21. Jokerman

I was born in Warsaw the month that Communism ended in Poland. Four and a half years later, Bob Dylan came to play in my homeland for the first time. On the 17th, he burst, which is to say, he played in Kraków, a concert that had to end after an hour because the thunderstorm that underlined Dylan’s delivery of certain lyrics (“you that build the big bombs”) was getting too dangerous. On the 19th, he played in Warszawa. The minuscule sliver of patriotism that exists in my spirit makes itself felt when I read that Dylan supposedly told Andrzej Marzec, concert promoter in Kraków, “That was the best show of my life… and for the best audience, too.” I’m proud of my compatriots for making Dylan feel so welcome.

That July week, I was either home in Warszawa, or a couple hours’ bus ride away from Kraków, hiking the Tatra mountains near Poland’s southern border. A photograph dated August 6th, 1994, of a grinning young me sporting a red-and-white koala cap and sitting atop a rough-hewn wooden post, forests and peaks behind me, is on our refrigerator here in Xiamen, three meters away from the Infidels on the wall. In either case, I’m certain that the vibrations and soul of the Jokerman that opened 1994 concerts made its way to me, whether from the Warszawa concert hall to my family’s nearby Ursynów neighborhood, or from the Kraków stadium a little ways south to the mountains; and having reached me, anointed me a future Dylan head.

I don’t know what deity of neglected music possessed Dylan to let Jokerman open his 1994 tour, but I’m grateful to it. Every ’94 Jokerman I’ve heard is wonderful, the band taking wing, Dylan’s phrasing shadowy as the world and slippery gray as the skies, singing as if he’d composed the lyrics that morning and couldn’t wait to share his wild new song with anyone who’d listen. The performances curve and swell and shoot out light in different places, Dylan never singing any verse of any version alike, the vocal melodies changing minute to minute and night to night. It’s live and it’s a weird song so, inevitably perhaps for an outfit as loose and liquid as Dylan’s 1994 group, there are stretches here and there where the band lose their way, or where Dylan grabs the wrong harmonica (if my ears don’t fail me, it’s not only the famed 1984 Letterman performance at which this happens), but if you wait another thirty seconds there’s bound to be another strong instrumental break or inventively sung verse.

Choosing favorites among the live Jokermen feels arbitrary, but of those I’ve heard (and this may be merely down to the taste of the air when I first heard it, or the shape of the clouds in the big Xiamen sky above my head—Jokerman is an outdoors song for me) I’m most attached to the March 20th, 1995 performance in Utrecht, Holland. Dylan sings it softly, wistfully; the band is the forest and he the walker on a little path between the trunks. Near the end of the song, the guitars take up the refrain melody and make it sound like church bells, or like bolts of lightning branching down to earth.

In any case my go-to is still the original, the slow, dubby Infidels opener. If I’m not hooked by the first seconds, in which Sly Dunbar’s drumfill kicks open the gates for Robbie Shakespeare’s strange bassline to bounce on in through, then by the third or fourth verse, I’m hanging on every word, every note. Knopfler plays sparingly but beautifully. Alan Clark occasionally supplies the off-beat that Sly & Robbie are implying. Mick Taylor’s guitar break is perfect, as are Dylan’s harmonica interludes (I don’t often fall in love with Dylan’s harmonica parts, but on Jokerman I do). I love how Dylan’s insistent piano playing floats in and out of the mix. Dylan’s vocal melodies are fantastic. I’ve heard the Infidels version countless times, and at this point I have a grasp on how Dylan sings the verses, but if I’m singing along, I regularly get lost in the refrains: I still haven’t figured out which one goes which way. As in the live versions, so with the studio recording. Dylan is restless and inclined to explore; he himself is a distant ship sailing into the mist.

I love when songwriters push their art right over the precipice of common sense. I love when they indulge their proclivities and give room in their songs to the strangeness in their minds (to adapt the title of Orhan Pamuk’s social realist novel; I love Pamuk, not unreservedly, but I do). This is why Lost in Space (“Out of control, singing with too much soul / Heard you got out on parole working for the queen / Gardening again / Landscape again / Keeping all the grounds around her clean”) and Like an Inca (“Said the condor to the praying mantis: / ‘We’re gonna lose this place just like we lost Atlantis’”) are two of my favorite Neil Young songs. And it’s part of the reason why Jokerman appears so high on this list. “In the smoke of the twilight, on a milk-white steed / Michelangelo indeed could have carved out your features / Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space / Half asleep ’neath the stars with a small dog licking your face.” I love the forty-one or forty-two year old Dylan who beckoned these lines from his head to the paper, and then decided that yes, they were keepers.

For one thing, what a great refrain: “Jokerman, dance to the nightingale tune / Bird, fly high by the light of the moon.” It may seem only half-intriguing written down like that, but sung to that bright tune and Dunbar (or Watson)’s shift snare-wards, it’s amazing. Other favorite lines of mine are “False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin / Only a matter of time ’til night comes stepping in” (to me, one of Dylan’s most eerie and beautiful evocations of the end of the world), and “It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray / A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet.”

But I would hold none of the words so dear if it weren’t for Dylan’s delivery. Singing Jokerman on Infidels, Dylan sounds like the ancient oracle at Delphi, or the Foretellers in Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness: there’s little chance of you making correct sense of the words you’re hearing, but all the same, with such dread weight upon them—even if it’s the shadow of truth more than truth itself—you’d be foolish not to take them to heart.