31. Is Your Love in Vain?

In the past, I’ve mentioned the strikingly brief distance in time between Saved and Empire Burlesque. When you consider how different the songs and their concerns are (at least for the most part), it’s pretty amazing. But that’s nothing compared to the mere months between “I have dined with kings / I’ve been offered wings / And I’ve never been too impressed” and Dylan writing When He Returns.

Although now that I put it this way, there’s also some interesting cross-over. Compare “Of every earthly plan / That be known to man / He is unconcerned.” The import is different, but the sentence is similarly formed.

Still, there’s a lot of psychological (or spiritual) ground to cover between the glutted, malaise-ridden, and complaining narrator of Is Your Love in Vain? and the guy who bows down, forehead to the bloody dirt, in When He Returns. Whatever you think about this era of Dylan’s life and work, something real heavy must have happened to the man in the autumn of 1978.

Is Your Love in Vain? doesn’t exactly suggest that the narrator is searching for something to redeem his wretched life—on the contrary, he’s inclined to give another shot to old things that didn’t work—but it does show he knows that everything he’s tried up to now wasn’t the thing. Has Dylan ever written a song that’s more degraded, more exhausted, more helpless and vulnerable? Not Love Rescue Me, which is a cool song but, by comparison, an ineffective case of “tell” rather than this song’s “show” (or rather “reveal,” or even “exhibit” if we use the word in the exhibitionist sense). Time out of Mind as a whole cultivates that mood in a way that actually makes it painful for me to listen to the album from start to finish, but I don’t think any of its individual tracks have the concentrated weakness and standoffishness of Is Your Love in Vain?.

As someone who spent a couple of his (romantically unfulfilled) late teenage years in a non-denominational Protestant church community, I’ve always loved the opening lines: “Do you love me? / Or are you just extending good will?” When a charming, pretty girl says “I love you, Sigismund!” in that context, it’s almost always the latter, no matter how much one wishes it weren’t.

“Do you need me half as much as you say / Or are you just feeling guilt?” is a more adult sort of concern. “I’ve been burned before / And I know the score / So you won’t hear me complain” is facetious, but illustrative, because the narrator has no idea that he isn’t being honest. Which is a lousy situation to be in, a jerk or a liar yet unaware—anyone who’s been married a while can probably relate. It’s unpleasant it is to have done something to make your spouse furious but have no idea what. And when you do find out later, you blanch, and are feverishly ashamed, and you can’t make excuses to your spouse or to yourself, because you were so blithe in your selfishness or unkindness that you didn’t even notice what thoughtless or mean or cruel thing you had done.

The narrator has a heart so ravaged by relationships past that he has absolutely nothing left to offer, not even the “comfort with conditions” (PLEASE stop crying) that we heard a song earlier, at the close of Street-Legal’s Side A. Here there is nothing but a catalog of doubts and suspicions and a list of unreasonable demands. “Are you so fast that you cannot see / That I must have solitude? / When I am in the darkness / Why do you intrude?” (These are fantastically original formulations, by the way. Who else but Street-Legal era Dylan writes lines like these?) Onwards, unrelenting: “Do you know my world, do you know my kind / Or must I explain? Will I be able to count on you / Or is your love in vain?”

What woman in her right mind would stick around to continue this conversation—no, not conversation, diatribe? It is obvious that (paving the way for Slow Train Coming) it is unconditional love the narrator is demanding, and not human love. No human can give endlessly, understand their partner perfectly with just a look, permit every manner of cruelty or misbehavior, and go on loving just the same. (But what would it look like if a person could? Check out Alanis Morissette’s song You Owe Me Nothing in Return. It’s an amazing thought exercise in precisely these terms, and puts tears in my eyes at almost every listen.)

Also, the stakes are too high. The narrator is (the song structure suggests) addressing a woman from start to finish. So what the fuck does this man expect when he launches the bridge on his (let’s just call her a) conversation partner? “I have dined with kings / I’ve been offered wings / And I’ve never been too impressed.” So how in the world can the woman make an impression? With sex? But we’ve already heard New Pony, back there on Side A. Sex isn’t gonna work.

This same bridge, while a stab in the side of the woman that the narrator will soon (ridiculously—and delightfully) deign to fall in love with (as if falling in love worked that way! By willpower!), is probably the song’s most intimate moment, for us the listeners who stand and watch from outside the constructs of the song-situation. For a moment, the narrator drops his aggression (if the narrator were a cat, then in the verses his tail would be puffed up like a squirrel’s) and talks honestly. The bridge is a great sigh, painfully heaved. “Well, I’ve been to the mountain / And I’ve been in the wind / I’ve been in and out of happiness…” But the cycle, the journeying, has become exhausting.

Which brings me to the most controversial portion of these lyrics, and also my favorite. In a line that’s often quoted alongside “A woman like you should be at home / That’s where you belong,” the narrator—having decided to give this woman a chance (I wonder if she ever got any say in that?)—asks her, “Can you cook and sew? Make flowers grow?”

Rating a potential lover on their cooking and gardening is old-school masculinity up the wazoo. But, I’d like to argue, it isn’t only that. Look at the very next line: “Do you understand my pain?” As I see it, this is no mere set-up for the rhyme with “vain.” I think it’s the key to the questions the narrator just asked. If we only look at them literally, then fine, they don’t do our opinion of the narrator any favors. But if we open them up a little to figurative interpretation (and this is Bob Dylan we’re talking about, right?) they take on a different sense.

The narrator uses three verbs. First, cook. Which is to say, to prepare food that will assuage hunger. In other words, to fill a recurring and ever-present need.

Second, sew. Which is to say, to take old ruined fabric and fix it, make it whole. What else, or should I say who else, in this song is old and ruined, and in need of fixing?

Third, make flowers grow. Which is to say, to bring a beautiful living thing out from, as it were, nothingness—or, maybe more accurately, a nothingness that brims with potential, but that might not produce something left solely to its own devices.

I think you see where I’m going with this. So when the narrator asks, after these questions, “Do you understand my pain?” I think it’s not just another demand, but a desperate and almost hopeless cry of need and pain. Yes, the narrator has definitely been reduced to the kind of state it’s easiest to just turn one’s eyes away from. It’s a raging, roaring, greedy, entitled, demanding, and demeaning creature that speaks to us from these lines. But there was a time when the speaker wasn’t that, and there’s nothing he’d like more than to not be that again. But he’s hurting so bad that he can no longer get out of the pit of desolation on its own.

In other words, this is a pretty scary song. And the heart of it is not “Are you willing to risk it all / Or is your love in vain?” but the lines before—which are so touchingly incapable of communicating their own real meaning, even though the person saying them didn’t have any trouble making outrageous (and articulate) demands just a bridge and a verse before.

And on a lighter note, if we’re honest with ourselves, we might be able to empathize even with such demands. Who among us, male or female, hasn’t dreamed of a “perfect” lover? Someone who would love us unconditionally and provide for all our needs? Maybe, in certain regards, little more than a slave? Isn’t the dating period of one’s life (presuming one is fortunate enough to have that period end in a complex, fruitful, and lasting union with a single individual) precisely where the absurd desires of our needy hearts come to terms with the realities of what it means to share one’s life with another person whose time is just as valuable, whose energies are just as limited, and whose character is just as flawed as our own?

In the terms this song sets out, the love of every single one of us is, in fact, in vain. But I think it’s normal to wish that weren’t so. My thoughts turn to what I find a lovely and endearing line in Keinan Abdi Warsame’s tremendous song Dreamer: “I got a dream, girl, in my mind / And that’s the hook: / An intellectual, sexual / And still can cook.” Can you hear that (knowing what sort of a soul Keinan is, granted, and in the context of the song) and not smile?

Musically, now, I could say, “Well, look, it’s on Street-Legal” and, at this point in the countdown, probably leave it at that. But that’s no fun. Let me point first of all to Alan Pasqua’s wonderful church-organ accompaniment, which does so much to enhance the contrast between the hymnlike musical setting and the disturbed lyrics. I especially love the organ break that comes near the end of the song, before the “Can you cook and sew” section is repeated.

That said, if Journey through Dark Heat can be said to be Billy Cross’s showcase, and Baby Stop Crying Ian Wallace’s, and New Pony the backing singers’ and Steve Douglas’s, and Señor Bobbye Hall’s, and We Better Talk This Over Alan Pasqua’s (although he’s obviously amazing on this song too) then Is Your Love in Vain? is Steven Soles’s. I don’t know whose rhythm guitar it is that sounds almost like it’s doing an offbeat (particularly audible in the first verse). Probably Dylan’s. But cool if it’s Soles’s. The main thing either way, though, is not Soles’s rhythm playing but his fairly unique position as a male duet partner on a Dylan studio recording, and his definitely unique position as duet partner on a studio recording who actually matches Dylan for intensity. If anything, Soles sounds even more crazed than Bob does. Talk about rising to meet the occasion.