by Jochen Markhorst
VIII The words are all mighty
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
Our great storytellers do like a cyclical narrative structure. The Odyssey begins on Ithaca and ends on Ithaca. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a continuously self-repeating family chronicle anyway, and also ends as it began, with yet another Ursula having a child by her cousin. Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet opens with a ship emerging from the fog and ends with that same ship vanishing again into the mist. Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Goethe’s Faust, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, the cafeteria in which Pulp Fiction begins and ends, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca with the Manderley estate… And, to stay closer to Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time A West (1968) begins and ends with a train. A train that, as in Dylan’s song, is so much more than just a train.
Leone’s film opens with a tantalizingly long waiting scene on an otherwise empty platform of a dilapidated railway station in a godforsaken desert setting, and when the train finally arrives it brings Death to the three bad guys waiting there for Harmonica. In the final scene, the train announces birth in a noisy, teeming setting: the train brings Life to the desert town Claudia Cardinale founds here, Sweetwater. An antithesis made all the sharper by Leone’s circularity, by having the film begin and end with the train.
It seems that Dylan did only in hindsight acknowledge this identical structure as a successful compositional frame, with the narrator arriving by train in the opening line, and the antagonist departing by train in the closing line. The later revisions of the second and third stanzas, which perfectly “round out” the song à la Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude do indicate as much, after all. In that lunch break on 29 July 1965, so before Dylan makes the final, rather radical changes (both in tempo and lyrics), he rewrites both stanzas to match the first verse: a Robert Johnson salute, an amorous allusion and a train reference. The child/ghost/angel is dropped to make way for the brakeman and the Double E, the baggage car with the 40 compasses disappears in favour of the Johnson quote wintertime is coming.
Similar literary considerations then seem to have led to the most dramatic and pronounced change: the title.
The title remains “Phantom Engineer” up to and including the last take – so also on the recording sheets from the last, final recording session Thursday afternoon, 29 July. The album will be in shops on 30 August, so pretty soon after that final recording session, Dylan must have decided to change the title. Into a – within Dylan’s oeuvre – rather unique title, at that.
Titles that give an extra charge to the song are something Dylan often chooses in these months. “From a Buick 6”. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”… word combinations that unusually do not appear in the song lyrics.
Titles that sometimes add value and clarify the lyrics (“Spanish Harlem Incident”, “Positively 4th Street”), much the way Picasso calls a painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or as Zadkine calls a sculpture The Destroyed City, but which more often than not give the song an alienating, enigmatic connotation (“Obviously Five Believers”, “4th Time Around”). And are often, as we can hear a few times thanks to the studio banter on The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-66 (2015), spontaneous fabrications, invented on the spot, knocked off, usually larded with chuckles (“On the Road Again”, “A Long-Haired Mule And A Porcupine”, “Alcatraz To The Ninth Power”).
“It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” falls outside those categories, and is unique in Dylan’s oeuvre. Not only because it is an entirely standalone title, but also for the aphoristic couleur, the proverbial nature of it. At most, “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” come close, but those are both derivations, semi-fabrications of word combinations we already know. This one is different.
A flash of inspiration presumably, knowing Dylan. In the most obvious scenario, Dylan drives home to West Saugerties after 4 August, after the final H61 sessions, to his wife-to-be Sara and her baby daughter Maria. Sara is already more than three months pregnant with Dylan’s first child (Jesse, 6 January 1966), Dylan did that much-discussed, earth-shattering electric gig in Newport between recordings last week, and he doesn’t have another commitment until 28 August (Forest Hill Tennis Stadium in Queens)… he has earned a few days of me-time. But somewhere in the back of his mind, the slight dissatisfaction with the title of “Phantom Engineer” still itches. These are the dog days. In these weeks of August 1965 we have only one single day with temperatures dropping below 27°C (80°F – the average daily temperature in these 25 days off is 84°F, almost 29°C). Dylan is hanging on the porch, languidly. Leafing through the works of Khalil Gibran:
“It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone… but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.”
When he reads those words the bells go off. Dylan’s superior sense of language, his instinct for rhyme & reason, and his powers of association rarely leave him, and neither do they this time – Gibran’s aphorism articulates a perhaps somewhat old-fashioned, but nevertheless cast-iron, universal wisdom – the amorous variant of “trust comes on foot but leaves on horseback”. Whereby Gibran stays closer to the age-old source of that proverb; already in the fifteenth century we find all kinds of variants of Sickness comes on horseback, but goes away on foot in Germanic, French and Anglo-Saxon areas, so: first fast, then slow. The inspired Dylan sees the link of Gibran’s aphorism to his song, integrates his motif “train”, and switches to the 20th-century variant, to first slow then fast. “It may take some time to forge a connection, but one departing train is enough to lose that connection”, something like that. On a first whim, he then rearranges Gibran’s oneliner into “It takes a lot to love, it takes a train to cry”, immediately notices that to love does make it a bit corny, and in the same breath finds the semi-homophone to laugh… yes, better. Well, pretty perfect actually.
Speculation, obviously, but really not too far-fetched; Dylan was presumably introduced to the Lebanese American’s work early on via devout Gibran fan Woody Guthrie. Leaving lasting traces, incidentally. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” from 1962 already has suspiciously strong Gibran traces, and on Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020) we can still hear echoes, too. From Gibran’s mega-bestseller The Prophet then especially; “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one,” for example, which we hear paraphrased in “I Contain Multitudes” (I sleep with life and death in the same bed).
And what’s more: Dylan acknowledges his love for Gibran’s parables and poetry in the summer of 1968 with Big Words, in the interview with John Cohen for Sing Out!:
“The only parables that I know are the Biblical parables. I’ve seen others. Khalil Gibran perhaps… It has a funny aspect to it – you certainly wouldn’t find it in the Bible – this type of soul. […] Gibran, the words are all mighty but the strength is turned into that of a contrary direction. There used to be this disc jockey, Rosko. I don’t recall his last name. Sometimes at night, the radio would be on and Rosko would be reciting this poetry of Khalil Gibran. It was a radiant feeling, coming across it on the radio.”
“Soul”, “mighty words”, “radiant” … words of a fan. “Inspiring” he might also have added.
To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 9: “It’s not such a terrible song to do”
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 lookin’ 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