inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
You can’t be blamed for being lucky – but you can be disliked for it, and you are likely to be envied for it. All you can do is shrug and propitiate (“I can’t help it if I’m lucky”). It was good of Dylan to wish us well at the end of an interview in 1965:
Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?
“Good luck!”
You don’t say that in your songs.
“Oh, yes I do; every song tails off with, ‘Good Luck – I hope you make it.’”77
It is a nice thought that every Dylan song tails off with “Good Luck” to those of us who are listening to it, but what about those whom the song addresses as you?78 Positively 4th Street does not tail off, it heads off, and in any case it does not tail off with “Good Luck” to its interluckitor. Dylan’s farewell in the interview has a cadence that is illuminatingly close to the wording of the cited farewell in this song from the very same year.
“Good Luck – I hope you make it”
“Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
The feeling of paralysis (the root notion of fascination79) is a consequence of the counterpointing – or counterpunching – of the units musical and verbal. Musically, the unit is of four lines, but verbally (as lyrics) the unit has a rhyme scheme that extends over eight lines. Positively 4th and 8th. The effect is of a sequence that both is and is not intensely repetitive. So while musically the song is in twelve verses, rhymingly it is in six. The armour-plated template in each set is simply the rhyming of lines two and six, and of lines four and eight. But Dylan, as so often, loves not only to attend but to bend his attention, and so to intensify, and what we hear within those first eight lines is the not-letting-go of any of the first four lines: “nerve” is repeated in the fifth line, the whole line back again as though in a lethal litany; “lend” takes up “friend”; “on” off-rhymes with “down”; and “winning” is in a clinch with “grinning”. (All the more a clinch in that the final rhyme, here as throughout, is a disyllabic rhyme, all the way from this grinning / winning to the final be you / see you.) As though on probation, not one line of the first four is let off its obligation to report back during the ensuing four.
Whereupon the next set can afford to relax, as though the template should be enough for now (that / at, and show it / know it), yet not quite enough, since Dylan threateningly dandles a rhyme-line from the first verse, whose “When I was down” immediately gets re-charged here:
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
If you’re so hurt
Why then don’t you show it
You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it80
The accuser is the one who had faith to lose. The music and the voice combine to create a chilling thrilling pause after that word “lose”, so that “And you know it”, pouncing, brooks no resistance.
Such an evocation of faith negated is a positive achievement, because it makes sense only as founded upon faith in the possibility of something better. For every Positively 4th Street about faith misplaced in friendship, there is a Bob Dylan’s Dream about friendship’s solid solidarity for all its pains and losses. And in any case the vibrant anger in Positively 4th Street does itself directly convey what friendship ought to be and can be. For how could there be a true indictment of false friends that didn’t call upon and call up true friends?
But now it settles into third, fourth, and fifth sets of verses, all in the sedate template. First, my back / contact, and in with / begin with:
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
Then, embrace / place, and rob them / problem:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem
“Understand” is irresistible (“Don’t you understand”), an unobtrusive triumph, mindful both of “You just stood there” at the beginning and of the undeviating repetition of “You could stand inside my shoes” at the end.
But the problem / rob them rhyme is something of a problem. The rhyme is a touch far-fetched, and is it worth the carriage? Perhaps, but that would have to be the point, for the other rhymes are living near at hand, and are simply telling: friend / lend, grinning / winning . . . The rhyme problem / rob them precipitates a different world or mood, suggesting the uneasy bravura of half sick / traffic in Absolutely Sweet Marie (absolutely sweet there). Nothing wrong with one pair of rhymes asking a different kind of attention (not more attention, really) than do the other rhyme-pairs in a song, and this would be congruent with the perplexity of the syntax in this verse. For whereas elsewhere in Positively 4th Street the syntax is positively forthright, advancing straight forward, here it is circuitous, and it pauses for a moment upon “Perhaps”:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
What is it (the phrase is cryptic) to embrace heartbreaks? To enjoy one’s own sufferings? To be sicklily solicitous of other people’s suffering, creepily commiserating away? And do these tangents amount to one of those mysterious triumphs of phrasing that exquisitely elude paraphrase (like “One too many mornings / And a thousand miles behind”), or is this one of those occasions when something eludes not us but the artist? Dylan is a master of living derangements of syntax81 but even he must sometimes let things slip. Dr Johnson ventured to characterize as an imperfectionist that Dylanesque writer William Shakespeare:82
It is incident
