Expecting Rain

Disclaimer: Before the web deputy (aka kebabsomething aka "Barney") shows up and commences to blowing his rape whistle let me confess that this is something from 2009. It may have been an old post here, I don't feel like looking (since Barney's hot on the trail already), it was a post to my blog, now it's here. it's here because I like it, I'm not "in love with" the sound of my own voice (but we are dating and things are getting serious) but I think it's worth revisiting. if there's some sort of harm in that go write it down, wrap it around a banana, and stuff it where the moon don't shine.

OK then....

Recently, I spent the first half of a day listening to the last three albums by Bob Dylan in the order of their release: Love and Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006) and Together Through Life (2009). Each record shares the trait of all great art in rewarding repeat visits. It wasn’t until sometime in 2003 that I realized that Love and Theft was the best album Dylan had ever made. Right now I am of the opinion that Modern Times has the slightest edge over the other two.

The writing on all three is some of Dylan’s best, but the writing on Love and Theft is particularly rich. At the half-way point, the song “Floater (Too Much To Ask)” shows up. Musically, the album is a tour of the popular music of America in the 20th Century, and this song sounds like something from the 1930s-1940s. Lyrically, however, its sixteen verses seem to flash on the screen like scratchy black & white home movies from rural Tennessee circa 1938.

Down over the window
Comes the dazzling sunlit rays
Through the back alleys - through the blinds
Another one of them endless days

Honeybees are buzzin'
Leaves begin to stir
I'm in love with my second cousin
I tell myself I could be happy forever with her

I keep listenin' for footsteps
But I ain't hearing any
From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many

A summer breeze is blowing
A squall is settin' in
Sometimes it's just plain stupid
To get into any kind of wind

The character who sings the song is a gentleman we only ever see out of the corner of our eye as we look at the various things he’s describing. Sometimes he describes aspects of everyday life, but other times he describes his own inner thoughts and feelings and we are offered little insights into his psyche.

The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
On bad terms with the younger men
But old, young, age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end

One of the boss' hangers-on
Comes to call at times you least expect
Try to bully ya - strong arm you - inspire you with fear
It has the opposite effect

As the song proceeds it builds up this rhythm moving back and forth between description and autobiography.

There's a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town
The old one is long gone
Timber two-foot six across
Burns with the bark still on

They say times are hard, if you don't believe it
You can just follow your nose
It don't bother me - times are hard everywhere
We'll just have to see how it goes

My old man, he's like some feudal lord
Got more lives than a cat
Never seen him quarrel with my mother even once
Things come alive or they fall flat

Even in the technology stock boom of the 1990s you’d still have been safe singing about times being hard. Times are always hard (and, for that matter, always changing).

You can smell the pine wood burnin'
You can hear the school bell ring
Gotta get up near the teacher if you can
If you wanna learn anything

Romeo, he said to Juliet, "You got a poor complexion.
It doesn't give your appearance a very youthful touch!"
Juliet said back to Romeo, "Why don't you just shove off
If it bothers you so much."

They all got out of here any way they could
The cold rain can give you the shivers
They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee
All the rest of them rebel rivers

I wonder if, as he’s spun this tale, this man has been sipping something a bit stronger than sweet tea. We’re offered advice (“Sit close to the teacher”), some thoroughly odd and oblique Shakespeare reference, and that utterly fantastic alliteration, “rest of them rebel rivers.”

I wonder about how alcohol effects people differently when he suddenly stops to remind us:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your own life
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I've seen enough heartaches and strife

The moment passes, and we move back to autobiography.

My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes

I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves

Perhaps that’s it then; our slightly tipsy narrator has lived his life as a tobacco farmer, running a plantation, his own “dreams and hopes left buried under tobacco leaves.”

And as I think about it, I can’t stop myself from wondering if, thirty-seven years after he condemned him in his most famous self-righteous and criminally distorted “finger pointing” protest songs, Bob Dylan is writing this song from the point of view of an older William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger.

No matter. The first fifteen verses were just passing the time up to where, his eyes downcast, we’re told that:

It's not always easy kicking someone out
Gotta wait a while - it can be an unpleasant task
Sometimes somebody wants you to give something up
And tears or not, it's too much to ask.

Thanks for your contribution. I love Floater. It does have that aura of yesteryear and so many delightful images... I hadn't thought much about his interplay between telling the story and his own inner thoughts but I see it.

Love and Theft is a work of art and labor of love. From start to finish it was the first Dylan album that I loved the moment I heard it and every song on it. Every other album I had to listen to a couple of times before I could "get it"... not surprising. This one traverses quite a landscape. And Floater is a centerpiece... to me, a masterpiece. For me, he's done some really good performances, especially with Larry and Freddy in the band, and yet, the studio remains the best.

I certainly didn't care for it when I first heard L&T. It's hard to ignore the second cousin line

"Love and Theft" includes some of the best lines Junichi Saga ever penned.

I sang this for my wife one time... she found it deeply disturbing...

Has it really been a whole hour since I said, I love this song!?

at least bob is well versed in chinese literature

The MEZ likes this tune quite a lot. Very unique & well delivered. MEZ

and at least he can take those lines move them around and apply them in a new interesting context for a figurative point.

I dig the song. Didn't dig love and theft at first but it's up there for me. Yes i like the lyrics, the soft quiet whitman type narrator getting lost in thought trying to be calm in peace. very neat.

Oh, please. It is John Bester's translation of Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza from which Dylan lifted the phrases. Junichi Saga is writing "oral history"; stories told by a gangster Eiji Ijichi in his own words. Dylan didn't write them, but - Bester, Saga, Ijichi, who's "lines" are they?

Dylan's use of the phrases, to me, adds extra layers and density to the songs, notably Floater (incidentally, nice post LJ), on L&T - it would have been generous (if uncharacteristic) had he acknowledged the book in a liner note or something, but that absence certainly didn't stop the source from being discovered and directing me (among many others) to the book - which I found a fascinating and enjoyable read.

Great post long johnny of a great song.

its incredible how he manages to squeeze so many lines in. I love the version form hammersmith in 2003, he sounds like a demented old tramp

Lately I´ve come to the conclusion that "Love & Theft" acutally is a concept album, an album with a theme. I just don´t know how to "label" that theme adequately.

If JWH is about morality, TOOM about mortality (and BOOT about despair) - well, what is "L&T" about? Is it power or the wish to obtain it? Greed? Any ideas anybody?

Maybe I don't know whose lines they are, but I know whose they aren't: Bob Dylan's.

Hey I like Bob Dylan as much as anyone, but he doesn't get a free pass from me when he "writes" songs in this fashion.

I think the "theme," if you want to call it that, is trying to make peace with the challenges and dispair established in TOOM. He seems to be taking action in L&T where is TOOM is more of internal dialogue addresing the problems that he would eventually have to deal with. I see L&T as his dealing with those problems in different ways. If that makes any sense. I doubt that it does. The fact that you can't sum it up in a few words is a good indication of the album's depth.

Edit: this is in response to Hanns' question. Forgot to quote

Selfishly, I'm hoping this is part of a series on "Love and Theft" songs.

Floater - like lots of the songs on "Love and Theft" - tries to reproduce how memory works. The seemingly random recollections are passing through the head of our narrator - who could be Dylan or Zantzinger or just about anyone. And to the narrator - and hence to us - it isn't easy to tell which lines are recollections, which are happening now, which never happened at all.

Great song, and beautifully played. Prior to "Love and Theft" could anyone have imagined Dylan writing a song like this?


I'm always surprised at people objecting to Dylan borrowing lines. Reminds me of the interview: "Bob, how many of the songs you perform are yours?" "They're all mine now".

You could say similar things about every Dylan album since BOTT where he first used this technique.



Uhm, no. The narrator is definitely not Dylan, but a "Lyrical I". (At least I hope so, `cause most of the characters on "L&T" are people who are not very likeable. Especially the "Floater", the "Po´Boy" and the guy in "Moonlight".

Anyway, all of the characters on "L&T" seem to suffer because of power - the greed for power, the inability to obtain power or simply because they are held down by power.



Very true.

I would honestly love to see you elaborate on this opinion, as I share it too.

I would like to see this too. I still give the edge to Love and Theft, primarily because I think it has a wider range of music. Modern Times feels like it is fully blues... very good, it is, but fully blues.

I feel modern times is more stronger and more important than the other two aswell. have upon first listen that dylan had something bigger and better to voice in modern times than the others.

The song is not poo, despite it's title.

Wow, Long Johnny and Warren Peace: United in the opinion that kebab is a tool



L&T has a more even quality, but doesn't hit MT's highs. There's nothing on L&T as good as the one-two punch of Workingman's/Nettie Moore (yes, even that song with a buncha "S"s and "I"s).

I prefer MT because it seems more like an album 'with a mission'. There's a particular drive and purpose that sets it apart.

L&T feels, to me, like a clever distillation of all the idioms that Bob addressed earlier as a young man on Highway 61 Revisited. It's a fine-tuning of those idioms, the same way that Van Gogh kept drawing the same haystacks and cornfields over the span of his career.

That said, "Floater" is the yang to "Desolation Row"'s yin.

Well said. Lyrically, High Water wouldn't be out of place on H61R.

Glad to find modern times lovers in this thread

You must be a second cousin of Weberman.

taking bait

Floater has zero in common with Desolation Row.