‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’: The lyrics even Bob Dylan found laughable
The phrases ‘Bob Dylan’ and ‘having a laugh’ aren’t commonly found in the same sentence, it must be said. That, however, doesn’t mean that the idea of the folk singer having a little chuckle doesn’t happen.
In the early 1960s, he established himself as something of a bard of folk music, bringing a modern energy to the genre with his incisive political commentary. However, at the same time, he was also something of a maverick who was out to disrupt the norms, especially when it came to adding new elements to a genre that had previously been quite resistant to change over time.
When he released Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, many were shocked by the decision to create a record that split its two sides between electric and acoustic numbers. While this was initially polarising amongst critics, people realised that at the core, the songwriting was still exceptional and deserving of praise, and it has since become regarded as not just one of his finest records, but also one of the best folk records of all time.
That being said, there was one song sitting at the tail end of the first side of the record that felt considerably more whimsical and removed from his usual socio-political themes, instead choosing to satirise and parody the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492. While this might seem like a heavy subject matter to tackle within a song, the way in which Dylan chooses to weave the narrative is brimming with humour and comic relief in order to soften the potentially harrowing themes.
‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ is still a poetically ambitious song, but is far more tongue-in-cheek and humorous than his usual fare, and Dylan was well aware of how absurd his references to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Guernsey cows, crêpes Suzette were within the context of the narrative. Considering how he had made his stance on war, colonialism and race relations clear through other earlier songs, his decision to tackle this in such an unusual fashion was somewhat perplexing, despite the end result still being just as impactful.
It was so amusing to him that at the beginning of the song, we hear a false start where Dylan and producer Tom Wilson burst into fits of laughter at the sheer silliness of the song, having to restart after barely being able to make it through the first line. However, while the pair clearly found humour in Dylan’s daft lyrics, there was supposedly another reason behind these giggles.
Dylan was apparently not used to having someone else in the same room as him while recording, and because Wilson was unusually there with him, the pair of them couldn’t help from corpsing as a result of the unusual situation. Despite messing things up on the first take, he managed to finally deliver the six-minute missive without faltering, with the final take ending up being one of the highlights of a record that changed Dylan’s career forever, and a fine example of how he has managed to demonstrate a sense of humour while exploring darker themes.
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