Gregory Peck, "Brownsville Girl" and Bob
America is still taking aim, isn't it?
“Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck…”
Bob Dylan “Brownsville Girl” - from “Knocked Out Loaded 1986.
The movie Bob was talking about was a 1950 film called “The Gunfighter” and indeed, it did star Gregory Peck. To me, it’s a long way from being a compelling western but watching it now, you can see why Dylan found a connection with Peck’s much put-upon character, gunslinger Jimmy Ringo.
Bob talked once of how the instant he’d walk into the room, everything would all change. And that he worked really, really hard not to pay any attention to that. But how could you not?
It’s exactly what we see of the life of Jimmy Ringo. He shows up and the world turns upside down. That’s Bob’s connection to what he writes in 1986’s “Brownsville Girl,” completing a thread he started with an “Empire Burlesque” outtake called “New Danville Girl” a couple years earlier.
Jimmy Ringo is a quick-handed gunfighter with an infamous string of kills in his past. As the film opens, he adds one more. He pulls into town, heads to the local saloon, is greeted by the bartender as a celebrity. A hot-headed kid recognizes him, tries to outdraw the quick-draw king and Ringo fires in self-defense and the kid winds up dead on the saloon floor.
From there, Ringo is saloon-bound for almost the entire film, there was no chance for him to get saddle sores. His presence completely upends the town, kids are let out of school to stand and peek in through the saloon window at him. The women in town even get together to complain to the town’s sheriff (an old running buddy of Peck) about him. Jimmy Ringo hasn’t done a thing there, just sitting at a table or drinking a shot, minding his own business, his past following him around like an invisible cloud.
We’ve all seen the pics of Bob, that infernal hoodie up, sunglasses on, shutting out as much of the world as he could or at least, keeping it as far away as he can. In the studio, you hear the talk “If the hoodie’s up, do NOT talk to him.”
There was a story just the other day about a dancer supposedly getting fired for making eye contact with him. Guys and gals are writing books about seeing him walking into a store, eating a pizza, playing music with him, one woman who eventually found her way into his bed, actually saved his cigarette butts. There are stories of him waking up in the back of a car, a unraveled turban around his head for some reason. What? He is BOB DYLAN and nobody will ever let him forget it.
The same goes for Jimmy Ringo, who had his share of kills — justified, unjustified, does it really matter, people have him in their sights from the start of the movie. And especially considering the time in his life when Bob wrote “New Danville Girl” and later amended to “Brownsville Girl” (with the help of Sam Shepard), he was, as he’s alluded in interviews and in “Chronicles, Vol. 1,” in a rut.
“The windows had been boarded up for years,” he says, “and it’s not like I didn’t know it.”
And just like everywhere Ringo went, people were itching for, hinting at, daring him to draw, show his stuff, you could imagine that’s how Bob feels, writing and recording these new songs. Hasn’t he already done enough? What more do you want? (Yeah, he’s right. We still want more. He’s 83, still has been touring and we want a new record, Bob, PLEASE….)
It’s his muse, it’s what he does, he can’t HELP IT, it seems. But once he’s done, gotten that song or those songs out of his system, maybe he’ll share it with us and maybe he won’t. We know the long list, “Blind Willie McTell” or “Series Of Dreams” or whatever song you want to throw in there. He’s written a million, has a million more coming, just another song to him. He’s not sweating it, we are.
“New Danville Girl” is an 11-minute story song that popped out while Arthur Baker was new-waving some of Bob’s cuts like “Clean Cut Kid” and “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky” (a wordy and not-as-good rewrite of “All Along The Watchtower.”) But it is different. A song that definitely doesn’t fit with these tracks. And Bob went with it.
Perhaps it was a song that, in the middle of what you’d have to assess as a dry spell, intrigued Bob enough to go back to it. Maybe realizing that “Knocked Out Loaded” wasn’t exactly loaded with gems, maybe that strange, long, unusual song would be worth revisiting, rewriting, reapproaching that song with a new title “Brownsville Girl.”
As he admits in the song itself “If there’s an original thought out there I could use it right now.” (Always makes me laugh as I bet it did in the studio when he recorded it.) So he went at it again and tried to complete it, tame it, like it was some wild bronco of a song that he couldn’t quite get a bridle on. And when he was done, he decided to share it with us.
A lot happens in the tune, the song sort of evolves into a sort of lament for a Brownsville girl with curls and teeth like pearls on some sort of wild chase across Texas but Bob is after bigger game, really.
Which he reveals as he gets to the end of a song that has taken him somewhere different, to see Ruby, to talk about Henry Porter, to maybe refresh his imagination? Or did Sam Shepard do that?
Does this sound like a love song to you?
“Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content. I don’t have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I’m gone
You always said people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent. And I always said, “Hang on to me, baby, and let’s hope that the roof stays on”
Bob doesn’t do what’s most convenient as a matter of practice. I don’t know that it’s artistic courage, necessarily. That’s just how he works. And you can think of the combats he’s had with, say, Daniel Lanois on “Oh Mercy” or recording “Time Out Of Mind” or later, having the balls — or was it the genuine concern - to release a 17-minute song in the middle of COVID, America just hoping for a comforting, fatherly voice from somewhere. We sure weren’t getting it from the White House. Didn’t Bruce Springsteen call him “the father of my country.” And the song is about the murder of a President and the aftermath and it goes to No. 1?
As he ends “Brownsville Girl,” Dylan returns to where he started, ten or so minutes and a lifetime ago. And a movie that, for all its flaws, inspired him, nudged him, made him feel like he wasn’t the only gunslinger out there whose every move was scrutinized, analyzed, criticized. No, he hadn’t been shot in the back yet. But he knew America was still taking aim.
“There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound.
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun
and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down.”
BROWNSVILLE GIRL by Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard