Ghosts of Electricity
The magisterial incomprehensibility of Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna.’
I.
Over the restless course of Bob Dylan’s six-decade-plus career, the 83-year-old singer-songwriter has adopted a different narrative persona for each successive stage of his personal and musical journey. There was the young protest singer of the early 1960s who wrote “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are a-Changing”; this was followed by the period of surreal lyrics and an electrified rock band, resulting in three groundbreaking records; then the pastoral period when he retreated to Woodstock with his family and jammed with The Band at Big Pink; the subsequent mid-decade records chronicling emotional turmoil and divorce; the born-again records of the late 1970s and early ’80s; the directionless decade after that when his muse seemed to have deserted him; and finally, the creative renaissance that began with the Time Out of Mind album and persists to this day.
No stage fascinates me more than the one that began with his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, continued with Highway 61 Revisited later that year, and concluded with a motorcycle accident shortly after the release of his double-platter masterpiece, Blonde on Blonde, on 16 May 1966, much of which was written over several sleepless nights in the Chelsea Hotel. The songs from that period epitomise Dylan-as-symbolist, a poet and songsmith who coloured his tunes with aleatoric lyrics, erratic rhymes, and Jungian images. More than the previous two records, Blonde on Blonde seems to have been inspired by the conflicts and mysteries of his love life: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the obsessive lullaby that sprawls across the whole of the second disc’s second side, was a paean to his wife Sara Lowndes; “Just Like a Woman,” a chauvinist ballad, possibly about unstable actress Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol’s Factory girls with whom Dylan had a brief affair; and the mercurial “Visions of Johanna,” in which Dylan re-inhabits the modernist ironies of “Desolation Row” from Highway 61 Revisited.
Of these three tracks, “Visions of Johanna” has always been my favourite—a plotless seven-and-a-half-minute dreamscape, recorded in a single take on Valentine’s Day 1966. The song’s elliptical narrative is dominated by two mysterious women, neither of whom is clearly delineated, though one is more apparent than the other. Louise is an earth-bound lover and resourceful free spirit reminiscent of Dylan’s early Greenwich Village girlfriend Suze Rotolo. The other is the eponymous Johanna, a luminous Madonna figure and perhaps a doppelgänger of Sara, whom the singer sees in visions.
