The Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown (#114-110)

We've entered the weekend (have a happy one, everybody!), which means two days with Bob Dylan and the headache of finding the pertinent videos on YouTube. Let my trouble begin!

At #114 is a song from his 1976 album Desire, a song that he co-wrote with Jacques Levy. It's called Romance in Durango. Scott Avett (of the Avett Brothers) said of the song:

"The melody of Romance in Durango makes the whole song work; it's so serious and driven. And like most of Desire and Blood on the Tracks, it is relatively repetitive, but it's so good it can kind of just keep going and going. That's really much harder to do than I think anybody who isn't trying to make music knows. As far as the lyrics go, it's an amazing endeavor; Dylan was able to put his mind and heart into a specific scene – of being a lone renegade in the desert, up to all these trying and dangerous things. You're buying all the masculinities and going right along with it. It's convincing."

I love the original, but it's not available. After a lot of discarding of unsuitable versions, I came up with this live one that isn't bad. It's live in Bangor, Maine, on November 27, 1975:

The Man in Me, a song from Bob Dylan's 1970 album New Morning, is at #113.

Sometimes it takes the right movie to expose the greatness of a song. Before the Coen brothers' 1998 cult classic, The Big Lebowski, The Man in Me was a half-forgotten track on 1970's New Morning. But its use in the film (in the opening credits and later in an epic dream sequence) highlighted its raggedly euphoric power (costumed Lebowskis drunkenly belt out every word at fan conventions, and Jeff "The Dude" Bridges performs it live in his second career as a country singer). Dylan has rarely sounded as joyful as he does during the "la la la" intro, and gospel-tinged backup vocals add to the lyrics' sense of unguarded intimacy and deliverance in hard times.

Here's the Big Lebowski version:

... And here's the version by Jeff Bridges:

At #112 we find Most of the Time, a track from Dylan's best album in the 80s, Oh Mercy (1989). Like many of the songs on Oh Mercy, Most of the Time had a difficult birth. Dylan envisioned it as a stripped-down folk song, but Daniel Lanois wanted to infuse it with his trademark swamp atmosphere production. Lanois won the battle, leaving Dylan to release his original on 2008's The Bootleg Series 8: Tell Tale Signs. The song explores the difficulty of getting over an old lover ("Don't even remember what her lips felt like on mine/Most of the time"), and both versions have their charms – yet while Dylan's original has a soul-baring immediacy, Lanois' slow, swelling track makes heartbreak seem like a real-time revelation. Here it is:

At #111 is a song from Dylan's second best album of all-time and one of the all-time greats overall, Highway 61 Revisited (1965). The song with the imaginative title It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry has been covered by numerous artists, including The Grateful Dead, Super Session featuring Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield and Steven Stills, The Allman Brothers Band, Marianne Faithfull, Jerry Garcia, Stephen Stills, Ian Matthews, Leon Russell, Little Feat, Chris Smither, Taj Mahal, Steve Earle, Levon Helm, Toto, Blue Cheer & Bun E. Carlos.

This sexy shuffle was still a hopped-up blues called Phantom Engineer when Dylan debuted it at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Later, it was the first song he attempted during the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited – but Dylan, frustrated with the arrangement, set it aside after a few takes and cut Tombstone Blues instead. He spent his lunch break at the piano, working out a slower version that let him linger over the lyrics' blues tropes ("Don't the moon look good, Mama, shinin' through the trees") and sly asides ("I wanna be your lover, baby, I don't wanna be your boss"). The results felt both timeless and brand-new.

Finally for today, at #110, a song from Dylan's best ever album and one of the ten best albums of all-time. The song is 4th Time Around and the album is Blonde On Blonde (1966).

What exactly inspired 4th Time Around is one of the great Dylan mysteries. The melody and story line are a direct takeoff of the 1965 Beatles song Norwegian Wood – among the band's first songs with a clear Dylan influence. Was the line "I never asked for your crutch, now don't ask for mine" a warning to stop ripping him off? Dylan's never said, but three months after he recorded it, he went on a famously stoned limo ride with John Lennon around London and didn't seem to be harboring any malice. The next year he released John Wesley Harding, which has what appears to be an upside-down image of the Beatles hidden in a tree on the cover – but that's another mystery.