Bob Dylan / 11:20
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Charlie McCoy: guitar
Russ Savakus: bass (?)
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: August 4, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston
Sound Engineers: Frank Laico and Pete Dauria
In 1969, Dylan told Jann Wenner that he wrote “Desolation Row” in the back seat of a New York taxi. This surrealistic and horrific satire drew its name from the Jack Kerouac novel Desolation Angels, which had already been referred to in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Al Kooper believed this “alley of desolation” was a section of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, “an area infested with whore houses, sleazy bars and porno supermarkets totally beyond renovation or redemption…”45 In any case, Bob Dylan casts a raw light on a decomposing world that went way beyond New York City. This world was Sodom and Gomorrah carried over into the twentieth century. One journalist asked the songwriter where Desolation Row was located and he replied, “Oh, that’s some place in Mexico, it’s across the border. It’s noted for its Coke factory…”20
This trip through the apocalypse, which Robert Shelton compared to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” was divided into ten sketches peopled with real or fictitious characters. The first verse, in which “They’re selling postcards of the hanging…,” was taken from a real event that took place in Duluth (where Dylan was born) in June 1920: the inhabitants of the city lynched seven black men working for an itinerant circus who were accused of raping a white woman and forcing her husband to watch. In Dylan’s version, Cinderella enters, sweeping the desolation alley; Cain and Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame, who didn’t have the right to be loved; the Shakespearean heroine Ophelia, who at her twenty-second birthday “already is an old maid”; then there was “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood…,” and “They’re spoonfeeding Casanova,” and finally, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who were aboard the Titanic, “Fighting in the captain’s tower.” These characters “are laughable, but our smiles freeze,” to quote the appropriate comment of Robert Shelton.7
Mark Polizzotti wrote, “‘Desolation Row’ might be considered the ultimate cowboy song, the ‘Home on the Range’ of the frightening territory that was mid-sixties America, a distillation of all the frontier ballads, cowpoke’s laments, tales of murder and gamblers on the run that help frame the most enduring of all our national myths.”45 Behind the typically American Western movie genre, Bob Dylan used untouchable irony as he found equally to blame the industrialists who built assembly lines and the critics who replied with ridiculously simplistic slogans.
This long journey in the middle of nowhere was all the more captivating because both guitars were lively and close to the Appalachian tradition and created a remarkable contrast with this ultimate ode to despair. A first version was produced on Friday, July 30, with the whole group. Unfortunately, there remains no official record of this session. Tony Glover, who attended the recording, stated that Dylan’s guitar was out of tune and that he complained afterward because he was not notified. After spending the weekend fine-tuning his songs, he joined the musicians in the studio once again on Monday, August 2. This session was productive, as they recorded as many as thirty-seven takes of four songs. At the end of the session, they tackled “Desolation Row.” Bob decided to try it differently, with bare arrangements. He surrounded himself with only Al Kooper on electric lead guitar and Harvey Brooks on bass, while he played acoustic. Five takes were recorded. One of them was found in The Bootleg Series Volume 7 (2005). Here, Dylan sang, “They’re spoonfeeding Casanova / The boiled guts of birds” instead of “They’re spoonfeeding Casanova / To get him to feel more assured.”
Musically, this version expressed serenity, but lacked conviction. Dylan, who now thought he had the entire album ready to go, asked that a tape be recorded for him so he could assess the results. But upon listening to it, he was not satisfied with “Desolation Row.” He wanted to redo it. So Bob Johnston assumed the responsibility of reserving a new studio date. He invited Charlie McCoy to the sessions because he admired the extraordinary Nashville musician. He happened to be in New York for the World’s Fair. Bob Johnston said, “I thought Charlie McCoy was one of the major talents of the world, but nobody knew it.” Dylan proposed he participate in the final session scheduled for August 4. “They just told me to go out and pick up a guitar and play what I felt like playing. I finished and I went in and asked Dylan if it suited him. And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine’… We just did one song. The only one I played was eleven minutes long… We just did two takes and… [I] left.”45
It was odd that McCoy only mentioned two takes, since seven were recorded on that day. Who was playing on the five others? We don’t know. The studio sheets refer to two false starts, one interrupted take, and two complete takes. Whatever happened, the Nashville guitar player performed a great Spanish-style improvisation on acoustic steel guitar. The playing was inspired and alternated solos and rhythm parts during the harmonica parts. Some people thought Bruce Langhorne played guitar, but his phrasing was totally different. It was McCoy who played.
The second musician was most likely bass player Russ Savakus. Although Mike Bloomfield’s presence was never confirmed in this song, he said he felt nervous at the beginning of the session because it was supposedly the first time he played an electric bass (Clinton Heylin stated that Bloomfield performed on “Like a Rolling Stone”). This great musician had crossed the path of Chet Baker and some big names of the folk scene, such as Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. As for Dylan, he accompanied himself on his Gibson Nick Lucas and repeated constantly the same three chords during the eleven minutes. Except for two harmonica parts in E, he managed to sing the longest text he had ever written so far while maintaining remarkable intensity. “Songs shouldn’t seem long, y’know,” he said in 1965, “it just so happens that it looks that way on paper.”20 The final results came from the arrangements of the last two takes (6 and 7). But when you listen to it, it is hard to find the point where they join. Maybe it is at 0:24 before the word town in the line “The circus is in town.” “Desolation Row” was the only song on the record to end without a fade.
Bob Dylan sang “Desolation Row” onstage on August 28, 1965, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York. There are two live versions: the one from MTV Unplugged (1995) and the other from the Manchester concert on May 17, 1966 (on The Bootleg Series Volume 4).