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19 February 2006

From the Songs I thought I understood as a young man, but that I needed to be 35 to truly get file: →[More:]

Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue

The line about 'all the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now,' hits like a ton of bricks these days.

also, listening to this song:

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer - George Thorogood

in a bar is one of life's treats.

post by: jonmc at: 21:55 | 35 comments

It took me until about 40 to thoroughly 'get' "Tangled" myself... but yeah, that's probably one of the five best single lines Dylan ever wrote. (And don't ask me for the other four...)

posted by wendell 19 February | 22:20

I agree. It's only in the last few months, literally, that I have been listening to Tangled up in Blue with anything akin to understanding. Part of it is that the song takes in this panoramic sweep of a relationship spanning decades, traces the travels of one person roaming from place to place, has the strange sad surprise reuniting scene, and the hopefulness at the end that he's gonna get back to her, somehow. In checking for the lyrics I found this kind of good Wikipedia page on the song.

Incidentally, I have the same newfound respect for Simple Twist of Fate and Shelter From the Storm. Is it a coincidence that I've been playing Blood on the Tracks relentlessly since December? Something clicked. I'd have to assert that these songs are what the love lives of mature people...sound like.

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:27

oh, yeah. The Wikipedia page.

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:28

I agree. It's only in the last few months, literally, that I have been listening to Tangled up in Blue with anything akin to understanding.

It isn't even the panoramic relationship part that gets to me. It's the fact that there are so many people (friends, lovers, and wanna-be both), in my rear view mirror at this point, and so much of my earlier life does seem like an illusion to me. But it isn't an illusion: there's a Bob Seger song called 'Travelin' Man,' where Bob says 'sometimes at night I see their faces and I feel the traces they left on my soul.' When I was 21, i thought I understood that. hell, my biggest ambition was to become someone with a history like that. Little did I know.

posted by jonmc 19 February | 22:33

Yeah.

It's a mystery where the past goes.

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:35

Told of the album's lasting popularity, Dylan was later to say: "A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?"r />

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:37

yeah. I wonder sometimes if I've left the same traces on their souls. I hope I did.

posted by jonmc 19 February | 22:38

Well, shit. So now I now it's NOT "we split up on the docks at night". Thanks a whole helluva lot, miko!

posted by yhbc 19 February | 22:40

Without a doubt.

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:40

yhbc: I had the same f*ing reaction. But you know what? "on the docks" is just better. I'm gonna keep singing it that way. For 20+ years I've had this image in my head of two people fighting on a seaweedy wharf amid derelict boats under a full moon. The smell of creosote, the lapping of the water, the dimness. It's waaay too late to erase that!

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:41

Without a doubt.

Well....

remember that oft-metioned lesbian ex of mine? One time she actually said in front of me, 'there's relationships and there's what happened between us.' That tore me up. Whatever we had was brief, but it mattered, at least to me.

But she's just one of the people who seems like an illusion to me now.

posted by jonmc 19 February | 22:45

And for every one of those, there's probably another to whom you meant more than you imagined.

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:48

But did she start in to dealing with slaves?

joking!!!

Yeah, I'm going to stick with "docks at night" too. The (more banal) alternative would force me to assume that Bob somehow realized that "we split up on a dark and stormy night" didn't parse as well, so he had to shorten it a bit.

posted by yhbc 19 February | 22:50

I wonder, sometimes. I also have my share of people in the rear view who are in the grave, due to drugs, car wrecks, murder and suicide. That's the price you pay for leading something approaching a life, I guess.

posted by jonmc 19 February | 22:51

I've been thinking about another song like that. Neil Young's Sugar Mountain. I've always known and liked that song, but I had no idea until this past week what it was about. I stumbled across a tuning that I thought it might sound good in, and went back and learned it.

All those years I knew it, and I thought it was a simple ditty about coming of age. God, no,it's about mortality, and the inaccessibility of the past one you have crossed the divide. The simplest images: your mother and your dad, the girl who passes you the note, the kids who smoke your first cigarette with. All things that you take for granted, that are so immediate when you're young, but that seem like visions years down the road.

posted by Miko 19 February | 22:51

Another great song. And you know what? No matter how miserable your life is, you can take satisfaction in knowing that you're not the poor bastard in the audience who coughed at the end of it.

Umm, unless you are.

posted by yhbc 19 February | 23:00

I can just picture that guy, trying desperately to hold a rough lungful in until that last note was struck.

posted by Miko 19 February | 23:01

"that are so immediate when you're young, but that seem like visions years down the road." I find things are just the opposite for me miko. As I get older I find distant people and events are more clear and immediate than ever. Most frighteningly, sometimes more clear than the here and now.

posted by arse_hat 19 February | 23:12

I think that's just it -- they're as vivid as ever, yet they can't be touched. I'm not trying to sound stupid or spout platitudes, but time really is a mystery. The narrative we tell ourselves about our lives -- the very idea that our experience is linear -- may be the illusion.

posted by Miko 19 February | 23:17

"And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine"

"they're as vivid as ever, yet they can't be touched" I think that is the curse of hindsight.

posted by arse_hat 19 February | 23:31

It isn't even the panoramic relationship part that gets to me. It's the fact that there are so many people (friends, lovers, and wanna-be both), in my rear view mirror at this point, and so much of my earlier life does seem like an illusion to me.

Holy crap, can I relate to this statement. When I think back on some of the things I did in my younger years...some of it seems like it happened to someone else, that it was a story I made up, or someone else told to me.

posted by sisterhavana 19 February | 23:34

George Thoroughgood? Come on, jon. You gotta go with the Hook.

posted by me3dia 19 February | 23:58

Er, Thorogood. I've been staring at a screen all day.

posted by me3dia 20 February | 00:04

me3dia: gotta agree with you there.

posted by Miko 20 February | 00:09

Jonmc's 35???

posted by orthogonality 20 February | 00:15

Right, like some 20-year old is going to come up with those lines?

posted by warbaby 20 February | 01:30

yhbc: I decided that there's another good reason to favor "docks that night" over "dark sad night." If you will indulge me:

Blood on the Tracks is a really consistent and carefully-thought-out album. It also is a work of interwoven motifs -- repeated musical ideas, as well as concepts and images that echo from song to song. The strongest motif is probably weather (wind, lightning, rain, storms, hail, etc.) But there's another that makes a frequent enough appearance: ships, boats, voyaging by water. To start, there's the fishing boat in "Tangled." But there are more.

In Meet Me in the Morning:

Look at the sun, sinking like a ship
Ain't that just like my heart babe
When you kissed my kips

And in Simple Twist, the last scene takes place on the docks, where the singer is wandering around:

He hears the ticking of the clocks
And walks along with a parrot that talks
Hunts her down by the waterfront docks
Where the sailors all come in.
Maybe she'll pick him out again...

So if there are docks in this one, why not docks in Tangled?

Then in You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome:

I'll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.

Note: All port cities. With docks. For leaving.

So, despite what Bob and his offical site may say, I think an argument can be made that on a subconscious level, he meant that they split up on the docks that night. It contributes better to the thematic structure of the record. So let's keep hearing it that way; it works.

This comment brought to you by the Professional Organization of English Majors.

posted by Miko 20 February | 02:06

The song that had me completely perplexed as a young man was "small blue thing" by Suzanne Vega. I got the album again a year or so ago, and realised just how obvious it was.

posted by seanyboy 20 February | 03:44

They were some dark, sad docks that night.

miko: That quote about the song has stayed with me (I think it's in the lyrics book, actually). Obviously it was cathartic for him to write the album at some level, but for listeners it's a different experience (like that hell-and-back AskMe last week).

Two other albums in the same vein: The Downward Spiral and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. They're in their own ways, like Tracks, cathartic emotional roller-coaster rides, but you imagine they were hell to write.

posted by stilicho 20 February | 05:39

seanyboy - what's it about?

posted by goodnewsfortheinsane 20 February | 05:46

I can't DL the jonmc Thorogood version. It wants me to sign up to YSI beta and when I do, it still won't work.

posted by sciurus 20 February | 08:02

As long as I live, I will never get what people think is so great about Dylan.

However, as the last time I said something like that on Mefi I got into an almost-shouting-match with Languagehat, which spilled over into email, I guess I should shaddup about it.

He hears the ticking of the clocks
And walks along with a parrot that talks

Sheesh.

posted by jokeefe 20 February | 15:59

jokeefe: I think I was in that thread, too. And anyway, I actually cringed when I posted that line. It IS a painfully bad rhyme, clearly a placeholder that didn't get replced. But let's be fair; it's the only clunker like that on the whole album.

posted by Miko 20 February | 16:19

"Rainy Night in Soho" by the Pogues is like this for me.

I'm not singing for the future
I'm not dreaming of the past
I'm not talking of the first times
I never think about the last
Now this song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still, there's a lot I hold before me
And you're the measure of my dreams --
The measure of my dreams.

At 17, I thought I knew all about that -- oh yessir, I was damn experienced in the ways of heartbreak and the passage of time and relationships fading in the rearview mirror. Then nearly 20 years on, I heard it on the ol' iPod the other day in the car and I actually had to pull over before careening into oncoming traffic.

posted by scody 20 February | 21:00

Heh, scody: So glad I'm not the only person that occasionally has to pull out of traffic because a song has clouded my eyes, and heart.

posted by Miko 20 February | 21:34

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