Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "M"

1. “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965). It’s amazing how much poetry Dylan could wring from what was really nothing more than a bad case of insomnia. And unlike Christian Bale in The Machinist, the almost-as-thin twenty-four-year-old Dylan actually makes sleeplessness sound fun (well, maybe not the part about losing feeling in your hands and feet). The Byrds’ transformation of Dylan’s original launched a genre or three, which in turn launched their own), but Dylan’s original remains the one to play over and over if you’re only going to play one over and over. The instrumentation, melody, and vocal combine to do exactly what the lyrics say: They cast a dancing spell our way, they take us on a trip on a magic swirling ship, and they spin and swing madly across the sun. But mostly the music and the words combine to map out an ideal to-do list for life and life only (or at least for what to do on a date with someone whose hometown isn’t hell): “[T]o dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free / Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands / With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves / Let me forget about today until tomorrow”--because, as even Elvis Presley knew, tomorrow is a long time.

2. “Motorpsycho Nightmare” (1964). The proof that this song works as comedy is that you don’t even have to know Psycho, La Dolce Vita, or the one about the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter to find yourself laughing. Knowing a thing or two about Fidel Castro, however, is a prerequisite, as well as knowing what a subscription to Reader’s Digest says about the capacity for sophisticated thought possessed by one’s assailants. Of course, knowing Psycho, La Dolce Vita, and farmer’s-daughter jokes makes the song a lot funnier. So if you haven’t already watched or heard them, do it now. Tomorrow all activity might cease.

3. “Man of Peace” (1983). A rolling if not quite thunderous blues about the seductiveness of evil that features Dylan’s best singing of the ’80s until he blew his voice out altogether and began singing even better on Oh Mercy. In his 1984 Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Loder, Dylan said, “[Y]ou can just about know that anybody who comes out for peace is not for peace,” and this song fleshes that idea out. Nowadays, Dylan seems to be implying, we incorrectly define peace as the absence of conflict, and, as long as we do, we’ll always be at the mercy of those who have no interest in the absence of conflict. What Dylan doesn’t imply (but which Frederick Buechner does in his book Wishful Thinking) is that peace, properly understood, is not the absence of conflict but the presence of love--of that, in other words, which will see us through everything from the burden of two thousand-pound troubles to the falling of trees that have stood for a millennium. My favorite line is “He can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull” although I have no idea what it means. I’d also have no idea what Dylan meant if he were to sing “He can ride down Viagra® Falls in the barrels of your skull,” but it might get him another chunk of ad revenue to go with his Victoria’s Secret windfall.

4. “Moonshiner” (1963). This trad., quiet descent into the dark night of the hooch still hath charms to soothe even the most savage breast. In his liner notes to The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3, the late John Bauldie correctly wrote that “Moonshiner” “certainly stands as one of the finest Bob Dylan performances of the early ’60s” and “if anyone should ever dare question Bob Dylan’s ability as a singer, play them this track.” Apparently, the song has stuck with Dylan over the years as he recycled the lines “Let me eat when I am hungry, / Let me drink when I am dry” on “Standing in the Doorway” thirty-four years later. And not until Slow Train Coming and Saved would he put as much raw emotion into a verse as he did when he sang, “God bless them pretty women, / I wish they was mine….”

5. “My Wife’s Hometown” (2009). To feel the caldron boiling at the heart of this nasty blues, it definitely helps to be, or to have been, married--namely, to a woman whose relatives are still alive and living in the same suffocatingly small town you refused to settle down with the Misses in because it was suffocating (and because her relatives still lived there). All of what I just wrote, however, only makes sense if you interpret the refrain, “Hell's my wife’s hometown,” as meaning “My wife’s hometown is hell to spend time in.” You can also interpret the refrain to mean “My wife is a demon,” i.e., from hell--an interpretation supported by the lines testifying to her power to make you rob, lose your job, go on the lam, kill someone, and lock yourself away in a house with no sign on the window saying “lonely.”

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "L": http://tinyurl.com/2eb6jgm)

Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "C"

1. “Changing of the Guards” (1978). In retrospect, this is a Jesus song. Not as much a Jesus song as “Señor” (about which more when I get to the S songs), but there he is--the Good Shepherd himself--right in the first verse, grieving away over the desperate as he is wont to do. Then he goes away for a few verses, leaving it to various mysterious, Tarot-derived archetypes to carry the story. Or maybe the stories. As with so many Dylan songs, each verse seems like a retelling of the one before it from a completely different perspective, changing it in small but significant ways, creating a cumulative Rashomon-like effect not unlike that undoubtedly created by the reflections of reflections seen in the “palace of mirrors” referred to in Verse Six. Also in Verse Six: “The empty rooms where her memory is protected / Where the angels’ voices whisper to the souls of previous times”--lines every bit the evocative equivalent of “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” Jesus or somebody like him comes back in Verse Nine, promising the arrival of “peace,” “tranquility,” and “splendor” on “wheels of fire” straight out of Ezekiel and at least one of which, one suspects, will be rolling down the road and exploding before long. Yet none of these images would matter a whit if Alan Pasqua’s lonesome grinding-organ cries and Steve Douglas’s golden saxophones weren’t shadowing and-or illuminating them with the intimacy of a precious angel under the sun.

2. “Clothes Line Saga” (1967). My, but this song is useful: It’s amazing how much trouble you can avoid simply by adopting “Sometime, not all the time” and “Some of ’em, not all of ’em” as your default responses to uncomfortable questions. Like that favorite of wives and girlfriends: “Do you love me?” “Sometime, not all the time.” Or the one personnel managers always ask job applicants: “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” “Some of ’em, not all of ’em.” Honestly, I’d be sad and blue if not for this song. Essentially, it’s Theater of the Absurd starring Flannery O‘Connor‘s “good country people.” Only they’ve been stripped of all outrageousness and left with nothing but their mind-numbingly mundane smugness--and possibly transplanted to New England, where elliptical Robert Frost-speak such as “What do you care?” and “Well, just because” is the lingua franca. For years the Roches performed this song in clubs to occasional titters and polite applause, and in 2001 Suzzy and Maggie Roche enshrined it on the Dylan tribute album A Nod to Bob. Seven years later, Joe Biden fulfilled the prophecies of the second verse.

3. “Can You Please Crawl out Your Window?” (1965). It’s hard to feed a bunch of your previous lyrics into a centrifuge and make the resulting mélange sound sexy, but Dylan came close on this once-obscure single, and Transvision Vamp came closer still when they covered it (and called it “Please Crawl out Your Window”) thirty-one years later. But poets who know it and hope they don’t blow it sometimes hit the verbal bull’s-eye even when they’re not aiming. Proof that Dylan is no exception: “religion of the little tin women,” “if he needs a third eye he just grows it,” “I’m sure that he has no intentions / Of looking your way, unless it’s to say / That he needs you to test his inventions.” On an unrelated note, just how was the woman whom Dylan was addressing intending to crawl out her window if he had to tell her to use her arms and legs? Head first?

4. “Caribbean Wind” (1981). Dylan was right to leave this off Shot of Love. Its length (5:54), relentlessly epiphanic lyrics, and heavily breathing background singers would’ve taken the focus off “Every Grain of Sand,” which God obviously intended as that album’s pick to click. Also, “Caribbean Wind”’s buoyant melody and bright instrumentation would’ve clashed with the rest of the album’s ragged spontaneity. By the time Dylan recorded this song in 1981, he’d been working on it for two years--he introduced it as a “new” song during his first gospel tour--and by his own admission he kept trying to get both its words and its sound right in the studio. He apparently gave up on the sound, but he kept working on the words: The eventually published lyrics differ from the ones he sang on the version that surfaced on Biograph, and not all of the differences are improvements. In the Biograph version, the men bathing in perfume “practiced the hoax of free speech”; in the published version they “celebrated free speech.” And the former beats the latter (unless, as some people think, Dylan’s singing “hopes” instead of “hoax,” in which case there’s not much difference between what he recorded and what he published). Two lines that haven’t changed: “She said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing / You can do about it, so let us just agree to agree.’” I had a woman say that to me once. Everything about her was bringing me misery.

5. “Cat’s in the Well” (1990). As those who keep up with his set lists know, Dylan occasionally opens shows with this sprightly fractured nursery rhyme. And as those familiar with the unfractured original--“Ding Dong Bell”--know, the line Dylan altered is “Pussy’s in the well.” In a way, it’s too bad he changed it; hearing feminists shout “Judas!” at his concerts would bring back fond memories. But change it he did, and from that point he was off and running, twisting toddler talk into apocalyptic visions of everything from world-wide slaughter and barns full of bull to anxiety-related hair loss and someone named “Back-Alley Sally” who’s “doing the American Jump.” I’m not sure what the American Jump is, but if Back-Alley Sally is related to the title character of Rudy Sooter’s old ditty “Up the Alley with Sally,” I have a pretty good guess. (Hint: It’s not exclusively American, and it doesn’t involve jumping. Usually.) Dylan ends it like a bedtime prayer (“Goodnight, my love, may the Lord have mercy on us all”), but all I can say to anyone who can sleep after absorbing this song’s litany of horrors is “Good luck."

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "B": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_28.html)

Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "A"

1. “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (1966). Smokin’ organ riffs and Dylan’s wildest harmonica wailing spur the music into a gallop. But the best verbal moment is the couplet “Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously, / but then, now again, not too many can be like you, fortunately,” which are also the only lines that Jason & the Scorchers changed (for the worse) in their otherwise definitive cow-punk rendition. (George Harrison’s at the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration was just so much Concert for Bangladesh by comparison.) Many an honest outlaw prefers the line “But to live outside the law you must be honest” (come to think of it, Jason & the Scorchers changed that line too--by adding “darlin’”), but that's just the old honor-among-thieves theme expressed in different words, which is maybe how Dylan later ended up on a Sopranos soundtrack.

2. “All Along the Watchtower” (1968). The best verse is the second one, in which Dylan kicks the penny-ante, Godot-lite existential despair so prevalent in 1968 to the curb then revisits his honesty-among-outlaws theme by putting “So let us not talk falsely now” in the mouth of the Thief. But would anyone consider this initially acoustic, three-verse sketch of a song a classic if Jimi Hendrix hadn’t plugged it in and dropped it into the cultural bathwater, thus inspiring Dylan himself to electrify it on the ’74 tour and forever after that (except on MTV Unplugged), eventually making it the song he would perform in concert more than any other? Maybe not. But Hendrix did plug it in.

3. “All I Really Want to Do” (1964). Dylan’s funniest song up to and maybe including The Basement Tapes and the Traveling Wilburys. Obviously Dylan found it amusing too, as he couldn’t get through the cockamamie rhymes with a straight face. Usually, one only laughs at his own jokes when they first pop into his head and catch him by surprise, so I’m guessing Dylan hadn’t written it too long before the tapes got rolling. (I know that one of the world’s several thousand Dylan books has probably already detailed the circumstances of this song’s composition, but I quit reading Dylan books after my 136th.) And you have to love the yodeling, as effective a slap in the face of protest-folk’s grimness as the Going Electric would be one year later. But, speaking as someone who used to have in-laws and who therefore now refuses to have anything to do with women whose parents are still alive, I sing along to “I don’t want to meet your kin” with not only relish but ketchup and mustard too.

4. “All over You” (1963). Dylan’s second-funniest song up to and maybe including The Basement Tapes and the Traveling Wilburys. And speaking of the Wilburys, the third verse (“Well, you cut me like a jigsaw puzzle / You made me to a walkin’ wreck / Then you pushed my heart through my backbone / Then you knocked off my head from my neck”--a verse missing from the live Town Hall version) would’ve fit in very nicely with that bunch of woman-bedeviled funsters’ misogynistic jokes.

5. “All the Tired Horses” (1970). Yeah, it’s a few syllables too long for haiku. And Dylan doesn’t sing on it. And it’s from his “worst” album. But Self Portrait is not Dylan’s worst album. It's simply 180 degrees away from what his audience wanted from him after the mellow and mellower twofer of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. (As a fan, I’d like to say he hasn’t made his worst album yet, but that would be to deny the existence of Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove.) And Delores Edgin, Hilda Harris, Carol Montgomery, June Page, Albertine Robinson, and Maretha Stewart--who do sing on the song--not only floated their voices into a soothing glow evocative of sunsets on a lonesome prairie horizon but, by repeating the song’s only two lines for three minutes and twelve seconds, also softened up a generation of rock-and-roll fans for Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Ten 21st-Century Love Couplets: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-10-21st-century-love.html)