I Want You (Bob Dylan song)

"I Want You"
Single by Bob Dylan
from the album Blonde on Blonde
B-side "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (live version)
Released June 10, 1966
Format 7"
Recorded March 10, 1966
Genre Folk rock,[1] pop[2]
Length 3:07 (album version)
2:54 (single edit)
Label Columbia
Writer(s) Bob Dylan
Producer(s) Bob Johnston
Bob Dylan singles chronology
"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"
(1966)		 "I Want You"
(1966)		 "Just Like a Woman"
(1966)
Blonde on Blonde track listing

"I Want You" is a song recorded by Bob Dylan in 1966.[3]

Recorded in the early morning hours of March 10, 1966, the song was the last one recorded for Dylan's double-album Blonde on Blonde.[4] It was issued as a single that June, shortly before the release of the album. The single's B-side was a live version of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."

Dylan performed the song as a slow ballad during his 1978 world tour, as heard on Bob Dylan at Budokan, released in 1979. Dylan also revisited the song in 1987 on a co-tour with the Grateful Dead; their version was released in 1989 on the Dylan and the Dead album.

Lyrics

Sean Wilentz sees numerous failures documented in early drafts for the lyrics; "deputies asking him his name... lines about fathers going down hugging one another and about their daughters putting him down because he isn't their brother".[5] Finally Dylan arrives at the right formula. The song's sentimental aspect was partially explained in a 1966 interview: "It's not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words... [It's] the words and the music [together]—I can hear the sound of what I want to say."[6]

Andy Gill observed that the song's tension is achieved through the balance of the "direct address" of the chorus, the repeated phrase "I want you," and a weird cast of characters "too numerous to inhabit the song's three minutes comfortably", including a guilty undertaker, a lonesome organ grinder, weeping fathers, mothers, sleeping saviours, the Queen of Spades, and "a dancing child with his Chinese suit".[7][3] Gill reports that "the dancing child" has been interpreted as a reference to Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, and his then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg.[8] Clinton Heylin agrees there may be substance to this because the dancing child claims that "time was on his side", as a reference to "Time Is On My Side", the Stones' first U.S. hit.[9]

Chart performance

Billboard magazine recorded the release of "I Want You" in its June 25 issue, and predicted it would reach the Top 20.[10] The track entered the Billboard Hot 100 charts on July 2, 1966 at #90, and Billboard tapped the single as a "star performer"—a side "registering greatest proportionate upward progress this week".[11] It peaked at #20 on July 30.[12]

"I Want You" entered the Cash Box charts at #59 on July 2, and was tapped for strong upward movement.[13] It rose slowly, and peaked at #25 on August 6.[14] It was also a major hit in the UK, where it peaked at #16.

Covers

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Neal Walters, Brian Mansfield, MusicHound Folk: The Essential Album Guide (Visible Ink Press, 1998), ISBN , pp. 239.
  2. ↑ "I Want You". Allmusic.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Gilliland 1969, show 40, track 1.
  4. ↑ Heylin 2009, pp. 311–312.
  5. ↑ Wilentz 2009, p. 124
  6. ↑ Heylin 2009, pp. 312–313.
  7. ↑ Gill 1998, pp. 99–100
  8. ↑ Gill 1998, p. 100
  9. ↑ Heylin 2009, p. 312
  10. ↑ Billboard magazine, June 25, 1966; p. 16
  11. ↑ Billboard magazine, July 22, 1966; p. 19
  12. ↑ Billboard magazine, July 30, 1966
  13. ↑ "Cash Box Magazine Charts (July 2, 1966)". Cash Box Magazine (charts)/cashboxmagazine.com (website). Retrieved March 27, 2011.
  14. ↑ "Cash Box Magazine Charts (August 6, 1966)". Cash Box Magazine (charts)/cashboxmagazine.com (website). Retrieved March 27, 2011.

References

External links