The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure

To live it you have to explode

In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed

Sacrifice was the code of the road

~Where are you tonight JC: “Sacrifice is the code of the road” is what you sing in Where Are You Tonight? To die before dying, shedding your skin, making new songs out of old ones.

BD: That’s my mission in life… “He not busy being born is busy dying.” Did you bring your

parachute?

~Bob Dylan interviewed by Jonathan Cott ‘Where Are You Tonight?’ stands alongside the best album-closers Dylan has written to order throughout his long career.

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

Grooveshark:

Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat) by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Spotify:





@#101 on my list of Bob Dylan’s top 200 songs.

Facts

Release on the album “Street Legal” June 15, 1978

Known studio recordings:

Rundown Studios, Santa Monica, California – December 26, 1977 – 1 take

Uncirculated.

Uncirculated. Rundown Studios, Santa Monica, California – 26 & 27 April 1978

Released on: “Street Legal”, June 15, 1978

Musicians: Bob Dylan (guitar & vocal), Billy Cross (guitar), Steven Soles (guitar), Jerry Scheff (bass), Ian Wallace (drums), Helena Springs, Jo Ann Harris, Carolyn Dennis (background vocals)

Check out: Bob Dylan: 3rd Street-Legal recording session, 27 April 1978

Live:

First known live performance: Blackbushe Festival, Surrey, England, July 15, 1978.

Your browser does not support this audio format.

It has been performed only 35 times live – last performance: Carolina Coliseum, Columbia, South Carolina – December 9, 1978

– last performance: Carolina Coliseum, Columbia, South Carolina – December 9, 1978 Only performed in 1978

..at the end of Street Legal, with his final words before collapsing into the Christian years and his Eighties malaise. He asks the same question he used to ask Sweet Marie, but this is definitely the sound of a man on the brink of a cosmic breakdown.

~rollingstone.com

Lyrics

Original:

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain

Tears on the letter I write

There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much

But she’s drifting like a satellite

There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze

Laughter down on Elizabeth Street

And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone

Where she bathed in a stream of pure heat

Her father would emphasize you got to be more than streetwise

But he practiced what he preached from the heart

A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted to me

The time and the place that the trouble would start

There’s a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage

And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage

And she winds back the clock and she turns back the page

Of a book that no one can write

Oh, where are you tonight?

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure

To live it you have to explode

In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed

Sacrifice was the code of the road

I left town at dawn, with Marcel and St. John

Strong men belittled by doubt

I couldn’t tell her what my private thoughts were

But she had some way of finding them out

He took dead-center aim but he missed just the same

She was waiting, putting flowers on the shelf

She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair

And discovered her invisible self

There’s a lion in the road, there’s a demon escaped

There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being raped

As her beauty fades and I watch her undrape

I won’t but then again, maybe I might

Oh, if I could just find you tonight

I fought with my twin, that enemy within

’Til both of us fell by the way

Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees

While the law looks the other way

Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes

The guy you were lovin’ couldn’t stay clean

It felt outa place, my foot in his face

But he should-a stayed where his money was green

I bit into the root of forbidden fruit

With the juice running down my leg

Then I dealt with your boss, who’d never known about loss

And who always was too proud to beg

There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room

And a pathway that leads up to the stars

If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise

Remind me to show you the scars

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived

If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived

I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive

But without you it just doesn’t seem right

Oh, where are you tonight?

–

The last verse of the song—and of the album— announces Dylan’s final arrival at re-birth. He has made it at last. Yet what is striking here is the humanity, the generosity of feeling. There is no note of glee or superiority. There is only a gladness which Dylan admits to, while admitting also that it is lessened by the final loss of love: ‘There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived / If I’m there in the morning baby, you’ll know I’ve survived / I can’t believe it! I can’t believe I’m alive! / But without you it doesn’t seem right / Oh! where are you tonight?!’

~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia ) These lines address Dylan’s own struggle with temptation. It is a recognition that ‘you can’t hide on a dark street from the demon within’ – which was exactly how he described (to Ron Rosenbaum) the struggle Renaldo faced, in the film he was piecing together when he penned this other ‘Journey Through Dark Heat’. Those last four verses could almost be a belated coda to ‘Idiot Wind’. And like that song, one suspects he worked on them right up to the last minute.

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

–

Live versions

Blackbushe Aerodrome

Camberley, England

15 July 1978

Your browser does not support this audio format.

–

The Spectrum

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

6 October 1978

Where Are You Tonight by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

–

Dane County Memorial Coliseum

Madison, Wisconsin

1 November 1978

1978-11-01 – Madison – Where Are You Tonight by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

–

Charlotte Coliseum

Charlotte, North Carolina

10 December 1978



–

—

Check out:

–

Sources

-Egil