Bob Dylan - “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”
From Blood on the Tracks (1975)
‘I’m glad to see you’re still alive, you’re lookin’ like a saint’
With all the Dylanalia floating around in honor of the man’s 70th birthday (hey, it beats yet another Goblin debate! at least if you are old on the inside like me), now seems an appropriate time to launch a weeklong miniseries about a few of my favorite Bob Dylan tracks.* I’m not going to argue that these are the best or most “important” records he made; Bono can tell you how epochal “Like a Rolling Stone” was. I’m not even claiming that these tracks comprise my personal Top 7, although the last three I’ll be posting will be my favorite Dylan song, performance and overall record.** What this series will do is allow me to collect a few scattered thoughts kicking around my head, while hopefully drawing attention to some worthy entries outside the Rolling Stone canon.
I’ll kick it off with a track from one of Dylan’s most revered records, 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. In fact, its only real competitor for the consensus title of “best Dylan album ever” is Blonde on Blonde, and the split is mainly down to how you rate electric, surreal Dylan vs. acoustic, straight-talking (relatively) Dylan. Blonde on Blonde is Dylan as young turk on an upswing, whose effortless brilliance has made him cocky, both in his stream of lyrical put-downs and in his choice to make it a double LP. Blood on the Tracks presents Bob Dylan a decade older and grappling with the breakup of a marriage. He can still wield contempt like a dagger, but now it’s out of defense, not sardonic aggression. Blood on the Tracks is the polar opposite of Blonde on Blonde: personal, depressing and, most of all, not a “fun” record.
What, then, to make of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”? What is a nine-minute Old West story song doing lodged between “Meet Me in the Morning” and “If You See Her, Say Hello”? From a fan’s perspective, it’s either a rude interruption or a welcome bit of levity. Either way, it’s the odd man out.*** Except, of course, that this is Dylan we’re talking about, a man whose persona is constructed on the ambiguity between the autobiographical and the invented. Dylan maintains that Blood on the Tracks isn’t about his divorce at all, but rather based on the stories of Anton Chekhov. In actuality, it’s probably somewhere in between - certain art speaks to you when you’re in a particular frame of mind, and it’s easier to comment on it from a place of understanding. So while the rest of the songs on Blood on the Tracks present as intimate confessionals but were inspired by fiction, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is an obvious piece of fiction that cloaks honest emotion. It’s a song about a heist, but also about a romantic betrayal. The plot is hazy by design - it’s difficult to nail down the events that lead to the end of a relationship and who precisely is responsible.
At the center of the story is the Jack of Hearts, an obvious Dylan analogue.**** Like the playing card of the same name, we only see one side of Jack/Dylan - one that offers no hint of true identity. Dylan has always experimented with facades, from adopting a stage name to coating his face in white pancake makeup for the Rolling Thunder Revue. By devoting the longest running time on Blood on the Tracks to the one song that seems to have nothing personal to say, perhaps Dylan’s dropping a clue to those who endeavor to filter the album through his autobiography: no matter how raw and honest these songs seem to be, they’re just songs. Even so, it’s hard to resist the temptation to treat Dylan’s lyrics as a code to be cracked. What’s the sense in wearing a mask if it doesn’t hide anything?
(For more detailed thoughts on identity and “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” see the piece I wrote last year for PopMatters’s Blood on the Tracks retrospective.)
*Blood not included.
**I’ll explain these categories in more detail as we approach them, but think of the Grammy Awards’ divisions between Song of the Year, Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance and Record of the Year.
***In hindsight, “Lily” is sort of a sneak preview for the epic narratives of Desire (1976), although nothing on that album except “Mozambique” is quite as uptempo or light-handed.
****If you really want to overthink it - and I’m not sure that’s wise! - perhaps Lily/Jack are the Dylans as young lovers, and Rosemary/Jim are them as the bitter, estranged couple seeking the version of their partner before they changed? Which then explains why both Rosemary and Big Jim end the song dead (the latter stabbed in the back!) while Lily and the Jack of Hearts seem to go their separate ways.
Bob Dylan & The Band – “Wedding Song”
From Planet Waves (1974)
What’s lost is lost, we can’t regain what went down in the flood
The early ’70s are sort of a lost era for Dylan. He had stopped touring in 1966, and his records began settling into a groove (some would say rut). The bomb that was Self Portrait (1970) cast a cloud that didn’t entirely lift until Blood on the Tracks (1975). No one expected Dylan to be the innovator that he was in the mid-’60s. Thus, freed from the obligation to be the “spokesman for a generation*,” Dylan got to do whatever he pleased. And in 1973, that meant making an album with a few of his old friends.
The Band’s association with Dylan stretched back nearly a decade, and the group – then called The Hawks, after former bandleader Ronnie Hawkins – backed Dylan during his first electric tour in 1966. Individual members showed up on a few tracks scattered across Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Self Portrait, and together they recorded the legendary “Basement Tapes” at The Band’s big pink house in 1967. Three of the tracks on The Band’s debut album, Music from Big Pink (1968), were written or co-written by Dylan. But when Planet Waves came out in January 1974, it was the first official release of a collaboration between Dylan and the Band. And while neither artist was on a career high, the synergy between the two – along with a joint tour in early 1974, Dylan’s first time on the road since that ’66 tour – gave Dylan his first number-one album.
As you can guess, Planet Waves isn’t a record that deserved to outrank Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. But it’s a nicely relaxed record, the sound of a family man hanging out with pals. But scattered among the thoroughly OK tunes are two pairs of standouts. Planet Waves is best remembered for “Forever Young,” which appears on the album in two versions: one slow, one uptempo. But the other pair isn’t such an obvious match, apart from sharing a somewhat similar sound: minor keys and minimal acoustic accompaniment.**
Blood on the Tracks would be the album eulogizing the Dylans’ marriage, but the dichotomy of “Dirge” and “Wedding Song” hints at the impending fracture.*** “Dirge” is one of the most painful songs in Dylan’s entire catalogue, an unlove song that’s almost more brutal for being a depiction of self-loathing than for being one of his’60s-era snide kiss-offs.**** “Wedding Song,” in contrast, pours on so many declarations of love that it seems at odds with the Dylans’ impending breakup. The song opens with the line “I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love,” and it only builds from there (“if there is eternity, I’d love you there again”). But I read something darker and sadder in the use of the A minor key and in some of the imagery Dylan chooses. The lyrics throughout are imbued with hints of violence, death and loss (“I love you more than blood”), most blatantly in the fourth verse:
You gave me babies one, two, three, what is more, you saved my life
Eye for eye and tooth for tooth, your love cuts like a knife
My thoughts of you don’t ever rest, they’d kill me if I lie
I’d sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die
By employing language of such finality, “Wedding Song” seems to acknowledge a relationship coming to a close, one that can’t continue despite the couple’s intense emotional bond. Dylan’s declaration in the first verse that he loves her “more than waves upon the sea” becomes the “flood” from which nothing can be saved. The theme of love enduring despite a failed relationship would pop up again the following year on Blood on the Tracks’ “If You See Her, Say Hello,” this time from the other side of the break-up:
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart
*Which is purportedly why he released Self Portrait in the first place!
**I spent all this time talking about The Band, yet I picked the one track on Planet Waves that is Dylan solo!
***As always, exercise caution when attempting to ascribe real-world corollaries with Dylan’s lyrics. Have we learned nothing from yesterday’s post?
****Actually, “Dirge” is much more complex than I can go into here. The last line in particular – “I hate myself for loving you, but I should get over that” is fascinating in its ambiguity. Does “that” refer to getting over loving her, or to getting over hating himself for loving her? Likewise, how you interpret “should” alters the song’s meaning. This is why people obsess over Dylan’s lyrics!
(This is Day 2 of a week-long series. For Day 1, click here.)
Bob Dylan – “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”
B-side to “Heart of Mine” (1981)
I see the burning of the stage, curtain risin’ on a new age
Confession time: the last Bob Dylan studio album I own is 1978’s Street Legal. It’s not that I’m opposed to Dylan’s later material; I look forward to eventually catching up with the missing 30+ years of his discography, even if I suspect I’ve already covered the best ground (claims to the quality of Time Out of Mind, etc, to the contrary). Neither, though, am I entirely ignorant of his post-Street Legal material, thanks to the overwhelming supply of compilations and Bootleg Series releases. In fact, I first encountered “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” the way I suspect most Dylan fans did, through the 1985 boxed set Biograph. The song has since been appended to every resissue of Shot of Love (1981), but at the time of Biograph’s release, it was just the flipside of a single from gospel-era Dylan. Which is insane, as its so clearly superior to almost everything I’ve heard post-Desire (1976). Then again, the ’80s seemed marked by Dylan’s inability to assess the quality of his own work - “Blind Willie McTell,” an Infidels (1983) outtake, has rightfully been canonized as one of his top-tier songs.
The release of “Heart of Mine”/”Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” comes at the close of Dylan’s born-again era. While the A-side is wholly secular (unless I’m missing some coded language), the B-side still bears some Christian influence. The song’s title recalls the Parable of the Ten Virgins (aka the Parable of the Bridegroom), but reverses it: instead of the virgins waiting on the groom, the groom’s the one standing at the altar. The theme of the parable is the importance of preparing for Judgment Day, which gives Dylan the excuse to pile on the sort of apocalyptic imagery he’s favored throughout his career* (“Cities on fire, phones out of order/They’re killing nuns and soldiers, there’s fighting on the border”). Woven into this depiction of the end times is the character of Claudette, a woman of questionable morals (“She could be respectably married or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires”) about whom Dylan nevertheless feels some ambivalence (“I’d a-done anything for that woman if she didn’t make me feel so obligated”). This tension between the spiritual and the carnal - reflected also in the metaphorical and literal figure of the groom - perhaps reflects Dylan’s internal conflicts over evangelical Christianity. I’m not familiar with most of Dylan’s born-again records, so I can’t speak to their quality. But “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” works for me because it never feels like its proselytizing. Instead, it taps into that mystic spirituality of the American folk and blues tradition that Dylan’s drawn from since his earliest records. You don’t have to be religious to be moved by the ghosts of the old, weird America.
*See tomorrow’s entry!
Bryan Ferry – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
From These Foolish Things (1973)
Original version from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I’d be remiss if I overlooked the many, many Dylan compositions covered by other artists, especially since many are better known than the originals. Dylan’s never managed a US number-one single on his own*, but The Byrds took “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the top of the charts in 1965. “All Along the Watchtower,” Jimi Hendrix’s biggest hit and lone top 10 single, has become indelibly associated with the guitarist. Dylan’s since modeled his live performances of the song on Hendrix’s electric version, rather than the folky original from John Wesley Harding (1968). Even Time Out of Mind’s “Make You Feel My Love” (1997), far from a “classic era” single, has become the go-to song for anyone aiming for a hit on the adult contemporary charts (most successfully, Billy Joel, Garth Brooks and Adele). “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Mighty Quinn,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “My Back Pages,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Too Much of Nothing” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” have all been US Top 40 hits for other artists, which is strange when you think about how few Beatles or Rolling Stones covers become commercial successes.** Then again, Dylan’s always had a bit of a sideline as a professional songwriter – the Basement Tapes originally circulated as demos for other artists to record.
But my favorite Dylan cover isn’t by any of the usual suspects: not The Byrds or The Band***, Joan Baez or Jimi Hendrix. Bryan Ferry’s persona could not be further from Dylan’s, apart from a shared taste for irony, so it follows that his take on “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” would diverge wildly from the bare folk of the original. A cover’s a difficult thing to get right: either it hews too close to original (which, what’s the point), or the artist self-consciously tries to reinvent the song (which, at its worst, leads to the dread “comedy” cover). But Ferry’s version sounds like a Roxy Music song, a natural fit for the singer, which in turn casts a new light on the lyrics. Dylan’s version is a streetcorner rant, an areligious call to repent or die, which he stubbornly refuses to vary over the seven minute running time lest you get miss one of the signs of the end times approaching. Ferry, in contrast, greets the apocalypse as the excuse for the greatest party ever. His version has synths, female backing singers, even sound effects (“I heard the sound of thunder that roared out a warning” is followed by a thunderclap; “the song of a poet who died in the gutter” gets a semi-sincere “aw”). It’s a production worthy of the world ending, and a sly rejoinder to Dylan’s street preacher: if the choice is between going straight or dying, let the hard rain fall.
*“Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) and “Rainy Day Women #12 &35” (1966) both stalled at #2, behind The Beatles’ “Help!” and The Mamas and the Papas’ “Monday Monday,” respectively. Dylan’s only managed two other top 10 hits: “Positively 4th Street” (1965) and “Lay Lady Lay” (1969), both of which peaked at #7.
**At least part of the reason has got to be Dylan’s voice, still a deal breaker for many sorry souls.
***Here I should point out that “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Tears of Rage” aren’t technically covers. Rick Danko co-wrote the former and Richard Manuel the latter, so they’re as much The Band’s as they are Dylan’s. If I didn’t make that distinction, Ferry would not be at the top of this entry!
(This is Day 4 of a week-long series. Day 1 / Day 2 / Day 3)
