Bob Dylan (22 page)

Dylan had recently experienced the transient attractions of materialism at first hand, when, having been greatly impressed by John Lennon's 22-room Weybridge mansion on a visit there during his 1965 UK tour, he went out and bought a 31-room place of his own upon his return to America. “I bought one just as soon as I got back from England,” he told Robert Shelton. “And it turned into a
nightmare!”
Also on that trip to England, he had demonstrated a remarkably mature (though ultimately mistaken) grasp of the transience of his own position and the ephemeral, fashion-based nature of fame in general, in an interview with Maureen Cleave of the London
Evening Standard
. “I've seen all these crazes come and go,” he told her, “and I don't think I'm more than a craze. In a coupla years, I shall be right back where I started—an unknown.” As it turned out, his appeal proved rather more enduring than the eponymous leopard-skin pillbox hat.

The album credits specifically singled out Bob Dylan as lead guitarist on this track, but while the slightly shaky guitar introduction (center-right in the stereo mix) may be by Dylan, the piercing lines coming primarily from the left channel (with a little spillage caught on the right channel microphone), including the solo break, are undoubtedly Robbie Robertson's work—as, perhaps, was the song's Chicago-blues format.

“Bob liked blues singers, but it was a different blues background to mine,” Robertson told me. “His was more folk-blues, like the Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and I was listening more to the Chicago blues, via the Mississippi Delta—[Howlin'] Wolf and Muddy [Waters] and [Little] Walter, those people. I wasn't as drawn to acoustic music as he was—I'd been playing electric guitar since I was quite young, so it was more attractive to me. But when Bob and I were spending so much time together on tour, a lot of the time we would get a couple of guitars and just play music together, and in the course of that, we were trading a lot of our musical backgrounds: he was turning me on to things, and I was turning him on to things, and this trading of ideas helped us a bit in the way we approached music, both live and on record.”

In May 1967, the track became the fifth single taken from
Blonde On Blonde
, though its hardcore Chicago style proved too tough for most people's tastes, and it failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it might have fared better if a later version of the song had been released instead. Al Kooper explains: “In the studio, besides the Hammond organ, there was also a Lowery organ, which has some great sound effects, including a doorbell that went “ding-dong!” There was one version of ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat' where it started with “ding-dong!” and the band yelled out “Who's there?” and then it went into the song. It was great! Too bad they didn't use it…”

The euphonious lilt of ‘Just Like A Woman', with Dylan's sly croon borne as if in a sedan chair upon the delicate triplets of acoustic guitar and piano, disguises one of his more controversial songs. In the ground swell of feminist liberation which followed the counter-cultural changes of the late 1960s, Dylan was roundly condemned by some feminist commentators for the song's unflattering portrait of its subject, and the implication in the chorus that grasping, whinging and weakness were “natural” female traits, along with a specific womanly manner of making love. This, however, seems a determinedly literal way of reading a song whose melody—the most overtly “feminine” of the album—and title—a sardonic appropriation of a classic misogynist exclamation—suggest a more ironic intention. It also ignores the fact that the song's delimitations are not between man and woman, but between woman and girl: it's a matter of maturity, rather than gender.

The song was widely believed—not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol's Factory retinue—to be about the Factory pin-up girl Edie Sedgwick, a '60s “ace face” and New York scenemaker with whom Dylan had a brief association in 1965. (Indeed, Robert Margoulef's biopic of Edie,
Ciao Manhattan
, includes “Just Like A Woman” on its soundtrack.) A former Boston debutante and model, Sedgwick dedicated herself to meeting beautiful, talented people, with the hope that she herself might develop artistic talent of some sort, or, failing that, serve as an artist's muse. Accordingly, she became one of Warhol's iconic superstars, before transferring her attentions to Dylan, to whom she was introduced at the Kettle Of Fish bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

Her interest may not have been purely amicable; it was rumored that Albert Grossman was interested in developing her career—though eventually even he was forced to admit defeat as to the means by which to achieve this, when it transpired that Edie was a hopeless singer. A rumored Dylan/Edie movie, meanwhile, never got beyond the talking stage. Warhol himself was apparently annoyed at her defection, as well as paranoid about Dylan's opinion of him: for some time, he apparently believed himself to be the chrome horse-riding diplomat in ‘Like A Rolling Stone' (and Edie, therefore, its subject), despite the fact that the song had been written well before Dylan had met either Edie or Andy.

Edie's growing infatuation with Bob was eventually broken early in 1966 when Warhol, who had learned that Dylan had been secretly married
a month or two earlier, took great relish in breaking the news to her. She drifted away from both camps, but not before making an impression on
Blonde On Blonde
—she was included among the photographs in the original inner sleeve, and some (including Patti Smith, who wrote a poem about her) believe her to be the inspiration for the album title. It would certainly explain the song's most often queried line, about “her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls,” which in the mid-'60s New York drug culture would have been recognized as references to marijuana, speed and pep-pills.

She eventually died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, while ‘Just Like A Woman' became one of Dylan's most popular songs. Ironically, at a time when his publishers were kept increasingly busy collecting his royalties from the flood of cover-versions of his material—in September 1965, there were no fewer than eight of his songs in the US Top 40, half of them covers—‘Just Like A Woman' was the only track from
Blonde On Blonde
to attract significant attention from other artists. It also became the
song Dylan performed most often over the subsequent two decades. It's not known for sure, however, exactly when during this period the song's second line was changed from the recorded “Tonight is lost inside the rain” to the less evocative “Tonight as I stand inside the rain,” as in the collected
Lyrics 1962–1985
. In the
Biograph
annotations, Dylan half-remembers writing the song on the road, in a hotel in Kansas City “or something” the previous Thanksgiving, having declined an offer of dinner at someone's house.

Apart from the intrusion of a quirky, nonsensical middle-eight concerning a badly-built, stilt-walking judge, this is perhaps the most straightforward Dylan lyric from the entire 1965/66 period, crystallizing the moment when a relationship finally cracks, the narrator tiring of the effort of dragging his lover along. In the
Biograph
annotations, Dylan reckons he must have written the song following a failed relationship “where, you know, I was lucky to have escaped without a broken nose.” Charlie McCoy repeated his party-trick of playing bass guitar and trumpet at the same time, though the real star is drummer Kenny Buttrey, setting a sprightly pace for the others to follow with some delightful snare-rolls.

The song continues the fascination with adverbial titles that Dylan had started with ‘Queen Jane Approximately' and ‘Positively Fourth Street', and which would continue through much of
Blonde On Blonde
's third side. “He probably named all of them at the same time,” reckons Al Kooper. “They were called other things until he said, ‘Well, what are we gonna call this? ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie', ‘Obviously 5 Believers', ‘Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35'… like that—they were pretty much all named at the same time, as I recall.”

Another slow, smoky blues, this one dominated by the beautifully evocative piano of Hargus “Pig” Robbins, who achieves a perfect balance between the song's basic chord structure and the restrained trills which, aside from
a brief wheeze of harmonica, serve as its sole embellishment. The song is all mood, a straightforward lament from a would-be lover kept dangling on his lady's whims: she knows the strength of his ardor, but remains largely unmoved—though not completely inaccessible.

A couple of hallucinatory images—a crawling scorpion and a velvet door—add enigmatic color to Dylan's plaint, while his situation is summed up in the final verse by reference to the eponymous Achilles: “How come you get someone like him to be your guard?” asks Dylan. The answer, of course, is to lead her suitor on, to keep him dangling on the vague promise of distant fulfillment. In classical mythology, Achilles was virtually impregnable, save for his heel, which eventually proved his downfall; so his presence as guard of her affections suggests that, while it may indeed be difficult for Dylan to break down her resistance, it is not completely impossible. But the task will be as difficult as catching Achilles in his one weak spot, and may take a while: for “temporary” as Achilles is, he's still likely to be around a considerable time.

The chorus and part of the tune were salvaged from ‘Medicine Sunday', a dour number attempted in late 1965 whose surviving minute-long fragment concludes “I know you want my lovin'/Mama but you're so hard.” With a simple inversion of the first line, Dylan located the song's true direction.

Containing one of the most oft-repeated of Dylan's little life-lessons—the claim that “to live outside the law you must be honest,” which served as justification for many a bohemian existence—‘Absolutely Sweet Marie' is one of the album's simpler pleasures, from the Lowery organ figure with which Al Kooper opens proceedings, to the wailing harmonica solo which Dylan skates over the second middle-eight break, and the sexual jesting in the lyrics.

It was whipped up on the spot in the studio. “I can remember the ones where I had the time to show it to the band,” says Kooper, “and that wasn't one of them. The real unsung hero on that track is [again] the drummer, Kenny Buttrey—the beat is amazing, and that's what makes the track work.”

The lyrics are a spicy combination of sexual entendre, old folk reference and surreal intrusions by various members of Dylan's repertory company of unusual characters, in this case the river-boat captain and the Persian drunkard. The first verse is as plain an expression of sexual frustration as Dylan penned: you can all but see his eyebrow cheekily raised as he sings about “beating on my trumpet” when “it gets so hard, you see.” The
references to the railroad (and its gate) offer variations on the common train/sex metaphor, while the “six white horses” are a further blues image of sexual potency, appearing both in Blind Lemon Jefferson's ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean'—recorded by Dylan on his debut album—and in ‘Coming Round The Mountain', the traditional song later covered by Dylan and The Band as one of the (unreleased) Basement Tapes numbers.

A strange combination of the desultory and the surreal, ‘Fourth Time Around' describes a romantic encounter of symbolic emptiness, whose narrative, tossed this way and that by the quirky gusts of imagery, drifts along with as little volition as its protagonists' actions. At times, it seems as if Dylan is simply rhyming whatever slips into his mind, following the story rather than dictating its course, even as it slides between verses, courtesy of an outrageously elongated “He-errrr” whose length is further exaggerated by comparison with the clipped brevity of the ensuing “Jamaican rum.”

Musically, the song stands apart from the rest of
Blonde On Blonde
by dint of its lightness and delicacy, Dylan's vocal and wistful harmonica riding the rippling Spanish arpeggios of Wayne Moss and Charlie McCoy's twin acoustic guitars. “Those guitars playing in harmony, that's pure Nashville,” says Al Kooper. “People don't think like that anywhere else.”

John Lennon allegedly thought the song was a parody of The Beatles' ‘Norwegian Wood', which appeared in December 1965 on their
Rubber Soul
album. “I thought it was very ballsy of Dylan to do ‘Fourth Time Around',” recalls Kooper. “I asked him about it—I said, it sounds so much like ‘Norwegian Wood', and he said, ‘Well actually, ‘Norwegian Wood' sounds a lot like
this!
I'm afraid they took it from me, and I feel that I have to, y'know, record it.' Evidently, he'd played it for them, and they'd nicked it! I said, ‘Aren't you worried about getting sued by The Beatles?' and he said, ‘They couldn't sue me!'” And indeed, they didn't.

The fourth and last of
Blonde On Blonde
's Chicago-blues workouts (after ‘Pledging My Time', ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat' and ‘Temporary Like Achilles'), ‘Obviously 5 Believers' is the closest the album comes to an out-and-out
rocker. Save for the apparently arbitrary references to “fifteen jugglers” (presumably from the stock circus company with which Dylan populated his songs) and the “five believers” of the title, it's a basic love moan that steams along on Robbie Robertson's hot-rod lead guitar, with Charlie McCoy's harmonica fills serving as links between the verses.

“I think that was the track I did that got everybody to accept me,” reckons Robbie Robertson. “It's a funny thing in Nashville, it was very clique-ish: the musicians that played on sessions there didn't like any outsiders coming in, and because Bob Johnston had already got these guitar players in there, when I came along it was kind of like, ‘What do we need
him
for?'—nobody
said
that, but you could feel that kind of a vibe.”