It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 6 :  Those old Baptist hymns

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Tony Attwood

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 6

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Those old Baptist hymns

I been into the baggage room where the engineer's been tossed
I stomped on a 100 compasses, God knows what they cost
I wanna be your lover, baby, I don't wanna be your boss.
I sure can't help it if this train gets lost.

The last verse of “Phantom Engineer” opens with the psychedelic lines with which Dylan remains satisfied for quite some time. They are more or less maintained on that first day of recording, 15 June, and on the second and final day of recording six weeks later they also still appear to be to the master’s liking. It is only after the lunch break, in the very last takes, when the tempo is also halved to the dreamy, slightly muggy version that will elevate the final version to the stratosphere, that Dylan suddenly says a radical goodbye to the engineer, the baggage room and the stomping on the compasses.

The Cutting Edge gives us five recordings in which we hear that alienating mise-en-scene. The only thing that changes in them, between the first take on 15 June and Take 3 of 29 July, is the number of compasses. From 100 to 40 – hundred compasses we only hear in the first take, then Dylan throws away sixty compasses and the first-person has to satisfy his destructiveness on the remaining forty compasses. Not too drastic or remarkable really – except that it has a funny correlation with an intervention in a song Dylan is recording these same days: “Highway 61 Revisited” (2 August). In that song’s first takes we still hear “I got a thousand red white blue shoestrings”, which has been changed in the final version to I got forty red white and blue shoestrings.

Phantom Engineer (Live at Newport – July 1965):

A similar operation, then, to change a numerical code for “very many” to “forty”. Prompted, presumably, by the euphony of the word forty. At least, it is a number we encounter so often in songs that it eludes probability and chance, and becomes statistically relevant. Not least with Dylan himself, by the way. “Miles”, for instance, in Dylan’s discography are sometimes many, sometimes two hundred, in two songs ten thousand, three times a million and four times thousand, all of which, of course, are not so much exact distance terms, but simply synonyms for “many”… and then three times forty (in “Long and Wasted Years”, “Things Have Changed” and “Lonesome Day Blues”). Which, among all those bulk numbers, suddenly seems oddly specific.

Then again, the Christian Dylan exegetes may want to argue that 40 is a “Biblical number”, as they are prone to do with every seven and every three and every twelve, but here with even less relevance. Sixty years after “It Takes A Lot”, we may have well reached the point to conclude that Dylan is not a Thirteenth Apostle, and apart from that, we cannot, with the best will in the world, see an edifying, evangelising symbolic quality in smashing 40 compasses (rather the opposite).

No, euphony is most likely the decisive trigger. Which seems pretty universal; “forty” is equally loved by poets, songwriters and literati. Through all the centuries: in the oldest variants of “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (Dylan’s template for “Seven Curses”), the maid does not have to be ransomed by gold or silver, but by “forty saddled horses, forty oxen with their yokes and forty geese with their goslings”; “Sir Patrick Spens” drowns forty miles off Aberdeen and the pirate “Charles Gibbs” robb’d full forty gallant vessels – to name just three examples of many from the Child Ballads. Kerouac (On The Road) is remarkably often “forty miles” from his next location, Burroughs, in Junky, more often than not holds back coincidentally forty pounds of weed or has forty dollars in his pocket. Dylan in his Tarantula calls a poem “Forty Links of Chain”, and a conversation with one Abner just so happens to last exactly forty minutes…. we need not, in short, ascribe mysterious symbolic qualities to Dylan’s choice of forty compasses.

More charge suggest the remaining words of these first, later rejected, lines. The engineer thrown into the baggage room seems to echo the fate of Casey Jones. Reports of his fatal accident always mention the fact that the baggage car was located behind the loco and tender – whether his body was actually tossed there the historiography does not mention, but the word baggage jumps out, in any case.

With the compasses, Dylan seems just as satisfied – at least they are maintained for just as long as the tragic engineer. Understandable, as it is a strong visual image with attractive, ambiguous connotations and, moreover, not yet milked – all too common is “compass” as a metaphor not in songwriting. Fitting also in the mercurial oeuvre of these years, among images such as the broken doorknob (“Desolation Row”), the crumbling statues made of matchsticks (“Love Minus Zero”), the empty-handed painter (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) and telephones that don’t ring (“Highway 61 Revisited”), among those dozens of images that insinuate failing communication or emotional emptiness. Besides, destruction of directional saviours, of compasses, has the same liberating power as “don’t follow leaders” (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or “You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)” – a wonderful, very Dylanesque image, all in all, which like, say, “watch the parking meters” after “don’t follow leaders” gets an again very Dylanesque banalising, ironic addition with God knows what they cost.

Therefore, the deletion of these lines that at least survived the six weeks from 15 June to 29 July does not seem motivated by dissatisfaction with the words or the images themselves. In the previous stanza, we saw that Dylan made a structural change to achieve compositional consistency, to mirror the triplet Robert Johnson – erotic ambiguity – train from the first stanza. And to exactly the same end he now seems to decide in this last stanza. Less thought-out apparently, but still: in the lunch break on that session day 29 July, Dylan not only comes up with the brilliant inspiration to cut the song’s tempo in half and thus quicksilvering it, but – kill your darlings – also to scrap the engineer, the baggage room and the forty compasses. In favour of the missing Robert Johnson reference:

Babe, it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors
Wintertime's comin', it's gon' be slow
You can't make the winter, babe, that's dry, long, so
You better come on in my kitchen, 'cause it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

… “Wintertime’s comin’” from the last verse of Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen”, one of his plaintive blues songs, according to biographer Elijah Wald “his first unquestionable masterpiece”, the song in which sister Annye Anderson hears echoes of “those old Baptist hymns” (in Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, 2020), the song also from which some joker got lucky seems to echo a year later in the last verse of “Pledging My Time”, in somebody got lucky.

Robert Johnson – Come on in my Kitchen:

Today, 29 July 1965, the sought-after compositional consistency then delivers the desired Robert Johnson reverence to “It Takes A Lot”, retaining the original rhyme (been tossed/they cost being changed to with frost/across):

Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across

And it’s not even a crazy thought that Johnson’s song also provides the inspiration for the slowdown; at the same time as the lyric intervention, Dylan brings the tempo down to 92 beats per minute… remarkably close to the 82 bpm of “Come On In My Kitchen”. And alright, with that I could not get across, the poet still maintains a small, shaky bridge to those smashed and then discarded compasses, to “being lost”. A bit regrettable it still remains though.

———

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 7: It Hurts Me Too

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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