Title: Freeze Out (take 2)
Artist: Bob Dylan
Album: Thin Wild Mercury Music (Track #15)
Duration: 08:28
Label: Sony Music Entertainment
(aka Visions of Johanna)
Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be quiet?
We sit here stranded, we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds her handful of rain temptin' you to defy it.
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes they just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing really nothing to turn off.
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
An' these visions of Johanna they conquer my mind.
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
An' the all-night girls whisper of escapades out on the D-train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Askin' himself if he's really insane.
Louise she's alright, she's just too near
Like silk she seems like the mirror
She just makes it all too concise and too clear that Johanna's not here.
Oh, this ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.
Little boy lost he takes himself so seriously
He likes to boast of his misery while living so dangerously
An' while bringin' her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me.
He's got a lot of gall to be so useless and so small
He mutters this small talk at the wall while i'm in the hall.
How can i explain, oh it's so hard to get on
An' those visions of Johanna they kept me up past the dawn.
Inside the museums infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation's like after a while
Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell that by the way she smiles.
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say "Jeeze! I can't find my knees.''
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
And these visions of Johanna make it all seem so cruel.
Ah, oh, oh, oh.
The fiddler now speaks to the countess who's pretendin' to care for him
He says "Name me someone that's not a parasite an' i'll say a prayer for him.''
But like Louise always says "You can't look at much? Can you, man'' as she herself prepares for him.
Madonna she still has not showed
An' we see the empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The peddler he now steps to the road
Everything's gone which was owed
He examines the nightingale's code
Still written on the fish truck that loads
My conscience explodes.
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are all that remain.