Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did. God knows when, but you're doin' it again,

he squeezes out obtrusively in "Marie"s penitentiary verses.

"4th Time Around" sounds like the Beatles's "Norwegian Wood." Like its model, it pushes a sitar or something into prominence, then narrates a man's seduction by some sore of Lamia, from his passive and clouded viewpoint. Once again triple rimes breed doggeral--this time in short, 3-to-a-line phrases like

ShE--bUttoned her bOst--strAlghtened her sUit--then she said "Don't get eUte"

The only pleasant line among the lyrics, YOu, yOu took me In, yOu loved me thEn, you nEver wAsted time, comes when the monotonous full rimes are minimized. What pleasure it thereby brings, unfortunately, is less that of normal theme-and-variation than that good feeling you get when you stop drumming your head with a hammer.

Full obituaries for all the corpees on the album would be too painful. A couple more failures may be mentioned, both of which try echoing past successes. "Obviously 5 Believers" has the word-obliterating background of "Subterranean," but has a subject less suited to chaotic rendering: a bluesy "baby, please come home" message that seems to justify the song's format, a blues repetition of each stanza's first line. But, as always, Dylan has bad luck with the blues format. The license for repetition seems to attract him to lyrics more banal than usual, when what is needed is something singularly well-chosen and repeatable. The other song, "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat," has the loose, talking-blues, shape of the "I Shall Be Free" and theirs, its jokes are mostly private or unfunny.

Two of the album's five successes are slick, mellifluous glances backward from a boy-girl breakup, "Most Likely You Go Your Way," and "One of Us Must Know." Like their ancestor from Opus 4, "It Ain't Me, Babe," these should yield the popular idiom a ripe harvest of epigrams.

Natural

"Just Like a Woman" is one of the very exciting things we have to deal with. Natural, seemingly without artifice but for a few lines, this is Dylan's tenderest humanism since "North Country Blues" (Opus 3). It defines with sincere concern and virtual clairvoyance the girl-woman, innocence-experience, stage of ambivalent transition. Its chorus echoes simply

She mAkes--love--JUst--like a wOman But she brEake--just like a little--girl

while a verse poses a less feminine, more universal problem:

NobOdy has to guEse--that bAby can't be biEased Till shE--Finally sEes that--ohEs like all the rEst.

At the end, focus is shifted strangely yet some-how comfortably from the anonymous woman to the previously unobtrusive narrator:

WhEn we meet agAin--Introduced as friends, PlEane don't--iEt on--thAt you knew me whEn I was hEipless--and it was yOur--world.

"Visions of Johanna," more exciting still, travels discreetly Dylan's whole range from realism to surrealism.