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

1. “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” (1966).  The narrator may be stuck inside some place (either a city in Alabama or a gas station), but the music sure isn’t.  If anything, it’s rollin’ and tumblin’, with Al Kooper showing off his rapidly improving prowess on the organ to delightfully virtuosic effect.  The lyrics, meanwhile, evoke Stockholm Syndrome.  Not only does the “stuck” singer have a “debutante” to give him what he needs, but there are also ladies who go so far as to treat him kindly, among who are a French girl who brags about knowing knows him, a honky-tonk woman named Ruthie who wants him to come up and see her sometime so she can give him what he wants, and a Mona whose middle name may or may not be Lisa and who may or may not had the highway blues but who sure enough worries about the train tracks.  Frankly, Mobile sounds a lot like the home that’s not a house in which Judas Priest gets stranded and dies with a smile on his face.  Moral: Don’t go mistaking Memphis for that home across the road.    

2. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965).  Dylan’s spiking Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” with Beat-poet punch and cue-card synching to the resulting concoction in the coolest rock-and-roll video ever made is what makes this song subterranean.  That the “home” to which Dylan was “bringing it all back” is the same one to which he would have “no direction” just a few months later is what makes it blues. Cultural events of this magnitude do not happen every day.  

3. “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” (1978).  Nobody noticed back in 1978, but “Señor” is a term that those for whom Spanish is a loving tongue often use for “Lord.” Thus this eerie track may have been Dylan’s first song to Jesus.  Can’t blame folks for not noticing really, so preoccupied were they with all the negative reviews Street-Legal was getting.  In hindsight, however, “Let’s overturn these tables” and “Lincoln Country Road or Armageddon” come straight out of the Messianic complex while “Son, this ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing” foreshadows Slow Train Coming’s “In order to dream you got to still be asleep.”  As for “Tales of Yankee Power,” it may have simply been an insider-baseball reference to “Catfish” Hunter’s million-dollar right arm.  Or a red herring.

4. “Sweetheart like You” (1983).  This song was a bona fide single (peaking at fifty-five on Billboard), with an MTV video featuring Carla Olson finger-synching a Mark Knopfler guitar solo and everything.  And it’s rich, drawing upon everything from Samuel Johnson (“They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings”) to the overtly New Testament language that had dominated the S-album trilogy (“They say in your Father’s house there’s many mansions”) to cast a smoky seduction spell over a precious angel who, according to the seducer (and to the affront of some feminist critics), would be better off “at home ... taking care of somebody nice” than doing whatever it is she’s doing down in the dumps.  So why isn’t this song on any of Dylan’s post-1983 compilations while the negligible “Time Passes Slowly” (Biograph) and “Under the Red Sky” (twice--Greatest Hits Volume Three, Dylan), for instance, are?  It’s not as if the singer said that the titular sweetheart should stay barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

5. “Sign on the Window” (1970).  Perhaps the least Dylan-sounding recording that Dylan ever made.  The David Ackles-like chord progressions, the lead acoustic piano, the cornfield flutes, the mid-song weather report in which the hard rain that the singer fears is sleet and sleet only, the desire to make like a Mormon and family up in Utah, the sheer gorgeousness of the thing generating an emotional nimbus so hopefully optimistic that the undertone of too-good-ever-to-be-true is as heartbreaking as the voice with which it’s sung--in short, what Graham Nash was aiming for in “Our House” and almost hitting.

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

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

1. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (1966).  “[S]ome people,” observed Rolling Stone’s Mikael Gilmore to Dylan in 2012, “still see ‘Rainy Day Women’ as coded about getting high.”  “It doesn’t surprise me that some people would see it that way,” replied Dylan. “But these are people that aren’t familiar with the Book of Acts.”  Heck, these are even people that aren’t familiar with what “stoned” meant to non Bible readers circa 1966.  According to Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, Ray Charles’ 1966 recording of the Ashford-and-Simpson composed “Let’s Go Get Stoned” was about the “pleasures of getting wasted”--but not via marijuana or any other then-illegal drug.  It was, rather, a musical “plea to go out for a drink.”  So “stoned,” like “tight” a decade or so earlier (but not in the “Tight Connection to My Heart” mid-’80s), probably just meant “drunk,” which is certainly how everyone in the studio sounded when Nashville tapes captured this raucous waltz.  But back to the Acts of the Apostles (which, lest anyone forget, was originally Part Two of the Gospel According to St. Luke).  In Chapter Seven, verses fifty-four to sixty, Stephen becomes the first Christian martyr.  “And they stoned Stephen,” writes Luke, “calling upon God, and saying, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’  And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.’  And when he had said this, he fell asleep.”  Dylan, by his own admission (cf. Don’t Look Back), wasn’t much of a Bible reader himself in those days, so it’s unlikely that Stephen was on his mind when he wrote this song.  But he did know a thing or two about being “stoned,” having weathered by that point the ire of folk-music Pharisees for his having gone electric.  Thirteen years later, he’d suffer a similar backlash for recording and performing nothing but songs in praise of the God-Man whom Stephen was stoned for preaching about--a fact that, along with his well-documented fondness for alcohol, no doubt explains why this song continues to pop up in Dylan’s set lists.  As for its spirit’s (if not its letter’s) having inspired the Meters’ “They All Ask’d for You” (in which men give names to all the animals in New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo), well, Cyril Neville, that song’s lead singer, did show up as a percussionist on Oh Mercy, didn’t he?  

2. “Ring Them Bells” (1989).  Speaking of Oh Mercy, this simple piano-and-eerie-organ hymn distills that album’s ghost-whispering-into-the-night gestalt at least as potently as “What Good Am I” (the acknowledged tour-de-force of his current Duke Robillard tour).  Addressed to “ye heathen” (like Infidels?) and alluding to the “bride” (the term for the Church in Dylan’s favorite biblical book, Revelation) for the first time since “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” eight years earlier, the song urges quasimodos everywhere to get over the hump and sound the alarm.  “Sacred cow[s],” widows, orphans, lilies arrayed finer than Solomon, “sweet Martha” (who, unlike her sister Mary, “was worried and upset about many things” [Luke 10]), sheep in need of a Shepherd, the “chosen few,” a God who is one--biblical archetypes abound.  But just who is St. Catherine?  It depends.  There are at least six by that name in the Catholic Church alone.  My guess is St. Catherine of Alexandria, about whom the Catholic Encyclopedia says, “far from forsaking her Faith, effected so many conversions, [and] was condemned to die on the wheel, but, at her touch, this instrument of torture was miraculously destroyed.”  I mean, if this wheel was destroyed because it was on fire....

3. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (2006).  The great rock-and-roll guitarist Bill Kirchen, who was actually in the audience at the Newport Festival when Dylan plugged in with Mike Bloomfield (and who went to high school in Michigan with Iggy Pop, but that’s another story), once told me that, while he revered Dylan’s first ten albums, he was no fan of this Modern Times song as it merely and lazily recycled the Muddy Waters’ song of the same name.  Well, recycle Muddy Waters Dylan unquestionably does but not without tossing in some piquant additives of his own: “Ain’t nothing so depressing as trying to satisfy this woman of mine” (ring them bells, ye divorced); “[t]his woman so crazy, I ain’t gonna touch another one for years” (yeah, good luck with that, ye heterosexual males); “[s]ome young lazy slut has charmed away my brains” (that’s more like it)--each sung in an experience-ravaged voice that does not by any means absolve the singer from having been one of the two that it took to tango.  And beneath it all rumbles a fast train coming.

4. “Rita May” (1975).  It was the B-side of a live Hard Rain single although it was recorded a year before during the Desire sessions.  It was included on the Masterpieces collection although a masterpiece is one of the many things that it’s not.  It may have been addressed to the author of Rubyfruit Jungle, a lesbian roman à clef that I would like to think Dylan, if he read it at all, preferred to whatever he read by Erica Jong.  It was covered by Jerry Lee Lewis (because it’s rockabilly-ish and because Lewis is randy).  In 2025, when Dylan is eighty-four, it will be included on Sony’s Desire 50th anniversary box.  You read it here first.

5. “Romance in Durango.”  “Me and Magdalena on the run”--nah, Dylan didn’t identify with Christ much, did he?  “No Ilores, mi querida, / Dios nos vigila”--nah, Spanish isn’t the loving tongue, is it?  “Then the padre will recite the prayers of old / in the little church this side of town”--how much you wanna bet that that church is ringing them bells?  “Soon the face of God will appear”--Dylan had no idea how soon (cf. Slow Train Coming, 1979).  The live Rolling Thunder Review versions, in which Dylan cracks the whip on all the tired horses dragging the rendition on Desire, gallop apace.  And If ZZ Top hadn’t already had folks “dancing the Fandango” before Dylan and Jacques Levy crafted these weird words, this song could even be more “Dylan is a prophet” material.

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

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

1. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” (1966). The lyrics don’t do much more than recycle those of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” but set to the second most exciting musical rush of Dylan’s electric phase (“Like a Rolling Stone” was the first), they take on a significance sufficient to the musical rush thereof. The straightforward patronizing of lines such as “I didn’t realize how young you were” and “then you told me later … that … you weren’t really from the farm” may come across as mere self-justification, but the not-at-all straightforward refrain rights the balance and maybe even tilts it in the faux farm girl’s favor. The flipside, in other words, of “Sooner or later, one of us must know / That I really did try to get close to you” is that, sooner or later, one of them won’t know it too. And since there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the one who won’t know it is the singer himself, it’s possible that he deserved to have his eyes clawed out.

2. “One Two Many Mornings” (1964). Of a piece with “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” this poignant contribution to the bulging folksong cache of regretfully abandoned love says its piece with a succinctness that not only proves less is more but that also helped it to withstand the far-from poignant treatment it received on Hard Rain. And, as usual, there’s a twist: It’s not the torched-up nights the singer misses, but the waking up to gaze through bleary but sleep-blessed eyes at a woman asleep on the side of the bed from which she was just as right as he was.

3. “Odds and Ends” (1968). “Lost time is not found again” is hard to argue with, but it’s the way the hi-jinx of the ramshackle music matches the lo-jinx of the playful dirty talk that makes it hard not to wonder what the Traveling Wilburys would’ve done with both. As for the juice mentioned in each verse, something tells me it was the freshly squeezed kind.

4. “Oh, Sister” (1975). You can almost transplant this song from the Rolling Thunder years (during which it originated) into the Slow Train and Saved years, where it would make a nice triptych with “Precious Angel” and “Covenant Woman.” In all three, God is a father bequeathing rebirth and salvation to those love and follow him and danger or worse to those who don’t. The difference in “Oh, Sister” is that the singer uses that danger or worse as a threat: His angel had better stay precious and not break the covenant or she’ll “create sorrow”--but is it sorrow for the singer, for God, or for the woman herself as she faces the fury of the man she scorned? In the sad, weeping-fiddle versions on Desire, Hard Rain, and Bootleg Series Vol. 5, it would seem to be the singer; in At Budokan, however, where Rob Stoner’s musical re-arrangement simmers with resentment, its clearly the sister whom we’d hate to be on that fateful day.

5. “Obviously Five Believers” (1968). “From a Buick Six” gets retooled for what’s basically a throwaway no better and no worse than “Sitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence,” “She’s Your Lover Now,” or any of Dylan’s other worthy mid-’60s rockers left off the albums for which they were recorded. In the two funniest verses, not even fifteen jugglers and five believers “all dressed like men”--so I’m guessing they were women--or the absent lover’s mother can cure the singer of the empty-bed blues. His lover may not be one in a million, but one out of twenty-two ain’t bad.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "N": http://tinyurl.com/299t2gn)

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

1. “Like a Rolling Stone” (1966). Although I’ve always assumed that the “everybody” who must get stoned included me, there's no way I'm risking death by stoning for something really stupid--like not placing this song at the top of this list. Neither am I going to join the rogues gallery of critics who would block it up, lock it up, analyze, and categorize it. All I really want to do is say that if you have to ask why it’s the greatest rock-and-roll song ever, I can't tell you. I will, however, number myself among those who insist that having nothing to lose because you ain’t got nothing is hardly one of life’s Seven Curses. And being invisible ain’t so bad either.

2. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” (1975). It takes some work, but if you rip Masked and Anonymous into a format compatible with Windows Moviemaker or its Mac equivalent, you can chop up and arrange the scenes to make a video surprisingly compatible with this song. Penélope Cruz can be Lily, Jessica Lange can be Rosemary, John Goodman can be Big Jim, Luke Wilson can be the hangin’ judge, Jeff Bridges can be the backstage manager, and, of course, Bob Dylan can be the Jack of Hearts. (Why not? His character’s name in Masked and Anonymous is “Jack Fate.”) And after you’ve spent the better part of a day or two editing the video together and then upload it to YouTube only to have the YouTube police take it down and mark your account for cancellation, you’ll know better than ever that failure’s no success at all.

3. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (1965). You can cynically deconstruct the lyrics of this song then reconstruct them as little more than the smart man’s “Just the Way You Are”--i.e., ostensible praise that upon examination turns out to be a veiled threat: “What I like about you is that you don’t talk very much, so if you want me to keep liking you, you’d better not be so fast that you cannot see that I must have solitude. Oh, and I also like that you can’t be bought with Valentines--saves me money on cards, roses, and boxes of candy. Best of all, you don’t argue with me or judge me. Speaking of which, I have to work late again tonight at the office….” The extent to which Dylan sells his slick talk derives from his sounding too naïve to know he’s being insincere and by camouflaging his insincerity in unforgettably vivid images that actually have nothing to do with what he’s saying: people drawing conclusions on walls, dangling cloaks and daggers, resentful chess pieces, spoiled rich girls for whom nothing less than gold, frankincense, and myrrh will do--all set to a melody so lovely that you really can’t blame a raven with a broken wing for choosing the window through which the music is floating as a good place to recuperate.

4. “Lay Lady Lay” (1969). What over-obsessive editor at bobdylan.com added commas to this song’s title (http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/lay-lady-lay)? I mean, for someone who can’t even spell Charley Patton’s first name, that takes a lot of nerve (http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/high-water-charlie-patton). And if we really must fix Dylan’s punctuation errors, why not fix his grammatical ones too and change this song’s lyrics to “Lie, lady, lie”? I’d heard “Lay Lady Lay” on the radio for years without ever knowing whose it was when in 1980 or thereabouts a friend of mine told me it was Dylan’s. (I’d been “into” Dylan for several years by then, but I’d yet to listen to Nashville Skyline or Greatest Hits Volume 2.) I didn’t believe my friend at first, but I hoped he was right because then I’d have yet another song to add to my songs-I-really-like-by-Dylan list. Pete Drake’s steel guitar drenches the descending chord changes of this invitation to foreplay-with-benefits the way Matthew Fisher’s organ drenches Procol Harum’s invitation to get stoned at a party where Bach’s on the jukebox, “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” But it’s the pillow-talk tenor of Dylan’s sublimated vocal urgency that really makes this song glow like a candle on the bedside of an irresistibly sad-eyed lady. (The fed-into-a-sausage-maker version captured on Hard Rain tastes pretty good too. A friend of mine says it was Dylan’s way of responding to having audiences shout, "Play 'Lay Lady Lay'!" one too many times.)

5. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” (1966). Pillbox hats, leopard-skin or otherwise, aren’t in fashion nowadays, so it can be hard to imagine why the subject of this electrified barbed-wire blues inspires prickly heat in the singer, her doctor, and those who like canoodling in garages. But a Google-image search of “pillbox hat” brings up pictures of Jackie Kennedy in a pink one, and everyone knows she was only the hottest First Lady of all time. When Dylan wrote this song, the widowed former Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was still two years away from marrying Aristotle Onassis and was therefore available for the fantasizing. Who knows? Maybe it was Onassis envy that inspired Dylan to make the man who hanged himself in “Black Diamond Bay” a Greek.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "K": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/08/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_07.html)

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

1. “Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1966). My French has seen better days, but I’m pretty sure “Rue Morgue Avenue” means “Morque Street Avenue” in English. And that minor verbal infelicity may be all that’s wrong with the first of Dylan’s two 1966 “Just like” songs. Besides, it’s a funny line anyway, leading as it does into a warning about women apparently made hungry by the “airs” a man might put on. The Juarez women not on the street aren’t much better: Sweet Melinda isn’t known as the “goddess of gloom” for nothing. She’ll even “steal your voice” if you “go to her [room] to soon,” even if you only went because she invited you and you thought, “Why not? She speaks good English” (and you were only early because. as a foreigner, you wanted to make a good impression.) And, of course, the last line, coming as it does after what’s essentially a series of thought dreams that Dylan would’ve rather left unseen (by himself), packs a punch. Not-bad cover version: Bill Kirchen’s on his 2001 album Tied to the Wheel. Not-bad Juarez fun fact: It’s located in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

2. “Jokerman” (1983). The Presbyterian pastor Don Williams argued at some length in his 1985 book Bob Dylan: The Man, the Music, the Message that the subject of “Jokerman” is Christ, and he doesn’t do a bad job, but I’m not convinced. (There doesn’t seem anything particularly Messianic about having your face licked by a small dog.) And clearly the director of the video, who illustrated the verses with a wide variety of paintings and sculpture, didn’t adhere to a monadic interpretation either. Quite possibly Dylan didn’t even have a specific entity in mind: All he told Kurt Loder about the song in his 1984 Rolling Stone interview was that it “was sort of inspired by these [Caribbean] spirits they call jumbis.” (That’s “moko jumbies” to you Wikipedia users.) Of this much I and I am certain: The difficulties he encountered on his (also 1984) punk performance of this song on the Letterman show still makes for seriously fun times (and perhaps the wildest live harmonica solo of Dylan’s career).

3. “Just like a Woman” (1966). I knew a fetching little waif in college who hated this song because she thought the refrain was overbearingly sexist, patronizing--you know the categories. And she might have been right. But you can also hear the refrain as nothing more than an attempt on the part of the singer to differentiate between what’s “womanly” and “girlish” in his “Baby.” (At least Dylan didn’t sing, “She makes love just like a lady”!) Anyway the point of the song isn't "woman" or "girl" but the last line of the bridge leading into the last verse. Dylan dug the chick, but he didn’t “fit” into her world (I’m thinking that her friends--especially the hot ones--were tolerable but that the in-laws were positively 4th Street), and now he wants to save face when they inevitably run into each other at Andy Warhol’s Factory. The last thing a rising young Voice of a Generation needs is people knowing he’d been dumped by someone whom it really would’ve been to his advantage to have been adored by.

4. “Jack-A-Roe” (1993). You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in Ye Olde Ballads to love the story: Girl meets boy, girl’s rich father disapproves of less-than-rich boy, boy goes off on a cannon-ball-firing (and receiving) warship, girl dresses like a male soldier and joins boy in battle, girl eventually saves boy's life. Neither do you have to have made straight A’s in love to appreciate the fact that the whole story turns out to be a marriage proposal.

5. “John Brown” (1963). Until a better Dylan version of this song than the one on MTV Unplugged surfaces, the Staple Singers will own this most viscerally anti-war of Dylan’s anti-war songs. Actually, as anti-war songs go, it’s not all that visceral. Anyone who, like John Brown (I'm thinking it's an alias) signs up for combat duty has to know there’s a better-than-remote possibility that he’ll end up with his face shot up and his hand blown off. Brown also seems to have been surprised that his enemy’s face looked just like his. Whom did he think he was going to war against--wombats? Of course human faces resemble each other! Frankly, neither Brown nor his mother, who is also surprised that war is hell, seem especially bright. So maybe Brown's being taken out of the action (not only of the war but also of ever making it as a Soul Train dancer) is just natural selection at work. “Gee,” you might be saying, “you really don’t like this song.” Fair enough. But I really don’t like “Joey,” “John Wesley Harding” (more examples of Dylan’s ridiculously romanticized “honest” livers outside the law), “Jolene,” and “Jet Pilot” at least as much. (“Jim Jones” ain’t bad.)

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "I": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/08/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_05.html)

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

1. “From a Buick 6” (1965). The only problem with this uproarious example of praising a woman with faint damnation is that it has to compete with its betters both fore (“I Shall Be Free No. 10”) and aft (“Ugliest Girl in the World”) for uproariousness. For example, in “From a Buick 6” Dylan’s “graveyard woman” (a.k.a. “junkyard angel,” “soulful mama,” “shovel mama,” “dump-truck mama”) “keeps this four-ten all loaded with lead”; but in “I Shall Be Free No. 10” she keeps a rifle loaded with buckshot and sticks him with it when he’s nude” and “puts bubblegum in my food.” In “Buick,” she “don’t make me nervous, she don’t talk too much / She walks like Bo Diddley and she don’t need no crutch”; but in “Ugliest Girl in the World” she not only talks but also “speaks with a stutter” saying, “b-b-b-b-b-baby I l-l-love you.” And while the Ugliest Girl probably don’t “need” no crutch either, it certainly wouldn’t hurt: She has flat feet, knocking knees, and a hitch in her giddy-up. (The night I saw Bo Diddley in 1985, he didn’t walk nearly as badly as that.) “Buick” does, however, contain one of Dylan’s more prophetic moments. “I got this graveyard woman,” he sings. “You know she keeps my kid / But my soulful mama, you know she keeps me hid.” By 1986, Dylan did have a soulful mama who kept his kid; only it was Dylan who kept them hid them instead of vice versa.

2. “4th Time Around” (1966). Hilarious, really, whether you think it’s a parody or a tribute to “Norwegian Wood” or not. The way the slyly delivered double entendres belie the pseudo-Elizabethan if not the pseudo-Victorian elegance of the waltz-timed melody comprises one of the most unpredictably multi-leveled uses to which Dylan ever put his tarantula-colored-glasses’ view of the world. And, like all great comedy, the lyrics illuminate the serious as well. The second verse, for instance, conflates one of those universal scenarios in which one finds himself playing poker with fate and not knowing what his own hand is let alone his opponent’s. And Dylan’s saying “filled up my shoe” instead of “put on my shoe,” especially in light of the threat he’d make to fill up Mrs. Henry’s shoe one year later, suggests he might be filling these shoes with something other than his foot. If imagining whatever you think that something is doesn’t crack you up, you’re imagining too hard.

3. “Forever Young” (1974). When this paternally affectionate song first came out, you could’ve imprinted many of its lines on a Hallmark® card. Nowadays, the biblical nature of nearly every line would probably raise the hackles of the ever-growing number of irreligious people who take everything they don’t like as a personal insult. Normally, I prefer the faster versions of the Dylan songs that have more than one, but of the two “Forever Young”s on Planet Waves, I like the slow one better, the better to hear Garth Hudson’s massaging of the keys and the better to hear the level of emotion that Dylan felt for his offspring. And it really was sweet of him to sing it to Pope John Paul II in 1997.

4. “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” (2001). By tacking “(Too Much to Ask)” onto the title, Dylan achieved two goals. First, he let listeners know that the song wasn’t a cover of the Henry Mancini composition of the same name. (You never know with Bob.) Second, he focused the spotlight on the song’s last verse, at the end of which the phrase “too much to ask” occurs for the only time in the song. The too much that Dylan’s narrator is being asked to do, apparently, is “kick out” his second cousin (from his house? from his life? both?), with whom he’s “in love.” Because he’s in love with her (which, obviously, is not the same thing as simply “loving” her), he can’t bring himself to tell her to go away from his window and leave at her own chosen speed. Besides, he knows there’ll be a scene, probably with tears--maybe even from the second cousin. By putting this verse at the end and tagging it as important in the title, Dylan makes all of the other fifteen (!) verses part of the very procrastination process he admits to in the end. He tells himself that he “could be happy forever with her.” And, of course, if you have to tell yourself that, you don’t really believe it. None of which makes it any easier to let go….

5. “Farewell Angelina” (1965). Funny, Dylan also wrote songs titled “Farewell” and “Angelina,” but it was only by putting the two words together that he got something worth keeping. Well, almost worth keeping--like “Farewell” and “Angelina,” “Farewell Angelina” ended up on the cutting-room floor of the album for which it was intended. But if it would’ve sounded all wrong on Bringing It All Back Home, it would’ve sounded more than all right on Another Side of Bob Dylan, especially if it had replaced the interminable “Ballad in Plain D,” the only song of his that Dylan has publicly regretted recording.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "E": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_31.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)