{"id":12899,"date":"2024-02-29T01:29:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T00:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/?p=12899"},"modified":"2024-01-21T07:53:44","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T06:53:44","slug":"morning-songbob-dylan-sara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/2024\/02\/29\/morning-songbob-dylan-sara\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning song#Bob Dylan #Sara"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Album closer \u201cSara\u201d 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: \u201cStayin\u2019 up for days in the Chelsea Hotel\/Writin\u2019 \u2018Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands\u2019 for you,\u201d name-checking the sprawling closer of 1966\u2019s\u00a0Blonde on Blonde.<\/em>\u00a0He howls her name again and again: \u201cSara, Sara\/Whatever made you want to change your mind?\u201d Talk about blood on the tracks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, as the song winds its pleading way to its conclusion, something feels off. After Dylan has spent the past fifty minutes recasting \u201cHurricane\u201d Carter as a man of peace and Joey Gallo as a populist immigrant hero, it\u2019s hard not to wonder what duplicity lies in this depiction of the Dylan-Lownds partnership. The story goes that Dylan held off recording Desire\u2019s<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Desire<\/em> 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\u2019s audience would proceed in whiplash succession: the tarot-glitz of Street Legal<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He would never make another record like it\u2014its circumstances being unrepeatable seemingly by design\u2014but in some ways Desire<\/em> is the most explicit manifestation of the central literary irony of Dylan\u2019s career: that the consummate barometer of social and cultural authenticity can\u2019t 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 \u201cSara\u201d in the same 1978 interview in which he complained about witchy women, Dylan struggled to parse what he\u2019d written three years before about his own wife: \u201cWas it the real Sara, or the Sara in the dream? I still don\u2019t know.\u201d For a second there, it sounds like he\u2019s telling the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Posted from: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/reviews\/albums\/bob-dylan-desire\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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