Bob Dylan – "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" (1975)

The cabaret was empty now
A sign said, “Closed for repair”

Lily had already taken
All of the dye out of her hair

She was thinking about her father
Who she very rarely saw

Thinking about Rosemary
And thinking about the law

But most of all she was thinking 
About the Jack of Hearts

Some of you are no doubt appalled that I’m including Bob Dylan on my list of overrated recording artists in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days.”

Dylan has written and recorded some truly great songs – Rolling Stone magazine picked “Like a Rolling Stone” as the greatest song of all time, and you can’t really argue with that choice.

But just because you’re a great artist doesn’t mean that you’re not overrated.  To wit, the Beatles.

I thought long and hard before deciding not to label the Beatles as overrated.  That’s not because I don’t love their music.  But a lot of people would tell you that the Beatles are the greatest group in history by a wide margin, which I don’t agree with.  (They are the greatest boy band in history by a wide margin – no doubt about that.)

Bob Dylan’s reputation is such that he was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Sorry, Bob, but I’m not buying it.  Dylan’s lyrics rarely stand up when they are read without musical accompaniment – he may have written some great song lyrics, but I don’t think he wrote great poetry.

I can only explain the Swedish Academy’s decision as an attempt to generate publicity.  (You can’t blame it.  Many of its recent choices for the Literature prize – Herta Müller?  Elfriede Jelinek?  Dario Fo? – have generated only yawns.) 

Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh – his best-known novel is Trainspotting – had this to say about the choice of Dylan:  

I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.

I agree with Welsh, although I wonder why he left senile, gibbering female hippies off the hook.

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Like the Beatles, Bob Dylan recorded a lot of stinkers.  

Bad Beatles songs tend to suffer from silly or trite lyrics.  (I’m thinking of songs like “Yellow Submarine,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”)

Bad Bob Dylan songs – like today’s featured song, which was released in 1975 on the Blood on the Tracks album – usually have pompous or obscure lyrics.

Click here to read all 15 verses of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.”  If you can make sense of them, you’re a better man than I am.  (The lyrics of the song are so scattershot that you often can’t be sure what character Dylan is referring to when he uses a pronoun.)

Click here to listen to today’s featured song.  Warning: it’s eight minutes and fifty-one seconds long.  (By coincidence, I’m typing these words at 8:51 PM.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: