20. Black Diamond Bay

I think of Black Diamond Bay as the spirit of Desire incarnate. It encapsulates and elevates almost everything I love about the album. I tend to think of it as the album’s best-sounding performance as well, which may be because it’s the one song not to have been played live (or, if the Salt Lake City ’76 performance wasn’t mere fantasy, it’s the only song we don’t have a live recording of). If you remember Ralf Sauter’s old inquiry-game, Black Diamond Bay has my favorite sung word on the album, “knocked” (as in, “she knocked upon it anyway”). And my favorite vocal melody on the album is here, at the point where the opening lines of each verse lead into the sections in which Emmylou Harris sings along (“Up on the white veranda, she wears a necktie and a panama hat”). There’s something in the way Dylan’s voice clutches at that repeated note, with Harris backing him, that grips me. “Her passport shows a face from another time and place, she looks nothing like that” is not a touching line in itself, but I get chills when Dylan and Harris sing it. The same applies for the last line of each verse, before the perspective zooms out to the island at large for the refrain (so “she smiles, walks the other way” or “she knocked upon it anyway”—though in these cases, the lines are designed to hit hard).

Track 3 of Side A on Desire is Mozambique, the purely fictional travelogue, in which the exotic getaway destination is an idealized one. Track 3 of Side B is Black Diamond Bay, which is just as much a flight of fantasy as Mozambique, but in which—although in one of the zoom-out refrains “the music did play on Black Diamond Bay”—the “honeymoon is over,” as the subtitle to Radiohead’s bright and eerie Backdrifts goes.

What I consider the second greatest pivot in all of Dylan’s work is here. The shift away from the exploding volcano and all the doomed characters with nowhere to escape to, over to a first-person narrator who hears about the disaster from soothing “old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news,” is unbelievably good. Like I wrote earlier, a really well done shift in time or perspective can make a great song immeasurably more excellent; it can amount to something like the progression that happens in the music video for Socalled’s You Are Never Alone (a song led into by a line that the Bob Dylan of 1972 might have enjoyed: “Frankly, there is nothing so unusual about being a Jewish cowboy”). The video begins with a close-up of a face and ends with the face dismantled and the camera zoomed out far enough to reveal the mountains, the sky, the stars.

In Black Diamond Bay, Dylan and Levy force you to realize that even these life’s-end dramas, which the writers depict so sensitively and modestly, without anything in the lyrics that might demean the anxiety and pain of their characters—even these events are, in the eyes of the distant observer, just a snippet of news that they can give half a thought to as they go to the refrigerator to grab a beer. In this way, we too—we distant observers—are implicated.

But the thrust of the song is not that every catastrophe is but a blip in the history of the world, and that nothing remains in the end of our lives, loves, and agonies but “a Panama hat and a pair of old Greek shoes” amidst the ashes. Instead, the final verse of Black Diamond Bay makes the first six more poignant. Even in the closing verse, the narrator is depicted without condemnation or irony; he is merely living his life the way he knows, just as all the figures in the grand hotel on Black Diamond Bay continue to live by their own terms, even as the island is busy sinking. In a certain sense, I think that Black Diamond Bay aligns with the following section of Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel Doctor Glas, quoted from Paul Britten Austin’s lyrical English translation—

“Now night falls; already a star is winking through the foliage of the big chestnut tree. I have a feeling I shall sleep well tonight; it is cool and calm inside my head. Yet I find it hard to drag myself away from the tree and the star.

Night. Such a lovely word! Night is older than day, said the ancient Gauls. They believed the brief transient day was born of endless night.

The great, endless night.

Well, that’s but a manner of speaking of course… What is night, what is it we call the night? The slender conical shadow of our little planet. A little pointed cone of darkness in the midst of a sea of light. And this sea of light? what is it? A spark in space. The tiny effulgence around a little star: the sun.

Ah, what sort of a plague is this, that has seized on mankind, making them ask what everything is? What sort of a scourge is it, whipping them out of the family circle of their creeping and walking and running and climbing and flying brethren, here on earth; driving them out, to see their world and their life from above, from outside, with cold estranged eyes, and find it little, and nothing worth? Where are we going? Where will it all end? I must think of the woman’s voice I heard in my dream; I still hear it in my ears, the voice of an old woman, grown old with weeping: The world’s on fire, the world’s on fire!

Look at your world from your own point of view, not from some point in space. Modestly measure with your own yardstick, after your own status, your own predicament, the status and the predicament of man the earthdweller. Then life is large enough and a thing of consequence; and night endless, deep.”

Thus Söderberg; and thus, if I’m onto something, Dylan and Levy.

Four more comments:

1. In Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, Dylan makes room for several characters’ viewpoints: the three title characters’, Big Jim’s, and the thieves’. In Black Diamond Bay the situation is even more involved, with the viewpoint changing from line to line. Although the nameless woman from the opening lines is most prominent throughout, it’s not clear that anybody is more important to the story itself than anyone else; and certainly everybody is doomed and helpless. In fact, the only character that actually effects a lasting change is the volcano.

2. Dylan sings so much of this song so sadly.

3. Among my favorite vocal moments are “from the mountain high above” and “thinking of forbidden love” in the fifth verse. The phrases are sung so strangely that if not for the official lyrics I’d still have no idea what the latter was.

3. I love that Dylan and Levy have the cranes fly away. Outside our university there’s a large reservoir, with a park surrounding and a long footbridge that crosses the southeast part of the water. It’s great to ride a bike along the bridge in the hot morning hours when no one else is about. We don’t have cranes in Xiamen but we do have egrets, and these like to stand on the railings, watching for fish. You can pedal in their direction a long time before they finally decide they had better get going. The third refrain out of six seems a bit early for them to be leaving, but considering that by the fifth the stars are dropping and the fields burning, I suppose the third refrain is just about right.