Tombstone Blues

Murderers, toadies
And quacks run the country. Bob
Is feeling their blues.

The chorus of the song “Tombstone Blues” is the only firm anchor with which to drop a haiku: “Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes. Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for the fuse. I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues.” Around this axis spin the usual characters from history, literature and elsewhere, doing strange things to make various statements about our screwy society and whatever else was going through Dylan’s mind at the time. The song appears on the 1965 album “Highway 61 Revisited,” just after the opener, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Characters and actions:
Sweet pretty things. In bed. Of course.
City fathers try to endorse reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse.
Ghost of Belle Starr hands wits to Jezebel the nun who knits a bald wig for Jack the Ripper, who runs the chamber of commerce.
Bride at the penny arcade is hysterical.
Doctor tells her not to accept boys in her house.
Medicine man offers a different prescription for her complaint, which is that she has just been made. He suggests that she swallow her pride.
John the Baptist tortures a thief and asks his hero, the president of the United States, if there’s a hole where he can vomit.
The president chases a fly, vows death to whimperers and cryers, drops his barbell, and accuses the sun of cowardice.
Philistine king puts jawbones on the tombstones of his soldiers, then flatters their graves. He puts the pied pipers in prison, fattens the slaves, and sends them into the jungle.
Gypsy Davey burns their camps with a blowtorch, and then takes a walk with his slave Pedro, who has a stamp collection that he uses to win friends and influence people.
Someone throws Galileo’s math book at Delilah, who’s laughing herself to tears all by herself.
Brother Bill, if Bob could help it, would end up in chains on top of a hill, along with a movie set by Cecil B. DeMille.
Tuba players play at a flagpole where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped a bed roll.
National Bank sells road maps to the soul for old people and college students.
Bob would like to write a dear lady a simple melody to keep her sane and end the pain of her pointless knowledge.

Queen Jane Approximately

Queen Jane's a pain, but

Prince Bob wants to see her when

Her schedule frees up.

This is a fantastic though somewhat high-handed song from the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited." "Queen Jane Approximately" is an entreaty to a woman, or, as Bob Dylan once said to Nora Ephron, a MAN, who is a little too busy for real people such as the singer, and is spending too much time in wasteful pursuits with wasteful people. Unluckily for the subject, many of those people are about to be done with Queen Jane, but at that rock-bottom moment, Mr. Dylan would be happy to see him/her.

People whose patience with Jane is running out, and what they're doing:

- Mother (sends back invitations)

- Father (explains to sister that Jane is tired of her creations and herself)

- Flower ladies (they want their stuff back. Jane borrowed it)

- Children (they are starting to resent her)

- Clowns (they were commissioned, but died in battle or in vain)

- Jane (she's sick of the repetition)

- Advisers (they throw her plastic at her feet to show she's in pain. Does this mean her credit cards?)

- Bandits (she forgave them, but they complained. Funny bandits)

Like a Rolling Stone

Now you feel like a
Stone alone without a home
Because of your tone.

This is Bob Dylan's most famous song, the one that elevated him from a hit to a legend. "Like a Rolling Stone" was the opening song on the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited," and there's never been anything before or after to match it. There are plenty of words written by many people about the song, a six-minute put-down of an unidentified person or people. I won't add too many to them, nor will I get into the possible subjects of the song. It's a one-size-fits-all poisoned-pen letter to anyone whom you don't like. The only twist in the song, at least to me, seems to be a nearly envious tone about having nothing left, like one of the Christian saints (Francis of Assisi, for example), or various beggars who drop everything on the path to enlightenment. Only in this case, that path seems extra hard because the subject of the song, a woman of course, doesn't seem to have been looking for enlightenment.

In short:

- You dressed fine, threw bums dimes.
- People warned you of imminent falling. You thought they joked.
- You used to laugh at poor people and losers, and now you're one.
- Describe the following feelings: no home, unknown, like rolling stone.
- You were well schooled, but now you're in the school of hard knocks.
- You're making deals with shady people. Sex, shelter, food, pharmaceuticals, presumably.
- Servants and entertainers always hated you.
- Enter chrome horse and diplomat with Siamese cat on his shoulder. He fleeced you, whoever he is. And what about that cat?
- Everybody's having a good time, but to be properly prepared, you should sell everything you own.
- Enter the Napoleon in rags who used to amuse you. He wants you now and you can't say no.
- And of course, the blistering final assessment of being wide awake and self aware: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal."

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

Bob goes to New York.
He might make it there, but he
Makes it nowhere else.

"Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" comes from the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited." It is one of Dylan's greatest songs. The runaway imagery that often obscures the diamond clarity of his songs is kept to a manageable level. The fractured narrative from verse to verse that can turn a song into a pond disturbed by ripples from a rock here makes a series of related if discrete episodes. The music rolls along with resignation, but it's punchy instead of bloated. The saloon piano sound is a standout for me. There are more good qualities, but you might as well just listen to it and admire.

1. Lost in the rain in Ciudad Juarez on Easter Sunday. No gravity, etc. Suddenly on Rue Morgue Avenue with hungry, aggressive women. 
2. Saint Annie: Tell her thanks. I can't move. Doc doesn't know what's wrong with me.
3. Melinda: Goddess of gloom. Also a prostitute.
4. Housing Project Hill choices: fortune or fame. It's a trick. By the way, you should leave if you want to get silly. The cops don't need your trouble.
5. Boasting authorities who blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms. Then there's the story of Angel who showed up from Los Angeles and didn't take well to New York.
6. Round one: burgundy. Round two: harder chaser. Game got rough. Joke was on me. I couldn't handle it. Heading back to New York City.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

You might not make it.
Don't worry, your sweetheart will.
She's got what it takes.

I see from my perfunctory reading on this song that "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" is a song sung with world-weariness, resignation and sexual frustration. I suppose. This song means something different to me each time I play it. It's a collection of disparate thoughts that I think reflects whatever you put into it:

Well, I ride on a mail-train, baby
Can’t buy a thrill
Well, I’ve been up all night, baby
Leanin’ on the windowsill

-- Sure. Sexual frustration. That's fine with me.

Well, if I die
On top of the hill
And if I don’t make it
You know my baby will

-- Sex? No, I think it's more about stamina, and maybe a little self pity. She'll keep going on in life, even if he doesn't.

Don’t the moon look good, mama
Shinin’ through the trees?
Don’t the brakeman look good, mama
Flagging down the “Double E?”
Don’t the sun look good
Goin’ down over the sea?
Don’t my gal look fine
When she’s comin’ after me?

-- Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across

-- Frustration, but people can probably take the temperature for themselves.

Well, I wanna be your lover, baby
I don’t wanna be your boss
Don’t say I never warned you
When your train gets lost

-- Two thoughts, two shrugs of the shoulders. 

For all my talk of seeing what you want in this song and not having much to say about, I do love the feeling that it gives me when I play it, and I especially like the piano part. You can find this song on the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited."

Highway 61 Revisited

We know just the place
For sacrificing sons and
Other strange requests.

"Highway 61 Revisited" is a dense, wacky little song that appears on the 1965 album of the same name. Dylan makes Highway 61 the location for a number of symbolic acts by inhospitable, greedy and opportunistic people. The real Highway 61, like Highway 51, is a north-south road that runs from Duluth, Minnesota to NeW Orleans. It travels along the mighty Mississippi River for most of its nearly 1,407 miles (2,264 kilometers). It was a major transportation route for the African-American migrations from south to north after the abolition of slavery, and carries with it a mystical association with blues music. That Dylan added a "Revisited" to the name of the song and the album at a time when he was tearing down and rebuilding the blues and rock music speaks to his overt intent as a radical musician. The police whistle sound throughout the song adds a nice touch of crazy to the proceedings:

Things to do on Highway 61:

- Be like Abraham and sacrifice your son Isaac because God says so.
- Look for new clothes: Howard tells Georgia Sam where to go.
- If you're Mack the Finger and you have 40 red/white/blue shoestrings and 1,000 telephones that don't ring, Louie the King suggests a place to stash them.
- The second mother and the seventh son go there when they should be hanging out with the first father of the fifth daughter on the 12th night. (She's much too white)
- Start a world war and sell tickets if you're a roving gambler with the right promoter.

From a Buick 6

The wife has the kid.
But the mistress has the fun.
She is resourceful.

For a song that has no apparent meaning, lots of people online like to discuss "From a Buick 6," one of the songs on Bob Dylan's 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited." Whether there's anything to it, I can't say. The idea that I came across that seized me is that the song is about two women. The "graveyard woman" is perhaps the narrator's wife, and probably the mother of his child. But the song isn't about her. It's about the "soulful mama," who must be the mistress. She's multifarious and skilled in the home arts (cooking, sewing), dancing, riflery and tact. You also get the impression that she might be the death of the narrator.

Graveyard woman:
Keeps his kid

Soulful mama:
Keeps him hid
Gives him bread
Sews him up with thread
Doesn't talk too much
Doesn't make him nervous
Walks like Bo Diddley sans crutch
Keeps a loaded gun
Brings him everything (and more)
Ready to put a blanket on his dying bed

Unaccounted:
Bob cracked up on the highway and the water's edge
The steam shovel that keeps away the dead
The dump truck to load his head.
The Buick 6.

The original song is here:

An alternate version, released in error on the first pressing of "Highway 61 Revisited," is here:

Desolation Row

Famous pop figures
Get up to no good on a
Surreal skid row

I could spend the rest of my life picking apart and stitching back together the themes, actions and characters who fill up the 11 minutes and 21 seconds of "Desolation Row," which closes the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited" with a big, long bang. The Wikipedia entry on the song refers to Dylan's weaving of characters from "history, fiction, the Bible and his own invention into a series of vignettes that suggest entropy and urban chaos." I wonder if that's giving it a more academic polish than the woodwork deserves. You can spend the rest of YOUR lifetime reading interpretations of the song, but I think of it as a long wind-up to a punchline, which you get at the end, as Dylan goes bitter:

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the doorknob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
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
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row

Whatever Desolation Row might be -- the place across the border in Mexico with the Coke factory (ask Dylan about that), or Eighth Avenue in 1960-whatever -- it sounds to me like a state of mind, a place that Bob might prefer to wherever he was stuck at the time he wrote the song. Whatever the song is about, it has produced snippets of pure genius, including the brilliant opening line: "They're selling postcards of the hanging."

The people of Desolation Row:
- "They" (who sell postcards at the hanging and paint the passports brown)
- Beauty parlor/sailor
- Circus
- Blind commissioner (in a trance. One hand on tightrope walker, other in pants)
- Riot squad
- Lady and Bob
- Cinderella, acting like Bette Davis
- Romeo
- Someone who cautions Romeo
- Moon and stars
- Fortune-telling lady
- Cain and Abel
- Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Everybody who is making love or expecting rain
- The Good Samaritan
- Ophelia
- Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
- Dr. Filth and his sexless patients and his nurse
- The Phantom of the Opera, as a priest
- Casanova
- Skinny girls
- Agents
- Superhuman crew
- Everyone who knows more than the crew does
- Insurance men
- Nero's Neptune
- Everybody on the Titanic who asks you your political affiliation
- Ezra Pound
- T.S. Eliot
- Calypso singers
- Fishermen with flowers
- Lovely mermaids
- You
- Lame people with new faces and names

Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

You're with a loser.

Are you one too? Why don't you

Come date me instead.

If Dylan's worst qualities, lyrically speaking, in the late 1970s and early 1980s were his sour moralizing and his toxic blend of self pity and anger toward women, his worst quality at the height of his fame in 1965 and 1966 was an arrogance born from intelligence and the irritation of others that seemed to shoot in all directions.

"Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" is the tale of Romeo seducing Juliet from the window, but by mocking her even as he makes clear that he has lustful thoughts on his mind. Toward the woman he's singing to, you hear petulant demands and scorn.

Can you please crawl out your window? Use your arms and legs it won’t ruin you How can you say he will haunt you? You can go back to him any time you want to.

The man she's dating, meanwhile, takes up each of the song's venomous verses. Example:

He looks so truthful, is this how he feels Trying to peel the moon and expose it With his businesslike anger and his bloodhounds that kneel If he needs a third eye he just grows it He just needs you to talk or to hand him his chalk Or pick it up after he throws it

Dylan can't even talk to him. He just harangues her about him. It's great to be young, smart, wanted and admired, but you get the impression that for a year or two, the singer couldn't stand to be around anyone because they're all a bunch of assholes. But there's a saying about the company that you keep...

I don't enjoy speaking this way about people I don't know, but the temptation through a song like this becomes too strong. It seems clear that the eventual motorcycle accident and decision to hop off the grid and into upstate New York was just what the man needed. I'm sure that he's even crustier today, but wisdom, if it comes, has a tendency to blunt arrogance, even if it can't cure misanthropy. Separately, I read on Wikipedia that when Phil Ochs and Dylan were riding in a limousine together, Dylan played the song to him. When Ochs was less than impressed, Dylan reportedly kicked him out of the limousine, shouting, "You're not a folk singer, you're a journalist!" So. There you go.

The song was released as a single in 1965 and is available on the "Biograph" anthology from 1985. I can't get a Dylan version to load up so I'm sharing Roger Daltrey's.

Ballad of a Thin Man

Squares, hipsters, freaks, cows
And dwarfs freak out Mr. Jones,
An ignorant man.

From a Buick 6

Bob's chick is tough.
She'll fuck up lesser homies,
But she protects Bob.

Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61
Is a place for crazy dudes
Whose plans don't work out.