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 "P"

1. “Precious Angel” (1979). As we all know by now, Dylan wanted to record Slow Train Coming the way he would later record Saved--by going into the studio, singing and playing everything live in a take or two, then hitting the road. But Jerry Wexler--God rest his card-carrying, Jewish-atheist soul--would have none of it. He insisted on approaching the album as he had his many previous classics, convinced he could get a classic out of Dylan. So the rhythm tracks got cut first, the other instruments came next, and then and only then did Dylan sing. Wexler also brought in Mark Knopfler, who, despite the success of “Sultans of Swing” the previous year, was hardly an obvious choice. Wexler also apparently slowed “Precious Angel” down: The live version from the May 1980 Massey Hall (Toronto) show sprints by so fast you’d think Dylan thought the race went to the swift rather than the worthy who can divide the word of truth. In short, the song is as powerful a testament to the Wexler genius as anything else in his justly celebrated canon. Without Wexler, Barry Beckett’s glowing organ virtuosity would’ve barely glimmered. Without Wexler, there’d have been no deftly deployed Muscle Shoals horns. Without Wexler, Dylan would’ve been too impatient (and distracted by simultaneously strumming his acoustic) to have delivered what just might be to this day the clearest singing and enunciation of his career. And without Wexler, Knopfler wouldn’t have come through with guitar playing so beautiful it can break your heart.

2. “Positively 4th Street” (1965). This song captures the righteous indignation of anyone who has ever been resented to the bone by those with a heart of stone so accurately that it’s almost worth being laughed at behind your back when you come walkin’ through just to be able to shout “I wish that for just one time / You could stand inside my shoes / You’d know what a drag it is / To see you” at your tormentors. And to break the icicles off the chilliest organ riffs ever and do one to others before they do one to you.

3. “Please Mrs. Henry” (1968). O.K., so am I the only Bob Dylan and Cheap Trick fan in the world who didn’t know until the recent release of Setlist: The Very Best of Cheap Trick Live that Cheap Trick had recorded a maniacal ten-minute live version of this song under the title “Mrs. Henry”? (That’s what I get for not acquiring the Sex, America, Cheap Trick box fourteen years ago.) In case you haven’t heard it yet: Nielsen and Co. pound it out of shape then pound it back into shape again: It could make Manfred Mann roll over and tell Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, and Flint the news. It is, in other words, ridiculous. But so is the song itself, with “Now, I’m startin’ to drain / My stool’s gonna squeak / If I walk too much farther / My crane’s gonna leak” as fully deserving of a Best Restroom-Stall-Verse Grammy as anything by George Clinton.

4. “Political World” (1989). The word “politics” was big on Dylan’s mind in the ’80s if only because interviewers kept asking him about it. Responding to Martin Keller in 1983, Dylan said that politics is “like a snake with a tail in its mouth. A merry-go-round of sin.” The next year, responding to Kurt Loder, he said that “politics is an instrument of the Devil.” So perhaps this song was Dylan’s way of saying, “You wanna know what I think of politics? Here it is. Now shut up!” It’s not a pretty picture: faceless crime, nameless gods, homeless kids, loveless technology, ruthless cowardice--everything is broken. And, in case future Dylan interrogators should miss the point, Daniel Lanois keeps piling coal into the engine until what had started out as a slow train quickly picks up steam and ends up smokin’ down the tracks like a runaway streetcar named desire.

5. “Po’ Boy” (2001). Heard in sequence on Love and Theft, “Po’ Boy” is a change-of-pace old-timey shuffle, a sepia-tinted respite of wry comic relief between the smoldering twin towers of “Honest with Me” and “Cry a While.” If memory serves, this is one of those songs with lyrics lovingly stolen from Junichi Saga’s Confessions of Yakuza. (A la “Union Sundown”: “Well, this melody’s from Tin Pan Alley / And these words are from Japan.”) The lyrics also echo Dylan’s late-’90s obsession with telling corny jokes between songs in concert. (Note to Sony’s Bootleg Series overseers now that there’s no Col. Parker--er, Albert Grossman--to put it out: Having Fun with Bob on Stage.) Weirdest or coolest (or both) of all, though, are these lines: “My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer / My father was a traveling salesman, I never met him.” Does this mean the singer is the love child of those two crazy kids in “Motorpsycho Nightmare”?

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "O": http://tinyurl.com/2de5u4m)

This series will now take a hiatus. I must tend to the life that meanwhile has been going on outside all around me. Thank you to everyone who has been along for the ride so far.

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

1. “Every Grain of Sand” (1981). Unquestionably the fullest verbal flowering of Dylan’s Vineyard Fellowship Bible studies, the lyrics would be perfect if not for the flawed subject-verb agreement in the second line and the penultimate line of the sixth verse, which Dylan himself has been known to tamper with onstage. But I’ve always thought the song as a whole needed something a little more than four chords and the truth--not Steve Douglas’s soothingly ebbing sax, which it already has, but a maybe a faster or at least a more syncopated rhythm, anything to keep Dylan’s meditations from seeming so meditative. Still, it’s always helpful under any circumstances to be reminded that if you gaze into temptation’s angry flame, it gazes also into you.

2. “Everything Is Broken” (1989). Thank heaven for this song and its fellow upbeat rocker “Political World,” without which Oh Mercy’s meditations would’ve seemed too meditative as well. And it made for a rousing set-opener for a time in the early nineties, especially when both Ian Wallace and Winston Watson thwacking away. I’m partial to the line about “broken pipes” just now, as I’m still paying on a plumber bill. But usually I’m partial to the couplet that goes “Every time you leave and go off someplace, / Things fall to pieces in my face,” which swerves the song from the socio-political to the privately emotional almost as deftly as Joni Mitchell’s last-verse admission in “Big Yellow Taxi” that it’s really being left by her man and not DDT or paved parking lots that make her blue.

3. “Emotionally Yours” (1985). When Empire Burlesque was released, some people found this headlong plunge into learn-to-slow-dance romance too much to take. And in some ways it is: the synthesized horns, the Arthur Baker-shellacked production, the piling on of sweetheart clichés, the shortness of breath that forces Dylan to break his last “emotionally” into two words. But coming from a man who’d once written, “Love is all there is / It makes the world go ’round” and who’d once said, “The world is full of non-supporters and backbiters … [b]ut it’s also full of people who love you,” this song or at least one like it shouldn’t have been all that surprising (especially since one like it, “I‘ll Remember You,” occurred overdisc). Not too much to take no matter how you slice it: Mike Campbell’s movingly lovely guitar solo--and the radically transformed version that the O’Jays took to the R&B top ten the year during the last year of Dylan and Carolyn Dennis’s marriage.

4. “Eternal Circle” (1963). Slight but funny, and a rare instance of Dylan practicing the art of self-mockery for self-mockery’s sake. If the performer-smitten girl in the coffee-house crowd couldn’t wait through seven minutes of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or the other “long” songs Dylan was performing at the time before bolting for greener pastures, imagine how nuts “Highlands” would’ve made her thirty-four years later.

5. “Enough Is Enough” (1984). If Dylan had written and performed more than five songs starting with E, this song would not be among the top five. But he didn’t, so it is. Not that it’s bad--in fact, it sounds a lot like the version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” that Dylan performed with members of the Cruzados on the David Letterman show a few months before debuting this song on the Real Live tour, so much so that for years I thought "Enough Is Enough" was “just” some old blues standard. And given Dylan’s history of love and theft, maybe it is.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "D": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_7970.html)