What is the worst ever line from a Bob Dylan song?

This couplet panders a bit too much to Michael-Moore-style xenophobia for my liking:

Sheiks walkin' around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings,
Deciding America's future from Amsterdam and to Paris

He saw an animal leavin' a muddy trail,
Real dirty face and a curly tail.
He wasn't too small and he wasn't too big.
"Ah, think I'll call it a pig."

The whole verse for context:

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly
Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry"
And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky
Saving, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken"

that's an awesome line....it's pretty obvious though..."yellow" being slang for cowardice as is "chicken"....great line.

xpost

I don't believe the Commander-in-Chief would say that though. It's the one joke out of dozens on the record that doesn't work. Usually with Dylan, if you understand why Shakespeare might be in the alley etc, what follows from that makes a kind of sense. But I think there is only one situation where someone might say "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken", and that it is in a Dylany absurdist song setting.

The joke would work if people commonly said the sun was yellow, but they don't. The sun's not yellow; it's golden if anything.

It works, that.

Yeah, that works too.

is alejandro up and about again? that's good news. i hadn't been keeping track.

"She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me
written by an Italian poet from the 13th century
and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you."

It's clunky, it's trite, and I don't like that song anyway.

The whole song's pretty embarrassing. There are tons of truly awful Dylan lyrics, and tons of really great ones, he's the original hit-and-miss lyricist.

Anyway, I will ask ten people. Not while walking down the street, though. This might compromise the data I admit.

xpost

I think he's more like hit-hit-miss. Whereas Neil Young is something like hit-miss-miss.

For some reason, this always grates.

Total weak setup line: "I asked the captain what his name was and how come he didn't drive a truck."

It's in there for no reason except to set up the rhyme "He said his name was Columbus and I just said 'good luck'."

I always thought that if he recorded the song about 10 years later, he could've said "I asked the captain what his name was, as if I gave a fuck."

Oh well.

i'll also stick up for "if dogs run free." i like New Morning a lot.

how about "don't think twice it's alright." grr you passive aggressive fucko

This one is great!

"this morning I looked out my window and found-
a bluebird singing but there was no one around.

At night I lay alone in my bed-
With an image of you going around in my head."

Christopher Ricks thinks Dylan's rhyming of "Mozambique" with "cheek to cheek" is brilliant. Crazy old fool.
Lester Bangs did a brilliant demolition of Desire, that song and Joey in particular.
It's such patronising excoticism. Noble savage and all that colonialist guff. And such hackneyed rhymes and banal cliches:

I'd like to spend some time in Mozambique
All the couples dancing cheek to cheek
It's very nice to stay a weeke or two...
There's lots of pretty girls in Mozambique
Andl plenty time for good romance...
Magic in a magical land

Now, from the xtian period, I know Bob's been called out before for this immortal opening couplet: "Senor, senor, do you know where we're headin'? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?"

Stripper: Check out these poems. They're from 13th century Italy.
Dylan: Wow! These poems go straight to my soul!

I've never heard "Don't Think Twice" as passive aggressive -- I think it's aggressive aggressive. Nothing much passive about "you just sorta wasted my precious time." It's in my pantheon of great Dylan fuck-yous, along side "Idiot Wind" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Most Likely You'll Go Your way..." ("you say my kisses aren't like his/ I'm not gonna tell you why that is")

But anyway, we're here to bury Dylan not praise, right, so..."Hurricane" is full of howlers, but this verse in particular is fingernails/chalkboard:

Rubin could take a man out with just one punch
But he never did like to talk about it all that much.
It's my work, he'd say, and I do it for pay
And when it's over I'd just as soon go on my way
Up to some paradise
Where the trout streams flow and the air is nice
And ride a horse along a trail.
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse.

I love "Empire Burlesque," btw.

Are you out of your mind? Have you never played with crayons? Where I come from, if you ask people what color the sun is, they'll say "yellow".

The worst lines are on "Under The Red Sky".

My pick would be "lay lady lay lay across my big brass bed". A frisky Bob = ewww.

I'd go along with this, except for "Isis". Also, I still like that album a lot, anyway.

(funny thing is, my wife loves that song, and it's one of the handful of Dylan tunes I know on guitar, so she often asks me to play it for her -- it feels kinda weird to sing it to the woman you love)

in some ways, that's Dylan's BEST nonsense (or not) couplet,
because it's exactly the point at which he's proving he could sing anything into the song
(there's the ring of a chuckle in his voice when he sings it)
but when I listen it does sound like it's a twisted (phallic?) metaphor

anyway, he was clearly having fun so more power to him

p.s. who will love me in the night when i'm horny?
i was in army of lovers .i like guys and girls.

Again, crayons! Are there any adults out there who would call the sun yellow?

Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200,000 for yellow sun

If I had my love here tonight
I'd be so happy. I'd be so bright.
And if I had my love by my side
I'd be so happy so satisfied.
But I've wandered so far away
that I can't see the light of the day.
But I know the time will come
when I see the light of the sun.

I got a friend who's hanging on the line.
I want to help him 'cause I've got the time.
When people say look out for yourself.
Well what's the use if it's for yourself.
If you've got nobody you can give to
then you might as well just be on that shelf.
But I hope the time will come
When they'll see the light of the sun.

O come see that yellow sun come shining.
It'll turn you on. It'll turn you around.
O come see that yellow sun come shining.
I'll turn you on. It'll turn you around.
But everybody suffers a little pain.
When there's no sun and only the rain.
So if you've been hurt then,
show your wound and smile.
And it will be all right in a while.

Yellow sun keep on shining............

Yellow Sun was the first thermonuclear weapon developed for operational service in the UK. Yellow Sun was a fission/fusion device intended for airdrop. The name referred to the bomb's casing, while the physics package was Green Grass. The neutron source for the physics package was called Blue Stone.

The initial Yellow Sun Stage 1 used the Green Bamboo tamper boosted fission warhead while Yellow Sun Stage 2 used a Green Granite fusion warhead with a yield of 400Kt.

Yellow Sun Mk1 was essentially a boosted fission weapon with a yield of about 500KT. Any weapon with a yield in excess of 500Kt was referred to as a Megaton weapon. Yellow Sun was also known as "Bomb, HE, 7000lb, HC"

Yellow Sun Mk2 had a yield of 1Mt. Yellow Sun was withdrawn when the RAF relinquished the strategic nuclear deterrent to the Royal Navy Polaris submarines.

Two Reasons why the Sun appears yellow:

1. The Sun's surface temperature (5,500 degrees C) produces a range of visible light (red to blue) in which yellow is the most plentiful, but not much more than other colors it produces. If the Sun were cooler, say 2,500 degrees C, it would look red, like the stars Antares and Betelgeuse. Or if the Sun were hotter, say 15,000 degrees C, it would look blue, like the star Rigel.

2 The Earth's atmosphere acts as a kind of light filter. Some colors are filtered more than others. The Sun is a yellow star, but the Earth's atmosphere makes the Sun look more yellow than it appears than if you were to observe it from space where it would appear more white than yellow...

Can't fucking stand "Hurricane" and never could.

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), February 12th, 2005.

I just did this lab in astronomy class (my school, Georgia State, has one of the best astronomy depts in the country) and we had to locate stars in constellations and determine their apparent magnitude and color class. They were either red, blue, or yellow. Anyways even in every single graph and computer print-out in class they have the sun as yellow..

Wow, this thread was really absurd, mainly cos of the confusion with the color of the sun. I mean it seems like common sense.

"Crimson flames tied through my ears rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps"

I originally almost just typed the lyric straight with no introductory text but I was concerned it might be read as a candidate for bad Dylan. I don't have one of those, though.

Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars.

Her chestnut mare? Is this Jane Austen? WTF?

...unless it's meant to satirize precisely such exoticism? I've always heard Mozambique this way. There had been a ten-year civil war against colonialism prior to Desire's release. Surely Dylan is not writing blind about a random country, but critiquing the facile tourist-brochure view of the world?
And, re: Bangs on Joey...Dylan's not a reporter. Expecting the guy who writes lines like "the highway is for gamblers" not to be given to mythologizing is a bit naive. (besides, since when was glorifying criminals unacceptable?).

"Man Gave Names to All the Animals." Also,

"The motorcycle black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen..."

always strikes me as too Dylanesque, like he just just put the word "woman" through the dylan-symbol-machine, and it went a bit crazy.

I read somewhere that this is a reference to Roger McGuinn, who had a song named "Chestnut Mare". I'm not sure the exact meaning, but perhaps Dylan's ex-wife had a thing with McGuinn? It's some sort of personal symbolism, I believe.

A golden opportunity missed by ILM!

The kelp line in Sara is the worst.

I reserve special ire for "When the Night Comes Falling From The Sky" and how Dylan mewls the mixed metaphor "I can hear your trembling heart beat like a river."

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

"the sun aint yellow..." is great

"Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on
Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon."

Okay, so I know what Lenny didn't do. And?

Well, in the rest of the song, Bob tells you what he does, but in a very moralizing way.

It's the Golden Globes reference that gets to me, I think.

from "Heart of Mine"

I have dined with kings, I've been offered wings
And I've never been too impressed.

-- always reminds me of Charlene ("I've been undressed by kings..."), which at least is funny.

(By the way, when has he been "offered wings"? Hot wings? Or like when he flies the friendly skies? "Here, sir, let me pin this to your lapel...")

--- one line, indicts itself without so much as a weak rhyme to trigger the eye-rolling.

plus its hard not to consider the larger context of the song --- I dig "is your love in vain" for instance --- I like the horns, I like that part where he goes "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalright I'll take-a-chance" ----

"neighborhood bully" is just pure shit through and through ----

"We want to put his ass in stir
We want to pin this triple MUR-
der on him - he ain't no Gentleman Jim."

from Hurricane.

Every time I reread this thread, I'm taken pleasantly by surprise by the whole "But the sun ISN'T yellow!" thing. Still one of the most goofily WTF things I've read on ILX.

"How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home; like a complete unknown. like a rolling stone?" = " Fire and ice, you come on like a flame and then you turn a cold shoulder; fire and ice, I wanna give you my love, but you'll just take a little piece of my heart - you'll just tear it apart."

I love the song it's from, but every time I hear the line "Many times I've often prayed" in "Girl From The North Country" I cringe a little bit.

Instead of stopping when we could we went right on
Till suddenly we found that the brakes were gone.

I always hated this:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

esp "Like it was written in my soul from me to you"

haha, oh, I said as much upthread

i know, i opened the thread to bitch about "hurricane," but apparently i already did that.

Half my posts lately are repeats. I'm gettin old mang.

I'm not sure if this belongs in best or worst:

Listen to me Mr. Pussyman
This might be your last night in a bed so soft
We're not pimps on the make, politicians on the take,
You can't pay us off.

"The waitress, he was handsome."

man hurting is RONG

uh yeah, that is a great verse -- (the tangled up in blue one). any songwriter would kill to have written that, you kidding me? I agree with the Lenny Bruce mention above -- that song always baffled me. "I rode with him in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half, Seemed like it took a couple of months." Sounds like a boring taxi ride ...

"Lenny Bruce" really is just full of awful lines. The one that makes me scratch my head the most is "Never robbed any churches/Never cut off any babies' heads" That Lenny Bruce, such a hero in his unwillingness to cut off babies' heads.

haha, yeah that is a good one ... it is curious, because Dylan still plays that song live from time to time! And there are a ton of good songs he never plays ...

the lyric is, "the sun's NOT yellow, it's chicken."

Most of "Desire" has pretty bad lyrics, most of which come from Jacques Levy.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Friday, February 11, 2005 8:43 PM (3 years ago)

Desire is full of howlers, most of which we can blame on Jacques Levy.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, May 26, 2006 2:27 PM (2 years ago)

i think one of the things i like about dylan is that a lot of his lyrics are borderline-terrible -- full of ridiculously extravagant imagery and hackneyed rhymes and really corny stuff. but his voice and persona are so powerful that he makes it work, at least most of the time.

"I always hated this:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue."

I like this because it feels like he is at least half-mocking the sentiment and the experience.

for me pretty much the whole lyric of sara is his worst.
that chorus - yowza.

J.D. otm

in a song called marijuanaville by tenacious D:

"And they say I sound like Dylan when I'm stoned!"

fucking hate that song, fucking Jack Black is not funny

his line, from the same song:

I have dined with kings, I've been offered wings
And I've never been too impressed.

-- always reminds me of Charlene ("I've been undressed by kings..."), which at least is funny.

(By the way, when has he been "offered wings"? Hot wings? Or like when he flies the friendly skies? "Here, sir, let me pin this to your lapel...")

― morris pavilion (samjeff), Friday, May 26, 2006 3:29 PM Bookmark

C'mon, how awesome is it if he was offered hot wings? He sits down to table with the King, expecting some sumptuous repast, and His Highness passes him a wing platter and starts going on about his secret sauce recipe!

This Wing's On Fire

this was the right answer:

Anyone up in this bitch ever listen to Another Side of Bob Dylan? If y'all did, you'd know the worst line AND verse ever in a Bob song is from Ballad In Plan D.
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

― kornrulez6969 (TCBeing), Friday, May 26, 2006 2:46 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

MOST MYS-TEER-EE-US-LEE

ah ballad in plain d is pretty i think

It's weird because if there are any chains-- any chains whatsoever-- that birds are free from, it's the skyway's. Everybody knows that. They do have some trouble with the chains that go on your tires in winter time though.

Guess that's why it's so mysterious.

His friends from the prison should've shanked him.

i refuse to believe anyone has actually listened to ballad in plain d more than once

The king was in his counting house counting out his money,
The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,
When along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

Super-lame, imho.

The hot wings thing is just cracking me up today, thank you samjeff.

Rhymes in Sara make me cringe:

Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp

And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore.

You always responded when I needed your help,

You gimme a map and a key to your door.

It doesn't get much worse than:
"Crimson flames tied through my ears rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps"

hell no this is AMAZING.

i kinda think that if you can't appreciate that sort of wonderful, ridiculous shit you can't possibly be getting as much out of dylaan as you could be.

"There's a whole lotta...sufferin' tonight...from da disease of conceit..."

(STUPID OBVIOUS PIANO CHORDS}

how has "Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35" escaped this thread???

damn near the worst Dylan song, easily the worst Dylan lyrics

hahaha, I heard "Disease of Conceit" for the first time this morning and it's what prompted me to revive the thread, but I forgot once I hit the hot wings.

do people hate rainy day woman just because it's the first track on a canonized album so it's like SUPERCHARGED burned

no, I have always hated it. and I love the rest of the album, my fave Dylan.

it's the penultimate "crazy circus crap"

"I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows"

That one's quite a gambit, shamelessly awful and good at the same time. It reads like a rural version of Norman Mailer, but if you really visualize it, the macho posture is somewhat undermined by the thought of Dylan as a frail, needy calf.

I like "Señor" but many of the lines are Dylan trying to sound Dylan-esque:

Well, the last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled
Was that trainload of fools bogged down in a magnetic field

yeah, senor is full of silly lines, but dylan and his band sell it, especially in the live 78 versions. he still performs it pretty well these days, seems to really enjoy singing it.
it's funny, i just read that Paul Nelson anthology/bio, and Nelson is really into this one unreleased (still?) song, "Dusty Old Fairgrounds," trying to get other artists (including the NY Dolls!) to record it, playing it for anyone who'd listen. It's weird, cuz I've heard it and it's sort of terrible! not a lost classic by any means.

sucked the milk out of a thousand cows rules wtf!

SERIOUSLY DUDES I WON'T HEAR A BAD WORD SAID ABOUT SENOR TALES OF YANKEE POWER

Son, this ain't a dream no more it's the real thing.

it's the penultimate "crazy circus crap"

Sorry but this is my number one grammar pet peeve. Penultimate is not a fancier way of saying ultimate. It means second to last.

The only way for the above statement to be true would be for someone to release an album of crazy circus crap, and put Rainy Day Women as the 2nd to last song.

pe·nul·ti·mate (p-nlt-mt)
adj.
1. Next to last.

The bridge that you travel on
goes to the Babylon
girl with the rose in her hair
Starlight in the East
and you're finally released
You're stranded but with nothing to share.

#1: always sounds like he's just straight up saying "goes to the Babylon," which is terrible
#2: "Babylon" is not an adjective so it really can't modify "girl" like that
#3: "travel on" and "Babylon" is awwwwwwful
#4: for some reason, in order to make "hair" rhyme with "share" (which, uh...), he pronounces "hair" "haaarrr"
#5: the "but" in the last line is superfluous
#6: wtf is he even trying to say with all this

bitches, man

no i have no idea

but i've decided disease of conceit is underrated. i like how dylan thinking he can get away w this shit is itself a symptom of the titular disease. it's soberingly meta.

and the answer to this question is still and forever "are birds free from the chains of the skyway".

LOL i know someone who uses that lyric as their email signature.

so many dylan lyrics are awful, and a lot hover over the great/awful divide. which is why i thought his "reinvention" in the 1990s (and continuing) as this kind of primitive sagelike conduit of the "old, weird america" is really off base. of all great lyricists, surely dylan is the one whose songs show their seams most fully.

his best lyrics are on john wesley harding, surely?

Who killed Davey Moore?
Why and what's the reason for?

that's a pretty strong song, lyrically. Especially for a dude in his early 20s.

gives me chills when the audience suddenly starts applauding on "i hit him, i hit him / yes it's true / but that's what i'm / PAID to do." i think they're applauding the line about cuba right before it but the timing is so strange.

That skyway thing...was he maybe writing about the Minneapolis Skyway? The one that the Replacements sang about?

dislike the dogs run free dissing in the first post >:(

xpost yo dog St Paul's got a ton of skyways too, it ain't just a mpls thing

(/western pride)

lolol i meant /eastern

I think I kinda like the "sun ain't yellow" line now.

xpost yo dog St Paul's got a ton of skyways too, it ain't just a mpls thing

And you chain birds to them? That seems mean.

New album has some clunkers, especially on "Tin Angel." "He pondered the future of his fate"? And this:

“Get up, stand up, you greedy-lipped wench
And cover your face or suffer the consequence
You are making my heart feel sick
Put your clothes back on, double-quick”

ze fkk?

"He pondered the future of his fate"

Hello David Coverdale

i don't know if this is the worst or the best:

Wiggle ’til you’re high, wiggle ’til you’re higher
Wiggle ’til you vomit fire

that's awesome is what that is

yeah under the red sky has some great oddball lyrics

Hey! Who could your lover be?
Hey! Who could your lover be?
Let me eat off his head so you can really see!

or
Handy Dandy, if every bone in his body was broken he would never admit it
He got an all-girl orchestra and when he says
“Strike up the band,” they hit it

i wouldn't say worst, and there's other keepers from Sara already referenced but

I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells,
I'd taken the cure and had just gotten through,
Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.

last line is just so yick

Like if Alanis Morrissette finally just wrote a song called "Dave"

alanis is gonna need a whole concept album to deal with Dave.

da croupier ot. I'm not a fan of I Shall Be Fee No. 10.

Well, I set my monkey on the log
And ordered him to do the Dog
He wagged his tail and shook his head
And he went and did the Cat instead
He’s a weird monkey, very funky

Sorry, I meant "otm" when I wrote "ot".

'sara' is one of my favorite dylan songs and performances but the concept is pretty appalling and that 'sad eyed lady' line is indeed cringeworthy.

Desire in general kind of straddles the line between being amazing and embarrassing, even more precariously than most of Dylan's albums.

haha, the "Sad-Eyed Lady" part is probably my favorite in that song! It's only line on the whole album where it's clear that this is broken-hearted Bobby Zimmerman, a guy who writes songs sometimes to work out his feelings, not the narrative voice of Bob Dylan, Teller Of Fantastic Tales. I actually prefer the latter usually (see the two Lily/Rosemary/Jack-of-Hearts threads) but I dig the former here as a moment of something cracking through.

Do you like "Blind Willie McTell"? I think it does a similar thing to what you're talking about when the song is suddenly en media res at the "St James Hotel" in the last verse. I like that part of the song a lot.

Listening to it now for the first time!

There are undoubtedly lots of bad lines from bad songs, but my collection is completely mid-'70s and earlier, so there are very few bad songs. I'll go with the second post and pick what I think is a bad line from a great song: "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken."

Doctor Casino otm as usual, it's the best part of that shabby album

if we're talking worst ~delivery~ of a line in a Dylan song then I'm inclined to agree on Davey Moore, haaaate that song & its whinnnne

aww thanks Euler! Thing is, Desire is probably the Dylan record I've played the most times, as it was one of the first ones I discovered in my parents' record collection and I was (and remain) totally hooked on "Black Diamond Bay" and "Isis."

see also Bob Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay" Characters Poll

i really like (most of) Desire. don't much care for "Sara", but the Sad-eyed Lady line is p cool imo

it's not even true! dylan wrote it in the studio in nashville

pretty ironic to pretend he's not a Teller Of Fantastic Tales in that bit

Xpost I think "the sun's not yellow it's chicken" is a great line indicating the, like, absurd cosmic grandeur of the speaker's egotism. I'm surprised to see it mentioned here tbh.

'blind willie mctell' is prob dylan's most perfectly formed lyric -- even his best songs usually have some throwaway lines, but not here. figures that he didn't even bother to release it for 10 years.

there's some very odd disagreement upthread about whether or not the sun is actually commonly considered to be yellow

the worst/funniest line in the pro-israel song "neighborhood bully" is:

WHEN HE DESTROYED A BOMB FACTORY
AIN'T NOBODY WAS GLAD
THOSE BOMBS WERE MEANT FOR HIM
HE WAS SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD!

from you're a big girl now:

"time is a jet plane
it moves too fast"

also from infidels another personal favorite:

YOU KNOW THEY USED TO GROW FOOD IN KANSAS
NOW THEY WANNA GROW IT ON THE MOON AND EAT IT RAW!!!

eating moon-food raw, that's a double entendre right

It's innocuous but it really bugs me:
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

No way dogg

"Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule."

Not every bit of speed-inspired nonsense that popped into his head in the 60s was brilliant.

the delivery of that line on the Live 1966 set is epic though

^^^

i think my favorite version of "visions of johanna" now is the one on the no direction home sdtrk. it rocks so hard; fuck a "thin wild mercury"

A close call: Desire, Street Legal or Infidels for grossest lyricist indivisible from vocal smarm

*lyrics

Street Legal is a pretty weird album, I agree. Changing of the Guards really creeped me out when I first heard it. The lyrics seem to describe an apocalypse of some sort but the song itself is really upbeat and joyful. I still don't really understand what it is about. I almost suspect that it is meant as ironic critique of revolutionary and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, like "When the Ship Comes In", but I'm not sure.

Maybe it's just lazy and cryptic in a cynical way.

Love street legal

Street Legal is a more cynical cash-in than Knocked Out Loaded or whatever; the latter sounds like table scraps while the former really does sound like he cared enough to craft songs in the studio yet had no idea what to say except to imitate what fans thought Bob Dylan should sound like. I know plenty of his best songs boast throwaways and laugh lines (often the best part of'em) but the images in "Changing of the Guard" are more discrete than usual; they don't cohere, and as singer he doesn't try to make them cohere.

The bridge that you travel on
Goes to the Babylon

^^^ stuck in my head and driving me crazy

haha i see i was suffering the same symptoms in november of 2012

LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD

Again, crayons! Are there any adults out there who would call the sun yellow?

"Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule."

Not every bit of speed-inspired nonsense that popped into his head in the 60s was brilliant.

Ha yes. And it became an equally terrible album cover by the Stones.

"Conceit is a disease that the doctors got no cure
They've done a lot of research on it, but what it is, they're still not sure"
The whole song's pretty embarrassing. There are tons of truly awful Dylan lyrics, and tons of really great ones, he's the original hit-and-miss lyricist.

― Joubert, Friday, February 11, 2005 12:38 PM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes we have a winner, I like oh mercy but totally forgot about this tune

maybe the sun NEVER looks yellow from new zealand??????!????

Now the beach is deserted, except for some KELP

Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the year of who knows when

or

Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch

The worst line in a Bob Dylan song is the one he never delivers in "Man Gave Names to All the Animals"

He saw an animal as smooth as glass
Slithering his way through the grass
Saw him disappear by a tree near a lake...

Portentous in every definition of the word

Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch

That’s a great line—I think about it a lot. Hotter than a crotch!

Now the house was deserted — except for the ELF

That’s a great line—I think about it a lot. Hotter than a crotch!

LOL, I know! I think it's awful in a good way - impossible to forget, like whenever it's hot outside, I think of that line.

And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table,
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table,
I AM THE TABLE. I AM THE TABLE.