Bob Dylan: When You’re Lost in The Rain in Juarez … Tom Thumb’s Blues

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All’s Well That Begins And Ends Well

A record exists between two silences.

The silence before the song starts is one of expectation and anticipation. Sometimes the silence after the song has finished is one of satisfaction, resolution and even joy.

When that happens you have a record that enters your personal pantheon – one you will return to over and over again.

Good beginings set the emotional mood of a song and should intrigue the listener ; beckoning them to lean forward and open up their hearts and minds.

Good endings deliver on the promise of their beginnings and close a song like a ship after a long journey safely docking in its home port – ready to sail again.

Dylan’s Tom Thumb’s Blues is the first from my own pantheon (more to come later!). It seem to me to begin and end exceptionally well.

Feel free to comment suggesting your own favourites.

Nobody tells stories like Bob Dylan.

This pearl comes from his mid 60s golden period when miracles emerged from his mind with machine gun rapidity leaving everyone else breathless in his rear view mirror.

Neither he nor any one else has ever caught up.

 

The song opens with entwined burnished mid tempo rolling piano and guitar lines evoking a journey to a humid landscape where unknown fevered delights and dreads lie in wait for the traveller as he voyages through the enervating, sticky exotic heat.

Dylan delivers the opening lines with his patented, langorous, half-past one in the morning, half a bottle of tequila to the good, come – hither charm.

‘When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez
And it’s Eastertime too
And your gravity fails
And negativity don’t pull you through’

Now, tell me you don’t want to know what happens next?

Some five minutes later we have have been treated to a magic lantern show spotlighting Rue Morgue Avenue, the legends of the mysterious St Annie and the entrancing Sweet Melinda, watched Angel being picked up, avoided the cops and sweated the booze and drugs out.

Tom Thumb, of course, remains unmet and unmentioned.

Throughout the song the band provide a supporting magic carpet of sound that allows Dylan to spin a narrative where he is simultaneously in the thick of the nightmarish action and serenely floating above it all.

The peerless Paul Griffin plays piano with wonderful rhythmic assurance while Mike Bloomfield’s guitar glistens throughout like liquid poured gold.

Al Kooper’s organ provides the aura while Bobby Gregg’s railroad drums provide momentum for a song that in all other respects seems to have escaped temporality.

As the song concludes we come to understand that either the singer will have to go home or he will die a lonely exile’s death.

Bob Dylan, no stranger to Homer, knows that all Odysseys must end.

The weary hero has to return home – even if he’s not exactly sure what kind of welcome awaits him there.

Everyone said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough

In Bob Dylan’s life, though he has criss-crossed the globe pursuing his vocation, all paths eventually lead back to New York ; the city where Robert Zimmerman truly became Bob Dylan and where he was launched into artistic immortality.

There are several epic live versions of the song. You should seek out two in particular.

The song was a staple of the astounding 1966 tour. The Manchester version features Dylan’s spectacularly swooning, surely he’s going to fall over now stoned vocals where syllables are seemingly stretched to infinity. Garth Hudson’s provides the all enveloping organ which seems to lift Bob to the heavens, if he wasn’t high enough already!

There is a further deeply committed and intense performance that occurred on Dylan’s return to New York City soon after 9/11.

Uncharacteristically, he precedes the song with a spoken introduction acknowledging his debt to the city – a debt he and the band discharge to the full in a performance that has a glorious ragged grandeur that electrifies the Madison Square Garden crowd.

68 thoughts on “Bob Dylan: When You’re Lost in The Rain in Juarez … Tom Thumb’s Blues”

  1. One of my all time favorites of Dylan’s. This was an excellent post. Was the careful creation of an alternate persona essential to create the music? Or just marketing strategy?
    Doesn’t change the wonderful attachment to time and events that Dylan’s music brings back to me. Excellent essay. Thank you.

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  2. Hi a friend of mine had this to say. Thought I might share it with you:

    In my memory, the line is ‘There was nobody even there to bluff.’ which is similar but not quite the same. Even if we accept the writers analysis of the song at the end which suggests that the last verse is the conclusion of his adventures and like Homer or Max from Where the Wild Things Are, he has told his tale and it is time to move on, there are available other interpretations.

    On some level Dylan has to have always been aware that he was creating a performance persona which was not intrinsically himself. Yet he tried very hard and quite convincingly to pass his creation off as real. His success at doing this plus his famous ambiguity, his personal secrecy, and of course his genius lyricism led to a reality where even when his deceit is exposed, nobody cares. They accept him anyway. So, Dylan might say of most who have followed him, admired him, copied and studied, that there was indeed nobody even there to bluff. Because we weren’t bluffed. We recognised reality when we came across it.

    There is the story that when he was told that Rambling Jack Elliot was really Charles Adnopoz, a Jew from Brooklyn, that he collapsed in helpless laughter, continuing to huddle under the chair he been sitting on, giggling.

    So in a sense there is another meaning to the line. All his monsters were his heroes. To kill the thing you love in order to consume it and transcend it. All the performers he admired were also obstacles to be overcome. But this is entertainmentland and everybody is faking in their own way. As it turned out Dylan’s passage into the hearts and minds of the audience of the world was about the easiest you could possibly imagine. So his fears of not being accepted, not being recognised or of needing support or help proved groundless, and as he says ‘The joke was on me.” He is the prize of his generation. The Beatles befriended him. Even Cohen who might conceivably have challenged his dominance was an early convert, and so again there was ‘nobody here to bluff.’

    In his own and others accounts Dylan does attempt to have himself accepted by an older generation of American poets. Mostly these attempts end in failure of one kind or another.

    Dylan tells a kind of truth about himself, but it is wrapped in ambiguity and theatre, so you cant be sure he is talking about himself but you feel that he is. So, I would conclude by saying that although the line could be simply a throw away line by the character who is singing the song, I also choose to imagine it is a line directly from his own personal experience about himself.

    One of my favourite Dylan lines is in the first verse: ‘And your gravity fails and negativity dont pull you through.’ – a seemingly hopeless situation. The whole verse echoes the crucifixion, and Dylan is clearly empathising with Jesus, while typically borrowing his imagined experience.

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    • Thanks. One of the many pleasures of a Bob Dylan song is the room it leaves for the imagination of the listener to become engaged and drive interpretation. Very much enjoyed reading this and will think on! Regards Thom.

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