Andrew Curry writes: It’s Bob Dylan’s birthday today, and two-thirds of the Salut! Live editorial team are off to Wembley, more in hope than expectation, to watch Sunderland play in the so-called ‘250 million pound match’[1]—the play-off decider that sees a team get promoted to the English Premier League. So I decided to mark the day with a Dylan song that sounds as if it was designed to put a smile on people’s faces: Leopard-skin Pill-Box Hat.
The song, of course, is from Blonde on Blonde, the 1966 double album which marked the end of the hugely creative spell that started with Bringing It All Back Home and took in Highway 61 Revisited along the way.
(A leopard-skin pill-box hat. Seen on Miranda’s Choice/ Etsy)
More on that in a moment, but we’re going to give it a run out—Dylan Neat or Dylan Beat?— against the version of the song that’s on Cat Power’s 2022 double record Cat Power Sings Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. In that collection, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall 56 years after Dylan’s 1966 show, Cat Power sings all the same songs in exactly the same order. It’s a huge act of hommage, and since Cat Power is a gifted interpreter of other people’s songs, it turns out that this is worth doing—her versions aren’t just copies.
But back to the song itself. On the face of it, it’s a bit of whimsy, almost a bit of nonsense:
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine
And who knows these days what a ‘leopard-skin pill-box hat’ even was, even if they were big in the 1960s? The song is immediately of its moment. And it turns out with some sketchy research that even in 1966, the pill-box hat was on the way out, and indeed, that might be the point of the song.
The hat is forever associated with Jackie Kennedy, JFK’s wife, and there’s even one of her pill-box hats in the Library of President Truman.
But the song is written three years after Kennedy’s assassination, and one way of reading it is that the song is being sung by a former lover to a fashion victim, who is hanging on to her things when they are no longer in vogue. The woman might be the model Edie Sedgwick, who put a glamorous face to Andy Warhol’s Factory, and who had a difficult relationship during 1966 with Dylan’s mate Bobby Neuwirth.
(Jackie K’s pill-box hat has lost its spots. Marshall Astor/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0)
The song is a 12-bar blues, and in Dylan’s version it kind of lopes along with a touch of honky-tonk. The producer of Blonde on Blonde, Bob Johnston, persuaded Dylan to move the recording sessions for the album from New York to Nashville, and some of the city’s best session musicians joined Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper, who had also been in the New York sessions, in the studio. The record has a definite Nashville feel to it.
In contrast, Cat Power’s version is sharper, faster, and harder. It has more of a sneer to it, and a bit more attack. The musicians are excellent, although I have to admit I hadn’t heard of any of them. But Discogs tells me that the band is Henry Munson and Arsun Sorrenti, guitars, Erik Paparazzi, bass, Josh Adams, drums, Jordan Summers, organ, and Aaron Embry on piano.
Dylan neat or Dylan beat? I think I’ll leave that to you, but if this seems like a cop-out, I’m leaning towards Cat Power.
Although the song sounds like a bit of nonsense—Dylan fan Tony Attwood can’t make head or tail of it—there are other ways of reading the song. It’s based loosely on Lightning Hopkins’s Automobile Blues—“I saw you riding around/ In your brand new automobile”—and like many blues songs, Automobile Blues might not just be about a car.
There’s quite a lot of innuendo on Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat as well.
The hat might be a stand-in for something else.[2] In verse two, the singer wants to jump on the hat; and in verse three they are welcoming the dawn, the singer with their belt “wrapped around my head”, and her “just sittin’ there” with the hat on, and perhaps not much else.
In verse four, she’s “cheatin’” with the doctor, who has “her brand new leopard-skin pillbox-box hat” on his head. By verse five, she has a new boyfriend:
You might think he loves you for your money
But I know what he really loves you for
It's your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat.
But then again: It might just be a song about a hat.
Oh, and happy birthday, Bob!
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[1] And worth quite a lot of money even if you get relegated straightaway, as happens quite often to winners of the Championship play-offs.
[2] In Freud’s interpretation of dreams, a hat is associated with genitalia, though more often male. It depends on the sexuality of the dreamer and the shape of the hat.
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