Expecting Rain

That song has it all. Knocked Out Loaded isn't even that good an album, overall. In fact, it's average at best. Brownsville Girl, though, what a song.

If I never hear van morrison again, I'll be finer than fine. One song is all need, and this isn't it..

ps, 'popcorn' is my safe word..use it if you ever feel like you need it..

..Knocked Out Loaded would be a better album if 'Brownsville Girl'
- were the ONLY song on it. And if that doesn't qualify as an 'album'
.. then by all means - put 'Brownsville Girl' on each side... Twice. ..
- the rest of it makes the worst of even Budokan sound good.
= forgive me, O' Boo-duh! -kan .. .. you great slab of Oriental Loungness..

I agree.. The cinematic sweep of the thing is sheer beauty... One of my all time favourite songs!!

It's good for getting guests out of the house when they have overstayed their welcome, that's for sure. I'd use Christmas In The Heart, but that would drive me out too.

The best version is the remix one found on the Dylan 2007 3 disc compilation or playlist very best of the 80s compilation.

I think the charm is the return of the Rolling Thunder Revue vocal performance, missing for a decade at that point. The production is dreadful IMO and the song means almost nothing to me.

Dylan's such a weird performer. Shortly after Brownsville he cut a "Pretty Boy Floyd" that proved he'd lost nothing at all, just put it away for reasons unknown.

What the hell drugs are you on?

what's the difference? is it just better because i doesn't involve the rest of knocked out loaded?

Painkillers, but I thought that before I was on 'em

No, no: the guitars are much more forward, the vocals cleaner and the girls less strident.

It's an overlong experiment that didn't really come off: the chorus is absurd, for one thing; and the lyrics are pastiche. I actually think it's a joke on Dylan's part.

The real pity is that his artistic output was so poor at a time when his vocal chords were in such good shape.

Brownsville Girl is the end to an amazingly diverse, unique, and satisfying album... Knocked Out Loaded is like no other listening experience in Dylan's catalogue and stands alone as a brilliant achievement for what he accomplished in less than a half hour.



**Less than 24 minutes if I remember correctly.

And I recall reading somewhere that it only took him ten minutes to write and record the whole album.

Only a genius at the top of his game could pull that one off!

The cocaine may have helped in the speedy execution of that particular album?

It certainly deserved to die quickly.

This is a great song as is the earlier version, New Danville Girl.

Knocked out Loaded comes in for a lot of criticism (much of it fair), but I would not want to be without this song or Under Your Spell.

I was 14 when this album was released, had loved Empire Burlesque and was slowly finding out just how good the back catalogue was. KOL was a record that I liked at the time. EB and KOL don't sound so good now, mainly because of the dreadful 80s sound: they got an impressionable 14 year old to go out and buy Blonde on Blonde, so they can't be that bad.

You were a pretty crap 14 year old then. I remember Empire Burlesque coming out when I was 14 and thinking it cheesy bollocks.

I may well have been, but remember how dreadful almost everything in the UK charts was back then.

Yes, both versions of the song are superb. You can really lose yourself in them

If all the music of the 1980s were lost except Knocked Out Loaded, you'll have in your hands the best example of what the '80s have to offer.

Great song - a clever, charming way for Dylan to address what it's like to be a mythological figure as well as a fairly flawed human being. He performs it brilliantly, way over the top but thrillingly nuanced - and you can hear on Under Your Spell that Dylan was in great voice at times in this era. The DYLAN mix is definitive, and that album's mixes serve the '80s songs really really well.

Horrible song. I can't imagine actually sitting through the whole thing. It's really painful to listen to, I feel embarrassed for Bob.

All those annoying verses, building up to this idiotic chorus:

Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls
Teeth like pearls shining like the moon above
Brownsville girl, show me all around the world
Brownsville girl, you’re my honey love

Brownsville curls? WTF?

I'll see him in anything...

It is a cinematic song, but of a particularly aimless and confused plot so much less interesting than any film Gregory Peck ever made that it was a huge mistake to summarize The Gunfighter, however poorly, to begin the song. The longer it goes on, the more it sounds like a bad imitation of Kerouac when he's drunk. It's hard to believe Sam Shepherd had any role in the song, unless the intent was in fact to create a monologue for an incoherently drunk drifter who just keeps droning on and on as a way to force you to give him money to go away and drink himself into silence. An aggressively awful song, so successful it's hard to admire even its awfulness, a sequence of rote gestures and phony attitude signifying a ruined imagination.

As an antidote, I recommend William Wellman's western Yellow Sky, starring Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Ann Baxter, and the California desert.