Visions of Johanna
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"Visions of Johanna" is a song by Bob Dylan from the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Many of his fans consider it among Dylan's greatest works, and Dylan referred to it as his favorite song on the album which captured that "Wild, thin, Mercury sound". It also contains one of his most famous lines "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face".
The identity of Johanna has been widely speculated. The three most common 'theories' seem to be:
- It refers to Joan Baez
- It relates to "Gehenna" and "Ge-Hinnom", from a Hebrew word for Hell.
- Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law, Johanna Gezina van Gogh (Bonger), who was largely responsible for Vincent's eventual emergence as a major artist.
Another theory is that the song contains a lot of references to drugs, perhaps heroin, and has a general hallucinogenic mood. Some of the lyrics that suggest this more overtly include: one character "Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall", the lines "Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while" and "When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the mustache say, 'Jeeze / I can't find my knees'"
None of these claims are supported by Dylan's own statements. Baez believed that she was the inspiration for the song, though she claims her importance in a number of Dylan works.
The song was originally titled "Seems Like a Freeze Out", though no studio recordings released on bootleg with this name have any significant differences from the released, renamed version.
A version often cited as superior to the studio recording took place at the Manchester Free Trade Hall concert. This concert has since been released in the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series, erroneously titled "The Royal Albert Hall Concert".
