I've been waiting for a long time for someone to figure out the lyrics to Bob Dylan's Tambourine Man. I knew what the song meant, but it seemed like nobody else did. I've heard music professors proclaim pompously that it's about drugs. Well no, dummy, it's not.
Finally, I found it online...some people had figured it out, and it was verified by someone who knew a musician who was present at a late-night session where Bob actually explained how he came to write such a strange song.
It's really a simple song, if you happen to know who the Tambourine Man really is. I won't help you there, go find out for yourself. He symbolizes something and you can find depictions of him in art that goes back centuries. Bob is a strange musician in a way, he doesn't seem to care that people are too ignorant to understand his references to mythology and human culture. He never did like the obtuse and ignorant people who demanded to know what his songs meant. I'm with him on that, actually. As he once said to a reporter who asked him about the meaning of his songs..."I wouldn't know, I'm just the guitar player."
People who get angry at poets because they can't figure out the meaning are fools. Poetry isn't for the wife-beaters and dog-kickers of this world.
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