The Big Red Room (4 of 4)
My father was a Bob Dylan fan. When Blood On The Tracks was released early in 1975 it immediately went into regular rotation as part of the household soundtrack. I was too young to really notice most of it, but one song - the breezy, mysterious “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” - caught my ear and lodged itself in my imagination.
A sort of Shakespearean wild west noir set to a skipping, organ-girded rhythm, for nearly nine minutes “Lily”’s lyrics detail a quizzical, complicated scenario in which an assortment of characters experience romance and intrigue amid an ever-looming threat of violence. It ends, decidedly, if rather obliquely, in tears. My dad tried to explain to me what was happening in the song - something about a bank robbery that happens during the performance of a play, with the Jack of Hearts taking a key role in both - but I only heard the sound. Especially the singing, with Dylan’s smoky voice taking on a sly, playful drawl, maneuvering like a maze runner through the verbiage, stretching downwards at the end of each verse, so the word ‘hearts’ becomes ‘haauuurrrts’. That’s the hook, really. To the extent that I thought the song’s title was simply “Jack of Hearts”. Whatever drama was going on between Lily and Rosemary and Big Jim was lost on me altogether.
The Jack of Hearts was an easily identifiable figure - some combination of joker and thief, jester and rogue. A troublemaker, maybe, but hopefully, I felt, a benevolent one. I imagined him to be stylish, funny, ultimately likeable. I still like to think that, no matter that a close reading of the lyrics reveals he is apparently actually a symbol of manipulative, Machiavellian guile. Maybe. Probably. Could be he’s simply (forgive me) a wild card; a romantic ideal for the song’s characters and the listener to dream on.
Either way, the tumble of words and the quicksilver sound wove a kind of spell that I was eager to fall under, what with our red living room having recently become a strange realm of fear and surreality. That voodoo doll from Trilogy of Terror had really done a number on me. I needed some light relief.
If the Jack of Hearts brought some levity to my little world, it had visual accompaniment in the form of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the British comedy series then being aired in the late night time slot on American public television stations. My parents let me watch it because they thought I might like the cartoons, and they were very, very correct in that assumption.
Those cartoons were the handiwork of future film director Terry Gilliam, and in addition to Python’s usual brand of surreal humor, they regularly featured copious nudity and plenty of gratuitous blood and gore, but I don’t think I cared, or more likely I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. (And if you’re wondering what kind of monsters let their four-year-old kid sit up in the middle of the night watching things like Twilight Zone and Monty Python, I can assure you that...well, I am actually sort of wondering that, too. Eh, it was the seventies. I’m certain that my parents at the very least meant well, and probably weren’t actually all that aware of the gruesome elements at work in Python. They probably perceived it as just good, silly fun. Anyway, I’m glad they did, it made me feel as though they trusted me, and I took it as a great responsibility. Which is not to say that I didn’t get off on the cheap thrills. I did.)
Ultimately, I just liked the careening, colorful insanity, the manic feel of it all. I imagined Dylan’s Jack of Hearts might be a character in those cartoons. Some of the same anything-can-happen vibe overlapped in both of those worlds.
The gleefully chaotic spirit at work in those cartoons and in Dylan’s song opened up space in our red living room that had previously been occupied by the perilous territory of Al Stewart’s “Roads to Moscow”; ditches and dark woods and wintry, barren fields. Into those fields suddenly flooded a wash of color, trailed by an assortment of odd, unruly characters. Some standing, some crawling. Some in the air. Carnival barkers, fire eaters, mortuary men. Grifters and saints. Spangled dancers and mid-level managers. Birds.
A bevy of rabbits filled the room. I went to the center and waited. They rushed by. Next came the lizards. Activity, then quiet. The sound of shuffling, then activity again. I looked around for the Jack of Hearts.
It was all a relief. The idea of our red living room, the center of the world as I understood it then, as both home and foreign territory was shaping up to be a mirage. If this was a place of both comfort and terror in near equal measure, then surely those modes could be molded or shaped to better fit the needs of the moment. When unease and abject fear pose a threat, and it seems they inevitably will, then a song like Dylan’s Jack of Hearts might be a ready, easily accessible antidote. And maybe all the chaos and wonder at work in late night TV, that other plane of existence, might be reflected or refracted into this plane, sort of a useful funhouse mirror.
It felt like strength. I got up and jumped around a little, testing. It felt alright.
I noticed the faceless statue over by our front door. It was looking at me, no eyes and all. I felt like it was waiting for me to cower or flinch. Instead I walked to the door and pulled the handle forward, ready to get out.
The figure tilted its head as I walked by. I managed a nonchalant shrug and moved on.
