Motorpsycho Nitemare

"Motorpsycho Nitemare"
Song by Bob Dylan from the album Another Side of Bob Dylan
Released	1964
Recorded	June 9, 1964, Columbia Recording Studios, Studio A, New York City, New York
Label	Columbia Records
Writer	Bob Dylan
Composer	Bob Dylan
Producer	Tom Wilson
Another Side of Bob Dylan track listing
"All I Really Want to Do" "Black Crow Blues" "Spanish Harlem Incident" "Chimes of Freedom" "I Shall Be Free No. 10" "To Ramona" "Motorpsycho Nitemare" "My Back Pages" "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" "Ballad in Plain D" "It Ain't Me Babe"

"Motorpsycho Nitemare", also known as "Motorpsycho Nightmare", is an early song written by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The song was released in 1964 on Dylan's fourth studio album Another Side of Bob Dylan.

The chord progression and lyrical flow in "Motorpsycho Nitemare" are re-used on the song, "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", which was released the following year on the album Bringing It All Back Home^{[citation needed]} The song is based in part on Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho and also makes a reference to the Federico Fellini film La Dolce Vita.^[1]

The song's story

The title and lyrics in Dylan's song reference Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho, which was released in 1960. The song is a parody that also draws on traveling salesmen jokes, where the main character shows up at a farmhouse looking for a place to spend the night, only to be lured by the temptations of the farmer's daughter. Dylan weds the basic plots of the film and joke to create a humorous tale with a political point.

In the opening of "Motorpsycho Nitemare", the narrator pounds on a farmhouse door after a long day's travel, only to be greeted by a gun-bearing farmer. At first, the farmer accuses the narrator of being a traveling salesman, but he denies it, claiming instead to be a doctor, a "clean-cut kid (who's) been to college, too." Convincing the farmer, he is welcomed to stay overnight on the condition that he not touch the farmer's daughter, Rita, and "in the morning, milk the cow." In the middle of the night, however, Rita sneaks in "looking like Tony Perkins," the actor who played the deranged killer in Psycho. She invites the narrator to take a shower, but he declines, saying he's "been through this movie before." The passage refers to the scene in the film where Hitchcock's female protagonist is stabbed to death while taking a shower in her motel room. Wanting to flee but feeling obligated to stay and milk the cow as promised, the narrator shouts out one of the most offensive things he can think of: that he likes "Fidel Castro and his beard." Enraged, the farmer chases him off with gunshots, accusing him of being an "unpatriotic rotten doctor Commie rat."

At the time, during the height of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, communism was regarded in the U.S. as the nation's number one threat, and Castro, who set up a communist government in Cuba in the late 1950s, was among the country's chief enemies. The narrator escapes, Rita gets a job at a motel, and the farmer lays in wait for the narrator in hopes of turning him in to the FBI. At the song's conclusion, the narrator considers that "without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp." The lines reference a scene near the end of the film, which shows the victim's car (with her body inside) being towed from the swampland where the murderer sank it. The implication of the song is that even the most outrageous political statements are protected by the First Amendment, and as Dylan's character realizes, exercising that right in this case possibly saved his life.

References

1. ^ Heylin, Clinton. Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol.1 :1957-73 ISBN 978-1-84901-296-6

External links

• Motorpsycho Nitemare lyrics at BobDylan.com