Category Archives: Bob Dylans’s best songs

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs – Most Of The Time

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Bob_Dylan-Oh_Mercy-Frontal

Most of the time
I’m clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path, I can read the signs
Stay right with it when the road unwinds
I can handle whatever I stumble upon
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time
~Bob Dylan (“Most Of The Time”)

“I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.”
~Bob Dylan (David Gates interview Sept 1997)

“Most of The Time” is a “big song,” a major work, the sort of listening experience that brings people back to an album again and again.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist Volume 3: Mind Out Of Time 1986 And Beyond)

“Most Of The Time” is the most atmospheric track on the best Bob Dylan album of the 1980s.
~Nigel Williamson (The Rough Guide To BD)

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“Most Of The Time” is my fav song from “Oh Mercy”, and it’s the “Oh Mercy” version that’s @ 31 on my top 200 list. This is however not my fav studio version.. as you will see further down in this post.

I really love the lyrics & Bob’s vocal on this one…

Here is Andrew Mueller (The Guardian) from the documentary “Both Ends of The Rainbow”:

Most of the time
It’s well understood
Most of the time
I wouldn’t change it if I could
I can make it all match up, I can hold my own
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone
I can survive, I can endure
And I don’t even think about her
Most of the time
~Bob Dylan (“Most Of The Time”)

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Tombstone Blues

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bob dylan tombstone blues

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the streets
With the tombstone blues

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The Vietnam War was one of the things going through Dylan’s mind when he wrote/sang “Tombstone Blues” (” … fattens the slaves/then sends them out to the jungle”), but one would be hard put to claim the song is about the war. The influence of Depression-era songs like “Wandering” (“Daddy is an engineer/Brother drives a hack/Sister takes in washing/And the baby balls the jack”) can also be spotted, but shall we then say it’s a song about the “new Depression”?
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)

… the star of this show is [Mike] Bloomfield, whose between-verse solos build from heated to blistering, jackrabbiting helter-skelter over the fretboard, anticipating and pointing the way to Alvin Lee, Johnny Winter, and any other late-sixties guitarist who took blues riffs and fed them uppers. It is practically the only time on the album that he’ll get to shine like this. [..] Bloomfield uses his axe like a flamethrower, spewing liquid fire over the space between the vocals, he and Dylan marauding the tune like twin Gypsy Davies burning out the camps, leaving only scorched earth. Take him away and the song remains lyrically strong but musically weakened, its engine a few cylinders short.
~Mark Polizzotti (Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (33 1/3))

 

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Bob Dylan’s best songs: Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)

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bob dylan where are you tonight

 

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure
To live it you have to explode
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed
Sacrifice was the code of the road
~Where are you tonight

JC: “Sacrifice is the code of the road” is what you sing in Where Are You Tonight? To die before dying, shedding your skin, making new songs out of old ones.
BD: That’s my mission in life… “He not busy being born is busy dying.” Did you bring your
parachute?
~Bob Dylan interviewed by Jonathan Cott

‘Where Are You Tonight?’ stands alongside the best album-closers Dylan has written to order throughout his long career.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

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Bob Dylan’s best songs: It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

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You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

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CM: It’s not the same Blue as in It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue?
BD: No, no. That’s a different Blue. That’s a character right off the haywagon. That Baby
Blue is from right upstairs at the barbers shop, y’know, off the street… a different Baby
Blue, I haven’t run into her in a long time, long time.
CM: You’re being serious?
BD: Yeah, I’ve never looked at Joan Baez as being Baby Blue.
~Craig McGregor Interview (March 1978)

I had carried that song around in my head for a long time and I remember that when I was writing it, I’d remembered a Gene Vincent song. It had always been one of my favorites, Baby Blue… ‘ It was one of the songs I used to sing back in high school. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”
~Bob Dylan (Biograph)

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Bob Dylan’s best songs: Call Letter Blues

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Bob Dylan call letter blues

The children cry for mother
I tell ’em, “Mother took a trip.”
Well, the children cry for mother
I tell ’em, “Mother took a trip.”
Well, I walk on pins and needles
I hope my tongue don’t slip.
~Bob Dylan (Call Letter Blues)

Such self-consciously autobiographical imagery probably told for it in the end. I just can’t imagine Dylan releasing the line ‘Children ask for mother, I tell ’em mother took a trip’ into the world back in 1974. But at least he got as far recording this one with Weissberg’s band on that first night, cutting it in three takes, before deciding that he would rather replace it with an entirely fanciful morning blues, a.k.a. ‘Meet Me In The Morning’. The tune, he kept. Literally. As the 1991 release of ‘Call Letter Blues’ fully revealed.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

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