Free Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks Page A

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 fascination 79 ) is a consequenceof 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 it 80
    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, becauseit 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 /