Category: Bob Dylan

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...

he narrator appears to be asking ‘Senor’ about the destiny of the world, which is presumably under the control of ‘Yankee power’.

  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...

    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...