Bob Dylan Song #43: Motorpsycho Nitemare

What's that they used to say about farmer's daughters? Well, I mean, besides this. I've heard my share of those awful jokes, and while I listened to "Motorpsycho Nitemare", I had every single one of them running through my head; I wonder if Bob chuckled as he wrote the lyrics to this song, thinking about all the crappy farmer's daughter jokes that were old back then. It's hard to believe the song was written at all, honestly, but that's part of the charm, I guess.

This is a stream of consciousness song that doesn't really sound like stream of consciousness; aside from the really wacky stuff like having a Reader's Digest hurled at one's head, Bob could very well have been relating a tale from his sojourn across America earlier that year. Then again, he might've just read On The Road or some other such novel/memoir/whatever about life on the road and wanted to pen his own goofy version of "one night at a strange farm". You never can tell with Bob, can you? At the very least, we got one of his best song titles, and Bob got to do a test run for "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" the next year; the song manages to use both the same (very basic) chord structure, verse construction, and oddball top of the head lyricism. Oh yeah, and there's the matter of that electric business.

What I kind of like about the song is something I usually don't care for: there's a time-capsule feeling around this song, and I'm not just talking about the references to Psycho and La Dolce Vita. I seriously doubt that "farmer's daughters" stories happen anymore; for one, the number of roads that don't have some form of motel or inn or something alongside it is dwindling every year, and our ever-widening societal net means that even rural teenage girls will probably have heard of iPods and the Jonas Brothers and DirecTV and that sort of thing. You're not really going to get guys sleeping in barns and confronted by somebody that looks like the McPoyle sister anymore, let alone Anita Ekberg. I will say that I have lived in the Midwest, and you do see your share of corn-fed gals who might or might not have spent time on a farm. But that's another story.

Not too long ago I undertook a drive from Ann Arbor, MI to Las Vegas. The drive stretched over 2 days and roughly 24 hours on the road, give or take time spent at gas stations and eating really, really unhealthily. I saw some really beautiful stretches of land (Utah, in particular, is a natural marvel) and some boring as hell stretches of land (Nebraska was so flat and dull I actually felt like Charles Starkweather for a few hours). What I didn't see too much of, however, were just isolated farms; I saw a couple of farms, to be sure, but what I saw a lot of were gas stations, McDonald's, rest stops, and lots and lots of open land. Driving through the badlands of Colorado, you can see the sky stretched out before you like a panorama, an endless sea of blue and white that never seems to end. It's enough to make me wish I'd had a camera. Alas.

The point, though, is that the modern-day road trip experience is miles and miles away from what it was like 40 years ago, both for better and for worse. It's certainly better in that having your car break down isn't a life or death experience, and that I can plug in my iPod into my car stereo and have the hours just fly by, and I can stop at a Comfort Inn if I'm tired instead of having to find some stranger to put me up for the night. But it's worse in that so much of the romanticism is gone; all the 7-11s and Arby's tend to take away from the experience of seeing the country, you can actually see areas where the natural beauty of the land has been raped by terrible farming techniques and yet another store with novelty items like clams with googly eyes pasted on them, and the thrill of being out there in the great wide open has been lessened by the urban sprawl reaching out and snatching up more pieces of the country.

Listening to "Motorpsycho Nitemare" is enlightening, not just because Dylan's view-askew writing style is at its most playful here, but because experiences like the one Dylan's parodying were much more common a long time ago than today. Maybe it's just my sense of nostalgia speaking, but I would like to experience an America far more open than it is today, one where every stretch of road was only a line traced through green fields and open forests, where roadside diners were actual events instead of places to grab a burger and eat while driving (not that I ever did that - that is poor driving etiquette!). I will say, though, that the idea of sleeping in a barn does not particularly appeal to me. Well, unless I knew that the farmer who owned that barn had a daughter that looked like Anita Ekberg.