{155} HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 2, 1965—9 takes [H61—tk.9][H61—tk.6].
First known performance: Isle of Wight, August 31, 1969.
On the evening of Monday, August 2, 1965, Dylan re-entered Studio A feeling he still had a lot of work to do if he was going to "eclipse anything I’ve ever done before." Only three of the half-dozen songs already on tape would make the finished album. Having originally planned to spend the weekend in Woodstock recuperating from two days of sustained work in Studio A, he found himself too cranked up to chill and returned to the city to work further on the songs.
Ever a man in a hurry, he now attempted to finish the album in one soulful, bounding leap, using the midnight-shift musicians who had already worked wonders. The studio log suggests the session on the second started at eight in the evening and ended around three thirty in the morning. In that time he would lock down four songs with a rare, iridescent inspiration—"Highway 61 Revisited," "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues," "Queen Jane Approximately," and "Ballad of a Thin Man"—before re-recording an acoustic, twelve-minute "Desolation Row" (presumably after the other musicians had crawled home to bed).
And the first song he elected to run through on that eventful evening would become the title track of this revolutionary collection. For "Highway 61 Revisited," Dylan had assembled the wildest collection of song characters this side of Jacques Brel. From the outset he is ready to roust another herd of sacred cows, starting with the father, the son, and an angry God:
God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son."
Abe said, "Man, you must be putting me on."
God said, "No." Abe said, "What!"
Has there ever been a more memorable dialogue to open a "pop" song? Adhering to another popular ballad convention—setting up the action by getting the protagonists to tell their story—Dylan finds a wholly original way to retell the story of Abraham in hip patois (an idea probably inspired by the memorable Lord Buckley skit, "The Nazz"). This time there is a more credible outcome. An incredulous Abraham only agrees to murder his own flesh and blood when God out-and-out threatens him, like the boss of a mob family. When Abraham asks where he must do the deed, God replies, "Out on Highway 61," the road that traverses the country, weaving past Dylan’s Minnesota home—where his father, Abraham, was doubtless wondering what his prodigal son was up to.
Dylan has not picked out a random dialogue between the Big J and a religious father. He is actually indulging in a philosophical speculation—one Kierkegaard had already addressed at length in Fear and Trembling—which is, What kind of a person would it take to make the leap of faith required to murder one’s own son at the command of one’s God? Whereas Kierkegaard indulged in a book’s worth of contemplation, Dylan cuts to the chase and sees it not as a test (or indeed an ethical dilemma, as Soren K. did) so much as a demonstration of power: "Next time you see me comin’, you better run."
He is informing listeners they have entered a world where one cannot even rely on God to be good—the world the characters in this (title) song, and by implication its narrator, inhabit. As he wrote in response to a university newspaper questionnaire back in May, "I have no faith in better world coming. I live now in this world." The world he finds himself in is a worried one, where a rovin’ gambler might try and "create a next world war"; where "the second mother" is lying incestuously "with the seventh son," and the father only finds out because he goes off to tell the mother that her "fifth daughter" is with child. Here all one can do is grimace—or grin. Dylan even has a little joke at tradition’s expense. The daughter does not tell her father she is pale and wan, as the convention demands, but rather, "My complexion . . . is much too white." Emphasizing the idea that the song is something of a hoot is the spontaneous inclusion of a kid’s toy police siren in the mix, surely the most unusual "instrument" found on a sixties Dylan album.
Preparing to travel down another restless highway, Dylan found no place for this title track in the live set (it was down as a possible encore at Forest Hills, but never played). It took a most incongruous setting—the 1969 Isle of Wight festival, where he appeared in a snow-white suit and sang "Like a Rolling Stone" like he was chewing the cud—for him to try out the song on the common folk. Thankfully, the "Highway 61 Revisited" that night was the cry of a raucous recidivist stuck in a border-town bordello, making it the one hint that the pre-accident Bob lived on (an audience video of the performance suggests he is really starting to loosen up by song’s end).
Subsequently revived as an occasional encore on the 1974 tour and as a nightly opener in 1984, it took G. E. Smith’s Never Ending Tour combo to find a reliable way of whipping the crowd up and holding on to any failing energy. The downside of this Never Ending Tour incarnation—as a Good Time Charlie of a song—is that one would be hard pressed to glean evidence of the metaphysic raising so many philosophical questions while the boys in the band were whooping it up.
{156} JUST LIKE TOM THUMB’S BLUES
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 2, 1965—16 takes [H61—tk.16][NDH—tk.5].
First known performance: Forest Hills, NY, August 28, 1965.
I write inside out and sometimes the dimensions cross.
—Dylan, responding to Cambridge Varsity questionnaire, May 1965
Of the songs Dylan recorded at this historic August session, "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues" took the most work, as Dylan sought to get his audience experiencing it in a visceral way. As he said in 1965, referring to all of these songs, "The point is not understanding what I write, but feeling it." The early takes of the song did not do it for him. The release of No Direction Home allows us to hear one of these early takes—take five, the second full version recorded. Taken in isolation, it is rather wonderful. The sedentary, almost mournful pace rather suits the song, and Dylan’s vocal sounds like a man awakened from a dream.
However, what really separates it from the sixteenth and final take is the studio personnel. It sounds like a more tentative drummer and less fluid pianist. And according to the log, there was a musician changeover around eleven in the evening, from Sam Lay to Bobby Gregg on drums and from Frank Owens to Paul Griffin at piano. If that is Griffin playing those great piano fills on the released version, he comes close to deserving a co-composing credit, while the drums acquire a jazziness they lack on that earlier take. So it wasn’t all serendipity! Someone was paying enough attention to realize that Sam Lay’s drumming, while fine for an up-tempo rocker like "Highway 61 Revisited," merely shuffled on a slow blues.
Dylan knew "Tom Thumb’s Blues" deserved all the loving care it could get, the lyrics skirting the edge of reason. "Your gravity fails / And negativity don’t pull you through" communicates as a "feeling," nothing more. It was surely such songs Dylan had in mind when he told Shelton later that month, "If anyone has imagination, he’ll know what I’m doing. If they can’t understand my songs, they’re missing something. If they can’t understand green clocks, wet chairs, purple lamps or hostile statues, they’re missing something, too." In "Juarez" (as the song was originally called) no hostile statues were needed to experience the kind of dislocation that could lead a singer to exclaim, "I’m going back to New York City / I do believe I’ve had enough."
Again Dylan has allowed himself to be drawn to "witchy women" exuding that gypsy air. Yet rarely has he conjured up a creature as enticing as "sweet Melinda . . . the goddess of gloom," a close relative of the "She" who belonged on Bringing It All Back Home. But this is a song with a moral, and this time it comes in the first verse, not the last: "They got some hungry women there / And they really make a mess out of you." As for any direct inspiration from the women of Juarez, we have no documented evidence Dylan visited Mexico a
t this time, though its influence was felt long before he spent the winter of 1972–3 in Durango.
As performed live in 1965–6, "Tom Thumb" became an inferno of pain. As if pain were indeed art. At the American shows Dylan claimed the song was specifically written "about a painter. Not too many songs about a painter. This one lived in Mexico City. . . . He lived with Indians in jungle. Will live to be a ripe old age. Was famous in his era. Called Tom Thumb. Did same things as other painters. Had his periods. This is about his blue period. It’s called Tom Thumb’s Blues." Introduced in a similar way in Melbourne, it induced the odd hormonal girl to scream. I guess they breed their women hungry in Australia.
But the song got no such reception in Liverpool a month later, when Dylan sounded like he’d been doing some sword swallowing, lacerating the audience with every hurled syllable. Issued as the B side to "I Want You," this was for many years the only official evidence of just how close to the edge Dylan came on that tour. It is still one of the most harrowing and compulsive cuts. Thankfully, his fondness for the song endured beyond those wild mercury days. Even now he can generally be relied on to treat that prophetic final verse ("I started out on burgundy / But soon hit the harder stuff . . .") with an appropriate degree of respect for someone who had no right to come out the other side, synapses intact.
{157} QUEEN JANE APPROXIMATELY
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 2, 1965—7 takes [H61—tk.7].
First known performance: Foxboro, Mass. July 4, 1987.
For many years "Queen Jane Approximately" was the forgotten lady of Highway 61. Sandwiched between "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues" and "Ballad of a Thin Man" at the August 2 session, and subjected to a painfully dry mix on the released stereo album (the mono mix is less painful, though one can still hear the band playing in at least three tunings), it seemed like the least memorable of those songs suffused with a "steady hatred directed at some point that was honest."
The only interviewer to ever ask about this song was then-journalist Nora Ephron who, at a September 1965 gathering, inquired as to Queen Jane’s identity. Dylan’s response was suitably cryptic: "Queen Jane is a man." Dylan may, of course, have been pulling Ephron’s leg. On the other hand, an androgyny bordering on out-and-out transvestism flickers on and off throughout songs of the period. Homosexual imagery abounds in "Ballad of a Thin Man," as it does in a number of songs circa 1965–6, notably "Just Like a Woman," where Dylan takes great delight in mixing up genders.
The central figure in "Queen Jane" may even be the same queen bitch Bowie later portrayed in song. Andy Warhol was certainly someone whose path crossed Dylan’s at this time. As the pop artist writes of the songwriter in Popism, "He was around 24 then and the kids were all just starting to talk & act & dress & swagger like he did. But not so many people except Dylan could ever pull off this anti-act. . . . He was already slightly flashy when I met him, definitely not folky anymore. I mean, he was wearing satin polka-dot shirts." By November 1965, after a year in which their supra-hip enclaves intersected at will, Dylan willingly sat for a silent film portrait at Warhol’s Factory.
Nor is there a shortage of lines in "Queen Jane" that could be applied to our regal pop art exponent. May I offer up: "When . . . you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations," "When all the clowns that you have commissioned," "When all your advisers heave their plastic," and so on. Written when all his songs were "city songs," this could have been Dylan’s way of saying he was not impressed by the hangers-on Warhol seemed to like accumulating.
Yet it was not a song to which Dylan developed any attachment. At the time Warhol died in February 1987, he had still to give the song a live debut. Since 1987, though, "Queen Jane" has been given another lifetime. Dylan has also turned the song inside out, adding inflections of sorrow and pity to that original, slightly sinister plea, "Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?" Obliged to survive the Grateful Dead, who insisted on giving the "lady" a good seeing-to at joint summer shows, Jane was miraculously revived by the Heartbreakers the following fall.
Born again, the song has gone on from strength to strength. The version on the penultimate night of an October 1989 New York residency at the Beacon Theatre might even get my vote over its 1965 archetype. Though it takes time to build some momentum—and Dylan can only hold on for as long as he sticks to the song itself, and not some imaginary harmonica fugue he adds as a coda—those five minutes transport his entire expressive range back in time. Its semi-acoustic incarnation at the November 1993 Supper Club shows almost rekindles the same emotional range. And these days the members of the band even usually play in the same key.
{158} BALLAD OF A THIN MAN
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
First known performance: Forest Hills, NY, August 28, 1965.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, August 2, 1965—3 takes [H61—tk.3].
Just as "Positively Fourth Street" may have been "inspired" by events at Newport, another song on Highway 61 Revisited could be a post-
Newport rant, according to one barely credible source. Rock journalist Jeffrey Jones claimed, some years after the event, that he interviewed Dylan at the festival and that it was his annoying line of questioning that prompted Dylan to write that memorable refrain, "Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" But it is hardly likely that Dylan would have remembered this innocuous individual’s name in the whirlwind of events that weekend, let alone make him an archetype for his own Mr. Clean. Nor would it be like Dylan to be quite so prosaic.
If Dylan did make an exception and it was a specific journalist he was targeting, the one credible candidate would have to be Melody Maker’s Max Jones, whom he had first attempted to contact in December 1962. He was the first British music journalist to interview Dylan in May 1964, and he was someone he specifically asked about at his first London press conference in April 1965. By 1966 Jones had become the slightly crumpled character seen in the tour documentary, Eat the Document, asking Dylan why he doesn’t sing protest songs anymore—though he is not seen during the sequence where a live "Ballad of a Thin Man" is intercut with footage of assorted candidates for the position.
The essential problem with such a theory is that Dylan liked Jones. He was never a victim of Mr. Send-Up, as one London journalist called Dylan after a classic 1965 demolition interview. Though Jones was strictly old school, so were Nat Hentoff, Robert Shelton, and J. R. Goddard, all of whom were more than just "pressmen" in Dylan’s mind. However, it is possible that his name sprang to mind when the idea for "Ballad of a Thin Man" came to him, and Dylan liked the way it fit. He has suggested that the song was directly inspired by events in England that spring. In March 1986, while onstage in Japan, he delivered one of the most credible explanations of what made him separate the world into neophytes and neophobes:
This is a song I wrote in response to people who ask questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. Y’don’t wanna answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So every once in a while you gotta do this kinda thing—gotta put somebody in their place . . . it’s not a bad thing to be put in your place. . . . Actually it’s a good thing. It’s been done to me once in a while, and I always appreciated it. So this is my response to something that happened over in England—I think it was about ’64 [sic]. Anyway, the song still holds up. Still seem to be people around like that, so I still sing it.
Ain’t it just like our man to provide such a cogent explanation to ten thousand bemused Nippon fans, prefacing a performance in Nagoya. Twenty years earlier, in March 1966, performing it for a Canadian audience, he was not so helpful, introducing it with an offbeat biographical sketch: "Mr. Jones lives in Lincoln, Nebraska—to prove I don’t make these things up. He hangs around bowling
alley there. Also owns water mill rights, but we don’t talk about that when we’re in Nebraska. We just let Mr. Jones have his little way."
Six months earlier, with the song only just in the shops, he told a Carnegie Hall audience at the song’s conclusion—and before another cathartic "Like a Rolling Stone"—"That was about Mr. Jones, this one is for Mr Jones." One contemporary confidant immersed in pill-popping paranoia was a Rolling Stone called Mr. Jones. Brian Jones’s insecurities led him to believe Dylan was having a go at him, though one would be hard-pressed to ever describe the hedonistic Stone as straight-laced. Perhaps Dylan was sending up Jones’s effete homophobia, if one interprets the song as one long catalog of homosexual innuendo (as has been suggested).
The song certainly convinced an awful lot of people that there was a real Mr. Jones behind the song (hence the Canadian rap). As such, although not a single interviewer in the months after Highway 61’s release asked Dylan about the identity of Miss Lonely, it seemed like every journalist had a burning need to know the true identity of Mr. Jones, starting with Nora Ephron, then of the New York Post, in early September 1965. Dylan ducks her question beautifully, while storing up a whole lot of trouble for himself in the near future:
He’s a real person. You know him, 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.
Three months later the question popped up again, at a press conference in San Francisco. Again Dylan suggests he is a real person, just not someone you’d want to meet at the dark end of the street: "[Who’s] Mr. Jones? I’m not gonna tell you his first name. I’d get sued. He’s a pin boy. He also wears suspenders." Uncomfortable with explaining the unexplainable, he began to develop a rap like the one he used in Vancouver, placing Mr. Jones in Lincoln, Nebraska, which was precisely where he was when Robert Shelton also summoned up the nerve to ask him about the Thin Man’s identity. And because it was Shelton, Dylan tempered his usual tendency to ridicule the questioner:
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