If You See Her, Say Hello

From the album that gave you the bile of Idiot Wind comes a very different ode to a woman who’s gone gone. In disclaimer, according to the Dylan himself, Blood on the Tracks was in no way influenced by the little fact that he was in the middle of getting divorced when it was written. We believe you, Bob. All those breakup songs just wafted in on the breeze, then. If you’re gonna be the subject of some poet’s divorce album, this tone of mournful resignation is the preferable way to go. At least he knows he’s at fault. Meditative songs like this one do shed more light on the human condition – and the artist’s condition – than spiteful angry ones.

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early Spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so

We had a falling-out, like lovers often will
And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart

If you get close to her, kiss her once for me
I always have respected her for busting out and gettin’ free
Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won’t stand in the way
Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I tried to make her stay

I see a lot of people as I make the rounds
And I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town
And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off
Either I’m too sensitive or else I’m gettin’ soft

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

Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/if-you-see-her-say-hello#ixzz2S9987n31

Idiot Wind

Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of this song. Bob Dylan can be a vitriolic bastard at the best of times. He’s known for not suffering fools gladly and cutting people down just for asking dumb questions. Having Dylan write a song about you is hardly a desirable honor. You’ll get a rhapsodic flight of imagery all right, but it’s more likely to be a meanly funny portrait of your faults than a praise of your beauty or wit. If you’re the woman who divorced him, be prepared for the big knives to come out. Of course, there’s no absolute proof that Sara Lowndes is the muse here. Dylan himself claimed that Blood on the Tracks was inspired by a collection of tales by Chekov and the whole divorce thing was purely a coincidence. Suuure, whatever you say, Bob. Dylan has never been the kind of artist who allows straight lines to be drawn between his music and his personal life. His songs are usually too complex to carry simple interpretations, and he certainly doesn’t want the world poking its nose into his private business. But even the ethereal Dylan can’t always escape scrutiny or avoid personal territory. Even if he didn’t set out to record a ‘divorce album,’ (who does?) he must have been deeply affected by the turmoil and couldn’t help bleeding out a bit lyrically.

I’ll Keep it With Mine

Well, I guess it’s official that Bob Dylan is a writer of Great American Standards. Like a grumpy, nasal, LSD-munching Cole Porter. Of course, he’s just as great a performer, but whether that’s first and foremost over songwriting is up for debate. Or maybe those two qualities are inexorably intertwined. Either way, besides providing us with his own musical persona, he’s also provided a brickload of songs other people like to sing. Singing Dylan is like a master class for aspiring rock stars. Everyone sings Dylan, it’s like a bylaw or something. You just have to do Dylan to prove your bonafides. This here is one of his many songs that have been interpreted by more singers than there are frogs in a swamp. Dylan tried to record this one for the Blonde on Blonde sessions, didn’t like any of it, and didn’t release a version until the Bootleg Series came out. What he did do was give to Judy Collins to song, and she released it as a single. Then there was a Bob-approved version by Nico, which is my personal favorite, because NICO. Actually, Nico’s version is kind of weird and terrible and not suited to her vocal style at all. But she’s Nico, so obviously it’s brilliant. I’m almost equally enamored or Marianne Faithfull’s recording. Or maybe even more, I can’t decide. Faithfull really surprised the universe by her metamorphosis from dreamy eye-candy folksinger into one of the greatest of torch singers. Any song she turns her mind to, she turns into something intensely personal and often painful. I almost always love what she does, but often I find it too depressing. As in this case. It’s practically the polar opposite of what Nico did. Nico played it all cool and detached, as befits her ice maiden image at the time. Faithfull played it her usual gut-wrenching way, as befits her image at the time, that of someone who’s traveled every circle of hell and has a lot of stories to tell about it. Next to those two, old Zimmy runs a very distant third. He was right to leave this track off his own albums. He may have written it, but it was never meant for him.

I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight

Here is Bob Dylan being noncryptic. He’s produced so many incomprehensible word salads that it’s easy to forget that the man can also write a damn good straight-up cry-in-your-beer drinking song. My favorite Dylan albums, and probably a lot of people’s, will always remain his fractured reality ’65, ’66 period. It’s inevitable that Dylan will always be defined by Subterranean Homesick Blues, Visions of Johanna, Desolation Row and their brethren. That’s fine – those were his finest moments, after all. On the other hand, it’s also good to remind yourself that Dylan is quite a bit more versatile a songwriter than that. He’s not the most versatile musician on earth, and his vocal limitations being what they are, there are a lot of genres he’s just not suited for. But he does like to mix it up and work with different styles. I’m not crazy for his early folk recordings, as that is just not a style of music I’m a fan of. Christmas songs, also, turned out to be not his forte. But if there’s one genre Bob Dylan is well suited to, it’s country. He’s great at croaking about unhappiness. On John Wesley Harding, Dylan found a sweet spot between old-school country and blues rock. That was a great album, and this track is my favorite. It’s the perfect combination of sweetly-sad, with simple, evocative words and just the right amount of croak in the vocal. No wonder it’s become a popular tune for cover artists, well loved by folksy types like Linda Ronstandt and Rita Coolidge. I have a particular fondness for Marianne Faithfull’s plaintive version. Her take is so much more painful and emotionally raw than the original, and certainly stands above most of the bland covers floating around out there.

I Want You

‘I want you’ songs are a genre all their own, a not unpopular one. Some musicians never play anything but. Everybody does ‘I want yous’ at least on a regular. And this, starting from the title, is as straight forward an ‘I want you song’ that Bob Dylan was capable of producing. Yes, it’s stuffed to the gills with the usual cryptic Bob Dylan mumbo jumbo, but at least it has a chorus. That makes sense. And a tune you could almost hop around to, or at least tap your foot a little. It’s Bob Dylan being almost accessible. I’m not one for playing games of What Does Bob Dylan Really Mean? I think that kind of defeats the purpose. I imagine even Bob Dylan can’t truly say what any of his songs mean. They’re not designed to have clean little meanings. They’re supposed to mean whatever you happen to hear in them, at any given time. But sometimes you have to wonder anyway. I’ve always presumed that the lines about ‘The dancing child with is Chinese flute’ was a reference to one or another of The Rolling Stones. Because time is on his side, don’t you know. Some scholars seem to think it’s about Brian Jones, who was the Stone who hobnobbed with Dylan the most. I’ve always thought it was a resentful jab at Mick Jagger, because Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull spend a lot of time hanging out with Dylan – before she was with Jagger – but rejected his advances on the grounds that she was pregnant and about to get married. Dylan expressed his anger by ripping up all the poetry he’d written for her. But, as Faithfull herself wondered “Did these thoughts, perhaps, end up in songs?” It’s a long shot, a load of speculation, but I’ve always suspected that in some roundabout way, maybe this is what came floating through from that encounter.

Hurricane

Like Bob Dylan says, this is the story of Hurricane. Meaning the story of Rubin Carter, a pro boxer who was wrongfully convicted of a shooting in 1966 and spent years in prison before winning his freedom. Dylan details the case pretty well, I think. It was seen as a prime example of instutionalized racism and caused a lot of outrage. Hurricane became rather a cause célèbre, high profile protests like Dylan’s song helping to keep his case in the public consciousness. Like the more recent case of the West Memphis Three, it’s a rare instance when celebrity activism actually made a difference and helped move justice forward. If you think the song isn’t detailed or dramatic enough, Carter was also the subject of a biopic starring Denzel Washington (which I avoided upon release, being under the misapprehension that it was a sports movie.) Unfortunately, the criminal justice system hasn’t improved much since Hurricane’s time, still all too often solving crimes by scapegoating the nearest available black man. At least now we have forensics.

Heading for the Light

Something inspiring from The Traveling Wilburys. They always had a very optimistic vibe about them, almost surprisingly so, coming from a batch of middle-aged men, who except for Tom Petty, might have had reason to feel that their better days were behind them. At that time, Petty was the biggest star among them, at least in terms of being on the charts and relevant. Jeff Lynne had done his best known work in the seventies, Dylan and Harrison in the sixties, Roy Orbison even before. They could’ve felt a like a bunch of has-beens trotting down memory lane. But they were so cheery and buoyant, so obviously having a blast that it was a huge breath of fresh air. Some of their stuff has taken on a certain poignancy, given that Orbison passed away not long after, and the Wilburys would become his legacy for a generation too young to remember the Pretty Woman days. He certainly didn’t sound like a man fixin’ to die, and no one sounded like they were looking backwards or feeling anything but jolly. Traveling Wilburys Volume I remains a sure picker-upper. Listening to it feels like being invited to the guys’ barbecue party for music and beers.

Handle With Care

The best supergroup. A lesson in superstars sharing the spotlight, having fun and bringing out the best in each other. Usually when big stars get together on a project it becomes a competition of who’s awesomer and more famous. The Traveling Wilburys were all about being awesome together. It was a buddy project. Although it was probably hard to imagine, before they came along, that Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Roy Orbison would ever be trading vocals. With their wildly disparate styles, it’s amazing how great they sound together. And make no mistake, it’s a showcase for those three legends – Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne are just sidemen, and though they both made good contributions to The Wilburys, they must have known they were outclassed. They must have felt very honored. But of course, it wasn’t about who had the biggest legend.

Gotta Serve Somebody

I wasn’t hugely delighted about Bob Dylan being all born again. Or anybody, really. Not that I have anything against having faith, but my feeling is, as soon as you start talking about it your motivation and purity becomes suspect. In the case of Dylan, it seemed almost like a sellout for such a renowned freethinker taking up religion. This song, however, is the best justification Dylan could have made, and it’s the best argument for belief I can think of. Dylan has written the most intelligent and accessible explanation of the appeal of religion. Because whatever the particulars of your belief, your base motivation is a primal drive towards something greater than yourself. The need to turn towards some higher power is one of our psychological cornerstones, along with the need to love and belong,  and whether or not we choose to frame it in terms of religion or spirituality or an extreme avidity for sports, it’s still there. Worship, follow, obey, belong to, look up to, seek, serve…

Gates of Eden

Interpreting Dylan is a fool’s game. Most of the time it’s impossible to tell even if he’s joking or not. He sounds very serious here, but what is he talking about? Faith, religion, society, reality, dreams? Or maybe he’s joking. One question arises; how did the superbrain who wrote this ever evolve to become born again? He got better, of course, but it was still a curveball. How does the Bob Dylan who wrote of such an ominous Eden ever become a follower? Only Dylan knows, and was Dylan ever a Gibraltar of reliability? His whole career has been a series of following and forgetting one passion after another, alienating audiences and critics alike as he goes along. I didn’t care much for his early days as a protest-fisted folksinger, but some people only liked him as that. Fans who loved his mind-bending sixties work were stung when he started talking about Jesus. Probably there’s fans of the Jesus phase who were let down when he eventually mellowed on Christianity. Even an icon is allowed to change his mind.

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden.

The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs ‘neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden.

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 tatooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden.

With a time-rusted compass blade
Alladin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden.

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I will try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden.

The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden.

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden.

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.