Ah, but I was so much older then.
I’m younger than that now.
My fav lyrics are all of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”- one stanza:
Now all the authorities
They just stand around and boast
How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms
Into leaving his post
And picking up Angel who
Just arrived here from the coast
Who looked so fine at first
But left looking just like a ghost
“The pump don’t work cuz the vandals took the handles.” Good? Bad? I don’t know, but it’s funny.
One of my faves is “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”.
Favorite: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” especially the lines that Qadgop the Mercotan quoted.
Also, in “It’s All Right, Ma” the line
Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
Now that’s choice. When Dylan toured with the Band in 1974, shortly before Nixon’s resignation, that line got huge cheers! I hope he’s reviving it now.
I didn’t listen to as much Dylan from the late '80s on, but “Blind Willie McTell” sure is one great song from his later period. I’ve never heard such a strong evocation of timeless Americana with such a pure distilllation of all the pain in it.
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem.”
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
“Gates of Eden” and “Chimes of Freedom” form a pair in my mind, maybe a trinity with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” of all that was best about visionary lyrics in the Sixties.
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Of war and peace the truth just twists
Damn, you can sure say that again.
P.S. Money doesn’t talk, it swears.
Worst? That’s easy, the hardcore Christian phase. “When You Gonna Wake Up” was strident a call to the Reagan conservatives to undo the social reforms of the '60s. Bob Roberts was not parody, Dylan was already making himself into a Bob Roberts when Reagan was getting elected. The album Saved was the most holy-roller Dylan ever got, unrelieved by even a touch of humor or irony. I’m so glad he got over that. Eventually, he actually did make one really good Christian song, “Every Grain of Sand,” which was soft and reflective instead of fundamentalist and aggressive.
The opening line has to be one of the worst:
Crimson flames tied through my ears…
Best:
They say I shot a man named Gray, and took his wife to Italy;
She inherited a million bucks, and when she died, it came to me.
I can’t help it if I’m lucky.
Not his greatest and not his worst, but in “Thunder on the Mountain” from the new album, there’s the line:
*Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages *
It’s a terrible rhyme. You can hear in his voice that he knows it’s a terrible rhyme. AND THAT’S WHAT MAKES IT GREAT!!!
Plus, he namechecks Alicia Keys in the same song. I’ll be she was totally blown away when she heard that.
:smack: Of course, that’s “My Back Pages,” not “Chimes of Freedom.” I knew that. I was just testing ya. Really.
I have never understood this song. The answer is blowing in the wind? I bought BD’s iTunes Essentials 1, but I have no idea what this means. It seems to be considered to be so deep by Boomers, but I’ve never heard an explanation about how the answer is in the wind.
My two favorites:
“And her I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.”
–Memphis Blues Again
"Yes I received your letter yesterday,
About the time the doorknob broke,
When you asked me how I was doing;
Is that some kind of joke?
–Desolation Row
He’s done some real crap, but mostly I don’t remember it. Why should I, when he’s written so much that was magnificent?
Some of my faves are from ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’
“Up on housin’ project hill
It’s either fortune or fame
You must pick one or the other
Tho neither of them are to be what they claim
If you’re lookin’ to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don’t need you
An’ man they expect the same.”
and also from ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’
"You raise up your head
And you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says
“It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?”
And somebody else says, “Where what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?"
I also found the Alicia Keys reference jarring the first time I heard the song.
I don’t like it at all. It seems totally forced.
The worst Dylan line I’ve heard comes from Thin Man:
There ain’t enough :rolleyes: in the world.
There’s just too much great Dylan for me to have a favorite, but this verse from “Desolation Row” has always knocked me out—especially the first two lines.
Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis-style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You Belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row
It’s not just the lyrics that make it great, it’s the way Dylan sings them. It ain’t a pretty voice, but it’s devastatingly effective when he’s on. Few things make me roll my eyes as quickly as hearing someone say, “I like his lyrics, but I don’t like his singing.” OK, fine. But people who say that also tend to find folks like Charlie Patton or Son House or the Carter Family or Bill Monroe unlisteneable. And, well, those aren’t folks with whom I’m likely to talk about music much.
Our Prime Minister, John Howard - that global reference point for coolness - is on record as liking Bob Dylan’s music, except for the lyrics.
Boggle at will.
Choosing a favorite is impossible, but two that come to mind are:
From the recent “High Water (For Charley Patton)”:
High water risin’, six inches ‘bove my head
Coffins dropping in the streets like balloons made outa lead
Water pouring into Vicksburg, don’t know what I’m gonna do
“Don’t reach out for me,” she said, "can’t you see I’m drownin’ too?"
It’s tough out there
High water everywhere …
From “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a masterpiece:
I’m a’thinkin’ and a’wonderin’, walkin’ down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s alright
As for worst, there are many contenders even without his Christian phase in the mix. I for one always hated the forced, anticlimactic end of “Motorpsycho Nightmare”:
Without freedom of speech
I might be in the swamp
It’s worse in context.
'Struth. A whole 'nother thread could be devoted to Dylan’s singing, lines that are perfect not just because the lyric is great (assuming it even is) but because of that Magic Dylan Thing™ he does with it. The way he hits the first line of “Visions of Johanna” in the live version on Biograph gives me the shivers.
Bob is my hero. I’ll grant that he gave us a lot of crap. He also gave us every word of “Idiot Wind,” “Hurricane’” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” These are songs that only get better each time you hear them.
Then we get “My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost
He’s always off somewhere when I need him most.” from Abandoned Love. What a quick sysnopsis for being left behind.
Or “The way is long but the end is near
Already the fiesta has begun.
The face of God will appear
With His serpent eyes of obsidian.” from Romance in Durango. He takes us to an older, scarier god. This is not the god of the Christian Bible, but a harder maybe Aztec god. And you feel Him looking at you. I get chills each time I hear that line.
He has been covered by every artist from A to Z. There is a site that tracks covers, http://www.baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/dylancov/main that recognizes almost 17,000 covers of Dylan’s songs. That, to me, indicates a large measure of his popularity and his universal appeal.
I was trying to think of what my least favorite of his lyrics would be, and I think it’s probably what Marley23 quoted from Ballad of a Thin Man. I also don’t really like the “The sun isn’t yellow, it’s chicken!” line from “Tombstone Blues”.
As for lyrics I do like, they’ve mostly been mentioned. Mr. Tambourine Man, A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, Chimes of Freedom are great. I like Masters of War and his more political stuff too. And I really like the lyrics to Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 and his delivery.
Overall, I’m really not as familiar with his music as I should be.
I have three actual albums of his, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Of those, I think I like Blonde on Blonde the best in terms of music. I also have the soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese documentary on him that came out about a year ago, and I like the first disc better. I love the last six songs on there, and I think I prefer those versions to the album ones I’ve heard.
I’m not a big fan of the electric blues type music, so the songs of his like that are the ones I like the least.
Oh my God, what might have been. Infidels with “Blind Willie McTell” and “Foot of Pride” instead of those two would have been one of the greatest albums ever made. (And I think Blood on the Tracks is already one of the greatest albums ever made, but how much better would it have been with “Call Letter Blues” instead of “Meet Me In the Morning”?)
He’s such a frustrating artist, I think, because he’s just that good yet could have been just that much better, and you don’t know what to make of it.
Thanks for reminding me how much I disliked those turkeys from Infidels. It seemed like an unusually cranky year for Dylan. In the Rolling Stone interview with the release of that album, he said “Women run everything. They always have.” Excuse me? That was a WTF moment all right.
I thought Dylan’s third Christian album, Shot of Love in 1981, had lots of good moments compared to the two that went before. It was a more easygoing version of Christianity. I decided I liked that album mainly on the strength of “Lenny Bruce.” Lots of fundamentalist Christians would probably have fits if they knew what he was singing in support of. 
“Every Grain of Sand” is so quiet and reflective, and not aggressively Christian, that it holds a more universal spiritual appeal. That was a relief after the previous two albums.
By contrast, “Infidels,” instead of warm fuzzies, has more of the reactionary attitudes like a hangover from the fundie period. The inclusion of “Blind Willie” would have totally changed the character of the whole album. But I liked how in the song “License to Kill” he has a woman speaking in the refrain, telling her point of view.
“Licence to Kill” seems to be one of those songs it’s fashionable to hate, but I quite like it too. However -
“Man has invented his doom
first step was touching the moon”
has to be one of his barmiest lines ever.
“Something There is About You” from “Planet Waves”, I think, is a masterful lyric which is often overlooked.
mm