23. Highlands

A triptych: three panels of about five and a half minutes each, with the middle one (in a “Boston Town” restaurant) the most absorbing, both by its own design and because it’s the middle panel, with such different lyrical material (in writing style, if not in mood or import) on either side.

There’s not much to say about the music, which (appropriately, given the themes of the song and the album) offers endless small but no large variations on its own  opening seconds. The drumbeat sounds like the footsteps of the wandering narrator. The organs and the guitars sound amazing. I used to think the music was looped, but Eyolf Østrem taught me otherwise: “[The riff is] not really a riff so much as a skeleton with quite a lot of different realizations. So I would either have to transcribe it all, spend a lot of time finding ‘representative’ versions, or just decide upon(/make up) a common denominator. The first is insane, the last I don’t want to do, and the middle, well, it would take a lot of time. But even so, what makes the riff tick is the interplay between the two main guitars…”

The important part is that Lanois, Dylan, and company developed music that could go on for sixteen minutes and never stop sounding good. Dylan’s vocals don’t carry much by way of melody, and his Time out of Mind voice is, I think, his raspiest one ever, so the brunt of the musical work falls to the instruments. Dylan has said that his idea for the song grew out of a “guitar run” he had in mind, and that the “sound in my mind and the dichotomy of the highlands with that seemed to be a path worth pursuing.” Lanois (whose approach to production I find most effective (and magical) on his own material, great albums like Acadie, For the Beauty of Wynona, Shine, Here Is What Is, Black Dub, Flesh and Machine…) likes cooking elaborate soups of sound, so that kind of dichotomy was right up the alley where his recording studios lie.

As for the song’s profound emotional impact… part of it comes from its being the album closer. The other ten songs on Time out of Mind don’t go in much for poetic language. The songs themselves may not be straightforward, and the effect they have on the listener attuned to their aesthetic can be profound, but they’re written using relatively straightforward language: “Gonna walk down that dirt road ’til someone lets me ride.” “People on the platforms waiting for the trains / I can hear their hearts beating like pendulums swinging on chains.” “Every nerve in my body so vacant and numb, I can’t even remember what I came here to get away from.” “There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do to make you feel my love.”

But not, as we have in Highlands, “Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air / Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow,” or “The wind it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme.” Granted, many of the verses are written in the way we’ve come to expect from a Time out of Mind song, but in other places the register goes way up, or else way down, with nothing else on the album as conversational as the Boston Town restaurant stretch. But what with the occasional beautiful poetic flourishes, listening to Highlands at album’s end feels like taking several steps up a staircase. You’re not actually much higher than you were before, but something has changed, something in the atmosphere gone a little bit thinner, the view from where you are now a little bit wider…

As I hear it, Highlands is a song of faith. Not of “Faith!” like Solid Rock or Every Grain of Sand, but of “Faith, because what else is there, really?” That too is usually part of a believer’s time on earth: the hours (or days, or years) when everything you once cared for turns out to be illusion, every goal or joy actually just ashes, and you turn your back on all old interests and values except… well, perhaps except faith in God. Sometimes that’s the only thing you find yourself unable to reject completely. You might think, “I know all the rest is worthless, but this… this, I’m not sure.” That’s what I hear Dylan’s narrator living through. His heart is in the highlands but the rest of him isn’t, it’s “sinking in the poison,” to quote Mississippi. All he can do is go on “drifting from scene to scene,” through landscapes where even the clouds look like sweet chariots swinging low. He is filled with longing, and unsure the longing can be fulfilled, but… “only place left to go.”

I like each of Highlands’ twenty verses. Nowadays, having read S. Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to “I’m crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog.” But I want to write about the Boston Town restaurant section, as that one fascinates me like almost no other set of verses in Dylan’s work.

First off, here’s the English-Welsh novelist John Cowper Powys in the Prefatory Note to his brilliant work, The Inmates:

“I think that any book or picture or composition of any sort, once out in the world, so to say, produces a different effect on each person who seriously tries to follow it. I certainly do not think that the author of it has any monopoly in its interpretation. In fact, Thomas Hardy, from whom I learnt so much when I saw him in my early twenties, implied once to me that other minds, if sympathetic, of course, could get more out of a work than the author had the faintest idea existed in it. I daresay, too, there are quite lawful reactions totally different from any the author could have imagined.”

I arm myself with this passage because this set of verses (eight through fourteen) may seem too prosaic to read much into. On the other hand, Dylan put them into a song on purpose; they’re not just an anecdote with musical backing, like A Wee Fortune at the end of Peter Stampfel’s A Sure Sign of Something (which is a fantastic album, and A Wee Fortune a fantastic closer; I don’t mean to put it down, just to point out a compositional difference). They’re an entire panel in the Highlands triptych.

I don’t have any cohesive theory about the import of this section, but I do have a few observations.

“I got no idea what I want” (with its attendant joke, “Or maybe I do. But… I’m just really not sure”)—I haven’t read much commentary on Highlands, but I expect it’s often been observed that this sentiment isn’t only about lunch.

“Nobody in the place but me and her”—a loaded observation. “She got a pretty face and” (with a pause long enough for the narrator’s eye to scan downwards) “long white shiny legs.” So the flirting can begin! And sometimes, when I listen to Highlands, the conversation that follows (of which Dylan’s ingenious phrasing is a crucial element; that’s true all song (and all album) long, but especially here) can make me laugh uproariously. That’s achievement enough. It’s really uncommon to find a song that not only is but stays funny. You have to pack in a lot of jokes and be extremely careful with your phrasing, if you don’t want a song’s humor to fade with familiarity. (The best writers make it seem easy: see many a song by Antonia, Peter Stampfel, and Warren Zevon.)

I love how when the narrator says he doesn’t “do sketches from memory,” the waitress upbraids him with, “Well, I’m right here in front of you. Haven’t you looked?” Which is to imply, there’s plenty to look at… The attraction (if we can call it that) is mutual; throughout their conversation, she’s as playful towards him as he is towards her.

I’m not going to point out every delightful detail of the Middle Panel, since (unless, like Clinton Heylin, you have the bad fortune of being immune to its charm) you can discover them easily enough for yourself. I’ll just mention a couple things that have been on my mind lately.

Concerning the sketch the narrator makes, the waitress says, “That don’t look a thing like me.” The narrator retorts, “Oh kind miss, it most certainly does.” I think they’re both correct. The narrator is, if not the same guy who spoke to us from the Infidels song I and I, the same kind of guy. He doesn’t see the world in an ordinary way. As he notes in Highlands’ third panel, “I got new eyes / Everything looks far away” (thanks to which line, the song I usually listen to right after Time out of Mind/Highlands is Big Blood’s New Eyes, from the Jeffrey Lewis-vetted Dead Songs, one of my favorite albums ever); that may be why he talks about making sketches from memory. After the first look-over, what the narrator sees when he looks at the waitress is not so much the waitress herself as a mixture of her and another woman (or women) he once knew; that layered-creature (His Own Version of Her, so to speak) is what he draws. So she sees no resemblance, and she’s correct; but he has drawn exactly what he sees when looks at her, and in this way he’s correct.

There are games in which the greatest pleasure is not completing the game or winning, but rather letting the game continue as long as possible: writing is like this, and the marvelous board game Cosmic Encounter. To the narrator, this little flirtation between him and the waitress—or, between a ghost and the ghost(s) he overlays on the living woman—is another such. It’s a moment’s distraction from his dreary existence (he’s not even allowed to play Neil Young’s electric guitar solos as loud as he’d like) (and, more on point, when he sees “people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes / They’re drinking and dancing, wearing bright-colored clothes / All the young men with their young women looking so good” in the third panel, he thinks, “I’d trade places with any of them in a minute, if I could”), and he’d prefer it to last as long as it can. It turns out to be fun enough to last several verses/song minutes, but the spell breaks when, at one point, the narrator fails to catch exactly what remark the waitress has made; “she says, ‘You don’t read women authors, do you?’ / At least that’s what I think I hear her say.” They exchange a little bit more snark, but the thread has snapped, and when she “goes away for a minute … I slide out of my chair / I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody’s going anywhere.” Or, as Mississippi has it, “Everybody’s moving, if they ain’t already there / Everybody’s got to move somewhere.”