[00:00:03] Speaker A: This is Dylan FM, the podcast that goes deep into the work and world of Bob Dylan. If you love Dylan, you're in the right place with your host, Craig Danieloff.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: No Dylan fan should be surprised that Joker man is a song that the Bob Dylan center chose to highlight on the main floor, along with other celebrated titles such as like a Rolling Stone and Chimes of freedom. Even in the Dylan catalog, this song stands out as a distinctive accomplishment. It is, however, a song that not everyone would say they've got a great handle on, so I'm pleased to once again have Michael Gray to talk to to help us unlock the mysteries. Our discussion is built around a bit of chapter five from the book song and Dance man volume two, which focuses on Joker man and to a lesser degree, the Infidels album where we find it. The discussion you're about to hear goes on for about 40 minutes, but we basically made it through the first verse and chorus of this incredible song in the 50 or so other pages. In the chapter, Michael discusses the entire song and for about 20 pages talks about infidels and the other songs it contains. It's another chapter that I turned almost entirely yellow, highlighting insights, clever explanations, and just plain interesting observations.
I guess you could be a Bob Dylan fan without reading song and dance man, but I'm really not sure why you'd want to be. There are links to the book on Amazon in the show notes.
This is the 11th episode in our podcast Companion tour through the 50th Anniversary series release of song and Dance Man. I love this song. Think this is another chapter that deserves a Nobel Prize and enjoyed Michael's comments so much that I want everyone to hear them. So for this one, the full extended conversation will be here in the public feed. To hear the complete versions of the prior ten chapters and most of the rest that will be upcoming. Sign up for FM in Apple Podcasts
[email protected] dot. As a member, you'll get access to video versions of these discussions, plus extended and bonus versions of other great music podcasts, including watching the covers flow, the Dilentans, Infinity goes up on trial, gaucho amigos, and more. Check the show notes for details. So now lets learn and talk about Joker man.
[00:02:44] Speaker C: Joker man alone. Among the release tracks from the infidel sessions, there's a song you can inhabit as you can so much of Bob Dylan's earlier work. It isn't a sermon or a pop song, but a real creation, a work you can wander inside, explore, breathe in, pass through, wrap around you. It looks different in different lights. It's always shifting. But this is because it's alive, not because it's nebulous. Oh, it may be that too. Its complexity isn't off putting nor distancing. On the contrary, Dylan sings you through the complexity with almost as much generosity of expression, almost as much bestowing of concentrated warmth, as he gives out on, say, sad eyed lady of the lowlands, a nebulous and complicated song from another lifetime.
It is as much the warmth as the substance of Joker man that makes it such a welcome item in Dylan's corpus. The two qualities cohere in Dylan's openness toward the listener, in confessing his fondness for the song itself, and in his palpably strong desire to communicate it, a desire often absent in 19 eighty's. Dylan.
[00:04:09] Speaker D: Hi, Michael. Welcome back. After a little break, we resume.
[00:04:13] Speaker C: Hi. Quite a long time.
[00:04:15] Speaker D: Yeah, but we have a great. We have a great topic today. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. It's the chapter in volume two on Joker man. And so another chapter where you focus on a song. Although there is an introduction with a fair amount of commentary on infidels as an album.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: That's true. An album that in general I don't much like. It certainly doesn't seem to me to be the great Dylan album that a lot of french and american critics were hailing it at the time. And I know that there's a whole book about how wonderful it is, but there's about twelve pages of this chapter of mine. The chapter is deliberately called Jokerman because that's the great song on the albumen.
But yeah, I mean, I do cover why I think the rest of it is somewhat short of what Bob Dylan's greatness can achieve. And also it also covers a general theme of how much of so often the Old Testament Bob Dylan brings into this album. You know, he does that all the way through, not least in Joker man, but also everywhere else in man of peace and in tell me and so on. Even the tracks like tell me that weren't on the album, which I think most people know.
[00:05:48] Speaker E: Let's listen to another passage from song and Dance man, volume two on Joker man, read by the author.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: The French and the Americans hailed infidels as a major return to form on Dylan's part. It wasn't, with the marvelous exception of Joker man. It is so far short of representing on form Bob Dylan that anyone who makes such claims for it has simply forgotten what thrilled them about him in the first place. It yields none of the heart leap delirium, amazement, laughter, joy, joy in truth, turmoil or awe that can surge through you when you hear great Bob Dylan.
[00:06:34] Speaker D: Yeah, I always thought it was interesting that given its placement, aftershot of love and the title infidels, it's post gospel, period.
[00:06:43] Speaker C: Yeah, well, it's not thumping evangelism like saved, is it?
[00:06:47] Speaker D: Neither shot of love, as we talked about. So Joker man clearly is the standout song, and I think in many ways it's another of many standout songs and Dylan's entire collection, entire catalog. So I wanted to actually kick off with a quote from another book. This is from mixing up the medicine and what the Bob Denlin center book says about Joker Mandy.
[00:07:21] Speaker F: The opening track from infidels, Joker man, encapsulates Dylan's new melding of the spiritual and the political.
He was inspired by the religion, music and culture of the Caribbean while traveling on his boat the water pearl in the early eighties. He later recalled in a 1984 Rolling Stone interview, joker man kinda came to me in the islands. It's very mystical. The shapes there and shadows seem to be so ancient. The song was inspired by these spirits they call Joombis. Joker man represents one of the densest series of drafts in the entire archive.
Over the course of some 17 versions, Dylan weaves together a dense web of vivid illusions and metaphors, eliciting a shadowy world of nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas padlocks, Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain.
[00:08:19] Speaker C: It's one of the standout Dylan songs of the 1980s. People very rarely seem to mention that when they're talking about his great eighties tracks, when they're defending his eighties work against the people who just sort of rather lazily assumed there wasn't much happening.
But surprisingly, people don't much mention that any more than, you know, they much mention.
[00:08:47] Speaker D: Brownsville girl. Yeah, I think there's a big in the celebration of Brownsville girl.
I mean, it's clearly great in its own way, but as you put it, against everything, it seems like the strangeness of it, the uniqueness of it, elevates it more than maybe anything else. Joker man really is special, and I think this issue of Joker man against the other eighties songs is similar to the issue of infidels versus the other albums in the sense that there's a strange elasticity that happens in people's ratings of Dylan material, meaning they're overly precious sometimes and overly generous other times. And the thing I like about your work, and reminded me specifically in this chapter as I was reading it, was when you say things. And, you know, you get flack sometimes for being critical when you say things like, you know, even what you just said about infidels, people get up in arms sometimes. And what I always think about is they don't watch you. Then do the dissection, for example, that we're going to talk about in Joker man, where you explain why the good things are so good, which opens up the clarity of why the things you rate lesser, what they don't have. In other words, it's not. You're just saying it's good. This is great. This is bad. You make this long list of the nuances and the subtleties and the accomplishments in the great things, and it then becomes really easy to see. Well, yeah, I guess a song like Union Sundown doesn't have those things, and therefore it justifies the explanation.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: Well, I loved working on Joker man for the book because it's just so many riches there, but it takes a lot of work to winkle all these things out.
[00:10:48] Speaker E: Let's listen to another passage from song and Dance man, volume two on Joker Mandy, read by the author.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: I wouldn't have used the word substance of Joker man when I first heard the recording. On the contrary, I found it a curiously skeletal thing, as if it were the piece of paper with the dots on from which you might construct and colour in a Bob Dylan song by numbers. The effect was owing partly to the sparsity of its noises, an attractive sparsity, but an undeniable one. What you hear is the huge amount of empty space between the ultra simple rhythm section, the minimal keyboards and guitar playing, and the strongly echo chambered vocal line, making for a production as on no other record I know by Dylan or anyone else, and partly to the way in which the song's title and the words of its chorus seem like pale, thin shadows of that great prototypical Dylan song, mister tambourine man. Joker man danced to the nightingale tune birds fly high by the light of the moon oh, Joker man.
It's not going to just occur to many people, and it didn't occur to me for a while that.
That there's so much of the Book of Ecclesiastes referenced in this song. And actually, not only in this song. I mean, there's a good example in tell me where he says a live dog or a dead lion. And this is absolutely straight out of ecclesiastes. You know, there's loads of things like that, I should say. Ecclesiastes is the one sort of book of the. Of the Old Testament in which there's any allowance, any generosity of spirit or anybody's doubt. That's the core thing in the chapter. You know, it's sympathetic to people who may harbor doubts about the total wonderfulness of everything to do with God. You know, there's all the. It's where vanity, vanity, all his vanity comes from, for example.
And that follows from a recognition that people know the brevity of life.
Which, of course, Dylan was singing about back on tears of rage in 1967.
Come to me now. You know, we're so alone. And life is brief. And therefore ecclesiastes is saying, well, you know, if we recognize that it's so brief, is it meaningless? And then there's a series of arguments that end up saying, well, no, it's not. Or you don't have to feel that way. And, you know, a very different tone of voice from Leviticus and deuteronomy, let's say. Anyway, so ecclesiastes, once I saw that there was so much. I just reread that chapter, that book of the Bible.
And, you know, as so often in my experience. You read something like a compendium of old blues lyrics. Or a book of the Bible. And suddenly there's Bob Dylan, you know, in there. And he squirrels bits of it away and puts them into his songs. And. And, you know, usually very purposively.
Yeah. And joke man was a beautiful song to work on because.
And, you know, particularly because I didn't start out certain that it was that great. You know, it seemed. Seemed a bit skeletal to me in the first place. It seemed a bit Bob Dylan by numbers. The chorus really.
[00:14:56] Speaker D: I want to talk about that. Because I think the chorus. It really stands out when you go back and look at it. Right. The simplicity of it and the vagueness of it. Versus this incredible richness of things and details and complexity going on in the verses.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: Yes, the chorus is like a sort of.
Take a little bit of the skeleton of Mister tambourine man.
And you sort of glue those bits back together. And there's a chorus for a new song.
A nightingale. The nightingale tune the bird fly high by the light of the moon.
He does return to these things.
The birds are all over his songs, like the weather.
And of course, he's visited the nightingales before.
In a version of visions of Johanna.
There's a verse that he doesn't keep. Where he talks about the nightingale's code.
In visions of Joanna. Way back then, 66.
[00:16:11] Speaker D: The chorus seems almost like a break. It's a breath. There's all this intensity and stuff going on. And then it's just this little.
It has the feeling, right? It's that word Joker man, which seems to have this weight and this force to it that. Whether he's implying it and we feel it, even though we don't know what it is exactly. But this. Oh, Joker man.
It just feels like those are chances to pause and think about or feel what just happened in this heavy verse. But not a lot is happening in that chorus. And yet it works. It's also that light and balance. It's not one of those songs. Even though there's this depth in it and density. It doesn't feel like a seven long versus Dylan thing that, you know, desolation row that you can't quite get out from under. It has a lighter feel. Maybe because of the way those choruses are.
[00:17:04] Speaker C: Yes, and also because he's in such a good mood when he's singing it, don't you think? I mean, it's a beautiful vocal.
Both the versions that people are sort of most familiar with. The unreleased and the outtake that was somehow available to us more or less immediately. The vocals are so beautiful. The unreleased version even more so than the one we get on the album. Although I can understand why we got the one we did. Because I think the words are better, even better than on the unreleased. But.
But, yes, he's in a very different sort of mood from anything like Desolation Rome. Yeah, it's a very light vocal. And also, there's not all that much music going on, you know? I mean, okay, there's sly and Robbie, but they're playing very minimalist style stuff.
You know, there's no big heavy guitar solos or anything in it. It's all done as if the song is lightweight. And yet the intensity of the verses tells a different story.
[00:18:16] Speaker D: One thing that Joker man has in common with other Dylan songs, and you just mentioned it in terms of how well you thought he felt, is that it just. It's an appealing song. We've talked a lot about these songs that are very easy to like. Even before you know, what they're singing about or what the story is.
[00:18:34] Speaker C: And sometimes you may never decide what it's about. I mean, that's really not. That's really not the point of art, is it?
I mean, it may be the point of a political diatribe, but it's not really the point of art. The point of art is to light up something in your own imagination.
And to delight you with in the case of a kind of art like song to delight you in music and in words and the way they can cascade and the way they can surprise you and the way that they end up giving you a feeling that's not quite the way you felt about any other song.
[00:19:21] Speaker D: So that's really interesting in this context, because I would say, I love this song. I listen to it all, all the time, and it makes me think, and it makes me puzzle on it. And yet you reveal, in this chapter specifically and in your other work, so much about it, I didn't know. So was the song serving its purpose for me when I missed everything that was in there? But even though I was enjoying it and contemplating it or, you know, well.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: I mean, I don't know why.
What struck me first was the skeletal way that the chorus is rather than the extraordinary way that the verses are. But when you do come to the verses, you know, it begins, really begins.
Standing on the water casting your bread while the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing. That very first line, standing on the water, casting your bread, that's two different biblical references fused together right there.
And mostly, most people would know at least the story of Christ walking on the water, in this case, standing on the water, which is a very weird sort of change to the image, because you sort of think that if someone's walking on the water, part of the secret of that is to keep going.
Whereas to just stand there, you're asking to sink, aren't you? And then, you know, somewhere in ecclesiastes Christ is, you know, there is the phrase casting your bread upon the waters.
So Dillon puts those together. That's just the first line, you know, and it flows straight into the rest.
It's.
It's one of. It's a. It's a marvelous, marvelous piece of writing. I haven't seen all these 17 different versions that are available to you if you go to the archive at the Bob Dylan center.
But just the song as it is, with the slightly superior words of the released version rather than the other version we've known for decades, it's all as tightly packed as that. And it's not just meaning, is it?
Its sound, the sound of the words.
So, you know, you get all these internal rhymes.
There's just loads of them all the time.
Standing on the water casting your bread while the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing distant ships sailing in through the mist. You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing. That's just four lines. And, my God, I mean, it's just enormous. There's just so much there. And as I say, it's sound as well as meaning. All those internal rhymes. The eyes of. The eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing. And then you get through several more internal rhymes and then you get to the resolution, the resolve of the, of the, of the matching word.
Glowing or flowing or whatever it is. Yeah. Glowing, hurricane blowing. Yeah. And more or less every verse is as compressed as that. You know, I mean, yes. You know, you get to the point where obviously it's supposed to be Hercules who is depicted holding snakes in his fist. But Dylan, Dylan again pushes it further to born with a snake in both of your fists. You know, a difficult birth, I imagine.
And you have to be so inward with the material that you're pulling in to be able to succeed the way Bob Dylan does with it. Anyone can be clever, clever with the Bible or with nursery rhyme or with any of these other sources, but Dylan always, he's always on the ball about it. He never messes it up. He's never thoughtless about it.
He knows the textual meaning in the first place. And if he changes it, that's to make another point.
It's not just to steal a nice phrase or something. You know.
[00:24:14] Speaker G: A lot happens in the world of Bob Dylan. Every week there are news stories and blog posts, concert tours and record releases, podcasts, videos and live events. How do you keep up? Sign up for seven days, our free weekly email that lists the best of all of these. Every Sunday night, see the most recent copy, and sign up at the FM Club, seven days.
[00:24:45] Speaker E: Let's listen to another passage from song and dance man, volume two on Joker man, read by the author.
[00:24:51] Speaker C: Sometimes Dylan seems to be singing about himself and sometimes about Jesus, but the whole is too fluid to need from the listener any analytic effort at separating out one from the other.
The intertwining of the two is, in any case, part of what the song evokes. One theme of jokerman is surely Dylan's mockingous of the distance between his own fallibilities and the omnipotence of his savior.
[00:25:27] Speaker D: And this opening. I really thought a lot about it in preparing for this, and it reminded me, and this may be a strange analogy to a priest, a rabbi, and a walking to a bar. It's like you hear this thing and you just want to know what happens next, right? This water and an idol and ships and snakes. And you're like, what? What?
And he starts in the middle of something and you're just primed to find out what happens next. It's cinematic in a strange way. And there's this juxtaposition of things that have nothing to do with each other. Seemingly. Which is obviously one of Bob's common tricks. Right. This list of things that seemingly no one would put together. And yet, as a whole convey or portray something.
[00:26:08] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:15] Speaker E: Let's listen to another passage from song and dance man, volume two on Joker man, read by the author.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: Thus the song begins with a nice mockery of superheroes. And the singer's own mythic pretensions in an opening verse that at once reveals that here is a work of high order, chiseled, clever, complex, compressed and unapologetically articulate. Yet carrying itself lightly with likable grace and poise. Entirely free of the solemnity or the didactic. And delivered with unguarded generosity of spirit.
You know, the Joker man is echoed by rifleman and preacher man in the course of the lyric.
Oh, that's. I think that's one of the most marvelous bits, is where the rifleman and the preacher seek the same.
They're both after. They're both out to get you in the same way. You know, he's nothing. He's fairly cynical about people who are preacher men.
[00:27:31] Speaker D: Yeah. Reminds me of the old folks home in the college.
[00:27:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Just as he's pretty cynical about somebody who can be a man of the mountains and walk on the clouds.
[00:27:46] Speaker D: What do you think that bit's about?
[00:27:49] Speaker C: Jesus.
I think he's being cynical about Jesus.
But it doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong.
It's the beauty of the creation of the verse that's what matters.
I mean, this is something that Greil Marcus talked about the first time I ever came across him. His writing, long before I got very far with the first edition of Song Dance man. He used to write when there was such a thing as an underground press. He used to write for some little thing in San Francisco or Los Angeles express Times.
And there he took someone to task for suggesting that in visions of Johanna, this reference meant that he said, you know, william Blake. When William Blake talks about this, he is not confining himself to meaning just this one little tiny thing.
And so this is why I say, yes. It's nice if you can feel that there is an overall consistency of theme in the song in Joker man.
And therefore you might be very tempted to sort of think that, you know, just like he.
I fought with my twin that enemy within till one of us fell, by the way.
And in this song, he has a parallel idea, and you might feel that, and I tend to feel that he's being very equivocal about Jesus. On the one hand, you're a man of the mountains. You can walk on the clouds, manipulator of crowds. You're a dream twister. I mean, that's suggesting both the guy's power and that he too is dodgy.
That there's something suspect about someone manipulating crowds is not something you applaud.
This puts him in the same kind of bag as Trump rather than goddess.
So I don't always worry too much about does this bit mean Jesus or does this bit not?
I think it adds up to an extraordinary sweep of ideas across, well, the way that America and the Old Testament gel and interweave.
You know, he's very american, isn't he? Bob Dylan? I mean, obviously, that's a very obvious thing to say on one level.
But in some ways, what Europeans like me love about him is the ways in which he's not very american.
You know, the ways in which he, you know, he cant be mistaken for Charles Atlas.
You know, hes, when he, when he first sort of burst onto the scene as a successful singles writing pop star in 65, you know, one of the things we all liked about him was his androgyny, the fact that he wasnt a meaty, crew cut american. You know, the same, same reason just yesterday why I loved the way Lorenzo Moretti ran rings around Taylor Fritz.
Taylor Fritz in the Wimbledon, I'm talking about tennis grand slam championship. Now, you know, Taylor Fritz was very american. He had a huge serve, but if it missed, he had no flexibility.
And the Italian was just an artist on the court, you know, and Bob Dylan is so much the artist on the court.
And so in those ways, he's nothing, you know, what we think of as an archetypal american type. But clearly America is what produced him, what fascinates him, what absorbs him and what gives him his material.
[00:32:58] Speaker D: Is there americanism in Joker Man? I mean, we've talked a lot about the religiosity, but then you pivoted to the american element, where in this song.
[00:33:08] Speaker C: Do you see that with the rifleman and the, and the preacher man and that wonderful verse about water cannons, Molotov cocktails. Yeah, that bam, bam, bam, bam, bam behind every curtain. Yeah.
[00:33:37] Speaker E: Heres another passage from song and Dance man, volume two, read by an AI.
[00:33:41] Speaker G: Named Charlie Dylan succeeds completely here, manipulating these technical effects of sound and rhythm in the best possible way while satisfying the primary requirement of poetry or song. That the form must serve the content.
Assuredly, it does. So here, the strong, quiet pulsing of the greater part of the line, while the eyes of the idol with the iron head and the drop down onto the quieter menace of, are glowing. This evokes with great sensual accuracy the pulsing glow of the pagan idol's magic power eyes, conveying both the spooky atmospherics and the hard physicality the pagan worshipper beholds.
[00:34:27] Speaker D: So one small thing I wanted to bring up, because we've alluded to the prodigious footnotes many times in these talks and in reading through this one, a lot of times they're backgrounds and references you make, but you point on the footnote something that I had never caught before, that the distant ships are often quoted as sailing into the mist, but the Dylan says, in, through. And you point out that those are opposite directions. And I would have absolutely said it was into the mist. And then I pulled it up and listened carefully. And there's a.
I believe it's in through the mist, but there's a.
I don't know if he got his tongue tied or there's a little break in there. It's not the most clear thing, but it's clearly is that. And not into. I thought that was a fun trivia fact or a way to get some.
[00:35:23] Speaker C: Yeah. Because if the ships are already distant and they're disappearing into the mist, then they're gone.
If they're distant ships sailing in through the mist, they're coming in, they're coming towards us. And the Titanic sails at dawn. Distant ships coming in is different.
How that might have come to him in the Caribbean with his own boat, I don't know, of course. But always, for me, the biographical explanation is the least interesting element. Although, on the other hand, there's a part of me that is very pleased that Bob did spend all that time in the Caribbean and had a boat. And I like the photographs.
[00:36:14] Speaker D: Yeah. And it's also the perfect Dylan ambiguity. Meaning, you know, a, we can all settle in our head the wrong way for 20 years, and it's still okay. And he has it both ways quite frequently, as we know.
[00:36:30] Speaker C: Oh, yes.
[00:36:33] Speaker D: So here's a passage, and I'll drop this in.
We talked before about the idea of the chorus and the title and the word Joker man, which, again, I really feel like is kind of the masterstroke of this song. For, to me, unexplainable reasons why it's clear and strong and it anchors it, and it obviously is given a nickname or a metaphor for Dylan the Joker man happens to fit in in this strange way, but it's kind of like the perfect name or title for something that sort of, for some reason, gives it this weight that it wouldn't otherwise have.
[00:37:27] Speaker E: Here's another passage from song and Dance man, volume two, read by an AI named Charlie.
[00:37:32] Speaker G: The chorus of Joker man may be skeletal and derivative, fleshed out only by Dylan's extraordinary vocal resourcefulness. Naturally, he never sings it the same way twice, but the verses are richly textured and freely imaginative, carefully, densely structured yet rhapsodically fluent blocks of writing that glow with inspiration, recognizably, of Bob Dylan's making without ever being Dylan esque.
[00:38:04] Speaker D: So one thing I did want to ask you about was we have this very successful song that Dylan, at least by our standards, by your standards and many others that Dylan continued to play, and they made a video of it, they promoted it. But Dylan has, as I think I quoted before, said, you know, it was one that got away, and I was wondering your thoughts. Having thought about and studied songs like Blind Willie McTale. Other ones he did let go, other ones that he worked hard on and decided, I'm looking for the connection between the ones he has the most specific goal for, works the hardest on, and then doesn't accept anything less than the perfection he was seeking, and then either says bad things about Orlando or let's go.
[00:38:54] Speaker C: He manages so often to give the impression that everything is just sort of throwaway, you know, the number of times he has said about a particularly substantial song that he didn't know how it came to him. It just. It was like. It was just like he was the vehicle that wrote it down, you know? And then until we ever saw the notebooks, we didn't know how much drafting went into some of these works.
And he's been saying that ever since the sixties that, I don't know, I just used to. It was like the song was already written and I just put it down on paper or something.
Whether there's a correlation between the ones he works on most and the ones he denies having done that about effectively, I don't know. But certainly this is a case in point where, ok, he's out in the Caribbean, and it just somehow comes to him.
And yet very clearly, not only from the notebooks or from mixing up the medicine, but just from the intensity of the lyric, the carefully crafted lyric, verse after verse after verse, it's perfectly clear that this stuff does not just come to him.
Joker man as a title.
I mean, in a way, that itself echoes Mister Tambourine Mandy, you know, having, having a something man as your title.
It also echoes I'm just a song and dance man.
[00:40:46] Speaker D: The fact that it's, I'm saying the fact that it's relatively pejorative is an interesting, you know, set tone setter for the song, which is you say he's, he's not praising someone here or holding them up.
[00:41:01] Speaker C: Oh, he's not holding them up or dissing them. I mean, he's doing both. He's balancing, you know, is this person, is this person good or bad? You know, that's up to us.
And Joker man, you know, on the one hand, that sounds like a pejorative expression as if you're saying this person's not serious.
On the other hand, it's also, it's also suggesting that, that there's a lightness of being here which is good, which is like the nightingale's tune and which is, if you like, the value of the joker, the clown, who often gets quite a good press both from Dylan and from Shakespeare. I mean, all those kings had their own Joker man. You know, I never really understood what was the great appeal of somebody who just kind of, you know, turned to king whoever and started talking gibberish.
But there's no gibberish here. It's just a very, as you said, it was a very concentrated term. It's extremely, you know, it's one very efficient word, but it does leave you wondering what its resonance is.
And he puts it in the chorus as if it is lightness of being hes talking about along with dancing by the light of the moon. But on the other hand, it also echoes Joker man and Rifleman. It also echoes preacher man and Rifleman. And, you know, its a play on Superman and all the rest of it.
[00:42:55] Speaker D: What do you think of the use of the ooos as a device in terms of conveying. We talked about the lightness of the chorus, but it seems like such a colloquial thing. And Bob obviously, at various times puts those in things that people wouldn't normally include in a lyric. It's like a la la lada.
I'm not even going to say anything, but it's also the way it sets up Joker man. Like, I have so many thoughts, I can't even say them. Oh, you know, you.
[00:43:29] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah, I think it works in that, exactly that way. But I also think that it's just a sort of vehicle for him to prove yet again what he can always prove, which is that he doesn't have to ever sing the same line the same way twice.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's God knows how many times. Well, somebody does, and no doubt we'll tell you straight after they've watched this, but how many times he has sung Memphis blues again? And yet, how many times have you heard the chorus at the end of each verse of that, the refrain at the end of each verse? And how many times has he ever sung it exactly the same?
You know, the capacity for that genius of phrasing is absolutely boundless.
[00:44:31] Speaker D: Yeah. Something we've covered well and compellingly in earlier. In earlier discussions that people should go back and seek.
Well, this is a mighty chapter. It's maybe 50 or 60 pages, and the song can bear that weight. And as I said, kind of like every grain of sand that we did recently, another song I must have heard a thousand or more times. You come through this chapter, and all of a sudden it's new. And to the earlier point, there's just a new raft of things to think about. It doesn't become precise. And, okay, now I know it's ABC. It's been unlocked. It's just issues and angles and both the religiosity and everything else.
[00:45:20] Speaker C: In a way, what I hope is that what it does is just provide a kind of fairly vast compendium of things that the song throws together and throws out at you. And so I hope that when people see the use of ecclesiastes, for example, or have their attention drawn to the effectiveness of the brilliant internal rhymes within the verse lines, I hope that that's helpful. And I. And I hope that it's not, you know, the thing that it's not nitpicky. It's not. It's not in any way trying to reduce the song by analyzing it. What I hope is that it opens out the song.
[00:46:17] Speaker D: Yeah, it does. It absolutely does. And so, well, as usual, encourage everyone to go read the long. Read the long version. But thanks, Michael, for spending some time today talking about it and verbalizing this. I think it adds yet another view and helps people get at the song.
[00:46:36] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:46:42] Speaker A: Did you enjoy this show? Then please rate this podcast and leave a review. It really helps. And take a moment to follow this podcast so you don't miss upcoming episodes.
Thanks for listening.
