jane dark's sugarhigh!

No Pasera! (+ Oscar Garza)

Cinco de Mayo is here again, which is a fine occasion to recall Bob Dylan's best 70s narrrative ballad, which begins on the fifth day of May and ends about a year later. I do not know why he chose this date. On the live version from Biograph, Dylan intros "This is a song about marriage. This is called "Isis." This is for Leonard if he's still here." I also do not know who Leonard is, or why he would leave.

One of the song's charms is how thoroughly it rises and falls on the peculiarities of Zimmerman's voice; in the penultimate verse, the lyric breaks into a dialogue between the title character and the narrrator in which they reduce the song's gothic narrative and romantic postscript to a quatrain. Speaking in quotation marks, the moment is stunning for its inarticulacy. Isis gets these four half-lines:
where you been
you look different
you been gone
you gonna stay?

and the narrator, who has seen the world, searched for treasure, been to the pyramids, survived many hardships, buried a partner, and straggled home, answers
no place special
well I guess
that's only natural
if you want me to --

What he says next varies depending on version; it's only one word, or part of a word. It's not semantically ambiguous, but it is as emotionally ambivalent as any single syllable on record (and it is profoundly different between the studio Desire and the live version performed at twice the hurry and quintuple the fury). Today is a good day to sit with the mystery!

Click on the link immediately below to read the Critical Karaoke proffering of freestyle hero Oscar Garza, reflecting (in his own ambivalent way) on Smokey Robinson's "Save Me."

SAVE ME

You can have "Tracks of My Tears" and "Ooh Baby Baby"
and "Beauty's Only Skin Deep." Great songs all, but
they are overkill victims of narrow playlists on
oldies radio, which has killed the oldies. But that's
another story. What we find then among the
considerable ouevre of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
is this gem, "Save Me," from the album "Going to
A-Go-Go," released in November of 1966. With its
intro distinguished by those pinging notes--what is
that, a glockenspiel or a cheap toy xylophone?--the
song's pulsing rhythm surges along, carrying Smokey's
plaintive tenor. And of course, he's singing about a
lost love. And he spoke to me because I had lost Susan
Villarreal. Technically, we hadn't broken up because,
well, we'd never been together. You see, we were in
the 4th grade. But I knew that if someday we were to
become a couple, she would break my heart because with
her bouncy jet black hair and pixieish smile, she was
simply too beautiful. And she would come to know the
power of that beauty. And this would be the song that
I would be left singing.

I first heard it as I hunkered down on the backseat
floorboard of my older brother's best friend's GTO. My
parents were out for the evening and I was 9 years
old, too young to be left alone, so I was left in the
care of my 18-year-old brother. But he and his friend
couldn't resist going for a ride to cruise past the
hot disco in downtown San Antonio--the Pussycat
A-Go-Go. If they spotted some cute girls and could
beckon them to the car for a chat, I couldn't be seen.
How uncool would that be? So that's how I found myself
down in the well, looking out the back window. All I
could see were neon signs and telephone lines as
Smokey's bittersweet lament poured out of the radio.
And even at that tender age, I knew what heartbreak
sounded like.

It sounded like a man hoping for salvation, and deep
down knowing it wasn't going to come. It sounded like
a man looking for a miracle, knowing it wouldn't be
found. It sounded like a man I didn't want to become,
so I vowed, right then and there, that I would never,
ever let a woman break my heart. Not Norma Narvaez in
the 5th grade, not Christy Hill in the 6th grade, not
Paula Ramirez in the 7th grade, not Maria Davalos in
the 8th grade. Not after you, Susan Villarreal, not
after you. Damn you.

Posted by jane at May 5, 2004 02:08 PM | TrackBack