Bob Dylan --"Desolation Row"
To undertake the task of writing anything -- even a paragraph or two -- on Bob Dylan is a daunting task. It's not that everyone else has written so well on him, nor is it that Dylan is an unassailable genius, but rather that it's just so easy to sound like a fool when you're trying to find something worthwhile to say about him.
Those of us who do think we might have something worthwhile to say about Dylan often get confused because the persona he presents is so slippery, so evasive. The man distracts us from the music. So, to bypass the artist and look at the art, let's just say that "Desolation Row" is one of the few eleven-plus minute songs that slips by in no time. It's gone before it wears its welcome out, which is pretty remarkable considering that there is very little change in the structure of the song throughout its duration--no bridge, no middle eight, no chorus except for the repetition of "Desolation Row" at the end of each verse, just a couple of instrumental breaks featuring primarily the harmonica. Charlie McCoy's nimble picking variations on the lead acoustic guitar help out, though, and a listen to the alternate version of the song from No Direction Home -- featuring Al Kooper gamely playing along on electric guitar -- quickly clarifies what a great decision it was to get McCoy on board. Lyrically, the song is written in the heavily allusive vein that characterizes all of Highway 61 Revisited; it offers a series of brief but telling character sketches, using names from history, literature, and folk tradition very haphazardly. Dylan's Ophelia and Cassanova bear little resemblance, respectively, to their antecedents in literature and history. The result is a deliberate veering away from the expected meanings of things: everyone starts over from scratch, even if scratch means the gutter. It's a song equivalent to John Ashbery's "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," a poem that offers a sestina about Popeye the Sailor. Both works seem to be saying that the old set of allusive references -- the Bible and the classical tradition -- are lost on a modern audience fed on a steady diet of pop culture ephemera. There's a lot of free association going on here, and the sketches are only loosely thematically related by the scenes of urban squalor conveyed throughout the song.
Somehow, though, it all works. Beyond this, I can't pretend any further to be able to explain why.
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