Poll--The Weakest Link: Bob Dylan TIME OUT OF MIND, Round 2

These were my Round 2 cuts, as well. But while I've always found TIFILWY to be a little on the generic side both musically & lyrically, cutting Can't Wait definitely hurts a little bit, with its swampy, spooky sonics & some great lines.

Perhaps we should just crown Not Dark Yet the winner right now; it would spare a lot of us the "agony" of the cuts we'll have to make along the way...

 

Hands down, "Highlands"* is my favorite song on the album. For those who find the album version lugubrious, you should check out the more spry (and therefore shorter) live versions out there. None of the will convert you. This isn't the best but it has the benefit of having performance video:



*I also find it a compelling, though incidental, bookend to "Desolation Row." That's a long, ponderous post that wouldn't belong here.

 

If not here, where? Feel free!

(or maybe next round, so more will see it...up to you)

JcS

 

DQ: I played part of it this week as I was readying myself for this game. Before that, it's been a few years. My opinion hasn't changed much--it's a marvelous album, one I probably appreciate more now at 58 than I did at 39 when it came out.

JcS

 

Highlands and Love Sick.

Only had the album for less than a month. Played it 8 times according to iTunes count.

 

"Highlands", vaguely brings the style of James Joyce's "Ulysses" to mind (MY mind, anyway). It's part stream of consciousness, and an almost perverse intermingling of the exceptionally mundane with serious existential thought. And in 16 minutes plus, through various "adventures", the narrator never makes a legitimate connection with a single human being. His give-and-take with the waitress is so uncomfortable that he leaves before his food arrives.

Even if the "meandering" in some of the early verses doesn't always "go somewhere", the punchline ("The party's over, and there's less and less to say") is well worth the time spent.

Looking like it might survive another round, at the moment.

 

Highlands and Till I Fell ...

Best Wishes,
David

 

If only I enjoyed the song as much as your post. Maybe it's a grower.

 

With "Highlands" my understanding of it shifts. For most of the song, our narrator is the outsider, observing but never interacting. The Boston sequence to me is a shaggy dog story with the metaphor that our narrator is Bob Dylan and the waitress is his audience. The drawing that looks "nothing like me" is like the song that is supposed to sound like it used to. Of course, the mangy dog is my friend Darryl who has approached the real Bob and he basically crossed the street. I'm sure others see it entirely differently. "Highlands" is a kind of Rorschach test.

 

Well said. Dylan complained of people coming up to him as if they knew him and were his intimate friend because of their connection to his songs. But from his point of view, he knew nothing about them, and was taken aback by this rude familiarity. The waitress "knows" a lot about Bob Dylan even though she doesn't know him - she knows what he likes to eat, what authors he reads, and that he draws. Dylan's eventual response to all this "knowing" is to slide out of his chair when she's not looking.

If your friend Darryl in the mangy dog, is your other friend Darryl the voter registration volunteer?

 

Had to laugh at the Newhart reference. The real Darryl has been to a lot of Bob shows but I first recall him being at Scranton 1993. People come and go on the NET but Darryl is always there. But he's a nervous guy and he's encountered Bob more than once and Bob was having none of it. The interview you refer to was filmed in Ontario. I always took it to heart. I was never going to be that guy trying to treat Bob like some long-lost brother. I've seen him walk from his bus to the stage door in Toledo. That was enough.

 

Reminds me of the times I saw "Sara Dylan" in the late 80s/early 90s. "Sara" was a fan who followed the NET and routinely tried to get access to tickets or areas by introducing herself as Bob Dylan's wife. (I wasn't really clear on whether or not "Sara" knew that she and Bob had divorced a decade earlier.) Apparently Bob heard about "Sara", and actually (and surprisingly) told his people to be kind to "Sara", although I assume he also gave instructions to keep her away from him.

 

I know the woman you speak of but she had true mental issues. According to Jim Callaghan - Bob's security guy at the time - she became problematic in Australia 1992. But the sad truth is she funded her trips by prostituting herself and she was murdered by a sexual predator on the way to the Fox-Warfield in 1992. Google "Sara Dylan" murdered and the story is probably there.

 

dq: This game made me look for the cd and I cannot find it. I guess it's in my country house and I cannot remember the last time I heard it. But I do play it from time to time. My opinion did not change from the day my friend played it to me as the alledged Dylan's recent return to form. The opening song has the nice sound of the organ, but after all the years I still somehow don't remember the details of the rest of the songs. The album has not "clicked" with me yet.

 

Yikes. Sad story.

 

Yeah sorry to drop that story on everyone's Sunday.

 

I knew she had mental health issues, but I didn't know the sad ending of the story. I also didn't know that she had legally changed her name.

 

I can raise the mood of the thread with just two words - SOY BOMB!

 

Well-put.

[In the time it took to type all this, much has been said, so some is now redundant]

In regards to the narrator's existential mindset and essential isolation, it seems like someone for whom life has been drained of its color and texture but, in the documented he encounters vivid life, it's always at arm's length, whether by choice, circumstance or simply his own perception.

Strictly for kicks, a spontaneous close-read (that I wouldn't take too seriously):

Operating from memory (or sketches thereof) and a quick read-through of the lyrics, the song begins in his inner sanctum which, Neil Young aside, is represented mostly through emotionally hollow interpretation. Mid-way through his Ulyssean day, he encounters the waitress who draws him out. He's uncomfortable about it. I've taken it as figuratively auto-biographical in that Dylan, or any celebrity, no longer has access to the anonymity that allows most of us to go about our day. He engages the waitress on her territory -- the menu. She pegs him immediately. He's recognized, something is expected of him because of his persona. He feels the demand to "be" the thing she believes him to be. His breakfast is now part of her story, her desire to be immortalized by this artist. He tries to politely decline. She escalates what feels to him like intrusion. He makes a slapdash effort that she rebukes. Off the top of my head, when he says, "I don't do sketches from memory" one can take it as he "won't look back" on this to draw her; one can take it as she's already the past; one can take it that this scenario has played itself out, one way or another, enough over his years that this exchange is more an echo of the past than a thing happening now. There are other, better readings, I'm sure. After his sly insult (kind'a dehumanizing to call someone a memory straight to their face!), she tries to turn it into an intellectual discussion, critically saying he doesn't read "women authors," with an underlying hint that perhaps he doesn't understand women. But throughout he's still in his head. And he just wants breakfast, even if he doesn't know what constitutes it. She steps away and he flees the scene, wandering through a lively park with young, colorful people with the future ahead of them. He envies it. He's approached about being politically active, but rather than being "finger-pointing" [Bob], he's thinking about being "leather-clad" [Bob]. This all disregards the Burns-inspired refrains that are placid landscapes absent of people. Like paintings. Maybe one of the earlier in Thomas Cole's "Course of Empire" sequence. In the moment I'm typing this I can picture this narrator being drawn onto one of many Hopper paintings of empty streets. Isolation within a space that's designed for interaction. Getting from one place to another, it seems for him, is as mysterious but certain as breakfast.

As to this vs. "Desolation Row," I don't see them as direct companions, but as detailed combinations of narrative and collage that reflect one another. "Desolation Row" is a vivid, chaotic roman-a-clef brimming with caricatures and grotesques. And yet, in both songs I can see the narrator (be it Dylan, a character, persona, mishmash, whatever) as that same inhabitant of "Desolation Row" long after carnival has left town, with the restaurant, his home, the park, as the dull landscape that remains. What's most enticing now is the dream of something placidly worldly and -- if stuck in this city -- otherworldly destination that he knows from literature, from experience, from shared memory or from the promise of escaping the desolation in his mind. Even on a musical level -- "Highlands" has this sort of loping, droning, humid texture, as if all the intricate, romanticized texture of Langhorn's (?) guitar filigrees had worn off.

One last bit: Hard not to see "Highlands" and "Ain't Talkin'" as much more direct companions but I really would need to sit down with both official sets of that song's lyrics before I could riff like this. To my mind, though, that song has always paled compared to "Highlands." It's less stark in its reportage and relies too heavily (for my taste) on (over-wrought) symbolism. Part of what draws me to "Highlands" is its specificity. Even the abstractly nightmarish emotional descriptions early on are tactile: windows. pawnshops, etc.

Okie-dokie. Now vote! We know what happens when people don't.



Edit to add:

He even has his own song:

 

Try listening to "Not Dark Yet" with a big glass of red or a bourbon at about 8 at night as the sun is dropping...would help to be sitting outside...and report back. A stout...imperial... would probably also do the trick...

 

I voted for Trying to get to Heaven and Not Dark Yet.

I'm not convinced of the greatness of the latter; I'll have to give a few more listens.

I've been singing the hook from 'Trying to get to Heaven' since the other day, but nonetheless.

I hadn't listened to the album in this millennium until the other day. Back then, Cold Irons Bound, Lovesick, Million Miles, and Highlands were the standouts for me, but this time around I've 'noticed' some of the other songs.

 

Terrific post - you captured a lot of what I think about the song myself. The closest the narrator comes to a legitimate human interaction is with Neil Young - and that's only a once-removed experience via sound recording. The song echoes the depressing, world-weary sentiments of many other TOOM songs - much of the world being "hollow" and, as Mellencamp famously said, life going on long after its thrill is gone. The "happy ending" to the song, if you will, that one day he'll be "called home" to the Highlands, is undercut by the cynicism about Heavenly reward heard elsewhere on the album, best illustrated by the title of "Trying to Get to Heaven (Before They Close the Door)".

 

I was about to start the next round before I left to go to a ball game this afternoon, but I'm wait so the conversation can continue (and I will have time to read it!) without two active threads going. Next round will start this evening--carry on!

JcS

 

I's getting tougher, but I'll go with "Million Miles" and "'Til I fell."

I listened to Time Out of Mind a couple months ago and I still love it as much as when I first heard it.

Dylan often talks about how music can stop time. With "Highlands," for me this is where he actually does stop time. The song never seems long to me (unlike some of his other recent songs) and I never feel like skipping it. He takes me into another world with it and holds back time masterfully. I don't understand people voting it off so soon either.

 

The last time I listened to it was this afternoon, while doing a 21,1 km run.
Love the album, very unique, both for Dylan and Lanois.
But the run went extremely bad. Not an album to run to. I wonder why.