Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, on When All Signs Point Away From Love)

“The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.”—American singer-songwriter and Nobel Literature laureate Bob Dylan, “I Want You,” from his Blonde on Blonde LP (1966)
 
I’ve blogged before about Blonde on Blonde, but my special feeling for one single from the Bob Dylan double-album, “I Want You,” requires me to focus on that today, the 60^th anniversary of its first appearance on the U.S. Billboard “Hot 100 chart. (It peaked at #20.)
 
More than a few critics and academics have parsed its lyrics. I’m not going to pick one interpretation—many seem perfectly plausible and non-exclusive to others. That’s what happens with lyrics so quicksilver and elusive, much like the nature of love itself.
 
Variations exist as much in its performances as in interpretation.
 
The brisk, buoyant tempo of the original recording reminds me of a later Dylan song I cherish, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” But a decade later, indulging his penchant for not settling for a single way to play his classics, he slowed it down to give it a torch-song feeling.
 
Three decades ago, in the tribute album A Nod to Bob, the folksinger Cliff Eberhardt delivered a plaintive, keening acoustic version that rends the heart without doing any violence to the spirit of the original.