Desolation Row, Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.

Bob Dylan (formerly Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota) released this epic song (around 11 minutes) in August 1965 on the album Highway 61 Revisited. Loved and hated by people for decades, Dylan has been described by some critics as one of the most significant poets of the Twentieth Century. Whether one agrees with that description or not, there is no denying his talent. When asked by a radio interviewer why he insisted on being so irritating with his music, he replied something along the lines of so where do you get the idea that I want people to like my music. It was more important to challenge people's complacency as a way of making them think about their values.

Dylan challenged the conventional values of his day. It earned him the reputation of being a dangerous subversive who was trying to corrupt the youth of America with his deviate ideas. At any given time, there will a bad boys and girls on the pop music scene that are designated dangerous by mainstream (read older) society. They said the same of the Rolling Stones. the Beatles, Elton John and Elvis Presley who today have either been knighted by the Queen (co-opted into the establishment), or sanctified as quasi-deities (if they are dead like Elvis). Its ironic that the parents of today are saying to their children the same unthinking words that their parents said to them about Dylan and others thirty years ago. That (insert name of demonised artist here) is going to poison the minds of our children. We have to silence him.

My observation is that this aspect of pop music -- that the older generation not approve of it -- is a key agent of social evolution. During adolescence, children becoming adults actively seek to distinguish themselves from their parents. They rebell. But notice how, despite the rebellion, in time (late 20s, early 30s) people seem to end up coming back to a place not very far from where their parents started them. They gradually morph into their parents -- but they are not exactly like their parents, there are some important differences that have derived from their peers.

So society changes in small increments from generation to generation. Pop music performs a valuable service, it gives adolescents the means by which they can distinguish themselves as being different from their parents, something to hang their hat on. It just has to be not liked by their parents, and it is doing its job. But beyond just being "not liked", some artists, like Dylan, have something meaningful to say about the state of the world, and how the supposedly all-wise older generation have managed to make a mess of it. It is saying "here is how we can make the world a better place".

In this song, Desolation Row, Dylan is warning people that society is heading for destruction, an apocalype, if it continues in its then direction. With the US locked in a deadly embrace with Russia, teetering on a knife-edge of mutually assured nuclear destruction, it was reasonable for people to be concerned (more like scared half to death), but governments of the time characterised anyone who spoke out against the Cold War as unpatriotic, even traitorous. When we read the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, it is horrifying to realise just how close the world came to letting the generals on both sides unleash a nuclear holocaust that would have likely destroyed much of the world as we know it.

That it didn't happen was in part due to the American President at the time John F. Kennedy having read history and being aware that the reason the First World War was so appallingly wasteful of human life was that the technology for waging war had advanced (machine guns etc) while the mind set of the generals had stayed in the past when a bayonet charge against an entrenched enemy might have worked. Kennedy saw a parallel with the development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, but the generals were still in a pre-nuclear mindset. It was a defining moment in history, and an illustration of the proverb "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it"

In this song, Desolation Row, Dylan uses a rich set of cultural and religious stereotypes as metaphors to describe this lunacy of main stream 1960's American society. Dylan probably wants us to take it as a whole and not deconstruct it too much. There is a harmony between the layers of his work, a consistency of theme in which he seems to be saying, this is the distilled truth as I see it, and these are the symbols that I have assembled to tell it as I see it.

Desolation Row is the name he gives to the place where people have gone to opt out of the lunacy, or perhaps been forced to go, and who are being punished by society for not participating in the lunacy. For example, the lines "They're spoonfeeding Casanova to get him to feel more assured. Then they'll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning him with words. And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls "Get outa here if you don't know, Casanova is just being punished for going To Desolation Row" . There is a world-weariness about Desolation Row that is at odds with a young man's outlook. Being Jewish, maybe it derives from a race memory, centuries of persecution and pogroms on both sides of Dylan's family.

Desolation Row is a counter-culture destination, though more a state of mind than an actual place. In the Casanova example he is referring to the average wage slave who is made to work long hours doing dehumanising work until they have a heart attack and die: Now at midnight all the agents, and the superhuman crew (the FBI and other covert agencies looking for un-American activists), come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do (and who are therefore dangerous). Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine is strapped across their shoulders (the yoke of dehumanising work) and then the kerosene (to burn the midnight oil, to work long hours) is brought down from the castles (capitalist corporations) by insurance men (Actuaries who calculate how long someone is likely to live under these circumstances) who go check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row (no-one is opting out of the system)

The name Desolation Row may have been derived by combining the best of Desolation Angels (Kerouac) with Cannery Row (Steinbeck). Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, and wrote The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels from his life transforming experiences on the peak. It has also been suggested that TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland was an influence on Desolation Row. Musician Al Kooper asserts Desolation Row is actually Greenwich Village in New York City, based on personal contact with Dylan.

Exploring the countercultural roots of Dylan's America, John Steinbeck's work looms large. Cannery Row is a place where the outcasts of society found a home. Cannery Row is an actual place in Monterey California. It refers to the derelect sardine cannery whose close environs was occupied in the book by homeless men and the town brothel. The cannery was derelect because the sardines had disappeared through a combination of over-fishing, agricultural run-off and unspecified pollutants from a nearby army base. For Steinbeck, what happened to the sardines was symbolic of the ruthlessly exploit until exhausted attitude that society and the military-industrial complex had for the environment and ordinary people. Wring all the goodness out of something, then when it worthless, toss on the rubbish-heap and give it to the worthless people who are no use to us.

We can make the case that Desolation Row represents a variety of counter-culture desinations; Skid Row, Cannery Row, Greenwich Village, Desolation Peak, TS Eliot's The Wasteland and others, because each of them represents an essential truth, the same truth, differently told. Its all of them, and none of them in particular. The guitar that features on the song has a Spanish feel that is reminiscent of old California; the ancestral California described by John Steinbeck and which has entered so vividly into the "Go West" liberation mythology of America. Going back even earlier, it is evocative of the California of Richard Henry Dana's classic work Two Years Before The Mast (1840).

Steinbeck's influence and ideas on social justice for the economic underclass of American society can be clearly seen in the works of Dylan and others (Woody Guthrie, Billy Brag, Bruce Sprinsteen and many others). Steinbeck's motivation derives from his experiences during the Great Depression and later when tens of millions of Americans became impoverished and suffered great hardship while the rest of American society who still had something did their best to ignore them. Steinbeck was a journalist who was one of the only haves who actually got down and dirty to experience first hand what it was like to be a have not. His work was intended to confront the same middle-class complacency that Dylan is challenging.

Finally, a quick note on my motivation for writing this. During 2001, I used to play Desolation Row to my (then) seven year old son and five year old daughter as we drove to their school in the mornings. Both reacted to it quite strongly, saying they loved it. Now they request it every other day. I was surprised because I thought its fairly hefty themes might be beyond young children. As it turned out, its the harmonica that they liked. Since their mother also likes Dylan, they might also have some kind of genetic pre-disposition for liking nasal singing and strident harmonica. In any case, I personally find it a most inspired and moving piece of music.

David Tuffley,
Redland Bay, Australia,
August 2008 (First written in 2002).

Click to see a visual rendering of Desolation Row from Shane Balkowitsch and Theo Cobb:



Desolation Row

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You Belong to Me I Believe"
And someone says," You're in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave"
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

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

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row

Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the door knob 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



Email David Tuffley



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