Serpent Eyes of Obsidian

In a songwriting career as long as Bob Dylan's, you would expect to find a wide variety of kinds of songs, even though he has long been pegged, fairly and otherwise, as a folk/blues Symbolist with a limited musical palette if a free-ranging lyrical imagination. In addition to the old-growth tentpoles that define his legacy, from "Like a Rolling Stone" to "Every Grain of Sand" to "Murder Most Foul," there are also plenty of first-rate pop ditties, from "If Not for You" to "Tight Connection to Your Heart"; protest songs, from "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" to "Hurricane"; and endless variations on the love ballad, from "Boots of Spanish Leather" to "Make You Feel My Love."

What Dylan is not known for, and to be fair has delivered only very rarely, are perfectly formed narratives, clearly legible short stories in song. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be puzzled by his songs than clear about the work of just about any other writer. But even when Dylan does nod in the direction of narrative, he's got other things going on. I love the sensation of being lost in the Altman-esque Old West deck of cards that is "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," for instance, but blissfully lost I remain; and while the aforementioned "Hattie Carroll" and "Hurricane" do their share of storytelling and scene-setting, those elements are there to make the songs' larger points.

This is not the case with an under-praised favorite of mine, "Romance in Durango," which he co-wrote with Jacques Levy for the similarly underrated Desire album. It first came to my attention on the Biograph boxed set, in a live version (the one posted above) which I still prefer for its force and drama, though its slower album version has its pleasures as well. The set-up is simple—an outlaw couple on the run through Mexico, partying and drinking but not quite relaxing, after our narrator shot a man named Ramon—and the fatal conclusion inevitable. But the musical and lyrical details are so vivid it's as if you can smell the heat and the dust and hear the climactic gunfire (this is true even without the explicit sound effects added by the band, around 3:35 in the video above). The melody of the verse and chorus are distinct from each other in a way that feels idiomatic to the song's faux-norteño style, and the stops and starts of the live version (also heard in this alternate Rolling Thunder version) only serve to heighten this contrast, with the pause on the high note leading into the galloping chorus in Spanish evoking nothing so much as a horse being spurred into motion. Drawing the verse-chorus line more clearly also manages to smooth out the album version's queasy mix of time signatures, in which a 5/4 measure pops up more or less regularly, as if the arrangement hasn't quite been fully worked out.

With a high mandolin tremolo and a fiddle in both versions (the album has a trumpet), the song conjures a Mexico that may admittedly be more secondhand than authentic, and may owe more to Sam Peckinpah than Fernando de Fuentes. And you could certainly accuse Dylan of laying it on thick with images of chili peppers, church bells, "hoofbeats like castanets on stone," Aztec ruins, a bullfight, a fiesta, a praying padre. But he doesn't linger gratuitously on these, I'd argue, and most crucially he never loses the momentum of suspense, the sense that the killers are nipping at our heroes' heels, amid all the exotic scene painting. By the time the face of God looms over a street party, we know the end is nigh.

Though most of Dylan's songs have a palpable sense of build, of shape, even of closure, few have what you'd call a big finish ("Masters of War," maybe, or "Ballad of Hollis Brown"). And here's where the live version seals its accept-no-substitutes superiority, as "We may not make it through the night" slams into a thunderous last-stand ritardando that all but serves the death notice. It's this lip-smackingly satisfying dramaturgy that sets "Romance in Durango" blessedly apart. And though it's not chiefly what I go to Dylan for—perhaps because it's not what I expect from him—I heartily relish this departure, this impromptu fandango in the desert. The dogs are barking and what's done is done.