Yup, it was just a matter of time…

…because of course I know this one, or at least enough of it to perform as a request. There are a couple more verses, but I never learned them and no one has ever complained about me leaving them out, as far as I remember — it’s been a lot of years since I was playing this with any frequency, and I may have forgotten old complaints. I don’t think I ever performed it onstage until last month, when I was booked to do a Dylan-centered concert in the run-up to the movie based on my book, Dylan Goes Electric! 

The gig was at a Dylan-branded distillery in Louisville, and I performed some obscurities like “The Old Man,” “Freight Train Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine,” and “If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You,” but also “Girl From the North Country,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “Blowin’ In the Wind,” and this one, because I figured people would want to hear them, and also because it was fun to see if I still knew them, and still knew how to play straight harp after years of only playing cross. (Which, of course, I did — it’s the musical equivalent of riding a bicycle.)

I rarely performed this song in the old days, because it was so overdone. During my European busking years, I met a guy who made his entire living playing it in the London tube stations — he’d found that it was his best money-maker, and he wasn’t down in the tube for fun, so he just played “Mr. Tambourine Man” over and over, collected his tips, and treated it as a day job. (I’ve previously written about my friend Doug, who similarly made his living playing “The Boxer” over and over on the trains of the Paris Metro.)

Honestly, I don’t even know if I like this song; it’s so familiar, so much a part of my past, that I can’t think about it in those terms. Nor do I have any interest in working out a novel, interesting arrangement for it. This is how I always played and sang it — or, considering that I started singing it when I was eleven or twelve years old, how I thought I played and sang it — and playing it now feels like slipping into a worn, old, favorite, denim jacket.

The usual gloss on the lyric is that the “tambourine man” was Bruce Langhorne, who played electric guitar on Dylan’s recording of the song and all his electric tracks before Highway 61, and also was known for expertly playing various sizes of tambourines. I have no reason to doubt that, but apparently Dylan wrote it during a trip to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, so he would have been hearing other tambourine players, and it also is a prime example of how his writing changed as he started smoking more grass — Verlaine and Rimbaud may have played a part, but the psychedelia is front and center.

Incidentally, I only heard the Byrds’ hit version of this after hearing Dylan’s, and it sounds as maudlin and pretty as Peter, Paul and Mary’s versions of previous Dylan songs — which is to say, of no interest to me, whatsoever. They were folk-rock; what Dylan was playing on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or Highway 61 was as solidly rock as the Rolling Stones (who were likewise deeply rooted in rural blues, but never get called folk rock). He did this more gently, with just his acoustic guitar and Langhorne’s subtly phrased electric accompaniment, but I don’t hear it as folk or folk-rock; like Joni Mitchell’s work, it was a new kind of art song and, for better or worse, changed the world.