Bob Dylan (19 page)

As a result, the song is open to a plethora of interpretations, virtually impossible to decipher in detail with any degree of certitude. (The English poet Philip Larkin, reviewing the album in
Jazz Review
, described ‘Desolation Row' as having “an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.”) Certain stanzas obviously offer implied criticisms of familiar Dylan targets: venal bureaucrats, bloodless academics, soulless theologians, loveless bourgeoisie, and the full stifling panoply of industrialized society in general, against which he posits the enduring power of creativity, love and freedom. Much of the song's enduring power derives from the way in which many of its characters are locked in symbiotic (but unfulfilling) balance with one another: the
sex-fearing Ophelia and the sex-obsessed Dr Filth; the blind commissioner and the tightrope walker to whom he is tied; Einstein and his friend, “a jealous monk,” trapped in an insoluble debate between science and religion; Eliot and Pound, glimpsed arguing over arcane poetical points while pop singers steal their audience; and lustful Romeo and casual Cinderella, a cancellation of desire.

Like much of Dylan's material from this period, the song makes a mockery of accusations that he had betrayed or abandoned “protest” music; rather, what he has done is to broaden the scope of his protest to reflect more accurately the disconcerting hyper-reality of modern western culture. It's clear that he regarded the song as one of his best—he is reported to have spent some time discussing it with Allen Ginsberg, and when Nat Hentoff asked him what he would do if he were President, the least absurd part of Dylan's response was that he would “immediately re-write ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', and little school children, instead of memorizing ‘America The Beautiful', would have to memorize ‘Desolation Row'.”

Musically, the song is completely different from the rest of
Highway 61 Revisited
, abandoning the guitar/double keyboards set-up that gives the album its distinctive tone, in favour of a more stately, ruminative setting of just two guitars, with no rhythm section at all. “I just think Bob wanted to set it apart in some way, shape or form,” believes Al Kooper, “and instrumentation was just the way he chose. Bob Johnston had Charlie McCoy come up from Nashville to play electric guitar on that one, but there was a version on which Bob played acoustic guitar, Harvey Brooks played bass and I played electric guitar, with no drums on it.”

The follow-up single to ‘Like A Rolling Stone', ‘Positively 4th Street' (which reached US No. 7, UK No. 8 in September 1965) gave the impression of being simply the second wind of a one-sided argument, so closely did it follow its predecessor's formula, both musically and attitudinally. Such differences as there are between the two are marginal at best: Al Kooper's organ is poppier and better defined after a month's practice, and Dylan's delivery is slightly less caustic—an unconscious counterbalance, perhaps, to his most brutal condemnation yet.

The title offers a pretty clear indication of who (in general) the song was aimed at: Dylan once rented a flat on 4th Street in Greenwich Village,
and the targets of his disdain are most likely to be the folkie in-crowd among whom he swam upon first relocating to New York from Minneapolis. As he admits in the fifth of twelve short verses, “I used to be among the crowd you're in with.” Clearly, someone offended him deeply, judging by the song's contemptuous tone and its magisterially dismissive final lines, in which the victim is told, “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/You'd know what a drag it is to see you.”

Judging by the references to his having let someone down and caused them to lose their faith, the song's target is probably one of those folk-music authorities who rounded on Dylan first for “abandoning” protest songs, then again for picking up an electric guitar—in some cases, only to follow the same path themselves shortly afterwards, when they glimpsed the fortune and fame available. Which narrows the field down to a few hundred or so. If Dylan's intention was to inflict a more generalized guilt, he succeeded perfectly: everyone in the Village had the feeling he was talking about them specifically, and quite a few felt deeply hurt by the broadside.

Dave Van Ronk—who, despite having had his arrangement of ‘House Of The Rising Sun' stolen without permission or credit, had defended his friend when the folkies had turned on him a few years earlier, claiming that “The folk community is acting toward Dylan like a Jewish mother”—felt that Dylan's riposte was a righteous hit. “People from the early 1960s are very bitter about [Dylan],” he told Robert Shelton. “Although Bobby did treat most of them rather cavalierly, their reactions are largely their own fault. They just wanted to bask in the light of an obvious talent, to reflect a little glory on them… I think that ‘Positively 4th Street' is a great song. It was high time Bobby turned around and said something to
[Sing Out!
editor] Irwin Silber and all those Jewish mothers. It's Dylan's farewell address.”

Others, like folk archivist Israel (Izzy) Young, were more bemused at what they considered Dylan's cheek. “I don't know if it was [about me],” he told Anthony Scaduto, but it was unfair… Dylan comes in and takes from us, uses my resources, then he leaves and
he
gets bitter? He was the one who left!”

At the time, however, Dylan had raised bitterness to the level of an art form. Surrounded by a group of cronies that included Bob Neuwirth, Victor Maimudes, and the folk-singers Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson and David (Blue) Cohen, he would hold court at one of New York's bars or nightclubs—mostly the Kettle Of Fish—where those foolish or brave enough to try and intrude would be systematically demolished in the verbal crossfire. David Cohen became particularly close to Dylan, whose defensive, suspicious nature he shared. “Dylan was very hostile, a mean cat, very cruel to people,”
he admitted to Scaduto. “But I could see the reasons for it. It was very defensive, for one thing. Just from having to answer too many questions. The big thing was that his privacy had been invaded… He was a street cat, man, and he lost his freedom.”

The verbal artillery was not just trained on outsiders, either. In the wake of his success, folk-singing had become something of a competitive sport, and Dylan realized that his cronies were picking crumbs from his table, trying to pick up clues that might bring them the same level of success. Cruelly, he rubbed their noses in their opportunism, telling them they would never make it the way he had, and suggesting to Phil Ochs that he should find a new line of work, since he wasn't doing very much in his current career. “It was… very clever, witty, barbed and very stimulating, too,” recalled Ochs, the most talented of the also-rans. “But you really had to be on your toes. You'd walk into a threshing machine if you were just a regular guy, naive and open, you'd be torn to pieces.”

The release of ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' in December 1965 proved a turning point in Phil Ochs' relationship with Dylan, when he made the mistake of being less than flattering at a playback of the new single. “It's okay,” said Ochs, as a limousine arrived to ferry the entourage to an uptown disco, “but it's not going to be a hit.” They had travelled but a few blocks when Dylan, no longer able to contain his mounting fury at this sacrilegious response, told the driver to pull over and ordered Ochs out of the car. “Get out, Ochs,” he said. “You're not a folk-singer. You're just a journalist.” Their friendship was over, consigned to history.

As it happens, both men's assessments were pretty much on the mark. Hidebound by the kind of protest issues that Dylan had deliberately thrown off, yet unable to animate them in anything like a comparable manner, Ochs was limited to a kind of sung journalism. And ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' was indeed nothing like as successful as Dylan's recent singles, scraping into the British Top 20 at No.17, but failing to crack the American charts at all.

The reasons are several. In the first place, it's not one of Dylan's better efforts, being basically yet another put-down song, but placed at one
remove further from its target—Dylan's attempt to persuade a girl to elope being just a flimsy pretext to pick away at her current lover's faults, which seem to reside in a tight-assed materialism and lack of spirituality. The only line which compares with the verbal pyrotechnics of ‘Like A Rolling Stone' is the scorching “If he needs a third eye he just grows it,” and too many others seem like over-crafted exercises, excuses to work in polysyllabic oddities like “preoccupied” and “businesslike.”

In the second place, the single's release was dogged by confusion and incompetence. Since neither song contains the actual words “positively fourth street,” Columbia mistakenly issued an early version of ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' as ‘Positively 4th Street', before quickly withdrawing it; and then, when ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' was itself released in the UK, the record company again initially put out the early version, before replacing it with the later version which constituted Dylan's first recording with members of The Band.

Al Kooper was fortunate enough to play on both. “There's a version of that on which I play celeste,” he recalls, “which was done at the
Highway 61 Revisited
sessions. The other version was cut quite some time after that in New York, with Paul Griffin, Bobby Gregg on drums, and Rick [Danko] and Robbie [Robertson] from The Band, at the same time as ‘One Of Us Must Know'—possibly the very same night.” Again, Kooper's ambitious streak served him well. “I wasn't booked for the session,” he admits, “but I visited the studio and ended up playing on it.”

BLONDE ON BLONDE

In spite of his disastrous Newport Festival appearance, Dylan was convinced he should continue his new rock'n'roll direction, particularly given the success of
Highway 61 Revisited
. But it would have to be better planned than at Newport. Accordingly, acting on the advice of Albert Grossman's secretary Mary Martin, he checked out a Canadian rock band, Levon & The Hawks, who had recently split from '50s rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Tight and disciplined, without sacrificing any of their essential wildness, the band's chops had been honed to a fine cutting-edge by years of one-night stands in clubs and juke-joints around the South and up in Canada, which native Arkansan Hawkins had made his base. Dylan was impressed, and midway through August he called them at Tony Mart's Nite Spot at Somers Point on the Jersey Shore, with an offer to back him at the Hollywood Bowl. “Who else is on the bill?” asked the drummer, Levon Helm. “Just us,” answered Dylan.

“We had just come from Arkansas,” recalls guitarist Robbie Robertson. “We were in a place near Atlantic City, a nice resort place to play, and we were going to try and do some stuff with Sonny Boy Williamson, even though it was a pretty off-the-wall idea for blacks and whites to be playing together at the time. So we went up to play this resort, to cool out a little, and it was there that we were contacted to meet with Bob. I went and met him and we talked about the possibilities and played a little music, and one thing led to another.”

Initially, only Robbie and Levon were hired, joining Al Kooper and organist Harvey Brooks for a late August concert at Forest Hills Stadium, New York. The reaction was mixed—not as virulent as at Newport, but with a substantial proportion of dissenters. To silence the catcalls, Dylan had his band play the intro to ‘Ballad Of
A Thin Man' for what seemed like an eternity, and eventually most of the crowd were won over, rushing the stage during ‘Like A Rolling Stone' and knocking Kooper's chair out from under him. “Kooper and I just looked at each other and laughed,” recalls Harvey Brooks. “We were having the time of our lives. It was fun, gleeful, from the heart, exciting—an experience we'd never had before.” Onstage, a laughing Dylan turned round to Levon Helm and shouted, “Looks like the attack of the beatniks around here!” The Hollywood Bowl show a few days later was even better received, but following that, both Brooks and Kooper were replaced by the rest of the Hawks. The whole band decamped for a week of rehearsals in Toronto, where the Hawks' tailor, Lou Myles, also ran up an outrageous brown houndstooth check suit for Dylan.

Through the rest of that Fall, Dylan and The Hawks toured the American heartland with a series of pioneering shows that brought high-volume rock'n'roll to the country's old sports arenas, where Robertson's guitar would “reverberate around the big concrete buildings like a giant steel bullwhip,” according to Levon Helm's autobiography
This Wheel's On Fire
. But the constant booing finally got to Helm, who quit the group prior to the 1966 world tour, being replaced by Mickey Jones (later to play the role of Tim Allen's ZZ Top-lookalike TV-show sidekick in the situation comedy
Home Improvement
). Things didn't improve outside America, however.