This write-up is dedicated to my friend Charlie Messing, the Unholy Modal Rounder, who played alongside Link Wray (and Desire’s Rob Stoner and Howie Wyeth) in the 1977 sessions for Robert Gordon with Link Wray.
Sign Language, surely the saddest song ever written about eating a sandwich, is also Eric Clapton’s favorite song on No Reason to Cry, which I think is a wonderful album from start to finish. The record opens with Richard Manuel and Rick Danko’s Beautiful Thing, as grand a composition as Manuel ever put his name to, and ends with Black Summer Rain, a Clapton composition that’s no worse; inbetween, there’s a plenitude of excellence.
The band requires a mere two minutes and fifty-seven seconds to break through the defenses of your heart. They don’t knock, they kick down the door... the door to the bakery. Where the narrator sits “surrounded by fakery.” Daring rhymes like bakery/fakery and language/sandwich are exactly the kind I want to hear in a song so downcast, so heartbroken, so hopeless.
I didn’t mention Sign Language in the Abandoned Love write-up (alongside The Present Tense, How to Change a City, 70 Excuses, and Abandoned Love itself) because I didn’t want to spoil anything, but it belongs in my list of outrageously, standard-settingly well-written break-up songs, the kind that justify the whole genre. It’s probably the closest glimpse we have to the tooth-gnashing album that Dylan wrote but didn’t record in 1977, the real divorce album, the one that certain friends of his and “some people around town” got to hear in private sessions, the way Stephen Stills heard Blood on the Tracks (while Graham Nash and David Crosby, who hadn’t been invited to listen, kept their ears pressed enviously to the door) or Jerry Wexler heard Street-Legal.
Sign Language is certainly more fragmented than Abandoned Love, which though buffeted by hard and demanding emotions, wavers from pole to pole in coherent fashion. Sign Language is vague, tense, and frustrated. It’s absolutely worn-down, in fact. If New Pony was “end of the line blues,” as TheFatChocobo put it on last.fm, Sign Language is end of the line folk, teetering with New Pony on the same knife’s edge.
Clapton remembers Dylan telling him that Sign Language was written in one sitting, “without any knowledge of what it was about.” This happens sometimes, to some songwriters more than others. I, like Leonard Cohen and Thom Yorke (to insert myself shamelessly in exalted company), tend to labor over songs for years, sculpting the original inspiration until it assumes a shape I’m satisfied with. But now and then a whole living song will beckon to me, all wet with the dew of creation, and after five or ten minutes of attention it’s 97% perfect. The sluice gate of the spirit opens and the song slips out. Sometimes I can recognize what troubled corner of my soul the song was born in; other times I don’t figure it out until months or years later. So I believe what Dylan told Clapton.
But it seems that by the time Dylan came to sing the song at the No Reason to Cry recording sessions (which Clinton Heylin estimates happened about eight months after the song was written; he calls Sign Language a “remnant from that lost continuum to Desire’s bloody predecessor,” whereas I imagine it to be the first, prophetic spark of the reportedly brutal 1977 songs—same difference), he understood the heart of the song just fine. He was living in a tent in the garden (“among the roses”) of the Shangri-La Recording Studio where Clapton was getting No Reason to Cry together (“Every now and then he would appear and have a drink,” recalls Clapton, “and then disappear just as quickly”). Hard Rain was two months away. And the day came to sing Sign Language…
There are voices that Dylan wore once and then never wore again, like those in the studio version of One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below) or the circulating studio outtake of Heart of Mine. The Sign Language voice is another such. It sounds a little like the wandering and (often enticingly) disconnected voice I’ve heard in 1990 and 1991 live performances, but with some of the Hard Rain bite, and with both the tightness (from the Rolling Thunder Revue side) and the looseness (linked to alcohol use?) wrapped in a unique, plaintive drawl. The “Link Wray” verse, which Dylan sings alone, is extraordinary. But every word out of Dylan’s mouth on this song sounds amazing, and all the more amazing because Clapton is there (or, in the “Link Wray” verse, suddenly and pointedly absent) to complement it. Clapton is, in fact, the best singer I’ve ever heard to lay his voice alongside Dylan’s. Dylan sounds rough and sad beyond belief; Clapton sounds smooth and sad beyond belief; Clapton caresses the same lyrics that Dylan is busy flinging at “you” like hand-axes—and so, what a blend! The end of the “Link Wray” verse, when Clapton rejoins Dylan for “It didn’t do me no good,” is breathtaking.
And what lyrics! I read them as being about the utter breakdown of communication between lovers in the process of estrangement. The way the situation is painted, I imagine the narrator sitting (“in a small café”) at a table before the long clear glass window that looks out onto the street. His lover (or once-lover) appears on the other side. They make some impatient, obscene gestures back and forth at each other, and the lover/once-lover departs. But the narrator takes the mundane situation to a place where the remarks he makes are simultaneously, or alternately, about the quotidian circumstances (painted very precisely: “I’m eating a sandwich in a small café at a quarter to three … Link Wray was playing on the jukebox I was paying”) and the larger situation: the horror of a love that’s collapsing in acrimony. Dylan sings “Does she know I still care?” as if the narrator really did still care. But the lyrics indicate that neither of them is up to breaking through the thick glass that separates them and mutes their pleas; just as the narrator can’t understand “[her] sign language,” she can’t hear him say (or think) “Does she know I still care?” It’s too late, and he’s too tired. They both are.
Having written this much, it occurred to me that the song is in fact, most likely, a series of vignettes: there’s a scene in a café and then there’s a separate scene in a bakery—though the mood is consistent and though the same problems follow the narrator wherever he goes, the setting does shift. That’s probably obvious to any of you reading this this, but I’ve lived in China for seven years, where a café is almost always also a bakery, and a bakery is almost always also a café.
Regarding the attention the narrator devotes to sandwiches and bakeries, I think of a line in How Little We Need to Be Happy, a song off of David Sylvian’s raw, groundbreaking album Blemish: “Everything goes on, but not as before.” The blogger Vista comments, “Some have said they only ‘got’ Blemish because it touched a nerve, recalling the raw pain of a relationship breakdown in their own lives ... There is something [in How Little We Need to Be Happy] that brings to mind those gut-wrenching emotions and experiences; not least the peculiarity” (a peculiarity, I would add, that accompanies the death of a loved one as well as the end of a relationship) “that some aspects of life carry on regardless, whilst simultaneously the foundations of normality are crumbling around you.”
I think Sign Language’s verses are brilliant. The sentences, not especially long to be begin with, are broken into tiny segments when sung, as if it were taking all the narrator’s energy just to get a few words out—just to take a single step… “You speak to me…” Long pause. “…in sign language…” Long pause. “…as I’m eating a sandwich…” Long pause. “…at a small café…” Long pause. “…at a quarter to three.” And a very long pause before the next verse.
What do all these pauses add up to? “You speak to me in sign language as I’m eating a sandwich in a small café at a quarter to three.” These are not words of shatteringly illuminating insight. They are an exhausted observation of a sliver of the narrator’s dreary daily routine, so much effort spent to say so little; so little, and yet so much—in the state the narrator is in, it’s an achievement to sputter out even the little he’s just said. And with the beautiful, melodic arrangement (that organ and that slide guitar!), Clapton and Dylan approximate the dignity that the narrator’s efforts, such as they are, embody.
I mentioned the organ and the slide guitar, but I think many listeners would agree that the most impressive instrument in Sign Language (alongside the two sets of vocals) is Robbie Robertson’s lead guitar. I haven’t heard another song on which his guitar playing sounds as deliciously out-there: not Going, Going, Gone, not the live As I Went Out One Morning, not Rags & Bones. Pinched harmonics is the technical term for what makes certain notes so sublime. Speaking more figuratively, I would call them eruptions of the soul.
Sign Language puts me in mind of a few songs by Neil Young. None are an exact match (how could they be, for a feast like this? And there are things the Neil songs accomplish that Sign Language doesn’t, which is as it should be), but there are interesting commonalities. Thematically, I think of Motion Pictures and Ambulance Blues, the two songs that close On the Beach. Neil’s narrator is much farther along the road of separation than Dylan’s, in that he has gained the strength and presence of mind to realize that “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” whereas Dylan’s is still far, far from the place about which he can say “If I get there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.” In Sign Language, however, as in those two Neil songs, there is a collapse deep, deep into the catacombs of the harrowed, isolated self.
The other two songs I think of are on the unsung gem Long May You Run, and feature Neil Young leading Stephen Stills’s band of slick Los Angeles professionals through songs as sad, raw, and ditchy as Midnight on the Bay, Let It Shine, and Fontainebleau. Clapton’s team on No Reason to Cry is not as unlikely an outfit for a pain-spurting Dylan song as Stephen Stills’s would have been (I mean, Robbie Robertson is right there) but they’re not exactly the Rolling Thunder Revue storming through Seven Days, either. As in the Stills-Young Band songs, the contrast between the tune and how the players handle it becomes part of the appeal.
One final note. I was wondering, why is it Link Wray on the jukebox and not someone else? I don’t know Link’s songs well enough to guess what particular tune Dylan might have in mind. But this quote from Cramps co-leader Poison Ivy seems apposite: “[Link Wray] had the most apocalyptic, monumental sound I ever heard—real emotional and so simple and so violent. That stands for rock n’ roll, which is supposed to be violent and dangerous and have this dangerous sound… No matter how long I’ve been doing this, I hear something new when I listen to him. Maybe because I’m not the same person, maybe I know more from playing longer. He’s just so… it’s like guitar at the end of the world. So austere. And so much drama. You know, he makes the most out of the least for sure.”
And Sign Language, like Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), does describe, if not the ending of the world, the ending of a world.
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