Bob Dylan

by Andy Gill

  Since its appearance, ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’—and particularly the identity of the denigrated “Mr Jones” figure—has probably prompted more debate among Dylan fans than any other song. Bob’s insecure friend Brian Jones, who suffered badly from Dylan and Neuwirth’s badinage, was convinced it was him; some have suggested it might refer to Ms Joan (Baez), or others among Dylan’s uncomprehending folkie friends; Judson Manning, the Time reporter savaged so mercilessly by Dylan in Don’t Look Back, fits the part as well as any other candidate—as indeed does Terry Ellis, the student inquisitor mocked by Dylan in the same film (who would, by the by, become co-founder of the Chrysalis record label a few years later); and of course, anyone searching for drug references would instantly recognize a “jones” as a junkie’s habit.

  And the longer the song remains inconclusively explained, the weirder the explanations get. In April 1998, a fascinating interpretation of the song as “outing” a closet homosexual’s desire to perform fellatio (based on such references as “your pencil in your hand,” “raise up your head.” “hands you a bone,” “contacts among the lumberjacks,” “sword swallower” and “give me some milk”) was posted on one of the many websites devoted to Dylan’s work, though this is probably more indicative of the pitfalls of interpretation than Dylan’s intentions with the song, which itself condemns the urge to interpret pruriently that which we don’t immediately understand.

  At the time the song was written, Dylan was routinely plagued by journalists demanding explanations of his songs, but even to reputable reporters like Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, he would offer no clues about the victim’s identity. “You know him,” Dylan told them. “but not by that name… I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘That’s Mr Jones’. Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn’t he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?’ And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground’. It’s all there, it’s a true story.” Which leaves everyone back where they started, chasing a chimerical character round another man’s imagination. To Robert Shelton, he claimed, more openly but no more revealingly, “It’s not so incredibly absurd and it’s not so imaginative to have Mr Jones in a room with three walls and a midget and a geek and a naked man. Plus a voice… a voice coming in his dream.”

  Mr Jones is, in fact, most likely to be a journalist; indeed, Dylan himself admitted as much when he introduced the song at a 1978 concert by saying, “I wrote this for a reporter who was working for the Village Voice in 1963.” Three years earlier, however, Jeffrey Jones had already “outed” himself as “Mr Jones” in Rolling Stone magazine, explaining that as a student journalist on assignment for Time magazine, he had embarrassed himself at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when attempting to interview Dylan for a piece on the proliferation of the harmonica in contemporary folk music (!). Later that day, in the hotel dining-room, he had been unfortunate enough to bump into Dylan again, this time with entourage in tow. “Mr Jones!” shouted Dylan, mockingly. “Gettin’ it all down, Mr Jones?” The poor youth, unskilled in even the basic rudiments of verbal duelling, let alone a blade as sharp as Dylan wielded, was forced to sit and squirm silently as he was cut to pieces for the entertainment of Dylan’s table. When, a few months later, the song appeared on Highway 61 Revisited, he knew instantly it referred to himself. “I was thrilled,” he admitted, “in the tainted way I suppose a felon is thrilled to see his name in the newspaper.”

  QUEEN JANE APPROXIMATELY

  When asked “Who is Queen Jane?” Dylan responded with typical panache, “Queen Jane is a man.” This seems sardonic at best, a sarcastic denial of the obvious. The prime candidate would, again, seem to be the queen of folk music, Joan Baez, whose stable and secure family life Dylan probably regarded as a brake on her creative development. The song is a double-edged missive, criticizing its subject’s immersion in an inauthentic world of superficial attitudes and acquaintances, yet offering a sympathetic invitation, should she break free of these diversions and require a more honest, authentic experience with “somebody you don’t have to speak to,” to come up and see him sometime. It’s the least interesting track on the album, although the piano cantering up the scale through the harmonica break neatly evokes the stifling nature of an upper-class existence reduced to the level of dressage.

  HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

  Highway 61 is one of the great North American arteries, originating across the border in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and snaking down through Dylan’s native Minnesota and on South through Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas, hugging the western bank of the Mississippi River, which it crosses at Memphis, continuing on down through the state of Mississippi into Louisiana, where it hits the Gulf Of Mexico at New Orleans. To the young Bob Zimmerman, growing up in chilly Minnesota with an urge to ramble, it must have seemed a romantically tight connection to the Southern homeland of R&B, blues and rock’n’roll, a tarmac Mississippi river leading to the music’s heart.

  Appropriately enough, it’s celebrated in the album’s most raucous blues boogie, a railroad shuffle scarred with Mike Bloomfield’s razor-slashes of slide guitar and boasting the most flip and sacrilegious of Bible studies, as befits such a slick example of the Devil’s music. In the album’s opening lines, Dylan cheekily invokes his own father’s name by having God refer to Abraham as “Abe,” which effectively makes Bob himself the son whom God wants killed. The fourth verse extends the tone of theological satire through the mathematically precise nature of the family relations outlined with such biblical pedantry, while the remaining three verses broaden the vision of Highway 61 as a site of limitless possibility populated by a string of highly dubious gamblers, drifters and chancers called things like “Mack the Finger,” and “Louie the King.” It’s perhaps indicative of Dylan’s increasingly cynical attitude towards the entertainment business that the last, and most venal, of these is a promoter who seriously considers staging World War III out on Highway 61.

  The song marks the only appearance on the album of drummer Sam Lay, who had backed Howlin’ Wolf for six years, playing on most of his classic Chess recordings, before hooking up with young white blues-harp sensation Paul Butterfield to form the Butterfield Blues Band. “We recorded it in one night, pretty quickly,” Lay recalls. “He knew what he was doing. The little police whistle in that track was mine, a little thing I had on my keychain. I had it in my drum case, and between takes I picked it up and blew it, and Dylan heard it and reached out his hand for it—didn’t say nothin’—then when we went back over the track, he blew it a couple of times.”

  Al Kooper, who played the galloping electric piano on the track, remembers things a little differently, however. “I was wearing that siren around my neck at the time,” he claims, “and I don’t know exactly how Bob got hold of it, but he stuck it in his harmonica holder and it became immortalized on that track.”

  JUST LIKE TOM THUMB’S BLUES

  As the album nears its close, Dylan takes a right turn from his trip down Highway 61, heading off down Mexico way. Ciudad Juarez is a Mexican border town just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, the kind of place Americans go to let their hair down and their morals slide. It’s used here in much the same way pulp novelist Jim Thompson and film maker Sam Peckinpah have used Mexico, both as a symbol of escape and as an index of how far down a person might have been forced to go—fallen so low, they’ve literally dropped out of America into the Third World.

  The song opens to reveal the singer washed up, lost in the rain after an Easter vacation binge, with literal alienation hardening into its spiritual equivalent in the rank and humid atmosphere. Weak with mysterious ailment, drained by his excesses with hookers and booze, he assesses his own situation, and realizes there’s no place for the civilised side of him in a place so riddled with venality that its authorities brag of their corruption. Finally, abandoned by his friends, he decides to head back to New York City, a place which may be
a sump of human depravity, but which still retains the vestiges of basic civilized contact.

  The song has been likened to The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot’s portrait of 20th century alienation, but it’s more accurate to view it as depicting the downside of Dylan’s attempt to escape such alienation (and boost his own creative powers) through intense sensory derangement and bohemian experientialism. Don’t try this, he’s saying, unless you’re prepared for the worst. The presence of the eponymous nursery-rhyme character in the title probably refers to Rimbaud’s Ma Bohème (aka Wandering), which finds the French Symbolist engaged in similar drop-out pursuits: “I tore my shirt; I threw away my tie/Dreamy Tom Thumb, I made up rhymes/As I ran… in dark and scary places/And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces/Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart.”

  The song’s enervated tone is perfectly captured in the weary, reflective trudge of the music, which makes innovative use of two different pianos, Al Kooper playing the electric Hohner Pianet while Paul Griffin adds a lovely bar-room feel on tack piano.

  DESOLATION ROW

  The south-of-the-border slant continues with ‘Desolation Row’, an 11-minute epic of entropy set to a courtly flamenco-tinged backing. Often described as a latterday equivalent of Dante’s Inferno, it takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities, in which equilibrium can only be maintained through immersion in the absurdity of the situation, acceptance of one’s position in Desolation Row.

  It could serve as Dylan’s alternative State Of The Nation Address, an increasingly surreal update of the America depicted in ‘Gates Of Eden’. From his vantage point on the Row, the singer describes the futile activity and carnival of deceit indulged in by a huge cast of iconic characters, some historical (Einstein, Nero), some biblical (Noah, Cain and Abel, The Good Samaritan), some fictional (Ophelia, Romeo, Cinderella, Casanova), some fantastic (The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The Phantom Of The Opera), some literary (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound), and some who fit into none of the above categories, notably Dr Filth and his dubious nurse. Detached from their historical moorings, abandoned in this cultural wasteland, these figures serve mainly as shorthand signifiers for more complex bundles of human characteristics, allowing Dylan to cram extra layers of possible meaning into the song’s already tightly-packed absurdist imagery.

  As a result, the song is open to a plethora of interpretations, virtually impossible to decipher in detail with any degree of certitude. (The English poet Philip Larkin, reviewing the album in Jazz Review, described ‘Desolation Row’ as having “an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.”) Certain stanzas obviously offer implied criticisms of familiar Dylan targets: venal bureaucrats, bloodless academics, soulless theologians, loveless bourgeoisie, and the full stifling panoply of industrialized society in general, against which he posits the enduring power of creativity, love and freedom. Much of the song’s enduring power derives from the way in which many of its characters are locked in symbiotic (but unfulfilling) balance with one another: the sex-fearing Ophelia and the sex-obsessed Dr Filth; the blind commissioner and the tightrope walker to whom he is tied; Einstein and his friend, “a jealous monk,” trapped in an insoluble debate between science and religion; Eliot and Pound, glimpsed arguing over arcane poetical points while pop singers steal their audience; and lustful Romeo and casual Cinderella, a cancellation of desire.

  Like much of Dylan’s material from this period, the song makes a mockery of accusations that he had betrayed or abandoned “protest” music; rather, what he has done is to broaden the scope of his protest to reflect more accurately the disconcerting hyper-reality of modern western culture. It’s clear that he regarded the song as one of his best—he is reported to have spent some time discussing it with Allen Ginsberg, and when Nat Hentoff asked him what he would do if he were President, the least absurd part of Dylan’s response was that he would “immediately re-write ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and little school children, instead of memorizing ‘America The Beautiful’, would have to memorize ‘Desolation Row’.”

  Musically, the song is completely different from the rest of Highway 61 Revisited, abandoning the guitar/double keyboards set-up that gives the album its distinctive tone, in favour of a more stately, ruminative setting of just two guitars, with no rhythm section at all. “I just think Bob wanted to set it apart in some way, shape or form,” believes Al Kooper, “and instrumentation was just the way he chose. Bob Johnston had Charlie McCoy come up from Nashville to play electric guitar on that one, but there was a version on which Bob played acoustic guitar, Harvey Brooks played bass and I played electric guitar, with no drums on it.”

  POSITIVELY 4TH STREET

  The follow-up single to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Positively 4th Street’ (which reached US No. 7, UK No. 8 in September 1965) gave the impression of being simply the second wind of a one-sided argument, so closely did it follow its predecessor’s formula, both musically and attitudinally. Such differences as there are between the two are marginal at best: Al Kooper’s organ is poppier and better defined after a month’s practice, and Dylan’s delivery is slightly less caustic—an unconscious counterbalance, perhaps, to his most brutal condemnation yet.

  The title offers a pretty clear indication of who (in general) the song was aimed at: Dylan once rented a flat on 4th Street in Greenwich Village, and the targets of his disdain are most likely to be the folkie in-crowd among whom he swam upon first relocating to New York from Minneapolis. As he admits in the fifth of twelve short verses, “I used to be among the crowd you’re in with.” Clearly, someone offended him deeply, judging by the song’s contemptuous tone and its magisterially dismissive final lines, in which the victim is told, “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/You’d know what a drag it is to see you.”

  Judging by the references to his having let someone down and caused them to lose their faith, the song’s target is probably one of those folk-music authorities who rounded on Dylan first for “abandoning” protest songs, then again for picking up an electric guitar—in some cases, only to follow the same path themselves shortly afterwards, when they glimpsed the fortune and fame available. Which narrows the field down to a few hundred or so. If Dylan’s intention was to inflict a more generalized guilt, he succeeded perfectly: everyone in the Village had the feeling he was talking about them specifically, and quite a few felt deeply hurt by the broadside.

  Dave Van Ronk—who, despite having had his arrangement of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ stolen without permission or credit, had defended his friend when the folkies had turned on him a few years earlier, claiming that “The folk community is acting toward Dylan like a Jewish mother”—felt that Dylan’s riposte was a righteous hit. “People from the early 1960s are very bitter about [Dylan],” he told Robert Shelton. “Although Bobby did treat most of them rather cavalierly, their reactions are largely their own fault. They just wanted to bask in the light of an obvious talent, to reflect a little glory on them… I think that ‘Positively 4th Street’ is a great song. It was high time Bobby turned around and said something to [Sing Out! editor] Irwin Silber and all those Jewish mothers. It’s Dylan’s farewell address.”

  Others, like folk archivist Israel (Izzy) Young, were more bemused at what they considered Dylan’s cheek. “I don’t know if it was [about me],” he told Anthony Scaduto, but it was unfair… Dylan comes in and takes from us, uses my resources, then he leaves and he gets bitter? He was the one who left!”

  At the time, however, Dylan had raised bitterness to the level of an art form. Surrounded by a group of cronies that included Bob Neuwirth, Victor Maimudes, and the folk-singers Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson and David (Blue) Cohen, he would hold court at one of New York’s bars or nightclubs—mostly the Kettle Of Fish—where those foolish or brave enough to try and intrude would be systematically demolished in the verbal crossfire. David Cohen became particularly close to Dylan, whose defensive, suspicious nature he shared.
“Dylan was very hostile, a mean cat, very cruel to people,” he admitted to Scaduto. “But I could see the reasons for it. It was very defensive, for one thing. Just from having to answer too many questions. The big thing was that his privacy had been invaded… He was a street cat, man, and he lost his freedom.”

  The verbal artillery was not just trained on outsiders, either. In the wake of his success, folk-singing had become something of a competitive sport, and Dylan realized that his cronies were picking crumbs from his table, trying to pick up clues that might bring them the same level of success. Cruelly, he rubbed their noses in their opportunism, telling them they would never make it the way he had, and suggesting to Phil Ochs that he should find a new line of work, since he wasn’t doing very much in his current career. “It was… very clever, witty, barbed and very stimulating, too,” recalled Ochs, the most talented of the also-rans. “But you really had to be on your toes. You’d walk into a threshing machine if you were just a regular guy, naive and open, you’d be torn to pieces.”

  CAN YOU PLEASE CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW?

  The release of ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ in December 1965 proved a turning point in Phil Ochs’ relationship with Dylan, when he made the mistake of being less than flattering at a playback of the new single. “It’s okay,” said Ochs, as a limousine arrived to ferry the entourage to an uptown disco, “but it’s not going to be a hit.” They had travelled but a few blocks when Dylan, no longer able to contain his mounting fury at this sacrilegious response, told the driver to pull over and ordered Ochs out of the car. “Get out, Ochs,” he said. “You’re not a folk-singer. You’re just a journalist.” Their friendship was over, consigned to history.