No Nobel Prize for Music: Can you please crawl out your window

by Tony Attwood

What did Bob Dylan write after completing the utter and total masterpiece that is “Desolation Row?”  The answer is “From a Buick 6,” a song which expresses the opposite vision of life from “Desolation Row” in the lyrics, and which in the melody has none of the delicate nuances of “Row” and is, in fact, nothing more than a 12 bar blues with, it has been noted, a refernce to Sleepy John Estes song “Milk Cow Blues”

But maybe we should not be too surprised; after all, the writing of “Desolation Row” must have taken a long while, and there was an album to be created, and an album contract to be fulfilled.

But just as Buick 6 was as different musically from Desolation Row as it could be, so the next song that Bob composed was different again; it was “Can you please crawl out your window”.

And the point about this song is that the musical feel of the piece is really very awkward.  Which probably explains why Bob only played once in public.  There is, as far as I know, no recording of that performance available, but Jimi Hendrix did have a go at the song, so we do have one alternative version… sorry the quality is poor – if you can find a better recording on the internet please do send me the link.

This was in fact the launch of Dylan’s period of writing songs of disdain in 1965.  And here we should remember that the year began with the delicate, beautiful and melodic “Farewell Angelina”.

But here, I think, if we look at the lyrics of the following songs we can see just how personal that song was…. for then Bob seems to be asking if love can be real (Love is just a four letter word) before starting to see himself as the person standing outside of society (as in Subterranean Homesick Blues and Outlaw Blues). 

There were two more beautiful love songs composed soon after Love Minus Zero and She Belongs to Me, before  the ultimate song of farewell with It’s all over now baby blue.  And from here on the songs became bleaker and bleaker.  True there were some surreal moments and songs in which Bob emphasised the benefits of simply moving on, as with Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,  On the Road Again, and Maggie’s Farm which were written one after the other, but then even moving on became tiresome (or perhaps just part of everyday life) as with It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry.     Indeed ultimately moving on seemed to make no sense as with Sitting on a barbed wire fence.

Which, as we have see,n led to the final summing up of all the problems in Like a Rolling Stone, wherein everything seemed to be an absolute mess and a jumble – something reflected in other songs of the time such as Why do you have to be so frantic (Lunatic Princess) and Tombstone Blues

I’m not at all sure who Bob is addressing the former of these songs with the lines

Why should you have to be so frantic
You always wanted to live life in the past
Now why d you wanna be so Atlantic
You finally got your wish at last

but  equally,I am not sure it matters, and quite understandably, “Lunatic Princess” was never performed by Bob.  He did of course, recover all his composing talent (and how!) with “Desolation Row” but the two songs composed between “Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” do seem to me to lack the focus that those two masterpieces have.

• Like a Rolling Stone
• Why do you have to be so frantic (Lunatic Princess). 
• Tombstone Blues
• Desolation Row

However, if we wanted to find a phrase for that sequence of compositions without contemplating their artistic merit, I guess it could be “everything is a mess”.  The lesson was however, that this message could turn out to be itself something of a mishmash that most people would never remember (as with “Lunatic Princess”) or a profound works of insight (like the first and last songs in that sequence).

But it is also important to note, I think, that this feeling of everything being a mess stayed with Dylan for almost all of the rest of the year in terms of his song writing, and it was only in the final composition of 1965 – Visions of Johanna – that he once more found his way to express the concepts that were on his mind, in a musical form that the rest of us could appreciat eand savour for years and years to come.

The one love song – first song in this series – From a Buick 6 – proclaimed that Bob had everything, but after composinig that then he was immediately back to disdain with Can you please crawl out your window?

And what marks this song out is the musical arrangement which is not only unique for Dylan, but almost certainly unique in terms of any pop, rock or popular song.  For a start the instrumental introduction is three bars long – not two or four bars as we normally get but three bars – which even if we are not counting and have no musical education, sounds rather odd.  It makes us uneasy before Bob has even started.

Then, the first line covers the conventional four bars of music but is followed in the  “Preoccupied with his vengeance” line with another three-bar line.  In short we have is actually a seven-bar phrase, which I am not sure was ever tried in popular music before this moment, not least because most of the time pop and rock musicians were expecting some people to be dancing to their songs.  (If you want to see the impossibility of dancing to seven bar phrases, in a partner dance, just try it!)

But then no one who listens to the lyrics is going to want to do a partner dance to this song, so really this doesn’t matter, but even though we are listening to Bob and not counting the beats, it feels odd.   And it gets odder: “Cursing the dead that cannot throw him back” actually takes up three and a half bars of music before Bob comes back with “You know that he has no intentions” which lasts three bars.   And then just to mess with us even more we have four bars of “Of looking your way, unless it’s to say, That he needs you to test his inventions” followed by one bar of music before we get to the chorus.

If you are a musician, have a go at playing it and you will see how weird it is.  If not, just listen; it feels odd.

And there is more for the chordal structure is really odd too.  The opening line begins conventionally enough with G, C, D which gives a clear feeling of being in G major, and although the second line (“Preoccupied with his vengeance”) contains two chords that are perfectly normal and usual within G major (A minor and G major itself) I can’t think immediately of another song which uses these two chords as a cadance – as a way of rounding off a line.  It makes the music feel as if we have got nowhere at all.

The third line returns to something like G major normality with the chords, G major, B minor, A minor, D major – all perfectly acceptable and commonpalce within G major, but then the fourth line (“you know that he has no invetnions”) again throws in two chords from the same key, but in a way that we don’t normally hear (A minor and C major).

And what makes the song sound even more unusual is we then get the totally unexpected whole bar of D major (which would be normal as a way of finishing a verse but here isn’t the end) followed by another A minor to C major sequence as in line four, but this time followed by a D chord leading into the chorus.

In short everything is strange.   Indeed the opening lyrics are not just strange but uncomfortable

He sits in your room, his tomb, with a fist full of tacks
Preoccupied with his vengeance

And it gets more and more spooky as it goes on.   So what Dylan has done is not just created lyrics that I think we can fairly call “weird” but also created a chordal accompaniment that is equally strange and unsettling.

Indeed if we then expect the song to resolve itself into something more Dylanish he only half obliges.  The melody and chord sequence of the chorus are perfectly standard and acceptable to the contemporary ear, but the lyrics are just plain strange….

Can you please crawl out your window?
Use your arms and legs it won’t ruin you
How can you say he will haunt you?
You can go back to him any time you want to

OK, it is a song that says to the lady, “you can leave him whenever you wish”  – or at least that is how it seems at the start, but the musical accompaniment is like nothing we have ever heard before.   There is no rhythmic balance to the lines, and the lyrics are stranger than strange.  Just consider the second verse…

He looks so truthful, is this how he feels
Trying to peel the moon and expose it
With his businesslike anger and his bloodhounds that kneel
If he needs a third eye he just grows it
He just needs you to talk or to hand him his chalk
Or pick it up after he throws it

It is almost as if, having written a song so beautiful, elegant and comprehensible, but also a song which is as utterly unsettling as “Desolation Row,” Bob felt he had to do weird and do it in a big way.  Indeed, even the use of the word “please” in the repeated title line sounds odd, given the context of the other lyrics and the jarring effect of the music.

Now this is all getting rather heavy, I know – but it is that sort of song.  However, if you would like a little light relief, you can always try and ask “AI Overview” what makes “please crawl out your window” sound so strange.  Not I hasten to add that I use AI to write my little reviews and articles here, but rather because I came across this while doing the background research into what others have thought of this song.   In essence, their view that that the title phrase “creates a jarring juxtaposition of formality and awkwardness, making the sentence sound unusual and even slightly unsettling. ”   

And I mention that because that is what the music does also – here both the lyrics and the music are completely as one.   The whole concept is unusual and (I would say more than slightly) unsettling.

The story so far

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends
• 13: The Gates of Eden
• 14: After the Revolution – another revolution
• 15: Returning to the roots (but with new chords)
• 16. From “It’s all right” to “Angelina”. What happened?
• 17: How strophic became something new: Love is just a four letter word
• 18: Bob reaches the subterranean
• 19: The conundrum of the song that gets worse
• 20: Add one chord, keep it simple, sing of love
• 21: It’s over. Start anew. It’s the end.
• 22: Desolation Row: perhaps the most amazing piece of popular music ever written