17. Cat's in the Well

Let’s commence with the obvious: the inside of a well is no place for a cat (or human; see Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or, better yet, Killing Commendatore). Even less so if a “wolf is looking down.” That means every verse of this song begins with an image of the proper state of things out of order, of dread and danger and no place to go to get away from either. Don’t let what Clinton Heylin calls the “jump blues” arrangement fool you. Gloom abounds.

Well, it does and it doesn’t. Cat’s in the Well (the last song on Under the Red Sky) is a party, much like Wiggle Wiggle (the first song on Under the Red Sky) is. What the backdrop to these two cousins of Saturnalia might be is another matter, maybe settled by the album title.

Or by the way the song ends. And here I have a chance to go off on one of my flights of fancy. Not that fanciful, actually; all I intend to do is expand slightly on an insight of Clinton Heylin’s (who, like Robert Christgau, thinks this album is, all in all, pretty awesome). In the Recording Sessions, Heylin notes the way that, as soon as the song’s last words are out of Dylan’s mouth, the band grinds to a halt. He had observed earlier that Side A ends with chaos (the mob overcoming the anti-TV preacher), an apocalypse in miniature (which, in an earlier lyric draft, featured the preacher being hung for his views), and that Side B ends with apocalypse supreme: “Cat’s in the well, leaves are starting to fall / Good night, my love; may the Lord have mercy on us all”—a couplet at once beautiful, tender, and chilling.

I’m on board with all of this, and a fact that I think only strengthens Heylin’s insight is that each of the first nine songs on Under the Red Sky ends with a fade-out, as if to imply that there’s still time to burn: things seem to roll on endlessly—you can imagine the band playing on and on and on, beyond your hearing. Only Cat’s in the Well, the closer, doesn’t fade out. On the contrary, it ends much more quickly than you’d think. And when it ends, it ends totally. There’s nothing pretty about that ending. It’s the wolf’s jaws crunching shut. “Something’s burning, baby.” Time’s up.

Wiggle Wiggle, the album-opening hoedown, ends with a creepy, off-hinged electric guitar solo, but cool as that “kick against the fade-out” ending is, it’s got nothing on the way Cat’s in the Well collapses suddenly to its knees. Every time I listen to Under the Red Sky all the way through, these last seconds make my skin crawl.

For a while I thought that I was the only person who’d noticed this—at least I never saw it mentioned online—but when I started dipping into Michael Gray at the outset of this writing project of mine, it turned out that, of course, he caught it too, though without linking it to Heylin’s understanding of why the album is so structured: “…the device of coming to a ‘live’ finish on the last track of an album on which every other song fades out also dramatises the outrageous last-minute call across another such divide that is, in the lyric, the album’s final end … That ‘Goodnight my love’ is so personal it leaps out at you, cutting not only clean through the recording but jumping right out of the song itself” (a strategy also employed, to similar effect, on 10,000 Men). “It is the most inspired, simple leave-taking on any of the albums of the artist who has always been incomparable at such leave-takings.”

Above all, what I love about Cat’s in the Well is the imagery. Dylan has long had a knack for good juxtapositions, and continues to (“Twelve years old, they put me in a suit / Forced me to marry a prostitute / There were gold fringes on her wedding dress… / That’s my story, but not where it ends / She’s still cute, and we’re still friends”) ; “Love And Theft” is built largely of the excellent off-setting of one line or couplet against another, and it’s stunning how that album, via the art of careful juxtaposition, reinvents songwriting itself (to these enamored ears, anyway). Cat’s in the Well, and Under the Red Sky as a whole, do this on the level of image. The language of nursery rhymes, which are guided by what to our twenty-first century minds can seem bizarre logic, make a terrific template, and Dylan makes good and noble use of his source material. Hence we get wonders like “The wolf is looking down / He got his big bushy tail dragging all over the ground,” and “Cat’s in the well and the barn is full of the bull / The night is so long and the table is oh so full.” But every line and couplet is fantastic: bright, imaginative, surprising, unique.

Add to this the way the song comes dancing out of the speakers after God Knows’ easeful fade-out (“God knows you can get from here to there if you have to walk a million miles by candlelight”), Dylan’s joyous singing, the heightened drama of the B-sections or refrains (“grief is showing its face,” etc.), the slide guitar, the “jump blues” rhythm (it always feels to me like the song is in 5/4, but it isn’t), and what you get is a modest masterpiece. Or maybe not that modest; Dylan, at least, never seems to have felt that Cat’s in the Well was out of place beside his most legendary songs. Throughout the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004, it was a nightly fixture of the encore, right next to Like a Rolling Stone, All Along the Watchtower, and the occasional Forever Young. When most people quote this fact, they treat it as something grotesque, but it makes perfect sense to me.