‘Idiot Wind’: Bob Dylan’s most scathing lyric
Bob Dylan contains multitudes. He can be loving, he can be kind, he can be funny, and he can be charming, but he can also be vicious and violent, dismissive and disarming. Often, he can be all these things and more in the same songs. From the casually cruel lyrics in ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ to the open contempt of ‘Positively 4th Street’, the young Dylan could be especially iron-tongued, but as his writing has matured over the years, so has his ability to strike someone down.
There is a river of blood that runs through all of his most recent work. Starting in 2001 with one of his greatest-ever albums, Love and Theft, Dylan’s imagery has become increasingly violent. He’s threatened to break in roofs of those who have wronged him, he’s killed a man in paradise, dragged corpses through the mud and threatened violence with all sorts of spears and swords, guns and knives, and even dogs that can tear you limb from limb, besides.
But proving the pen is mightier than the sword, Dylan’s words can be more cutting than any blade. Combined with all the built-up bile in his voice, he took aim at corrupt money men in shark-skin suits on ‘Early Roman Kings’, and in ‘Pay in Blood’, from 2012’s Tempest, with lines like “Another politician pumping out the piss, another angry beggar blowing you a kiss / You’ve got the same eyes that your mother does, if only you could prove who your father was”. Later in the song, he goes on to exclaim, in the voice of anyone who has felt double-crossed and lied to by a political figure, that “I’ve been through hell, what good did it do? You bastard, I’m supposed to respect you!”
Dylan has had corrupt politicians in his sights for a long time. Almost 50 years before Tempest came out, his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contained plenty of contempt for the decision-makers who gladly sent soldiers off to their deaths from behind the safety of their desks and the piles of money they could generate by making piles of bodies.
‘Masters of War’ is an irate anthem against unjust cruelty which turns those very tables on the politicians who manufacture so much death and destruction and imagines how they’d fare under the bombs that they so freely order. Over a hammering, dark acoustic guitar riff, Dylan is shockingly graphic in the song. Setting the bloody scene and before building to the final horrifying—but justified—image (“And I hope that you die, and your death will come soon, I’ll follow your casket by the pale afternoon / And I’ll watch while you’re lowered down to your deathbed, and I’ll stand over your grave ’til I’m sure that you’re dead”), he has one question to ask: “Let me ask you one question, is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness, do you think that it could? / I think you will find when your death takes its toll, all the money you made will never buy back your soul”.
The song is now over 60 years old but is perhaps more relevant in modern times than it has ever been. In America, and on the rise all across Europe, South America, Asia, and especially in Israel, there is an ever-increasing number of these “Masters of War” who need to ask themselves the same question about their money and their souls.
Dylan has always been a socially conscious artist. Whether it is in songs like ‘John Brown’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, ‘George Jackson’, ‘Hurricane’ or ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’, he knows the deal that’s going down in the wider world, and he is not afraid to point fingers and take up arms for his cause. As the greatest writer on the human condition in the modern age, the condition of humanity is a major through-line in his work, but he is at his darkest when he feels he has been personally wronged.
In the wake of his 1977 divorce, Dylan had penned a collection of songs which would have made ‘Masters of War’ look like a children’s game of soldiers. He never got around to recording the songs, but his band-mates Steven Soles and T-Bone Burnett did get to hear some private performances of them. Soles described what he heard as “all very, very, very tough, dark, dark, dark songs”. One of these toughest and darkest of all the divorce tracks, ‘I’m Cold’, even scared Soles: “It was scathing and tough and venomous. A song that would bring a chill to your bones. That’s what it did to me. T-Bone and I, when he left, our mouths were just wide open. We couldn’t even believe what we’d heard.”
Soles and Burnett were no strangers to the darker depths of Dylan’s performance, either, so ‘I’m Cold’ must have been truly icy to elicit such a reaction. The pair had both been in Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue band, where Dylan performed select cuts from his seminal Blood on the Tracks, including the album’s most devastating song, ‘Idiot Wind’.
Dylan’s home life seemed idyllic in lyrics from ‘New Morning’ (“If not for you, my sky would fall”, “marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout, have a bunch of kids who call me ‘pa’, that must be what life’s about”), but the cracks were starting to show in songs like ‘Dirge’ by the time he got to Planet Waves in 1974 (“I hate myself for loving you”), and in the fact that his most adoring song ‘Nobody ‘Cept You’ was even left off the album entirely.
One year on and Dylan found that not only was everything a little upside down, but as a matter of fact, the wheels had stopped. What’s good was bad, what’s bad was good, “you’ll find out when you reach the top. You’re on the bottom”.
‘Idiot Wind’ is a hurricane of rage, frustration, regret, scorn, and sheer, God-like power. It blows and gales and storms and devastates over the course of almost eight howling minutes. Full of mysticism, spirituality, pettiness, and hardened anger, it blows through your brain and knocks you off your feet.
For eight long, never-ending minutes, it feels like Dylan is murderous at the thought of his soon-to-be ex-wife Sara, and he even pictures the scene of her death in the lyric, “One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes”. He’s so despairing that he sings of how he “can’t even touch the books you’ve read” and that “your corrupt ways have finally made you blind”.
In the refrain, Dylan drops the grander imagery and goes in for the kill with something simpler, singing, “You’re an idiot, babe, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”. But, right at the end, when it feels like he is about to bring down his knife for one final blow, he pulls back from the edge of his descent into madness and reveals that he is not sparing himself from any of his ire, either, and takes some responsibility in the lines “we are idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”
It’s only fitting that his most scathing song was on the end of his most scathing delivery, as he performed a harrowing rendition at the Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins, Colorado, on May 23rd, 1976, with Sara Dylan sitting mere feet away in the front row of the crowd.
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