It Came From Before I Was Actually Born

AOHell's got the new Dylan CD set in one of those streaming Flash thingies. CD1 is the folky acoustic stuff, CD2 is outtakes from Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, and lemme tell ya, there are scads of artists out there who'd kill to be able to throw away records this good[*], even if a lot of the changes made to the official versions of these songs improved him. If only their player had better support for track names, etc.

Anyway, I had "Down In The Flood" running through my head earlier today, it seemed apropriate given the New Orleans disaster. Even though "Down In The Flood" is pretty much a bitch-done-me-wrong song and the flood's pretty much metaphorical:

There's rain on the levee, the water's gonna grow
Water will rise and no boat's gonna row

Well it's sugar for sugar
And it's salt for salt
If you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault
But oh, mama, you gonna miss your best friend now
You gonna have to find yourself another best friend somehow

[*] Except "Desolation Row", that version's amazingly even more of a drag than the official version.

Where am I going with this? Well, unless you're down in the Delta with a boat and a mess of extra food, there's probably fuck all you can do for N'Awlins. Except, that is, for donate to the Red Cross.