Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing “Visions Of Johanna”
CD Review
Biograph, Bob Dylan, 3 CD set, Columbia Records, 1985
The other day my old socialist propagandist and gadfly 1960s folk revival commentator friend, Peter Paul Markin, regaled me with some stories about his early experiences following the musical ups and downs of the well-known singer-songwriter from that period, Bob Dylan. The strangest story revolved around Mr. Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport (R.I.) Folk Festival, then the premier showcase for virtually anything that could reasonably be called folk or roots music, and having the plug, literally (at least that is the way Pee-Pee told it, although there is a wealth of disputed oral testimony on the subject), pulled on him by one iconic folk legend singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Why? Apparently the “big tent” of American roots music did not include what has now become known in library CD collections as rather tame folk-rock, or rock-folk. Stuff done with mad amped electric guitar (and other electric instruments) rather than pure traditional acoustic instruments. So much wind as far as I can tell.
Needless to say such a story from back in the day, back in Pee-Pee day sounded bizarre to this writer who came by his Dylan aficionado-hood in the post-plug period (although when we when over the details again later the old arch-Stalinist fellow-traveler strong arm artist Seeger probably was capable of that kind of “soft” bureaucratic music hatchet job). That is those of us from the later edge of the generation of ‘68 who didn’t grow into Dylan singing Kumbaya or Chimes Of Freedom but rather the acid-etched period of the Blonde On Blonde album and stuff like Visions of Johanna. Just that few years made the different. Of course when Pee-Pee and I met on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster yellow brick road bus up on Russian Hill in San Francisco in the late summer of love, 1967 version, all such plugged, unplugged, distinctions were ancient archival history as we “dug” such beauties as Highway 61, the above-mentioned Blonde on Blonde, and Bringing It All Back Home without Seeger-ish interference. Just pass the pipe, please.
All this memory stuff though can be kind of tricky for an old man, old men, chattering in back porch Olde Saco face the ocean shoreline spots talking of this or that 1960s glory days memories, and unintended evocations. And evocation is really what drives this little screed. Evocations, or rather visions of Jewell, brought on by an untimely reference to Dylan’s own Visions of Johanna.
See that was our song, our summer of love, 1966 version, song. Jewell DeFarge and me, she of one thousand generations of French-Canadian American fragile beauty creation (okay, maybe I am a little high on the number but no instant beauty stuff). She of our hot Olde Saco High junior year getting ready to take on all comers to find our place in the sun, not the nasty Pee-Pee political place where you were doomed from the start, but starry night in heaven place. Hell, how can I explain it now to make sense? Maybe I will just take a step back describe it in light detail and be done with it, and done with visions too. Maybe.
Truth, in those days, those 1960s days, when I imagined girls (young women) I only thought of Botticelli Renaissance women like I saw down in Boston a bunch of times while hanging around Boston Common and you could hardly walk about ten feet before running in some young woman who a few centuries before would have been proud to model for old Botticelli. You know all airy, and thoughts of butterflies. Some loose garment, a sarong thing, going this way and that, long flowing angel hair, also going this way and that, no make-up but a twice-look beauty anyway, maybe some flowers in her hair, and at peace with herself. Or the look.
Enter Jewell DeFarge, all swirls, butterflies, and magic. And all secret eyes, secret blue eyes that spoke of transport, and less of desire, sexual desire, although that too was present, than elysian fields and midday walks. Strangely, well, maybe not so strangely, we met at the Olde Saco Beach one hot June day. She seeking shade and solitude, shade from the hot sun that would wreak havoc on that Botticelli skin, and solitude because she, like I, wanted to break-out of the common Olde Saco dream of finishing high school, getting some textile mill job or something like that, finding some guy to marriage and turning into our parents. She spoke of candles, burning incense, some reefer madnesses (we had both admitted to taking a few hits of anonymous offered reefer), and cloudless days. She spoke to me.
And so we spent our time together, our summer of love, our ocean swirl, our midday sun bonnet-protected walks, our solitude not speaking, our solitude speaking, and our break-out fever. And we spoke of cloud dreams, of ancient caves to live in, of some thatched peasant hut to live in, of simple seaside desires, and end of desire. But mainly we spoke in softness, in butterfly swirls, in sea spray mists, in cloudless cloudy skies, and, and, but enough. Let’s just call it visions of Jewell, and let’s just call it come September and she was gone, that Botticelli smile, that hair furious in the wind gone. And fifty years later the mystery behind that smile still haunts recalled dreams.
*****
Visions Of Johanna by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze
I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him
Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”
But like Louise always says
“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music
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