A Few of Dylan's Best Lines

He's a poet, and he knows it...

Ok, so here I am hanging the word BEST in the title, like raw meat for hungry wolves, for all the highly intellectual and proportionately opinionated mo-fo’s out here to get a whiff of and circle around to take a bite at. Hmmmph, Dylan’s BEST lines? We’ll see about that. Growl.

I do though welcome as always a diversity of opinion, since every person on the planet (and some who may not be exactly grounded here) is a new, original creation, diverse from every other person, not matter how hard the archons of the age try to divert our attention to whatever they’re hawking at the moment, squeeze us into ideological boxes and charge us our very last dollar for something we know in our heart of hearts we definitely do not need - but you see, diversity, for all its ordained, holy peculiar-ness, craves company. We want to want what the rest want. Thus the rise of the corporate target, it’s on you buddy, on your back and the portals to the liminal spaces they want us to wander in, with credit card readers posted on every other corner you turn, charging you to walk the next fifteen feet.

Well, it works for somebody’s interests out there, but not for mine. Ahh, I digress… my point was, have your opinion, brother, you’re free to shout it out here, that voice may be the last wall between us and the rising tide. Just please remember, play well with others.

Dylan’s got countless great lines, and I’m not going to do a ranking, these aren’t in any particular order except what I happen to pull out of the big bag. The only criteria is that these are the ones that rise above the others. “Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a bowl of soup” won’t be here, though Clinton Heylin could probably make a case for it.

Blind Willie McTell

Seen the arrow on the doorpost    saying, “This land is condemned 
All the way from New Orleans        to new Jerusalem”

Dylan left this song off of Infidels. That’s how capricious he can be. Mark Knopfler begged him to include it, but Dylan didn’t think he got the right take.

A gigantic, sweeping landscape of biblical proportion zeroing in on the America that created the unerasable stain of shame that was slavery, laid out throughout the song - a masterpiece with its melodic roots in “St. James Infirmary,” here compressed into the opening lines. A woman writer friend of mine once told me that you can’t ever miss the first few minutes of a movie, because that’s the establishing shot, like the first sentence of a great book. “Call me Ishmael.”

“Seen the arrow on the doorpost, saying this land is condemned,” are amazing opening lines. The image, of course, hearkens back to the Biblical Book of Exodus, where the blood on the Jewish house’s doorposts spared them from the death of firstborn children. This is an arrow, however, pointing to somewhere else, while the entire land is condemned. The arrow points, but there is nowhere to go.

The chorus tells us no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell. No white person has experienced the depth of such existential blues, to live in a land where you could be hunted down, dog packs howling in the distance, where all human rights disappear in the dictates of the more powerful. That’s why nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell, the representative bluesman Dylan chose.

A second set of great lines in the same song.

Well, God is in His heaven   and we all want what’s His
But power and greed and corruptible seed   seem to be all that there is

Things reconfigure, they morph, but nothing changes. The powerless are still being hunted down, separated from their families, imprisoned, sent away in the dark of night.

It’s Alright Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding)

And if my thought-dreams could be seen  
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine  
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Also an analysis of the hollowness at the core of America, “It’s Alright Ma” dissects falseness and artifice in verse after verse, but in the final resigned chorus, with its dry, gallows humor, Dylan captures the only escape from insanity, which is to imagine commiserate insanity in return. Everyone’s crazy here, so you must be too. The biting humor cuts through everything, grounding the listener, who too has felt like they’re crazy sometimes. Who hasn’t?

If Dogs Run Free

If dogs run free, then why not we   across the swooping plain?
My ears hear a symphony  of two mules, trains and rain
The best is always yet to come, that’s what they explain to me
Just do your thing, you’ll be king
If dogs run free

A personal favorite of mine, no doubt will be one of the one’s that people say WTF? about, but I see a Walt Whitmanesque voice here, reveling in nature, written when Dylan was raising a family in Woodstock. Behind the breezy bucolic tone where you can almost hear wind softly blowing between the lines is a profound sense of connection with the everpresent, the cosmic sea he speaks of later in the song. Here is life unobstructed, the fetters of the world have fallen, there is only possibility, similar to Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” where he too had disengaged and says, “I tell them there’s no problems, only solutions.” Surely in this chaotic swirl that often constitutes what we call daily life, there is room for reflection in quiet, in ease, a place to rejuvenate, a place to ask, why not we?

Trying to Get to Heaven

Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I’ll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems

When you think that you’ve lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door

This is Dylan once again at a high point creatively, yet apparently low personally, at least when he wrote the song, obviously dealing with fundamental existential questions. If after the life he’s lead until then, Dylan can come up facing himself and questioning the hollowness of everything he’s been through, that’s a bonafide spiritual life-crisis. The bleakness of it knows no bounds - you can always lose a little more. The well of nothing is bottomless. But there’s something bracing in that realization, in the voicing of it. You’re hereafter prepared for the worst. At this point, after shaking the sugar down - a nod to Elizabeth Cotton’s “Shake Sugaree.”

Oh lordy me, didn’t I shake sugaree, everything I got is done and pawned.

So is everything Dylan has, but not material things. He pawned his life to the world, to his career, to song, and what’s left? It all appears hollow, except the chance of heaven. This was the battleground of the soul Dylan was waging his life for when he wrote this.

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

Tagged on to the end of the overproduced but underrated “Empire Burlesque,” this acoustic song, just Dylan and guitar, is the quintessential portrait of him as outsider, observer, weary mystic, treading the earth in revulsion, Diogenes in search of an honest man. The message of the verse is self-evident, it needs no real analysis, but the image of the set-apart man surrounded by the dark eyes of humanity is one of Dylan’s most stark and searing indictments. “They’re all protest songs,” he said once in jest, that wasn’t.