The business of the day: WLBOTT is considering expanding our pantheon. We’re thinking of adding “Sweet Melinda, the Goddess of Gloom.” She is based loosely on the Bob Dylan song “Tom Thumb’s Blues.” A Goddess of Gloom.
Very much in the grand WLBOTT tradition of mixing melancholy, absurdity, and sly beauty. Sweet Melinda, Goddess of Gloom sounds like a perfect addition to the pantheon.
Especially because:
- Gloom isn’t despair — it’s more wistful, rainy, a little tragic, but still weirdly beautiful.
- The name “Sweet Melinda” gives her an almost ironic tenderness, like someone you can’t help but love even as the clouds gather.
- Bob Dylan’s lyric — “she’s the goddess of gloom” — already paints her as a figure of mystery, sadness, and inevitability.
Maybe in the WLBOTT pantheon, Sweet Melinda would be in charge of:
- Granting artistic inspiration through sadness.
- Scheduling days where “everything feels off for no reason.”
- Helping unfinished letters, unfulfilled promises, and good intentions find their final resting places.
Almost IRL Melinda
The Pantheon Archetype
Real-World Melinda Sightings
Real World Shrines
The DMV
Laundromat / 3 a.m.
Waiting…. waiting….
Appropriations, Blasphemies, and Trading Cards
References
I’d always been fascinating by the word play and imagery in Bob Dylan’s song Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. It turns out that the story behind it is much more literal and pedestrian than the lyrics might suggest.
Sweet Melinda / The peasants call her the goddess of gloom
The song describes an Easter road trip that Dylan took to Juarez, Mexico. It was recorded on August 2nd, 1965, and describes the dark side of the border city.
A border city is where things are desired and available, the same things that are desired and unavailable on the other side of an invisible line a few miles away.
One reviewer called the song “the limits of the hedonistic lifestyle.”
Ciudad Juárez
Juárez is not on the WLBOTT World Tour.
In 2008, General Moreno and the Third Infantry Company took over the fight against the cartels in town. They were removed in 2009, with the general and 29 of his associates now in custody and awaiting trial for charges of murder and civil rights violations.
As of 2019, Juárez’s murder rate placed #2 of the highest reported in the world, at 104 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. An August 2008 GQ article described a dispirited and disorderly atmosphere that permeated the city, caused by multiple factors including drug violence, government corruption and poverty.
Wikipedia
Prepare to Perspire
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Written by: Bob Dylan
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez
And it’s Eastertime too
And your gravity fails
And negativity don’t pull you through
Don’t put on any airs
When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue
They got some hungry women there
And they really make a mess outta you
Now if you see Saint Annie
Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move
My fingers are all in a knot
I don’t have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won’t even say what it is I’ve got
Sweet Melinda
The peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
And she invites you up into her room
And you’re so kind
And careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice
And leaves you howling at the moon
Up on Housing Project Hill
It’s either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim
If you’re lookin’ to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don’t need you
And man they expect the same
Now all the authorities
They just stand around and boast
How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms
Into leaving his post
And picking up Angel who
Just arrived here from the coast
Who looked so fine at first
But left looking just like a ghost
I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to call my bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
The Guardian’s List
Let it be known that ranking Bob Dylan’s 50 best songs is not a relaxing diversion to pass one’s lockdown time. It’s a supremely frustrating exercise that can only end with you looking agog at the songs you have left out, your face crumpling…. As for No 1, sometimes you have to bow to the inevitable. In its author’s own words, Like a Rolling Stone changed it all: six minutes of “steady hatred”, its chorus melody loosely based on Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba, its musicians – as writer Greil Marcus has pointed out – just clinging on to the song by their fingernails, it was a boundary-breaking single that permanently altered the face of music. Entire books have been written about it, unravelling meanings from its dense lyrics, but Marcus’s point is key: along with the sheer venom of Dylan’s delivery, it’s the sense that the journey into uncharted territory is permanently on the brink of collapse that makes it so eternally thrilling.
1. Like a Rolling Stone (1965)
The Guardian
2. Visions of Johanna (1966)
3. Idiot Wind (1975)
4. Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965)
5. Desolation Row (1965)
6. Blind Willie McTell (1983)
7. Positively Fourth Street (1965)
8. Not Dark Yet (1997)
9. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (1966)
10. It Ain’t Me Babe (1964)
11. Girl From the North Country (1963)
12. Tangled Up in Blue (1975)
13. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964)
14. Things Have Changed (1997)
15. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965)
16. One of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) (1966)
17. Ballad of a Thin Man (1965)
18. Mr Tambourine Man (1965)
19. The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (1981)
20. A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall (1963)
21. I Threw It All Away (1969)
22. Chimes of Freedom (1964)
23. I Shall Be Released (1967)
24. Hurricane (1976)
25. Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
26. I Want You (1966)
27. Most of the Time (1989)
28. All Along the Watchtower (1967)
29. Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright (1963)
30. High Water (For Charlie Patton) (2001)
31. Isis (1976)
32. It’s All Over Now Baby Blue (1965)
33. Murder Most Foul (2020)
34. Brownsville Girl (1986)
35. Slow Train (1979)
36. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973)
37. If Not For You (1970)
38. Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965)
39. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964)
40. Jokerman (1983)
41. Forever Young (1974)
42. One Too Many Mornings (1964)
43. Ain’t Talkin’ (2006)
44. Blowin’ in the Wind (1963)
45. Went to See the Gypsy (1970)
46. Make You Feel My Love (1997)
47. My Back Pages (1964)
48. Pay in Blood (2012)
49. This Wheel’s on Fire (1967)
50. Changing of the Guards (1978)