Hard to pick a favourite, as these things change depending on current moods. But this one will always be in my top three for sure. What a lyrical masterpiece, as you say.

No better song. Lyrics and music.

My favourite Dylan song by a country mile!

Great song.

Great insight and eloquent expression on the fish trucks. I feel the same way. They are a seminal city image roaring out of docks and markets to the concrete jungle early in the morning. Whether Johanna is a person (ideal partner) or the "ideals" of" Johanna" (Baez) of a better world that she she never gave up but Dylan here seems to have done is the song's great central ambiguity.

Johanna means "Visions of God" That have now taken my place :)

@@kenkaplan3654 interesting. never thought visions of Johanna could also be Baez's ideals.

@@waz3128 That's my take but the meaning of the Visions is not absolute. Some say "Johanna" is a word for God. Although it seems as if it's about a relationship, and I do think Baez is Johanna (she thought so too), it is the "Visions" of Johanna that are important. So it could be Visions OF Johanna (longing for the person) or VISIONS of Johanna, what were/are the visions that inspired Johanna a higher ideal. For me the depth of the song, it's profound existential nature, arenas outside relationship (the museum, the fish truck, the empty lot, it's very very "Beat like-Ginsberg, Kerouac) to be just about a lost lover. Also Dylan got married a few months before. Also Blonde on Blonde reeks of existential despair and betrayal-Stuck Inside of Mobile, Just Like a Woman, , Absolutely Sweet Marie, 4th time around. etc so the song is compatible with those and a direct similar expression to the existential bleakness of Stuck Inside of Mobile. VOJ however is at a higher octave of surrealistic and poetic expression. Absolutely One of his greatest works. One last thing. there are strong similarities in VOJ to Tambourine Man but in TM, the desire for transcendence is youthful and hopeful where here the singer feels that transcendence is impossible to reach, those hopes have been dashed. "An’ here I sit so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going through all these things twice (Just twice????) But who really knows?

This line always reminds me of when we were trying to sleep in on a Sunday morning at our all male dorm in college, and the garbage trucks and delivery trucks would clang outside while we were hung over and trying to sleep! Same with the words "the heat pipes just cough".. it was much like living in a flophouse or Lower Manhattan dive lolol

“Wow I really hear a lot of Coldplay in this!”

And "Desolation Row"

The ignorance of music history. There is a long tradition in blues of TALKING BLUES. Dylan got it largely from his folk idol Woodie Guthrie who often used it. Screw the prancing ego-tripping ME-ism of "Rap" and "Hip-Hop".

@@jnagarya519 "The young hip-hop pioneers of the early 80s weren't, by in large, listening to Dylan, however, and certainly not his deeper cuts like "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Instead, they were taking inspiration from the Jamaican tradition of "toasting" over a beat, novelty records like Black comedian Pigmeat Markham's "Here Comes The Judge," and Black spoken word artists like the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. (While Scott-Heron was often compared to Dylan, and was certainly aware of his work, he explicitly denied any direct influence.) To put it another way, there's a long line of Black spoken-word with musical accompaniment that predates the talking blues lineage, and doesn't have any traceable debts to it. For that reason, there's no reason to look to the talking blues as anything more than an incidental predecessor to rap. If they have a familial resemblance, it's most likely due to their most recent common ancestor --early twentieth-century Black folk music. But then again, that source was the wellspring for nearly all twentieth-century American popular music styles.

@@kenkaplan3654 Well said. The problem is the lack of knowledge of music history, and therefore seeing Dylan as an "originator" as "proto-RAP" (or whatever the nomenclature). Dylan was influenced primarily by Woodie Guthrie's talking blues. But that of course, was from Black folk/folk blues tradition.

@@jnagarya519 Well It wasn't me but as a folklorist who studied for a week with the Georgia Sea Island Singers, whose mother was Bessie Jones, I did a search because I suspected the roots went deeper and were in the black experience. So someone else expressed this but it seems to be the consensus. Rock itself grew out of black rhythm and blues. Nearly all white artists in the 60's were influenced by (one could say stole from) black R and B and blues artists. The whites became millionaires. A lot of this traces back to Africa and in the US the slave tradition.

Right! And Joan Baez was commonly referred to by her own fans AS "the Madonna" in the early years of the 1960's, because of her general appearance and because she radiated a kind of purity, dignity, spirituality, and idealism that fit that title. (Completely, utterly different from the style set by Madonna Ciccone in the 80's and since... 😄) The Madonna in music back then was Joan Baez, and it's got to be her that Bob is referring to.

They are trip-visions, not exactly hallucinations. Your thoughts made into pictures.

His songs will still be sung a million years from now.

@@kenbellchambers4577 only by those who've kept a close watch on their towels.

With all due respect, the Blonde on Blonde version is the definitive version. It’s one of the greatest studio recordings of all time.

´God on our side´, ´Changing of the guards´, ´Boots of Spanish leather´, ´Chimes of freedom´, `My back Pages´ To add some more great examples!

@@thebacons5943 we’ll have to agree to differ

Agreed.

@@carlburnett5986 love me some live 66 visions of Johanna

The harmonica gives me goose bumps. No one can play that instrument like Bob.

Thank you! This is what I want to say to all the people who say his lyrics make “no sense”.

Yes please but also his contemporaries included Lenny Bruce and mort sahl and the beats. All very stream of consciousness I’d also say that early American musics lyrical content was highly poetic and evocative Both from the African tradition as well as Ireland/Scotland/wales

@ Oh-Mercy: [I “heard”something I hadn’t thought of before- what if the Visions of Johanna are not his visions of her but Johanna’s visions of him] That's an interesting idea, but the line "These visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn" point to him having the visions. You never really know with Blonde on Blonde tracks, though.

The Rolling Stones paid a tribute to the verse"Jewells and binoculars hanging on the head of the mule in the cover of the Get Yer Ya Ya's Out

There is a town on a river in NSW called Bellingen. The River is called the Bellinger.

Seconded! Great track.🖖🏼

I’ve seen Bob Dylan six times. And each time I saw him he played tangled up in blue. And each time he changed some of the words. I know of at least 4 maybe 5 recorded versions of Tangled Up In Blue with different lyrics. Even a Christian version. I love Dylan.

Nice! I’m a weird Dylan fan in that I hear his voice as an instrument and tend to do so with music in general, but when you break it down, I re-appreciate music I already love… that was an organ by the way, was a few years before synthesizers were made… love this whole album…

"This period with albums "Bringing it all back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde" was the pinnacle of his career. For me, only "Blood on the Tracks" gets near to them" Boy do I agree with you 1000 %. I think Dylan was quite aware of what he wanted to say. Songs like "It's All Right Ma", "Tombstone Blues, "Highway 61", "Stuck Inside of Mobile" and "Desolation Row" are too thematically coherent (within themselves and with other songs). However HOW his process worked to create them is not that definable and mysterious as images probably came to him like waves on the ocean or the string flow of a river.

Planted into his mind through MKULTRA dreams. It’s the case for nearly all those musicians at the time. And then you find out the music is the exact same as obscure Neapolitan operatic music… 🤔 you’re being lied too and I for one do not like that. Read Dave McGowans book Weird Scenes Inside Laurel Canyon. This will get the ball rolling for you.

haha yh that was dope

I agree but all these people will think different.

Does he have an Indian accent at all…?