The only song Bob Dylan admitted was about his past relationships
Bob Dylan has always been famously tight-lipped when it comes to the true meaning or inspiration behind his songs. While his lyrics are deeply introspective and often keenly specific to a certain time or scene, he would never let slip who the person behind the poetry was. Except in one rare instance.
Dylan’s work deals with many things. In the early days, it was deeply and obviously political, as he was interested in the world around him and used his work to highlight injustices. As the eras rolled on, he dealt with religion, spirituality, fights with fellow creatives, and the various trials of an artist’s life. But again and again, love has come up.
Whether exploring the heights of love with songs like ‘Sara’ and ‘Make You Feel My Love’ or delving into the turmoil of breakups with tracks like ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ and ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’, the emotion is a powerful and universal force in art. Bob Dylan masterfully captures this in his music, illustrating that even he is not immune to its profound influence.
But despite pouring over the feeling in his lyrics, he’s always dodged personal questions about who or what inspired his music or even who he’s with. Even when he got married in 1965 to Sara Lownds, the relationship and even the wedding were a secret until after the fact, leaving his ex-partner Joan Baez in total shock at the revelation. Dylan was never a man forthcoming with facts about his personal life, but he was willing to admit that at least this one song is about past relationships.
It’s not any of the expected ones, though. While he has plenty of tracks that appear to be about relationships, ‘Positively 4th Street’ wouldn’t immediately spring to mind as an obvious one. But for Dylan, it’s the only one he was willing to own up to.
“Outside of a song like ‘Positively 4th Street,’ which is extremely one-dimensional, which I like, I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called relationships,” Dylan said in 1985. To him, ‘Positively 4th Street’ is an exception to a rule as the one time he allowed himself to turn his pen to relationships. However, he got around his dislike of it by writing a scathing take that says it how it is.
“I don’t have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretence, not to say that I haven’t. I’ve had just as many as anybody else, but I haven’t had them in a long time,” he said. Unlike his hush-hush public persona, he claims that his personal life is built on openness, which is why he doesn’t like to mine it for lyrical content. “Usually, everything with me and anybody is upfront. My-life-is-an-open-book sort of thing. And I choose to be involved with the people I’m involved with. They don’t choose me,” he added.
But the track doesn’t deal with relationships in any typical way, and it doesn’t just focus on one. Instead, the song seems to take hits at the Greenwich folk scene Dylan was a part of, looking at his peers with clear bitterness or anger. “You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend,” he sings as the opening line, and the entire song says in this tone of annoyance with the unnamed “you”.
There are plenty of rumours regarding who the track mght be about. Some say it’s Andy Warhol, some say it’s Edie Sedgwick, while plenty more names have been thrown into the hat as possibilities. But while Dylan admitted the song is about relationships, that’s about as much information as he’d ever give.
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