Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain

Artist: Bob Dylan

Song: Buckets Of Rain

Album: Blood on the Tracks

A tender folk ballad with dobro guitar and a suggestive stanza by a master singer-songwriter with an unrivaled resume of over 700 songs. If you consider Blood on the Tracks in its historic period, a wistful Viet Nam War perspective didn’t much fit into surrounding disco craze, but it was Bob’s best album in years.

THE ALBUM’S FINAL SONG, bucket full of rain, seems conciliatory in tone. The simple brief lines help Blood on the Tracks end of a positive note, and there’s even a bit of imagistic language – little red littlered bike – that resembles william carlos williams famous poem “The Redwheelbarrow”. The concluding word are shooting: “Life is sad...”

Dylan said about lp “You’ve got yesterday today and tomorrow all in the same room”

From Michael Gray’s excellent book, the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Buckets of Rain (from Blood on the Tracks):

The closing track on the Blood on the Tracks album, this is an immensely likeable, modest song of barbed sanity ACUTO BUON SENSO. A blues- structured work, it also neatly NETTAMENTE METTE INSIEME conflates other old song titles within its lyric, as when Dylan sings

‘Little red wagon, little red bike / I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like’.

In a genre so riddled ENIGMATICA with sexual innuendo INSINUAZIONI and double entendre as the blues, it’s sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery ASILO NIDO or the porn shop, and this is a good example. One long-term Dylan collector was told years ago that the phrase ‘little red bike’ was a blues term for anal sex: which certainly puts a different perspective on Dylan’s lyric. But it is not a common blues term: there isn’t a single ‘little red wagon’ in Michael Taft’s Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance.

‘Little Red Wagon’ is, however, a recording by the pre-war blues artist Georgia White, and by a happy coincidence the very next track she laid down at the same session is called ‘Dan the Back Door Man’.

I’ll never hear that song quite the same again.

From the official Bob Dylan lyric site:

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I’m takin’ you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears.
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,
I got all the love, honey baby,
You can stand.

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke.
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear,
If you want me, honey baby,
I'll be here.

Like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips.
I like the cool way you look at me,
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery.

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain't no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I'm takin' you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must.
You do what you must do and ya do it well,
I'll do it for you, honey baby,
Can't you tell?