What is the worst ever line from a Bob Dylan song?

For some reason, this always grates.

Total weak setup line: "I asked the captain what his name was and how come he didn't drive a truck."

It's in there for no reason except to set up the rhyme "He said his name was Columbus and I just said 'good luck'."

I always thought that if he recorded the song about 10 years later, he could've said "I asked the captain what his name was, as if I gave a fuck."

Oh well.

i'll also stick up for "if dogs run free." i like New Morning a lot.

how about "don't think twice it's alright." grr you passive aggressive fucko

This one is great!

"this morning I looked out my window and found-
a bluebird singing but there was no one around.

At night I lay alone in my bed-
With an image of you going around in my head."

Christopher Ricks thinks Dylan's rhyming of "Mozambique" with "cheek to cheek" is brilliant. Crazy old fool.
Lester Bangs did a brilliant demolition of Desire, that song and Joey in particular.
It's such patronising excoticism. Noble savage and all that colonialist guff. And such hackneyed rhymes and banal cliches:

I'd like to spend some time in Mozambique
All the couples dancing cheek to cheek
It's very nice to stay a weeke or two...
There's lots of pretty girls in Mozambique
Andl plenty time for good romance...
Magic in a magical land

Now, from the xtian period, I know Bob's been called out before for this immortal opening couplet: "Senor, senor, do you know where we're headin'? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?"

Stripper: Check out these poems. They're from 13th century Italy.
Dylan: Wow! These poems go straight to my soul!

I've never heard "Don't Think Twice" as passive aggressive -- I think it's aggressive aggressive. Nothing much passive about "you just sorta wasted my precious time." It's in my pantheon of great Dylan fuck-yous, along side "Idiot Wind" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Most Likely You'll Go Your way..." ("you say my kisses aren't like his/ I'm not gonna tell you why that is")

But anyway, we're here to bury Dylan not praise, right, so..."Hurricane" is full of howlers, but this verse in particular is fingernails/chalkboard:

Rubin could take a man out with just one punch
But he never did like to talk about it all that much.
It's my work, he'd say, and I do it for pay
And when it's over I'd just as soon go on my way
Up to some paradise
Where the trout streams flow and the air is nice
And ride a horse along a trail.
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse.

I love "Empire Burlesque," btw.

Are you out of your mind? Have you never played with crayons? Where I come from, if you ask people what color the sun is, they'll say "yellow".

The worst lines are on "Under The Red Sky".

My pick would be "lay lady lay lay across my big brass bed". A frisky Bob = ewww.

I'd go along with this, except for "Isis". Also, I still like that album a lot, anyway.

(funny thing is, my wife loves that song, and it's one of the handful of Dylan tunes I know on guitar, so she often asks me to play it for her -- it feels kinda weird to sing it to the woman you love)

in some ways, that's Dylan's BEST nonsense (or not) couplet,
because it's exactly the point at which he's proving he could sing anything into the song
(there's the ring of a chuckle in his voice when he sings it)
but when I listen it does sound like it's a twisted (phallic?) metaphor

anyway, he was clearly having fun so more power to him

p.s. who will love me in the night when i'm horny?
i was in army of lovers .i like guys and girls.

Again, crayons! Are there any adults out there who would call the sun yellow?

Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200,000 for yellow sun

If I had my love here tonight
I'd be so happy. I'd be so bright.
And if I had my love by my side
I'd be so happy so satisfied.
But I've wandered so far away
that I can't see the light of the day.
But I know the time will come
when I see the light of the sun.

I got a friend who's hanging on the line.
I want to help him 'cause I've got the time.
When people say look out for yourself.
Well what's the use if it's for yourself.
If you've got nobody you can give to
then you might as well just be on that shelf.
But I hope the time will come
When they'll see the light of the sun.

O come see that yellow sun come shining.
It'll turn you on. It'll turn you around.
O come see that yellow sun come shining.
I'll turn you on. It'll turn you around.
But everybody suffers a little pain.
When there's no sun and only the rain.
So if you've been hurt then,
show your wound and smile.
And it will be all right in a while.

Yellow sun keep on shining............

Yellow Sun was the first thermonuclear weapon developed for operational service in the UK. Yellow Sun was a fission/fusion device intended for airdrop. The name referred to the bomb's casing, while the physics package was Green Grass. The neutron source for the physics package was called Blue Stone.

The initial Yellow Sun Stage 1 used the Green Bamboo tamper boosted fission warhead while Yellow Sun Stage 2 used a Green Granite fusion warhead with a yield of 400Kt.

Yellow Sun Mk1 was essentially a boosted fission weapon with a yield of about 500KT. Any weapon with a yield in excess of 500Kt was referred to as a Megaton weapon. Yellow Sun was also known as "Bomb, HE, 7000lb, HC"

Yellow Sun Mk2 had a yield of 1Mt. Yellow Sun was withdrawn when the RAF relinquished the strategic nuclear deterrent to the Royal Navy Polaris submarines.

Two Reasons why the Sun appears yellow:

1. The Sun's surface temperature (5,500 degrees C) produces a range of visible light (red to blue) in which yellow is the most plentiful, but not much more than other colors it produces. If the Sun were cooler, say 2,500 degrees C, it would look red, like the stars Antares and Betelgeuse. Or if the Sun were hotter, say 15,000 degrees C, it would look blue, like the star Rigel.

2 The Earth's atmosphere acts as a kind of light filter. Some colors are filtered more than others. The Sun is a yellow star, but the Earth's atmosphere makes the Sun look more yellow than it appears than if you were to observe it from space where it would appear more white than yellow...

Can't fucking stand "Hurricane" and never could.

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), February 12th, 2005.

I just did this lab in astronomy class (my school, Georgia State, has one of the best astronomy depts in the country) and we had to locate stars in constellations and determine their apparent magnitude and color class. They were either red, blue, or yellow. Anyways even in every single graph and computer print-out in class they have the sun as yellow..

Wow, this thread was really absurd, mainly cos of the confusion with the color of the sun. I mean it seems like common sense.

"Crimson flames tied through my ears rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps"

I originally almost just typed the lyric straight with no introductory text but I was concerned it might be read as a candidate for bad Dylan. I don't have one of those, though.

Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars.

Her chestnut mare? Is this Jane Austen? WTF?

...unless it's meant to satirize precisely such exoticism? I've always heard Mozambique this way. There had been a ten-year civil war against colonialism prior to Desire's release. Surely Dylan is not writing blind about a random country, but critiquing the facile tourist-brochure view of the world?
And, re: Bangs on Joey...Dylan's not a reporter. Expecting the guy who writes lines like "the highway is for gamblers" not to be given to mythologizing is a bit naive. (besides, since when was glorifying criminals unacceptable?).

"Man Gave Names to All the Animals." Also,

"The motorcycle black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen..."

always strikes me as too Dylanesque, like he just just put the word "woman" through the dylan-symbol-machine, and it went a bit crazy.

I read somewhere that this is a reference to Roger McGuinn, who had a song named "Chestnut Mare". I'm not sure the exact meaning, but perhaps Dylan's ex-wife had a thing with McGuinn? It's some sort of personal symbolism, I believe.

A golden opportunity missed by ILM!

The kelp line in Sara is the worst.

I reserve special ire for "When the Night Comes Falling From The Sky" and how Dylan mewls the mixed metaphor "I can hear your trembling heart beat like a river."

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

i think my favorite version of "visions of johanna" now is the one on the no direction home sdtrk. it rocks so hard; fuck a "thin wild mercury"

A close call: Desire, Street Legal or Infidels for grossest lyricist indivisible from vocal smarm

*lyrics

Street Legal is a pretty weird album, I agree. Changing of the Guards really creeped me out when I first heard it. The lyrics seem to describe an apocalypse of some sort but the song itself is really upbeat and joyful. I still don't really understand what it is about. I almost suspect that it is meant as ironic critique of revolutionary and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, like "When the Ship Comes In", but I'm not sure.

Maybe it's just lazy and cryptic in a cynical way.

Love street legal

Street Legal is a more cynical cash-in than Knocked Out Loaded or whatever; the latter sounds like table scraps while the former really does sound like he cared enough to craft songs in the studio yet had no idea what to say except to imitate what fans thought Bob Dylan should sound like. I know plenty of his best songs boast throwaways and laugh lines (often the best part of'em) but the images in "Changing of the Guard" are more discrete than usual; they don't cohere, and as singer he doesn't try to make them cohere.

The bridge that you travel on
Goes to the Babylon

^^^ stuck in my head and driving me crazy

haha i see i was suffering the same symptoms in november of 2012

LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD

Again, crayons! Are there any adults out there who would call the sun yellow?

"Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule."

Not every bit of speed-inspired nonsense that popped into his head in the 60s was brilliant.

Ha yes. And it became an equally terrible album cover by the Stones.

"Conceit is a disease that the doctors got no cure
They've done a lot of research on it, but what it is, they're still not sure"
The whole song's pretty embarrassing. There are tons of truly awful Dylan lyrics, and tons of really great ones, he's the original hit-and-miss lyricist.

― Joubert, Friday, February 11, 2005 12:38 PM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes we have a winner, I like oh mercy but totally forgot about this tune

maybe the sun NEVER looks yellow from new zealand??????!????

Now the beach is deserted, except for some KELP

Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the year of who knows when

or

Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch

The worst line in a Bob Dylan song is the one he never delivers in "Man Gave Names to All the Animals"

He saw an animal as smooth as glass
Slithering his way through the grass
Saw him disappear by a tree near a lake...

Portentous in every definition of the word

Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch

That’s a great line—I think about it a lot. Hotter than a crotch!

Now the house was deserted — except for the ELF

That’s a great line—I think about it a lot. Hotter than a crotch!

LOL, I know! I think it's awful in a good way - impossible to forget, like whenever it's hot outside, I think of that line.

And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table,
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table,
I AM THE TABLE. I AM THE TABLE.