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Certain Songs

Certain Songs #96: Bob Dylan – “You’re A Big Girl Now”

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Album: Blood on the Tracks.

Year: 1974.

If Blood on the Tracks is about the pain of a major love affair falling apart, then “You’re A Big Girl Now” is quite possibly the most explicit song about the actual break-up.  It gets right to the point:

Our conversation was short and sweet
It nearly swept me off-a my feet
And I’m back in the rain, whoooooaoooooooh
And you are on dry land

But it’s not really the words that make me love this song so much, but rather the wordless cry that punctuates the middle of every single verse.

Later on in the song, he sings:

I’m going out of my mind, whoooooaaooooooh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart

For all of his wonderful use of words, nothing conveys more emotion, expresses more deeply the pain, sadness and anger that he’s feeling than that cry. In a weird way, it’s a fractal of the entire album, and the most beautiful part of one of the most beautiful songs he’s ever written.

Official Video for “You’re A Big Girl Now”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #95: Bob Dylan – “Tangled Up In Blue”

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Album: Blood on the Tracks.

Year: 1974.

Here’s the the thing: sometimes with Dylan, it’s a specific performance of a song that grabs me. For example, the slow HIghway 61 Revisited version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry.” or the “Royal Albert Hall Version” of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues." 

Other times – and this is more rare – it’s the song. One of the reasons I’m endlessly fascinated with something like "Visions of Johanna,” is that it seems to be resist having an absolutely definitive version for me, as I can find something to love in multiple recordings of the song, making it an ever-changing phantom in my mind.

And then there’s “Tangled Up In Blue,"  the most endlessly malleable of Dylan’s great songs, held together by maybe his most beautiful melody line and an ever-changing lyric that circles endless back to the title phrase at the end of each verse.

And because "Tangled Up in Blue” is a story, we want to believe that it’s real, it’s true, it actually happened. And maybe it did, but which version?

There’s the original New York version, with Dylan’s jacket buttons clacking against his sadly droning guitar. This recording captures the sadness of of losing the person who might be the love of your life who you also know would be the end of your life.

He was always in a hurry,
too busy or too stoned,
And everything that she ever planned,
just a-had to be postponed.

There’s the Minneapolis Blood on the Tracks version, with the drums subtly driving the song, and setting up the title phrase again and again, which I think captures the weirdness of running into that love years later under strange and desperate circumstances. And reconsidering everything. Maybe it could work this time.

So now I’m goin’ back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now.

There’s the 1984 Real Live version, for once just Bob Dylan and his guitar, telling these strangers yet another version of this story. It’s somehow darker – if the earlier versions felt like a conversation, this one feels like a confession. A confession to thousands of strangers, each one who would have a different interpretation as to what he was confessing.

And when it all came crashing down,
I was already south.
I didn’t know whether the world was flat or round,
I had the worst taste in my mouth,
that I ever knew,
Tangled up in blue.

So which version is the true version?  One of these? Or a version that I’ve never heard?  Maybe the one he sang just last December was the true version. Maybe they’re all the true version.

“Tangled Up in Blue” – New York, 1974

“Tangled Up in Blue” – Minneapolis, 1974

“Tangled Up in Blue” – Wembley Stadium, 1984

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs 94: Alvvays – “Archie, Marry Me”

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Album: Alvvays.

Year: 2014.

The song that ended up being my favorite song of 2014 (give or take a “Sun Glass” or “Shake It Off”) gets to the point almost immediately. There’s about 20 seconds of random guitar strumming, and then – coming on like the bastard child of Linda Hopper & William Reid – singer Molly Rankin gets straight to the point:

You’ve expressed explicitly your contempt for matrimony
You’ve student loans to pay and will not risk the alimony
We spend our days locked in a room content inside a bubble
And in the night time we go out and scour the streets for trouble

Hey, hey, marry me, Archie
Hey, hey, marry me, Archie

“Marry Me Archie” is one of those songs where the melody of the verse is is so amazingly pretty the chorus is just the sugar on top. In any event, by the time she gets to the that first  "Hey hey!“  chorus, you’re already wondering what Archie is even thinking.

And by the time they get to the final breakdown chorus after a completely unexpected bridge, you know that she’s wayyyy to good for Archie, and if he doesn’t say "yes” by the end of the song, that maybe she should just move on and find somebody else who’s not a complete fucking idiot.

In just a few short months, “Marry Me Archie” has risen to the top of both the proposal song list and the dreamy guitar-pop song list. If kids today even remotely cared about music that sounded like this, it would have been a Top 10 single for sure.

Official Video for “Archie, Marry Me”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #93: Bob Dylan – “Drifter’s Escape”

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Album: John Wesley Harding.

Year: 1968.

It’s always been hard for me to exactly explain why I love “Drifter’s Escape” so much. Maybe because it describes an incident with amazing specificity: the Drifter has been found guilty, much to disgust of the Judge, and as the crowd cries for justice God intervenes by destroying the courthouse, and the Drifter escapes.

“Oh, help me in my weakness”
I heard the drifter say
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away
“My trip hasn’t been a pleasant one
And my time it isn’t long
And I still do not know
What it was that I’ve done wrong”

Maybe it’s because of the simple music: Dylan strumming his acoustic and blowing his harmonica between the verses; Kenny Buttrey being amazing as always on the drums, and Charlie McCoy providing sly bass hooks. And it’s all over in 2:46. Of course, that was most of John Wesley Harding.

Well, the judge, he cast his robe aside
A tear came to his eye
“You fail to understand,” he said
“Why must you even try?”
Outside, the crowd was stirring
You could hear it from the door
Inside, the judge was stepping down
While the jury cried for more

Maybe because despite the specificity of the incident and simplicity of the music, “Drifter’s Escape” is completely mysterious. Of course, the long-held suspicion is that it’s a parable about Bob Dylan and his relationship to the white-hot stardom he was desperately dialing down with John Wesley Harding, so maybe that’s why I love it so much.

“Oh, stop that cursed jury”
Cried the attendant and the nurse
“The trial was bad enough
But this is ten times worse”
Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while ev’rybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape

Or maybe it’s just that last verse with the deus ex machina helps the drifter triumph over mob rule, because the mob worships the deus in the first place. The combination of that kind of dramatic irony with the  weird rhyme scheme of “out of shape” and “did escape” has fascinated me since I first heard it.  

Official Video for “Drifter’s Escape”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #92: Bob Dylan & The Band – “Goin’ To Acapulco”

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Album: The Basement Tapes.

Year: 1967.

One of the standard tropes in popular music is to take upbeat music and wed it to depressing words. Bands like The Smiths pretty much made a living exploring the contradiction of Morrissey’s depressing words with the bouncy guitar hooks that Johnny Marr specialized in. But hell, even Hank Williams did it.

But “Goin’ to Acapulco” does the exact opposite. It takes words about  having a good time and sets them to a mournful, organ-filled deathmarch.

Goin’ to Acapulco–goin’ on the run
Goin’ down to see fat gut–goin’ to have some fun
Yeah–goin’ to have some fun

It’s so doomy and resigned-sounding that by the time the song is ending you want to yell at Dylan “FOR GOD’S SAKE, MAN, DON’T GO THERE! GO ANYWHERE BUT THERE” even as you realize that it’s too late, that he’s doomed to have some some fun whether he likes it or not.

Official video for “Goin’ To Acapulco”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #91: Bob Dylan & The Band – “I’m Not There”

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Album: The Complete Basement Tapes
Year: 1967

“I’m Not There” was one of those songs that I only read about for years. It was often cited as the prime example of how the compilers of the original Basement Tapes got the whole enterprise wrong. And when it showed up on one of the gigantic Basement bootleg sets I found in the early 2000s, the fidelity wasn’t quite good enough for me to understand what Greil Marcus and Clinton Heylin were on about.

It felt, well, formless. Just Dylan strumming on his guitar with maybe an organ and almost chanting incomprehensible lyrics that probably didn’t make any sense, to boot. It wasn’t until 2007, when it was released as part of the soundtrack of Todd Haynes excellent film of the same name, that we finally got a cleaned-up recording.

So what’s it all about? Well, the official lyric sheet on Bob Dylan’s web site isn’t any help at all.  Which is as it should be, I think.

Out of all of the Basement tape recordings, this just might be weirdest.  In a lot of ways, it’s still incomprehensible,  but it’s also mesmeric, where the individual pieces don’t really matter. Sure, you eventually hear an organ, a piano and a bass, and sure there’s probably more than one guitar. But none of that seems as much as how the whole song expands and expands, as if to fill the hole left by Dylan not being there, but rather being gone.

“I’m Not There”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #90: Bob Dylan & The Band – “Tiny Montgomery”

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Album: The Basement Tapes.

Year: 1967.

I should surprise absolutely noone that I spent much of the last couple months of 2014 immersed in the definitive 5-disc version of The Basement Tapes, nor should it surprise anyone that I’d been listening to nearly all of it for at least two decades as bootlegs, so I was pretty familiar with it beforehand.

But what might surprise people that despite all of the heavyweight songs recorded during those – well, you can’t really call them “sessions, can you? – months, titans like "This Wheels on Fire,” “I Shall Be Released” or “Tears of Rage” never really do it for me the way an obvious goof like “Tiny Montgomery” does.

As far as I’m concerned, “Tiny Montgomery” encapsulates the entire informal greatness of the Basement Tapes by the vocal call-and-response between Bob and The Band.

Bob:

Well you can tell ev’rybody
Down in ol’ Frisco
Tell ’em Tiny Montgomery says hello

The Band:

Hellooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I just picture of all of the guys in The Band, sitting in a room playing their instruments, looking at Bob and grinning while shouting “Hellooooooooooooooo!” into the nearest microphone. They’re probably stoned out of their minds, but it doesn’t matter, because the amount of fun they’re having is palpable.

And I think, “this is why music exists.” This is why people love to play music together. This is why I loved to play music: those moments where you look around a room and everybody is enjoying what they’re doing at that exact moment.

That’s what a bunch of the songs on The Basement Tapes capture, and I think that’s part of the reason for their appeal.

Official Video for “Tiny Montgomery” (from original Basement Tapes)

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #89: Alice Cooper – “School’s Out”

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Album: School’s Out.

Year: 1972.

Alice Cooper didn’t fuck around. He became one of the most unlikely artists to continually dent the Top 40 because he didn’t write pop songs, but rather pop anthems. And those anthems were nearly always aimed at teens, and always covered in hard-rock guitars.

And the greatest of them all is the eternal “School’s Out,” which is so awesome, it’s the only song in popular music history to successfully incorporate the dread kiddie choir. Singing a fucking schoolyard chant, of all things. 

It shouldn’t work, but over the big-ass bolero drumbeat and flash guitars that ace producer Bob Ezrin, it seems absolutely natural, and for the rest of time, kids of all ages will sing this:

Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes!

School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
My school’s been blown to pieces

As a guy who hated school until I got to college and met college girls, allow me to philosophize a bit about as to why this song still resonates with me. “School’s Out” isn’t just about the end of the school, but rather about the end of just any responsibility that you really don’t want to do.

It’s really about freedom. Or at least the illusion of freedom. Two times in the past decade, I’ve taken a vacation between leaving one job and starting another. And those were the sweetest vacations, because for those couple of weeks or so, I didn’t have to worry about what was going on at work.

I think that “School’s Out” taps into that feeling: school isn’t just out for summer, but it’s out forever; out completely; blown to pieces.

“School’s Out” performed on Top of the Pops in 1972

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #88: Bob Dylan & The Hawks – “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Manchester 1966)”

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Album: The Bootleg Series Vol 4
Year: 1966

On Highway 61 Revisited, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” was a bit of respite from the supersonic Old Testament testifying of the title track and the epic name-dropping of “Desolation Row.”  Infused with uncharacteristic melancholy, it kinda gets lost in the shuffle.

But not the live version. As far as I’m concerned, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” was the peak of every concert on the 1966 tour and this version is  definitely in my top 5 Dylan songs. All of that melancholy has been replaced by anger, as it now sounds like a trip through a harrowing hellscape.

[Read more…] about Certain Songs #88: Bob Dylan & The Hawks – “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Manchester 1966)”

Certain Songs #87: Bob Dylan & The Hawks – “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Manchester, 1966)”

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Album: The Bootleg Series Vol 4.

Year: 1966.

This rocked-up revision of a polite (he even gives it attribution before he sings it) pretty acoustic cover from Bob Dylan’s debut exemplifies everything great about the “Royal Albert Hall” concert. Every single song in this set is given a new lease on life.

Even discounting the music, the new lyrics in this version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” – and how he sings those lyrics – transform the lovelorn cast of the original into an anticipatory fucksong:

I’ll buy you rope and twine
Honey, just for you to climb
Yes, I’ll do anything in this god almighty world
If you just once drive me out of my mind!

But of course, you can’t discount the music. Not without taking your life into your hands, because with Mickey Jones crashing around his drum kit like he forgot where the brakes were and decided to speed into the spinout, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” will run you right off the road if you’re not paying attention.

Energized by those drums, or maybe just to protect themselves, Dylan and Hawks take turns trading off solos after each verse. Here goes Robbie Robertson. Here goes Dylan. Here goes Garth Hudson. Here goes Richard Manuel. All of them are just hanging for dear life and no doubt hoping that Rick Danko’s bass will provide the stability they need to make it to the end of the song.

The “Royal Albert Hall” concert came into my life via a cassette that my brother Joe had somehow gotten ahold of in either the late 70s or early 80s, and instantly became a favorite of mine. In case you couldn’t tell. 

At some point in the mid-1980s, I discovered that the Henry Madden Library – the big one, with all of the books and magazines and microfiche and shit – at Fresno State had a vinyl copy of the “Royal Albert Hall.” Why they had it, I don’t know. I do know that there were a couple of other boots there, including The Rolling Stones Live’R Than You’ll Ever Be. 

In any event, I recorded it to cassette a couple of times, and spent the next few years trying to figure out how to, uh, liberate it from its involuntary servitude and give it a new home in my vinyl collection. I never did, mostly because I couldn’t figure out a way to do it without getting caught. Nevertheless I often wondered how those boots ended up in the Library.  I’ve always assumed that some super-hipster hippie librarian was responsible.

One amazing minute of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” performed live in 1966

Official video for “Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Manchester 1966)”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever