Daily Ramblings:
Shelter From The Storm ...04/21/2005 02:30:12 pm
Here is an mp3 file of Dylan doing Shelter
From The Storm at Boston's Orpheum theater,
on April 15th, 2005. I think it's very nice indeed,
even though he muffs the words at one point and has
to recover.
There's various ways that people hear this song.
Naturally, appearing as it does on Blood On The Tracks, the
assumption tends to be that the singer is addressing
a woman from whom he's become estranged. And the song
certainly works that way, and, Lord knows, lots of
other ways too.
These days though, I always hear the song as being
addressed to the singer's muse - or whatever you may
want to call it. You could call it just
"music," or "song," or that
spiritual conduit from which the singer believes his
songs emerge. Dylan of-course succeeds in avoiding
having to hang some clunky label on it, by just
saying "she." That's why he's a poet. I'll
just call it "song" for simplicity's sake.
In the early days, song gave an identity and shape
to the young artist, crystallizing the chaos in his
head and all around him, and enabling him to create
something enduring from it:
'Twas in another lifetime, one
of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full
of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of
form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
There was nothing the singer had to do back then
to discipline or force his art. He had a natural
connection to it and it flowed without prejudice or
fear.
Not a word was spoke between
us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left
unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and
warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Then something goes wrong. The singer feels
exhausted, hunted, "blown out" and ravaged.
Who's going after him? He doesn't say. But even in
these times he continues to find his refuge in song -
she gracefully approaches him and offers him her
shelter once again.
I was burned out from
exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the
trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Suddenly I turned around and
she was standin' there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers
in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my
crown of thorns.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
If you think about Dylan's attempted escape from
"counterculture hero" status which he
describes so well in Chronicles, the next
verse might be seen to speak to a certain aspect.
Dylan says in his book, about the songs on the 1970
album New Morning:
I felt like these songs could
blow away in cigar smoke, which suited me fine.
... Maybe there were good songs in the grooves
and maybe there weren't - who knows? But they
weren't the kind where you hear an awful roaring
in your head. I knew what those kinds of songs
were like and these weren't them. It's not like I
hadn't any talent, I just wasn't feeling the full
force of the wind. No stellar explosions. I was
leaning against the console and listening to one
of the playbacks. It sounded okay.
Of-course Bob still does some of those songs in
concert - so he is not in that passage disavowing the
songs, but he is recognizing that something is
lacking compared to his earlier work, and that he
himself has played a role in making it disappear. He
didn't want the kind of excitement that he'd been
generating in other people through his songs. His own
excitement was just fine, but he couldn't control
what other people were going to do with that
quicksilver he was generating. It had been coming
back to bite him, and literally knocking on his door
in Woodstock. But in tampering with his inspiration,
had he broken something that could never again be
fixed?
Now there's a wall between us,
somethin' there's been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals
crossed.
Just to think that it all began on a non-eventful
morn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
A number of the remaining verses are rich in
Biblical imagery and some questions and implications
that are beyond the reach of my little post today.
But it's clear that the singer continues to seek
comfort and truth from that elusive and eternal
source, i.e. "song," as I'm calling it.
I've heard newborn babies
wailin' like a mournin' dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without
love.
Do I understand your question, man, is it
hopeless and forlorn?
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
And he comes back and sums it all up in the final
verse, as any good narrator should. He's in exile, in
a "foreign country," but determined to
return. Beauty (like his art of song?) "walks a
razor's edge," where the slightest tilt from one
side to the other will cause it to fall. He feels he
doesn't have that crucial balance right now but
"someday will make it mine." It would be
easy, if only he could get back to the real
beginning, the first moment of creation, "when
God and her were born." When God was born?
Of-course, God being eternal, it's not possible to
ever go back to the moment of His birth, is it? And
Dylan's well aware of that, and of the futility of
his yearning. It's a heartbreaking end to this song,
really ( and listening to him sing it is so much
better):
Well, I'm livin' in a foreign
country but I'm bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it
mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God
and her were born.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Of-course an irony is that the song appears on
what is lauded as one of his greatest albums, an
album on which many feel he did "turn back the
clock" and create work that stands with his best
from the previous decade. And Blood On The Tracks
certainly does stand, not only with his best work,
but with anyone's. So, while creating a work of
genius, did Dylan also, as a part of that work, write
a song that mourns his hopeless disconnection from
the very source of that genius? Was writing the song
the penance he needed to do to be granted some rays
of that former light back?
A paradox wrapped in a conundrum, or something
like that. And one great song, I think.
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