The Bob Dylan Song Meanings Post

For whatever reason, I've recently become focused on "Black Diamond Bay" from Bob Dylan's 1976 album Desire.



Black Diamond Bay - Bob Dylan on Vimeo.

Which has eventually lead me back to the comment section of its SongMeanings.com page. I wanted to highlight just a few of them.

The kind of meaningful commentary that isn't the norm:

Basically, this song is about irony. The Greek hangs himself even though everyone is about to die anyway, the loser wins in gambling right before he is about to die, the big "tough" soldier wants to have "forbidden love" with a tiny man, and the woman does find love but it's too late because they are about to die so she "sheds a tear and begins to pray." And finally, the ultimate irony is that the speaker saw all this on the 7 o'clock news and just shuts it off. It doesn't even matter to him... -StallionintheRift12

I think this is where I'm coming from:

Forget the symbolism. Dylan paints images and characters. This story feels like Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle." We watch the wild characters, laugh, and ultimately feel detached enough to switch it all off, while other peoples' lives go down. -manumoka

Hmmmmm, okay.

The "Bay" is the "Bay of Pigs", She is Jackie Kennedy and " the greek" is that Onassis guy! As watched in a delirium, Old Cronkite on the seven o'clock news. -MGAlpha

Oooooookay then...

Black Diamond Bay has long been my favorite Bob Dylan song. It is a song of the detachment that mankind feels for his fellow man and a warning for the consequences of that detachment and the consequences of simple sins of ommission and self-indulgence.
The woman in the song represents the individual who will ascend to heaven. Thus she is on the white veranda while everyone else in the song is consumed by the boiler in the basement, i.e hell
The lava from the mountain high above is symbolic of God's hand in the end of the world. [... more] -gkhd11a

One more cup of coffee, I think we could tie this into Apocalypse Now (1979) and the ill-fated 1987 Dylan & The Dead tour!

The specific reference of Black Diamond Bay is to the Conrad novel called "Victory". In the novel, Black Diamond Bay is a disused coal port/depot on an island in the far east (Indonesia/Borneo area). There are elements in the novel that reappear in the song (a hotel, a volcano, gambling, a somewhat enigmatic woman, BDB itself of course) but the song is not a 'song of the book' by any means. In some ways its a bit like a dream version of the book with everything mixed up and in the wrong places. -jtg76

Which are all much better than the most common interpretation by far: "I think this song is about being on drugs." But it's still just a popularity contest. What Bob Dylan song you think has the most (not necessarily best) user comments?



Like a rolling stone - Bob Dylan on Vimeo.

Yep, that one. Currently with 211, vs. 17 for "Black Diamond Bay." Did you see the recent interactive video for it? Pretty cool.

I wish the search function was more robust. Like, is there a thriving commentary community for Killdozer songs? Unfortunately not, but they do have the lyrics. You can access a most popular artists list, which I think is purely aggregate post-count.

As of now (artist / most commented on YouTube)...

1. Radiohead ("Creep"?! 665 comments)
2. Brand New ("Seventy Times 7", 651)
3. Bright Eyes ("Lua", 331)
4. Modest Mouse ("Float On", 540)
5. Coldplay ("Viva la Vida", 916?!?!)
6. Bon Iver ("Skinny Love", 249)
7. Death Cab for Cutie ("I Will Follow You into the Dark", 369)
8. Kings of Leon ("Sex on Fire", 214)
9. Mumford & Sons ("Little Lion Man", 224)
10. The Beatles ("Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds",
459 comments: "This song is about being on drugs.")

Maybe not 100% ranked by total posts - The Beatles looks like a hefty chunk.

A lot to untangle here, but the first point is that I had literally never heard of Brand New (#2!) before now. Just based on overall popularity & visibility, I won't re-hash Radiohead, Mumford & Sons, and The Beatles... maybe Coldplay too? But the rest of those point to a specific audience being very active on the site.

Yeah, it would be weird if late-'80s Touch & Go fans were more active on a lyric site than the early-'00s indie-pop of Bright Eyes-Modest Mouse-Death Cab. There's 128 comments for Butthole Surfers' "Pepper," but not too much else. I was trying to find anything somewhat comparable, but ridiculous - best I could do was Pearl Jam's "Black" (with 503).

Okay, that was weird - I'm done now.

The Man Who Fell to Earth - Roeg (1976)

Hahahaha! Not a single vote on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. That's low, man... Low.

I'm feeling a little symmetry across the month, here at the end. Third from the last, '70s-style relaxed pace sci-phi, from otherwise respected auteurs, yet no love from S&S? Sounds like our third from the start.

The Man Who Fell to Earth
dir. Nicholas Roeg. 1976, U.K.
Roger Ebert's 1976 movie review ... 2011 movie review
1993 Criterion essay ... 2005 Criterion essay
OOP Criterion DVD from Amazon [OOP CC Blu-Ray]
Watch via Netflix / Amazon Instant / iTunes



The Man Who Fell to Earth trailer (1976)

There was also a more traditional trailer, without the William Shatner groove. And a 35th anniversary 2011 re-release one.

Mary Lou: I don't understand how you can watch them all at the same time. You know, Tommy, you're a freak. I don't mean that unkindly. I like freaks. That's why I like you.

Buck Henry! Rip Torn!! ... and some long-forgotten folkie from the '60s. Maybe the guy from the Monkees? The parable of arable land.

I think I like this movie more than most people. Everything about it seems so schizophrenic. The tone jumps around between Stranger in a Strange Land sci-fi, lotsa grindhouse sexploitation, sociological essay, Five Easy Pieces artfilm, corporate intrigue, laconic Western, space/nature trip, and maybe a half-dozen others. Bowie's Newton shifts from strutting cock-o'-the-walk to a basket case that's been squeezed from 5-Dimensions into three, with a range described by a non-Euclidean parabola bisecting madness itself. The film's music includes Roy Orbison, Eric Satie, Joni Mitchell, Holst, and Steely Dan.

The movie starts with splashdown, stumbling down a mountain, almost getting run over, an aggressive bouncy house, a leering drunk, an asymmetrical cash transaction, a major-league thirst-slaking, farm animal transport seen through two-tone alien eyes... and on and on. Newton likes TV and booze, but can't stand elevators - nor sushi samurai kabuki violence. He builds a fortune on some ridiculous technologies. A camera that immediately shows your pictures? Preposterous! A book with paintings and poetry? Ludicrous!! (Icarus reference?  slightly clever.)  Rip Torn's professor chases freshmen girls on the funky campus, but rails against computers and their reliability. Bah!! Wait, now he'll get some "mind libido" and faith in himself.

We get some extinct '70s airlines, and an Olde English hymn. The good old days of train travel, and an alien homeworld in decline. A line-of-sight mining-era time intersection, and a big-ass Caddy with a phone. The covers of both Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977) come from this film. Down the stretch, everything starts falling apart even moreso. Bernie Casey finally shows up, and then they... I mean: "The problem with this corporation is that it is technologically overstimulated..." To which: "Then you must go further. They have to take the wider view... We're flexible. Something, uh - elastic... We're determining a social ecology. This is modern America, and we're going to keep it that way."  Modern America, yes - in all its post-Watergate, stagflationary, swinging-'70s debauchery.

All is become frenzy. Rip Torn does heat photography, and psychic emanations transmit to home, alien trampoline gymnasticsex. First there is a spaceship, then there is no spaceship... Terry Southern is there! Jim Lovell!! Buck Henry fell to earth, Newton is kidnapped and put in an autumn-forest rec room with leaves on the grassy floor. Scenario aligns to parallel The Third Man (1949, S&S #73), meanwhile it's playing onscreen. Gunsexplay, science experiments, a laid-back escape, and years later (maybe?) the alien-in-hiding releases an album. I think his family is dead back home - the bar cuts him off.  And that is a '70s movie ending!

Afterwards I read this extensive essay, which provides a much closer reading of the various obscure themes.  I was thinking more of how the narrative reflected the dissolution of Newton's mission (much like Capt. Willard's) - so I missed stuff like the intersecting arcs of the main and supporting characters (down & up), or the specific praxis of earthly temptations.