Sorry for the delay of this weekly installment.
Time makes fools of us all.
At #42 in our Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown is a song called Idiot Wind. The original
version of this Blood on the Tracks
(1975) centerpiece was a rueful acoustic ballad, but when Dylan
rerecorded half of the album at the last minute in Minneapolis, the heavily
rewritten Idiot Wind became one of his most scathing, frothing, furious songs –
a rant against the woman he married and idiocy itself. "You're an idiot,
babe/It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe," goes the chorus,
and that's not even as harsh as it gets. Dylan makes sure he's not spared from
blame: "It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves," he sings in the
last line. Dylan said of the song, "I didn't feel that one was too
personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. Which might be the same
thing." This is a great live version from the Rolling Thunder Tour 1976:
... And this is how the New York studio version,
which wasn't eventually included in the album, sounded:
At #41 is a song from the same album, called Simple
Twist of Fate. In this song, Dylan looks at an idyllic relationship that fell
apart for reasons neither party can control. People logically assumed he
was singing about the breakup of his marriage to Sara, but his lyric notebook
for Blood on the Tracks reveals
a different story. Originally, the song had a subtitle, "4th Street
Affair," named for the apartment at 161 W. 4th St., where he lived with
girlfriend Suze Rotolo shortly after arriving in New York. The narrator of the
song has moved on to meaningless one-night stands (as Dylan surely had in early
1975), but his heart was more than 10 years in the past. It's a very poignant
song.
We are now entering the Top 40. At #40 we find Desolation
Row. It is part of Dylan's 2nd best album, Highway 61 Revisited (1965). An epic
song going on for more than 11 minutes, it is often ranked as one of Dylan's
greatest compositions. Its surreal lyrics weave characters from history,
fiction, the Bible and of Dylan's own invention into a series of vignettes that
suggest entropy and urban chaos. Here's what Mick Jagger has to say about it:
"Desolation Row is so simple musically – just
three chords for 11 minutes, with minimal accompaniment – yet it's so
effective. There's Dylan, a bassist and a session guitar player, Charlie
McCoy, from Nashville, who adds a nice little counterpoint to the melody. After
many listenings, his playing still sounds sweet; I like the slight Spanish
tinge of it. But it doesn't get in the way of what is obviously the main thing:
the vocal and the lyrics.
Dylan's delivery is recitative, almost deadpan, but
he engages you. What's wonderful is all these characters he inveighs on our
imagination: Famous people surrealistically appear, some of them mythical and
some of them real. The Phantom of the Opera. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
Cinderella. Bette Davis. Cain and Abel.
I love the bit about "Einstein, disguised as
Robin Hood": "You would not think to look at him, but he was famous
long ago/For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row." It's a great
image of Einstein – all his hair is jutting out, and he's got the violin, which
he used to play. Someone said Desolation Row is Dylan's version of (T.S. Eliot's)
The Waste Land. I'm not sure if that's true, but it's a wonderful collection of
imagery – a fantasy Bowery – that really gets your imagination working."
At #39 we find Chimes of Freedom, a song featured
on his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. The most ambitious song Dylan had
written to date – a six-verse masterpiece in which a thunderstorm and its
lightning flashes become a beacon that summons outlaws, outcasts, artists and
"every hung-up person in the whole wide universe" – reportedly
evolved out of a brief poem he'd written about John F. Kennedy's assassination
in late 1963. Dylan's gift for internal rhyme and assonance flowered here, as
did his knack for phrasemaking: "starry-eyed an' laughing,"
"midnight's broken toll," "chained an' cheated by pursuit."
He first performed it in mid-February 1964, and recorded it that June for Another Side of Bob Dylan (after
half a dozen false starts – it's tough to keep that many lines straight). By
the end of the year, he'd dropped Chimes of Freedom from his set, but other
artists picked it up and ran: The Byrds recorded it for their first album in
1965, and Bruce Springsteen made it the title track of a 1988 EP. Here he is
live:
Here's the 1965 Byrds' cover:
Here's Springsteen's cover:
At #38 is Masters of War, from Dylan's groundbreaking
and starmaking The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) album. With many of his early
songs, Dylan adapted or "borrowed" melodies from traditional songs.
In the case of Masters of War borrowing from Nottamun Town, however, the
arrangement was by veteran folksinger Jean Ritchie. Unknown to Dylan, the song
had been in Ritchie's family for generations, and she wanted a writing credit
for her arrangement. In a legal settlement, Dylan's lawyers paid Ritchie $5,000
against any further claims.
Masters of War is Dylan's angriest protest song.
His starting point seems to be the fears of nuclear holocaust – but characteristically,
Dylan took that common theme and gave it a crucial twist. Where typical
anti-war songs might indict politicians or generals, Dylan's target is the
military-industrial complex itself: Greed drives the masters of war, not
ideology. "Is your money that good?" Dylan spits out as he envisions
a world awash in blood. "Will it buy you forgiveness?" The song ends
with the singer calling out for the deaths of those bomb builders, promising to
stand over their graves "till I'm sure that you're dead." "I
don't sing songs which hope people will die," Dylan observed at the time.
"But I couldn't help it with this one."
Here's a great cover version by Odetta:
Finally for today, at #37 we find Shelter from the
Storm. It's the third song that we hear today from the Blood On The Tracks
album. The twin moods of Shelter From the Storm are best captured in two wildly
different performances. On Blood
on the Tracks, the song is an acoustic reflection on a
relationship mysteriously gone bad, a fond remembrance of a woman who, for all
her faults, provided the singer a respite, however brief, from the world's
trials. On the live album Hard
Rain, meanwhile, the song is a roaring rock & roll juggernaut, a
sneering denunciation of a hypocritical lover whose offer of a warm, safe haven
is dismissed as a cynical joke. Encompassing such emotional extremes within
a single song is one of Dylan's most distinctive gifts – in this case, a song
that took shape as his marriage to Sara was disintegrating. "Beauty walks
a razor's edge," he sings, and as the song makes clear, when you pursue
it, you sometimes bleed.
This is the studio version:
This is the live version, from the Rolling Thunder
Revue:
Now, to our weekly statistics. The most popular story
of the week was the 1937 Oscars. It's only been up for a little more than a
day! The most popular post of April though, belongs to the post that opened the
month. The one about our friend Martin Del Caprio. It has been steadily growing
since it debuted, in fact it's the third most visited subject of this week.
As far as countries are concerned, France and the United Kingdom are still galloping;
their gains continue to be spectacular. In fact, the United Kingdom has overtaken Germany and is now 4th in the
all-time list, while France could be a threat to Greece in about 6 weeks, if
the trend continues. Cyprus also did very well and is poised to overtake Italy,
while Spain, Belgium and Canada also did OK. 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.
Spain
8.
Germany
9.
Italy
10.
Canada
Here
are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last
statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium,
Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, French Polynesia, Georgia,
Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Kenya, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Macau, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria,
Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore,
Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Happy to
have you all!
And
here's the all-time Top 10:
1.
the United States = 49.5%
2.
Greece = 8.6%
3. France = 7.5%
4.
the United Kingdom = 5.3%
5.
Germany = 5.2%
6.
Russia = 4.3%
7.
the United Arab Emirates = 1.0%
8.
Italy = 0.91%
9.
Cyprus = 0.89%
10.
Belgium = 0.61%
That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!
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