Dylan's Visions of Sin. Christopher Ricks

title as given in Lyrics 1962–1985, Clothes Line, was the better for not letting sarcasm have the last word, as against Clothes Line Saga.

      It feels like a parody of a way of lifelessness. And so it is, while taking a shot at a previous shot at this: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe, which had been a hit with its doggèd tedium, its Papa said, and Mama said, and Brother said. Hard to get flatter-footed than the Ode.¹⁴⁸ Hard, but not impossible. For along came Dylan and levelled it some more, the flatly faithful flat-liner. Full of mindless questions, the song is an answer of a sort, and something of a parody.

      As so often in Dylan, there may be a touch of the nursery rhyme (and nursery rhymes like to accommodate parodies).

      The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

      When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

      The song avails itself of this in its nose / clothes lines, but its social setting doesn’t have any maids to help out around here with the chores. And there will be nothing as penetrating as a peck, although there is a pecking order: “Papa yelled outside ‘Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring them clothes.’”

      It starts bored, and it stays that way.

      After a while we took in the clothes

      Nobody said very much

      To put it mildly. This is classic boredom, the more so because not really admitted to, with not just the vacancy but the vacuum of smalltown small talk. Why are you telling me all this? “Well, just because”.

      Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants

      Which nobody really wanted to touch

      Really? And they are bleached of any real wildness, those “old wild shirts”. The Oxford English Dictionary has, under “wild”:

      U.S. slang. Remarkable, unusual, exciting. Used as a general term of approbation . . . “amazing range of colours (including some wild marble-like effects)”.

      Exciting? Amazing? Forget it. “It was January the thirtieth / And everybody was feelin’ fine”. (“Feelin’ fine” has never been so evacuated in the delivery. Not tonic, catatonic.) January the thirtieth, eh. Why that day? (King Charles I’s deathday? The birthday of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had run for Vice-President but had not “gone mad”?) Who knows? Who cares? Just being retentive as to the annals, that’s all. “Hmm, say, that’s too bad”. Sloth, which shoulders nothing, shrugs its shoulders, shrugs everything off. “Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it”. Or can do about anything, come to that. Or can do, period.

      The conversation from the start has proceeded apace. A sluggish pace.

      Mama come in and picked up a book

      An’ Papa asked her what it was

      Someone else asked, “What do you care?”

      Papa said, “Well, just because”

      The boredom is always edgy, on the brink of bad temper (you might think of the opening scenes of the film Badlands, with its smalltown voice-over of incipient family violence). Everything is a matter of course: “Mama, of course, she said, ‘Hi!’” – the voice flattening the exclamation mark, since not-caring is never marked by exclamations. “Well, I just do what I’m told / So, I did it, of course”. Everything just takes its course. And nothing courses, least of all through anybody’s veins.

      “The next day everybody got up” – No!!?*!?!* You gotta be kidding.

      If people ask you pointless questions, you do well to stick to your rights, and to answer with matching pointlessness:

      I reached up, touched my shirt

      And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”

      I said, “Some of ’em, not all of ’em”

      He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”

      I said, “Sometime, not all the time”

      The empty questions, the cagey answers, let nothing out, give nothing away. (Here’s some nothing for you, says the song all the way through.) Nothing to give, nothing gives. Or rather, not quite nothing, for there is that one surprising yelp or yodel from Dylan, exultation even, of “Yoo ooh” in the last verse just before the end, as though signalling a way out, an end, an escape from a world in which when “my neighbor, he blew his nose”, that just might be the most interesting thing that you’ll ever hear from him. Hold on to that little yelp, for it is just about all that might give you a glimpse of hope. For the end of the song doesn’t sound as though it can imagine much of a way out:

      Well, I just do what I’m told

      So, I did it, of course

      I went back in the house and Mama met me

      And then I shut all the doors