Dylan likes to play with the meaning of words. And he does this with the word “hard.” Hard can mean a surface that’s not soft or something complex.  One of the things I love about Dylan is where his words take me. And the road that leads me to thinking he means one sense of a word and then makes me start to think he means another is the poetic road worth my traveling.

He tried to explain about how “Hard Rain” is not about atomic or fallout rain, it’s just a hard rain, “an end that just has to happen.”  Well, hard rain also conjures images of missiles, weapon launches and catastrophic landings, twisted metal and steel shrapnel falling from the sky. But maybe he really meant hard as in complex; the hard rain that’s gonna fall perhaps is hard because after what we’ve done to our environment with pollution this will not be a simple rain–a hard to figure out what it is rain, or worse, what it will do, a rain based on “lies,” the poisoning of our minds.

Here’s the interview with Studs Terkel in which Bob talks about the song’s meaning (he sings it first and then talks about it around 11:00):

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The words that rhyme with “hard” in “Life Is Hard” are all names of hard subjects,  except for the first one:

I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard

Schoolyards and boulevards are hard, concrete and blacktop abound in them.  And being locked and barred has a hardness to it to the touch.  But to be on guard is not hard yet it signifies a rigidness. All told the “hard” rhymes Dylan creates in the song have a nice range of feeling to how life is hard, the sensation of life’s hardness is conjured by the sensations of hard substances and how one feels when on guard.

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Exasperation is the tone in “Narrow Way.”  The bridge underscores this:

It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I can’t work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me someday.

The narrow way is biblical, i.e., Matthew 7:14, “”For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Struggle to get somewhere, yes, but there’s in the song a resistance or an unwillingness to put up with the situation (whatever it is) being so difficult to achieve.  So the speaker holds the other accountable–if I can’t get there, you gotta meet me at least halfway.

Threats are present, too–this is not a voice of supplication or subservience–the terrific “hard“/”unscarred” rhyme is an example”

I’m armed to the hilt, and I’m struggling hard
You won’t get out, of here unscarred.

This is a lashing out against someone, maybe a some thing or even a deity.  It’s a Dylan whose bell still rings with its voice of revolt and invectives hurled in rhymes.

I like to think of Bob Dylan, as  a guard, a sentinel, a sentry of sorts. I’ve always anticipated each album release as a chance to see how Dylan looks at our world. His mind’s eye matters to me. What he watches over, what matters to him enough to write and sing about is what he guards for those of us who have followed him for years.

If you glance at some of his album covers over the years, he looks like a guard, watching and looking out for us. As in The Times They Are a Changin:

That downward stare emanates disdain, scorn for what he sees, but it’s a look of contemplation, too, as if what’s worse is what the world is forcing him to think about.

And here he is again on the cover of Highway 61, sitting as if in his rock star throne, just dying to ask “How does it feel?” to just about anyone who approaches:

And is it any surprise that on an album with “Changing Of The Guards” that Dylan would be seen standing in a doorway on the lookout for who or what knows what:

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Maybe admitting anything is hard. Burden it with admitting your life is hard, or that you think in general life is hard, then add admitting to someone life is hard without them.  Not so hard, well, maybe it’s something hard to admit to one’s self, especially when you’re alone and that person is nowhere near you:

I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

Just to survive such admission might be dangerous, what if I can’t go on? I may need the “strength to face that world outside.”  It’s a sad song, “Life is Hard,” days are barren, hearts are locked away.

Be on guard for what you may admit to when you’re forced to face the world on your own, like a rolling stone:

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Dylan takes awhile to sing the title line in “Changing of the Guards,” 8 verses out of 9, to be exact. Only one word rhymes, with “guards,” because it only appears once, and that word is “cards”:

Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards

Peace will come
With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when her false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and the Queen of Swords

A live version from 78, the year the album was released.

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You love someone but he/she sends you no regards, sends someone out to have you barred  . . . now that’s pretty hard to deal with. In “Temporary Like Achilles,” things get harder and harder for the would be lover, while the words that rhyme with hard keep piling up.  “heart” and “hard” have a kind of assonance, and the heart being referred to is questioned as being made of stone,  solid rock even.  The “guard” rhyme with “hard” helps phrase the deepest question, puts it back on the object of the devotion:

Just what do you think you have to guard?
You know I want your lovin’
Honey, but you’re so hard

If nothing else gets her (assuming gender)  to let down her guard this might, but if the guard is actually someone like Achilles, well this is going to get even harder:

Achilles is in your alleyway
He don’t want me here, he does brag
He’s pointing to the sky
And he’s hungry, like a man in drag
How come you get someone like him to be your guard?
You know I want your lovin’
Honey, but you’re so hard

Now Achilles is rock solid hard, all brawn, but he once did dress in drag, ordered to by his mother to make him avoid going to war. But he was hungry for battle, his nature was to be a warrior. Capture Achilles in that moment of his myth and make him your guard? Well that’s bound to be temporary.  Maybe there’s hope in breaking down or losing that guard altogether after all.

Back to the myth: here is a painting from Greek Mythology Link of the moment when Odysseus discovers Achilles’ disguise:

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The beginning of this blog post depicts Dylan as a guard, a sentry, and the internal rhyme with “guard” makes a similar association:

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.

But he’s not speaking of a guard in the sense of a sentinel or sentry; the guard here is his resistance, his ability to stay on guard, but the image of his guard standing hard creates the image of a guard, his guard is kept up hard like a person standing guard, this in the face of “abstract threats” made him believe he “had something to protect” which is what guards do.  This is terrific wordplay, stretching the meaning of “guard” to multi-meanings, or two at least, and ignited, by the rhyme word “hard.”

Here’s Bob performing this excellent song in Glasgow, 1995. Listen for the crowd chiming in on the chorus.

There’s a moment in his 1965 press conference in San Francisco when Dylan says, “It doesn’t mean anything.” It’s an  exceptional moment from an interview that’s typically evasive, amusing, giddy, and glib, the usual fodder from early Dylan interviews, but I think it’s candid and truthful.  He understands and wants to express the meaninglessness.

To some extent, the cannon of Dylan is really an attempt to figure out what things mean. Songs like “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” “Things Have Changed” and “Brownsville Girl” address the searching for meaning directly.  In others, there’s a straining to know what things mean, or worse, meant. What something or even someone used to mean is a harder question even than what something or someone means. His love songs are painful because they address what someone meant to the speaker, something that can never have the same meaning again. Other songs are amusing and deep because the search for meaning in them holds up a mirror to the absurdity of searching for any meaning at all.

Come with me on this journey to find out what meaning “meant” as a rhyming word can have in Dylan’s songs.

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In “Life Is Hard” “meant” rhymes with “went” and the meaning known is what two things used to mean but not what they mean now; those two things are the will and the way:

The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will
Can’t tell you where they went
I just know what they meant
I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

He came and went. He was here but now he’s gone. Many Dylan songs are about comings and goings, arrivals and departures. Most of them have to do with lost loves, relationships gone south but with the yearning for them still in place (“Most Of The Time“) or the suffering from the yearning expressed (“Love Sick“). The need to travel on, move ahead, be gone, sever ties, are shared in them, painfully sometimes, if not most times. “Boots Of Spanish Leather,” “One Too Many Mornings,” Down The Highway,” “Tangled Up In Blue” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” come immediately to my mind.

Other comings and goings involve death. The ballads are about people who went to their deaths, often abruptly, unjustly, tragically.  Songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “A Pawn In Their Game,” “Only A Hobo,” “7 Curses,” and “Who Killed Davey Moore” are not only memorable as finger-pointing songs but for the feelings pity and tragedy evoke in us.

Like the film I’m Not There, the latest video version of “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” traces the comings and goings of Dylan’s personas:

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The “went” rhyme in “Life Is Hard” conveys something gone but how we’re left with the traces, past being never dead, not even past:

The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will
Can’t tell you where they went
I just know what they meant
I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

Way and will are gone, but their meaning remains with the speaker. If you think about it that is the way with all meaningful things gone–they are gone but what they meant to us remains; hard to shake what brings meaning to our lives, partly why life is hard.

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“Tin Angel” is about by desertion. It’s the Boss’s wife we learn from the start who has gone and left her husband:

It was late last night when the boss came home
To a deserted mansion and a desolate throne
Servant said: “Boss, the lady’s gone
She left this morning just ‘fore dawn.”

Later, on the road to revenge his men desert him:

Well, they rode all night, and they rode all day
Eastward, long down the broad highway
His spirit was tired and his vision was bent
His men deserted him and onward he went

The Boss goes, too, ardent-hearted, bent on going, vision bent, narrowed to the narrow way, “bent”/”went” rhymed for emphasis, this theme tune following him wherever he goes, which is to his own death:

He crawled to the corner and he lowered his head
He gripped the chair and he grabbed the bed
It would take more than needle and thread
Bleeding from the mouth, he’s as good as dead

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“Roll On, John” consists of eight stanzas with an irregular rhyming pattern, perhaps partly caused by lines coming directly from so many of Lennon’s lyrics.  The first stanza fools us into what could be a consistent a/b/c/a/c rhyming:

Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day
Another bottle’s empty
Another penny spent
He turned around and he slowly walked away
They shot him in the back and down he went

The “e” in “empty” and “went” have assonance and then “spent” hooks up with “went” for a perfect rhyme. But the “roll on, Johns” break up the continuity, a broken pattern to fit a world broken by Lennon’s departure, his “journey’s end:
Shine your light, move it on, you burn so bright, roll on John
From the Liverpool docks to the red light Hamburg streets
Down in the quarry with the Quarrymen.
Playing to the big crowds Playing to the cheap seats
Another day in your life until your journey’s end
Shine your light, move it on, you burn so bright, roll on John

The “roll on, John” lines aside the rhyming goes a/b/a/b.

By verse three, the rhyming is disrupted into a/b/c/d/c:

Sailing through the tradewinds
Bound for the sun
Rags on your back just like any other slave
They tied your hands and they clamped your mouth
Wasn’t no way out of that deep dark cave

Bob Dylan never met a word he couldn’t rhyme.  With Bob, where there’s a will there’s a rhyme.  This blog post is dedicated to seeing that through, how Bob rhymed the word “will” through all his songs, that is.  The goal is to follow “will“‘s power as a Dylan rhyming word.  Bob asks a lot of questions with “will,” “How many deaths will it take til we know . . .” etc.  But will as an expression of one’s determination, a desire to fulfill intentions is what I get mostly from Dylan songs, whether he uses “will” or not.  “Will” means future tense, but it can also connote the past, as in a legal document to be read after a death.

In “Life Is Hard” will combines for a perfect rhyme with “still.” Life can be hard when one’s will is lost, acknowledged more so later in the song:

I just know I need strength to fight
Strength to fight that world outside

Being still and Bob Dylan don’t go together.  He is always moving, changing, on the go, gone even before he gets there.  Many of his songs are about moving on, being unable to keep still, being on the road again, wind blowing him up and down the street, freewheeling Bob, never able to gather moss, much like a rolling stone.  But “still” as in continuous, as in rhyming Simon’s “still crazy after all these years,” is suited to Dylan much better.  His self-dubbed never ending tour gets him into places where his appearance inspires, “Is he still around, still touring, still singing, still putting out records, still performing, still singing “Blowin In The Wind”?  And the answer is yes to all—still doing what he’s been doing since he first arrived in Greenwich Village six decades ago.

“Still” examined as a Dylan rhyme word has the promise of revealing stillness and movement in his songs.  I’m certain movement will win out, but maybe it sometimes will in contrast to what Dylan makes still for us.  Each song is a like a photograph—movement caught in repose, sometimes deep repose as in the silence one finds in say the still of the night or in the “still” rhyme that begins “Life Is Hard”:

The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will

Still winds are no winds at all, just as losing your way and will suggests no way and no will at all, nothing to you at all.  No wind, no way, no will.  A chilly wind appears at the end of “Life Is Hard”:

The sun is sinking low
I guess it’s time to go
I feel a chilly breeze
In place of memories
My dreams are locked and barred
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me
Be still the song seems to say and then you can still move again.

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At the end of the first verse in “Scarlet Town,” Dylan keeps the rhyming couplets alive (as he does throughout the song) but uses “still” as an internal rhyme kicker:

In Scarlet Town, where I was born
There’s ivy leaf and silver thorn
The streets have names that you can’t pronounce
Gold is down to a quarter of an ounce
The music starts and the people sway
Everybody says, “Are you going my way? ”
Uncle Tom still workin’ for Uncle Bill
Scarlet Town is under the hill.

It’s the only verse that ends that way.  The “is” in the middle of the last line also keeps the assonance maintained, “Bill,” “is,” “hill.”  This all seems constructed by someone who knows his rhyming, not over the hill with use of it, not over the hill like Scarlet Town isn’t, described instread as being “under the hill.”  Still plenty to do and experience when not over the hill.  “All things are beautiful in their time” the last verse states.  But Dylan’s time has not come, his bell still rings, after all.

Give a listen, with scenes from, Masked And Anoymous (thank you SYDHARTHA SHIVA whoever and wherever you are).

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“Shake, Mama, Shake” has “still” in it the way I hoped and expected Dylan to use it, that is as a way to show the movement in stillness and the stillness in movement, as John Keats does so well in the last stanza of “To Autumn,”

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Such movement, such arousal of the five senses, but all so quiet, mellowed, lazy, and serene.

“Shake” is packed with three line verses all with line ending rhymes, the second verse with “still” repeated with “hill”:

Well it’s early in the evening and everything is still
Well it’s early in the evening and everything is still
One more time, I’m walking up on heartbreak hill

The speaker is walking, thus the movement, but everything is still, but just maybe everything is still including the speaker.  Heartbreak hill may not be a place, but a feeling inside, not unlike the feeling of doing 21 miles and hitting heartbreak hill in Boston.  Emotionally that is the feeling of heartbreak, but who would know, often heartbreak is kept inside relegated to a stillness of the mind and body while the heart is moving–just ask the Tin Man when he says goodbye to Dorothy.

Usually, I like to keep the audio and video of songs on this blog to Dylan himself, but I found a video of  Canadian Ryan Boldt, lead singer and guitarist of The Deep Dark Woods (speaking of stillness) that is quite moving (pun not intended).   I find his voice both penetrating and soothing; like the bow leaving the violin, his voice remains after the song is over:

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“Still” is used 9 times in “Ain’t Talkin,” not surprising since it appears in the refrain of this long song.  The short i vowel sound dominates the refrain with “still” echoing from all the “talkin” and “walkin” going on in it.  There’s much “burnin” and “yearnin,” too, all working to muster a short i-fest throughout the song.

the 8th time “still” appears is the only time it links with a word to create a clean rhyme, and the rhyme is all internal:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
Walkin’ ever since the other night
Heart burnin’, still yearnin’
Walkin’ ‘til I’m clean out of sight

“burnin still“/”walkin til” is the full rhyme, not just “still” with “til.”

Much has been made of Dylan’s borrowing from Ovid in this song, from a text that Ovid probably wrote while exiled. Dylan sings it like an exiled wanderer, walkin, burnin, and yearnin.

Here’s a video of it done with much walkin:

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Of “Positively Fourth Street.” Christopher Ricks says the song “has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.” Of the second line in the last verse of “Not Dark Yet” with “still” completing the couplet rhyme with “will,” Ricks says, “This as contemplation,  not as confrontation.”  So not so threatening then, but hard to conceive.  It would be easier to conceptualize a person standing still but whose mind is moving; here Dylan says he’s moving or it looks that way yet he’s standing still.  I guess we’re all moving since the earth we live on is and that kind of movement is against our will as well, just like being born and dying though not from suicide.

What Dylan does will in this song is many rhymes; each two lines are couplets, and he sings each one in such an unforced fluent and achingly beautiful tone.  Yes, the next to last verse shows his movement from Paris to the sea, but the speaker’s mind is stagnant, numb even, he sings (love that “numb”/”from” rhyme):

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Ricks observes the Keatsian influence in the song–namely to “Ode to a Nightingale.” Much heartache in both, much nearness to the end (not dark yet), fading, even half loving death.  “Do I wake or sleep?,” Keats ends the poem, “not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Still moving but standing still.

This song is always worth a listen:

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By the time you get to the end of “Neighborhood Bully,” Dylan starts pounding away with questions.  Not only is the message clear that we still have to endure bullying and being bullied, stereotypes, propaganda, politics, war, etc., but we still have to put up with having to ask these same damn questions.  How much longer? How much longer?  The “hill”/”still” rhyme in the last stanza is housed amidst questions and time as a factor:

What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully

Running out the clock while time stands still is a paradox–one that gets to the complexities involved with the Middle East.   Both the bully on the hill and time are still, standing targets, the bully with time on his side, but the clock is ticking, how much longer?

Good collage of Bob with this 1983 recording session of “Neighborhood Bully” from vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/50603569

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“Heart of Mine” uses “still” as in calm down, suppress y0ur restlessness.   Dylan commands his heart in this song, advising it to resist giving into passion and thereby deflecting the commitment, hurt, and guilt that will come from it.  It’s a song that does not trust trust in a relationship.  But while doing so it also accuses the heart, his heart of being “malicious and so full of guile,” not trusting it either or most of all. The first line uses “still” to set the tone:

Heart of mine be still
You can play with fire but you’ll get the bill
Don’t let her know
Don’t let her know that you love her
Don’t be a fool, don’t be blind
Heart of mine

(Taken from Norbert Baro’s website I’ve Got a Song to Sing)

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“Senor” is an exhausting song, or rather its about exhaustion.  Its universe is the long trail, the dusty unending road, where people on it just keep asking questions like, “Do you know where we’re headin’?” and “How long are we gonna be ridin’?”  It’s a song begging to use the word “still.”  And Dylan does use it all at once three times in the third verse:

There’s a wicked wind still blowin’ on that upper deck
There’s an iron cross still hangin’ down from around her neck
There’s a marchin’ band still playin’ in that vacant lot
Where she held me in her arms one time and said, “Forget me not”

There is a presence of he said, she said in Dylan.  Of course, all things said in Dylan are sung by him. It would be an interesting study to collect all the dialogue in Dylan songs to see it all as one big conversation, “said” included as a rhyme word done, marked, recorded as in a transcript . . . finality . . .

You can’t take back what’s been said in Dylan (you can go back, but not all the way, especially after what’s been said), it’s all there on the page, in the lyrics, in the air from his voice.

“said” ends “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.”  “said” having the last word is ironic, especially since it speaks of “nothin” said:

My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said

I was thinkin’ ’bout the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleepin’ in Rosie’s bed

The reality another.  Of course, thinking can lead to dreaming. Rosie’s words stirred up in the mind can jingle a dream that puts the dreamer smack dab in her bed.  The voice and the physical strange bed partners? Not in this song where staying one day too long can make you hear and dream things that later on you might say, that was the one thing I did wrong.

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Odysseus knows a thing or two about staying too long.  The day he does so with the Sun-god he falls asleep (dreaming of Circe? Calypso?) and while he does, his men eat the Sun-god’s sacred cows as depicted in this painting by Johannus Stradanus:

“Mississippi” ends with the message, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Odysseus’ men pay for their forbidden act with their lives, Odysseus for his sleep with the loss of his men.  Yes, you can go back but not all the way back, as you thought of maybe dreamed.  Dreams do affect reality, as do rhymes about saying and sleeping.

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Lot of “he said” and “she did” in “Standing in the Doorway.”  She (is it a she, is the speaker a he?) done left him in the doorway crying, but when it comes down to it (literally down the end of the song), the said rhyme says it all:

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I see nothing to be gained by any explanation
There are no words that need to be said
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head

Yes, nothing to say, just tears and blues.  And an excellent blues tune it is ending with nothing to say, but plenty to sing, not to say, but a need to sing the blues. Dylan singing, those blues, this song at Wembley, 2000 (no visual–“the light in this place is so bad”?):

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Christopher Ricks hands us over eight pages on “Handy Dandy” in his chapter that focuses on Envy in Dylan’s Visions of Sin. He gives attention to the song linking him and Michael Gray to how they both find the song terrific.  Ricks distinguishes himself from Gray in how he sees the song as scary, and he ties what he calls the “You’ll say / He’ll say routine” in at as part of the fright, “as if someone is being instructed in a code of behavior.”  This makes the “said“/”dead” rhyme ominous, threading the motif of threat through the song:

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You say, “What are ya made of?”
He says, “Can you repeat what you said?”
You’ll say, “What are you afraid of?”
He’ll say, “Nothin’! Neither ’live nor dead.”

Yes, as Ricks notes, what’s neither live nor dead is money, HD is made of money, and probably drug money, i.e. the candy that he’s just like with sugar (on top? over the top?).

Ricks refers the game handy-dandy, defined the OED as “A children’s game in which a small object is shaken between the hands by one of the players, and, the hands being suddenly closed, the other player is required to guess in which hand the object remains.”  The expression has been used to mean “change of places, alternately, in rapid alternation.”   Sounds a little like Dylan himself.  Is Dylan the “hand-dandy” in the song?  Here are a couple of turn of the century dandies:

Dylan can look rather dandy himself:

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In “Ugliest Girl In The World” “said” diverts attention away from bed, which might be good, especially if who’s lying in the bed is the ugliest girl in the world:

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The woman that I love she got two flat feet
Her knees knock together walking down the street
She cracks her knuckles and she snores in bed
She ain’t much to look at but like I said

What Dylan has already said is the bridge, which gets sung four times in the song; after this verse it appears again for the third time:

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You know I love her
Yeah I love her
I’m in love with the Ugliest Girl in the World

At the end of the verse ending with the “bed”/”said” rhyme completed is the image of a snoring woman, who we also learn in this verse has two flat feet (not good for a poem/song either), has a knee-knocking walk, and cracks her knuckles.  So her ugliness is not relegated to her looks; sounds matter in Dylan’s depiction of ugly.  And sounds matter with the rhyme that takes us from the image of the snoring woman to the bridge, “but like I said,” which brings us to “love,” three times in each chorus.  Image of ugly, sound of ugly, rhyme, love.  Vintage Dylan!

Another poet has something to say about an ugly woman, Shakespeare in his sonnet 130:

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Ricks makes a fuss about “lines” in “Brownsville Girl.” “[M]uch is made of lines in this song,” he says.  And, of course, songs/poems are made up of lines, as Ricks acknowledges.  Dylan is hip to being at the end of the line or over the line as themes but also as phrases that pertain and bring attention to the lines on the page, which Dylan puts in the air when he sings them.  “She studied the lines of my face” is a famous line of Dylan’s, and aren’t the lines of a song as personal as a songwriter’s/poet’s face?  Be that all as it may, “said” is what matters on this page, and it s what’s over the line in “Brownsville Girl,” appearing 9 times to “line”‘s mere 3.

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I recently tweeted that when I listen tom “Brownsville Girl” I feel like I’m at a pub overhearing Bob conversing with the bartender.  What we remember most about “Brownsville Girl” is the unique conversational prose he pours into it.  But there’s a great deal of rhyming in it, end of the line ones where we expect rhymes.  And good ones, too, some over the line, over the top:  “soft”/”off,” “soul”/”control,” “curls”/”world.”

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“said” never ends a line, but it appears so often that it smacks of internal rhyming, perhaps to keep the prose in line; it’s a poem Dylan seems to want to remind us with the end of the line rhymes.  When the prose gets going, “said” seems to reign it in.  This verse is a good example:

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She said, “Welcome to the land of the living dead”
You could tell she was so broken hearted
She said, “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt”

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Prose and poetry battling it out–always worth eavesdropping on that (from The Essential, with lyrics at the bottom, line by line:

“Brownsville Girl”

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When Dylan was recently accused of sucking up to Chinese authority by agreeing to have his playlist censored there, included in the songs he performed was “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking.”  The title alone suggests diversion from mind control.  Dylan himself had this to say about the episode:

“As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.”

My bet is that if Dylan was forced not to play a song he would either have not performed or would have just changed the lyrics of accepted songs to sing what he wanted to anyway.

Speaking of lyric changes, that’s what happened in 2003 to “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking,” which Michael Gray calls a duet version of with Mavis Staples as “ferocious” “[pacing] menacingly between the spiritual and secular worlds.”

Missing from the 2003 version is the stanza with “said.”  “said” in the 1979 original creates both internal rhyme and the presence of “Jesus” with the sounds in his name Jeee . . . suuus”:

Jesus said, “Be ready
For you know not the hour in which I come”
Jesus said, “Be ready
For you know not the hour in which I come”
He said, “He who is not for Me is against Me”
Just so you know where He’s coming from

e and s sounds abound, nothing much against those sounds in this verse.  Jesus is coming from those sounds, watch out for them.

This verse is replaced in the 2003 version with a different Jesus presence:

Jesus is calling, He’s coming back to gather up his jewels
Jesus is calling, He’s coming back to gather up his jewels
We living by the golden rule, whoever got the gold rules

Here’s the ferocious 2003 version with Mavis, including dialogue between them:

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Who gets to say what in “Hurricane” is lopsided.  Bello and Bradley speak one time, but the cops and the D.A 4.  Hurricane is silenced, a fitting gag on a man depicted in the song as a victim of a system Dylan is ashamed of:

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Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.

The word “said” in the fourth verse first appears in a line that begins a rhyme and then three lines later finishes a rhyme:

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Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops
Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just out prowlin’ around
He said, “I saw two men runnin’ out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”
And Miss Patty Valentine just nodded her head
Cop said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead”

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I’ve always loved the way Dylan sings that last line.  Perhaps an underrated quality of Dylan’s singing is how well he voices the words of characters in his songs.

Dylan singing “Hurricane” live, 1975 at Madison Square Garden:

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“I said” and “Isis” work well together in “Isis.”  In the next to last verse there’s a barrage of “she saids” and I saids“:

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She said, “Where ya been?” I said, “No place special”
She said, “You look different.” I said, “Well, not quite”
She said, “You been gone.” I said, “That’s only natural”
She said, “You gonna stay?” I said, “Yeah, I jes might”

and yes this is dialogue, not poetry, at least we read it that way.  The sound of it though keeps “Isis” alive throughout the song, as in the last verse,

Isis, oh, Isis, you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzlin’ rain

s’s and i’s banging together and reverberating in memorable ways.

“said” also appears though at the end of a line finishing the rhyme with “wed” in verse 6:

How she told me that one day we would meet up again
And things would be different the next time we wed
If I only could hang on and just be her friend
I still can’t remember all the best things she said

“again” and “friend” don’t rhyme no matter how hard you try, but “wed”/”said” rhymes no matter how you say it.  Yet, “again” looks like it has a better shot at rhyming with “said,” even a better chance as “Isis” rhyming with “I said.”  But it doesn’t.  Don’t trust your eyes, Dylan seems to be saying, trust the sound, trust what you hear, trust going to “the wild unknown country where [you can] not go wrong.” Trust a voice like this singing Isis in 1975, yes, it IS NECESSARY!!:

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5 “saids” are sung in “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack of Hearts,” just enough for a hand of poker.  The first “said,” beginning the second verse, comes up aces with the only rhyming “said” in the lyrics”

He moved across the mirrored room, “Set it up for everyone,” he said
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads

The other 4 “saids” are found in the middle of verses, the second setting up what the backstage manager says, the third what Lily says, the fourth what legacy or rumor says, and the fifth what a sign says.As Ricks says, this song is the “world of the Western,” where you better mean what you say, like when in a duel, as in this one with Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral, for you Tombstone fans:***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************”said” heralds a nice “head”/”instead” rhyme in the fourth verse of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat“:Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

It’s a doctor who is quoted, and by the end of the verse he’s wearing the hat, which bothers the speaker, not the being cheated on, but that he’s wearing the hat.  Hilarious, the image and the absurd response.

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According to bobdylan.com, Dylan has sung the song live 534 times.  I find that lopsided, like “a mattress balances/On a bottle of wine.”  Why has this song gotten so much attention from Bob?  Maybe because he gets a kick out of it himself.  Bob’s humor is underrated.

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One of the 534:

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I write this on Bob Dylan’s 72nd birthday.  Bob was 24 when “From a Buick 6” was released in on Highway 61 Revisited.  It’s the fourth cut on a brilliant, landmark album that set him free from the expectations the folk community placed on him and defined the mark he would make on the sixties and his generation.  How fitting that the album appeared right smack dab in the middle of the 1960’s.  Arguably, it is the counter-culture epicenter with a distinct sound never achieved before and never to be again.

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The “said” rhyme in “Buick 6” is a cascading one, with three words echoing the the “ed” sound in the song’s last stanza:

Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head
She brings me everything and more, and just like I said
Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed.

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Each stanza has a rhyming word with the chorus’s “bed,” but the last stanza with  “said” is the only one with two words rhyming with it, “dead” and “said.”  The song ends with a reminder the the chorus has been sung before, “just like I said . . .” Choruses are reinforced in songs via repetition; here “said” is used for more reinforcement . . . remember what I said.

Bob has not gone “down dyin” yet; but if he does, well just like he said . . . Today though we celebrate his birth. Happy Birthday, Bob. Here’s to all those junkyard angels.  Play this loud, very loud in his honor:

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“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is a rollicking zany frolic, with the word “said” used 15 times. The one it’s used in rhyme, repetition of the word aside, is with the -ed sound in “exploded”:

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I went into a restaurant
Lookin’ for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
The waitress he was handsome
He wore a powder blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said
“Could you please make that crepe”
Just then the whole kitchen exploded
From boilin’ fat
Food was flying everywhere
And I left without my hat

For over five decades much has exploded when Bob Dylan says something–it’s clever to have a rhyme be the trigger to one here.  But the trigger is actually identified as “boilin fat.”  It’s just a coincidence that when the speaker spoke the explosion happened.  But we can take what we gather from coincidence, and I rather believe that words, spoken or written, have caused more explosions than fat throughout history.

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Speaking of words, there’s lots of them in “115th Dream,” 774 to be exact.  Here are all of them sung by Bob Live In New York in 1988:

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“Man on the Street” is  a poignant piece, one that makes you stop and think about the lives of the less fortunate.  It is Woody Guthrie-esque in it what it forces us to look at and in its slice of life depiction of injustice.  The “said“/”dead” rhyme comes from the mouth of an insensitive police officer whose beat perhaps has numbed him to scenes like this that maybe have been too numerous for his humanity to be maintained:

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Well, the p’liceman come and he looked around,
“Get up, old man, or I’m a-takin’ you down.”
He jabbed him once with his billy club
And the old man then rolled off the curb.Well, he jabbed him again and loudly said,
“Call the wagon; this man is dead.”
The wagon come, they loaded him in,
I never saw the man again.

The policeman pronounces the man dead. What he said announces a death, the rhyme uniting the two contextually.  Below is the outtake from Dylan’s bootleg; listen closely to how Dylan stretches out the word “dead,” just enough to underscore the harsh reality and the detachment present from both the policeman and the singer (though the singer somehow knows “he never done wrong”).

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Turns out who killed Davey Moore is a really good question–I mean really good–the kind that gets to the very fabric of how a society is woven.  The song is about accountability–and all the accused Dylan parades through it are in denial, refusing “to think ill of [themselves]” as Christopher Ricks asserts.  The manager even blames the victim, the moment where the “said” rhyme sits:

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“Not me,” says his manager
Puffing on a big cigar
“It’s hard to say, it’s hard to tell
I always thought that he was well
It’s too bad for his wife an’ kids he’s dead
But if he was sick, he should’ve said
It wasn’t me that made him fall
No, you can’t blame me at all”

“said‘/”dead” brings back the voice of the dead–he should’ve said, he, the dead that is.  Well, Dylan speaks for the dead in this song, too.  And we are all left to wonder who killed him, or are we, when after all it was you and me.

“Who Killed Davey Moore” live from the bootleg series:

On almost every one of his album covers Dylan’s head is displayed; in the  case of several that’s all there is, just a head.  He’s worn many hats for those many heads, literally so on his first album, Nashville Skyline, Desire, and World Gone Wrong.  But most times it’s just his crazy, curly hair that adorns that strikingly familiar head:

In my Oxford American Minidictionary the word “head” as a noun has 15 different meanings, just a sample of the many senses this word has–as many perhaps as the number of heads Dylan has displayed for us.

In “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘” head means what sits on the top of one’s body, and a request is made to have a hand lay on top of it:

My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said

No demand for a head on a shoulder, hand to head please . . . better for this weary voyager, heading where nothin’ is or staying to avoid nothin.’  Love is always something,as the beginning of the songs says:

I love you pretty baby
You’re the only love I’ve ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own

Hand to head, such a touch will keep one together through life, but the album cover shows more than just that going on.  Any touch between lovers, a world onto its own.

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A  lot of “heads” roll around in Tempest, rhyming with “bed” five times:

from “Duquesne Whistle“: “I wake up every morning with that woman in my bed/Everybody telling me she’s gone to my head”

“Pay In Blood“:  “You get your lover in the bed/Come here I’ll break your lousy head

“Scarlet Town“:  Mistress Mary by the side of the bed/Kissin’ his face and heapin’ prayers on his head”

“Tin Angel“: “The boss he lay back flat on his bed/He cursed the heat and he clutched his head” and “He crawled to the corner and he lowered his head/He gripped the chair and he grabbed the bed”

The rhyme finds itself in moments of sex, violence, pain, and death. Tempest is one of Dylan’s most violent albums, perhaps the one with the most deaths and threats. “head“/”bed” then becomes a thematic rhyme helping to weave sex and violence throughout the album as a motif.

The  “Duquesne Whistle” video shows this emphasis.   Watch the close-up of the would be lover’s head as it bobs and weaves, descends and rises, gets sprayed with mace, is covered with a hood, gets punched, accumulates more and more blood and scars, and comes near to a kiss, but no where near her bed .  But most of all watch the hands in pocket Dylan leading a gang of all shapes and sizes, genders and ages through this narrative indifferent to the results of violence and unrequited love.

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A friend of mine interprets “Narrow Way” as a dialogue between Dylan and Jesus.  The lines with the “bread”/”head” rhyme lend support for such a theory:

You went and lost your lovely head
For a drink of wine, and a crust of bread

Theories only sometimes work in Dylan within a song, at most, most of the time.  The pronoun references are too slippery to follow and attempts to build narrative, make sense of dialogue or time, well it’s a long and narrow way . . . you take what you need and you leave the rest when you try to interpret Dylan.  But the attempt is worth it.   When I hear the chorus blasting

It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I cant work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me someday

I’m both amused and stimulated by Dylan again whose defiance can include telling even Jesus what to do, the Jesus with lost his “lovely head,” . . . wait . . . that was John the Baptist . . . slippery Dylan at it again.

I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I ain’t got enough room to even raise my head

Dylan loves to thieve.  We all know that.  But Shakespeare did, too.  Most of his plays are created out of other sources.  He may very well have plundered a contemporary’s The Taming of a Shrew to write his own The Taming of the Shrew.   But it’s what he did with previous sources that matters.  Theft, of the kind that involves lifting and then rewriting material from sources, is duplicating followed by invention.  Dylan mirrors this in “The Levee’s Gonna Break” with duplicating rhymes followed by full rhyming words.  “If I keep on writing the duplicate rhyme is gonna break, if I keep on writing the duplicate rhyme is gonna break . . .”

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Call it “cultural plunder” (Lott)or “yoking” (Yaffe) “High Water” is an amalgam of allusions, references, borrowings, gleanings,  and sifting.  That said, the prophet in Dylan sure got it right that after 9/11 (Love and Theft released on 9/11) many people have lived feeling that their heads are just above water.  The song is packed with messages of how tough, rough, and bad it is “out there.”  The verse with the “head”/”lead”/”said” rhyme helps reinforce this sentiment:

High water risin’, six inches ’bove my head
Coffins droppin’ in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin’ into Vicksburg, don’t know what I’m goin’ to do
“Don’t reach out for me,” she said
“Can’t you see I’m drownin’ too?”
It’s rough out there
High water everywhere

There’s keeping just above the dangers and threats, almost drowning, not dark yet but getting there, and we’re in this together–this is all over the place, happening to me and you stuff in this verse.  Coffins droppin like balloons is quite an image.  There’s staying above but going over implied in these lines, too.  Things go over like lead balloons.  Greil Marcus notes that what drops harder than anything in this song is the word “care” and the way Dylan says it in the line, “Either one, I don’t care”/High water everywhere.”  Dylan not caring goes over like a lead balloon. The finger pointing songs we grew up on made him seem to care so much.  Now he “used to care but things have changed.”  Staying above and going over, heady advice for our time though, downright caring, when we look again and see that what we saw is no longer standing there.

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Love sick?  That means your heart must be heavy; you might even feel it more in the stomach.  Where’s your head in all this?  Well, that’s what’s causing the heartache.  I think Bob gets this, and that’s why we find the word “head” early on, almost right away in “Love Sick,” rhyming with “dead”:

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I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

In one verse, Dylan conveys the physical (tired feet), mental (brain is so wired), and emotional (to him even the clouds weep) impact of being sick of love–this kind of love (lust?).  The rhyme suggests this is a kind of death, dead in the head, a whole other take on what it means to be a dead-head.

In a Victoria’s Secret commercial he depicted the kind of love he was talking about.  Sell out?  Well, he once told a reporter if he were ever to sell out lit would be for “ladies’ garments”:

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Michael Gray calls “Standing In The Doorway” one of four major songs on Time Out Of Mind.  David Yaffe puts it on his top 70 list in Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown.  If you’ve ever been left alone, abandoned, tossed aside, rejected, well, this song resonates, finds its way into your heart, your broken one.  Dylan uses “head” twice in the song, once in the second verse rhyming with “bad” and “sad”:

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The light in this place is so bad
Making me sick in the head
All the laughter is just making me sad
The stars have turned cherry red
I’m strumming on my gay guitar
Smoking a cheap cigar
The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Under the midnight moon

How so?  This is a wrenched rhyme, the way Dylan delivers the “ea” sound forces it to rhyme with “bad”/”sad.”  The whole song is wrenching, the sadness is especially–captured so well with the tone of his voice, the highlight being the way he stretches out the word “head,” the last word on the song:

There are no words that need to be said
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head

The “said”/”head” rhyme ends the song.  But it’s not the sound of that rhyme that lingers; it’s the way he stretches out the words that end the last two lines, ” crying” and “head.”  The singer is not the only one the blues wrap around by the end of the song, the listener is, too.  This is a blues song, and the lingering instrumental after the word “head” leaves you with nothing to say and maybe even tearing up if you let the song have its desired effect on you.  The tone of voice and the atmosphere created by it may  be unmatched in any other Dylan song.

Bob singing it on Masked and Anonymous:

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You can head to a life shackled to cold irons, but if you’re heading out to find Cold Irons, forget it.  The town doesn’t exist, at least not in the U.S.  Chicago does though, and if the singer in “Cold Irons Bound” has gotten anywhere we know he’s passed through Chicago. He says,  “the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds/Reality has always had too many heads.”  Reality as the multiple-headed hydra is an interesting image.  Lop one off and two others appear.  If you’re going to try to lop off one of those heads anyway though, you’ll need a weapon, and that’s exactly what cold iron refers to, as in the poem named “Cold Iron” by Rudyard Kipling:

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Gold is for the mistress — silver for the maid —
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.
“Good!” said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.”So he made rebellion ‘gainst the King his liege,
Camped before his citadel and summoned it to siege.
“Nay!” said the cannoneer on the castle wall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — shall be master of you all!”Woe for the Baron and his knights so strong,
When the cruel cannon-balls laid ’em all along;
He was taken prisoner, he was cast in thrall,
And Iron — Cold Iron — was master of it all!Yet his King spake kindly (ah, how kind a Lord!)
“What if I release thee now and give thee back thy sword?”
“Nay!” said the Baron, “mock not at my fall,
For Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all.”Tears are for the craven, prayers are for the clown —
Halters for the silly neck that cannot keep a crown.
“As my loss is grievous, so my hope is small,
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all!”Yet his King made answer (few such Kings there be!)
“Here is Bread and here is Wine — sit and sup with me.
Eat and drink in Mary’s Name, the whiles I do recall
How Iron — Cold Iron — can be master of men all!”He took the Wine and blessed it. He blessed and brake the Bread,
With His own Hands He served Them, and presently He said:
“See! These Hands they pierced with nails, outside My city wall,
Show Iron — Cold Iron — to be master of men all.””Wounds are for the desperate, blows are for the strong.
Balm and oil for weary hearts all cut and bruised with wrong.
I forgive thy treason — I redeem thy fall —
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all!”Crowns are for the valiant — sceptres for the bold!
Thrones and powers for mighty men who dare to take and hold.
“Nay!” said the Baron, kneeling in his hall,
“But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all!
Iron out of Calvary is master of men all!”

“shreds”/heads” is a good rhyme.  Previous to it, “head” appears in the fifth verse:

There’s too many people, too many to recall
I thought some of ’m were friends of mine, I was wrong about ’m all
Well, the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud
Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood

Though not an internal rhyme, “head” works well with “road” in its d-ending accompanying the full “mud”/”blood” rhyme that ends each line.  “head” used twice, two heads better than one, two that appear when you cut off one, from the hydra that is.  You might start with cold iron but hot iron is the key to defeating the hydra.  To stop the growth of more heads, Ialaos helped Heracles brand the stumps from the severed heads, stopping the heads from multiplying.  Heady idea!

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The first things broken in “Everything Is Broken” are lines, and the only “broken” line in the song is in the first verse, broken because it has the only unrhymed end of line word and because the verse has seven lines, not six like the rest (besides the two line bridge).  The “heads“/beds” rhyme is in this verse helping to accentuate the brokenness in the verse from the line with “jiving,” left discarded by a rhyming partner:

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Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken

Yeah, the -ings in “jiving” and “joking” have a ring to them, but they form a  half rhyme, “broken” replacing “jiving” as the better sounding rhyme with “joking.”  Dylan hints at what will be broken with the i in “lines” matching the one in “jiving.”

Neil Young and Tom Petty sang it together at a benefit concert in 1989, the year Oh Mercy was released, no jiving, no joking:

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Dylan’s “dream” songs refute any theory that you can’t dream in color.  Read any of them and you’ll see that what he shares is packed with vivid details, memorable visuals, and vibrant colors.  “Had a Dream About You, Baby” is one of them, and the “red”/head” rhyme in it is one of those moments that has the kind of specifics more associated with reality than dreamland:

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You got a rag wrapped around your head
Wearing a long dress fire engine red

Compare this to say, The Judds’ first single release about a dream:

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Had a dream about you, baby
Had a dream about me and you
Had a dream and I woke up cryin’
Well, I can try but I just can’t stop
And the time is draggin’ by, tick-tock
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you

Well, I’m high and dry and lonely
I’m as lonesome as can be
And I stare out of my window
Well, I can play but I just can’t win
And the weather’s lookin’ mighty grim
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you

Oh my heart, it can’t love no one but you
My heart can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart can’t love no one but you
My heart can’t love no one but you
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you

Had a dream about you, baby
Had a dream about me and you
Had a dream and I woke up cryin’
Well, I can try but I just can’t stop
And the time is draggin’ by, tick-tock
Oh my heart, it just can’t love no one but youOh my heart, it just can’t love no one but you

I can’t see a thing, let alone a color.  But I actually like this song better than I do Dylan’s so here it goes, have a listen:

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Dylan once said this about the voice of Johnny Ray:

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“Johnnie Ray, he had some kind of strange incantation in his voice, like he’d been voodoo’d, and he cried, kind of, when he sang … it was the sound that got me, it wasn’t who it was … I began to listen to the radio, [and] I began to get bored being there [in Hibbing].”

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The idea that a voice can have or create an incantation is thought-provoking.  Perhaps Dylan’s voice has done that to me, put me under some kind of spell, can’t shake him, get him out of my head, just like what the woman in “Under Your Spell” did to him.  In the next to last verse of “Under Your Spell,” he uses the “head“/”dead” rhyme:

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I’ll see you later when I’m not so out of my head
Maybe next time I’ll let the dead bury the dead

The internal identical rhyme, “dead”/”dead” is like an echo, almost as if “see you later” could mean when I’m dead because that’s the only way I can get out my head and not under your spell.  Death as the antidote for all lifetime spells.  Well, maybe some spells were not made to be broken.   If Bob has a spell on me, let it not be broken til I say the ultimate see ya later.

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Here’s a performer who could put a spell on anyone and I think that was his intent.  I saw Screamin Jay Hawkins in 1979 or at the Bottom Line in NYC–will never forget him; he’s seared in my memory; I’ll never get him out, and that’s a good thing.

Screamin Jay Hawkins, The Merv Griffin Show, 1966:

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Arguably the eeriest presence that rears its ugly head in all of Dylan’s songs is in the very beginning of “Jokerman“:

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Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing

Dylan has several rhymes complete before the end of the second line in this song.  The lilt of his voice makes it hard to notice this.  Only in reading the lyrics can additional words in the same line after rhymes like “are glowing” be observed.  His voice stretches out words and vowel sounds, and his gentle pauses after each rhyme accommodate the “extra” words in those lines to keep the song smooth and pleasing to the ear.  I think it’s one of Dylan’s best sung songs.

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Back to that idol . . . it is the idol of people who worship materialism, violence, greed . . . any inhumanity to man for personal gain.  The bread being cast is a hope that in the midst of what nourishes this idol good deeds will and can be done and repaid in kind.  Dualities dominate this song, “bread”/”head” being one of many.  Here’s what that idol looks like in the official video of the song:

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David Yaffe refers to the shot of love on Shot of Love as a “spiritual injection.”  Poetically, what’s shooting at you on the title track are couplets, 12 to  be exact, with “head” used in one of them, early, in the second verse:

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What I got ain’t painful, it’s just bound to kill me dead
Like the men that followed Jesus when they put a price upon His head

The head, of course is Jesus,’ 12 couplets, one for each disciple that followed him, one of whom would benefit from the price on Jesus’ head, and that would be Judas.  He’s the fifth one from the left, sitting, in Da Vinci’s painting:

The fifth verse, tenth couplet reads,

There’s a man that hates me and he’s swift, smooth and near
Am I supposed to set back and wait until he’s here?

Just having some fun with numbers.

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Michael Gray calls Shot of Love’s “Lenny Bruce” “an endearing bad song.” The song is deserving of those conflicting comments.  That the song can be both “endearing” and “bad” may be perfectly suitable for a song about Lenny Bruce.  He too was “bad,” Dylan croakes, at the end of the song: “Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.”

Bad in a bad way would be someone who cuts off baby’s heads, something Bob says Lenny never did:

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Never robbed any churches nor cut off any babies’ heads
He just took the folks in high places and he shined a light in their beds

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That shocking image stays with you for awhile though.  It’s an extreme, as is robbing a church which would get you a noose around your neck in Elizabethan times.  Why such exaggeration–well the line that finishes the “heads‘/”beds” rhyme returns to what he did for people.  And the lines with that rhyme mirror the effect Bruce had–shocking but elevating and revealing. What do I mean?  Well, listen to Bruce talk about the meaning of obscenity for just a couple of minutes and I think you’ll find it shocking (at least it was back in his time), elevating, and revealing:

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“In the Garden,” Dylan’s “most performed song of his gospel period,” according to David Yaffe, asks 25 questions in 5 verses, questions Yaffe says, “about whether the people who crucified Christ knew who they were dealing with.”  A statement is in the middle of each of the 5 verses except the first.  The fourth verse contains the half-rhyme  “Head“/”instead”, half because only one part of the second word rhymes with the first.  In fact, all the rhymes with the statement lines are either half-rhymes or wrenched rhymes, i.e. “earth”/”worth.”  Most of the lines with questions are auto-rhymes, merely repeated words,  4 times each as in “know”/”know,” “know”/”know.”

Some Psalms are structured this way.  And I think that’s Dylan’s model here or his attempt to write a Psalm that he could sing.  Psalm 118 is a good example:

Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
For His mercy endures forever.

² Let Israel now say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
³ Let the house of Aaron now say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
⁴ Let those who fear the Lord now say,
“His mercy endures forever.”

⁵ I called on the Lord in distress;
The Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.
⁶ The Lord is on my side;
I will not fear.
What can man do to me?
⁷ The Lord is for me among those who help me;
Therefore I shall see my desire on those who hate me.
⁸ It is better to trust in the Lord
Than to put confidence in man.
⁹ It is better to trust in the Lord
Than to put confidence in princes.

¹⁰ All nations surrounded me,
But in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.
¹¹ They surrounded me,
Yes, they surrounded me;
But in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.
¹² They surrounded me like bees;
They were quenched like a fire of thorns;
For in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.
¹³ You pushed me violently, that I might fall,
But the Lord helped me.
¹⁴ The Lord is my strength and song,
And He has become my salvation.^[a]

¹⁵ The voice of rejoicing and salvation
Is in the tents of the righteous;
The right hand of the Lord does valiantly.
¹⁶ The right hand of the Lord is exalted;
The right hand of the Lord does valiantly.
¹⁷ I shall not die, but live,
And declare the works of the Lord.
¹⁸ The Lord has chastened me severely,
But He has not given me over to death.

¹⁹ Open to me the gates of righteousness;
I will go through them,
And I will praise the Lord.
²⁰ This is the gate of the Lord,
Through which the righteous shall enter.

²¹ I will praise You,
For You have answered me,
And have become my salvation.

²² The stone which the builders rejected
Has become the chief cornerstone.
²³ This was the Lord’s doing;
It is marvelous in our eyes.
²⁴ This is the day the Lord has made;
We will rejoice and be glad in it.

²⁵ Save now, I pray, O Lord;
O Lord, I pray, send now prosperity.
²⁶ Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
We have blessed you from the house of the Lord.
²⁷ God is the Lord,
And He has given us light;
Bind the sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar.
²⁸ You are my God, and I will praise You;
You are my God, I will exalt You.

²⁹ Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
For His mercy endures forever.

And naturally, all this repetition lends itself to song:

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The “head” rhyme in “Hurricane” is “head“/”dead” found in the fourth verse:

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Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops
Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just out prowlin’ around
He said, “I saw two men runnin’ out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”
And Miss Patty Valentine just nodded her head
Cop said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead”
So they took him to the infirmary
And though this man could hardly see
They told him that he could identify the guilty men

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In some “head”  rhymes two heads are better than one; the first is Patty Valentine’s and it’s nodding; the second is William Marins’, whose head had a bullet in it that went through his left eye.   The nodding head and the head with the “one dying eye” united by rhyme offer a microcosm of Dylan’s effort to lay before us in this song at once violence and the denial of violence, at once violence and lack of culpability . . . accountability, at once violence and injustice, and the anger fueled by it all.  The song uses rhyme to build on this anger, build and build until justice is served, not just a drink at the bar.

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The ababc rhyme scheme is consistent throughout “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.” Christoper Ricks says Dylan loves to play with rhyme as much as he loves the complication of it.  The “did him” “Jim and him” rhyme in “Lily” is one of those  playful complications perhaps, but one set “in the world of the Western.”  Likewise, Robert Shelton refers to it “a narrative ballad in the western tradition . . . filled with whimsy and mystification.”

The first rhyme to start the second verse is “said”/”heads”, an imperfect rhyme due to the -s in “heads“:

He moved across the mirrored room, “Set it up for everyone,” he said
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads

Much rhyme “imperfection” is in this song, but much “perfection” is present, too.  The beat never stops though and Dylan’s voice never skips a beat, blending imperfection and perfection, both whimsical and mystifin’, like this guy:

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4 “heads” pop up in “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,” but only one of them rhymes, even though 3 appear at the end of lines where we expect rhymes.  Actually, there’s not a lot of rhymes in the song, and maybe too much “skin” and “hat” identical rhymes in the first verse:

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Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

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A perfect set-up for further  discussion of what else is too much in the song is a line from Robert Shelton who said, it’s “a sustained joke about mindless excess.”  Maybe true, but certainly not headless.   And if the song is about Edie Sedwgwick as David Jaffe and many others support, then she’s the target of the “mindless excess” and many “heads,” “skin,” and “hats.”  Here’s the one rhyming “head” rhyme–note it takes 5 lines for the rhyme to sound with “said”:

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Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

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And here’s the head, skin, and hat:

And here’s the factory girl, dancing, smiling, living in her skin, with and without hats, and with that perfectly beautiful head, worth writing, as Michal Gray says, “a whole song about a hat” for.

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Robert Shelton notes that the lyrics in “From a Buick 6″ are “traditional couplets.”  And almost from the start Dylan gets the lead out to get the “e” sound charging up and down the highway of the song.  “bed” starts it at the end of verse 1, but the “dead”/”head“/”said”/”bed” rhymes in the last verse drive it home:

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Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head
She brings me everything and more, and just like I said
Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed.

Here’s what a Buick looked like in 1965, the year Highway 61 came out, the album Michael Gray called the “carving out of a new emotional correspondence with a new chaos-reality”:

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In “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” Dylan acknowledges that he knows he’s a poet, but it comes with a guarded hope:

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Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it
Hope I don’t blow it

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The song Shelton calls an “abrupt shift towards whimsy and Dada nonsense” has some of Dylan’s most outrageous rhymes, with the likes of “Goldwater”/”daughter,” “scarf”/”barf,” and “Swimmin”/”women”, but the zaniest of all the verses might just be the one with the “head” rhyme in it:

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Well, I set my monkey on the log
And ordered him to do the Dog
He wagged his tail and shook his head
And he went and did the Cat instead
He’s a weird monkey, very funky

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Is there any better example of freedom: monkey is told to do the dog and he does the cat instead?  Yes, freedom of choice, Bob; even the monkey gets it.  And Bob’s a weird funky monkey, too–makin up these rhymes and all.  Thanks, Bob, for all your funky monkeyness. Worth a listen, for comic relief and all:

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Michael Gray calls “To Ramona” one of two songs off Another Side of Bob Dylan that comes “across as early flashes of the creative explosion” soon to be.  It’s a five verse song with the rhyme “fed”/”head” beginning the third, middle verse:

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I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
By worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
On back to the South
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one t’ defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad

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The rhyme feeds images that last, a head twisted and foam from the mouth. The foam comes from others–worthless fodder, scraps of crap Dylan would get used to from the media, would come to know all to well what it was, and even more so how do deal with it–only self-pity could be the real crippling damaging force.

“head“/”fed” is the only rhyming couplet in that verse.  But what I really like is how the ending -d sound is echoed later in it at other line ending words, “hand” and “bad.”  “head” which begins the verse almost helps “hand” and “bad” become a rhyme, especially when Dylan sings it compressing just the right words to do it, with that “early flash” of “creative explosion”:

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I’m amused by the irony that when Robert Shelton saw Dylan put on a show for his “Dinkytown” friends in 1962 Bob forget the words to “Bob Dylan’s Blues” and so sang “Corrina, Corrina” instead.  The irony lies in the lyrics from “Bob Dylan’s Blues” with the “heads“/”dead” rhyme:

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Oh you five and ten cent women
With nothin’ in your heads
I got a real gal I’m lovin’
And Lord I’ll love her till I’m dead
Go away from my door and my window too
Right now

Yup, nothin in his head when it came to the lyrics to that song that night either.

It’s an imperfect rhyme that “heads“/”dead” with the plural on “heads.”  But imperfect rhyming adds to the ludicrous content of the song, perhaps another with comic relief intentions.

Those cheap women maybe don’t deserve that wisecrack, but Bob would make it up to them thirteen years later on “Simple Twist of Fate,” a deep, tragic song that glorifies a prostitute.  But this song is just for funning and for enjoying the ride of it.

Here’s Bob performing in the Gaslight in 1962:

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Shelton sees “I Shall Be Free” as a shirttail song–one of those tucked into the end of Freewheelin, a weak one amongst blockbusters.  But Ricks sees some rhyming quality to it, namely the “heavy/levee” rhyme used by Bob for the first time.  It’s a rollicking haymaker of a song again, and as such it’s not surprising that a good ole hit in the head happens, one with a memorable head rhyme:

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I’s out there paintin’ on the old woodshed
When a can a black paint it fell on my head
I went down to scrub and rub
But I had to sit in back of the tub
(Cost a quarter
And I had to get out quick . . .
Someone wanted to come in and take a sauna)

This is slapstick and farce, mindless fun; but that poor head, right?  Well, Bob gives it some attention again in the last of eleven verses,

Well, ask me why I’m drunk alla time
It levels my head and eases my mind
I just walk along and stroll and sing
I see better days and I do better things

The head and mind both pacified by alcohol.  And he knows from the last line here (not of the song–more nonsense there) that he will do better things, but he already has on Freewheelin, so not such a gamble there–it’s all a stacked deck in fact, as to the art he will create, so if back then you were a better ready for betting days or better things, betting on Bob would have been a good bet.  “I Shall Be Free” he names it.  This is a song that helped him feel free from better days and better things, the kind that are like a kick in the head eased by drink or the high of real freewheelin’.

My favorite hit in the head with a paint can scene:

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Bob tells us that the answer is blowing in the wind, so when he refers to specific winds we should pay attention.  But “Caribbean Wind” was a song Dylan seems to have had as much problem wrapping his head around as we might trying to find answers in blowing in the wind.  On Biograph he says about it “I just couldn’t quite grasp what it was about after I finished it.”  Maybe he meant it when he created the “head“/”bed” rhyme in verse 7:

The cry of the peacock, flies buzz my head
Ceiling fan broken, there’s a heat in my bed
Street band playing “Nearer My God to Thee”
We met at the steeple where the mission bells ring
She said, “I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing
You can do about it, so let us just agree to agree”

The image of flies around a head appears as a threat in “Idiot Wind“:

One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle

In “Caribbean Wind,” however, the flies are buzzing a head, not flying around eyes.  And the victim is in a ditch, not a bed, decay and death not prompting the flies, a buzz, buzz like confusion rather than real flies camping our for dinner.

Yeah, what’s this song all about . . . the answer is blowing . . . somewhere in the song, from Bob’s head to ours:

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Rolling Stone called Dylan’s 1971 “George Jackson” a “return to social relevance.”  Michael Gray reminds us in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia that it also marked the return of Dylan recording an acoustic guitar solo single, the first since the “pre-electric period, 61-64.  What Gray also saw in the song was a “particular and special–pers0nalizing” of the “classic opening line of the song, “I woke up this mornin’.”  The “head” rhyme helps summon the “personalizing”:

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There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

The tears from the speaker he wakes to find in his bed collide with the shot in the head, a private response to public violence, Dylan at it again with rhyme to move its impact beyond sound and into emotional response and theme.

Often lost in the study of Dylan is what he teaches us by defending the people he writes about, revealing the injustice, the tragedy, and impact of their loss to us as memorable and palpable, the facts and circumstances of a victim’s death to be part of  a truth too real to be true.  For those of us who may not know who George Jackson was and what happened to him, let Dylan shed light via his song and motivation to learn more via the research Dylan inspires:

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The 1,705 word long “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie” uses the word “head” three times, twice in rhyme, “head“/”bed” and “head“/”lead”:

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But it’s trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head
And it bothers you badly when your layin’ in bed

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And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head
And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead

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I find it fitting that this blog post on “head” would end with Woody Guthrie, whose head contained a mind Dylan loved and influenced so much.   Dylan unites “mind” and “head” in the first line of the song:

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When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb

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So the last part of this “head” blog post will simply just do the same, focus on the mind, the revolutionary one, contained by the head that mattered so much and still does to so many, including Tom Morello covering Woody’s “Ease My Revolutionary Mind” for the Occupy Movement on Woody’s 100th birthday:

We spread everything from lies to disease to tables to the word. We can spread things beneath our feet, over our bodies, or across the sky.  We can put spread on a cracker or tuck ourselves under one before we sleep.  I’m confident enough in the English language that poets have explored the range of “spread” through the centuries in content and rhyme.

In the last verse of “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘,” the only song Dylan uses “spread” in a rhyme sails are spread:

My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said

Dylan rhymes “spread” with “head” and “said.”  All four verses have a three word rhyming pattern, rhyme spread out nicely within the song, beyond it . . . well . . . there’s nothin.

For the record, William Butler Yates’ use of the word “spread” in “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is my favorite poetic moment with “spread.”  Something about spreading your dreams that works for me”:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

“The music we play has to be tomorrow’s, the things we say have to be today,  and the reason for bothering is yesterday”  -Pete Townsend-  1972

The past, meaning not today or tomorrow, is complicated with Dylan as it is with most writers/poets.  I don’t think I’ve read anyone who speaks about Dylan and the past better than Michael Gray does in his comments about Blood on the Tracks.  It

deals with the overlaying of the past upon the present . . . a profoundly felt understanding of our fragile impermanence of control, so that in dealing with the overlay of past upon present Dylan is dealing with the inexorable disintegration of relationships, and with the dignity of keeping on trying to reintegrate them against all odds.

The overlaying of the past Gray speaks of tied to understanding, disintegration and reintegration is throughout Dylan, not limited to relationships but history, the self, words, and rhymes.

I liken Dylan and the past to Willa Cather’s Thea Kronberg in The Song of the Lark who comes to the conclusion that hers is a “soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not recall.”

Dylan writes under the cloud of the past, sometimes recalling it, sometimes summoning it, many times rejecting it, and often making his listeners sense that its reality is not hinged on completely recalling it but feeling it, his and ours.

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In “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘” Dylan refers the mountains to the past:

Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past

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The lines that rhyme “fast” with “past” in “Mississippi” hit home the mythological reference to Odysseus in The Odyssey:

Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinkin’ fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me

Odysseus’s ship is split to splinters in Book 12:

Zeus with thunder and lightning together crashed on our vessel,

and, struck by the thunderbolt of Zeus, she spun in a circle,

and all was full of brimstone. My men were thrown in the water,

and bobbing like sea crows they were washed away on the running

waves all around the black ship, and the god took away their homecoming.

Holding onto what’s left of the ship, Odysseus arrives on the island of Calypso, where he eventually sets sail on a raft and winds up on the shores of Phaecia where he is stripped to nothing, even clothes.  It is here that he must feel that the past he wishes to return to, his home in Ithaka, where he is king, is lost.  Dylan,  conversely, as any study of his life will show, has tried to escape from his past, even lying about it to erase it, “pure hokum–hophead talk,” he calls it in Chronicles.

What Odysseus and Dylan have in common though are women who have come on the scene to save them.  For Odysseus, when he arrives on the shores of Phaecia, Nausicaa, the daughter of the king and queen, pulls him out of the emotional depths (sinkin fast), guiding him to what results in his return home (nostos).  Dylan’s savior women, Suze, Joan, Sara, Carolyn all have, in some way, pulled him out of one phase into another, pulled him out of a sinkin into a past that is a kind of death, one that would end his knack or talent for shape-shifting, from one music to another, one sound to another, one image to another, one personna, etc.

The ancient Greek myth of Nausicaa, by the way, has morphed into Japanese pop culture in the form of a protector of the environment.  As such, she protects our past, the one where nature is not violated, kept unharmed by human greed.  Some things, perhaps the myth and Dylan are telling us, should never become past, never even come to the point of sinkin fast.

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Dylan overlays not the present with the past but the future in “Bye and Bye” with these rhyming lines:

Well the future for me is already a thing of the past
You were my first love and you will be my last

One of the reasons I admire Bob Dylan is for the unexpected places, the twists and turns to them, he takes my mind.  Lots of good rhymes throughout this song.  Christopher Ricks quotes the lines above in association with Philip Larkin’s poem, “Going, Going” . . . Here’s Larkin, another writer who invites satisfying mind shifting, reading his poem:

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“past“/”fast” rhyme in “Political World,” too, but in an apocalyptic way:

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last

I guess in in such a world the past becomes a different world, the future threatened to be no world at all.

At the Dodge Poetry Festival in the late 1990’s, reading “The Crying Poem,” Jimmy Santiago Baca asked the audience to STOP TALKIN’ POLITICS!” and instead create “a language made of whimpers and sniffles and sobs,cry out loud, louder, cry baby, cry! Cry! Cry!”  “I’ll never forget it.

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Clearly, Dylan has a thing for this “past“/”fast” rhyme.  He uses it again on “Silvio” right from the start of the song:

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast

Maybe he likes it for what it says about how fast time goes by.  Time flies–future becomes present and then past.  As I’m typing this what I just typed just became the past–what I’m thinking about writing, just became present, now BAMM past!

The song’s opening with this rhyme helps defy the standard investment clause that past performance is not an indicator of future results.  In 1986, Greil Marcus felt that “Silvio” was evidence that Budweiser commercials had more of a future than Dylan’s music:

‘”Silvio” suggests he has so little left of his style he couldn’t make a convincing Budweiser commercial–there’s more musical freedom in the average Budweiser commercial than there is here. Dylan’s music now has meaning only as neuroticism.”

Well, again that was 1986.  This is now. Dylan did have a hell of a past and now he still does, and a present and future.  A better would have done well to put money down on Dylan in 86 based on Dylan’s past, good sense even, “better use your sense.”

Maybe some of us would still rather hear this Budweiser tune than listen to “Silvio“:

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Interesting that “past” is not used by Dylan during his Christian phase. Perhaps he cut off his past so severely at this time that the word never came to mind, even in a rhyming way. The “past“/”fast” rhyme appears again in “If You See Her, Say Hello” and it helps convey regretting that time passes so fast:

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast
If she’s passin’ back this way, I’m not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time

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Times spent in a relationship replayed movie style, movies of the mind, not out of mind, have that flash before your eyes effect, though it can cripple the present, that living in the past stuff.  It has a way of splitting the self–keeping one from being fully alive in the present.  Optima dies . . . prima fugit, writes Virgil, “In the lives of the mortals, the best days are the first to flee.”  This is the epigram Willa Cather used for My Antonia.  Better to let them go then, on their fleeting way, or they just might keep us too preoccupied with the past to be open to what occupies our present.

Robert Shelton senses a “sea-wave rhythm in the song.”  Memories can go like that, sea-wavy, trance inducing, smoke coming up on the screen.  Hard to resist the past when listening to this song:

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In “Tough Mama,” Bob throws “last” into the rhymes of “past” with “fast,” saving it for last in the third of five verses:

Sweet Goddess
Born of a blinding light and a changing wind
Now, don’t be modest, you know who you are and where you’ve been
Jack the Cowboy went up north
He’s buried in your past
The Lone Wolf went out drinking
That was over pretty fast
Sweet Goddess
Your perfect stranger’s comin’ in at last

I want to play (and this might be lamely done) with a little Christopher Ricks-like analysis here.  Under the study of “last” I blogged about this song’s White Goddess associations.  This verse may be the most direct reference to her.  In Chronicles, Dylan states, about the “poetic muse,” that he “[d]idn’t know enough to start trouble with it.” Well, maybe in 1974 he was ready to.  Be that as it may, Ricks comes in here because I want to look at that word “last.”  If that perfect stranger is Dylan himself “comin’ in at last,” maybe it is a statement of “I know this has taken awhile but I’m ready to invoke you now.”  Or maybe, he means check out the last verse where you’ll see me “comin in at last.”  The last verse is

I’m crestfallen
The world of illusion is at my door
I ain’t a-haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore
The prison walls are crumblin’, there is no end in sight
I’ve gained some recognition but I lost my appetite
Dark Beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight

Yes, the meeting time is set.  Is this when Dylan finally decided it was time, at last, to have a tryst with the White Goddess?  Well, again, Blood on the Tracks was next.  Clearly, this meeting was a success if Blood on the Tracks is the payoff.

Want a glimpse of the White Goddess?  A version of her appears as Jadis, the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia:

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The laughter that begins “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” sets the tone for the whole song.  It is a raucous, playful, “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free” romp of a song. And they rhymes enhance the fun.  Robert Shelton in his entry on “115th” in No Direction Home, that Dylan’s “ear was always looking for the rhyme that would work, unsettle, and amuse.”  The “mast”/”past” rhyme in “115th” is one of those:

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Well, I got back and took
The parkin’ ticket off the mast
I was ripping it to shreds
When this coastguard boat went past

The rhyme standing by itself doesn’t tickle, you but when the rhyme hits, coming off the throes the image of a parking ticket on the mast of a ship, well, it’s all, as Ed Norton, Ralph Kramden’s pal, says, “good clean fun.”

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The laughter alone is worth listening to over and over again:

http://vimeo.com/35540786

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“The Times They Are A Changin” is all about breaking from the past and the last verse hits this message home with the “past“/”fast” rhyme taking the lead from “fast” leading the charge:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

I so admire Christopher Rick’s observation that “the refrain at the end of each verse is itself unchanging” . . . and so each time it is sung it sends the message that all things must change.  This song, as Ricks says, “Was not enlightenment dawning once and for all” . . . “the times are still a-changin” and always will be. The present now will always “later be past“–this is a song of hope–for a change for the better–for forward thinking for being “younger than that now” all the time.

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Ricks will not be relegated to the past . . . here’s a scholar not done with his changes:

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In Chronicles Dylan says, “Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change , but you can only feel it . . .  but you don’t know it in a purposeful way.”  Maybe this is why the farewell in “Restless Farewell” is a restless one.  The speaker is uneasy, agitated, regretful, but finger-pointing, insinuating in his targets.  The “fast”/”past” rhyme, maybe the first time Dylan used it, helps express the break to come, the need for change, the inevitability of it:

Oh ev’ry girl that ever I’ve touched
I did not do it harmfully
And ev’ry girl that ever I’ve hurt
I did not do it knowin’ly
But to remain as friends
And make amends
You need the time and stay behind
And since my feet are now fast
And point away from the past
I’ll bid farewell and be down the line

Robert Shelton says that “[t]ime is crucial in this song.”  Time to go, time to leave the past behind, time to move on, time to cut ties, time to make the break.

Dylan chose to sing this song at Frank Sinatra’s 80th birthday celebration, a restless farewell of sorts, to a man whose time was to come (he died at the age of 82).  Time goes by fast . . . the last time Dylan would sing this song live was near his own birthday, May 24, on May 21, 1998.  Birthdays are celebrations of our years.  “Restless Farewell” to them Dylan seems to be saying, so we can “point away from the past.”

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The World War that takes place in “Talkin World War III Blues” lasts about 15 minutes:

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Well, the whole thing started at 3 o’clock fast
It was all over by quarter past

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This is Dylan’s first and only use of the “fast”/”past” rhyme with “past” not meaning relating to a former time.  Still there it is again, a rhyme Dylan has used for over 40 years.

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Eric Bulson says there’s joking “around about commies, fallout shelters, and nuclear war” in the song, but feels that Dylan “was seriously trying to come to terms with a very real fear about America’s future.”

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In Chronicles, Dylan shares what he felt those fears can do to a child growing up in the midst of the threat of annihilation:  “Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit.”

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Maybe in 1950, William Faulkner had the spirit of children in mind when he wrote his Nobel prize speech, expressing hope for humanity even if we seem hell-bent on destroying ourselves:

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I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

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Here’s most of the speech: