Desolation Row revisited: was that some kind of joke?
Desolation Row is the final track on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61
album. Unlike the album’s other tracks, Desolation is an entirely acoustic
number, travelling out long at 11 minutes 21 seconds. The song begins with a
downbeat two strum, limping acoustic strings slowly tick and rick upon adoor.
After four or a five seconds, just before Dylan’s voice enters, a second
acoustic begins to whine, softly winds around the strumming dumbing beat,
drifts in and out: light notes, small streaks of brief fire
amid darkness.
They’re selling
postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the
passports brown
Noted for its wide range of canonical references, including
Ophelia, Robin Hood and TS Eliot, Desolation Row is considered to be Dylan’s
most literary effort. But the song holds so much more than just that.
Desolation Row is one of the saddest songs I have ever listened to, a song
about dejection, the final whimpers of a dying dream. Highway 61 was written
only a year before Dylan’s infamous motorbike crash in 1966, and his subsequent
8-year break from touring and the media spotlight. Dylan had spent years in the
centre of the public eye, his every move shadowed and his every sound waited on
desperately by the folk music community. And his move from purely acoustic
music to an electric sound, which began in 1964 with the release of Bringing it
All Back Home saw a backlash develop against Dylan amongst the folk crowd. Instead of writing lyrical call to arms
against the American Establishment, Dylan was criticised for abandoning the
protest movement in favour of personal pantomime. His lyrics depicted surreal moments, of stumbling
upon Guernsey cows, of conversations with shadowy promoters about starting a
new World War, instead of focusing on a specific political campaign.
The Newfolk community’s criticism of Dylan was that in
departing from protest songs, Dylan was downing his political tools, instead
withdrawing into himself and his own phantasy in order to find creative
inspiration. Yet it is clear from a song such as Desolation Row, that Dylan was
beginning to find the world too sickening, too enflamed with madness to protest
against anymore. Everywhere he looked, a carnival rocked of blood and misery.
The beauty parlour is
filled with sailors
The circus is in town
His songwriting began to consider this madness ironically,
and Dylan began to create stage characters who would embody it within his
lyrics. There’s the obscure vigilante Captain Arab in Bob Dylan’s 115th
Dream, and the various figures of authority who order workers about on Maggie’s
Farm. But far from a turn away from the political, Dylan’s songwriting on
Highway 61 is an attempt to depict society through song and metaphor. The
Newfolk community missed the idea that by abandoning direct protest in favour
of metaphor and fantastical paraworlds, Dylan was only trying to further entrench
and enrich his art in the social fabrics from which it emerged.
And now the riot squad
they’re restless
They need somewhere to
go
As lady and I look out
tonight on, desolation row
The song is ten whole verses, scrambling out Dylan’s muse,
his voice weary, strained, bearing more weight than the youthful croon heard on
The Freewheelin. A sure part of this comes down to the sheer intensity of
Dylan’s life at this point: as Scorcese’s No Direction Home alludes to, an
incessant press and brutal touring schedule meant that as much as anything, the
motorcycle crash allowed Dylan to spend some much needed time locked away from
the outside world. You can see Dylan feeling the weight in these clips, his
face bearing the look of a man ground thin, with nothing left to him but old
routines, passing round and round a rat race he’d dedicated his life and
artistry to escaping.
Einstein disguised as
Robin Hood
With his memories in a
trunk
Passed this way an
hour ago with his friend, a jealous monk
Oh he looked so
immaculately frightful
As he bummed a
cigarette
Then he went off
sniffing drainpipes, and reciting the alphabet
There’s an analysis to be carried out on how Dylan’s singing
voice buckled under the heaviness of touring and media attention during those
early years. But we underestimate the sheer genius of Dylan as an artist
to believe him incapable of altering the sounds of his voice according to the
song and time at hand. Because in Desolation Row and in the live performances
around the time of Highway 61’s release, Dylan’s voice channelled not only the
feelings of exhaustion and defeat which had swamped his own lived existence,
but which were also beginning to swamp American society.
I want to
accept this award, the Tom Paine Award, from the Emergency Civil Liberties
Committee. I want to accept it in my name but I'm not really accepting it in my
name and I'm not accepting it in any kind of group's name, any Negro group or
any other kind of group. There are Negroes - I was on the march on Washington
up on the platform and I looked around at all the Negroes there and I didn't
see any Negroes that looked like none of my friends. My friends don't wear
suits. My friends don't have to wear suits. My friends don't have to wear any
kind of thing to prove that they're respectable Negroes. My friends are my
friends, and they're kind, gentle people if they're my friends. And I'm not
going to try to push nothing over.
The above is taken from a speech Dylan delivered in 1963, after
receiving the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, a collective
of Civil Rights pressure groups. Dylan’s early albums serve as an incredibly accurate
chronical of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s. The Death of Emmet
Till, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll deliver bitter, furious tirades
against white on black murder, and the injustice of the American law in the
face of this murder. Only A Pawn in Their Game recalls the murder of black
activist Medgar Evers by a Klan member, situating the rage and madness of the
white working-class in the South within the puppet-strings pulled by a
ruthless, devastating American Establishment.
Dylan’s attack on the March on Washington in his speech to the ECLU
bears striking resemblance to Malcolm X’s view on what X termed the ‘Farce’ On
Washington.
Yes,
I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all
harmonizing "We Shall Overcome. . .Suum Day. . ." while tripping and
swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily
revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare
feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and
guitars and "I Have A Dream" speeches?
And
the black masses in America were--and still are--having a nightmare.
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up, on Desolation Row
The Civil Rights Movement saw the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It saw the end of school and housing segregation, again, both changes which were framed in legislation by the Democratic government at the time. But the fundamental class structures that had pinned Black people’s backs to the ground for so long remained intact, and ‘race riots’ continued to be a feature of urban life in the States well into the 1970s. America stumbled out of the 60’s fractured, still splitting at the seams. The optimism of the decade had spiralled up in smoke to the dark skies at Woodstock, and Desolation Row defines this moment like no other song, picking over the broken bones of the dead idea: that America could be a new place and that the past could be left in the past.
A sense of harrowing failure creeps out from every corner of the tune. It’s there in the figure of a mad Einstein, crawling around the streets searching for a quick fix, and in the sadness and desperation of Casanova, with nowhere left to turn but extreme nihilism. The feeling on this song, in Dylan’s voice, is that he has reached the end of a road which started out a dream, and ended up a nightmare. Desolation Row itself as a place, is described by Dylan as the drowning sense of isolation and loneliness that takes ahold once you realise how fucked up things really are. Desolation Row is the place Dylan and his lady look out from, onto the restless riot squad. It’s the place where the Good Samaritan goes out to party, only to notice that everyone else has headed off inside.
There’s also the hint that Desolation Row is not itself, a bad place to be. It’s where Dylan describes Einstein as having once played the electric violin to much fame and applause, and in the final three verses, the suggestion that Desolation Row is a place we absolutely must pass through in order to for anything to meaningfully change for the better, begins to emerge. It is the place Dylan wound up in 1966, having taken a battering from the industry of touring and recording music, the place he could set a seat down on his own, and, trembling from the madness which had bought him there, begin to apprehend just what on earth had been happening all around him.
And at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Comes out and rounds up everyone who knows more than they do
And they take them to the factories
Where the heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene
Is bought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that no body is escaping to Desolation Row
For a long time this by far was my favourite verse on the song. It’s on surface, a seething critique of a society based on capitalist production, where powerless people are forced to sell their freedom for safety. And it ends on the insistence that wage-labour is in fact a means of stopping people from escaping to their freedom, to Desolation Row.
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
Which side are you on?
There’s a degree to which being cast off, thrown out from the merry-go-round smile of society can be a great thing. Some of the most painfully isolated times in my own life have been the most personally rewarding, offering the rare chance to regroup, to work out what is and is not important, and to allow my thoughts to run without the hassle or interruptions of others. Constantly wired to some device, plugged into a live network, it’s difficult to ever find this time today. Mark Fisher described it as: you can never be bored, everything is boring. You are never alone, you always feel lonely. It’s near impossible to escape to Desolation Row, and to survey the sure turn of the world around you for what it is, free from distraction.
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
The Dylan that recorded Desolation Row was the Dylan in sunglasses, the shadowy figure who slipped on and off the stage, a man who had come to resent the adulation and popularity he had craved for so long. The early Dylan was fresh-faced, as you can see in these videos, basically a young boy writing music, performing it on stage to a captive audience, completely in love with the entire thing. But by 1966 the man on stage had come to resemble something quite different. He had mastered the trick pulled by the Clancy brothers, of holding a face of mystery on stage, as if, somehow, in Dylan’s words, ‘the performer knows something the audience doesn’t.’ As the faces in his audience which once sat in bewitched adoration now scrunched and booed and jeered, Dylan became only further alienated from performing. As well as in his voice, this alienation can be heard in the wail of his harmonica from live performances of the song in 1966. Like some kind of low-blue siren, the harmonica’s call comes as a kind of release within the song, the chance for Dylan to whistle out his sorrow and anger before singing the final verse. In these performances, the harmonica sounds something like a final cry, an attempt to salvage some crumbs of defiance while everything Dylan felt to be meaningful and important is gouged and beaten beyond any recognition.
All these people that you mention
Yes I know them they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
When feeling low, there’s a sense to which we don’t want the company of people who are still floating. Their happiness grates on our mood, as if it somehow stands for a lack of understanding on their part: look at how much they smile, they could never understand my sorrow. And perhaps Dylan’s final statement on Desolation Row, is to suggest that before things can progress, we must all, somehow, be able to understand each other’s pain: a reconnection to the other of some sort, that goes way beyond, way deeper than the bursting paraphernalia and the ubiquitous, hollow gestures of late capitalism.
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them from, Desolation Row
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