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

xpost yo dog St Paul's got a ton of skyways too, it ain't just a mpls thing

And you chain birds to them? That seems mean.

New album has some clunkers, especially on "Tin Angel." "He pondered the future of his fate"? And this:

“Get up, stand up, you greedy-lipped wench
And cover your face or suffer the consequence
You are making my heart feel sick
Put your clothes back on, double-quick”

ze fkk?

"He pondered the future of his fate"

Hello David Coverdale

i don't know if this is the worst or the best:

Wiggle ’til you’re high, wiggle ’til you’re higher
Wiggle ’til you vomit fire

that's awesome is what that is

yeah under the red sky has some great oddball lyrics

Hey! Who could your lover be?
Hey! Who could your lover be?
Let me eat off his head so you can really see!

or
Handy Dandy, if every bone in his body was broken he would never admit it
He got an all-girl orchestra and when he says
“Strike up the band,” they hit it

i wouldn't say worst, and there's other keepers from Sara already referenced but

I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells,
I'd taken the cure and had just gotten through,
Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.

last line is just so yick

Like if Alanis Morrissette finally just wrote a song called "Dave"

alanis is gonna need a whole concept album to deal with Dave.

da croupier ot. I'm not a fan of I Shall Be Fee No. 10.

Well, I set my monkey on the log
And ordered him to do the Dog
He wagged his tail and shook his head
And he went and did the Cat instead
He’s a weird monkey, very funky

Sorry, I meant "otm" when I wrote "ot".

'sara' is one of my favorite dylan songs and performances but the concept is pretty appalling and that 'sad eyed lady' line is indeed cringeworthy.

Desire in general kind of straddles the line between being amazing and embarrassing, even more precariously than most of Dylan's albums.

haha, the "Sad-Eyed Lady" part is probably my favorite in that song! It's only line on the whole album where it's clear that this is broken-hearted Bobby Zimmerman, a guy who writes songs sometimes to work out his feelings, not the narrative voice of Bob Dylan, Teller Of Fantastic Tales. I actually prefer the latter usually (see the two Lily/Rosemary/Jack-of-Hearts threads) but I dig the former here as a moment of something cracking through.

Do you like "Blind Willie McTell"? I think it does a similar thing to what you're talking about when the song is suddenly en media res at the "St James Hotel" in the last verse. I like that part of the song a lot.

Listening to it now for the first time!

There are undoubtedly lots of bad lines from bad songs, but my collection is completely mid-'70s and earlier, so there are very few bad songs. I'll go with the second post and pick what I think is a bad line from a great song: "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken."

Doctor Casino otm as usual, it's the best part of that shabby album

if we're talking worst ~delivery~ of a line in a Dylan song then I'm inclined to agree on Davey Moore, haaaate that song & its whinnnne

aww thanks Euler! Thing is, Desire is probably the Dylan record I've played the most times, as it was one of the first ones I discovered in my parents' record collection and I was (and remain) totally hooked on "Black Diamond Bay" and "Isis."

see also Bob Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay" Characters Poll

i really like (most of) Desire. don't much care for "Sara", but the Sad-eyed Lady line is p cool imo

it's not even true! dylan wrote it in the studio in nashville

pretty ironic to pretend he's not a Teller Of Fantastic Tales in that bit

Xpost I think "the sun's not yellow it's chicken" is a great line indicating the, like, absurd cosmic grandeur of the speaker's egotism. I'm surprised to see it mentioned here tbh.

'blind willie mctell' is prob dylan's most perfectly formed lyric -- even his best songs usually have some throwaway lines, but not here. figures that he didn't even bother to release it for 10 years.

there's some very odd disagreement upthread about whether or not the sun is actually commonly considered to be yellow

the worst/funniest line in the pro-israel song "neighborhood bully" is:

WHEN HE DESTROYED A BOMB FACTORY
AIN'T NOBODY WAS GLAD
THOSE BOMBS WERE MEANT FOR HIM
HE WAS SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD!

from you're a big girl now:

"time is a jet plane
it moves too fast"

also from infidels another personal favorite:

YOU KNOW THEY USED TO GROW FOOD IN KANSAS
NOW THEY WANNA GROW IT ON THE MOON AND EAT IT RAW!!!

eating moon-food raw, that's a double entendre right

It's innocuous but it really bugs me:
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

No way dogg

"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.

the delivery of that line on the Live 1966 set is epic though

^^^

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.