No poet-songwriter worth his or her salt will explain what their song lyrics mean. The absolute king and ruler of this attitude is Bob Dylan, of course…he’s been rebuffing such questions since he first appeared 65 years ago.
On at least one mid ’60s occasion, however, Dylan not only relaxed his standards but eagerly offered specific analysis of each and every track on Bringing It All Back Home, released in April ’65.
Why the lyrics tutorial? Because Dylan wanted to put the high hard one to Marianne Faithfull, who was quite the erotic object of desire back then.
N.Y. Times correspondent Lindsay Zoladz reports that in “Faithfull: An Autobiography“, published 25 years ago, Faithfull wrote that Dylan “tried to seduce her by playing his latest album, Bringing It All Back Home, and explaining in detail what each track meant.”
Alas, no nookie for Bobby. “I just found him so…daunting,” Faithfull wrote. “As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.”
The legend is that post-shutdown Dylan exacted a form of revenge by ripping up a poem he’d written about Faithfull. They nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long friendship.
Faihfull got fat when she aged into her late 60s or thereabouts, but that happens. She passed two months ago — 1.30.25 — at age 78.
