25. 10,000 Men

Among the things I treasure most in a set of lyrics is a sense of the unexpected. One of the reasons I adore the songs of Antonia and Peter Stampfel is because they’re always inclined to push the material somewhere you, the listener, would never expect.

In the beautiful Antonia “selected works” that her friend John McFadden published as Bear Suit Follies, there is a letter which John describes as “blatant self-promotion, tongue-in-cheek style.” The text goes:

“Bear With You (Professional Collaboration Service ON APPROVAL)

ZIPLESS FINISHING

Many people have a flash of inspiration and begin a song with one or two great verses and perhaps even a bridge and then go dry and can’t get a finish. We will provide GUARANTEED a first-rate finish so much in your style that even your BEST FRIENDS won’t know where you put it down and we picked it up. We can make endings to demonstrate, imply, or provide any philosophical, religious, or political theory or hypothesis, based on the work you did at the beginning of the song. ‘Deeper meaning’ last verses to complete ‘ordinary level’ beginnings. ‘Surprise’ endings—the content of your beginning turned inside out. MORAL SERVICE—any moral principle demonstrated in ‘CUTESY’ kid’s style or ‘DRY WRY’ adult fashion. ‘BLUE DINOSAUR’ endings—guaranteed to have 100% NOTHING to do with anything else in the song—confound the critics! Extraneous, dense, or stupid plot material removed. Obtuse verses clarified.

SPECIALTIES—Pep up your boring song lyrics with a striking image or flash of insight when they least expect it! Pass yourselff off as a Writer with Promise!”

It’s a delightful (and, I might add, verifiably truthful) account of Antonia’s strengths as a songwriter. She’s capable of, and generous with, every skill she lists. Peter Stampfel, with whom Antonia wrote many songs throughout the 1960s and 1970s, works much the same way. Wherever possible, yet without going overboard, Antonia and Peter allow their songs to twist and turn and buckle and jump, and the finished products are amazing.

I think Under the Red Sky is like that, too. Wiggle Wiggle is the most Stampfelian of Dylan songs: you quickly learn where every line is going to begin (with the word “wiggle,” of course) but it’s harder to guess how any line is going to end. The “knotty fairy tale” approach in general yields great dividends. 10,000 Men has nine verses, none of which follow logically from another, but which hold together anyway; they’re linked both by the recurring title image and by the spirit that guides the whole album. Inside of each verse, the first line is repeated, giving the listener plenty of time to imagine the line that will close the couplet, not a single one of which is predictable or obvious. There are Dylan songs I like in which no particular line feels weak, but which hold no surprises either—Emotionally Yours, say. 10,000 Men is as far to the other side of that spectrum as one can get.

Dylan has said of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall and of Slow Train that “you could write a song to every line in the song.” 10,000 Men is another set of lyrics where that seems to apply.

The first four verses all begin with ten thousand men doing something in unison. Even if what they’re doing and why remains deliciously mysterious, you figure that there’s a pattern here and that, as in Wiggle Wiggle, God Knows, or the verses of 2 x 2, and as in many a children’s nursery rhyme, Dylan is going to stick to it.

But then the fifth verse comes, and the pattern goes out the window. “Hey!” Dylan exclaims, as if wanting to snatch the attention of the listener lulled into the established pattern, “who could your lover be?” And in the sixth verse, instead of another completely pattern-breaking verse, we return to the original pattern—but only partially, because now, instead of the familiar ten thousand men, we hear tell of ten thousand women. And lest we think “Aha, so the ‘Hey!’ verse is an interlude, and the second half of the song will be about the women,” the seventh verse goes back to the men. And lest we think the “ten thousand women” verse was a one-off, the eight verse goes back to the women. And lest we think that now the verses will alternate between the men and the women, the ninth (and final—not that you’d be able to guess that) verse is another completely pattern-breaking verse: “Ooh, baby, thank you for my tea…”

I don’t need to sing the praises of the individual verses and their ingenious verse endings. If they don’t delight you as they delight me, all I can say is, our lyrical interests lie too far apart. But I do want to comment on a few.

There’s an Expecting Rain thread with a fun exchange between two members, Warren Peace (a Tolstoy pun) and TheFatChocobo. Commenting on the the third verse, Warren Peace says, “That line, ‘None of them doing nothin’ that your mama wouldn’t disapprove’ drives me crazy every time... why not just say, ‘None of them doing anything your mama would approve’ ?” TheFatChocobo responds: “Hah, I searched up a thread about this song just to inquire about this. I love the piling-on of the negatives, it makes the line a hoot, but I can’t follow what it actually equates! Which no doubt is part of the point, given the playful and mischievous nature of this album. But is that what it’s supposed to mean, that all ten thousand are acting naughty? I like the alternative too, that they’re actually all good friendly men who could be friends with little Ms. Goo Goo [to whom Dylan dedicated the album] ; her momma wouldn’t disapprove.”

The shift to sudden and absurd violence that closes the fifth verse is worthy of Hans Christian Andersen himself: “Hey! Who could your lover be? / Let me eat off his head, and then we’ll really see!”

I love that the “ten thousand women” in the eighth verse, though apparently in servitude when the verse begins (“Ten thousand women all sweeping my room”) turn out to be cleaning up the mess they themselves made (“Spilling my buttermilk, sweeping it up with a broom”). Also, with a broom? What ungodly amount of the narrator’s buttermilk were the women responsible for spilling, exactly?—innuendos aside…

The first few times I heard that eighth verse, I thought the lyric was “Ten thousand women all sleep in my room,” a fascinating sort of boast, perhaps (I thought) meant to put the ten thousand men in the previous verse to shame (“each one of them’s got seven wives”—yeah well, the narrator says, I got way more than that!).

As for the ninth verse like Robert Christgau, “when he thanks his honey for that cup of tea, I melt.”

Dylan’s singing is as slippery as the words. He begins quietly, almost muttering, as befits the band’s zombie sway, but as the song goes on, he works himself up to joyful shouts.

My favorite stretch of State Radio’s live career was when Michael “Maddog” Najarian, the drummer, favored the china cymbal. The china is a kind of crash cymbal that doesn’t resonate. Before the china became part of Maddog’s kit, many State Radio songs would end with a powerful smash of the crash, so that the after-waves went on filling the air for a few seconds after the song was over. In the china years, these powerful song-endings would build up to a very brief “ksh.” One hell of an anticlimax. I loved it.

I don’t know what exactly Kenny Aronoff’s set-up on Under the Red Sky was, but there’s something that sounds like a china cymbal, and I enjoy every time he goes for it. You can hear it most clearly when he hits it three times in a row at 3:25. But there’s hardly anybody doing anything that isn’t cool. Listen to the rambling lead guitar, and to the is-it-an-organ?-is-it-a-guitar? that plays the melodies in the left channel, and to the rhythm guitar’s choked offbeat, and to the “I’ll play notes whenever the hell I feel like it” slide guitar, and to the staccato, passionately attacked piano. 10,000 Men is Dylan’s patent “controlled chaos” at its most fun.