We Infidels of the 80s – and a Dylan song that got away – UNTIL MR MORI ARRIVED!

Just for the record, George Best, Richard and Judy, Tony Wilson – and Leigh came along too with with a gal who was definitely up to scratch

A personal story as LA filmmaker Bob Mori releases yet another brilliant Bob Dylan video … inside

The first time I heard Jokerman, I was a bit of a joke myself.

I lived over the brush with a mad drinking woman in downtown Didsbury on the better side of Manchester. But infidelity and drinking were just some of the way we media people acted in the early 80s. We were egotistical, flamboyant and, yep, infidels of the heart.

George Best was on the lash down our street. Richard and Judy were flaunting their illicit love all over the place and club-owning speed freak and Granada Reports bad boy Tony Wilson stumbled around looking piss-stained, shabby and chic.

Us media people back in 1983 eh? Drunk, stoned, divorced and stressed.

But me personally?

I was waiting for Infidels to arrive at our local record shop.

I had a commission to review it.

It was a big thing for Dylan ‘freaks’ like me, it was another record heralded as a return to form, this one with dashing lyrics, bold production and a new powerful vocal character for Dylan to startle us with.

The record shop was just down a Victorian gunnel behind the butcher and the baker and the wreaking pubs on the High Street.

So, early one morning in 1983, I ignored my hangover and slipped discreetly out of the sweating duvet me and the mad woman shared, stuck some pants and a shirt on with my trendy sandals and skedaddled to see if it had arrived.

It had!

The NEW Bob Dylan album … Infidels! And I sensed right away, as I held it in my nicotene-stained fingers, that Bob was still a full-blown preacher man, finger pointing and rambling on and on just like in his latest shows.

People said this was his first secular album since he had been born again!

Really? Had they listened to it?

I slid back into our rented house and stuck Infidels on the stereo in the corner of the dining room. I dropped the needle.

License to Kill flapped in the gashed bass speaker and trilled like a budgie in what were either my battered tweeters or woofers.

Despite the awful sound from our bashed stereo, right away i realised old Bob was tantalsingly close to his old howling yowling ways.

And he was showing a social conscience again in poetic ways. Yeh, right on man!

Then Jokerman came on …

And, I’m sorry, it all seemed a bit sensorious and, yes, peavish!

“Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame,
You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name“

Anyway, the mad woman came downstairs looking like a luciscious unkempt witch. I could smell last night’s gin on her breath as she reminded me we had arranged to meet Rodney (Wodney as she said) and David (Davey as she said) and their mistresses … Rodders was a trendy flowerseller and Dave a drunken journalist like myself.

So we did.

Conversation was good and me and the mad woman ended up getting drunk. Then we had a row.

We ended up sleeping in seperate houses for some reason.

But what ever the reason, I did the walk of fear the next morning… no, it wasn’t the walk of shame, i wasn’t ashamed. Neither me nor the barmaid had any recollection of anything hsappening between us at all

I wasn’t ashamed, just scared i’d get spotted and the mad woman would reek revenge in her own peculiar and imaginative ways.

I made my way home stopping off at the George where Tony Wilson was sitting reading his paper and blanking a yellowing George Best who was holding a wall up with the side of his face.

I exchanged pleasantries with them both and got varying degrees of low-key response, had a couple of liveners and wandered back to our trendy little two-up-two-down back street terrace, assuming the mad woman would be at work by now.

Well, she was but she’d left the place in uproar as Infidels played repetitively in the background.

She had taken her revenge too. The brand-new shiney black chelac of Infidels had been expertly scratched and scrubbed so ol’ Bob kept repeating over and over, over and over

‘Freedom just around the corner for you
But with truth so far off, what good will it do?

I got the message and went back to barmaid’s to hide for a few days. Until the heat died down, so to speak.

To cut a long story short, it didn’t die down, it went up in flames! And that was the end of us.

The mad woman flounced off to look after guirallas in the mist. (More like guirallias on the piss!)

Me? I went back to the pub finally slid down the wall and rested his chin on the bar, Tony kept fiddling in his 80s equivalwnt of a man bag. |he wore it like a girl across his chest. He alsod kept emitting noises like audible twitches.

So, i tended to have a pretty jaundiced view of Infidels and didn’t give it the attention it deserved over the next forty years.

Until today, that is. when Bob Mori sent me this video.

Bob Mori is the award-winning Hollywood-based film creator who has been sharing his work with us recently.

And his film for Jokerman showed me what i’d been missing.

Yes, the song is a peavish, devilish tale of swirling smoking devastation dangling a warning sign from the Thunder Roadbridge.

God hovers on his cloud of vapour throwing thunderbolts to smite the businessmen and the politicians and everybody else who’s about.

And Bob had chosen a thin hectoring gargoyle of a voice to tell us all about it.

Until this video i thought the song was sneering and vicious.

But this video revealed to me so much more … have a watch and tell us what you think.

The song is about a man who has incurred the judgment of God. If this man embraces the truth of his crime against God and repents, he will be set free.

Jokerman

Bob Dylan

[Verse 1]
Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

[Chorus]
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh-oh Jokerman

[Verse 2]
So swiftly the sun sets in the sky
You rise up and say goodbye to no one
No store bought shirt for you on your back
One of the women must sit in the shack and sew one
Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within

[Chorus]
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh-oh Jokerman

[Verse 3]

You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah, but what do you care?
Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister
Scratching the world with a fine-toothed comb
You’re a king among nations, you’re a stranger at home

[Chorus]
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

[Verse 4]
Now, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
No crystal ball do you need on your shelf
Michelangelo himself, could’ve carved out your features
So drunk, standing in the middle of the street
Directing traffic with a small dog licking your feet

[Chorus]
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh-oh Jokerman

[Verse 5]
Well, the preacher man talking about the deaf and the dumb
And a world to come, thats already been pre-determined
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, and padlocks
Molotov cocktails and rocks can’t drown out his sermon
You let the wicked walk right into a trap
You give away all the good things that fall in your lap

[Chorus]
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh-oh Jokerman

[Verse 6]
It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray
A woman just give birth to a prince today and she’s dressed in scarlet
He’ll turn priests into pimps and make old men bark
Take a woman who could have been Joan-of-Arc and turn her into a harlot
Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response

[Chorus]
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

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