Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ has always been my favourite—a plotless seven-and-a-half-minute dreamscape

Bob Dylan has adopted a different narrative persona for each successive stage of his personal and musical journey.

The 83-year-old singer-songwriter wrote Blonde on Blonde , on 16 May 1966 , much of which was written over several sleepless nights in the Chelsea Hotel .

The songs from that period epitomise Dylan-as-symbolist .

Bob Dylan ’s “Visions of Johanna” has been beguiled and puzzled by critics over the past six decades .

Dylan 's lyrics bridge the gap usually separating “literary” poems from popular songs that, poet Matthew Zapruder has observed, tend to be “written in a language regular people can understand” In addition to the collision of vowels and consonants, the pugnacity of the lyric: “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head, they make it all seem so cruel”.

The original Blonde on Blonde studio recording of “Visions of Johanna” remains, for me, the unimprovable version of that song.

In recent decades , the song has appeared in Dylan ’s setlists infrequently, its mystique now diminished.