'If my thought-dreams could be seen...' Stuck inside one Bob Dylan song in a time of chaos
A strange edition of this newsletter for strange times.
I needed to take a break from writing relentlessly grim things for this newsletter, so please accept this brief essay on music as a palette cleanser.
On Bringing It All Back Home, the 1965 album on which it originally appeared, ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ is a sparse song with Bob Dylan’s voice and his accompanying acoustic guitar strident in the verses and almost consoling in the chorus. The lyrics are a masterpiece of phrasemaking, with Dylan constructing new proverbs and aphorisms in practically every line. He was 23 when the album was released, and the song hums with youthful distaste for hypocrisy and consumerism.
I am fond of that original version, but the take on ‘It’s Alright, Ma…’ with which I’m borderline obsessed is on the 1978 live album Bob Dylan At Budokan. The 36-year-old Dylan, post-motorcycle crash, but not yet in his born-again Christian phase, appears on the cover wearing heavy black eyeliner and giving the audience a hard stare. A frequently maligned moment in Dylan’s discography, …At Budokan was originally intended as a Japan-only release and features radical rearrangements of some of his most familiar songs at the time. It is Dylan’s ‘Elvis in Las Vegas’ record.
On the … At Budokan version of ‘It’s Alright, Ma…’, Dylan’s voice rises and falls with the arrangement, rushing above the extravagant mix of driving electric guitar, violins, saxophones, and crooning backing singers. The bite of the lyrics remains, but there is a more bruised and jaded quality to the vocal. This is not the solitary prophet hurling out condemnation, but the practised preacher with the choir behind him to echo his most striking lines. This Dylan is singing the phrase, “But even the President of the United States/sometimes must have to stand naked…” in a post-Watergate world. On 1974’s Before The Flood, his live album with The Band, the line provokes a cheer from an LA Forum crowd that clearly made the Nixon connection.
The Before The Flood performance of ‘It’s Alright, Ma…” features Dylan singing the song at a pace, tossing off the lines as though he’s a club comedian. By …At Budokan, he is really performing the song. The show was part of a 10-country, 114-show jaunt derisorily dubbed the Alimony Tour by some, as Dylan sought to pay for his divorce from Sara, his 1978 movie Renaldo and Clara, and his newly built mansion in Malibu. He told The Los Angeles Times: “I had a couple of bad years. I put a lot of money into the movie, built a big house ... and it costs a lot to get divorced in California.” Choosing to tour with an 11-piece band wasn’t the most economical decision he could have made, but the tour still grossed $20 million.
… At Budokan is a source of scorn from a lot of Dylan fans and critics because of the bombastic arrangements, which can veer into offensively jazzy territory (“Too jazzy? Too jazzy!”). I agree with that for some tracks, particularly the call centre hold music, toot tootling flute take on ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, which feels like nothing more than Dylan trolling his audience. But ‘It’s Alright, Ma…’ which follows straight after is the sound of the band locking in and Dylan delivering on that stare from the cover.
The simplicity of the original version of ‘It’s Alright, Ma…’ doesn’t feel quite right to me as a soundtrack for this moment of abject chaos in the world. The Budokan take does. I need the sound and the fury. Dylan’s opening, “Darkness at the break of noon…” has an appropriately apocalyptic feel to it and the stab of the violins and tautness of the guitar line lock in with the anxiety in my stomach. The way the lyrical images pile up chimes with an information environment where the bad news feels as illogical as a game of Mad Libs played by disinterested deities.
In the final refrain…
And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
… there’s the combination of paranoia and desperate hope that 2026 seems to be shaping up to require.
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