Bob Dylan Song #154: The Man In Me

I want you all to try something. Take a really good, catchy, emotionally resonant song - say, "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which I've been listening to quite a bit lately. Now, find a scene from any movie that you can think of, one that might match the emotional resonance that "Maps" has, and might sound and look good when paired up with that song. But remember - we're not just looking for something that might work well when "Maps" is playing in the background. We're looking for a scene in which the music and the scene on film work as damn close to perfection as you could ever hope for, where what the director is going for on screen is in sync with Karen O's declarations of unmatched love on "Maps", to the point in which you cannot think of one without the other, and vice versa. Oh, and one more thing - we want this little pairing you've put together to run as the title sequence of the movie you've chosen. Think you can do it?

It says a lot about what incredible filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen are (well, with a hat-tip to T-Bone Burnett) that they managed to do just that, pairing a lesser-known Bob Dylan album deep cut with images of people bowling in slow-motion, shoes being sprayed, balls rolling across alleyways...and making it work to absolute perfection. It doesn't even matter that what Bob's singing about - a paean to loving somebody, maybe even his wife, with unflagging emotion and with apparently no hint of irony whatsoever - it still sounds like the most natural pairing in the world (I would find the title sequence on YouTube, but for once it appears that I have been let down). And, at least in my humble estimation, the pairing has now reached the point where you cannot hear "The Man In Me" without thinking of Walter chucking his undies out the window in the "ringer" or poor Donnie confusing John Lennon with V.I. Lenin or "I got a bad headache and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!", and you cannot think of The Big Lebowski (the movie I'm talking about, in case you didn't know) without at least once having Bob pop into your head with those glorious "la la la"s. That's something pretty special, a tremendous example of how music and films can be so gloriously intertwined.

Which gets into the heart of the matter with regards to "The Man In Me". Look, I love the song as much as any of you - it's almost impossible not to just like on its aesthetic level. The harmonies at the beginning and chorus, the way the song just explodes to life, Bob singing with unencumbered joy (not something we always get out of him), that fantastic part in the middle eight when Bob sings "but oh, what a wonderful feeling" and the organ in the background matches him step for step. But, I mean...we all know that Dylan can do better lyrically, right? Eyolf Olstrem (yet again) gets it perfectly, when he says the song is "just TOO sweet - things that are too good to be true usually aren't" and notes that while something like "Sara", another song that trucks in naked emotion (of a different kind, true), has its own intrinsic seriousness, "The Man in Me" has "la la la la la". Which, I mean, is fine; but, in the end, when all you've got is Dylan having fun, that only takes you so far.

All the same, that fun is still there, it makes the track worth hearing at least once in your life, and it took a couple of geniuses to draw it out and use it for all it's worth. In my mind, one of the most flattering compliments anybody can pay to a song is to find its niche and to actually pair it with something tangible in that way that filmmakers can. I mean, we all have memories attached to certain songs that set them apart from everybody else - I, for example, have a memory related to Macy Gray's "I Try" that I'm not going to share but means the absolute world to me. We all know that that is what helps make music so special - our visceral reactions to it, and the way that songs and albums and musicians can be threads in the fabric of our life (pardon the cliche). It is something else entirely when somebody has the brains to make a song the fabric of many people's lives, simply by matching that song to something you'll never, ever be able to forget. Think of how many of us now imagine "As Time Goes By", or "Perfect Day", or "Stuck In The Middle With You". To get so many people to hear a song and think about the exact same thing is a skill, and one that precious few people could ever hope to attain.

I'm not saying that "The Man In Me" would have been consigned to the dustbin of history if T-Bone Burnett hadn't told the Coens "maybe it'd work...here?" over a decade ago. The song has enough creative merit on its own that it probably would've been a cult favorite, the same way that you could say that this album has become something of a cult favorite (and, for symmetry's sake, the way that The Big Lebowski is very much a cult favorite). What I am saying is that the song now has a very special appellation to it, which sets it apart even from some of the best songs in Dylan's catalog. I close my eyes when I hear "Like A Rolling Stone", or "Blind Willie McTell", and I see what I want to see in my mind's eye. I close my eyes when I hear "The Man In Me", and I see The Big Lebowski. And many, many other people can hear that song, close their eyes, and also see what I see. I don't know about you, but that's something quite meaningful to me. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #153: One More Weekend

And with a reprise of that descending blues riff Dylan likes to whip out whenever he's in a rockin' (or, excuse me, "rawkin'") mood, we get one of the most outright fun songs Bob had written in years, a combination of Bob hearkening to the '50s rock-n-roll "two chords and a cloud of dust" mentality (he even starts the song "slippin' and slidin'") and the swaggering bump and grind of "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat". One wonders what impetus Bob had to interrupt all the pretty, low-key piano-driven tracks (there's piano on this song, make no mistake, but it's mixed pretty low to let some slide guitar work carry the day instead) to break out some barroom raunchiness, but it's a pretty good change-up on this album and something of a welcome mood shifter. After the quiet genius of "Sign on the Window", it's pretty neat to immediately break in with Dylan indulging ol' Elston Gunn.

I suppose if you wanted to buy into the theory brought up in the last post (that the songs here had as much to do with Bob screwing around as anything else), this might be the star witness in the case, so to speak. Quoting bits out of the lyrics doesn't make as much sense as actually reading the lyrics themselves - just look at some of the stuff he talks about. He compares himself to a weasel, for the love of Pete! Sure, you can argue that Bob's trying to sing a song to his wife about spending one more weekend together like things used to be - leaving the kids behind and all that - and just being together. But...I mean, take a look at those lyrics again. Does that sound like the kind of thing you'd sing to the woman you roll over and take a look at every morning, or to the woman that you have a crazy, looking over the shoulder, sleeping together in tawdry motels relationship with? I have a pretty good idea what the answer to that would be.

Okay, I know that I've had the occasional flight of fancy that hasn't really worked out, but try to go with me here for a second. You're listening to this album, one that not only has a general lyrical theme of pastoral life, of songs of love and devotion (to whoever), and of doing things the simple way, but also has a general instrumental motif of piano, loose band arrangements, and so on. In other words, you've got a mood going on this album. And then bang - you've suddenly got a song that's basically a slowed-down, loosey-goosey version of something off of Loud, Fast, and Out of Control, Dylan basically saying "come on, baby, let's go downtown" to some random woman that may or may not - probably may not - be his wife. In other words, the mood's been blasted to smithereens by some nasty lead guitar, and we've gone from strolling in a winter wonderland to whiling away some weekend doing Lord knows what. What are we to make of that?

What we can make of that, I think, is that Dylan's basically written himself the equivalent of an interlude to his little one-act about country life, almost like he's throwing in a dream sequence for the hero to fantasize about when he's peeling potatoes or reading "Jack and the Beanstalk" or something. Consider that the album then goes from "One More Weekend" directly into "The Man In Me" (which I've always figured was meant to be the album's centerpiece and linchpin, especially since the last two songs are short and almost anticlimactic), one of Dylan's most simplistic and direct declarations of love. If you want to assume Dylan's singing about somebody other than his wife in this song (and, I suppose, every other song here by proxy), I can certainly see that. But if you take the album on its face value and assume Dylan's being the family man both in life and in song, then "One More Weekend" takes on a completely different role. And, let's be honest, it's a pretty strong little bit of temptation, to head off on a cruise somewhere away from the kids and from his remote country home. You almost can't blame Bob for eventually succumbing to it. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #152: Sign on the Window

A quick word or two about the actual song itself, one of my favorite Dylan songs of all time (the "sneaky favorite" of mine on this album, lest you were wondering). There is a bootleg version of this song floating around with a string arrangement kind of rivet-gun attached to the master take, along with (I think) some extra backup singers doing work or some such added frippery. As you'd expect from my description, the extra instrumentation kind of ruins the song, almost Disney-fying one of Dylan's most gorgeous songs and drowning its more simple, piano-driven beauty in the same sort of glop that ruined "The Long And Winding Road". The actual album take, the one that I love so much, works because there's a measure of understatement - the backup singers that are on the track are muted, and the flute solo after the middle eight (well, middle four) works in glorious counterpoint to Bob's piano. And the lyrics - oh, how I love those lyrics. The first verse, with its punch to the gut imagery; that fantastic "Brighton girls are like the moon" line; and, yes, the third verse, which apparently is more divisive opinion-wise than I'd expected. It all adds up to maybe Bob's greatest forgotten masterpiece, and one that maybe will get the attention that it deserves.

Now, then - that third verse. In the "Time Passes Slowly" post, one of the commenters wrote out a long, somewhat detailed comment about how Bob's actually writing songs to and about his mistress, both on this album and on Blood on the Tracks. His reasoning makes quite a bit of sense - it really doesn't make sense to just assume "Simple Twist of Fate" is actually about Sara, does it? And that sort of reasoning tends to color the rest of the album; songs about the good ol' country life, about a woman like you (who?) to find the man in him...they're not really about being happy and married, are they? It's the sort of realization/theory/what have you that makes you reevaluate what you thought about the man; hell, what you think about life in general.

And that's why I'm choosing to ignore it.

No, I'm kidding. I would just prefer to believe that Bob, at that particular moment in his life, meant exactly what it was he was singing about, that he was enjoying himself and the life he'd carved out for himself, or at the very least comfortable and accepting of it. Another commenter, in the "Day of the Locusts" post suggests that Bob's bit about how being a family man must be what it's all about "feels more like uncomfortable resignation to me than joyful enlightenment...like he isn't quite convinced". To me, though, I don't necessarily think it has to be either - Bob's never struck me as the kind of guy who has too high highs (although he's probably had too low lows - think about his mental state during the '76 version of the RTR), and I also think that he's not one to put on a face for the hell of it (if you ever saw pictures of him in 1966, he sure as hell isn't hiding his discomfort and agitation about what's going on around him - the only time he doesn't look awful is when he's on stage). I think Bob's singing those words simply because those words sum up his frame of mind; maybe there's some resignation in "that *must* be what it's all about", but I see him firming that up in his mind, thumping his chest and saying "yes, that really is what life is", just like God knows how many men whose lives have changed when they see their offspring for the first time. Dylan may not have had that frame of mind for long, but he still probably had it (unless you're giving him no benefit of the doubt whatsoever), and that surely counts.

One thing I think doesn't get enough attention, which probably makes sense given how relatively obscure this song is, is just how wild the stuff Bob's singing about in that final verse must have sounded, even after Bob had spent a few years out of the limelight. It's a really remarkable thing; Bob, counterculture icon, writer of "Like A Rolling Stone", telling us that getting married, having kids, and fishing in a cabin in Utah is really what life is all about. Perhaps on a smaller scale, but certainly on a scale, this has to be like what Bob's folk music fans must have felt like when Bob went electric, no? Think about it - you've got your mindset about how the world works, about what this and that means, and your hero, the man you trust above all else to both side with your viewpoints on how the world works and espouse those viewpoints to everybody else, has turned his back and become The Enemy, so to speak. Now, the transformation from electric warrior to "marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout" was slower and more pronounced in this case, but...I mean, really? We're busting our ass out there having protests and calling Nixon a douchenozzle and talking about free love (which, I'm assuming, didn't just die out after 1967) and changing the world, maaaaan - and Bob's singing about kids and shit? What a fucking asshole!

The irony, surely, is that the radical generation of the 60s eventually found themselves thinking Bob's way in the end. It shouldn't be a surprise; how many people say "aw, I ain't ever having kids, I ain't ever getting married - nobody's tethering this bird down, I'm gonna spread my wings and fly!", only to end up at a company BBQ with the mortgage and the station wagon and the son named after your wife's dearly departed father, wondering just how in the hell you got there? Life has a funny way of taking us in places we never expect (unless you're a child prodigy or something); surely Bob at 20 with his Sherpa outfit and blues repertoire or Bob at 25 with his cool-ass shades and Telecaster had no idea that he'd be 29/30, scraggly thin beard on his face, talking walks down a dirt path in the forests of upstate New York and carefully avoiding a world that still wanted to look for him. Maybe that's the real resident emotion of "Sign on the Window" - a sort of bemused wonder, Bob shaking his head with a wry smile at the way his Game of Life went, more pegs in his car than he'd expected and a totally different house than he could've imagined at the start. And maybe he doesn't just have to be talking about marriage and kids - maybe just the fact that things, and outlooks, can change is really what life's all about. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #151: New Morning

If there's a phrase that you might be able to use as a definition for the generation that I grew up in, for better or ill, it might be "Generation Irony". "Irony", to be honest, is something difficult to pin down; much like the infamous pornography test, you'd probably know it if you saw it. But it's become redolent in our society, something that, when properly utilized, can make something funny and interesting on a deeper level than it might have been otherwise...and, when not properly utilized, is just as aggravating and worthy of disdain as my elders (and even some of my peers) say it is. I think of the brilliant quote from the "Homerpalooza" episode of The Simpsons, in which a Gen-X teenager is asked if he's being sarcastic (the bastard cousin of ironic) and the response is a weary, depressed "I don't even know anymore." There's only really so far you can go with irony, with being detached from what you might consider real life, before that line is completely washed away. And that's not a good thing.

Many people, I think, would agree that the concept of America as an ironic culture kind of came about as a result of America becoming a distrustful culture - i.e., the Watergate scandal, coming on the heels of the Pentagon Papers and the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. I'm not going to sit here and say that the idea of distrusting authority as a whole (and the government in particular) came about solely because of the 1960s (which, I imagine, some might lead you to believe); what I will say is that if you're looking for a flashpoint, that's as good as any, and few events say more about why authority SHOULDN'T be trusted than Nixon's slow, painful slide into disgrace. The thing that should be noted about distrust of authority and the bringing of irony into our culture is that it's a genie that most definitely cannot be stuffed back into the bottle. And I would argue that's certainly a good thing; it's better that we don't go tripping into the world as a bunch of doe-eyed innocents who trust everybody in a position of power over us. But there's something kind of sad in that we can no longer be doe-eyed innocents (well, it's possible, but probably not recommended unless you're Amish or something), and that the ability to have that sort of unswerving faith in authority has been shattered forever.

I think about these things when I listen to "New Morning", a track that (from all appearances) seems to be unencumbered by irony on any level. Wikipedia's description calls it "wry", but even that seems somewhat unconvincing; when you're dealing with lyrics like "This must be the day that all of my dreams come true/So happy just to be alive/Underneath the sky of blue", the only way you can really call that "wry" is if you're actively trying to make it so. That is, I think, one of the things that can make this album somewhat difficult to deal with - Dylan, who you could argue was one of the most ironic and detached artists to ever live during the Electric Trilogy era, has put out an album with nearly no preconceptions, no hidden agendas, and no motives other than to be a collection of songs about where Dylan's head was at during this part of his life*. Even Nashville Skyline, an album where Bob had his heart imprinted directly on his sleeve, could be excused as a genre exercise (which, we can agree, is a little bit ironic), as this album could to some extent. But the actual lyrics?

I must confess that, to my modern ears, my love for this album does occasionally waver a bit when I mull over this particular conundrum. The songs are good, make no mistake...but is Bob really as invested as he seems to be (and as I'd like him to be, trusting soul that I am)? Should I be suspicious of just how soaring that chorus, all major chords, sweeping organ runs, and Bob leaping headfirst into one of his simplest and most memorable refrains, sounds blaring through my headphones? What am I to make of Bob singing about yet another pastoral setting, rooster's crowing and rabbits running and a freakin' groundhog, of all things, popping up? Do I trust my instincts and believe that Bob's really singing about something that he cares about, which makes the song a not half-bad pop ditty that manages to be just a little, teeny-weeny bit life-affirming? Or do I go with what some writers (and, IIRC, one or two commenters on this here blog) have suggested, that Bob was putting on a show for us rubes, either pretending or trying to convince himself that the country life was the one for him, probably not meaning it deep down inside?

You know what? I think I'm going to stick with my instincts here. There's too much unassuming joy here, in the (somewhat amateurishly, but whatever) picked acoustic solo to start the song, Dylan putting what sounds like his all into singing "so happy to just hear you smile", and that truly anthemic chorus, to simply discount or try to explain away. What the hell; sixties or no (yes, this is 1970, but you know what I mean), there was still room in the world for a paean to living the life of a quiet country gentleman without having to assume that it's a pile of bullshit. Hey, this whole "benefit of the doubt" thing is kinda cool. I should keep it up.

*well, there's "Day of the Locusts", but you could even argue that that's just Bob singing about his own insecurities, which is also a very direct thing to do, right? Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #150: If Dogs Run Free

When I've talked about the "jazzy" side of New Morning, I'm usually thinking more about the distinctive piano playing style (compare and contrast with what he's doing on, say, "Ballad of a Thin Man"), the light band accompaniment throughout (never have I heard so many drum brushsticks played on a Dylan album before), and Dylan's loosest arrangements yet (see "Time Passes Slowly", which basically stops on a dime so Dylan can indulge his ivory-tickling side). That's not to say that all jazz can be described that way, just that in terms of how the album sounds, it's easier to use those sorts of comparisons than to suggest Dylan created some brand new genre out of whole cloth or something. And there's no better distillation of the mood of this album than "If Dogs Run Free", one of the few songs Dylan has ever written that could persuasively argued is its own island in his catalog. Sure, the song is in line with the jazz-based styling of much of this album, but none of those songs are so, well, outright jazz; we have scat singing in the background, Dylan banging away at the keys like a lounge singer with a brandy snifter on his piano for tips, a guitar playing random and aimless lines, and Dylan speak-singing his lyrics in the most casual way possible. It's really something else.

Now...does that actually make the song GOOD? That's a little harder to say. On the one hand, you really do want to give Bob points for trying; the song has the relaxed feel down cold, like Dylan really wanted to get some snaps of approval from the engineers after the take was laid down. And it's hard not to love the song's goofy, stoner-philosophy ramblings, one of those post-Electric Trilogy moments where Dylan just lets his mind wander and he babbles on about whatever pops in the ol' melon of his (quite frankly, I don't know how THIS song didn't end up in The Big Lebowski...oops, a little hand-tipping there). On the other, the scatting is more distracting than anything else, and the song might be a little too relaxed, more experiment than actual tune. Experiments are fine, but at a certain point you have to stick the tunes in there, or else you get the Panda Bear album*. "If Dogs Run Free" sorta wanders around the tune, like someone circling a mall parking lot on the final pre-Christmas weekend, but it never manages to pull into a space.

Kudos to Bob for trying, though. In the post for "Wigwam" I made mention of how you could see Dylan reaching for something really big and ambitious with the sprawl of Self Portrait, only for one reason or another it never quite came off. Well, here's the thing: this album actually DOES have effort behind it, and that's what helps put it an extra peg ahead. One of the lazier criticisms people will lob against jazz is that it's intrinsically lazy in its composition, that the free-form nature of the modal stuff Miles Davis helped usher in or even something like "If I Were A Bell" might as well have been put together in the studio 5 minutes before the tape started rolling. Not only this is incredibly simplistic, but rather insulting to guys like Gil Evans, who put together remarkable arrangements thanks to having good ears for what works and what doesn't. And I think that Dylan, both on this album proper and this song especially, had to have his good ears working if he wanted the whole thing to work. This is, after all, uncharted waters for him; if he didn't put in some work and give his arrangements at least a little structure (and I do mean "little" at times), the whole thing would fall apart. If you've heard bad jazz, you know what I mean.

"If Dogs Run Free" is not my favorite song on here, but it might be the most representative. Just like some of the best comedic improvisers get there from hours and hours of practice, a song this relaxed and this surface-level effortless had to have come from Bob using his songwriting instincts to patch together every seemingly aimless element of this tune and duct-tape it all together into something that, while not a classic, at least works. That was one of the great problems of the last album - he patched together a lot of shit there, too, but it just didn't work. Here, though, the arrangements hold together, the wandering goes into interesting (rather than soporific) areas, and many of the songs, at their core, are just straight-up good. Believe me, this album wouldn't have been as well-received as it was in 1970 just based on it not being Self Portrait - there had to be quality tracks for those critics to latch onto. And those quality tracks are there, make no mistake about it. And, for that, I think I'll give Dylan some snaps.

*I've said before that I'd rather take a year off the end of my life than hear Person Pitch again. That's rather harsh, in retrospect, but it's always aggravating when a band takes material that might make a pretty darn good EP and tries to stretch a whole album out of it. At a certain point, you realize you're just listening to fat that should've been trimmed. It's not pleasant. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #149: Winterlude

Eyolf Ostrem, curator of the astoundingly awesome Dylanchords website, has a nice little line in reference to "Winterlude", where he says the song "has this corny, guy-on-the-sleeve-of-Nashville-Skyline-ish, country dude thing going on". That, honestly, about sums it up. So that's the end of the post. Good night, everybody!

Okay, fine. The reason I really enjoyed reading this line is that you can take the reference to Nashville Skyline as either a compliment or an insult, depending entirely on how you feel about that particular album and the songwriting metier Bob indulged himself in while recording it. As ten posts previous to this one should attest, I like Bob's style on that album just fine; there are many, I'm sure, that disagree. But for those on my side, it would seem somewhat strange to enjoy a song like "Tell Me That It Isn't True" and not go for something like "Winterlude", which almost seems to revel in its droll waltz-like tempo, its moon-June rhymes (but then, of course you'd want to rhyme "Winterlude" with "dude", am I right?) and its peaceful imagery of ice skating rinks and cozying up by the fireplace. I'd already written about the domestic tranquility that Bob brings to this album, and here he basically takes that tranquility to its logical extreme, painting a picture like the kinds that made Norman Rockwell a rich man. That, I'm sure, will put people off.

I will admit that I do find the song a little slight at times, what with some of the more saccharine-sweet imagery ("go down to the chapel, then come back and cook up a meal"? When do the neighborhood carolers come by?) and goofy rhymes ("darlin'" with "quarrelin'" - actually, that's not all THAT bad) kind of grate a little bit. I freely admit that I give songs like these a little bit more leeway, simply because I like the tone of the album so much, but I do have my limits, and "Winterlude" brushes right up to the edge of them. The song, really, works best as part of setting that tone, with its tempo reminiscent of "To Ramona", the gentle backup singing, and Dylan painting those pictures right out of the 1950s we all imagine but probably didn't really exist in that way. It would sound out of place on most any other albums Bob's put out (even Nashville Skyline, really), but it sits just fine here, and that's a good thing.

We all know, I'm sure, that quote Dylan said about his songwriting style, the bit about having to learn to do consciously what he used to do unconsciously; I'm sure I've even quoted it somewhere on this blog. I think about it now because, were that actually true, I can see this song as part of that process, a process that Bob embarked on more or less non-stop for the four years between his neck break and the recording of this album. In those years, Bob goes from the left-field Americana of The Basement Tapes, to the spare mystical folk of John Wesley Harding, to the straight-up country of Nashville Skyline, to the quasi-Western balladry of Self Portrait, and then finally to the jazziness of this album; that sort of stylistic ping-ponging suggests a man trying to get a handle on where his music ought to be, now that it can no longer return to where it used to be (as, of course, it hasn't returned to since). I've been guilty of penning a few bits of doggerel myself, and while nothing is nearly as good as even "Winterlude" is, in this song I see some of what I used to do as a songwriter, grasping for easy rhymes and already built-in emotional imagery, relying on four chords to carry the day, letting sentiment inform my lyrics in occasionally embarrassing ways. It's kind of endearing to think about that and then hear this song, quite frankly.

One of the reasons this album gets overlooked so often, I think, is that you can hear that casting about more on this album than any other pre-1974, even more so than Self Portrait. At least that album was just throwing all sorts of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Here, Bob knows what he's aiming for, he's got his arrangements down and the tone he wants for the album set...and there's something there nonetheless, something that can put people off if they're not in the mood to buy what Dylan's selling. It's funny to say about an album so gentle and unassuming, but it's really an album that needs to be played in a certain frame of mind, or else you're just not going to like it. I wouldn't even go as far to say that's an excuse to say to people that don't like the album no matter what; you can like what you like, obviously. But I find it funny that "Winterlude" shares at least one trait with Metallica's "One", a song that couldn't be more different musically - there's a time and place to listen to it, and if you ain't there, it's not gonna work. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #148: Went To See The Gypsy

One of the things I really like about New Morning is just how relaxed all the songs tend to sound. "Laid-back" is a positive quality that often proves both ephemeral and rather subjective - after all, one could call the previous album "laid-back", and it wouldn't really be a compliment. But with this album (subjectivity again), it feels like Dylan had captured the casual quality that he'd infused into his life after making his escape from the grind of being a full-time musician, with songs that speak to his more relaxed state of mind. Take this song, "Went To See The Gypsy" - the tempo isn't particularly fast, the guitar licks don't so much sting as add spice to the track, and the organ track isn't as powerful or intrusive as other organ tracks on Bob's songs. This song could have been overwhelmed by more instrumentation, or even an arrangement similar to something on Self Portrait, but in the capable hands of the New Morning band everything sounds pretty darn good. Lest you thought Dylan's arranging instincts were dulled on the last album, here's proof that they were still there and in fine form.

The generally held belief about this song is that it has something to do with Elvis Presley; I can't remember if Dylan ever talked about there being some sort of dream involving Elvis or something (he never did meet Elvis in real life), but that story has been sunk into the Dylan legend at some point. There are a few clues to this in the lyrics - "big hotel", "he did it in Las Vegas/and he can do it here", and so on. Dylan's denied it, but big whoop-whoop - I wouldn't be surprised if at one point or another he's denied that Slow Train Coming is an album about God. We all know about young Elston Gunn; actually writing something that pays some sort of tribute to his boyhood idol (even if it's actually referring to the Vegas-era, maximum excess Elvis) would make a lot of sense. And the reference to "that little Minnesota town", where young Bob heard all those rock-n-roll records, helps cements that idea.

Then again, can this really be said as paying any homage to Elvis? After all, the gypsy of the song (and the pretty dancing girl, surely meant to be an embodiment of temptation) basically says two lines and disappears when the narrator goes looking for him again. That dancing girl told the narrator that the gypsy could do all these amazing things, and yet at the end that narrator finds himself back in his small town up North, just staring at the sun rising up, a banal image that manages to be infused with so much poetry. I bet I'm not the first person that thought about the Bob of Greenwich Village, making the move from rock rebel in leather jacket to folk hero in work shirt and blue jeans, perhaps seeing those rockers he idolized as myth, something that fades away if you look too closely, and the lives of those in those small towns (the subject of so many folk songs) as something real and tangible. It's kind of a bittersweet image, something akin to what it's like to grow up and realize that what you held true as a youth turns out to be something entirely different as you grow older.

This is, of course, something we all can sympathize with. If there is one lesson that adulthood (and many of our finest entertainments, from Mad Men to The Replacements' "Unsatisfied") has taught us, it's that the great big wide world we were promised as youngsters somehow manages to become smaller, pettier, and far less satisfying as we grow and mature. I know that's oversimplifying things, and that for many people (including myself, lest you think I'm already some muttering old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn) you can find all sorts of ways to be happy, or at least content, with a life that you could not have imagined ever wanting ten or even five years ago. And yet there is always that vague feeling in the pit of my stomach, this notion that somehow things got turned around and scrambled somewhere down the line, and that I probably missed the boat on something that would've changed my life and brought me infinite joy, but I never even knew that boat existed. I cannot be the only person that has felt this way. I know this is a downer, and I apologize.

I can't help wondering, as I listen to the song again, if that interpretation of "Went To See The Gypsy" is really true and Bob was really thinking about that moment in his life where, after all that zigging, he decided that he wanted to zag instead. Maybe, as he penned the lyrics, there was a slight rueful smile on his face, as he thought about the baby-faced, early-twenties version of himself, wondering where that gypsy went and if it wasn't better to turn away from pretty girls in Vegas (so to speak) and sing about what he saw in front of his own eyes, whether it was the sun rising over Hibbing, a girl he wished he could've brought to Italy, or the injustices of a world that promises so much and so rarely delivers. Of course, things turned out far more complicated than that, and it would not be long before the work shirts were placed in mothballs and the leather jacket pulled out to be worn once again. And that is why Bob is who he is - he surely had the same fears as I have, and he surely felt at some point that he'd missed a boat somewhere...and then he just got on another boat and sailed to where he wanted to sail. One day, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to do that as well. Read more!