just sit there and watch the river flow ... even though that's not quite what he's saying". For Marcus, "Watching the River Flow" is a compelling work, but the subtlety of the song may have prevented it from reaching a wide audience. Clinton Heylin and writer Christopher Ricks discussed Dylan's restlessness in the song. Heylin said that in "Ballad of Easy Rider", co-written by Dylan and Roger McGuinn two years earlier, Dylan claimed he was content to watch while "The river flows, flows to the sea/Wherever it flows, that's where I want to be"; by contrast, in "Watching the River Flow", Dylan writes that he wants to be moving, wishing he was "back in the city/Instead of this old bank of sand". Ricks found Dylan's unsettledness at odds with the implied bucolic notion of watching the river flow. For Ricks, the vocal phrasing and the musical arrangements clash with the lyrics; the "choppy" rhythms and "stroppy stomping" of the backing track, disrupt the theme of contentedly watching the river. He noted that two of the verses begin with "People disagreeing", introducing conflict into the song, and concluded that "Watching the River Flow" is "tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy". Heylin heard in the composition Dylan's admission that in 1971 he felt uninspired about writing lyrics and had no specific ideas he wanted to voice. The biographer placed this avowal in the context of changing, polarized critical estimates of Dylan's work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In June 1970, Dylan had released Self Portrait, an album that received very negative reviews; Dylan's next album that year, New Morning, was viewed much more favorably by critics, and Ralph Gleason declared "We've got Dylan back again!" For Heylin, Dylan's assertion in the song that he does not have any particular message to express, is an attempt to subvert critics like Gleason. Heylin wrote that both "Watching the River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" discuss Dylan's professed lack of inspiration at the time in an honest and satisfying way. Pointing to the fact that Dylan made no attempt to record either a single or an album in the following year of 1972, he commented that "Dylan had now concluded that he must simply sit by that bank of sand and await [his muse's] return." Ian Bell, in his critical biography of Dylan, wrote