Book Excerpt: Counting Down Bob Dylan: His 100 Finest Songs

91. “Up to Me” (from Biograph, 1985)

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During the making of Blood on the Tracks, this song lost out to the similar-sounding “Shelter from the Storm” when Bob chose the pecking order. The album turned out OK: It’s generally regarded as one of Dylan’s finest, which, by definition, puts it among the finest albums in rock-era music history.

In both songs, Dylan strums his acoustic guitar while bass player Tony McCoy thumps along. His bass playing is far enough up in the mixes that it becomes almost a countermelody to Dylan’s main tune, a neat little effect that Bob clearly fancied. After all, he kept “Shelter from the Storm,” which was one of the songs from the New York sessions of Blood on the Tracks, as it was, rather than re-recording it in Minnesota as he did with five other songs on the album. It can be inferred from this that he would have done the same with “Up to Me” had that stayed in the final mix.

The tunes of the two songs are also similar; so is the way that Dylan phrases the lyrics in each line. The basic song structure, a series of fourline stanzas, every one of which ends up with the refrain, is repeated in both. Even the subject matter is pretty much the same in both songs: Each ruminates on a spent love affair, the narrator’s pain barely hidden behind his placid demeanor.

If there is a difference, it’s in the way that Dylan frames his reflections. In “Shelter from the Storm,” he spends the first half of the song talking about the good times, then changes course and spends the second half detailing how it all fell apart. “Up to Me” is more of an unruly mix, victories and defeats scrambled together, and somehow it feels just a tad truer for that messiness.

Comparing the two, “Up to Me” digs just a little deeper and comes across with a few more memorable lines. It’s a song about the responsibility that both parties must take on to sustain a relationship and the subsequent fallout when those responsibilities are abandoned. Dylan’s narrator is defending himself, the battles he fought and the lines he crossed, in an ultimately futile effort to keep things alive.

This guy owns up to the fact that his own notion of how life must be lived probably presented some problems, but that was the only way he knew. “If I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’, the heart inside me would’ve died / I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity,” he sings. Those lines likely ring true with iconoclasts everywhere.

From there, he looks back upon the various incarnations these two souls have taken, rearranging their faces and giving them other names, so to speak, all as a way of recounting the little injuries and perceived slights that have taken the toll on their love. Later on, the narrator admits to seeking out new companions as a way of dealing with the pain of her absence, but it’s all in vain.

The final verse is one of the finest closing scenes Dylan has ever yielded, as the narrator, hopeless now of her returning, asks if she will at least yield him some nostalgia. He begins, “And if we never meet again, baby, remember me / How my lone guitar played sweet for you that old-time melody.” You can imagine the tears welling up in both their eyes as he continues, “And the harmonica around my neck, I blew it for you, free / No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me.”

Considering that the song was recorded in the midst of the sessions for one of rock’s all-time breakup albums, it’s tempting as a listener to immediately to read autobiography into these final lines. Yet it’s also conceivable that the guitar and harmonica could be equivalent to any gesture made by someone in the thrall of a passionate relationship, before its purity is stained by pettiness and frailty.

It’s hard to believe that Blood on the Tracks could have been better than it actually turned out to be, but inserting this gem in the place of “Shelter from the Storm,” which is great but not quite as fantastic, would have turned the trick. With “Up to Me,” Bob Dylan performed a stunning balancing act by capturing both the wonder of love and the anguish of its unraveling.

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