Bob Dylan (18 page)

Secondly, ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry' offers a glimpse of the malleability of Dylan's material and the improvisational nature of his recording methods. Two versions of the song were recorded, sharing the same lyrics, though completely separate in mood and approach. The first version, since included on
The Bootleg Series, Vols 1–3
, was recorded the same day as ‘Like A Rolling Stone', along with an unreleased track which later turned up on various bootlegs (and eventually on The Bootleg Series, Vols 1-3) called ‘Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence' (aka ‘Killing Me Alive'). The latter's tart, bluesy sound seems to have provided the basic inspiration for this first, uptempo run-through of ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry', a sleek R&B groove dominated by Mike Bloomfield's quicksilver guitar, one of whose breaks is punctuated by an exhilarated “Aaah…” from Dylan. At that time, the song was called ‘Phantom Engineer', but by the next sessions, six weeks later, it had been transformed in both title and style into the slow, loping, piano-based blues that was included on
Highway 61 Revisited.

Al Kooper, who played one of the two pianos on the song, liked the original, faster version so much he later recorded the song that way on the
Super Session
album he made with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills. “I don't want to put down the version that's on
Highway 61
, though,” he assures me, “because it's a wonderful mood—you can slice the mood on that song. All these songs went through incredible metamorphoses, like ‘Like A Rolling Stone' being in 3/4 originally. ‘Phantom Engineer' was done fast at first, then slow a day or two later, after Bob had had a chance to think about it. It might just have happened, but I suspect it was premeditated.”

As with ‘Like A Rolling Stone', ‘From A Buick 6' sails in on the back of a declarative snare-shot from Bobby Gregg, but thereafter the mood is quite different, being loose and goosey motorvating rock'n'roll striding along on the back of Harvey Brooks' bass and crowned with a soaring harmonica break. It's great, simple fun, just like the song itself, which is basically another of Dylan's paeans to his female ideal, the unpretentious, undemanding earth-mother type who'll be there to take care of him when he falls apart. References to her as a “soulful mama” who “don't make me nervous, she don't talk too much” suggest the role model may be Sara, though the various descriptions of her as “graveyard woman,” “junkyard angel,” “steam shovel mama” and “dump truck baby” seem somewhat less than completely flattering. As for the claim that “She walks like Bo Diddley,” what woman could resist such enigmatic blandishment?

After the light-hearted frolic of ‘From A Buick 6', the stern, sententious opening piano chords (played by Dylan himself) of ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man' sound more like the theme to a courtroom drama series like
Perry Mason
. And so it proves: this is one of Dylan's most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited. Al Kooper remembers that when the musicians listened to a playback in the control room, drummer Bobby Gregg said, “That is a nasty song, Bob… I don't know about this song!” to which Bob chuckled,
“Nasty
song!” “We all
had a good laugh at that,” Kooper recalls. “Dylan was the King of the Nasty Song at that time.”

Since its appearance, ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man'—and particularly the identity of the denigrated “Mr Jones” figure—has probably prompted more debate among Dylan fans than any other song. Bob's insecure friend Brian Jones, who suffered badly from Dylan and Neuwirth's badinage, was convinced it was him; some have suggested it might refer to Ms Joan (Baez), or others among Dylan's uncomprehending folkie friends; Judson Manning, the
Time
reporter savaged so mercilessly by Dylan in
Don't Look Back
, fits the part as well as any other candidate—as indeed does Terry Ellis, the student inquisitor mocked by Dylan in the same film (who would, by the by, become co-founder of the Chrysalis record label a few years later); and of course, anyone searching for drug references would instantly recognize a “jones” as a junkie's habit.

And the longer the song remains inconclusively explained, the weirder the explanations get. In April 1998, a fascinating interpretation of the song as “outing” a closet homosexual's desire to perform fellatio (based on such references as “your pencil in your hand,” “raise up your head.” “hands you a bone,” “contacts among the lumberjacks,” “sword swallower” and “give me some milk”) was posted on one of the many websites devoted to Dylan's work, though this is probably more indicative of the pitfalls of interpretation than Dylan's intentions with the song, which itself condemns the urge to interpret pruriently that which we don't immediately understand.

At the time the song was written, Dylan was routinely plagued by journalists demanding explanations of his songs, but even to reputable reporters like Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, he would offer no clues about the victim's identity. “You know him,” Dylan told them. “but not by that name… I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘That's Mr Jones'. Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?' And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground'. It's all there, it's a true story.” Which leaves everyone back where they started, chasing a chimerical character round another man's imagination. To Robert Shelton, he claimed, more openly but no more revealingly, “It's not so incredibly absurd and it's not so imaginative to have Mr Jones in a room with three walls and a midget and a geek and a naked man. Plus a voice… a voice coming in his dream.”

Mr Jones is, in fact, most likely to be a journalist; indeed, Dylan himself admitted as much when he introduced the song at a 1978 concert by saying, “I wrote this for a reporter who was working for the
Village Voice
in 1963.”
Three years earlier, however, Jeffrey Jones had already “outed” himself as “Mr Jones” in
Rolling Stone
magazine, explaining that as a student journalist on assignment for
Time
magazine, he had embarrassed himself at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when attempting to interview Dylan for a piece on the proliferation of the harmonica in contemporary folk music (!). Later that day, in the hotel dining-room, he had been unfortunate enough to bump into Dylan again, this time with entourage in tow. “Mr Jones!” shouted Dylan, mockingly. “Gettin' it all down, Mr Jones?” The poor youth, unskilled in even the basic rudiments of verbal duelling, let alone a blade as sharp as Dylan wielded, was forced to sit and squirm silently as he was cut to pieces for the entertainment of Dylan's table. When, a few months later, the song appeared on
Highway 61 Revisited
, he knew instantly it referred to himself. “I was thrilled,” he admitted, “in the tainted way I suppose a felon is thrilled to see his name in the newspaper.”

When asked “Who is Queen Jane?” Dylan responded with typical panache, “Queen Jane is a man.” This seems sardonic at best, a sarcastic denial of the obvious. The prime candidate would, again, seem to be the queen of folk music, Joan Baez, whose stable and secure family life Dylan probably regarded as a brake on her creative development. The song is a double-edged missive, criticizing its subject's immersion in an inauthentic world of superficial attitudes and acquaintances, yet offering a sympathetic invitation, should she break free of these diversions and require a more honest, authentic experience with “somebody you don't have to speak to,” to come up and see him sometime. It's the least interesting track on the album, although the piano cantering up the scale through the harmonica break neatly evokes the stifling nature of an upper-class existence reduced to the level of dressage.

Highway 61 is one of the great North American arteries, originating across the border in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and snaking down through Dylan's
native Minnesota and on South through Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas, hugging the western bank of the Mississippi River, which it crosses at Memphis, continuing on down through the state of Mississippi into Louisiana, where it hits the Gulf Of Mexico at New Orleans. To the young Bob Zimmerman, growing up in chilly Minnesota with an urge to ramble, it must have seemed a romantically tight connection to the Southern homeland of R&B, blues and rock'n'roll, a tarmac Mississippi river leading to the music's heart.

Appropriately enough, it's celebrated in the album's most raucous blues boogie, a railroad shuffle scarred with Mike Bloomfield's razor-slashes of slide guitar and boasting the most flip and sacrilegious of Bible studies, as befits such a slick example of the Devil's music. In the album's opening lines, Dylan cheekily invokes his own father's name by having God refer to Abraham as “Abe,” which effectively makes Bob himself the son whom God wants killed. The fourth verse extends the tone of theological satire through the mathematically precise nature of the family relations outlined with such biblical pedantry, while the remaining three verses broaden the vision of Highway 61 as a site of limitless possibility populated by a string of highly dubious gamblers, drifters and chancers called things like “Mack the Finger,” and “Louie the King.” It's perhaps indicative of Dylan's increasingly cynical attitude towards the entertainment business that the last, and most venal, of these is a promoter who seriously considers staging World War III out on Highway 61.

The song marks the only appearance on the album of drummer Sam Lay, who had backed Howlin' Wolf for six years, playing on most of his classic Chess recordings, before hooking up with young white blues-harp sensation Paul Butterfield to form the Butterfield Blues Band. “We recorded it in one night, pretty quickly,” Lay recalls. “He knew what he was doing. The little police whistle in that track was mine, a little thing I had on my keychain. I had it in my drum case, and between takes I picked it up and blew it, and Dylan heard it and reached out his hand for it—didn't say nothin'—then when we went back over the track, he blew it a couple of times.”

Al Kooper, who played the galloping electric piano on the track, remembers things a little differently, however. “I was wearing that siren around my neck at the time,” he claims, “and I don't know exactly how Bob got hold of it, but he stuck it in his harmonica holder and it became immortalized on that track.”

As the album nears its close, Dylan takes a right turn from his trip down Highway 61, heading off down Mexico way. Ciudad Juarez is a Mexican border town just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, the kind of place Americans go to let their hair down and their morals slide. It's used here in much the same way pulp novelist Jim Thompson and film maker Sam Peckinpah have used Mexico, both as a symbol of escape and as an index of how far down a person might have been forced to go—fallen so low, they've literally dropped out of America into the Third World.

The song opens to reveal the singer washed up, lost in the rain after an Easter vacation binge, with literal alienation hardening into its spiritual equivalent in the rank and humid atmosphere. Weak with mysterious ailment, drained by his excesses with hookers and booze, he assesses his own situation, and realizes there's no place for the civilised side of him in a place so riddled with venality that its authorities brag of their corruption. Finally, abandoned by his friends, he decides to head back to New York City, a place which may be a sump of human depravity, but which still retains the vestiges of basic civilized contact.

The song has been likened to
The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock
, T.S. Eliot's portrait of 20th century alienation, but it's more accurate to view it as depicting the downside of Dylan's attempt to escape such alienation (and boost his own creative powers) through intense sensory derangement and bohemian experientialism. Don't try this, he's saying, unless you're prepared for the worst. The presence of the eponymous nursery-rhyme character in the title probably refers to Rimbaud's
Ma Bohème
(aka
Wandering)
, which finds the French Symbolist engaged in similar drop-out pursuits: “I tore my shirt; I threw away my tie/Dreamy Tom Thumb, I made up rhymes/As I ran… in dark and scary places/And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces/Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart.”

The song's enervated tone is perfectly captured in the weary, reflective trudge of the music, which makes innovative use of two different pianos, Al Kooper playing the electric Hohner Pianet while Paul Griffin adds a lovely bar-room feel on tack piano.

The south-of-the-border slant continues with ‘Desolation Row', an 11-minute epic of entropy set to a courtly flamenco-tinged backing. Often described as a latterday equivalent of Dante's Inferno, it takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities, in which equilibrium can only be maintained through immersion in the absurdity of the situation, acceptance of one's position in Desolation Row.

It could serve as Dylan's alternative State Of The Nation Address, an increasingly surreal update of the America depicted in ‘Gates Of Eden'. From his vantage point on the Row, the singer describes the futile activity and carnival of deceit indulged in by a huge cast of iconic characters, some historical (Einstein, Nero), some biblical (Noah, Cain and Abel, The Good Samaritan), some fictional (Ophelia, Romeo, Cinderella, Casanova), some fantastic (The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The Phantom Of The Opera), some literary (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound), and some who fit into none of the above categories, notably Dr Filth and his dubious nurse. Detached from their historical moorings, abandoned in this cultural wasteland, these figures serve mainly as shorthand signifiers for more complex bundles of human characteristics, allowing Dylan to cram extra layers of possible meaning into the song's already tightly-packed absurdist imagery.