The Dylan Scale
A Doomscrolling Playlist
The Dylan Scale, a next-level metric for Interesting Times. A scale for indexing bad vibes in exponential orders of magnitude, all the bad faith and bad blood in the world going from bad to worse. DIY – rig up your own settings, plug in your custom specs. I run the numbers by using choruses and refrains from the Dylan discography as my weights and measures. I’ve developed a protocol for gauging how bad things are getting by quantums of bad karma on the seismic spectrum of shitshow mayhem. I’ve programmed the thing to chart the shocks to my system and the ground moving under my feet. That’s how great refrains roll if you’re wired for them, moving the needle by hitting you where you live. It’s my way to get a read on things falling apart at warp speed in real time. It’s the perfect metric for calculating the current rate at which history isn’t repeating itself but rhyming something fierce. My latest reading: 10 Dylan refrains on a how-bad-is-it scale of let’s say 11 or even 13, because there’s no telling how much worse it’s going to get. Take it from me, it doubles as a playlist for doomscrolling. That’s my Dylan Scale and I’m sticking to it.
The Times They Are A-Falling Apart: The Yeats Test & the Dylan Scale
(1)
Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
“Idiot Wind” | Blood on the Tracks (1975)
Who hasn’t felt it? Idiot wind, blowing 24/7. Idiot wind, blowing like there’s no tomorrow and no yesterday either. Idiot wind, hellbent on blowing us away. Idiot wind, refrain as anaphora, i.e., the title phrase launching each chorus, idiot torqued into four syllables (ee-ed-i-ot) like the twist of a blade. Idiot wind, howled twice in each chorus, first to start off a couplet, then shifting into a three-line syncopated rhyme, time after time. Idiot wind, who hasn’t felt it these days, that off-the-charts idiotic vortex blowing from every which way, the gale-force whirlwind we’re reaping. Idiot wind, blowing all across a Republic it doesn’t look like we’re keeping, the baying anaphora all the more bone-rattling here in the epic couplet Allen Ginsberg called “the great disillusioned national rhyme.”
(2)
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” | Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Look out kid – the all-time all-purpose heads-up to all kids in and of all ages. Cutting-edge anaphora, that grand old rhetorical repeating device to start things off and keep things going like a chain reaction, one of the great engines of oratory and liturgy. Look out kid, here comes a rapid-fire proto-rap – short lines spitting bullets, a rat-a-tat run of monorhyme phrases after every refrain couplet, kid. Look out kid, same wake-up call every time, but the couplet’s snap-back line always another tipoff telling you why. It’s something you did, kid. Don’t matter what you did, kid. They keep it all hid. It’s hard to keep up with the barrage of pell-mell pointers, kid, but you get the drift. Look out, kid, whoever you are and wherever you may be. You young-uns will have to google the period in-jokes (You don’t need a weather man | To know which way the wind blows), but the big takeaway is as timeless as ever. Look out kid.
PS: Do yourself a favor, kid. Dial up the trailblazing film clip with the album recording playing over rolling footage of Dylan in an alley flipping through the lyrics on big hand-lettered cue cards, complete with slapstick misprints (SUCKCESS) and straight man Allen Ginsberg hanging out in the background. It was shot in London around the corner from the Savoy Hotel for DA Pennebaker’s B&W cult documentary Don’t Look Back, later released as a promo trailer. Legend has it the bit was all Dylan’s idea. It’s the original music video, kid.
(3)
This wheel’s on fire
Rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode!
“This Wheel’s On Fire” | The Basement Tapes (1967)
What wheel? If you have to ask, you’re not keeping up. It’s rolling down the road. It’s on fire. It shall explode! That’s all you’re told and all you need to know. Allegory, sure, but not in any point-blank way. Perfectly OK if the refrain brings to mind the medieval wheel of fortune (the Rota of the goddess Fortuna) or the prophet Ezekial’s spiritual wheel in the sky (a vision of God’s celestial battle chariot and the origin of the proverbial saying “wheels within wheels”). Perfectly OK, so long as you don’t stop there. No question fate and faith are driving forces here (Best notify my next of kin), but you can’t sleep on the colloquial dependent clause that opens and closes all three verses. Let the record show that whatever loaded reckoning is in the offing, it all hinges on one condition being met – If your mem’ry serves you well.
Everything else hangs in the balance. This wheel’s on fire, but there’s only one burning question. Except there’s no doubt about it. Your mem’ry serves you well, all right. The refrain makes it an open-and-shut case. Gotcha, it’s not the hoity-toity expression it’s cracked up to be. Every time that “if” completes the circuit from one end of the verse to the other, it ups the ante on being the one sure thing anyone can count on. Your mem’ry serves you well, all right, and therein lies the reckoning. This wheel’s on fire, whatever that means. This wheel’s on fire, but it all takes a back seat to your hot-wired mem’ry serving you well.
(4)
Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?
Seems like I been down this way before
Is there any truth in that, señor?
“Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” | Street Legal (1978)
Quick question, Señor. So many questions, Señor. Where to even begin with this bad-ass meta-ballad? Was there a blueprint for it or was it a battle plan? Let’s see if I’ve got this right – lyrics mostly in the form of running questions, a racking series of questions for Señor that Señor sure as hell ain’t going to be answering? Some forced march through some scorched-earth wasteland or badland, some hostage guerilla or bandito doing all the talking? Señor, señor, do you know where she is hidin’? | How long are we gonna be ridin’? | How long must I keep my eyes glued to the door? | Will there be any comfort there, señor? Right, then roughly midway through the song the questions give way to declarations and flashbacks, and something like the makings of a shadowy back story, part hellscape road show (Well, the last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled | Was that trainload of fools bogged down in a magnetic field), part wild-west fever dream (Señor, señor, I can see that painted wagon | I can smell the tail of the dragon). Señor, Señor, this is some twisted shit, all churning along to a spooked-out soundtrack of marching-band fanfares, cathouse keyboards, and cantina percussion, all in concert and all out of whack. Not a big fan of the Comandante Castro-adjacent subtitle, Señor, makes it seem at first like you’re taking to the barricades, not traversing the Here Be Dragons borderlands of Lincoln County Road and Armageddon. But you get a pass and then some, Señor. You’ve got no answers, and that’s why the whole trippy odyessy feels like the real thing. We don’t know where the hell we are, Señor, but it seems like we’ve been down this way before.
(5)
Things are breakin’ up out there
High water everywhere
It’s bad out there
High water everywhere
“High Water (For Charley Patton)” | Love and Theft (2001)
Borrowed, swiped, stolen, sampled, call it what you will. High water everywhere – a three-word refrain lifted from an iconic 1927 recording by OG Delta bluesman Charley Patton. Except that what’s been pinched or pirated or what have you isn’t in fact a refrain. Turns out it’s the title of the Patton song. Call it a repurposed or retrofitted refrain. Not a ripoff, a tribute. Not stolen goods, recycled materials. Patton’s title, Dylan’s refrain, High water everywhere the refrain for a Dylan song called “High Water (for Charley Patton)” from his 2001 album Love and Theft. Love and Theft – they go hand in hand. The Patton song widely hailed as his masterpiece, a howling two-part lament in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the worst in American history. The Dylan song a crazy-ass banjo-driven mashup of old-time calamity balladry and jukebox tabloid satire, riffing away on jangly American strains of rack and ruin.
High water everywhere, which is to say a refrain that goes both ways in Dylan-speak, a flood for real and a sign of the times in one fell swoop. High water everywhere, meaning everywhere from the Delta to the Bible and back. High water everywhere, a refrain referencing the epochal natural disaster spliced into American memory by Charley Patton’s blues record in the same year, love and theft going hand in hand. High water everywhere, which is to say High water risin’, six inches ’bove my head… And then again High water everywhere, which is to say Coffins droppin’ in the street | Like balloons made out of lead. Everywhere you go it’s High water everywhere, which is to say the flood of the century or a flood of bad tidings, a wanton path of destruction either way. High water everywhere, meaning a refrain to remind us that history doesn’t repeat itself but man, does it often rhyme.
(6)
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
“Ballad of a Thin Man” | Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
It’s been sixty years now, Mister Jones. Figured anything out yet? Fat chance, right? You’re the clueless Thin Man of All Thin Men, and you’re never going to know what’s happening here as long as you live in the playlist queue. Your Ballad is a period piece, but your chorus is timeless. Scuttlebutt has it you really were a well-known scribbling somebody on assignment back then, out to size up the wild and crazy Sixties scene in downtown NYC. Something for sure was happening there – why, the very term of art for a certain kind of hip public something then was “a Happening” – and it seems you were dispatched with your press badge to get the scoop. Probably sounded good at the time, but your Ballad wastes no time making a monkey out of you. Dylan had just “gone electric” that year, and the musical intro’s minor-chord piano riff and bum-bum-bum descending bass-line lays down the rolling mock-portentous groove right out of the gate. Cue the first verse and you already stand exposed as a hapless putz: You walk into the room | With your pencil in your hand | You see somebody naked | And you say, “Who is that man?” | You try so hard | But you don’t understand | Just what you’ll say | When you get home.
It’s not a fair fight, and the drubbing only gets worse. The sneering verses are damning enough, but it’s the chorus that lowers the boom every time. It starts to feel like you’re kind of asking for it, just because. Because something is happening here and you don’t know what it is – wait for it – Do you, Mister Jones? Here it comes again, the bottom falling out of your code name on the downbeat with the throaty slur of MISS-ter JOE-OWNZ. It’s one crushing chorus after another. It’s overkill, Mister. It must make you wonder if you really had it coming after all. Not just you, you blundering scribe, but all the Mister Joneses out there, all of us who suspect there’s a little Mister Jones in all of us. Because what could be more cussedly American than knowing something’s happening here but not knowing what it is? Because how many times has being out of it come back to bite us? Because as no less of a hepcat than Fats Waller says, One never knows, do one?
(7)
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I’ll know
What’s happening in there
What’s going on in your show
“What Was It You Wanted?” | Oh Mercy (1989)
Good question. Good example of a question that’s not really a question. A question that doubles as an accusation. A question that touches off a whole line of questioning. What was it you wanted? What was it you wanted | When you were kissing my cheek? What was it you wanted | Do I have it here in my hand? What was it you wanted? | Tell me again I forgot. Almost like something out of Beckett – a monologue interrogating a dialogue, a questioner who’s his own interlocutor. Kind of like an edgelord standup routine, but not playing for laughs. All Q and no A, the hinky vocal all of a psycho piece with the shivery tremelo guitar chords and the spooky wah-wah reverb of Dylan’s harmonica breaks. The questioner more like an inquisitor, but who’s being cross-examined? A particular Somebody? Any old Nobody? An archetypal toady? Or maybe none of the above, just the interview-averse sphinx of legend taking the piss? Any way you take it, the refrain is calling the shots. It’s an advanced seminar in acerbic alliteration, the What and the was and the wanted running circles around the Who and the Why with no semantic mercy. No question about it: what we have here is a failure to communicate in spades, three little words adding up to one big disconnect from start to finish. The kiss-off sign-off says it all: What was it you wanted | Are you talking to me? Any further questions?
(8)
And I can tell you one thing
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
“Blind Willie McTell” | The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 (1991)
A refrain out of nowhere. A refrain making a clean break from theme. A refrain wrapping all five verses with a smash cut. It doesn’t follow. It doesn’t parse. There’s no logic to it, no natural segue. Enigmatic on every level, especially in light of the lyric sheet on the official Dylan site having an extra refrain line and one fewer verses than you hear on the definitive stripped-down Bootleg Series take. The line gone missing on the record no small thing – And I can tell you one thing setting up the payoff punch of Nobody can sing the blues | Like Blind Willie McTell. The refrain all the more blindsiding without the telegraphing, all the more non a sequitur. The verses are visions, a mind’s-eye pilgrimage through the Old South via a gospel-tinged piano vamp, kicking off with an oracular quatrain to conjure with: Seen the arrow on the doorpost | Saying, “This land is condemned | All the way from New Orleans | To new Jerusalem.” Searing images flicker by in a ghostly first-person voiceover, the only trace of a through-line the unspoken open wound of the color line.No message, no moral, just the one thing that can be told: Nobody can sing the blues | Like Blind Willie McTell.
Blind Willie McTell (1898-1959), the hypnotic Georgia-born fingerpicking guitarist and ragtime blues singer with classics to his credit like “Statesboro Blues,” “Dark Night Blues,” and “Writing Paper Blues.” One of the greats, no question, but what difference does it make if nobody can sing the blues like him? Why keep repeating it as if it were a revelation? Why double-down on it as if it promised some form of redemption? Listen to how the last verse begins: Well, God is in His heaven | And we all want what’s His | But power and greed and corruptible seed | Seem to be all that there is. That’s some heavy prophetic weather right there, so the refrain had better deliver. And so it does, but the one thing it’s not is some kind of sermon. The refrain isn’t going there, and more power to it. It doesn’t follow, it comes out of nowhere. It explains nothing, it leaves everything hanging. It’s telling us the one thing that rings true, and that’s why it’s a leap of faith in spite of itself.
(9)
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row
“Desolation Row” | Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Desolation Row, just around the corner. Desolation Row, all roads lead there. Desolation Row, everywhere you go, there you are. Desolation Row, over and over, once more with feeling. Desolation Row, rhymes with Ready for the show, After the ambulences go, Noah’s great rainbow. Title refrain, clincher and zinger, the three-beat place-name capping off every 12-line strophe with a hardbitten Row. Same every time, except for the shifting prepositions locking the cadence into place. From it, on it, into it, about it, all sorts of ways to find your way there. Desolation, from the Old French desolacioun, “sorrow, grief, personal affliction”; in English c. 1500, “a thing or place unfit for habitation, a dreary waste or ruin” and also “the condition of being lonely, forsaken, deprived of companionship and comfort.” Row, an old word for a kind of narrow street or alleyway lined with row-houses, sometimes designating a real address but more often an unofficial city quarter like Millionaires’ Row or Publishers Row. See also: Skid Row and Death Row, metaphorical, off the map, roughly the same zip code as Desolation Row.
Ditch the GPS, it’s right over there, just down the block, you can get there by falling out bed. And look what a motley crew you’ll find hanging out there – Cinderella and Ophelia, Cain and Abel,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower, and the list goes on. Not the place to be, not if you can help it, Brave New World meets the Wild West right from the top: They’re selling postcards of the hanging | They’re painting the passports brown | The beauty parlor is filled with sailors | The circus is in town. Desolation Row, where Dr. Filth sets up shop and the Titanic sails at dawn. Desolation Row, with its cyanide hole on tap and its heart-attack machine at the ready. Desolation Row, clincher and zinger, over and over. Desolation Row, rhymes with Don’t send me no more letters no. Desolation Row, you can only get there from here.
(10)
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
“Not Dark Yet” | Time Out of Mind (1997)