J's Music Hour -- Bob Dylan's Top Thirty Verses (Happy Birthday Bobby!)

Happy Birthday Bob Dylan! 85 years old! Miraculous. Legendary even. And as Bobby has aged, he has shifted this legendary status some; once he was a nobody, an unwashed phenomenon, sprung from the spirit of Americana itself. A ghostly bolt of lightning, a flash. He became something greater, as his voice began to speak in grater vollumes. "Simultaneously young and adult," as the Boss put it. This was the sort of legend that springs forth once or twice in a generation.

Nowadays, Bobby has been a legend for so long that other legends were born, lived full lives, painted there masterpieces, and perished, all while Bobby continues on. Its sort of like hes all ways been here, in the back ground, in the fore ground, where ever he wants to be really. He has seen it all, been there for every moment, and all the while he has written and written and written and written. SO, in honor of 85 years of Dylan, I've compended my favorite 30 verses by the Jokerman into a list for you all hear. As all ways this is comnpletely subjective! Thanks for reading, and happy birthday Bobby!

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Lay Lady Lay – Nashville Skyline (1969)

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?
You can have your cake and eat it too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he's standing in front of you?

Isis – Desire (1976)

She said “Where you been?”
I said “No place special”
She said “You look different”
I said “Well... I guess”
She said “You been gone”
I said “That’s only natural”
She said “You going to stay?”
I said “If you want me to, yes"

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine
And I said, "Oh, I didn't know that
But then again, there's only one I've met
And he just smoked my eyelids
And punched my cigarette"

AND NOW OUR LIST

30. One of us Must Know (Sooner or Later) – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

I couldn't see what you could show me
Your scarf had kept your mouth well hid
I couldn't see how you could know me
But you said you knew me and I believed you did
When you whispered in my ear
And asked me if I was leavin' with you or her
I didn't realize just what I did hear
I didn't realize how young you were

This song, to me anyway, really captures the mystery of self-awareness, in a subtextual way. "I didn't realize how young you were" is so condescending that I all most have to believe that Bobby is painting the speaker in a negative light, as if he himself is the one who doesn't get it. "I couldn't see what you could show me" seems to reinforce this. It's never going to be confirmed of coarse, one way or the other.

29. Positively 4th Street – Single (1965)

I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is
To see you

Vitriol. Just poison. There's a number of speculations as to who this could really be targeting, I all ways assumed he was speaking to a woman, but we can't know for sure. What we do know is that this song has no chorus, no refrain, just a magazine of bullets, fired one after another. And this is the final death blow.

28. Simple Twist of Fate – Blood on the Tracks (1975)

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere
He told himself he didn't care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside
To which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate

I all ways found myself so drawn to that line, "Felt an emptiness to which he just could not relate." The deep pain the speaker is experiencing is one he has not felt, perhaps ever. The loneliness painted in the first half of the verse sets the stage for this pensive revalation in a way that feels expected, and yet is still so heartbreaking. Being unable to relate to one's own feelings, that's despair I suppose.

27. I Want You – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

The drunken politician leaps
Upon the street where mothers weep
And the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin' from my broken cup
And ask me to open up the gate for you

What I love about this attire song, is how unapologeticly romantic it is. Bobby's lyrics are often quite guarded, but that is completely eschewed here. The chorus is so brazen and unambiguous that their can be no question as to how he feels. Its gorgeous.

26. Mama, You Been on My Mind – Studio Outtake (1964)

Even though my eyes are hazy and my thoughts they might be narrow
Where you've been don't bother me, or bring me down in sorrow
I don't even mind who you'll be waking with tomorrow
But mama, you're just on my mind

I found this line very brave, the one about who his former lover is waking with. Not often are these thoughts put onto the page, and in fact, in many versions/covers of this song, this line is amended or the verse is omitted attirely. Theres a power in that. A tempestuous sort of howl, a keening, that is so sorrowful. Furthermore, his thoughts being presented through the lens of someone still in denial of these feelings, either internally or just in outward expression, compounds the grief.

25. Mama, You Been on My Mind – Studio Outtake (1964)

When you wake up in the mornin', baby, look inside your mirror
You know I won't be next to you, you know I won't be near
I'd just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

A really beautifull use of imagery. So many words to say something so simple, but it doesnt come a cross as verbose at all. Just thoughtfull.

24. Tangled Up in Blue – Blood on the Tracks (1975)

So now I'm going back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters' wives
Don't know how it all got started
I don't know what they're doing with their lives
But me, I'm still on the road
A-heading for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point
Of view
Tangled up in blue

Blood on the Tracks is a break up album. Plain and simple. Most of the songs are simply sad, but Tangled Up in Blue really isn't. Its fundamentally fatalistic, perhaps, but it ends on a hopefull note. He is going back again, some way some how, in spite of the obstacles a head or the difficulty's left behind. I appreciate this.

23. Mississippi – "Love and Theft" (2001)

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Perhaps a contender for my favorite individual lines, "You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way" is the sort of wisdom that can be applyed to all feilds. All situations. Cigarettes never taste the same once re-lit.

22. Visions of Johanna – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

What is he even talking about what is the ghost of electricity.

21. The Times They Are A-Changin' – The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964)

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

This song, and perhaps this verse most of all, was the pinnacle of an attire protest moment. The birth of the omni-cause, fighting for all sorts of social justice from ratial equality to ending the wars. His voice, its timbre, is so young and yet so old. His voice in his word choice is much the same.

20. Subterranean Homesick Blues – (Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

Johnny's in the basement, mixin' up the medicine
I'm on the pavement, thinkin' about the government
The man in a trench coat, badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough, wants to get it paid off
Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did
God knows when, but you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alleyway, looking for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap in a pig pen
Wants eleven dollar bills, you only got ten

This just makes my foot tap and my head bob. dylan.

19. Subterranean Homesick Blues – (Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

Oh, get born, keep warm, short pants, romance
Learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed, try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts, don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift
Look out, kid, they keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole, light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals, try to avoid the scandals
Don't want to be a bum, you better chew gum
The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles

I really love this song. Takes a few listens, in my case a few dozen but i have mental difficulty's be cause of all of my boblems, but anyway it takes a few listens to really understand the story being told here. Theres this sort of paradoxical hypocracy happening where the main chraracters are all most put upon, there being victimized and targeted, as if there braking the law, as if there doing somnethign wrong, and the speaker is trying to help guide them. The joke of coarse is that they ARE actally criminals, and the police coming after them are warranted in doing so!

18. My Back Pages – Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964)

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now

17. All Along The Watchtower – John Wesley Harding (1968)

"No reason to get excited"
The thief, he kindly spoke
"There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late"

This song is so evocative. I can feel the wind on my skin when I here this. I am in a desert, it reads as a western to me. But the vocabulary is so archetypal that I would be shocked if anybody else said the same thing. This album has his best story telling, his best narratives, and this was one of the best.

16. Like a Rolling Stone – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Princess on a steeple and all the pretty people
They're all drinking, thinking that they've got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you better take your diamond ring, you better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can't refuse
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal

This was the most important song ever written. Maybe it still is. The release of this song, this whole album, that REALLY began the 60s, and the birth of songwriting as we know it today. I still get chills thinking about the story of how the organ intro was improvised. Such a fun and provocative song and its all most funny how the lyrics are telling a very specific story that is largely unrelatable.

15. Ballad of a Thin Man – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels
He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice, he asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan"
And you know something is happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Ballad of a Thin Man is really dense, and theres so many storylines happening at once. Who Mr. Jones really represents is up for interpreation but to me the surface level reading is that this is some drug-induced acid trip. A bad trip specifically, with strange and scary entity's and villains abound, frightening the confused Mr. Jones. A level deeper and we can see that Mr. Jones is perhaps representative of the media, the critics, the journalists. And that the man with the pencil who is refereed to as "very well read" (in a tongue and cheek way), is way out of his depth in the art world, home to all sorts of freaks and strangers. Another reading is that Mr. Jones has found himself in a Eyes-Wide-Shut sort of sinister underbelly, and that Dylan is portraying the media or the music industry or whomever as demonic in a way. "Here is your throat back thanks for the loan" makes my skin crall.

14. Ballad of a Thin Man – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

You have many contacts among the lumberjacks
To get you facts when someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect you to all give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations

This song is just grate.

13. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) – Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

This song is one of those that you here and you just know your listening to something extraordinary right from the jump. And this opener is some of the silkiest most mercuruial lyrics put on tape.

12. Idiot Wind – Blood on the Tracks (1975)

I can’t feel you anymore
I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
Every time I crawl past your door
I been wishing I've been somebody else instead
Down the highway, down the tracks
Down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars
Hounded by your memory
And all your raging glory

Wow. Each line falls out of the previous, like an unfolding staircase into hell. Its just dismal. Brutle. Tragic. This song breaks my heart.

11. Changing of the Guards – (Street-Legal) 1978

Peace will come
With tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when her false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and the Queen of Swords

I have long contended, very controversially, that this song is his finale. His opus. Everything proceeding it, the decades of brilliant work, is all epilogue.

10. Changing of the Guards – (Street-Legal) 1978

Fortune calls
I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace
Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down
She's smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born
On midsummer's eve, near the tower

There is an epic nature to its lyricism, the story seems biblical in scale. And I love when Dylan uses archetypes in his work. This song pulls a lot from Tarot which I also enjoy.

9. Changing of the Guards – (Street-Legal) 1978

They shaved her head
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn't help but follow
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil

There is a sense of urgency in the rhythm of the song, but I wander if it isn't professed in the lyrics at all. The words seem to flow all most softly like a stream or a brook, while the arrangement is like a waterfall. I really really love the imagery hear, and I find it to be among his best work. As far as lyrical masterpieces throughout the ENTIRE song, this is his number three for me.

8. Mr. Tambourine Man – Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

I mean come on. I could just read it over and over and over again.

7. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross and your voice like chimes
Oh, who do they think could bury you?

6. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

Now you stand with your thief, you're on his parole
With your holy medallion in your fingertips now enfold
And your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul
Who among them could ever think he could destroy you?

5. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands – Blonde on Blonde (1966)

The kings of Tyrus, with their convict list
Are waiting in line for their geranium kiss
And you wouldn't know it would have happened like this
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?

I think Sad-Eyed Lady has my favorite lyrics of his. I think that this song captures something otherworldly, ethereal, angellic. He tapped in to something divine. It grows on you, with each listen. Who among them watns just to kiss you? It brings a tear to my eye. The gratest love song ever written. Ever. I would put the attire song hear, but these are my favorite verses.

4. A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall – The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten-thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children

3. A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall – The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazing
I heard ten-thousand whispering and nobody listening
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley

2. A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall – The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

And what will you do now, my blue-eyed son?
And what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-going back out 'fore the rain starts a-falling
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
And the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking
But I'll know my song well before I start singing

I think this is his first masterpiece, and it may just be the gratest lyrical content produced in the 20th century. Probably ever. This was written by a child. He was like 20. Do you understand? As far as lyrics go top-to-bottom, this is his best song, by far. This song makes me cry and I cant articalate why. I dont know what it is. Theres a heartbreaking beauty in it. Bobby has the saddest voice I've ever heard.

1. It's All Over Now Baby Blue – Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

Leave your steppingstones behind
There's something that calls for you
Forget the dead you've left
They will not follow you
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue

But this is not a list of his best attire songs. This is a list of my favorite individual verses, and this one is my favorite, bar none. I think about it every day. It is my mantra, my sacred text. It is his best. It speaks for itself.