Tuesday 2 May 2017

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

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 Tracksthe 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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