Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  This "far out" vision depicts a totalitarian world where one’s only escape is to the ominously named Desolation Row (an idea David Bowie borrowed for his own magnificent "All the Madmen"). With Dylan’s reading beginning to branch out beyond the Beats and French symbolists—and the drugs temporarily helping to open yet more doors of perception—he draws on the likes of Nietzsche (cited in the album sleeve notes), Kafka, and Kierkegaard to fuel a bleak, dystopian worldview. (There can be little doubt that the castle where the insurance men keep the kerosene is Kafka’s.)

  Dylan later suggested (to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner) that "Desolation Row"—along with everything from "that kind of New York type period, when all the songs were just ‘city songs’"—was heavily influenced by his good friend, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—"His poetry . . . sounds like the city." Well, one of Ginsberg’s achievements in writing Howl and Kaddish was to reintroduce oral rhythms to poetry (hence their suitability for record). "Desolation Row" went further still, returning the words of popular song to a time when they had a power no other media could match. Or as Ginsberg himself put it, "It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a juke box. And he proved it can."

  Despite displays of literary ambition, one must be wary (as others have not been) of reading too much into Dylan’s name-dropping of literary sources in midsixties songs, a list of which would imply an awfully well-read twenty-four-year-old university dropout. References to the likes of Ophelia, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound in this oral epic in no way affirm an intimate knowledge of Shakspeare, Victor Hugo, or the authors of The Waste Land and The Cantos, respectively. Dylan wants these familiar cultural icons to provide him with a series of archetypes he can place in his own wasteland.

  Dylan actually had something of a fierce anti-intellectual streak running through him in these years. As he told Hentoff a couple of months after the composition of "Desolation Row": "We have the literary world . . . [and] the museum types . . . which I also have no respect for. . . . In my mind, if something is artistic or valid or groovy . . . it should be out in the open. It should be in the men’s rooms." When asked about the prospect of critical acceptance by another journalist friend, Ralph J. Gleason, the following December, Dylan retorted, "They should use the new ones, like ‘Desolation Row’ [if they want to study me]."

  It seems clear that, even in his midsixties heyday, Dylan drew more from the world of painting than from any extra-curricular reading—or from frequenting men’s rooms. "Desolation Row" was, in Dylan’s mind, an aural painting, "a picture of what goes on around here sometimes," as he suggested on the sleeve of his previous album. Were it to have a visual equivalent, it would have been something like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych vision of heaven and hell certainly familiar to Dylan’s former girlfriend, Suze (who attended one of the Highway 61 sessions). A similar incongruity regarding its characters ("Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood") and locale ("They’re selling postcards of the hanging") suffuses "Desolation Row." And whereas a song like "On the Road Again" was intended to be humorous, here the results are as oppressive as anything Hieronymus ever daubed on canvas.

  Yet it would appear that some contemporaries found "Desolation Row" a riot of sorts. When it was debuted at Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl, a month before the album’s release, there is audible laughter from each audience. And one suspects that one more line that would have induced mirth at these shows would have been, "They’re spoonfeeding Casanova / The boiled guts of birds." But it was the one significant change Dylan made to the lyrics between July 29 and August 2, when the song went from electric to acoustic, "their" motive for spoonfeeding now being "to get him to feel more assured."

  Writing a song of this length was only half of the challenge—recording and performing it quite another. For all of Dylan’s early immersion in epic narratives like "Matty Groves" and "Tom Joad," his longest studio recording to date had been "Percy’s Song." As such, Dylan must have been both surprised and delighted when he recorded it, backed by electric guitar and bass, in a single take at the end of the first album session on July 29. (Krogsgaard dates the "electric" version of the song to the July 30 session. He is clearly wrong. The session sheet for the July 29 session has an untitled song that times out at eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds, the exact time of the take on the Highway 61 test-pressing.)

  His own performance is almost faultless, singing the words like a man in the captain’s tower on a personal voyage of discovery. Yet something convinced Dylan to redo the song, and I doubt it was the slightly out-of-tune guitar (Tony Glover, in his Live 1966 notes, has suggested it was wildly out of tune, and that Dylan didn’t notice). So at the end of another extraordinarily productive session on August 2, he cut the song acoustically, allowing producer Bob Johnston to overdub some flamenco guitar fills (which may or may not have been provided by Bloomfield or Charlie McCoy) at a session two days later, before editing together the released version from four incomplete takes and the only complete take. And even though it would generally be hard to fault his judgment at this juncture, I am not sure the acoustic version is more captivating than the electric one. What it did mean was that the song became Highway 61’s "Restless Farewell."

  That Dylan seriously considered using the electric take is confirmed by the existence of a test-pressing of all the songs on his shortlist, presumably cut at the end of the August 2 session. One must presume it was for Dylan’s own benefit, allowing him to decide which songs and sequence to go with. This remarkable artifact (subsequently bootlegged as Highway 61 Revisited Again) doesn’t utilize the acoustic "Desolation Row" but rather the earlier, electric take, implying that Dylan and/or his producer still preferred the electric version, even after recording its acoustic alter ego (thus debunking Glover’s suggestion that Dylan was annoyed to find himself out of tune).

  The sequence of songs on this test-pressing does not resemble the order in which they would have appeared on the original reels. Nor does "Desolation Row" come last. This, and the fact that Dylan ended up releasing the songs in pretty much the order they were recorded, suggests that neither he nor producer Bob Johnston ever settled on an ideal album sequence, and "Desolation Row" ended up as the album closer largely by default. ("Desolation Row" is also "out of place" in Writings and Drawings, appearing before "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.")

  In concert "Desolation Row" was never the finale, even though Dylan performed it at every show from Forest Hills to the Albert Hall nine months later. Those performances showed just how sure he was of the power these plentiful words had to hold his audience/s. Post-accident, he has been less convinced, performing the song exactly three times between 1974 and 1986: once in St. Louis in 1974, once in Rome in 1984, and once with the Grateful Dead gumming up the works in Washington in 1986. (Where are the superhuman crew when you need them?) In each case the song was trimmed of at least two of its ten, twelve-line verses (in truth, they are thirty four-line verses in traditional ballad meter).

  Only in 1987, with the Heartbreakers on hand, did Dylan rediscover "Desolation Row." Trimmed down to even slimmer proportions, performed in seven- and eight-minute versions, this semi-electric tour de force almost resembled that fabled outtake from July 29. Even when he mastered the song sufficiently to perform an eleven-minute semi-acoustic arrangement—such as the one manifested at Bethlehem, PA, in December 1995, it was still pruned of three verses (including the penultimate "Praise be to Nero’s Neptune . . ." stanza). Other Never Ending Tour performances suggest he has never quite resolved its acoustic/electric status, and also that the full ten-verse original is long gone. At least the release of the electric outtake in 2005 meant everyone could finally savor that first studio vocal, when Dylan could still recall the thrill of it all.

  {152} FROM A BUICK 6

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

 
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 30, 1965—4 takes [H61 ver.1—tk.3; H61 ver.2—tk.4].

  First known performance: Forest Hills, NY, August 28, 1965.

  Highway 61 Revisited is hardly an album littered with filler, but "From a Buick Six" is definitely one that Dylan put there for light relief. Another "she’s killing me alive" lyric, it may well be what came out when he decided to rework "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence." Another barroom blues, it relies on the band’s sound to convince us he is doing more than just listing the number of ways in which this "graveyard woman" is both a lifesaver and a death-giver, handy with a shroud should she ever need one.

  At least the song was not one that either held up or hung up its author, being recorded in two takes (after a couple of false starts) at the start of business on July 30. As if to prove that both takes served their purpose just as well, Columbia managed to release the earlier take accidentally on the album’s initial U.S. pressing (and every Japanese pressing for years to come). Dylan also tried out the song at both Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl (where she walks like Rimbaud, as opposed to Bo Diddley), before dropping it and Her, never deigning to invoke the woman with the blanket again.

  {153} CAN YOU PLEASE CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW?

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 30, 1965—21 takes [45]; October 5, 1965—2 takes; ?November 30, 1965—10 takes [45—tk.10] [probably recorded on October 5 in reality].

  Dylan’s claim that he abandoned writing sequel songs after the now-lost "Mr. Tambourine Man Part 2" does not bear a great deal of scrutiny. He wrote a couple of sequel songs to "Like a Rolling Stone" in the months following, issuing them as a series of singles that produced progressively more disappointing chart positions. The first of these was almost certainly "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"—a song he did not release until December 1965, but first recorded at the second-album sessions in late July. Its twenty-one starts and five finishes occupied a large chunk of studio time on July 30, and even then he wasn’t entirely happy.

  The reason this song occupied Dylan and the musicians so long is unclear, though Bloomfield had his own chaos theory about the sessions as a whole that seems particularly pertinent here: "No one had any idea what the music was supposed to sound like. . . . The sound was a matter of pure chance. . . . The producer did not tell people what to play or have a sound in mind. . . . It was a result of chucklefucking, of people stepping on each other’s dicks until it came out right." Bassist Harvey Brooks confirms that new producer Bob Johnston—who replaced Wilson after he and Dylan had a fundamental falling out, as artists and producers sometimes do—was largely a bystander to proceedings: "Johnston was there just to keep it going. He was supposed to say if somebody was in tune or out of tune, but that was a useless concept."

  In the case of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" Dylan seemed to want the thing out of tune. After twenty-one takes, the one that was put on the Highway 61 test-pressing features an off-key rhythm guitar (Dylan’s, I suspect) throughout. That a more musical take was available was confirmed when Columbia managed to accidentally release another July 30 take of the song on the A side of early copies of "Positively Fourth Street."

  For once, one has some sympathy for the label. With a song title like this, who knew what it actually sounded like? "Can You Please . . ." certainly wouldn’t have been much of a clue, as that particular phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in the song. Dylan generally sings, "Ah, c’mon, crawl out your window." In Columbia’s cardex system it was initially filed under the title on the studio sheet—"Look at Barry Run"—while "Positively Fourth Street" had itself been filed under "Black Dalli Rue." Gee, I wonder why they mixed ’em up?

  The song demonstrates very little compassion for this particular Miss Lonely, even when she seems to be on the receiving end of a rather violent man ("your face is so bruised"). For those who consider Dylan’s sixties symbolism to be entirely consistent (e.g., A. J. Weberman), there is doubtless mileage to be found in his use of that "window" again, presumably the very one from which he told an ex-lover, "It Ain’t Me, Babe," and beneath which a fearful Ophelia sits in "Desolation Row." But Bloomfield probably had a better handle on the song’s theme as a reflection of the changes Dylan was going through personally, when he told Larry Sloman, "I would see him consciously be that cruel, man, I didn’t understand the game they played, that constant insane sort of sadistic put down game." For now, he also enjoyed being consciously cruel in song.

  Though "Can You Please Crawl Out . . ." was the one song from the July/August sessions not issued the following month either as a single or on album, Dylan still felt it could be another potential "hit," and in October he attempted to record the song a second time with his new Canadian pick-up band, the Hawks. On this version he even threw in a little aside in the fade—the opening line to "Positively Fourth Street"—probably a dig at Columbia for not telling the difference between the two.

  According to Hawks drummer Levon Helm, the single version was recorded shortly after their October 1 Carnegie Hall show (for which it was apparently rehearsed). A November 30 studio date, assigned by others, is decidedly unlikely, both because Helm had left the band by then and because it left no time to get a single out in the pre-Christmas rush. (Yes, the studio logs suggest multiple takes on that date, but for a stereo mix, which would not be issued for many years, and then only in Japan, on Masterpieces.) The Band’s own Musical History box-set, issued in 2005, clearly attributes it to October 5.

  The Hawks give their all on this single version, the wordplay is quintessential midperiod Dylan, and his vocal is a delight, but the song showed no obvious advance on an album’s worth of dispositions reflecting that "sadistic put-down game" his sustained amphetamine habit was merely exacerbating. It failed to replicate the success of the previous two Dylan 45s, both of which went Top Ten Stateside. Dylan himself never gave the song a live debut and, when asked about it in the lead up to Biograph, claimed, "I was pressured into doing another single." By whom?

  Note: Dylan is surely singing, "religion of little tin women," not, as the published lyric suggests, "religion of the little ten women."

  {154} POSITIVELY FOURTH STREET

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 29, 1965—12 takes [45—tk.12].

  First known performance: [University of Vermont, Burlington, October 23, 1965] Berkeley Community Theater, December 4, 1965.

  It may be hard to be any more precise than June/July for the majority of songs recorded at the July 29 to August 2 album sessions, but "Positively Fourth Street" sure sounds like the product of a post-Newport Dylan, mightily pissed off for the second year running by those shouting, "Which Side Are You On?" This time it is clear the gloves are off, Dylan dishing out his audible disdain with added vocal relish. It still stands up as one of his greatest-ever vocal performances in a studio setting.

  Should my assumption be correct, he wrote the song in the three-day period between the postshow party and his return to Studio A, i.e., with an immediacy that made the emotion real but also kept second thoughts in check. In this sense, it is another "Ballad in Plain D." This time he leaves us guessing as to his unnamed target/s. But I think we can assume they still wake with a start whenever they hear that exquisite organ intro.

  Like in "Plain D," his main beef seems to be against the female of the species ("I do not feel that good / When I see the heartbreaks you embrace" sure doesn’t sound like a guy thing). He almost admitted as much two decades on, when he accurately described "Positively Fourth Street" as "extremely one-dimensional. I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of so-called relationships." Which rather suggests the song should be placed somewhere between "Ballad in Plain D" and "Idiot Wind," and that Miss Lonely is still very mu
ch in his sights.

  "Positively Fourth Street" may even be a belated reworking of (unused parts of) the vomit version of "Like a Rolling Stone," already edited down to its poetic core. Rather than inducing a feeling that one is reading someone else’s mail, it invokes a sense of stumbling in on a particularly bitter argument with Miss X. Like most Dylan arguments-in-song, this is one long j’accuse. He had found the perfect medium for saying what he thought without worrying about the subject of such "verbal bayonets" talking back. Not that he entirely accepted the power of such words or that they were even meant to wound, telling Hentoff shortly after the single charted:

  I don’t want to hurt anybody like that . . . but then again, I know a lot of people are hurt, but it’s not really me that hurts them . . . like, they’re just deceived. But I haven’t hurt them any. . . . I don’t really worry too much about people who say they’ve been hurt by me because, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s not me that hurts them.

  Here is the retort of someone equipped with his own state-of-the-art psychological armor. He simply cannot conceive of the pain his barbs might be causing others. As long as he remained wired on speed, he retained the same air of invincibility. And "Positively Fourth Street" would be his way of winding himself up for "Like a Rolling Stone" at the ensuing North American live shows. Only after the regime of daily drug transfusions had ceased did Dylan examine the wreckage he’d left behind. "Positively Fourth Street" itself was performed exactly once, at a benefit show for "Hurricane" Carter in Houston in January 1976, in the twenty years before the Heartbreakers convinced the songwriter to take the spitting old jalopy for another few spins round the block. Since that time Dylan has tapped into the song’s sarcastic self a fair few times, but never with anything like the venom unleashed in Studio A, when the wild mercury sound had a real merry-go-round feel.