6. Changing of the Guards

 The 1978 concert-closing live versions of Changing of the Guards are awesome. As the long tour rolled on, Dylan figured out a great way of heightening the drama: to wail out the last word of every other verse. For a good example with good sound, look up the December 10th version from Charlotte, North Carolina.

The studio take of Changing of the Guards begins with a fade-in, as if introducing the listener to a scene that has been full, crowded, and complicated for a long, long time before you hit play on the album. As Horace says, describing the ideal epic poet, “Nor does he begin [Street-Legal] from the egg [ab ōvō], but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things [in mediās rēs].”

Not only does Street-Legal introduce the listener to its esoteric/searcher themes via the album’s most brilliant handful of moonlit pearls, but the song that brings the theme of desperate love to the forefront is not True Love Tends to Forget or Is Your Love in Vain?, or even Baby Stop Crying; it’s New Pony. “If you can find sustenance in these first two volleys,” the album-designer seems to tell the listener, “why then, you’re set for what’s ahead. Follow me…”

In my interpretation, Changing of the Guards is about history, which makes it all the more fitting that the song begins with a fade-in. We are born into the midst of history much the way Changing of the Guards fades in, and history will continue after our deaths much the way Changing of the Guards fades out. And if, following this interpretation, Street-Legal’s opener posits that history is but a procession of heartbreak, bloodshed, and love—all at once or in succession, weighing differently in the balance depending on the time and place and life you peek into—that seems right to me.

The first words, “Sixteen years,” emphasize time. Time is also the one reliable ally of the narrator of Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)—“If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived”—so that creates a pleasing symmetry. But where the narrator at album’s end does, perhaps, tread tentatively on the next mildewed step of the old staircase he’s climbing from darkness up into light, the curse of suffering that attends the characters of Changing of the Guards seems like it will only be broken in myth-time, not in anything as easily pinpointed as the dawn of a new calendar day.

We, the listeners, leave the would-be savior in the song’s penultimate verse at the threshold of a great change—“‘Either get ready for elimination, or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards,’” he tells the assembeld “gentlemen”—but we don’t actually get to see him cross it, much like the narrator of Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) doesn’t actually “overturn these tables” or “disconnect these cables.” And from the second-to-last to the last verse is a leap as deep and wide as Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. We leave behind all individual characters and instead deal only with ideas and notions, or with the phantoms that embody them: “Peace,” “Death” (and its pale ghost), “the King and the Queen of Swords.” The narrator swears that “Peace will come,” and at the conclusion of the litany of agony that is Changing of the Guards, it’s a beautiful and a meaningful promise. But a promise is all that remains. It will come means only that it hasn’t come yet.

And so the song fades out.

I love that in the 1999 remaster, which is my preferred version of Street-Legal, Dylan’s final words are followed by an entire instrumental verse, as if, having raised the matter of a time when “Peace will come” and “cruel Death surrender,” the narrator can’t help but dwell for a while on the painful beauty of that vision, and dwell on it in silence. Only the backing singers continue to mourn.

Around the time I was first delving into Street-Legal, I was reading Owen Glendower, John Cowper Powys’s epic novel of love, war, and loss. Something of its themes and images probably melded into Changing of the Guards, which in its sweep, sorrow, and scope is so like it. That may be the reason I hear the song as a coherent (or coherently fractured) lament for the way that, in all the course of human history, violence ruptures love. Certainly most of the language and the images are on the archaic, if not fantastic, side: there are messengers and fountains, banners and veils, priests and witches, kings and queens. And in this land of ancient or timeless scenes, one episode after another suggests tragedy. What the images don’t conjure directly, we understand when we hear the profoundly sad chord progression, and we hear it also in the backing vocals, which often sound like weeping, and in Dylan’s inflamed delivery.

The Street-Legal band is an incredibly able and well-matched bunch of players, and they waste no time demonstrating it. I remember the disbelief I felt on my first listen to Changing of the Guards, the evening I first heard Street-Legal. I thought, “Dylan made a song that sounds like this?!” Of course I loved the man’s work by then, having listened my way through the 1960s and most of the 1970s, but nothing that came earlier led me to imagine Street-Legal: not Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, not New Morning or Planet Waves, not even Blood on the Tracks or Desire. This vast and bloody sound was something new, and the jagged weight of the song seemed to me a revelation.

Then there is the procession of images, which would be striking set to a far lesser melody or arrangement, but which to the tune of Changing of the Guards, and in the hands of the Street-Legal band, is, for this listener, penetrating like almost no other set of words in Dylan’s catalogue. I can’t think of a Dylan line that’s more crystalline than “She’s smelling sweet as the meadow where she was born, on Midsummer’s Eve, near the tower.”

I’ll limit myself to comments on nine lyrical details:

1. Falling leaves again. Mississippi, The Wicked Messenger, Cat’s in the Well, and Changing of the Guards—I’m an easy target for Dylan songs that mention falling leaves, just like I can’t resist a Chadwick Stokes song that has anything to do with mountains (Mountain, Sugarbeet Wine, Black Welsh Mountain, Sand from San Francisco).

2. I love the aching contrast of “Merchants and thieves hungry for power, my last deal gone down” with the lines immediately afterward, “She’s smelling sweet…”

3. Is the “cold-blooded moon” the same moon that “sees you” in Wiggle Wiggle? It wouldn’t be amiss.

4. The “dog soldiers” call to mind the Dogs of War in the great Pink Floyd song, recently rescued from ’80s studio mire in the remixed and partially rerecorded A Momentary Lapse of Reason (The Dogs of War is a much later composition, but by the time I first heard Street-Legal, I’d been living with Momentary Lapse for many years), while the “palace of mirrors” (where the dog soldiers are reflected) reminds me of the Ice Palace in the great Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas’s novel of the same name.

5. “The captain is down, but still believing that his love will be repaid”—a lovely image of longing and faith. But that belief is precisely (and poignantly) what proves impossible for the narrator(s) of Street-Legal songs ahead. The only payment for the experience of love, from New Pony on down to Where Are You Tonight?, is in the currency of exhaustion and pain.

6. I treasure the fourth verse (“They shaved her head”). I don’t know what exactly is happening to the woman in question, but whatever it is—violence? a marriage? the initiation of a celibate priestess?—seems to put her beyond the dismayed narrator’s reach.

7. The narrator’s half-appalled, half-resigned sorrow at the end of the fifth verse is amazing: “Renegade priests and treacherous young witches were handing out the flowers that I’d given to you.”

8. As sung, “mountain laurel and rolling rocks” is my single favorite phrase in any Dylan song.

9. The speaker in the eighth verse is a badass.