Song Interpretations
Summer Days, Bob Dylan
February 18, 2007
When Bob Dylan began a concert from his mid-70s Rolling Thunder Revue with "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" one could be forgiven for not taking the song literally. It is no longer the wispy country song from Nashville Skyline, but an assurance to the audience: "Tonight I'll be staying here with you!" The lines take on new significance:
Is it really any wonder
The love that a stranger might receive.
You cast your spell and I went under,
I find it so difficult to leave.
It is hard not to hear that as a tribute to his audience.. and an admission of the way that adulation can act on him like a spell.. and what else can explain his year in year out presence on the stage.. sometimes in the smallest damn towns you can imagine.
In the second album of cover songs from the 90s, World Gone Wrong, Dylan sings someone else's lines:
I tried to be loving and treat you kind,
But it seems like you never right, you got no loyal mind.
I can't be good no more, once like I did before.
I can't be good, baby,
Honey, because the world's gone wrong.
It is the first song on the album.. and it sure sounds like Dylan is making an admission to his audience. The critical point here is that the singer refuses to admit that the loss is his own fault.. a sign of his own weakness. Nope, the "world's gone wrong".. that's why he can't go on like he once did.
It was not too many years previous that Daniel Lanois was urging Dylan that we could use more songs like "Masters of War or "Girl from the North Country".. and in Chronicles Dylan recalls his response: "I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn't have anything like those songs" (195). Now go back to that line: "I can't be good no more, once like I did before..." The trick of Dylan's last decade.. from Time Out of Mind in 1997 to Modern Times in 2006.. is his ability to make a virtue out of his creative dead end.
The song that to my mind most clearly sets out this mode of working is the glorious "Summer Days". The song has become a concert staple. Whenever Emily and I make up our imaginary set list for a concert, we know that song 14, the last song of the set before the encore, will be "Summer Days". The song has a weightier presence in concert than it did originally on Love and Theft.. the doodling sinuous guitars make it a beautiful and shimmering closer. But the more I listen to it, the more it seems to take on a programmatic character.
The opening and closing stanza of this blues-form song is suggestive:
Summer days, summer nights are gone
Summer days and the summer nights are gone
I know a place where there's still somethin' going on
In the context of a concert those lines could easily be taken to mean something like: "the old days are gone.. the 60s are gone.. but right here and now we still have some sparks left from that time." The concert set list may have included songs like "The Times They Are a Changin" or "Tambourine Man".. but it all gets closed down with this song that brushes all that away.. it's fun now, but it's gone.
The song has a lot of stanzas.. too many to examine them all. But let me look at a couple of them, emphasizing in each case the way in which Dylan addresses his position as an artist and as a performer on stage.
Well I'm drivin' in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, "You're a worn out star"
My pockets are loaded and I'm spending every dime
How can you say you love someone else when you know it's me all the time?
The previous line had made reference to giving a toast to the "King".. so the mention of a Cadillac car being driven by a worn out star calls to mind Elvis.. The image of a worn out Elvis, faded creatively, is a central rock trope. Dylan gives us an image that would perhaps make us want to look away with disgust: the star giving out money left and right.. asking, begging for adulation. Then comes the line that does not quite admit defeat: "How can you say you love someone else when you know it's me all the time?" Having morphed himself into the King, Dylan then wonders whether all the new voices are not after all simply versions of himself..
The following stanza picks up a new image:
Well, the fog's so thick you can't spy the land
The fog is so thick that you can't even spy the land
What good are you anyway, if you can't stand up to some old businessman?
Those opening lines leave us with the same struggling character.. this time not begging fans to return, but lost in a fog and unable to get a firm hold on anything. Then comes one of the most self-condemning lines of Dylan's work: "What good are you anyway, if you can't stand up to some old businessman?" The line is couched as a question, but surely the drift of the song would make this a rhetorical question. No, he can't stand up to some old businessman.. and it follows that he can't be good for anything.
That old businessman could well be the one that Dylan complains about in "All Along with Watchtower": "Businessmen they drink my wine/ Plowmen dig me earth.." The young Dylan could howl back: "None of them along the line/ Knows what any of it is worth".. The older Dylan can't put his hand on anything stable.. and is hardly certain how much any of that is really worth.
My goal is not to present a complete commentary on the song, but to indicate the key theme of the song: loss over time. It is a theme you can hear everywhere in Dylan's music over the last decade.. here are some lines from "Highlands":
The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over, and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away
That could almost be the rough draft for "Summer Days"..
To my mind this is a dangerous position for Dylan creatively, as it paints him into a corner. It is a strong theme to mine, but it also ties his hands when it comes to speaking out politically.. or when a disaster overtakes a city he loves.. the Summer Days are gone.. those days when someone really could write "Masters of War" are gone. There is a creative shackling inherent there.
But we do enjoy some pretty impressive sparks! Watch this YouTube clip of Dylan performing "Summer Days". Can anyone wonder why we travel such distances to see Dylan?
more song interpretations:
The Village Green Preservation Society, The Kinks
