Bob Dylan Song #104: As I Went Out One Morning

"As I Went Out One Morning" is one of those songs that almost has to be fairly dripping with meaning; we've had plenty of those so far on this little project I've undertaken, but this is surely one of the songs most budding Dylan fanatics will take a fine-tooth comb over when they first hear it. For one thing, it's a tremendously dramatic song - built around a D minor chord and played with insistent, almost menacing rhythm, there's something kind of cinematic about the album version. The studio band deserves a great deal of credit for building that drama, certainly, as essentially an MTV Unplugged crew managed to summon up a great deal of emotion with very little (dig that expressive bassline - it bounces with a solemn energy, like if Morse Code could be set to music). And then you have Dylan's sublime contributions - not just the music and lyrics, but his fantastic vocal performance (the second verse, in particular, is one of my favorite vocal moments of his entire canon) and that ringing harmonica. Eyolf Ostrem, whose truly amazing Dylanchords website has been invaluable to me even before I started this blog, notes that the harmonica playing here is tremendously expressive, possibly thanks to the '66 World Tour, and it's hard to disagree. So, from a purely musical standpoint, "As I Went Out One Morning" has a great deal to offer.

But, of course, it's the lyrics to the song that draws all the attention, and the boatloads of analysis that comes along with that sort of attention. AJ Weberman, a man for whom the word "asshole" doesn't quite seem strong enough, made the all-too obvious parallel between the Tom Paine reference and the infamous NECLC dinner in 1963 where a rather loaded Dylan said he saw a little of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald. Greil Marcus, in turn, wrote a somewhat tortured analysis about how the song actually is about American history or something like that. Marcus, at least, has the good sense to suggest that "it'd be astonishing if what I've just described was on Dylan's mind when he wrote the song" (gee, you think?), noting that Dylan's words have the power to make us think in that sort of way, where we can draw metaphors from the world we live in just as surely as we can draw them from the lyrics to Dylan's songs. Weberman, on the other hand, has figured out what the song means to him, and that is that. Which method of looking at songs is correct, I'll leave for the reader to figure out on their own.

I've always thought that Weberman's way of looking at the song was off from the very beginning - if somebody can untangle the girl in chains and all that flying South business from the dinner where Bob made an ass of himself, feel free to write about it in the comment section, but I don't particularly feel it's worth the effort to try. And yet there's something about the song that makes you wonder what Bob was getting at (if, indeed, he was getting at something), and as I listen to the song again I keep wondering about why this girl is in chains, and why the narrator would offer his hand and then pushes her away, and so on and so forth. Perhaps what the song could be about is the dark side of seduction - not just from women, but from anything that promises far more than it could ever deliver and ends up leaving you worse off than when you started, like heroin, or compulsive gambling. Or maybe, just maybe...fame. This is, after all, the withdrawn Dylan we're talking about, the one that sought to remove himself from the pressures of being a superstar as much as he could, and the siren song and accompanying insanity of said stardom had to have been fresh on his mind.

That, to me, could very easily explain the "girl in chains bit" - when it comes to vices, they're always held back, sometimes by society, sometimes by our own dint, just waiting to be let loose by some poor unsuspecting person. What we tend to forget about such things as cocaine is that very rarely does anybody tell you "hey, sniff this or I'll put a bullet in your temple" or "try this cigarette or your dog gets it". It is always a conscious decision to tie that vein and shoot that needle, or to make that trip to Atlantic City just one more time, or to tip your elbow again because surely this is the last beer you'll be needing for the night. And I'm not climbing on some bully pulpit here; the reason such things are so seductive is because they can make you happy, at least for a little while, and a lot of people don't even get that much in their lives. But all the same, you take that step down the road to ruin and it's hard to move in another direction...that is, unless you utilize a little common sense. Or should I say...Common Sense? Eh? Eh?

Ah, and here I go, falling prey to the siren song of digging into Dylan's lyrics to find something that may or may not be there. I can see why people will dedicate portions of their lives and kill tree after tree to do it - it can be a lot of fun, if you really do think you're on to something. And there we see Greil Marcus's words validated - not the American history lesson business, but Dylan's words as gateway to your imagination, so to speak. If you can think this way about a song like "As I Went Out One Morning", you can put that same cerebral cortex power to looking at your favorite movies, or even the way you approach the world and the people inhabiting this planet of ours. That's pretty special, in my opinion. We often take a very myopic view of the world, and if it takes a pretty darn good song off a pretty darn good album to yank those blinders off our heads, so be it.

BONUS! At the risk of losing readers of my blog to a more well-written and erudite piece of work, I'm linking you here to a tremendous blog that focuses on Dylan's music and exceptional analyses therein, and more specifically a post he wrote about "As I Went Out One Morning" that goes on a way different tangent from mine. Read it here.

BONUS #2! For those that haven't heard it before, I'm embedding below the one and only live performance of "As I Went Out One Morning", played on January 10th, 1974 at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. It's a fine performance, one that captures the drama of the original while enfolding it in the aesthetic of Tour '74, and makes me wonder why this song was never played again in any iteration of Bob's touring band. Enjoy!