The Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown & This Week's Statistics

After a week of The Who, and a day with The Artist and the rest of the 2011 Oscars, it's back to Dylan & Statistics. Let's begin!

At #84 in our Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown is a song from the Oh Mercy (1989) album, called Everything Is Broken. The song's lyrics describe Dylan's detachment from his world at the time of its writing.

Originally recorded as Broken Days in March 1989, Dylan had rewritten the song entirely by April, giving it its current name. Oh Mercy's producer, Daniel Lanois, described how Dylan would rework his songs over and over again:

"I sat next to him for two months while he wrote [Oh Mercy] and it was extraordinary. Bob overwrites. He keeps chipping away at his verses. He has a place for all his favorite couplets, and those couplets can be interchangeable. I've seen the same lyrics show up in two or three different songs as he cuts and pastes them around, so it's not quite as sacred ground as you might think.

This is an alternate version of the song:

Everything Is Broken

... And this is the original version:

Everything Is Broken

At #83 is a pretty little tune called You Ain't Goin' Nowhere.

How did Dylan spend the Summer of Love? Starting in June 1967 and ending in October 1967, he was holed up in a basement in upstate New York, making strange demos with his friends in the Band, singing this stoic warning about tough times ahead: "Strap yourself to the tree with roots/You ain't goin' nowhere." The first time most people heard You Ain't Goin' Nowhere was in the Byrds' straight country rendition on 1968's Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Dylan released it later as one of the new tracks on his Greatest Hits Vol. II, turning it into a good-time banjo shuffle and adding a sly riposte to the Byrds' Roger McGuinn: "Gonna see a movie called Gunga Din/Pack up your money, and pull up your tent, McGuinn." The definitive Basement Tapes version is mysterious, doomy, yet somehow still festive. In an outtake, he sings it as a stoned lullaby, apparently addressed to his housemates: "Look here, dear soup, you'd best feed the cats/ The cats need feeding and you're the one to do it." He left the cats out of later versions, but kept the song's playful spirit.

Here's Dylan:

This is the "dear soup" outtake:

You Ain't Going Nowhere

Here's the version by The Byrds:

Finally for today, at #82, here's the title track from Dylan's 1967 album, John Wesley Harding. Dylan told Jann Wenner in a 1969 Rolling Stone interview that the song "started out to be a long ballad. I was gonna write a ballad on ... like maybe one of those old cowboy ... you know, a real long ballad. But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn't want to waste the tune; it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that." Biographer Clinton Heylin states that Dylan has had a well-documented interest in outlaw cowboys, including Jesse James and Billy the Kid, and in the past Dylan has said that his favorite folk song was John Hardy, whose real-life title character in 1893 murdered another man over a game of craps. John Wesley Hardin was another late-19th century outlaw. Dylan has stated that he chose John Wesley Hardin for his protagonist over other badmen because his name "[fit] in the tempo" of the song. Dylan added the g to the end of Hardin's name by mistake.

Dylan has said that he did not have a clear notion of what the song was about. He told Cameron Crowe in 1985 that after recording the John Wesley Harding album, he "didn't know what to make of it. ... So I figured the best thing to do would be to put out the album as quickly as possible, call it John Wesley Harding because that was the one song that I had no idea what it was about, why it was even on the album. So I figured I'd call the album that, call attention to it, make it something special..." It was the only title that he considered for the album.

Wesley Hardin may have been a late-19th-century badman, but Dylan's evocation of a "friend to the poor" who "was never known to hurt an honest man" is less about a particular character than celebrating a rugged American past that fit the rootsy turn his music was taking. Recorded in Nashville with drummer Kenny Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy, it's a masterwork of ascetic idealism.

Now, let's move on to this week's statistics. It's good that the total visits this week stabilized on the high level they achieved last week. The big winners were the US, then Russia, but also the UK and the UAE. Italy, Canada, and India also had a very good week.

The full Top 10 is as follows:

1. the United States

2. Russia

3. Greece

4. the United Kingdom

5. the United Arab Emirates

6. France

7. Germany

8. Italy

9. Canada

10. India

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence this week (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Equador, Finland, Gabon, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Jersey, Kenya, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

In the all-time Top 10, there have been two fierce battles raging all week: 12 hours ago France and the UK had absolutely the same number of visits, now France has one visit more than the UK, which gives them the same percentage, since one visit is not statistically significant. Cyprus and Italy have also been fighting it out - at one point there was a difference of only two visits, now it's slightly more, but Cyprus' position is still vulnerable. I wonder how will things be in a week from now... Here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 51.1%

2. Greece = 15.6%

3. Russia = 9.3%

4. Germany = 2.9%

5. France = 2.3%

6. the United Kingdom = 2.3%

7. the United Arab Emirates = 1.45%

8. Canada = 0.84%

9. Cyprus = 0.75%

10. Italy = 0.74%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!