Bob Dylan Song #147: Time Passes Slowly

Of all the left-field choices that ended up on Biograph (still the gold standard of albums that make an attempt to do a career retrospective of the man; the fact that it hasn't been bettered 20 years later is kinda sad, if you ask me), "Time Passes Slowly" might take the crown. And that's nothing to say about the quality of the song; it's just that valuable real estate on this box set is being held by a two and a half minute pop (well, pop-ish) number on one of Dylan's lesser-known albums. Then again, one could easily argue that this is what makes Biograph so damn great - there's any number of more well-known nuggets that could've made it on the album, and yet we get a fine piece of work from, yes, one of Dylan's lesser-known albums, sitting proudly in between "I Believe in You" (one of Dylan's best Christian-era numbers) and "I Shall Be Released" (which needs no explanation). And where Biograph is arguably at its best is when it showcases stuff we might never have heard, like "I'll Keep it With Mine" or something from the New York sessions for Blood on the Tracks, as well as that lesser-known stuff. We can hear "Like A Rolling Stone" any old time - why not shine a spotlight on something different?

And "Time Passes Slowly" is certainly something different. A long while back, writing about "Queen Jane Approximately", I wrote a little bit about Bob Dylan's piano work on Highway 61 Revisited. Well, his piano playing on that album sounds primitive compared to the glorious work Bob unleashed on this album, and most particularly on this song. Dylanchords proprietor Eyolf Ostrem, in his tablature for this song, mentions a "short, glorious piano break" right after the second verse, and he's absolutely right on the money. Seemingly out of nowhere, acting as a counterpoint to the skronky 70s-style guitar solos that have been splashed all over this song, Dylan plays an understated, yet absolutely marvelous few bars that don't so much show off Dylan's talents as let us know that he does, indeed, HAVE talents. It's really something you should at least hear once - and hey, maybe that answered the question I posed above, as to how this made it onto that supposedly definitive retrospective. Bob isn't above showing off a little, is he?

While I'm thinking about showing off, it's pretty interesting to listen to the song and see what kind of subject matter was on Bob's mind at this time. I've written a lot about the 1960s in this blog series (perhaps far more than I should have), but one thing that might not have been mentioned here is just how much actually happened within those ten years. Now, obviously, a lot of stuff happens in EVERY decade, but it's astonishing to imagine that three game-changing Presidential elections, a gut-wrenching string of assassinations, the emergence of a potent counter-culture, a rift opening between Nixon's "silent majority" and, well, everybody else, and a general shift in the way that people viewed the world all happened in those years. If ever a band could encapsulate the era they came from, it was The Beatles, who essentially packed their entire recording career into seven years, changing not just the record industry, but the entire entertainment industry, in their wake. It seemed like you couldn't open the paper without reading about at least one thing that unalterably changed the world.

And what's Bob singing about in "Time Passes Slowly"? Lazy days in the mountains, searching for a honey to call his own, and how our lives, so finite in the big picture, tend to move so slowly along from day to day (have you ever had an hour, say, at the airport, with nothing to do? It can be goddamn interminable, can't it?). You could suggest that Bob was out of touch in those days, living up in Woodstock and baking bread with his kids or whatever; that couldn't possibly be true, but whatever. The point is that he seems to be reveling in that lifestyle he'd created for himself, separated from a world changing so fast few people could properly keep up, content to gaze at the stars, "lost in a dream", "no reason to go anywhere" (these are quotes from the song, of course), quietly sitting in a self-created bubble. There are probably a few of us for whom that sounds pretty nice. And it certainly seemed pretty nice for Bob in those days - which is why he chose to write about it, I assume.

I suppose you could also take the tack that Bob might be taking a more wry take on this sort of thing (as has been suggested about the album's title track). After all, some of the lyrics could be considered a droll parody ("we sat in the kitchen while her mama was cookin'"? Really?), and Bob's never been above a wink to his audience, or even just to himself. But I like to think that he was straight-faced here (as, also, in the title track), and that he was content with where he was in life. We know that the reverie wouldn't last and Bob would find himself stepping back in the real world, so it's pretty neat to hear him lost in that bubble, waiting for what the next day would bring in his cozy secluded home.