Bob Dylan (21 page)

Although most of the songs on
Blonde On Blonde
were written as the album was being recorded, ‘Visions Of Johanna' had been with Dylan several months by the time it was recorded in Nashville for the album. Indeed two earlier versions had been cut at New York sessions in late November 1965 and January 1966 with The Band, as he tried to discover the song's ideal setting. Along the way, a few changes were made in the lyrics, mostly minor alterations—“like silk” becomes “she's delicate,” little boy lost goes from being “so useless and so small” to being just “so useless and all”—but with a couple of more substantial revisions to the final verse involving the deletion of the line “He examines the nightingale's code” and the switching of the positions of the fiddler and the peddler.

Given the lyrical malleability indicated by these changes, it's perhaps best not to try and ascribe too literal an interpretation to ‘Visions Of Johanna', which is more of an impressionistic mood piece anyway. If it doesn't really matter to the writer whether it's the peddler or the fiddler who speaks to the countess, why should it matter to us? The song remains one of the high points of Dylan's canon, particularly favored among
hardcore Dylanophiles, possibly because it so perfectly sustains its position on the cusp of poetic semantics, forever teetering on the brink of lucidity, yet remaining impervious to strict decipherment.

For a long time, the song went under the working title of ‘Seems Like A Freeze-Out' (a term meaning “to stand-off”), which evokes something of the air of nocturnal suspension in which the verse tableaux are sketched. They're full of whispering and muttering, low-volume radio, echoes and ghosts, a misty, crepuscular netherworld inhabited by the increasingly familiar denizens of Dylan's imagination, a parade of lowlifes, functionaries, all-night girls and slumming snobs.

Here and there, images and lines accrete into possible wisps of meaning: the line in verse four about “the one with the mustache,” for instance, may refer to the Mona Lisa, also mentioned in the same verse—or, more specifically, to Marcel Duchamp's “revision” of the Mona Lisa by the addition of a graffiti mustache to a print of the portrait. (It has also been noted that the picture in question is a three-quarter length portrait, which may account for why its subject may be unable to find her knees.) And Joan Baez apparently felt suspicious that certain images in the song referred to her, particularly after Allen Ginsberg, possibly primed by Dylan, tried to pump her for her opinions on the song. “I had the feeling the two of them were sort of in cahoots to make sure I never thought the song had anything to do with me,” she told Anthony Scaduto.

Certainly, on the most basic level the song is simply a delineation of the narrator's differing feelings towards a purely carnal lover—the always available Louise—and the more spiritual, but unattainable, Madonna-figure Johanna, whose most likely model would be Sara, whom Dylan had recently married (and whom he described to Robert Shelton as “Madonna-like”). On a deeper level, however, ‘Visions Of Johanna' would seem to be about the artist's search for transcendence, the constant attempt to locate inspiration outside of the physical world, in some more spiritual aesthetic realm, fully cognizant of the desiccation that ultimately awaits all art through the “salvation” of curators and museums. In the final analysis, Dylan appears to be saying, the artist is doomed to pursue these visions of perfection, whatever the cost and whatever the outcome, since they are what gives meaning to his/her life—they are, effectively, all that remain.

The song's journey to its final form echoes this process of aesthetic discovery. In the earliest of the three versions, it begins as a loose, medium-tempo rocker, which alters subtly until, by the final verse, it's clear that everyone except the drummer (the rather limited Bobby Gregg, who continues to whack along regardless) has located something rather more haunting and transcendent in the song. The second version builds upon this insight, but it is not until the final Nashville version that it all comes together, with Al Kooper's eerie organ casting dusky shadows across the verses and, from the second verse through to the conclusion, Robbie Robertson's tiny, bent-note stitches of lead guitar complementing one of Dylan's most accomplished vocal performances.

“If you listen to it very critically, it's very important what Joe South's bass is doing in that,” says Al Kooper. “He's playing this throbbing thing which rhythmically is an amazing bass part, and it really makes the track. Charlie McCoy couldn't have done that, he doesn't think like that. On my part, I was responding to the lyrics—like when he says, ‘The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,' it was very challenging to play something after that line!” It says much that the track retains that challenge for the listener over three decades later. It remains one of Dylan's finest achievements.

(Sooner Or Later)

The first track recorded for
Blonde On Blonde
—at New York sessions in late January 1966—‘One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)' was originally
released as a single in February 1966, failing to chart in America (although on its UK release in April, it narrowly missed the Top 30).

Schematically, the song is positioned at the opposite end of the romantic trajectory from its predecessor ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?': having succeeded in persuading the object of his affections to elope with him, the relationship has now run its course, foundered, and the singer has moved on to the autopsy stage, trying to divine exactly what went wrong, when, and where. The air of feverish inquest is sustained by the intense, melodramatic interplay between Paul Griffin's piano and Al Kooper's organ, while Robbie Robertson stitches the chorus together with a beautifully-judged series of tingling grace notes.

“I wasn't booked for the session,” admits Al Kooper, “but I visited the session and ended up playing on it. The piano playing on ‘One Of Us Must Know' is quite magnificent, it influenced me enormously as a pianist. It's probably Paul Griffin's finest moment. He was an amazing player, but he felt badly done by when Valerie Simpson, the woman he loved, and to whom he had taught his piano style, left him and went off to achieve fame and fortune with Nick Ashford. He felt she had stolen his piano style.”

The song emerged out of ‘She's Your Lover Now' (AKA ‘Just A Little Glass Of Water'), another romantic autopsy which Dylan worked on intermittently around the same time but which was never officially released until it appeared on
The Bootleg Series, Vols 1-3
. The line “you were just there, that's all” appears in both songs. The subject of the song, which is about as close as Dylan gets to an apology, might be Joan Baez: the line “I didn't know that you were sayin' goodbye for good” could refer to her final departure from the hotel room in
Don't Look Back
, after which the pair didn't speak for several years.

Baez undoubtedly felt deeply hurt by his behavior—she couldn't bring herself to listen to his new records for quite some time, and it was only after urgings from her editor E. L Doctorow (subsequently the author of
Ragtime)
that she could be persuaded to mention Dylan in her autobiography
Daybreak
, and then only briefly, as “The Dada King.” For his part, Dylan bore her no malice. To Robert Shelton, he admitted she had helped establish his name, but claimed that he didn't feel any debt to her. “I feel bad for her because she has nobody to turn to that's going to be straight with her,” he explained, adding cryptically, “She hasn't got that much in common with the street vagabonds who play insane instruments.”

The third single taken from the album, ‘I Want You' was a Top 20 hit on both sides of the Atlantic when it was released in Summer 1966. Musically the straightest pop track he ever recorded, the song's lyrics occupy a curious position, balanced as they are between the most direct of address and the most obfuscatory of images. It's perhaps for this reason that the song is sometimes taken to be about heroin—the ecstatic profusion of imagery prompting a recurrent plea for more.

Through the verses, we encounter a typical parade of Dylan characters, too numerous to inhabit the song's three minutes comfortably: a guilty undertaker, a lonesome organ grinder, weeping mothers, fathers, daughters, sleeping saviors, the Queen of Spades, a chambermaid and a “dancing child with his Chinese suit”—the last rumored to refer to Brian Jones, to whom Dylan was on occasion not very cute, allegedly. From this confusing tangle of characters and interrogations, Dylan emerges to repeat his simplest, most straightforward of choruses, the most basic of testaments to his affection. It's as if the simple, secure love expressed so directly in the choruses offers him a refuge from the confusion and demands of his everyday life: it's the fixed point to which he can return after battling the demons of his imagination and the duties of his career.

It was also the last song cut for the album. “When we were running the stuff down in his hotel room, I went fucking mental over that track,” recalls Al Kooper. “I kept saying, ‘Let's do ‘I Want You',' and Bob just kept putting it off, just to piss me off. He knew he was going to do it, but I kept pressing, because I had all these arrangement ideas, and I was afraid it wouldn't get cut, but he kept saying, ‘No,' until finally, on the last night, I taught it to the band before he came in. “When he came in, I said, ‘I took the liberty of teaching them ‘I Want You',' and he just smiled at me and said, ‘Well, yeah, we could do that.' I said, ‘It's all set, just come on in and plug into this.' I had the basic arrangement in my head, but then Wayne Moss played that sixteenth-note guitar run, and I wasn't ready for that! It was a wonderful addition to what I had in mind! That was one I wrote out parts for, which the musicians embellished in their wonderful Nashville way, and it became even bigger than what I had heard in that track.”

The second of the album's three epics crams nine complex verses into seven short minutes, each retailing an absurd little vignette illustrating contemporary alienation. In the first, the disquieting effect of an itinerant mute fails to be dispelled by the kindly attentions of ladies, leaving the narrator with a vague feeling of unease.

In the second, the unease persists through a foppish Shakespeare's conversation with a French girl. (Dylan enthused about Shakespeare to Robert Shelton, describing the playwright and poet as “A raving queen and a cosmic amphetamine brain,” though in this context, the playwright's attire of bells and pointy shoes may be a reference to the stylish British pop stars Dylan had been mixing with.) The sense of disjunction is reinforced by the first of a series of Spoonerized image-confusions—involving the stolen post-office and the locked mailbox—which vividly convey the sense of synaesthetic swapping of the senses reported by many LSD takers, in which sights can be smelt, sounds viewed, smells heard, and so on.

The third verse finds a girl called Mona (perhaps the same one hymned so satirically by Bo Diddley) offering the song's narrator some advice about railroad men drinking up your blood like wine, a dubious claim which originally derives from ‘I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground', a weird traditional folk song included on Harry Smith's
Anthology Of American Folk Music
in a version by the 1920s' singing lawyer, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who learned the song from a North Carolina neighbor, Fred Moody. Clearly relishing the extension of an earlier absurdity, Dylan trumps the image with his own deliciously absurd image of one such railwayman smoking his eyelids and punching his cigarette.

And so the madness mounts up: the narrator's grandfather goes mad and dies after building a fire in the road and shooting it; a preacher has weighty headlines stapled to his chest; further confusion—perhaps the cause of his synaesthetic turmoil—sees Dylan mixing his medicines, blowing his mind on gin and “Texas medicine,” whatever that is; and in the song's most enduring couplet, the dancer Ruthie offers earthier relief from his
high-class girlfriend: “Your debutante just knows what you need/But I know what you want.” At the song's conclusion the narrator is overwhelmed by the barrage of absurdity, waiting to find out how much his experiences have cost him, and how he can avoid them, as if his life had become a fairground ride upon which he was trapped, an endless cycle of confusions and allusions. Which was probably closer to the truth than most realized.

“That's Joe South playing guitar on ‘Memphis Blues Again',” recalls Al Kooper. “I was in awe of his abilities, so I was excited to be in the room with him. He was fantastic, he has that sort of hammering-on style that Curtis Mayfield and Reggie Young have. I was very happy with the organ on that, too, it has a lot of spontaneity. I think there's some lovely interplay between us on this one—that's where, I think, the organ and guitar are most perfectly matched. I heard it again recently and went, ‘Wow!' Usually I go ‘Oww!'.”

One of the album's jokier cuts, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat' is a plodding 12-bar blues satirizing the superficiality of fashion—and, by extension, the emptiness of materialism in general—a cogent subject for Dylan's caustic attentions in the style-obsessed '60s. The absurd millinery in question is exactly the kind of ludicrous garment found in fashion one day and out the next, as the industry hurried to supplant its previous designs. It's clearly an amazing creation, balancing on one's head “just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine”—which is to say, precariously, albeit cleverly, with an inordinate amount of time and attention spent on such a preposterous maneuver. And it's powerfully effective, able to sway the affections even of Dylan's doctor, an increasingly frequent figure in his songs.