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

It's that time of the week again; before the new one begins, we'll check out our statistics, as well as one of our last installments of the Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown. Let's begin!

At #18 there is a song originally found on his fourth album, Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964). It Ain't Me Babe marked a departure for Dylan as he began to explore the possibilities of language and deeper levels of the human experience.

Speculation has been rife that this was simply about a one sided relationship or about his terse connection to the folk movement. Most agree that Dylan’s talking about the fact that at the time he reluctantly took the mantle of a figurehead for his generation (“It ain’t me you’re looking for”).

The other side maintains that It Ain't Me Babe is among Dylan's most elegant women-don't-get-me songs, cataloging an erstwhile girlfriend's ill-founded expectations of old-fashioned chivalry and fidelity. The opening line ("Go 'way from my window") is a poetic formula that goes back to the 16th century, but the song also takes from more contemporary sources: The "no, no, no" appeared to parody the "yeah, yeah, yeah" in the Beatles' She Loves You. "Eight in the Top 10," Dylan said of the Fab Four's pop dominance. "It seemed to me like a definite line was being drawn."

It Ain't Me Babe

This is a live version from 5/7/65 in Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England:

Here's a hit version by the Turtles:

At #17 is a song from one of Dylan's masterpieces, 1965's Highway 61 Revisited. Ballad of a Thin Man is one of Dylan's most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited.

Dylan has written a lot of mean-spirited songs, but few are funnier or more cutting than this stomping tune about a dude who totally doesn't get it – or even what there is to get. Dylan serves up baffling lines ("You should be made to wear earphones"), then mocks his baffled listeners for not being in on the joke. It's also packed with homoerotic innuendo, from the naked man in the first verse to the sword swallower and the one-eyed midget who show up later on, maybe because nothing's more certain to make straight-laced folks like Mr. Jones uncomfortable.

In March 1986, Dylan told his audience in Japan: "This is a song I wrote a while back in response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don't want to answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So, every once in a while you got to do this kind of thing, you got to put somebody in their place... So this is my response to something that happened over in England. I think it was about '63, '64. [sic] Anyway the song still holds up. Seems to be people around still like that. So I still sing it. It's called Ballad Of A Thin Man."

Ballad of a Thin Man

Here's a live version from the 70s:

Here's the cover version that was introduced in the film I'm Not There, by Stephen Malkmus And The Million Dollar Bashers:

At #16 is It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Found in his other great album from 1965, Bringing It All Back Home, it's been speculated that this is his ‘kiss off’ to the folk scene before he went electric. It’s also been suggested that it’s about fellow folk singer PaulClayton who toured with Dylan.

In the film Don't Look Back, Dylan sits around his room in London's posh Savoy Hotel, surrounded by hangers-on. Bored, he picks up an acoustic guitar and plays a new song he's just written: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. He has an evil grin on his face; after the first two verses, it's the only smile in the room – everyone else looks shattered. The party's definitely over.

The song is his devastating farewell to innocence, kicking Baby Blue out into the street, whether that means the end of a friendship or his abandonment of the folk scene. After he was famously booed offstage for going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, and returned with an acoustic guitar, this is the song he chose to play as his hard-ass response.

It instantly became one of his most covered songs. But nobody's ever sung "Strike another match, go start anew" with the menace of Dylan himself.

This is Dylan singing at Liverpool, in his 1965 UK tour:

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

This is the famous "sing-off" between Dylan and Donovan in the Savoy Hotel, as portrayed in Scorsese's film Don't Look Back:

This is a great cover version by Van Morrison & Them:

At #15 is All Along the Watchtower. It's the best song on John Wesley Harding (1967). Commenting on the songs on his album John Wesley Harding, in an interview published in the folk music magazine Sing Out! in October 1968, Dylan told John Cohen and Happy Traum:  I haven't fulfilled the balladeers's job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three songs for an hour and a half... it can all unfold to you. These melodies on John Wesley Harding lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of The Wicked Messenger, which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider... The same thing is true of the song All Along the Watchtower, which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.

You could say that jokes and theft are the twin poles of Dylan's art, and this 12-line masterpiece about a joker (who believes he's being robbed) and a thief (who thinks everything's a joke) penetrates to the core of his work. Watchtower is among Dylan's most haunting tunes: Built around an austere arrangement and Dylan's spooked croon, it starts like a ballad that's going to go on for a long while. But as soon as the joker and the thief get their opening statements, the song ends with an ominous image – two riders approaching – leaving listeners to fill in the blanks.

Who is ‘the joker’ and who is ‘the thief’? Is it Dylan and Elvis? Is it Jesus and Satan? Lower and upper class? It’s actually thought to be a mix of all the above and, ultimately, the futility of it all. “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke,” he sings.

Jimi Hendrix's reading of Watchtower is one of the few Dylan covers that has permanently affected the way Dylan himself plays the song. Hendrix started recording his cover within weeks of John Wesley Harding's release, fleshing out the song into something stunningly intense. "He played [my songs] the way I would have done them if I was him," Dylan later said of Hendrix.

All Along the Watchtower

This is a live version from 1999:

And this is Jimi Hendrix's cover, one of the best cover versions of any rock song, ever:

At #14, we find another song from Dylan's best album, Blonde On Blonde (1966): Visions of Johanna contains what is perhaps the best opening line in a Dylan song, "Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin' to be so quiet?".

Johanna is widely believed to be Joan Baez, the folk singer whom Dylan dated in the early part of his career. The track is said to reference the time when he fell for his future wife Sara.

Visions of Johanna is a tour de force, a breakthrough not only for the writer but for the very possibilities of songwriting. An extended, impressionistic account of a woozy New York City night, rich in pictorial detail and erotic longing, the five long verses zigzag between Dylan's acute dissection of one woman, the tangible and available Louise, and his longing for an absent ideal. Johanna may not even be real. But she is an addiction. "It's extraordinary," Bono once said. "He writes this whole song seemingly about this one girl, with these remarkable descriptions of her, but this isn't the girl who's on his mind! It's somebody else!"

Dylan's masterpiece of obsession – written, ironically, shortly after his marriage in 1965 – was a passion in itself. He debuted the song in concert in December 1965, to an audience that included ex-paramour Joan Baez and poet Allen Ginsberg, then played it every night on the 1966 world tour – notably in the solo acoustic sets. A November '65 attempt to cut an electric Johanna with the Hawks (under the explicitly bitter title Seems Like a Freeze Out) had run aground after 14 takes. The Hawks were still too much of a bar band; the song's confessional complexity required poise as well as muscle.

In contrast, Dylan nailed Johanna on the first take in Nashville. The local session pros, supplemented by Robbie Robertson's crying-treble guitar, brought the right unhurried empathy to Dylan's vocal mood swings – from a whisper to a howl at the moon in the same verse – and unforgettable lyric images.

"I still sing that song every once in a while," Dylan said in 1985. "It still stands up now as it did then. Maybe even more in some kind of weird way."

Visions of Johanna

This is a fine cover version by Marianne Faithfull:

Finally for today, at #13, is the title song from 1965's Highway 61 Revisited. If Visions of Johanna contains the best opening line, then Highway 61 Revisited contains the most wickedly funny opening verse:

Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God said, "No" Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin', you better run"
Well, Abe said, "Where d'you want this killin' done?"
God said, "Out on Highway 61"

Abram, the original name of the biblical Abraham, is the name of Dylan's own father.

Dylan said the song was inspired by Robert Johnson, the legendary blues singer who was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49.

"I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it, and could go anywhere from it," Dylan said of Highway 61, which runs from his native Minnesota down to New Orleans. Here, he proved just how far he could take it. Recorded in a marathon session that also spawned Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, Ballad of a Thin Man and Queen Jane Approximately, the galloping title track from 1965's electric breakthrough Highway 61 Revisited is Dylan in frizzed-out jeremiad mode. He leads a series of star-crossed characters (most famously, God and Abraham) down to America's "blues highway," while spitting venom at a series of American hypocrisies (phony patriotism, crass commercialism). Session musician Al Kooper claimed he lent Dylan the police whistle that jarringly kicks off and closes the song, instructing him to use it instead of his harmonica. "A little variety for your album," he told Dylan at the time. "Suits the lyric better."

Highway 61 Revisited

This is Johnny Winter's great cover version:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics. Not much has happened: The United Kingdom is still rising; the United States is still falling. The other countries from the all-time list are more or less stable. Armenia, who has recently joined us, is a pleasant surprise at #6 in the weekly Top 10. Ukraine, a weekly Top 10 entry last week, hasn't shown up at all this week - meanwhile Austria and Australia are still doing well. Congrats to all! Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United Kingdom

2. the United States

3. France

4. Greece

5. Cyprus

6. Armenia

7. Australia

8. Austria

9. Russia

10. Brazil

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 46.6%

2. Greece = 8.3%

3. France = 7.8%

4. the United Kingdom = 6.5%

5. Russia = 4.8%

6. Germany = 4.6%

7. Cyprus = 1.04%

8. Italy = 0.98%

9. the United Arab Emirates = 0.86%

10. Belgium = 0.6%

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