Sunday, May 28, 2006

Tangled up in Blue

Many requests for the full words to that Bob Dylan song Tangled up in Blue, I had on Desert Island Discs, so here they are...

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin',
I was lyin' to you
Wond'rin' if she'd changed at all
If her hair was still blue.
The folks they said our politics
Sure was gonna be nasty
They never did like Mama's finishing school
Papa'd never eaten a pasty.
And I was standin' on the side of the road
Rain fallin' on my shoes
Heading out for the Right Wing
Lord knows I've paid some dues gettin' through,
Tangled up in blue.

She was Prime Minister when we first met
Soon to be cut to size
I helped her out with PR, I guess,
But I used a little too many lies.
We lurched to the right as far as we could
Privatized with zest
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best.
She turned around to look at me
As I was holdin' the blade
I heard her say over my shoulder,
"My legacy won't fade on the avenue,"
Tangled up in blue.

I had a job in the marketing game
Snorting the coke real well
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell.
So I drifted down to parliament
Where I happened to be employed
Workin' for a while on a manifesto
For the vampire boy.
But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind,
I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind, and I just grew
Tangled up in blue.

She was dozin' in a sunlit place
And I stopped in to be anointed,
I just kept lookin' at the side of her face
Her questions to me were pointed.
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I's just about to do the same,
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me, "Don't I know your game?"
I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,
She studied the lines on my face.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she tol' me to tie the laces of my shoe,
Tangled up in blue.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never get this far," she said
"You look like the shallow type."
Then she opened up a book of prose
And handed it to me
Written by a scottish guy
From the eighteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

I lived with them on Montague Street
With A-listers dim and tarty
There was a chameleon on the television
And revolution in the party.
Then we started into making policies
And that's where it all went wrong.
We didn't know what its all about
Just like this song
And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn,
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew,
Tangled up in blue.

So now I'm goin' back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are politicians
Some are Conservative wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.

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