18. Abandoned Love

Quinnisa Rose Kinsella-Mulkerin of Big Blood made her official debut as a songwriter on 2015’s Double Days. Around the time of that album’s release, Colleen Kinsella took part in a music/philosophy podcast and spoke appreciatively of Quinnisa’s impatience with how so much of popular music is about break-ups. “Aren’t there other things to sing about?” Quinnisa had said. Sure enough, on her own debut songs, You’re Crushing My Heart (“I play video games twice a day”) and Golden Heart (“He’s got that spectacular energy in his eyes and his nose”), she steered away from the conventions.

A further reason to think twice before penning yet another platitudinal song about break-ups is that the songwriters who have gone before us have set certain standards. If you don’t attempt to meet these standards, or if you don’t at least keep the mountains your forebears have scaled in sight, the result is unlikely to be interesting. True, there are the wunderkinds who get somewhere amazing just by instinct, but for most of us—or for all of us, at certain times—the great successes of old (and the new successes of any given year) are there to remind us of what can be done, and just how well it can be done. “Don’t settle for less than this,” Abandoned Love tells us other practitioners of the art (the older Dylan, I would think, in our number), “because what happens in me is proof that it’s possible. My richness is within human reach.”

The only comparably stirring break-up songs I can bring to mind (though I feel there must be more) are Radiohead’s The Present Tense (much of the force of which is in the music and the singing, rather than the lyrics per se), Ned Collette’s How to Change a City, and Keinan Abdi Warsame’s 70 Excuses, and (granted, not a song but a whole album; a song cycle) David Sylvian's Blemish. Abandoned Love is so unabashedly full of conflict, and so lovely besides (WalterNeff from last.fm: “One of the very best Bob Dylan being a selfish asshole but sounding beautiful song EVER……and there’s ALOTT”), that almost nothing else is quite in its zone. The song is bold, sweet, aggressive, defiant, vulnerable, proud, defeated, and it contradicts itself right and left. It has both verisimilitude and the sting of a personal and unique pain. It had sadness, it has strength, it has weariness, and even glimmers (if only in imagery) of vague hope.

It has, besides, some of my favorite Dylan couplets and verses. But as with other songs in these echelons, I’d have to quote 85% of the song to tell you which.

Abandoned Love circulates in two Dylan versions, live (solo acoustic) on July 3rd,  1975, and a studio take recorded four weeks later. I love both of them, but prefer the former. I love Dylan most when he’s playing with a band, but in the case of the famed Other End performance of Abandoned Love, that lone guitar and lone bootheel were all Dylan needed to cast a spell as heavy as any exquisite group performance from the autumn of 1975, or the spring of  1980, or the spring of 1995, or the autumn of 2009. The live version has excellent lines that were replaced by slightly less excellent ones in the studio. What I miss most of all is “Send out for St. John the Evangelist / All my friends are drunk. They can be dismissed,” a couplet that perfectly captures, in miniature, the mood of the whole.

When I got into the Desire outtake, I disliked that the just-quoted lines were missing, but I liked the new one Dylan set in its place. In the century’s early teens I liked to walk around the streets of my town and sing the songs that were on my mind. In order to have an Abandoned Love that incorporated both versions of the penultimate verse, I wrote a new ending to the “we sat in a theater” lines myself. A decade has passed and I still remember what I came up with; be merciful and keep the melody in mind as you read, since the words work better set to Dylan’s rhythm than on the page: “We sat in an empty beater and we kissed / I asked you please to cross me off your list / But still I wouldn’t let go of your hand / Guess I’ll have to ask you again before you finally understand.” It isn’t Dylan, but for a songwriter of only one year’s standing, like Sigismund Sludig was in 2012, it isn’t terrible; the spirit of the original does seem to be within. (Why “beater” instead of what Dylan actually sings, “theater” ? First because Dylan’s phrasing makes “theater” sound like “beater,” and second because I happened to like that image more: the couple sitting in the front seats of an old beat-up car, parked on the side of some highway or country road, with sunrise pouring in through the windows, the scene like a more rundown edition of the front cover of Together through Life. But how a beater can be called empty when there are two people inside is something that didn’t occur to me at the time.)

Dylan’s delivery of Abandoned Love live has to be heard to be believed. Much as in Michael Hurley’s incredible Growlin’ Bobo (a 1980 show that Byron Coley calls “a live Greatest Hits package” and “the homecoming of a conquering hero”), or the recording of Dylan’s 1994 concert in Kraków, the responses of the crowd (a tiny one, in this case) help make the experience as good as it is. I think it’s because the live performance is so accomplished (sample comments: “the single greatest moment of Dylan’s entire career—no arguments please,” “easily one of the best things ever recorded… ever,” “as far as recorded sound goes, this is the very top”) that Dylan lovers tend to slag the version recorded for (and left off of) Desire, but I’m really happy that we have both. I love the new intro in the studio version, with one of the (I want to say “most,” but honestly should just say) many charming lines getting featured in advance, and Scarlet Rivera’s melodic playing on violin, and the way Howie Wyeth incorporates the rim of the snare drum into his typically inventive drumbeat, and Dylan’s grand vocals.

The final verse received a curious edit sometime in July 1975. “Put on your heavy make-up and your shawl” became “Take off your heavy make-up and your shawl.” Since the following line in both versions is “Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?” I can understand why Dylan changed it; removing the make-up would, like the descent from the throne, make the woman the narrator’s addressing more approachable. But I prefer the earlier command. I love the way it suggests the narrator is encouraging the woman he loves to distance herself from him even as he asks her to approach; after all, he’s already begun to distance himself from her, and it’d only be fair. In the earlier version, the feeling is something like, “Come down to me, please, but put your make-up on first, and drape yourself in your shawl; I want you to draw near—but not too near.” (As a three-year-old neighbor of mine in Bailey, Colorado used to say, when she and her siblings and I all gathered at the local swingset, “Swing me higher! But not too higher.”) “Let me feel your love one more time, before I abandon it”—but let me feel it distantly, distantly, lest I falter.