The Minneapolis musicians who backed Dylan up on Blood on the Tracks were versatile. Depending on the demands of the song, they could do Tex-Mex (If You See Her, Say Hello), Laurel Canyon (You’re a Big Girl Now), underground rock (Idiot Wind), glimmering folk rock (Tangled Up in Blue), and western barroom swing (Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts). While Idiot Wind and Tangled have remarkably strong and memorable arrangements, my favorite of the band’s performances is here on Lily. It’s just a simple groove, but I feel I could listen to them play it forever.
Dylan, for his part, is in exceptionally fine, warm voice. If I were to rank my ten favorite Dylan studio vocal performances, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts might not appear, but it’d be in the top fifteen for sure.
There are songs with stories so long, involved, and occasionally telegraphed that you need to listen to them several times before you can figure out exactly what’s going on. Jeffrey Lewis’s magnificent Come On Board is like that, and O’Malley’s Bar from the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads. Same with Lily. I have fond memories of my first ten or twelve listens to Blood on the Tracks, during which I’d set off every time trying to follow Lily’s story to the end, but lose the thread somewhere, either because I got distracted by some terrific detail or something in Bob’s singing, or just mesmerized by the groove. That was a lot of fun, because the song went on beckoning like an unsolved mystery even as the rest of the album grew familiar. When I finally figured out who each character was and more or less what happened between them, I was duly impressed. It’s a great story. I remember the first time I noticed how casually Bob litters early verses with references to the drilling in the wall: a chill went down my spine. Now that’s how you plot a narrative.
I love how many great little details there are in the lyrics. When the story, eventually, became a familiar one, it was the little details that continued to delight: the breeze coming in through the window; Rosemary contemplating her reflection in the cutlery; Big Jim wondering where he’d seen the Jack of Hearts’ face before, “maybe down in Mexico or a picture up on somebody’s shelf” ; the freshly painted wall; the gang of thieves waiting by the riverbed in the dark.
Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts is among the grandest instances of self-mythology in song that I’ve yet heard. I love when songwriters do that, openly turning themselves into the material of a song, as Antonia does in Hoodoo Bash, or Peter Stampfel in We Are the Rounders, or Michael Gira in The Man We Left Behind, or Ian Anderson in A Raft of Penguins, or Leonard Cohen in Going Home. The dashing hero fantasy of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts is written with evident love for the Jack of Hearts: he’s the coolest character in the tale, and everybody loves him, or else is afraid of him, or else tries but fails to take him down; he is the story’s charismatic center. He can swoop into town, make love to a beautiful girl, (inadvertently) get an I Pity the Poor Immigrant tyrant-type killed, clean out the bank, and still get away unscathed, to the next woman, the next town, the next adventure… and so it’s a pity that this song wasn’t a Rolling Thunder Revue staple, as that was a great era for Dylan inhabiting his songs, and surely he would have gotten as into this one, performing it, as he got into Isis. The incomplete S.I.R. rehearsal released on The 1975 Live Recordings shows that Dylan thought it was a good idea too. But for whatever reason, not quite good enough. A pity.
It’s often observed that this song points forward to Desire and that, as such, it doesn’t belong on Blood on the Tracks; Michael Gira, who otherwise adores the album, has called it a “stupid-ass song.” As far as I’m concerned, I think Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts is the key to understanding an album that Dylan fanhood throughout the ages has cited as a deeply personal one, and that Dylan throughout the ages has denied is as overtly personal as people think, while not discounting the real pain that was poured into the witch’s (artist’s) cauldron.
The presence of Lily (a modern myth and psychosexual romance like many to come on Desire) on Blood on the Tracks is a pointed reminder that Dylan is no stranger to writing fiction, and that if such an obvious fantasy is sitting right there in the middle of the album, all long and prominent, the listener would do well to listen to the album’s other nine tracks skeptically. The main character of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts is not Bob Dylan, however attractive to its author the character may be. So why, Dylan seems to be suggesting, should we believe that the narrators of Tangled Up in Blue, You’re a Big Girl Now, You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, or If You See Her, Say Hello are Bob Dylan either?
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