The Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown (#95-93)

Before we go on with our Dylan countdown, a few words about next week: during the first few days, we'll be traveling to the UK to meet the people that will take us from the 50s to the 60s. Bob Dylan will be around only on Sunday, along with the week's statistics. On Saturday, there'll be a new thematic unity that combines my two great loves, songs and the movies, as well as taking on an institution which is a vital part of gay culture. I'm looking forward to it and I hope that you will enjoy it.

More on that during the week: now, on with the countdown!

At #95 in our Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown is a song from Dylan's best album of the 70s, Blood On The Tracks (1975). In the officially released studio recording, Buckets of Rain is played in the key of E major. There are only two instruments: acoustic guitar and bass guitar. The guitar is not in standard tuning; rather, it is in "Open E" tuning.

Lyrically, "Buckets of Rain" is relatively simple, with five short verses addressing a lover. Oliver Trager describes the song thus:

Closing an otherwise desperate album with a light reappraisal of commitment, Buckets of Rain is a final, Sinatra-like tip of the hat sung with the playfulness of an old Piedmont songster. Though Dylan seems to liken the relationship he describes here with the ferocity of a deluge, he plaintively sings to his love, describing in light, sensual brushstrokes why he still finds her special.

Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Say Anything...), the celebrated movie director/screenwriter, as well as music journalist, says:

One of the great gifts Bob Dylan has is to slip a grace note into an album, something that doesn't cry out to be noticed but is unforgettable.

To me, that's Buckets of Rain, the perfect grace note for Blood on the Tracks: melancholy, loping and bittersweet. It's sly and unpretentious, but has huge power. Any room I've ever played it in has changed as a result. One little thing in the corner of an album, a movie or any piece of writing can be the most important element of all.

Dylan was in his middle period when he wrote it. I heard he went back to Minnesota and was living on a farm. He had a notebook, and the lyrics of Blood on the Tracks were honed in that period. He was going to get personal. It was going to hurt to hear, but it was going to be revelatory. It turned out to be the confessional Dylan album that people had been craving for a long time, and he hasn't really gone back there since. He put up a lot of roadblocks and disinformation about it, but Blood on the Tracks is his Blue – his confessional album about relationships. I can't think of it without Buckets of Rain. Dylan's stuff continues to inform every generation – it just lives and lives and lives, and a song like Buckets of Rain breathes with a simple truth about real life. After a blistering heartache comes a soothing rain.

Here's Dylan's version:

Buckets Of Rain

... And here's Dylan's duet with the fantastic Bette Midler:

At #94, here's a song from third studio album, The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964), called North Country Blues. Its apparently simple format (ten verses of ABCB rhyme scheme), accompanied by only two chords (C#m & Bb) and subject matter (the perils of life in a mining community and its ultimate demise) appears to have been influenced by Woody Guthrie.

The specific location of the town is never stated. However, a location on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota is suggested by the song's title, Dylan's childhood residence in Hibbing, Minnesota, and the reference to "iron ore" and "red iron." The reference to "red iron pits" strongly suggests the location is on the Mesabi Range, a portion of the Iron Range where open-pit mining has predominated, and where Hibbing is situated.

The song opens with a deliberately conventional opening (Come gather round friends and I'll tell you a tale...). However, the darkness of the tale soon becomes apparent. Each verse contains at least one tragic situation or event:

1      For starters, speaking of the current day, "the whole town is empty."

2      When the narrator was young, her mother "took sick" and obviously died, as she was "brought up by my brother."

3      One day her brother "failed to come home, the same as my father before him." (The implication is that they failed to come home from the mine, suggesting repeated mining tragedies.)

4      Her schooling was cut short "to marry John Thomas, a miner."

5      With three children, her husband's work was cut to a one-half shift "for no reason."

6      "The man" came to town and announced that mine #11 was closing.

7      The price of the mined ore is too high and not worth digging, because it's cheaper from South America where miners work "almost for nothing."

8      Total desolation, hours last "twice as long . . . as I waited for the sun to go sinking."

9      Her husband is talking only to himself now, and one morning he up and left her "alone with three children."

   10   The stores have all closed and her children "will go, as soon as they grow," because "there ain't nothing here now to hold them."

Dylan hides the fact that the narrator is a woman to the end of verse four. The song ends bleakly, as by this time the woman has lost her husband, mother, father and brother; the mine is closed and the town is virtually abandoned; and soon her children will leave her in complete isolation and desolation.

Within this apparently restricting and morose format, referred to as a "formally conservative exercise in first-person narrative" Dylan manages to achieve significant tonal and expressive variation, and the song is considered by some to be one of his most effective in the 'Folk-song' genre.

Here's Dylan's excellent performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival:

... And here's Joan Baez's remarkable version:

At #93, a song from the same period: Ballad in Plain D is the tenth track of Bob Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, and - at eight minutes, eighteen seconds - the longest song on the album. The song recounts the circumstances surrounding the disintegration of Dylan's relationship with Suze Rotolo. Dylan details the conflicts between himself, and Rotolo's mother, Mary Rotolo, and her sister Carla Rotolo. In this song, Dylan idealises Suze Rotolo, while characterizing Carla as a "pretentious, social-climbing parasite".

Clinton Heylin claims that Dylan wrote a rough outline of Ballad in Plain D soon after the events. In May 1964, he stayed in the Greek village of Vernilya, working on songs for his next album; there he drew out the material to the lengthy ballad he recorded in June 1964. Heylin writes "It took thirteen cathartic verses to get all this out of his system, without Dylan ever transcending his material. 'Plain D' remains an exercise in painful autobiography."

In an interview with Victoria Balfour, Suze Rotolo sounded a forgiving note about the song: "People have asked how I felt about those songs that were bitter, like Ballad in Plain D, since I inspired some of those too, yet I never felt hurt by them. I understood what he was doing. It was the end of something and we both were hurt and bitter. His art was his outlet, his exorcism. It was healthy. That was the way he wrote out his life, the loving songs, the cynical songs, the political songs, they are all part of the way he saw his world and lived his life, period."

Dylan, when asked in 1985 if he had any regrets about Ballad In Plain D, replied: "Oh yeah, that one! I look back and say 'I must have been a real schmuck to write that.' I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I've written, maybe I could have left that alone."

I can understand why this song is not a critics' favorite, as well as why it makes Dylan feel awkward. These are the exact reasons that I like it: for an artist such as Dylan, who exerts such control over his material, which usually comes out as self-assured, poetic, and even prophetic, this one was his most direct and raw offering. One can see glimpses of the real Dylan, hurt and confused, before the sheer amount of his success and of the expectations of others forced him to build inpenetrable layers of armor around him.

I could only find this 1964 outtake, which is only part of the song. The usual problem with Dylan and YouTube...