This is another one I’ve known forever, and don’t even remember learning. It’s kind of an anomaly in Dylan’s oeuvre, since  he tended to be better at break-up songs, and in particular nasty break-up songs (“Don’t Think Twice,” for example), than at love songs. I’ve already posted one noteworthy exception (“Love Minus Zero…, at least through its first verse”) and this is another: to my ears, the most straightforwardly romantic lyric he ever penned.

The standard story is that he wrote it for Echo Helstrom, his high school girlfriend, and I like to think that’s true and the affection and nostalgia are genuine.

He wrote a dedication in Helstrom’s high school yearbook that feels like a sharp teenager practicing his beat poetry:

20 below zero,
and running down the road in the rain
with yo´ ol´ man´s flashlight on my ass.
Now yo´ mother shines it in my face.

when we sat and talked in the L&B ´til two o´clock at night.
I was such a complete idiot, thinking back,
that the car was in the driveway all night.

Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none,
but I think I told you that before.
Well, Echo, I better make it.

Love to the most beautiful girl in school.
Bob

In her recollection, they got together around a shared love of R&B: she was sitting with a friend in the LB Cafe in Hibbing, drinking a soda; he came in with a friend, they got to talking, and she mentioned liking “Maybelline,” which she’d heard on a late night show beaming out of Shreveport, Louisiana — the same show young Bobby Zimmerman was listening to, and thought was his secret world.

“ ‘Maybelline,’ he screamed ‘Maybelline’ by Chuck Berry…? And on and on about Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, everybody that was popular at that time, about their music and how great it was, how he loved to play it himself and how someday he wanted more than anything else to be a rock and roll singer…”

In high school, Dylan led a rock ‘n’ roll band, mostly playing piano, and Helstrom said she was disappointed when she heard his first records. After he left Hibbing, they didn’t see each other for a few years, and then they met briefly in Minneapolis…

“He called me and asked if I wanted to go to a party. I said okay ’cause I hadn’t seen him for so long or anything. He’d changed a lot. He was skinny, whereas he’d always been sort of chubby. He had on bluejeans and a workshirt and was… dirty. I asked him about New York and the music he was playing, and whatever had happened to the hard blues stuff? He said, ‘Oh don’t worry it’s still there, but folk music is what’s really going to be big,’ and that’s how he was going to make it. I told him I didn’t like the sound of it as well as the other stuff, and he said ‘I know, but this is the coming thing.’”

I don’t know how accurate those recollections are — presumably they were colored by hindsight, and just what she said to one interviewer, on one day.  The first thing that struck me was the cynical careerism, and that may have been her point, but on second thought, I’m struck that he was still trying so hard to impress her, and to convince her that he was still a member of the secret club they’d shared in high school.

Helstrom was sure this song was about her, and seemed proud of that, as well, though it is certainly on the soft, folk side. To some extent, it feels to me like Dylan was doing an exercise, listening to old ballads and trying to write something in that tradition, without modernisms or irony. And it works. He starts by paraphrasing “Scarborough Fair,” just as many traditional ballad composers built on previous models, and carries it through to the end, beautifully. It doesn’t feel archaic; it feels heartfelt, and if he consciously set out to write a traditional love song, I still like to think it was about Echo, and expresses something simple and real.