Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "T"

1. “Tangled Up in Blue” (1975).  Dig (as “Lenny Bruce” might’ve said): In 1985 I drove “out west” with a red-haired woman (let’s call her Miss X) who was “married, soon to be divorced.”  A U-haul trailer full of her stuff was killing my car’s transmission alive, but otherwise I did not use “a little too much force.”  Sometimes I wish I had.  I definitely sometimes wonder whether “her hair is still red.”  During our road trip, we stopped in at the Milltown Union Bar made famous by Richard Hugo in the poem of the same name.  We bribed a motel maid in Wyoming to let us overstay our checkout to watch John Cassavetes‘ Love Steams, which just happened to be playing on HBO.  We spent a night in the Badlands made famous by Terrence Malick (and Charlie Sheen and Sissy Spacek) and Bruce Springsteen.  Once during my two-year stint in Seattle, she was my date for a solo Roger McGuinn show at the Backstage in Ballard, WA, and therefore shared with me the pleasure of hearing Byrds-lite performances of “My Back Pages,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and (approximately ten years after its nightly roll in the Rolling Thunder Review) “Chestnut Mare.”  I got McGuinn’s autograph.  As far as I know, she did not ever work in a “topless joint,” and, to this day, I know nothing about her parents‘ attitude toward homemade dresses or bank accounts.  A few years later, I drifted down not to New Orleans but to Opelousas, which is just three hours north of it (i.e., close enough for jazz) and eventually saw lots of shows (three of them Dylan’s) in the Big Easy, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Thibodeaux.  I never worked on a fishing boat, but I endured four or five “Hurricane”s (Katrina included).  I don’t know any Montague Streets, but for sure something inside of me has died, and I own a vinyl copy of Eddie Kendricks’ “Keep On Keepin’ On.”  None of my friends are mathematicians or carpenters’ or truck drivers’ wives--at least I hope not.  But it’s not dark yet, so, you know, there’s still time.  Do I ever wonder what’s going on with Miss X (besides hair-color changing, I mean) these days?  Sometimes.  In short, this song is the story of my so-called life.  I’d have it over “Brownsville Girl” any day.

2. “Tombstone Blues” (1965).  The “Papa’s in the alley, looking for the fuse” lyrics on Real Live are better than the Highway 61 Revisited originals that have papa “looking for food,” not only because fuse rhymes more precisely with blues but also because the ghost of electricity can howl in the bones of your face whereas you can’t live by bread alone because you won’t be satisfied.  Otherwise, either version will do.  “Stop all this weeping, / and swallow your pride.  You won’t / die.  It’s not poison”--besides prescribing the antidote to the disease of conceit--is haiku.  And although “Ma Rainey and Beethoven” is more interesting misheard as “My Iranian Beethoven,” the singer’s desire to “write a melody so plain” that it could function as an easing, cooling, analgesic that helps folks unlearn what they didn’t want to learn in the first place explains in part why he once told an interviewer he hopes he "never" paints his masterpiece. 

3. “This Dream of You” (2009).  First, listen to 1979’s “I Believe in You.”  “Don’t let me drift too far,” sings the newly reborn Dylan, touchingly illuminating the fear of apostasizing that haunts even the most obvious believers.  Skip ahead thirty years.  Dylan has drifted too far--from shore, from sure, you name it.  (A busted second shotgun marriage, a pile of second-or-third-rate albums, discovering the shallowness of American Evangelicalism, and a heart ailment resulting from inhaling too much chicken merde down on the farm will do that do a Voice of a Generation.)  But the dream--i.e., the memory--of that magic once-upon-a-time moment when the presence in a “cheerless room in a curtained gloom” couldn’t have been anybody else but Jesus persists and keeps Dylan hanging on like a Vanilla Fudge Supreme.  “There's a moment when all old things / Become new again,” sings the sixty-eight-year-old, now much craggier-voiced troubadour, paraphrasing the non-Minnesota Saint Paul in Second Corinthians 5:17.  “But that moment might have come and gone.”  He goes on to paraphrase Second Timothy 4:7  (“I’ll run this race until my earthly death”).  He’d admitted that he was a “little too blind to see” circa “Precious Angel,” but now by asking “Am I too blind to see?  Is my heart playing tricks on me?,” he’s questioning not only his own vision but that heart of his as well. He doesn’t want to believe, but he keeps believing.  He’s not so much hanging on to a solid rock as discovering that somehow the solid rock is hanging onto him.  No wonder come Tempest he was swearing to uphold the laws of God--and insisting that the blood with which he was paying was not his own.

4. “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” (1988).  It’s been common knowledge for so long that this song is a Springsteen spoof that people coming to it for the first time nowadays probably don’t find it all that funny.  But when The Traveling Wilburys Volume One was new, the audacity of the Old Dylan’s making unfiltered fun of the most famous New Dylan ever was unexpected enough to be flat-out hilarious.  That the Old Dylan’s fellow grizzled vets went gleefully along for the ride (and included a Beatle, an Electric Light Orchestrator, a charter member of the Only the Lonely Hearts Club Band, and that grizzled-vet-to-be Tom Petty) gave the sarcasm added cachet, as did the way the humor echoed the many punch lines of the similarly goofy trees with roots that the Old Dylan had once planted in the Band's basement.  The main difference?  He'd been so much older then; he was younger than that now.  And by christening this song's protagonist “Tweeter,” he obviously foresaw the Twitter world in a grain of sand.  (Follow me at https://twitter.com/ArsenioOrteza).    

5. “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)” (1985).  This song was a bona fide single (peaking at 103 on Billboard), with an MTV video featuring Dylan turning Japanese and everything.  And it’s rich, drawing upon everything from Puccini (“Madame Butterfly, she lulled me to sleep”), Gene Pitney (“in a town without pity where the water runs deep”), and Humphrey Bogart (“Well I had to move fast, / and I couldn’t with you around my neck") to Foreigner (“there’s a hot-blooded singer”), Hoagy Carmichael (“singin’ ‘Memphis in June’”), and overtly palace-of-the-Pope language (“Never could learn to drink that blood and call it wine”) that wouldn’t rear its head in Dylan’s lyrics again until the reference to the “mother of our Lord” in 2012’s “Duquesne Whistle.”  Atop a Sly Dunbar and Robbie “In the Alley” Shakespeare’s reggae-groove-with-benefits excavated from an Infidels outtake, Arthur Baker applies just enough techno-sheen to accentuate this song's many positives.  So why doesn’t "Tight Connection" appear on any of Dylan’s post-1985 compilations?  And why mightn't the Gary Cooper paraphrase that goes “What looks large from a distance /close up ain’t never that big” be a reference to the Dylan body part that itches in the third verse of “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight”?

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

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 "H"

1. “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965). Even if Dylan had never recorded Slow Train Coming, Saved, or Shot of Love, he’d still be the king of Bible blues on the basis of the first verse of this rip-roaring song alone. When it came out, general biblical knowledge was still fairly common, so as many people probably followed the conversation between Abraham and God about sacrificing Isaac as followed the references to broken phones, the Welfare Department, and World War III. Nowadays, you have to wonder. Kids cottoning to Dylan for the first time might think that God is talking to Abraham Lincoln--you know, the guy who said, “Half of the people can be part right all of the time / Some of the people can be all right part of the time / But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time.”

2. “Highlands” (1997). This song is as close to taking a long, leisurely walk with Dylan as most of us are likely to get--a long, leisurely walk, that is, with a stopover at a diner for some scrambled eggs, which is where things would really get interesting. There you’d be, skimming the menu, casually explaining to Dylan how to tell a real blonde from a fake, when a waitress with long, white legs would walk up and significantly affect the room temperature. After she and Dylan had finished flirting each other up, you’d say to Bob, “You like Erica Jong too? Wow! I thought I was the only one. What’s your favorite book of hers? Fear of Flying? Sappho’s Leap? Fear of Fifty? I mean, I know it’s a hard call to make but--” Then you’d notice that Dylan was just staring at you. Awkward silence would follow. Finally, he’d say, “I was only joking.” You’d try to rebound by saying that maybe he should record “I Was Only Joking” as a thank-you to Rod Stewart for all of the Dylan songs he had recorded over the years, but it would be too late.

3. “Huck’s Tune” (2007). A gentle, sad waltz with Donnie Herron’s steel guitar shedding tears that the world-weary singer has grown even world-wearier trying to hide. You think he’s blue? You would be too if you had to leave a woman whose lips drip honey and who’s fine as wine. Of the forty-two lines, all but the one ending in “sunshine tan” (is there a “moonshine tan”?) evince the precise expression that, if you’re lucky, you can rise to when you want to have to say something only once--and would rather not say it at all.

4. “Heart of Mine” (1981). The following review ran in either Melody Maker or the New Musical Express in September 1981: “BOB DYLAN: ‘Heart Of Mine’ (CBS). What is this trash! The stuff you can get away with when you’re a Name. This sounds like an out-take from ‘Self Portrait’. As expected Bob delivers the tune in his famous ‘I can’t sing but who cares’ nasal drone while the band rambles along in a sort of folky-thingy type vein. ‘Ragged’ would be complimentary--backwards is nearer the mark. Still, it’s all so real, so pure, so agonisingly dull. PS: I didn’t mean it God--don’t strike me down when they’re still repeating ‘Alias Smith And Jones’. The Zim has written some GREAT songs--this ain’t one of ’em.” Pretty funny, you have to admit, and somehow both one hundred percent right and one hundred percent wrong at the same time.

5. “High Water (For Charley Patton)” (2001). In his book Deep Blues, Robert Palmer has this to say about Charley Patton’s original “High Water Everywhere”: “[I]n the recorded version of 'High Water Everywhere,' … Patton found public events meaningful only insofar as they impinged on his private world--his perceptions, his feelings.” (Like post-protest Dylan, one might add.) “This,” Palmer continues, “is one of the fundamental distinctions between blues and the black music that came before it. Those earlier songs … deal in archetypes. The singer-narrator remains relatively cool and uninvolved. In blues, there is no narration as such, and while one finds signs and symbols and proverbial homilies aplenty, there is nothing as abstract as an archetype.” (Signs and symbols in Dylan’s High Water”: coffins afloat in the flood, a lover’s panties thrown onto the dashboard, Charles Darwin stranded on a highway. Homilies: “I’m preachin’ the Word of God,” “Keeping away from the women / givin’ ’em lots of room,” “It’s bad out there”) “The singer is so involved that in many cases his involvement becomes both the subject and the substance of the work. Such unflinching subjectivity may seem callous and self-involved [Callous and self-involved? Dylan?], but in the context of its time and place it was positively heroic. Only a man who understands his worth and believes in his freedom sings as if nothing else matters.” (Nobody sings Dylan as if nothing else matters like Dylan.)

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "G": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/08/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_02.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 "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)

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)