Anti-Climacus

IT TAKES A LOT TO LAUGH, IT TAKES A TRAIN TO CRY:

It's fall. It really became fall for me last weekend, the first I encountered where it got very cold. I've written below about how the music I listen to changes as the seasons change, and perhaps not surprisingly, Highway 61 Revisited has gotten a lot of play recently. Nick Hornby once astutely noted that, for the average music fan, one can own a lot of Bob Dylan without especially liking him. At best, I qualify as a lukewarm fan, which means I own: Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Nashville Skyline, and The Basement Tapes on cd, Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home on vinyl, and assorted important tracks from the crucial 1965-1968 period on mp3.

Highway 61 Revisited was the first I bought, in 10th grade, on the recommendation of both the guitar magazines and the music magazines I bought back then. The first thought I had about it was that it unmistakably sounded of fall, so it tends to resurface at this time of year: I started out liking "Like a Rolling Stone" (as everyone must), then moved onto "Tombstone Blues" and "Highway 61 Revisited." Both of those require very little investment, so it's not surprising I liked them early and do not think very much of them now. Then "Ballad of a Thin Man," which has a few very great lines, but is perhaps a little overwrought. Last year's great breakthrough was "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," which has one of the great all-time opening lines: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too/ When your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through..." It has tragedy, but it fits with the music in the proper way. ("From a Buick 6" has one of those great lines, too: "she don't make me nervous, she don't talk too much/ she walks like Bo Diddley and she don't need no crutch." I have no idea what that means, but I've always liked it). And "Desolation Row" for a long time was the 11-minute song at the end of the album I would always skip, and now is the last thing I heard before I arrived during my last trip up north, so I think very well of it, even if it's still too long. Also, it mentions T.S. Eliot.

Then there's this, perfectly laconic:



"The wintertime is coming, the windows are filled with frost..."