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 "O"

1. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” (1966). The lyrics don’t do much more than recycle those of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” but set to the second most exciting musical rush of Dylan’s electric phase (“Like a Rolling Stone” was the first), they take on a significance sufficient to the musical rush thereof. The straightforward patronizing of lines such as “I didn’t realize how young you were” and “then you told me later … that … you weren’t really from the farm” may come across as mere self-justification, but the not-at-all straightforward refrain rights the balance and maybe even tilts it in the faux farm girl’s favor. The flipside, in other words, of “Sooner or later, one of us must know / That I really did try to get close to you” is that, sooner or later, one of them won’t know it too. And since there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the one who won’t know it is the singer himself, it’s possible that he deserved to have his eyes clawed out.

2. “One Two Many Mornings” (1964). Of a piece with “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” this poignant contribution to the bulging folksong cache of regretfully abandoned love says its piece with a succinctness that not only proves less is more but that also helped it to withstand the far-from poignant treatment it received on Hard Rain. And, as usual, there’s a twist: It’s not the torched-up nights the singer misses, but the waking up to gaze through bleary but sleep-blessed eyes at a woman asleep on the side of the bed from which she was just as right as he was.

3. “Odds and Ends” (1968). “Lost time is not found again” is hard to argue with, but it’s the way the hi-jinx of the ramshackle music matches the lo-jinx of the playful dirty talk that makes it hard not to wonder what the Traveling Wilburys would’ve done with both. As for the juice mentioned in each verse, something tells me it was the freshly squeezed kind.

4. “Oh, Sister” (1975). You can almost transplant this song from the Rolling Thunder years (during which it originated) into the Slow Train and Saved years, where it would make a nice triptych with “Precious Angel” and “Covenant Woman.” In all three, God is a father bequeathing rebirth and salvation to those love and follow him and danger or worse to those who don’t. The difference in “Oh, Sister” is that the singer uses that danger or worse as a threat: His angel had better stay precious and not break the covenant or she’ll “create sorrow”--but is it sorrow for the singer, for God, or for the woman herself as she faces the fury of the man she scorned? In the sad, weeping-fiddle versions on Desire, Hard Rain, and Bootleg Series Vol. 5, it would seem to be the singer; in At Budokan, however, where Rob Stoner’s musical re-arrangement simmers with resentment, its clearly the sister whom we’d hate to be on that fateful day.

5. “Obviously Five Believers” (1968). “From a Buick Six” gets retooled for what’s basically a throwaway no better and no worse than “Sitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence,” “She’s Your Lover Now,” or any of Dylan’s other worthy mid-’60s rockers left off the albums for which they were recorded. In the two funniest verses, not even fifteen jugglers and five believers “all dressed like men”--so I’m guessing they were women--or the absent lover’s mother can cure the singer of the empty-bed blues. His lover may not be one in a million, but one out of twenty-two ain’t bad.

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "N": http://tinyurl.com/299t2gn)

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)

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

1. “Changing of the Guards” (1978). In retrospect, this is a Jesus song. Not as much a Jesus song as “Señor” (about which more when I get to the S songs), but there he is--the Good Shepherd himself--right in the first verse, grieving away over the desperate as he is wont to do. Then he goes away for a few verses, leaving it to various mysterious, Tarot-derived archetypes to carry the story. Or maybe the stories. As with so many Dylan songs, each verse seems like a retelling of the one before it from a completely different perspective, changing it in small but significant ways, creating a cumulative Rashomon-like effect not unlike that undoubtedly created by the reflections of reflections seen in the “palace of mirrors” referred to in Verse Six. Also in Verse Six: “The empty rooms where her memory is protected / Where the angels’ voices whisper to the souls of previous times”--lines every bit the evocative equivalent of “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” Jesus or somebody like him comes back in Verse Nine, promising the arrival of “peace,” “tranquility,” and “splendor” on “wheels of fire” straight out of Ezekiel and at least one of which, one suspects, will be rolling down the road and exploding before long. Yet none of these images would matter a whit if Alan Pasqua’s lonesome grinding-organ cries and Steve Douglas’s golden saxophones weren’t shadowing and-or illuminating them with the intimacy of a precious angel under the sun.

2. “Clothes Line Saga” (1967). My, but this song is useful: It’s amazing how much trouble you can avoid simply by adopting “Sometime, not all the time” and “Some of ’em, not all of ’em” as your default responses to uncomfortable questions. Like that favorite of wives and girlfriends: “Do you love me?” “Sometime, not all the time.” Or the one personnel managers always ask job applicants: “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” “Some of ’em, not all of ’em.” Honestly, I’d be sad and blue if not for this song. Essentially, it’s Theater of the Absurd starring Flannery O‘Connor‘s “good country people.” Only they’ve been stripped of all outrageousness and left with nothing but their mind-numbingly mundane smugness--and possibly transplanted to New England, where elliptical Robert Frost-speak such as “What do you care?” and “Well, just because” is the lingua franca. For years the Roches performed this song in clubs to occasional titters and polite applause, and in 2001 Suzzy and Maggie Roche enshrined it on the Dylan tribute album A Nod to Bob. Seven years later, Joe Biden fulfilled the prophecies of the second verse.

3. “Can You Please Crawl out Your Window?” (1965). It’s hard to feed a bunch of your previous lyrics into a centrifuge and make the resulting mélange sound sexy, but Dylan came close on this once-obscure single, and Transvision Vamp came closer still when they covered it (and called it “Please Crawl out Your Window”) thirty-one years later. But poets who know it and hope they don’t blow it sometimes hit the verbal bull’s-eye even when they’re not aiming. Proof that Dylan is no exception: “religion of the little tin women,” “if he needs a third eye he just grows it,” “I’m sure that he has no intentions / Of looking your way, unless it’s to say / That he needs you to test his inventions.” On an unrelated note, just how was the woman whom Dylan was addressing intending to crawl out her window if he had to tell her to use her arms and legs? Head first?

4. “Caribbean Wind” (1981). Dylan was right to leave this off Shot of Love. Its length (5:54), relentlessly epiphanic lyrics, and heavily breathing background singers would’ve taken the focus off “Every Grain of Sand,” which God obviously intended as that album’s pick to click. Also, “Caribbean Wind”’s buoyant melody and bright instrumentation would’ve clashed with the rest of the album’s ragged spontaneity. By the time Dylan recorded this song in 1981, he’d been working on it for two years--he introduced it as a “new” song during his first gospel tour--and by his own admission he kept trying to get both its words and its sound right in the studio. He apparently gave up on the sound, but he kept working on the words: The eventually published lyrics differ from the ones he sang on the version that surfaced on Biograph, and not all of the differences are improvements. In the Biograph version, the men bathing in perfume “practiced the hoax of free speech”; in the published version they “celebrated free speech.” And the former beats the latter (unless, as some people think, Dylan’s singing “hopes” instead of “hoax,” in which case there’s not much difference between what he recorded and what he published). Two lines that haven’t changed: “She said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing / You can do about it, so let us just agree to agree.’” I had a woman say that to me once. Everything about her was bringing me misery.

5. “Cat’s in the Well” (1990). As those who keep up with his set lists know, Dylan occasionally opens shows with this sprightly fractured nursery rhyme. And as those familiar with the unfractured original--“Ding Dong Bell”--know, the line Dylan altered is “Pussy’s in the well.” In a way, it’s too bad he changed it; hearing feminists shout “Judas!” at his concerts would bring back fond memories. But change it he did, and from that point he was off and running, twisting toddler talk into apocalyptic visions of everything from world-wide slaughter and barns full of bull to anxiety-related hair loss and someone named “Back-Alley Sally” who’s “doing the American Jump.” I’m not sure what the American Jump is, but if Back-Alley Sally is related to the title character of Rudy Sooter’s old ditty “Up the Alley with Sally,” I have a pretty good guess. (Hint: It’s not exclusively American, and it doesn’t involve jumping. Usually.) Dylan ends it like a bedtime prayer (“Goodnight, my love, may the Lord have mercy on us all”), but all I can say to anyone who can sleep after absorbing this song’s litany of horrors is “Good luck."

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "B": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_28.html)