“Buckets, Wagons, and Woes: Dylan does Love”
by Sean McGahey
by Carrie Wong
In Blood on the Tracks, Dylan concocts a whirlwind of torment in the wake of mangled irreparable romantic relationships. But Dylan’s seminal 1974 release is not merely a funeral pyre set ablaze to eradicate former lovers. As destructive and ruinous in tone as Blood on the Tracks is, the album also yearns for and reminiscences about those innocuous first moments of requited and actualized love. And just as well, he celebrates and gives weight to the honeymoon AND the divorce.
After years of being among many things, a political signpost and a Woody Guthrie protégé, Dylan, the enigmatic troubadour, finally removes his mask. For those anticipating another persona, Dylan outwits them all by seemingly donning a non-persona. On this particular album, he is a revelation: honest, searching, and vulnerable, though elusively like fireflies flickering in a dark country night, and not to mention rather briefly. The album though encompassing enough hurt and pain for a lifetime, only clocks in on 51 minutes and 40 seconds.
But even amidst such personal psychodrama, Dylan maintains his inscrutable distance. That he had been witnessing the end of his own marriage is no secret. And it makes you wonder if there are indeed any parts of him disclosed within the ten stories about unfortunate love he crafted; are they Bob’s thinly veiled confessions and regrets? Or are they another couple of that legendary Dylan-spun lore? Is this the real Bob Dylan? Or is Dylan playing the role of the lovelorn minstrel?
Still, Dylan’s personal life aside, Blood on the Tracks remains a great album. Rich with emotional fecundity, the album recreates every possible and imaginable feeling and thought associated with love…that is with the exception of reconciliation. After all, this IS an album about how much falling out of love hurts. In Blood on the Tracks, Dylan has never sounded so honest and truncated love never so satisfying. And the following tracks display Dylan’s craftiness while telling the sweetness and the harshness of it all.
Simple Twist of Fate:
There are a total of six stanzas in “Simple Twist of Fate”, and in each, Dylan paints a different relationship. Yet they all end the same way, with situations bridled with doubt and emotional realizations, before Dylan brings it all back to and wraps up with that “simple twist of fate”. In each sketch of love, you get a sense that each person is a pawn that fate carelessly manipulates with disinterest. As much as it’s responsible for bringing the lovers in each stanza together, it’s also responsible for tearing them apart. Yet, there’s an almost c’est la vie response to the almost cruel way the lovers are treated. It’s also interesting how ambiguous the power governing the actions of all these lovers is. Is it well meaning? Is it malevolent? Or is it just indifferent?
Yet, even more puzzling than the idea of fate in the song is Dylan’s own narrative. In “Simple Twist of Fate”, Dylan transitions from his much more familiar observation lore to an intense intimacy previously dormant in the artist’s previous works. As warm and personal as this song sounds, “Simple Twist of Fate” relies on classic Dylan commentary. Slightly distant and unengaged, Dylan’s voice remains neutral as he recounts six instances of love and co-dependency. He also reverts back to using his familiar third person narrative with the song’s opener, “They sat together in the park as the evening sky grew dark”. Dylan’s role as observer becomes much more significant as he transcends physical limitations to transform into an omniscient agent who knows and understands the hidden motives and private thoughts of the various lovers over whom he presides: “She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle through his bones it was then he felt alone and wished that he’d gone straight”. And with increasing acrobatic and twisted word play, Dylan gradually assert his presence on the narrative of his song, ”They walked alone by the old canal/A little confused, I remember well”, by suggesting his involvement with the incandescent affairs. Dylan’s presence in the song continues and culminates in the stunning final moments where he warns “People tell me it’s a sin/To know and feel too much within/I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring/She was born in spring, but I was born too late/Blame it on a simple twist of fate”.
You’re a Big Girl Now:
With the succinct sweetness of “our conversation was short and sweet it nearly swept me off-my feet”, Dylan accomplishes the rare feat of recreating the initial moments of falling in love. Now the subsequent line and howls, “now I’m back I the rain, oh, oh”, is true also, as it reveals the disastrous aftermath. Leave it to Dylan to seamlessly capture the almost contradictory moods with brevity.
And while “Simple Twist of Fate” shifts from an observer/actor narrative to both lay the foundation for and allow for Dylan’s emotional honesty to take centre stage in Blood on the Tracks, “You’re a Big Girl Now” is about the artist’s own affairs; at last, Dylan talks freely, fully, and completely about himself, or so it seems. The previous song had done much to build up Dylan’s pained recollections, but in “You’re a Big Girl Now”, Dylan’s private drama reaches actualization. To me “Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re a Big Girl Now” has always existed side-by-side. Taking on where “Simple Twist of Fate” leaves off, “You’re a Big Girl Now” revisits and then continues the same thought. Like a lover’s argument spread throughout the course of a week, “You’re a Big Girl Now” is an evolved if not angrier version of “Simple Twist of Fate”. Time seems to have pushed the hurt and anger to the forefront and made it stronger in the process. In this case the succession of songs represent the trajectory of Dylan’s imagined dialogue between quarrelling lovers. The argument itself have likewise escalated and blown up, so the murky and thinly veiled problem in “Simple Twist of Fate” gives way to a full account of personal hurts and howls on the track following. And he howls and howls in agony crying that love is unfortunate, oh, oh, which never fails to send me into a state of temporary paralysis. Oscillating between nearly unspeakable pain to rhythmic cathartic verbal exclamations and stark truth, “You’re a Big Girl Now” is a sublimely romantic piece about falling in love and watching it go bad, as each lover become helplessly looks on by the sidelines unable to make it work. I’ve lived a dozen lifetimes in each stanza, as we’ve all had. Each time the music begins, and sways me into Dylan’s lovely prose, I fall into the song just as easily as I fall in love despite knowing the inevitable pain. Staggering.
Buckets of Rain:
By the time the last track “Buckets of Rain” materializes on Blood on the Tracks, everyone’s pining for relief from Dylan’s depiction of constant romantic pain. An answer to prayer, Buckets of Rain arrives in the nick of time like healing holy water falling softly on and soothing a pair of massacred ears and one much damaged heart.
The song is wondrously woven from a breathtakingly singular guitar crying over a muffled bass and Dylan’s slightly out of place “aw-shucks” plaintive pleas. “Buckets of Rain” coos and sighs through emotional mountains and valleys summing up all the ugly and beautiful feelings appearing on the album, and making it three minutes and 24 seconds of incomparable bliss.
After about forty-eight minutes of near schizophrenic though elegant indecision between self-loathing and lover hating, “Buckets of Rain” is surprisingly sweet and sly, easy-going and engaging, with wit and wry humour sprinkled throughout. While Dylan’s previous allegories unconvincingly report repeated hints of an uncertain and miniscule happy ending to a dour present, “Buckets of Rain” is an affirmation of Dylan’s nuanced brand of pessimistic optimism.
The barebones steeliness of the song and its structure quenches Dylan’s fiery tongue and burning emotional restlessness, levelling the two extremes. All in all, the result is a song that is intimately warm and relenting, and though its arrangement is sparse, it is ironically lush. And as the song progresses, Dylan’s poetry slowly become rhyme. His bleakness gives ways to light heartedness as his observations and commentary graduates to listless, whimsical, and ridiculous musings, where rain magically turns into tears that flow ceaselessly from his ears. Plus, he really likes his little red wagon. He REALLY likes it.
July 23rd, 2005 at 6:17 pm
While I appreciate the sense of awestruck-ness in this piece as regards “Blood On The Tracks,” I’m not at all sure that I agree with it.
There have been contradictory reports as regards that this album is about Bob Dylan’s impending divorce from Sara. While Jacob Dylan, in a recent interview, said something along the lines of ‘When I listen to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” I’m rocking right along with you, but when I listen to “Blood On The Tracks,” that’s about my family.” However, this attitude, and the sentiments expressed in this article, are directly contradicted by what Bob Dylan himself said in his “Biograph” notes for the song “You’re A Big Girl Now:”
“You’re A Big Girl Now well, I read that this one was suppossed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are - I mean I’m always trying to stay one step ahead of myself and keep changing with the times, right? Like that’s my foolish mission. How many roles can I play? Fools, they limit you to their own unimaginative mentality. They never stop to think that somebody has been exposed to experiences that they haven’t been…anyway it’s not even the experience that counts, it’s the attitude towards the experience. There is so much misunderstanding by people who are caught up in their own little worlds laid on you…contrary to what some so-called experts believe, I don’t constantly ‘re-invent’ myself - I was there from the beginning. […] I’m a mystery onl;y to those who haven’t felt the same things I have…you can’t take my stuff and verbalize it, like I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it. It only seems so, like it seems that Laurence Olivier is Hamlet.”
Whew! Anyway, when I listen to “Blood On The Tracks,” I don’t try and focus on who he may be singing about, I am thinking about how the lyrics reveal aspects of myself. I have always identified with the subject of the song “You’re A Big Girl Now,” for instance, even though I am of the opposite gender. After going through a painful, unrequited puppy-love high-school crush with someone who had red hair in High School, rouughly a year or so after the album came out, I used to listen to the album over and over and cry over what I perceived to be the similarity in the situations. It wasn’t at all like Rimbaud and Verlaine, and there was no way I could compare all those scenes, as I was unaware of Rimbaud and Verlaine, let alone their relationship. But this is my basis for understanding this album, on an intuitive level, as someone who has felt what Bob Dylan has felt, or at least has felt what Bob Dylan has expressed. Although I have suffered break-ups that are certainly more in line with the sentiments expressed in this album since then, they are not reflected in my listening to it now. Rather, I am reminded of the girl with crimson hair across her face, and I wonder whether her hair is still red.
All of which is to say that, in order to understand what Bob Dylan’s songs are about, don’t look for any biographical information to help explain it. Don’t look without, but within. That is the key to understanding, and one need not look any further.
I wish to add that there are elements of this in the article, such as when the author expresses how she falls into the song “You’re A Big Girl Now” as easily as she falls in love, knowing the consequences. I appreciate that sentiment, and find it illuminating and informative. To say that it’s about the artist’s own affairs, however, is unwise, a distraction, and contradictory to the artist’s own words.
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