Bob Dylan Song #159: When I Paint My Masterpiece

This is a post that, in a way, almost writes itself. If ever there was a Dylan track that would qualify as my all-time sneaky favorite, it would be "When I Paint My Masterpiece", one of those songs that always seems to slip through the cracks when people talk about Bob's classics (some might append that classification to "Watching The River Flow", I think). What I really love about the song is just how laid-back Bob sounds on it, like he really is singing about chilling out in Rome and thinking about when he finally finishes his life's work. One almost wishes that it was true - that instead of being in upstate New York all this time, he'd actually been crossing the Continent by train, suitcase in hand, living it up with a big Derek Flint grin on his face. And the musicians help set that mood from the start, Leon Russell's piano leading us into a bevy of wry guitar solos and a gently propulsive rhythm. One imagines that this is the sound of Bob not taking himself all too seriously (much like the Christmas album, as a matter of fact - what is "Must Be Santa" if not one of his all-time great pisstakes?), and it's hard not to want him to do that more often.

Much has been made about how this song and "Watching The River Flow" are musical twins in that they depict Bob at his creative low point (well, until the mid-80s, of course), fumbling around for ways to relight his creative muse, none of them working until the ultimate torch arrived in the form of Bob's crumbling marriage. What occasionally seems to be lost in that assessment is the fact that both of the songs that are seemingly about Bob's fallow creative period are, of course, pretty darn good on their own, some of the best stuff that Bob released in this decade. And, rather amusingly, both of the songs manage to attack the subject in roughly the same way, with the musical equivalent of a good-natured shrug of the shoulders. If Bob really has lost his creative muse, he's doing a pretty darn good job of showing us that he could care less.

If there is one obvious difference between the songs, though, it would be the fact that Bob puts us in two different locales (and maybe even mindsets) in the two separate songs. "Watching The River Flow"'s narrator is basically all by himself, sitting in a cafe and staring out at the Mississippi or whatever rushing on by - there's something almost Zen-like in the way he talks about how the river keeps rolling along, no matter what happens - and just musing about how funny the ol' human race can actually be. In "When I Paint My Masterpiece", on the other hand, we're deposited right smack in the middle of some European vacation, a rush of memories coursing through the narrator's brain as he moves from country to country looking for the next big adventure and getting a kick out of, you guessed it, how funny the ol' human race can actually be. That the song still manages to retain its laid-back tone is really something; Bob's telling us a story about how strange his life is without being able to write that one masterpiece he's been waiting on (then again, most artists always feel this way), and yet it feels so casual, like he's relating this tale into a tape recorder sitting poolside in Malibu. It's a relaxed song about a hectic subject, which is always fun.

One is tempted, especially when doing a project like the one I'm embarking on, to speculate about whether or not Bob really did miss that hectic life at the time. Now, real life kind of answers that question all by itself, as Bob slowly worked his way back into the limelight before Tour '74 re-established him as one the biggest rock stars in the world. But that was a gradual process, one that went from recording new material to appearing in a movie to putting together a brand new album for a brand new record label. And yet, in 1971, there was still no real indication that Bob was ever going to go back out on the road, or release something like Planet Waves, or be anything other than a father and a husband. All people really had to speculate on were rumors, innuendo, and then these songs. And while most people tend to think of them as Bob talking about how his muse had done a runner, it's also possible to speculate on that second song, on Bob writing about the hustle and bustle of a life on the run, walking up the Spanish Steps and feeling history below his feet, and missing it just a little bit. The world was not as easy to reach then as it was now, and one imagines there were some nights in New York where our man Bob was getting just a touch antsy.

And, soon enough, that hustle and bustle would be back in Dylan's life. As much as we think about how hectic and crazy 1965-66 were for Bob, I don't think enough attention gets paid to just how wild the mid-70s were for the man; after all, for all of Bob's religious studies after he broke his neck, he didn't become a full-on Christian, for Pete's sake. After all, between Planet Waves and Slow Train Coming, Bob released a slew of albums that ranged from "quite good" to "absolute classics" (including what might very well be his masterpiece), embarked on four massive tours (including a World Tour that led to his voice's irrevocable damage and that aforementioned conversion), and forcefully re-injected himself into the lifestyle that a rock star of his stature tends to lead. That's a hell of a lot for one man to do. You wonder, though, if Bob would have had it any other way.

Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #158: Tomorrow Is A Long Time

I've always wondered what it was about "Tomorrow is a Long Time" that appealed to Elvis Presley so much, to the point where he would record his own version for one of his crappy movie soundtracks (the phrase "crappy" can apply to both the movie and the soundtrack, in general). Quite frankly, I wonder why Elvis would bother with a Dylan song at all; after all, this is a guy who used to joke when he had bad breath that "it feels like Bob Dylan's been sleeping in my mouth". But we have Elvis' version of this song nonetheless, and it's a surprisingly good version, a down-home Mississippi Delta touch attached to the tune, Elvis putting in a pretty decent vocal performance (although there are moments where he does something with his voice that reminds me why I don't like him more than I think I ought to, if that makes sense), a casual take on a love song that succeeds because it's so darn casual and laid back. You'd never have thought to turn the song into a crawling blues track, but Elvis and his producers did, and they get kudos for that.

Funny enough, the Elvis version is probably the reason why Bob chose to record the song in a bluesier style for the New Morning sessions, a version that would be left in the vaults yet again. Listening to the song, you can definitely tell that Bob had that version in mind, both in the literal (the slower, more blues-like arrangement, with a pedal steel doing some nice work) and in the more abstract (the "ah-ooh" backing vocals reminiscent of the Jordanaires, the somewhat amateurishly picked solos), although Bob fleshes things out a little more with his full New Morning band behind him. One presumes that this version was never going to have a shot at making the album - especially considering how much more jazz-influenced the official version would end up being - so listening to it can feel more academic than anything else, like it's Bob just having a goof in the studio before he got to "One More Weekend" or whatever. All the same, it's a fun goof, a nice little window into Bob's mind, and a weirdly fitting tribute to Elvis that works just as well as "Went To See The Gypsy" does.

And yet, for somebody like me that has such great affection for the Greatest Hits II version, recorded for what was supposed to be Bob Dylan In Concert way back in 1963, there's something kind of blasphemous about these bluesy recordings, like Elvis and Dylan are taking something chaste and pure and slapping some mud on it. That isn't to say that I don't like those versions, or that there's something wrong with turning a tune into a blues number; it's more that the original version, so beautifully downcast and gentle, so full of quiet wistfulness, is probably best served in its original state, a gently picked acoustic guitar the only accompaniment to Bob's gorgeous lyrics (some of his best of the acoustic era). It makes a kind of sense that this song, like "Mama, You Been On My Mind", was consigned to the vaults upon its release; both songs are as direct in their emotion as any Bob has ever recorded, and maybe Bob didn't want anybody to get the wrong idea.

Of all the emotions that Bob has managed to capture in his lyrics - anger, disdain, happiness, joy, pain, agony - the one that he never really quite gets to is loneliness; he's sung about isolation, but that's not quite the same thing. For whatever reason, we never get to hear much about the great loneliness that Bob must have felt all throughout his life, both in the literal sense (the 1966 tour springs to mind), and in the mental (that mind of his keeping people away by mere virtue of his almost crushing genius); we know so much about Bob in his public life that any glimpse at the private Bob, no matter how fleeting, is as treasured as gold. And that is what makes "Tomorrow is a Long Time" so valuable, because we get a very small glimpse at Bob singing about loneliness, even in the context of a love song, as he waits for his true love to be back with him and spins off words that tell us just how hard that wait can be. But, to me, what really sums up the loneliness of the song (more so than the lyrics, which I think I will get some disagreement over, and I don't blame you) is Dylan's performance, one of his most brutally direct of his early days, a quiet emotion in his voice not even heard on his most well-known classics. I hear that song and I think of that young man, all by himself, singing about his beloved, and it's as heart-wrenching as anything I could imagine. And yet I cannot help but listen to it over and over again, because of that heartache, and because it's so beautiful in its sadness. There's plenty of that in Bob's catalog, but few songs touch that emotion as well as this one does.

Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #157: Watching the River Flow

My sincerest apologies to those of you that assumed my discussion of Greil Marcus' review of Self Portrait would cease with the "Alberta #2" post, but I found myself thinking of that album, and rather specifically the bit about Dylan's responsibilities to his audience, during my most recent listen to "Watching the River Flow", one of a handful of original songs Bob recorded between 1970 and 1974's Planet Waves. Listening to Dylan kick the tune off with those fateful words "What's the matter with me?/I don't have much to say", then talk about sitting on a beach somewhere and watching the inexorable progress of some random waterway, one can only assume that Marcus must have been livid. After all, compare Self Portrait, in which Bob makes what could be interpreted as a symbolic retreat from the arena, to this song, in which Bob straight up admits it to all of us. I dunno - were I in Marcus' shoes, I think I might be kinda pissed.

I bet Dylan thought of this, too. Maybe he didn't have Marcus on his mind per se (it's worth wondering if Bob, in 1971, actually knew who Greil Marcus WAS), but I like to think he had a little smile on his face as he penned the words to this song, dreaming up a surrogate Bob wandering some deserted coastline, finding that all night cafe on the beach, having a cup of joe, and staring at the water rushing by. More specifically, I think of those middle eights Bob conjured up, where he sees people disagreeing about God knows what (and he's right - it really DOES make you want to stop and read a book) and just shakes his head knowingly to himself. It was not all too long ago that Young Bob was out there disagreeing with people himself, first in the protest songs that he wrote, then in his views on how his music should sound, to the point where he found himself really shook (and, if some people are to be believed, crying) on that Newport stage. It would only stand to reason that Older and Wiser Bob would be able to write so wittily and intelligently about that.

"Watching the River Flow" would be a fun song if Dylan had picked up an acoustic and sang about his casual acceptance of what sounds like one bitch of a case of writer's block, but the song is made all the more fun by his studio band, who bring a touch of 70's AM rock to Dylan's palette of recording tricks. From the moment that guitar solo comes ripping out of your speakers, it's clear that Dylan's in a rakish mood, and the song boogies along at a nice bluesy clip, Leon Russell's pounding piano mixing well with more radio-friendly soloing and a bouncy bass line. Dylan, for his part, appears to be having a grand old time, barking out his vocals in that 70s voice I've always considered his best. One imagines that, in the hands of somebody like Badfinger, the song might have become an even bigger hit. Instead, it just barely missed the top 40, and ended up on a Columbia stopgap; given the laid-back nature of the song, that's probably how it should be anyway.

I always liked that Bob chose to start off his 2nd (and, remarkably, more essential) Greatest Hits collection with this song, an amusing admission of his current fallow period leading off a collection of songs that demonstrated just how amazing he was when all his creative juices were flowing. What's made Bob so fascinating, along with the music and the myths and the history and all that, is that you really can't pin any kind of mental process upon the man, no matter how hard we try to shoehorn him into our preconceived notions. The same man who has enough self-awareness to wink at his audience with this song had the somewhat puzzling naivete to think that his conversion to Christianity would be well-received when he took it on the road (well, perhaps; he probably knew people would be surprised, but I'm not sure he knew he'd whip up 1965-levels of invective). The same man who exhibited the rigid self-control of his days in the upstate New York woods as he cared for his family and grew closer to his wife essentially fell to pieces on the 2nd leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, drinking himself into constant stupors as his marriage crumbled around him. And the same man who released some of the greatest albums ever recorded, leaving only a paucity of worthy tracks in the vaults in favor of legendary classics, essentially consigned three or four of his best songs of the 1980s to outtake status when putting together Infidels, maybe the most disappointing moment in his canon. That's all human nature, of course, to be that inconsistent; but it's human nature on a grand scale, and that's always interesting.

"Watching the River Flow", in its own way, is an encapsulation of part of Dylan's human nature, and a part that brings him closer to us. Having made mention in the previous post of the elusiveness of creativity, it's funny to hear a song where Bob directly addresses that elusiveness, fully admitting that the process is beyond his understanding ("What's the matter with me?") and not giving a damn anyway. It's kind of rare to see Dylan engaging his audience as directly (relatively speaking) as he does here, and it's all the better that he does it in such an amusing way. Who knows, maybe even Greil Marcus had to have been okay with that.

Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #318: Mama, You Been On My Mind

Okay, so.

I had a special post all typed out, I really did. I was going to do one of those "author interviewing himself" conceits, where I asked myself these pertinent questions about where I was in my life, why I'd put this blog on its longest hiatus yet, and whether or not I was really prepared to see this through to the bitter end (I mean, look at that post title - I'm not even halfway to reaching THIS song, let alone the last one!). But, to be quite honest, nobody needs to read all that, especially in light of all the emotional gushing that will soon commence in the post proper. So I've instead condensed said special post into three questions and answers:

Q. Where the hell were you?
A. It's like John Lennon said - "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

Q. Why this song?
A. Because the time to write about it was right, for me at least. Normal chronological order will resume after this post - I just wanted to get this out of my system. If this somehow seems like a cheat, I apologize. I fully acknowledge that this post is the rare one that's more for me than anybody else.

Q. Will you continue this project?
A. Yes. I don't know how regular I'll keep things, but I will do my level best to maintain at least some sort of schedule. That anybody reads this at all is amazing, and it's at the point now that I want people to keep reading and to look forward to what I do. It means more than you could ever know, believe me.

And so back I go into the maelstrom. Just a heads up - this gets into some REALLY emo shit. If you're not prepared or that sort of thing doesn't suit you, I suggest you come back later in the week. Trust me.

Second heads up: this baby is LONG. Again, don't say I didn't warn you.

A FEW SELECTIONS FROM A LONGER ESSAY ABOUT BOB DYLAN'S "MAMA, YOU BEEN ON MY MIND"

I once had a girl

Or should I say

She once had me...

- John Lennon

(1)

When people (up to and including myself) talk about how Bob Dylan's lyrics are "poetic", I feel like the vast majority of those people are referring to Dylan's more out-there lyrics, stuff like "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Gates of Eden" that push the envelope of what was previously considered to be acceptable things to sing while simultaneously strumming a guitar and/or being backed by a band of musicians. Which makes sense - it's not so much that Dylan was doing things like messing with time signatures or fiddling with the verse/chorus/verse dynamic (his deeply ingrained musical instincts probably would not let him do this), as much as he was pushing the boundaries of what you can do with words, how you can arrange them in ways that impact others emotionally without directly attempting to ENGAGE them emotionally, and of the subject matter that people can sing about. And I think that many of us engage poetry in that same way; we've grown accustomed enough to the works of Eliot and Plath and Ginsburg and Sexton and so on that we think of poetry not as something straightforward, but as a way to push the boundaries of both the spoken and written English language, something that takes us to the further edges of what we can do with that language, for better or for worse.

I bring all this up not because I believe I'm telling you all something you don't already know, but because it's elucidating for me in general to think about things in other ways. After all, not all poetry bothers to push the envelope, or to do something entirely different from tradition, and yet that poetry can still hit on an emotional level. Think of something like "Dulce et Decorum Est", or "To His Coy Mistress", neither of which go crazy with the metaphors or fuck with accepted rhyme schemes or anything, but both hit on an emotional level while bending words into something beautiful (even in the ugliness of World War I, in the former's case). And I'm sure it doesn't REALLY bear stating, but you can apply that to Dylan's less wildly imaginative lyrics, songs from his acoustic era or from something like Planet Waves, where Dylan can keep himself firmly grounded in the language that you and I speak every day (or, sometimes, wish we could) and still make us go "wow, that was something else".

And, to me, the quintessential example of Dylan's genius in this regard is the first verse of "Mama, You Been On My Mind", one of the greatest songs he wrote and never released on an album. I'm reprinting it here simply because I cannot help myself:

Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat

And covering these crossroads I'm standing at,

Or maybe it's the weather, or something like that,

But mama, you been on my mind.

To me, at least, I cannot think of any better way to try and explain what it is about love that cannot be explained, and to put something tangible on a feeling that, so very often, eludes our grasp. We all know that often something as innocuous as a song on the radio or seeing an ad for a restaurant can bring back memories both good and bad (I had one such moment last night, as a matter of fact - damn you, Van Morrison!), but we can find ourselves forgetting that sometimes it doesn't even take THAT much to trigger our memory banks, and sometimes we find ourselves drifting back to past beloved entirely of our own accord, almost like an acid flashback or something. Dylan manages to capture both sides in four truly amazing lines, reaching both to the specificity of an image that reminded him of somebody, and to the generality of a mood that hits you when you don't expect it. It's really something that I cannot fathom.

I had a conversation once with one of my friends, in which I was attempting to describe why exactly it was I felt a certain way about somebody else. I said that I could make a list of all the reasons why I was enamored, from the more obvious physical aspects to the way that she engaged me on an intellectual level to the fact that she had a fondness for things that I, too, had a fondness for. But, ultimately, the reason I felt that certain way about that somebody was because I simply did. I mean, that sort of thing is more animal than human to begin with (which I'll get to in greater detail), and on a gut level it really just comes down to synapses firing in your brain in ways you could not possibly imagine. But, us being who we are, we find ways to justify those firings of our synapses, and we turn what would be simple nature into something deeper and more meaningful. As I'd written in a previous post, the feeling tends to come before the rational; first comes love, then you sort of have to fill in the blanks. But filling in the blanks makes us who we are.

What I love about that first verse of "Mama, You Been On My Mind" is that Bob never bothers to delve into that conundrum at all. Of course, given the constraints of songwriting and such there just wasn't enough room anyway, but it's still impressive to see Bob condense such a markedly difficult emotional issue into a short gut punch of a verse and then immediately move on, secure in the knowledge that we all know what he's talking about. And we all do, of course - much like that feeling you can only express in French where you could've sworn something happening to you has already happened, we all know what it means to remember something from our past with both a meaningful prompt and with no prompt at all. We all just can't sum that feeling up the same way Bob can.

(2)

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, one of my great failings as a human being is that I have the potential to be an utterly selfish prick on an emotional level; you know, the old "look out for number 1" thing. I can be totally willing to sever a personal relationship (friend or otherwise) with a female at the drop of a hat if I think that relationship is causing me hurt, and I'm pretty sure I could do it without too much effort. And, in the same honest vein, one of the things that is pretty good about me as a human being is that I am aware of that selfishness potential, and that I deal with it in much the same way that people deal with quarantined viruses. After all, once you've connected with somebody on any meaningful level, even if it is just plain ol' friendship, you have a responsibility for that connection, to maintain it and even try to make it grow, and to cut it in half just because of your own base feelings is a pretty boorish thing to do. It's sad that I need to remember that, but I thank my lucky stars that I can, and that I can put aside my own bullshit to have actual meaningful friendships with the opposite sex. It would be a real black mark on me as a person if I couldn't.

One of the hardest things to deal with is when somebody you have feelings for harbors those same feelings for somebody else. This, again, is not something I think you all don't know. What is even harder is to feel, if not happiness for that person, at least a sort of Zen acceptance, a security that you can dispense with the hurt that that knowledge brings. It, like so much of human personality, is an acquired skill; still, having that skill is almost astonishingly important, if only for our own peace of mind. To be able to wish somebody well is nice; to wish somebody well and actually mean it is some next level shit. I will fully admit that I struggle with that skill on a daily basis (and it's much harder these days), but I'm well aware that the person I'm struggling with would appreciate that I'm even making the effort. If I couldn't, I might as well give up and go live in a cabin in the woods.

When Dylan sings "I don't even mind who you'll be waking with tomorrow", it is hard not to marvel at that moment. It is both the most devastating moment in the song, and somehow the most uplifting at the exact same time. I don't need to really tell you what's devastating about it on one level; I still remember being told by the woman I love that she was moving in with her boyfriend, and what a horrible crushing blow that was for me. And on another level, the one where you've reached that kind of acceptance (or resignation, as the case may be), the line takes on an even more devastating effect. But uplifting? Yes, I truly do believe that. That line, and the sentiment behind that, is a statement from a man that truly believes what he's saying, that does not care that his beloved will be waking up in the bed of somebody else, because she's still part of who he is, no matter what. And that's uplifting in the sense that so often we tend to try to cut the hurt out of us, rather than attempting to understand that hurt and make it work for us. When you lose somebody in that way, a piece of you gets torn out, and it's all too easy to let that piece disappear without ever trying to replace it. It really is better to keep that piece where it is, if only for the memory.

Not to immediately bring things back down, but I've often thought about the things that separate us human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom, usually because there's far more crossover than we would like to admit. Even love, our greatest attribute as a human race in so many ways, can be explained on a molecular level, where the general idea of "attraction" has a lot more to do with our hormones than with rational thought. I mean, it makes sense, of course; even if you discount all the scientific crap, just think about how often relationships tend to fail. We all can understand the idea behind wanting to knock it out with somebody else - it's when you get to shit like meeting parents and thinking about looking for an apartment together that things become murky and complicated. Fill in the blanks, remember. We don't always do the best job of that. And that's why love isn't always the greatest thing (as Damon Albarn once sang); the actual emotion itself can be found amongst jungle cats or what have you, and they don't have to worry about how two sets of friends would interact at a bar on Friday night.

So, to me at least (and perhaps this is just my own slightly jaundiced view at work), what really does separate us from animals and makes us something special is that we can be hurt by love. After all, you never hear of an orangutan crying and listening to Morrissey records, or of a house cat trying to win another house cat back by playing "In Your Eyes" on a boom box, and so on. I know how silly that sounds, and I even kinda did that on purpose, but the general idea is that we are the only race for whom the romantic-based rejection of another member of our species hurts us on an emotional level, one that we have to intellectualize in order to properly deal with it. We can intellectualize love, of course, but on a gut level we know why it exists and how it really works. I don't think we have that same gut level with rejection; trying to make sense of it the best way that we can, whether through hurt, rage, acceptance, and so on, is an entirely different being altogether. In a way, it's even a beautiful thing - the fact that we cannot simply dismiss a mate walking away, that we have to put things together in our mind and compartmentalize it in order to function at all, says a lot about just how important that really is to us. It's an idea that always strikes me as sad, and as profound. Funny how those two words so often mean the same thing.

(3)

Why don't we ever hear more about who Bob's singing about in this song? So much about Dylanology (of which I grudgingly include this humble little blog) centers around the various women that have populated Bob's life and how he has worked his relationships (both the good and the bad times - more bad than good, rather unfortunately) into his songs. Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo, Sara Lowndes - we always find ourselves reading the tea leaves, looking for those faces, almost to the point where you need to stop and just ask yourself, well, why? Why do we bother? Is there really a point? And, as a corollary, how has a song THIS nakedly emotional and full of heartache slipped through the cracks?

Creativity, like so much of our human experience, is an ethereal concept. I mean, that's pretty obvious (nobody's selling "creativity juice" at the local supermarket), but it's also something that we feel like we need to deal with, even though we don't know how. William Goldman, as great a screenwriter that has ever lived, stated that he has no idea where his creativity comes from, but he lived in a never-ending fear of simply waking up one day to find that his spark has deserted him forever, never to return. And that's somebody who legitimately has/had that spark, who has written some of the most enduring motion pictures ever made. For the rest of us average punters, the idea of creativity on that level is even harder to fathom, like attempting to wrap our minds around Foucault's Pendulum without the requisite Ph.D. in astrophysics. Creativity, in that sense, is almost certainly something legitimately scary, a mutant power that taunts us even while astonishing us when others harness that power to create amazing works of art. Like a lot of the Big Concepts, it is something that totally eludes us.

And that, I think, plays into why people so often look for Dylan's paramours in his music. The concept of the muse, as old as it is, is one that a lot of us can wrap our minds around. Hell, the whole concept was almost certainly conceived so that the ancient Greeks and Romans COULD wrap their minds around something as astounding as creativity, an otherworldly explanation for why people could write poems or music or whatever that fit in quite well with the whole "multitude of gods" thing they had going on. But even today the idea still has its place, mainly because its base concept is something we can get behind. Surely it was the love/hate of another woman that drove Dylan to write those masterpieces, and nothing else, right? I mean, it's kind of a reductive concept, no matter how true it is (if "Ballad in Plain D" is NOT about Suze Rotolo, then Bob has some serious explaining to do), but it's still one that's easy for us to grasp. It's annoying as hell, but I can understand it.

Which, I suppose, brings us back to this song, and why nobody has made an effort (or maybe they have, and I've willfully ignored it) to tie "Mama, You Been On My Mind" to any number of women that have been in Bob's life. I mean, it's not like you couldn't make a very easy case, given the time frame the song was written in and so forth. But I kind of like the fact that the song has sort of been left untouched in that sense, that it's not scrutinized in the same way that some of Dylan's more famous songs have been, and that it's mainly been left to stand on its own considerable artistic and lyrical merits. It lends the song a little additional weight that occasionally gets denied from the Webermans of the world trying to read between the lines. For a song this good, that's incredibly appreciated.

(4)

I've said that "Like A Rolling Stone" is my favorite Bob Dylan song, maybe my favorite song by anybody ever, and that's not going to change. But if I had to choose the song that meant the most to me on an emotional level, the song that's nearest and dearest to my heart without bringing in any intellectual considerations, it would surely be "Mama, You Been On My Mind". I mean, I love the song on an intellectual level, of course - it's as perfect an example as you could ask for of purely economical songwriting, of communicating an astounding amount of deep feelings and ideas on a personal scale, performed in Bob's straightforward manner that manages to suggest the well of emotions the song carries without needing to dip into it just to score a few extra points. A lot of Young Bob's genius is summed up in this song, and that's something I can truly appreciate.

But, as you might expect, it's what Bob is actually singing about that gives the song such heft in my eyes. Speaking as somebody that was in love with somebody for a VERY long time, I can't help but identify with every word Bob sings in this song; memories being brought forth just by the weather or something, asking her not to be upset by my frame of mind, not minding who she wakes up with, and that final stinging verse where Bob asks the mystery woman of the song if she could ever see herself as clearly and as vividly as he, himself, carrying her memory deep inside of his cerebral cortex. It's such a powerful moment, and one so evocative of what it means to not just love somebody, but to care about them as well - this notion that we can see them better than they can see themselves. There is great truth to that; why else would we talk about our problems with our friends than because we need a voice that's not our own to help us puzzle out what's going on with us? And it's moments like that where I find myself utterly swept away, hearing somebody explain the pain and emotion I'm feeling better than I ever could. Everything about what art is, and why art matters, crystallizes for me when I hear this song.

I don't presume to suggest that I know why art matters, for the record; I'm simply not that smart. I will say, though, that I have an idea. The concept of the muse, that I briefly touched on before, can seem quite silly on its face, but it does serve an important purpose - it helps us make tangible something that is rather clearly not. And for people in general, just the idea that we can make SOMETHING that we have trouble understanding a little more easy to wrap our minds around is truly important indeed. I mean, just take a second and think about the nature of the cosmos, and infinity, and what that actually means. Thinking about that without a shit ton of postgraduate work, a massively high IQ, or a pharmacy's worth of illegal drugs is nigh impossible. But we've all been to a planetarium, we've all seen the stars in the sky and heard about white dwarfs and black holes and sound bouncing out millions of miles away and so on, and that sort of helps us understand a little better and come a little closer to touching what seems so very far away. We need that in our lives.

And I think we can agree that the whole idea of art, at least on a level beyond "I want to watch guns go boom and cars explode" or "I'm going to read this romantic novel about forbidden love with the guy with a six-pack of abs on the cover", is to help us understand what we cannot, or what we find hard to deal with. Why do you think there are so many damn songs about us getting our hearts broken? Because we all know what it's like to get our hearts broken, and we so very rarely know how to deal with an emotion so powerful and gut-wrenching. And it's that knowledge that allows us to identify with music, or books, or movies; the knowledge that, even if they don't specifically know why we're hurting or why we're happy or angry or whatever emotion it is we're feeling, the artists we love can channel THEIR own hurt or anger or happiness into what they create, and that gets filtered to us on our own levels. It's probably a stretch to say that artists understand us, but there is enough universality in who we are as humans that artists, in attempting to understand themselves and what they're feeling, tend to land on our issues as well. It's rather convenient how that works.

We all have moments in our lives where we feel that we're all alone, and that nobody understands us and what we're going through. That's often nonsense (there's only so much we as humans can go through, really), and yet it's such a strong feeling, simply because nobody ever has the same experience in the same way. To have something in my life that helps sort out that feeling, whether it's a good friend or a great book, is impossible to overstate in terms of importance. And, at the most basic level, I'm happy that I can cue up this song, hear a much younger Bob Dylan (a man younger than I am now when he recorded the track) singing about a mindset I know all too well, and say to myself "you know...Bob Dylan understands".

Read more!

Every Bob Dylan Song will return...

...soon.

Aren't I a tease?

Thank you all for your support and well wishes. A full explanation - and something both a bit special and a bit off the beaten track - is forthcoming. Stay tuned. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #156: Father of Night

"Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax - YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I'M LIVING IN THE (expletive) PAST!" - John Goodman in The Big Lebowski

Now, while the previous song had baffled me in a way that I'm embarrassed to think about even now, "Father of Night" somehow manages to make a perfect, almost serene sense. On an album that has evoked such gentle images of pastoral life and quiet solitude (except with a lady, of course), there's something kind of nice about Bob offering up his version of a Jewish prayer as the album's end, sort of a droll Hebrew equivalent of T.S. Eliot's "shantih shantih shantih" or something. And the presentation is gorgeous - running a mere 92 seconds (surely Bob's shortest song ever), opened with a nifty little bit of singing from Bob's backup singers that occasionally repeats throughout, Dylan offers up a simple and plaintive paean to the God of the Torah that he'd worshiped as a young man. It's beautiful, no two ways about it, and a fine ending to an album that hearkens for the simple life he knew as that boy in Hibbing, before rock and roll, Woody Guthrie, and fistfuls of barbituates changed everything.

One of my friends from Michigan is an atheist raised in a Jewish family, and while she continues to not believe in a God, she still makes it a point to observe all the Jewish holidays and traditions and pay homage to the faith in which she was raised. I'm not going to lie - I found that odd when I'd first heard about it (she's not going to read this, so I feel safe mentioning it, although I'm sure she'd be fine with it anyway), as most people that don't believe in God tend to have something less than a favorable opinion about faith in general, and especially in the traditions and occasional prejudices that make up the world's religions. But the more I thought about it, the more respect I have for her stance - even though she has objection to the one principle that binds this entire group of people together, she finds enough worthy in the sort of cultural framework that's sprung up around this group and their devotion to that principle that she's decided to remain a willing participant. It really is an extraordinary thing.

I'm jumping way ahead here, but one of the most remarkable facts of Dylan's career in retrospect, something that I think doesn't get nearly the play that it deserves, was Dylan's conversion to Christianity. It isn't that it's not understandable, so much as it was a fervor that gripped him with remarkable tightness and then loosened itself almost as fast (I've seen pictures of Bob in his yarmulke in the mid-80s). What tends to get lost in the whole thing, though, between the controversy over the music he made and his infamous battles with the crowds in Tempe and all that, is just how deeply human it actually makes Bob. After all, what is more human in the experience of life than the search for a greater truth, a higher plane of existence beyond mortal flesh and blood, and the search for the reason why we're here in the first place? I'm not saying that I consider Bob some sort of demigod, so much as I'm saying that Bob's crisis of faith gives us something to hang our hat on, something we can relate to, just as much as the adultery and the boozing and drug use and occasional terrible albums are things we can relate to. Bob becomes much more enjoyable, I'm starting to find, when he's not on the pedestal that (it has to be said) things like this blog put him on.

And a song like "Father of Night", which has no other purpose than recasting the Amidah into a short little tune to close out a short little album, is just as much a part of that equation that makes Bob a flesh and blood man. His faith (aside from the Christian years, of course) has never been much of a talking point; we knew he was Jewish (I mean, Zimmerman? C'mon, now), but it was never overtly shoved in our faces at any point in his career. And when he does decide to pay a little homage to his old faith, he does it in as low-key a way as possible, paring down his language almost to the point where you can see bone, singing simple words to the Lord of Abraham and Ezekiel. As mantras go, it's pretty hard to top.

And that's it for New Morning! Coming up next - the three unwritten songs from the 2nd Greatest Hits, "Billy" and "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"...then Dylan's second great creative period. I cannot wait. Hope you all join me on the trip! Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #155: Three Angels

I'm not really sure what to make of "Three Angels". As we come to a close on New Morning, it seems kind of strange for Dylan to suddenly pull out a gospel-inflected (check out that organ!) philosophical piece about angels hovering above us as people go off and live their little humdrum lives, never stopping to see if they can find the ethereal so close to the mundane. It's not that it's a bad song, at all - it's kind of like Bob's "Everybody Hurts", only with a little less universality and a little more slice-of-life lyricism - so much as it's a really odd downer at the end of the album, especially given the one-two-three punch that had preceded it. There's something that just seems a little off, I can't tell you what.

It isn't that Bob hasn't given us character pieces in the past (what is "Ballad of a Thin Man" if not a character piece?) or delved into everyday life in a metaphysical way. What makes the song seem strange to me is that Dylan gives us a really good example of the keen eye that he has as a songwriter, whipping up a little slice of life that gives us well-observed details and people seemingly snatched right off the street - but for what purpose? A two-minute throwaway tacked on the end of the album because it would've sounded even stranger coming after "Winterlude" or something? Maybe it's just the sequencing, then; but that still doesn't explain why there's something lacking about the whole thing. Could it be the length? The weird Christian underpinning that sort of but doesn't really jibe with what's going on with the rest of the album? Maybe it's just another experiment Bob decided to try, giving us a speak-sung O. Henry pastiche set to music? Baffling.

It occurs to me, typing these words, that I'm probably doing a 180 on the stuff that I've typed in the past, where I've chastised others (and myself) for looking for too much or thinking too hard about one of Bob's songs, and that I should just listen and enjoy the song for what it is. And I think I still do that, or at the very least make an effort to do that and not let my feelings about the music get overwhelmed by what I'd like to talk about for the song's blog post. But a song like this...I mean, where do I really go? I've talked about Dylan's nice usage of imagery (the U-Haul truck in particular manages to be the most evocative, and I'm not really sure why), and about Bob reaching into his John Wesley Harding Biblical playbook, only with a little less subtlety, and about how the song touches on a very deep and spiritual subject for a few minutes before coming to an abrupt end. That doesn't seem to leave too much out.

The disappointment I feel at moments like these, where the (usually latent) limitations of this project I've undertaken and enjoyed so often become glaringly apparent, is something I wouldn't wish on any Dylan fan. It can be said about Dylan that even his bad music gives you something to talk about (the last two-three months prior to this album should've been proof of that), and his good music can encompass our whole wide world in terms of subjects of conversation. That, of course, is something that can be said about most great artists in most of the artistic fields. And, let it once again be said, I think that this is a fine song, maybe even a good song. I know that there are bigger fans of this song than I, people that are more likely to tell me something they love about this song that I may have missed, and people that are more than happy to elucidate on why this deserves a deeper look than I'd given it. And believe me when I say that I would be more than happy to hear them out. Read more!