The Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown (#120-118)

Today it's back to the Bob Dylan Top 125 countdown. We are currently entering the Top 120.

At #120, here's a song from the first studio album that Dylan released after his mysterious motorcycle accident, John Wesley Harding (1967). The album marked Dylan's return to acoustic music and traditional roots, after three albums of electric Rock music. John Wesley Harding was exceptionally well received by critics and enjoyed solid sales, reaching #2 on the US charts and topping the UK charts. The commercial performance was considered remarkable considering that Dylan had kept Columbia from releasing the album with much promotion or publicity.

The song in question is I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine. This deliciously ambiguous hymn riffs on the opening line of Joe Hill, a folk standard about a labor organizer and songwriter who was executed (and probably framed) for a double murder. Dylan replaces folkie certainty with layered complexity: St. Augustine is a martyr, but the narrator places himself "amongst the ones/That put him out to death," and it's never clear if we should sympathize with Augustine or Dylan or anyone at all. What we do know for sure is Dylan's tattered, slightly out-of-tune intensity. It's an earnest gesture of faith in something that he doesn't quite understand.

The St. Augustine in the title has often been linked to St. Augustine of Hippo, although St. Augustine of Hippo was not martyred. He was, however, a philosopher who wrote about evil and guilt, and could have viewed himself as being martyred in the sense of being killed by his own sins. In the dream revealed in the song, St. Augustine wears a coat of solid gold, which may signify either the worldly excesses of mankind and the Catholic Church or St. Augustine's own spiritual wealth. He also carries a blanket, which may be a sign of asceticism or of his compassion. St. Augustine searches for "the very souls / Whom already have been sold," a reference to the commercialization of mankind's inner self, a motif that will recur on later songs on the album such as Dear Landlord and The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest. He tells "ye gifted kings and queens" that "No martyr is among ye now," but consoles them with the knowledge that nonetheless they are not alone. But the dream ends with the narrator realizing that he himself is among those that put St. Augustine to death, initiating his feelings of guilt as he now sees the error of his ways. One interpretation of the song is that St. Augustine is a stand-in for Dylan himself, who had been viewed as a prophet or messiah, was nearly "martyred" in a motorcycle accident a few months before the song was written, but in any case had come too late since mankind (including himself) had already sold its soul to many temptations.

The best version I could find on YouTube is this Dylan duet with Joan Baez:

... And here's a version by Eric Clapton:

At #119 we find an earlier song, Spanish Harlem Incident, a track on his 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Dylan performed this brief, tender slip of a song about a crush on a fortune teller exactly once. The "incident" of its title seems to be as tiny as incidents come: the "gypsy gal" holding his hand in hers, and sparking a flurry of associations. Spanish Harlem Incident is one of Dylan's most open, unambiguous sex songs, complete with references to her "rattling drums" and his "restless palms."

Music critic Tim Riley writes that "Spanish Harlem Incident is a new romance that pretends to be short and sweet, but it's an example of how Dylan begins using uncommon word couplings to evoke the mysteries of intimacy...her 'rattling drums' plays off his 'restless palms'; her 'pearly eyes' and 'flashing diamond teeth' off his 'pale face.'"

The version that I've found on YouTube is a 1964 alternate take. It's good.

The song was covered by The Byrds on their 1965 debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, and had first been performed by the band during their pre-fame residency at Ciro's nightclub in West Hollywood, California.

The song at #118 is Series Of Dreams: the song was recorded in 1989, but was remixed and released on his 1991 collection The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.

Dylan emerged from his worst artistic period to team up with Daniel Lanois for 1989's creative comeback Oh Mercy. But in an unsurprisingly strange move, he dumped one of the best songs off the album. "Lanois liked the song," Dylan wrote in his 2005 memoir, Chronicles. "He liked the bridge better, wanted the whole song to be like that. ... It just couldn't be done. ... Thinking about the song this way wasn't healthy." Two years later, the tumbling track came out; true to its title, it's a flow of fragmented images ("In one, the surface was frozen/In another I witnessed a crime") delivered with a striking just-woke-up frankness.