The Dignified Curtains Are Open Dispatch

A new YOU for a new year

What follows is an amended e-mail from an affiliate of the "I'm So Restless" Appreciation Affiliate:

Record Store Day was reprised on Black Friday and an acquisition was made of timely interest: a box set containing vinyl copies of four Dylan singles from 1965.  The one of particular interest: its title is given on the label on the vinyl as "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?".  It's rendered the same way on the cover of the box set.  There's a slip sleeve for the vinyl, and on that the title is given as "can YOU please crawl out your window" - that's the most exact replica I can give you, and having negative vinyl capability, I can't say if it's the celeste version or not.  The track time is 3:27, if that helps.  [Andy Gill, who is quoted below, provides a good summation of the "confusion" that surrounds this release in his book,  Bob Dylan: The Stories Behind The Songs 1962-1969 -  as well as the infamous Phil Ochs "can you please get out of my limo?" incident.]   

This song is referred to in The "Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking" Dispatch, which itself refers to The Open Door Dispatch - both of those centered on the struggle for freedom that won "The Protester" Time magazine's Person Of The Year for 2011.  Seen as a summons from the free world to the unfree world, it's the equivalent of "can you please tear down this wall" - addressed to no one but the people who would eventually do so.

Two singles Dylan released in the same year are among his best known: "Like A Rolling Stone" and Positively Fourth Street".  "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" is one of his most obscure - it wasn't a perfect year, though it was great..  Those first two are both expressions of vomitous vengeance.  [Gill: "'Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' [sic] [is] basically another put-down song but placed at one further remove from its target - Dylan's attempt to persuade a girl to elope being just a flimsy pretext to pick away at her currrent lover's faults, which seem to reside in a tight-assed materialism and lack of spirtituality."]  The messages of those first songs are that the bossy can be brought down and that the bossy can be positively ludicrous.   In the last, it is that the bossy can be outmaneuvred.

Not that Dylan thinks crawling is the optimal way.  He's playing on some reluctance he perceives in his addressee, which may or may not exist.  He offers freedom - "How can you say he wil haunt you, you can go back to him anytime you want to."  Dylan just thinks she can do better than someone "who just needs you to talk or to hand him his chalk or pick it up after he throws it"' - all in service of his "religion of the little tin women."   [In the choruses, Dylan urges "Use your arms and legs, it won't ruin you" - a vision of the resiliency of - and an optimism of - the will.  A line about "the box you keep him in" reflects the confusion of transference, playing out, at its most extreme, in the Stockholm Syndrome.]

Protests calling for democracy - or for a greater democracy - were seen this past year in the Arab world, in Israel, and in America.  On December 11, The New York Times reported of protesters the previous day in Moscow: "'We exist!'. they chanted.  'We exist!'"  And they do.  And they've got arms.  And they've got legs.

Pictures: Time's Ingrates of the Year, original cover art for "Can YOU Please Crawl Out Your Window?."