For week two of the Bob Dylan Appreciation Society (read and listen to Part one here), I would like to steer your attention towards a specific side of the man’s writing. Love songs and relationship songs. This is an element to his work in which he has excelled and in fact, arguably his most celebrated music has been meditating on this subject. I say this simply because it is not where he broke through, in the early sixties Dylan was the topical song protest guy so much so that when love and other relating matters began to dominate his songs, he had to give his audience a little heads up by naming the album ‘Another Side Of Bob Dylan’. It actually did not need to be considered such a departure, his second album featured at least three songs in this vein, albeit fairly overshadowed by some of the protest songs that would cement his place in that particular canon.
His third LP was similarly packed with topical concerns but that too contained a notable composition that revealed a flair for more emotional content. ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ is one of the earliest corkscrews to the heart of his breakthrough years, a yearning song in which a narrator ends with the hollowest of mementoes from a true love whose boot heels have gone permanently a-wandering. Having created something with such refined brush strokes as this, it should have been crystal clear that the man would continue to write about human relations, to write about love from all angles and to sing to the residue of lost romance with a poetic touch that is of a fine, fine grain.
The side of Dylan’s relationship writing that has easily been celebrated most is the one that deals with hurt and pain. ‘Blood On The Tracks’ is the benchmark when it comes to divorce albums, so much so that it’s almost too obvious to focus on it. But you cannot put together an appreciation of Bob’s visions on the subject and not dip into the sudden surge of poetic, free form, impressionist work he delivered on heartbreak and love in 1974. ‘Simple Twist Of Fate’ candidly recalls the minutiae of circumstances that ignited a former romance; by the end, the narrator dreams that the same twist could happen all over again. As a swan song to an affair, it is certainly powerful and it is also interesting to note that, contrary to the assumption that the album mainly addresses the unravelling of his marriage to Sara, this one is generally taken by Dylan-watchers to be about his first love, the co-cover star of ‘Freewheeling Bob Dylan’, Suze Rotolo. In concert in 1981 the line “I remember Suze and the way she talked” briefly featured and if this really was a song for Suze, it is a good deal nicer than ‘Ballad In Plain D’ which first appeared in 1964 and left no room for debate as to its subject matter.
Dylan was known in the mid-sixties for his finger-pointing songs. Self-styled truth attack numbers were a big part of his repertoire at the time but rarely has he ever been so specific in his target than heard here. As strong a ballad as it is, it still makes for an uncomfortable listen in the direct, brutal manner it takes down Suze’s older sister and mother, both of whom are firmly blamed in the lyric for snuffing Suze’s creative flame. Dylan lays it on thick, in a way that we do not usually see from him, calling his ex the “would be dream lover of my lifetime”. By contrast, the closest ‘Blood On The Tracks’ came to attacking Sara (and it is worth remembering the couple were actually still together for three years after the release, so it is hardly an autobiography account of final separation) is on ‘Idiot Wind’. Here though the assault is a little more palatable because Dylan directs the critique at himself too, singing “we’re idiots babe”. If it is un-furnished real-life, real-time declarations you want from the mid-seventies you’d be better off looking at ‘Wedding Song’ from ‘Planet Waves’ and ‘Sara’ from the ‘Desire’ LP. Both of these seem like blatant exercises in marital repair, he even is reported to have brought Sara into the studio for the recording of the latter tune and sung his vocal straight to her.
The version of ‘Idiot Wind’ I have picked for this playlist is the gentler acoustic one from the Bootleg series. I have also included the Bootleg series take of ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ even though I also picked that track on Volume 1; I just think it is such a masterwork in the Dylan relationship catalogue it entirely merits both versions being featured and I genuinely cannot pick a favourite; they are both such strong performances bringing out wholly different nuances within the song. So fertile was that mid-seventies period that even the originally unreleased offcuts from the sessions are now regarded as essential works. ‘Call Letter Blues’ with its anxiety at his former partner’s absence and ‘Up To Me’ with its relentless procession of bad turns and misfortunes are in no way second-rate works, they just simply befell the atypical Dylan twist of fate that saw them not make the original album.
There are more too in this playlist, plough the entire back catalogue and the unearthing of buried gems becomes a frequent occurrence. ‘Tell Me’ did not make it onto the ‘Infidels’ album but heard here it’s clearly one of Bobs greatest cuts of the 1980s, a really lush plea for communication to a would-be lover. How about ‘Wallflower’, a country waltz that is crying out for a Willie Nelson cover? Gorgeous it is too and indeed we should not ignore that when Dylan wrote about love and relationships in his prolific early years, it was not all hurt and vitriol. Far from it, he was a romantic poet of the first degree on odes such as ‘She Belongs To Me’ and ‘Love Minus Zero’ although, as is so often the case, everything is far from clear cut. I still cannot work out if it is a good or bad thing that his love is outside the window, like a raven with a broken wing in the latter song, as beguiling an image as that is. Maybe she just wants to hear the lonesome sparrow sing?
Perhaps his best-known love song from the later years period (possibly even his best-known song for some music fans) is ‘To Make You Feel My Love’, taken into the mainstream of course by Adele. It is an interesting one for me because, I have too often heard some Dylan fans say that it is a little too obvious, that there is maybe too much schmaltz. As always with Dylan though, there is a lot more than meets the eye. Lift the lid on that alleged schmaltz and you find whole other levels. I feel this because when the song was first heard back in 1997 it was via Billy Joel covering it on one of his compilations. He got his release before Bob’s own version and Dylan actually made some approving comments about the rendition, claiming Billy had found something in the song that the writer himself had not. If you listen to that cover version, you hear a straight-ahead love song. It is a declaration, something that would be totally appropriate as the first dance at a wedding. Play Dylan’s versions in that scenario and you will hear mutterings of “I’ll give it three months”!
You see, I do not think that, in the context of the ‘Time Out Of Mind’ album, that ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ is romantic and flowery at all. Quite the opposite, for my money this is a howl of despair into the abyss. He seems to be saying there is nothing he would not do to get that feeling not merely reciprocated but maybe actually recognised, to be seen and yet he has been hitting a brick wall for too long. He sounds desperate and the object of his feelings is in another place altogether, the last thing they are feeling is any love. For me, that track hurts and you have to look at the whole album for further proof of this, it is a record in which the narrator focuses all his energies on finding true love, a blissful union before his time runs out and even though he had so nearly found it, he has let it slip through his fingers. The album sets it out from the start, he is ‘Love Sick’ and the person who left him in that state he wishes he had never met and is trying to forget. The heaven he is trying to reach before the door is shut is just that, the utopia of a happy domestic relationship.
Even the song that many hold up as exhibit ‘A’ in the theory that ‘Time Out Of Mind’ is all about mortality, the classic ‘Not Dark Yet’, sings the lines “she wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind, she put down in writing what was in her mind”. Obviously, it is true that ageing and the passing of time are hot topics on this record, but they are shot through a prism of love and failed relationship writing which I have felt for a long time is on a par with ‘Blood On The Tracks’. Do you see what happened there? Writing about one song opened up a whole avenue of debate and theorising in which I offered opinions that will undoubtedly be thrown aside by the next listener. There is no right and wrong with this stream, you let the river flow and see what it brings you on any given day. The one sure thing to remember when you listen to these songs though is this, they will surely pluck your heartstrings to some degree. Be it with joy or pain, few artists have written about love with so much understanding of the human condition.