35. Isis

If, among those who’ve dug deep into the catacombs of Dylan, Brownsville Girl is universally beloved, then Isis is the insiders’ secret for those who’ve made it partway underground. Not the version on Desire, which is one really cool song among many, but its live rearrangement for the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, featured on Biograph and then on the Live 1975 Bootleg Series and, at last, in several high-quality recordings on the Scorsese flick-accompanying multiple-disc release of 1975 live shows. Live, the band take the song a lot faster, so the journey described in the lyrics moves along that much quicker too. In fact, Dylan goes so fast that he typically forgets the important verse in which the narrator opens up the tomb his companion had intended to rob. My favorite version of those officially available is from December 4^th in Montreal, because it does include the often-missing verse; performance-wise, you can’t go wrong with any of them. Dylan highlights different lines each time. On December 4^th, I love “when I took up his offer, Lord, I must have been mad!” , his voice dropping, bewildered, for “Lord.”

Playing Isis live in 1975, Dylan had nothing in his hands but the occasional harmonica, and as seen in Renaldo and Clara (footage recycled for Scorsese’s film), he—in his coolest-ever concert get-up, with that beautiful hat bedecked in flowers and his face painted white—leaps deep into the world of the song, so deep that by the time the penultimate verse with its ornery dialogue comes around, Dylan does not merely intone “yes” as he does on Desire, but screams it out. “She said, ‘You gonna stay?’ / I said, ‘If you want me to————YES!’”

What I think I like even more than Isis live in 1975, though—at least in certain moods, which seem more frequent of late—is Isis live in 1976. Looking at the dates, you wouldn’t think the song would undergo great changes, but Dylan is a restless performer, and the 1976 arrangement is another type of trip. It starts slow and calm, each line in the opening verses given a lot more room than they were in either 1975 or the slow and dusty Desire recording. You think the whole song might be delivered this way, but no, this is 1976 (see I Pity the Poor Immigrant, Tangled Up in Blue), and once the two main male characters have agreed to join forces, the band suddenly picks up the pace. The lines remain spaced out, but now we’re moving quickly again—though a 1976 performance averages out at seven minutes, like the Desire recording, instead of 1975’s five. As befits a setlist shorn of Sara but that included Idiot Wind, Shelter from the Storm, Going Going Gone, and You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, the great affirmative yes near song’s end is subdued. But all through the song, to make up for it, we get Dylan’s mellifluous electric guitar straddling the divide between rhythm and lead. And, at the 1976 pace, we get to experience the journey that much more thoroughly.

I don’t suppose a lot of people reading this will have played the late-Super Famicom era masterpiece Treasure Hunter G, but in that story there are also “pyramids embedded in ice” (or snow, anyway); I loved Treasure Hunter G before I loved Desire, and if anything, the connection helped my imagination welcome Isis in.

It’s a welcoming song in any case. “I married Isis on the fifth day of May / But I could not hold on to her very long / So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away / To the vast unknown country where I could not go wrong”—is one captivating opening verse. The lore goes that this was the song that opened the doors to all the other Dylan/Levy co-writes; according to the snippets of interviews Clinton Heylin gathered for Still on the Road, it was Isis, in quite different form, with a lost refrain, that got them started. If I sat down to write songs with somebody and the first thing we came up with was Isis, why then yes, most definitely, I’d go in for another ten.

Only recently, as I listened to Isis in its various guises in preparation for this write-up, did I register the connection between “He said, ‘Are you looking for something easy to catch?’” , “When he died, I was hoping that it wasn’t contagious,” and “When I took up his offer I must’ve been mad.” While there may have been an earnest treasure hunter in the stranger the narrator meets and joins up with (another curious moment—“we’ll be back by the fourth,” one day before “the fifth day” of the first line, and Isis speaking of how “things would be different the next time we wed”), a fellow hoping to find somebody desperate enough to come along on a secret quest that would ultimately involve chopping ice “through the night [and] through the dawn,” I now also get the sense that the invitation was an invitation to the kingdom of death (after all, their destination is a tomb, and the object of their pursuit a dead body), and that the reason the narrator survives and his partner doesn’t is because whereas his partner thinks of “jewels” that “would fetch a good price,” what the narrator has on his mind is riches that he might offer to Isis. The verse that begins “I was thinking about turquoise, I was thinking about gold” ends with “I was thinking about Isis,” and the next verse is an all-out revery that concludes with the rapturous “I still can’t remember all the best things she said.”

So we have this wonderfully interesting and multi-layered story featuring three (or four, if we count the missing body, which I think we should) great characters; but we also have an abundance of terrific details. For instance, there’s the last-verse revelation that the narrator and Isis’s wedding ceremony took place “in the drizzling rain,” a much warmer and softer kind of weather than the windswept snow that greets the narrator at the pyramids. There’s the “high place of darkness and light” where a “dividing line ran through the center of town”—dividing what, exactly, life and death? Hope and despair? There’s the seemingly casual excuse for a chat—“a man in the corner approached me for a match”—a detail that now seems important to me, as if the other were a zombie of sorts, drawn to the narrator’s life force, which is all rolled up in his (the narrator’s) intense longing (or should I say desire?) for Isis. There’s the delightful exchange of a blanket for a promise. There’s “necklace/reckless,” one of my favorite of all Dylan’s rhymes. There’s the description of snow as “outrageous.” There’s the loaded reversal near the story’s end, where the narrator’s partner ends up in the empty tomb they chopped their way into.

“I said a quick prayer and I felt satisfied / Then I rode back to find Isis just to tell her I love her”—indeed, because what he’s buried is not so much (or not only) a dead man, as the dissatisfaction and misery left in the wake of the narrator and Isis’s divorce, and which the narrator undertook this “wild unknown” journey to escape, or at least to wrestle with. So of course (back to the dividing line) when he finds Isis again, “in the meadow where the creek used to rise” (I love that image), it’s with “the sun in my eyes.” Out of the kingdom of ice and death, then, out of the “canyons” and the “devilish cold,” back to light and life, for a second go at connecting to the heart of his existence.

Now take this complexity of words and join it with the complexity of delivery and phrasing, Rolling Thunder Revue performance to Rolling Thunder Revue performance, 1975 to 1976, and you get what I think a lot of Dylan fans would agree is one of this songwriter’s richest creations. Great credit to Jacques Levy for his part in its birth.