It was a Saturday afternoon and I was in my Father’s car. He had just bought this really fabulous metallic green special edition Ford Escort. This was so unlike my modest dad. This thing was a flying machine and had dials all over the place. It was one cool car, tan leather bucket seats and wide wheels! Like I said so unlike my Dad. Best of all he told me it was time to learn to drive and I was going to learn in this car! It was the summer my world turned into bright colour. As exciting being in this car was, it wasn’t the dream of driving this car that had an affect on me, it was the words that came tumbling out of the car’s speakers.
Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’ I was layin’ in bed Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all If her hair was still red Her folks they said our lives together Sure was gonna be rough They never did like Mama’s homemade dress Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough.
I had never heard words like this in a song before and certainly not in a song being played on Radio One! Suddenly the colours of the world outside the car became vivid. It was like someone had flipped a switch in my head. Dylan said that his wife never understood him after he took an art course prior to writing this album. The effect of time shifting and multi-dimensional views affected his thinking from then on. Dylan was never really happy with the finished result and has attempted on several occasions to get it right. The version I heard that day was the second attempt at the song, but was further from what he had originally intended. The first version recorded in New York wouldn’t be released until the 80’s on the Biograph collection.
When Dylan sang the song at Slane in 84 it had very different words and a different tempo. He told Jonathan Cott in a Rolling Stone Interview in 1978” "What's different about it is that there's a code in the lyrics, and there's also no sense of time. There's no respect for it. You've got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there's very little you can't imagine not happening"
