"I need a dump truck mama to unload my head"
moto
in hs" but it's better because he says it without saying it, plus he
implies that he is building something else. Great line.
moto
btw, is he saying he needs a "dump truck mama" or a "dump truck,
mama"???
Treadleson
He's saying "dump truck, mama." He's talking to Mama. But I never
thought he meant to unload all the useless info from high school or
anything. I assumed that it was the head full of ideas, driving him
insane, the "thought-dreams."
moto
i dont know. I hear it differently than those.
Dylanetics
I hear the line as darker than either of those.
There are so many images of death in this song -- maybe this is why S.
King borrowed the title. The singer (call him "Bob") is praising "this
graveyard woman" who's bound to put a blanket on his bed if he goes
down dyin'. She's apparently armed and knows how to sew up the
wounded, so she may be able to protect Bob. But it's still pretty
grim.
Turning to the specific line under discussion, note the preceding
image:
"Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head"
Steam shovel to keep away the dead? How? The most plausible way it
could "keep away the dead" would be to lift them (corpses) up and
dumping them someplace else.
I wonder whether Bob was alluding (privately) to some of that
horrifying documentary footage of the liberated concentration camps --
the piles of emaciated, naked dead (Jewish and otherwise) being pushed
around with heavy equipment.
I don't recall seeing a steam shovel, but we've all seen the image of
the *bulldozer* (same number of syllables) being used to "CLEAR AWAY"
the dead -- a much more natural expression than "keep away" the dead.
This may be yet another case of Bob slightly changing a word or two to
make conceal his personal source for the "first draft" of the song --
which was too personal, too concise and too clear, etc. The result is
something that's both evocative and mysterious, which is a place Bob
liked to be in 1965.
I share Treadleson's association to It's Alright Ma. But I'm reminded
more of the singer's eyes colliding (i.e., a violent visual encounter)
with "graveyards stuffed."
So the line about how he needs a dump truck to "unload my head" strikes
me as originally having been more about getting these shocking images
out of Bob's mind (and ours). But it's not going to happen.
sweet heel
moto skrev:
> great line. reminds me of "when i think back on all the crap I learned
> in hs" but it's better because he says it without saying it, plus he
> implies that he is building something else. Great line.
Beep......Beep..... Beep......Beep...... Beeep........
Beep......Beep......Beep.....Beep...
gabriel
Dylanetics wrote:
> > Treadleson wrote:
> > I assumed that it was the head full of ideas, driving him
> > > insane, the "thought-dreams."
zing!
> "Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
> I need a dump truck mama to unload my head"
>
> Steam shovel to keep away the dead? How? The most plausible way it
> could "keep away the dead" would be to lift them (corpses) up and
> dumping them someplace else.
>
> I wonder whether Bob was alluding (privately) to some of that
> horrifying documentary footage of the liberated concentration camps --
> the piles of emaciated, naked dead (Jewish and otherwise) being pushed
> around with heavy equipment.
"forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you" - these are the
same dead, the leeches, the hangers-on, the ones who will drag you down
into the hole they're in. As with the dump-truck full of ideas, it's a
quantity image - there are so many hangers-on now, he needs a steam
shovel to keep pushing them back.
Dylanetics
I see my speculation has been anticipated. In a book, no less. A
*Harvard* book, in fact! (Thanks to Patricia Jungwirth for posting
excerpt back in 1999.)
Well done, H.U.P.!
When We Were Good: the Folk Revival, by Robert Cantwell
Harvard University Press, 1996
ISBN: 0674951328
Here's the first words of the Prologue, just to whet your appetite
[P.Jungwirth]:
"I need a steam shovel, mama, to keep away the dead," Bob Dylan
declared in
1965, having personally terminated the popular folksong revival, some
thought, by picking up an electric guitar and sending his message
around the
world with it. "I need a dump truck, baby, to unload my head."
Having shared and brought to light so much of the experience of his
generation, maybe Dylan was remembering an evening in the parlor back
in
Hibbing, Minnesota, in front of his parents' new television set, where
in
film supplied by the army department a man with a surgical mask,
operating a
bulldozer, was moving a naked trash heap of human corpses into an open
pit.