It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry part 7: It hurts me too

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 7

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        It Hurts Me Too

Well, I wanna be your lover, baby
I don’t wanna be your boss
Don’t say I never warned you
When your train gets lost

 Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) is now manager of the shop where they both work when he finally reveals to shop-girl Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan) that he is the mysterious man with whom Klara has been having such an intimate, heartfelt correspondence all this time. Alfred wants to be her lover, not her boss. Thus bringing the plot of The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) to a happy ending. Yes, indeed: in 1998 Nora Ephron reworked the movie into the hit film You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. But by then we are almost sixty years on and a love affair between an executive and a subordinate is a lot more problematic – in Ephron’s film, for safety’s sake, man and woman are no longer colleagues in the same company, but both executives at competing shops.

In the intervening years and in the decades, or even centuries before The Shop Around the Corner, it is anything but offensive, and even a romantic, plot-driving ideal: the manager with the secretary, the prince with the citizen, the squire with the maid, the surgeon with the nurse, and when Dylan writes his song in the spring of 1965, he has just seen Captain Von Trapp break up with the baroness to marry his children’s governess Sister Mary, Julie Andrews. For centuries we have, in short, found it super romantic when the boss wants to be not the boss but the lover. And we actually still do – despite the twenty-first century enshrining in company protocols, army regulations and even laws that amorous liaisons within an authority relationship are forbidden, it remains popular in all telenovelas, soaps and Bollywood productions. Or perhaps all the more so: der Reiz des Verbotenen, as our German friends call it – the forbidden attraction.

In songs, however, master & servant never is a romantic constellation. Bosses do appear, but really always as The Evil One, or as representative of the life the protagonist now leaves behind, as a recipient of resignation, or to illustrate the hero’s rebellious disposition – who now says the boss can go f*ck himself, or something like that. “Summertime Blues”, Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man”, “Wake Me Shake Me”, “John Henry”, songs like that. As a love object never, anyway. And if so, then only in a figurative sense – “he or she is is bossing me around,” or, as Elvis warns in “Britches”: “Who wears the britches is the boss / That’s a gal, that’s a gal in britches.” A warning he himself doesn’t take too seriously, by the way: “But in the middle of the night when the moon is shining bright / Ah, you’re the boss” (“You’re The Boss” in Viva Las Vegas, 1964). Then again, that’s Ann-Margret, so that doesn’t really count.

Dylan seems to realise that too, that originality of I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss in a lyric. It is the only line of the final couplet that has stood from Day One, never changing, and which he continues to sing throughout, not only in all studio takes, but also in all live performances. Indeed, it is even the only line in his oeuvre that he reuses.

“Bob really, really hates to repeat himself. He just hates it,” reveals engineer Chris Shaw in 2008 in the Uncut special dedicated to the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs. Shaw should know – he has been involved with both the Bootleg Series and Dylan’s regular studio albums since “Things Have Changed” (1999) through to Rough And Rowdy Ways in 2020. It is clear from the context that Shaw is referring to less tangible things like sound or the shuffle or – even more elusive – the “feel”, but an aversion to repetition obviously extends to lyrics as well; Dylan, like any poet, will not want to reuse notable word combinations in other songs, would surely never sing “one hand waving free” or “infinity goes up in trial” or “at the time of my confession” in any other song.

But during the recording of the “scooped up” songs that would later be cobbled together on Self Portrait (1970), other laws temporarily applied. That reviled album, which Dylan himself also repeatedly dismisses with derogatory qualifications like “joke” and “a lot of crap”, and which he claims was meant as a deterrent, as a deliberate attempt to put an end to his stifling popularity, contains enough moments that make it a treasured album for many despite everything – even well before its more or less official rehabilitation with the release of The Bootleg Series 10 – Another Self Portrait (2013). If only because, for a whole next generation, it is a first introduction to classics from the canon. “Alberta”, “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know”, “Little Sadie”, “Gotta Travel On”, “Copper Kettle”, and perhaps the greatest of them all: “It Hurts Me Too”.

“It Hurts Me Too” is a monument and all the gods have it in the repertoire. From The Stones to the Grateful Dead, Clapton to Junior Wells, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, not to mention all the songs that use “It Hurts Me Too” as a template (like Dylan’s 1966 “Pledging My Time”). The song is first recorded by – and usually attributed to – Tampa Red in 1940, but is pumped up into the outer limits of the stratosphere first and foremost by Elmore James in 1957, and again in 1962.

 

Lyric variations aplenty, of course. To Elmore, for instance, we owe the rewrite of the first verse, which has become sort of the standard by now;

You say you hurting, you almost lost your mind
The man you love, he hurts you all the time
When things go wrong, go wrong with you
It hurts me too

… but none of the dozens of variants has the words Dylan sings in 1970 as the second verse:

I want you baby just to understand
I don't want to be your boss babe, I just want to be your man
When things go wrong, so wrong with you
It hurts me too

… with which Dylan adds further music-historical lustre to the monument: it is the only recording in which the greatest song poet of the past 60 years repeats himself. Which he really, really hates, thus making his derogatory, scathing self-reviews with “joke” and “a lot of crap” even more convincing on reflection – he really, really means it.

Official monument status, by the way, “It Hurts Me Too” won’t be given until 2012, when the song will be inducted into the Blues Hall Of Fame in Memphis. Pretty late, as a matter of fact. The Blues Hall Of Fame has been elevating songs to the peerage since 1983, an average of three a year, and “It Hurts Me Too” in Tampa Red’s rendition is, 42 years after the list’s inception, only song number 69 on that list. For what that list is worth; Jimi’s “Red House” is not on it, for instance – Jimi Hendrix is not on there at all – and neither is “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”. Nor any other blues by Bob Dylan, the hardest-working and most respected bluesman of the past sixty years – which is a bit strange for a foundation that claims to have as its mission: preserving history, celebrating excellence, supporting education, and ensuring the future of the music.

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To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 8: The words are all mighty

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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