Category: Music

Chris looks at Dylan's mystical I and I from 1983's Infidels

A look at Bob Dylan's extraordinary single release from 1965 Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window

    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...

Analysis of Bob Dylan's Dream

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.

…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...