Dylan's Visions of Sin (45 page)

The effect has something of the off-rhyme about it. For the unmistakable
rhyme
love / of
, see or rather hear
City of Gold
, a song that he
performed in 1980, now covered by the Dixie Hummingbirds on the CD of
Masked and Anonymous
:

“And the stuff dreams are made of”: good Shakespearean stuff, benign enough, unlike the growl of Philip Larkin:

“
Love
rhymes with
of
”. Such is the title of a generously revelatory essay by Anne Ferry.
³²³

There is “a wáy of”, and there is “a wáy óf ”. The one way of apprehending those words is pitched against another. There is a dual possibility in the
very word “stress”.
Sugar Baby
deals in stress, deals with it.

Prudence and temperance set themselves to engage stress, responsibly
anticipating all such movements as may prove incautious or immoderate.
Sugar Baby
opens with
open eyes, thanks to a prudent decision as to where to place oneself:

Prudence and temperance do not shrink from giving advice or from issuing admonitions such as these. For instance, don’t be too intense. Prudence and temperance concur in
such a turn of phrase as “Might as well . . .”, which is at once prudential and temperate, careful not to be precipitate or to overdo things, careful not to insist
Easily the best
thing would be to
. . . or
Much better to
. . . Settle for “Might as well keep going now”: this, as the conclusion of the refrain, both precedes and succeeds another
recommending of prudence, “Try to make things better for someone, sometimes, you just end up making it a thousand times worse” – a serpentine line that warns against the danger of
spilling and flooding.

Look before you leap, but first of all, station yourself, not where you look best but where you can best look.

Position yourself where you can best see (and can least be seen back?), where you can see not only what everybody in the world is up against but what everybody in the world is
up to. Bear in mind, and not only there, that – in the harsher terms from
Foot of Pride
–

“You can’t turn back – you can’t come back”: two halves of truths, these,
and saved from being virtue-ridden only by the
touches of comedy. First, that even if you can’tcome back, the word “back” can, since hereitis,coming back – after just a couple of lines – from “I got my back
to the sun”: back as “You can’t turn back”, and then, not only coming back but coming back again, as “you can’t come back”. Second, by a memory that comes
back, the memory of
Mississippi
earlier on “
Love And Theft
”, which had been happy to qualify what, for its part, it felt obliged to say on the matter: “You can
always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”.

In
Sugar Baby
the succeeding thought that opens ominously with “One day you’ll . . .” is out to lace a warning with a threat. Prudence and temperance, who need to watch
their propensity to italicize their wisdom (
mark my words
), do well to remember that they have the duty not only of offering good advice but of offering advice well. That is, in such a way
as to maximize the chances of people’s being willing to take it. “Sometimes we push too far”, not just go too far. And this goes even for the high-minded virtues themselves, for
here, too, we must not go too far. T. S. Eliot cautioned against too much prudence and temperance:

Of course one can “go too far” and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far
can possibly find out just how far one can go.
³²⁵

“One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are”. But on this particular day, listening to this song, we have to open up not our
eyes but our ears, since
Sugar Baby
is not verse-lines on a page but a sound-sequence on the waves. Which means that the things that might be said about the song’s movements will be
more than usually useless to anyone who does not have the song in the head.

As printed in the lyrics, the song’s opening is cast as four lines, two couplets that rhyme
intense / against
and
far / are
. But as voiced there are twelve units. You might
think of these as constituting a twelve-line verse, or as taking care to register within the location of those four long lines several edged divisions, but, either way, such is Dylan’s way
with these sub-units of his devising. This is not only where the song goes but how it goes. Get on down the lines when the lineation is set as sung:

The instrumental bass-line that has opened the song, and that precedes any of the words, may be heard as one sequence that is divided:

dark dark Darktown     dark dark Darktown     dark dark Darktown     dark . . .

Immediately following the instrumental opening there are the opening words. Looking down the line:

I got my backto the sun ’cause the light is too intense

But, heard and not seen, it goes like this:

Not “to the sun / ’cause the light . . .”, but “to the sun ’cause / the light is too intense”. As a friend of mine once turned it, comedy is
the secret of timing. But then so is tragedy.

The song’s beat is fourfold, and the rhythm of the instrumental opening is immediately confirmed by there being four syllables in each of the first two units. But the words that provide
the title and that later open the refrain,
“Sugar Baby”,
³²⁶
have their four syllables two by two, 2 x 2. The
rhythm of the words “Sugar Baby” is a dual rhythm, fourfold and twofold. And in pacing the song, Dylan pauses at certain points so as to make two syllables occupy the time and space
that in the basic scheme of things will be expected to be occupied by four syllables. It is this movement in the voicing, with its pauses (contemplative, disconcerted, riven, chary, sardonic,
shifting its grounds), that gives to the song its unique gait. The song does proceed down the road, down the line, but it never puts only its best foot forward and it never marches. More, the song
always plays the slow troubled subdivisions of the verse-lines against the single-minded momentum of the speedy refrain (wishing her God speed?), the lines of which always get on with it, without a
break, getting on down the road and down the line.

A shape in space for the song’s shaping in time might look like this.

Sugar Baby get on down the road, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

Sugar Baby get on down the line, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, you might as well keep going now

Sugar Baby get on down the road, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

Sugar Baby get on down the road, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

Sugar Baby get on down the line, you ain’t got no sense, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

All the pauses are designed to give us pause. Attentive to the mobility of the heart and head, which are often at odds with one another (and neither of them simply of one
mind), the pauses repay attention.

With the doubled weight not of four syllables but of two, “One day” is dilated so as to occupy – while speaking of time – the
time that on all the six previous occasions in this opening verse has been occupied by the expected count of four syllables that confirms the fourfold beat of the song:

and

and

Instead of those foursomes, a twosome: “One day”. This vocal dwelling upon “One day”
³²⁸
is then succeeded
at once by the local housing within the next line, this time not of two syllables instead of four, but of seven syllables instead of four:

Opening up, yes indeed. Especially when this expanded syllabification is then compounded by the reach of the open “and”, out on the end of the arm of the line. This
is a line that does not run, as it does on the page,

– or, as the sense-units would have it,

– but is audible as the footfalls of this:

At the brink, “and”. In
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot transformed Oliver Goldsmith’s song by a tiny unsettling re-settling, re-setting on the page
Goldsmith’s conjunction “and” in an inspired disjunction. Goldsmith:

Eliot:

The record could not, except in
Back to the Future
, have been “
Love And Theft
”, but love and theft are in evidence there in Goldsmith – and in
Eliot, whose lines pace about the room with a different view of these matters.

A road may have cracks where you had better step with caution. The movement from one verse of
Sugar Baby
to another is not a train of thought that moves on metalled ways but is firmly
footing. What is it, for instance, that grounds the move from “you’ll see where we are”, via the refrain (“get on down the road”), to “Some of these
bootleggers”?