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)

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.