Showing posts with label Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 3. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Things Have Changed

The world can hurt you
If you let it in. Bob did,
But now things have changed.

This song from "The Wonder Boys" soundtrack earned Bob Dylan an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. I like it best for its refrain, "I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range. I used to care, but things have changed." This is a song about growing a shell to keep the world at bay, a lesson learned only after multiple rounds through the wringer.

Round 1: Worried man w/ worried mind. All by himself except the champagne-drinking woman on his lap with white skin and the eyes of the assassin. He's well dressed and watching the skies, waiting for the last train (to heaven). His head's figuratively in a noose, and at any moment, all hell might break loose. 
Round 2: He ought to be in Hollywood instead of here. He thinks about taking dancing lessons and dressing up as a woman. What does he have to lose? Only a fool thinks he has something to prove. Anyway, "don't get up gentlemen, I'm just passing through."
Round 3: He's been walking 40 miles on bad roads, waiting on the apocalypse. He wants to escape himself. He can't stand himself. He's going to fall in love with the first woman he sees and plop her in a wheelbarrow, wheel her down the street.
Round 4: It's easy to hurt him, but you might not know you scored. These next 60 seconds might take forever. And the world is a big lie, with this case in point: he's in love with a woman who doesn't even float his boat.




Sunday, May 10, 2015

Dignity

Dignity: it's more
Than a word. Everyone knows,
But really, they don't.

"Dignity" is the great Bob Dylan anthem that wasn't. Like Sam Peckinpah's movies "The Osterman Weekend," "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" and "Major Dundee," I don't think there's one finished version that matches what Dylan was searching for in this song. Dylan and producer Daniel Lanois intended the song to appear on 1989's "Oh Mercy" album, but repeated takes failed to produce what they were looking for. In Dylan's book, "Chronicles, Vol. 1," he says everyone eventually got fed up and abandoned the track. I heard it first on the 1995 "MTV Unplugged" album, and then on a single featuring various edits. You can hear a version on the "Greatest Hits Vol. 3" album as well as other versions on volume 8 of the Bootleg Series. The song, as far as I can tell, focuses on the antics of various characters as they search for the one trait that eludes them as well as Bob.

Who's looking for dignity and in which ironic places he or she looks:
- Fat man/blade of steel
- Thin man/last meal
- Hollow man/cottonfield
- Wise man/blade of grass
- Young man/passing shadows

- Poor man/painted glass
- New Year's eve party (somebody was murdered just after dignity phoned for a cab)
- Bob/city-town-midnight sun
- Bob/the police
- Blind man/trance/pockets of chance/circumstance like pocket lint
- Bob/Mary Lou's wedding (She has a deadly secret and an aversion to being seen with Bob)
- Bob/Where the vultures feed
- Bob/asking the maid while the house is on fire, his gets go unpaid and the cold winds blow
- Drinking man/crowded room with obscured mirrors/lost forgotten years
- Bob/Prince Phillip at the house of blues (he speaks on condition that he gets paid and can speak off the record. He has a bone to pick with dignity)
- Bob/sons of darkness and sons of light in the bordertowns of despair
- Bob/in a river on a boat reading a note
- Sick man/doctor/masterpieces of literature
- Englishman/in the wind
- Unidentified person with a photograph that he claims is dignity, but Bob says no one has taken a picture of dignity
- Bob/the red and the black and the valley of dry bone dreams
- Bob/the edge of the lake (he gives up here)