by Jochen Markhorst
V The whole world is a cactus
I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Jacques Dutronc reaches immortality and eternal fame in 1968 with the now perhaps a bit dated-sounding but still irresistible hit “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille”. And well alright, also because the lucky devil was songwriter, lover and for some years even the husband of Françoise Hardy. But in this part of Europe, we already knew him before “Paris s’éveille”. In 1966, when Dutronc has just been paired up with his regular lyricist Jacques Lanzmann, a producer is dissatisfied with beatnik singer Benjamin’s performance of a Dutronc song, and he asks if Dutronc, by then already a widely recognised driving force behind the success of yé-yé, can’t record it himself. The single reaches second spot in the charts, is the start of Dutronc’s long and highly successful solo career, and “Et moi, et moi, et moi” is now part of the canon. To this day, the song keeps returning in covers, arrangements, parodies. Our English friends know the translation “Alright, Alright, Alright” with which Mungo Jerry scored a big hit (number 3 in 1973).
Jacques is asked to record an entire album (like most Dutronc LPs self-titled, but for convenience we usually call this one Et moi, et moi, et moi, 1966) and draws two more successful singles from it: “Les Play Boys” and the hit that half of Europe must think of when they hear Dylan sing I get blood from a cactus: “Les Cactus”. As attractive as almost all the songs from Jacques’ four 60s albums – swinging, melodic garage rock, hopping back and forth between chansons, The Kinks and ’65 Dylan. With Dylan, Dutronc (or rather lyricist Lanzmann) shares a fondness for the sound of words and unobtrusive wordplay, often enough at the expense of syntax and even semantics. Unexpected recognition from the highest echelons scores the song in 1967, when Prime Minister Georges Pompidou quotes the song – with source – in parliament: “J’ai appris que dans la vie gouvernementale, il y a aussi des cactus – I have learned that in government life, there are also cacti”, ironically winking at the opening couplet;
Le monde entier est un cactus Il est impossible de s'assoir Dans la vie, il y a qu'des cactus Moi je me pique de le savoir Aïe aïe aïe! Ouille! Aïe aïe aïe!
The whole world is a cactus It's impossible to sit down There are only cacti in life I pride myself on knowing it (litt: “I prick myself”) Ai ai ai! Ouch! Ai ai ai!
… and then three more stanzas in which poor Jacques gets all punctured by those damn cacti; they are in his bed, in his pants, in his fellow man’s smiles and in their bonjour. Even in their cacti are cacti.
So Dutronc, though hyperbolically, uses “cactus” the way we have used “cactus” since the Middle Ages: as a metaphor for hard, painful, forbidding. And to that symbolic charge the protagonist also seems to be referring when he draws the blood for his creature from cacti: “the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper,” as Dylan tries to articulate the song’s impact in his long declaration of love to Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” in The Philosophy Of Modern Song. In those regions, the gory western songs, we also seem to be in this verse. Blood, cactus, gunpowder, and in the next line the reference to the card-playing and dice-playing gamblers, in the saloon no doubt… the blood flowing through the veins of my version of you is apparently the blood of black country romance, of “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”, “Billy the Kid”, “Cool Water” and “Big Iron”, the blood dripping from Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959).
Alienating still is make gunpowder from ice. Probably picked up from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (chapter V, “I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder”), and with some tolerance, the associative leap to Dr Frankenstein can then be followed; this is the chapter in which Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado and is shown around the laboratories of one mad scientist after another. The first has been working for eight years on a project “for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers”, the next leads in an infernally smelly laboratory “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food”, another is a blind professor who teaches his likewise blind students to distinguish colours by taste and smell (with no visible success), and so on. Gulliver does not want to weary the reader with “with all the curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity”, but perhaps the grand academy of Lagado also has a workroom in which a senior scholar tries to bring someone to life.
The ponderousness of this shaky bridge to “My Own Version Of You” suggests that the verse with the cactus and the ice was dredged up from Dylan’s famous “very ornate, beautiful box”, the box in which he keeps dozens of scraps of paper with loose ideas, melodic word combinations and useful names. We know of its existence thanks to Larry Charles’ lack of discretion, the director and co-screenwriter of the Dylan vehicle Masked And Anonymous (2003): “He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesise into a coherent thing.” A name like “Uncle Sweetheart”, for example, which the men then use for a film character, but Charles also recalls phrases we will later hear in Dylan’s songs. He finds a strip of paper with “I’m no pig without a wig”, which is rejected for the script, but then turns up in the Dylan song “High Water”.
A second clue is the slight deviation from the sung version. Officially, on the site, the line reads “I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice”, but that is not what Dylan sings: “I get blood from a cactus – gunpowder from ice” – in the studio and on stage, he omits “make”. A singer’s intervention, obviously: now the metre is correct, a classic four-foot anapaest (da da DUM – da da da DUM – da da da DUM – da da da DUM), the metre into which the next verse is squeezed as well (I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice).
The whole world may be cactus, but in his verse Dylan does cut off any prickly protrusions.
To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 6: They saw, yet they did not see
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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