tastes than Jim Beviglia’s ranking, in which the song didn’t make the top two hundred.

I always found Under the Red Sky beautiful. I love the way its feast of melody follows the shakedown of Wiggle Wiggle and the way the ending of the feast is marked by the hard, distorted riff that opens Unbelievable. I’ve never heard Al Kooper play better alongside Dylan; for me, not even his legendary organ part in Like a Rolling Stone matches what he does here. And George Harrison’s slide guitar solos are just perfect. They’re as evocative as Dylan’s singing—and I think Under the Red Sky is one of Dylan’s best-sung studio recordings, so that’s saying something.

I don’t think there’s another Under the Red Sky number in which the fairy tale element is brought so far forward, and in which the tenor of the tale is not complicated by turns or digressions. Dylan has a mournful story to tell, and he tells it with John Wesley Harding-esque economy and Slow Train Coming-esque intensity. Even if we set aside what he told Was about the lyrics, I think that the sadness of the song would, like its sweetness, be undeniable; it’s in Dylan’s voice, in the chord progression, in Harrison’s solos. The narrator feels affection for the characters in the song, and sorrows over their fate.

Back in 2014, something happened that shot this song from a ranking in what would have been the 20s or 30s to its ultimate seat at #13. About that:

I spent the first six years of my life in picturesque Warszawa, the capital of Poland. It’s been four hundred years since, at the behest of my namesake King Sigismund III, the capital moved from Kraków to Warszawa, but the joke still circulates: “Why did the king change the capital city? Because he wanted to breathe some country air.”

When my family moved, I was compelled to trade my hometown for crowded, grimy New York (which in turn, seventeen years later, I traded by my own choice for the even grimier and more crowded Zhengzhou—the courses of a life!). I’ve been back to Warszawa four times, by my blurry count: a mere four times. The most recent was six years ago, in the summer of 2014 (when I also stopped by Tallinn to visit Ralf Sauter and then Stockholm to visit Björn Waller). The trees in Ursynów, where my family still kept the old apartment in which I had learned to crawl and walk (and to feel joy, and to know love, and to be overcome by stories and music), were taller than ever, and grander, and the narrow, winding streets of the neighborhood were bright with blossoming flowers.

But Warszawa had ceased to be Home long before. It’s been my lot (or blessing) throughout this life to feel like a stranger wherever I go. For all that I now see ways in which growing up in America shaped me, I spent my youth feeling like a proud and confirmed outsider in the USA (I remember thinking, at six years old, “I don’t like this place. Warszawa was better,” a thought I would’ve of course had in Polish) and—with my English accent, hesitant grammar, and complete cluelessness as regarded the ever-morphing colloquial speech of people my age—I was as much an outsider in Poland. And there’s no escaping how alien a figure a person with a western face is in the average mid-sized Chinese city.

One afternoon that 2014 summer (“One summer’s day he came passing by”), I was riding Warszawa’s spotless and impeccably punctual metro, from downtown back to the Stokłosy station, a ten minute walk from our family's apartment. That metro station opened just a few months before my family relocated, and revives vivid and poignant old memories anytime I see it. Anyway, I was riding the metro. No seats were available, so I stood by the door and put headphones on and hit play on Under the Red Sky.

Wiggle Wiggle sounded awesome, as always. So did the title track. But, as Under the Red Sky played, it got a piece of its clothes, a sleeve or pant cuff maybe, caught on a hook in my soul, and all at once there were tears streaming down my face. For the several minutes left of the song, I couldn’t stop crying.

Sometimes it’s difficult to explicate moments that shake us deeply, even six years after they occur. But I’ll attempt a gloss. I was in my hometown; I had left it, others hadn’t; I had been a little boy there, and now I was 24, and it seemed to me the world was lonely and beautiful and frightening wherever you went. But there in Warszawa, for the moment, it was summer and the flowers were blooming, the trees arcing heavenward, and some of the most beloved people in my life were dead or dying. And the little boy and the little girl were baked in a pie; and the man in the moon went home, and the river went dry; and George Harrison played his solos, to the tune of Dylan on accordion.

To this day, Under the Red Sky is (as you see for yourself) one of my favorite Dylan songs of all time; natch; one of my favorite songs of all time, period, and Under the Red Sky one of the Dylan albums I love best. My third favorite Dylan album, in fact.

I’ll close with a personal postscript for a dear friend: Caleb, if you’re reading along, I hope you’ve fallen in love with this album by now! As I hope Colleen has too, if she didn’t love it already. I think of it as revisiting the John Wesley Harding spirit, twenty-three years on; it’s different in many respects of course, but in certain respects even finer. If there’s a latter-day Dylan album that might have a smooth, straight road into your heart, I imagine that Under the Red Sky is the one.