In the first few seconds of Bob Dylan’s 23rd studio album, Empire Burlesque, a cavernous snare clues the listener in to the fact that this album came out smack dab in the middle of the 1980s. But by the closing track, said listener could reasonably assume that they had just traveled back in time two decades to a much younger, much folkier Dylan frequenting nightclubs around Greenwich Village. “Dark Eyes”, the tenth and final track to Empire Burlesque, was, appropriately, the last song Dylan recorded for the album.
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Interestingly, it was only partially Dylan’s choice to do so. The famously independent musician took the advice of the album’s producer, Arthur Baker, who told Dylan he ought to end the album with a stark acoustic number. The only problem, of course, is that Dylan didn’t have anything on hand to use for the closing track. “I knew he was right,” Dylan recalled in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. “The night the album was being completed, I told him I’d see what I could come up with. Saw the importance of it.”
Dylan found his inspiration later that night after leaving the studio. And in true Dylan fashion, the song he created from that experience was an opaque, five-minute-long expansion of a seconds-long encounter with a woman he saw in a hotel hallway.
The Story Behind “Dark Eyes”, the Closer to Bob Dylan’s ‘Empire Burlesque’
Bob Dylan didn’t get back to his hotel, the Plaza on 59th Street, until after midnight. With his recent conversation with Arthur Baker still swimming in his head, Dylan’s mind was on potential ideas for a closing track to Empire Burlesque. He recounted in his memoir, “[I] went through the [hotel] lobby and headed upstairs. As I stepped out of the elevator, a call girl was coming towards me in the hallway—pale yellow hair wearing a fox coat—high-heeled shoes that could pierce your heart.”
“She had blue circles around her eyes,” he continued, “black eyeliner, dark eyes. She looked like she had been beaten up and was afraid that she’d get beat up again. In her hand, crimson purple wine in a glass. ‘I’m just dying for a drink,’ she said as she passed me in the hall. She had a beautifulness, but not for this kind of world. Poor wretch, doomed to walk this hallway for a thousand years.”
Dylan turned this brief encounter into “Dark Eyes” while overlooking Central Park out of his hotel window. “I recorded it the next night with only an acoustic guitar. It was the right thing to do,” Dylan wrote. Unlike the rest of Empire Burlesque, “Dark Eyes” harkened back to the early Dylan days, when only an acoustic guitar and a racked harmonica accompanied him. The track was a stark contrast from the rest of the über-1980s production on the album, which helped hammer its introspective point home.
“Oh, time is short, and the days are sweet, and passion rules the arrow that flies,” Dylan sings in the final verse. “A million faces at my feet, but all I see are dark eyes.”
Photo by Luciano Viti/Getty Images
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