“but I could leave today”, so there may or may not be a little time in hand. The rhyme today / someday has a stranded feeling, reluctant to leave (-day after -day), especially when combined with the wistful effect in the move from the beginning to the end of the line: “Somewhere down the road someday”.
Added to all of which, it feels truly like the last verse, because in the sentence that makes up these two lines (the penultimate line and then the last line) the song concedes what it needs to:
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
The singer (the young Dylan, yes, but the point is art, not autobiographical application) is truthful and rueful: I wouldn’t want even to seem to upstage you or pretend that I’ve had your life’s experiences, including the hard travelling of the hard old days. Hard, though, my disclaimer, for I do have some claim to share things with you, don’t I? And then “The very last thing” turns out to be almost the very last thing in the song: that is, it opens the very last sentence of the song but it does not close the song. For the very last line of the song is not where those words occur.
This is an arc completed, not a feeling vacated. Our mind is tipped off – through Dylan’s play with the phrase “The very last thing” – and so is our ear: for this is the first time, the only time, then, that a rhyme has returned in the song: too / you in the one but last verse, and then do / too in these very last lines. (“Travelin’ too”: the word has itself travelled on from the previous stanza: “that traveled with you”.)
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough
’Cause there’s not many men ’ve done the things that you’ve done
– so Dylan sings, finding a way of making this truth of gratitude’s benign insatiability ring true. Some of the tribute’s authenticity, and its being so entirely an envy-free zone, must come from the reluctance to make an inordinate claim even for the singer whom you are honouring, audible in “not many men”. Any men, really, when it comes to the world that Dylan is evoking? Let us leave it at not many men.
“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”: and other men than both Guthrie and Dylan are to be the beneficiaries of the song’s gratitude. Not only as being thanked both personally and on behalf of us all, but because of the nature of gratitude itself, which appreciates – even in the moment when it is grateful to genius – that genius is not solitary and can thrive only because of all the others that keep it company, “all the good people” that travel with it – and with the rest of us.
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
This is full of respect, even while the names themselves are duly differentiated: Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Leadbelly are spoken of famously and familiarly, though not impudently. Woody Guthrie is Woody in the title, Song to Woody, but in the song proper he is treated with a propriety that is saved from being too deferential by the affectionately chaffing lead-in: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song” (that might seem cheeky of young me, but honestly it isn’t), and
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
That is quite something to say, and to sing, and it asks – as art, I mean, not as a personal plea – a substantiated trust that we will take it in the spirit in which it is offered: not as false modesty but as true tribute. For the song has not moved, as it so easily might have done, from the words of the first verse, “I’m seein’ your world”, to something along the lines of “Now I’m goin’ to show you my world”, but to a world that is neither yours, Woody Guthrie, nor mine (as yet . . .), “a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along”. And “I know that you know” can, on this happy unenvious occasion, have nothing of the icy negation of Positively 4th Street with its soured repetition of the word “know”. No?
Positively 4th Street
If you want your good book to get a bad review, have a friend review it. Envy has a way, regrettably and even regretfully, of rearing its sore head. Of course friendship thinks of itself as the enemy of envy, but then there is nothing more embitteredly envious than a friendship betrayed.
You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning
You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning
But if there had always been positively no two-way street, they wouldn’t now be standing in this acid rain.
For friendship (and Positively 4th Street has to be a song about a friendship that went wrong, that soured) differs most of all from love in this: that friendship has to be reciprocal, reciprocated. I can love you without your loving me, but I can’t be your friend without your being my friend. (My befriending you is something quite other.) “You just want to be on / The side that’s winning”? Careering into envy, are you? The song itself is concentratedly one-sided, and from the very beginning it makes clear that it is going to strike unrelentingly the same note and the same target.
This starts with the immediately metallic rhyme within “You got a lotta nerve”. (Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every arrow-strung line.) Then there’s the re-insistence, promptly, of the entire line repeated, “You got a lotta nerve”, same timing, same placing, pounding with the same instrument – and this with the very next line then saying yet once more “you got a”. (Helping hand to lend? You must be joking.) At once obsessedly repetitive and laconically flat-tongued, the song is a masterpiece of regulated hatred – the great phrase for the key-cold clarity (not charity) of Jane Austen.74 The fire next time, maybe, but the ice this time. Anyway, revenge is a dishing-it-out that is best eaten cold.75
Impact impinges. Repeatedly. The song exercises its sway while swaying (like a boxer), for it has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.76 “You just stood there grinning”: the song just stands there, not grinning, but grinding. Might it even be said to just stomp there? No, because it bobs a bout. So when we suddenly find (it is a surprise) “surprised” precipitating “paralyzed” –
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it
– it is that the song has realized its power, tonic and toxic, to paralyze its opponent.
“You say, ‘How are you?’
