Bob Dylan Song #52: Outlaw Blues

After having four albums where Dylan demonstrated that he could write a mean little blues song for his acoustic guitar (or, at the least, appropriate blues tropes in an acceptably pleasing fashion), it's kind of neat to finally have a blues song with a full band, filtered through Dylan's kaleidoscopic recording and songwriting style. And it's definitely a fun song, full of wailing harmonica, pounding piano licks, and chugging guitars - you get the feeling that Dylan must have recorded this song with a huge shit-eating grin on his face, knowing that he'd finally get a chance to cut loose in a way he never could when it was him alone in a studio playing "Bob Dylan's Blues" or something like that. As much as Dylan had his truly serious reasons for going electric, doesn't it also seem like one of the reasons he did was simply to be in a recording studio with a bunch of crack musicians, cranking out a song like this one? If the "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" franchises have taught us anything, it's that making music on your own can be a lot of fun, but not nearly as fun as making music with other people. And Dylan, who'd made a few band recordings but was mostly a solo artist, must have had a blast rediscovering that fun for himself.

Now, with no offense meant to this song or those that feel that every song has some meaning, damn it!, I'm going to suggest that outside of thinking about how much fun the communal music-recording experience is, this song may not be the most substantive Dylan's ever written (unless you want to jump through some real hoops, as I'll point out below). So, with that in mind, I'll pluck out three lines from the song and try to put together some thoughts about them. Here goes:

1. "Well, I might look like Robert Ford/But I feel just like a Jesse James"

From Wikipedia: "The song describes how Dylan wishes to leave behind the pieties of political folk and explore a bohemian, "outlaw" lifestyle. Straining at his identity as a protest singer, Dylan knows he "might look like Robert Ford" (the outlaw who shot and killed Jesse James), but he feels 'just like a Jesse James.'"

Hmm. Here's what I see: Bob telling us how crappy it is to fall into a lagoon when it's cold outside, how he doesn't want to hang a picture frame (along with the quoted line above), his desire to move to Australia (a haven for criminals in its formulative days, yes), how he's got sunglasses and a black tooth, and that he's got a woman in Jackson (a nod to the Johnny Cash song?). I mean, if you really want to tie everything together, I guess you can get from A to B - hanging a picture frame equals being a protest singer, sunglasses/black tooth = outlaw lifestyle, and falling into a cold muddy lagoon is, I dunno, being into a relationship with Joan Baez, who knows. The one thing that really gives that theory credence is the Robert Ford line, because you could easily suggest that Dylan in 1965 was a man who may have looked like he was on the side of the law (at this point he wasn't quite the strung-out thin wild mercury musician he would be around Blonde on Blonde), but felt like an outlaw rock singer. Then again, to live outside the law, yadda yadda yadda. Maybe he had this song in mind when he wrote "Absolutely Sweet Marie", tying together two songs with a metaphor and concept that everybody wants to see in his songs. And if you think he did, I've got a bridge in New York I'd like to sell you.

2. "Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'/I just might tell you the truth"

Now this is something that you can hear some truth in. What I've often wondered, but never really knew how to properly express, was just how much pressure Bob felt in his folk music days to toe the company line, to be a good soldier, and to not have doubts about what exactly the protest movement was supposed to mean both to music and to America in general. I'm not saying that the folk movement was controlled by shady guys or that they were doing something wrong or anything like that - I'm just saying that in any sort of movement that wants to affect change and topple existing orders, you just may have to swallow a little bit of shit along the way. And Dylan, undoubtedly, had to swallow a little bit of shit, especially as the Great White Hope of the folk movement of the 1960s. He never directly said what it is that he had to do as that Great White Hope, or what really cemented his change in direction, but you hear lines like this and you have to wonder.

3. "She's a brown-skin woman/But I love her just the same"

Dylan gives a little wink to the civil rights movement (and, one could surmise, the roots of blues music) in one seemingly throwaway line. And on that note, that seems like a good way to wrap things up. Today was a big day today. I was wrong on this blog, and I couldn't be happier.