Previously:
- Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? part 1: Look at Barry Run
- Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? part 2: density and gravity
by Jochen Markhorst
III The amusing cruelty
He sits in your room, his tomb, with a fist full of tacks Preoccupied with his vengeance Cursing the dead that can’t answer him back I’m sure that he has no intentions Of looking your way, unless it’s to say That he needs you to test his inventions
The “density and gravity you won’t find anywhere else” that Hornby refers to are certainly suggested by the hermetic text here. The “you” seems to be the same lady as “Miss Lonely” from “Like A Rolling Stone”, and is treated as ruthlessly here. The narrator notes that she is stuck in an unhealthy relationship, one in which she allows herself to be abused both psychologically and physically. She tolerates being bullied by a vengeful, loveless egomaniac, who, by his mere presence, manages to turn her room into a tomb, radiating aggression with his “fist full of tacks”. He wants nothing from her – she is at most useful as a test subject for his “inventions,” his ingenious insults.
Halfway through the first verse, a suspicion comes up: Dylan paints a self-portrait of his own black side. All the testimonies of intimates from the mid-sixties make a point of Dylan’s nasty side, his habit of verbally insulting less gifted table-companions to the bone, surrounded and encouraged by a few loyal disciples, especially Bob Neuwirth:
“I would see him consciously be that cruel, man, I didn’t understand the game they played, that constant insane sort of sadistic put down game.”
(Michael Bloomfield in Larry Sloman’s On The Road With Bob Dylan, 1975)
“If Dylan got drunk enough, he’d select a target from among the assembled singer/songwriters, and then pick that person apart like a cat toying with a wounded mouse. Making fun of a person’s lyrics, attire, or lack of humor was the gist of his verbal barrage. Dylan was so accomplished at this nasty little game, that if he desired, he could push his victim to the brink of fisticuffs.”
(Al Kooper in Backstage Passes And Backstabbing Bastards, 1998)
“When he was on his “telling it like it is” truth mission, he could be cruel. Though I was never on the receiving end of one of his tirades, I did witness a few. The power he was given and the changes it entailed made him lash out unreasonably, but I believe he was trying to find a balance within himself when everything was off-kilter.”
(Suze Rotole in A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008)
Although, according to Marianne Faithfull, Bobby Neuwirth was worse, and was the really diabolical of the two:
“He was affable but as forbidding, if not more so, than Dylan. Dylan had a reputation for demolishing people, but when people told these stories, it was really Neuwirth they meant. Neuwirth and Dylan did such a swift verbal pas de deux that people tended to confuse them. But the most biting commentary and crushing put-downs came from Neuwirth. And when Neuwirth got drunk, he could be deadly. I never saw Dylan’s malicious side, nor the lethal wit that has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial, bemused center of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike.”
(Marianne Faithfull in An Autobiography, 1994)
… bearing all a very close resemblance to the male protagonist from “Can You Please Crawl”, with which this song fits in with the other sketches “of what goes on around here sometimes, tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening” as Dylan says in the liner notes on Bringing It All Back Home.
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
This protagonist can erupt in a “businesslike anger,” is surrounded by slavish bloodhounds and can break through any armour, any mask, any posed image to humiliate, to expose his victim to public scrutiny. Biographers try to fit an occasional dinner companion like Edie Sedgwick into that profile, who, incidentally, seems to have had a somewhat unhealthy relationship with Bobby Neuwirth. But any random groupie or unsuspecting girl who happens to be present fits the fatal atmosphere of the lyrics, of course. The narrator and the male protagonist do not offer her a warm shoulder, as in “Queen Jane Approximately” – she is a target, nothing more – and she herself must bring them the ammunition, at that. Nor does he offer hope;
Why does he look so righteous while your face is so changed Are you frightened of the box you keep him in While his genocide fools and his friends rearrange Their religion of the little tin women That backs up their views but your face is so bruised Come on out the dark is beginning
Worse still, it is getting lurid. The narrator suggests that the abuse is not only verbal and psychological, but unfortunately also physical. The original mouth full of tacks in the opening line had already been changed to a hand full of tacks in the second take and to a fist full of tacks in the third take, and in this closing verse, the ruthless narrator mentions a bruised face, qualifying the men present with a bizarre superlative from the graveyard woman in “From A Buick 6”, with genocide fools, noting that they adhere to the religion of the little tin women, that they regard women as toys. And if she does leave him, where could she possibly flee to? To more darkness, apparently: come on out, the dark is beginning.
Gloomy, vicious and unheard of; Dylan rhymes this together in a week when Herman’s Hermits’ über-cheesy “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am” is the most popular song in the U.S., while singalongs like “I Got You Babe” and “What The World Needs Now Is Love” and “What’s New Pussycat” are in the Top 10… fists full of tacks, genocide and damaged faces are spectacularly ill-suited to the Zeitgeist and the prevailing cultural climate. Which may be a key to Dylan’s schizophrenic treatment of the song. The many recording attempts between 30 July and 1 December (29 takes) illustrate that he definitely feels something for the ditty – it is even released as a single – and then Dylan forsakes the number entirely. Never plays it again, discarding it for Blonde On Blonde, and ignoring “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” for any Greatest Hits and Best Of compilation until 1985.
The song simply does not have, as La Faithfull would say, that amusing cruelty.
To be continued. Next up Can You Please Crawl part 4: “I’m sure that Bob Dylan would dig this version!”
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 looking 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
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs