Visions of Johanna

"Visions of Johanna"
Song

"Visions of Johanna" is a song by Bob Dylan from the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Considered among Dylan's greatest works, Dylan referred to it as his favorite song on the album which captured that "thin, wild mercury sound". [2] The song is ranked #404 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The identity of Johanna has been widely speculated. The most common 'theories' seem to be:

1. It refers to Joan Baez
2. It relates to "Gehenna" and "Ge-Hinnom", from a Hebrew word for Hell.
3. 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.
4. Johanna refers to the infinite or to God.
5. It alludes to William Blake's poem, "On the Virginity of the Virgin Mary & Johanna Southcott".

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 statements made by Dylan, who once said, "I don't know how to write drug songs, I wouldn't know where to start." 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"; studio recordings from Blonde on Blonde's' early New York sessions, released on bootleg, have a much faster tempo (more similar to Most Likely You'll Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine) and, in the fifth verse, contain the additional line, "He examines the nightingale's code". Two slower versions were recorded in New York, one with a march-like tempo (which was released on the No Direction Home soundtrack), and another with a more conventional rock tempo, closer to the album version recorded in Nashville.

Another version was recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall concert. This concert has since been released as the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series, which was titled The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert as a jab at bootleggers who had erroneously referred to the Manchester concert as such for years prior.

In Perth, during the Australia tour of 1966, Dylan treated the audience to an otherwise unknown verse of "Visions of Johanna". This verse introduces two new characters, Amelia, who describes Australia as "God's favourite failure", and "A Maya with gloves", who talks about love and chocolate. There is no indication that Dylan has performed this verse on any other occasion.

Commenting on this song, Marqusee characterises it (p. 196) as 'Dylan's definitive treatment of "strandedness"', and notes that 'in contrast to most of the material in "Blonde on Blonde", he brought it to the studio as a finished composition'. He later comments 'In VoJ Dylan is stranded between extremes - total freedom and abject slavery.'

Others have subjected the words to poetic 'close reading' and have found in it a wealth of allusion, for example, to William Blake; thus Thakkar [3] says 'My claims will be these: Louise represents the earthly, the prosaic, the finite; and Johanna represents the pure, the poetic, the infinite'.

References

Marqusee Mike, 2003, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art

Thakkar Jonny, 2007, Visions of Infinity, The Owl Journal, Hilary Term 2007

External links

• Complete lyrics