Recent articles
- Covers we missed: the most wonderful “Boots of Spanish Leather” ever recorded.
- Is there a reason why certain Dylan songs are so rarely performed by Bob?
By Tony Attwood
There are a fair number of sites that offer up a selection of Bob Dylan lines that stand out for the writer – and quite a few of them I’d agree: these lines are particularly memorable. And by way of example I took a quick flip through various songs sites this morning and I found others had covered this topic long before me, coming up with such lines as…
- Some people will offer you their hands and some won’t
- I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
- Everyone is wearing a disguise
- There’s a black Mercedes rollin’ through the combat zone
They are not laughter inducing lines, but they are what I think Bob does best – lines which make me pause, and later go back to them and think a bit further.
I even found an article headlined, “3 of Bob Dylan’s Most Memorable, Gut-Punching One Liners” written by By Alex Hopper, earlier this year and I thought that was worth mentioning since he came up with some lines that I haven’t seen picked out elsewhere. Such as…
Steal a little and they throw you in jail / steal a lot and they make you a king (“Sweetheart Like You”)
And he also added the thought that “Dylan’s songwriting is often layered. He might be singing about one thing on the surface, but there is even more rich context hiding in between the lines.”
I’d go with that but take it a bit further, in that I have often had the feeling that he doesn’t see the world like many of us do. By which I mean he is often (to use a phrase I have indulged in before) looking in all directions at once.
Indeed I think most of us might well recall “I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul” as one of his most well-remember early lines, a line which stresses that we are made up of multiple elements which can be pulling in different directions at the same time.
And maybe the entire song (“Don’t think twice, it’s all right” of course) tells us that we are all being pulled in multiple directions by the world around us, so we can’t easily just focus on one person, one issue, one thing.
Then I found The America Songwriter website which came up with
Steal a little and they throw you in jail /
steal a lot and they make you a king (“Sweetheart Like You”)
and also offered
I’ve heard you say many times That you’re better than no one And no one is better than you If you really believe that You know you have Nothing to win and nothing to lose
And contemplating all these amazing quotes I wondered how it worked for Bob. I mean, is he writing the song and then this extraordinary line come into his head, so he puts that in, or does the line come first and then he first the song around that line?
Thinking of this I came across a site from Snugfan: “50+ Funny Bob Dylan Quotes That Prove the Legend Has a Killer Sense of Humor”
You can read them all here, and of course many of them you will already know, but I rather did like this one…
“The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
And yes I would certainly go with that. So what are we to make of lines such as this from Bye and Bye on Love and Theft.
“I’m sittin’ on my watch, so I can be on time.”
Amusing when you hear it once, but not necessarily that good over and over again. And of course that is the problem with a joke in a song. Songs are designed to be heard repeatedly, while jokes really aren’t that funny after you have heard them once or twice before. That seems to be a considerable problem for me.
But the American songwriter website which noted the “watch” comment also came up with
‘Tombstone Blues’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
“The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken!”
‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ (Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964)
“I like Fidel Castro and his beard.”
And the funny thing about those was that neither of them actually ever made me laugh. Somehow it seems for me that humour doesn’t really work in songs. But maybe that is just a sign of me being sad and old. Or maybe it is something deeper about the nature of songs.
There’s an index of recent articles and series on our home page.