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 infa...