Dylanology No. 9 (January 2022): The Untouchables, the Desperate Ones, and the Possibly Revengeful

1: Street Legal revisited - 2: The Times They Are A-Changin’ deconstructed - 3: Pay In Blood - but whose?

Jakob Brønnum

and

Eyolf Østrem

Jan 19, 2022

∙ Paid

Street Legal Revisited

By Jakob Brønnum

1 A first impression

Street Legal at first appears to be a pop-rock album. The orchestration is the same on the album as during the 1978 World Tour, his most smooth and probably intentionally most generally appealing set-up ever. The album is recorded live in the studio.

The pop-rock element even manifests itself in the love-theme in the titles of the songs, at least in five of them: “Baby, Stop Crying”, “Is Your Love in Vain?”, “True Love Tends to Forget”, as well as “We Better Talk This Over” and the overlooked masterpiece “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”

2 The songs: True Love Tends to Forget

But then the pop-rock surface falls apart. While one might think that a song about a true love that tends to forget would be about not holding a grudge about mistakes and relational misdemeanors, the song is almost the opposite. It is criticizing the other part in the relationship. Like when verse 3 opens with a complaint about the lover whining and moaning, although the narrator (i.e., the true lover) will live with it:

You're a tearjerker, baby, but I'm under your spell,
You're a hard worker, baby, and I know you well.

But two verses on, in the concluding fifth verse, the narrator lets the masks fall, if they were ever on:

You belong to me, baby, without any doubt,
Don't forsake me, baby, don't sell me out.
Don't keep me knockin' about from Mexico to Tibet,
True love, true love, true love tends to forget.

The lover is the narrator’s property, the verse claims, but she doesn’t act like it. The one-liner refrain, the title of the song, attains a double meaning: “I know you love me, but you forget it all the time” AND “You know I love you, but if you keep on like this I might go and forget it.”

Is Your Love In Vain

And then there is the image of women in “Is Your Love in Vain” that opens the B-side. Greil Marcus has called the song sexist, seemingly for good reason:

Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow,
Do you understand my pain?

Rhyming on pain is the song’s title, “Is your love in vain?” Apart from the requirement that the woman be willing and able to take care of life’s basic needs in the family, there seems to be a special demand that she should also know about the man’s special needs, expectations, and prerequisites. The song seems to say: You can love me all that you want, but if you don’t fit in, your love will be in vain. Well, unless the man decides you’re ok.

In these songs there seems to be no trace of love as an unpredictable emotion, like in the song from Blood On The Tracks, allegedly written to Ellen Bernstein, an employee of Columbia Records:

I've seen love go by my door
It's never been this close before

Instead we hear:

All right, I'll take a chance,
I will fall in love with you

Almost as if the love the speaker bestows on the woman in the song is an act of charity and not a mutual project.

Baby Stop Crying

To these not altogether – if at all – sympathetic descriptions of an amorous relation, one could add another, symbolized by the incessantly repeated chorus in “Baby Stop Crying”.

Why should she stop crying? Because now he makes her feel better? Because now he will protect her? Because her troubles are over?

None of these. She has to stop crying like that because the male narrator can’t stand it. For whatever reason that is – perhaps because it reminds him of his own flaws – it also signifies an attempt to deny the woman the right to express her feelings. And a demand to subordinate them under his whims.

By glossing over the alleged love songs like this, we may miss some of the finer lines, like the dramatic and mysterious scene with the river and the gun in “Baby Stop Crying” and the nod towards a paradisiacal innocence with all the beauty and intensity this might hold in “Is Your Love In Vain?” The finer lines are nothing new in Dylan, but the description of the female seems to be.

And what about the staunch blues parable “New Pony”, which follows the album’s epic opener “Changing Of The Guards”? One wouldn’t call it sexist, one would deem it misogynic (and sexist):

I had a pony, her name was Lucifer
She broke her leg and needed shooting …
I got a new pony, she knows how to fox-trot, lope and pace
She got great big hind legs …
Come over here pony, I, I wanna climb up one time on you

The last line adds the sexual to the sexist, complete with the aroused breathing in, “pony, I, I wanna …”

Lucifer is one of the Devil’s many names, meaning “the light-bringer”, i.e., bringer of a light that turns out to be false and creates temptation and fall, a sinister blend of Eve and the serpent in Genesis 3. I wholeheartedly recommend Chapter 13 in Thomas Mann’s late novel Doctor Faustus for further explanation of the matter.

What happened to the hard-fought individuality of women? More than anything, it brings to mind the biblically founded submission of woman to man that is found in the conservative Christendom Dylan joined six months later.

The desperate songs

Beneath or beside these songs, which at least in their titles allude to the pop-rock surface of (most of) the album, there is a layer of sheer apocalypse, of change, desperation, and imminent breakdown. In the stomping, waltzing “No Time To Think” the stress is too hard to bear; in “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)”, Dylan writes one of his most impressive pieces of modern poetry, tearing out his heart in the search for a lost feeling of contentment in life.

With “Changing Of The Guards”, Dylan delivers his trademark large-scope, singable and danceable album opener. It began with “Like A Rolling Stone”, but “Tangled Up In Blue”, “Hurricane” and “Changing Of the Guards” are up there with it. After Street Legal, only Infidels attempts the same, with “Jokerman”.

And finally the song, the only Street Legal song that Dylan himself has carried with him since the tour of 1978, “Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)”. It is the last of the group of songs that seem to be based on inspiration from Dylan’s experiences while filming the western Pat Garret & Billy The Kid in Mexico with Sam Peckinpah (and writing the score, including the universal “Knocking On Heavens Door”).

On Blood On The Tracks there was “Lily, Rosemary and The Jack Of Hearts” – fighting it out in the saloon. On Desire several songs have a Mexican and/or Western scent, as has “Señor”.

The desperation and imminent breakdown in this song is to be found in verse 4, where Dylan returns to a sort of biblical paraphrasing:

Señor, señor, you know their hearts are as hard as leather.
Well, give me a minute, let me get it together.
I just gotta pick myself up off the floor.
I'm ready when you are, señor.

In Matthew 26.40-42 one reads:

Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Their hearts are as hard as leather).

He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” ((Let me get it together./ I just gotta pick myself up off the floor./ I'm ready when you are, señor.)

Needless to say, in Spanish Señor is used for both “Mister”, and “The Lord”.

The hardness of the hearts signifies a form of evil intent and the sleeping a psychological reaction to anxiety. I think the leathering of the hearts, the hearts unmovable to true awe, refers to a condition of unfaithfulness that Jesus’ warnings about those who fall into temptation also does. They fall asleep like overwhelmed children, because they simply have not the capacity to understand how big this is that is going to happen. Their bodies give in to the spiritual excitement because their hearts are as hard as leather and cannot be moved sufficiently.

3 The aftermath

What happened? Well, everything did break down, didn’t it? A year or so later Bob Dylan sang about that kind of consequence:

I've been broken, shattered like an empty cup.
I'm just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up

Some people call the 1978 World Tour, which resulted in the Budokan-album, recorded in Japan in the earliest stages of the tour, “The alimony tour”, with bittersweet sarcasm. It would be wrong to do a 1:1 reading of the strange love songs on the album as accounts of Dylan’s divorce, and the biographical reading is not what I attempt here. The ways in which the relationship and its roles are rendered is at least just as interesting.

To Dylan fans, the more than one hundred concerts on the tour, practically all documented in audience recordings, reveal a steadily more dramatic insight in hindsight, especially as the autumn leg winds through the United States.

The performances of “Tangled Up In Blue” constitute a link between the experiences of the writing in Street Legal and the subsequent Slow Train Coming album. Dylan begins to references to the Bible instead of to the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarca:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century

In Houston on November 26, the rhyme for “handed it to me” is “Matthew 33”. In Jackson on the 27th,m it is “Jeremiah, verses one and thirty-three”. In Memphis three days later, the verses are “Jeremiah 22:1 and 33”. And so on.

The title Street Legal and the cover tell their own story. Here is a person, standing in the doorway, glancing down Main Street, not yet sure about which direction to take. There might of course be other interpretations, but I have always understood the title as a signal relating to Mr. Dylan’s divorce, which was finalized around this time. He is back on the street. What’s up, girls?

It is tempting to say that this might be the last we hear of this phase of Dylan. I usually like to see the three albums, Blood On The Tracks, Desire and Street Legal as a “Mid-Seventies-Trilogy”, comparable with The Mid-sixties Trilogy. The heavily metaphorical lyrics, the epic opener, the story-telling, a couple of short and more simple, almost folksy songs, the musical compositions between folk-rock and rock, with less elements of blues than both in The Mid-sixties Trilogy and later on in Dylan’s work.

In the coming issues of Dylanology I shall go further into the four desperate songs, “Changing Of The Guards” and "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)", as well as “No Time To Think”, one of Dylan’s many successful attempts of mapping out a specific psychological condition and the seriously overlooked "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)".

What’s Wrong With The Times?

There is not a single bad song on the album, but I never really liked it.

The Times They Are A-Changin’ deconstructed. Eyolf Østrem reads through Dylan’s third album. Respectfully irreverent.

By Eyolf Østrem

A Game

In the inevitable game of “Rank Dylan’s albums from best to worst”, there are obvious winners (Blood on The Tracks, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Time Out Of Mind), equally obvious bottom-scrapers (Knocked Out Loaded, Empire Burlesque, Self Portrait), a number of “Meh”-albums, and some that are always mentioned in lists of under- or overrated albums (frequently the same albums can appear in both lists: Street Legal is one).

There is also the challenging list: “How many songs would you have to remove to make x a great album (and how good would it become)?” Obvious examples here are Infidels (remove “Union Sundown” and the “Neighbourhood Bully” forever from the cultural memory of mankind, replace them with “Foot of Pride” and “Blind Willie”, and voilà: a top ten album on anyone’s list) and Knocked out Loaded (remove everything except “Brownsville Girl”).

But as I was working myself through the various list categories, I came across a paradox: The Times They Are A-Changin’.

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