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 "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 "N"

1. “Not Dark Yet” (1997). Don’t hate this song just because Mel Gibson hand-selected it for inclusion on Songs Inspired by the Passion of the Christ (Universal South/UMG Soundtracks). Gibson still had his marbles then, and in a way “Not Dark Yet” prefigures his recent meltdowns. I mean, walk a mile in his shoes: You reach a spiritual peak by making The Passion of the Christ and watching it become a worldwide smash, and then the high wears off and you crash, as it were. Meanwhile, you’re still getting invited to Hollywood parties, being hit on by hotties with dollar signs in their eyes that you mistake for true lust because you’ve had a few drinks too many, and, let’s face it, a marriage as old as yours has seen better days. So you throw it all away only to realize (after you’ve knocked her up) that, despite her dark eyes, your Russian concubine wasn’t as emotionally yours (or you hers) as you’d thought. That’s when you’re soul turns into steel, when you don’t see why you should care, when your burden seems unbearable, and when you don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer. It’s almost enough to make you pity the poor immigrant.

2. “New Pony” (1978). The 2009 version of this raw, serrated blues by the Dead Weather put it back on the cultural map if only for awhile. It deserves to be there more often. It’s similar to but even nastier than “My Wife’s Hometown”--similar because the hometown of the woman being scornfully addressed in “New Pony” is also hell, and because the new pony uses voodoo (and because the old pony’s name was Lucifer); nastier because at least the wife in “Hometown” is a woman while in “New Pony” Dylan has shape-shifted his female nemesis into a member of the species equus ferus caballus, one so nasty and so bad that even her long, black shaggy hair and great-big hind legs cry out, “Mount me.” So Dylan does (or at least wants to). But not out of love--to teach her a lesson, maybe. Pet peeve: Shouldn’t the line “I’ve seen your feet walk by themselves” go “I’ve seen your shoes walk by themselves”? Surely the woman-pony’s feet bones remain connected to the ankle bones.

3. “Nettie Moore” (2006). This song’s slow and steady pace wins the race, and apparently the prize is Nettie Moore herself, whom the narrator misses and for whom he’d gladly pass through blazing flames. The tender sorrow in Dylan's voice, however, implies that the time to win her has passed, perhaps irretrievably. So he’s settling for attractive bad-luck women who cook up more than he can eat (at least in a single bite) and convincing himself that he actually loves one of them. Maybe he does. But she can’t make him forget the mundane (research gone berserk, dances that split pants, whiskey) the way Nettie Moore could. Yet somewhere along the greasy trail he's wandered ever since his happiness was o'er, he finds it in himself to enjoin Nettie, wherever she may be, to think twice because it’s not all right--calling him dirty names, that is. Apparently the tender sorrow in Dylan's voice may result from his suppressing a few choice epithets as well.

4. “Neighborhood Bully” (1983). Perhaps the best commentary on this song (and the best reason to be grateful that Dylan attended Bible studies at the Vineyard Fellowship) came from Dylan himself in an interview he gave to Martin Keller shortly before Infidels hit the stores. Keller: “What about all we’ve been reading about your search for your so-called Jewish roots?” Dylan: “My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt. They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses, you know, the guy that killed the Egyptian, married an Ethiopian girl and brought the law down from the mountain. The same Moses whose staff turned into a serpent. The same person who killed three thousand Hebrews for getting down, stripping off their clothes and dancing around a golden calf. These are my roots. Jacob had four wives and thirteen children, who fathered an entire people. Those are my roots too. Gideon, with a small army, defeating an army of thousands. Deborah the prophetess. Esther the queen and many Canaanite women. Reuben slipping into his father’s bed when his father wasn’t there. These are my roots. Delilah tempting Sampson, killing him softly with her song. The mighty King David was an outlaw before he was a king, you know. He had to hide in caves and get his meals at back doors. The wonderful King Saul had a warrant out on him--a ‘no knock’ search warrant. They wanted to cut his head off. John the Baptist could tell you more about it. Roots man--we’re talking about Jewish roots, you want to know more? Check upon Elijah the prophet. He could make rain. Isaiah the prophet, even Jeremiah, see if their brethren didn’t want to bust their brains for telling it like it is, yeah--those are my roots I suppose.”

5. “Nothing Was Delivered” (1968). “I wish I’d have been a doctor,” sang Dylan in 1983 on “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight.” “Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost.” And on the basis of the evidence contained in “Nothing was Delivered,” his fantasies of finishing med school must have gone back a quarter of a century at least: The injunction to “take care of yourself and get plenty of rest” sounds like nothing so much as the beginnings of a bedside manner. But unless you interpret “delivered” in the OBGYN sense, there’s nothing else that would make sense being uttered or sung by a doctor or even an orderly (a disorderly, maybe) in any hospital ward where getting well was the object. “I tell this truth to you,” moans Dylan, sounding none too healthy himself, on The Basement Tapes, “not out of spite or anger / But simply because it’s true.” Or maybe simply because it rhymes.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "M": http://tinyurl.com/2asjyyt)