Still on the Road by Clinton Heylin

Author:Clinton Heylin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2010-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

{460} FOOT OF PRIDE

Published lyric/s: Lyrics 85; Lyrics 04. [Recorded version: Words Fill My Head.]

Known studio recordings: Power Station Studios, NYC, April 22, 1983—9

takes; April 23—17 takes; April 25—9 takes; April 26—3 takes; April 27—5

takes; April 29—1 take [TBS].

Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked remove me.—Psalms 36:11

Dylan straps on his Jeremiah garb again to deliver a “Yonder Comes the Sin of Pride” to the Greed is Good generation—for whom he reserves a couplet just as apposite in 2009 as it was in 1983: “They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in / Sing ‘Amazing Grace’ all the way to the Swiss banks.” He’s definitely still got it in for the kind of education dispensed in college.

“Foot of Pride” remains one of his most unrelenting polemics, and one of his best. This time he wraps what is really one long rant in the language of Kings, while namechecking a number of popular songs coopted by the proud to cover their parasitic tracks: “Danny Boy,” “Amazing Grace,” and even “Abraham, Martin, and John” (from which he quotes the line “Only the good die young”). The generic “You’ll Love Me Till the Morning, Stranger” doesn’t really exist, but sounds like it should.

All of these are valedictories one might hear at a wake—which is fitting because “Foot of Pride” is told from the vantage point of a mourner at a funeral, looking down on a man the narrator had known, and looking back on the life he led, as “the earth just opened and swallowed him up.” At the end of the song, he even delivers the perfect eulogy to a man killed by his own hubris—as befits a song whose title on the tape logs was “Too Late”:23

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