Where Teardrops Fall – Bob Dylan

The sneering contempt Dylan’s voice wrenches from the word ‘you’ in such songs as Positively 4th Street and Like a Rolling Stone is exhilarating, because listening to those songs involves identifying with Dylan’s rage, not with the object of it.

 Dr Pamela Thurschwell, ‘A Different Baby Blue’

So wrote my third-year tutor Pam Thurschwell in an essay for a collection entitled Bob Dylan With the Poets & Professors in 2003, published shortly after I graduated. (Once we had discovered a mutual love of Dylan and Waits, tutorials were perhaps rather too apt to come round to the topic of music.) So maybe I’m biased where Thurschwell’s argument is concerned, but I agree with her, and she does a great job in her essay exploring how it is that a progressive feminist listener to Bob Dylan can reconcile that with enjoying the music of the man who wrote Just Like a Woman and Idiot Wind, let alone Sweetheart Like You and Is Your Love in Vain?, songs that drip with unpleasant condescension to women, if not outright misogyny (and it’s not enough to argue that these songs are specific where misogyny is general, if for no other reason than that Dylan has written too many such songs for that defense to hold up).

So it’s nice to hear a Bob Dylan song that doesn’t require a certain political double-think to enjoy, a song that is exactly what it seems to be, a song without troubling subtext. A song when we can enjoy the melody and the empathetic playing of Rockin’ Dopsie and His Cajun Band (not to be confused with Rockin’ Sidney of My Toot Toot fame), brought in to the Oh Mercy sessions on Dylan’s request after failing to get anything satisfactory with the first band Daniel Lanois assembled. In Chronicles, Dylan describes how the song was cut simply, in just a few minutes, and how a saxophonist sitting in the corner who he hadn’t even noticed was there took a ‘sobbing solo that nearly took my breath away’ after the last verse, a guy who was the spitting image of Blind Gary Davis. Typical of the often fractious sessions for this album, Dylan loved it (‘The song was beautiful and magical, upbeat, and it was complete’) but Lanois was unconvinced by the take and eventually pressed Dylan into recutting it. They went with the original in the end. A good call, but what was it Lanois didn’t like? The slightly unsteady tempo? As if, in the end, that matters, when the song and performance is as strong as this.

So it’s a great song, one of several on Oh Mercy, which doesn’t sound to me like a classic, but does sound like an enormous animal waking up from a long hibernation and slowly finding that it’s just as strong as it was last year. But by Dylan’s standards, Where Teardrops Fall is almost mockingly empty lyrically; when the last verse begins ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’, it’s hard to suppress the sense that Dylan is having a little joke (although whether the target is himself or his listeners is moot).

Is this binary choice a necessity with Dylan? Does it have to be a choice between troubling content and no content? Can he write a substantial relationship song without crossing over into asshole territory? Answers on a postcard, please.

‘What d’ya mean? Of course I’ll never regret wearing this vest’ – Bob Dylan, 1985, during the Empire Burlesque sessions. (Roman Iwasiwka)