One of the perils of having a CD Jukebox is that CDs occasionally get lost. I thought my copies of Rubber Soul and Bringing It all Back Home were gone forever, and I’d even started scrounging around for cheap replacements, until they turned up out of order in an obscure part of the collection. Good times. Bringing It all Back Home is just about the perfect Dylan album. The lyrics are a treasure trove of incredible images and familiar if noteworthy truths.

Well, I wish I was on some
Australian mountain range.
Oh, I wish I was on some
Australian mountain range.
I got no reason to be there, but I
Imagine it would be some kind of change.

I’d say it was the best Dylan album, but Shaun Carney’s gentle mockery of making lists like that, or even starting them, has convinced me otherwise. Carney’s piece is great, but he can’t possibly be right about Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, I hope. (You’ll have to read the article to find out what he’s hopefully wrong about – it’s too disturbing to repeat here and this is family website.)

But there’s more to Bringing It all Back Home than its list-topping virtues. I’ve been wondering, as part of my ongoing concern about fictional realism, just what it takes for a character in a song to be real. I presume that if novels can really contain characters, so can songs, especially explicitly fictional songs. Frankee Lee and Judas Priest are just as real as Neo and Zaphod Beeblebrox. But what does it take for a character in a song to exist. I won’t include all the lyrics here, but read through Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream and see how many characters you think exist in virtue of that song’s existence.

Does reality include Captain Arab and is he also a character in Moby Dick? Does it include

The cop?
The Gurnsey cow?
The people carrying signs around?
The cook?
The waitress (sic)?
The bank staff?
The girl from France?
Her friend?
His newly-acquired boots?
The proto-Bentsenite limb-tearer?
The Fabulous Englishman?
The funeral director?
The bowling ball?
The pay phone?
Its foot?
The coin?
The coastguard boat?
Its crew?
The parking ticket?
The Pope of Eruke?
The deputy sherriff of the jail?
His (or her) Cetacean spouse?
And, last but not least, Columbus?

My little self-waged campaign to embarrass myself out of believing in fictional objects is starting to work I fear.