Visions of Johanna

01/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

This is Dylan’s reply to Eliot.  Where TS Eliot wrote about watching the women come and go talking of Michaelangelo, and measuring out a life in coffee spoons, so Dylan gives us Mona Lisa with the highway blues.

“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?” is surely the most atmospheric opening line of any popular song ever written, and it takes us directly into this cold dark world of isolation and dislocation.   “We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it” - just as Eliot’s characters are, but the causes and cures are different.

As for the characters - who are they?  And indeed come to that where are they now, 40 or more years since the song was written? 

Louise, her lover, Johanna, little boy lost (or is he the lover of Louise?)

And in that one simple line, “How can I explain?” Dylan speaks for all the young of the late 60s who found themselves disenfranchised from communication with their parents, their university lecturers, and everyone else.

And yet, tragically for such a wonderful song, the first version most of us heard, and indeed the only version we heard for many years, was one of those quickly knocked-out recordings that Dylan seems to like.  It is clear that the bass guitarist in particular had no idea about the curious construction of the song, with its additional lines in the last verse adding to the sense of futility and frustration, for instead of building he simply cocks it up and plays the wrong notes.   It makes the recording near impossible to listen to.

As to the women - now presumably in their sixties - what are they up to?  Did they have children?  Did they stay in touch?  Where are the Visions of Louise?  Who can tell?

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