by Jochen Markhorst
I play both sides against the middle
Pickin’ up that pirate radio signal
I heard the news – I heard your last request
Fly around my Pretty Little Miss
I don’t love nobody – gimme a kiss
Down at the bottom – way down in Key West
Heath Ledger’s legacy is largely built on his portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), a role for which he was posthumously awarded a well-deserved Oscar in 2009. And as well as to Ledger’s overwhelming performance, we can attribute the success to the Joker’s retorts, the monologues, the script and the highly quotable one-liners. “Why so serious?” “Do I look like a guy with a plan?” “I believe, whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you… stranger.”
The Joker is a complex and rather unique character, who finds his soulmate decades later in this single line from the final verse (if we choose to view the closing verse as a chorus) of Dylan’s “Key West”: I play both sides against the middle. Just like Dylan’s narrator, The Joker is the ultimate outsider, standing even outside the outsiders. He plays everyone – the authorities and the law, as well as the criminals, the outlaws, the Mafia, the gangster bosses. And his deepest contempt is reserved for “the middle”, the law-abiding citizens, the conformists. His mission – for The Joker most certainly is a guy with a plan – is, after all, to prove that a mere nudge is enough to bring about total collapse, the unmasking of these civilised people: “Their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble.”
Dylan’s outsider doesn’t go as far as the Joker. This outsider doesn’t blow up hospitals or fully loaded ferries. He sails across the ocean, leans to starboard and feels the sun on his skin, and turns the dial. And then seems to sail into an otherworldly twilight zone; “I heard the news today” is, at any rate, strongly reminiscent of the opening words of one of Lennon’s greatest songs, “A Day In The Life” (1967, I read the news today), and is identical to the opening words of Lennon’s closing verse (“I heard the news today oh boy / Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”). The same words that Dylan quotes in his Lennon tribute on Tempest (2012), in the closing track “Roll on John” – including a maritime connotation, incidentally:
I heard the news today, oh boy
They hauled your ship up on the shore
Now the city gone dark, there is no more joy
They tore the heart right out and cut it to the core
… the passage in which the narrator recalls the moment he heard about Lennon’s murder.
Fitting, then, with the morbid undercurrent of Dylan’s follow-up, “I heard your last request”. We are apparently in a realm beyond time and space: where most of us would struggle enough just to convince the executioner to let us hear one last request (and would then presumably waste all the time granted by frantically scrolling up and down the playlist), this spectre is given time for no fewer than three songs, and he knows exactly which ones:
Fly around my Pretty Little Miss
I don’t love nobody – gimme a kiss
It is a remarkable playlist. “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” is an old, originally instrumental banjo tune from the Appalachians (1924), which has survived for a hundred years in various versions (“Blue Eyed Girl”, “Suzanna Gal”, “Fare Thee Well, My Blue-Eyed Girl”, “Western Country”) in bluegrass and alt-country circles. Gillian Welch & David Rawlings included an understated, affectionate interpretation on their 2020 album All The Good Times Are Past And Gone, for example. Dylan undoubtedly knows the song from the 1961 album The New Lost City Ramblers Vol. III, and probably from even closer range:
“Everything about them appealed to me — their style, their singing, their sound. I liked the way they looked, the way they dressed and I especially liked their name. Their songs ran the gamut in styles, everything from mountain ballads to fiddle tunes and railroad blues. All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth. I’d stay with The Ramblers for days.”
(Chronicles, Ch. 5 “River Of Ice”)
This is set in 1961, around the same time that “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” was part of the repertoire of Mike Seeger, John Cohen and Tom Paley, of the New Lost City Ramblers that is. And perhaps the song title is now buzzing through Dylan’s mind because the last Rambler passed away shortly before “Key West” was conceived: his old mate John Cohen died 16 September 2019. The song itself, at any rate, has little depth;
Fly around my pretty little miss,
Fly around my daisy,
Fly around my pretty little miss,
You almost drive me crazy
… although the verses do have that weird quality again, the quality that Dylan so admires in those old folk songs; “Full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. […] They were out of sight” (Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston interview, 1965):
Going to get some weevily wheat,
I’m going to get some barley,
Going to get some weevily wheat,
And bake a cake for Charlie
Number two on the your last request playlist is “I Don’t Love Nobody”, and that’s just as much of an old-timer – the first copyright is dated 1896, secured by the blackface performer Lew Sully, with rather racist lyrics. Variations – without the racist slurs – began to find their way into the jazz and fiddle repertoire from the 1920s onwards, and from the 1930s we have dozens of recordings in bluegrass, country rag and Western-style versions. The walking music encyclopaedia Dylan is bound to know them, but will first and foremost think of Elizabeth Cotten, the great artist he honours as a DJ on his Theme Time Radio Hour (episode 96 Sugar And Candy, 2009), whose “Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie”, “Freight Train” and “Shake Sugaree” Dylan covered, and who is an obvious association following the New Lost City Ramblers – Elizabeth was the Seegers’ housekeeper, played music with Mike, who made the first home recordings of her songs (which eventually became Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, 1958) and ultimately brought her onto the stage and into the recording studio.
The radio show itself also seems to give away which song the narrator is referring to with gimme a kiss. Whilst there are (minor, unremarkable) songs titled “Gimme A Kiss” or “Give Me A Kiss”, it is more likely that Dylan is once again dusting off a classic: “A Kiss To Build A Dream On” from 1951, one of Louis Armstrong’s signature songs. It is the song the DJ chooses to close his show, which is his last for the time being (the bonus broadcast Kiss, aired in February 2015, later followed by yet another bonus broadcast, Whiskey, in 2020). DJ Dylan speaks highly of the song, and especially of Satchmo:
“Well, we can’t end the show with such a sad kiss, so let’s listen to one of the masters, the fountainhead from which all music flows. Louis Armstrong and a song that was a signature piece of his live performances in the later period of his life. This is a version he recorded in 19 and 51.”
And when the DJ puts the “fountainhead’s” record on, we hear:
Give me a kiss to build a dream on
And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss
Mmm, sweetheart, I ask no more than this
A kiss to build a dream on
It is a beautiful song with a gently melancholic undertone, celebrating the power of a kiss and acknowledging, in the words of Robert Burns, the kiss as adieu’s last action. It is the song the skipper requests before he sets sail for his final destination, for down at the bottom – way down in Key West.
To be continued. Next up Key West part 24: Willie’s backward psychology
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle: 
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
