Everything about you is bringing me misery

Bob Dylan - 'Buckets of Rain' (Blood On The Tracks - 1975)

By all accounts, Bob Dylan had finished the verses of one of his greatest songs, ‘Idiot Wind,’ when the phrase that started the ball rolling on ‘Buckets of Rain’ came to him.

Little red wagon / Little red bike /I ain’t no monkey, but I know what I like

Briefly, the song was known as ‘Nuggets of Rain’ before the more familiar name was settled on. The song is a sleight one, almost deceptively so. It is Dylan on vocals and a guitar in an open E tuning and Tony Brown on bass over several short, 12-bar blues verses addressing a new love. All the more poignant after the emotional wreckage of the rest of the album.

When Dylan turned 80 last year, Stereogum asked 80 musicians to name a favourite Dylan song, and Geordie Greep of Black Midi selected this song. He said;

[The] words are sparse and natural, strengthened in their purity by his undeniably emotive performance. While not a complicated narrative or vividly painted scenario like some other songs on the album, the track still makes room for some dynamite lines. One example being, 'Everything about you is bringing me misery', which, coming as it does after a string of compliments to the unnamed second person, is a punchline almost as hilarious as it is devastating. Wonderful song

I agree with that assessment, say what you like about Blood On The Tracks, but funny is not something I would say about most of the songs on the album. In that sense, the closing track is a tonal shift compared to the rest of the album. It is also interesting that alongside ‘Meet Me In The Morning’, it was one of the last songs recorded and lacks some of the complexity and swollen cast of characters the earlier recorded songs do.

It is a song that would be easy to dismiss, but there is a sense of some delicate interwoven pieces within it. Having a sparse love song complete the album, with all those lines which amount to a dry run of this song by The Police and undercut it with the misery line is unexpected in the way you don’t expect Sting to say, “Everything she does is magic, but wey aye she gets on my tits.”

It is worth stopping to pause on quite how evocative and perfect the phrase '“buckets of rain” is in a way that “buckets of water” or “pitchers of rain” are not. I may have spent too long thinking about it, but I think it is a turn of phrase that brings to mind a Venn diagram of both crying buckets and bucketing¹ down as well as sounding a little unexciting and non-committal. There’s a sense of not committing in the lyric, too; Dylan can’t pin down the words that portray his newfound feelings, so he goes down the route of “no specifics, just vibes” and instead tells us the little things that endear.

Despite being the closing track on one of Bob Dylan’s most acclaimed albums and, by extension, one of the most revered of all time by anyone, it is a song that Dylan has not played live a second time. There are a group of songs from Dylan’s 1975 album Blood On The Tracks that he has only played once each.² In this case, opening a set in November 1990 in Michigan. You can hear a version from 1976, soaked in Hammond organ and handclaps, where Dylan duets with Bette Midler.

One theory for the lack of love for the song in a live environment from Dylan is that the song has a very similar melody to songs like Tom Paxton’s ‘Bottle of Wine’ and Jona Lewie’s ‘Seaside Shuffle’ (recorded as Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs). Some others can hear elements of 'Mungo Jerry’s ‘In The Summertime’, but as I was born a good decade after all of those, the earworm ‘Buckets of Rain has always given me is the line “the small ones are more juicy naturally” from this Outspan advert.

It possibly dawned on Dylan that the melody had come to his brain secondhand, meaning it is not a concert mainstay like ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ or ‘Simple Twist of Fate‘.

In a way, the song does wrap up the album well in that it is moving on to a new love, away from the pain of divorce-centric songs like ‘Idiot Wind’ and ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You’re Gone’ elsewhere but laying down the seeds for more strife in the future and a relationship with ups and downs just like the last and another someone to have it in for him, someone to plant stories in the press.

Bob Dylan and Sara at Heathrow Airport in 1969

1. We also have a bucket of moonbeams which may be a nod to ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria’ from The Sound of Music (1965)

2. The other two are ‘Meet Me In The Morning’ and ‘Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts’. I feel the latter spoils side B of the record, but that’s wandering off topic.