‘A HEADFUL OF IDEAS’ is ranked in the top 20Bob Dylan podcasts at:
https://www.millionpodcasts.com/bob-dylan-podcasts/
EXTRACTS FULL TEXT HERE
SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW…
She’s Your Lover Now is one of the highly ambitious extended pieces that Dylan composed in 1966. It consists of four eighteen line verses. Like Visions of Johanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands it is full of distinctive imagery and devastating one liners, as Dylan takes the art of song writing itself into new realms. Whereas long ballads were common in traditional folk music, before Dylan such elongated works were virtually unknown in rock and roll. She’s Your Lover Now features several switches of narrative perspective, in a way that presages the ‘cubist songs’ of Blood on the Tracks. In order to accommodate these shifts, which occur mid-verse, the music requires some unusual chord changes, which the session musicians (mostly members of The Band, with Mike Bloomfield on additional guitar) seem to have struggled with. So after working on many takes for an entire day, the song was abandoned. The version that appeared on many early bootlegs, and which appeared on the first official Bootleg Series release in 1991, is performed with great verve and energy. But it trails off midway through the final verse. The only complete version is an equally remarkable, if more introspective, take with Dylan on solo piano, which can now be heard on the extended Cutting Edge release.
In order to accommodate the experimental structure of the song, each verse is divided into three roughly six-line segments. In some instances the narrator appears to be speaking directly to his ex-lover, while in others he addresses her new lover. One of the unusual features of the song is how its narrator is beset by apparent mood swings. He is clearly bitter, delivering a number of highly cutting put downs, but in some ways these only appear to illuminate his own insecurities. The refrains at the end of the verses alternate between …She’s your lover now… and …You’re her lover now… We begin, however, with the narrator addressing us directly: …The pawnbroker roared, also so did the landlord/ The scene was so crazy, wasn’t it?… We may speculate that, as in I Wanna Be Your Lover, these apparently random character names are ciphers for Dylan’s contemporaries. The direct address invites us into the song. The narrator seems to be referring back to these two characters when he declares rather bitterly that …Both were so glad/ To watch me destroy what I had… which is followed by the aphorism …Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?… delivered here with measured and deliberate sarcasm.
LOVER NOW….
Already Dylan has generated a sense of claustrophobic intensity, with the narrator rather desperately trying to make sense of ‘crazy scenes’ that appear to be overwhelming him. He then delivers a scathing rebuke to his ex-lover …Why didn’t you just leave me if you didn’t want to stay?/ Why’d you have to treat me so bad?/ Did it have to be that way?… from which we may infer that she has cheated on him. This is as vicious a putdown as the address to the girl in Like a Rolling Stone, but in this case the narrator seems to be far more uncertain about how he actually feels about the situation. This is emphasised by the way he stretches out …Now you stand here expectin’ me / To remember somethin’/ You forgot to say… We may speculate that in reality he is very probably smarting after she has ditched him. But as he gradually reveals himself to be increasingly self conscious, it becomes more and more difficult for us to sympathise with him.
LOVER NOW…
The song slows down for a moment, with something of a musical jolt, as he addresses the new boyfriend for the first time: …Yes, and you, I see you’re still with her, well/ That’s fine ’cause she’s comin’ on so strange, can’t you tell?… The narrator is as scathing here as he is to the girl. He seems to be implying that he does not really care that she has cheated on him with this unidentified ‘villain’ because she is a crazy person. The evidence he gives for this is merely that she wears an ‘iron chain’. This is of course an arrogant and patronising attitude. He also does not endear himself to us when he claims that he would confront her himself but makes the rather unconvincing excuse that …I just can’t remember how…
LINKS
STILL ON THE ROAD – ALL DYLAN’S GIGS
Leave a Reply