The overlooked Bob Dylan song both Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen adored: “It’s tremendous”
Like a multi-millionaire jealous of a billionaire, David Bowie once said of Bob Dylan, “50 songs isn’t enough, I’ve realised. I heard, and I was green with envy, Dylan’s got like 140 songs he chooses from [to make a setlist]. I can see that you’ve got to build up to that because even when you’ve got 50, there are some that you’re [going to] get a bit fed up with faster than others.”
Perhaps that’s why Dylan is still energetically touring well into his 80s: he simply has too much great music to share for it ever to grow stale. From ‘Sign on the Window’ to ‘Not Dark Yet’, there are masterpieces in his discography that even some firm fans may never have heard.
That has made him not just the envy of Bowie, but a whole host of other stars. Two of the most notable are Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. These two luminaries clung to the fresh intelligence that Dylan had brought to pop songwriting and made the new mantle their own. And both these elevated maestros agreed that one opus in Dylan’s discography had been somewhat overlooked amid the overwhelming tome of triumphs.
For Leonard Cohen, ‘Brownsville Girl’ was worthy of lofty praise in Jim Devlin’s book Leonard Cohen: In His Own Words. And Lou Reed similarly loved the classic from the often derided 1986 album, Knocked Out and Loaded. The roving epic is a track that has drawn praise from a great many musicians for that matter.
It’s a mark of spellbinding storytelling set to music that perfectly showcases how Dylan infused pop with something rather more literary. In a 1987 interview with Joe Smith, Reed explained as much, stating: “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song I thought.”
Adding: “Now, other than Dylan, there’s not much there. Elvis Costello has some lyrics. But, 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’ – a true dirge that cuts through the myth of the dream.
The reason that the track proves to be so pictorial is, in part, because it was co-written with the playwright, screenplay star and actor Sam Shepard (Paris, Texas). Some 11 years prior to the release of the track, Dylan had hired Shepard for his Rolling Thunder Revue concept tour. Dylan had envisioned the wayfaring tour as a rag-tag travelling gipsy circus, who roamed as a multi-talented fleet across the rolling land’s ala Jack Kerouac. During which Shephard was ostensibly given the difficult task of penning a Fellini-esque script as they went along.
As Shephard would later write in his logbook of the whole experience, in which he even became romantically entwined with Joni Mitchell: “Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not to the head. It moves us into an area of mystery”.
Adding, “Some myths are poisonous to believe in, but others have the capacity for changing something inside us, even if it’s only for a minute or two. Dylan creates a mythic atmosphere out of the land around us. The land we walk on every day and never see until someone shows it to us.”
For Cohen and Reed, that insular world is contained within this roving epic. It is a song that you can walk into like a cathedral of song. That has sustained its timeless importance even if it wasn’t lauded upon release. As the more contemporaneous praise from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy shows when he told Stereogum, “The song is concrete, cathartic and epic, humorous and charming. It rolls across unmapped territories and hints at a way of realising musical ideas that has yet to be pursued since by anyone, anywhere, including by Bob Dylan.”
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