You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning
You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning
But if there had always been positively no two-way street, they wouldn’t now be standing in this acid rain.
For friendship (and Positively 4th Street has to be a song about a friendship that went wrong, that soured) differs most of all from love in this: that friendship has to be reciprocal, reciprocated. I can love you without your loving me, but I can’t be your friend without your being my friend. (My befriending you is something quite other.) “You just want to be on / The side that’s winning”? Careering into envy, are you? The song itself is concentratedly one-sided, and from the very beginning it makes clear that it is going to strike unrelentingly the same note and the same target.
This starts with the immediately metallic rhyme within “You got a lotta nerve”. (Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every arrow-strung line.) Then there’s the re-insistence, promptly, of the entire line repeated, “You got a lotta nerve”, same timing, same placing, pounding with the same instrument – and this with the very next line then saying yet once more “you got a”. (Helping hand to lend? You must be joking.) At once obsessedly repetitive and laconically flat-tongued, the song is a masterpiece of regulated hatred – the great phrase for the key-cold clarity (not charity) of Jane Austen.74 The fire next time, maybe, but the ice this time. Anyway, revenge is a dishing-it-out that is best eaten cold.75
Impact impinges. Repeatedly. The song exercises its sway while swaying (like a boxer), for it has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.76 “You just stood there grinning”: the song just stands there, not grinning, but grinding. Might it even be said to just stomp there? No, because it bobs a bout. So when we suddenly find (it is a surprise) “surprised” precipitating “paralyzed” –
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it
– it is that the song has realized its power, tonic and toxic, to paralyze its opponent.
“You say, ‘How are you?’ ‘Good luck’”. Disarming? No, and Dylan declines to lower his guard. For luck invites envy, as is understood in Idiot Wind:
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
You can’t be blamed for being lucky – but you can be disliked for it, and you are likely to be envied for it. All you can do is shrug and propitiate (“I can’t help it if I’m lucky”). It was good of Dylan to wish us well at the end of an interview in 1965:
Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?
“Good luck!”
You don’t say that in your songs.
“Oh, yes I do; every song tails off with, ‘Good Luck – I hope you make it.’”77
It is a nice thought that every Dylan song tails off with “Good Luck” to those of us who are listening to it, but what about those whom the song addresses as you?78 Positively 4th Street does not tail off, it heads off, and in any case it does not tail off with “Good Luck” to its interluckitor. Dylan’s farewell in the interview has a cadence that is illuminatingly close to the wording of the cited farewell in this song from the very same year.
“Good Luck – I hope you make it”
“Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
The feeling of paralysis (the root notion of fascination79) is a consequence of the counterpointing – or counterpunching – of the units musical and verbal. Musically, the unit is of four lines, but verbally (as lyrics) the unit has a rhyme scheme that extends over eight lines. Positively 4th and 8th. The effect is of a sequence that both is and is not intensely repetitive. So while musically the song is in twelve verses, rhymingly it is in six. The armour-plated template in each set is simply the rhyming of lines two and six, and of lines four and eight. But Dylan, as so often, loves not only to attend but to bend his attention, and so to intensify, and what we hear within those first eight lines is the not-letting-go of any of the first four lines: “nerve” is repeated in the fifth line, the whole line back again as though in a lethal litany; “lend” takes up “friend”; “on” off-rhymes with “down”; and “winning” is in a clinch with “grinning”. (All the more a clinch in that the final rhyme, here as throughout, is a disyllabic rhyme, all the way from this grinning / winning to the final be you / see you.) As though on probation, not one line of the first four is let off its obligation to report back during the ensuing four.
Whereupon the next set can afford to relax, as though the template should be enough for now (that / at, and show it / know it), yet not quite enough, since Dylan threateningly dandles a rhyme-line from the first verse, whose “When I was down” immediately gets re-charged here:
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
If you’re so hurt
Why then don’t you show it
You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it80
The accuser is the one who had faith to lose. The music and the voice combine to create a chilling thrilling pause after that word “lose”, so that “And you know it”, pouncing, brooks no resistance.
Such an evocation of faith negated is a positive achievement, because it makes sense only as founded upon faith in the possibility of something better. For every Positively 4th Street about faith misplaced in friendship, there is a Bob Dylan’s Dream about friendship’s solid solidarity for all its pains and losses. And in any case the vibrant anger in Positively 4th Street does itself directly convey what friendship ought to be and can be. For how could there be a true indictment of false friends that didn’t call upon and call up true friends?
But now it settles into third, fourth, and fifth sets of verses, all in the sedate template. First, my back / contact, and in with / begin with:
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
Then, embrace / place, and rob them / problem:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If