Hitting It With Words

Introduction.

This is a polished-up piece from my Seven Days In blog from 2018 which you can read here if you so wish, on a couple of Bob Dylan albums and the lyrics and titles within those excellent collections.

Hitting It With Words (On Vocal)

Two albums I've listened to over the past couple of days are Bob Dylan's "Bringin' It All Back Home" and "Blonde on Blonde".

"Blonde on Blonde" is a double album (ie seventy or eighty minutes of music) and opens with the almost comedy stomp of "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" with its infection refrain of "Everybody must get stoned" tagged onto a rousing list song, that is followed by a standard folk blues of "Pledging My Time" not making the most promising or auspicious introduction of what is an all-time classic album.

However, the next four songs are killers and make you realise that you have something special (follow the link to find out what they are) before a slight lull with "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" which deserves including if only for the title (which contains two hyphenated words) but this also fits in with the introductory duo of songs.

This seems an odd way of telling you about an album only mentioning the non-classic (in my opinion) songs, we then have another four songs, before a duo that is still good, precursors to the eleven minutes of "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" the albums tour-de-force, and I have finally mentioned one of the must listen to songs.

"Blond on Blonde" is a band album but "Bringin' It All Back Home" is mostly solo acoustic baring the intro of "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and when I started listening to it I was thinking "How the hell does he remember those words?".

Johnny's in the basement, mixin' up the medicine

I'm on the pavement, thinkin' about the government

The man in a trench coat, badge out, laid off

Says he's got a bad cough, wants to get it paid off

Look out kid, it's somethin' you did

God knows when, but you're doin' it again

You better duck down the alleyway, looking for a new friend

The man in the coon-skin cap in a pig pen

Wants 11 dollar bills – you only got 10

Then there is the iconic video with the cards related to the lyrics being sung often cited as the first true music video because it wasn't just the performer being filmed performing.

The original clip was the opening segment of D. A. Pennebaker's film "Don't Look Back", a documentary on Dylan's 1965 tour of England. You can read more about it here.

Some of the imagery in the songs is stunning, especially in the quartet starting with "Bob Dylans's 115th Dream" which is based surreally on Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" though Ahab becomes A-Rab, but some ear-catching lyrics for me are in "The Gates of Eden" although the album is littered with them:

Of war and peace the truth just twists

Its curfew gull just glides

Upon four-legged forest clouds

The cowboy angel rides

With his candle lit into the sun

Though its glow is waxed in black

All except when 'neath the trees of Eden

The lamppost stands with folded arms

Its iron claws attached

To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail

Though it shadows metal badge

All and all can only fall

With a crashing but meaningless blow

No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

Absolutely stunning for me and there are lots more where that came from. The most interesting version I could find on Youtube was a live take with Neil Young, and you cannot complain about Neil Young and Bob Dylan being onstage performing an awesome song.