“The Drafts of ‘Brownsville Girl,’ Found and Lost”

By Bill Lattanzi

 

Bob Dylan has been surprisingly generous describing his writing method over the years. When he was young, he’s said, the songs came straight from the unconscious: “the early songs … were mostly all first drafts … It’s like a ghost [wrote them].”^[1] As he came into middle-age, though, the ghosts withdrew, and Dylan had to “do other things,” that is, to write from the conscious mind. ^[2]  He became a professional working hard at his craft. In answer to the question of what comes first, words or music, his responses have varied over time. Words came first, he said in 1965.^[3] “The lyrics are your dance partner,” he’d later write.^[4] Twenty years on, he said that most often words and music came together, a first line along with a melody.^[5] And by 2004, he’s saying that he gets an old song going in his head and eventually new words get attached to it.^[6] He learned early from Buddy Holly that anything could be a song lyric, say, a line of movie dialogue, like “That’ll be the day” (Hilburn). It had to have “resonance” though, or as he said about one early composition – the stage name “Bob Dylan” – it had to have “that extra dimension.”^[7] The late comic Norm McDonald claimed that Dylan told him of the vital importance of verbs: that you could “verbify anything,” a trick on display at the top of No Direction Home Part 2, with Dylan freestyling verse out of shop signage.^[8] He’s said that he aims to turn a song on its head, like Johnny Cash creating a talking train, like Robert Johnson throwing in some wisdom from Confucius at random, or Dylan himself calling failure a success.^[9] That, if he can’t get his thoughts to rhyme, he’ll write them out in a big clump and figure out how to sing them later (Hilburn). He’s said the best songs come quickly, and that the longer he works on one the more likely it is to slip away.^[10] And that when an idea comes, the task is to “get in touch with the base of its power.”^[11] Sometimes, he’s not thinking about what he wants to say at all, but, “Is this okay for the meter?”^[12] He says that you can do a lot with metaphors, that it’s better to be “circular” than “lateral,” and that a song is “like a dream and you try to make it come true.”^[13] And that songs are “like strange countries that you have to enter” (165). Dylan summed it up best, perhaps, in 1985: “I write them lots of different ways.”^[14]

 

Up until recently, these words of Dylan’s were our only account of the artist at work. But, with the opening of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, draft after draft of song after song lie in wait for the obsessed, the scholarly, and the semi-scholarly, to pore over for clues to the unsolvable mystery: how does he do it? (It’s a hopeless question in some ways, but less absurd than the buried notion beneath it: that if we could find the answer, then we, too, could write as well. It ain’t gonna happen, but still we search.) In November 2024, I had the privilege of visiting the Tulsa archives, plunging down the rabbit hole of the multiple drafts and scribbled revisions that added up to the eleven-minute, seventeen verse, eleven hundred-word-plus mock-epic, “Brownsville Girl.” I pored over them for days (no photography allowed), doing my Bartleby-best to make fair copies of the bard’s scribbles. But Dylan’s drafts of this bright spot of his mid-80s output are only half the story. On an earlier visit to the Harry Ransom Archives in Austin, Texas, I’d stumbled across “Brownsville Girl” co-writer Sam Shepard’s hand-written and typed drafts of the song written during the two days he spent with Dylan in the late November of 1984. Together, these pages paint a rare, detailed portrait of Dylan at work, his methods thrown into high relief through comparison with Shepard’s rejected (and accepted) lines.

 

One non-trivial caveat to the proceedings. Upon submitting this essay to “the Dylan people” (outside the jurisdiction of the unfailingly kind, helpful, and efficient team at the Archives), permission to quote directly from the Dylan drafts was summarily denied in every instance, perhaps for good reason, though I wasn’t given one. After a short but intense journey through the seven stages of grief, the task of a careful rewrite was surmounted. I’m happy to report that, even without the specific words found in the drafts, the content of the essay, and the picture of Dylan and Shepard at work, remains intact. So while you, dear reader, may at certain moments here feel like the singer in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” who “only saw what they let me see,” I hope you’ll agree that despite the couple of closed exhibits, the show is well worth the viewing.^[15]

 

Like all of Dylan’s best songs, “Brownsville Girl” feels like it is about, as Dylan once said of Woody Guthrie’s songs, “everything at the same time.”^[16]  Some of those things include the Wild West, the fall of American culture, the movies and their effect on an audience, the U.S. Southwestern desert, the price of our actions, the difficulties of freedom, maybe one specific woman, maybe Lou Reed, and maybe an appeal to a muse. All of these are threaded in and out of a hopeless yet hope-filled odyssey across a desert, both literal and metaphorical, that ends where it begins, with the frustrating, tantalizing feeling of a memory that seems important yet just out of reach. “Brownsville Girl” has been lauded by critics from Steven Scobie (“a masterpiece, a song that must rank among the five or six best that Dylan has ever written”) to Clinton Heylin (“Dylan’s … greatest narrative ballad. A song that could stand alongside anything in Child,”) to Michael Gray (“a long tour de force … the Bob Dylan of genius and generous intelligence, fully engaged.”).^[17] Dylan himself rates the song highly. When asked by Bill Flanagan in 2017 if any of his works deserved more attention, Dylan’s immediate response was “Brownsville Girl.”^[18]

 

We’ll deal with five basic versions of “Brownsville Girl” here. They are:

 

S1        Shepard first draft, hand-written, notebook and loose notebook pages, November 1984

S2        Shepard typed version of final first draft, with pen amendations

NDG   New Danville Girl, as recorded December 1984

BG      Brownsville Girl, as recorded in May of 1986

BD      Dylan drafts that exist, but will not be quoted directly

 

S1 is the first day’s work, hand-written by Shepard. Shepard, or his faithful typist, typed up the result to prepare for the second day’s effort. There are a limited number of revisions in pen and pencil there in S2, along with the optimistic plural heading at the top, “Dylan Songs.”^[19] (Close by the draft lyrics in Shepard’s notebook is a draft of another song, “The Girl I Left Behind,” – not the 1961 Dylan song – a verse-by-verse list of old girlfriends, none of whom compare to the eponymous one. Dylan recorded one instrumental take of it, with a single line sung, and it went no further.)^[20]

 

Dylan brought his own typed up and revised version of S2 into the studio for the first recording of “New Danville Girl,” on December 6, 1984.^[21] Among changes to the Shepard draft, Dylan wrote a new verse during the session in ten minutes, according to guitarist Ira Ingber.^[22] Looking to the Shepard drafts for what’s missing, the verse seems to be the one about “the time our engine broke down,” a half-quote of Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine Blues.”^[23] The overall result, though, must have lacked that extra dimension for Dylan, because he left the song off 1985’s Empire Burlesque, the album for which it was intended.

 

While there are those who find “New Danville Girl” superior to “Brownsville Girl, there are ample reasons to explain why “New Danville Girl” didn’t make the cut. With its bare orchestration and unvarying four chord structure over eleven minutes-plus, the burden to keep the song moving falls too heavily on Dylan’s vocal delivery. Dylan tries hard, maybe too hard, adding fills like, “Aw, yes, he did!,” and “Oh, yes, I am!,” to make up for the musical monotony and lack of momentum.^[24] That might have been solved with overdubbing additional parts, but it’s not the only issue. Dylan’s delivery in places is uncertain, lacking conviction. It sounds to me as if he’s not quite at home with the lyric as a whole, like he’s performing someone else’s song, and someone else’s ideas. Which, to some degree, he is. Shepard’s influence, as we’ll see, is strong in this early version. And some of the lines fall flat, like, “Well, I keep tryin’ to remember that movie, though / And it does keep comin’ back,” “…it starred Gregory Peck, and he was in it,” and “That was a long time ago / and it was made in the shade.” (Danville). Recorded early in the Empire Burlesque process, it also feels very different in tone to much of the rest of the album, with its emphasis on 80s synths and the big beat, another bid to stay current. An old guy’s memory of a cowboy movie from his youth didn’t fit the agenda, maybe.  Clearly, though, Dylan knew he had something of value. Sam Shepard urged Dylan to turn  the shaggy tale into a ninety-minute opera, and there was talk of making a movie out of it.^[25]   Clinton Heylin reports that Jay Cocks produced a script, and who knows, someday it might be realized.^[26]

 

A full eighteen months after the first try, in May of 1986, Dylan returned to the studio to add a brassy, foregrounded, nearly parodic horn section, along with a spirited six-female-member gospel choir. With that, and a thoroughly revised, expanded set of lyrics (including, again, some in-studio writing), “Brownsville Girl” as we know it was born. ^[27]

 

The Shepard-Dylan collaboration was not without its tensions. The pair first met in 1975, when Rolling Thunder Revue director (and co-writer of much of Desire), Jacques Levy, suggested that Dylan hire Shepard to write the script for his can’t miss self-directed blockbuster-to-be, Renaldo and Clara.^[28]

 

Shepard was already a legend of Off-Broadway, the rock ‘n’ roll playwright who deconstructed American myth with hallucinatory language and imagery that frequently drew on the legends of Hollywood, the Wild West, and rock. He raised horses in California and would soon be competing in steer roping contests at rodeos on weekends (222). In his plays, he often wrote of identity as changeable, provisional, constructed: “I believe in my mask,” a character says in a line that could have been written for Dylan. “The man I made up is me” (xiv).

 

On arrival, Shepard was starstruck in the presence of flesh-and-blood Dylan, writing of his first encounter, “All I’m seeing are album covers for six minutes straight.”^[29] The fizz went quickly flat though when Shepard realized that not only was the movie shoot chaotic, with his attempts to shape the script almost entirely ignored, but that he was not going to be paid what he was promised.^[30] Shaken by the blow to ego and pocketbook, but drawn to the unfolding spectacle around him, he opened his notebook and wrote what he saw. The result is his invaluable account of the first improvised leg of the tour, Rolling Thunder Logbook.

 

By 1984, to some degree, the tables had turned. Dylan was still Dylan, but his summer stadium tour of Europe leaned heavily on his 60s classics, showing the first bare hints of becoming an oldies act. The gospel period had dented Dylan’s commercial appeal, and he had been all but supplanted by the kids on the block as the big 80s took hold: MTV was dominant, running Madonna, the material girl, and the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, in heavy rotation. Bruce Springsteen now wore Dylan’s rock poet crown, and with the hit film and accompanying album Purple Rain, Minnesota’s own Prince had succeeded wildly where Dylan had failed so miserably with Renaldo and Clara. Sam Shepard, meanwhile, hit the peak of his career in 1984. Not only had he won the Pulitzer Prize for his family drama Buried Child, he’d written the screenplay for the most celebrated indie film of the year, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas. He’d also become a movie star, nominated for an Oscar for his turn as jet pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff.^[31] Ironically, the ex-hippie Shepard’s laconic screen presence provided a vision of traditional masculinity tailor-made for the conservative values of Ronald Reagan’s America. Shepard even showed up in People magazine,^[32] which covered his split from his wife and young son the previous year for a tempestuous relationship with actress Jessica Lange, his co-star in the movie Francis. Shepard was so hot in 1984 that Lou Reed even wrote a song about seeing Shepard’s latest play (about a tempestuous relationship), Fool for Love. The song was called “Doin’ the Things That We Want To.”^[33] Dylan heard it live in concert in Los Angeles at the start of November 1984, turned to his seatmate, Lou Reed’s wife Sylvie and said, “Man, that’s a great song. I wish I had written that song.”^[34] And that, maybe, is where “Brownsville Girl” began. Dylan told Bill Flanagan in 1985 that the song was a response to Reed’s, with the variation of opening on a narrator going to see a movie instead of a play.^[35]

 

It’s a fantastic story, but like many Dylan stories, questionable. Sam Shepard told Howard Sounes an entirely different, more workaday version of how it happened:

 

We tossed around a bunch of ideas, none of which really

got anywhere, and then we just sort of [started] telling

stories to each other … He says, “One day I was standing

in line for this Gregory Peck film.” And I said, “Why don’t we

just use that … as we’re not getting anywhere?”^[36]

 

“Dylan Danville Girl,” “11/21/84,” “Malibou” [sic].^[37] That’s the heading at the top of Shepard’s hand-written pocket-notebook first draft, curiously in three different pens, all different from the main text, suggesting he wrote it in after the fact. Maybe Shepard remembered the financial issue from Rolling Thunder and wanted an exact written record of the date.

 

What follows is a verse-by-verse account of the song’s development, drawing out some of the many allusions and references embedded in the lyrics, final and non-final.

 

Verses 1 and 2: That movie

 

The first two verses of Shepard’s first draft are remarkably close to the finished product, a faithful summation of the 1950 western, The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck. Peck played Jimmy Ringo, who pulls into town to retire from gunfighting and reunite with his secret wife and child, but the fastest gun in the West is a tempting target, and in the end, he is shot in the back by a hot-headed youth, “out to make a name for himself,” as the song has it.^[38] Ringo wants the boy turned loose, so that he’ll “every moment have to face his death,” challenged as Ringo has been at every turn (Brownsville). It’s not surprising that Dylan was thinking about a hungry kid itching to outdraw a legend, given Springsteen and Prince’s ascension at his expense. Shepard, too, had visited this territory in his play, The Tooth of Crime, about a future world where rock stars were gunfighters who faced off in a kind of pre-rap battle with life and  death stakes.^[39]

 

The first line remains essentially the same through every written draft: “I don’t remember that movie that well,” in S1, “I wish I could remember that movie just a little bit better,” from the first recording.^[40] It’s a theatrical open, following the playwright’s familiar practice of starting in media res. But something is wrong. There’s a hesitance to it, an uncertainty, unfitting for our soon-to-be-rambling hero. Finally, in the recording of “Brownsville Girl,” Dylan ditches in media res and comes up with something that appears nowhere in the drafts. It’s a classic “once upon a time” start, crucially switching the grammar from proper English to Dylan’s favored country dialect: “Well, there was this movie I seen one time, about a man riding ‘cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck.”^[41] The narrator goes from uncertainty and vulnerability, with his memory failing, to strength and centrality. You can practically see him in the bunkhouse, pushing his cowboy hat back, setting a toothpick in his mouth and starting his after-dinner yarn while the other ranch hands whittle or work on letters back home. It sets the perfect mood for the adventures ahead. “I go on instinct,” says Dylan in several interviews, stating what might be his prime directive. ^[42] Sometimes, it takes a year and a half to feel it.

 

Verse 3: Chains, Trains, Automobiles

 

Shepard was fairly obsessed with driving long distances, “the farther the better,” and he starts the next verse with vivid specificity. “I was driving in a car – just like I’m doin’ now – with the rain beatin’ down / Radio static buzzing / Both windshield wipers broken.”^[43] Dylan does not share the driving obsession, though, and the line is lost. Instead the writers focus on one of the many overlaps in their interpersonal Venn diagram, the power of movies on the imagination (“I keep seein’ this stuff and it just keeps rollin’ in”), along with the introduction of the lost love who will haunt the narrative.^[44] In the drafts, Dylan fiddles with the wording, searching for those active verbs they told us about in creative writing class. Part of the need for the search is due to another of Dylan’s favorite moves, scrambling sense in search of fresh expression. Shepard’s typed draft, presumably used on their second day together, has the movie images rolling “right through me like a moving train,” while the lost love’s memory is “like a ball and chain” – simple, clear, sensible (Notebook). But a double-headed arrow in pen on the second day of Shepard’s work indicates that someone decided to swap the rhymes, so now we have “rolls right through me like a ball and chain,” and a memory that’s “like a moving train,” which … what?^[45] It’s a trick Dylan picked up from Beat poet models like Gregory Corso with his signature phrase, “Fried Shoes,” conjoining disconnected words and phrases, sometimes a chase for new and unexpected meaning, sometimes a bid for surreal, comic or absurd effect.^[46]  This is not the first time Dylan has pulled this off. In 1966, in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” he flipped nouns so it’s not the mailbox that’s been stolen, but the whole post office.^[47] Later in the song, a switch of verbs brings a pedestrian line alive, producing eyelids that are smoked, and a cigarette that’s punched.^[48]

 

Verse 4: The Ghost of Paris, Texas

 

Verse four, nearly intact from the start, has the Brownsville girl coming to meet our narrator on the Painted Desert, in her “busted down Ford and platform heels,” only to demurely turn the car over to him to drive.^[49] The old Ford calls to mind the 1959 Ford Ranchero that Harry Dean Stanton so memorably travels in, crossing the desert to meet his own lost love in Paris, Texas.^[50] The image clearly spoke to Dylan, as he would later create at least four paintings of still frames from the film, including two of the Ranchero.^[51] John Gibbens points out that cars have never figured much in Dylan’s lyrics, as opposed to Bruce Springsteen’s, but in real life, to hear Howard Sounes tell it, Dylan suspended one of the first cars he owned from the living room ceiling of his Malibu home.^[52] In Shepard’s typed draft, the busted up Ford is crossed out for “cardboard Corvette,” maybe teasing Dylan about the junker hanging over his head.^[53]

 

Verse 5: She’s Gone

 

“Well, I’m driving this car,” Verse 5 begins. Shepard would like it to go through “Cold Springs” and “Huntersville,” maybe toward his farmhouse in Kentucky.^[54] But Dylan is less interested in covering every corner of the Rand McNally atlas than he is in heading toward the resonant land of myths and legends. Instead of the backwoods, the song heads straight for the Alamo, where S2 has the couple sleeping “under Jim Bowie’s name.”^[55] A theme is developing, one of visits to iconic places in the American west. Aiden Day and Katherine Weiss see the song using these sites to tear apart myths of American exceptionalism, but this seems too easy.^[56] It’s true that Sam Shepard’s been forever conflicted about the macho codes of the cowboy he nevertheless seemed to live by, asking in his play True West if a movie is a true western if “it’s got grown men acting like little boys.”^[57] Dylan, at first blush, has no such conflict. He idolizes these films, calling them “heroic, visionary” and “inspiring.”^[58] Where, then, does this song fall? Michael Gray sees an admixture: “90% affection, 10% challenge.”^[59] Why not both/and? Dylan, Shepard, and the song all seem not just equivocal about the movies and America, but of two simultaneous, contradictory minds: 100% critique and 100% embrace.

 

Weiss suggests that the Brownsville Girl’s disappearance in Mexico, when she “went out to find a doctor and never came back,” might be a trip to an abortionist, adding a political dimension to the song.^[60] While it’s possible, there’s slim evidence to support it. The first two Shepard drafts have her going out “for food” and, while there are several variants in the Dylan drafts, there is nothing to suggest pregnancy (Notebook). Given that the final version has the singer worried about getting his “head blown off” if he goes after her, a more likely scenario is the classic western trope of the wounded criminal hiding out, hoping for some discreet medical assistance (Brownsville).

 

Verses Six and Seven: She Ain’t You

 

The Brownsville girl is gone forever, but our hero is still on the road, now with another woman. Shepard tries to get his highway knowledge going yet again, this time steering the Ford “from Spokane to Vancouver,” but that gets cut.^[61] What remains is the sun coming up over the Rockies. In a set of lines that will be reworked extensively, the singer tries to delicately explain to his lost love that while he’s with someone new, he’s actually thinking about her. It’s a tricky navigation. In the Shepard drafts and on “New Danville Girl,” the new woman triggers memory by singing “Baby Let the Good Times Roll.”^[62] Clinton Heylin was able to quote a few of the draft lines in his 2024 book, and there he cites Dylan’s rejected, “She ain’t you, but she reminds me of ya when she leans toward the ledge.”^[63] It’s unclear whether the ledge here is behavioral or a piece of reckless driving. After several variations, Dylan will arrive at the final version, the economical, evocative, “She ain’t you but she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul.”^[64] At verse’s end, just the thought of the memory of the Brownsville Girl threatens to send the car off the road, lifting the song into its chorus.

 

The Chorus: Gina?

 

Shepard’s original draft calls the woman the unlikely and unmelodious name of Gina:

 

Gina

With deep brown eyes

Shine like the moon above

Gina

Still stuck on you

Gina

Honey Love^[65]

 

Gina is likely from Shepard and his interest in the film, Lonely are the Brave, from 1962, referenced in True West as “a western that’d knock yer lights out.”^[66] Kirk Douglas is the untamed cowboy, running free but hemmed in by the 1962 America of fences and interstates. Still, he aims to free his civilized friend Paul from jail, and to see the woman they both love, played by then-unknown Gena Rowlands. Rowlands’s first name was pronounced “Gina” in the trailer, and perhaps that stuck with a then-teenaged Sam Shepard.^[67] Rowland’s character, Jerry, like the Brownsville girl, is a nurturing supporter to a wandering cowboy, but she also isn’t afraid to call him on his stuff. Gena/Gina/Jerry is a truthteller who blows up the hero’s sentimental myth about the freedom once enjoyed in the west: “That world you … live in doesn’t exist,” she tells him. “Maybe it never did.”^[68]

 

Dylan, at some point, per Clinton Heylin, switched Gina to Ruby.^[69] In the December ‘84 session, Dylan found his way from Ruby to Danville Girl (“Danville Girl, with your Danville curl.”)^[70] Both girl and curl were lifted from the Woody Guthrie tune of the same name.^[71] Dylan knew the song early on, and can be heard singing it at a very young age on the “The Madison Tapes 1958-61.”^[72] He seems to have changed Danville to Brownsville close in time to the final recording. Brownsville made better sense than Danville, it being another prominent Texas town to go with Amarillo and San Anton.’ A history buff like Dylan might even know that Brownsville was the site of the first battle of the Mexican-American war and the last battle of the Civil War, taking place after Appomattox.^[73] Dylan’s affection for Texas goes deep: “You feel things, and you’re not quite sure what you feel,” Dylan told Douglas Brinkley in 2009. “Texas might have more independent-thinking people than any other state in the country.”^[74] That same year, the Malibu man from Hibbing, Minnesota told French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “I’m from the Lone Star State” (Late Era). Perhaps he was referring to that invented character, the one with the “extra dimension,” who might be from anywhere on any given day: “Bob Dylan.”

 

Verses Seven, Eight, Nine:  On the Road to Amarillo

 

Another verse, another road trip, this one with the flavor of that favorite of both Shepard and Dylan: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The basic situation is the same in all drafts. The travelers (I’m imagining them here as two men, Dylan and Shepard as analogs for Kerouac’s Sal and Dean) pull up to Henry Porter’s old place. Henry is gone but Ruby (originally Lily Mae in the Shepard drafts) offers comfort and conversation.^[75] She shares her disappointment with the world, commenting in the great line first added in S2 – impossible to know whose addition – “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.”^[76] Kerouac took a similar view of  Amarillo’s cultural decline in On the Road: “We bowled for Amarillo, and reached it in the morning among windy panhandle grasses that only a few years ago waved around a collection of buffalo tents. Now there were gas stations and the new 1950 jukeboxes with immense ornate snouts and awful songs.”^[77] It’s not impossible that in those first few halting hours of working together the book came up, and Dylan pulled his tattered copy off the shelf in search of inspiration. If he did, I wonder if the pair stumbled on this passage, holding a striking and borderline eerie description of a guy closely resembling Sam Shepard named Stan Shepard, excited to meet his hero, ready to ride through Amarillo, heading south: “Stan Shepard … was a rangy, bashful shock-haired Denver boy with a big con-man smile and slow, easy-going Gary Cooper movements …  He had been waiting to meet me for years and now for the first time we were suspended together in front of a venture … ‘Is it true you’re going to Mexico? Hot damn, I could go with you?’” ^[78]

 

Outside Amarillo, Shepard’s draft is in the land of the real, the specific. When they pull up to Henry Porter’s, they are “running out of gas, and friends.”^[79] There’s “cornbread on the table and sweet potato pie” (Notebook). Henry had fallen from whatever hipster or criminal beginnings to a point where, “junk metal and spare parts had become his lifestyle,” and he had to “hide his despair with a mask of a smile” (Notebook). The mask reference is lost somewhere along the way – too on the nose maybe for Dylan and his many masquerades. Originally, the conversation in the verse was with Henry, but of course, Henry’s not there. (Even Homer nods.) One wonders if the junk metal and spare parts came from a tour Dylan might have afforded Shepard of his collection of junk that he’d soon start welding into sculptures. The wonderful line about going all the way, “til the seat covers fade and the water moccasin dies,” is there nearly from the beginning, but car-freak Shepard keeps trying to sneak in more details, like “the seat chrome stripping gets soft” (Notebook). Alas, no dice.

 

In the drafts included in Heylin’s book, Dylan flirted with the idea of making Ruby a stripper, like the lost love in “Tangled Up in Blue:” “She used to show herself off in a niteclub for so much a nite.”^[80] But she fell nicely into the role of the unappreciated homemaker. In a Dylan line that might have been jettisoned for its strong Eleanor Rigby flavor, Ruby was, per Heylin, “baking a pie for no one”(462).^[81] Ruby, too, at one point gets a jolt of Dylan’s late-70s Christian scold, complaining, per Heylin again, “it’s as if the whole country needs a floggin’ / And the Son of Man has no [place] to lay his head” (462).

 

As with the first line in the song, there is a word problem in the Ruby episode that holds back resonance. Once again, the word remains for a year and half. “She was so disillusioned with everything” is heard on “New Danville Girl,” and this line will be rewritten many times.^[82] In the final recording session, Ruby is no longer the prosaic “disillusioned.” She’s now the poetic, resonating, “broken-hearted.”^[83]

 

Verse 10: Falling into the screen

 

One of the true delights of “Brownsville Girl” is that, just when we’ve forgotten it, we suddenly return to the movie that the singer can’t remember. Shepard had it “slappin’ my mind, like a billboard in the night,”^[84] a line maybe too attention-grabbing to keep. In any event, the singer is now an actor in the film. Like Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr, he’s fallen into the screen, though he has no idea what part is his. And here, we hit on what I see as the song’s major theme, being lost. Divorced for seven years, Dylan was at the tail end of a series of intense relationships. Just five days before meeting with Shepard, he told a pair of radio interviewers, “I don’t know where I’m going as a person.”^[85] Creatively, too, Dylan was struggling to write, asking not only Shepard, but Carole Bayer Sager and others for help. The notion that his talent might be lost was the worst fear of all: “That would scare me. I wouldn’t know what else to do. I would be lost,” he told Bill Flanagan in 1985.^[86] For Shepard, the split from his wife and child only added to his constant conflict about his own identity. “Something’s been coming to me lately about this whole question of being lost,” he wrote to friend and collaborator Joseph Chaiken in 1983, “one’s identity being shattered under severe personal circumstances.”^[87] This sense of personal lostness, for both Dylan and Shepard, must have lent the notion of identity-loss within the song a magnetic power. One way to look at “Brownsville Girl” is as an exploration of both the fear and reality of being lost, whether the songwriters were aware of it or not.

 

With identity such an unstable concept for both writers, it was natural for the movies hold a hypnotic, formative power. In Shepard’s play Angel City, the character Miss Scoons describes it this way: “I look at the movie and I am the movie. I am the star … I hate my life not being a movie … I’m dreaming but never living.”^[88] Dylan enjoyed a big James Dean phase as a youth. One night he snuck out of the house and headed for his uncle’s local movie theater in Hibbing to see Dean in Giant one more time. When he got home, his aggravated father tore up the Dean poster young Bobby had hung on his wall.^[89] A few years later, Dylan wrote to his girlfriend and cultural mentor Suze Rotolo of his intense identification when at the movies:  “I saw another great movie – ‘The Magnificent Seven’ – oh I just couldn’t believe it – I hate to say it but I’m Yul Brynner – Gawd am I ever him …  I thought for a minute I coulda been Eli Wallach but after seeing Yul – I just knew I was him.”^[90]

 

Verses 11 and 12: Real (Fake) Tears

 

After the second chorus, Dylan and Shepard are ready to realize this fantasy of life inside the screen. We’re now firmly in a new film, the singer’s dream of a western, starring himself as the charming outlaw. Wearing a pompadour like Little Richard or Bobby Zimmerman in high school, the singer/actor becomes Peck’s assassin, or some wholly other wanted character, “cornered in the churchyard,” maybe a sly reference to the commercial failure of Dylan’s Christian-era songs.^[91] Once again, Dylan blurs the narrative. Shepard’s (and “New Danville Girl’s”) “I was crossin’ the street when they opened fire,” becomes the more ambiguous, “when shots rang out.” ^[92] The vagueness resonates.

 

At the trial, our hero is saved by the Brownsville girl herself, who provides an alibi and “cries real tears” (Brownsville). “It was the best acting I ever saw you do,” appears in S1, and makes it as far as the recording of “New Danville Girl.” ^[93] The line pegs the Brownsville girl as an actress, like Shepard’s new partner, Jessica Lange. Shepard recedes as the song develops, though, and in the final, the line is switched to, “the best acting I saw anybody do” (emphasis added), leaving the idealized lover more mysterious, more open, keeping that extra dimension in place. ^[94]

 

Verse 13: Original Thoughts

 

“He’s a lot of fun to work with, because he’s so off the wall sometimes,” Shepard told Rolling Stone about working with Dylan. “We’d come up with a line, and I’d think that we were heading down one trail over here, and then suddenly he’d just throw in this other line, and we’d wind up following it off in some different direction.”^[95] So I’m betting that it’s Dylan who abandons the narrative with this line, found in the Shepard drafts: “I’ve always been an emotional person but this is too much.”^[96] It’s pure speculation, but I imagine the two real/fake spiritual cowboys, now comfortable with each other, challenging each other with lines shouted out and impossible to follow. Shepard’s answer? “I’m always standing in line but when I get to the window they’re always sold out” (Notebook). Funny, but it doesn’t make the cut.^[97] Whoever called out the next line, there from the first draft, gets credit for an instant classic:  “If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.”^[98] The shock of breaking the song’s fourth wall is not only a hilarious surprise, it makes the songwriting process itself another of the song’s losses: the loss of the girl, of the nation’s integrity, even the loss of the missing Henry Porter. Lou Reed loved “Brownsville Girl” and might have been thinking of this line when he said, “I think that is one of the greatest things I ever heard in my life. I fell down laughing.”^[99]

 

The quest for an original thought is followed by a couplet that starts off on Mars, but ends right back on track, and it’s there, nearly final, from the first Shepard draft: “I feel pretty good, but I could feel a whole lot better / I need you to help me put my hand to the plow.”^[100] The singer’s “I” now includes not only the guy trying to remember the movie, and the guy on trial in the fantasy movie, but also the songwriter who’s having so much trouble getting work done that he’s calling out for collaborators. “Hand to the plow,” will morph into “if you were here by my side to show me how,”^[101] but the call to the woman, to the muse, to the goddess of creativity is the same. This verse is a microcosm of the whole, wandering to space and returning to the road of the song. As Shepard said of working with Dylan, “You are going down a dark alley and, all of a sudden, you see the sunlight … It’s not the usual track of thought.”^[102]

 

Verse 14: Not the one I had in mind

 

Back in line for the movie, our hapless hero’s situation has worsened. It’s raining and he’s just realized that he’s not going to see The Gunfighter at all, but some other Peck film.  On Dylan’s thirtieth birthday, in May of 1971, Dylan was in Jerusalem and, to celebrate, he told a reporter, “We went to see a Gregory Peck movie – I’m quite a fan of his.”^[103] In release at that time was Shoot Out, its poster showing Peck with a pistol aimed at three bad guys,^[104] matching the plot and not too far off from the poster of The Gunfighter.^[105] Could the punch line of Dylan’s story about waiting in line have been that he was waiting for the wrong film, and that he only realized when he saw the older Gregory Peck? (“He just don’t look the same,” as “New Danville Girl” has it.) ^[106] Now Shepard uses this idea to turn the old notion of, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to” into a complaint against 1980s Hollywood: “They got a lot of silly ones out now, but ones like that are hard to find.”^[107] In the final, Dylan will be the one to bring things back to fandom, with “I’ll see him in anything, I’ll stand in line.”^[108]

 

Verses 15, 16: The only thing we knew

 

Shepard and Dylan’s first version of this verse made it, with revisions, as far as the “New Danville Girl” recording. It continues the movies-are-bad-now idea, repeating the notion about Hollywood that “nothing [good] happens on purpose. It’s an accident if it happens at all,”^[109] and then opens all the way up to end with the appearance of Plato’s cave: “While we talk to our shadows by an old stone wall.”^[110] Shepard’s notebook and typed revision ends here, and this is the last of his contributions. Everything that follows in the song is pure Dylan. Left to his own devices, Dylan first abandons the verse, then the entire narrative – both  road trip and movie – with another stunner of a line: “The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.”^[111] What follows is a series of disconnected scraps of conversation and Dylanesque aphorisms about suffering, contentment, and repentance. It’s all finished off with a sexual boast: “And I always say, hang onto me baby and let’s hope the roof stays on” (Brownsville). Dylan blunts the bravado by having the back-up singers derisively sing/scream a long “Waoooohhh!” in bemused delight. As he sings in “Things Have Changed,” “I hurt easy / I just don’t show it.”^[112]

 

Verse 17: The stars are torn down

 

The blaring horns settle, the backup singers listen. Quietly at first, the singer resigns himself now to the loss of the film. He remembers even less than he started with, seventeen verses ago. “All I remember about it was Gregory Peck / He wore a gun and he was shot in the back.”^[113] Dylan then adds the narrator himself to this world of loss: “I don’t remember who I was, or where I was bound” (Brownsville). In a Dylan draft quoted by Heylin, he’s no longer even sure of the movie’s existence: “that was a long time ago – maybe it was never made.”^[114] As the song nears its end, the erasures grow to encompass the entire world. Dylan ends the last verse with, “that was long ago, long before the stars were torn down.”^[115] Poet and critic John Gibbens called out the connection to the Book of Revelation, quipping that, “It’s probably not a good idea to let Dylan get behind the wheel, because it seems wherever you start out, you’re going to end up in Apocalypse.”^[116] From here, there’s nowhere to go. The oblivion the song has been aiming at all along is complete. If “Brownsville Girl” was written as a response to Lou Reed’s celebration of “Doin’ the Things That We Want To,” it’s a withering critique of the consequences.

 

To review: the nation’s moral strength, The Gunfighter, the Brownsville Girl, all the song’s various plots and road trips – along with the singer’s very selfhood – are all lost. What’s left? In another of Dylan’s greatest songs, the visions of Johanna were “all that remained.” Here, in place of those visions is the cry to the Brownsville Girl for succor, for inspiration, for connection. The call goes on forever as the song fades out.

 

Lost and Found

 

“Lostness can be profoundly rejuvenating in a way,” Sam Shepard told a reporter in 1986. “It’s a desperate time and full of despair and all that – but being really lost can start something that’s brand-new  …  I think you continually turn around that circle – finding yourself lost and then getting relatively found. To me, writing is a way of bringing things back together a little bit.”^[117]

 

Shepard would stay with Jessica Lange for thirty years. They had two children together. Dylan would marry Carolyn Dennis in June 1986, six months after the birth of their daughter Desirée and two months before the release of “Brownsville Girl” on Knocked Out Loaded. Dylan’s creative and commercial slide would continue, with exceptions, until the early nineties, when he retrenched with a pair of traditional blues and folk records, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. These records found Dylan circling back, covering the old songs that had first inspired him – songs that were born in the time when the stars still hung in the sky.

 

---

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Shepard Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Container 14, Folder 14.

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—. Fool for Love and Other Plays. New York Bantam, 1 Nov. 1984.

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—. Fool for Love and Other Plays. New York Bantam, Nov. 1984.

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[1] Hilburn, Robert. “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door.” Los Angeles Times, 4 Apr. 2004, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-apr-04-ca-dylan04-story.html. Accessed 5 Jan. 2025.

[2] “Bob Dylan FULL 60 Minutes Ed Bradley 2004 Interview – HD.” YouTube, 15 Dec. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG4sadfa-ew. Accessed 10 Jan., 2025 (2:52).

[3] “Bob Dylan San Francisco Press Conference 1965.” YouTube, 20 Sept. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPIS257tvoA, (2:15).

[4] Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One. New York, Simon & Schuster, 4 Oct. 2004, 173.

[5] Flanagan, Bill  Written in My Soul: Rock’s Great Songwriters Talk about Creating Their Music. Chicago, Contemporary Books, 1986, 92.

[6] Hilburn.

[7] Hilburn, and Brinkley, Douglas. “Inside Bob Dylan’s Lost Interviews and Unseen Letters.” Rolling Stone, S21 Oct. 2020.

[8] For McDonald’s purported sleepover at Dylan’s, see O’Sullivan, Dylan. “When Norm Macdonald Met Bob Dylan, a Since-Deleted Thread That I Just Love.” X.com, 24  Dec 2024, x.com/DylanoA4/status/1865016007305068977. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025. This originally came to me via a tweet thread from Harrison Hewitt (@harryhew), currently unavailable. For the freestyle verse, see No Direction Home. Directed by Martin Scorsese, PBS, 27 Sept. 2005, (1:53:40-1:54:46).

[9] Hilburn.

[10] Flanagan, Written, 93.

[11] Chronicles, 164.

[12] Hilburn.

[13] See Hilburn for circular and lateral metaphors, and for song as dream, Chronicles, 165.

[14] Flanagan, Written, 91.

[15] Dylan, Bob. “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven | the Official Bob Dylan Site.” Bobdylan.com, 2019, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/trying-get-heaven/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2025.

[16] Hilburn.

[17] Gray, Michael. Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan. London ; New York,

Continuum, 2000, 579, and Heylin, Clinton. The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Vol. 2: Far Away From Myself. The Bodley Head, London, 2024, 674, and 591.

[18] He added “In the Garden” to his list of two. Flanagan, Bill. “Q&A with Bill Flanagan | the Official Bob Dylan Site.” Bobdylan.com, 2017, http://www.bobdylan.com/news/qa-with-bill-flanagan/. Accessed Jan 6, 2025.

[19] Shepard, Sam. “Brownsville Girl” typescript draft of lyrics with revisions, undated. The Sam Shepard Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Container 16, Folder 6.

[20] Heylin, Double Life, 464.

[21] Recording date from Heylin, Clinton. Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006. Constable, 2010, 290.

[22] Taylor, Tom. “The Day Bob Dylan Blew Away a Room Full of Musicians.” Far Out Magazine,  15 Dec. 2024, faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-blew-away-a-room-full-of- musicians/. Accessed Jan 16, 2025.

[23] Dylan, Bob, and Sam Shepard. “New Danville Girl.” Springtime in New York: the Bootleg Series, vol. 16 (1980-1985),  Columbia Records, 2021, and McTell, Blind Willie. “Broke Down Engine Blues.”  Blind Willie McTell. The Blues, Smithsonian Collection of Recordings, 1993.

[24] Dylan and Shepard, “Danville.”

[25] Cott, Jonathan. “The Rolling Stone Interview: Sam Shepard.” Rolling Stone, 16 Dec. 1986

[26] Heylin, Road, 501.

[27] Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades. London, Faber And Faber, 2011, 391.

[28] Winters, John J. Sam Shepard. Catapult, 15 Mar. 2017, 180.

[29] Shepard, Sam. Rolling Thunder Logbook. Viking, 1977, 13.

[30] Sloman, Larry. On the Road with Bob Dylan. New York, Three Rivers Press, 2002, 117-8.

[31] Shepard’s sidekick in the film, Jack Ridley, was portrayed by none other than drummer and singer Levon Helm from The Band, legendary both on their own and as erstwhile Dylan backing band.

[32] “The 25 Most Intriguing People of 1983.” People, vol. 20, no. 26, 26 Dec. 1983, 38.

[33] The opening line: “The other night we went to see Sam’s play.” Reed, Lou. Doin’ the Things That We Want To. RCA Records, Apr. 1984.

[34] Bockris, Victor. Transformer: The Story of Lou Reed. Simon and Schuster, 1994, 347.

[35] Flanagan, Written, 90.

[36] Sounes, Howard. Down the Highway – the Life of Bob Dylan. Transworld, 2011, 375.

[37] Shepard, Sam. Brown notebook, includes material for A Lie of the Mind, “Brownsville Girl,” October-November 1984. The Sam Shepard Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Container 14, Folder 14.

[38] Dylan Bob, with Sam Shepard. “Brownsville Girl | the Official Bob Dylan Site.” Bobdylan.com, 2018, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/brownsville-girl/. Accessed 12  Dec. 2024, and The Gunfighter. Directed by Henry King, 20th Century Fox, 1950.

[39] Shepard, Sam. Tooth of Crime. 1974. Vintage, 2006.

[40] Shepard, Notebook, and Dylan, Bob, and Sam Shepard.“New Danville Girl.” Springtime in New York: the Bootleg Series, vol. 16 (1980-1985), Columbia Records, 2021

[41] The film opens with Peck riding through the sands, and ends with the assassin doing the same, but the rest of it takes place in a civilized town, à la High Noon. Dylan with Shepard, Brownsville.

[42] Flanagan, Written, 104; Brinkley, “His Mind” (“It’s one of those where you write it on instinct.”), Dylan and Cott, 72. (“I believe that instinct is what makes a genius a  genius.”)

[43] For “the farther the better,” and Shepard’s love of driving, see “Falling Without End,” from 1990, included in Cruising Paradise. Its conclusion reads like what might have been Shepard’s solo version of “Brownsville Girl:” “I love long-distance driving. The farther the better. I love covering immense stretches in one leap: Memphis to New York City; Gallup to L.A.; Saint Paul to Richmond; Lexington to Baton Rouge; Bismarck to Cody … Relentless driving. Driving until the body disappears, the legs fall off, the eyes bleed, the hands go numb, the mind shuts down, and then, suddenly, something new begins to appear.” Shepard, Sam. Cruising Paradise. Random House, 30 Sept. 2010. 156. Draft lyric from Shepard, Notebook.

[44] Dylan with Shepard, Brownsville.

[45] Shepard, Typescript.

[46] “MANNERS & MORALS: Fried Shoes.” TIME, nextgen, 9 Feb. 1959, time.com/archive/6827179/manners-morals-fried-shoes/. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025.

[47] But the post office has been stolen / And the mailbox is locked. Dylan, Bob “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” | the Official Bob Dylan Site.” Bobdylan.com, 2015, www.bobdylan.com/songs/stuck-inside-mobile-memphis-blues-again/.

[48] “An’ he just smoked my eyelids / An’ punched my cigarette.” Dylan, Stuck.

[49] Dylan with Shepard, Brownsville.

[50] “Ford Ranchero in “Paris, Texas.”” IMCDb.org, 2025, http://www.imcdb.org/v069051.html. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025

[51] Warmuth, Scott. “Bob Dylan did several paintings and drawings based on different scenes in Paris, Texas.” X.com, 06/03/2021, https://x.com/scottwarmuth1/status/1400494793311014918

[52] Gibbens, John. The Nightingale’s Code. Touched Press, 2001, 61, and “Howard Sounes … said of the home, ‘He has a car suspended from the ceiling in the living room, which was one of his first cars.’” Roundtree, Cheyenne. “Folk Legend Bob Dylan, 77, Makes Some Youthful Updates to His Malibu Compound.” Mail Online, Daily Mail, 12 Mar. 2019, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6795861/Folk-legend-Bob-Dylan-77-makes-youthful-updates-Malibu-compound.html. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.

[53] Shepard, Typescript.

[54] Shepard, Notebook.

[55] Throughout the eighteen month gestation, the lyrics will shift from Shepard-centric to Dylan-centric. The Jim Bowie line is supplanted in “New Danville Girl,” with “we fell out under the stars,” an echo of a line from Shepard’s nostalgic account of a road trip as a boy recounted in Motel Chronicles. “That night we crossed the Badlands. I rode in the shelf behind the back seat of the Plymouth and stared out at the stars.” Motel Chronicles. San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1982, 8.

[56] Gray, 580 and Weiss, Katherine. “… Long before the Stars Were Torn Down…”: Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 32, no. 1, 1 Jan.

2009, 53–65. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.

[57] Shepard, Sam. Seven Plays. Bantam, 1984, 35.

[58] Brinkley, Late Era.

[59] Gray, 580.

[60] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville,” and Weiss, 59.

[61] Shepard, Notebook.

[62] Shepard, Notebook. Dylan and Shepard, “Danville.”

[63] Heylin, Double, 462.

[64] Trying to pin real-life names to fictional characters is a guessing game that, at best, blunts literary insight – but let’s face it, it’s irresistible. The song comes at a time when Dylan had recent, serious relationships with a series of African-American women, one of whom, Carolyn Dennis, he’d soon marry. Combining the suggestion in this line with “I can’t believe we’ve lived so live and we’re still so far apart,” one might suggest Mavis Staples crossed his mind. Dylan had asked her father for her hand in marriage when Dylan and Staples were both in their early twenties, but he was turned down.

[65] Shepard, Notebook.

[66] Shepard. Seven, 18.

[67]   “Lonely Are the Brave Trailer.” YouTube, 19 May 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDKGx3lOXkQ. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024 (1:27-8).

[68] Lonely Are the Brave. Directed by David Miller, Universal ,1962. https://www.amazon.com/Lonely-Are-Brave-David-Miller/dp/B002SATCO0 (11:52).

[69] Heylin, Double. 461-2.

[70] Dylan with Shepard, Brownsville.

[71] Guthrie, Woody. ““Danville Girl” ~ Woody Guthrie.” WoodyGuthrie.org, 2024, http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Danville_Girl.htm. Accessed 30 Mar. 2025.

[72]Dylan, Bob. “Danville Girl.” 1960-61. Early Tapes, Minnesota, Madison, 1958-61. The Bob Dylan Archives, Series 12: Audiovisual Materials, Concert Recording. On display at The Bob Dylan Center, Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

[73]In another instance of both/and, the outcome of the war brought the state its independence. It also enabled Texas to establish itself as a slave state. “About Brownsville | Brownsville, TX.” Www.brownsvilletx.gov, http://www.brownsvilletx.gov/822/About-Brownsville. Accessed 25 Mar. 2025.

[74] Brinkley, “Late Era.”

[75] Shepard, Notebook. Shepard, Typescript.

[76] Shepard, Typescript.

[77] Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London, Penguin Book, 5 Sept. 1957, 156.

[78] Adding to the resemblance is the mention of Gary Cooper. Film critics and journalists often compared Shepard to the older actor, calling him among things,  “Gary Cooper in denim.” (Winters xiii.). Excerpt, from Kerouac, 149.

[79] Shepard, Notebook.

[80] “She was working in a topless place, and I stopped in for a beer.” “Tangled up in Blue | the Official Bob Dylan Site.” www.bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/tangled-blue/, and Heylin, Double, 461.

[81] “Father McKenzie, writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear.” Beatles, The. “Eleanor Rigby.” Parlaphone, 1966.

[82] Dylan and Shepard, “Danville.”

[83] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[84] Shepard, Notebook.

[85] Dylan, Bob and Jonathan Cott. Bob Dylan, the Essential Interviews. New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; New Delhi, Simon & Schuster, 2017, 324.

[86] Flanagan, Written, 111.

[87] Shewey, Don . “Sam Shepard’s Identity Dance.” Don Shewey.com, July 1997, http://www.donshewey.com/theater_articles/Shepard_Signature_season.htm. Accessed 24 Nov. 2024. (Article originally published in American Theater Magazine, July/August 1997.)

[88] Shepard, Sam. Fool for Love and Other Plays. New York Bantam, Nov. 1984, 77.

[89] Lee, C P. Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan. London, Helter Skelter Publishing, 2000, 12.

[90] Brinkley, “Inside.”

[91] Dylan with Shepard, Brownville.

[92] “opened fire,” Shepard, Notebook. Dylan and Shepard, Danville. “shots rang out,” Dylan with Shepard, Brownville.

[93] Shepard. Notebook, and “Danville.”

[94] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[95] Cott, “Rolling Stone.”

[96] Shepard, Notebook.

[97] The final line: “I’ve always been the kind of person who doesn’t like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line.”

[98] Shepard, Notebook.

[99]Taylor, Tom. “Lou Reed Picked His Favourite Bob Dylan Song of All Time.” Far out Magazine, 28 Sept. 2021, faroutmagazine.co.uk/lou-reed-favourite-bob-dylan-song/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.

[100] Shepard, Notebook.

[101] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[102] Sounes, 375.

[103] Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home. Backbeat Books, 1 Apr. 2011, 414.

[104] James, Will, and Marguerite Roberts. “Shoot Out.” IMDb, 13 Oct. 1971, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067750/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.

[105] Davidson, Mark, and Parker, Fishel. Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine, Vol. 9. Blackstone Publishing, 12 Dec. 2023, 409.

[106] Dylan and Shepard, “New Danville Girl.”

[107] Shepard, Notebook.

[108] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[109] The source for this is personal memory from working in the film business in New York as an assistant film editor and editor throughout the 1980s. The idea that a good film could only happen by accident was summed up in another saying then current about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”

[110] Dylan and Shepard, “Danville.”

[111] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[112] Dylan, Bob. “Things Have Changed | the Official Bob Dylan Site.” Www.bobdylan.com, 2000, www.bobdylan.com/songs/things-have-changed/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.

[113] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[114] Heylin, Double, 461.

[115] Dylan with Shepard, “Brownsville.”

[116] “And his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth.” James, King. “REVELATION CHAPTER 12 KJV.” Kingjamesbibleonline.org, 1611, http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-Chapter-12/#4. Accessed 30 Mar. 2025, Revelation 12:4, and Gibbens, John. “Through the Iron Gates, Part 1.” Touched.co.uk, 2025, http://www.touched.co.uk/press/irongates.html. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.

[117] Cott, “Rolling Stone.”