Down The Highway
"Down The Highway" is one of the great unrecognized songs in the Bob Dylan canon. It is the fourth song on side one of what is perhaps his greatest album and prepares the listener for the next track, another road song, "Bob Dylan's Blues." However "Down The Highway" itself like innumerable Dylan compositions to follow is loaded with references, musical, personal, literal and maybe even non-literal.The first reference is in the very first word, "Well." This is a continuation of the religious theme started on Dylan's first album, Bob Dylan. The question of course is which well is it. Well, it could be the well that the woman met Jesus at or maybe it's the well Jesus met the woman at but either way according to legend and maybe a book or two and and a couple of scribes who lived for centuries without modern medicine something happened at that well. What it has to do with "Down The Highway" no one is sure, not even the Mexican bus driver. Anyway where was I? Oh yes, the song. The next important word is the word Walkin'. This has many references and most likely this one refers to the mythical bluesman Robert Johnson and his song "The Walking Blues," which kind of is the bastard child of Eddie Son House's "Death Letter Blues" maybe. I just went to reference this song and noticed I actually have a sealed unopened copy of this in my record collection along with a non-sealed un-opened one. Go figure.Hmmmm. Wonder if it's worth somethin'. Mebbe it'll get me on a demXM radios. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, walkin'. The best version of "Walkin' Blues" was by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It opened up their second album, "East-West" leaving the listener with the impression that someone was walkin' from east to west. And it had the"walkin' beat" which is kind of like the train beat except slower and without the tracks. In any case back to the song in question. Someone maybe the singer is walkin' down the highway with his suitcasein his hand. This immediately begs the question what kind of suitcase. I have a feeling that it wasn't one a dem modern ones made out of some kind of mystical cloth that has wheels and a disappearing handle and all kinds of strange compartments for modern amenities. Nay, this was undoubtedly an old leather suitcase with a shoe compartment and even a leather handle, the kind that leaves one of them big nasty blisters on your finger if you carry it too long. It probably once belonged to somebody's grandmother in case they needed to go to Oneonta or some other place like that that only grandmothers ever go to where they sit in a room by a little round table with a vase looking at the window for a week, dining on meatloaf and boiled potatoes at the corner eatery and then return home with tales of mountains and candy. In any case, this line with the suitcase and the walkin' is repeated more than likely because the suitcase was heavy and the singer's just a little guy. Oh yeah I forgot, he was on the highway cause he had to get to Philadelphia to meet the ghost of WCFields. But since he was the most notorious scrounger anyone had ever encountered in the Village in 1962, everyone refused to give him money, so he he decided to thumb a ride in the syntax of those ancient times.
The last part of the verse has him missing his baby. He might have meant that he missed the bus if he had any money to take it, which would have been a Trailways bus back then. But then he says his baby is in a far-off land. In the history of this particular singer-songwriter, this specifies things and refers to the picture onthe cover of the album, and points the finger to a the next album.
The next verse clues the listener into what time of day this walkin' down the highway was occurring. Morning rush hour! "Your streets are gettin' empty." If he had had a car, this would have been the best time to get a parking space in what is now commonly referred to as "the hood," and especially if they had alternate side of the street parking back then which I don't think they had come that far in metropolitan evolutionary thinking just yet then. Anyhow, since all that parking was available of course the highway's were gettin' filled with all kinds of singled drivers on their way to their meaningless daily employment cutting down the vast forests of the planets in order to keep tab of some unspecified something or other that would beforgotten about by sundown.
In the third verse, we find the singer is not on his way to meet WCFields at all but is escaping from gambling debts because being anobstreperous type, prolly one of those ADD people that would become soprevalent later in the century, he started playing the game without paying attention to rules.
But things deepen by the next verse. First off he is definitely in need of gambling rehabilitation cause he figures he's bound to get lucky and this was decades before powerball. He's serious about this since he's willing to die for it. But the key line is the dawning oft he messianic complex that would become extremely serious for this particular blues singer over the course of the decade approximately,when he talks of meeting his baby in the middle of the ocean implying he could walk on water, which some said he could, but that would come later.
Equally revealing is the next verse, where he finds someone to blame and this is a songwriter who always looked for someone to blame, at least most of the time he did. In this case, finding no one, he blames the ocean begging the question who is going to defend the ocean should this case be brought to court. But there is more than one theif in the verse. The ocean steals his baby, and his baby stole hisheart. Not only did she steal his heart, she packed in a suitcase and took it to Italy, which leaves one wondering if it was an Italian suitcase to begin with and did that suitcase ever go to Oneonta.
{But this also reminds me of the real life time I had to deliver a heart to some heart hospital. I picked it up at some lawyer's office where it was in one of those not too clear plastic containers, the kind like that cole slaw comes in. It looked not unlike an artichoke and I had to make it to some foreign county in New Jersey in the rainto some German doctor who didn't talk like Peter Lorre and insisted I be a witness him poking it prodding with all sorts of nasty sharp devices of heart implementation. Naturally I called up the companyand demanded the extract extra cash from the lawyers for this since heart poking was not part of the contract, artichoke or not, and if my name had been Art, which it isn't I mighta choked.)
However before I forget, I almost skipped over the most important part of the song, Italy. At the end of the line she took it away to Italy,the singer repeats the word or perhaps it's a name Italy. The reasons for this are of course mysterious and sometimes negligible but this phrasing of Italy would be the foretelling of notation of a remarkable kind of phrasing that would be not only commented on but catalogued by pundits and critical authorities alike from here to Arizona and maybe even Bombay. Eventually down the highway, the tracks and especially on the road to ecstacy some would consider it a severe maniacal illness but to to this very second, all manner of people, not excluding jelly-faced drunkards from England especially indulge in this practice and even argue about it in barrister-like language saying prevailing inanities such as "No, you ignorant Mongoose, the Preoria 'Italy' was lightly caressed such as it were a sprightly leafo' lettuce stretched across a wad o' cottage cheese with a plump partition of peach layin' by or did he mean bye," to which another lost arrogant chum wandering down the forelorn road of foddeery or is it foppery responded, "No you fool, it wasn't Preoria at all," he couldn't possibly sing it right in the states. it was at the lone performance it was at the lone performance at the Cathedral in Bath in a marvelous duet with the bardof Belfast with the local drunkard Wm. Wyman sitting on on bass that the ultimate 'Italy' occurred, and if you don't think I'm right, I will stomp right out of here, get me five pints up at the pub and change my name to a fourth alias that's 9 times as obnoxious as the one I use now, and shan't commerce with you until the next argument contrariwise." At this point a fourth and sixth person if they can even be called that interfered and everyone else left the room.
No doubt this brings us to the sixth and final verse where the forlorn trudger is still out on the highway, probably the Lincoln Highway,somehere in Rahway, New Jersey. No one will give him a ride, probably because they're afraid that Bavarian suitcase contains all manner of of contaminated species, so he is left to walk and evoke both Whitman(it being New Jersey) and the mighty Woodrow, poet hoboer of thearchaic railway, and with strains of Ferlinghetti references, he now intends to walk to California and back to the welcoming arms of Lady Liberty, an inevitable prehistoric forecast of his entire career.
And with that I call upon Mr. Blaine Duncan to subject the musical work "Bob Dylan's blues to the whims of Alabambian analysis.
PSB
The last part of the verse has him missing his baby. He might have meant that he missed the bus if he had any money to take it, which would have been a Trailways bus back then. But then he says his baby is in a far-off land. In the history of this particular singer-songwriter, this specifies things and refers to the picture onthe cover of the album, and points the finger to a the next album.
The next verse clues the listener into what time of day this walkin' down the highway was occurring. Morning rush hour! "Your streets are gettin' empty." If he had had a car, this would have been the best time to get a parking space in what is now commonly referred to as "the hood," and especially if they had alternate side of the street parking back then which I don't think they had come that far in metropolitan evolutionary thinking just yet then. Anyhow, since all that parking was available of course the highway's were gettin' filled with all kinds of singled drivers on their way to their meaningless daily employment cutting down the vast forests of the planets in order to keep tab of some unspecified something or other that would beforgotten about by sundown.
In the third verse, we find the singer is not on his way to meet WCFields at all but is escaping from gambling debts because being anobstreperous type, prolly one of those ADD people that would become soprevalent later in the century, he started playing the game without paying attention to rules.
But things deepen by the next verse. First off he is definitely in need of gambling rehabilitation cause he figures he's bound to get lucky and this was decades before powerball. He's serious about this since he's willing to die for it. But the key line is the dawning oft he messianic complex that would become extremely serious for this particular blues singer over the course of the decade approximately,when he talks of meeting his baby in the middle of the ocean implying he could walk on water, which some said he could, but that would come later.
Equally revealing is the next verse, where he finds someone to blame and this is a songwriter who always looked for someone to blame, at least most of the time he did. In this case, finding no one, he blames the ocean begging the question who is going to defend the ocean should this case be brought to court. But there is more than one theif in the verse. The ocean steals his baby, and his baby stole hisheart. Not only did she steal his heart, she packed in a suitcase and took it to Italy, which leaves one wondering if it was an Italian suitcase to begin with and did that suitcase ever go to Oneonta.
{But this also reminds me of the real life time I had to deliver a heart to some heart hospital. I picked it up at some lawyer's office where it was in one of those not too clear plastic containers, the kind like that cole slaw comes in. It looked not unlike an artichoke and I had to make it to some foreign county in New Jersey in the rainto some German doctor who didn't talk like Peter Lorre and insisted I be a witness him poking it prodding with all sorts of nasty sharp devices of heart implementation. Naturally I called up the companyand demanded the extract extra cash from the lawyers for this since heart poking was not part of the contract, artichoke or not, and if my name had been Art, which it isn't I mighta choked.)
However before I forget, I almost skipped over the most important part of the song, Italy. At the end of the line she took it away to Italy,the singer repeats the word or perhaps it's a name Italy. The reasons for this are of course mysterious and sometimes negligible but this phrasing of Italy would be the foretelling of notation of a remarkable kind of phrasing that would be not only commented on but catalogued by pundits and critical authorities alike from here to Arizona and maybe even Bombay. Eventually down the highway, the tracks and especially on the road to ecstacy some would consider it a severe maniacal illness but to to this very second, all manner of people, not excluding jelly-faced drunkards from England especially indulge in this practice and even argue about it in barrister-like language saying prevailing inanities such as "No, you ignorant Mongoose, the Preoria 'Italy' was lightly caressed such as it were a sprightly leafo' lettuce stretched across a wad o' cottage cheese with a plump partition of peach layin' by or did he mean bye," to which another lost arrogant chum wandering down the forelorn road of foddeery or is it foppery responded, "No you fool, it wasn't Preoria at all," he couldn't possibly sing it right in the states. it was at the lone performance it was at the lone performance at the Cathedral in Bath in a marvelous duet with the bardof Belfast with the local drunkard Wm. Wyman sitting on on bass that the ultimate 'Italy' occurred, and if you don't think I'm right, I will stomp right out of here, get me five pints up at the pub and change my name to a fourth alias that's 9 times as obnoxious as the one I use now, and shan't commerce with you until the next argument contrariwise." At this point a fourth and sixth person if they can even be called that interfered and everyone else left the room.
No doubt this brings us to the sixth and final verse where the forlorn trudger is still out on the highway, probably the Lincoln Highway,somehere in Rahway, New Jersey. No one will give him a ride, probably because they're afraid that Bavarian suitcase contains all manner of of contaminated species, so he is left to walk and evoke both Whitman(it being New Jersey) and the mighty Woodrow, poet hoboer of thearchaic railway, and with strains of Ferlinghetti references, he now intends to walk to California and back to the welcoming arms of Lady Liberty, an inevitable prehistoric forecast of his entire career.
And with that I call upon Mr. Blaine Duncan to subject the musical work "Bob Dylan's blues to the whims of Alabambian analysis.
PSB
posted by Julia D | 10:45 PM
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