36. New Pony

Between Changing of the Guards and No Time to Think, two shards fallen from the wandering moon, appears this raucous sliver of playful blues. If on the song Slow Train, the narrator is pitching base camp on Mount Deranged, on New Pony he’s dancing naked on the summit, and if I stick to my metaphor, that would mean (if we take the two for one man) that between April 1978 and May 1979 we find him on his way down.

Scrolling through the comments on last.fm’s page for this song, I misread one as “GET THIS MAN AWAY FROM THAT PONY.” That’s not what it actually said, but it would have been apposite. Mixing humor with the demonic as he would do again twelve years later on Wiggle Wiggle, “this is the furthest off-edge Dylan lets himself get on the record—end of the line blues” (quoth last.fm user The Fat Chocobo). The narrator here is a wonderful creation, every verse revealing another facet of his, er, interesting way of looking at things.

I’m not sure Dylan ever took as full advantage of blues songwriting structure as he does here. In your classic blues-form song, you repeat a line twice and only then complete the couplet. As I understand it, this is done so that the singer has a chance to show off the breadth and stretch of the voice they possess: heard me sing that line? Well, now listen again and see what I do differently. And man, oh man, does Dylan rip the repeat-lines of each New Pony verse into oblivion. His voice is so elastic, or rather, downright liquid, that an Expecting Rain user (alias Maggies uncle Ian) “thought that the first line of New Pony was ‘I got a new pony, her name was Lucy-bird,’ although I heard the correct ‘her name was Lucifer’ on the repeat of the line, and I couldn’t understand why it was different that time around!!!!!”

Thanks to that post I’ve never been able to unhear Lucy-bird… which is one hell of a name for a pony…

Now, obviously the “new pony” of the title is a new lover, but much of the song’s hilarity and ingenuity comes from Dylan playing a game of “How literal can I make this metaphor and still get away with it?” (see also I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, in which he gets away with it perfectly; tell me that song isn’t narrated by a real baby and I’ll tell you “that’s what you think”—for that matter, Baby Stop Crying is a quarter of the way there too… “You been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe / But you’re back where you belong”—an averted kidnapping! And if my wife and I have a child down the line, I imagine “baby, please stop crying ‘cause it’s tearing up my mind” may take on new relevance). I mean, “She got great big hind legs / Long black shaggy hair hanging in her face”—I do picture a horse first, and only then does my mind supply the human characteristics being suggested. And obviously “Come over here, pony, I want to climb up on top of you”—yup… sounds to me like a drunken stablemaster with unrealistic expectations. If you want to climb on a horse I think it’s you who have to take the first steps…

How bold New Pony’s first verse is. I think we’re so distracted wondering why the narrator would name a pony Lucifer that we never consider why he needs a new pony. But he’s very forthcoming with the explanation, perfectly happy to make the listener feel, hmm, uneasy at best: “She broke her leg and needed shooting / I swear it hurt me more than it could have hurted her.”

At least three thoughts follow naturally from this:

1. Seems excessive.

2. “Hurted” ?

3. Based on the way it’s sung, we’re clearly meant to believe the narrator (if not the writer) is dead serious (no pun intended, but there you have it).

Alias thickboy on Expecting Rain glosses the first verse as follows: “To attract foxy ladies I often speak part of this song in an attempt to demonstrate just what a modern and kind sort of chap I am... I say to them, ‘I had a pony, her name was Lucifer. She broke her leg and she needed shooting. I swear it hurt me more than it could ever have hurted her’... I feel that it shows the ladies my softer, more caring and compassionate side of my personality. I am certain that almost any lady … would be strongly attracted to a guy who loved ponies (in a non-sexual way), especially when they knew the guy would get upset after having to shoot the ponies when they hurt themselves.”

Another productive mishearing (as misheard independently by three posters on the Expecting Rain thread about mishearings) : “Sometimes I wonder what’s going on with me sex,” versus the discreet Miss X of the official lyrics. Since there’s “hurted,” the colloquial English of “me sex” would fit right in, and this narrator definitely does sound like the kind of fellow who would worry publicly about the willful behavior of his reproductive member (alias dwhite: “Bob Dylan—first to sing the blues about erectile disfunction”). But the official lyrics have made me laugh out loud before as well: “She’s got such a sweet disposition / I never know what the poor girl’s gonna do to me next.” Poor girl? Why “poor” ? Wouldn’t that be because… (“Come over here, pony…”)

Following the third verse, Billy Cross delivers a fiery solo that, despite its fervor, is kept stately, within bounds. While he’s soloing, Dylan gets possessed by the groove, so that when it’s his turn to sing again (after the first of the backing singers’ delightful mistakes, one of the girls too hasty on the “longer” but catching her error, having enunciated the “l” (could you even call it an error though, in a song like this?)), he comes in as hot and strong as John Lennon, heartened by Ringo Starr’s crash cymbal, ever did on Don’t Let Me Down. “Everybody SAYS you’re using voodoo! I’ve seen your feet walk by themselves—ah weeeell...”

Ian Wallace enhances the amped-up singing by adding hi-hat to the beat, which, as usual with Ian, is a subtle but powerful update. The line, when Dylan repeats it, is emphasized in all new places. And then he positively explodes with sympathetic venom for “Oh, baby, but that god that you been praying to gonna give you back what you’re wishing on someone else!” He sings this so hard that the band gets confused, Ian Wallace hitting the wrong beat (by mistake? on purpose?) while all but one of the backing singers hold back on the “longer” in their first “how much longer?” Then Ian compensates with an extra note on the crash. Considering how much Dylan loves controlled chaos, how he likes to “teeter on the parapet” (to quote Roger Waters from a fantastic song on Radio K.A.O.S.) (for controlled chaos, see also Tangled Up in Blue in 1976, or all of Shot of Love), it’s no wonder that he earmarked this raggedy take for the album.

We get one more verse (“you’re oh so nasty and you’re so vain, but I swear I love you, yes, I do!”—a classic bit of Dylan love song ambivalent over-emphasis (“I swear … yes, I do”) which, for once, the singing completely sells, erasing any doubt that the sentences might create when read on the page), a verse in which Dylan’s electric rhythm playing catches my ear. After the verse, there’s a duet between Steve Douglas’s saxophone (as bold and raunchy as Dylan’s singing, and as promiscuous as Cross’s earlier solo was restrained) and Billy Cross’s electric lead. I love the pebbly stream of notes Douglas lets loose at 4:16, ushering in the fade-out.

Is New Pony just a demonic come-on played sideways for laughs? Not exactly. It’s on Street-Legal, after all, and track two no less (how important the second track of an album is for defining a mood! See, for instance, Saved rising up out of A Satisfied Mind, or the vulnerability of I Believe in You countering the swagger of Gotta Serve Somebody, or the dread trawls of Promise of Water and Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett) qualifying the openers’ stomps on Michael Gira’s We Are Him and To Be Kind, or the tender answer of Baby Eyes to the loose and rainy sadness of Hail the Happy Hourlings on Big Blood’s Deep Maine, or the thunderous crush of Away Pt. III after the long organ-and-insinuation Sphinx-side float of A Watery Down Pt. I on their Unlikely Mothers… I could go on endlessly… so better just return to the steamy heat of New Pony, so different from the crystalline sorrow and beauty and the swirling instrumental colors of Changing of the Guards).

The complication is in Dylan’s ingenious arrangement for the backing singers: like a Greek chorus, more focused and less playful than the Queens of Rhythm on Brownsville Girl, they nag and nag and nag the wayward narrator: “How much longer? How much longer? How much? How much? How much longer?” These, too, are words Dylan wrote (and all the more reason for us not to identify New Pony’s narrator completely with the song’s author). Just as Changing of the Guards announces a departure from the old way of things, in the light of which you must either “get ready for elimination” or gather your courage, here every spurt of lasciviousness and humor is greeted with the chorus of the soul, the spirit wailing up and out to the body: how much longer can you and I go on like this, eh, dear landlord? The obvious intended answer being “not much longer.” No, not much longer—“‘cause there’s a slow, a slow train coming, coming up around the bend.”

But the narrator of New Pony doesn’t know that. And he’s happy to ignore the warnings. So we fade out on a Steve Douglas solo.