Bob Dylan Song #62: From A Buick 6

I've had times on this blog where I've questioned some of Dylan's song choices on his albums, where it seems like he placed songs of inferior quality on his albums while casting aside more worthy efforts for reasons only known to himself. Occasionally I will catch some grief for it, because I've missed some sort of significance to the folk/blues traditions Dylan so steeped himself in, or because the song in question has more fans than I could have realized. Ultimately, though, those sorts of debates end up being meaningless, because we're basically arguing over history without any chance of changing it. And, as any of us are entirely aware, Dylan's catalog is essentially a history of his whims, of his instinct as a musician either burning red-hot or waxing ice-cold (i.e. most of the 80s), and of what he felt he could get away with at the time. That knowledge also renders arguments about his song selections moot - if Dylan had wanted "Farewell, Angelina" on one of his albums, he'd have put it on one of his albums, but he didn't, so there.

And then there are the times where seemingly inexplicable song choices make more sense when you know a little bit more about them. Case in point - "From A Buick 6", generally considered the weakest song on Highway 61 Revisited (though, I imagine, more by virtue of degree than anything else), fine song though it may be. One might suggest that "Positively 4th Street" or "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" may have enhanced the album's greatness more if they'd been in cluded, although that's hard to say. But it isn't like "From A Buick 6" takes away from that greatness; the song has its own high-octane appeal. And we all know how Dylan likes to play the bluesman - this is his way of indulging himself, letting loose with a churning three-chord attack, and needing a steam shovel to keep away the dead.

The history of modern blues is, for the most part, a history of newer bluesmen robbing older bluesmen blind, and Dylan has not been immune to the occasional pilfering from his heroes. This song bears the structure of an older song, Sleepy John Estes' "Milk Cow Blues" (not to be confused with another "Milk Cow Blues" - I almost laughed just typing that), although the stinging rock treatment is more or less Dylan's. One thing going for the song is the crack album band, many of whom have blues experience (including Michael Bloomfield, of course), and who contribute to a genuinely exciting backing track. The other is Dylan's infectious enthusiasm; you can tell he's having a grand old time tearing into lines about junkyard angels and sneering "she walks like Bo Diddley and she don't need no crutch". The lyrics aren't particularly anything special - when you get to the "four-ten all loaded with lead", it's almost like Dylan was playing Bluesman Mad-Libs - but Dylan's joy in singing them make them that much better.

It should also be noted that this song has a very interesting place in Dylan's canon - as part of the setlist of Dylan's very first electric shows in 1965, the tentative test-run for the 1966 spectacular. Again, one might wonder why this song got the preferential treatment in those early shows, especially when "Subterranean Homesick Blues", a song that everybody knew at that point, was left on the sidelines for over 20 years. An easy explanation is that Dylan's backing band, which was hastily assembled and not particularly well-rehearsed, would quickly take to the simple blues arrangement, needing only perfunctory rehearsal to nail down the song's ins and outs. After all, once the band picked up momentum, "From A Buick 6" dropped right off the setlist (replaced with "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" - why not go back in the archives and read my thoughts on that song again?), never to be seen again. But I like to think that Dylan, already nervous about his electric performances and the barrage of hostility he received at virtually every tour stop, wanted something familiar to fall back on while he was ironing out the kinks and getting his sea legs on stage. And "From A Buick 6", as classic a blues arrangement as there is, fit the bill quite nicely.

I've made mention any number of times about Dylan's lack of perfection on this site, how in many ways he was just a man with the same emotions as any of us. And even though he was pushing the envelope in any number of ways, reinventing what could and could be done in terms of "rock music", and challenging the notion that popular music couldn't have brains or ingenuity behind it, he still needed comfort in the middle of the hurricane, lest he completely lose his footing and go spinning into the void. A song like "From A Buick 6" was that comfort, and he utilized it both on his first all-electric album and on his first major electric shows. There's something kind of sweet about that, I think.