Bob Dylan is one of my favorite artists. I probably have 30 or 40 of his songs on my ipod, but sometimes I wonder what he was trying to say when he wrote the songs with what I would call “nonsense” lyrics. I’m not using “nonsense” here in a negative way. Many of these songs are my favorites. Anyone else love this kind of song? Here’s a few samples:
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
STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN
Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line.
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine.
An’ I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that,
But then again, there’s only one I’ve met
An’ he just smoked my eyelids
An’ punched my cigarette.”
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.
BALLAD OF A THIN MAN
Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word “NOW”
And you say, “For what reason?”
And he says, “How?”
And you say, “What does this mean?”
And he screams back, “You’re a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home”
I’ve always respected Dylan as an innovator but I used to not care for his music. Lately I’ve been appreciating it more, though. I do enjoy songs with “nonsense” lyrics, although I think many of these songs’ lyrics actually do come together to form an evocative picture or a story, so I appreciate them the same way I appreciate poetry or abstract art.
Another band with great “nonsense” lyrics is Pavement, and its spin-off The Silver Jews. Both of these groups have lyrics that have been compared to Dylan.
The question that Dylan’s works poses - and it’s true for many other good rock lyricists - is why we need to understand his poetry. Can it not just evoke emotions, suggest meanings, be a personal expression of incidents remembered without being clear to an outsider? Isn’t this true of other poets?
Look at Dylan Thomas, who is usually considered the source of Dylan’s name. His poetry is certainly elusive and evocative.
You feel Dylan’s songs as much as you think them, perhaps more.
I’m in the middle of reading The Essential Interviews. Now, you can’t really trust what Dylan says, but in one he claims that Ballad of a Thin Man was based on a real person. He also says that his name comes from his uncle, whose name was Dillon.
In one section of Chronicles, he talks about how he is blocked, and how the songs just flowed. He mentions in several of the interviews how he writes in trains, and in the backs of cars, and how some songs take hours and some take months. Hard Rain was written at a table in a club in the Village.
From everything I’ve read, he never mathematically constructs the songs - they just come. In versions on the Bootleg series, you can see that he changes words all the time. So I’m not sure that Desolation Row is about anything.
If you want a more accessible song, listen to Tombstone Blues, and consider that a Vietnam protest song. That seems to work. But even so, he mentioned the concept of “Old Folks Home in the College” in an interview long before Highway 61 came out, so the Vietnam reference might be accidental.
In a review of The Essential Interviews (or some other book that had a bunch of Dylan’s interviews) in The New Yorker it was said that Dylan does not care much about the meaning of the words he writes. In one interview when asked what some album or song was about he said it was about “rats and balloons”. What he does care about is the sound of the song. Dylan was notorious for giving a bad interview, but he would open up if you asked him about the sound of his songs. The words are supposedly just place fillers to help the song sound better.
That is my impression of The Beatles too. The few songs who’s meaning I tried to look up I found were written just to sound good or they were written while the band was high.
I’ve always wondered about lines such as
“Like Napoleon in rags, and the language that he used”. (from “Like A Rolling Stone”)
What the heck did Dylan mean by that?
His truthiness is a lot different in the later interviews as opposed to the earlier ones. He especially did a number on Nat Hentoff in a Playboy interview - not that Hentoff didn’t deserve it, calling The Band a combo. By the end, he was actually speaking truthfully of his background. I’ve read a lot of Dylan biographies, so I have something to compare against.
One of the interesting things he said in a later interview is that the words came first, and the music was often based on old folk and blues songs. Or rock songs, like Subterranean Homesick Blues.
1920s Style "Death Ray"
That is a great link. I think Weird Al was rather creative with that, especially since the pallindromes have to rhyme.
I’m sure we’ve all heard Paul Simon’s “A Simple Desultory Phillipic”, a “tribute” to Bob Dylan. (Hilarious)
Returning to Weird Al, one of the lines is “Rats live on no evil star”.
If that appeared in one of Dylan’s songs people would be pondering the hidden meaning in that. But since it is Weird Al, no one gives it the same reverance.
See, now this is brilliant, because in isolation it just seems like another bit of Dylan surrealism, but when he was a kid they really were selling postcards of hangings. I’m sure if you could get inside Dylan’s skull you’d have an oblique but rational reason for every line.
Desolation Row always seemed to me to be a mockery of urban bohemia, like Greenwich Village: while the outside world is full of oppression – restless riot squads, defaced passports, mocked political officials, and a "superhuman crew / [who] Come out and round up everyone / That knows more than they do) – the world of outsiders on Desolation Row seems like a tourist attraction, a carnival of misery.
In “Memphis Blues Again,” the line “She said that all the railroad men / Just drink up your blood like wine,” is actually a quote from the song “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, recorded in the early 1930s, and it doesn’t really make any sense in that song either.
Don’t believe Dylan’s interview bullshit that he doesn’t care about the lyrics, it’s all he cares about.
