PODCAST BOB DYLAN: A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season Two 5) Your Saint Like Face: Sad Eyed Lady

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Sad Eyed Lady…

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is a song that Dylan has never performed in front of a live audience, partly perhaps as a result of its length, but possibly because – unlike virtually every other song he has written – it seems somehow unchangeable. Dylan has said that he keeps adapting his songs on stage in pursuit of the ‘perfect’ version of each one. But here, for once, he seems to have achieved that end in the first recorded version. It could thus be said to be the ‘purest’ of all his songs. You can lie back and feel it carry you away into another world – a kind of luminescent, poetic reality in which meanings are felt in deep emotional rather than intellectually rational ways. And yet it is not an emotionally variable song. It establishes a certain mood and then stays with it. The narrator is both deeply invested in and detached from the surreal, ever-changing plethora of images he presents us with. He is both ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time.

Dylan’s songs of his celebrated 1965-66 period are full of surreal images, unexpected juxtapositions, barbed jokes and pithy observations. Despite this, we can still locate Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in a ‘semi-mythical’ version of Mexico. Visions of Johanna may be a drug-induced dream but it definitely appears to be taking place in a ‘bohemian loft’. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) is a kind of existential prayer. Even Stuck Inside of Mobile has a coherent, if scatological narrative. But Sad Eyed Lady is the most difficult of all these songs to pin down. It has been subjected to many – often highly dubious and almost entirely reductive – interpretations. In his 1975 song Sara Dylan himself appears to have ‘confessed’ – in a very rare moment of autobiographical revelation – that the song was written for his wife: …I can still hear the sound of those Methodist bells… he sighs …I’d taken the cure and I’d just gotten through/ Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/ Writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you… These lines seem to suggest that Sara had saved him from the perils of some kind of addiction. Yet there is nothing in Sad Eyed Lady that suggests that this is any kind of ‘key’ to the song. It may well be a statement which, like so many of Dylan’s public pronouncements, we can take with a pinch of salt. Testimonies by the Nashville musicians Dylan was working with on Blonde on Blonde have actually established that most of the song was written in the studio while they kicked their heels.

SARA DYLAN IN ‘RENALDO AND CLARA’

Sad Eyed Lady…

It is impossible to deny that Sara herself had a huge influence not only on Dylan’s life but also on his career as a performer and a songwriter. His marriage to her was accompanied by a long ‘rural retreat’ in which he gravitated first towards the shorter, playful songs of ‘The Basement Tapes’, the dense mythological symbolism of John Wesley Harding and later the expressions of domestic bliss on Nashville Skyline, New Morning and much of Planet Waves. Only when his marriage broke up in the mid 70s did he return to the public stage. But although the song was undoubtedly inspired by his love for her, the stream of heartbreakingly beautiful hallucinatory images Dylan presents us with turn the object of his devotion into an emblematic figure, not only of all womanhood but of all humanity. She is an ineffable, indefinable muse. The song is a series of ‘reflections’ – deep meditations on the qualities of the ‘Lady’ which also mirror the state of mind of the narrator. The poet appears to be, perhaps more so than in any of Dylan’s other songs, ‘drunk on words’. In some ways Sad Eyed Lady is a love song to the power of language itself. Meanwhile, those infinitely sad eyes – which contain an indefinable wisdom: a kind of ‘secret knowledge’, perhaps of both beauty and mortality – continue to stare at us, sphinx-like, unmoving.