It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry part 1: Like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Tony Attwood

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 1

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet

Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby
Can’t buy a thrill

 DJ Dylan is quite fond of Big Joe Turner, and has professed that love for more than sixty years now. “Joe Turner is always surprising me with little nuances and things,” Dylan tells Jeff Slate in the 2022 Wall Street Journal interview. In Dylan’s oeuvre, we hear snippets and scraps from Big Joe’s songs like “Cherry Red” (the big brass bed that will end up in “Lay, Lady, Lay”), “Bull Frog Blues”, which delivers I left you standin’ here in your back door crying to “Standing In The Doorway”, and classics like “Rebecca” and “Boogie Woogie Country Girl” become reference records for Dylan’s songs in the 21st century. In Episode 75 of his radio show (2 April 2008, Cold), the DJ delves a little deeper into the Big Joe Turner record he just played, “The Chill Is On”:

“There’s also a line in that song: I been your dog ever since I been your man. Certain phrases are used over and over in the folk process, and are crossing the boundaries between country and blues music. A phrase like that one, or: I’m going where the chilly winds don’t blow can be heard over and over.”

… “certain phrases used over and over”, “crossing the boundaries between country and blues music” – exactly what Dylan has been doing for more than 60 years now. Which he often enough – indirectly – reveals in his radio show, as in Episode 57, Head to Toe, when he plays an old favourite, “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” by The Monroe Brothers from 1936. “They were like the speed metal of bluegrass,” the radio-maker says admiringly before starting the record, and a few moments later the listener immediately understands to what the artist Dylan owes “Maggie’s Farm”:

I ain't gonna work on the railroad 
I ain't gonna work on the farm
I'll lay around the shack till the mail train comes back
I'm rollin' in my sweet baby's arms

Little doubt; we know that “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” is under Dylan’s skin as early as 1961 (we know of two living room recordings on which he sings the song), and in those years the song has already long been a standard on the setlist of all the greats. Dylan is familiar with the versions of The Monroe Brothers, whose variant seems to be the template for Dylan’s own rendition, he hears the interpretation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in Greenwich Village, and listens to the one by The New Lost City Ramblers (on New Lost City Ramblers Vol. 3, the record that will become such prolific inspiration for Dylan’s songs anyway), but he is presumably particularly enamoured of the Foggy Mountain Boys, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt – Dylan copies the way Lester deploys the song to “Maggie’s Farm”.

Foggy Mountain Boys  – Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms: 

The third line then seems co-responsible for the emergence of the mail train, for the setting of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, or at least for ingraining that setting into Dylan’s working memory. Co-responsible: in the same months in 1961 that “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” is on his set list, producer John Hammond gives Dylan an advance copy of one of the most influential albums of the 20th century, King of the Delta Blues Singers;

“From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.”
(Dylan, Chronicles, Ch. 5 “River Of Ice”, 2004)

… the record with sixteen classics, sixteen songs recorded by Robert Johnson in five sessions in November 1936 and in June 1937, the record that, with songs like “Traveling Riverside Blues”, “Cross Road Blues” and “32-20 Blues”, laid the foundations for entire generations of rock, blues and folk artists. Graphically, Dylan honours the monument on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, the musician Dylan records “Milk Cow’s Calf’s Blues” as early as 1962 (during the first Freewheelin’ sessions, April ’62), “Kind Hearted Woman” and “Rambling On My Mind” are welcomed onto his set list. Dylan is, in short, crushed. And poetically articulates the crushing in Chronicles:

Bob Dylan – Ramblin’ on my Mind:

“The record that didn’t grab Dave very much had left me numb, like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet. Later, at my West 4th Street apartment, I put the record on again and listened to it all by myself. Didn’t want to play it for anybody else. Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition.”
(Dylan, Chronicles, Ch. 5 “River Of Ice”, 2004)

… and with many more words; in this final chapter of his fictionalised memoir the autobiographer Dylan devotes 2318 words to the impact Robert Johnson had on him in 1962 – and in 2020, nearly 60 years after the acquaintance, he still professes that admiration, in the New York Times interview with Douglas Brinkley:

“Robert was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time. But he probably had no audience to speak of. He was so far ahead of his time that we still haven’t caught up with him. His status today couldn’t be any higher. Yet in his day, his songs must have confused people. It just goes to show you that great people follow their own path.”

In Chronicles Dylan then explains quite specifically how that influence manifests itself. “I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns,” he writes, “the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, bigass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.” And one page later: “In about 1964 and ’65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson’s blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things.”

The only example Dylan then cites is “a song of mine, Highway 61 Revisited, which itself was influenced by Johnson’s writing,” but we can effortlessly find more examples of that lyrical imagery. In “It Takes A Lot”, for instance – and right from the opening: “Well, I ride on a mailtrain”. In his little room on West 4th Street, Dylan listens to Robert Johnson for weeks on end, “cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player,” so he hears track three from Side B come by dozens of times, “Ramblin’ On My Mind”, and jumps up each time at

I'm going down to the station
Catch that old first mail train, see
I'm going down to the station
Catch that old first mail train, see

And then, when Dylan reports to Columbia Studio on 15 June 1965 for the first session for the album he is recording with a real blues band with real blues musicians to return to the Blues Highway, to Highway 61, Dylan already knows what the setting will be for the first song he plans to record today: Bill Monroe’s and Lester Flatt’s and Robert Johnson’s mail train, “crossing the boundaries between country and blues music”.

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 2: The Ghost of Casey Jones

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:

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