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

97. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (from Blonde on Blonde, 1966)

It was, by all accounts, the result of one of the most chaotic recording sessions in rock history, one that rivals the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” in terms of whooping and hollering caught on tape. The song came from a take that the musicians assumed would be a demo, yet one Bob Dylan chose to release as a single that went to number two, despite the incendiary chorus of “Everybody must get stoned.” And it’s the opening track on Blonde on Blonde, one of the finest albums of rock music there will ever be.

Yet determining Dylan’s motivation behind the song has always been a bit of a head-scratcher. There are two camps here: Those who see Dylan as advocating the use of drugs as a way to solve problems, and those who detect a streak of dark sarcasm in his use of the double meaning of the word “stoned” to throw listeners off track.

The songwriter himself has given mixed messages on the subject. He has vehemently denied in interviews that this or any of his other compositions were intended to be about drugs, nor has he ever advocated the use of drugs as a way of enhancing the listening experience. Yet, by all accounts, he insisted that he would have nobody playing on the session for the song who wasn’t stoned, which can account in part for the woozy yet wondrous recording.

Dylan didn’t even give us a title that made any sense. Many hardcore Dylanologists have had a field day with it and the numbers in the title, including adding, dividing, and doing all kinds of equations with them to come up with some significance, when chances are Bob probably made it up on the spur of the moment.

Taking the nonsense title in conjunction with the rim-shot-worthy lyrics, it seems safe to assume that Dylan was having a laugh with everybody. Considering that when the song was recorded in ’66 for Blonde on Blonde, he was in the middle of a surreal ride full of concerts, recording sessions, press conferences, and the like, the hapless, putupon nature of the song must have appealed to him immensely.

If you choose to read it as a drug song, the evidence is there for you to go wild with it. In a world where everybody wants to bring you down, the song seems to say, the only sane reaction is to soar above it all through chemical enhancement. What else can you do when people are so two-faced that “They’ll stone ya and then say, ‘Good luck’”?

Yet Dylan was also writing from the perspective of someone who had naysayers all around him, as he was still dealing with the backlash of his conversion to electric music from acoustic folk. In that case, maybe he was just asking for a little company. If he had to endure so much of this criticism, why did he have to be alone in it? This reading makes Dylan seem paranoid, but anybody who’s ever seen the craziness surrounding him in footage from that era should realize that his paranoia might have been well earned.

As for the title, it seems to be just another playful jibe at the lifestyle he was experiencing, the one that most normal people would envy until they witnessed what it entailed. The song’s already got the drugs and the rock and roll; the title adds the sex, implying that the singer has enough spare women lying around that he has to number them and that number goes at least as high as thirty-five.

Getting too deep into a heavy argument about the intent of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” ultimately is a counterproductive exercise since the song just wants listeners to enjoy themselves for the duration of it. Dylan’s lyrics are as simple as he has ever written, and his stumbling, fumbling vocal is accentuated perfectly by the tipsy horns of Charlie McCoy and Wayne Shorter.

It’s amusing to think of this subversive song soaring so close to the top of the pop charts, but this was the ’60s, a decade that claimed Dylan as its spokesperson even as he rebelled against that notion every chance he had. Had he fully accepted such a role, then “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” could be taken at face value as an ode to drug-induced oblivion. Yet how can you expect Bob to fully inhale with his tongue so firmly planted in his cheek?