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

Those of you who came to read this week's statistics - scroll further down. Those of you interested in the Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown - continue reading.

At #45 in our list, is yet another song from Dylan's best album, Blonde On Blonde (1966). In fact it's the longest song in the album, clocking in at over 11 minutes. It's Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Many critics have noted the similarity of 'Lowlands' to 'Lownds', the name of Dylan's wife Sara, and Dylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that "Sad Eyed Lady" was a "wedding song" for Sara Lownds, whom Dylan had married just three months earlier.

Dylan verified this in his 1976 song Sara. "Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel," he sang wistfully, "writing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you." Like so many stories about Dylan's past, the anecdote from Sara is both fascinating and mostly false. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is indeed an ode to Sara Dylan, but he largely wrote it on the spot during the dead of night in a Nashville studio. While the session musicians he'd hired played cards, he sat down and wrote the sweetly surreal verses. "It started out as just a little thing," Dylan said in 1969. "But I got carried away somewhere along the line."

After eight hours of work, Dylan called the band members into the studio at 4 a.m. and gave them minimal instructions. They had no idea the song would keep going for 11 minutes – and they were stunned once more when, afterward, Dylan told them they had nailed it on the very first take.

Because the song was recorded at around four in the morning, critic Andy Gill feels the work has a nocturnal quality similar to Visions of Johanna. Gill comments on the "measured grace and stately pace" of the song's rhythm, characterising the mood of the song as "as much funeral procession as wedding march". Gill notes that, though the song has its share of enigmatic imagery, there is no trace of the jokey nihilism that marks out much of the rest of Blonde on Blonde. "This time around", writes Gill, "it's serious."

Tom Waits said of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in 1991: "It is like Beowulf and it 'takes me out to the meadow'. This song can make you leave home, work on the railroad or marry a Gypsy. I think of a drifter around a fire with a tin cup under a bridge remembering a woman's hair. The song is a dream, a riddle and a prayer."

Here's the song:

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Here's a cover by Joan Baez:

At #44 is Changing of the Guards, a song from the 1978 album Street Legal.

There are some pretty bizarre lyrics in the Bob Dylan catalog, but nothing quite like the opening track from Street Legal. "They shaved her head," Dylan sings against a dense layer of R&B backup singers and neon-dream saxophone. "She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo." The song is full of references to tarot cards, and some Dylan geeks see it as a look back at his own life since changing his name to Bob Dylan and moving to New York. Whatever the case, it's one of his all-time great forgotten Seventies works, precisely because it's so open to interpretation.

This is a good live version, but the sound is shite:

For one powerful reading, see Patti Smith's mordant, politically tinged take from 2007:

Finally for today, at #43 is Oh, Sister, from the 1976 album Desire. Steeped in Biblical seriousness and allegorical trappings, the only clues you have that the song isn’t from, say, Infidels or Shot Of Love, are Scarlet Rivera’s mournful violin and Emmylou Harris’ heartfelt harmonies.

The song probably is about Joan Baez, as an answer to her 1974 song Diamonds And Rust. In this live version, Baez introduces the song with the comment “by far the most talented crazy person I ever worked with” which appears to be a note to the effect that the song is about Dylan.

Skip forwards to Oh, Sister written in the first half of 1975 – so not too long after – and we have Dylan singing it at the John Hammond concert in September before a specially invited audience, including Joan Baez. Dylan introduced the song with the line “I want to dedicate this to someone out there watching tonight I know, she knows who she is”. We'll be playing the studio version though:

The song ends with:

Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door

Don’t turn away, you’ll create sorrow

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore

You may not see me tomorrow

An olive branch from Bob to Joan? Anyway, it didn't work, because Baez struck back with Oh Brother! a few months later. The lyrics were scathing:

You’ve got eyes like Jesus

But you speak with a viper’s tongue

We were just sitting around on earth

Where the hell did you come from?

With your lady dressed in deerskin

And an amazing way about her

When are you going to realize

That you just can’t live without her?

Take it easy

Take it light

But take it

Your lady gets her power

From the goddess and the stars

You get yours from the trees and the brooks

And a little from life on Mars

And I’ve known you for a good long while

And would you kindly tell me, mister

How in the name of the Father and the Son

Did I come to be your sister?

You’ve done dirt to lifelong friends

With little or no excuses

Who endowed you with the crown

To hand out these abuses?

Your lady knows about these things

But they don’t put her under

Me, I know about them, too

And I react like thunder

I know you are surrounded

By parasites and sycophants

When I come to see you

I dose up on coagulants

Because when you hurl that bowie knife

It’s going to be when my back is turned

Doing some little deed for you

And baby, will I get burned

My love for you extends through life

And I don’t want to waste it

But honey, what you’ve been dishing out

You’d never want to taste it

Here it is. The sound is not great, but it's the only version I could find:

Now, to our weekly statistics. The most popular story of the week were the Train Songs. It covered so much ground, that I sort of expected it. I'm glad that it was indeed popular, because there was a lot of work involved.

As far as countries are concerned, there's no stopping France's and the United Kingdom's race to the top; they had the most spectacular gains. Cyprus also did very well, while Australia and Canada didn't do badly at all. Congrats to all! Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. France

3. the United Kingdom

4. Greece

5. Cyprus

6. the United Arab Emirates

7. Germany

8. Australia

9. Canada

10. Italy

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, China, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 49.7%

2. Greece = 8.8%

3. France = 7.1%

4. Germany = 5.4%

5. the United Kingdom = 5.0%

6. Russia = 4.4%

7. the United Arab Emirates = 1.01%

8. Italy = 0.94%

9. Cyprus = 0.88%

10. Belgium = 0.61%

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