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Senor

Date:    Tue, 9 May 1995 14:28:43 GMT
From:    eddie@edlis.org (Ed Ricardo)
Subject: Re: Street Legal Performed

Levi Asher (brooklyn@netcom.com) wrote:
: : having worked on these 9 songs for the last couple of months i must admit
: : that this is a  most personal work of bob's the class has  an on going
: : discussion on the song senor.  we would appreciate any info re:it's
: : meaning. peace.
: Great songs often hold up under multiple interpretations, and I find
: it interesting that some see Senor as Christ.  I've always gotten
: a lot out of the song by taking the words at face value : it's about
: a helpless bit player, a pawn, in the midst of a society driven
: crazy by fascism and civil war.  It makes me think not only on South Americ

I was riding on a train one time through Mexico, travelling up
north to San Diego; and I must have fell asleep on this train and I
woke up and it was about midnight...and the train had stopped at a
place called Monterrey... This bunch of children were getting off the
train, this family - there must have been about seventeen children
and a mother and father and they were getting off the train. And at
the time I was watching it all through the glass; it was dark outside
so the whole side of the train was like a mirror. So I was watching
it all happen and I saw this old man stumble up onto the train and he
gets onto the car; and he was walking down and he took a seat right
across the car from me. I felt a vibration in the air. I turned to
look at him and I could see he wasn't dressed in anything but a
blanket; he was just wearing a blanket. He must have been 150 years
old. I turned around to look at him and I could see both his eyes
were burning out - they were on fire and there was smoke coming out
of his nostrils. I said, "Well, this is the man I want to talk to."

                                           -- Before "Senor" - Fall 1978


Michael Reynolds, Sep 5, 2008: You could enter this in "Atlas" and/or in Who's Who. The song is definitely about Peckinpah, as others have remarked. But it's more than just the Lincoln County reference. There's also the "iron cross" line, which has to refer to "Cross of Iron", a film made by Peckinpah in 1977 (the year before Senor). Finally, "overturn these tables, disconnect these tables" could of course refer to the music business (with overtones of Jesus driving out the money-lenders), but it could just as easily reference the film industry. Dylan and Peckinpah shared a common contempt for the "bosses" both in music and in film. M Reynolds

Who's Who