For a better reading experience, make sure to listen to the songs before you read the entries. You can see this and previous entries at rorschachmusic.substack.com, “Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez  It’s a weird convention that’s quite unique to song lyrics that things must remain vague so that listeners can treat the song as if it’s about them. No one complains that, in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Kathy doesn’t say,”My love for [insert your name here] resembles the eternal rocks beneath,” so why is it such a problem in music? For example, I once read a critical review of one of John Lennon’s solo albums that said, “The love songs are incredibly moving, provided that you happen to be in love, specifically, with Yoko Ono.” But I’ve never felt this way about Lennon’s songs – or, indeed, any highly specific love song – because surely the very root of empathy is the ability to feel what other people are feeling? Basically, if you can’t relate to a song like this, it might be your problem. “Diamonds and Rust” is a breakup song, but it’s also very specifically a song about breaking up with Bob Dylan. So a bit of background is in order: Joan Baez was the beloved queen of the folk scene long before Dylan slouched onto the scene. In “Diamonds and Rust,” she sings “You arrived on the scene already a legend / the unwashed phenomenon,” but she’s actually being a bit modest. His rise was fast, but it probably wouldn’t have been nearly as effortless if he hadn’t had Baez supporting him. She taught him the ropes, brought him on stage with her at every show, introduced him to her fans and promoters, and covered his songs with her huge audience. Along the way, they fell in love. It does seem, though, to have been a motherly sort of love:
“The madonna” seems to have been a nickname Dylan had for her, as it crops up in a number of his early songs. This says something not-entirely-healthy about how he saw Baez, and something equally unhealthy about how he saw himself (i.e. as Jesus). In less than four years, Dylan had bought deeply into his own messiah-ness, and had transformed from the aw-shucks traveling hobo character of his early days to his meth-addled hipster prophet persona. By his 1965 peak, Baez had become an uncool hippy accessory. While he did bring Baez along with him on his first UK tour, he did not invite her on stage. If you watch Don’t Look Back, the documentary about the tour, you’ll see him mock her relentlessly in front of Allen Ginsberg and his other hipster friends. It’s more than a bit embarrassing. By the end of that tour in 1965, they’d broken up and Dylan had married Sara Lownds, a hip New York model, with whom he’d father four kids (including one Wallflower). Dylan and Baez didn’t speak for nearly a decade. And then, in 1974, Dylan called her up on the telephone, out of the blue, and invited her to tour with him. “Diamonds and Rust” is about that phone call, and the Proustian rush of memories that followed hearing that distinctive voice on the line. And the song is truly Proustian, the way she plays with time and memory and nostalgia. She remains her present self, aware of all the bad things that happened, all the hurt that followed, but she’s also able to inhabit fully those feelings from before, and experience them like no time has passed. The lyrics are deliberately fractured, so that the present moment and the memories from the past are able to inhabit the same space. In this verse, for example, the love and the hurt and the prosaic-present all collide:
(Also: imagine having Bob Dylan tell you that your poetry is lousy!). It’s the incredible bridge where the song takes off: in a barrage, the relentless burst of memories and feelings almost overruns her, and her words come so fast she’s left almost breathless:
The phrase that breaks me, of course, is “speaking strictly for me.” While the structure and tense of this bridge song suggests she has been catapulted back into that perfect moment of happiness back in 1963, this line reminds us that she’s actually standing in disbelief by her telephone in 1974. Her happy memories are forever colored by her later realization that, even in that moment of absolute bliss, he didn’t love her like she loved him. But Joanie rallies a bit after this realization, and there’s a lovely bit of redemptive bolshiness in the last verse:
(I love how she’s throws that “your poetry was lousy” line right back at him here). The next year, Dylan wrote one of his most beautiful songs, “Oh Sister,” which is inspired, in part, by Baez’s coldness towards him on the tour that followed the telephone conversation. Dylan's song ends:
But by this time, Baez was done with Dylan. Her response song to “Oh Sister” – which she cleverly called “O Brother!” – has none of the wistfulness of “Diamonds and Rust”: It begins “How in the name of the Father and the Son did I come to be your sister?” and ends:
But it’s not nearly as good a song as “Diamonds and Rust,” because it lacks the contrary heartfelt emotions, captured in the song’s title, which make the earlier song so much more interesting. “The Lonely 1” by Wilco  I know I wrote about Wilco a week or two ago, but I’ve been wanting to use these mini-essays as an avenue to explore my irrational hatred for late-period Wilco for a while, and I think this song is my way in. By any measure, I had a pretty lonely nineties, but not for lack of trying. I moved to Canada from England in 1992, with only my mum and brother, and went straight from an idyllic British primary school with lots of friends to a Canadian middle school populated by the type of students who, if asked to participate in the Milgram experiment, would have electrocuted the test subject before the doctor had even entered the room. I tried to make friends with these monsters. My first new friend seemed alright. We spent a lot of time playing ClayFighter in his wood-paneled basement on his SNES. After six months of hanging out, I received a Christmas card from him (in July) that told me to kill myself. It was written in crayon. But I rallied, and shortly after I struck up a friendship with a pretty girl in my class. We talked almost every night on the phone, for hours. I remember being so happy, lying on the ground, my shoes on the wall, staring at the spackling on the ceiling with my finger curled around the phone cord. After several months of these phone calls, in which I spilled my heart and soul, she sent me a letter saying that the whole thing was a gag, and that her friends had been listening on the other line laughing at me. These sorts of betrayals happened again and again, with varying levels of drama and cruelty. Because of this, coupled with the daily bullying (I once spent an entire school assembly having wads of chewed gum rubbed into my hair by the kids behind me), I eventually decided that being friends with people was more trouble than it was worth. But I did have music. My first real friends were Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. Both of these smart, creative, bookish, sensitive, melancholy, artistic men gave me faith that I was not alone. Both of them also held the opinion that the world, and most of the people in it, are pretty awful, which was my experience at the time, and, let’s be honest, still is.¹ As I got older, my taste in music matured, as did I (a bit). I discovered Wilco in 1998, when I was seventeen. I was lining up for Bob Dylan tickets at a mall in Calgary, and the cool old dudes in front of me were talking about Mermaid Avenue, the album of Woody Guthrie songs interpreted by Billy Bragg and this up-and-coming American band called Wilco. I went out and bought the record right after I got my Dylan tickets, mostly because of Guthrie and Bragg – but, when I got home, I was most thrilled by the Wilco songs. I bought their album Being There, shortly after, and I adored it. But the next year Summerteeth came out, and it became (and has remained) my Favorite Album Of All Time™. I could write forever about Summerteeth, but essentially it gave me what Nirvana gave me (relatable sadness and loneliness, intelligence) with an extra heaping of complexity and artistry. Where Kurt saw the world as full of punk heroes and fratboy bullies, Tweedy seemed more mired in his internal melancholy, at war with his own mind, and lost in an unkind world. Lines from that album still haunt me: “Why, I wonder, is my heart full of holes?” “I’m worried, because I’m always in love,” “How to fight loneliness? Just smile all the time,” “It’s just a dream he keeps having, and it doesn’t seem to mean anything.” And the sound! Summerteeth sounded uncannily like the noise that already existed in my own head: strange, mysterious, and stuck in the middle of a war between beauty and sadness. Discovering this record was like discovering someone outside me who not only understood me completely, but also experienced the world like I did. And, oh, how I needed that.² The other thing that facilitated this sense of connection was the fact that Tweedy seemed to have felt a similar sense of connection with his own musical idols. Two of his Golden Smog songs speak to it directly: In “Radio King,” for example, he sings:
And in “I Can’t Keep From Talking,” he sings:
But his best song about this “relationship” is “The Lonely 1,” the penultimate track from Being There. It’s a crystalline creation – just two verses and two choruses – and there’s not a word out of place. It reminds me of “Eleanor Rigby,” another meticulous song about loneliness, in both its sparseness and lack of sentimentality. It begins with a similar scene to “I Can’t Keep From Talking”: the narrator is waiting outside the venue for his hero to leave after the show. When he does emerge – “shining guitar hung on gold lamé” – he walks right past without signing an autograph. Still, the narrator feels a momentary connection: “I caught your eye in the camera’s flash.” Importantly, it’s not the fame or the clothes or the aura-of-cool that he connects to: It’s the fact that, from the music, he knows the artist suffers like he does. The next verse begins:
This resonates with me too: I had a spiritual experience when Jeff Tweedy played a solo show at the Trinity Chapel in Toronto in the early 2000s. But the review of the show in Toronto’s Now magazine ripped it to pieces; it said that fans were filing out in droves before the show ended, and that wasn’t true. Like the narrator of “The Lonely 1,” I wrote a letter to Now correcting the error, and it got printed in the next issue. I wrote in his defense. I still have a copy. And then there’s the crushing final verse:
Tweedy knows that there's something delusory and desperate about this. After all, he doesn’t sing that “we” are the lonely ones; he remains insistent that it’s the singer alone who's lonely. But we don't buy it; we know he's relieving himself of the burden of his own reality by projecting it on someone else. And I’m similarly aware that my sense of connection to Tweedy is based on my own subjective (and equally needy) interpretation of a piece of art that at-no-point purported to offer any true insight into its creator, or his similarity to me. But it felt that way. This delusion, I think, is why I turned on Jeff Tweedy later. As more and more Wilco albums came out, it became harder and harder to hang onto the image of Tweedy I had constructed in my head. The new layers didn't fit with my old image. And (unfairly to him) this felt like a betrayal, like he had switched from being a friend I knew so well to the one sticking abusive Christmas cards in my mailbox. It's unreasonable, but there it is. Sadly, I think the lesson I’ve taken from all of these experiences is that you can never really know or trust anyone, and any moment of connection we feel with anyone is probably largely in our heads. That said, delusions aren’t so bad: I still go back to Summerteeth for that feeling of communion. And I still cling to my friendships, despite lingering suspicions that they’re probably based on some fundamental misunderstanding that will one day come back to bite me. But I keep trying, because what else am I supposed to do? “Bad Timing” by Blue Rodeo  If Blue Rodeo’s 1994 album Five Days In July was a Tom Petty album, it would be my third-favorite Tom Petty album. The three singles – “Five Days In May,” “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet,” and “Bad Timing” – are all-time classic country-rock songs. The narrator of “Bad Timing” knows he missed his chance for true love, and every effort he makes to resuscitate things just makes things worse. So it's a very-relatable song about regret and longing and love and the hope of forgiveness. There’s nothing complex or strange or deliberately artful about it: it’s a straight-speaking, right-on-the-money country song that speaks the truth without pretension. I love it. 1 My fandom was such that the crayon Christmas card I mentioned earlier actually read “Curt CobAyn WaS a LoSER FaG who SUKKED Michel Jacksons DicK ANd You SHOulD Kill Yourself Lik He Did”. 2 I met Jeff Tweedy twice. The second time was in Toronto on the Ghost is Born tour in 2003. After their gig, I went back into the venue to use the bathroom, and the band was on the stage packing up their gear. I had just finished my own album, and I wanted to give it to Tweedy, so I walked up to him — so nervous — and mumbled something about how much his music meant to me, and said I had something to give him. In retrospect, that sounded vaguely threatening and I should have been more specific. I began to fumble to get my bag open to find the CD, but I was shaking too much to undo the clasp. He was nice, and said “Hey, I like your bag” to fill in the awkward moment. I decided to compound the awkwardness and replied “You can have it!” and then tried, quite persistently, and for quite a long time, to make him take my bag. Not my finest moment. You can read older entries on the Rorschach Music website. You can hear Jim's own music on his other site, Jim Clements Music. If you liked this post, please share it!
© 2022 Jim Clements
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Week 30: Telephones
October 16, 2022
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