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

It's time for our penultimate broadcast of the Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown, as well as our regular feature of this week's statistics. Fasten your seat-belts, and here we go!

At #12 there is that rare beast; a happy Dylan Song. Recorded in the early morning hours of March 10, 1966, I Want You was the last song recorded for Dylan's double-album Blonde on Blonde. It was issued as a single that June, shortly before the release of the album. It peaked at #20 in the US, #16 in the UK and #19 in the Netherlands.

The spritely guitar figure that kicks off the song is an instant classic, and the way the chords are structured, the song seems to build and build with each lyric, until the chorus releases the tension. The song is a paeon to romantic longing, but on the Blonde on Blonde version, Dylan doesn’t seem particularly mournful. Maybe the woman he “wanted” so badly, he already “had.” (Dylan had a terse friendship with The Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and the track was said to be about Dylan’s feelings for Jones’ then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg (RIP). Others believe it was inspired by Edie Sedgwick.)

The lyrics are brilliant in their efficiency. The song begins with:

"The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it's not that way
I wasn't born to lose you"

Such vivid, bittersweet images; it's as if the adjective is at war with the noun and both are at war with the verb, yet they all manage to gloriously come together. Of course, being Dylan, he doesn't miss a chance at being nasty:

"Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit
He spoke to me, I took his flute
No, I wasn't very cute to him - Was I ?"

But he had a reason for it:

"But I did though because he lied
Because he took you for a ride
And because time was on his side
And because I ..
I want you, I want you
Yes, I want you so bad"

Flash forward to 1994, and the MTV Unplugged outake of I Want You. While it never aired (imagine that), it ended up on YouTube anyway. The song, now played acoustically, has been slowed down, lines come in at unexpected times, and the chorus is somehow twice as resonant. It’s like the song has grown up, and grown into its own skin.

That’s what great songs do. They change. They stay the same. They make you feel something.

The audiovisual quality of this is bad, but it's the only MTV one available:

This is an inspired cover by queer artist Sophie B. Hawkins:

At #11 is our second-to-last song from the 70s to be found in this list: Hurricane is a song unique to Bob Dylan’s vast body of work. Driven by Scarlet Rivera’s frantic violin fills and Rob Stoner’s spidery bass lines, the eight-plus minute tune is like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll on steroids. Both songs deal with racial injustice, but only Hurricane actually helped get someone out of jail, even if it did take 12 years.

Hurricane unspools the story of the false imprisonment of boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, who in 1967 was incarcerated for the murders of three bar patrons in Paterson, New Jersey. The song is the introductory track to one of Dylan’s most diverse and mystical albums, 1976’s Desire, and came at a time where no one expected Dylan to write another protest song (a Dylan-esque reason, if there ever was one, to write one.)

From its evocative opening lyrics (“pistol shots ring out in a bar room night”) to its righteous ending (“but it won’t be over till they clear his name,”) “Hurricane” functions like a real live detective story. It’s a song that peppers the listener with rich details and impolite truths, many of which are enough to make the hairs at the back of your neck stand up:

“In Paterson that’s just the way things go/If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street, ‘less you wanna draw the heat.”

“The wounded man looks up through his one dyin’ eye/ says ‘Wha’d you bring him in here for? He ain’t the guy!'”

“And though they could not produce the gun, the D.A. said he was the one who did the deed, and the all-white jury agreed.”

Another line could have come directly from Dylan’s Masters Of War, Freewheelin’ period, so similar is the language:

“How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.”

Hurricane was the product of a writing session with playwright Jacques Levy. Levy, who was also a clinical psychologist, co-wrote every song on Desire save for One More Cup of Coffee and Sara.

Dylan was inspired to write Hurricane (whose chord progression in the verses echoes the one used in All Along The Watchtower) after visiting Carter in prison in 1975 and reading his autobiography, “The Sixteenth Round”. His circus-like Rolling Thunder Revue tour doubled as a way to stump for Carter’s amnesty. “If you’ve got any political pull at all, maybe you can help this man get out of jail and back on the street”, Dylan introduces the song on Live 1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 5.

The story of the Hurricane has a (relatively) happy ending. He was freed in 1988, and all charges were dropped against him. Before his passing in 2014, Carter worked as a motivational speaker, and was the Executive Director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.

This is the studio version:

Hurricane

This is a live version:

Indie-folk troubadour and one-time Dylan tour-mate Ani DiFranco also recorded a version:

At #10 we have another song from my favorite Dylan album, Blonde on Blonde. There was a time in the mid-70s when Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again was among my Top 3. The song's last verse still remains one of my favorite mantras:

"An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice"

The story of my life...

All twenty takes of Stuck Inside of Mobile were recorded in the early hours of February 17, 1966, in Columbia's Music Row Studios in Nashville. Dylan continuously reworked the song in the studio, revising lyrics and changing the song's structure as he recorded different takes. Eventually, after recording for three hours, a master take, the twentieth and final take, was chosen.

"Oh, mama, can this really be the end?" Dylan moans over and over in this desperate seven-minute epic. Bob drives the Nashville session pros through verse after verse of surreal blues imagery, and the band sounds inspired by the challenge. The mood is all sex, drugs, temptation and paranoia. Despite the poetic abstraction, Dylan delivers one of Blonde on Blonde's most sensual vocals.

Here it is:

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

A live version of this song appears on the 1976 album Hard Rain, and was also released as a single with Rita May as the B-side:

This is a good version by Cat Power, which appeared in the movie I'm Not There (2007):

Spanish artist Kiko Veneno covered this song in a rumba (a subgenre of Flamenco) version:

At #9 is a song from Dylan's seminal album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963); if Blowin' In The Wind helped build Dylan's public persona, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right helped bridge the gap between the old and the new: the folk crowd loved it, but so did the country crowd. It appealed to the pop hipsters, as well as to the old-fashioned crooners. Perhaps this is the reason there are so many cover versions out there: it has been covered by Peter, Paul and Mary (1963), Dick and Dee Dee, Bobby Darin, Dolly Parton, The Seekers, John Anderson, Randy Travis, Arnaldo Baptista, The Georgia Satellites, Cher, Melanie, Kesha, Johnny Cash, Ed Sheeran, Bobby Bare, Jackie DeShannon, Gordon Lightfoot, Davey Graham, Odetta, Ralph McTell, Rory Gallagher, Stone the Crows, Heinz, Elvis Presley, Burl Ives, Waylon Jennings, Flatt and Scruggs, Steve Young, Donavon Frankenreiter, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jerry Reed, Joan Baez (who, in addition to covering it herself, also recorded it as a trio with the Indigo Girls), Brett Dennen and Ted Lennon, Joshua Radin, Doc Watson, The Waifs, Vonda Shepard, John Martyn, Metric, Elliott Smith, Billy Bragg, Frank Turner & Mark McCabe, Nick Drake, Sandi Thom, Susan Tedeschi, Emily Haines, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, Boris Grebenshchikov, Jackie Greene, Bryan Ferry, Julie Felix, Wolfgang Ambros, Arlo Guthrie, Tristan Prettyman, Bree Sharp, Gavin Castleton, The Folkswingers, O.A.R. with Matt Nathanson and Mike Ness, The Kingston Trio, David Wiffen, Billy Paul, guitarist Lenny Breau, Susan Tedeschi, Ryan Montbleau, John Mayer, Albert Hammond Jr., The Allman Brothers Band, Emilie-Claire Barlow, Cock Robin, Gregory and the Hawk, Barbara Dickson, Chris Thile, Brad Mehldau, Kronos Quartet, and Nick Takenobu Ogawa, among others.

From Postively 4th Street to You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine), Bob Dylan has proven to be a masterful songwriter of “kiss-off” songs, adding another element to rock lyrics that punk would perfect. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, is one of his best, saddest, and sweetest kiss-off song, evoking feelings that are equally world weary, tender, forgiving, and spiteful. It’s a classic on an album of classics that introduced Dylan to the world at large, and its poignant, knowing refrain has been burned into our hearts and minds for decades.

In 1962, Dylan was heartbroken after Suze Rotolo, his first serious girlfriend, left New York for an open-ended stay in Italy. Out of that pain came this classic breakup ballad, in which he reels from a desperate sense of abandonment to a sharp bitterness ("You just kinda wasted my precious time"). "It isn't a love song," he wrote in the liner notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. "It's a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It's as if you were talking to yourself." Dylan borrowed the song's melody from folk singer Paul Clayton's Who’s Goin’ To Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone? (who had himself adapted it from the earlier tune Scarlet Ribbons for Her Hair), later settling out of court when Clayton's publicist filed a claim against him. But a poultry supplier near Dylan and Rotolo's former Greenwich Village apartment inspired one key image: "When your rooster crows at the break of dawn/Look out your window, and I'll be gone." As Rotolo recalled in her 2008 memoir, "When Bob and I stayed up all night ... we heard the roosters crowing at the break of dawn."

Other classic lines from the song:

“Goodbye’s too good a word babe, so I’ll just say fare thee well”

“I once loved a woman, a child I’m told”

... and my favorite:

“I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul”

On the day he is laid down in his grave, surely somebody somewhere will be singing Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.

Here's Dylan's original version:

The Peter, Paul and Mary cover was the definitive single, reaching #9 Hot 100, #2 easy listening on Billboard's charts. Here they are, along with Andy Williams:

Here's Johnny Cash's version:

The Four Seasons released a cover of the song as a single in 1965 (with the title Don't Think Twice) under the pseudonym The Wonder Who?. Their "joke" version reached the #12 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and eventually sold one million copies.

Here's a cello-accompanied version by Nick Takenobu Ogawa:

Finally, two versions that show the song's longevity. From the original King of Rock 'n' Roll, Elvis Presley:

... To the current biggest name in Pop, Ed Sheeran:

At #8 is the title track from the 1964 album, The Times They Are A-Changin'. In the liner notes of his box-set Biograph, Dylan said about the track: “I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way… I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to.”

When people describe Dylan as the "spokesman of a generation," they are thinking of the man best defined by The Times They Are A-Changin'. And while Dylan would later bluntly reject that title, he consciously sought it with this passionate anthem. A masterpiece of political songwriting, it addresses no specific issue and prescribes no concrete action, but simply observes a world in violent upheaval. (That the song was released just months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy only lent it more power.) Dylan sings in the voice of a bard or prophet, in cadences that are clearly biblical – in his words, "short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way."

The Times They Are A-Changin' is a call to arms, a generational battle cry, a warning that the center cannot hold:

"Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown"

It advocates compassion over complacency, action over inaction, courage over fear:

"And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’."

The Times is quintessential early Dylan – wise beyond his years, speaking with the impetuousness of youth, and calling for change in the name of the truth. With it, Dylan inspired those who heard it to see things his way, and gave voice to the millions who wanted a new world.

The song was ranked #59 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Here it is:

Here is a cover version by the Byrds. It features lead vocals by bandleader Jim McGuinn and prominently features his signature twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar:

Here is a cover version by the fabulous Nina Simone:

... and here's a cover version by Keb' Mo':

Finally for today, at #7, another song from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. Like the songs of the troubadours of old, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall reports on the state of the world at large, and vows to keep singing until something is done about it. Released in 1963, the song announced to the world that Dylan was more than just the guy who wrote indelible songs like Blowin’ In the Wind. He also wrote epic songs — when everybody else in popular music was writing 3 minute songs, he upped the ante to 6:55, making Bob Dylan the first prog-rocker.

Hard Rain is one of those Dylan tunes that begged to be compared to poetry. The song is like a road trip for the mind, with its cascading imagery and shimmering power. It’s largely a laundry list of bad news, but it’s more about life itself than just life’s darkest corners.  It’s also a precursor to the vast surrealist imagery Dylan would offer in songs like Desolation Row and Mr. Tambourine Man.  While the clown cries in the alley, girls offer rainbows, a white man walks beside a black dog, the executioner’s face is hidden, and ten thousand whisper but nobody listens. The “hard rain” in the chorus threatens to wash it all away, all of humanities’ follies and tender accomplishments. Its verses offer elaborate metaphors for the state of the union in 1963, but they’re vague enough to feel prophetic for every year that’s followed.

The greatest protest song by the greatest protest songwriter of his time: a seven-minute epic that warns against a coming apocalypse while cataloging horrific visions – gun-toting children, a tree dripping blood – with the wide-eyed fervor of John the Revelator. "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song," Dylan said at that time. "But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one."

The threat of nuclear war was in the air at the time, as other songs from the Freewheelin' sessions – including Talkin' World War III Blues and the anti-fallout-shelter rant Let Me Die in My Footsteps – make clear. But this rain was abstract rather than literal. "It's not the fallout rain," Dylan said. "I just mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen."

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall – that "a-gonna" was the young Dylan's Woody Guthrie fixation popping out again – began life as a poem, which Dylan likely banged out on a typewriter owned by his buddy (and fellow Greenwich Village dweller) Wavy Gravy. Dylan debuted the song at Carnegie Hall in September 1962, when he was part of a folk-heavy bill in which each act got 10 minutes: "Bob raised his hand and said, 'What am I supposed to do? One of my songs is 10 minutes long,'" said Pete Seeger, the concert's organizer.

A Hard Rain is the first public instance of Dylan grappling with the End of Days, a topic that would come to dominate his work. But the tumbling verses of A Hard Rain culminate not in catastrophe but in Dylan describing his task as an artist: to sing out against darkness wherever he sees it – to "tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it" until his lungs burst. "It's beyond genius," says the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. "I think the heavens opened and something channeled through him."

Here is this great song:

10 years later, Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry did the unthinkable: he turned the protest prototype into a dance hit. It should have been a catastophe, but it actually works perfectly:

This is Ann Wilson (lead singer of Heart) with Rufus Wainwright & Shawn Colvin:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics. Another quiet week: The United Kingdom is still rising, but less prominently; the United States is still falling, which is causing a slight drop in the total weekly visits. The other countries from the all-time list are more or less stable, with Belgium and Cyprus a bit better off than they were, while Germany, Italy and the United Arab Emirates are a little worse off. Armenia and Austria, both in the weekly Top 10 last week, have been completely AWOL this week. Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. the United Kingdom

3. Greece

4. Belgium

5. France

6. Cyprus

7. Germany

8. Russia

9. Brazil

10. Canada

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 46.3%

2. Greece = 8.3%

3. France = 7.8%

4. the United Kingdom = 6.6%

5. Russia = 4.8%

6. Germany = 4.5%

7. Cyprus = 1.06%

8. Italy = 0.97%

9. the United Arab Emirates = 0.83%

10. Belgium = 0.69%

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