Stuck inside my head
A few years ago I listened to only Bob Dylan for a year. I can’t say it was a good decision, nor can I say it was a bad one. It wasn’t even a decision, in fact. It was just something I did.
“Come you ladies and you gentlemen, listen to my song / Sing it to you right, but you might think it’s wrong / Just a little glimpse of a story I’ll tell / ‘Bout an East Coast City that you all know well.” He sang that about New York City in the early 1960s, and I listened to it as I drove my Jeep to NYC in early 2021 to move there. I was moving there to write. A friend was putting me up for a few months, and then I was gonna have to find my own place.
The city was a wasteland. The streets were pretty much empty and most of the shops were shuttered. COVID-times. I listened to Bob Dylan constantly, until he became a voice in my head that wouldn’t shut up. Not necessarily a friendly one, either. Sometimes Bobby was confused, and other times he was angry. Other times he was sad. Other times he was stoned.
“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet.” He sang that on possibly his most stoned album, Blonde on Blonde. I was trying to be pretty quiet back then too. I was trying to get some writing done. I wrote this short story under the name Giuseppe Casta for a Medium blog called Il Macchiato that was run by these two guys I’d never met who liked to pretend on their site that they were old Italian men. I didn’t get paid a cent for that story. I didn’t get paid for any of my writing, actually, and I thought that was just fine. I did online tutoring to get by. I took a job writing copy for a health-tech company. I listened to Bob Dylan while I sat on Zoom calls.
I’d already gotten really into the Bobby D lore too. I’d seen Don’t Look Back, obviously, and I’d seen it like three times. Don’t Look Back is D.A. Pennebaker’s movie about Dylan’s ’65 tour of England. A lot of it is Dylan having conflicts with media people. He was an awfully temperamental guy at the time, and he didn’t like to hide his moods for the press. Dylan was a huge celebrity in ‘65, and he was always being asked to comment on social issues since his songs commented on social issues. But he just refused to do the whole public relations song and dance. He was early on the punk thing.
His next album after this tour was early on the punk thing too, sonically. Highway 61 Revisited was cited by the Velvet Underground as an influence, and you can hear that on songs like “Tombstone Blues,” where the snare sounds awfully blown out, or “Queen Jane Approximately,” which just chugs along in its lackadaisical sweetness. My favorite on the album was always “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” which is about being heartbroken and a little self-destructive. My friend Brandon, who I met during this period in NYC, told me he once went to Juarez just so he could get “lost in the rain in Juarez,” which is the first line of this song.
I got into other stuff too. I got into the earlier stuff, especially the perfect little folk songs on The Times They Are A-Changin’ like “One Too Many Mornings,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” The latter is a song about the death of Medgar Evers, a Black civil rights activist who was shot and killed in 1963. That song has some great poetry in it, a slow-motion kind of narrative that moves back in time from the bullet that hit Evers to the anatomy of the shooter pulling the trigger — his finger, his eyes, his brain.
Another Dylan song I always return to is “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” I memorized it in the summer 2020 on the guitar. I can still recall it, save for the last verse which always eludes me. The thing about that song is that it doesn’t really make any sense. It’s not really clear what he’s talking about. At one point he seems to be lecturing a girl about how he’s leaving her and she better get ready to be on her own. At another point he seems to be lecturing himself. Then he’ll just lapse into surreal imagery, like the “orphan with his gun / Crying like a fire in the sun.” That’s a dream image, and it’ll resist your best interpretation, lest you try to understand it.
And then there’s Nashville Skyline, which must have been Dylan’s attempt at a countrified re-brand. The opening track has got Johnny Cash on it. Someone once told me in a text: “I just learned there’s a song with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. So why is anyone listening to anything else?” It’s a good question. The song is just alright though. Johnny sounds a little off, maybe coming off some speed. But I’ll take a comedown Cash over most other artists anytime.
Nowadays, I don’t solely listen to Bob, but he’s still buried in my mind somewhere. In fact, a few months ago I had a dream in which I met Bob Dylan at a baseball game and he told to me to learn one of his songs. He said something about a song that had the word “remember” in the title. Sure enough, I went on my phone in the morning, looked it up, and found a Dylan song I’d never heard: “I’ll Remember You” off of his mid-80s album Empire Burlesque. And it’s good too. Really good. Like it’s one of my favorite Dylan songs now.
There are a lot of Dylan fanboys prowling around the internet these days. Some of them even have podcasts. I avoid those, and I usually avoid talking about Bobby in front of the ladies, since I don’t want to be that guy. But guess what, I’m not really ashamed. I love Bob Dylan. Sometimes I ask myself: “Can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again?” You tell me.—Will Powers
