Expecting Rain

This song has been on my mind for a few days now, for no discernable reason really. I think Empire Burlesque was another superb album that was kind of overlooked. Too personal and not commercial enough maybe, who knows? (Just don't listen to the truly hideous duet with Patti Smith )

Dark Eyes

Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside,
They're drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide.
I live in another world where life and death are memorized,
Where the earth is strung with lovers' pearls and all I see are dark eyes.

A cock is crowing far away and another soldier's deep in prayer,
Some mother's child has gone astray, she can't find him anywhere.
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise,
Whom nature's beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes.

They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes,
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I'm sure it is.
But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized,
All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.

Oh, the French girl, she's in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel,
Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel.
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies,
A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.

the cover version by Iron & Wine and Calexico on the I'm Not There soundtrack is fantastic.

love the Dylan version too and my only complaint is how nasal his voice sounds on that one.

i think i have a show or two with the Patti Smith duet version, but i forget how they sound. i thought most fans loved those versions?

-justin

The Patti Smith duet versions, 12/14 and 12/16 1995, found on this DVD http://dvdylan.com/dvd/d480.a, are phenomenal. Check it out.

here it is on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZqwOh5gYTM

I love this song.

I rank it up there with some of Dylan's top lyrics.

The music on the other hand... Let's just say I'm happy with what Iron & Wine and Calexico did with it.


-dELVIS-

It's a step above Changing of the Guard but it still has the sense of being unfinished and abandoned, under cooked.

I sometimes think that the surrealist songs from the 60s (Chimes of freedom, Visions of Johanna, Stuck inside of Mobile etc.) were written without the intention of making much sense (or rather with the intention of distorting their meaning) but after finishing them Dylan himself may have been delighted about the actual cohesiveness that made them so great.

The surrealist songs past '78 (Changing of the guards, Dark eyes, Brownsville girl, Jokerman) were possibly written just as carelessly but after Dylan finished writing they still didn't make much sense and stayed incohesive. Dylan only never bothered to finish them or make them cohesive - who'd care about it anyway? He has allegedly never been a hard working songwriter like many others, eg Leonard Cohen.

The great Dylan songs of the 60s are either very polemic, anthemic or completely bonkers. The great Dylan songs of the 70s are very introspective and in-depth. The great Dylan songs of the 80s (there aren't many) are either one or the other. The great Dylan songs of the 90s and 00s are anachronistical reworks of the traditional truisms of the music he'd first learned to love (call it folk/blues/roots music or whatever).

He tried to revisit some of his former songwriting techniques every once - I think that it usually didn't work out too well (there are notable exceptions, though: Every grain of sand).

I disagree. The nasality of the voice really shines through beautifully in such songs as Dark Eyes, Brownsville Girl, or, later, Mississippi (alternate #1). He really hits certain notes just the right way with this voice, strengthening the words in a way that could not be done otherwise (see "passion rules the arrow that flies" for an example)

Love this song... and just learned to play it on guitar, which is nice. I think Dylan nails the performance on EB and I also like the live duets with Patti Smith.

It's odd to hear people complain about the sound of his voice or the problems with the guitar. I thought these were the reasons we liked early Dylan. To me, on this track, the nasal adds a kind of medival feel to the song.

I think it's very similar in both meaning and style to the lyrics of Changing of the Guard. I do get annoyed at this "He never tries hard on his lyrics" crap. As if the fact that he wrote it in one night means he didn't work hard on it. Maybe the song did just come to him, but I doubt Changing of the Guards or Brownsville Girl just came to him.

Particularly in the 80s I think he worked pretty hard on his lyrics, particularly between 81 and 85, as he never seems able to decide on what should be left out or put in. Maybe he was trying to be like Leonard Cohen and write a lot of extra verses, not realizing he is nowhere near as decisive as Cohen and works better on the excitement of perfect lines, rather than fine tuned revisions.

You might be on to something there. I'm going to go and give it a listen.


-dELVIS-

>It's odd to hear people complain about the sound of his voice or the problems with the guitar. I thought these were the reasons we liked early Dylan. To me, on this track, the nasal adds a kind of medival feel to the song.

don't get me wrong, i love Dylan's voice, especially on the latter-day stuff. i wouldn't consider EB to be "early Dylan" though. i just think that the voice is really nasal in the 80s-early 90s. much more so than the typically nasal Dylan that people like to make fun of.

-justin

where'd I read that the Patti/Bob duet marked Patti's return to the stage after a long and difficult journey? somehow "knowing" that makes this all the more poignant. I wish someone would fix up the video though so it wasn't quite so shaky.

When Patti's husband died she stopped performing. Bob was the person who encouraged her to get back on stage and tour again.

I agree with the criticism of Bob's vocal on the EB version. I think he pitched it too high. However, it is a very fine song (Michael Gray's whining aside) - actually an early prototype for what he'd end up doing in the 90s, reworking ancient folk motifs in this striking way. It's like some of the stuff on UTRS in that sense, some sort of shot from Bob's self-conscious about the way forward from the creative morass of the 1980s.

I don't really agree with TinyMontgomery about Bob's great surreal lyrics of the late 70s-80s. I think it exaggerates both the (accidental or intentional) cohesion of a lot of those 60s epics, and is uncharitable to the cohesion that exists in the '80s works. (This is typical of a lot of Dylan criticism - it listens charitably to stuff in the 60s and nit-pickingly to stuff in the 80s). For instance, with the grating exception of the "subpoena" rhyme, "Angelina" to me is a downright masterpiece, a truly major Dylan song that ranks with many of his 60s high-points. Does it make literal sense? Beats me, but it is enormously evocative - it truly opens up a world, which is what Dylan's best stuff has always done. Ya know, the Waste Land strains to make rational sense either, but is rated one of the great poems of the 20th century (not that I'm saying "Angelina" rivals The Waste Land, don't kill me for that). You could say the same of "Senor." "Jokerman," "Brownville Girl," and "Foot of Pride" - more major songs from the 80s - actually do rather make sense, as the analyses by Michael Gray and Stephen Scobie tend to show.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Bob was on his game in the '80s. What I'm saying is that his great songs from that period, as compositions, are no less coherent or impressive than most of the songs considered "great" from the '60s.

(Also, many later Great Songs like "Ain't Talkin," "Cross the Green Mountain," and "Blind Willie McTell" have a focus and discipline that Dylan could not have achieved in his youth. Not that you're necessarily denying that, TM).

I'm glad you mentioned "Blind Willie McTell." It seems that Dylan has always been more interested in mood and ambiance ("Tangled Up In Blue," "Honest With Me") than coherence which is fine with me.

What's great is that he is more than capable of writing very emotional narrative like songs -- "Isis," "Joey," "Catfish," "Lenny Bruce." Perhaps it's the folk singer in him

I wouldn't say that all of Dylan's "mood" songs with nonlinear lyrics work, though. I've never really thought "Ballad of A Thin Man" works or "Sad-Eyed Lady..." The two great songs that work well would have to be "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." and "Desolation Row."


-dELVIS-

You're right. Dylan works on an allusive level more than a rational one. Funny, though, I would tend to prefer "Ballad" and "Lady" to the two you mention I don't know why that is, but the former two are among my absolute Dylan faves. Go figure.

Yes, you do

Seriously, I did not intend to say that Bob's great 80s songs (like Every grain of sand, Angelina or Blind Willie McTell) are not as cohesive as his earlier songs. My point was that many of his surreal lyrics past '78 are not "great" (Changing of the guards, Brownsville girl etc.) because they are simply all over the place. I don't think that the early songs like VoJ are cohesive in the sense that they're using a coherent narrative, as you already stated they're rather evocative and their meaning is not determinable by one (or two or 200) interpretation(s).

I just think that their surreal imagery is more cohesive as the verses are comparable to other verses from the same song, the techniques are used coherently (look at the list of persons in 'Desolation Row' - is the selection arbitrary or not? Could 'Cinderella' be replaced by 'Bloomfield'?). The imagery of the latter days (note: the handful of great songs excluded) seems to be odd for the sake of oddity while the earlier songs seem to be painting a more complete picture. Just compare 'Jokerman' to 'The waste land'. Then start again and compare 'Desolation row' to Eliot's poem.

i have to point this out:

the Iron & Wine/Calexico version really matches the theme of the original. without a doubt, "Dark Eyes" has echoes of the forthcoming apocalypse tht shade Dylan's last two albums more so than anything in his career. the world music-esque arrangement that they give it would make it an exact fit on Iron & Wine's last album, The Shepherd's Dog, which, unlike his (Sam Beam's) earlier stuff, seems to focus on modern times as a precursor to the end times, shaded with references to religion and arranged with all sorts of extremely cool, tribal sounding instrumentation. if you like their cover version or good music in general, i highly recommend that album.

-justin

>Seriously, I did not intend to say that Bob's great 80s songs (like Every grain of sand, Angelina or Blind Willie McTell) are not as cohesive as his earlier songs. My point was that many of his surreal lyrics past '78 are not "great" (Changing of the guards, Brownsville girl etc.) because they are simply all over the place. I don't think that the early songs like VoJ are cohesive in the sense that they're using a coherent narrative, as you already stated they're rather evocative and their meaning is not determinable by one (or two or 200) interpretation(s).


see, personally, i disagree. i find the only way i can get into some of the great songs from the 80s is by way of the lyrics. then, i find songs like "Changing of the Guards," "Angelina" and "Dark Eyes" to be fascinating because the lyrics are so odd and the verses so seemingly disjointed. they are so mysterious to me and instead of thinking they were odd for the sake of oddity, i simply find them to be genius. i find myself pondering the lyrics more and more, letting them mean different things to me at different times and thinking "damn, this man is wise as all hell." nowadays, some of the new songs ("Nettie Moore," "Floater (Too Much To Ask)" seem to be just as weird as the 80s stuff. but, i love it. though the verses are disjointed, it somehow all makes sense. the things that holds it together thematically (love, death, warfare, God) are stitched from the antique phrases he "lifts" and his own lyrics all tossed together. it seems as if the words are again being used just for the way they sound and the images they evoke, same as in the 1960s...

-justin

Beautifully put. Nice post!

I didn't mean Empire Burlesque was early Bob. I meant that in the early days Bob skipped out on talent for content as well.

Totally agree. If anything, the mid-60's stuff can sometimes be even more disjointed (not a bad thing either) than his later stuff. Blonde On Blonde especially is often extremely bonkers and off-the-wall.

And Changing Of The Guards has some of Bob's best lyrics around. I don't know how people can not be drawn in by lyrics like:

The palace of mirrors
Where dark soldiers are reflected,
The endless road and the wailing of chimes,
The empty rooms where her memory is protected,
Where the angels' voices whisper to the souls of previous times.

She wakes him up
Forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking
Near broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks.
She's begging to know what measures he now will be taking.
He's pulling her down and she's clutching on to his long golden locks.

'Gentlemen' he said,
I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes,
I've moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards

Well, that was gracious of him. About the duet -- I should just not have even mentioned it. Different strokes for different folks and all that. Anyway, it's an interesting and lovely song.

Also, even though it is patently unfair and irrational to be jealous about someone you have never even met, it's a fact that some female fans (and some of the boys too, no doubt) do get their nose out of joint a bit to see their favorite stars cavorting and gallavanting around with God knows who! (Patti Smith and Dylan were hanging out together at one point at the Bitter End , which was right down the street from where I used to live. Naturally I would have loved to run into him, since I did go there every once in a while, but I wasn't able to haunt the place every night of the week since I was a single mom and had more important things to do -- like work.)

The desire and perceived need for secrecy about people being married or gay was especially true in old Hollywood. I've heard tell that's one of the reasons why Dylan's second marriage was kept under wraps, for instance. (Had I known that at the time, I'm certain I would have been less enthusiastic about him.) So maybe it's unfair NOT to let "us" know! Believe me, I know how silly all this must strike y'all!

Bob and Patty seem to be kindred souls with much in common.

This is such a beautiful song. I don't even have EB yet, so I am not familiar with that version, but I've seen the duet with Patti Smith and absolutely love it. The lyrics are incredibly moving. Really, right up at the top in my eyes. I'd love to add something profound but it would just be pointless.

Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside
They’re drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide
I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls and all I see are dark eyes

A cock is crowing far away and another soldier’s deep in prayer
Some mother’s child has gone astray, she can’t find him anywhere
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise
Whom nature’s beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes

They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes,
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.
But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized,
All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.

Oh, the French girl, she’s in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel
Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies
A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes

I'm sure everyone has seen it, but surely you want to watch it again There is obviously something really wonderful between Bob and Patti.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... LEkrS0CWK8