
They’ll stone you and then say you are brave. They’ll stone you when you are walking home. Well, they’ll stone you when you walk all alone. They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar. They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car. Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll come back again. Well, they’ll stone you and say that it’s the end. Tell ya what, I would not feel so all alone, They’ll stone ya and then they’ll say, “good luck.” They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to make a buck. They’ll stone ya when you are young and able. They’ll stone ya when you’re at the breakfast table. They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ to the door. They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ on the floor. They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat. Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ ‘long the street. Then they’ll stone ya when you’re there all alone. They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to go home. They’ll stone ya just a-like they said they would. Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re trying to be so good, It’s an effective number in concert, giving the inevitable concert-attending potheads something to cheer about. I think it would have worked better if it were the last selection on the recording, not the first.ĭylan used the song as an encore for a long time. However, a novelty song grows tiresome with repeated listening. Rainy Day Woman is a clever, amusing song.

Pretty ironic to appropriate their musical style for this song. Members of the Army refrain from alcohol, drugs, smoking, and so forth. The Salvation Army is a Christian organization that maintains a number of brass bands, not always of the highest quality, that play at its various functions.

Somehow I doubt that one.Īl Kooper said producer Bob Johnston had the idea to play the song in a drunken Salvation Army band style.
#Rainy day woman lyrics code
And 4:20 was teenager code for the time to meet after school to smoke a joint. The most far-out theory is that 12 * 35 = 420. And what about the numbers 12 and 35? One apocryphal story has it that a woman, age 35, and her daughter, age 12, were guests at the Blonde on Blonde recording sessions. Many have noted that a “rainy day woman” was a popular slang term for a marijuana joint in the sixties (I hadn’t heard that term used before – but see Time Magazine J– it’s true). The title of the song is rather mysterious. (Ahab is mentioned in Highway 61, and is married to Jezebel, a character in Tombstone Blues.) God finds out about the crime and destroys Ahab’s kingdom. But in The King of Kings Naboth is stoned to death unjustly by supporters of King Ahab. In most of the stories, the victim is being punished for some misdeed, unlike the innocent character in the song.

A search of the King James Bible returns no less than 31 hits on the word “stoning”.

There’s no doubt that Dylan intentionally wrote the lyrics so the listener could interpret the song both as a jokey “drug song” and also about someone literally being stoned to death. Spector and Dylan were surprised that a song about getting high could be played so frequently on the radio. charts and also doing well in Britain, even though it was banned from many radio stations in both countries because the lyrics celebrate the act of getting “stoned”.ĭylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that record producer Phil Spector and Dylan had heard Ray Charles’s Let’s Go Get Stoned on a jukebox not long before the song was written. Surprisingly, Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35 was one of Dylan’s best selling singles, reaching number two on the U.S.
