“One for the ages”: How Bob Dylan’s ‘Brownsville Girl’ blew away a room full of musicians
Bob Dylan wasn’t at his best in the 1980s. He freely admits to being “disillusioned” and road-weary and forlorn following a tour with Tom Petty where the golden-haired youngster was at the “top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine”. So, it comes as yet another superlative of his superhuman creativity that even in this notable trough, he was still able to triumph with one of his greatest-ever songs.
‘Brownsville Girl’ was the track he had been waiting for. It was originally cut as ‘New Danville Girl’, a demo from during the Empire Burlesque sessions, but Dylan figured it was probably best to give it more time than those misfiring days in the studio could afford it. So, he put it to one side and set about polishing the roving epic up with his playwright pal Sam Shephard a little bit further down the line.
Even still, in typical Dylan style, when he finally came to record the tower of song, it was still under construction. Ira Ingber was in the studio playing lead guitar on the sessions, and he got to watch the craftsman go to work on the finishing touches first-hand. “We started it at Cherokee Studios in those first sessions in late 1984,” he recalled in Uncut.
It was evident that ‘Brownsville Girl’ was going to be a stand-out anthem even then. When it was even mentioned, Dylan would regain a steely look in his eyes, and the years would roll off him. “Before we got into the studio, we had practised it during the rehearsal sessions at his house, but we had never played the whole thing up there. When we got to the studio, Bob said he wanted to do it,” Ingber added.
But it wasn’t coming out perfectly. “During the recording, Bob said he was short a verse,” Ingber recalled. As always, it was late in the day, the time when Dylan was at his most lucid. “I said, ‘Let’s come back to it tomorrow or whenever you finish it.’ He said, ‘Wait a second.’ He took out this impossibly small pen or pencil-like, maybe an inch and a half long – and this tiny scrap of paper.”
Like all his best-dogeared anthems, this humble means did not beget the masterpiece that was about to be etched upon it. “He went off into the corner of the studio, and we’re waiting maybe five or ten minutes. He comes back and says, ‘OK, let’s go.’ We start playing the song again, and all of sudden here comes this new verse that he’d written, and it was breathtaking. At that very moment I remember thinking: ‘That’s why he’s Bob Dylan. That’s what the guy does. We all looked at each other and we were thinking, well – this is one for the ages.”
Indeed, the song would reach the status that Ingber prognosticated when he blew the room away after retreating for a brief five minutes of pure inspiration. As Lou Reed would hail, “The thing Dylan did with Sam Shepherd, ‘Brownsville Girl’, I mean, I think that is one of the greatest things I ever heard in my life. I fell down laughing. You can listen to that, you can listen to the words going on and it’s tremendous.”
Indeed, there aren’t many songs that can cram in something as simultaneously poetic and cinematic as the line: “Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square, / I want him to feel what it’s like to every moment face his death.” In some ways, the song almost even seems like a counterpoint to Lou Reed’s American epic ‘Street Hassle’.
Reed isn’t alone either; a host of stars from across the eras have heaped praise upon this roving western, perhaps Dylan’s best of the decade.
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