She Bent Down To Tie The Laces Of My Shoe

Dylan slays me, absolutely crushes me. How do you think of a line like that?

She was workin’ in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer,
I just kept lookin’ at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear.
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s just about to do the same,
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me, “Don’t I know your name?”
I muttered somethin’ underneath my breath,
She studied the lines on my face.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,
Tangled up in blue.

By the way, I retrieved those lyrics from Dylan’s website. It’s a really cool site and if you are ever looking for a Dylan lyric, go straight to the source. They’re all there, even cover songs.

So, “Tangled Up In Blue”. Where to start. Some songs have imagery that is so vivid that the song is almost like a movie or a novel. “Tangled” pretty well sets the bar for that. There are seven verses, and actually, each separate verse could inspire a full length epic. You can almost break it down to single lines and say the same thing.

Here you go…

I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs

That’s a great opening sentence for a novel.

So, “Tangled Up In Blue”; It’s got a special place in my memory. The guy that introduced me to the song was the bass player in my first band, Mark.

See, we had this garage band and it really was the genuine article. We were buddies hanging around on the streets. We decided we wanted to play music and we started bashing around in my parent’s garage. None of us had any experience, any background, we just started bashing. From that bashing, we started learning music together.

We didn’t have a real bass player. We had three guitar players and we would each take turns playing pseudo bass parts on the low strings of the guitar. We got to the point where we knew a bunch of songs but, it really wasn’t progressing because, we needed a real deal bass player. And, they were hard to come by.

There was really only one working band in the area. They were called Saturday Night Special; I guess named after the Skynyrd song. Funny, our crew was called Skydog which was a tribute to Duane Allman. Pretty heavy southern rock thing going on in eastern Missouri during the 70’s, I guess.

So, this band, Saturday Night Special; we heard they were breaking up. Somebody came by the garage during our “rehearsal” (the garage was turning into a hangout) and said he knew that the bass player was looking to join another band. We thought that this guy wouldn’t want anything to do with us because; One-He was a real good player and, while we were serious about what we were doing, we didn’t have much experience under our belts. Two-He was, like, 26 years old and we were all 16-18. We figured he probably wouldn’t want to hang out with a bunch of kids.

Somehow, Mark got the word that we would love to play with him and a “jam” was set up. We were all nervous, waiting for the guy to show up. He was late. We figured:”To good to be true”. We were getting ready to call it a night and walk away discouraged when, here he comes rolling up in the most beat-to-hell, little Datsun you ever saw.

He was wearing a tie-dye shirt, sandals; stoner chic. He says; “You guys mind if I bring some beer in here”? Well, we were in the habit, even though well under legal age and, right away, that put us more at ease. Mark goes out to his car and drags in a trash can! I mean like a kitchen trash can full of Budweiser on ice. Must have been three cases of beer in there. Our kind of guy.

So, we started playing and it was like this magical thing-really. Sounds silly but, we had been working on these songs for a long time and everyone knew their parts. So, adding a rock solid bass line; it was like dancing on air. And, Mark was digging it too. See, we were just a bunch of kids but, we had been doing our homework. Our song list belied our youth. We were doing Lou Reed stuff, The Kinks, Stones, all the southern rock things, Dylan, “Freeway Jam” by Jeff Beck; I think that Mark looked at it as a chance to do cooler songs than what he had been playing at the V.F.W. dances. So, we played and drank beer and it was good; a good time. We made big plans. We were going really have something here.

We started practicing a few nights a week and just having a blast. We got a little tighter and one Sunday afternoon , we hauled all the gear down to the city park and played. It was crazy, there was maybe 150 people showed up. We felt like rock stars. We felt pride. We had worked hard and made this thing happen.

Mark was kind of like a mentor to all of us. He had made money playing music and he was going to show us the way. Truthfully, we were in awe of him. I remember one time, I gave him a ride after practice and he had me secretly drop him off at a woman’s house. A woman, not a girl you know. A clandestine affair, that would have been scandalous if people knew. Another time, we got into an altercation with a gang. No kidding, a gang. Mark shows up, out of nowhere, and starts swinging a golf club, shouting like a banshee and scares them off. Too cool.

One night, after everyone else went home, Mark wanted to hang out and play some acoustic stuff with me. I felt honored. It was a summer night, cold beer, crickets and tree frogs. Anyway, one song he showed me was “Tangled Up In Blue”. He didn’t sing in the band. But, sitting there, just between us, he sang all seven verses in a trembling tenor voice.

So, things were good. It was summertime and we had a rock and roll band.

Then, with no warning Mark didn’t show up for practice. That made us nervous. Then, a couple nights later, same thing. No word from Mark, no way to get in touch. We all figured it was over. We thought that Mark probably found a paying gig and hit the road. Too good to be true. We still got together on our next regular night, knowing that Mark wouldn’t show, and we ended up just walking the town, looking for a party. Actually, this happened a couple of times. We never even made an attempt at playing because, we knew we couldn’t go backwards after playing with a real bass man. We just kept showing up anyway and had a kind of extended wake for the loss of the band.

So it’s been, like a week and a half, maybe two weeks have gone by. We got together, walked around, had a few beers at somebody’s house and made our way back to the garage; real hangdog.

Walking up the street, we heard music. Cutting the through the late summer, humid, night time air; we heard this warbling tenor and a jangling guitar….

Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter’s wives.
Don’t know how it all got started,
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives.
But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.

There was Mark, sitting it the garage, with the trash can full of beer iced down, loaded, with the PA all fired up, playing my guitar and singing for the cosmos.

The band was back together and all was right with the world.

But, summertime was ending and that feeling that everything is going your way never lasts; does it?

It turns out that Mark had spent the last ten days in jail. He was sleeping in his car down on the riverfront and got rousted. He had a bunch of outstanding parking tickets. The story was that the arresting officer got occupied with something else, there was some mix up and they just “forgot” about Mark. No phone calls, just “forgot” he was in the jail.

Who knows what went on? I think that, after this arrest, Mark’s people probably started asking the tough questions and urging him to be productive. He left me a message that he was going back to college and that was it.

Everybody else in the band was reaching the age where reality was creeping as well. What you gonna’ do, go to school, join the army, get a job? We had peaked and we knew it. I don’t think we ever played a paying gig. Just the free “concerts” in the park. Those free shows were glorious though. To us, at least. It may well be that no one else even recalls.

For us, it was the summer of beer on ice. The summer of the principal’s daughter and her friends, in sun dresses, dancing barefoot on the grass. The summer when I wore through the finish on my Les Paul where I rested my sweaty right forearm. Street fights and rock and roll. “Tangled Up In Blue”.