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

1. “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” (1981). Of Dylan’s three gospel records, Shot of Love was the least focused--not only sonically (“loose” and “ragged” can be exciting, but “coming apart at the seams” is something else altogether) but also thematically. Was following “Property of Jesus” with a paean to Lenny Bruce some kind of joke? And if so, on whom? Then Columbia released “Heart of Mine” as a single, and what should be pressed on the other side but this loose, ragged, and very exciting conflation of gospel (Jesus is the Church’s “bridegroom” in the New Testament) and Dylan’s careening mid-’60s epiphany-blues? How was this left off the album? Dylan would later say that he didn’t think he had gotten the recording right, but with the exception of “Every Grain of Sand,” no song on Shot of Love sounds as if Dylan had gotten the recording right. True, the non-album B-side of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the still-unanthologized “Trouble in Mind,” was a buried nugget of considerable worth too, but not nearly as much worth as “Groom.” Apparently Dylan eventually warmed up to it himself as it was later not only added to Shot of Love but also included on his Greatest Hits Vol. 3 and the 2007 compilation Dylan. If learning that Chuck Plotkin sped up the master tape to give the song a little more punch runs afoul of your purist’s instincts, put your instincts in your pocket and your purism on the ground.

2. “Girl from the North Country” (1963). It’s nice to hear the (young) man who wrote or would write “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” et. al. get his comeuppance: He’s actually missing someone whom he has no hope of running into again any time soon--possibly one of the very girls he blew off so his boot heels could go wanderin’. Serves him right, you want to say. Only somewhere in the wistful tenderness of both his singing and his gently plucked acoustic guitar, you detect a confidence of tone quite likely deriving from his sensing that he knows there’ll be plenty of others enough (if not just) like her. That’s what’s missing from “Scarborough Fair,” ye olde folk tune Dylan based this song on. And it was even more missing after Simon & Garfunkel got through with it.

3. “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979). I don’t know what’s harder to believe, that this nerve-touching, bluesy gospel anthem was almost left off Slow Train Coming or that it managed to make the Billboard top forty, peaking at the twenty-four spot during the same week that Robert John’s “Sad Eyes” hit Number One. I do know that it didn’t deserve the bitch slapping it got from John Lennon (“Serve Yourself”). First, the terms Dylan uses to describe every stratum of society are funny; second, you don’t even have to believe in God to accept the idea that every choice we make “serves” someone else’s better interests. (Lennon’s labors have certainly left Yoko Ono and his children better off.) Or you can simply switch “evil” for “devil” and “good” for “the Lord.” (Certainly, our more important decisions nudge the world a little in one direction or the other.) Third, although it has become common to regard Mark Knopfler or Jerry Wexler as Slow Train Coming’s musical savior, it’s Barry Beckett’s eerily low-key electric piano that distinguishes this song from anything else on Dylan’s four consecutive albums starting with S.

4. “Get Your Rocks Off” (1967). A lot of the Big Pink tunes left off The Basement Tapes deserved to be. This ridiculously dirty ditty, however, did not. Perhaps the decision makers at Columbia thought it was too slow, but, really, if it were any faster, the punch line at the end of the refrain couldn't sneak up on you and Richard Manuel’s basso profundo “Get ’em off”s would get lost in the rush (as would Garth Hudson’s Labyrinthine Olympics organ runs). And the Manfred Mann’s Earth Band version on Messin’ gets its rocks back on. (For some reason, the lyrics aren’t posted at bobdylan.com. You can find them here: http://www.lyricstime.com/bob-dylan-get-your-rocks-off-lyrics.html.)

5. “Got My Mind Made Up” (1986). Slight words, I’ll admit, but Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ loco-motorvatin’ Bo Diddley beat was Dylan’s most solid rock of the ’80s. And, actually, some of the words aren’t slight at all--especially stanzas four and five, which anyone who’s ever had his brain charmed away by some young lazy slut will swear are the essence of wit.

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

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

1. “Desolation Row” (1965). Simultaneously hilarious and sad in that off-the-cuff surrealistic way that came so easily to Dylan once he realized he was younger than that now. And unlike the slightly longer “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” he’d record one year later, this song’s images--thanks in no small part to Charlie McCoy’s acoustic-guitar filigrees--flow as naturally together as a river to the sea, and wherever those rivers go, you want to be. As with “Ballad of a Thin Man,” drugs might accelerate one’s access to exactly what, or at least where, Dylan thinks Desolation Row is, but they’re not necessary because the song itself is drugs enough. Besides, the best lines make more sense when received out from under the influence: “Everybody is making love / Or else expecting rain” is a pretty accurate description of the human condition. Eventually you discover that Dylan, by loading representatives of practically every category of mankind (real and imagined) into his ark, is telling us that Desolation Row is everything or at least everywhere--a perpetual dark-night-of-the-soul 3 A.M. And unlike “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (and the dark night of the soul), when “Desolation Row” is over, you wish it weren’t.

2. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (1963). The twenty-two-year-old Dylan delivers this restless farewell so succinctly that he sounds almost happy to be leaving his woman-child lover or at least convinced that she’s to blame. But a bounder who was really happy to be saying goodbye would write something along the lines of “This woman’s so crazy, I swear I ain't gonna touch another one for years,” not “Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say / To try and make me change my mind and stay.” And no cad who genuinely believed it was the woman-child’s fault would spend so much time trying to convince himself of it, especially with transparently insufficient arguments. “I give her my heart,” he sings, “but she wanted my soul.” Surely, Dylan must have known that when you fall in love, you fall in love heart and soul, the way a fool would do gladly. What he probably really didn’t want to give her was his money. As the oft-married (and oft-divorced) Harlan Howard once said, “The next time I feel like getting married, I’m just gonna find me a woman I don’t like and buy her a house.”

3. “Dignity” (1989). Interesting trait to write a song about. Most songwriters stick to variations on faith, hope, love, and getting’ rich or dyin’ tryin’. Not Dylan, though, for whom dignity clearly has nothing in common with either pride (cf. “Foot of Pride”) or grace (cf. "Saving Grace") and certainly not conceit (“Disease of Conceit”). Those you can find everywhere. Dignity, on the other hand, can’t be found anywhere--not in a cotton field, not at a murder scene, not in the pockets of chance, not at Mary Lou’s wedding, not in all F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books, and certainly not in yourself (or you’d never go searching high and low for it in the first place). So there’s really no need to hurry. Which is probably why the song, paced by Willie Green’s loping drums, doesn’t.

4. “Dear Landlord” (1968). Landlords--you can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em. They punch your cigarette, strap you to a tree without roots, intrude when you’re in the darkness, and utter idle words with a reprobate mind. And that’s just what’s good about them. Judging from the defeated tone in his yearningly mournful vocal, Dylan seems to know as much. Or as he would later write, “Sometimes I think this whole world / Is one big prison yard / Some of us are prisoners / The rest of us are guards.” And later yet: Why our “hearts must have the courage for the changing” of the latter.

5. “Dirt Road Blues” (1997). One of the few songs on Time Out of Mind that you don’t have to be recovering from a hellish breakup to feel in your bones. It helps, of course, to have looked for the sunny side of love after rolling through the rain and hail and to have run away and hidden after not having found your “baby,” but no more so than to have prayed for salvation in a one-room country shack, put up barriers to keep yourself away from everyone, or sung in your chains like the sea. Anyway, what helps the most is the junkyard racket that Daniel Lanois got from his band of merry noisemakers and the way he made it echo like a hell storm.

(Top-Five Bob Dylan Songs Beginning with "C": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_30.html)