For this month’s Bob Dylan song, I have no link. The song is
from Time Out of Mind, his big
comeback album late in the Nineties. Dylan didn’t write many songs in that decade,
producing only two albums of original songs, Time and Under the Red Sky
(1990). Time Out of Mind was released
after Dylan had his brush with a potentially fatal condition. The album’s dark
moods suggested to his listeners that he was reflecting on the end of it all,
though it was recorded before his health crisis. No matter. Dylan was 56 when
the album came out, in the fall of 1997. On Sunday I turn 55, so . . . close
enough. Feels to me that the dark mood is just par for the course.
Even back in 1997 today’s song jumped out as one that suited
my mood. I was not exactly enjoying the ride in 1997, for various reasons. Did
it have something to do with the late 30s? Yeah, probably. There are bluesier
and more melancholy songs on the record than this one. So I don’t mean to say
that I feel the song is despairing when I hear it—then or now. It’s resilient,
I think. But it also recalls the dark brooding of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
from 1973. There, the singer (the song was written to accompany a dying
sheriff’s last scene in Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid) knows he’s reached the end; it’s time to lay down his gun
and his badge and try to enter heaven. In “Trying to Get to Heaven,” the terms
of the negotiation aren’t clear. The speaker lets us know that he’s not so
concerned by worldy things any more, that he’s thinking of heaven and being
called up yonder and the final reckoning and, I suppose, the bliss that is to
come. Sure, right.
But that sentiment—which isn’t fully addressed at all—is
only found in the refrain which, like all Dylan refrains, comes in to restate
and to move us forward. Each time it’s said it has been inflected but what has
come before. In each verse, the line—“I’m trying to get to heaven before they
close the door”—follows a line about moving or traveling. So that “heaven”
might just be: the next place down the line. Much of the song sketches
relations to places, places that no longer matter because they’re being left
behind in favor of “heaven.” There’s a bit of the feeling of “Stuck Inside of
Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” in the sense of “can this really be the
end?” An end devoutly to be wished.
The lines that synched most with me when I recently played
the song were: “Every day your memory grows dimmer / It doesn’t haunt me like
it did before” (further sold by the ghostly organ that slides in behind). Since
I’ve mentioned the “ghosts” that to some degree haunt this daily accounting, a
statement like that is apropos. Memory does indeed dim and the memory of a
particular person (and place) can fade. One of the advantages of getting old,
we might say, is no longer having to recall things with such clarity.
The lines that hit me just now, in considering the song,
were the lines about Missouri—where this week there has been a heavily armed
police presence (in Ferguson, near St. Louis) after a policeman killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth,
and many residents have taken to the street in protest and outcry. “When I was
in Missouri / They would not let me be / I had to leave there in a hurry / I
only saw what they’d let me see.” Words that are uncannily apropos as there
have been alleged efforts to control what is seen on media of such
confrontations. I don’t mean to say that the song is topical—I think, in the context
of the song, the lines indicate a personal persecution, but the “they” and the
hurried departure are curious details, and it's ironic that, in the “Show Me State,” you can only see what they show you. And, no matter how one parses it,
the next lines seem a non-sequitur: “You broke the heart that loved you / Now
you can seal up the book and not write any more.” A nice way of saying “that’s
all she wrote.” Maybe everyone either experiences or causes a broken heart at
some point, and there’s nothing more to be said about it.
A particular strength of this song is Dylan’s vocal. It’s
probably my favorite on the album and the album is strong in its vocals and in
the way Daniel Lanois creates its textured soundscape. It puts Dylan outfront
but surrounds him with lots of atmosphere—like the way the bass surges up at
times, stately, or the slide that punctuates the title line, or the understated
harmonica solo that plays it close to the chest.
A favorite verse for delivery is the third, about people on
the platforms, “waiting for the trains / I can hear their hearts a-beatin’ /
Like pendulums swinging on chains.” The emphasis on “hearts a-beatin’” feels
both fond and wistful, and hearts beating like swinging pendulums? It’s almost
surreal, certainly an odd image and simile. Then the delivery of the line “When
you think you’ve lost everything / You find you can always lose a little more”
comes as almost a consolation (remember, Lear said “the worst is not so long as
one can say ‘this is the worst’”—things can always get worse and you can always
lose a little more). Listen to how Dylan draws out “looose a lit-tle more.” It’s
almost said with a twinkle. Nah, buddy, your losing days ain’t over yet.
The sixth line in each verse, which has to carry the end rhyme
for “door” in the refrain, often gets an interesting inflection, as in “Miss
Mary Jane’s got a house in Bal-ti-more,” the line that follows one of those
oddly pertinent Dylan asides: “They tell me everything is gonna be alright /
But I don’t what ‘alright’ even means.” John Lennon, for one, told us it was
gonna be alright in the song “Revolution”—which was a way of acknowledging that
things were not alright, just then. It’s in the nature of a sweet by-and-by
that things will be better. Dylan’s riposte—“I don’t know what ‘alright’
even means” cuts against the notion that any thing ever will be, ever. Or that
one could know it is. Dylan’s speaker reserves the right to say it isn’t
because he couldn’t say it is.
And, as usual, the final verse—while not an out-and-out
corker—does give a sense of ending. First there’s the great delivery of “Gonna
sleep down in the parlor,” sounding like a tired housecat crawling away to
seek some creature comforts. Then comes reflection on just how not “alright” things might be: “I’ll
close my eyes and I wonder / If everything is as hollow as it seems.” This is
truly despondent—but it’s not a strong claim. The speaker doesn’t insist
everything is hollow and not alright. He’s only wondering if all is as it
seems—hollow. Or maybe there’s a meaning or a deliverance still lurking within
the facts of things, here on earth, not up in heaven. The boast “I been to
Sugar Town / I shook the sugar down” also has its despondent side. If shaking
down the sugar means he’s dispensing it, then, OK, he’s still someone with
something to offer. But in a more
metaphoric sense the lines suggest that being “to Sugar Town” is like being
lovey-dovey, all sugar kisses and honeyed phrases. He “shook the sugar down”—as
if shaking down an illegal trade—could be a triumph over the urge to sweeten
the despair of the song.
And yet there is something, if not sweet, then at least
charming in Dylan’s vocal and attitude. Rather than try to bluff his way into
heaven, he seems to have adopted the technique of gentle persuasion via a
mixture of despondency and admiration. The speaker’s world seems both
diminished and augmented by the song’s reflections. As with a lot of songs that
look back at a “then” compared to a now (“Some trains don’t pull no gamblers /
No midnight ramblers like they did before”), the thing lost or mourned isn’t
all that clear—it was just the way things were. What’s clear is you can’t have
it that way any longer. Fuck this, boys,
see you in heaven is the takeaway.
I’m just goin’ down
the road feelin’ bad
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