“last is one of those words with a broad sense scope.  We are upset when we come in last but happy when something we enjoy lasts.  Conversely, it’s been said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first–“what’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom,” sort of thing.  Likewise, we rather not endure things that last too long or that we don’t like.  After much delay, we may exclaim with exuberance, “At long last,” or demand, “This is the last straw.”  “last” has a lasting presence in daily expression.

Dylan’s rhymes “last” with “past” in “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.”

Down every street there’s a window
And every window made of glass
We’ll keep on lovin’ pretty baby
For as long as love will last
Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past

Yes, the past lasts, like those mountains.  American authors like Cormac McCarthy, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner come to mind as ones who would agree.  Faulkner went as far as to say, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

To me, the lasting effect of past inspired by rhyme is the perfect way to explore Dylan’s use of the word.

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The line echos Faulker’s quote that begins this blog page.  The second line completes the rhyming with the word “last” sung by Dylan with a strong effort by Dylan to make it last:

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You were my first love and you will be my laaaaaaaaaaast

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Eric Lott calls the song one of those “soft shoe shuffles.”  In such songs, some sounds are made to last. Listen to Billie Holiday make “tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime” last on Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger’s “Havin Myself a Time,” the tune David Yaffe thinks Dylan heard and “based some changes on”:

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“Take what you gathered from coincidence,” says Dylan in “It’s All Over Baby Blue.”  It is coincidence that on the day before the Mayans proclaim the end of the world as we know it, I would target these rhyming lines from “Political World”:

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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

There’s that “past”/”last” rhyme again.  Maybe it’s the perfect rhyme.  Maybe it’s the duality these words create together. Maybe it says what he wants to say whether those words rhymed or not.  In the world of this rhyme courage is gone–a thing of the past–without it we think things like tomorrow is our last.  What would a non-political world be like?  A place where there’s courage and where you don’t think or aren’t compelled to think that next days could be last ones.  This is what Dylan does best.  When he defines something at the same time he’s defining something else, which redefines what he set out defining.  “Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine.  Most of the time.”  Most of the time defined, rest of time defined, too.  Most of time redefined.

Dante has something to say about those who predict the future.  They’re better than thieves and hypocrites, but worse than panderers and seducers.  Their punishment? “[T]o have their heads turned backwards on theirs bodies and to be compelled to walk backwards (into the past?) through all eternity, their eyes blinded with tears” ( so they can’t see forward anymore?) (Ciardi).  Perhaps they above all should hope that tomorrow is not the last day.

One day they blew him down in a clam bar in New York
He could see it comin’ through the door as he lifted up his fork
He pushed the table over to protect his family
Then he staggered out into the streets of Little Italy

This deadly blowing down or blast took place specifically at Umberto’s Clam House at 129 Mulberry Street in Little Italy.  More specifically, the table in the foreground is where Joey Gallo ate his last supper.

With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass

Christopher Ricks in his chapter on “Sad-Eyed” adds the word “resistance” to pockets when referring to the items the song “insists upon listing”:  “her pockets of resistance.” The dimension Ricks adds with that word moves the “pocket” line away from a longing to be financially secure (“at last“) to one much less mundane–one that depicts this Sad-Eyed lady as someone who has always wanted to have her ability to resist protected, perhaps someone who has reached a place in her mind or emotionally where she can hold her desires in check.  More than anything what this narrator is able to reveal about her  speaks of how well he knows her.  To know so certainly how deeply someone feels is to reach a place, too, “at last,” that says something about what lovers, like no other companions, can express to each other.  I thank Ricks for that one word added, making the line so much more rich with meaning.

You cannot go a day or walk most streets without seeing glass. In fact, if you are reading this blog page, you are probably staring at the screen though glass. We can see through it, see our reflections in it, and drink out of it. It can be smooth or jagged. It can shut you in or shut you out.  In Bob Dylan’s songs, the word “glass” plays many roles, its sense explored with a wide scope.  Dylan likes to frame the perspective offered in songs—glass as something that you can see through while it obstructs you—invites while it hinders–provides the kind of opposition, paradox, and conflict his songs dwell in.

“Beyond Here Lies Nothin” kicks off the study of “glass” in a verse where two words rhyme with it:

Down every street there’s a window
And every window made of glass
We’ll keep on lovin’ pretty baby
For as long as love will last
Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past

Glass lasts, that’s why every window is made of it; it’s part of our lives just like those mountains of the past that are still with us now.

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Tempest offers good examples of the variety of ways Dylan has used “glass” throughout his career.  In “Long and Wasted Years” he refers to the kind we put on our face:  “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes.”  In “Tin Angel” is the kind we drink and toast from, “They looked at each other and their glasses clinked.”  And in “Tempest” glass refers is from the famous chandelier on the Titanic: “Glass of shattered crystal/Lay scattered roundabout.”  “glass” is not used for rhyming, but that’s coming.  It’s his range with the word that impresses.

Here’s a sampler of Tempest from Sony Records.  And here’s to you, Bob, my glass is raised, for creating an album for us at the age of 72 that American Songwriter ranked as the number 1 album in 2012.

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Whatever crawling across cut glass would be like is the cr/acr/cut/ss sounds combined with Dylan singing them.

I put this up there with Paul Simon’s “sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon” or Eliot’s “pair of ragged claws scuttling across the sands of silent seas.”

No rhyming fame for “glass” in this song, but  a brilliant sound effect, smooth as glass.

Many Dylan fans will remember the video:

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Dylan hasn’t rhymed “glass” in over three decades.  When he last did it was in reference to that snake that he mysteriously does not name at the end of “Man Gave Names To All The Animals“:

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He saw an animal as smooth as glass
Slithering his way through the grass
Saw him disappear by a tree near a lake . . .

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The “glass“/”grass” last rhyme of the song is the last time Dylan will be responsible for the rhyming–he leaves us to come up with “snake” from the rhyme with “lake.”  Clever.  We have to name him from the sound Dylan gives us, but he won’t say it/sing it . . . a rather snake in the grass move, if you ask me.  The -s sound helps, too, though; can you hear the snake slithering with all those s’s?  We may not be able to see him, disappearing and all by that tree, but we can hear him and we can identify him so ingrained as he is into our psyche.  Just  a little help, Dylan seems to be saying, is all we need to point out the snake though we can’t see it.

For those of you who don’t like snakes in the grass, don’t watch this video:

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Dylan is brilliant at using the s sound, and I think he knows it.  His voice sounds like a hive of angry bees with some of his best moments with s stressed.  Highlights for me are, “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press,” “Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives/I don’t know how it all got started/ I don’t know what they do with their lives,” and “You shouldn’t let others get their kicks for you!”  One ways those memorable lyrics work is because of Dylan’s mastery of the s.

In “On a Night Like This,” “glass doesn’t rhyme with “kiss,” but Dylan emphasizes the s alliteration so effectively it’s as if the verse is right out of Chaucer:

Let the four winds blow
Around this old cabin door
If I’m not too far off
I think we did this once before
There’s more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this

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Dylan’s uses, unrhymed, the word “fiberglass” in “Dirge” calling our time the “age of fiberglass“:

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There are those who worship loneliness, I’m not one of them
In this age of fiberglass I’m searching for a gem
The crystal ball up on the wall hasn’t shown me nothing yet
I’ve paid the price of solitude, but at least I’m out of debt

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According to the OED, the word was first used in publication in 1937.  In that year, American Dystuff Reporter stated, “There are many types of Fiberglas fibers. They vary in diameter according to their use.”  46 years later, fiberglass would define our age–maybe that’s something to write a dirge about.

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The song titles on John Wesley Harding have six “I”‘s in them, two in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”  And that first person perspective is part of the impact the song makes, especially at the end when “glass” appears.  The song is an account of a dream involving participation in an execution.  The speaker’s reaction to the dream, the culpability felt from being responsible for someone’s death, is profound, and it is captured immediately upon his return from sleep:

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I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried

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The reaction of the “I” in the song is accentuated by the “I” sound that appears ten times in eight lines.  The personal response to the dream arguably is dramatized more than the dream, with the figure left caught in a freeze-frame leaning against glass (Robert Shelton asks, “What is ‘the glass‘ he touches before crying? A window, a telescope, or a mirror?) “glass” is left unrhymed, not peculiarly so as a pattern is present.  The odd numbered lines do not have rhyming end words.  Anger, loneliness, and terror combine to cause bowing and crying.  “glass” plays a memorable role in the “I”‘s distraught condition.   In all of Dylan’s “dream” songs this may be the one with the most emotion with the touch of glass the only support for a grieving man. In all, the response seems to be more about the “I” than St. Augustine’s, a self that has died, a self that was once “alive with fiery breath,” a self seen through a “looking-glass” of a dream, a self no longer.

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“I Pity the Poor Immigrant” reminds me of Langston Hughes’ “Dream Deferred” in its escalating threat that oppression unabated can result in violent responses.  “glass,” rhyming with “pass” helps provide the moment in “I Pity” at the end of the song when the violence erupts:

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I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass

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Visions shattered are like dreams deferred.  What happens when dreams are deferred?  Hughes gives several answers in the form of rhetorical questions:

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What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

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In 2007, actor Danny Glover read Hughes’ poem for Voices from Voices of a People’s History of the United States:

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“glass” rhymes with “grass” in the first verse of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  Sun-glassed-eyed gentleman of the Zimmermans (isn’t this song really Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lownds, like Juliet is the star-crossed daughter of the Capulets?), would next rhyme “glass” and “grass” in reference to a snake in “Man Gave Names to All The Animals.”  I won’t touch the irony (is it irony?) of that, because I’d rather aim at how Bob’s uses glass for description:

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

Since the smoothness of her face is identified by silk (smooth as), what role does glass play in comparing her face to it?  I think it’s fragility or preciousness.  Either would be challenging to carry, who among them willing to carry something so fragile or precious.  The extended rhyme that’s so melodic in this moment is “place on the grass” with  “face like glass.”  I like more what “place” and “face” unite–a face can become a place if the face is of someone so cherished.

There are worse ways to spend 11:20 minutes of your time:

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The first time Dylan uses the word “glass” is in “Outlaw Blues“:

I got my dark sunglasses
I got for good luck my black tooth
I got my dark sunglasses
I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’
I just might tell you the truth

No rhyme here, just the word repeated, as is “tooth,” a black one.  Dylan tells us why he has the black tooth–for good luck.  It would take him 47 years later in Tempest‘s “Early Roman Kings” to tell us why he wears sunglasses, “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes.”  Mystery solved!

In “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Dylan tells us to take what we have gathered from coincidence, and sometimes I do.  One of my favorite short stories is “Powder” by Tobias Wolff.  It’s about a hopeless romantic, impulsive, “never plans ahead” father who takes his “anxious about everything,” “always thinks ahead” son out skiing on Christmas Eve during a snowstorm.  In one part of the story, the father starts humming, “Stars Fell on Alabama.”  It’s a poignant moment, the father driving his son in a blinding snowstorm, “breaking virgin snow between a line of tall trees” while humming this romantic ballad.

One night after sharing the story with my students, I drove home and popped in a Bob Dylan’s theme-time radio show CD that my brother-in-law had recorded for me.  On the CD, (I forget what the theme was–I’m thinking it was “stars”), Bob played that very song sung by Jack Teagarden.  Because of that coincidence, I will always associate Dylan and Wolff’s story with this song.  Here are the lyrics:

We lived our little drama
We kissed in a field of white
And stars fell on Alabama last night
I can’t forget the glamour
Your eyes held a tender light
And stars fell on Alabama last night

I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land where no one else could enter
And in the center just you and me
My heart beat like a hammer
My arms wound around you tight
And stars fell on Alabama last night

And here’s Jack  Teagarden and the Chicagoans performing it live in Los Angeles in 1952:

This blog page will is dedicated to Dylan’s own use of the word “star.”  Starting with “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” Dylan uses it as a rhyming word with “car”–just another thing I can gather from coincidence since for me this song, this story, stars, and cars all combine in meaningful ways.

I’m movin’ after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don’t know what to do without it
Without this love that we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ but the moon and stars

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Daniel Mark Epstein calls “If You Ever Go to Houston,” his personal favorite” off of Together Through Life.  He sees it as “a hip lecture on how to handle yourself in the hot towns of the Lone Star State.  The lone “star” in the song is not in the sky but worn by a man:

If you’re ever down there
On Bagby and Lamar
You better watch out for
The man with the shining star
Better know where you’re going
Or stay where you are
If you’re ever down there
On Bagby and Lamar

Dylan has always done imaginative rhyming with names of places and people.  One that comes immediately to my mind is from “Meet Me in the Morning“:

Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha
Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha
Honey, we could be in Kansas
By time the snow begins to thaw

In “Houston,” “Lamar” is one of the two words (“are” the other) rhyming with “star.”  Apparently, you don’t want to be a shooting star on Bagby and Lamar (leave any shooting to the man with the shining star–by the way, the star is not shiny but shining–a notch brighter?); it’s better to stay there unless you know where you’re going?  Better to stay there because the man with the shining star is often there–an authority figure for protection?  Or is it better to be on the lookout for him if you’re “ever down there,” in a duck and cover sort of way?  I guess that depends on who you are on Bagby and Lamar.

What’s on the corner of Bagby and Lamar?  Houston’s Heritage Society Museum.

Poor boy in a red hot town
Out beyond the twinklin’ stars
Ridin’ first-class trains—making the rounds
Tryin’ to keep from fallin’ between the cars

On Time Out of Mind‘s “Standing in the Doorway,” “stars” is not a rhyming word, but they are colored by the speaker’s state of mind:

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

Bad light, feeling sick, and laughter that makes you sad all can add up to make you see the stars with cherry red glasses.  Cherry?  Well maybe needed to keep the 7 syllable second line in each of these two rhyming couplets alive.  The speaker is sick, melancholy, yes?  But not enough to keep those cherry red producing eyes away from lines that rhyme and balance.

Don Weiss in”Echoes of Incense: A Pilgrimage in Japan” writes, “Everything born will someday die. Even stars. Even worlds. Even cherry blossoms,” which by the way kind of look like stars:

Time Out of Mind has that Keatsian quality of how fleeting all of life is–“a song cycle,” Daniel Mark Epstein says, “about aging, love, and loss, where the lyrics of one ballad of angst bleed into the lyrics of the next.” Perhaps  someone who can see sadness in laughter has a strenuous enough tongue to “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” or even turn stars cherry red.

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“Make You Feel My Love” uses “stars” not quite as a rhyme, but then again . . .:

When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love

Something sneaky to the ear is going on here.  When I first heard that line I thought “shadows” was a verb, as if the evening shadows something, but “and” joins “shadows” to “the stars” making that impossible. “appears”/”tears”/years” are the rhyming words.  But “stars appear” with “your tears” does something else for the ear.  I think it’s the t in “stars” as well as the r that accompanies the r in “your” and the t in “tears” that gives it a sing-ability, a tonal unity good for the singer, good for the listener, and distant for the reader.  As Ricks says, “Every song, by definition, is realized only in performance.”  I think this can be said of this verse–listen closely to the way Dylan sings it and I think you’ll hear  the sounds from those letters mesh into words to create a tone that echoes throughout the song and perhaps the entire cd.

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Stars are far, unbelievably so. This comes across in “Unbelievable” when “star” and “far” pair up for the rhyme in the first verse:

It’s unbelievable, it’s strange but true
It’s inconceivable it could happen to you
You go north and you go south
Just like bait in the fish’s mouth
Ya must be livin’ in the shadow of some kind of evil star
It’s unbelievable it would get this far

Unbelievable, too, is the notion that you could be living under an evil star, unless superstition is your thing.  But if it is, Dylan undercuts it beginning the next verse:

It’s undeniable what they’d have you to think
It’s indescribable, it can drive you to drink

If I start believing that I’m living under an evil star, I think I will have a drink, indeed it would mean I’ve taken bad things that happen to me a bit too far, maybe as is done when we think of those lovers in Romeo & Juliet as “star-crossed.”

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Something masterfully pleasing to the ear is happening in “Shooting Star.” The song consists of four verses, four of which have a shooting star,  six because the verse with “star” appears at the beginning and end of each verse.  In each verse with a shooting star, “shooting star” shoots through each rhyme.  In the first verse, it breaks the “u” rhyme pattern: “you”/”knew”/”through”/”you,” breaking “into another world” in a sense; in the second, the “e” rhyme from “me”/”be”/”see”/”me”/; in the fourth, the “a” in “away/”day”/”say”/”away.”  In each, the first and last words of each rhyme are repeated.  What’s with the star-less third verse?  Well, in it the speaker asks us to “Listen.”  The only sight is of people praying.  Otherwise, it’s all about what can be heard:

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

an engine, bell, the sermon on the mount, a radio.  No sighting, just what can be heard.  In three out of four verses, a shooting star was seen (“Seen a shooting star tonight”), but in each verse with a shooting star, we are invited to hear the rhymes that “shooting star” frames.

If you’ve never seen a shooting star, which by the way you can’t hear, here’s a video of one with a full moon:

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In “Brownsville Girl,” “stars” refers to celebrities. Dylan recalls Gregory Peck, playing a character in a movie,  shot in the back:

There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun
and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down

Dylan had his share of being torn down by fans and the media, and the 80’s may very well have been his time to recover from feeling beat down.  But this verse,  not totally rhyme-less, “bound”/”down” keeping it from being all prose, comes only five years after John Lennon was killed in front of his apartment in NYC, shot in the back by Mark David Chapman.  The allusion to it gives the song a mournful feel or rather assists the mournful feel throughout.   The mourning continues; forgetting that day is impossible. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be his friend . . . can’t . . . Imagine . . .

Roll On, John.

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“Clean Cut Kid” says Robert Shelton “tells of the savaging of American youth by the Vietnam War.”  It’s also a story of what could have been:

He could’ve sold insurance, owned a restaurant or bar
Could’ve been an accountant or a tennis star

The songs pummels the listener with rhymes (my favorite is “choir”/”wire”), and with a hard c sound that underscores the k in kill in each chorus:

They took a clean-cut kid
And they made a killer out of him
That’s what they did

Yes, they did, but based on the lyrics the only one we know he killed for sure was himself:

He was wearing boxing gloves, took a dive one day
Off the Golden Gate Bridge into China Bay

Are the rhymes made to battle alliteration in this song?  Something’s at war.  But if the only killing in the song is a suicide then it’s a battle inside that’s raging.  Perhaps Dylan was telling us back then that a wall like this one would only grow and grow if we don’t stop sending our clear cut kids off to war:

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“Jokerman” houses what might very well be the most Romantic (with a capital r) scene in all of Dylan and “stars” plays a role in it:

In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

The role is also a rhyming one, hidden, embedded, internally so with “carved” and “far.”

At the moment that the line with “stars” is sung by Dylan on the official video of the song, an image of Chief Joseph, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, appears.  Below is his story:

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In “Neighborhood Bully” the word “bully” bullies the rhyming couplets that proceed the ending line of each verse.  The last verse, with the rhyme of “stars” with “scars” is no exception:

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

So the obvious answer to these questions is a resounding NO!  But “bully” is in the neighborhood in this song, ruining the sounds of rhymes, 14 times to be exact, 6 in the first 3 stanzas.   If he would just go away, right?, and leave the harmony of rhyming alone?  Stop polluting words that just want to be left alone in their own little rhyming world?  Well, as Christopher Ricks reminds us, words rhyme only by coincidence and “bully” is only discordant in this song because Dylan, not by coincidence, wants it to stand out even more from its lack of rhyming power.  All this choice of words is behind Dylan’s efforts to play with structure to enhance the neighborhood bully metaphor.  In this song, “bully” is the star with the scars.

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So it was bound to happen that Dylan would refer to the North Star during his Christianizing phase.  Here it is in the last stanza of “Man of Peace“:

Somewhere Mama’s weeping for her blue-eyed boy
She’s holding them little white shoes and that little broken toy
And he’s following a star
The same one them three men followed from the East
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace

“star” shines in the middle of the verse, unrhymed at the end of the middle line, like many end of middle line words in this song.  Perhaps it shines that much brighter being unrhymed where rhyming is expected.  According to EarthSky it, the North Star aka Polaris, is only about the 50th brightest star in the sky, but the organization admits, it “has gladdened the heart of many a lost traveler,”

the traveler in this song being the blued-eyed boy.  Dylan, by the way, has blue eyes:

Johnny Cash’s were brown:

In 2003, when Cash died, Dylan called him the North Star, “you could guide your ship by him–the greatest of the greats then and now.”

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Michael Gray says that “Covenant Woman” may be “an address of private gratitude to Mary Alice Artes.”  If this is the case, she then would be the one who is like a “morning  star” in the opening verse:

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Covenant woman got a contract with the Lord
Way up yonder, great will be her reward
Covenant woman, shining like a morning star
I know I can trust you to stay where you are

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Interestingly enough, if you play around with the arrangement of the letters in Artes you’ll find a star in it.

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Gray sees a “fusing of spiritual and earthly passion” in the song.  I think the reference to “morning star” supports this view.  The morning star is Venus who represents love, a love beyond platonic, an erotic love even, tied to fertility and beauty.  Artes as the target of gratitude in the song is a figure of love of a different kind, a kind perhaps associated with a passion for “the Lord.”  The “Lord”/reward” rhyme is followed by the “star“/”are” one.  But all four of those words are linked by the r sound accentuated, too, by the surrounding words “contract,” “her,” “morning,” and “where.”  Gray’s word “fusion” is perfect here as these words are fused together by the r sound enhancing a fusion of different kinds of passion.

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“A pathway that leads up to the stars” is suggestive of a stairway to heaven, yet “Where Are You Tonight,” which includes that reference to stars offers no easy ticket to paradise, reach for the stars but expect scars:

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There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise
Remind me to show you the scars

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By rhyming “stars” with “scars,” Dylan conveys that one cannot be achieved without the other.  The song goes like that.  The forbidden fruit that results in the erotic juice running down his leg is paid for by meeting her boss.  Beauty fades while he watches her undrape.  A woman he longs for drifts like a satellite.  Doubling, the this but that, the at what cost that ties to every pleasure, captured with a rhyme, “stars“/”scars.”  There may be no other rhyme in Dylan so riveted to the theme of a song than this one.

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The first verse of “One More Cup of Coffee” always has reminded me of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” and “stars” has a helping hand in it.  When someone has to compete for someone’s affection life is hard–it’s worse when that competition involves  stars:

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Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don’t sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above

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In Joyce’s story, Gabriel Conroy has to compete with the likes of his wife’s dead paramour, Michael Furey.  “It was a person I used to know in Galway,” . . . “He died when he was only seventeen,” . . . “I think he died for me.”  With all that revealed,
“a vague terror seizes” Gabriel, and by the end of the story “[h]is soul swooned slowly,” with “both the living and the dead” united by the falling snow.

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By the end of “One More Cup,” the speaker feels the same distance from his lover:

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And your pleasure knows no limits
Your voice is like a meadowlark
But your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark

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As “mysterious and dark” as the “evocation of [a] figure from the dead,” who is as permanent in his lover’s eyes as stars in the sky.

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Here’s the moment when Michael Furey returns to Gretta’ memory when she is at the top of a staircase listening to “The Lass of Aughrim,” from John Huston’s film version of “The Dead”:

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In his chapter called “The White Goddess, Desire,” from No Direction Home, Robert Shelton sees “Black Diamond Bay” as a song that deals with the myth of “life as a movie,” that asks of us the questions, “Are we all global village idiots whom television has reduced to voyeurism, and are we “so deadened . . . to catastrophe that we can’t tell a real crisis from a fictional one”?

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In “Black Diamond Bay” the catastrophe happens in the fifth of seven verses:

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Then the volcano erupted
And the lava flowed down from the mountain high above
The soldier and the tiny man were crouched in the corner
Thinking of forbidden love
But the desk clerk said, “It happens every day”
As the stars fell down and the fields burned away
On Black Diamond Bay

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“stars” has no say in the rhyming matter, but they do seem to be part of the fallout from the catastrophic volcano eruption, no a romantic falling on Alabama this time.

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In the last verse, the significance of this event is minimized when it is made to fit into the size of a T.V. screen:

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I was sittin’ home alone one night in L.A.
Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothin’ but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn’t seem like much was happenin’,
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear
And there’s really nothin’ anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay

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Deadened we are, too, to the fall of stars of the celebrity kind, that also seems to happen every day.  We forget though that such a fall is the fall of a man or women, a human being (“O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!).  When we become dead to each other we are no longer human, Dylan seems to say in many songs.  Maybe Shelton caught on quick to how Dylan keeps us human when are open to the questions his songs ask of us.  Why then were we so obsessed with asking questions of the celebrity falling kind when he was always the one with the good questions of the uplifting, humanity elevating kind (“How many road . . .”).  Dylan is master at asking questions or rather getting his songs to.  His songs read us, his songs listen to us; sometimes we are too busy reading and listening to his songs that we miss how much they ask of us.

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Christopher Ricks, in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, comments on Dylan’s love for rhyme– “he loves to play with it, and he loves the complication of it.”  Not to be missed is the comedy of it.  Ricks’ examples of Dylan’s most amusing rhymes includes one from “Goin’ to Acapulco,” “what the hell/Taj Mahal,” a rhyme that mutters itself, Ricks says, what the hell.

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“stars” is found in the verse that includes this “what the hell” rhyme:

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It’s a wicked life but what the hell
The stars ain’t falling down
I’m standing outside the Taj Mahal
I don’t see no one around

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It’s a verse that captures the purpose of The Basement Tapes.  The whole album smacks of , “What the hell?”   Yeah, life sucks, but it could be worse–the stars are still where we want them to be–up in the sky, not falling down.  So go have some fun:

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Goin’ down to see fat gut–goin’ to have some fun
Yeah–goin’ to have some fun

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Put on this song, or any of them, “What the hell?” And what the hell–here it is to listen to to have some fun:

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I like Carrie Brownstein’s observation that Dylan’s voice in “Idiot Wind” grows “stronger and more dangerous with each line.”  “stars” is used twice in the song, at the midway point and late, and this increasing danger is present in the lines with “stars”–the danger being the speaker’s increasingly damning finger pointing that paints him as the victim. The first time it appears is in the fourth verse:

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I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle

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Here “stars” is a rhymed word with “are.”  Stars are not shooting here, the visions are, and they are sexual (chestnut mare, bare chest, or lower . . .  chestnut hair?).  These physical visions are tough to escape, but later in the song what hounds him is more abstract, more profound, harder to overcome:

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Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

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It’s her memory, all of her, not just the attraction of her body, that he follows, and the stars are comprehensive–blanketing the world above him and around him, not relegated to his head, making him see stars.  In this verse the stars are real. Real, too, was how he “came pretty close” to revealing his “personal life, he admitted to Bill Flanagan.

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Dylan sang this song in a memorable performance at Colorado State University with Sara Dylan in the audience.  The song becoming that much more dangerous:

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Dylan wrote “Forever Young” in Tucson, AR around the time he was working with Sam Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  He hoped to avoid sentimentality in the song, admitting he was, “thinking of one of [his] boys (Jakob?) and not wanting to be too sentimental.  Christopher Ricks feels Dylan gets his wish since the song can’t avoid”sensing something dark that is in the air.”  In the first verse, one such line with that sensing includes “stars”:

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May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

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Ricks argues that the William Blake poem “For Children” (which may or may not have been familiar to Dylan) contains the “dark sensing” that Dylan’s song alludes to.  In the Blake poem, “A tiny man mounts a ladder propped against a quarter moon,” and in the background are seven stars, the caption under the illustration at this moment in the poem reads, “I want, I want.”

Better to build ladders directly to the stars, yes?  And do it with some humility–Dylan’s song after all is about granting, not wanting (no “I want you” or any one or thing for that matter in this song).  It’s about wishes, may you, may you, may you over and over again, and you will never want, in the sense of lack, for nothing.

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An epithalamion is a wedding poem, and Dylan’s “Wedding Song” is no exception.  More specifically it is a poem written for a bride on her wedding day.  It can be written by someone else for a bride and groom on their wedding day or by a groom for his betrothed as is Edmund Spencer’s “Epithalamion.”  The speaker will use hyperbole to praise his bride above all other things on earth and urge the time to pass so that bride and groom can consummate their love.  Dylan’s song is for Sara, though they had been married for some time when he wrote it.  Still what he pledges sounds like vows, freshly cut ones even, as if a page has been turned and the marriage will start anew.

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“stars” assists that exaggerated language of praise in the song, though not in a rhyming role:

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I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love
I love you more than money and more than the stars above
Love you more than madness, more than waves upon the sea
Love you more than life itself, you mean that much to me

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Likewise, Spencer uses stars to exaggerate his lover’s eyes:

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My love is now awake out of her dreames,

And her fayre eyes like stars that dimmed were

With darksome cloud, now shew theyr goodly beames

More bright then Hesperus his head doth rere.

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Brighter than the evening star (Hesperus) her eyes are.  In Dylan’s song, his love for Sara is greater than than the stars, more than love and even life itself.

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This photograph captures the kind of doting needed to write “Wedding Song”:

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In No Direction Home, Robert Shelton informs us that “Time Passes Slowly” was written by Dylan for Archibald MacLeish’s play, The Devil and Daniel Webster, which Dylan later backed out of.  Ricks says it’s a song whose “rhymes refuse to stay right.”  This may be true, but “stars” has no part of any such refusal.  The word appears away from any rhyming action in the second verse:

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Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin’
We sat in her kitchen while her mama was cookin’
Stared out the window to the stars high above
Time passes slowly when you’re searchin’ for love

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Ricks gives the example of the rhyme “daylight/”stay right as one with tension:

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Time passes slowly up here in the daylight
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right

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Ricks made me stare so much–or rather strain to here it that I noticed starring and star-ing have something going with the sounds in the song.  “Stared” begins the line with “starts” in it.  “stare is the second word in the line Ricks aims at.  But look!  Stare even . . . “stars” rhymes with “hard” and “high” rhymes with “right.”  What happens when those lines become neighbors?

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Stared out the window to the stars high above

We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right

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Not much in the rhyming vein, but the s-sounds become more prominent.  s . s . s . s . s . s . s . s .  Something’s ticking in this song, namely the s alliteration–time passing slowly.  I should have been a pair or ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.  Yes, Eliot . . . time passes slowly and we fade away.

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What Dylan does with the “not right” rhymes and alliteration is worth a listen:

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Robert Shelton says “One More Night” from Nashville Skyline has the feel of an old Bill Monroe song which turned out to be Elvis’s first recording.   “Stars” appears in the first line of Dylan’s song,

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One more night, the stars are in sight
But tonight I’m as lonesome as can be
Oh, the moon is shinin’ bright
Lighting ev’rything in sight
But tonight no light will shine on me

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In Bill Monroe’s tune it “stars” appears in the bridge:

It was on a moonlight night,
The stars were shining bright.
And they whispered from on high,
Your love has said goodbye.

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Neither has a rhyming role, but in both the brightness of stars are in opposition to the darkness the singer feels inside.  The real light of their lives is missing or has gone away.  They yearn for the return of the light in their lives that has gone out.   In both, too, stars take a backseat to the moon.  In Dylan’s song, the light in it won’t shine on him–or at least it won’t affect him, or worse, he’s resolved that he won’t feel the light of his lover, at least for one more night (but you know tomorrow can be a long time).  In Monroe, there’s more hope, the light may be able to shine on his lover and bring her back.  Listen to the quickening pace Monroe uses in this live version to inspire that hope.

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The third verse in “Desolation Row” begins with the moon and stars:

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Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide

“hidden” and “hide” don’t rhyme though they look like they want to.  “moon” and “stars” seem to always want to do something together in song and poetry, but the moon is always closer to the poet; stars are far away.  So distance matters.  In these two lines, “stars” is closer to the rhyme and gets bragging rights over the moon for being in the line that forces the first rhyme:

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The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside

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The rhyme jumps over the moon.  “stars” has the inside track with the rhyme “hide”/inside” (Hide inside Desolation Row?)  Not a rhyming starring role for “stars” but it shares the line with “hide.”

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Both the moon and stars will be hidden soon (by clouds?, dawn?), but the moon is acted upon–“hidden”–“stars” get to hide of their own volition–they “are beginning to hide.”

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Thematically, this fits with “Desolation Row.”  Dylan refers to people throughout the song whose ultimate fate is a result of being acted upon (Ophelia) or an action taken (Einstein, Cinderella).  I love things hidden by Dylan; I love when Dylan lets things hide.

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What is Bob Dylan’s finest love song?  Christopher Ricks, under the category of “Faith” (one of the “The Heavenly Graces”) in his book Dylan’s Vision of Sin, thinks it’s “Boots of Spanish Leather.”  So I assume he’d give it four stars.  The song though has only one:

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Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’

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It’s the fourth verse, one of the four that begin with “Oh,” and it may be the most heartfelt expression from the, shall I say, male lover who does not want his beloved to depart.  Ricks is right that this song is doesn’t ask for anything, and in this verse, the lover would even give up great possessions like stars and diamonds if he had them for just one of her sweet kisses.  They’d also be the shiniest stars since they’d be from the darkest night–perhaps the one coming once the Dear John letter arrives in verse seven:

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I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’

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It’s Dylan’s voice that captures just the right tone that makes this a legitimate pick for his finest love song.  Always worth a listen:

When it comes to cars, where is your Dylan?  In the backseat smoking a cigarette?

Behind the wheel?

(Photo by Brad Elterman)

Outside near a car?

Or where he makes things happen inside cars?

Well, whatever one, buckle up and start your engines, because this blog is taking a ride down all the twisting turning roads in all of Bob’s songs where “car(s)” appear.

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In Dylan’s most recent videos, cars play prominent roles.  In “When the Deal Goes Down,” the always double-barrel beautiful Scarlett Johansson is in a red convertible. A car is used by a woman as a weapon against her abusive mate in “Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘” (“cars” is used to rhyme with “ours” in that song).  And most recently, in “Duquesne Whistle” a van (okay, not a car) is a source of terrorism for the Charlie Chaplin-esque young lover.  Cars are vehicles for many things in Dylan.

Cop cars appear in the next to last verse of “It’s All Good“:

Cold-blooded killer, stalking the town
Cop cars blinking, something bad going down
Buildings are crumbling in the neighborhood
But there’s nothing to worry about, ’cause it’s all good
It’s all good
They say it’s all good

No rhyme with “cars,” but the alliteration in “cop cars” hooks up well with the “Cold” in “Cold-blooded.”  Daniel Mark Epstein quotes the same verse from the song to demonstrate how the song is “laugh-out-loud hilarious,” and how Dylan’s voice “was just the right voice for it.  Agreed.  Just right, too, is a cop car or two to hit home, if it hasn’t already, that “It’s all good” is exactly what it’s not.

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According to Daniel Mark Epstein, Bob’s first car was a pink Ford Convertible given to him by his dad after his 16th birthday, “Abe sometimes spoiled his son with gifts.”
Maybe it looked something like this:

And then in 1961, Bob made his famous hitchhiking journey, with two college students, from Madison, WI to NYC, in a four-door Chevrolet Impala:

In 2001’s Love and Theft, Dylan puts Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in a street car named desire:

Well, they’re going to the country, they’re gonna retire
They’re taking a street car named Desire

The rhyme “retire/Desire” that comes from this street car creates an interesting contrast in Dylan’s life.  Desire certainly drove him to NYC, becoming “the city that would come to shape my destiny,” Bob says.  His desire to see Woody Guthrie, especially fueled him more than anything else.  And Bob has never considered retirement it seems (motorcycle accident respite aside), the unending tour proof of his ardent-heartedness, desire countering any impulse to retire.  Dee and Dum are two identities in one, two impulses, two roles to play, neither real or only real together, like Robert Zimmerman and Bob Dylan, but both with “their noses to the grindstones.”

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“car” and “star” rhyme in “Summer Days.” The star, the celebrity kind that is, not the celestial type, is worn out, or at least called so:

Well I’m drivin’ in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, “You’re a worn-out star”

Later in the song, a car is getting worn out as well:

I got eight carburetors, boys I’m using ’em all
Well, I got eight carburetors and boys, I’m using ’em all
I’m short on gas, my motor’s starting to stall

Being on all cylinders will do that.  Summer’s wearing out in this song, too, but the song isn’t, too much jump and energy for that to happen.  And the speaker knows a place anyway “where there’s still something’s going on.”  Maybe it’s here, the perfect destination for anyone, even a worn out star, drivin’ in the flats in a Cadillac car”:

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In “Union Sundown” off of Infidels, “car” is not in the rhyming headlights, but “Chevrolet” is with “day”:

And the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day

The lines with the rhymes are ten syllables each, too–straight roads taken by Bob to make this rhyme.

Here’s an 83 Chevrolet I could picture Bob in, but I guess the license should say Argentina;

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In 1983, Dylan once said about the song, “Shot of Love,” “It defines where I am at spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else.  It shows where my sympathies lie . . . It’s all there in that one song.”

I always take what Dylan says with a grain of salt (every grain even, salt and sand), but If I  pretend he meant this, “car“‘s place in this song ramps up a bit:

What makes the wind wanna blow tonight?
Don’t even feel like crossing the street and my car ain’t actin’ right
Called home, everybody seemed to have moved away
My conscience is beginning to bother me today

“car” is parked away from the rhyme, “”away”/”today” but it adds to the sense of being stuck and in need of a shot of love. The speaker can’t move while everyone else  seems to be, away that is.  Spiritually, this song smacks of an existential angst, a parting from the absolutes from Slow Train and Saved.  Everything’s not broken, but they “ain’t actin’ right, that’s for sure.  Musically and romantically? I get–the reggae/gospel sound he liked during this period, and who hasn’t been in need of a shot of love.  Spiritually speaking though, this song and this verse are an indictment of a religion with all the answers or rather of religion that makes questions unnecessary.  What makes the wind want to blow tonight?  Maybe  to keep those answers just far enough away from our mortal grasp.
Dylan live singing “Shot of Love” with his gospel gang:

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In the first stanza of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “streetcar” pulls up again in the sixth line, not as a noun though, but as an adjective describing the lady’s kind of visions:

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate

No hint of a rhyme, but if that streetcar is desire again, how beautiful to have visions of desire placed “on the grass.”  According to the Oxford Dictionary of World Histories, the word “car” was mainly poetic and conveyed splendour and solemnity, from Latin carrum, carrus meaning a wheeled vehicle.  I can only imagine with what splendour and solemnity this sad-eyed lady would place her desires on grass; with  “flesh like silk” and a “face like glass” what an image that would be.

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The speaker in “Talkin World War III” steals a car, a Cadillac to be exact:

Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown
And there was nobody aroun’
I got into the driver’s seat
And I drove down 42nd Street
In my Cadillac. Good car to drive after a war

Lord, I ain’t goin’ down to no race track
See no sports car run
I don’t have no sports car
And I don’t even care to have one
I can walk anytime around the block

World War III changes things–he’s alone stealing a car in NYC in that song, where

Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else

In Bob Dylan’s Blues” “car” is unrhymed, “run” rhymes with “one,” but “one” refers to a car.  On the cover he doesn’t seem to want to be “one,” “walkin around with no one else that is,” but together, smiling, walking with Suze.

“Midnight” is the next rhyming word from “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.'” I could see Dylan doing a theme-time radio show on it.  Several like Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” Clapton’s “After Midnight,” The Rolling Stones’ “Midnight Rambler,” Lionel Hampton’s “Midnight Sun,” and maybe my favorite midnight tune, “Midnight Special” by Credence come immediately to my mind. (Dylan’s first professional recording experience was playing harmonica on the title track of Harry Belfonte’s album Midnight Special.)

I think Dylan would have a special place in his mind with “midnight” what with the liminal status associated with it from Cinderella.  It was the time after all, when she  returned to her former identity–perhaps a nightmarish thought for Dylan (midnight as death) who has spent his life stripping himself of one mask after another: “mask-erading.”

In “Beyond Here,” midnight comes across as the time that reveals more Cormac McCarthy-like desolation to what lies out there, out of reach.  It’s rhyming partner is “without it,” or rather the “mid” in midnight is “without it”‘s rhyming partner, with the “t” sound like a bell tolling at the end of each line (a sneaky non-rhyme really), and at first it feels like he does not know what to do without midnight:

I’m movin’ after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don’t know what to do without it

Likewise, the train can’t stop a rain linked to at the very least to the ending of a day, but likely the end of our days.

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Hard to avoid visions of paradise in “Beyond the Horizon.”  The way Dylan describes it who’d not want to go there right now.  There it’s easy to love, love waits forever for everyone, and people pray for your soul.  Get me a ticket–no slow train. . . . Duquesne Express, please.   “midnight” finds itself in the middle of a line again in this song, internally rhyming side by side with “side.”  Midnight is when something’s gonna happen–entities separated will be united:

Beyond the horizon across the divide
‘Round about midnight, we’ll be on the same side
Down in the valley the water runs cold
Beyond the horizon someone prayed for your soul

What can’t ‘scape my mind is the word “chime” is also in this song.  Shakespeare used “chimes” just once  in all his plays and it’s linked up with “midnight” to form a memorable phrase from Falstaff:

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow. (HIV.III.II.2067)

Can’t help but think that the phrase was on Dylan’s mind when he used both words in the same song.  Hearing those chimes at midnight with Falstaff meant some good, late night frolics.  But Hal must separate himself from his drinking buddy to become HenryV.  Beyond the horizon, maybe they hear those chimes together again.

Below is a link to the Orson Welles film on the Henry plays called Chimes at Midnight.  Within the first 1:15 the phrase above is spoken.  It’s worth a look just t see Welles, but note the nostalgia for good ole times–going back to them, dream-like . . . like a Bob Dylan dream where you’d hear

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOhq0AyRNjY

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“chimes” and “midnight” appear in “Chimes of Freedom,” too.  In this song the sound of the bell is broken or maybe it’s “like the fading sound of bells in the distance” or “more of a knell than a chime,” as Dalton says, but the flashing replaces the impact of sound, sound illuminating, a synesthesia effect on behalf of but maybe also to reveal “the warriors whose strength is not to fight,” “the refugees on the unarmed road of flight,” and “each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night”:

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

Broken, too, is any end of line rhyming in those first four lines, but not the chiming of the short vowel sounds in “finish”/”midnight’s,” “ducked”/”thunder,” “Seeming”/”freedom.”  . . . “bewilderment in the highest degree”?  Sure, but in a good way.

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“midnight” modifies the moon and a train on “Standing in the Doorway,” but  (mid)–night train/my veins” may be the best damn rhyme on the whole Time Out of Mind  album:

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“Trying to Get to Heaven” is on my list of top ten Dylan songs.  It’s tone is carried through so perfect and Dylan’s voice soothes while it aches from the “air is getting hotter” right to Sugartown.  Fittingly, “midnight” appears in the last of five stanzas. Death may not the end but midnight is and for a person trying to get anywhere, let alone heaven, before the door is closed, midnight might just be the deadline. But “midnight” is not a specific time in this song; it just describes a rambler and it’s not involved in any rhyme:

Some trains don’t pull no gamblers
No midnightramblers like they did before

A rambler is an individual on a peaceful walk.  A Middle Dutch derivation of the word though refers it to as animal wandering about in heat”–an interesting link to a song that begins, “The air is getting hotter.”

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In his chapter on ‘Hope” in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, Ricks refers to “Can’t Wait” as one of Bob’s”how much longer” songs.  From the title, how much longer he can’t wait clashes with the ending of just about every stanza when he either says “And” or “But” “I don’t know how much longer I can wait.”  Can/Can’t what’s the difference, right?  Well, when you say you can’t wait for something eager anticipation is involved, saying you can wait implies a kind of take or leave it, leaning on the leave it.

“midnight” appears in the first stanza where can’t and can waiting are both present, the first at the beginning (repeating the title) and the latter at the end:

I can’t wait, wait for you to change your mind
It’s late, I’m trying to walk the line
Well, it’s way past midnight and there are people all around
Some on their way up, some on their way down
The air burns and I’m trying to think straight
And I don’t know how much longer I can wait

The “can’t wait” seems more literal–he literally can’t wait–there’s an urgency, but not one tied to anticipation.  Something’s about to happen.  It’s way past midnight–and people going up or down suggest a waiting for judgment that’s a result of the tolling of the midnight bell.  The burning air is ominous, portending a descent rather than an airlift.  “midnight“‘s not involved with any rhymes, but each end of the line is, and this song seems about being at the end of the line or one’s line, or rope, though if the line’s long enough maybe he’ll just have to wait, or we will; it’s a long song, can’t wait for it to end . . . how much longer . . . or can’t wait for the end, can’t wait, can wait.  Gotta go, can’t wait.

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On Empire Burlesque, “midnight” appears twice, once in “Something’s Burning, Baby” and in “Dark Eyes.,” the last two songs of the album, the midnight of it, if you will.  In “Something’s Burning,” “midnight” modifying”train” is not included in the rhyme, but “train” is:

Got to start someplace, baby, can you explain?
Please don’t fade away on me, baby, like the midnighttrain

In “Dark Eyes, a song Shelton calls “an affirmation of love’s transcendence in a painful world,” “midnight” describes the moon:

Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside
They’re drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide

“midnight”  helps perspective in both songs.  A midnight train does fade for someone on the platform watching it disappear into the night.  A midnight moon shines bright off the water when one sees it in the distance perhaps from a concert stage (Ricks makes much ado about the last line of the song referring to the eyes Dylan sees at every performance) near a, river (riverside) lake or park.  And the singer is about to slide, slide out?, the crowd is thinning out, and he’s just about to do the same?  On stage, removed, from another world (where one stands seems to matter in this song: “They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.), the world he sings to is separate from his:

I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls and all I see are dark eyes

In 1997, Dylan said, “When I’m up there, I just see faces. A face is a face, they are all the same” (Ricks 490). Singing about life and death every night, which truth be told he does, better sometimes to lift those eyes to that unique midnight moon above/beyond the sameness of dark eyes.

(Midnight Moon by B. Wilson)

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In “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “creep” rhymes with “leap,” two nicely juxtaposed contrasting movements.  It’s “creep” that finds “midnight” in front of it though, not leap, which would make the lines with that rhyme less open to interpretation:

Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful, bounding leap
And, foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst

Really, it’s the word “make” that causes interesting problems.   A person can make a low to the ground movement, because  he would rather not be noticed.  So “midnight” describes the time of the creeping.  And this makes sense in the song, being that this is no home but a brothel Frankie Lee goes to (creeps) for sixteen nights . . . days, too.  But Frankie may have turned those days into nights (“moral desert,” Shelton calls it), succumbing to temptations of the flesh.  So Frankie Lee may have made his midnight go slower, move gradually, to the tune of 16 days worth of midnight.

Not sure if anything is revealed by this; even the little creep who carries Frank Lee’s body to its grave concealing his guilt while doing, says, “‘Nothing is revealed,'” just what someone who creeps or a creep would want, perhaps especially around midnight.

Here’s the audio of Bob singing it live in London in 2000 sometime within 24 hours of midnight:

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I have listened to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” many a time; as an undergraduate, I even recall writing about it in a T.S. Eliot class with Christopher Ricks, so when I recently listened to it and then saw “midnight rug,” I think I just chalked it up as just one of those far-reaching psychedelia Blonde on Blonde moments that would evade me. Maybe it didn’t help that rug rhymed with drugs (“midnight” playing bridesmaid again to the rhyming word):

With your childhood flames on your midnight rug
And your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs

But then I googled “midnight rug” just to see what would happen.  I was surprised to find that I could buy a midnight rug if I wanted to–midnight is a color.  Now, who knows what Dylan meant by the phrase, but in any event for me he advanced the range of midnight‘s meanings–and I kind of like the color, it’s, wouldn’t you know it, dark, black, and look what it does for a rug:

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Daniel Mark Epstein, in The Ballad of Bob Dylan reports that on the night Allen Ginsberg died Dylan, on stage at the time, sang “Desolation Row” on his behalf.  He told his audience that it was one of Ginsberg’s favorite songs–perhaps especially for what it said to him in its eighth stanza about the education system , as Michael Gray puts it, “organized to enforce and perpetuate ignorance, a nightmarish machinery . . .”

I can’t find a video or recording of that moment (if anyone can, please let me know or feel free to post it in a comment) and I would someday love to hear it.  I wonder for instance how Bob sounded that night when he sang that eighth verse,

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

It’s got “midnight” in it, no rhyme involved, just the word perhaps tolling a bell this time, for his friend, rounded up that night, brought to the eternal factory, etc., etc. I just wonder what Bob’s own words meant to him when he sang them for his friend that night, probably not too far from midnight.

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Christopher Ricks sees the darker side of “Love Minus Zero, No Limit” coming out in the last verse that begins with the image of that midnight bridge trembling:

The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing

Ricks asks, “[W]ho (it may be wondered with a slight tremble ) can be out there at this time of night?” Yes, there’s something deeply dark about the song’s ending,” and it is “midnight” that helps kick it off.  Ricks aims at the un-rhyming of “perfection” and “hammer” as indicative of a feeling in the song that moves from admiration of the woman’s aloofness to “a need that she not be so strong.”

Though “midnight” is an un-rhymed word as well, short and long “i” sounds permeate almost every line in the verse, creating a dark blanket of midnight from beginning to end.  Shelton doesn’t think the “ominous images . . . mar the tranquility that the love object exudes,” but Jean Tamarin observes how it “expresses a yearning that’s always disappointed.” “midnight,” real “midnight”–time of almost night “midnight” and Dylan seem to like going to the dark side together.

Here’s Bob singing it live from the Rolling Thunder Review:

A friend of a friend recently took the quality photo below of Dylan at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, NY.  Note the brilliant perspective, Bob in command, all energized but still, Tony Garnier all stillness in motion.  But most of all just look at those shoes!  No boots of Spanish leather that night–and they would indeed feel out of place in someone’s face.

By Howard Horder

The photo has inspired me to let “shoe(s)” tap dance to the forefront of concordance attention.  I will start smack dab in the middle of Dylan’s career with the last stanza of “Black Diamond Bay” from Desire:

I was sittin’ home alone one night in L.A.
Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothin’ but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn’t seem like much was happenin’,
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear
And there’s really nothin’ anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay

Dylan rhymes “shoes” with “news.”  An old pair of shoes, no big news, but a new pair, now that’s news.  We all love a new pair of shoes, newsworthy in fact, but when they’re old and all that’s left with a Panama hat, well that’s another story, worthy of seven o’clock news.

http://vimeo.com/43691890

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“Shoes” rhymes well with “blues,” too, as Dylan proves in the chorus of “Workingman’s Blues #2”:

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

You’re planning on singing a lot of blues if you need both boots and shoes.  But maybe “boots and shoes” create just the sound Dylan wants for us to meet him at the bottom of the song.  Don’t be lagging behind on that “front line” of the song–meet me at the bottom where “boots and shoes” will help us find the voice/tune/tone to “sing a little bit of those workingman’s blues.”

Dylan also sings the chorus four times–one for each boot and shoe?

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“Shoe(s)” steps in twice into “Tangled Up In Blues.”  You’d expect that from a song with a lot of traveling going on.  In both cases though, the shoes are not moving, first outside on the road:

And I was standin’ on the side of the road
Rain fallin’ on my shoes
Heading out for the East Coast
Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through
Tangled up in blue

And then later inside a “topless place”:

I just kept lookin’ at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s just about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me, “Don’t I know your name?”
I muttered somethin’ underneath my breath
She studied the lines on my face
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe
Tangled up in blue

The first “shoe” rhyme batters the “oo” sound into the song like the rain hitting his shoes, what with “dues,” “through,” and “blue” all present in three of the last seven words of the stanza.

The second one is housed in one of my favorite moments in Dylan.  Before her move to his shoes they both focus on each others’ faces: he at the side of her face, she at the lines of his (both “i” sounds by the way).  The movement to his shoes breaks this tension, creating an uneasiness–you can do anything but lay off of my blue suede shoes?

Just enjoy folks.  This song is a work of art.

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“Positively 4th Street” is a searing indictment against someone. Who?  We don’t really know, but who cares.  The insults are so good, so harsh, they amuse.  Ricks calls it “a masterpiece of regulated hatred.”  What can get lost in the midst of all the great putdowns is some of Dylan’s best rhymes:  “grinning”/winning,” “my back”/”contact,” “surprised”/paralyzed,” “rob them”/”problem.”

“Shoes” appear in the last two stanzas, with the power to rhyme as far as repetition of a word allows.  But “shoes”  gets Dylan to stand something on its head with the request to have someone stand inside his shoes and that is the cliche of “standing inside one’s shoes.”  Ricks observes that normally such a request  “is a movement inviting sympathy.”  Come see how I feel and you’ll understand me better.  But not with this shoe flip-flop.   Instead the “stand inside my shoes” is a way to turn back attention to the target of Dylan’s anger–you’ll understand not me , but what “a drag it is to see you.”  Ha! Yes, whoever you are, just when you thought you’ve lost everything in this song you find out you can lose a little more. And “shoes” helps Dylan pull this off:

I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you

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Dylan’s much maligned Self-Portrait album came out in 1970.  Many critics felt the album was Dylan’s way of escaping the media and his identities as a finger-pointing song writer/activist/voice of a generation/enlightened poet as it contained mostly covers of others’ songs and even two of his own (“Like a Rolling Stone” and “She Belongs to Me”) from previous albums.  In actuality, the album has eight new songs and one with “shoes” called “Living the Blues.”  In this song, the shoes are moving:

Since you’ve been gone
I’ve been walking around
With my head bowed down to my shoes
I’ve been living the blues
Ev’ry night without you

Dylan the contortionist–that’s a long way down to bow your head, Bob.  I believe Ricks was the first to note that the song is not about singing but living the blues.  And he quotes Dylan from the sleeve notes on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan about his admiration for those blues singers who sang the blues they lived:

“What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.”

Yeah, so depressing that one might bow down all the way to his shoes.

Here’s Bob live at the Johnny Cash Show in 1969 singing “Living the Blues.” I’m glad Bob sang it for us and created Self-Portrait so he could get outside his troubles.

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In “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” off of John Wesley Harding shoes are worn, but the request  is to kick them off:

Kick your shoes off, do not fear
Bring that bottle over here
I’ll be your baby tonight

These are  the last  three lines of the song and the album.  It’s as if Dylan is saying relax, kick off your shoes, grab that bottle, and play that album again.  I also like it as a sequel to “Tomorrow is a Long Time.”  That long day is over and in this song lovers reunite.

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“shoes” and “shoe” show up once each on Blonde on Blonde.  In “Stuck  Inside of Memphis with the Memphis Blues Again” Shakespeare’s in the alley with his pointed shoes (Dylan puts Shakespeare right smack in the alley, Ophelia only gets to peek into Desolation Row). In “Fourth Time Around” Dylan does something different with a shoe–he fills it up:

And when I was through
I filled up my shoe

This is a dense song.  Lying, deception, cruelty, and secrets abound in it.  Filling a shoe and giving it, in the universe of this song,  is enough to get something for the giving, even love (both a 4th time around)?  Perhaps the reminder in the first stanza of the song prompts the giving of a filled shoe:

“Don’t forget
Everybody must give something back
For something they get”

This song can make your head spin–worth listening to while staring at revolving vinyl:  around and around we go . . .

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In Who Is That Man, David Dalton says of  “Tombstone Blues” it “is old-fashioned Buck Owens country rock (overlaid with Chicago blues guitar leads) that chimes perfectly with the mock hillbilly yarn.”   I think Scorcese captured that well in the scene this song appears in No Direction Home where the young, black Dylan sings it porch-side.   “Shoes” filters its way six times through this song, as part of the chorus.  But this time shoes are not really there–Mama ain’t got none:

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse (Dylan sings “food” )
I’m in the streets (Dylan sings “kitchen”)
With the tombstone blues

Dylan wrote “fuse” but sings “food” but either way with “shoes” and “blues” the rhyme supports the “mock-hillbilly yarn” of it all .  Catchy as all get-out, it’s hard to get this chorus out of your head once you hear it.

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In “Gates of Eden,” someone else is  shoeless,  the hunter who’s gone deaf:

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden

Jean Tamarin calls “Gates” “a biblical, metaphysical protest song,” in which “[n]othing is what it seems.”  This is reassuring for to be a hunter who’s deaf and shoeless is perhaps a fate worse than death.  At least he can’t hear the complaints from the “savage soldier.”  “complains”/”remains” is a good rhyme to hear though, in or out of Eden.

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Robert Shelton in No Direction Home refers to “Down the Highway” as one of those songs in which “Suze is a recurring theme.”   “shoes” appears in the middle of the song, rhyming with “lose.”

Well, I been gamblin’ so long
Lord, I ain’t got much more to lose
Yes, I been gamblin’ so long
Lord, I ain’t got much more to lose
Right now I’m havin’ trouble
Please don’t take away my highway shoes

Both words form the only rhyme that also rhymes with “Suze.”  Clearly on his mind is losing her:

Well, the ocean took my baby
My baby stole my heart from me
Yes, the ocean took my baby
My baby took my heart from me
She packed it all up in a suitcase
Lord, she took it away to Italy, Italy

Losing Suze is one thing, (and his heart–she packed it in the suitcase) but not the sound of her name, not with “shoes” and “lose” around to keep it alive where he can hear it every time he sings this song.

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What rhymes with “shoes” is one thing, but who rhymes with “shoes” is another, and who rhymes better with shoes than Gypsy Lou:

Well, I tell you what if you want to do
Tell you what, you’ll wear out your shoes
If you want to wear out your shoes
Try and follow Gypsy Lou
Hey, gone again
Gypsy Lou’s ’round the bend
Gypsy Lou’s ’round the bend

You’ll wear yourself out if  you try to keep up with Gypsy Lou; tell you what you’ll wear out a rhyme, too, if you repeat it twice in two lines.  Following them words that rhyme with Gypsy Lou, is fun to do, too, in “Gypsy Lou,” especially when she comes round the bend to be at the end of the line for some mighty fine rhyming.

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Shelton calls the rarely performed “John Brown” an attack on “the concept of war heroes.”  In it, perhaps Dylan does what most, if not all, effective anti-war literature does (Wilford Owen, Tim O’Brien come immediately to my mind)–it makes us feel what it’s like to be inside the shoes of a victim, specifically someone who returns as maimed and disfigured mentally from disillusionment as he/she is physically.  The stanza that houses the “shoe” rhyme is this one:

“Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?
I was on the battleground, you were home . . . acting proud
You wasn’t there standing in my shoes”

Yes, it’s what been done in those shoes (you’d know what a drag it was to be me?)–seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt while standing in those shoes by, as Owen says in “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” “children ardent for some desperate glory,” that makes the war hero’s return home the time for those tears.

Here’s Bob’s memorable live performance of it on MTV Unplugged, 1995:

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According to bobdylan.com, 1961’s “Man on the Street,” has been played only once by Dylan.  It’s about a homeless man found dead in the street.  Shelton says it’s based on a real incident–Bob saw “a policeman jab a dead man with his club to stir him.” “shoes” is not used for a rhyme, but it sure helps reveal the devil in the details:

Well, the crowd, they gathered one fine morn,
At the man whose clothes ‘n’ shoes were torn.
There on the sidewalk he did lay,
They stopped ‘n’ stared ‘n’ walked their way.
Torn clothes and shoes, torn shoes, especially so sad, on “an old man who never done wrong.”
I’m not certain, but this performance from the Witmark Demos, might be that one time Dylan played it:

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Ricks says of “Walkin Down the Line” that it “is always light-hearted even when you might have expected otherwise.”  Maybe one of those moments is at the end of the song when the speaker admits to having the “walkin blues”:

I got my walkin’ shoes
I got my walkin’ shoes
I got my walkin’ shoes
An’ I ain’t a-gonna lose
I believe I got the walkin’ blues

Determined not to lose in those “walkin shoes,” begs the question, not a heavy headed one though, not lose what exactly?  The blues?  No, Bob never did; no thing, no one, no how, will blow his blues away.

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Under the Red Sky has “shoes” in three of its songs, “Wiggle, Wiggle,” “Cats in the Well,” and the title song.  in each, respectively, “shoe(s)” is used as a rhyme word:

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle in your boots and shoes
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, you got nothing to lose

The cat’s in the well, and Papa is reading the news
His hair’s falling out and all of his daughters need shoes

Someday little girl, everything for you is gonna be new
Someday little girl, you’ll have a diamond as big as your shoe

In the first, boots are seen wiggling with shoes, the second a lack of shoes again links to poverty, in the third the shoe is compared to the promise of one big-ass diamond, unless the little girl is Thumbelina-like tiny, which is possible in this album filled with fairy-tale allusions.  For the sheer fun of it, check out Thumbelina’s shoes:

[“Boots and shoes” is a phrase also found in the chorus of “Workingman’s Blues #2.” Gecko, in a reply to this blog post, implied that the phrase may have its roots somewhere in a bygone past:  ““boots and shoes,” is a striking image that is bygone for me like I know what he means but it is a little foreign to me.”  Inspired I did a little research but came up empty as a dry well.  If anyone finds that the phrase has a link to a time before Dylan, please share.]

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In “Summer Days“off Love and Theft “shoes” get lost but only in the sense of rhyming with “lose.”

Politician got on his jogging shoes
He must be running for office, got no time to lose
He been suckin’ the blood out of the genius of generosity
You been rolling your eyes—you been teasing me

And these are certain kinds of shoes, jogging ones, but they get lost, run right out of their shoes, since “running for office” doesn’t really require any running, just some motionless blood-sucking from those generous enough to support the campaign, a clean kind of theft, a good fit for an album filled with love and theft, the soft kind, worthy of a tax deduction.

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In “Union Sundown”off Infidels, “shoes” find themselves as items in a long list of non-US-made products, among them a flashlight, a tablecloth, a belt buckle, a shirt, and a car.  Appearing early in each line, none gets rhyming attention, not even internally:

Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore
My flashlight’s from Taiwan
My tablecloth’s from Malaysia
My belt buckle’s from the Amazon
You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines
And the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day

In “Man of Peace,” “shoes” appears at the end aiding in a sad, memorable visual of a missing son, a blued-eyed one, rekindling memories of the same boy in Hard Rain:

Somewhere Mama’s weeping for her blue-eyed boy
She’s holding them little white shoes and that little broken toy

“blue”/”shoes” gets a rhyming nod here, but “boy”/”toy” is the key rhyme it leads to.   Stealing the show for me though is “them,” poignantly expressed as if were all part of this story or have heard it before.

“shoes” in “I and I” gets the prominent sense role as the set-up man for “barefoot,” the word that ends the line,

Noontime, and I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part
Into the narrow lanes, I can’t stumble or stay put
Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart
I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot

The “put”/”foot” rhyme is so good I almost wish “stare put” made sense for a more complete rhyme with “barefoot.”  Anyway, the singer is a cobbler, making shoes (soles, souls, life as a vale of soul-making?) this time, or having made them, but never again?  There’s an “I ain’t coming” back feel to this song, as Jonathan Lethem says, “‘I and I’ allegorizes a journey from home and hearth, but here Dylan never returns, the last verse dissolving on the singer ‘barefoot’ on ‘the narrow lanes.'”  Yes, it’s a long and narrow way.

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One thing to make shoes and go barefoot, it’s another to shine them, move mountains and mark 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

No rhyme there with “shoes,” a little surprising since it appears at the end of the line, but so do those gentlemen, with two choices, elimination or “The Changing of the Guards.”

I have a different take on “I Want You.” I think Dylan’s playing with the word “you”  or rather the sound “u.”  I think he’s saying I want “u,” the sound, to enter that song.  Ricks spotlights the equivocal meaning of “sense” and “cents” in “It’s All Over Now Baby Blues”:

The highway is for gamblers better use your sense.’

Yes, better, one who bets, use your cents well.

I want u.

Dylan wants a u.  Vanna, Where are you/u?

After the first stanza, which sets up the conflict, “The silver saxophones say I should refuse you,” someone telling him to refuse “u” (how does a poet do that exactly?) see how long it takes for Dylan to get to a “u” sound in song:

The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way
I wasn’t born to lose you

I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you

The drunken politician leaps
Upon the street where mothers weep
And the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin’ from my broken cup
And ask me to
Open up the gate for you

I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you

How all my fathers, they’ve gone down
True love they’ve been without it
But all their daughters put me down
’Cause I don’t think about it

Well, I return to the Queen of Spades
And talk with my chambermaid
She knows that I’m not afraid to look at her
She is good to me
And there’s nothing she doesn’t see
She knows where I’d like to be
But it doesn’t matter

I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you

Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit
He spoke to me, I took his flute
No, I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?
But I did it, though, because he lied
Because he took you for a ride
And because time was on his side
And because I . . .

I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you

Yup, not until the last stanza before the final chorus. (And yes, if you looked/listened close, the word “True” that begins line 22, is the long “u” sound, but it is not used in a rhyme.  Why else would Dylan want a “u”?)

And that last stanza houses a sudden barage of long “u” rhymes:  suit/flute/cute followed by a steel curtain of “i” sounds.  Yes, “I” wants “U” and both unite at the end.

And because I . . .
I want u

In his recent book, Who Is that Man (which I’m thoroughly enjoying ), David Dalton refers to Christopher Ricks as “[t]he eminent scholar.”  And so he is.  I had the privilege of meeting Sir Christopher in 1983 when I took a class at Trinity College, Oxford.  It was a class on T.S. Eliot, and I had no idea who Christopher was.  I left for England on July 4th, the day Dave Righetti pitched a no-hitter for the Yankees.  I remember calling home before my flight left, to find out if Righetti nailed it, and he did.  I landed at Heathrow airport the morning of my first class with Ricks, and entered the class late.  Christopher seized it as a teaching moment putting me on the spot by saying  something to me like, “What do you think of all of us?”  Seized myself by embarrassment and paranoia, I muttered somethin’ underneath my breath like, “I don’t know . . . I don’t know any of you.”  He seemed to like that response because he was teaching “Eliot and Prejudice.” (At the time, Ricks was working with the widow Eliot on T.S.’s unpublished poetry.)

Once I settled myself in, the red gradually disappearing from my face, I noticed that Christopher was weaving in quotes from Bob Dylan while he spoke ( as I did above).  No one else seemed to be noticing this, so after class I went up to him and asked  him about it.  “You speak a lot of Dylan when you talk.”  Ah, glad you noticed.”  We went on to talk about Dylan, and I told him I brought my Dylan tapes but unfortunately forgot my tape player.  In a moment of generosity I still admire, Ricks gave me one of his (his only one?) to use the entire summer.  Naturally, when I did my final paper for the class, I chose a comparison of Dylan and Eliot.  Christopher’s loan of his player enabled me to listen to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” so that I could fall into the song’s “hypnotic trance,” as Dalton calls it, and not just read the lyrics.

Thanks again, Christopher.

Ricks deserves credit for being the first brave scholar to place Dylan on in the pantheon of poetic studies.  He saw in Dylan someone whose way with words is ingenious.  His book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, is a testament to Dylan’s genius and mastery of language.

For anyone who has the time, check out his lecture on the poetry of Bob Dylan:

Sir Christopher Ricks on the Poetry of Bob Dylan

by New College of the Humanities

Jacques Levy, a theater director, who co-wrote songs with Dylan on the album Desire, spoke of Dylan’s passion for rhyme:

“One of the very nice nice things about working with Bob is that he loves rhyme, he loves to play with it, and he loves the complication of it.”

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One of my favorite passages about rhyme comes from Ricks’ book  Dylan’s Vision of Sin.  In his segment called “Rhyme,” Ricks refers to Arthur Hallam’s assertion that a “constant appeal to Memory and Hope” permeates rhyme.  Ricks writes,

“Rhyme contains this appeal to Memory and Hope . . . because when you have the first rhyme-word you are hoping for the later one, and when you have the later one, you remember the promise that was given earlier and is now fulfilled. Responsibilities on both sides, responsively granted” (38-39).

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“Rhyme” will have its heyday on this blog for sure, but in the meantime, collecting favorite moments when Bob uses the word “rhyme” or any form of the word has I think a certain symmetry for this blog.

So here’s  one of mine from “Bye and Bye”:

Bye and bye, I’m breathin’ a lover’s sigh
I’m sittin’ on my watch so I can be on time
I’m singin’ love’s praises with sugar-coated rhyme
Bye and bye, on you I’m casting my eye

Oh, and let’s get this one out of the way from “Mr. Tambourine Man” . . . I mean that in a good way:

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

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I was just blasting Under the Red Sky when the word “rhyme” shot into my mind (no rhyme intended) from “T.V.Talkin Song.”  I wonder if this is the only negatively associated use of “rhyme” in Dylan, though it is found in the speech from the man in Hyde Park denouncing what T.V. does to “children when they’re young/Being sacrificed to it while lullabies are being sung”:

“The news of the day is on all the time
All the latest gossip, all the latest rhyme
Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free
Don’t let an egg get laid in it by something you can’t see”

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Who else but Dylan would notice that crickets talk “back and forth in rhyme”?:

Flowers on the hillside, bloomin’ crazy
Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme
Blue river runnin’ slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever and never realize the time

from -“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”

And as Ricks says, “For all rhyme is a form of talking back and forth, something that crickets are in particularly good position to understand, rubbing back and forth, stridulating away” (VofS 42)

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Christoper Ricks helped me find “rhyme(s)” in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and in “Highlands,” two of Dylan’s longest songs.  Of its use in “Sad-Eyed, he writes, “Times,” “rhymes,” and “chimes”are rhymes because they are chimes that come several times” (VofS 41).  Here’s the lines he’s talking about:

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?

Here’s the stanza with “rhyme” that Ricks sees yearning realized, not hope:

Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam
That’s where I’ll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highland
I can only get there one step at a time

The whole album, Time Out of Mind, is filled with yearning, especially the kind that comes from knowing the end is near (the Highland? getting called home?).  David Dalton says the album “uncannily anticipated [Dylan’s] own near-death experience”–a rare disease called histoplasmosis affected his heart in 1997.  Best to savor life’s details like observing the rhymes the wind and trees make when you’re yearning for more time.  Hard to get time out of your mind when you think you don’t have much of it left.

Here’s a live performance of Bob singing “Highlands” in 1999:

age, n.: “Long Time Gone,”

all, adj., adv.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

bring, v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

by, prep.: “Long Time Gone,”

*car(s), n.: “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” Brownsville Girl,” “Honest With Me,” “Hurricane,” “Idiot Wind,” “It’s All Good,” “Paths of Victory,” “Po Boy,” “Quit Your Low Down Ways,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Shot of Love,” “Summer Days,” “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “Tangled Up In Blue,” “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” “Union Sundown.”

flower(s), n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

future, n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

*glass, n., adj.: “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” “Dignity,” “Dirge,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” “Long and Wasted Years,” “Man Gave Names To All The Animals,” “On a Night Like This,” “Outlaw Blues,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Summer Days,” “Sweetheart Like You,” “Tin Angel,” “Tempest.”

gone, adj.: “Long Time Gone,”

grudge, n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

*guard, n., v. “Changing Of The Guards,” “George Jackson,” “Life Is Hard,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “My Back Pages,” “Narrow Way,” “Temporary Like Achilles,” “Walls Of Red Wing.”

*hard, adj., adv. “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” “Ballad In Plain D,” Ballad Of A Thin Man,” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Buckets Of Rain,” “Can’t Wait,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “Dead Landlord,” “Floater,” “Forgetful Heart,” “The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Hard Times In New York Town,” “Honest With Me,” “I Don’t Believe You,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “It’s All Good,” “Jolene,” “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,””The Levee’s Gonna Break,” “Life Is Hard,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Lilly Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts,” “Long And Wasted Years,” “Million Dollar Bash,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine,” “My Back Pages,” “Narrow Way,” “Obviously Five Believers,” “Only A Hobo,” “Outlaw Blues,” “Paths Of Victory,” “Pay In Blood,” “Property of Jesus,” “Roll On, John,” “Rollin and Tumblin,” “Sara,” “Senor,” “Shelter From The Storm,” “She’s Your Lover Now,””Someday Baby,” “Song To Woody,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Sweetheart Like You,” “Talkin John Birch Paranoid Blues,” “Temporary Like Achilles,” “Thunder On the Mountain,” “Til I Fell In Love With You,” “Time Passes Slowly,” “Tin Angel,” “True Love Tends To Forget,” “This Wheel’s On Fire,” “Visions Of Johanna,” “The Walls Of Red Wing,” “Who Killed Davey Moore.”

*head(s), n., adj., v. “Abandoned Love,” “All Over You,” “Angelina,” “The Ballad of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest,” “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,””Brownsville Girl,” “Caribbean Wind,” “Changing Of The Guards,” “Clean Cut Kid,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “Day Of The Locusts,” “Dead Man, Dead Man,” “Desolation Row,” “Disease of Conceit,” Duquesne Whistle,” “Everything Is Broken,” “From a Buick 6,” “Gates of Eden,”  “George Jackson,” “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar,” “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance,” “Hurricane,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” “I Shall Be Free,” “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” “Idiot Wind,” “In The Garden,” “It’s Alright Ma,” “Joey,” “Jokerman,” “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” “Lenny Bruce,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” “Let Me Die In My Footsteps,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” “Lilly Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Love Sick,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Man Gave Names To All The Animals,” “Most Of The Time,” Motorpsycho Nightmare,” “Narrow Way,” “No Time To Think,” “One More Night,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Only a Hobo,” “Oxford Town,” “Paths of Glory,” “Pay In Blood,” “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” “Romance in Durango,” “Scarlet Town,” “She’s Your Love Now,” “Shot of Love,” “Standing in the Doorway,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “10,000 Men,” “Things Have Changed,” “Tin Angel,” “To Ramona,” “Tombstone Blues,” “TV Talkin’ Song,” “Unbelievable,” “Under Your Spell,” “Union Sundown,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Walls of Red Wing,” “What Good Am I?,” “With God On Our Side.”

hour(s), n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

judge, n., v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

*king(s), n.:  “All Over You,” “Song to Woody” “Walls of Red Wing.”

*last, adj., adv. “Ain’t Talkin,'” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Brownsville Girl,” “Bye and Bye,” “Changing of the Guards,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Clothes Line Saga,” “Cold Iron Bounds,” “Cry A While,” “Dignity,” “Fourth Time Around,” “God Knows,” The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar,” “Had A Dream About You Baby,” “Hollis Brown,” “I Don’t Believe You,” “I Feel A Change Comin’ On,” “I Shall Be Free,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You Ever Go To Houston,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” “Joey,” “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” “Lonesome Day Blues,” “Long And Wasted Years,” “Maybe Someday,” “Million Miles,” “Mississippi,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine,” “Never Say Goodbye,” “No Time To Think,” “Pledging My Time,” “Political World,” “Property of Jesus,” “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” “Roll On John,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Saved,” “Seeing the Real You At Last,” “Senor,” “Shooting Star,” “Something Is Burning,” “Song to Woody,” “Standing in the Doorway,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Sweetheart Like You,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “Tempest,” “Things Have Changed,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Tin Angel,” “Tough Mama,” “Under Your Spell,” “Walkin’ Down The Line,” “When The Night Comes Falling,” “Where Are You Tonight,” “You’re A Big Girl Now.”

me, pron. “Behind Here Lies Nothin,” #Duquesne Whistle,” “I Feel A Change Comin On,” “If You Ever Go To Houston,” “It’s All Good,” “Jolene,” “Life Is Hard.” “My Wife’s Hometown,”  “Narrow Way,” “Shake Moma Shake,” “This Dream Of You,”

*meant, v. “As I Went Out One Morning,” “Dead Landlord,” “Early Roman Kings,” “Everything Is Broken,” “Going Going Gone,” “The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Alter,” “Life Is Hard,” “Long And Wasted Years,” “Never Gonna Be The Same Again,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “One Of Us Must Know,” “Pay In Blood,” “Roll On, John,” “Scarlet Town,” “Spirit On The Water,” “Tin Angel,” “When The Deal Goes Down,” “Who Killed Davey Moore.”

*midnight, n., adj.: “Abandoned Love,” “Ain’t A-Gonna Grieve,” “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” “Beyond the Horizon,” “Can’t Wait,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Dark Eyes,” “Desolation Row,” “Dignity,”  “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Something’s Burning, Baby,” “Soon After Midnight,” “Standing in the Doorway,” “Trying to Get to Heaven,” “When the Deal Goes Down.

on, prep.: “Long Time Gone,”

one, n., adj.: “Long Time Gone,”

*past, n., adj., adv., prep.: “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,'” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Bye and Bye,” “Can’t Wait,” “Changing of the Guards,” “Don’t Fall Apart,” “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You See Her Say Hello,” “Let Me Die In My Footsteps,” “Mississippi,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Political World,” “Restless Farewell,” “Romance in Durango,” “Silvio,” “Spirit on the Water,” “Summer Days,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “Tangled Up in Blues,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Tin Angel,” “Tough Mama,” “TV Talkin’ Song,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Wedding Song.”

plains, n.:”Long Time Gone,”

quotation(s), n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

ramble(s), v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

rhyme(s), n.: “Bye and Bye, “Highlands,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,””Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” T.V.Talkin Song,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,”

ride, n., v.: “Long Time Gone,”

*said, v, adj.: “All Along The Watchtower,” “As I Went Out One Morning,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,'” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Brownsville Girl,” “Caribbean Wind,” “Clean Cut Kid,” “Cry A While,” “Dignity,” “Down Along The Cove,” “Drifter’s Escape,” “Floater,” “Fourth Time Around,” “Frankie Lee And Judas Priest,” “From A Buick 6,” “Going, Going, Gone,” “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking,” “Had A Dream About You Baby,” “Handy Dandy,” “High Water,” “Highlands,” “Highway 61,” “Hurricane,” “I Don’t Believe You,” “I Shall Be Free,” “I Shall Be Free #10,” “I Threw It All Away,” “Idiot Wind,” “In The Garden,” “Isis,” “It’s All Good,” “Joey,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Last Thoughts on Woodie Guthrie,” “Lenny Bruce,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Lilly Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts,” “Man In The Long Black Coat,” “Man On The Street,” “Maybe Someday,” “Million Miles,” “Mississippi,” “My Back Pages,” “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “North Country Blues,” “One Of Us Must Know,” “Percy’s Song,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” “Rambling Gambling Willie,” “Senior,” “Shelter From The Storm,” “Sign On The Window,” “Slow Train,” “Standing In The Doorway,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Talkin’ New York,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “Tangled Up in Blues,” “Thunder On The Mountain,” “Tight Connection To My Heart,” “Tin Angel,” “TV Talkin’ Song,” “Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum,” “Unbelievable,” “Union Sundown,” “The Ugliest Girl In The World,” “Up To Me,” “Wedding Song,” “Went To See The Gypsy,” “Who Killed Davey Moore.”

same, adj.: “Long Time Gone,”

*shoe(s), n.: “Black Diamond Bay, “Cats in the Well,” “Changing of the Guards,” “Down the Highway,” “Fourth Time Around,” “Gates of Eden,” “Gypsy Lou,” “I and I,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” “John Brown,” “Living the Blues,” “Man of Peace,” “Man on the Street,” “Positively 4th Street,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Summer Days,”  “Tangled Up in Blues,” “Tombstone Blues,” “Under the Red Sky,” “Union Sundown,” “Walkin Down the Line,” “Wiggle, Wiggle,”  “Workingman’s Blues #2.”

silence, n. v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

situation(s), n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

son, n.: “Long Time Gone,”

song, n.: “Long Time Gone,”

*spread, spreading, v., n.: “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” “Changing of the Guards,” “Hard Times In New York Town.”

*star(s), n.: “Angelina,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Brownsville Girl,” “Clean Cut Kid,” “Covenant Woman,” “Desolation Row,” “Goin’ To Acapulco,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You Ever Go to Houston,” “Jokerman,” “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” “Make You Feel My Love,” “Man of Peace,” “Mississippi,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “One More Cup of Coffee,” “One More Night,” “Po Boy,” “Shooting Star,” “Standing in the Doorway,” “Summer Days,” “Time Passes Slowly,” “This Dream of You,” “Tin Angel,” “Unbelievable,” “Where Are You Tonight?”

station(s), n., v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

*still, adj., n., adv.:  “Abandoned Love,” “Ain’t Talkin,” “Are You Ready,” “Beyond The Horizon,” “Born In Time,” “Brownsville Girl,” “Bye and Bye,” “Can’t Wait,” “Caribbean Wind,” “Changing Of The Guards,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “Dirge,” “Disease Of Conceit,” “don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “Drifter’s Escape,” “Duquesne Whistle,” “Early Roman Kings,” “Floater,” “Gates of Eden,” “The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Alter,” “Handy Dandy,” “Hazel,” “Heart of Mine,” “Honest With Me,” “Hurricane,” “I and I,” “I Believe In You,” “I Don’t Believe You,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You Ever Go To Houston,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “In The Summertime,” “Isis,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” “Life is Hard,” “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack of Hearts,” “Lonesome Day Blues,” “Million Miles,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” “My Wife’s Hometown,” “Narrow Way,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “Not Dark Yet,” “Precious Angel,” “Rambling Gambling Willie,” “Sara,” “Saving Grace,” “Scarlet Town,” “Seeing The Real You At Last,” “Shake Mama Shake,” “She’s Your Lover Now,” “Shooting Star,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Something Is Burning,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Summer Days,” “Tangled Up In Blues,” “Tight Connection To My Heart,” “Till I Fell In Love With You,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “To Ramona,” “Visions of Johanna,” “What Good Am I,” “When The Deal Goes Down,” “When The Ship Comes In,” “When You Gonna Wake Up,” “Who Killed Davey More.”

tell, v.: “Long Time Gone,”

*throne, n.: “Abandoned Love,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” “Tin Angel,” “When He Returns,” “No Time To Think.”

through, prep.: “Long Time Gone,”

train(s), n.: “Long Time Gone,”

tremble(s), v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

twelve, n., adj.: “Long Time Gone,”

upon, prep.: “Long Time Gone,”

view, n.: “Long Time Gone,”

violence, n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

wall, n., v.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

*went, v.: “All Along The Watchtower,” “All Over You,” “As I Went Out One Morning,” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Brownsville Girl,” Caribbean Wind,” “Clean Cut Kid,” “Clothes Line Saga,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “Cry A While,” “Desolation Row,” “Dignity,” “Dirge,” “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” “Floater,” “Fourth Time Around,” “Hurricane,” “I Shall Be Free,” “I Shall Be Free #10,” If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Isis,” “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” “Joey,” “Lilly, Rosemary, And The Jack of Hearts,” “Life Is Hard,” “Man In The Long Black Coat,” “Million Dollar Bash,” “Most Of The Time,” “Narrow Way,” “Oxford Town,” “Roll On, John,” “Sign On The Window,” “Slow Train Comin,” “Sugar Baby,” “Talkin World War III Blues,” “Tears Of Rage,” “Tempest,” “Tin Angel,” “Tough Mama,” “Under The Red Sky,” “Up To Me,” “Wedding Song,” “Went To See The Gypsy,” “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere.”

*will, n., v.: “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Angelia,” “As I Went Out One More Morning,” “Are You Ready,” “Ballad In Plain D,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” “Billy 4,” “Billy 1,” “Black Crow Blues,” “Black Diamond Bay,” “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Born In Time,” “Buckets Of Rain,” “Bye and Bye,” “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” “Can’t Wait,” “Changing Of The Guards,”  “Cold Irons Bound,” “Covenant Woman,” “Dead Man, Dead Man,” “Dirge,” “Disease of Conceit,” “Early Roman Kings,” “Emotionally Yours,” “Frankie Lee And Judas Priest,” “Gates Of Eden,” “Got My Mind Made Up,” “I Am A Lonesome Hobo,” “I Believe In You,” “I Threw It All Away,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You Ever Go to Houston,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Is Your Love In Vain,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” “Joey,” “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” “Let Me Die In My Footsteps,”  “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” “Life is Hard,” “The Man In Me,” “Masters Of War,” “Maybe Someday,” “Mississippi,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine,” “Nettie Moore,” “No Time To Think,” “Not Dark Yet,” “North Country Blues,” “One More Night,” “One More Weekend,” “One Too Many Mornings,’ “Pay In Blood,” “Po Boy,” “Precious Angel,” “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” “Ring Them Bells,” “Romance In Durango,” “Scarlet Town,” “Senor,” “She Belongs To Me,” “Shooting Star,” “Silvio,” “Something Is Burning,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” “Spirit On The Water,” “Standing In The Doorway,” “Stop Crying,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “Things Have Changed,” “This Wheel’s On Fire,” “Thunder On The Mountain,” “Til I Fell In Love With You,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “To Ramona,” “Trust Yourself,”  “TV Talkin’ Song,” “Under Your Spell,” “The Ugliest Girl In The World,” “Watered-down Love,” “We Better Talk This Over,” “When He Returns,” “When The Night Comes Falling,” “When The Ship Comes In,” “Winterlude,” “Who Killed Davey Moore,” “Working Man’s Blues #2.”

wing, n.: “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,”

wrong, adj.: “Long Time Gone,”

young, adj.: “Long Time Gone,”

*denotes complete through Tempest