"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"

"Whoo-ee! Ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day
My bride’s gonna come"In this lyric from the Woodstock recording sessions that ended up primarily as The Basement Tapes, the humor is in the forefront. Like most of his lyrics from these sessions, there's a subtlety & wit that seems characteristic of his other stuff, but it's less ignorable... if we can use the word "ignorable." That said, we could probably fill an entire blog focusing solely on this album, but we won't.

We seem to have two basic issues at play here: 1) the "ride me high" part & 2) the "brides gonna come" part. In the first part, we have a nice play on words. in the traditional phrase, it's either "high on the hog" or high in the saddle," but here, Dylan replaces the other animals with himself. This could me two things. Either he sees himself as the beast of burden being ridden by other which is certainly a possibility, or it's a sexual innuendo... granted, not a very subtle one. As it's linked to the "brides gonna come" part, the sexuality becomes even more clear.

On the surface, it seems like a reference to stories like "The Bride Comes to Yellow Skies," by Stephen Crane; it's a nice naturalistic story about the commodification of the West in relation to the fictionalized mythology created by writers in the East. This is definitely a major theme in Dylan's lyrics, but from whence is she coming? There's no other reference to this woman, so she could obviously be a mail-order-bride: scheduled to arrive @ a specific moment. However, that doesn't really fit w/ the previous line, "Ride me high." If it's sexual, & the wife is coming (i.e. reaching orgasm), then it seems like her orgasms are scheduled like the train on which she may be arriving. Apparently, he checked the calendar & realized that "oh, tomorrow is the day I need to get her off." if this is really the case, it places the lyric in the same position as "The Bride Comes to Yellow Skies" in that we're dealing w/ the commodification of an idea. Here though, the idea is the idealized version of the woman: simple and controllable rather than the complex women of the real world.

The use of the word "tomorrow" sets the coming in some indeterminite future. While it appears as though tomorrow is right around the corner, we know that in another Dylan song from the same period, "tomorrow is a long time." He may not be refering to the day after today, but rather to some unspecified point in the future. In fact, tomorrow may never come... perhaps she will never come either.