Expecting Rain

I'll also add that I liked the wacky 2006 re-arrangement that sounded like a heist theme for one of the Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen capers.

To me, being bound in cold iron suggests being shackled and chained. He is like a prisoner to the love he has for her. Trapped on the outside (20 miles outside in fact!), but unable to escape.

I went to church on Sunday and she passed by
My love for her is taking such a long time to die

It's almost like, almost like I don't exist
I'm twenty miles out of town, in cold irons bound

She passes him by, she is over him. And yet he longs for her. To him she is unobtainable and just one look can send him out of control.


Well, the road is rocky and the hillside's mud
Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood

Oh, the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads


During a discussion of Idiot Wind, I said that "the reason (some of) Bob's love songs are so incredibly powerful is because they feel like a place... Full of mountainous terrain, endless plains and dirt roads. They have there own weather, black clouds rolling in on the horizon. The people, the places, the events all come together to create something incredible... something that seams at first to be just out of reach, like being held at arms length... and yet, at the same time something that resonates so personally.

In my eyes, no one else could have written Idiot Wind... It's something from another time... or perhaps another word. I'm just glad that when Dylan caught a glimpse he managed to take a photo and was kind enough to share it."

While I don't think CIB measures up to Idiot Wind, he does employ some of the same techniques. Of course the clouds are not really full a blood, it's an emotional landscape. And a darkly beautiful one at that.

My favorite "version" is the Time Out of Mind release. Lanois' production style for that wouldn't work for most albums but it is nearly perfect for the material on Time Out of Mind. Time Out of Mind is one of two albums, the other being Love and Theft, that however incredible or wonderful the NET performances are or have been, Dylan has not improved over the studio official release. I don't think that can be said of any other album of his career with the possible exception of Modern Times.

"Clouds of blood" is one of Bob's most striking lines IMHO. That whole song has a great, clattering deathly sound, all right. And Lanois deserves a lot of credit for that, despite all the opprobrium he has to endure from some of Dylan's fans - the puritanical Michael Gray not least among them.

Conal0102, you make some great points here. I don't know that the use of landscape as metaphor has ever been systematically explored in Dylan's work. It's an ancient poetic device, of course, but one he deploys supremely well. Think of "frozen leaves...haunted frightened trees...diamond sky..." all delivered in a single burst.

Bob's ultimate excursion into the correspondence of landscape and emotional condition may, of all things, be "Tell Ol' Bill," especially in the wonderfully ominous (and spectacularly sung) version on Tell Tale Signs. (For the life of me, I'll never know why he chose the banal rockabilly version for official release. It deprives the song of all its drama, not to mention that great rolling piano line). Check out how the correspondences run systematically through the tune:

The river whispers in my ear
I've hardly a penny to my name
The heavens have never seemed so near
All my body glows with flame.

The tempest struggles in the air
And to myself alone I sing
It could sink me then and there
I can hear the echoes ring.

I tried to find one smilin' face
To drive the shadow from my head
I'm stranded in this nameless place
Lyin' restless in a heavy bed.

Tell me straight out if you will
Why must you torture me within?
Why must you come down off your high hill?
Throw my fate to the clouds and wind.

Far away in a silent land
Secret thoughts are hard to bear
Remember me you'll understand
Emotions we can never share.

You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing more to tell you now.

I walk by tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season's dawn awaits
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate.

Beneath the thunder-blasted trees
The words are ringin' off your tongue
The ground is hard in times like these
Stars are cold, the night is young.

The rocks are bleak, the trees are bare
Iron clouds go floatin' by
Snowflakes falling in my hair
Beneath the gray and stormy sky.

The evenin' sun is sinking low
The woods are dark, the town is too
They''ll drag you down, they run the show
Ain't no tellin' what they'll do.

Tell Ol' Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I'm not alone
That the hour has come to do or die.

All the world I would defy
Let me make it plain as day
I look at you now and I sigh
How could it be any other way?

I'm not crazy about it either, but others in this arrangement are fantastic--I especially like the 2000 ones, before they added in more solos and diluted what was, to me, a great rock and roll track.

I like the new version too.

Anybody think the "thunder-blasted trees" could be a reference to Dylan Thomas' "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" ("the force...that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer")?

I'm not fussed with the current arrangement, I much prefer the Tell Tale Signs version, also M&A. TOOM version is good, but several notches below those others.

Exactly. TooM version hasn't been topped.

Yeah it has, in 1998.

Give me a date or give me death!

At The Globe Arena (1998)

DivShare File - 04 Cold Irons Bound.mp3

Unbelievable - check out the f'ing bass on that!

For me it's the M&A version, but possibly only because of the visuals: that wink after he leans in to Charlie? Schmexy as all get-out. Rawr. (That and the smoldering intro)

Classic!

Ding, ding, ding! I think we have a winnner.

My favourite is the TTS version. Mind you, I'm not into all these NET boots, so I'm only familiar with the released ones. Very similar to M&A but the vocals on this version are way better imo.

my opinion, modestly: longing for a woman?

I like the live 2000 versions. Wembley Arena II holds a particular appeal... Cork 06 is also quite special but the new ones have something really going for them too. It's a song that Bob must really hold dear given the frequency of plays he gives it and the amount of variations he has shaped over the years. The album version is very spooky and fits with the rest of the piece but...the vocal is a little too distorted and distant and Bob was right to ditch the second last verse from the live incarnations.

Heard this Monday night in Bloomington with the latest arrangement, and it was fantastic.

Here's a clip of it from last month: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCXjsnc33Jc

I agree with those that have cited the 2000 versions, as well as the arrangement from M&A. The Time Out Of Mind album version is good, but does the least for me of all it's incarnations.

One of my favorite Dylan tunes...loved it live

Check out the live version from London 03.

And bare in mind that it's the opening track. The intro is also shorter than it usually is and the crowd haven't even stopped cheering yet when he kicks them in the face with the first line.

A really raw and angry sound. Same with Million Miles from another of the London nights.

Lots of great performances over the years, I always love hearing reinterpretations, but for this song put me in the camp that feels the album cut is the "perfect" version. There's something about the sound of the bass/organ/drums (perhaps due to some Lanois tricks with compression?) that gives it a special character. It sounds like molten metal being dripped across ice in a frigid wind.

The album cut almost drips with sweat. Much like man in the long black coat

when your "cold irons bound " your about to get on a train ....actually your already on the train... because .....your twenty miles outa' town .....the
"cold irons" being the rails .... i thought he said -- i'am twenty miles outa' town [and] cold irons bound - not - [in] cold irons bound ....i stand corrected if it's [in] not [and] .... maybe i'am alone in this train analogy ; dylan / trains kinda fits for me ............oh and i just wanna say .... "one look at you and i'am outta' control ...like the uni-verse swallowed me whole ...there i feel better now just for saying it !