Key West part 17: It’s a game

by Jochen Markhorst

XVII     It’s a game

I play the gumbo limbo spirituals
I know all the Hindu rituals
People tell me that I’m truly blessed
Bougainvillea bloomin’ in the summer and spring
Winter here is an unknown thing
Down the flatlands - way down in Key West

So, rhyme master Dylan opts for a fairly classic, not overly complex rhyme scheme in “Key West”: six-line stanzas, aab-ccb, the shortest tail rhyme (or end rhyme) that is. It isn’t particularly common in modern pop music, although we have heard it resurface from time to time in recent years (Taylor Swift’s “Our Song”, Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey). But Dylan has decades of experience with it (every verse of “I Don’t Believe You” from 1964 begins with a sestet in tail-rhyming, for example), and generally demonstrates his mastery of rhyme within that aab-ccb framework. As he does here; rhyme finds such as railroad track/Kerouac, gateway key/purity, the land of Oz/unworthy cause, in a suit/prostitute and middle/signal illustrate the sincerity of Dylan’s words from 1991, in the SongTalk interview with Paul Zollo:

Is rhyming fun for you?
“It’s a game. You know, you sit around… you know, it’s more like, it’s mentally… mentally… it gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”

In fact, it can be an end in itself. “You get the rhymes first and work back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way,” Dylan readily admits in that same interview segment; the rhyme can trump the intended meaning of a verse. Although it can be a pitfall, as he argues in his collection of essays The Philosophy Of The Modern Song (2022):

“Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes. Revolution/evolution/air pollution. Segregation/ demonstration. John Lennon got away with it by using his cheeky sense of humor to create a postmodern campfire song all about bag-ism and shag-ism. But in less sure hands one might as well write about the periodic table of elements with built-in rhymes about calcium, chromium and lithium.”
(Chapter 17, Ball Of Confusion)

Dylan seeks the thrill of rhyming something that’s never been rhymed before, recognises the pitfall of easy rhymes, but nevertheless surprises us with this ninth verse of “Key West”; in terms of rhyming, the weakest verse of the song.

That sense of surprise begins right from the first rhyme. Gumbo spirituals/Hindu rituals is not only impure (the metre doesn’t match), but is above all an identical rhyme – after all, it rhymes rituals with rituals. Unusual, and generally a stopgap measure by an uninspired songwriter. Which is certainly not the case here – in the hundreds of performances following the release of Rough And Rowdy Ways, Dylan rewrites dozens of verse fragments, deletes lines and changes words, but gumbo spirituals/Hindu rituals remain unchanged in all performances of the song. Apparently, he is satisfied with it, and the impurity and the identical rhyme do not bother him. Which then leads to the “philosophical” reflections in Chapter 56, Black Magic Woman:

“It’s important to remember that these words were written for the ear and not for the eye. And as in comedy, where a seemingly simple sentence can transform into a joke through the magic of performance, an inexplicable thing happens when words are set to music. The miracle is in their union. […] All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirize their lack of profundity only show their own limitations. They are as useless as the police officer reading the transcript of Lenny Bruce’s act in the courtroom during his obscenity trial. Just as that police officer misses the essential spark in Lenny’s performance, so do the others miss the magic that happens when lyrics are wed to music.”

… with which the essayist suggests that an unconventional choice like Hindu rituals contributes to the song’s magic.

Seems debatable. After all, as the master himself explained as far back as 1978 in that superb Playboy interview with Ron Rosenbaum, a prerequisite for a song’s melodiousness is: “It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They… they… punctuate it.” How pleasant the sounds of hin-du are in combination with the underlying music is, to a certain extent, subjective, but that the word Hindu interferes is beyond dispute. Within the lyrics anyway; if an exotic, religious touch fits into “Key West” at all, then the setting invites sooner something like voodoo rituals or Rastafarian rituals, and given the atmosphere of the song’s lyrics in general, Buddhist rituals would in any case “interfere” less than Hindu – which is, after all, quite a catch-all term, and one that moreover rather clashes with the narrator’s slightly boastful claim I know all the Hindu rituals (of which there are thousands, spread across the various traditions). Well, perhaps the narrator is referring to the sixteen sanskaras then.

Within Dylan’s body of work, the choice of Hindu is just as puzzling. Over the course of sixty years, across more than six hundred songs, Hinduism is never explicitly mentioned, and only implicitly so if one views it through a particularly tolerant lens. Themes such as suffering and transience begin to emerge more prominently from roughly Time Out Of Mind (1997) onwards and, with a little goodwill, can be reconciled with Hinduism; on this album, for instance, we have already heard “the path in my mind”, “sightless eye”, “the gods” and a few others, phenomena which, if one so wishes, can be seen as Hindu concepts. Too tenuous and far-fetched, however, to elevate Hinduism to a motif on the album – or in Dylan’s oeuvre at all. No, we must simply assume that the combination of the sound patterns, the underlying music and the lazy identical rhyme does work that particular magic, at least in Dylan’s own synaesthetic experience; “the magic that happens when lyrics are wed to music”.

Still, this is even harder to follow in the subsequent, clichéd rhyme summer and spring/an unknown thing, which is even a bit awkward. Justifiable, at best, because the songwriter simply needed a context for the ever-melodious bougainvillea bloomin’. Or, and this is an unlikely but far more charming interpretation, to pay a small, subtle tribute to Dickey Betts. The Allman Brother whom Dylan, according to all sources, held in such high esteem, whose “Ramblin’ Man” he knows by heart, who gets a name-check in “Murder Most Foul” (“Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz / Play, ‘Blue Sky,’ play Dickey Betts”), and whose second album (Dickey Betts & Great Southern, 1977) concludes with the beautiful, drawn-out “Bougainvillea” – written after he had, in his own words, snagged a sort of masterclass:

“I was out there getting to know Bob. It was kinda selfish on my part, but that’s the way you learn, you get around people. I’d written songs before, but I was just trying to improve myself. And it helped. I wrote some pretty good stuff.”
(interview Ray Padgett, Pledging My Time, 2023)

Dickey Betts & Great Southern – Bougainvillea:

Incidentally, featuring backing vocalist Don “Sonny Crockett” Johnson, co-writer of the song and winner of the 1988 Key West World Cup in the Super Boat Class in his monstrous racing boat. In waters he knew well – all the speedboat scenes from Miami Vice were filmed way down in Key West.

To be continued. Next up Key West part 18: Mankind’s spiritual odessey through life

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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 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