Little Red Bike

"The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: Revised and Updated Edition" (Michael Gray)

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. A blues- structured work, it also neatly 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 with sexual innuendo and double entendre as the blues, it's sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery 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.
musical snippet: Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain

"The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: Revised and Updated Edition" (Michael Gray)

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. A blues- structured work, it also neatly 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 with sexual innuendo and double entendre as the blues, it's sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery 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.

musical snippet: Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain

Buckets of rain

Buckets of tears

Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears.

Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,

You got all the love, honey baby,

I 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.

 

I Like your smile

And your fingertips

I like the way that you move your hips.

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?