Trouble, Trouble, Trouble, Nothin' But Trouble--Dylan's Timeless Lament

Whenever I see lists ranking Bob Dylan's album, Shot of Love--his third album from that Christian trilogy era 1979-1981--is usually quite far back in the back. I have personally enjoyed this album which has some real gems in it.

The song "Trouble" is one of many timeless songs that is as relevant today as it was when Dylan penned it. A predecessor to "Everything Is Broken" (Oh Mercy, 1989) it's a reminder that reality bites. To borrow from "Union Sundown" (Infidels, 1982) "This world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid." Dylan doesn't mince words, and to get by we "cover up the truth with lies." (Blood on the Tracks, 1974) This is why he says, "I got my back to the sun, 'cause the light is too intense. I can see what everybody in this world is up against." (Love and Theft, 2001)

What we're up against is trouble, trouble, trouble, nothin' but trouble.

The song is a dark, grinding blues track that trades Dylan’s earlier gospel fire for something more raw and resigned. Each verse lists the world’s ills—from poverty to corruption—and ends with Dylan's stark refrain: “Nothing but trouble.” It’s a stripped-down, unrelenting meditation on a world gone wrong.

The song is less hopeful than the rest of his “Christian trilogy,” but that's because he's removed any rose-colored outlook about how things really are in this world. Whereas the opening guitar licks are scratchy and jarring he's not abandoning the preacher role yet as he begins with a statement regarding misplaced hope.

Trouble in the city, trouble in the farm

You got your rabbit’s foot, you got your good-luck charm

But they can’t help you none when there’s trouble

"Trouble"

Lyrically, the song is deceptively simple. Dylan piles example upon example of “trouble”—from global unrest to personal suffering, from broken homes to legal systems gone wrong. Each verse starts with a fresh trouble and ends with the stark, repeated refrain: “Trouble, trouble, trouble / Nothing but trouble.” 

Musically, the track leans into a heavy blues-rock groove, with snarling guitar work and a deliberate, stomping beat. It's less ornate than much of Dylan’s '70s output, and intentionally so. Here, the sparse arrangement complements the song’s message: the world is broken, and we are living among the pieces.

This is not the Sermon on the Mount, nor is it the Gospel of John. It's more like the Book of Lamentations, as if the weight of the world is crushing the speaker. It challenges us by asking, "What is the basis for your hope?" 

Here are some of the messages in the stanzas.

Trouble in the water, trouble in the air
Go all the way to the other side of the world, you’ll find trouble there

Revolution even ain’t no solution for trouble

and

Drought and starvation, packaging of the soul

Persecution, execution, governments out of control

You can see the writing on the wall inviting trouble

and

Put your ear to the train tracks, put your ear to the ground

You ever feel like you’re never alone even when there’s nobody else around?

Since the beginning of the universe man’s been cursed by trouble

and

Nightclubs of the broken-hearted, stadiums of the damned

Legislature, perverted nature, doors that are rudely slammed

Look into infinity, all you see is trouble

* * * 

Critically, Shot of Love received mixed reviews on release, and “Trouble” didn’t stand out for many listeners at the time. But in hindsight, the song feels like a bridge to Dylan’s later, darker works—echoes of this mood can be heard in Infidels, Oh Mercy, and even as far down the road as Time Out of Mind. 

On one level, “Trouble” is not a hopeful song. It paints a picture of a world under siege. Yet on another level, it serves as a guidestone. By facing the reality of how things really are, we're liberated from the futility of wishful thinking. 

 

Alarming Tesla Incident Reminds Us of Tomorrow's New Challenges

Here's a funny story someone sent me recently. (Thanks, Kent.) It's not entirely funny, as you will see in a moment.

This is not a Tesla.

For years we've been reading and hearing bout the IoT (Internet of Things) in which everything is connected via technology. If you have car trouble, you call tech support and, because "they" are connected to the brain box in your car via satellites and whatever else. From their ivory IT tower they can diagnose and fix are your troubles in a flash. 

In an ideal world the IoT will all supposedly make life easier, at least for the haves. This story, however, shows how we have not yet arrived at the utopian future yet. The humorous aspect of this story is that the "victim" in this case is a podcaster who is also famously upbeat.  In fact, his cheerful podcast is titled, "Always Sunny In Philadelphia."

So what happened?

Well, actor Glenn Howerton owns a Tesla Model X. Evidently he was parked way underground beneath a Los Angeles parking garage when his key fob broke. Fortunately, the Tesla has a nice feature in which you can contact tech support and they can let you into the car and start it for you.

Except, the car was too far below the ground that there was no internet access. 

Bummer.

Well, he called the tow truck folks, but then there was another problem. Where he parked had too low of a ceiling and the truck couldn't get there. PLUS, to tow him out would require unlocking the wheels so they would roll. But this was not going to work either because--yep, that's right--no internet access.

While I was reading this story last night, we had a major storm with rolling thunder and I lost my internet connection as well. I'm a little concerned about the future of transportation as we continue to become more embedded into the grid.

You can read the full account here at Jalopnik.com: https://jalopnik.com/dennis-from-always-sunny-got-his-tesla-stuck-in-a-parki-1849682811

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Nothing But Trouble

Trouble in the city, trouble in the farm
You got your rabbit's foot, you got your good-luck charm
But they can't help you none when there's trouble.
Trouble, trouble, trouble
Nothing but trouble.
--Bob Dylan

The images here are from old Detective magazines courtesy Claude Angele Boni & sent to me from France, the first one being Diamond Joe, who's featured in a song on Good As I Been To You (1992)

Diamond Joe

This is a story about LANDRU, a famous French killer.
He used to invite rich women for dinner, poison them,
then burn them in a big furnace. He did it for a long time
before they caught him.

One of the 20th century's most famous spies.

Al Capone had an international reputation.

Sing Sing Prison

DIAMOND JOE  

Now There's a man you'll hear about
Most anywhere you go,
And his holdings are in Texas
And his name is Diamond Joe.

 And he carries all his money
In a diamond-studded jar.
He never took much trouble
With the process of the law.

FULL LYRICS to this traditional ballad HERE.

* * * 

Regarding Trouble, my favorite line in the song, 

as born out by these Detective stories:

Go all the way to the other side of the world, you’ll find trouble there
Revolution even ain’t no solution for trouble

* * * 

Keep on keepin' on, friends.

Dylan Often Sings About the Darkness He Sees: Trouble

On The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan it was "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and it's detailed one line descriptions of the troubles everywhere and all around, a branch that kept dripping, people whose tongues were broken, a clown crying in the alley, the sound of many people crying.

"All Along the Watchtower" opens with "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief. "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief."

His album Oh Mercy opens with "Everything's Broken."

And just as he's sung frequently of things changing, so he also frequently sings this refrain as well, that sorrows are many and they are a recurring part of this life, in part because of injustice, in part because of man's stupidity and inhumanity.

This song came to mind this morning when I read this story about the impact our current quarantine situation is having on Wisconsin dairy farmers. Restaurants are closed which means the cheese makers have, for now (and how long), lost a big part of their revenue stream.

"Trouble" may never be cited as Dylan's greatest achievement, appearing as it does on Shot of Love, the last of his trilogy of albums during his "Christian period." (I put that in quotes because the album is not the end of his writing songs expressing a Christian worldview or with spiritual underpinnings.) The song was performed only seven times in concert, and that was in 1989, two years before Shot of Love was released in the summer of 1981.

It's fairly straightforward, opening with a sidewinding, scratchy guitar lick. There are five stanzas, each followed by the chorus, "Trouble // Trouble, trouble, trouble // Nothin' but trouble."

The first two verses focus on where the trouble is. City, country, in the water, in the air and on the other side of the world as well. Neither lucky charms nor revolutions are going to solve it, either.

Trouble in the city, trouble in the farm
You got your rabbit’s foot, you got your good-luck charm
But they can’t help you none when there’s trouble

Trouble in the water, trouble in the air
Go all the way to the other side of the world, you’ll find trouble there
Revolution even ain’t no solution for trouble

Verse three identifies some of the causes of these troubles. We could sum it up as "the world system." I'm curious if the writing on the wall is a reference to the hand writing on the wall, interrupting King Belshazzar's great banquet in Daniel 5. This is no doubt the source for the expression which people use to this day, but probably have no clue of its origin.

5 Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. 6 His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking.
(See full story here.)

"Time is running away."
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Drought and starvation, packaging of the soul
Persecution, execution, governments out of control
You can see the writing on the wall inviting trouble

The next verse is a summing up of our existential reality. Looking backward in time our human situation has been with us from the beginning.

Put your ear to the train tracks, put your ear to the ground
You ever feel like you’re never alone even when there’s nobody else around?
Since the beginning of the universe man’s been cursed by trouble

In the end we look around and see masses of people just like us, and looking forward this doom-sense remains bleak looking forward as well.

Nightclubs of the broken-hearted, stadiums of the damned
Legislature, perverted nature, doors that are rudely slammed
Look into infinity, all you see is trouble

Trouble
Trouble, trouble, trouble
Nothin’ but trouble

Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music

To avoid placing the absolute worst configuration on this song, one needs to remember its context. It was written in the period where he was writing "Gonna have to serve somebody." What he is doing is laying an essential foundation of how bleakness the bleakness really is. This is what Sartre does with Nausea and No Exit. This is what Camus does with The Plague.

It is the starting point in man's search for meaning. How do we respond? How do we find a basis for hope in this world where it feels like we've been abandoned?

The placement of this song on the album is interesting, the second last track on side two. The final track is considered one of the most beautiful songs from his catalog, "Every Grain of Sand." In a sense it begins where this song leaves off, wrestling with despair. But he's now in a different place, and it's a song he went on to perform 185 times in concert, the last being Rome, Italy in 2013.

Related Links
Ode to Job
Fifty-One Years of Hard Rain
Dylan and 50 Years of Change

How Will It End?

The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey as Truman, is a wonderfully original film about a man whose whole life, unbeknownst to him, has been lived in front of TV cameras. His life is a TV show. The story becomes a vehicle for many insights and questions about our own lives, the roles we play, our level of awareness as regards what is really going on outside our own little world.

One of the themes in the film is a pin Truman is wearing. "When Will It End?"

Despite the comic story line, amplified by Carrey's naturally inventive style, the film is serious in tone. And this question is not simply for Truman's audience, but for each of us as well.

We're all familiar with sayings like "it came to pass," with which we comfort ourselves during hard times or a cold spell. Nothing lasts forever, we say. Yet when we say this, we seldom apply this across the board. We generally live as if we ourselves are not going anywhere any time soon. And by extension, few of us can imagine a future in which the United States is no longer the United States.

So when we read books and articles about the fall of the Roman Empire, designed to teach us lessons about how nations and empires fall, how is it that we do not, almost cannot, relate it to our own nation, which is currently the world's strongest superpower?

Last Saturday I wrote about bread and circuses. Someone responded Monday by sharing an article with me from the Wall Street Journal that day regarding a prediction that the U.S. will be history by 2010. According to Andrew Osborn, a certain Igor Panarin has predicted for more than a decade that the U.S. will break up in a civil war due to economic and moral collapse.

This is no lightweight academic. Panarin is a former KGB analyst who is head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. The factors that will bring us down include "mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation"... along with collapse of the dollar. His new portrait of our United States will be a breakup into six pieces, Alaska ultimately returning to Russian control.

The story sounds far fetched, but stranger things have happened. No one expected the USSR to unravel as quickly as it did when the Soviet empire began to implode. Would the Wall Street Journal print something like this if it were the rantings of a lunatic? The friend who forwarded this to me found it on The Drudge Report.

There was a time when Britain basked in the glow of knowing that the sun never set on the British Empire. How long can the United States be so blissfully oblivious to the reality that all things must pass?

Which leads directly to my question. How will it end? Nothing lasts forever. We know that. So, what next? The evidence that America is in decline is all around. Predictions of decline have been heralded for some time. How serious is our sickness? Will the patient recover?

Is this all too far out? You tell me... because an inquiring mind wants to know.