“The rainman gave me two cures”: Attempting to decode Bob Dylan’s most cryptic lyrics
When Bob Dylan was asked in 1966 what his songs are about, he replied “Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11”. Of course he did.
In 1986, he told Maurice Parker, that “I can’t describe myself in one or two words, considering the fact I’ve written over 300, 400 songs that do describe me. I gotta let other people speak for me, you know? If you want to find out what I’m like, you usually have to ask other people. Usually you can find out better from some people that don’t know me”.
“I think it’s wrong for a person to talk about themself”, he added. “A person’s life speaks for itself”.
This philosophy bleeds into his songs, as well. His best songs speak for themselves, too, and don’t need their author to explain what they really mean, what they’re all about or what they’re supposed to make you feel. But other people have spent plenty of time trying to work out all of those things and more. Plenty of us have spent hours, days, weeks, months and years trying to unpack the meaning of all his songs, whether they seem to have a subtle or obvious message.
He has too many songs to accurately say what their overall message is, anyway, but in a 2015 advert for IBMs AI software Watson, the computer suggested that after analysing Dylan’s entire lyrical output, his “major themes are that time passes and love fades”. “Well, that sounds about right”, Dylan quietly responded through a half-smile.
His songs are about everything and they’re about nothing. They’re about the profane, the profound and the mundane. They’re about the every day and the once in a lifetime and the once upon a time. They’re about here and now, now and then, then and there and the everafter.
But some of them are more straightforward than others. We know that when he sings “God says to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’”, Abe says ‘Man, you must be putting me on’, God says ‘No!’, Abe says ‘What!?’, God says ‘You can do what you want, Abe, but the next time you see me coming? You better run”, that he’s retelling the Binding of Isaac from Genesis.
We know that when he sings “if not for you, my sky would fall and rain would gather, too / without your love I’d be nowhere at all, oh what would I do? If not for you?” that he’s madly in love, and when he sings that “Most of the time, she ain’t even in my mind / I wouldn’t know her if I saw her, she’s that far behind / Most of the time, I can’t even be sure / If she was ever with me, or if I was ever with her” that he’s still in love, but this time he’s thrown it all away.
We know that when he sings “I’ve already outlived my life by far” and “I hope that the God’s go easy with me” every single night from the stage on his seemingly-neverending Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, that he is still reckoning with the end of his life, or the onset of old-age, just like he was when he sang “I feel like I’m knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, or “I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere, trying to get to Heaven before they close the door” and “the door has closed forevermore, if indeed, there ever was a door” before that.
But, not everything is as clear as all that. Some of his lines don’t pierce you like a corkscrew to the heart; they’re not as fierce as an arrow, right on target or so direct. Some of them, like ‘Desolation Row’ seem to be so gargantuan in scope that there’s no way that they could make as much sense as ultimately they do when you hear them.
Some of his songs operate in similar territory to all those mentioned above, like ‘Gates of Eden’, for example:
The lamppost stands with folded arms
Bob Dylan, ‘Gates of Eden’
Its iron claws attached
To curbs ‘neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden
But in songs like this one, there might not really be all that much to analyse and the dazzling dance of words actually obfuscates the truth that there is not all that much behind them. Just like in his unreadable novel Tarantula, plenty of his seemingly cryptic early songs were clearly written in a stream-of-consciousness fever-dream, likely drug-induced. Songs like this one—and it’s far-superior sibling songs ‘Chimes of Freedom’, ‘My Back Pages’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues‘ and ‘Desolation Row’—squarely placed Dylan at the forefront of the contemporary literary movement in music, and in the lineage of Beatnik writing that gave us things like On the Road and Howl or, much later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel Little Boy. These are words that are thrown together to test, push, confound and examine the edges and the boundaries of language, but, in ‘Gates of Eden’ at least, they are not as brilliant as his seemingly more simple, but more mature and emotionally resonant songs like ‘Tell Me That It Isn’t True’, ‘Sign on the Window’, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘Most of the Time’ or ‘Not Dark Yet’, or else things he later covered, like ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’, ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Stormy Weather’.
When Dylan went to ground in the summer of 1966 and retreated into the basement of the big pink house owned by His Band, his songs exploded into a haze of bizarreness, inscrutability, complication and obfuscation that something like ‘Gates of Eden’ could only ever hope to reach. They did it, too, whilst managing to be more pleasing on the ear, as well.
I’d defy anyone to come up with a definitive meaning for all of the the words that Dylan plucked from the air for ‘Tiny Montgomery’, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’, ‘Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread’, ‘Lo and Behold!’, ‘Please, Mrs Henry’, ‘Open the Door, Homer’, ‘Don’t Ta Tell Henry’ and some of the early versions of ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ (“Look here you bunch of basement noise, you ain’t no punchin’ bag / I see you walkin’ out there, and you’re the one to do it / Pick up your nose, you canary, You ain’t goin’ nowhere – Just pick up that oil cloth, cram it in the corner / I don’t care if your name is Michael, you gonna need some boards / Get your lunch, you foreign bib / You ain’t goin’ nowhere”). All I could say to anyone who tried to unpick bits of writing like that is “good luck, I hope you make it!”
Another one of his most inscrutable, mysterious and mystical lyrics might also have come from those legendary Basement Tapes sessions, as well, but these ones are more tantalising than the thrown-together nonsense sounds of the other Basement songs.
Only about half of the lyrics for the transcendent and transcursive ‘I’m Not There’ are actually audible, but even when Dylan’s vocals switch from a clear stream of consciousness into a murky river of onomatopoeic slurring, they still get you in the gut. If anyone ever tries to tell you that Dylan is not a great singer, you just need to play them this, and show that even at his most unintelligible and illegible, he has still got the power to move you more than most other people can do at their most try-hard best.
A recently discovered manuscript for a seemingly early draft of ‘I’m Not There’, found tucked inside a first-edition paperback of Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat which was once owned by Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s first manager, Albert Grossman, and the woman who appears in red with Dylan on the cover of his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, promised to shed some light onto the lyrics that Dylan slurs in the only known recording of the track.
“She’s a lone-hearted miss, and she daren’t carry on”, Dylan typed on the manuscript. “When I’m there she’s alright but she’s not when I’m gone”.
“She’s a lone forsaken beauty and she don’t trust anyone” he continues, “I wish I was beside her but I’m not there, I’m gone”. But most of these words come through clearly on the recording, so the new manuscript doesn’t tell us much. There is one glimpse of a line in writing that isn’t as clear in the song, as Dylan typed out: “2 hearts mistaken / I don’t far believe / it’s so bad / For it’s amusing / an she’s so hard to please”
Actually, some of Dylan’s best writing has sat somewhere between subtle and obvious. Somewhere between inscrutability, intangibility and direct-fire. Think about ‘Visions of Johanna’. There are phrases in that song that will re-wire your brain (“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet? We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it” and “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo ‘this is what salvation must be like after a while’”). There are scene-setting descriptions that are worthy of Steinbeck, worthy of the Nobel Prize (“Lights flicker from the opposite loft, In this room the heat pipes just cough / The country music station plays soft, but there’s nothing, really, nothing to turn off”) and then some that are so confounding that even sixty years on from their release people are still debating their meaning (“See the primitive wallflower freeze / When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the mustache say, ‘Jeez, I can’t find my knees’ / Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule”).
At that point in time, he was overflowing with lines like these. “I need a dump truck, mama, to unload my head” as he sang on ‘From a Buick 6’, or “I got a headful of ideas that are driving me insane” on ‘Maggie’s Farm’. And you’d probably go insane, too, if you had got the idea for ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again’ stuck inside your head, too.
Grandpa died last week
Bob Dylan, ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again’
And now he’s buried in the rocks,
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked.
But me, I expected it to happen,
I knew he’d lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again
Like all of Dylan’s best work from the Sixties (“You know, everybody makes a big deal about the Sixties. Did I ever want to acquire the Sixties? No. But I own the Sixties”, Dylan said in 2006), ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again’ consists of a fantastic cast of characters. The Ragman, Shakespeare in the alley, some French girl, Mona, the Senator (and his gun), the preacher, the rainman, Ruthie and the neon madmen.
That’s quite a parade, but they also speak to the patchwork and collage of influences on Dylan’s own work and on his writing. Shakespeare speaks for himself; that much is clear. The French girl who knows him well could be any number of fans from around the world who know more about Bob Dylan than Bob Dylan does.
Dylan had already spoken to Senators and Congressmen in ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, but here, he comes in parading a firearm and representing the political edge of all of Dylan’s work, and Dylan’s cynicism towards such politicians. The Preacher represents the role of religion in Dylan’s writing and the rainman speaks to a more mystical, magical aspect in the music. Mona represents the presence of art, and history, in Dylan’s writing. Those neon-madmen could well be his peers; the all-night crew lit up by the neon signs of New York City and soaked in the nighttime rainfall. The song is full of desperation. It’s full of the maddening repetition and futility of life.
It’s a song about trying to get as far away from yourself as you can, and falling in love with a woman who doesn’t even appeal to you. A woman who doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to find it out. It’s a song about trying to get ahead, only to end up further back than where you started. It’s a song about losing yourself and your sense of time and then finding it all again underneath the rubble and ashes of your past-lives. It’s a song that is full of movement and in it, you’re constantly wishing that you were someplace else, only for you to find out that you don’t want to be there, either, once you’ve got there. It’s a song about mobility, and finding yourself immobile in Mobile.
Now I’ve never been to Mobile, but I have been to Memphis. Ever since I left, I’ve wished that I was back there. Had the Memphis Blues again and again.
Or at least, that’s what it sounds like it’s all about to me, anyway. You might think it’s about something different. Whatever it means or doesn’t mean, Dylan probably stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago, and now he’s not looking back. He already made his position perfectly clear in the last lines of the song, anyway, singing “And here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice”.
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