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 "I"

1. “Idiot Wind” (1974). My doubts regarding the “superiority” of the unreleased version of Blood on the Tracks began song when I finally heard this song’s unofficial version on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3. Not only does it lack the steely sheen of the official version, which is one of the most amazing songs in rock-and-roll (if that’s even what it is), but it also lacks the ragin’ glory of the full-throated live version on Hard Rain. The gallows humor of the first verse sets the tone for the visions of Gehenna to follow, visions encompassing everything from boxcar Christs that smoke in the dark and fortune tellers to the Grand Coulee Dam and the Capitol, visions illuminated by recontextualized Dylan song titles (“down the highway”), those of his buddies (“chestnut mare”), and Everyman assertions you try to justify your latest existential paralysis with (“I haven’t known peace and quiet for so long I can’t remember what it’s like”). Since it’s a “sweet lady” (a.k.a. a “babe”) on whom Dylan casts his aspersions, the song is obviously of a piece with his other kiss-off classics. But the mournful melody, Paul Griffin’s incessant organ, and the way Dylan makes idiot a three-syllable word suggest heretofore un-assailed heights (or depths) of bitterness. So what is the idiot wind exactly? Easy: any wind the answer isn’t blowin’ in.

2. “Isis” (1975). ”She said, ’You gonna stay?’” / “If you want me to, yes.” (Or “If you want me to, yes!” as belted by Dylan before that Rolling Thunder audience with Leonard Cohen in it). Those eleven words comprise the insanity that the other shaggy-dog details--the tips of the Isis-berg, you might say--go out of their way not to drive the narrator to but end up driving him to anyway. And like “Black Diamond Bay,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and “Brownsville Girl” (all but one of which, interestingly enough, Dylan wrote with a collaborator) this song would make, if not a coherent film, a better incoherent film than Renaldo and Clara, Hearts of Fire, Masked and Anonymous, or I’m Not There. (Note to Hollywood: No more Dylan non-documentaries with three words in their titles, O.K.?) (Note to date watchers and coincidence counters talkin’ in the name of numerology: The fifth day of May is Blind Willie McTell’s birthday.)

3. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (1965). Has any other Dylan line resonated beyond the time and place of its composition more than “Even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked”? The cathartic roar it elicits on Before the Flood still stands as one of the most thrilling moments in live-album history, even if you think the devil we knew in 1974 (Nixon) was better than the devils we didn’t yet (Ford, Carter). Otherwise it’s nothing less and plenty more than a treasure trove of skillfully sharpened, fire-hardened aphorisms, suitable for wielding against whatever chimeras of the zeitgeist are shaking your windows and rattling your walls: “[H]e not busy being born is busy dying”; “It’s easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred”; “[I]t is not he or she or them or it / That you belong to”; “[M]oney doesn’t talk, it swears”; “Obscenity, who really cares / Propaganda, all is phony”; “[I]f my thought-dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” If one of those doesn’t help in your current journey through dark heat, bleeding is probably the least of your worries.

4. “I Want You” (1966). If with “Mr. Tambourine Man” the Byrds beat Dylan at his own game, “I Want You” finds him returning the favor by beating them at theirs. The lyrics of the verses and the jingle-jangle mourning of the instruments conjure a nighttime that may or may not be the right time (for him definitely, for her maybe not), but it’s the kaleidoscopic vortex of a melody and Dylan’s dispensing of all wordplay in the refrain that suggests lust is just a four-letter word too.

5. “I Threw It All Away” (1969). Maybe you don’t have to have thrown it all away to appreciate the economy with which Dylan cuts to the sorrowful quick on this Nashville Skyline highlight, but it helps. (I was going to write, “but it doesn’t hurt” instead until I remembered that hurt is all throwing it all away does.) Unless the relatively newly wed Dylan was thinking of Echo Helstrom, Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, or Edie Sedgwick (or if you believe her--I don’t--Mavis Staples), he hadn’t yet thrown it “all” away by the time he wrote and recorded this song. But he would. And maybe deep down he knew it. And maybe it was his singing from deep within that well of self-knowledge and ineffable sadness (oh yeah, and quitting smoking) that transformed his voice into the ghost of Roy Orbison’s nineteen years before Orbison was a ghost.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "H": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/08/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_04.html)

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

1. “Black Diamond Bay” (1975). A masterly shaggy-dog tale wagged by Howie Wyeth’s shaggy-dog drumming. Dylan once said he wanted to make a movie out of “Tight Connection to My Heart” because, of all the songs he’d written, it “might be the most visual…. the one that’s got characters that can be identified with.” He then added: “Whatever the fuck that means.” As well he might--because he was wrong. “Black Diamond Bay,” not “Tight Connection,” is his most visual and the one that’s got characters that can most be identified with (even though, for all I know, Jacques Levy may have written the entire thing). By sympathetic characters, I don’t mean the Panama-hat-wearing lady or the fez-wearing desk clerk or the noose-wearing Greek. Nor do I mean the tiny man (maybe if I were Mike Tyson) or the soldier (maybe if I were Evander Holyfield) or the loser or the dealer. No, I mean the beer-sodden couch zombie in the last verse, too lethargic for all but the most reflexive and enervated schadenfreude, zoning out to news of the erupting volcano as transmitted from the TV screen by Walker Cronkite. “I never did plan to go anyway,” he shrugs, the lug. "So it's no big deal that everything and everyone mentioned in the song was destroyed." Coincidentally, I never did plan to do Lindsey Lohan anyway, so it's no big deal that she's a drug-addled jailbird. See how timeless Dylan can be? 2. “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965). This similarly visual song has characters that can be identified with too--especially if you’ve ever taken the drugs that Dylan was taking at the time that he wrote and sang it. For what other reason is the central character’s last name “Jones”? It doesn’t end-rhyme with any other word and therefore could’ve just as easily been “Tork” (not “Dolenz” or “Nesmith” though--too many syllables). Dave Marsh says that Dylan “lifted” the song’s melody from Ray Charles’ 1959 hit “I Believe to My Soul,” and maybe he did. And maybe Charles released “Let’s Go Get Stoned” in the summer of 1966 because Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” had been a hit in the spring of 1966. And maybe you don’t have to be Ray Charles to know what it means to “put your eyes in your pocket.” And maybe you don’t have to get stoned to find yourself crying, “Oh my God / Am I here all alone?” And certainly “You should be made / To wear earphones” is the best reason to avoid being caught either grateful or dead using an iPod™. 3. “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (1965). A magical history tour. Columbus, the pilgrims, Moby Dick mongrelized with Ray Stevens, Jesus, Captain Kidd, and the swindling of the Indians comprise much but by no means all of the syllabus. Going for five days without eating, getting kicked by a foot coming through a pay-phone receiver, flipping coins like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, falling for a mercenary French girl, leaping a hot-dog stand in a single bound, and pulling down your pants for collateral comprise much but by no means all of the final exam. Just two years earlier, Dylan had written his first “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” which, for all its poignancy, was really just a sentimental re-write of a relatively unsentimental olde ballad. (If any of you feel like giving away ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat, just tell me where it hurts ya, honey, and I’ll tell you who to call.) Dylan had obviously come a long way in a short time, and I‘d love to trace how he did. So I hereby petition Sony to add Bob Dylan’s 2nd-114th Dreams to its Bootleg Series docket. 4. “Blind Willie McTell” (1983). A tragical history tour. Of the American deep South. Of the American deep South as a wide-awake version of the world Dylan discovered while dreaming for the 115th time. Where the clogging of one’s sinuses with the centuries’-old effluvium of “power and greed and corruptible seed” is offset only slightly (but maybe just enough) by the medicating effects of “bootlegged whiskey” and the endorphins unleashed by “charcoal gypsy maidens” who “strut their feathers well.” Dylan makes it sound like one of those places that it would be great to visit but terrible to live in. But we do live in it. Which is why McTell has his eyes in his pocket. And why he sings the blues. 5. “Buckets of Rain” (1974). Five six-line verses, the longest only thirty Twitter-friendly words long, and each one a grain of sand in which you can see if not the world then at least a life. Doing not what you want to or can but what you must, evanescent “pretty people” and friends, little red wagons and little red bikes (no doubt beside white chickens and glazed with rain), a lover’s every charm causing nothing but misery--if it’s not your life yet, it will be soon enough. (Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "A": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning.html)