Let us begin with that geranium kiss: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” isn’t an Otis Redding song, but – emotion-wise – it wouldn’t be too hard to place this song somewhere between “Dream Dream Dream” and Otis doing “A Change is Gonna Come.”
I like “Sad-Eyed Lady.” I like that it fits with fall. The song and the album are as thick as an Almodovar film. It’s an album where I keep seeing Dylan flourishing his right hand after strumming a few chords like he’s just finished signing a check or one of his Tarantula letters.
Lots of people get Bob Dylan wrong because they don’t understand the intuitive, experiential difference between creation and critique — and they don’t understand how the artist stakes out and yields space. While performing “King of Spain” live, for instance, The Tallest Man On Earth never sings the words, “And I’ll wear my Boots of Spanish Leather.” It’s also why Bowie’s “Song for Bob Dylan” or “Cat Power’s “Song To Bobby” don’t quite work for me, “Some brimstone baritone anticyclone rolling stone preacher from the east” being the wonderful lone exception.
It seems startling to me that Dylan can talk about coming so very close to capturing that “wild … thin mercury sound” in that Playboy interview in ‘68, start off “Sad-Eyed Lady” by singing, “With your mercury mouth,” and no one talks about it. For me, it threatens to turn the album into an album of love songs (Visions of Joanna, Pledging My Time, Sooner or Later, I Want You, Leopard-Skin, Sad-Eyed Lady), but it also — for now — brings up a one other thing: in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, he reminds us that “The Ancient Egyptians believed the seat of the soul was in the tongue: the tongue was a rudder or steering-oar with which a man steered his course through the world.”
So the image comes to mind of a mercury mouth — quick, verbally dexterous, literally invoking Mercury — and, of course, the mercury poisoning associated with The Mad Hatter acting as the rudder of this kind of ship.
When people turn to inventing their adulthood and placing the people that occupy it here and there, Blonde on Blonde is as lively a taxonomy as any, one that — after the pillow-fight exuberance of “Chimes of Freedom” or “It’s Alright, Ma” — slowly circles to “Sad-Eyed Lady,” the dog turning around three times on the bed before sitting down.
On the level of the one-to-one immediate sexual intimacy it conveys, it’s a great line, and it’s great in capturing a kind of kinetic back-and-forth as well, this gifting of the mouth to someone else.
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