The Songs - Abandoned Love

This is another entry in my ongoing “songs that visited me and decided they wanted to stay” series. I hope you like these enough to become a paid subscriber, because I really need you! I only ask for $5 a month, which is $2 less than the last Guinness pint I bought.

Abandoned Love - Bob Dylan

So one more time at midnight, near the wall
Take off your heavy make-up and your shawl
Won't you descend from the throne, from where you sit?
Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it

Lots of Dylan in the air these days, thanks to the “A Complete Unknown” movie. Hopefully it will send a new generation diving into his songbook, even if they only hit the hits. For the lay down your weary dudes like me, it’s prompted all sorts of strange detours. I was reminded that “Girl From the North Country” was the first song I learned how to play on the guitar, and while I saved my dimes for an actual harmonica rack, I improvised with a wire hanger and some duct tape. Through Dylan I went backwards to Rambin’ Jack and Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers to Stephen Foster…..a crew who combined taught me more about this nation than any history class I’d ever attended. Not bad for a bullshit artist from Minnesota who wanted to be Little Richard.

I’ve recently been listening to Dylan’s song “No Time To Think” from his album “Street Legal”…..a song I surely heard before but completely forgot. As did Dylan, apparently. He’s never played it live, and “Street Legal” is considered one of his weakest records. That a song this good was just discovered by a guy who claims to be a Dylan expert makes that sobriquet sound so silly, because I also missed the title track to “Shot of Love”, which is an amazing song that got lost in the haze of what one contemporary critic termed his “crackpot Christian days” of the late 70s and early 80s. I could go on and on. In other words, I don’t know shit even though I’ve been surrounded by Dylan records for over 40 years.

That being said, there’s not many people who, after watching Timothée Chalamet do a dead-on Dylan impression, felt the immediate need to listen to the long-forgotten “Street Legal” in the first place, and it’s just this sort of obsessive weirdness that us long-time Dylan fans take pride in.

Anyway, when people ask me what my favorite Dylan song is my answer blows in the proverbial wind, but it’s usually a song Dylan didn’t consider good enough to release, like Blind Willie McTell, Up To You, Foot of Pride, or especially Abandoned Love.

Abandoned Love. Somehow Dylan left this masterful song off his “Desire” album in favor of “Joey”, a truly dreadful 11 minute pile of ponderous, revisionist shit that treats murderous, psychopathic mobster Joey Gallo as if he was Keanu Reeves. Dylan is fallible, in other words. VERY fallible. That he clearly doesn’t give a shit is both admirable and irrelevant. The man made horrendous decisions when it came time to put his official records together, and the fact that “Abandoned Love” is not as well known as “Tangled Up In Blue” is as big a crime as “Blind Willie McTell”, one of the greatest blues songs ever written by a caucasian, being left off the album Infidels in favor of cheese like “Union Sundown”, the type of song Dylan could write while he was reading the cereal box at the breakfast table.

But then again, this sort of tale is what makes us Dylan-bros so insufferable in the first place. Now I get to tell you how shallow your life is because you do not know of the songs “Blind Willie McTell” and “Up to You” and “Abandoned Love”, and I get to feel intellectually superior despite my flatlined C average in school. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Abandoned Love” is the sort of “love” song that a guy about to get divorced writes. “Let me feel your love one more time / before I abandon it” sings Dylan over a rollicking melody driven by his own metronomic acoustic guitar. The story goes that his wife was in the studio the night he cut the track, in retrospect not a good idea for a man without a pre-nup. (Sara Dylan eventually got $36 million dollars, including 50% of the royalties from the songs her husband wrote from 1965 to 1977) It’s a song that another songwriter might hang a career on, instead of disavowing almost immediately, but then again….

I march in the parade of liberty
But as long as I love you I'm not free
How long must I suffer such abuse?
Won't you let me see your smile before I turn you loose?

….makes some of the acerbic songs Dylan wrote on “Blood on the Tracks” sound like lullabies. For me, “Abandoned Love” doesn’t conjure up any romantic ghosts….so I can sing and strum along with impunity. It might have been too raw for its creator to sing every night, so he’s over-compensated by never singing it at all.

Beware of letting Dylan into your head, because he stays there.

In a bit…

—tf

Songs That Visited Me and Decided They Wanted to Stay

Intro
In a Big Country
Found Out About You
Tutti Fruitti
Surrender
Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Nightswimming
Fast Car
Take Five
Romeo and Juliet
Wichita Lineman
Waterfall
There She Goes
A Sort of Homecoming
Purple Rain
Nights On Broadway
Tough All Over
What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round
Inside Out
Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More
America
Thirteen
I Wish
Love is Alive
Back in the High Life Again
Volunteers
The Show Goes On
Mike Collins
Fall Down
Green Grass & High Tides
Tom Sawyer
Mainstreet
Volunteers
Northern Sky
Reservation Girl