Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Many of Dylan’s songs take the form of an appeal to a woman to grant the singer her favors. In this, they share common ground with the songs of the troubadours and trouvères, the ghazals of Persian and Urdu, African-American blues, and a great deal of popular music everywhere. The lover addresses, coaxes, cajoles, argues with the beloved. As a suitor, Dylan likes to cast himself as the egalitarian lover who asks for and offers nothing, the straight-shooter who says simply, here I am, here’s how I feel, what happens next is up to you. In the languorous “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” he is a modest and undemanding admirer:I am not askin’ you to say words like yes or no

  Please understand me, I got no place for you to go

  He stresses that “it don’t even matter to me where you’re wakin’ up tomorrow.” In “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” the bluesy, plaintive atmosphere is interrupted by a remarkably stark declaration:Well, I wanna be your lover, baby,

  I don’t wanna be your boss.

  So Dylan did indeed apply the democratic individualism he celebrated elsewhere to personal and sexual relationships. But he was not the liberated male he made himself out to be. In “If You Gotta Go,” he seems to be making an argument based on the freedom and mutual honesty of the two potential lovers: “If you gotta go / it’s all right / but if you gotta go, go now / or else you gotta stay all night.” While he insists there’s no pressure—“I want to be with you, gal / if you want to be with me”—the song lays on the pressure, verse after verse. “I certainly don’t want you thinking that I ain’t got any respect,” he says, but observes a few lines later: “It ain’t that I’m wantin’ / anything you never gave before.” In “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” he urges the object of his suit to choose risk over security, spontaneity over calculation, i.e. Dylan over his rival. He argues forcefully that this rival is merely using her as an adjunct to his frozen ego. But in return he offers nothing but the spur of the moment. As if to reassure her (and protect himself) the chorus ends with the repeated line: “You can go back to him any time you want to.”

  In “Queen Jane Approximately,” Dylan offers himself as the lover of last resort, the one who demands nothing and who accepts the beloved without illusions. When “you want somebody you don’t have to speak to / Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” Dylan could hardly be accused of overselling himself. But there is almost always a sense that, despite the little he offers them, the women are getting a bargain. Indeed, in the very minimalism of his offerings there is an implied honesty and authenticity that exposes and undercuts the illusions of both his lovers and his rivals. He’s the real one, and if they reject him, they reject reality.

  In “4th Time Around,” his reworking of Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” Dylan and his lover spend the entire song in coded sparring. Though to outsiders the details remain obscure, the pattern is unmistakably familiar, a dance of attack and retreat, negotiation and ultimatums. The song acts out this tangled mutuality but ends with a renunciation of inter-dependence in which Dylan spells out what he offers and what he expects:And I, I never took much

  I never asked for your crutch

  Now don’t ask for mine

  In “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” he tells a former lover, “I really did try to get close to you.” But much of the song explains how he really always meant to keep her at a distance. And all of it is about disclaiming responsibility for the failure of the relationship: “I didn’t realize how young you were . . . I couldn’t see where we were goin’ / but you said you knew an’ I took your word.” He harps on about his own good intentions (“I didn’t mean to treat you so bad . . . I never meant to do you any harm”) but the song is a study in mutual immaturity. In his self-exculpation, what’s clear is that Dylan is not and never has been what he’s pretending to be: in command of his emotions and purposes.

  The women cannot win in Dylan’s songs. In the exquisite “Love Minus Zero / No Limit” Dylan describes his ideal lover, who “speaks like silence,” is “true, like ice, like fire” and, crucially, “knows too much to argue or to judge.” This was the ethic of innocence embraced by the post-protest, “younger than that now” Dylan. Strikingly, many of his accusations against women echo his criticisms of the movement; in the personal as well as the political, the great enemy is the impulse to categorize or control or appropriate others. But silence itself does seem to be what the Dylan of these songs prefers from his women. The graveyard woman, soulful mama, junkyard angel who takes care of the singer in “From a Buick 6,” who can be relied on to keep his bed warm in a cold, chaotic universe, is praised because:She don’t make me nervous, she don’t talk too much

  She walks like Bo Diddley and she don’t need no crutchag

  The flawless Sad Eyed Lady celebrated at such mournful length in Blonde on Blonde is shown, in verse after verse, besieged by exploiters, phonies, and power freaks, but speechlessly, passively impervious to their corrupting blandishments. Yet turn this glacial indifference around and it becomes one of Dylan’s major complaints against women. In the ironically titled “She Belongs to Me” (the point of the song is that she doesn’t), the unattainable woman is resented because she “never stumbles,” “The Law can’t touch her at all.” The “Bankers’ nieces” are disparaged for seeking “perfection, / Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.”

  Dylan flails women whom he sees as desexed and uptight, as in the portrait of Ophelia in “Desolation Row”:On her twenty-second birthday

  She already is an old maid

  To her, death is quite romantic

  She wears an iron vest

  Her profession’s her religion

  Her sin is her lifelessness

  In “Tombstone Blues,” he ridicules “the hysterical bride” who thinks she’s “been made”:Now the medicine man comes and he shuffles inside

  He walks with a swagger and he says to the bride

  “Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride

  You will not die, it’s not poison”

  But it’s not just those women who spurn desire who come under attack, it’s also those who indulge it. In “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Dylan finds himself marooned south of the border: “they got some hungry women there / and they really make a mess out of you.” One verse is dedicated to the attractions and perils of Sweet Melinda, the prostitute whom the peasants call “the goddess of gloom.” Dylan warns: “She steals your voice and leaves you howling at the moon” (an orgasm reference?). Stuck inside of Mobile, Dylan responds to Ruthie’s invitation to visit “her honky-tonk lagoon” by warning her: “you must know about my debutante.” To which she replies: “your debutante just knows what you need / but I know what you want.” A memorably insinuating line as well as an unthinking expression of the familiar dualism in male perceptions of womanhood. Sexless Ophelia or the “hungry women”; frigid or predatory; elite or earthy; unattainable or attainable—and either way despised and resented.

  The double-standard permeates Dylan’s love songs of this period. In “I Don’t Believe You,” the refrain is an unappeasable complaint: “She acts like we never have met.” Yet Dylan could perform this in the same set in which he sang: “When we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew me when.” One of the things Dylan does effectively in many of his love songs is to evoke the passage of time and its ineluctable impact on relationships. Alongside that, he also seems deeply agitated about shifts in social status, who’s gone up and who’s coming down, who’s out and who’s in.

  You will start out standing

  Proud to steal her anything she sees.

  But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole

  Down upon your knees.

  In one song he reminds an erstwhile object of his affections of the time “when I was hungry and it was your world” and in another he states blankly, “Everyone’s gone but me and you and I can’t be the last to leave.”

  In “Most Likely You Go Your Way and
I’ll Go Mine,” he depicts love as a contest, a power game. Whoever is left on top when the music stops wins:Then time will tell just who fell

  And who’s been left behind,

  When you go your way and I go mine.

  In this song, Dylan is unsparing in his repudiation of a woman whom he sees as not being reliable in her affections and ultimately not capable of rising to the challenge of his independence:You say you love me

  And you’re thinkin’ of me

  But you know you could be wrong

  You say you told me

  That you wanna hold me

  But you know you’re not that strong

  Yet in the final verse he resents the appearance of a rival: “You say my kisses are not like his.” This is one of a number of songs in which Dylan situates himself inside a ménage à trois. In “Visions of Johanna,” he watches “Louise and her lover / so entwined.” In “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” “Temporary Like Achilles,” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” (“I saw him makin’ love to you / you forgot to close the garage door”), he’s the third wheel, the one left on the outside, clamoring to be let in. In “She’s Your Lover Now,” a bitter dissection of a failed romance (cut at the Blonde on Blonde sessions but left off the album), he declares with an air of betrayed innocence:You know I was straight with you.

  You know I never tried to change you in any way

  The song is remarkable for the sustained petty rage it directs at both the woman and her new lover, and the utter failure of this rage to bring even temporary relief to the singer. It’s a heady and affecting mix of desire, regret, jealousy, and disgust.

  “I Want You” has the simplest and most conventional of all love-song titles, but it’s packed with enigmatic imagery and haunted by ambivalent emotions. The slinking, intricate first verse evokes a fluid, ghostly, treacherously ephemeral environment in which desire itself seems the only thing that’s fixed and real, though not its objects. In fact, the object of Dylan’s obsession in this song scarcely exists; there’s no flattery, no effort to seduce her. The point of the song is that desire cannot be explained or justified. Despite rejection, competition, friends’ counsel, and his own better judgment, Dylan wants her, and that is pain and pleasure rolled into one. In the final verse the singer is driven to assault a rival, then collapses into a stammering wreck. But in the meantime Dylan vents his anger at women in general in a harsh, stunningly cynical bridge:Now all my fathers, they’ve gone down

  True love they’ve been without it.

  But all their daughters put me down

  ’Cause I don’t think about it.

  Resentment and fear of women, as well as unexamined sexist assumptions, infuse Dylan’s music of the mid-sixties. Frequently he portrays women as an alien species, fascinating, necessary, but not to be trusted. The locus classicus of that prejudice has always been seen as “Just Like a Woman.” However, any song that begins with the magically drowsy “nobody feels any pain” and climaxes with the howl “what’s worse / Is this pain in here” must be more than the sum of its tired patriarchal put-downs. The discovery of the vulnerability of the woman/girl he desires but cannot fully possess touches and angers the singer; he revels in her weakness, seizes on it for the leverage it may give him, but finds that even then she remains elusive. The steady, circular rhythm over which the singer murmurs (the melody is subtly extended and the lyric delicately teased out) gives way to a dramatic bridge of rising frustration, and the singer’s emotional collapse, segueing back to the verse with the bathetic “I just can’t fit.” It’s a plea of utter helplessness. The vulnerability of the woman is in the end the vulnerability of the (male) singer. There’s a little boy lost inside that little girl.

  Dylan’s appearance in these years has often been described as androgynous. (It’s one reason why this image remains attractive when so much sixties machismo has palled.) Apart from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and a handful of references to queens, drag shows, and the like (“The beauty parlor is filled with sailors,” “The waitress he was handsome / He wore a powder blue cape,” the fifteen jugglers are “all dressed like men”), there is a broader element of sexual ambiguity, of uncertainty about personal identity, in these songs. There is also a camp theatricality in much of Dylan’s delivery and self-dramatization, not least in “Just Like a Woman.”

  This song spawned more cover versions than any other track on Blonde on Blonde, including several by women—Judy Collins, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, Stevie Nicks. My favorite is an obscure one: a jazzy, cabaret-haunted remake by Barbara Gosza, an American performer working in Europe. With the aid of a few strategically placed amendments to the lyrics, notably the substitution of I for she in the final chorus—Gosza remakes the male dirge as a torch-song celebration of lesbian love.18 But she couldn’t have done that so successfully if there wasn’t, in the original itself, a powerful element of erotic ambivalence.

  Dylan built “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” on Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Automobile Blues,” and the song shares Hopkins’s sly humor. It’s a neatly coded tale of erotic pursuit and jealousy, of fashion accessory turned sexual fetish (“Honey, can I jump on it sometime?”). There’s a tone of comic detachment throughout, nowhere more effective than in the verse where he unexpectedly finds his doctor with the woman he desires (and to whom the song is addressed):You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me

  But I sure wish he’d take that off his head

  Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

  Once again, Dylan finds himself a reluctant troilist. It’s as if the games people play in private have proved as mind-bendingly bizarre as the public realities from which Dylan had turned away, and can only be faced with something like that mixture of sangfroid and barely disguised panic that fills “Highway 61 Revisited.” Although “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” has an element of woman-baiting, its satire is broader than that. After all, the woman may be ridiculed for her attachment to a piece of frivolous millinery, but the singer himself appears positively obsessed with it.

  In these songs, we see again and again the ridiculous spectacle to which people reduce themselves in pursuit of their erotic-romantic desires (which turn out more often than not to be as inauthentic as their political illusions). Sometimes, as in “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” and in the marvelous “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” the despair is lightened with self-mockery. Self-pity, however, remains the prevailing mode, an unabashed, delirious self-pity that somehow leaps beyond moralism and becomes a strangely exquisite pleasure-pain in its own right. There’s a simultaneous sense of huge power and total helplessness and, throughout, an undertone of vulnerability, fear, and loneliness. The songs are redeemed by the sheer authenticity of the confusion: emotions given a powerful and concise artistic expression long before they have been assimilated or understood by the person feeling them. This undigested immediacy stands in contrast to the more conscious, long-range analysis of relationships in Blood on the Tracks. The contradictions, the double standards, are all expressions of a boy-man lost in a world of temptations and frustrations, torn between the thirst for autonomy and the siren song of complete surrender. (“Yes, I guess I could make it without you / if I just did not feel so all alone.”) It’s the richness of interlayered emotions that makes these songs live. An inverted Bessie Smith, frail and bleached out, “helpless like a rich man’s child,” Dylan blends lust and contempt, longing and fear. Not a healthy cocktail, perhaps, but nonetheless a potent artistic brew.

  It’s often said that sexual liberation in the sixties merely liberated men to exploit women. Personal freedom and frankness became masks for self-serving irresponsibility. And you can see that syndrome blazed in neon in the Dylan of the mid-sixties. But what you will also find there is a poetry of the disorientation that follows the (forever incomplete) escape from inherited sexual norms. The songs are full of Dylan’s discontent with (elements of) conventional male-female relationships and with his (and others’) failed attempts to constr
uct an alternative. The political parallels are clear: in personal relationships, it was also year zero, only no one came to this launching pad without millennia of acquired expectations. You can feel Dylan scratching at the walls of his misogyny, trying to break or sneak or fake his way out of it. Then reeling back exhausted, unable to fathom or name his prison. There’s a poignancy in that.

  Relationships of ownership

  They whisper in the wings

  —“Gates of Eden”

  In the thirties, Theodor Adorno had declared, “All contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form.” Those leftists who made democratic claims on behalf of popular music he dismissed with scorn. They missed the totality within which that music was created. “The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above . . . the listener is converted, along his line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser.” In so doing, the industry strips listeners and artists alike of real autonomy, of the power to change the system that the music serves. “The consumption of light music contradict[s] the interests of those who consume it.”