Refer to the lyrics at www.bobdylan.com
Andrew Muir writes:
Hello
Welcome to my new column which I envisage will look in detail at a particular song or group of songs.
For those unfamiliar with any previous writing I have done, I would like to explain my critical stance. I defined it in Homer, the slut as "analytical but understandable" but the best explanation of it comes from elsewhere. There is a series of books entitled Literature In Perspective whose general introduction states:
...the critics and analysts, mostly academics, use a language that only their fellows in the same discipline can understand. Consequently criticism, which should be 'as inevitable as breathing' - an activity for which we are all qualified - has become the private field of a few warring factions...
I concur heartily with this view and believe the damage caused in the field of artistic appreciation in general and, specific to our purpose here, to Bob Dylan has been enormous. I cannot imagine many readers enjoying Aidan Day's book Jokerman, in fact I know of few people who managed to read it all the way through. The sad thing is that it contained more insights and illuminating hypotheses than most books on Dylan.
Introduction
I thought I would start with a toughie - the generally derided Maggie's Farm. (Derided, that is, by some of those who attend or listen to concert after concert, it is usually greeted rapturously by others.) It certainly seems to mean something special to Dylan, after all he has played it almost 600 times since January 1974. On that Newport night it was the opening song. It appears on the following six official albums:
Bringing It All Back Home
Greatest Hits
Hard Rain
Live At Budokan
Real Live
Masterpieces
I listen to him singing it this year, he has revitalized it (again!), so that it is still fresh and powerful after all these years, all these performances -clearly it is an important song to Bob Dylan.
I am not alone in focusing in on this particular song, the redoubtable Mr. Sorabh Saxena on the computer rec.music.dylan USENET group is currently delving into its historical genesis. (The story of Bob Dylan singing Only A Pawn In Their Game at Silas Magee's Farm on 6th July 1963, a clip of which is seen in Don't Look Back, and perhaps will even find sources for the people named in the song1. Many people believe this is what Maggie's Farm is all about.)
This is doubtless fascinating stuff but it is not what I want to write about here. I want to tell you how it felt to me in my 16th summer (I was late into Dylan). A summer that saw my first exposure to Dostoyevsky (Notes From The Underground), Sartre (All the fiction, some of the plays and philosophy) and Dylan (all the mid- sixties classics). Everywhere I read, saw and heard a cry for the freedom of the individual.
Does it sound pseud to list Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Dylan? Maybe it does, I don't know. I am telling you what happened and I'm recollecting the three artists that have stayed with me ever since. There is no snobbery involved, they were all opening up my mind to the inviolability and importance of the self. Not least the gorgeously expressive voice tied to the Rockabilly style beat drilling into my head:..
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm, no more ..... It is quite a simple song. Simple in the sense of its structure, its melody and its message or import for want of better expressions - but there are depths to this song too. Yes, there are specific references to farm labourers, slaves and servants; but what I heard first of all was the cry of the "I". Through that summer I also noticed how interlinked and self supporting Dylan's imagery was in the great 1964-68 years. But more of that later....
....because before I heard the imagery, I heard the sound. The voice, the instruments, the rock 'n' roll beat...it sounded like a great single to me. It is the right length, has a great hook and short, sharp, punchy lines screaming against drudgery and confinement.
A scream that has universal application, from the downtrodden slaves to anyone who listens and feels the same. Mid-sixties pop music, that's what Dylan was creating; music played on the radio to adolescents, listened to by teenagers who hated being locked up in an institution day after day. Who hated always being told what to do and when to do it. Schoolkids are too smart to believe the "these are the best days of your life" crap - hell, they know their lives haven't started yet. If you look back on those days and think that they were, well your life never really did start. Me? I hated it then and went AWOL as often as possible, muttering under my breath
I try my best To be just like I am But everybody wants you To be just like them. That is how I remember the last years of school, you've just become a person, an individual in your own right but everyone, everywhere, wants you to be just like them. The only good thing about those days is the soundtrack - the magic inherent in the classic pop single. Bruce Springsteen got it right when he sang:
We learned more from a three minute record, babe Than we ever did in school A 3 minute record like Maggie's Farm. Maybe it is time to take a closer look at it. Or, even better, you should play a really loud, fast, rocking version and idiot-dance to it for a while, or play a 1976 version and imagine Dylan's face as he pulls off some outrageously effective line endings.
The Song
Back with me? Good. I've been persuaded to omit my usual detailing of metrical and rhythmic structures: but it is worth noting that these give us four short and punchy middle lines around which lines or very similar lines are repeated and there is a long fifth line in each stanza for Dylan to deliver however the mood takes him in concert. For my purposes in this article, it is highly relevant
that Verses 1 and 5 deal with "I", (in relation to "Maggie" and "They" respectively) while enclosing three verses that deal with "you" (in relation to the "Brother, Pa, and Ma").
Verse One:
This verse certainly has specific references to servitude: it's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor. Also, does the comment pray for rain denote a plea for cooling rain while slaving in the burning Mississippi sun as someone suggested to me recently?
However, it also contains lines that surely come straight from the heart of Bob Dylan. Oh, I know I should talk about "the singer-as- narrator" and all that, but I always hear it as the author's voice.
I got a head full of ideas That are drivin' me insane. Suddenly we seem to be on a whole other level; this is the man who sings on the same album (and, again, I perceive no screening of the author, for me this is Bob Dylan speaking - whatever he claims):
And if my thought-dreams could be seen They'd probably put my head in a guillotine. There we have two quotes from two songs - one rock, one folk - by one artist. These were viewed at the time as being "fun" and "serious" respectively. We forget how deep the pop/folk divide was or even luckier for me back then it'd all been long before and what I listened to was "popular music". Of course Maggie's Farm is a very funny song - at least at times. I do not know which version you played earlier but if you didn't play the original go and stick the track on now - isn't it great? Listen to the invention in the playing and the phrasing. It is catchy, appealing, witty....and, yes, pretty funny in parts. I do not mind the reviewer in the New York Tribune Herald writing "There is the genuinely funny Maggie's =46arm.." (12/12/65) but I certainly would take issue with P.M. Clepper describing it as "one of his most farcical songs..." in the Washington Star (27/3/66). For a "funny" song it is about to make a few disturbing observations but this is no surprise to the listener of mid-sixties Dylan.
Verse 2 -'The Brother'
Not a nice chap, Maggie's brother. He seems heavily into money as power, using it to demean via charity (something Bob has always been strong on), paying a pittance for hard labour or for fining people for expressing the temper he has ignited in them. If this man gave money to a charity it surely would be a tax-deductible one and he would do it with all the sincerity of Freddie Mercury performing at Live Aid.
Picking up from where verse 1 left off we have another demeaning reference; this time to the payment in petty cash - a nickel, a dime - that he 'hands out'. Most listeners seem to equate the 'you' the money is being handed over to as the 'me' who 'scrubbed the floors' - a kind of tip for doing the menial work. It certainly seems to be a meagre wage for such work but I'm not sure it needs to be the specific 'scrubbing of the floors' referred to in stanza one.
There is something very unsettling in his "grin" - in fact, people who grin in Dylan songs are a bad lot. The same disquiet you feel with:
he asks you with a grin If you're havin' a good time is also present in the second verse of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts:
Then he walked up to a stranger and he asked him with a grin 'Could you kindly tell me, friend, what time the show begins' Do you remember the crowds in Roman times with their "bloodshot grins" (Long Ago and Far Away), and what was his "friend" doing when he was "down" in Positively 4th Street? My favourite lines - well they're all great lines, really - in Clothes Line Saga are:
'Have you heard the news?' he said, with a grin 'The vice-president's gone mad..' However, I digress: depending on how Dylan sings it the word "grin" and the phrase "good time" can suggest a very nasty side to the brother- but it is all a bit petty compared to when he grows up and becomes "the Pa". You see, I've already left Magee's farm in Mississippi behind, surely we are now hearing of all our relatives, of all society's restraints and victimizations?
Verse 3 - 'The Pa'
Now this is a real nasty piece of work and a fellow whose unfortunate traits and characteristics resound throughout Dylan's mid-sixties work. I don't find much funny here and definitely nothing 'farcical'. The whole song darkens as the latent viciousness of the power holders comes to the fore:
Well, he puts his cigar Out in your face just for kicks. It would be a cigar, of course, a cigarette would be too common. A "cigar" spells as much trouble as a "grin".
This is the work of a sadist, the lines always remind me of the frightening, if pitiful, persona in Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? who is preoccupied with his vengeance. In both songs, too, the implication of cruel, perverse sexuality is also there. I'm not surprised 'Maggie's Pa' has his bedroom window bricked up, otherwise we might see him testing out some of those 'inventions'. What we need here is Lenny Bruce to come along and shine a light in their beds.
But Lenny Bruce isn't there, so we are left to wonder in what deviant ways this stunted, twisted personality gets his kicks. The brother grown up, still hung up on power, all the negative aspects of man; hell, if he needed a third eye he'd just grow one.
The National Guard standing around his door seems to be opening the song out into even wider contexts. (In Britain, as the full injustice and perversion of the Thatcher years became apparent even to the dimmest observers, this song became very popular. There were numerous cover versions, including one which railed against a 'Maggie's Pa' who had his door guarded by the "SPG"2.
Verse 4 - 'The Ma'
And what a difference! Dylan takes us from those unsettling images of the sadistic 'Pa' to 'Ma' - a vain, old fusspot. OK, some people may tell you that she is the brains behind pa, but, you know, I doubt it, I think it is just an image. Like the image she has of herself as being a bit of a philosopher while the very glibness of the line;
About man and God and law lets us know she is babbling nonsense.
The verse has its serious side, too. It re-introduces the servitude motif, and Ma's self-delusion about her age could be taken as being important, but Dylan usually plays it for laughs. (It could be viewed as a fairly sexist slander, but I must say that the 'ma' character is considerably less offensive than the 'brother' or the 'pa'.) The ma is anti-life but not in the overtly malicious way of pa or the sneering brother. She epitomizes Aunt Sally in Huckleberry Finn, when Huck says:
....because Aunt Sally says she's going to adopt me and sivillize me and I can't stand it. Or at least that is how I hear the song now. Honesty compels me to admit that up until I wrote this article, I'd thought of the song's verses as rising in menace. The sneering brother led to the sadistic pa who was controlled by the mastermind of evil known as ma. Listening to it more closely, I came out with the above interpretation. It is only fair that I tell you how I heard the song for some twenty years rather than just present you with my view of the last week! I'm not certain of why this is so. I suspect it is because when I now think of the song I hear Dylan's
playful, over the top, 1976 versions and I now hear his favoured live line:
She's sixty-eight but says she's twenty-four which exaggerates her vanity beyond serious interpretation. On the other hand, the song was greeted as "humorous" at the time of its release. That view was surely only based on this verse. Perhaps the song is flexible enough to be taken either way: after all the whole point of Aunt Sally's attempts to "sivillize" Huck is to destroy his very nature, however well-intentioned she thinks she is. Anyway I am not writing here as a definitive oracle, it would be great if you could send your views in on this.
Verse 5
Now I approach the end of the article where I will try and explain why Dylan plays this particular song so often, what pull has it got on him to appear almost constantly present in his set lists. To anticipate that somewhat, I think it has a lot to do with the last verse. Listen to the third of May, 1976 version where he has so much fun with the line:
They sing while you slave I get bored
ohh -soo-bo-o-o-red
but yet doesn't rob it of its meaning. What a great line this is,
it is literally true for slaves and both literally (in a different
way) and metaphorically true for Dylan. The perfect line to sum up
the two strands of the song, the perfect line to sing night after
night on stage. Before that we have a four line summary of a theme
dear to Dylan's heart:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
This is the voice that spoke to me way back when I first heard the
song and speaks to me still. I hear it as a straightforward
statement from Bob Dylan, the man who wrote:
>
stay in line. stay in step. people
Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous
Birthday.
are afraid of someone who is not
in step with them.
Well you're on your own, you always were,
Trust Yourself.
In a land of wolves and thieves,
Don't put your hope in ungodly man
Or be a slave to what somebody else believes.
Conclusion
Now I approach the end of the article and I haven't had time to mention the setting of the track in Bringing It All Back Home: succeeding as it does a song which includes images of serfdom which itself is preceded by a song including a character called Maggie. That leads me on to point out that Maggie herself is conspicuous by her absence in the song under discussion - which makes it difficult to locate her farm! Is it simply an oblique reference to Silas Magee's farm in Mississippi? If so why do I feel Maggie is a such a feminine character? Her farm may be taken as a metaphor for all manner of things: the Establishment, white-dominated society, the US of A. Ultimately, though, I see it as representing any restricting, corrupt society or system. In my gloomier moods I see it as being inevitable that any society will, by its very nature, turn into a Maggie's Farm that forever tries to entrap and torment the individual spirit of humankind.
One of the main reasons for writing this piece was to try and explain why the song seems so important to Dylan. Well, I really think it has got a lot to do with the first and last verses. I realize, though, that there are many that will be horrified by me taking these lines as pertaining to Dylan at all. I am fully aware the whole song can be seen as the view of a black slave (literal or
economic) from a farm such as Silas Magee's. However, I'm telling you how I first heard it, how it felt to me. And, anyway, this I do not see how this alternative view would account for the song's enduring appeal to Dylan the performer. I suspect that comes from its crucial place in Dylan's oeuvre, in addition to all I've said above.
The song has a pivotal place in the folk-folk/rock-rock move (I remind you again he opened with this song at Newport '65), the version on Bringing It All Back Home could not be classified as "Rock", it is in fact, true folk-rock by being not one thing or another but then again it is more rockabilly than either. The music Dylan must associate with his growing up, with the impact of much of the early Elvis.
So the song is a kind of musical bridge between folk and rock. I also see it as being a lyrical bridge between the concerns for the farms from the The Times They Are A-Changin' period to the intensely psychological investigations of the personal prisons that we all create by denying the freedom of the individual. As Sartre also spoke to me all those years ago, Hell is other people.
Dylan may always play it as an out and out rocker nowadays, but the original Maggie's Farm, in every sense, stands midway between:
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota Farm
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota Farm
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born
And then you told me later, as I apologized
That you were just kidding me, you weren't really from
the farm
An' I told you, as you clawed out my eyes
That I never really meant to do you any harm
_______________________________
1From the same source Adam K. Powers has written a spirited defence
of it as one of his favourite song. I stopped reading this as I
didn't want to be influenced by it, but I'm looking forward to
returning to it.
2 Special Patrol Group
catherine yronwode wrote:
A pointer in a recent post querying on "Postively 4th Street" led me once again to the excellent EDLIS Things Twice pages, which i browsed for a while before realizing that MY personal "Things Twice" conundrum was not on the list -- nor have i ever seen it posted here, which makes it, i suppose, a Things Once:
Has anyone ever speculated on -- or determined -- who Maggie is in the song "Maggie's Farm"?
When the song came out, i recall some drug-addled freinds of mine stating that it referred to drugs, specifically peyote, because a woman named Maggie (last name forgotten by me) was well-known in that era for selling cactus plants by mail, including the infamous peyote cactus. But even to the at-the-time-drug-addled me, that seemed like too long a stretch. It didn't conform to the LYRICS of the song, you see.
(I will not disfigure my thesis by noting that the narrator holds his head and prays "for rain," which in Weber-speak means heroin, but i must admit that the thought has crossed my mind, as many things Weberian have, twice.)
Having, to my own satisfaction, disposed of the drug subtecxt, i pondered this song for years, until i ran across references to Dylan in his lefty folk-nik, pre-electric days having played at a civil rights gathering held at Magee's Farm in Mississippi. And at this point, the song's tenor, its electric agressiveness, somehow seemed to me to fit the notion that -- as in "Positively 4th Street," which was supposedly directed against Irwin Silber, who had slammed him for abandoning social protest songs when he went electric -- Dylan was proclaiming that he would not write political songs anymore. He would not work on Magee's Farn no more.
Under this paradigm, the song, with its ironic, needling images of a southern plantation family, could very well be a cruel reversal of symbolism, in which the nominally kindly lefty folk-niks are the oppressors of a poet (Dylan) because they want all his songs to be proletarian-positive work songs. He has "a head full of ideas" but they want him to "scrub the floor." In breaking away from folk music and into his own style, he must confront their open hostility: "I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them."
Even more, he is tired of folk music itself. According to the printed lyrics, he declares, "They sing while you slave and I just get bored" -- but i have always heard this line as, "They say 'Sing while you slave,' and i just get bored" -- which is even more of a renunciation of his erstwhile role as civil rights performer at Magee's Farm. Either way, the line could be interpreted as a termination of his interest in the acoustic folk style he had heretofore championed.
Another oddity of this lyric is the description of Maggie's pa's bedroom window, which is "made out of bricks." Does this not evoke the imagery of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" -- written the same year? To my mind, at least, it is obvious that Maggie's pa cannot ever crawl out his window because it has been bricked over.
A further, albeit more tentative, link exists between "Maggie's Farm" with its cigar-to-the-face injury, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" with its "face is so bruised" injury, and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" (written one year later) whch contains the line "he just smoked my eyelids and punched my cigarette."
(And yes, that same "Stuck" verse contains the Webermanistic "rainman" and the notorious "Texas medicine," either psyolcybin mushrooms or peyote cactus, take your pick -- but again, i am not looking for a drug-drenched subtext here, although i must mention that drug use was one of many improprieties frowned upon by sincere left-wing social protesters.)
What do you all make of this?
Has anyone ever figured out who "Maggie" is?
I await with interest going through all these things twice.
For quick reference, here are the lyrics:
MAGGIE'S FARM
(Words and Music by Bob Dylan)
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
Well, I wake in the morning,
Fold my hands and pray for rain.
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin' me insane.
It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more.
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more.
Well, he hands you a nickel,
He hands you a dime,
He asks you with a grin
If you're havin' a good time,
Then he fines you every time you slam the door.
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more.
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.
Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face just for kicks.
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks.
The National Guard stands around his door.
Ah, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more.
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more.
Well, she talks to all the servants
About man and God and law.
Everybody says
She's the brains behind pa.
She's sixty-eight, but she says she's twenty-four.
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
catherine yronwode
http://www.luckymojo.com