Brill Building: Dylan Days pt. 3: Highway 61 Revisited

Dylan Days pt. 3: Highway 61 Revisited

There is no code! There's nothing to crack! What are you looking for? The guy wrote songs. Wrote great songs, that's it. End of story. - Tom Scharlping of The Best Show on WFMU after seeing I'm Not There

There was a bit of a factual error in my last Dylan Days post. I made it seem that the Newport performance with members of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band happened first and then Bringing It All Back Home was recorded. The Newport show happened in between the recording of that album and this one. I'm not attempting a biography of Dylan here but I'm still going to try and not let factual mistakes like that happen again. With that admission of my infallibility out of the way let us now tackle one of the greatest records of all time.

You can't deny that first song. A lot has been written about "Like a Rolling Stone," Greil Marcus wrote a whole book on it. I want to focus on how the song is the high point of this stage of Dylan's career. Listen to how the guitar and organ mesh right in the front of the song. When Mike Bloomfield (guitar) and Al Kooper (organ) joined Dylan's band the records hit the aspirations Dylan had harbored since probably before Bringing It All Back Home. What was promised with "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was fulfilled many times over. The band (not The Band, that would be later) perfectly reflect Dylan's screed. The personal sentiments of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" meet the political finger-pointing of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding." Is Dylan lambasting a society girl (many think it's about Warhol pal Edie Sedgwick)? Is Dylan indicting the entire hippie movement? A work like this can't be just explained away with one simple interpretation. It wouldn't retain the power it has kept over so many decades if that was the case. I am sure of one thing. When that snare is hit in the first second of the song and later when the band rises whenever Dylan asks "how does it feel?" the boundary between instrumentation and words is demolished. Dylan originally meant this to be a twenty page short story. I couldn't imagine everything here being communicated in just prose. This is one complete and confident six minute, fifteen second explosion.

"Like A Rolling Stone" contains strong imagery but it's clearly grounded in real life. I don't know if you can say that about the next song "Tombstone Blues." Knowing I was going to write about it for this series I tried to do what Scharpling in the opening quote detests. I tried to crack the code. When Dylan sang "The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save/Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves/Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves/Then sends them out to the jungle" is he singing about Vietnam? Maybe. Frankly I don't know and I will never know. In the slight chance I ever meet Bob Dylan I'm certainly not going to demand he explains "Tombstone Blues" and other dense songs lyrics by lyric. Like the works of David Lynch, which I also adore, there's a danger if you try to unravel everything that doesn't make sense. You have to fight that part of your brain that wants everything to be completely clear and cohesive. It's not easy but that challenge is honestly one of my favorite things about Lynch and Dylan's work. I can sit back and get a heaping dose of weirdness that makes it own kind of sense. That and drummer Sam Lay churns out a backbeat that can't be stopped.

Most of the album fits into that strange area of powerful blues rock playing behind verses that would confuse William Blake. Right in the middle there's a change. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is a departure from an album that itself is a departure from what Dylan was known for. The song is based around this piano riff that rings like gothic church bells. The danceable shuffle heard previously is gone. Now things have slowed down to a menacing lurch.

Similar to "Like A Rolling Stone" this is another of Dylan's sneering put-downs. But if the first song was skewering the youth of the United States at the time then in "Ballad" he sets his sights on the establishment. I actually did manage to catch I'm Not There which featured a music video of sorts for this song (performed by Stephen Malkmus and the backing band collected for the soundtrack). I knew this before seeing the film and was very apprehensive about the idea. I had seen the wretched Across The Universe months earlier and had found the one-dimensional interpretation of Beatles songs irritating. I was glad to see in the context of the film the sequence in question is somewhat more complex. Journalist Keenan Jones (Bruce Greenwood) first asks the Highway 61-era Dylan, represented by a character named Jude (Cate Blanchett), about his new direction. The journalist soon discovers Jude's elusive and nasty disposition and begins to needle the singer about how he acts like he's above the rest of the inteligencia interested in politics and poetry. Jude is tired of the questioning and just cuts the interview off. In the film "Ballad of a Thin Man" is Jude's response to Jones. He can't articulate how he feels through normal speech. He can only really express himself, and rather forcefully so, in verse.

I've listened to the song many times before seeing the film but now I come to it from a whole new angle (which I suppose is a testament to director Todd Haynes's accomplishment). I never thought of the side of the accuser in this song, just Mr. Jones and the carnival that berates him. Now I have a somewhat more complete idea of the song. The narrator wants to turn the tables. He or she wants the power that Mr. Jones has had all along. Now Mr. Jones is subjected to the rules of "the freaks." It's a major theme in Dylan's work. What is meant to authentic, which can be summed up as "the system" or "the old order," is rendered suspect. What is meant to inauthentic now has new power invested in it, at least it does Dylan's dark imagination. In the film it is depicted that The Black Panthers listen to the song (specially Huey Newton tries to explain the song to a skeptical Bobby Seale). That is a fact about the song and The Black Panther Party. It makes sense that a group who wanted to turn American society upside-down would respond to "Ballad."

There are hundreds of more things I can write about this album. I'll resist going over all of it lest I exhaust my analytical faculties and bore you all. But I can't discuss this album without writing something about the eleven and a half minute final track "Desolation Row." It recalls the second side of Bringing It All Back Home with its quiet acoustic guitars and ominous, bleak lyrics. Like "It's Alright Ma" this is another take down of all of society. In this apocalyptic vision there's no point in dividing things up between the Mr. Joneses of the world and the sideshow. But while "Ballad," "Rolling Stone" and "It's Alright Ma" are all very angry "Desolation Row" is told by an objective observer. If you want to assign an personality to the narrator it would have to be "resigned." Resigned to the fate of a world already lost.

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row

I honestly could not bring myself to break up that stanza. Everything there is pure Dylan. There's the imagery of the carnival, which was apparently a young Dylan's only escape from the suburban boredom of Hibbing, MN. There's the Biblical allusions. Dylan tells us that all that's left in the world are the idea of victim and victimizer. They are joined only by human aberrations like the hunchback of Note Dame. They are the only ones who can stray somewhat outside the destructive dichotomy of Cain and Abel. The imagery of rain is used again to signify doom like it was in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Then it was meant to suggest atomic weapons but in this age of global warming and climate change perhaps rain itself is enough to mean doom. There is one person who tries to stand up against all the calamity. Dylan doesn't let us know how well the Good Samaritan will do. He doesn't breathe any heroism into the narrator by making him or her the samaritan. It's just another part of show.

Gee, I guess I did end up "trying to crack the code" there, didn't I? Perhaps some Dylan songs are just nonsensical fun and others deserve to be figured out. The hope isn't that we get the "right answer" and win some Bob Dylan No-Prize. By looking at "Desolation Row" or "It's All Right Ma" we're trying to uncover something about ourselves.

Labels: Bob Dylan

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