It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 3: La petite morte

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

III         La petite morte

Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby / Can’t buy a thrill
Well, I’ve been up all night / Leanin’ on the windowsill
Well, if I die / On top of the hill
And if I don’t make it / You know my baby will

 The spirit of Casey Jones and the spirit of Robert Johnson mould the form as well, or so it seems. Four-line stanzas with the simplest rhyme scheme. The “Casey Jones-variants” are simple enough; all written in the pair rhyme aabb, and even simpler is the mono rhyme of the classic blues couplets, though these are usually three-line (a repeated opening line plus a bouncer). But Robert Johnson does occasionally resort to the four-line aaaa. For example, in track 4 of that legendary record King of the Delta Blues Singers that so impressed Dylan, “Walkin’ Blues”:

I woke up this mornin' / feelin' round for my shoes
Know 'bout 'at I got these / old walkin' blues,
Woke up this mornin' / feelin' round oh, for my shoes
But you know 'bout it I / got these old walkin’ blues

Likewise twelve-syllabic verse lines, likewise four-line stanzas, likewise rhyme scheme aaaa… it could just be that Dylan uses “Walkin’ Blues” as the railway tracks to guide his mailtrain of thought across. Without the repeated verse lines, of course – he has used that particular trick before (very recently as a matter of fact; “Outlaw Blues” and “She Belongs To Me”, six months ago) and besides: he has converted to Beat Poetry, Dylan is more ambitious, these days.

We hear that right after the “Casey Jones opening”. Well, if I die / On top of the hill is an alienating derailment. It seems cut-up, it seems as if Dylan is pasting a randomly chosen film quote into his lyrics, or at least a sentence patch borrowed from some low-culture product. A B-western with Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, or Blind Boy Fuller’s “I’m Climbin’ On Top of the Hill”, or maybe even from the Big Bang of rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” (And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill). Though a borrowing from the über-sad ballad “Two Soldiers” still seems the most obvious source (the blue-eyed Boston boy with the curly hair who meets his death on top of the hill), as that age-old folk song is high on Dylan’s list of favourites. Not important of course; on top of the hill, combined with if I die or not, is far too generic to attribute to a source, and is presumably instinctively chosen by Dylan precisely to trivialise. In fact, the word combination is so common that Dylan – very unusually – repeats himself a month later when he writes “Tombstone Blues”:

I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I’d set him in chains at the top of the hill
Send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after

in which “top of the hill” also rhymes with thrill and is the setting of a death scene again.

Besides the desired banalising effect, the blues-exploring Beat poet is undoubtedly attracted by the by-catch: the erotic connotation. Dylan has immersed himself in Johnson’s lyrics, even transcribing them all, and is entranced by the “free association, the sparkling allegories, bigass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction,” as he explains in Chronicles, and acknowledges that in 1965 he was trying to copy “the lyrical imagery”. So he has encountered them all: You can squeeze my lemon ‘til the juice runs down my leg and I flash your lights, mama and I’m bound to check your oil and Your calf is hungry, I believe he needs a suck and all those other euphemisms for genitals and intercourse. And also the same sub-variant that Dylan seems to insinuate here: the failing lover. With Robert Johnson, Dylan sings along to “Phonograph Blues”, to

Beatrice, I love my phonograph
honey, you have broke my windin' chain
And you've taken my lovin'
and give it to your other man

… as “Poor Bob” laments in one verse, only to choose different “lyrical imagery” to express the same thing in the next:

Now, we played it on the sofa, now
we played it 'side the wall
My needles have got rusty, baby
they will not play at all

Phonograph Blues – Robert Johnson:

“Nonsensical abstraction” may semantically not be entirely conclusive, but it covers quite nicely the idiomatic turns those old blues giants had to wriggle into to avoid vulgarities. A “lyrical imagery” that, by the time Robert Johnson uses imagery like “calf” and “oil” and “phonograph” and “rusty needles”, is already starting to go berserk. By the time Johnson records his songs (late 1930s), his predecessors and his colleagues have pretty much looted the entire fruit basket (peaches, grapes, lemon, banana, apple), the entire zoo plus the safari park and petting zoo (rooster, rattlesnake, poodle, mare, bumble bee), every physical activity (ride, roll, shake, gravel, rock, drive, bang) and the Food Department too (sugar, ham, honey, syrup, pie, jelly, meat, milk). It is, in short, getting increasingly difficult to come up with something new if you want to capture “intercourse” in lyrical imagery.

However, all those culinary, zoological and fructarian variations are, for all the imagery, hardly ambiguous. Dylan’s preference, as is well known, is keeping things vague, and vagueness he achieves with if I die on top of the hill. Even within its ambiguity: surely, you can understand it as a euphemism for “orgasm”, la petite mort, but also as “failure”, as premature ejaculation or impotence – to which the sequel if I don’t make it seems to hint. But just as effortlessly, you can initially deny any sexual connotation.

After all, Casey Jones is in fact, leaning on the window sill, on his way to his death. Agreed, not on a hilltop, but we could attribute some metaphorical quality thereto. But then, in the next stanza the narrator communicates the already less ambiguous don’t my gal look fine when she’s comin’ after me? and the last stanza shuns any ambiguity: I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss. Reasoning back then, the vagueness from the first stanza does indeed seem like an intimate confession: the narrator laments his premature ejaculation or his erectile dysfunction.

Which still does not promote the song to being a dirty blues, although Dylan does wink at it, at the very least. And then opts for the less usual failing lover as narrator. By far the majority of dirty blues songs, of course, have boastful, horny, virile narrators who, in songs like “Shave’ Em Dry” or “Sixty Minute Man” or “Keep On Churnin’ (Till the Butter Comes)”, sing of not only the pleasures of sex, but also one’s own Olympic lover’s qualities. Still, we also are familiar with the more tragic variation, the song told by the failing lover. The aforementioned “Phonograph Blues” by Robert Johnson, for instance, or Bo Carter’s “My Pencil Won’t Write No More” (remarkably also recorded by the hoochie-coochie man himself, Muddy Waters). And in that subcategory, we may now conclude, we can place ‘”It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” as well.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry – Chris Smither: https://youtu.be/2Yv3QR2_C1Y

Poor Bob.

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To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 4: He knows all those songs

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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