Book Excerpt: Counting Down Bob Dylan: His 100 Finest Songs

99. “Love Sick” (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)

As so often happens with songs, perhaps more with Dylan songs than others, “Love Sick” has pretty interesting ephemera attached to it. It will forever be associated with “Soy Bomb,” the bizarre message on the T-shirt a stage crasher wore during Bob’s performance of it at the 1998 Grammy Awards. Perhaps more bizarre than that, it was the song used in a Victoria’s Secret ad that featured the singer with lingerie model Adriana Lima, who prances around while Dylan stares ominously.

None of this craziness can obscure the fact that “Love Sick” is not just a fantastic song, but also the perfect song for its time and place. It was the first song on Time Out of Mind, the album that reintroduced a wary public to Dylan as a songwriter. It’s important to recall that, at the time, he was some seven years removed from his previous album of original material, 1990’s Under the Red Sky, which hadn’t exactly set the world on fire.

It was also the first song that people would hear from Dylan following the serious fungal infection in the spring of 1997 that nearly claimed his life. As such, the song, and the album that contained it, would be heard by many fans as the musings of a man staring down the great abyss of death, even though the truth was that Bob was healthy when the album was written and recorded.

Daniel Lanois’s production unintentionally played into this erroneous interpretation, although he shouldn’t be blamed for the misinformation of others. He should, however, get serious credit for his work on “Love Sick,” when he somehow humanized Dylan’s pain by disembodying him.

Dylan seems to have had a tumultuous relationship with Lanois in the two albums they made together (Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind). For as often as Bob has praised the producer’s contributions, there seem to be just as many instances of disagreements and clashes. Yet there can be no denying the two came together in harmony on “Love Sick,” an example of subject matter and production style melding together until they are inseparable.

“I’m walkin’ through streets that are dead,” was the way that Dylan reintroduced himself to the world as a songwriter after seven years away. Only it wasn’t Dylan singing it, more like an apparition of Dylan, his voice beaming in from some radio station in purgatory with mediocre reception, all courtesy of Lanois’s studio cleverness.

Augie Meyers’s staccato organ stabs are like the soundtrack to some macabre carnival, while Jim Dickinson’s electric piano burbles to the surface occasionally to cry for help. The verses crawl along at a somber pace before an electric guitar clears the air for Dylan’s chorus: “I’m sickof love but I’m in the thick of it / This kind of love I’m so sick of it.” It is a declaration of independence and a cry for help all in the same breath.

The scene that Dylan depicts alternates between an unforgiving landscape (dead streets and weeping clouds) and idyllic images (lovers in meadows and silhouettes in windows) that he can spy but not touch (“they leave me hangin’ on / To a shadow”).

The “shadow” to which he is referring is the object of his obsession, the girl the narrator addresses in the song. It’s clear that this communication with her is one-sided, like a letter that she won’t ever deign to read. Even after she shatters whatever innocence he has left (“I spoke to you like a child / You destroyed me with a smile”), he can’t help but hope for some sort of turnabout in her behavior (“Could you ever be true? I think of you / And I wonder”).

In the final verse, his voice giving way to the helpless sorrow that engulfs him, the narrator admits how completely screwed he is: “Just don’t know what to do / I’d give anything to be with you.” When you reach the point that you want the thing that is causing you the most pain, the loneliness can’t even be properly measured.

“Love Sick” has become a lot of different things in the time since it was recorded, none of which it really has any right being. It’s not the soundtrack for some clown dancing spastically on a stage he has no right inhabiting, nor is it the proper music for cavorting in a lace bra.

 Most importantly, it isn’t the last gasp of a man about to die. If anything, considering the dire straits of the character inside “Love Sick,” death might be a welcome change.