Don’t Think Twice, I’m All Right (I Swear)

To say to someone, “You mean nothing to me,” is one of those things that immediately become untrue as soon as it’s said. The very act of speaking it, with even that minimum of thought and effort and desire to wound, makes the claim null and void. “I care about you enough to tell you that I don’t care about you,” is the truer subtext, regardless of the words or their bluster.

To write a song that says, “You mean nothing to me,” especially one of the most wistful and elegant in the pop canon, is almost laughable in its bullshit (if it weren’t so heartbreaking).

That goddam photo, that timeless soft-lit shot on a snowy street in Soho, it’s more than just an album cover. It’s obviously been carefully framed, even though it tries to pass itself off as a throwaway, a candid snapshot of the skinny poet and his stunning ladyfriend arm-in-arm. It always evoked a nostalgia, a need for that moment in that place to be this moment in this place. It always seemed to be a misty-eyed hope to freeze the early 60’s in time, with its unspoiled Greenwich Village, its communist poets and self-righteous balladeers and postwar optimism.

It’s nothing so universal or ambitious. Now it seems just a plain and simple longing for that girl, Suze Rotolo, the devastating brunette, Dylan’s former love and the raison d’etre of the whole shebang. Freewheelin’ has long been known for its social effect, for its rabblerousing conscience; for me it’s just a breakup album. Forgetting “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War” and “Oxford Town”, placed carefully to keep the presence of protest and the 60’s zeitgeist, the bulk of the album is, quite simply, about a girl.

And at the dead center of this album, the first song on Side Two, is one of the most glorious breakup songs ever written, a gently-plucked, bravely-sung ballad that bids adieu to an inconsequential love. Don’t think twice, kiddo. You never had the power to break me anyway. You did to me what you could (and that wasn’t a lot), and now I’m headed off down the road. Don’t think twice--it never meant that much.

He never drops the affect, never lets the mask down for an instant. It’s a breathless performance, a mighty attempt to prove his steadied keel, his recovery. The voice doesn’t waver, the guitar glides along never limping, the lyrics don’t whimper about the perceived wrongs, or drop into sniveling self-pity. He never asks that most familiar (and human) of breakup questions—Oh why?! Oh dear, why me?!?—and actually opens the song by telling her not to bother either. We were together and now we’re not. That’s that.

He’s an untouchable, this kid Dylan.

Trouble is, no matter how well he can wear the mask, feign his invincibility, he’s as human as human gets. He freely admits, Now I wish there was something you would do or say / To try and make me change my mind and stay. Whether or not he would isn’t broached, but at the very least, he wants something back from her, some sense of her regret echoed back at him, and it hasn’t come. She remains silent and it kills him. And yet he contradicts himself in the next stanza: And it ain’t no use in a-calling out my name, gal/ I can’t hear you anymore. He’s still treading that line, playing the tough-guy troubadour, trying to bail without his chin quivering, and at the same time trying to keep the door wedged open behind him.

Later he tosses off another chin-scratcher, another deceptively vulnerable dismissal: Goodbye is too good a word, babe / So I’ll just say “Fare thee well.” “Goodbye” isn’t too good a word, babe, it’s commonplace and obvious, the most boring one he could use. “Fare thee well” is Elizabethan fucking poetry, and that’s what he chooses to leave her with. He’s not really casting her aside with disinterest—he’s constructing a palace in his wake, something grander than she to make her truly feel the loss. It’s not all right, and I’m leaving this on your doorstep, to make you think twice, thrice, a million times, every night before you sleep until the lonely day you die. You inspired this, and now that’s done. Feel it.

Even the song’s kiss-off, its closing stanza, one of the best Dylan ever wrote, betrays itself—Now I’m not saying you treated me unkind / You could’ve done better, but I don’t mind / You just kind of wasted all of my precious time / So don’t think twice, it’s all right. A waste of time does not merit this song! A waste of time is something that annoys briefly, a housefly or a detour, an old crank at the checkout line with a bundle of triple-coupons. A waste of time wouldn’t have made a deep-enough dent, given him the emotional capital to conquer this song, this pageant of mournful harp, wounded bluster, and a stiff upper lip.

He’s drowning in affect to try and prove himself unaffected. He’s running circles around himself just to contradict himself by his very running. Is he trying to shoot himself in the foot? Is he aware of his posture’s failure, of the vulnerability that seeps through? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. As with everything else, the only thing that remains is the artifact, the record, and without the posture we’d be without the song.

The only real weapon, the only way for him to truly prove his disinterest, would have been to follow her lead, to throw up a great wall of inscrutable silence. And for the artist, for a hyper-verbal sadsack, that’s easier said than done.