You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

Stay right where you are.
Your bride's coming. Genghis Khan
Has other problems.

I don't know how to describe this song, which Dylan and the Band recorded during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions. Here are the lyrics, which are a masterpiece of sweet and weird at the same time. The lyrics will have to do.

Clouds so swift
Rain won’t lift
Gate won’t close
Railings froze
Get your mind off wintertime
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
Whoo-ee! Ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day
My bride’s gonna come
Oh, oh, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair!

I don’t care
How many letters they sent
Morning came and morning went
Pick up your money
And pack up your tent
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
Whoo-ee! Ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day
My bride’s gonna come
Oh, oh, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair!

Buy me a flute
And a gun that shoots
Tailgates and substitutes
Strap yourself
To the tree with roots
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
Whoo-ee! Ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day
My bride’s gonna come
Oh, oh, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair!

Genghis Khan
He could not keep
All his kings
Supplied with sleep
We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep
When we get up to it
Whoo-ee! Ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day
My bride’s gonna come
Oh, oh, are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair!

When I Paint My Masterpiece

A slog through Europe
Makes Bob think one day he'll quit
And stay home and paint.

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" comes from a 1971 single, and was popularized, with slightly altered lyrics, by the Band, which released it on their album "Cahoots." Dylan wrote both sets of lyrics. It comes from a time when Dylan wasn't writing much, and apparently has said he was suffering from writer's block or a lack of inspiration or something like that. It's a great song with a simple piano riff that propels it along. In short, he's taking a trip in Europe, dealing with the various things a star deals with while trying to find a path to painting (or writing?) his masterpiece.

1. Ancient Rome, climbing the Spanish Steps, seeing double on a cold, dark night. Back to the hotel room where he has a date with Botticelli's niece. She said she'd be there when he paints his masterpiece.
2. He's been stuck in the Coliseum, "dodging lions and wasting time." That, to me, sounds like a stand-in for life in the music business.
3. Traveling around the world in a dirty gondola, wouldn't it be something to be back in the USA - "the land of Coca-Cola."
4. FCO --> BRU. It was a bumpy plane ride. Lots of uniformed clergy and young girls pulling muscles. (So say the lyrics, but I would have thought they were pulling mussels given that they're in Brussels) Lots of people showed up to welcome him, including unruly members of the press. One day, this will all be different.

Watching the River Flow

Read by the river
Until you feel like writing.
It takes flow to flow.

"Watching the River Flow" appeared as a single in 1971, and was included on Dylan's "Greatest Hits, Volume II" album that same year. It's Dylan's description of writer's block, or a dearth of inspiration, or something like that. He wants to be back in the city with his lover, doing his thing, but until he's able to get the writing to flow, he's going to have to sit like Andrei Tarkovsky or some Buddhist monk and watch the river flow. That’s what flow motion is all about. 

- "What’s the matter with me, I don’t have much to say."
- "If I had wings and I could fly, I know where I would go. But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly, and watch the river flow."
- People everywhere are upset and disagreeing with one another. "Makes you wanna stop and read a book."
- The river keeps flowing regardless.

Wallflower

"May I ride you home?"
Wallflower asks wallflower
For a late-night dance.

"Wallflower" didn't make an appearance on a Bob Dylan album until 1991 when it was included in the rare/unreleased recordings in the first volume of the Bootleg Series. The song had been around for a while though, mainly because of its appearance on the 1973 album "Doug Sahm and Band" on which Dylan performed as a sideman. The song, which Dylan copyrighted in 1971, is a standard country and western love song.

1. Wallflower, let's dance. I'm sad and lonely like you. As a matter fact, I'm falling in love with you.
2. What are we both doing here? Let's dance.
3. I took one look at you and, regardless of the smoke in this joint, I knew that you would be the one for me.
4. The ending that most of us hope for in such circumstances: "Wallflower, wallflower, take a chance on me. Please let me ride you home."

Spanish Is the Loving Tongue

Gambler loves a girl,
Flees mexico after fight,
Leaves girl heartbroken.

This is an old cowboy song, or maybe just a western border song, based on a poem from 1907 by Charles Badger Clark. It's about a man who falls in love with a Spanish girl down in Sonora. The trouble with him is that he's not a terribly upstanding guy. He gets into a gambling fight and must flee for his liberty. She begs her not to go, but he goes anyway. He says he misses her, but in such a nonchalant "yeah I sort of think about her" way that he sounds like a cad. But I suspect that he was lying to himself. The poem and the song lyrics are below. Dylan recorded a version with a studio band in 1969 that wasn't intended to show up anywhere, but show up it did when Columbia released it and other songs of Dylan's on a 1973 album after he bolted for Asylum Records. Most people hate it, though I like it. There is an undeniably beautiful version of him performing it on solo piano. That version was released in 1971 as the flip side to the "Watching the River Flow" single.

Spanish is the loving tongue
Soft as music, light as spray
'Twas a girl I learned it from
Living down Sonora   way
I don't look much like a lover
Still I hear her loved words over
Mostly when I'm all a-lone!
Mi amor, Mi corazón
nights that I would ride           
She would listen for my spurs,              
Throw that big door open wide,              
those hours would go a-flyin!
All too soon I would hear her sighin'
In her sweet and quiet tone
"Mi amor, mi corazon."
Haven't seen, haven't seen her since that night,
I can't cross, I can't cross the line, you know.
They want me for a gambling fight
Like as not it's better so.
Still I've always  kind of missed her
Since that last sad night I kissed her
I broke her heart, left my own
"Adios, mi corazon."

Solo piano version. Ignore the bizarre video.

I Shall Be Released

A man in prison
Awaits release. His friend says
He was wrongly jailed.

Faith, imprisonment, deliverance. "I Shall Be Released" doesn't spell it out, but you get the impression that the singer is a prisoner. Whether he's literally behind bars or trapped here in life on earth is hard to say, and perhaps irrelevant. I would argue that the singer is in prison, but I usually search for the simplest meaning in a song. The more important theme here is the release from caring about circumstances, which I guess is in some sense a release from caring about life because, after all, it'll be over at some point and then there won't be any confining walls anymore.

1. They say ev’rything can be replaced
Yet ev’ry distance is not near

Maybe: Nothing is permanent, nothing is so precious as to be indispensable. Separately, the space that divides me from you, and ourselves from everything else in our minds and in the world, is insurmountable. No one knows what the other person has, thinks or feels. True communication is impossible, we're all trapped and so on.

2. So I remember ev’ry face
Of ev’ry man who put me here

I'm not sure why this is a consequence of the previous lines. I think this is more literal: You don't wind up in a prison of any kind if you're innocent unless other conspired against you. Framed, etc.

3. Chorus:
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released

I never thought much about why the light comes from the west to the east unless it means that all he sees is the reflection of the sun against the prison glass, indicating that his world is turned around and everything moves backwards because he's in the mirror image of a free world, ie, a bonded world. As for any day now/released, that could be release from bondage or release from life.

4. They say ev’ry man needs protection
They say ev’ry man must fall

You're nobody until somebody loves you. That's one way to put it. Or, everyone needs a rabbi. Even then, everybody gets what's coming to them, and everyone must take a fall at one time or another.

5. Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall

The reflection of himself as a free man, or perhaps his spirit, considering that it's high above the wall. Like, in heaven.

6. Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Crying out that he was framed

If you want to get deep about this line, you could say that the other guy is actually the narrator. Maybe this is the man who has been delivered of his earthly cares and concerns looking at the other side of himself, his reflection, who still longs for freedom, even though being on the outside again won't be different than being on the inside.

Maybe that's all nonsense. I'm not a professor, and I don't teach the meaning of Dylan songs to undergraduates, but it's all interesting and fun to think about.

Here are two versions. The first is from the Band's first album, "Music From Big Pink." It's my favorite version of the song. Rick Danko sings like an angel. The second version is one of the takes that Dylan and the Band performed during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions. It's available on volume 11 of the Bootleg Series. There is another version, performed by Bob Dylan and Happy Traum on the second of Dylan's greatest hits albums. I couldn't find a version online that I could post here.

George Jackson

Prison guards kill George.
They were afraid of his love.
Being black? No help.

"George Jackson" is one of the few Bob Dylan songs in his commercially available catalogue that is nearly impossible to find. He released the song as a single in November 1971, with a band version on the A side and an acoustic version on the B side. You can buy the single on vinyl through various online shops. The acoustic version also appears on the "Sidetracks" album that accompanies the complete Dylan album collection reissues series. The "big band" version is available on a compilation album called "Masterpieces," released in 1978, but only in Japan and Australia. It's possible to find copies in the USA, but usually at a prohibitively high price.

The song is a fictionalized account of the death of George Jackson, who was shot dead by guards as he tried to escape from San Quentin Prison in August of the same year. Jackson was a Black Panther leader after being introduced to Marxism and Maoism through a friend. He was sentenced to one year to life in 1961 for armed robbery ($70 from a gas station), and was 18 when he went to jail. He became a celebrated author, though prison authorities said he was a sociopath who had no interest in revolution. The tale grew darker from there, and you can read about it online. He died on Aug. 21 after securing a gun and attempting to break out of the prison. He and other inmates took guards hostage, and six were killed while several others were shot and stabbed, but survived. Jackson was shot in the prison yard.

Dylan's song does not mention these events, instead making a more general statement about long prison sentences disproportionately handed out to black men, and pointing to a system that dehumanizes people and leads to violent behavior.

I woke up this mornin’
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

He wouldn’t take shit from no one
He wouldn’t bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love.
Lord, Lord,
So they cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

(Note: in fairness to copyright holders, I wouldn't normally post the lyrics in their entirety. Given the lack of easy availability of the song for most music buyers today, I thought it would be OK in this case)

Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)

Bob warns his woman

About a flood and suggests

That they leave, or else.

It's hard to capture the spirit of "Crash on the Levee," one of Bob Dylan's stranger songs from the 1960s. Its main appearances in his catalogue are in the 1975 album "The Basement Tapes," which was taken from the 1967 Saugerties recordings, as well as a different arrangement added to the end of the 1971 album "Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II." It's a quirky song based, in part, on the "James Alley Blues" of many years earlier, particularly the line about "sugar for sugar and salt for salt, if you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault." That echo aside, it's one of the most creative and original blues songs that Dylan wrote, and is filled with the same kind of concrete-yet-mystical imagery that gives his music from the late 1960s such a rural, but spooky air. Generally, it goes like this:

1. Floodwaters will overflow the levee. Whatever you do, including rocking the joint and going to Williams Point, won't help much. If you do that, you'll lose your best friend and will have to find a new one. (I've always assumed that Bob's the best friend)

2. You can't "move" Bob, presumably change his mind about escaping the flood. If you go into the flood, it's your own fault. Cue the line about the best friend again.

3. You need to pack up and leave because this is going to be the meanest flood ever. It's king for king and queen for queen, as Bob notes. And then the best friend routine again.

Here's a chuggy version from a live performance with the Band. It's not a swampy-creepy as the album versions, but it's fun.