Notes on Track 5: Dylan is one of our main influences. We always try to make albums as good as his, even the bad ones.
Before I became obsessed with Bob Dylan, I was obsessed with becoming obsessed with Bob Dylan.
Dylan albums were among the most sacred in the rock canon. In The New Rolling Stone Record Guide—the one with the blue cover, 1983 edition, the only bible that mattered to me as a young classic-rock convert—Dave Marsh described Dylan’s 1966 masterwork, Blonde on Blonde, as “rock and roll at the farthest edge imaginable, instrumentalists and singer all peering into a deeper abyss than anyone had previously imagined.” I took this in and understood that Dylan was at the top of the classic-rock food chain, with the Beatles and the Stones, the one guy above anyone else that I had to figure out. “Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Bruce Springsteen once said, and I was eager to also become a citizen of the United States of Bob.
Dylan albums were totemic items thought to contain valuable secrets, great mysteries, and profound wisdom. But you couldn’t just plunder their riches willy-nilly. You had to earn all of the treasure that was inside. You had to work at it, even if it wasn’t going to be easy. So I worked for many years.
But for many years I did not become a Dylan fan.
Nothing had prepared me to appreciate his thin, wild, mercury sound. I had heard a few Dylan songs on the radio, but he didn’t seem to slot comfortably in any format. Strangely, Dylan songs upended the traditional oldies/classic-rock divide—WAPL occasionally played “Like a Rolling Stone,” in spite of that song’s coming out in 1965 and therefore residing in traditional oldies territory. Meanwhile, WOGB played “Lay Lady Lay,” Dylan’s Top 10 hit from 1969’s Nashville Skyline, which should’ve represented his classic-rock period. But local radio mostly avoided Dylan—practically nothing was played from Blood on the Tracks, Desire, or his other seventies albums, and there was zilch from Dylan’s eighties and nineties work. Based solely on radio exposure, I was better acquainted with songs by Jethro Tull and Ted Nugent than Bob Dylan.
Dylan songs were very long and densely coded. Time and again, I would try to engage with the gnarled verbiage and circular logic of the lyrics and fail horribly. Take “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the eleven-minute closer from Blonde on Blonde. This song gave me brain damage. Dylan once claimed in another album-closing tune (“Sara,” from 1976’s Desire) that he wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in New York’s Chelsea Hotel for his then-soon-to-be-ex-wife, Sara Dylan. But he actually wrote the song during an all-night Nashville recording session in early 1966, scrawling line after line about his sad-eyed lady while some of the finest (and most expensive) session musicians in the world sat around smoking cigarettes and playing cards. A few years later, Dylan admitted that he “started writing and just couldn’t stop,” presumably because he was zonked out on speed. “After a period of time, I forgot what it was all about, and I started trying to get back to the beginning,” he told Rolling Stone in 1969.
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” was like a foreign language devised by a man who himself only half-understood all the conjugations. According to Dylan, the sad-eyed lady had “eyes like smoke” and “prayers like rhymes” and a “voice like chimes.” The lowlands from whence she came were a place “where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,” but how did one get there? Dylan drafted a map that seemed to consist only of dead ends, littered with a “deck of cards missing the jack and the ace” and allusions to “basement clothes” and “warehouse eyes” and “Arabian drums.” And that was just in the first two verses. There had to be at least seventeen more verses after that. If Dylan got lost in this song, what hope did I have?
I was raised on the seventh-grade-English-class model of poetry interpretation, in which every line has to be connected to a concrete meaning. But “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” offered no easy answers. The only overarching message, in this Dylan song and all the others I tried in vain to decode, was, “You’re on your own, kid.” Priceless advice, I came to understand, whether you’re trying to interpret rock lyrics or just make it through the day.
Some listeners drive themselves insane trying to get to the end of the onion. They refer to themselves as Dylanologists—self-appointed professors in the school of rock’s poet laureate. The most famous Dylanologist was a writer, political activist, and stark-raving-mad lunatic named A. J. Weberman. In the late sixties, around the time that Dylan and his family moved from Woodstock to Greenwich Village, Weberman started stalking his idol. Among Weberman’s many innovations in the field of Dylanology was something he called garbology, in which he dug through Dylan’s trash in order to uncover evidence supporting his crackpot theory that Dylan was a heroin addict who had sold out the political left at a time when activists were gaining traction in stopping the Vietnam War. Along with analyzing Dylan’s discarded coffee filters and banana peels, Weberman was a crazy-devoted interpreter of Dylan’s lyrics, which he parsed like a World War II code breaker poring over intercepted Nazi correspondence. In 2005, Weberman published a truly demented but endlessly fascinating 536-page tome called Dylan to English Dictionary, in which he isolates hundreds of words that recur in Dylan songs and uncovers their “actual” meanings.
In the smoke rings of Weberman’s mind, whenever Bob Dylan uses the word “frost,” he is really referring to middle-of-the-road twentieth-century poet Robert Frost. When Dylan uses the word “load,” he’s really referring to drug slang for twenty-five bags of heroin. When Dylan mentions Texas, Weberman argues that Dylan really means Europe. When Dylan says “thick,” Weberman surmises that Dylan is referring elliptically to contracting HIV in the late eighties. (Did I mention that another of Weberman’s totally unfounded crackpot theories concerns Dylan’s being HIV positive? We are truly through the looking glass here, people.)
I can see now that I was listening to Dylan all wrong. The Weberman approach of “solving” Dylan songs is a pointless exercise. Dylan songs are never about the destination. If you love Bob Dylan, you come to wish that the journey would never end, for this is what keeps his music fresh over so many listens. All of the detours in Dylan songs—which lead to other detours, which lead to still more detours—offer limitless possibilities. I wanted something I could put in a box, like all of the other songs I had ever heard, because I hadn’t yet fathomed an alternative in which—to quote Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets—I could fuck around with the infinite. But that’s what “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is—a pathway to the infinite. I came to Blonde on Blonde on a mission to get down to the bottom of it, but Blonde on Blonde is infinitely better as a record with no bottom.
Hundreds of artists have covered Bob Dylan’s songs, but only Bob Dylan can sing his songs a hundred different ways.
It’s not just that Dylan changes up his phrasing, or that his voice sounds completely different depending on which decade you happen to be hearing him. Dylan’s singular talent as a vocalist is his ability to convey two or three or even four different emotions at the same time. Listen to Dylan sing “Just Like a Woman,” and you’ll hear cruelty, tenderness, anger, and sorrow. That mess of feelings inside your chest when somebody breaks your heart, which you can’t articulate because your brain doesn’t know how to reconcile the devastation that’s been wrought—that’s what Bob Dylan was born to express.
But when I first heard Dylan, his voice just seemed weird and I didn’t like it. As an early-nineties alt-rock baby, I was raised to appreciate grating vocal styles—Kurt Cobain’s parched howls, Billy Corgan’s piercing caterwauls, Polly Jean Harvey’s threatening whispers. But Dylan’s dust-bowl wheezing, which was subsequently pinched into a needling whine by amphetamines and then lacquered over with a country gentleman’s croon during his Nashville Skyline era, rubbed my inexperienced eardrums raw. I recall a feeling of relief while watching Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready perform “Masters of War” at Dylan’s thirtieth-anniversary tribute concert, televised from Madison Square Garden in 1992. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Dylan’s version, originally recorded for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, when I was fourteen. But thanks to Eddie and Mike, “Masters of War” sounded like an acoustic Pearl Jam B-side, a preview of the quieter numbers from the next PJ record, Vs. Pearl Jam made sense to me in 1992. Bob Dylan did not.
When Dylan performed at that Madison Square Garden show, he looked gaunt and disengaged. On “My Back Pages,” he was surrounded by a gaggle of adoring classic-rock royalty—Neil Young, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn—who each took a verse on Dylan’s ode to pushing beyond the limitations of your past. The irony of “My Back Pages” that night couldn’t have been sadder—here was Dylan, hemmed in by his own legacy, utterly unable to transcend his own back pages, and his discomfort showed. Dylan’s voice was even more choked off than usual. He was awkward and stiff amid all the pomp and circumstance in his honor, and seemed incapable of moving his arms or legs more than a few inches. Dylan was practically a wax figure on that stage, fit to be boxed and shipped to a museum.
Three weeks after the thirtieth-anniversary show, Dylan released his twenty-eighth studio album, a collection of folk standards recorded in his garage called Good as I Been to You. At the time, the record was treated mostly as an afterthought—reviews were more positive than they had been for 1990’s Under the Red Sky, one of the most disastrous albums of Dylan’s career, but an LP of old folk covers hardly seemed to herald a comeback for rock’s most celebrated songwriter.
I came to Good as I Been to You many years later, when I had fully converted to the Dylan cult and sought out everything he had ever recorded. I doubt that Good as I Been to You has ever been anyone’s entry point into Dylan. Like most people, I was first hooked by the peerless invention and youthful fury of his midsixties period. Then I went back to the early-sixties folk stuff, and then fast-forwarded to the midseventies “divorce” records, Blood on the Tracks and Desire. After that, you start investigating the less heralded records. Good as I Been to You falls into that camp.
The seventh track, “Hard Times,” also known as “Hard Times Come Again No More,” was written by Stephen Foster, often referred to as the father of American music, in 1854. “Hard Times” was a popular parlor song in its day, which means it was the epitome of pop music back in the 1850s. It’s a protest song of sorts, imploring listeners to “pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears / While we all sup in sorrow with the poor.” But the line that sticks out to me—and maybe it did for Dylan, too—comes next: “There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears / Oh! Hard times come again no more.”
“Hard Times” lingered long after Foster’s death in 1864, having been adopted by folk singers like Dylan more than a hundred years after it was written. It was then carried forward by artists such as Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Mavis Staples, Bruce Springsteen, Iron & Wine, and Mary J. Blige and the Roots, all of whom either recorded versions of “Hard Times” or performed the song live well into the twenty-first century.
As a budding Dylanologist, I surmised that Good as I Been to You and its companion record, 1993’s World Gone Wrong, represented another retrenchment by Dylan in the traditions of American music. There’s a pattern of rootsy reboots in Dylan’s career going back to his “basement tapes” period in 1967, when he hid out with the Band in upstate New York in the wake of a chemical-addled explosion of creativity and pop stardom in 1965 and ’66. A decade after that, with his marriage perilously teetering on the edge of oblivion, Dylan retrenched again with the Rolling Thunder Revue, a nightly hootenanny modeled on Dylan’s early days as a folkie in Greenwich Village, only now on a rock star’s budget. Much later, a couple of decades after returning to folk music on Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, Dylan would dig into the past yet again by recording a series of albums in the 2010s dedicated to American pop standards popularized by classic crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, the kinds of artists that the parents of Dylan’s fans back in the sixties would’ve enjoyed.
It’s a good theory, but Dylan himself has disproved it. Dylan never “returned” to the past, because he never left it. Dylan songs that seemed revolutionary or topical or just strange in the sixties and seventies were nothing new as far as Dylan was concerned. All of his music was part of an unbroken chain. “These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth,” Dylan said in 2015, during an instant-classic acceptance speech for the MusiCares Person of the Year award. “It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock ’n’ roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music.”
As an alienated kid growing up in the middle of Minnesota iron country, young Robert Zimmerman wasn’t all that different from me, back when I was an alienated kid growing up in the middle of Wisconsin papermaking country. When Dylan was a tween, he was drawn to music created long before he was born, just as I was. Dylan has spoken of how, at the age of ten, he serendipitously discovered two important items lying around in the house—a guitar and a mahogany radio with a record player that spun 78s. On the turntable was a recording of “Drifting Too Far from the Shore,” a gospel song written by Charles E. Moody in 1923 that’s been recorded by Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Porter Wagoner, and Jerry Garcia, among many others.
Young Bobby Zimmerman felt transformed by this music. It made him feel like he was somebody else—it made him feel like Bob Dylan, the person he had always been deep down inside. Dylan would have similar experiences throughout his adolescence and early adulthood. Dylan learned about the Blue Yodeler, Jimmie Rodgers, a defining country singer of the early twentieth century who died eight years before he was born, from a tribute record by Hank Williams, and it inspired him to start dabbling in songwriting. Hearing the gritty prison songs of Huddie William “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, initially recorded in 1939 by legendary folklorist Alan Lomax, helped to steer Dylan away from rock ’n’ roll and toward folk music around the time he graduated from high school in 1959. While briefly attending college in Minneapolis in the early sixties, Dylan read Woody Guthrie’s fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory and swiftly became a devotee of the Oklahoma cowboy, whose period of greatest renown had been twenty years earlier.
“For three or four years, all I listened to were folk standards,” Dylan said in that MusiCares speech. “I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere: clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I’d heard it just once.”
Dylan’s old friend and rival John Lennon once described the blues as a chair. “‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me to You’ and all those were our version of the chair,” Lennon said of the Beatles. “We were building our own chairs.” I learned about the chair from listening to Bob Dylan. What I had heard in Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and all of the classic-rock bands I loved—that sense of the past, present, and future happening simultaneously—Dylan had heard in Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.” Dylan has said that to him folk music didn’t sound archaic, that it in fact uncovered “how [he] always felt about life.” That’s how classic rock made me feel.
Dylan passed that feeling of immortality along to me and countless other people by plugging his songs into the same continuum of music that had transformed him. Bob Dylan made me see that the rock mythology I was obsessed with went back further than just rock ’n’ roll, and deeper than just the sixties and the seventies. It was also there in Jimmie Rodgers and Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. It seemed to me like the very backbone of human civilization.
This was nothing less than a spiritual awakening, an ongoing conversation going back centuries between the dead and the living through rock ’n’ roll. If you could see yourself in old songs, it kept the voice on that ancient record alive. And it might keep you alive, too, by connecting you to a deathless universal spirit.
The first Dylan album I ever loved wasn’t a proper album. It was a bootleg recording of a Dylan concert performed with the Hawks, soon to be known as the Band, in Manchester, England, in 1966, part of the most famous tour in rock history.
This was Dylan’s first “electric” tour, in which he performed by himself with an acoustic guitar in the first half of the show and then was joined by backing musicians in the second half. This might seem innocuous now, but at the time it was a major scandal—the folk-scene politics of the time suggested that Dylan was committing sacrilege when he played amplified music. This is what makes the second half of the Manchester tape—mislabeled the “Royal Albert Hall concert” by bootleggers—so dramatic. You can hear the crowd getting more pissed off after each song with the Hawks. The trolls are heckling Dylan, and drowning him out with whistles and slow-clapping whenever he tries to introduce the next number. But they never succeed in stopping Dylan and the Hawks. The musicians just bulldoze over all of the disgruntled punters howling in the darkness. It’s like punk rock ten years before the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
According to legend, Dylan wanted the shows on this tour recorded so he could review them once he got offstage and try to discern why exactly the audience hated it so much. But Dylan could never figure it out. The tapes to him always sounded pretty good. In fact, it was some of the most powerful rock ’n’ roll ever recorded.
Before the final song on the “Royal Albert Hall” tape, “Like a Rolling Stone,” some turtleneck-sporting dweeb in the audience screams an unholy epithet: “Judas!” Dylan seems stunned. “I don’t believe you,” he says. “You’re a liar!” Then—and you can hear this on the tape—Dylan turns to the band and says, off mic, “Play fucking loud!” A couple of beats later, “Like a Rolling Stone” comes crashing in like an asteroid slamming into planet Earth, initiating the apocalypse. This version is much slower and much, much harder than the studio cut. The last word of each line in the chorus is shouted a little louder than the last—feel, own, hooome, unknooooown, stooooone! Dylan is drawing out the phrases, injecting extra venom, cultivating surplus spite, making sure that the weight of every accusation is so heavy that it pulverizes. He might also actively be trying to annoy the audience. Either way, it rocks like a son of a bitch.
This concert was finally released via legitimate channels in 1998, and again in 2016 as part of a massive thirty-six-disc box set collecting every recording from the tour. But I first encountered the “Royal Albert Hall” recording back when it was still an illegitimate bootleg, a secret shared by those in the know, which gave the tape a stature that exceeded even the incredible music it contained. This was music that you weren’t supposed to hear, music that was actually illegal to sell or buy. Illegal music? I thought that only existed in the world of Rush’s 2112. The “Royal Albert Hall” bootleg was like science fiction to me.
In the twenty-first century, pirated music became a way of life for music fans. But pirated music is different from bootlegged music. Pirated music is music that is supposed to be purchased, whereas bootlegged music isn’t even supposed to be released. Live tracks, outtakes, rehearsals, radically different and not wholly successful but still fascinating alternate versions of songs that you already know and love—this is the stuff of bootlegs. It’s what you seek out when you already own all of the albums and you’re still chasing the buzz you felt before those records were worn out. Bootlegs are like an undiscovered back door to a house that you’ve lived in for years. They make the familiar seem unfamiliar again.
If albums are the signposts of rock history, bootlegs are a portal to rock’s shadow history. In a way, they’re just as important to the creation of classic rock mythology, because they were often difficult to track down. The only music greater than the music that moves you is the music you’ve been told over and over would move you if only you could hear it.
In terms of album sales, Dylan trails far behind the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. But no artist has been bootlegged more. The first significant rock bootleg was Great White Wonder, a mishmash of early Dylan recordings from 1961 and tracks that Dylan recorded at the Big Pink house in upstate New York with the Hawks in 1967, the first flash of what would become known as The Basement Tapes. Great White Wonder initially appeared in California record shops, though the legend quickly spread among Dylan fans about a whole album’s worth of material—perhaps multiple albums—that Dylan was withholding from the public. For hard-core Dylanologists, Great White Wonder was like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Six years later, Dylan’s record label, Columbia, finally released a cleaned-up version of The Basement Tapes, overseen by Robbie Robertson. In the liner notes, Greil Marcus played up the mythology of the music, comparing The Basement Tapes to epochal recordings in music history such as Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” and Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” But The Basement Tapes included only a fraction of the music recorded by Dylan and the Hawks, and was marred by overdubs that altered the shape of the music. Marcus’s words only fueled fans’ hunger to hear the “actual” Basement Tapes, and bootleggers obliged by compiling a five-volume set that dwarfed the Columbia version. (An official “genuine” Basement Tapes box set was finally released in 2014.)
I found the “Royal Albert Hall” tape at New Frontier Record Exchange, a cluttered, cavelike shop downtown that smelled of cigarettes and stale coffee. I started going there in middle school, usually showing up right when the store was supposed to open at eleven a.m., which was forty-five minutes before the store actually opened. I’d stand next to the door and wait for Stan, the proprietor, to pull up in a Chevy Nova. Stan was the most rock ’n’ roll guy in my town—he wore flannel shirts and chain-smoked Camels and always looked like he was on the third day of a weeklong bender. (In my memory, Stan resembles Neil Young after a dozen honey slides, that mystical concoction of pan-fried weed and honey that Young consumed heavily during the On the Beach sessions.) Stan would see me waiting, wordlessly nod, and wonder why this kid wasn’t spending his Saturday morning doing something worthwhile, like underage drinking or sleeping. And then he let me in.
New Frontier first and foremost trafficked in vinyl, even though vinyl had not yet made a comeback in the early nineties. I didn’t own a record player, so I mostly just stuck to the small but surprisingly stacked tapes section. I bought a lot of crucial tapes at New Frontier: Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Rust Never Sleeps, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Queen’s A Night at the Opera. Each time I bought a tape, Stan would just wordlessly nod in approval.
When I finally got a CD player for my fourteenth birthday, I started scanning the CD section, though CDs were more expensive, so I had to be choosier. One time, I saw a double-disc set that I had read about in books but had never actually touched with my own bare hands—Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall” concert. The discs were $30, way too rich for my blood. But Stan said he would dub a tape for me for $10. I wasn’t yet a Dylan fan at that point, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. I had to act now, or risk never coming across this bootleg ever again. I handed Stan my $10 and made arrangements to return for the tape a few days later.
In those days, I don’t think I said more than ten words to Stan. I was too scared. He knew things that I wanted to know, but I was too intimidated to ask. But to this day I am grateful for those tapes. Stan sold me the world.
One of the ironies of Bob Dylan’s career is that while his albums are considered essential listening for a basic understanding of rock music, the man himself has said time and again that he’s not very good at making albums. “My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on record,” Dylan said in 1969, not long after recording some of the most beloved LPs in rock history. Throughout his career, he has spoken of his failures to replicate the sound in his head, though he’s never seemed to try very hard to get it.
Here is Dylan explaining his recording method to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in that 1969 interview: “We just take a song; I play it and everyone else just sort of fills in behind it. No sooner you got that done, and at the same time you’re doing that, there’s someone in the control booth who’s turning all those dials to where the sound is coming in . . . and then it’s done. Just like that.”
Dylan is a cagey guy, and it’s possible that on the day he gave this interview he didn’t feel like giving Jann Wenner a more thorough rundown of his creative process. But, clearly, Dylan is not Brian Wilson or Paul McCartney. He wasn’t inclined to make his own Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper. He has never been a creature of the studio. Dylan’s methods have always been primitive and slapdash compared with the pop geniuses of his time. He gets bored playing anything more than once. He’s quick to say “good enough.”
“I’m not giving you a hundred percent. I’m not giving anyone a hundred percent,” Dylan said in the mideighties, when he was making some of the worst records of his life. In 2001, when he was making classic albums again, he admitted that he almost quit recording altogether in the early nineties. “I’d rather play on the road. Recording is too mental,” he said.
Apparently, even making a proper track list was “too mental” for Dylan. For years, he routinely left some of the best songs off of his albums—like “Up to Me” off Blood on the Tracks, “Abandoned Love” off Desire, and “Blind Willie McTell” off Infidels. Bootleggers were the first to rescue these songs; they also circulated the “Royal Albert Hall” concert when Dylan held back the release because he didn’t think the recordings were up to snuff. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest, as scores of Dylan fans have testified, that bootleggers have had better taste in Dylan’s music than Dylan himself.
Dylanologists have long wondered: Does Dylan intentionally make it hard for his most ardent followers to hear some of his best material? Or is it possible that he’s held back so much music because he honestly believes that the best versions of his songs don’t yet exist?
My favorite Dylan song is “Visions of Johanna,” from Blonde on Blonde. It’s his greatest questing tune, full of romance and foreboding, piling on seductive images—heat pipes cough, country music plays soft, all-night girls whisper, a lover’s face stares back like a mirror—that evoke spiritual wanderlust with no particular place to go. The narrative ostensibly concerns a love triangle between the narrator, his lover Louise, and another woman, Johanna, whom the narrator secretly pines after. But it’s really about yearning for something that’s missing, a flaw in the human condition that doesn’t go away even when you have everything you could possibly ever need. As long as the unknown exists, the belief that something better is out there is never quite dissuaded.
Using officially sanctioned recordings as well as bootlegs, I’ve tried to follow Dylan on his journey through this song by compiling a “Visions of Johanna” playlist composed of different versions recorded in studios and concert halls. There’s the version on the record, in which Dylan sounds laconic and stoned, approaching the song as a supremely self-absorbed young man who considers Johanna only in relation to his own desires. A similar vibe exists on two outtakes from the Blonde on Blonde sessions, including a galloping, sped-up take with the Hawks that recounts the song’s emotional ménage à trois with arrogant bravado.
A version culled from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976 couldn’t be more different—here Dylan plays the song accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and sings it in a painful, pleading tone, reimagining “Visions of Johanna” as the mournful lament of a man taking stock of how his wanderlust has wreaked havoc on his family. The song got another dramatic makeover in 1988, when Dylan assembled a three-piece band headed up by Saturday Night Live’s G. E. Smith and transformed even his most contemplative numbers into guitar-heavy arena rock. Now Dylan was using “Visions of Johanna” to recharge himself—playing it was an exercise in reminding Bob Dylan how to be Bob Dylan again.
Then there’s an odd take from a residency in Minneapolis in 1992, in which Dylan spits out the lyrics rapidly while the music skitters along on a skiffle-like rhythm, a metaphor for middle-aged uncertainty. A version from 1995 is more relaxed and sensitive—Dylan is less concerned with rebooting “Visions of Johanna” than finding his place in the old warhorse now that he’s lived many lifetimes with the highway blues. My favorite version, though, might be the one recorded at a gig in Dublin in 2005, almost forty years after it was written. The arrangement is stately and beautiful, and Dylan’s vocal is wily and melancholy. You can hear how the perspective has shifted—Dylan has grown up enough to now consider the feelings of Louise and Johanna, and to learn from them.
Could this be the definitive version of my favorite Dylan song? I hope not. I never want to stop being surprised by “Visions of Johanna.” It has come to symbolize the significance of Bob Dylan’s art in my life. What the narrator in that song goes through is an allegory for being a Dylan fan—if you never stop yearning, the song never ends.