Bob Dylan Song #57: It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but one thing I enjoy having in my life are little rituals, things I do as a matter of course throughout the day, whether it's how I do my exercising, how I conduct myself at a gaming table, or just the way that I eat breakfast. There's something comforting about a ritual, even though it's a strictly illogical comfort; there's no particular reason for anyone to do anything of that sort. We all know about sports fans that will wear the same clothes during a playoff run, sit in the same chairs, eat the same food, even cross their legs or arms the exact same way. And, if you asked those people, they would probably admit that, deep down, they know that all that rigamarole does nothing to help their team win. But it makes them feel better, helps them cope with something that is beyond their control by doing things that are in their control, and that's the really important part. That's how those rituals work, when you get down to it; doing the things you know you can do help you deal with things you may not be able to do. At least, that's what I tell myself.

In my first year of college, I attended a class on European history from 1800-1945 or thereabouts. As it turns out, we didn't quite get to 1945, as the class pacing was a bit too leisurely and the course ended somewhere around Triumph of the Will; but that's neither here nor there. As it happens, this semester coincided with my Dylan fandom slowly burgeoning into Dylan obsession, and from that came a little ritual that (at least, I think) helped me get into the proper mindset for learning about this weighty subject. Before every lecture I attended, I'd pop Bringing It All Back Home into my Discman (ah, the B.I. - Before iPod - era), cue up "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)", and listen the whole way through before entering the lecture hall. If I got there early enough, I'd listen twice. And this ritual of mine helped steer me to a B+ for the class (well, that and my already ingrained interest in history), one of the few courses where I actually reached those glorious heights. One wonders how many other classes I could have done as well in if I'd simply chosen a Dylan song to listen to before those; alas, that question will never have an answer.


Now, I'm sure you all have the same question (other than "you're a little strange, aren't you?") - "why that Dylan song?" And, believe it or not, I have an answer for you. Every time I hear "It's Alright, Ma", I feel something weighty, something important, coming out of my speakers, a song that could actually match the massive importance we place upon our past and the events that have led us to where we are today. I'm drifting into very deep waters of pretentiousness here, but I think I have at least the ghost of a point; who amongst us hasn't heard this song and marveled at just how incredibly, mind-blowingly deep the song is, or at least feels like? How can you not hear lyrics like "he not busy being born is busy dying", or the one about the President (more on that in a second), or "while one who sings with his tongue on fire/gargles in the rat race choir", without feeling that Dylan is singing about something that speaks to each and every one of us, touching on the machinations of our lives, what we deem to be important and what truly is important, and making sense of what so many others have tried to make sense of but failed? Isn't history, which shapes our lives even though it's already happened, something like that? How do we learn from the past unless we're taught about it? And how do we make sense of ourselves without somebody lending a hand to all of us?


We all remember that famous moment on Before the Flood when Dylan, singing "It's Alright, Ma" as the closer of his acoustic sets, gets to the line about the President standing naked, and the audience explodes in applause. After all, this was in the thick of Watergate, as Richard Nixon's doomed Presidency slowly spiraled towards his undignified resignation, and every single person knew exactly what Dylan was talking about in that particular moment, with that particular line. But there are probably a few of you that haven't heard modern Bob concerts, and I will admit that it's been a while since I heard any 2000-era Dylan shows and my memory may be a bit foggy, but I still recall that around 2002 or 2003, especially as the Iraq war drew closer to and eventually became reality, Dylan would play "It's Alright, Ma", hit that line, and the crowd would inevitably explode into cheers and applause. Not only does that show you the power of Dylan's words stretching across generations, but it also shows you just how history works sometimes. The faces may change, but the feelings don't.


"It's Alright, Ma", as I hear it, is a song about feelings, and emotions - one man's reaction to the strangeness of the world enveloping him, with its hypocrisies and evils small and large, and his attempt to find a small candle of light in all that darkness. As brilliant as the line about the President is, it's always been the line before that's stuck with me more - "and goodness hides behind its gates". Whatever interpretation you give this song, including the notion that Dylan's telling his audience his new approach to songwriting or whatever, you cannot deny that the vision he's spinning is a dark one indeed. Everywhere you turn is something new and horrifying - advertisements that tell you lies, people that only want to drag you down to their depths, those that wish to force their morals down your throat even though there's no truth in them. And yet, somehow, there's light to be found - that "trembling, distant voice, unclear" of someone reaching out to you, a tacit reminder that no matter how alone and confused we may feel, there's somebody that feels the exact same way, and wants just as badly as you to find someone to share their feelings with. And Dylan, who I feel has always been a romantic at heart, allows us to have hope, reminds us that there's nothing and nobody that we belong to, and in the end can break his bonds and say "what else can you show me?", thumbing his nose at everything he holds in contempt. And if he can do that, you can do it too.


What makes this song so enduring, other than just how amazing his words are, is the message those words carry, summed up in that final verse and in the last line: "it's alright, Ma...it's life and life only". Dylan never denies that those evils exist in the world, nor does he say that we will ever be rid of them; that's not realistic, and we all know that. But, ultimately, because we know that doesn't mean that we have to be slave to anything, any evils, or any masters, and that we don't have to live our lives with our heads down and our eyes closed. We can, if we want to, push back and say "what else ya got?", and let the world know that we can take anything it dishes out. Dylan, in fifteen astounding verses, captured a feeling that people have had for eons, a feeling that has, yes, helped make history. He sang "it's alright, Ma, I can make it", and sometimes I am inclined to really, truly believe him. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #56: Gates of Eden

It occurs to me, writing a blog about Bob Dylan that is essentially read exclusively by Bob Dylan fans, that there are going to be more than a few moments in which I am preaching to the converted. Sure, we can quibble about what we think about certain songs and albums, their interpretations, which versions we like better, and whether or not Street Legal is a good album (my thoughts on the matter will have to wait - aren't I a tease?). But, when it comes down to it, we'll all agree that a) Bob Dylan was an artist without parallel and (possibly) without peer, b) certain albums of his are better than certain others, and c) certain songs of his are better than certain others, as well. I mean, I'm not going to go off half-cocked and say "Like A Rolling Stone" sucks or something, and all of you that read this know that. And you also will have certain expectations about my Dylan opinions as well, based on your own and those of other Dylan fans you know, and I will more than likely meet those expectations. This is not a bad thing; it's simply what it is.

With that in mind, it seems educational and, perhaps, even instructive to look at Bob Dylan through a different set of eyes - in this case, through the eyes of somebody that is not only not a fan of Bob Dylan, but in fact doesn't "get" Dylan and can't reconcile their opinion with anybody that actually does. We have to remember that as broad-based and worldwide as Dylan's appeal is, he still does not have the fanbase of the Beatles (then again, who does), or an Aerosmith, or perhaps even a Dave Matthews Band or Coldplay. And, when you think about it, that does make sense - Dylan's lyrics, first and foremost, don't have the same easily grasped aesthetic as, well, just about any other artist; how many musicians can you name that are as challenging lyrically as our man Bob is? And, on top of that, few artists in ANY medium have a catalog as challenging and daunting as Dylan's - maybe an Altman in film, or a Faulkner in literature, or a Goya in the art world, but you're talking about the absolute upper echelons of any artistic field. That tends to turn people off. And I'm not saying that just to pat us Dylan fans on the back; I'd love to jump into James Ellroy like so many others have, but I'm too damn scared to leap into a pool that deep and frightening. Dylan, I'm sure, strike many others the same way.


And in terms of putting people off Bob Dylan, when you think of a song that would do the job better than any, you could do worse than selecting "Gates of Eden". I mean, what would the uninitiated possibly think of this song? "The motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen", incredibly, is not the most oddball line in the song; the surrealist imagery that flowed so smoothly through "Mr. Tambourine Man" has been tweaked into something darker and crazier, and the phrases flow from Dylan's lips less like smooth waves than jagged spikes that dig into your mind and practically dare you to suss them out. There's seemingly no rhyme or reason to this song, the same way that the poetry of Ginsburg (sorry, I know it's an easy comparison) has seemingly no rhyme or reason to it. And, like, Ginsburg's best work, the imagery is more than enough to compensate - what does it matter if "Gates of Eden" has no plot or whatever to it, when you can chew on lines like "upon four-legged forest clouds/the cowboy angel rides"? But that's my feeling as a longtime Dylan fan - there are people that aren't fans of Ginsburg or, say, Ferlinghetti, people that find these types of lyrics either pretentious, unfathomable, or both, and people that will just plain not want to listen. And you cannot begrudge them that.

Occasionally, when I think about musicians or filmmakers that I like, I try to identify a potential "litmus test" for that artist, something that I could show to a neophyte to see if they would enjoy that artist as much as I do. This can usually be a dangerous prospect, because it is the rare great artist that can have their work summed up in a single item (compare this with, say, Nickelback, who were notorious for writing two hit singles that sounded exactly the same - which, I think, says as much about radio listeners that made them popular as the band themselves) and offering one song alone would do them a disservice. Still, it is the even rarer artist that doesn't have some sort of common thread running through their works, something that may not be tangible or identifiable but that makes you go "yes, this is (insert artist's name here)". For example, if I wanted to introduce New Order to somebody, I'd play them the Substance version of "Temptation", which is both a great dance song and a musically strong piece of work that shows just how talented all of the band members were. Or, if I wanted to introduce Monty Python to somebody, I'd show them Monty Python and the Holy Grail, probably the most accessible thing the Pythons have ever done, but still as offbeat and hilarious as the rest of their oeuvre. The point is that, if you don't like either "Temptation" or Holy Grail, New Order and Monty Python are probably not for you.

Dylan, of course, is harder, simply because there are so many different phases to his career; sure, all of his songs are recognizable as Dylan (if only for the voice, but even that changed drastically between 1962 and 1974, let alone 2008), but there are still a lot of stylistic changes that can throw you off when trying to find that one introductory song. With that in mind, if I wanted to show somebody a song that was representative of Dylan's most well-known phase, as well as an example of his majestic, dizzying talent, I would seriously be tempted to select "Gates of Eden". I mean, "Like A Rolling Stone" is the obvious choice, but even THAT song isn't wholly representative - "Like A Rolling Stone" towers over even his best work, the same way "Paranoid Android" obliterates anything else Radiohead's done or The Stand casts a shadow over Stephen King's collected works. But "Gates of Eden", with its staggering wordplay, nonsensical and thoroughly poetic lyrics, and lack of any unifying elements outside saying "gates of Eden" over and over, might be a truer litmus test - while the wordplay is surreal (thought not as surreal) in "Like A Rolling Stone", the band compensates by churning out a heady brew of rock that envelopes the song and makes you forget just how weird it is in certain points. There's no such fallback in "Gates of Eden" - those lyrics are out there, practically naked, forcing themselves to be heard. And if you can hear them and not run out of the room with your hands over your ears, I think that means you're part of the club.

What draws me to Dylan, in part at least, is that there are still portions of his catalog that are mystical to me; the aforementioned Street Legal, New Morning and its hodgepodge of styles as Dylan sought to recast himself after the "country period", and even Oh Mercy have eluded my understanding and ability to figure the man out. And I hope to never figure the man out, so that his work can always seem fresh to me, and that even when I've finished this project I can return to his songs and find something new constantly to keep giving me reasons to go back and give the whole damn catalog a hearing all over again. I envy those that can listen to a "Gates of Eden", feel that startling joy in their hearts and minds as they realize that yes, these lyrics do mean something to me, I want to hear more of this man, and then proceed to hear Blonde on Blonde and Desire for the very first time. You only get to do that so many times in your life. Savor them every chance you get. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #55: Mr. Tambourine Man

Out of the entire match I find the 13th game to be the most attractive. Possibly because, even today, when I play through it for the umpteenth time, I am still unable to understand the inner motives behind this or that plan, or individual move...Like a mysterious enigma, it still teases my imagination.

- David Bronstein, on the 1972 Fischer/Spassky match

(1)

I've given considerable writing space on this blog to mashups and how much I enjoy sample-driven music, so it should come as no surprise that one of my favorite songs of all time is "Frontier Psychiatrist", from Australian sample kings The Avalanches' masterpiece Since I Left You. For those of you that haven't heard it, the song is a freewheeling cavalcade of spoken-word samples, tied together by the barest theme of cowboy movies, and underpinned by a pounding, insistent hip-hop breakbeat, spaghetti Western horns, and ghostly harmony vocals. What really makes the song work for me is its' goofy sense of humor - a parrot's squawk gets chopped up, the vocal samples put a grin on my face, and the song takes a sudden sharp left turn into a Mexican cantina, with no warning or particular reason other than "hey, this sounds kinda cool". I've loved the song ever since I heard it, and it's a song I always find myself listening to when I'm taking my iPod out for a test drive every so often.

It is also, for the record, a song that absolutely, positively confounds me. I've often thought about what went into the creation of that song, how many drafts and first runs the group went through, and the process that led to the staggering 4 and a half minutes that made up the final product. Think about it - months, maybe years of digging through record crates to come up with the distinct samples to string together in the song; finding the instrumental samples that give the song its particular flair, from the first drum shots to the final Latin guitar flourish; carefully piecing the song together, testing out which sample should go where, if the "man with the golden eyeball" line is in a spot that makes sense; making sure that the sudden shift in tone doesn't completely wreck the song, but takes it in a brand new direction; and, finally, giving the record one final listen, simply reveling in just how everything perfectly meshes together. There's a lot of hard work that goes into making that kind of music (as though other kinds of music are a cakewalk, I know), and it's always amazing when that hard work is rewarded.

All the same, you can put in as much hard work as humanly possible, and it will all be for nothing unless you have a certain something, a creative spark, that allows you to create such astonishing music. And that, right there, is why I posted the quote above and why I talked about a song that probably very few of you have actually heard. The creative element is something that's always interested me, even when it's proven so very elusive in my own life. I've always wondered where that spark comes from, that ineffable quality that you can't see or touch but has still changed lives and altered our very being. And that quality has eluded humans for centuries, as it refuses to be harnessed or properly quantified, no matter how much brainpower and energy we can dedicate to trying to understand it. You look at the paintings of Picasso, or Jules et Jim, or listen to Sketches of Spain, and you can feel that creative spark all throughout, but you will never be able to properly express what it is that makes those works so fantastic, why they were created in that certain way - to put it simply, why they are. And I'd bet that, when you got right down to it, the creators couldn't tell you why they are, either.

I will readily admit that I've wasted hard drive space on unfinished works - short stories, longer novel-lengths, even the occasional (terrible) screenplay. The one time I managed to finish something, I had a little celebratory cigar that night, so happy was I to have finally completed something I cared enough about to see through to the end. But, for the most part, I've never been one to finish what I've started, no matter how gung-ho I am from the start - eventually my attention will be turned elsewhere, either by real life, by my ADD nature of hopping from one interest to the next with little warning, or by simple entropy, and I'll move on. As I've noted, this blog is part of the process of rectifying that; then again, we'll see how gung ho I am about continuing when I get to Self Portrait. But seriously, the creative process is something I've struggled with my whole life, and I've always envied those that have not only reined in that process, but have the tenacity to carry out their visions and make something that others will cherish and enjoy.

The remarkable thing about the quote above is that David Bronstein was a great chess player in his own right, a grandmaster who'd contested for the world title and was renowned for his imagination on the board and his ability to play moves that no mere mortal would ever dream of playing. He had seen just about everything you could see on the board, and it's hard to imagine chess ever truly surprising him. And yet, in that 13th Fischer/Spassky game (where a rook was fighting against five pawns), he saw something that he not only had never seen before, but continued to amaze him long after the game had been played. I love that - that even the best and brightest of us can still be surprised and baffled by something that they know inside out. And that might be the most remarkable element about the creative spark - that a rare individual can create something that not only baffles us regular plebes, but even the most brilliant of us as well. And even when we're baffled by the incomprehensible, we can appreciate how amazing the incomprehensible can be.

(2)

There's a nice irony in the fact that Bob Dylan's first album with mostly electric music is most distinguished by its acoustic songs. And with good reason - all four of the songs on the acoustic side are stone cold classics, and at least one of them (the song I'm posting about) is commonly cited as one of Dylan's very best works, if not just one of his most well-known. Quite frankly, even without the Byrds' chart-topping version (overrated, IMO, by the way), I would venture to say that "Mr. Tambourine Man" would have the same level of worldwide fame and renown that it does today, if only because of its extraordinary lyrics and its beautiful musical structure. Who hasn't been hooked by that legendary chorus, by the way the words seem to wind around Dylan's guitar like tendrils of smoke wafting through the air, and by phrases like "deep beneath the waves" and "vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme". There isn't much I can say about this brilliant song - I'd actually like to know how many of you don't love, or at least like, "Mr. Tambourine Man".

What is worth mentioning is that this is right about the moment where people started to actively wonder just how much Bob's drug use was bleeding into his music. I mean, there were certainly flashes of his new poetic, trippy writing style on Another Side, but I would suggest that on this album, and especially on this particular song, that writing style fully coalesced and was utilized in its most perfect form. Everything about "Mr. Tambourine Man" seems to just fit, with every line leading beautifully into the next one, almost like the words are arranging themselves without anyone's help into those majestic verses. Of course, words can't do that, so obviously somebody had to have managed to write all of those lines, arrange them in the way they were arranged, and commit the song to tape (not once, but twice, as a matter of fact). But, again, have you heard those words? Those lines don't read like English, or at least any English I've ever read before. So how can you explain how a human being, with a human mind, wrote those words?

So what must be the logical explanation? I don't think any of us buys that story about Bruce Langhorne and his gigantic Turkish tambourine (I like to think Bob and Bruce had a joint one night and dreamed up that stupid story, giggling the whole time). And it's really hard to imagine that somebody could write lyrics that wild and out there just by himself - after all, we all knew what kind of crazy shit Rimbaud was on when he penned his Dylan-influencing poems. So the obvious answer, then, is that Dylan, taking his first trip on LSD, wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man" on the influence of drugs. And I don't think anybody has ever really disputed that claim, or thinks anything different. I mean, go and read those lyrics again! I think we can all agree that drugs, at least in some way, played a part in the creative process that led to these songs.

But were they the lone reason? I wrote something a while back about how people tend to have this assumption in their minds that drugs not only play a part in the creative process, but are the main reason for so many people, especially musicians, that the creative process even exists. We've all read stories about great musicians and how often they abuse drugs, and we also know that plenty of people have talked about how drugs have stimulated their minds, allowed new doors to be opened in their ways of thinking, and so on and so forth. That leads to an obvious conclusion - people that do drugs become more creative. If only that were true. There's the other side of the stereotypical coin: the lazy druggie that sits on his couch, watches TV, and eats cereal. And while that may not always be true, the thought that hitting the bong magically makes you a genius is just as untrue. Leaving aside any addiction issues, drugs are just as likely to make you think you're writing great stuff when it's really crap, only you don't have the wherewithal to know the difference. On top of that, people on drugs tend to have issues with reining in their muse, leading to overblown cocaine/pot/LSD/ecstasy epics that might sound great on drugs, but sound terrible otherwise.

My typical example would be Sandinista!, the Clash's misbegotten double-album followup to the classic London Calling and one of the great missteps of their career. Blessed with a ton of money and all the resources of a major band, the Clash threw everything but the kitchen sink into their album and produced a staggering mess, with legitimately great songs rubbing shoulders with half-baked ideas, way too much dub experimenting, a goddamn children's choir-sung track, and basically the indulgences of a group that no longer knew how to rein themselves in. Now THAT definitely had something to do with drugs. I know I've also mentioned it before, but another great example would be Be Here Now, where Oasis basically buried their trademark sound under an avalanche of cocaine (and about 20 guitar tracks, courtesy of Noel Gallagher) and created an epic of excess. There are good songs on there, make no mistake, but for the most part the overlong song lengths, overwrought production, and general lack of editing prowess make the album a painful listening experience. Oasis' career in America has never been the same.

What I'm trying to get at is that, ultimately, drugs aren't what makes a musician great, nor could they ever be. They may play a part in the creative process, sure...but in the end, if you aren't already blessed with the gifts that allow drugs to enhance them in that process, it won't matter how much pot you smoke or acid you drop, you're not writing a "Mr. Tambourine Man". Bob Dylan may have ingested enough drugs to kill an elephant in the years of the Electric Trilogy, but he still had to write those great songs, and what allowed him to write those great songs was the same talent that allowed him to write "Blowin' In The Wind", and would allow him to write "Tangled Up In Blue", and "Jokerman", and "Mississippi" as well - and there aren't a lot of people trying to say that Dylan's weed habit or LSD dropping allowed him to pen a "Mississippi", are there? Dylan is a genius on a level few of us could ever match, and that talent, coupled with some drug use, is what allowed him to hone and fashion "Mr. Tambourine Man" into a classic song, one that people have loved for over 40 years. But that drug use didn't put the song in Dylan's mind - it only helped to bring that song out. The song was already there, put together by Dylan's incredible abilities to use the English language in a way few of us could ever dream of doing. And that makes all the difference in the world.

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Bob Dylan Song #54: Bob Dylan's 115th Dream

I'll get into it a little more in the next post, but one thing that's fascinated me about the Electric Trilogy is how many of the lyrics feel almost arbitrarily strung together, as though Dylan had taken a dartboard and used that to determine where the verses are supposed to go, and occasionally even where the individual lines are supposed to go as well. I don't mean that Dylan wrote willy-nilly or had no sense of making the verses work together, lest you think I'm trying to insult him or anything. What I mean is that when it comes to Dylan's work around this time, his words can hit your cerebral cortex and either sink in beautifully or bounce right off, leaving you confused. I think that's why Dylan isn't as easily acceptable to the general public as, say, the Rolling Stones or other such bands of similar longetivity - with the exception of a few key albums, Dylan's work is far more inscrutable, and far less easy to assimilate. And I'm not saying that that makes Dylan's fans more intelligent or discerning because we can assimilate (or, at least, appreciate) his writing style - I'm saying his mid-60's work is not for everyone.



"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" is a key example of how Dylan's work isn't for everyone. There's a lot of stuff going on in this song - historical allusions, goofy wordplay, and a narrative that actually kind of, sort of makes sense. What's funny, to me at least, is that even though there is a Point A and a Point B in this song, and that Dylan clearly had an idea of where he wanted the song to go, there's still an element of the arbitrary and unpredictable, almost as though Dylan was simply letting the lyrics take him where they wanted to go, instead of vice versa. That's what gives the song such an off-kilter rush: the thrown-together feeling runs all throughout, like a Monty Python episode where you wonder how they decided to work in the World's Deadliest Joke sketch and why they put it right after Nudge Nudge (I know they're not in the same episode - that's just for example). There's no real reason why the restaurant verse has to go before he meets the funeral parlor guy, but that's how it is, and it works.



There's something weirdly apropos about Dylan putting together this song with so many elements of Americana (Moby Dick, Columbus, the Bowery), especially when you consider the title of this song. It feels, in a way, like Dylan's winking at the audience all throughout, counting on their knowledge of history - which, if it needs pointing out, was probably stronger back in the 1960s than it is today - and their appreciation of why some of the lyrics are meant to be funny, as well as the fact that he was known preeminently as a folk singer, the leader of a genre rooted very deeply in American tradition (as well, it should be noted, as European tradition - but then how much American tradition originated overseas, anyway?). There's something very meta about that, the same way that Citizen Kane would have been more meta if the original title, The American, had been used instead. Kane, brought to his downfall by his need to own and possess, is uniquely American; Dylan, by turning our traditions and cultural bedrocks into a gag, turns out to be uniquely American as well.



The playful mood of the song is helped right from the very start, with the infamous giggly intro (probably brought on by, uh, the natural buoyancy of Dylan and his producers...yeah, that's it) tacked on to the start for posterity. I love everything about that - the fact that Dylan was strumming his acoustic instead of having the band kick in, whereas from the 2nd take the band immediately roars to life; Dylan still managing to complete that first line, even though he's already laughing; and those hiccupy laughs, of course, that just make me feel like laughing as well. And that infectious playfulness seems to seep through the entire song - there's a silly element to begin with in the lyrics, but the band actually seems to get caught up in that silliness and gives added heft to that goofy feeling. Maybe it's because the chords of the song are the same as another silly Dylan tune, "Motorpsycho Nitemare". Who can really say? But I mean, even the guitar licks put a smile on my face!



"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" puts an exclamation point on Dylan's first ever electric side to an album, and somehow manages to encapsulate everything that made that side so unique, controversial, and astonishing in the history of Bob Dylan, and even in the history of music. You have the plain and simple fact of America's foremost folk singer playing music with an electric band, singing lyrics both literate, inscrutable, and drug-informed, not so much pandering to the popular music crowd as announcing that there was a new voice entering that crowd, one that sang in a different way about different things. Dylan didn't hit you directly with easy to understand lyrics, appeal to the simplest of instincts, or simply get you out of your seat to dance. He forced you to think about what he was saying, he appealed to your mind as well as your heart - and he occasionally could make you dance, but that was incidental. And "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" neatly packaged all of those elements into one crazy song. Talk about something completely different. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #53: On The Road Again

When you think about the Bob Dylan of 1965 and the place he was inhabiting in the musical landscape, a song like this one can tell you just as much about where he stood as any of the classics on the album. That's not to say that this song is a classic the way "Subterranean Homesick Blues is"; what I'm saying is that "On The Road Again" shows you exactly where his head was at and why this album became as popular as it did. Lest we forget, it peaked at #6 on the Billboard charts, a great showing for what (as I'd previously mentioned) was essentially Dylan's debut album in the popular music market. And a song as seemingly innocuous as this one, which might (unkindly) be viewed as filler for the electric side of this album, is actually an example of the looser, more relaxed Dylan we saw on Freewheelin', capable of funny imagery and jokey lyrics, only translated to his new metier.

It is interesting, and a little informative, to take a look at the albums and the hit singles that were released in 1965, the year after Beatlemania and the British Invasion changed everything, and the year where rock music expanded outside songs about fucking (or, in most cases, implied fucking). In a funny way, as much as an entire year can be seen as a transition year, 1965 can. What the Beatles did on their arrival in America in 1964, along with sell ungodly amounts of albums and cause untold amounts of young girls to lose their voices at their concerts, was to legitimize the idea of rock music as something that could be more than three chords and a nifty guitar solo; in other words, rock wasn't just something you could dance to at a high school prom, but something you could admire on a deeper level. But, as intricate and introspective as many great songs from this year were ("In My Life" and "A Change Is Gonna Come" were released in this year, for starters), rock hadn't quite reached the next level of 1966 (Revolver and Pet Sounds pushed both the limits of production and lyricism) or 1967 (which I don't need to spell out for you). It was like music knew which way it had to go to become viable as an art form as well as a popular medium, but was struggling to figure out that path.

And into that void leapt Bob Dylan, who was still trying to figure out how to properly match his increasingly crazy, out-there lyrics to that "rock" stuff all the kids were talking about (in some cases, he didn't quite succeed, and that's why we have Tarantula - you don't think he'd have turned that book into 20 more songs if he could have?). While there were previous artists that had tapped into the surreal, that had tried to expand their lyrics outside the well-worn realm of boy-meets-girl or hey-guys-let's-party, and that had tried to marry the worlds of the poetic and the mainstream, none of them knew quite how to do it the way that Dylan did with his Electric Trilogy. This isn't something any of us Dylan fans didn't know - hell, it's something we're all incredibly proud of - and yet it bears repeating: in a world where the Beatles still sang songs like "The Night Before" and Motown hadn't quite expanded their boundaries of subject matter yet, there was Dylan, pushing the limits of rock, and bringing a whole new aesthetic to what you could write about in song form. Hell, we probably wouldn't have gotten Rubber Soul and everything that came after without him, and that alone is worth it.

All the same, Highway 61 Revisited did not spring fully formed from Dylan's head like Athena tearing out of Zeus's skull; there had to be moments of Dylan learning to fly, figuring out where he could take his mind in terms of writing lyrics, and what worked as brilliance and what just made people laugh. "On The Road Again" is an example of that transition, where Dylan took his Tarantula style of writing (non sequitur after non sequitur), jammed some lyrics into a conventional song verse style, and set it in a band environment (I'm amused to mention that the song only uses three chords - hey, he was learning!). The result is a song that works both on an entertainment level (when are monkeys ever not funny?) and a historical level as well - this is Dylan learning the ropes of what he wanted to do, not quite hitting a home run, but settling for a solid double instead.

I suppose, then, that this album is often cited as the weakest of the Electric Trilogy (with, again, "weakest" being a relative term). To me, what makes the second and third albums so incredible is that they feel so seamless, like every song contributes to the greater whole, and even the weaker songs (say, "Temporary Like Achilles" or "From A Buick 6") contribute to the fabric and feel almost indispensable when it comes to assessing what makes the album so great. You don't quite get the same feel on Bringing It All Back Home - a song like "Outlaw Blues" or "On The Road Again" aren't as strongly tied into the rest of the album, and the whole "two sides" concept makes the album's overall arch suffer just a little bit. Maybe it would be different if the songs had been mixed together - say, if "On The Road Again" had been a bridge between "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Maggie's Farm" or something like that, then maybe there would be more of a "fabric woven together" feel. But they aren't, so there isn't. Instead, "On The Road Again", with its off the wall imagery and comic-book feel, makes you realize what Dylan had to achieve in order to make a "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and a Blonde on Blonde, and how far he had to come in his musical style. Read more!

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. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #51: Love Minus Zero/No Limit

It was only a few years into my Dylan fandom that I realized that "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" was actually a mathematical equation (yes, an Asian not catching something math-related; try to keep your world from spinning off its axis), and only after Mr. Justin Shapiro was kind enough to have pointed that out to me. Basically, the title is a clever way of saying "love without limits or boundaries" - at least I think it is - and lets the discerning listener know that the song is about that rarest of white unicorns, a relationship founded on unconditional love. And Dylan's song is so beautiful and sweet that you could actually imagine for a second that unconditional love actually exists. Certainly, at least, you could imagine somebody worthy of being described as "true like ice, like fire", as poetic a declaration of a person's faithfulness as you'll ever find.

When I was pondering what I'd write about for "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", I found my mind wandering, oddly enough, to "Tangled Up In Blue". Now, I know that both songs are quite different from each other, in terms of length, subject matter, and especially in the lyrical devices employed. "Tangled Up In Blue", although occasionally abstract in the way it goes about things, weaves a narrative tale from beginning to end; "Love Minus Zero" does not tell any particular story and seems to make a point of being abstract (what's all this statues made of matchsticks business about?). And yet, to me, it sort of feels like there's a connection between the two of them, as though one could not exist without the other. And maybe, in some small way, there is. Maybe that very abstract nature of "Love Minus Zero", the way Dylan piles surreal imagery on top of what is essentially a declaration of a woman's true character, was a step Dylan needed to take to arrive at "Tangled Up In Blue", quite possibly the most perfectly realized song Dylan ever wrote in his career. Perhaps it was the discoursing about "ceremonies of the horsemen" and such, the way that Dylan sets the mood of a dark and foreboding world around him where the only protective cocoon is the love he feels, that would push Dylan to fuse that ability to set a mood through word pictures and his ability to tell a story the way he did a decade later. The word pictures of "Tangled" are clearer, true, but just as striking to my ears as those of "Love Minus Zero".

And it is those pictures from "Love Minus Zero" that make the song so striking, that hooks you in every time you hear it. The band Dylan assembled gives the song as gentle an arrangement as an electric band can afford, making me think of Simon and Garfunkel's prettier ballads, except Paul Simon never quite wrote a song as gorgeous as this one. What stands out after repeated listens is the bass line, which constantly seems to wander off on its own path, and yet always sounds like it was perfectly written for the melody, underpinning Dylan's own lyrical meanderings. And Dylan does meander; the first verse starts with a description of Dylan's love, and then the lyrics make their way through bus stations, through candle-lit dark rooms, and across bridges long past twilight, only returning occasionally to mention his love as a counterpoint to the strangeness he sees all around him, even as "a raven/at my window with a broken wing". She may be vulnerable like all of us, but she's still the rock Dylan leans on without hesitation or thinking twice.


Now, I suppose my referring to unconditional love as "the rarest of white unicorns" would lead you to believe that I'm a heartless cynic who can't understand what real romantic love is like. Well, I am. No, seriously, I just believe that unconditional love is something that does not exist. I mean, even in the strongest and most committed relationships that people can have, certain boundaries need to be kept in order for them to work. That's just human nature. And at the same time, unless you've just met somebody for the first time and are still basking in that wonderful feeling you have when you've connected with a new person on your life at that deep and meaningful level, you know that nobody, not even the love of your life, is completely perfect and that they are unerring in what they do. And I don't hear the words of somebody that just fell in love with someone else in "Love Minus Zero", but the words of somebody that's committed to a person they've been with long enough to know they're committed. The point I'm trying to make, then, is that to me, that's the real fantasy element - the fact that this woman is so brilliant, so untouchable, that there's nothing you could say about her other than she's completely faithful and true to you. Rare white unicorn, indeed.


So that's the enduring image for me and this song - Dylan singing about a woman who does everything right. (Okay, maybe that's a little tongue in cheek.) That probably leaves me in the distinct minority, since there have been plenty of odes written about the lyrics and the way that Dylan strings these crazy images together into a way that somehow manages to make sense and paint a beautiful picture of comforting love in a world that offers no such comfort. And the real world may not always work that way, but it's strangely comforting to imagine that it really does, and that in a universe with those that only seek perfection and those that "make promises by the hour", there are people that can guide you through and always be by your side. Sometimes you want a song that makes you feel like that's true. Read more!