I decided that there just was not enough 'meat' to this article to
include it in the book. However it is my pleasure to make it available
here as a supplementary piece of light reading
Foreword
Like the one on ‘Maggie’s Farm’, this article
was written to try to reclaim a song that everybody I knew was sick
to death of, due to its perennial, trashed beyond bearing each time
appearances in the set lists of the time and preceding years. In both
cases, whether or not I succeeded for my
audiences, I did so for myself and enjoyed doing so.[1]
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ is a novelty song, whose sheer
fun is compellingly infectious, with enough ‘serious’
points being raised to make it the perfect opener for the Blonde
On Blonde double album. It is a tissue of outrageous and outrageously
successful puns, both musical and lyrical.
The song’s main pun, of course, is that of ‘being stoned’.
‘Being stoned’ as in being high on dope, or ‘being
stoned’ literally and metaphorically by those entirely too quick
to judge. The reason this pun is so successful is that it has so many
connotations on both of what for convenience’s sake I will call
the ‘fun’ and the ‘ serious’ sides.
Before we look at these, though, I want to say that it is always going
to be the ‘fun’ side which first strikes the listener.
Indeed, in the majority of cases it is probably the only side that
does, especially if the song is heard on the radio or as a single,
rather than as the superb introduction it forms to Blonde on Blonde.
‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ has been played live many
hundreds of times, often as the final song of the night. Without fail
the audience have lapped it up as an invitation to party and/or to
celebrate the taking of drugs.
It is worth stressing this straightforward celebration of hedonism
both from the artist and his audience, given the rather extreme po-facedness
of many interpretations given in books and magazines on Dylan. This
results, one suspects, from critics reared in the cloistered ivory
towers of Lit. Crit. being unwilling, or unable, to admit that a song
by someone they rate as an Artist could actually mainly be about fun,
on one hand at least. And also from devoted fans putting Dylan on
such a pedestal that each and every song must be seen to carry deep
import. Since he has so often provided work that illuminates the human
condition, some feel that all of his songs must therefore be informed
with profound truth.
This isn’t the case, as many songs testify. Dylan is all for
celebrating the basic joys of rock’n’roll without engaging
too much of his or your grey matter. On the other hand he is a major
artist, and therefore even his fun often cannot help but be informed
by insights. ‘Rainy Day Women’ does have that side to
it, but it is not its primary face. This has to be remembered when
reading interpretations that will have you reaching for your Bible
to investigate the religious ramifications of what Dylan is singing,
or before you follow instructions on how to decipher ancient mystical
texts to discover the true meaning of numbers 12 and 35.
Dylan himself, in interviews, kept such things going with references
to New Mexico and wild flights of fancy:
Well, you know my songs are all mathematical songs. Now, you know
what that means so I’m not gonna have to go
into that specifically here. It happens to be a protest song. ...and
it borders on the mathematical, you know, idea of things, and
this one specifically happens to be ... ‘Rainy Day Women #12
& 35’ happens to deal with a minority of, you know,
cripples and Orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they
live,.... It’s another sort of a North Mexican kind of a thing,
uh, very protesty. Very, very protesty. And, uh, one of the protestiest
of all things I ever protested against in my protest years.[2]
Yes, thank you Bob for a nice taste of your defensive interview technique
during the gruelling tours and accompanying inane media grillings
of the mid ‘60s.
One listen to the song with its laughter, extraordinary instrumentation
and ‘off- stage’ shouts would surely convince you that
these musicians are having a whale of a time – and are inviting
you to too. If you need any more convincing, just listen to Dylan’s
pronunciation of ‘young and able’ in the third stanza.
So there you have it, a fun song, a novelty hit single, a party song.
Nonetheless, there are serious issues raised in the song – I
just wanted to stress that the fun clearly predominates. As I will
show below, there are references to young soldiers dying, to racism,
to the generation gap, and, of course to the countless millions who
have not yet learnt from the biblical story
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said
unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her.[3]
Because, unquestionably, the song is about persecution as well as
getting high. Note the constant drumming home of They’ll stone
you. But one must never forget the song’s central humour: of
course the singer will feel such persecution everywhere – such
paranoia is a very common effect of ‘being stoned’! At
the same time, also, Dylan was ‘being stoned’ by audiences
around the world for moving to Rock from Folk. I have tried to stress
that there are two sides to the song, ‘fun’ and ‘serious’;
Dylan cleverly has them co-existing throughout.
Interview quotes show Dylan fully aware of both the sides and their
possible impacts; sometimes he discusses both at once, as with Philippe
Adler for L’Expresse (16th June 1978). Notice how Dylan stresses
that there are ‘many meanings’, but has no doubt as to
which ‘precise’ meaning Adler is referring to.
PA: Knowing
the influence that you exercise over millions of young people, don’t
you think it
is dangerous to go on singing Everybody Must Be Stoned? (sic)
BD: But
that song has lot of other meanings.
PA: Maybe,
but it does have a precise one.
BD: Marijuana
isn’t a drug like the others (a pause). Today there are drugs
that are a lot more
dangerous than in my time.
In other interviews, such as this one with Jonathon Cott in December
1977, Dylan has shown that he consciously created the multi-levelled
meanings of this seemingly innocuous novelty song, stressing alienation
and persecution for standing up for what one believes in:
JC: You
can’t really dance to one of your songs.
BD: I
couldn’t.
JC: Imagine
dancing to ‘Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35’. It’s
kind of alienating. Everyone thought
it was about
being
stoned, but I always thought it was about being all alone.
BD: So
did I. You could write about that for years....
And also in the Bob Fass Radio Phone-in, 21st May 1986:
‘Everybody must get stoned’ is like when you go against
the tide. ..you might in different times find yourself in an unfortunate
situation and so to do what you believe in sometimes, people, uh,
some people they just take offence to that. You know, I mean, you
can look through history and find that people have taken offence to people
who come out with a different viewpoint on things. And ‘ being
stoned’ is like...it’s just a kind of way of saying
that.
And this is, indeed, the point the song starts off from, Bob ‘trying
to be so good’ but getting/being stoned instead:
Well, they’ll stone ya when
you’re trying to be so good,
They’ll stone ya just a-like they
said they would
They’ll stone ya when you’re
tryin’ to go home
Then they’ll stone ya when you’re
there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned
As the verse progresses, you can hear why Jonathon Cott’s interpretation
rang so true. The repeated ‘alone’s in verse one are revisited
in the last stanza to re-inforce the point. There is also something
extremely sad in the attempt to reach the safety of home while being
stoned – but, but, but who notices this sadness when first hearing
the song? Sure, there’s a resigned tone to the lyrics that acknowledges
all-pervasive persecution, but everything you hear and feel screams
‘hey its party time – let’s get stoned’.
Stanzas two and three catalogue a host of ‘normal’ behaviours
that we all go through every day, walkin’ (there’s a lot
of that in stanza two), opening doors, sitting down, having breakfast,
‘trying to make a buck’ – all the time ‘being
stoned’. And it is all very humorously put across – yet
there are hidden depths. The line:
They’ll stone ya when you’re
tryin’ to keep your seat
may not resonate much nowadays, but in the Sixties, and especially
from the mouth of Bob Dylan, it irresistibly evoked the campaigns
for racial equality and desegregation. Listeners then – and
one would hope it is never completely forgotten – would recognize
the significance of being able to take a seat on a bus without fear
of persecution, regardless of one’s skin colour.
By now the listener might also be thinking that there is more to the
music than just party sounds; it comes across almost like a New Orleans
jazz band marching down the street at times, or an unholy mixture
of intoxicated players at a religious walk. Producer Bob Johnston
has spoken of his attempts to capture a ‘Salvation Army’
sound in amongst the bedlam. He succeeded brilliantly; as I said above,
the puns are musical as well as verbal. In verse three the lines:
They’ll stone ya when you’re
tryin’ to make a buck
They’ll stone ya and then they’ll
say, ‘good luck.’
debunk the God-given right of every American capitalist to make money
by whatever means and at whatever cost to others. The ‘good
luck’ here is as ironically meant as the one ‘spoken’
in ‘Positively 4th Street’:
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, ‘How are you?’
‘Good luck’
But you don’t mean it
They don’t mean it here, either.
Stanza four seems to be, again, concentrating on ‘normal’
behaviour – in this case Dylan is playing to his audience with:
They’ll stone you when you’re
riding in your car
They’ll stone you when you’re
playing your guitar
Whereas the opening two lines:
Well, they’ll stone you and
say that it’s the end
Then they’ll stone you and then
they’ll come back again
just seem to suggest that one has no escape, these people doing the
stoning will cheat and lie just to get the chance to stone you again.
There is, though, a more specific interpretation possible here, depending
on how one accepts the title of the song. I will come to this interpretation
soon.
The concluding verse reiterates many of the points made in the opening
one: again we have the stress on being ‘alone’, while
the second line:
They’ll stone you when you are
walking home
neatly echoes stanzas one and two. Then Dylan drops in more lines
that resonate far beyond the chaotic fun of the music and performance:
They’ll stone you and then say
you are brave
They’ll stone you when you are
set down in your grave
Which, as in the anti-racism line already quoted, come from the same
Dylan who wrote ‘Hero Blues’, ‘Masters of War’
and other anti-militarism songs that mourned the waste of young men
being sent off to be maimed or killed. So you see, Dylan was –
as usual – not talking complete nonsense in his surrealistic
responses to interview questions in the Sixties. (It is a protest
song, after all!) Also, specifically in ‘Hero Blues’ and
‘John Brown’ Dylan sings of women sending/encouraging
young men off to war. This is a clue to yet another level one can
read into the lyrics of this song: This is that it is men continually
being put down by women. I do not subscribe to the view that this
is the central theme, but I certainly think it informs the song in
places – particularly in the last three verses. It is discouraged
neither by the male camaraderie of the musicians, sounding for all
the world like the malerevellers escaped from their wives’ surveillance
in, say, Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter. Nor by the biblical
proverb:
A continual dropping in a very rainy
day and a contentious woman are alike.[4]
Which may be another clue to a title that has inspired many an interpretation;
the most common being that ‘Rainy Day Women’ is a slang
term for marijuana.
I fear I may be straying into the very territory that I lampooned
earlier, so I will hastily return to my opening position, stressing
the ‘fun’ side of the song. Despite my other comments
above, to this listener the musicians sound more like the partying
inhabitants of Burns’s anarchic dance The Jolly Beggars, which
also celebrates escape via musical and narcotic bliss from society’s
cruel attacks on the individual spirit.[5]
So what does the whole song mean, and what is the relevance of the
title? It means all I have said above and more. Dylan, in full 1966
interview-mode again, following on from our earlier Stockholm quote,
answers like this:
KB: Why
that title? It’s never mentioned in the song.
BD: We,
we never mention things that we love. And that’s, where I come
from that is, that’s
blasphemy, blas-per-for-me, you know that word ? Blas-per-for-me
?
KB: Yeah.
It has to do with God.
KB: Shall
we have a listen to the song?
BD: OK.
KB: Which
is selling quite well in the States. How do you feel about that?
BD: It’s,
it’s, it’s horrible.
KB: It
is?
BD: Yeah.
I don’t wanna, uh ... because it is a protest song. Protest
songs, really; shouldn’t really,
uh, we shouldn’t really listen to protest songs.
KB: Well;
I see it in the way that a lot of people buy the record and listen
to it, the radio stations
and so on. So a lot of people could get the message in that case.
BD: Yeah.
They do get the message. I’m glad they’re getting the
message.[6]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This first appeared in Freewheelin’ Quarterly.
[2] Klas Burling interview, Stockholm 28/4/1966
[3] John: 8.7 King James Version
[4] Proverbs 27:15 King James Version
[5] For text and commentary, see: http://www.robertburns.org/works/79.shtml
and
http://www.robertburns.plus.com/loveandliberty.htm
[6] Klas Burling interview, Stockholm 28/4/1966
Text copyright Andrew Muir © 2003
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