Songfacts®:

• "Silvio" has Dylan contemplating his own past and future. He's gotten himself into a rough spot in life, but refuses to get down about it or to whine about his ordeal. The song is summed up by the last two lines of the fifth verse:
  
  Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
  Pay for your ticket and don't complain
  
  An interesting aspect of the song is that the chorus ("Silvio, silver and gold won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold") suggests poverty isn't the problem Dylan is dealing with. It may be the exact opposite, in fact, as the "silver and gold" threaten to make him lifeless and cold.
• The natural assumption is that "Silvio" is the person Dylan is embodying in this song, but the chorus makes it clear that Silvio is actually the person he's addressing. Dylan (or whoever Dylan is speaking as in the song) is telling Silvio he (Dylan) has got to go. No details about Silvio are given.
• Dylan composed the music to this song while Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter wrote the words. It's one of two Down in the Groove songs featuring that collaboration, with the other being "Ugliest Girl In The World."
  
  "Ugliest Girl" is the first track on Side 2 of the album. "Silvio" immediately follows.
  
  In his book of collected lyrics, A Box of Rain, Hunter mentions this collaboration with a simple parenthetical message, stating, "Bob Dylan released this is as a single in 1988."
  
  In 2009, 21 years after releasing Down in the Groove, the pair worked together on nearly every track on Dylan's album Together Through Life.
• Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Brent Mydland sang the backup vocals on this one.
• "Silvio" is generally considered the best song on Down in the Groove. It's also included on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 3, released in 1994.
• Nathan East played bass on this one. A first-call session player, others to use his services include Earth, Wind & Fire, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Michael Jackson. East played on Diana Krall's 2015 album Wallflower, which was named after Dylan's song of the same name.
• The second verse of "Silvio" contains the lines:
  
  I'm an old boll weevil looking for a home
  
  The boll weevil, scientific name Anthonomus grandis, is a beetle that eats cotton buds. Hunter's inclusion of it here is a reference to blues legend Leadbelly and his 1934 song "Boll Weevil," which includes the opening verse:
  
  Well the boll weevil and the little black bug
  Come from a-Mexico they say
  Came all the way to Texas
  Just a-lookin' for a place to stay
  Just a-lookin' for a home, just a-lookin' for a home
  
  The lyrics are accurate in saying that the boll weevil came from Mexico. The insect was a major pest to American cotton crops, particularly in the 1920s.
  
  Leadbelly's song grew out of a 1908 song by Charley Patton titled "Mississippi Boweevil Blues."