Never Just One Thing, Pt. XVI: Ten Favorite Dylan Songs, 1

January 11, 2025

Never Just One Thing, Pt. XVI: Ten Favorite Dylan Songs, 1 - 5

Well, I haven't seen the Dylan bio pic yet, and I'm not exactly in a hurry to do so since I find that all music films disappoint me in terms of capturing the actual gestalt of the art form, that is, the full richness of music as it is experienced in our multidimensional, vibrational, and emotional lives as they are really lived. But I think I will see it, since I hear the musical performances by the actors are quite compelling and convincing. At any rate, my ambivalence or laggardness about the film presents no obstacle to me doing as so many are doing these days and offering my top ten list of Dylan favorites. Or at least my top ten as they stand today. Consider it non-definitive and inevitably a bit arbitrary.

My list will skew in the direction of Blood on the Tracks, indisputably either the best or second best (behind Blonde on Blonde) Dylan LP, since it is my favorite and the one I've listened to the most. Mostly I listened to it back in those magical days of 90-minute cassette tapes. I had Blood on one side and Tom Petty's Hard Promises on the other, Petty being one who carried forward the Dylan vocal aesthetic into a new generation, my generation. Said listening mostly happened during long road trips with my buddy Dave through the Rocky Mountains, from Telluride in the Southeast corner of Colorado to the Medicine Bow range outside of Laramie, Wyoming, and in the process I internalized the songs to a significant degree. So for me they unfold with impeccable spirit and logic, though others will feel that way about other Dylan records, for their own reasons. And that's the way it should be. In no particular order, except for my carved -in-stone favorite of favorites, "Idiot Wind," which I'll discuss in Part Two.

1. Like a Rolling Stone (1965)

I almost left this one off but that would be merely contrary and churlish. After all, it is his greatest song and probably the greatest achievement in rock songwriting. Not only did it break the boundaries of how long a "pop" song could be, but it brought in previously untapped modes and registers, including the language and attitudes of the Beat poets, the concerns of the Existentialists then in vogue, and his all-round anti-authoritarian point of view. No love song, that! If that all sounds like a lot, well, it's a fun listen, and it flows. And the question raised the chorus -- How does it feel? -- serves as an unlikely rallying cry, since it contains no directives. We should also note that said chorus provides the title not only for the new biopic, A Complete Unknown, but also Scorsese's definitive documentary, No Direction Home. That's called packing some songwriting punch. Personally speaking, the song affected me in an unexpected way. At the same time I was becoming really familiar with this song I was also looking into graduate school in international relations. When Dylan sings how "You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat" and "Ain't it hard when you discover that / He really wasn't where it was at," well, it struck some kind of chord in me about seeking a more nonconventional life. Funny how a minor line can do that. Oh, and Al Kooper's last-minute, improvised organ line makes the whole thing sing.

2. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (1975)

Here's one that doesn't show up on a lot of lists, but it's an exceptionally felicitous, jaunty, and lyrically rhapsodic song. It's a Blood on the Tracks cut, and though one might argue it's only the fifth best song on that record you could also argue it's one his top 20 songs of all time. For me, it's both the way the words fit the music and the way the words fit together in pure interlocking logic that always brings me back to this one. It possesses an inevitability that is in no way forced. I recommend listening, but allow me to just cite some lyrics. "Dragon clouds so high above / I've only known careless love / It always has hit me from below / But this time 'round, it's more correct / Right on target, so direct / You're gonna make me lonesome when you go." As always, the way Dylan sings it brings out both the humorous and profound implications of the passage. And how about the bridge section: "Flowers on the hillside blooming crazy / Crickets talking back and forth in rhyme / Blue river running slow and lazy / I could stay with you forever and never realize the time." Lovely. It's interesting that the song was written not for or about his wife of the time, Sara Lownds, the ostensible subject of Blood, but Ellen Bernstein, a staffer at Columbia with whom he had an affair. By no means the love of his life, she nevertheless inspired a timeless song of touching vulnerability.

3. Positively 4th Street (1965)

With this mighty diss track, Dylan reveals himself a proto-punk. It's under-remarked upon how much attitude he brought to popular music, both in terms of lyrics and how much irony and insinuation he injected with his vocal style. People say they don't "like" his singing, but he made his singing count to a degree largely unmatched by others, before or since. Yes, a bad singer can be a great singer. This track wasn't on Blonde on Blonde but it features that band and that mid-60s sound, the one that most people think of when they think of Bob Dylan, even though he only featured it for a year or two. It is speculated that the song refers to the hypocrisy and disapproval he perceived in the folk community as he changed and grew (the topic of A Complete Unknown), but really it's abstract enough to serve as a generalized song of being underestimated and misunderstood, which is what made me click with it when I was young. Now, I didn't know myself at all then, and I wore my confusion on my sleeve, which made it easy for others to be unimpressed with me, but I felt that I was getting close to something important, something others couldn't perceive. So, yes, I did get a charge out of the song, which opens with disdain, and only intensifies from there: "You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend /When I was down you just stood there grinnin' / You've got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend / You just want to be on the side that's winnin'." Not every line or couplet is so straightforward though. I especially like the one that's like a koan: "Do you take me for such a fool, to think I'd make contact / With the one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with?"

4. Simple Twist of Fate (1975)

Let me go ahead and declare this the most perfect Dylan song. It's a story song, a noir tale actually, and the concision of the lyrics and vividness of the imagery work together to project a movie in your mind. And this is to say nothing of the poignancy of the melody itself. All these things make the song a true standard, capable of being covered in any number of ways. The original version on Blood on the Tracks is great, with Dylan singing as well and as movingly as he ever did, but I really like the versions by Diana Krall and Jerry Garcia. Each in their own way casts a spell. In terms of structure, "Simple" has no choruses or bridge, just verses. But the way each verse concludes with an invocation of the phrase "simple twist of fate" gives it the feeling of a chorus within the verse, with a great sense of anticipation as he introduces a new rhyming word for fate in each verse's penultimate line. And the way the key word is sounded is crucial. The vowel receives a dramatic, drawn-out delivery from Dylan and the note itself is the highest in the song, bringing a solemn-yet-gratifying sense of resignation when the final phrase is finally once again quietly uttered. "He woke up, the room was bare / He didn't see her anywhere / He told himself he didn't care / Pushed the window open wide / Felt an emptiness inside / To which he just could not relaaate / Brought on by a simple twist of fate." Dylan uses this method a lot and it, and this might be his most successful take on it.

5. I Threw It All Away (1969)

Music isn't separate from life; a performance is life itself, just heightened, distilled, intensified. "I Threw It All Away" is one of those songs that will never come across as "poetry" on the page, and surely could serve as a prime exhibit for skeptics of Dylan's Nobel Prize. Yet Dylan himself made the point that his words are only meant to be experienced as music and that this is where the power comes from. Just say something true, and let the melody and the vocal delivery transpose the sentiments to a higher key, letting simplicity acquire the force of revelation. "I once held her in my arms / She said she would always stay / But I was cruel / I treated her like a fool / I threw it all away." It wasn't until this moment that I realized that this is the third song in this short list in which my affection for it relates to how lines or ideas in it speak, or spoke, to my personal experience. In my case I was the guy who was cruel and treated her like a fool, and almost threw it all away. I guess I like the song so much because in my case disaster was actually averted, so my own regret, while real, was short-lived. John Lennon used to say that he loved simple rock and roll most of all because it was honest, direct, and true. The same is true of country music, the genre in play here. With "I Threw It All Away," Dylan affirmed that whatever the word count existential truth is always the goal, whether in a minimalist number like this or in heavily symbolic epics like "Desolation Row."

THE "NEVER JUST ONE THING" SERIES

Part I: Dylan’s Mysterious Musical Maturation

Part II: The Nature of Dylan’s Art

Part III: Dylan's Verbosity and the Path to Poetry

Part IV: Close Reading Dylan's "Idiot Wind"

Part V: Don't Overlook Dylan's Musicality

Part VI: On Dylan's Identity Tricksterism

Part VII: What Dylan Knows and Doesn't Know

Part VIII: Dylan, Taylor Swift, and Genius Inflation

Part IX: Close Reading "Simple Twist of Fate"

Part X: The Authentic Zen of "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"

Part XI: Mr. Tambourine Man's Tale of Comin' Down

Part XII: A True Song - Dylan's "I Threw It All Away"