Welcome to this week's selection of Picks, where we've been spending considerable time at bobdylan.com, which includes lists of the renowned troubadour's albums and songs, as well as a searchable archive of all of his lyrics. It's a useful resource for the layperson, but we feel the site fails to examine some of the more arcane aspects of Dylan's life and oeuvre. And so, in an effort to remedy the situation, we proudly present the following Yahoo! Picks Exclusive, the result of minutes of hard research -- Bob Dylan: Now It Can Be Told.
Where to begin? How about this: Did you know that Dylan's "Subterranean Homsesick Blues," long considered incomprehensible, is in fact a subtle homage to the mystery novel? It's true. At first we were skeptical, but after sitting down with the good folks at Troutworks Mystery Guide and watching the classic "tumbling cue card" mini-film that Dylan made for the song, we converted. Here's why:
Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
This is obviously a reference to John Ball's 1965 novel, In the Heat of the Night, which uses the burgeoning Civil Rights movement as a backdrop, with integration and racial equality as the ultimate "medicine."
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
Here Dylan expresses the lasting paranoiac effect of reading Richard Condon's Manchurian Candidate, the story of government brainwashing during the Korean war.
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
This was the clincher for us, as it clearly indicates that Dylan had recently finished Raymond Chandler's classic The Big Sleep, although we're not quite sure where exactly the "trench coat" fits into the whole mystery genre. Just another example of Dylan stretching his poetic license a bit too far...
What else? Well, Dylan worked for many years on a record dubbed Treasures of the Sunken City that, alas, never surfaced to see the light of day. It was meant to be an ode to the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that, by simple twist of fate, lay buried underwater just offshore from the city of Alexandria in Egypt. The effort gave rise to such classics as The Riches of Alexandria, Unforgettable Moments, and the anthem-like Seven Wonders: Get Clued In. Although the project was mysteriously scrapped, we have a few snippets here and there from the orginal work, gems that appear scattered throughout his music. Examples? An album appropriately titled Before the Flood, the equally apt song "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," and these poignant lyrics from an apparently quite literal tune:
...you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Of course, change was especially familiar to Dylan, what with his near-fatal motorcycle accident, his continuous vacillation between Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, and his stormy on-again off-again relationship with singer Joan Baez. It is a little-known fact that their affair came to an abrupt end when Dylan lifted the melody to Baez's song, Field Guide to North American Males, to produce his 1965 hit "Like a Rolling Stone." Now lost to history, the original lyrics offered a particularly striking insight into man:
Once upon a time
I saw a site
About why males might
Think they're always rightAnd otherrrrrrrrrrrr things
Oh, why does he hog
the remote control?
Play air guitar?
Act ter-ri-torial?
The song included a veritable catalog of men, with "descriptions of their plumage, mating calls, sexual and agonistic displays, courtship rituals and habitats." Ironically, the final verse, entitled Artsy males, detailed the parallels between the three famous Dylans -- Bob, Dylan Thomas, and Dylan McKay of 90210. Despite this tribute, the couple's relationship soon turned, as Dylan would later put it, "as cold as Quinn the Eskimo's underpants."
It was shortly after this episode that Dylan began to devote himself to looking for the center of things. We speak, of course, of his now-famous "Galileo phase." Here's a representative sample from this fruitful period, the original lyrics to "Tangled Up in Blue:"
After spending all day on his experiments,
Galileo was layin' in bed
Wond'rin' if that sun was center
or if he was misled
The Church, it said that he was wrong:
Earth-centered was what it taught,
But still he looked and the telescope
Gave fodder to his thought.
And he used the data of Tycho Brahe
(there was lots there to pursue)
And the elliptical theories of Johannes Kepler
(Which he surely paid his dues gettin' through),
Heliocentrisim - it was true...
But there was another, more adventurous side to Mr. Tambourine Man. Dylan harbored a secret addiction to lawn mower racing, as evidenced by his 1966 hit, "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Lawn Mower Blues Again." The famous last verse reads, "Dust off that rusty John Deere, pull on your boots of Spanish leather, and head down Highway 61." As an official member of the U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association, Dylan raced for many years as "The Flying Zimmerman." Tragically, his career was cut short after a near-fatal collision with pro-racer Bob Stormer of Lawn Race Cafe fame. The lesson learned? It takes a lot to laugh, and it takes a train to cry, but it takes a lawn mower to seriously haul ass.
And there it is. The truth about Bob Dylan, more mystery behind the man than we ever imagined. Hey, you can believe us or not, we're just laying down the truth. It's up to you, weigh the evidence, take your pick(s).
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