I
have been digging back into Bob Dylan's catalogue recently, as I often do
considering he is my favourite artist of all time and has perhaps the richest
discography of any musician in popular music to date. I keep having the urge to
listen to Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Bob's ode to his then wife Sara
Lownds. It has always ranked among my favourite songs of his 'wild mercury'
period in the mid 60's (his best period in my humble opinion), only behind
masterpieces like Visions of Johanna. But I've never really considered why the
song is so powerful. Many critics have cited its lyrics as sloppy and overly
pretentious, a critique I don't think can be thrown at many Dylan songs. I do see
where these people are coming from though. Reading the lyrics is mystifying to
say the least. The metaphors seem slightly strained and sometimes even
non-sensical. And yet, the song has always drawn me back, always fascinated me,
always had me listening intently to each line. It made me want to look at the
song in a bit more depth, so I thought about the song in the context of both
Dylan's life and art in general.
After
a little research, I found that Dylan also adored this song, and claimed it to
be the best song he'd ever written upon its completion in February 1966. There
are legendary stories about how Dylan worked in the studio, especially for
Blonde on Blonde, keeping his musicians waiting for hours on end whilst he
spontaneously added to his songs before sporadically recording them with little
to no direction. When it came to Sad Eyed Lady, the band expected to only be
playing for a few minutes and had no idea that Dylan intended them to play for
almost 12!. As the verses kept coming they just kept playing, with no idea of
when the song would finish. From the reports of the musicians who played on it
and Dylan's own comments, it is clear that Sad Eyed Lady evolved very
naturally. It is a song that sounds like mother earth, something beyond perceivable
reality but at the same time inherently real. Upon hearing the acetate, Dylan
quipped that it sounded like “old-time religious carnival music” – a
description that I think fits it perfectly. There is something ancient and
timeless about the sound of it, from the surreal imagery of the lyrics to the
soft tone of the band, who all perform sublimely on the track. It is almost
lullaby like in how it moves, swaying the listener back and forth until they
fall under its dreamy spell.
So
in my attempt to try and pin down the song, I have concluded that I love it for
a similar reason to why I love the rest of Blonde on Blonde. I think by this
point Dylan had almost completely transcended the medium of songwriting, and
passed into a realm only a few artists in history have managed to reach. If you
look at the lyrics for the songs on Blonde on Blonde, they aren’t technically
his best. I think many tracks from Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61
display a sharper example of Dylan’s genius, but those albums don’t quite
possess the abundance of nuance of Blonde on Blonde. Sad Eyed Lady, amongst
other songs on the album, gives the listener a sense that they are tapping into
a higher reality, a pool of knowledge that one must nearly completely lose
themselves in the music to find.
It
is not the words on Sad Eyed Lady that astonish me. They are good, and taken at
face value then one can find some really interesting imagery in there. But what
really defines a song like this is its complete sound. This is backed up by a
few things Dylan said during this period. I read somewhere that when asked
about how people should listen to his songs, he replied that although the words
are important, their main purpose was to punctuate the music. In other words,
the sound of the words and instrumentation together is where the truth and
message of the song lies, rather than any literal interpretation of the words.
He reinforced this point at his famous San Francisco press conference in
December of ’65 when asked if he writes the words or music first, cryptically
responding that he just “writes it all”, implying a very holistic approach to
songwriting. Of course he talks about having finally created that “wild mercury
sound” that he heard in his head before Blonde on Blonde. Songs like I Want You
and Sad Eyed Lady encapsulate this, and even though I don’t really know what
the term means, somehow I understand what he is saying.
When
I listen to the first 3 sides of Blonde on Blonde, I hear the city. It is
metallic, rough edged and claustrophobic stuff for the most part. Visions of
Johanna describes a vacuous party, Fourth Time Around an encounter with a
prostitute, whilst Stuck Inside a Mobile captures a sense of disillusionment
and entrapment in urban life. Yet by the time we get to Sad Eyed Lady, the
whole pace of the album changes and it opens up. We get the chance to breathe
with Dylan, meditate with him if you will. Dylan’s hypnotic voice is the same
as it is on much of the rest of the album, yet it summons a different energy
entirely, a much more peaceful one. I hear Dylan giving himself completely to
the music in this song, almost stepping aside to make room for a more objective
truth to come through. It is definitely one of Bob’s least self-conscious
songs, which reminds me of what Allen Ginsberg said in No Direction Home, that
by 1965 Dylan had become a sort of shaman, able to tap into a higher dimension
and transmit it to his audience through the medium of music.
Thinking
about the song in the context of Dylan’s marriage to Sara is definitely relevant,
but far from the defining characteristic of the track. There is no question
that it was inspired by her, as Dylan admitted himself 10 years later. After
doing some more research on Sara, it appears that she was a very private
person. She had a certain duality to her personality that intrigued the young
Bob, and Sad Eyed Lady is a very fitting tribute to her indeed. Nevertheless, I
still believe that the song is much more than a love letter to Sara. She is
depicted in a divine light and as a symbol of eternal love in a world gone
wrong. There seems to be an implicit acceptance in the words and the way Bob is
singing them. He doesn’t want to change anything about this woman or the world
she inhabits, he simply wants to observe and admire everything unfolding in
front of him. This is of course, very un-Dylan like. The songs and albums that
preceded Blonde on Blonde showed a songwriter who wanted to challenge ideas and
perceptions at every chance he got. One could argue it was a step in the wrong direction
for Dylan to waver too far from the finger pointing material he was writing
just a year or so earlier, but personally I see songs like Sad Eyed Lady as an
example of Bob maturing as an artist and a person, without sacrificing an ounce
of his ability to dig deeply into the collective unconscious.
Sad
Eyed Lady is not Dylan’s best song lyrically. It does indeed contain countless
lines that are among his best, but also a few that seem thrown in to draw out
the length of the verses. But thanks to what the fantastic session musicians
manage to achieve musically, combined with Dylan’s enthralling vocal
performance, it remains one of his greatest achievements as a songwriter. Roger
Waters once said that after he heard Sad Eyed Lady he finally realised that it
was possible to write 12 minute songs that don’t become tedious to listen to.
The song was boundary pushing in more ways than one, being the longest track
Dylan had recorded to that point and occupying a whole side on the first
significant double album in rock history. It is a song I will always keep coming
back to, learning and feeling more each time I do.
