When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky

You'll need him at dusk.
Until then, you'll be mostly
Wasting all your time.

Among Dylan fans and people who know the 1985 album "Empire Burlesque," this song has been subject to some mockery for its dance club style thanks to producer Arthur Baker. It's true that the style doesn't fit the song, and it's generally true that the style doesn't fit Dylan at all. But even in an alternate arrangement released on the Bootleg Series, I find this song a little too diffuse to enjoy. It's a variation on the theme of Dylan addressing a former lover for whom he still has feelings, but he's been burned enough to know better that the person he's missing has made him feel bad too. He meanwhile predicts that all sorts of things will happen when the night comes, most of them involving her coming around to him in some way, whether he’s willing to give or not.

1. He's returning. You have smoke in your eye because you've been burning his letters.
2. He might love you or you might love him. Doesn't matter.
3. You're hurting, but you managed to escape disaster.
4. He doesn't have all the answers. He wouldn't lie to you and say he did.
5. He thinks you've been seeing somebody, though you've not said so.
6. Some people have been victims of darkness and the lust for money. Not us.
7. He sees his reflection in your tears. He doesn't want to be starving for affection, nor does he want to drown in someone else's wine.
8. He'll always remember "that icy wind that’s howling in your eye." You might find him in the wasteland of your mind.
9. He wrote you a letter as you were "gambling" for support. As we know, it was cold that day so you burned the letter. He has a better memory these days so he'll remember this about you.
10. He asks for freedom and you'll give it. If not, he'll take it anyway.

Radio-edit, severely truncated from the album version:

Alternate version:

Up to Me

Why I'm single now:
True to me or true to you?
I made a hard choice.

"Up to Me" is undoubtedly an achievement, but Bob Dylan left it off the 1975 album "Blood on the Tracks," an album that underwent significant revision at Dylan's behest just before its release. Given the themes of abandonment and divorce, and the broken hearts beating at the center, it's not surprising that Dylan's brother (so they say), after hearing some of the stark songs that he recorded in New York City, suggested that he lighten up the tone if he wanted to sell some records. "Up to Me" didn't make it at all. While it's a significant, lovely piece of work, it's full of words. I know that this should be a good thing, and on a song like "Idiot Wind," the words are on fire and they move the song along. On this one, they are more static. There are events unspoken, but you get the impression that this event has set everybody on a solo course. Bad things happen to good people, love fades, the singer is forced to accept responsibility that he seems to feel is more than his share. You can hear the song on the 1985 compilation "Biograph."

It was up to him -- a list of the end of each verse:
I know you’re long gone, I guess it must be up to me
Someone had to reach for the risin’ star, I guess it was up to me
Somebody’s got to find your trail, I guess it must be up to me
Somebody had to unlock your heart, he said it was up to me
When the dawn came over the river bridge, I knew it was up to me
You looked a little burned out, my friend, I thought it might be up to me
But she ain’t a-gonna make me move, I guess it must be up to me
Somebody’s got to tell the tale, I guess it must be up to me
But you ain’t a-gonna cross the line, I guess it must be up to me
Somebody’s got to cry some tears, I guess it must be up to me
One of us has got to hit the road, I guess it must be up to me
No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me

Other events:
1. Bad to worse. Death on the trail. Someone has to say what they want in this thing of ours. Guess it's gonna be me.
2. I would have died if I'd lived my life the way other people wanted me to live it.
3. I smiled once in 14 months and it was an accident. Train's leaving as the orchids bloom. My one good shirt smells like perfume. I'm looking for you.
4. You betrayed me with your touch. I unlocked your heart.
5. I watched you go hang out with a bunch of men all night long.
6. When I worked in the Post Office, I took your picture down from the wall near my cage to protect your identity. (Sounds like a general judgment on his career and ability to manage family life until that time.)
7. It's amazing how much in love you can fall with someone. You must resist it.
8. The Sermon on the Mount sure is complicated. So is biting off more than you can chew.
9. Side story: Dupree comes to the Thunderbird Cafe, pimping. Crystal wants to talk to him. I can't bear it.
10. I left a note for Estelle. You thought there was something going on there, but there wasn't.
11. Life's a stage and a dream. Boys, that woman I'm with, I'm not really with. Try your luck.
12. We might be through, but remember that song I played for you? Only I could play it.

Trust Yourself

Don't trust me, trust you.
Don't trust beauty or "the truth."
Don't trust. Period.

After three years of sung lectures about getting right with God and Jesus to avoid eternal damnation, Bob Dylan used the "Empire Burlesque" album in 1985 to tell people two things:
- Trust yourself
- Don't trust anyone, including me.

Trusting oneself:
- Do what you know best
- Don't be second guessed
- Beauty turns to rust
- Find your own path to prove true in the end
- Find the path without is and when
- Don't trust me to show it to you. Truth might be ashes and dust.
- You're on your own, beset by wolves in thieves.
- Don't hope for ungodly men to save you.
- Don't be a slave to someone else's beliefs.
- "You won't be disappointed when vain people let you down."
- Don't look for answers that don't exist.
- "Don't trust me to show you love when my love may be only lust. If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself."

Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)

Looking for my love,
I stumble on a film noir
And try to escape.

This opening song from 1985's "Empire Burlesque" album is one of my real Dylan soft spots. It's a strange song about strange goings-on surrounding a woman with whom the singer is no longer involved. It's a reworking of a 1983 song that he recorded called "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart," and as essayist Jonathan Lethem points, out, it replaces a number of the more heartfelt lines with hardboiled lines from Humphrey Bogart movies as well as some other films, including one featuring Gary Cooper. I don't know why he did it, and many people say that it doesn't work. I think it does. It works even better when you watch the MTV video for the song. It takes place in Tokyo, I think, where Dylan is facing trouble with the police over a possible murder, three Japanese girls sing karaoke in a bar with Dylan's voice emanating from their mouths, an American woman sings in a different bar, and a fight between some folks on a Japan street breaks out. It makes no sense that I can see, but it's fun.

Notable lines from the song:
- "Well I had to move fast, and I couldn't with you around my neck. I said I'd send for you and I did. What did you expect?"
- "I'll go along with the charade until I can think my way out." (From a "Star Trek" episode)
- "There's something I've got to do tonight, You go inside and stay warm."
- "I must be guilty of something, You just whisper it in my ear."
- "Madame Butterfly, she lulled me to sleep, in a town without pity where the water runs deep. She said, "Be easy, baby, there ain't nothing worth' stealin' here."
- "I can't figure out whether I'm too good for you or you're too good for me."
- "What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big."
- "Never could learn to drink that blood and call it wine. Never could learn to hold you, love, and call you mine." (That blood/wine line comes from Dylan's own song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," in which he notes that Mona tells him to stay away from railroad brakemen because they'll just drink up your blood like wine."

Something's Burning, Baby

I suspect we're through.
Having said that, I'm still here
If you should want me.

"Something's Burning Baby" comes from the 1985 album "Empire Burlesque," the one where producer Arthur Baker tried to make the 44-year-old Bob Dylan sound like someone half his age by giving him contemporary production and arrangements. It didn't work for most people, and this is one of those songs that slipped out of view shortly after it appeared. It's not bad.

What's burning:
- Something's burning, could it be that that is smoke in her hair? Is she still his friend? Or is the love she has for him turning blind?
- He's looking for her missing file. He wants to know what's going on with her. Why is the love light no longer in her eyes?
- Is he no longer part of her plan? What happened? Something clearly has changed.
- He thinks another guy is on her mind.
- This stage of their relationship: charity is supposed to cover up sins. But where is she? And why does she just stare into the distance?
- She can't live by bread alone or roll back the stone from the tomb all by herself.
- She shouldn't just fade away without comment.
- She's giving him the Mexico City blues.
- When she's ready to reconsider, if she's ready to reconsider, she should call him. "I believe in the impossible, you know that I do."

Seeing the Real You at Last

Bob has had enough.
A little trouble is fine
But you were too much.

If there's one thing we know about the time that Bob Dylan recorded "Empire Burlesque," his contribution to listeners in 1985, he seems to have spent plenty of it watching movies. "Seeing the Real You at Last," which is the second song on the album, is made up of a whole bunch of movie lines. The trouble is, I don't remember which films they are. I'm pretty sure Humphrey Bogart figures in here somewhere. As for the song, I suppose that it could be about a woman, but it could just as easily be about God and religion. This album was his second since the end of his three-album born-again streak, and in some songs from the time, I hear what sounds like a more skeptical, disappointed attitude toward God and the promise of salvation:

1. The rain didn't cool things down. You haven't changed your mind, and you probably won't.
2. I'm keeping myself busy, and I'm glad that this whole affair is over and I'm seeing the real you at last.
3. I risked everything for you and rised above some unfortunate circumstances too.
4. I went through long and sleepless nights for you, but only now am I seeing who you really are.
5. Hungry/irritable. It used to be that anything that was wrong with me was something that you could fix.
6. I strapped myself to the mast and sailed through a storm for you, just like Ulysses.
7. You used to seem flawless, and you could ride like Annie Oakley and shoot like Belle Starr.
8. A little trouble is to be expected, but I'm past all that now that II'm seeing the real you.
9. I know I have troubles, but I think you have troubles too.
10. "Whatever you gonna do, please do it fast, I'm still trying to get used to seeing the real you at last."

Nice performance from Farm Aid, 1986:

Percy's Song

Bob implores the judge
Who sentenced his guilty friend.
The judge says, "Tough shit."

"Percy's Song" is about a falsely accused reprobate who's a friend of the singer. The singer is sure that Percy did not commit the manslaughter that he's been accused of, and implores the judge not to sentence poor Percy to 99 years in prison. The judge is having none of it, and leaves the singer to muse about the cruel rain and the wind, and to sing, throughout each verse, "Turn, turn, turn again... Turn, turn to the rain and the wind."

Summary:
- Bad news: one of your friends is in big trouble
- He's been sentenced to life in Joliet prison
- The charge is manslaughter "in the highest degree."
- You wrote and rehearsed it with the intention of visiting the judge of Wednesday to plead Percy's case.
- You arrive
- You ask the judge to tell him the story of what transpired.
- Percy was driving when his car crashed, killing the four people in the car with him.
- But he wouldn't do something like that! you say.
- Get out of my office. We had a witness.
- But 99 years? That's too much! you say
- He's not a criminal, you say. It could have happened to anyone, you say.
- Get out of my office, please, the judge says.
- You walk down the courthouse stairs and hear the judge slam the door.
- You play your guitar and muse on cruel fate.

The song was recorded in 1963, but was not released until it appeared on the "Biograph" compilation in 1985.

Never Gonna Be the Same Again

Woman changes man,
And he stays changed even when
She breaks up with him.

"Never Gonna Be the Same Again" is an unfairly ignored song on a throwaway album, "Empire Burlesque" from 1985. Producer Arthur Baker was seeking a big, electric '80s sound to make Dylan sound more modern for contemporary audiences and hopefully the resulting album sales. It didn't work out that way, and people generally don't like most of the songs from this period. This song is one of my favorites from that period, though. The backup singers add serious punch, particularly at the fade as they and Dylan improvise on the vocals -- "You're too hot, baby," "Come on, darlin'" etc. It fairly swings as it makes it exit. The lyrics are so so, but what can you do...

As for the haiku, there's no point at which Dylan says that they're not together anymore. He even says "Now you're here beside me, baby... And every time you get this close, it makes me want to scream." Hideous lyric, but the implication is that she's there. Same for "You give me something to think about, baby, every time I see you. Don't worry, baby, I don't mind leaving, I'd just like it to be my idea." But he consistently sings about other things in the past tense: "You touched me," "Sorry if I hurt you baby," "But you meant more than everything," "You taught me how to love you," "Now I can't go back to what was, baby, I can't unring the bell," "You took my reality and cast it to the wind..." To me, that implies that he's been forever changed, even though she might be gone. And that's my argument for the haiku, probably more than it deserves.

Mixed-Up Confusion

Mixed up and confused
Man keeps walking and searching
For mixed-up women.

"Mixed-Up Confusion" is Bob Dylan's first single, issued on the other side of the song "Corrina, Corrina." These two were the only songs from the sessions for the 1963 album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" that were released with electric instruments backing him. The song feels like a conscious attempt at an easy-going hit single, though it didn't perform that way. The song is a compact lament:

1. I have mixed up confusion. It's killing me. It's hard to please so many people.
2. I'm walking around with my hat in my hand looking for a woman who's as mixed up as I am.
3. I have lots of questions and a fever. I don't know whom to ask for answers.
4. I'm still walking. Every time I see my reflection, "I’m hung over, hung down, hung up!"

The first commercially available version of the song after the single appeared was on the "Biograph" compilation in 1985. When the first volume of the "50th Anniversary Collection" came out, a copyright extension collection of songs from 1962, it included seven of the 11 takes of the song that Bob performed. They're all slightly different. I have included three takes here.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

Though your song be good,
Nature can do it better,
Be quiet; listen

"Lay Down Your Weary Tune" isn't like any other Bob Dylan song, at least the way I hear it. The song was recorded in 1963 for the album "The Times They Are a-Changin'," but was left off the cut. It appears on the 1985 box set compilation "Biograph." I read on Wikipedia that Dylan said he was trying to capture the feeling of a Scottish ballad that he heard on an old 78-rpm record. I can see that. Rather than striving for the surreal, he pursues a sound of natural beauty, to use Neil Young's term from the "Harvest Moon" album, that he tries to convey with guitar and voice. I hear the sound of waterfalls and wind in the trees, waves on the beach and the rhythms of the universe, especially in Dylan's use of alliteration and the pairing of words that don't necessarily go together -- the "strength of strings," for example. Have a look. It makes me think a little of William Wordsworth, or even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Hiawatha on the Gitche Gumee:

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself ’neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum
(This verse forms a chorus after each of the next verses)

Struck by the sounds before the sun
I knew the night had gone
The morning breeze like a bugle blew
Against the drums of dawn

The ocean wild like an organ played
The seaweed’s wove its strands
The crashin’ waves like cymbals clashed
Against the rocks and sands

I stood unwound beneath the skies
And clouds unbound by laws
The cryin’ rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause

The last of leaves fell from the trees
And clung to a new love’s breast
The branches bare like a banjo played
To the winds that listened best

Jet Pilot

Jet pilot got the
Attention of the boys, but
She's really a man.

Forty-nine seconds of silly from sessions in 1965, later released on the "Biograph" collection.

Well, she's got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down.
All the bombardiers are trying to force her out of town.
She's five feet nine and she carries a monkey wrench.
She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch.
She got all the downtown boys, all at her command
But you've got to watch her closely 'cause she ain't no woman
She's a man.

I Wanna Be Your Lover

Rasputin and friends
Get up to no good. Not Bob,
He wants your loving.

Very little of this 1965 song, which went unreleased until 1985, matters. The key is the chorus:

I wanna be your lover, baby, I wanna be your man
I wanna be your lover, baby
I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yours

It's a riff on the Beatles song "I Wanna Be Your Man."

The rest is fake symbolism:

1. Rainman/magic wand.
2. Judge: "Mona can't have no bond." (She cries, rainman leaves as Wolfman)
3. Undertaker/midnight suit addresses masked man: "ain't you cute?"
4. Masked man feels the same way about the undertaker.
5. Jumpin' Judy reaches maximum altitude.
6. Rasputin touches her head and dies.
7. Pheadra has a looking glass. She faints on the grass because she's obvious (and you are not)

I'll Remember You

He'll remember her
Even though she left because
He did things his way.

"I'll Remember You" is probably on the set list of "greatest slow dance songs" maintained by somebody about my age who surely must have encountered it during a high school gym dance. It appeared on the 1985 album "Empire Burlesque," complete with big Arthur Baker production, and dropped out of sight after that. Its only other appearance that I know of on any album associated with Dylan is the soundtrack of the film "Masked and Anonymous," where Dylan performed it with a gentler band and a gentler production hand.

Either way, there's not much to recommend the song other than its sweet sentiment. The lyrics are a reach.

Samples:

"I’ll remember you
When I’ve forgotten all the rest
You to me were true
You to me were the best"

"When the roses fade
And I’m in the shade
I’ll remember you"

"Didn’t I sleep, didn’t I weep beside you
With the rain blowing in your hair?"

"I’ll remember you
When the wind blows through the piney wood
It was you who came right through
It was you who understood"

The line that made the haiku for me was this one:

"Though I’d never say
That I done it the way
That you’d have liked me to
In the end
My dear sweet friend
I’ll remember you."

I'll Keep It With Mine

You have many fans
Eager to earn your favors.
Ignore them, choose me.

"I'll Keep It With Mine" saw its first release on a Judy Collins single in 1965. I first heard it on Nico's debut solo album in 1967. She recorded the song after her now legendary appearance on the first Velvet Underground record, and songs like this were intended to cast her as a Germanic folk chanteuse. It worked, sort of, though nobody could keep Nico on the rails, and by the time she recorded her next album, "The Marble Index," she was charting a course for waters that were too dark for most other musicians to follow. 

Dylan wrote the song in 1964 as a demo for the Witmark company. You can find that version on the ninth volume of the Bootleg Series. He also tried recording it for the 1965 album "Bringing It Back Home." That version is available on the "Biograph" box set from 1985. A version for the "Blonde on Blonde" album in 1966 appeared on volume 1 of the Bootleg series in 1991. There are other versions too, but apparently don't circulate even among obsessives. I could be wrong about this, as I have found one instrumental version from 1966, pasted below.

As for the song, which is Bob lecturing a woman on what's good for her:
- She searches for what's not lost.
- He notes people will help her and be kind, but he might be able to save her some time by being her main man.
- He might seem odd to you because he loves you for what you're not.
- Again, people MIGHT try to help you, but he's a better bet for the job.
- Separately, there's a train leaving at 10:30, but it will be back tomorrow. The conductor's sick of the reputation.

Emotionally Yours

I’m unraveling
While traveling, but am yours
Emotionally.

Why should it be hard to write a haiku for a simple love song? Maybe simple love songs are empirical statements from the start. I gave it a try with this 1985 hit from the "Empire Burlesque" album. My ingredients, by verse:

1. Find me remind me (my origins)

2. Show me you know me (tell me you're the one, regardless of the truth)

3. I'm learning you're yearning (see behind closed doors, emotionally yours)

4. Rock me lock me (in your heart's shadows)

5. Teach me reach me (start playing the music)

6. I might be making this up (this thing about living for you)

7. You wiped my entire hard drive when we met. You re-imaged my computer.

8. This might be crazy.

9. Shake me take me (That's all I need)

10. Hold me help me (I have arms, they're wide open)

11. Unraveling traveling (even when traveling overseas)

12. Emotionally yours

Dark Eyes

Life goes on outside

While Bob thinks about the dead

And distressed people.

"Dark Eyes" is one of the most perplexing songs that Bob Dylan has written, one that I find as resistant to analysis and scrutiny as a carbon cube or some kind of diamond. You can see through it from one side to the other, but it gives up absolutely nothing. It's all the more interesting for being the only "unproduced" song on the 1985 album "Empire Burlesque." A short closer to an album full of synthesizers, drums, overdubs and big '80s-style-sounding rock bands, "Dark Eyes" is spare and flat, just Dylan with his guitar and harmonica. He has told stories about being inspired to write the song by seeing a strung-out young woman in a hotel hallway in the middle of the night, and I suppose that that's as good a starting point as any, but the song in four short verses spins through a universe of its own. I have driven trucks through this song and come out just fine on the other end, but always without a sense of what I was driving through. The images are brilliant and real, and most of you will understand every sentiment, but that doesn't solve the riddle of this song. I don't even know what the riddle is.

1. Gentlemen talking, moon on the riverside, they're drinking but it's time for me to leave. He lives in a world where life and death are memorized, the earth is strung with lover's pearls and he sees dark eyes.

2. Cock crows, soldier prays at dawn, mother misses a child gone wandering, while "nature's beast" fears the rise of the dead who march to a drumbeat.

3. He hears that revenge is sweet, and maybe that's true, but he doesn't believe it because there game means "beauty goes unrecognized."

4. French girl in paradise, drunkard at the wheel. Hunger pays a heavy price to falling gods of speed and steel. Time short, days sweet, passion rules the arrow that flies (Where did he get some a great line? It should be a homily cross-stitched into framed pictures on the walls of farmhouses, next to the memento mori of the cuckoo clock and the tired floral wallpaper).

Clean-Cut Kid

Vietnam victim

Leaves the service. Once sweet,

He's now a killer.

This up-tempo song from the 1985 album "Empire Burlesque" is one of Bob Dylan's attempts at social commentary on the scars of war that veterans suffer and how some Vietnam veterans in particular couldn't cope with life after the fighting in the 1970s and 1980s. From being raised in the Eisenhower-era security blanket of American supremacy and, in its way, post-war innocence, then to the jungle, then back into society without much more than a thank you very much, and so on and so on, "Clean-Cut Kid" is part of the narrative of films and art at the time that blamed the U.S. government and society for failing to support its troops. I'm thinking of movies like "The Deer Hunter," "Coming Home," "Cutter's Way" and later, "Born on the Fourth of July." The trouble with this song is that the lyrics are goofy, and the production of the song hovers in a void of big 80's rock, doot-doot-style vocal group backup singing and outrage that just doesn't sound all that outraged. For example:

He was on the baseball team, he was in the marching band
When he was ten years old he had a watermelon stand

He went to church on Sunday, he was a Boy Scout
For his friends he would turn his pockets inside out

They said, “Listen boy, you’re just a pup”
They sent him to a napalm health spa to shape up

They gave him dope to smoke, drinks and pills
A jeep to drive, blood to spill

They said “Congratulations, you got what it takes”
They sent him back into the rat race without any brakes

That's reasonable to a point, but then comes the surreal left turn into what I suspect was a search for rhymes:

He drank Coca-Cola, he was eating Wonder Bread
Ate Burger Kings, he was well fed

He went to Hollywood to see Peter O’Toole
He stole a Rolls-Royce and drove it in a swimming pool

He could’ve sold insurance, owned a restaurant or bar
Could’ve been an accountant or a tennis star

He was wearing boxing gloves, took a dive one day

Off the Golden Gate Bridge into China Bay

Burger Kings? Peter O'Toole? Rolls-Royce in a swimming pool? Tennis star? Boxing gloves? The trouble with tragedy is that it can turn into comedy.

Here's an outtake of the song from the "Infidels" sessions in 1983 which I like much better than the album version on "Empire Burlesque."

Caribbean Wind

Tropical leftist

Embarks on doomed romance with

Bob, preaching gospel.

This 1981 song didn't make the final cut of "Shot of Love," and was released four years later on the "Biograph" anthology. "Caribbean Wind" is another one of those Dylan songs that is heavy on the imagery and symbolism, sometimes at the cost of clarity and plot. Where do I get that the woman was a leftist? I don't know. I concluded that it was unlikely that she and her brothers would be getting shot at in the jungle by gunmen on an embassy roof in the late 1970's if they weren't leftists, particularly if the backstory takes place in Brazil, as the lyrics suggest. In brief:

1. She's the rose of Sharon from paradise lost, from a seven-hilled city near a cross (Rio de Janeiro?). He's playing a concert and preaching about Jesus in Miami in a theater of "divine comedy." She tells him her brothers were killed in a jungle by a guy dancing on the roof of an embassy.

2. Did she use him? It's possible.

3. Chorus: Caribbean winds blow from Nassau to Mexico, fanning flames in the furnace of desire. Ships of liberty on iron waves are bold and free, but apparently are bringing everything that's close to Bob close to the fire.

4. She says a mutual friend has their best interest in mind, but it seems that however well connected he is, she has him in a trap because he's in her debt for some reason.

5. They meet in a church on a hot day. She tells him he can't do something about whatever he's thinking.

6. Bob's in Atlantic City. It's cold out. He hears someone calling him "daddy," but there's no one there. The news reports are full of stories about famines and earthquakes.

7. He contemplates whether he should have married her.

Choose your own adventure!

Abandoned Love

We are breaking up.

Not sure who’s responsible.

Let’s have sex again.

This is an improvement over the previous version of this haiku, which covers a song that Dylan recorded in 1975 to run on the 1976 album, "Desire." The song was released in 1985 on the "Biograph" anthology, while the original haiku appeared here a few years ago. It's embarrassing to me now because it has no relation to the song. In fact, I'm not sure that I even knew what song I was listening to.

This song, say the Dylan scholars, relates to his breakup with his wife Sara Lownds. Regardless of whether that's true, let's leave aside the biographical particulars and concentrate on the lyrics. The singer is ready to leave, though it might be possible that she's doing the leaving. One thing is certain: he wants a little more loving before he departs into the chasm of melancholy. Breakup sex, as we can see, is a matter of literary concern.

Dylan fans like the live version that he performed at the Bitter End cafe in Greenwich Village in 1975 (apparently known as the Other End at the time). I posted it here after failing to embed it properly, thanks to unusual and restrictive policies that Google enforces. Here is the studio version that he recorded for "Desire."

Dark Eyes

Bob has a vision
Of millions of dark eyes. They
Are his biggest fans.