29. No Time to Think

Songs can do cool things with time. Unlike an album, or a middle-length or long short story, or a novel, all of which the maker understands may not or probably won’t be listened to or read in a single sitting (though with albums, of course, the great ones are best experienced so), we’re likely to listen to a song from start to finish. Films are like that, too, and the theater even moreso. Songs, though, don’t last quite as long; even those by Swans. They have to weave their magic at a brisker pace.

Remarkable, to my mind, are the great short songs, those that are over almost as soon as they’ve begun: Michael Hurley’s Ratface, Jethro Tull’s Grace. But there’s all sorts of ways to subvert a listener’s expectations about how long or short a song will be. A favorite of mine is the fake-out ending, as in Radiohead’s I Might Be Wrong or near the end of Sufjan Stevens’s Impossible Soul.

Another way is to write a song called No Time to Think, the refrain of which fiercely insists that there is “no time to think,” but which actually consists of nine leisurely verses and lasts eight and a half minutes. (In this regard, a grand-nephew of No Time to Think’s is the dog-oriented It Only Takes a Moment by Jeffrey Lewis. The song’s first line asserts that “It only takes a moment to collect my thoughts,” but as Robert Christgau observes, the narrator actually spends five minutes doing so.)

This is, of course, by design. It isn’t carelessness.

One way to think about the paradox is in terms of the unraveling of a long-term relationship. Such things are rarely clean. Instead the horror accumulates in stages, each stage frenetic and explosive and seemingly final, but ultimately followed by a quiet period and then more of the same: another olive branch extended, another brief reconciliation, and only then another disaster, another crisis, in the midst of which there is, once again, no time to think…

Another sense Dylan raises in the lyrics is the way time may seem to slow in moments of extreme uncertainty or danger. “You glance through the mirror and there’s eyes staring clear / At the back of your head as you drink / And there’s no time to think,” because in the hand of the owner of those eyes is a pistol pointed at the back of your head. There may be no time to think, but in whatever sliver of time remains, no matter how tiny, you’re certainly going to be thinking as hard as you can. (In Pink Floyd’s Julia Dream: “Will the following footsteps catch me? Am I really dying?"—lines that terrified me when I was a young boy and first working out the contours of death in my imagination.)

Christopher Ricks thinks of it this way: “It is not that there is no time to think, but rather that one of the things that must be properly thought about is that there’s no time.” (In live sets, a year later, Dylan would upbraid the dithering of When You Gonna Wake Up by making When He Returns the set’s next song.)

Ricks continues, “The refrain that marks the particular whirligig of time that is No Time to Think makes a punctuation point of adding, every time, ‘And there’s no time to think’—until the last time, the last verse. Then the refrain-line both expands and contracts. It expands, in that it takes over the whole of the last verse. It contracts, in that in the final end” (an apt reference on Ricks’ part to Idiot Wind, in which a characters wins the war after losing every battle; in No Time to Think, the narrator has lost every battle, and the war too) “when the time comes for the last refrain, time so presses (‘no time to lose’) that, instead of ‘And there’s no time to think,’ the refrain is curtailed to ‘And no time to think.’”

That’s the terrific subversion of the expectations Dylan builds in this song. The seven long first verses teach us to expect a certain rhythm and dynamic, and even a certain sequence of words (“And there’s no time to think”), so when the eighth verse turns all that around on us, it’s a powerful motion, a well-sprung trap.

In any case, with these vocal melodies, this arrangement, and especially that between-verse riff, I would not want the song to be any shorter than it is. One of the things I love so much about Street-Legal is that when Dylan and the band latch on to a good idea, they hang on to it. The album has no song under four minutes, while the majority are over five, and the shortest song, We Better Talk This Over, is so rich and complex that I’m surprised to discover it’s actually the shortest.

As usual, it’s fun to listen to Ian Wallace. Not only does he play different fills every time the band is transitioning from the verse to the riff, but he never plays along to the riff the same way twice. Sometimes he emphasizes the ride cymbal, sometimes the crash, sometimes the snare. My favorite time comes after the third verse (“like the plague, with a dangerous wink”), when he centers on the hi-hat.

Dylan has noted that No Time to Think is meant to be dreamlike. Since we’re in Street-Legal country, the dreams are troubled ones. “I’d have paid off the traitor and killed him much later,” the identity-shifting narrator notes at one point, before adding, “But that’s just the way that I am.” These lines are illustrative of something I’ve always loved about Dylan’s writing, namely the way that he lets his characters be as they may be: petulant, violent, tender-hearted, noble; whatever it is, Dylan doesn’t interfere. He lets the figures born from his imagination speak as they will, and doesn’t worry (like I often find myself doing when I write songs) about what a listener might feel, hearing the lines. Dylan stands to one side, and I bet has often surprised himself.

Another favorite line is “The empress attracts you but oppression distracts you / It makes you feel violent and strange.” Not merely violent (like the boss in Tin Angel, say, out on his singleminded mission) but also strange: the wish to be violent is the stronger emotion, so it’s mentioned first, but in its wake comes something less certain, and less easy to indulge.

The verse I like best goes: “The bridge that you travel on goes to the Babylon / girl with the rose in her hair” (one of the song’s many ingenious line shifts resulting in what Clinton Heylin calls “some of the most impertinent rhymes ever attempted in popular song,” until the mature work of Marshall Mathers, anyway) “Starlight in the east, you’re finally released / You’re stranded with nothing to share.” The lines would be desolate enough on their own, but since they’re clearly referencing I Shall Be Released, they come off even heavier. “I see my light come shining,” the old song goes, “from the west down to the east” (where we now see starlight). “Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.” A decade later, in No Time to Think, the writer seems to glower and think, “And so what if I will be? Maybe there’s nothing on the other side of that high wall but emptiness and waste.” — “Stranded, with nothing to share.” So much for all that misguided hope, then—“So much for tears / So much for these long and wasted years.”

In that same disappointed spirit, each “refrain” (which we shall call a refrain for simplicity’s sake) begins with four big/long, usually Latinate words (though this pattern too is sometimes subverted, as in “china doll, alcohol” which I like to imagine is a tip of the hat to the wonderful Garcia/Hunter composition from 1973), wailed out with ironic conviction: glossing “equality, liberty, humility, simplicity,” Ricks notes that “No Time to Think came to be sardonic about such abstract nouns and their lending themselves so obligingly to sloganry.” The attitude is in line with the defeated but defensive spirit of a lot of Street-Legal.

If it’s quite a trip to give oneself up to the flow of the rivers of apparently disconnected images in earlier 1970s songs like Tough Mama and Idiot Wind, in No Time to Think the experience is downright phantasmagorical. I’m not sure that Dylan ever let himself drift quite so far into the world of shadow-connections and mystic light again, afterwards—not in Series of Dreams, not in Dark Eyes, not even in Jokerman. He had different business to be about. But No Time to Think remains: the furthest footprint Dylan made on his path into the aether, before the “cold wind from space” (as the Antonia song goes) got to be too bitter, and the wanderer turned back.

A tarot card—the Empress, as it happens—appeared on the back cover of Desire. Mythically-minded as that album was, perhaps the Empress and her scepter were only there to indicate the way. See how she lifts and points it kinda backwards, behind her? Desire is the field where her plush seat is, in the sunshine, beside the stream. Street-Legal is that dark forest.