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

1. “What Can I Do for You?” (1980).  If, as Keats wrote, beauty is truth and truth beauty, this song from Saved contains all that anyone need know about Dylan’s having thrown in with the Vineyard Fellowship in the late-’70s.  The melody and the chord progression it glides in on, the voice sighing in the wilderness, the expressive simplicity of the heartfelt first-person lyrics whether original or paraphrasing Scripture--each is without parallel in Dylan’s vast body of work.  Taken together, they could relieve even Mona Lisa of the highway blues.  And then there’s the harmonica.  What was once an instrument for playing skeleton keys in the rain has become a rusty hinge blowing in the wind, setting the chimes of freedom to flashing. 

2. “When the Deal Goes Down” (2006).  More love, more theft--this time for and from both Henry Timrod and Bing Crosby.  Getting old and pledging his love have never suited Dylan better.  “Love is all there is,” he implies in a voice more frailer than the rose poking through his clothes.  “It makes the world go ’round.”  And even though “we live and we die” and “know not why,” love’s enough to see us through when, to quote Larry Elder, the fit hits the shan.  It is not, however, enough to keep Dylan from being haunted by words he “never meant nor wished to say.”  And therein lies the tragedy of this song’s many spoken and unspoken universal truths: Not only is everything broken, but we ourselves have broken or at least participated in the breaking of a lot more of it than we’d like to admit.  So Dylan admits it for us.  Catharsis longa, vita brevis.  And the video is still my favorite Scarlett Johansson film.

3. “What Good Am I” (1989).  Unlike so many of his s-album gospel songs, this deeply spiritual exercise in tonal breath control finds Dylan extracting the log in his own eye rather than going after the speck in his neighbor’s.  It’s a painful operation, as anyone who has ever tried it will attest.  But once it’s over and the eye has had a chance to heal, its capacity for being seen through rather than seen with is immeasurably greater than it ever was before.  It’s almost as if Dylan wishes he’d been a doctor.  Maybe then he’d have saved some life that’d been lost--or at least discovered a cure for the disease of conceit. 

4. “We Better Talk This Over” (1978).  If this song’s rimes didn’t fire so rapidly past on a country shuffle worthy of the Marshall Tucker Band auditioning for Billy Swan, the couplet that goes “The vows that we kept are now broken and swept / ’neath the bed where we slept” might have achieved by now the classic status of a George Jones lyric if not the classic status of these lines from an unpublished, posthumously discovered poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky: “The love boat has crashed against the everyday.  You and I, we are quits, and there is no point to listing animal pains, sorrows, and hurts.”  But the rimes do fire rapidly past.  “Don’t look back,” Dylan seems to be saying as he himself fails--and seems to know that he’s failing--to practice what he preaches.  The hypocrisy weighs on him.  He can’t let go, and he won’t let go unless she does so first because unless she does, letting go doesn’t seem right or possible.  They’ve done nothing to each other that time will not erase, but time passes slowly when you’re lost in the dream of being a magician who wishes he could tie back the bond that both of you have gone beyond because beyond there lies nothin’.   

5. “The Wicked Messenger” (1967).  The instrumentation is largely if not entirely unplugged, but the blues run through this underrated John Wesley Harding gem as surefootedly as they do through anything on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, or Blonde on Blonde.  Question: Is the “Eli” mentioned in Verse One a person or a place?  If a person, that person is most likely the biblical priest and judge to whom Hannah turned over her son Samuel.  “God said to Hannah, ‘Give me your son.’ / Hannah said, ‘O.K.’” lacks a certain something, but, given the reference to the parting of the seas in the last verse, the possibility cannot be ruled out.  Neither, however, can the possibility that Eli is Eli “Cotton Gin” Whitney.  Dylan does, after all, consider America’s participation in the slave trade to be her Original Sin.  Or does he?  So much of his career, after all, based as it is on the music that displaced Africans made to stop their suffering and ease their pain, is a tree with Roots.  And what if Eli is a place?  Is it the ancient Irish kingdom Éli (not likely unless Dylan was tossing Van Morrison a prescient bone), the modern-day Israeli West Bank settlement Eli, Mateh Binyamin (not likely since it wasn’t established until 1984--on September 11 by the way), the Iranian village Eli (not likely, cf. “Neighborhood Bully”), or the unincorporated community of Eli, Kentucky?  At a mere two minutes and one second, it’s almost over before it begins.  But it isn’t really over ’til it’s over, and it’s not over ’til the wicked messenger’s audience tells him not to bring any news unless it’s good.  Interesting: When Dylan himself finally began bringing the Good News, he discovered that his audience only wanted the other kind.  

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

Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10

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 "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)