If you have never heard Guy Davis’ version of Bob Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” you’re really missing something.
Unfortunately, I can’t make you sit down in a seedy bar with a glass of watery American beer and a plate of stale pretzels and a cloud of smoke and a worn-out sagging beauty eyeing you from the bar and the smell of urine and bacon drifting over the tables like yesterday’s politics so the song can start out at you just right, from the unbalanced jukebox in the corner, accordion and lead guitar poking through the din, and Guy Davis’ gravelly voice:
by the way, that’s a cute hat you’re wearin’
And that smile’s so hard to resist
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in dump like this?
All right– so that part is not so new. How about:
You know, I once knew a woman who looked like you,
She wanted a whole man, not just a half,
She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child,
You kind of remind me of her when you laugh.
In order to deal in this game, got to make the queen disappear,
It’s done with a flick of the wrist.
What’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this?
That’s better. I like that line about “whole man”, not just “half”. What is the missing half? Sexuality? Manliness? Why is he “only a child”? Because he doesn’t understand that this woman, this “queen”, is ready to immolate herself for something that baffles even his royal Bobness, but which Guy Davis sounds like he understands better than anyone.
A “whole” man? “I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul”. (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”).
Bob being Bob then announces:
You know, a woman like you should be at home,
That’s where you belong…
It boggles the mine that the same expansive mind that wrote “Only a Pawn in the Game” and “Masters of War” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Tangled up in Blue” could drop a dud like this on the listener. A woman belongs at home with her husband!
Well, it’s not really a “dud”. It’s an alive line. It’s a dumb idea, but a live one. So it’s a bad line, but not a dud. It’s poetry.
But she is out to make the Queen disappear, which means, she wants to get rid of all the dignity and prestige and meaningfulness that comes with being “at home” with her husband (who is himself probably out sitting in a bar with an assassin on his lap– wondering why she’s not at home where she belongs) and to that end, she makes herself subject to a man’s trivial whim, the flick of a wrist. That’s all it takes to persuade this woman to immolate herself.
Regrettably, Dylan doesn’t see women as whole persons. They only exist in halves, and always half of whatever the man in the lyric is doing. In “Things Have Changed”, he isn’t even fully evil because, after all, she is sitting in his lap, drinking champagne, so she is merely an accessory to the narrator’s despair. Her only hope for salvation is to rush home, grow some flowers and do some sewing, and wait for her man to arrive for dinner to validate her existence.
That does not mean it’s a bad song. No, it doesn’t.
You know you can make a name for yourself,
You can hear them tires squeal,
You can be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal.
Wow. You really owe it to yourself to hear Guy Davis scrunch those lines into that lovely bridge, without missing a half-breath or letting the tension slack, so that the “cut glass” really is a shock and the “make a deal” is inevitable.
The liberated Bob Dylan:
Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain?
Are you ready to risk it all,
Or is your love in vain?
“Is Your Love Is Vain”, from Street Legal.