Things continued to move fast for Dylan. After the release of Bringing It All Back Home, he played a few more American shows before departing in late April for Britain, for the tour that would be featured in Donn Pennebaker’s revealing documentary Don’t Look Back. At the time, Dylan was far more popular in Britain than he was in America, and the film captures the adrenaline rush of fame better than any subsequent attempt.
“I wanted to hear him sing, and I wanted to watch him with people,” Pennebaker told me. “Beyond that, I had no expectations. It’s the process of being there that’s interesting. The one sure thing in life is that you never know what’s going on in somebody’s head—that’s what the novel was invented for. You can’t point a camera at someone and find out what’s in their head. But it does the next best thing: it lets you speculate. The process of looking, if you look sharply and well, is a stunning process—people make lifetime generalizations based on a glance, and I think in a sense that’s what the camera’s doing with Dylan. And that’s probably the best you can hope for.”
“With Dylan, what you see is what you get,” Pennebaker believes. “And for everybody who says, ‘You really savaged that bastard,’ somebody else says, ‘God, he’s wonderful, I love him.’ It’s clear that people see what they set out to see. And I’m no different—I guess I tried to make that film as true to my vision of him as I could make it. But as a storyteller, I wanted there to be stories in it.”
Pennebaker had been introduced to Dylan’s people by Sara Lowndes, and was immediately intrigued when Dylan and Neuwirth tried out their assassin routine on him. “I recognized instantly, when I met Dylan and Neuwirth, that they had the same sense about what they were up to as we did about what we were up to, which was a kind of conspiracy,” he recalled. “We felt as if we were out conning the world in some kind of guerrilla action and bringing back stuff that nobody recognized as valuable and making it valuable.”
Accompanied by an entourage including sidekick Bob Neuwirth and an increasingly estranged Joan Baez, Dylan cut through the country like a whirlwind, from his first press conference on arrival at Heathrow—where he carried an outsize light bulb and answered the inevitable question about his “message” with the advice, “Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb”—through his none-too-private life at the Savoy Hotel, and on to his concerts in provincial cities like Sheffield, Liverpool and Leicester. Significantly, the brief moments of concert footage are vastly outweighed by the fascinating backstage cinema-verité, which features, a drunken Alan Price opening a bottle of Newcastle Brown on a dressing-room piano; Dylan losing his rag when a glass is thrown out of a window at a party in his Savoy suite; Bob Neuwirth and Dylan ruthlessly mocking Joan Baez; Albert Grossman and UK promoter Tito Burns playing off two television companies against each other; and Dylan verbally cutting a variety of interviewers and sundry other inquisitors into shreds.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of the film is the running gag about Donovan, the young Scottish Dylan imitator who was experiencing his first flush of success with the single ‘Catch The Wind’. Everywhere he went in Britain, Dylan kept coming across Donovan’s name, in the papers, on peoples’ lips, and even announced over the concert-hall PA systems at his shows. At his Leicester concert, he made fun of his imitator’s omnipresence by altering a line of ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ to “I turned on my radio—it was Donovan,” adding as an afterthought, “Whoever Donovan is…” Later on, the two troubadours would meet at Bob’s hotel, in a crushing scene during which Donovan played Bob his song ‘To Sing For You’, and Bob responded in kind with ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. Nevertheless, Dylan liked Donovan enough to let him sleep on the floor of his suite for a few nights, during which time he helped (along with Baez and Alan Price) in the writing of the lyric cards which Bob would discard during the film’s famous opening scene. Other visitors to the suite—though not filmed—included The Beatles, who spent an afternoon of cheery badinage in the company of Dylan, Ginsberg and Neuwirth. (Dylan later reciprocated by visiting the Lennons’ home.)
During his stay, Dylan made a drunken attempt at recording a version of ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but the session proved unfruitful, to put it mildly—after a single verse and chorus, Dylan shouted at producer Tom Wilson, “Fade it out! Fade it out!”; then, when the music stopped, “Didja fade it out?” Equally as amusing was the message he taped for Columbia Records’ Miami Sales Convention—“Hi! Thanks for selling so many of my records! I’ll see you next year in New York. God bless you.”
Unfortunately, the tour ended on something of a low note, with Dylan having to spend several days in hospital with a viral complaint. By the time he returned to America, in early June, The Byrds’ version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was heading for the top of the charts. A couple of weeks later, he went into the studio to start recording his next album, beginning with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Before any further sessions could take place, however, he was booked to appear on the Sunday evening show at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he stunned the crowd by appearing with an electric band comprised of members of the Butterfield Blues Band, a hot young outfit from Chicago.
Sam Lay, who had played on many of Howlin’ Wolf’s classic Chess tracks, was the band’s drummer. “The first time I played with Dylan was at the Newport Festival,” he recalls. “I don’t think we even rehearsed for it! He wanted to try the electric sound, but the people didn’t go for that. It was a stormy reception, without a doubt. When they’re used to that acoustic sound and all of a sudden you break out with all that power and stuff, people don’t like that. They weren’t exactly liberal-minded that day!” After only three songs—‘Maggie’s Farm’ and the live debuts of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’—during which the sound quality was allegedly so bad few could make out the shape of the songs, let alone their lyrics, the band were booed off; but Dylan was persuaded to return with his acoustic guitar, to play ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and, pointedly, his swansong to the Festival, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. Some among the crowd considered this a victory.
Pete Seeger, who was infuriated by the electrical intrusion into what he considered his own personal acoustic oasis (but who would later succumb, like everyone else, to the lure of amplification, by recording an album with The Blues Project), had crassly opened that night’s show with the sound of a new-born baby crying, asking the evening’s artists to sing to that baby to tell it what kind of a world it would grow up in. Ironically, of all the performers, only Dylan’s supercharged electric approach offered anything approaching an accurate representation of the world to come.
So it was too with Highway 61 Revisited, which was completed at three or four days’ more sessions on the cusp of July and August. Impressed by John Lennon’s mansion during a visit there, Dylan had gone out and bought himself a 31-room house upon his return to America, where he holed up and wrote the rest of the album. (Within a year, he had put the place up for sale and moved back into Albert Grossman’s place, explaining to Robert Shelton, “I don’t believe in writing some total other thing in the same place twice. It’s just a hang-up, a voodoo kind of thing… I just can’t stand the smell of birth. It just lingers, so I just lived there and tried to go on, but couldn’t.”) The new material was mostly of a piece: streamlined, sardonic, surrealistic and bulging with raw blues power, particularly as rendered by his new studio band. “I can’t tell you how disorganised it was,” says organist Al Kooper of the sessions. “Highway 61 has a very raw edge to it, because half the people involved were studio musicians, and half weren’t, so it’s got that rough thing which Dylan loves.”
“I’ve stopped composing and singing anything that has either a reason to be written or a motive to be sung,” Dylan explained to Nat Hentoff in a Playboy interview later that year. “What I’m going to do is rent Town Hall and put about 30 Western Union boys on the bill. Then there’ll really be some messages!” This was, however, so much jesting: Dylan hadn’t really stopped offering messages, only obvious ones. His new messages were more a matter of implication and inference than direct statement, and needed more deciphering than his old ones. Highway 61 Revisited, for instance, suggests that ours is an absurd world navigable only from the position of an outsider—from which vantage one may, like Chaplin, attack life’s drawbacks with wit and clowning; brute reality is consequently dismissed as “useless and pointless knowledge,” compared with the life of the spirit. As Dylan acknowledged around this time, “Philosophy can’t give me anything that I don’t already have.”
Released at the end of August, just as the colossal ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was sending shockwaves through the music industry, Highway 61 Revisited followed the single into the Top Five on both sides of the Atlantic. Though the rear sleeve featured the singer’s now familiar stream-of-consciousness beatnik screed, the front offered the clearest indication yet that Dylan’s folkie days were but a distant memory. With Neuwirth’s lower half visible behind him dangling an SLR camera on its strap, a sleek, epicene Dylan sits on the steps of a white-fronted building, fixing the viewer with an enigmatic expression that’s neither smile nor frown, but some gestalt combination of both. His blue and pink silk shirt is unbuttoned to reveal a white Triumph Motorcycle T-shirt underneath. The hand clutching his sunglasses, however, has clearly not been near the business end of a motorbike engine in quite some time. If there was a cooler person on the planet—Beatles and Stones included—no one had told Bob Dylan.
No one had told the old folkies, either. They were still too busy singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ to realize just how much the times had actually changed. Dylan’s switch to rock’n’roll triggered off a furious correspondence in the letters columns of Sing Out! magazine between detractors and supporters of the new style, not all as prescient as one Loren D. Schwartz, who pointed out that “The oral tradition you so cherish is now in the hands of Top 40 radio. It is its logical heir… Dylan is bringing his personal distillation of hundreds of years of liberal and enlightened thought to the youth of America and the world in the greatest number possible… His drive, I’m sure, is not to ‘create art’, but to communicate at all costs and to as many as will listen. The fact is, he has caught the general ear while you have yet to be heard above a whisper.”
Others were less impressed. “Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society,” pontificated traditional singer Ewan MacColl, with no discernible trace of irony, in Melody Maker. “He is against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world… I think his poetry is punk. It’s derivative and terribly old hat.” Some could even get it wrong while getting it right, such as Sing Out! editor Irwin Silber, who wrote of the “essentially existentialist” philosophy of Highway 61 Revisited: “Song after song adds up to the same basic statement: Life is an absurd conglomeration of meaningless events capsuled into the unnatural vacuum created by birth and completed by death; we are all living under a perpetual sentence of death and to seek meaning or purpose in life is as unrewarding as it is pointless; all your modern civilization does is further alienate man from his fellow man and from nature.” True enough, of course—but it’s exactly this emptiness and absurdity that furnishes the freedom which gives the album its unique potency.
The younger singers, though, recognized Dylan’s achievement for what it was. “I knew he’d produced the most important and revolutionary album ever made,” acknowledged his friend, the singer Phil Ochs. “It’s the kind of music that plants a seed in your mind and then you have to hear it several times. And as you go over it you start to hear more and more things. He’s done something that’s left the whole field ridiculously in back of him.” Eric Anderson, too, tipped his hat in Dylan’s direction: “He may be the greatest influence on the generation,” he said. “I think the seeds of the future were laid down by him right there. I don’t see any force quite like what Dylan did. Keats said the artist is the antenna of the race. Dylan is the antenna of the race.”
Even Dylan himself, normally his own harshest critic, was impressed. “I’m not gonna be able to make a record better than that one,” he claimed. “Highway 61 is just too good. There’s a lot of stuff on there that I would listen to!”
‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was unlike any rock’n’roll record that had been heard before. At one second short of six minutes, it was far longer than any previous single, and its rippling waves of organ, piano and guitar formed as dense and portentous a sound as anyone had dared to offer as pop, smothering listeners like quicksand, drawing them inexorably down into the song’s lyrical hell. Dylan’s performance, too, was utterly gripping, a semi-spoken blues rap delivered in a sour, offhand monotone which curled occasionally at the ends of lines, like a sneer twisting the corner of his mouth as he gloated over a hipster’s downfall. At a time when three-minute declarations of love were still the pop norm, this vicious tirade of recrimination was quite simply without precedent, a strange but compelling experience made all the more troubling by the incursions of surreal imagery into its damning flow. Who, fascinated fans debated, were Miss Lonely, Napoleon in rags, and—most bizarre of all—the diplomat who rode a chrome horse while balancing a Siamese cat upon his shoulder? What on earth was going on here?
For an industry whose optimum single length—anywhere between two and three minutes—had been set during the Forties and Fifties by jukebox operators intent on maximizing the number of plays per hour, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was far too long to secure blanket radio coverage, and yet it still managed to become Dylan’s biggest hit so far, reaching number two on the American charts (and number four in Britain) in August 1965. Its effect was simply stunning: fans, peers and rivals alike realized that Bob Dylan had now raised the bar way beyond anything they had heard or done before.
More importantly, a whole new army of teenagers, for whom Dylan had previously meant little or nothing, were profoundly moved in ways they couldn’t quite explain. At Dylan’s Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame induction on January 20, 1988, Bruce Springsteen described hearing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ for the first time, while out in the car with his mom. “I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard,” he recalled. “It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult… it made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent—it still does—when it reached down and touched what little worldliness a 15-year-old high-school kid in New Jersey had in him at the time. Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body.”
The song was written upon Dylan’s return from England, in what he described as a “vomitific” manner, at a Woodstock cabin he and Sara rented from Peter Yarrow’s mother. “It was ten pages long,” he told journalist Jules Siegel. “It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. Revenge, that’s a better word. I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, ‘How does it feel?’ in a slow motion pace… it was like swimming in lava. In your eyesight, you see your victim swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Skipping, kicking the tree, hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up with.”
Exactly who this “someone” was has long been a matter of conjecture. Joan Baez believes it is about Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan’s partner in character-assassination; others suspect it refers to the recently-dumped Baez herself—and certainly, there are distinct parallels between the well-off, well-schooled, slumming princess pilloried in the song, and that most saintly of folk-singers. Yet another theory contends that the song could, like so many of Dylan’s writings from this period, be self-referential—after all, Bob’s mother’s maiden name was Stone, and he had, by this time, certainly rolled some distance from home. “I don’t dislike them or anything,” he said of his family around this time, “I just don’t have any contact with them. They live in Minnesota, and there’s nothing for me in Minnesota.” Later, in the same interview, he admitted he found it “easier to be disconnected than to be connected.”
Over the previous couple of years, Dylan’s world view had altered drastically from the youthful socialist spirit that informed his early albums, to a position which could loosely be described as existentialist. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ reflects this new attitude, arguing that truly to know yourself and find fulfilment, you must face the world alone, mould your future and your philosophy from your own experiences, without relying on the comforts of favor or patronage; instead, one has to push off from shore, head out into uncharted waters with “no direction home.” Accordingly, the song’s climactic assessment that “you’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal,” ostensibly a triumphalist sneer of schadenfreude, can be read as a positive breakthrough, applauding a revelatory moment of self-awareness.
Dylan wrote the song on an upright piano in the key of G sharp, using the riff from ‘La Bamba’ as a jumping-off point, then transferred it to the key of C on guitar before recording it on June 15, 1965. “The chorus part came to me first,” Dylan said later in Rolling Stone magazine. “I’d sorta hum that over and over, then later figured out that the verses would start low and move on up.” The song’s time signature wasn’t figured out until he got to the studio; on the rehearsal fragment included in The Bootleg Series Vols 1–3, Dylan and Paul Griffin can be heard trying to work their way through a waltz-time setting of the song, before the hit single version crystallized later in the session.
Crucial to the session’s success was the introduction of Al Kooper, a musician Dylan had never met before, on organ, an instrument Kooper had never played before. “I was very good friends with Tom Wilson, who invited me to the session to watch, because he knew I was a Bob fan,” Kooper explained to me. “But I was very ambitious then, and planned to play! The session was booked for two in the afternoon, so I got there early, about 1.20, with my guitar—because at the time I had been doing sessions as a guitar player—sat down, plugged in and warmed up, and at about a quarter to two, Dylan came in with Mike Bloomfield, who I didn’t know. I heard Bloomfield warming up, packed up my guitar and went back into the control room. I’d never heard anybody play like that!”
Salvation came for Kooper’s ambitions when, midway through the session, organist Paul Griffin was moved to piano. “I said to Tom, Why don’t you let me play the organ, I’ve got a really good part for this,” continues Kooper. “He said, ‘Oh man, you’re not an organ player!’ But then he was called to the telephone before he could refuse, so I went out and sat at the organ. In fact, on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM, they include some of the different takes of the song, with the between-takes chatter, and you can hear Tom Wilson saying, ‘OK, this is Take 7, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’… hey, what are you doing out there?’, and you can hear me laugh. At that moment, he could have pulled me out of there, but he didn’t, and that was the moment I became an organ player!”
With Kooper’s organ swathing Dylan’s lines in brooding, exultant chords while Bloomfield’s guitar arpeggios and Griffin’s piano circled menacingly around each other, the song developed an animated, claustrophobic atmosphere which Dylan tried to recapture several times afterwards, though rarely with the same impact. “’Rolling Stone’ is the best song I wrote,” he told journalist Ralph Gleason. “When I was writing it I knew I had to sing it with a band. I always sing when I write, even prose, and I heard it like that.”
“‘Like A Rolling Stone’ changed it all,” he told Nat Hentoff around that time. “I didn’t care anymore after that about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean it was something that I myself could dig.”
Despite the success of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, Dylan was dissatisfied with Tom Wilson as producer. For the rest of the album he was replaced by Bob Johnston, best known as a songwriter for some of Elvis Presley’s movies. Al Kooper was unimpressed with his abilities, compared to Wilson’s more hands-on style.
“Tom was musically inclined, and the only quality Bob Johnston really has as a producer,” Kooper claims, “is that he knows how to pat the artist on the back. He made that into an art form! He says things like, ‘Can you believe these songs? This is the greatest record that I ever made in my life!’, whatever record he’s working on, and that pumps the artist up tremendously.” Then again, in the case of Highway 61 Revisited and the ensuing Blonde On Blonde, at least, Johnston’s assessment would have been 100% accurate—though given that his previous greatest production success had involved the resuscitation of Patti Page’s career, it needn’t have been that great a record to exceed his personal best.
Whatever the reason for changing producers, there would be an hiatus of six weeks before the musicians gathered for the next session, on July 29, when three more tracks were recorded, including the thrilling ‘Tombstone Blues’. A fast blues shuffle with Chuck Berry’s tire-tracks all over it, ‘Tombstone Blues’ was the second song of Dylan’s (after ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’) to parody the repetitive structure of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s ‘Taking It Easy’, updating lines like “Mom was in the kitchen/ preparing to eat” for its chorus. In Dylan’s song, the matriarch has been freed from the role of cook and housekeeper, but her emancipation is pyrrhic as she works in a factory, shoeless, while her husband hustles on the streets and the narrator is stuck with the eponymous Tombstone Blues—probably a reference to police. In the annotations to the Biograph box, Dylan recalls playing in a bar frequented by off-duty cops, whose salty, violent conversation he mimics here. “I think I wrote this either in that place or remembering some conversations,” he admits. “I don’t know, I had it for a while before I recorded it.” Also included in the Biograph box is a 48-second fragment of the previously unreleased ‘Jet Pilot’—a throwaway boogie about a woman who “weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch” and who turns out to be a transvestite—which Dylan regarded as the original ‘Tombstone Blues’.
With considerable comic panache, the song uses a parade of historical characters—American hero Paul Revere’s horse (reincarnated), vaudeville artiste Belle Starr, biblical temptresses Delilah and Jezebel (the latter now a nun), Jack The Ripper (now a successful businessman), John The Baptist (now a torturer), a Philistine king, Galileo, Cecil B. DeMille, and the intriguing musical double-act of blueswoman Ma Rainey and Beethoven (who share a sleeping bag)—to sketch an absurdist account of contemporary American ills. In these verses, church, state, college and commerce collude to squander both the country’s history and its future, most notably in the lines where the Philistine king (surely President Lyndon Johnson) “Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves/Then sends them out to the jungle”—a reference to the country’s treatment of draft-dodgers and the inequitable proportion of black Americans sent to fight in Vietnam.
Written in paired four-line stanzas to the rhyme-scheme a/a/a/b, c/c/c/b, the song allows Dylan to indulge in some outrageous rhyming—never more so than in the opening couplet, where “endorse” follows “of course” in a daring leap from the demotic to the bureaucratic. This parallels Dylan’s take on American society, in which ordinary folk are in constant struggle with the authorities’ attempts to control them through their desires. After every second verse, the chorus rolls around to remind us that, whatever the high-falutin activity of the verses, with their star-studded cast of characters, life just goes on as normal for the scuffling ordinary Joes and Janes confined to life’s chorus-line. In the official version included in Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–1985, the variations in the chorus (“I’m in the kitchen…” and “I’m in trouble…”) have been flattened into the dull uniformity of “I’m in the streets…” which may give a more streetwise/underclass interpretation to the choruses, but don’t sing anywhere near as colorfully.
After the sour recrimination of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, Dylan’s delivery is delightfully offhand, with a wry comic nonchalance punctuated between verses by some of guitarist Mike Bloomfield’s greatest work, which may have been decisive in choosing which take to release. “I know we cut a version with The Chambers Brothers singing on the chorus, almost like a gospel backing,” recalls Al Kooper. “I often wonder what happened to that version, and if it could be resurrected at all—I thought it was great. But I think the deciding criterion was that Mike Bloomfield was great on the take they used.”
On a couple of levels, ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’ provides a succinct illustration of Dylan’s creative processes in action. Firstly, it shows he was still keen on borrowing from old blues songs, the second verse being an adaptation of lines (“Don’t the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea/Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me?”) from Brownie McGhee and Leroy Carr’s ‘Solid Road’ —which, as ‘Rocks And Gravel’, had been one of the tracks Dylan recorded for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan but pulled at the eleventh hour. (Ironically, Dylan’s own song then went on to provide similar second-hand inspiration for Steely Dan, Dylan fans who borrowed the line “Can’t buy a thrill” as the title of their debut album.)
Secondly, ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’ offers a glimpse of the malleability of Dylan’s material and the improvisational nature of his recording methods. Two versions of the song were recorded, sharing the same lyrics, though completely separate in mood and approach. The first version, since included on The Bootleg Series, Vols 1–3, was recorded the same day as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, along with an unreleased track which later turned up on various bootlegs (and eventually on The Bootleg Series, Vols 1-3) called ‘Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence’ (aka ‘Killing Me Alive’). The latter’s tart, bluesy sound seems to have provided the basic inspiration for this first, uptempo run-through of ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’, a sleek R&B groove dominated by Mike Bloomfield’s quicksilver guitar, one of whose breaks is punctuated by an exhilarated “Aaah…” from Dylan. At that time, the song was called ‘Phantom Engineer’, but by the next sessions, six weeks later, it had been transformed in both title and style into the slow, loping, piano-based blues that was included on Highway 61 Revisited.
Al Kooper, who played one of the two pianos on the song, liked the original, faster version so much he later recorded the song that way on the Super Session album he made with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills. “I don’t want to put down the version that’s on Highway 61, though,” he assures me, “because it’s a wonderful mood—you can slice the mood on that song. All these songs went through incredible metamorphoses, like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ being in 3/4 originally. ‘Phantom Engineer’ was done fast at first, then slow a day or two later, after Bob had had a chance to think about it. It might just have happened, but I suspect it was premeditated.”
As with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘From A Buick 6’ sails in on the back of a declarative snare-shot from Bobby Gregg, but thereafter the mood is quite different, being loose and goosey motorvating rock’n’roll striding along on the back of Harvey Brooks’ bass and crowned with a soaring harmonica break. It’s great, simple fun, just like the song itself, which is basically another of Dylan’s paeans to his female ideal, the unpretentious, undemanding earth-mother type who’ll be there to take care of him when he falls apart. References to her as a “soulful mama” who “don’t make me nervous, she don’t talk too much” suggest the role model may be Sara, though the various descriptions of her as “graveyard woman,” “junkyard angel,” “steam shovel mama” and “dump truck baby” seem somewhat less than completely flattering. As for the claim that “She walks like Bo Diddley,” what woman could resist such enigmatic blandishment?
After the light-hearted frolic of ‘From A Buick 6’, the stern, sententious opening piano chords (played by Dylan himself) of ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ sound more like the theme to a courtroom drama series like Perry Mason. And so it proves: this is one of Dylan’s most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited. Al Kooper remembers that when the musicians listened to a playback in the control room, drummer Bobby Gregg said, “That is a nasty song, Bob… I don’t know about this song!” to which Bob chuckled, “Nasty song!” “We all had a good laugh at that,” Kooper recalls. “Dylan was the King of the Nasty Song at that time.”
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.”
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 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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
As it happens, both men’s assessments were pretty much on the mark. Hidebound by the kind of protest issues that Dylan had deliberately thrown off, yet unable to animate them in anything like a comparable manner, Ochs was limited to a kind of sung journalism. And ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ was indeed nothing like as successful as Dylan’s recent singles, scraping into the British Top 20 at No.17, but failing to crack the American charts at all.
The reasons are several. In the first place, it’s not one of Dylan’s better efforts, being basically yet another put-down song, but placed at one remove further from its target—Dylan’s attempt to persuade a girl to elope being just a flimsy pretext to pick away at her current lover’s faults, which seem to reside in a tight-assed materialism and lack of spirituality. The only line which compares with the verbal pyrotechnics of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is the scorching “If he needs a third eye he just grows it,” and too many others seem like over-crafted exercises, excuses to work in polysyllabic oddities like “preoccupied” and “businesslike.”
In the second place, the single’s release was dogged by confusion and incompetence. Since neither song contains the actual words “positively fourth street,” Columbia mistakenly issued an early version of ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ as ‘Positively 4th Street’, before quickly withdrawing it; and then, when ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ was itself released in the UK, the record company again initially put out the early version, before replacing it with the later version which constituted Dylan’s first recording with members of The Band.
Al Kooper was fortunate enough to play on both. “There’s a version of that on which I play celeste,” he recalls, “which was done at the Highway 61 Revisited sessions. The other version was cut quite some time after that in New York, with Paul Griffin, Bobby Gregg on drums, and Rick [Danko] and Robbie [Robertson] from The Band, at the same time as ‘One Of Us Must Know’—possibly the very same night.” Again, Kooper’s ambitious streak served him well. “I wasn’t booked for the session,” he admits, “but I visited the studio and ended up playing on it.”