Songs Lyrics and YT- Youtube Music Videos

Bob Dylan - Visions Of Johanna

Bob Dylan - Visions Of Johanna Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Blonde On Blonde
Released: 1966

Visions Of Johanna Lyrics

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these Visions Of Johanna that conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?
It's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeez, I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can ya man?"
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

Writer/s: DYLAN BOB, BOB DYLAN
Publisher: BOB DYLAN MUSIC CO
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Visions Of Johanna

Dylan (from Rolling Stone magazine): "It's easier to be disconnected than connected. I've got a huge hallelujah for all the people who're connected, that's great, but I can't do that."

Al Kooper, who was a prolific session musician, played the Hammond B3 organ. Kooper went on to become a successful producer and worked on some of Lynyrd Skynyrd's most famous tracks.

Dylan wrote this song while he was dating folk singer Joan Baez, but was falling in love with his first wife Sara.

In her 1975 song "Winds of the Old Days," Joan Baez seems to be making the case that she is Johanna. Sample lyrics: "A decade flew past her and there on the page, she read that the prince had returned to the stage," "Most of the sour grapes are gone from the bough, ghosts of Johanna will visit you there."

In their June 1997 issue, Mojo magazine named this one of their 100 Greatest Psychedelic Classics. Jon Savage wrote of the song: "As early as 1963's 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune,' Dylan was exploring the egoless surrender to the universe that would characterise the first, benign phase of psychedelia. From 1965 on, his gnomic, gnostic utterances laid down the parameters for what would follow, as The Beatles, The Byrds and The Rolling Stones fell under his spell. Dylan issued disclaimers - "I never have and never will write a drug song... It's just vulgar," he exclaimed on the last night of his 1966 world tour - but this 'Visions Of Johanna,' taken from the night before, has the infinitesimal focus of acid-time compression."