Reply #16: This was a real pump! [View All]

[Squeech]

There are a lot of Dylan lyrics that really do come out of left field, but this one had a real world reference. There was supposed to be an old pump on the campus of Bard College, a historical relic, which had lost its pump handle over the years.

My favorite Dylan lyric story is the one about "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." The story was that Dylan thought that, because of international tensions, the bombs might drop at any time. That's what the song is about on a real obvious level. But beyond that, there were a bunch of songs Dylan felt he should write that he was afraid he wasn't going to have time for. So each of the cryptic lines in "Hard Rain" was supposed to represent the topic of one of the songs he wasn't going to get to.