The Midnight Train:
The mystic world of ‘Standing In The Doorway’

There’s something about the deepest and darkest of Dylan’s songs that cut right into the human consciousness. And one song for me that seems to do this most brilliantly is ‘Standing In The Doorway’… This song has an aura, a mystery to it and everything about the way it sounds is inspiring. The desperation of the lyrics, the moody drone of the instruments and the warm yet sparse dusty landscape I imagine upon hearing the song, creates a sense of timelessness, of suspension and of loneliness. Yet still, there is a sense of comfort in the voice and in the music, something inexplicably touching and moving which pulls the listener out of the wilderness and into the tale. I can see Dylan ‘Standing In The Doorway’ on a veranda in some broken down shack in the Midwest, with the sun fading fast, the clouds overcast and the dust rolling up and down the plains. That is the mood, that is the setting; just pure desolation. ‘Standing In The Doorway’ is one of those great atmospheric Dylan songs that not only gives you goose pimples but seems to find the key to those unexplainable and mysterious places within the human soul. This song may well be my favourite Dylan song of all time.

Landscape and Mood & Painting the canvas

When I first truly heard ‘Standing In The Doorway’ it was the autumn of 1999 and I was riding on an east coast train up into the Scottish highlands. Feeling tired but restless I began browsing through the tapes I had brought with me, looking for something relaxing to listen to for the remainder of the journey. I came across a compilation I had made of those Dylan songs that really cut to the bone, like ‘Shelter from the Storm’ or the haunting version of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ from Vienna 1999. I picked up the tape and set it to play. While waiting on the music to start I began gazing out the window. By this time the sun was setting and the rolling hills were overcast by long lingering shadows, the sky was a watercolour mix of faded orange, wispy blue and traces of pink and the sun was growing closer to the horizon. The landscape had a feel of timelessness; everything was still, with just the fading sun resting on the cold landscape, yet leaving a feeling of warmth. It was a sight that made me feel inspired and it was at this precise moment that the music began. The opening chords of ‘Standing In The Doorway’ began to gently swing back and forth and the eerie organ of Jim Dickinson flickered quietly like a smouldering fire. At that moment the scene was set. It was lonely, it was desolate and instantly I felt transfixed and in awe of what I was hearing.

Angles And Triangles

Much has been said about Dylan’s experiments with narrative and dramatic techniques on Blood On The Tracks. Attention has particularly focussed on the various perspectives in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ which is all about seeing things ‘from a different point of view’. Indeed, in the performed versions of this song, the narrator often shifts backwards and forwards from ‘I’ to ‘He’ apparently randomly and interchangeably and it’s never entirely clear who the ‘you’ and ‘me’ are.

It is all part of the strategy Dylan uses in the songs on this album to examine the mystery of love and its breakdown from many angles and moods: from the redemptive possibilities of love in ‘Shelter from the Storm’ to the bitter anger and recriminations of failed love and separation in ‘Idiot Wind’. Even the long, cinematic western epic ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ is more about the interplay of emotions between the various characters than it is about a bank robbery. And Dylan cleverly switches the focus from one character to another: here we are given Big Jim’s feelings; there we see things from Lily’s viewpoint; one moment we are looking through Jack’s eyes; the next we are inside Rosemary’s head. It all builds up a picture of complex relationships - the endless round of desire and unspoken needs, the yearnings and betrayals.

In this context, surprisingly little has been written about a lyric which I believe epitomises the kind of techniques Dylan was using at the time, ‘Buckets of Rain’. With the utmost brevity and with some of the most concise and concentrated writing on the album he uses this song to explore love from three different angles which may be the points of view of three different characters or, possibly, three radically different moods or sides of one person.

The first verse is a generalised statement of the contradictions and tensions of love. It’s a powerful, demanding experience which makes ‘I’ feel as if the negative effects of love - the tears and the rain - have filled him to overflowing and are coming out of his ears. But the relationship also offers a handful of moonbeams because of what his lover can give him: ‘You got all the love, honey baby, I can stand’ Dylan sings on the record. Interestingly, in the published lyrics the line is reversed, so that it is the amount of love that he gives to her which sustains him. In the face of the rain and tears of love, he is the one offering the handful of moonbeams: ‘I’ve got all the love, honey babe, you can stand’.

Once more, the roles are interchangeable, the points of view are reversible. But what is sure is that, at times, love feels like a face-off in which both partners need the strength to withstand the onslaught of emotions. And in the next three verses Dylan goes on to identify three kinds of love, three moods and attitudes, three ways of approaching the loved one. So radically different are these approaches that they feel as if they are made by three different people.

Red, White and Blue Shoe Strings - III  

If you asked a million people which song first got them into Bob Dylan and why, you could certainly expect to hear a million varied and colourful answers. There is probably a book in there somewhere, now I think of it. For what it’s worth, my particular song was ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’. There is absolutely no conscious reason why I woke up that fateful morning with that song stuck in my head but, nevertheless, stuck there it was. When the burning and overwhelming need to hear it became too powerful to ignore, I went off into town to track it down. Into the record store and straight to the Dylan section, I searched for the album that contained the elusive track. I guess that the store didn’t have The Basement Tapes because the only disc that seemed to feature it was the unusual but entertaining 3 CD set, Masterpieces. The store not having The Basement Tapes was, I have always considered, to be a work of fate in itself. Much as I love the album (and the various bootlegs associated with it), it is probably not the best collection for a newcomer to approach to ease himself into the complex world of Bob. Reasonably priced, despite being an imported title, Masterpieces looked like a good buy because it not only featured the song I wanted but most of the hits that I already knew but didn’t have and a load of other tracks that I didn’t recognise.

On my arrival home, I immediately put the third CD into the deck and pressed the play button. I began to listen to the music while doing some other things around the house. I don’t know why I didn’t initially skip straight to track five to quickly satisfy my desire to hear ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’; I suppose that there must have been some intervention from somewhere, probably the same guiding hand that didn’t send any copies of The Basement Tapes to my local record store that week. The disc started very poorly; the painfully awful Hard Rain version of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ was almost enough for me to rue the purchase and check to see if I’d kept the receipt. The second track though, the sublime ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, more than made up for its predecessor. I was already vaguely familiar with it, of course, but I had never before considered it to be, at just two minutes and seventeen seconds, the most relentless, infectious and gob-smacking pop single that has ever been pressed. However, nothing was to prepare me for ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. It stopped me dead in my tracks and hit me like nothing I had ever heard before. I was devastated on hearing this for the first time and felt immensely foolish that I had up until now considered myself a serious music fan without ever having heard this mesmerisingly emotive tune. The charming ‘Mozambique’ then followed before I finally got to hear ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’. In the days that followed, I played Masterpieces night and day, with ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ enjoying dozens of airings. It was difficult not to be struck by how incredibly cruel and threatening Dylan’s performance is and, even before I went on and researched the story behind the song, I managed to pick up the blatant overtones of attitude and nastiness. In a world that had since encountered The Sex Pistols, the Clash, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Oasis and the like, there was still nothing I had ever heard that even came close to touching the danger and awareness of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. I soon knew my way all around the album and I found it intriguing that such a compilation did not feature the most famous and obvious versions of some of the songs. From this strange and bizarre thread, my Dylan interest and collection soon grew into something massive. Things haven’t quite been the same since.