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

Now that all the celebrations are done (for the moment), let's get back to our regular Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown, and this week's statistics. Let's go!

At #81 on our countdown is The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar, a track from Dylan's last "Christian" record, Shot Of Love (1981). One of Dylan's most opaque songs, it offers a plethora of disconnected images, building to a chaotic absurdity, which is breathing in hot pursuit of the listener across the switchback longs and shorts of the verses and the punching ups and downs of the chorus melody.

The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar

At #80 we find a single-only release from Devember 1965: Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

Dylan famously kicked folk singer Phil Ochs out of a limousine for saying he didn't like Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? In fact, it's one of Dylan's great diss tracks. A sequel of sorts to Like a Rolling Stone, the song distills its predecessor's torrent of contempt down to a taut three and a half minutes of lean, tossed-off spite. The driving, no-frills style came courtesy of Levon and the Hawks, who were backing Dylan in the studio for the first time after playing only a handful of live shows with him. But like Ochs, the public wasn't buying it: Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? unfortunately fizzled at #58 on the US charts. It did much better in the UK, peaking at #17.

This is the proper studio version:

Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

This is a different take:

Finally for today, at #79, is Gotta Serve Somebody, perhaps the most well-known song of Bob's Christian phase (#24, US). It also won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Male in 1979. Let's see what Sinéad O'Connor had to say about it:

I was about 13 when my older brother Joseph brought home Slow Train Coming, and it just completely blew my mind. People say – and I hope it's not true – that Dylan doesn't stand by that record. It's a staggering album for anyone to make, but especially him.

The song that killed me most was Gotta Serve Somebody. Living in a Catholic family in Ireland, the only religious music we had ever heard was just awful – so incredibly boring. For that song to come out in Ireland at that time was life-changing. He wasn't giving a lecture. There was a sexuality, almost, in the sound of the guitar and the other instruments.

And the lyrics are brilliant – what he's saying is that whatever you're going to do with your life, you're fucked if you don't stand for something. I quite like that, as a lesson from a master teacher on how to be an artist and also, I suppose, on how to live your life. What he's saying is, "Don't just get into your bed and curl up under the covers. You have to get the fuck up."

This the proper studio version:

Gotta Serve Somebody

This is his live version at that year's Grammies:

Now, let's move on to this week's statistics. Good news: the total visits have increased by almost 20% this week compared to the last one. The big winners were primarily the US, then the UK and Germany. The other major players did well too.

The full Top 10 is as follows:

1. the United States

2. Russia

3. Greece

4. Germany

5. the United Kingdom

6. France

7. the United Arab Emirates

8. the Netherlands

9. Canada

10. China

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence this week (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Palestine, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

In the all-time Top 10, one of the two ongoing battles has produced a new winner. The United Kingdom has been slowly inching towards France, and this week it has overtaken it, returning to the Top 5 after a number of months. Can it threaten Germany? Not right now, but if the trend continues, it's possible. Cyprus and Italy are still battling it out, with no change for the moment. Still, they are very close... Here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 53.2%

2. Greece = 14.6%

3. Russia = 9.0%

4. Germany = 2.9%

5. the United Kingdom = 2.3%

6. France = 2.2%

7. the United Arab Emirates = 1.39%

8. Canada = 0.78%

9. Cyprus = 0.71%

10. Italy = 0.70%

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