(Do feel free to contact me direct about this somewhat different interpretation of this great song- hughwright59@gmail.com)
At the moment I am busy rehearsing for ‘Through the Wild Cathedral’, a concert of Bob Dylan songs in Portsmouth Cathedral with an 8-piece band. (https://www.simpletix.com/e/through-the-wild-cathedral-a-bob-dylan-con-tickets-254234) This will include many of the songs we’ve performed live in the last 3 years, but some new ones from the artist’s extensive back catalogue. The most challenging of these is ‘Visions of Johanna.’ ((https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/visions-johanna/)
This song which many, including myself, consider one of Dylan’s finest achievements, is included on one of his greatest albums Blonde on Blonde (1966). In that album Dylan finally discarded the political and social comment that had made him famous, a process begun 2 years earlier on ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’. Recording in Nashville with arguably the greatest group of rock musicians he has ever assembled and creating what he later referred to as ‘that wild mercury sound’, Dylan concentrated instead on relationships, mostly between man and woman.
Apart from ‘Sad eyed lady of the lowlands’ , an 11 minute song filling the whole of side 4 of this, his first double album, a paean of praise to his new wife Sara Lowndes, the figures in these songs (such as ‘Just like a Woman’ , ‘I want you’ and ‘One of us must know’) do not seem to correspond to his actual lovers including Sara, Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez (about whom I have written in the post ‘A complete unknown’.) Instead the themes seem to concern the amorphous and tangled web of relationships that swirled around the late night, drug-induced scene of late 1965 and early 1966, when Dylan made the infamous New York Chelsea Hotel his and Sara’s home.
Dylan being Dylan, however, he wasn’t content to completely identify with the hedonism of the subculture (though he does sing ‘Everyone must get stoned’ in the song Rainy Day Women #12 and 35’)- any more than he was content to echo the political platitudes of the folk scene two years earlier. In ‘With God on our Side’ (1963) Dylan takes the partisan Irish republican ‘Patriot Game’, applies it sardonically to American history and concludes that God is on no-one’s side except that of humanity (‘If God’s on our side, then he’ll stop the next war’). Likewise, in ‘Visions of Johanna’ , he creates a prophetic and poetic distance from the world he was currently inhabiting, whilst retaining the jargon of its subculture. .
The song is heavy with imagery and quite complex. Dylan’s theme is the ubiquitous one of love, not that this word is mentioned once in the song. Three people feature in this very unusual love triangle. First, the singer, referred to as ‘I’ and ‘he’, the lover of verse1, ‘me’ in the second half of v2 and peddler of the final verse. He is a sad figure, called ‘little boy lost’ in v2 , possessed by one woman , yet finding comfort in the arms of another.
That woman is Louise, who is physically present yet emotionally estranged from him. (‘We sit here stranded, though we’re both doing our best to deny it.’) She provides a warm environment for him- ‘lights flicker from the opposite loft/ in this room the heat pipes just cough/ the country music station plays soft) but gets little in return. Sometimes it appears it is not he in the room with her but Johanna, as in the memorable words, ‘The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her (Louise’s) face where these visions of Johanna have now taken my (the man’s) place.’ Although not an ideal relationship (she is no saint for she ‘holds a handful of rain’, or heroin, ‘to defy’ their situation)) she is doing her best for the singer, her lover, who is constantly distracted and tormented by thoughts and visions of the third character Johanna.
Johanna seems to be one of the beautiful enigmatic women that peopled the hip mid-60s pop scene. She is probably a former lover (‘v3 ‘speaks of a farewell kiss to me’), though her qualities seem to be more mystical even aristocratic (‘Madonna’ and ‘Countess’) than sexual. Alternatively, she may be just an image of idealised beauty. She is Mona Lisa in a hard frame (v5) , around whom lesser, unlovely jelly-faced female tourists giggle in awe – they are described cruelly but memorably as ‘jelly-faced,’ ‘with a moustache, unable to ‘ find my knees’) . Louise, by contrast, is not distant but ‘all right, she’s just near,’ but it is Johanna who conquers the singer’s mind. I am reminded here of the beautiful but untouchable Estella in Dickens’ Great Expectations, who was raised by the jilted Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all men, especially the innocent Pip, by possessing his mind.
Unlike in her case, however, there is no happy ending. The singer’s yearning for this perfect but absent woman is part of a doomed pact with the fiddler (or devil), the stealer of souls, who, because of the man’s inability to trust to enfleshed human love (‘You can’t look at much can you, man (says Louise)), takes everything, waltzing off to the sound of a danse macabre played on the harmonica and leaving the singer with neither woman but only his tormented visions.
I have read many analyses of this song which highlight its literary merits, comparing it, in one case to Keats’ ‘On a Grecian urn’ or other works that employ poetic apostrophe (that is, the addressing of something or someone absent to create effect) , but not many who discuss its moral or metaphysical-theological qualities. That will be my approach in these thoughts.
Just as in ‘with God on our side’ Dylan is questioning the idea of patriotism and divine partisanship, in ‘Visions of Johanna’ he interrogates the subject of 90% of all songs, that is love. Many songs speak of the love of a woman in extravagantly exalted, even obsessive terms, One thinks of Charles Aznavour’s ‘She’
‘She may be the reason I survive
the why and wherefore I’m alive’
or Edith Piaf’s ‘Hymne a l’amour’
‘I will renounce my country I will renounce my friends
if you ask me to.
One could really laugh at me, I will do anything
if you ask me to. (Literal translation!).
Strong words indeed, but Dylan, in ‘Visions’ is examining the dark side of such obsession.
Love, in this song, is not beautiful , enigmatic, heroic or idealised, not something that ‘conquers my mind’, to gaze at , even to mock lesser beings deemed unlovely. That is obsession,. True love is rather present, enfleshed, not always beautiful but everyday and unremarkable (‘All right, just near’) . Those who miss this truth are in as much danger as those who fail to heed the warnings of ‘The times they are a-changin’(1963) ‘You’d better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone’. Some people may find this a bit rich from a noted philanderer who was rarely faithful to his women, but I believe it to be part of Dylan’s complexity and his prophetic eye, notwithstanding his moral failings. Dylan is extolling love that is here, right now, in the flesh. Johanna is the stealer of that love.
Yet the lessons of song are more than moral. Given Dylan’s lifelong interest in, and frequent adherence to, religion, Christ and God, I don’t think it is too far-fetched to draw theological conclusions also from ‘Visions’. Here I must acknowledge the man who put me on to this. The first time I ever heard this song explained was in a worship setting, in a Eucharistic service at Salisbury and Wells Theological College, 40 years ago in 1986. The preacher was Rev Dr Alan Gregory, the (now) Principal of St Augustine’s College London, who said, after examining the song, ‘We may dream of a God who welcomes only pure spirits, escapees from the dust, but the needs of our frail flesh have put this infinity on trial and condemned it even as we’ve dreamed of it. Do not get mixed up with a fleshless God, get involved with a God for whom the flesh is quite enough to be a home, who is ‘just near’, whose reality is in his nearness- in the crucified Jesus, in the consuming of bread and wine.’ That makes it an appropriate song to sing in front of the altar in a cathedral.
We’ve come a long way from the ‘room where the heat pipes just cough’ to the incarnation of God, but that is Dylan’s poetic genius: to paint a picture of the everyday, and, in the words of George Herbert, ‘there the heavens espy’. God, beauty and eternity can be found, not in a beautiful but cold museum nor on the catwalk, nor the realm of pure spirit, but in a dingy New York loft and in a tawdry, drug-fuelled but warm and caring embrace found there – even, maybe, in the sneezing, moustachioed jelly-faced woman who can’t find her knees.
Hugh's Views 