Sweetheart Like You

- 00:03. Dylan's voice begins before we see him. Indeed, Dylan's presence is always in question. When he crashed his motorcycle in 1966, he vanished for some time. When he reappeared for Nashville Skyline, his voice had changed, become country, distant. He was absent at Woodstock, probably the most notable musician not on the playbill. Oddly enough, he crashed his motorcycle at Woodstock three years before the famous concert.

-  00:50  Infidels is not a Dylan album of romantic tunes, despite the presence of "Sweetheart Like You," or Rolling Stone's insistence that it is the best Dylan album since the romantic and classic album Blood on the Tracks. Dylan was only 42 when he made this album, an album so late in his career you'd think that by then he would be as old as the janitor he serenades. Alan Clark is playing keyboards in this band. He also played in Dire Straits, whose leader, Mark Knopfler, also plays on Infidels. Clark also played on Tina Turner's "Private Dancer," a point not lost on this video tribute to a private, solitary janitor.

Sweetheart are everywhere, it seems. In 1989, I saw Dylan play at the O'Connell Center in Gainesville, Florida. Sweethearts of the Rodeo were the opening band. By then, Dylan was 48. Between these two dates, the album's release in 1983 and his concert in 1989, I find my own age now.  Dylan's band, then, included G.E. Smith of the Hall and Oates band as well as the Saturday Night Live band. If there are five degrees of Kevin Bacon, there may be just as many with Bob Dylan. Gainesville. Hall and Oates. Saturday Night Live. Me.

One song Alan Clark played keyboards on was Dire Straits' "Romeo and Juliet," a song unlike Hall and Oates "Romeo is Bleeding." 

- 1:15 "You know a woman like you should be at home/That's where you belong." We all read this line as misogyny. The Dylan fan site Expecting Rain once ran a thread called Dylan's Most Sexist Line. This line received a lot of attention. One poster brought up a line that has also stuck with me, from "Groom's Still Waiting at the Alter":

"What can I say about Claudette?
Ain't seen her since January,
She could be respectably married or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires."

- 1:23 The red hair is startling. Dylan almost looks like Willie Nelson in Red Headed Stranger. Nelson sings, too, about a woman:

He bought her a drink, an' he gave her some money,
He just didn't seem to care.
She followed him out as he saddled his stallion,
An' laughed as she grabbed at the bay.
He shot her so quick, they had no time to warn her.

Is this a killing of a prostitute? Dylan's Claudette?  Even "Sweetheart like You" alludes to a prositution or similar activities:

Got to be an important person to be in here, honey
Got to have done some evil deed
Got to have your own harem when you come in the door

- 1:23-2:00 The background singer stares deeply at Dylan. She's Clydie King, a woman Dylan was rumored to have secretly married and fathered two kids with (or left at the alter....since no official statement has ever been made that they were married). She, in fact, might be the sweetheart like you here, and not the janitor. She was also a backup singer on Ray Charles' "Hit the Road Jack," whose line "You're the meanest old woman that I've ever seen," is the exact opposite of what "Sweetheart Like You" proclaims. Are we to believe that this ode to a janitor is nothing more than violence? Anger? The sweetheart vanishes only to be replaced by the angry man? According to one rumor, Knopfler wrote "Romeo and Juliet" because he felt his girlfriend Holly Vincent used him to boost her career. In that sense, "Sweetheart Like You" could be just another angry love song.

- 2:42. "Got to have done some kind of evil deed." Apparently, Rod Stewart covers this song on his 1995 album, A Spanner in the Works. That, to me, sounds like an evil deed. I would consider any Rod Stewart cover an evil deed, one equal or worse than a sexist lyric. After all, Stewart insisted that we think he's sexy. And then he covers Dylan!