I’ve been drunk four times in this life. Once was in New York City, in the company of Steven Rineer. Once was with friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico—I remember the conversation turning to Neil Young, and the four of us all gathered around one computer to watch a 1970 video of him and Crazy Horse playing Down by the River. The third time I was alone, in Bailey, Colorado. The last was in Zhengzhou at Liam Paul O’Kell’s place, the evening capping in us blasting Keinan Abdi Warsame’s Coming to America from Liam’s potent speaker system. That final instance, some five years ago now, was the first to result in a hangover. The misery of the experience (I remember thinking, over and over and over again throughout the day, “Why would anybody, ever want to just throw away a whole day of their lives like this?!”) is the reason I haven’t done any meaningful drinking since.
Perhaps because it only happened four times, I remember each time well. Regarding the first: it was the week I made it to Street-Legal in my Dylan exploration mission, and Steven Rineer was in town from across the coast to see Roger Waters perform The Wall. We met up in a bar somewhere in Manhattan and I probably spewed a lot of hot air in Steven’s direction about how excellent and underrated Street-Legal was, because (as hasn’t always been the case with Dylan albums) the very first listen had won me over and the next few had brought zero disillusionment. That evening’s buzz was the kind that made descending the stairs to the bar’s bathroom challenging. On the metro ride back to my neighborhood, I took out my brick of an iPod classic, slipped earphones in my ears, scrolled over to Street-Legal, hit play… blissed out…
I remember that warm and happy autumn evening best when I hear Where Are You Tonight? Maybe it’s something in the sleazy and tired way the song begins, like some Rolling Stones anthem for after the after-party. Or maybe not. As soon as the vocals enter, and the active backing singers, any hint of enervation vanishes. Street-Legal (as I’ve had ample occasion to try to demonstrate) is an album bursting not only with complex and beautiful performances from the band, but with fantastic Dylan studio vocals, and as far as these are concerned, Where Are You Tonight? is among the peaks. The singing is sharp, crazed, modulated, and/or limpid as the line or verse or refrain demand, so that the song (which, if memory serves, is the great Ralf Sauter’s second favorite Bob Dylan song, behind only Brownsville Girl) truly does feel like a “journey through dark heat.”
It starts like some kind of classic country tune, as if we were in 1969 and the album Nashville Skyline again; but all it takes is the way the opening couplet finishes to remind us that we’re in the strange territory of Street-Legal, where we belong: “There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write / There’s a woman I long to touch, and I’m missing her so much, but she’s drifting like a satellite.” Note the intricate rhyming pattern, by the way: AAB/CCB (and the refrain will add EEEFF!), sustained long verse by long verse, all song long. Whatever else you might say about Street-Legal, surely it’d be hard to argue the claim that it’s Dylan’s most intricate and ambitious album where rhymes are concerned.
I love how, in the verses, the backing singers join Dylan for the last three words of every other line. Combined with Dylan’s confident delivery, this accompaniment gives the sense of someone setting out on the road with good, reliable partners, something akin to the readiness of “I left town at dawn with Marcel and St. John, strong men belittled by doubt.” Ironically, though, the feeling of togetherness that the vocal arrangement introduces is in stark contrast with the point of the song, which is that whatever the narrator has, and whatever might be going on, the one thing he feels he needs isn’t there (as in, “Last night I danced with a stranger / But she just reminded me you were the one”) ; and since Where Are You Tonight? is the closer of Street-Legal, we know that the woman in question is not only gone that particular night, but that she’s been gone for a while, and will be gone every night from then on. In this song, the narrator has at last achieved the freedom that he (or others like him) fought so painfully and painstakingly for in True Love Tends to Forget and We Better Talk This Over.
The world is large, the world is full, and the woman the narrator seeks is nowhere but in the chilly halls of memory: “Her father would emphasize you got to be more than street-wise, and he practiced what he preached from the heart / A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted it to me: the time and the place that we’d part.” “In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed sacrifice was the code of the road.”
“The woman the narrator seeks,” I wrote—but, when you think about it, is he really seeking her? Maybe he’s only asking, and even if he were to learn the answer, he wouldn’t do anything with the information. I think this becomes explicit in the final refrain: “There’s a new day at dawn, and I’ve finally arrived / If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived / I can’t believe it! I can’t believe I’m alive! / But without you, it just doesn’t seem right / Oh, where are you tonight?” It doesn’t seem right without her, yes; but that doesn’t mean he wants her to be there. He misses her “so much” and longs for her touch, but that doesn’t mean he would find and embrace her, given the chance.
What the narrator really wants, I think, is to cross the borderline of agony, to enter the stage of loss in which every day it feels easier to be without her, not harder. But he is far from that country, far indeed; there is much dark heat before him yet; and look, he is barely able to make it through a single night. How many more nights like these will there be? He wonders “where are you tonight?” because—well, what else is he going to think about? When you’re in the furnace of a break-up, of a separation, that’s the only object of thought that presents itself. Yet he knows (as we, here at the conclusion of Street-Legal, also understand) that returning to each other is not the solution. The two of them have to press on through the dark heat until they are purified, until they are clean—“the man you were loving could never get clean…”
That’s how I understand the throughline of the song. The details are imagery to lavish in, and not, as I see it, keys to understanding the whole. They are moments of clarity, of insight, of feelings embodied in scenes and situations: “It felt out of place—my foot in his face—but he should’ve stayed where his money was green.” “I bit into the root of forbidden fruit with the juice running down my leg.” “There’s a lion in the road, there’s a demon escaped / There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being raped.” These are the thoughts and the images that come searing across the mind of somebody whose old self is burning.
It occurs to me suddenly that, as Bob Dylan—more or less intentionally—took Leonard Cohen’s True Love Leaves No Traces and remade it into his own True Love Tends to Forget, so the following year, on his gorgeous Recent Songs, Leonard Cohen—more or less inadvertently, I expect—took Where Are You Tonight? and remade it into his own song, The Gypsy’s Wife: “Oh where, where, where is my gypsy wife tonight?” But the mood and arrangement of that song are different: dark and quiet. Where Are You Tonight? is loud and exploding with heavenly bodies and bodily fluids (and, as the song ends, guitar riffs and choked solos).
It’s triumphant, ultimately—the narrator has made it, or is about to make it, to the morning, and at least until night falls again he’s going to be okay. And his direction is true and correct: away from the woman he loves but cannot live with. Someday yet he might set foot on softer soil, and he might sleep.
The Street-Legal band is up for and capable of anything. Everybody is present and accounted for: Bobbye Hall in the percussion-only intro, and steady after that in the left channel; Dylan strums acoustic (acoustic!! in a song like this!) in the right channel, and Steve Soles electric in the middle; the backing singers sing a greater number of distinct words with their leader here than on any other Street-Legal song; Alan Pasqua’s organ anchors the verses and bursts into Like a Rolling Stone abandon in the instrumental sections of the refrains; Ian Wallace plays with his usual subtle distinction (listen to his fills, ever-different, as Dylan sings the words of the main title) (and to his hi-hat work in the final verse!); Steve Douglas adorns the intro and bows out; and, just the opposite, Billy Cross keeps himself hidden until it’s his turn, right at the end, as the song (and the album) is ending.
Dylan is not a songwriter interested in codas. He’s no Sufjan Stevens, no Paul McCartney—the way a Dylan song sounds as it’s beginning is almost always also the way it sounds as it’s ending. But here, though the chords don’t change, the band still working that C and F, the singers add a cheerful “hey hey hey” chorus that makes you feel something big in the song has shifted; and, more significantly still, Billy Cross is unleashed. It’s his best guitar work all album long, marvelously sequenced as the album’s conclusion. The sound of his guitar is the sound that our ears reach for as the song fades out.
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