I think it is too tempting for those of us analysing Dylan’s music almost 20 years into a new millenium, so far away from the time it was written, that we forget about the biggest issue of Dylan’s hay day – the Vietnam War. The undertakers is guity, he doesn’t just feel guilty — Dylan makes clear that he is guilty, like all the other bureaucrats and most of the adult population who are walking around pretending that hundreds of thousand of our kids, 18 year olds with their lives ahead of them, had been rounded up and dumped into the man-made jungle that was the Vietnam war. 200,000 – 250,000 of them came home in coffins draped in flags, most of the rest came home in a different kind of coffin. Dylan has set the scene.

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“She belongs to me”. I have racked my brain trying to understand the meaning of the line “A hypnotist collector”. Is this simply a rhyme for rhyming sake or a is it a hypnotist who collects objects? I realize this question is quite trivial but I’d appreciate any input on this. T.I.A.

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Everybody seems to work hard to avoid the explanation of “Double E”. In every analysis of the song I came across the author spends quite a long time guessing what this or that metaphor might really mean but, for reasons unknown to me, goes over the “Double E” as if in fact it wasn’t in the lyrics. Other example of “Double E” in connection with railroads is Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”: I laid my head on the railroad track/waiting for the Double E. Another Double E train is mentioned in “The Liar’s Club: A Memoir” by Mary Karr where one character says that he took a Double E train from Memphis to New Orleans. Furry Lewis’s Jelly Roll you mention seems to me to be another story – the Double E there definitely means something different from Dylan’s (and Zevon’s, for that matter) meaning. But I may be wrong, I am not an American, even not a native English speaker.

The fact that meaning of so frequently used term is not known to everybody in the US puzzles me. Thank you.

Dan

hogwash. it’s one of the strongest songs on the album