Album closer “Sara” is by orders of magnitude the most explicitly biographical song the notoriously private Dylan has ever released. He recounts in forensic detail the fraying of his union to Sara Lownds, his longtime wife and the mother of his children. Even by the contemporary standards of full-frontal psychic nudity, its oversharing is extremely uncomfortable. He conjures their babies playing on the beach. He marinates in his own mythology: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you,” name-checking the sprawling closer of 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. He howls her name again and again: “Sara, Sara/Whatever made you want to change your mind?” Talk about blood on the tracks.
Still, as the song winds its pleading way to its conclusion, something feels off. After Dylan has spent the past fifty minutes recasting “Hurricane” Carter as a man of peace and Joey Gallo as a populist immigrant hero, it’s hard not to wonder what duplicity lies in this depiction of the Dylan-Lownds partnership. The story goes that Dylan held off recording Desire’s final track until his estranged wife could be present at the session, a last gambit for reconciliation. Apparently, she gave no reaction at all as it was recorded. Their divorce became official shortly after.
Desire was a hit, even briefly reaching No. 1 on the US Billboard album charts, and serving as the soundtrack of the wooly second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, as it evolved from an ersatz-folk revival medicine show into a mesmerizing quasi-gothic hellscape. From there, the head trips for Dylan’s audience would proceed in whiplash succession: the tarot-glitz of Street Legal and subsequent Vegas-style live shows, the should-have-seen-it-coming shock of his evangelical years, the drift from his vision in the 1980s, the improbable return as the mustache-twirling Nobel laureate of the new millennium. Were they arbitrary scenes or some part of a connected whole?
He would never make another record like it—its circumstances being unrepeatable seemingly by design—but in some ways Desire is the most explicit manifestation of the central literary irony of Dylan’s career: that the consummate barometer of social and cultural authenticity can’t be trusted with the facts about anything, least of all himself. Perhaps his true desire is to reduce real life to a kind of theater: a zero-sum contest between his sublime powers of expression and the vexing limitations and grinding tedium that more often than not constitute existence. Asked about the song “Sara” in the same 1978 interview in which he complained about witchy women, Dylan struggled to parse what he’d written three years before about his own wife: “Was it the real Sara, or the Sara in the dream? I still don’t know.” For a second there, it sounds like he’s telling the truth.
Posted from: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-desire/
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