A look at Bob Dylan's extraordinary single release from 1965 Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window
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THREE BITTERSWEET SONGS FROM BOB DYLAN’S OH MERCY: SMILE IN THE FACE OF MANKIND
Bob Dylan’s 1989 album On Mercy represented a crucial turning point in his career. The ‘post-gospel’ records he had put out in the 1980s had received poor reviews. Most critics and fans agreed that Shot of Love (1981), Infidels (1983) and Empire Burlesque (1985), despite including some brilliant songs, were patchy affairs. By...
Extract from ‘DETERMINED TO STAND’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest
As chaos takes over we return to our friend Leo, who can now make no sense of what is happening in this bizarre, hallucinatory scenario: …Leo turned to Cleo/ “I think I’m going mad”/ But he’d lost his mind already/ Whatever mind he had… We are never told who ‘Cleo’ is. Meanwhile the description of Leo trying to …block the doorway to save all those from harm/ Blood from an open wound pouring down his arm… seems to be a version of the scenes in the movie where Jack performs heroics in order to save some of the passengers. But this is the last we will hear of Leo and we will never find out whether he shares Jack Dawson’s fate. In the next verse we hear that: …Petals fell from the flowers/ ‘Till all of them were gone/ In the long and dreadful hours/ The wizard’s curse played on… The mention of the ‘wizard’s curse’ suggests that this dream-version of the sinking of the ship is indeed a kind of Hollywood movie in which the passengers have been bewitched by an unseen manipulator. Given that the trouble with the ship appears to have been started by a whirlwind, perhaps this ‘remake’ of the famous movie has somehow incorporated elements of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends are however, nowhere to be seen.
BOB DYLAN’S JUST LIKE TOM THUMB’S BLUES: …HOWLING AT THE MOON…
…My only pair of trousers had a big hole. Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes As I went along. My inn was at the Big Dipper. —My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound… Arthur Rimbaud, My Bohemian Life …My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as...
BOB DYLAN’S SENOR: CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE WE’RE HEADING?
he narrator appears to be asking ‘Senor’ about the destiny of the world, which is presumably under the control of ‘Yankee power’.
BOB DYLAN’S LOVE SONGS OF THE MID-1960s (Part Two)
Several very distinctive love songs that Dylan composed around this time never made it onto his official albums, although these songs did tend to get ‘snapped up’ by other musicians. If You Gotta Go, Go Now is a light hearted romp which, like I Don’t Believe You, is based around a sexual encounter. As...
BOB DYLAN’S LOVE SONGS OF THE MID-1960S: IT USED TO GO LIKE THIS… (Part One)
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head…. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 O my Luve is like a red, red rose That’s newly...
BOB DYLAN’S TOMBSTONE BLUES: THE SUN’S NOT YELLOW
…I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night… Allen Ginsberg, Howl, 1956 …My solution to the problem would...
BOB DYLAN’S HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED: NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME COMING…
No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry. –Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place (1989) Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on...