Desolation Row

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Template:Unreferenced Desolation Row is the final song of Bob Dylan's sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited. The eleven minute song is a favorite of Dylan's fans; the lyrics especially are often cited as among his best, full of evocative imagery and poetry. Along with Visions of Johanna from 1966, it represents the apotheosis of Dylan's unique lyrical vision from the 1960s. It is the album's only purely acoustic track, in contrast to the thunderous electric rock and roll sound that Dylan was completely embracing for the first time with the album. It was recorded in New York City, New York on August 2, 1965; the take on the album was the second time Dylan had sung the song.

The songs of this period received wide critical acclaim; thus Gammond in the New Oxford Companion to Music, wrote of Dylan's work of the mid-60s as achieving 'high level of poetical lyricism... as heard in Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row.

Al Kooper, who played organ and piano on the album, claimed in his autobiography that Desolation Row was Eighth Avenue in New York City. At the time, this was a very dangerous part of town. Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, is also a possible source for the song, as is The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (the poem is alluded to; the poet is directly referenced.)and "Desolation Peak" by Jack Kerouac.

The song describes a town of some sort, full of lowlifes and losers. The various characters receive only a line or two each, yet Dylan still manages to be evocative and bring forth images of crazy, nonsensical townspeople. Desolation Row would seem to lie on Highway 61, perhaps at the end of the line in Dylan's native Duluth, Minnesota, where the horde of freaks congregate after being rejected from elsewhere. Dylan's feelings about this place seem contrary; it is clearly a town full of mean, stupid and insane people, yet he seems nearly jubilant about being there. On the other hand, it is also a land of counter-cultural rebellion. At the time, political dissidents such as socialists and pacifists were shunned; these rejects are the inhabitants of Desolation Row, described in the song. Indeed, most of the characters mentioned were rejected from their society for being some sort of freak, from the Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, shunned because of their appearance to Cinderella, who forces her way out of her assigned role in society through sheer will power.

On June 15, 1920, a mob of 10,000 lynched three men, Isaac McGhie, Elias Clayton and Elmer Jackson at the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East in Duluth MN. The men were in town with a traveling circus and were dubiously accused of raping a local girl. (On June 15, 1920, Dylan’s then ten-year-old father lived in a third floor apartment at 221 North Lake Avenue.) The Police Commissioner instructed the guards not to use their guns to defend the young men who were broken out of jail by the mob. Postcards with a photo of the incident were sold as souvenirs. It seems likely that the opening lines of Desolation Row, if not the entire song refer to this incident and the players involved, or to Duluth in general.

"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"


—“Desolation Row,” by Bob Dylan

http://www.ripsawnews.com/June07_2000/feature.html


The Threepenny Review describes the song this way:

"(I)n 'Desolation Row' the listener's eye is directed toward a circus of grotesques: a beauty parlor filled with sailors, a commissioner masturbating as he caresses a tightrope walker, a whole city in disguise. But whoever they are, nearly all of the characters in the song share one attribute: they're not free. They are prisoners of judges, doctors, torturers, an entire secret police, and the worst part is they may have recruited its troops from their own hearts. If they are not free it is because they are prisoners of their own ignorance, their own vanity, their own compromises, their own cowardice. By the way they are sung, the saddest lines in the song echo with all that one man used to be, could have been, will never be again: 'You would not think, to look at him, but he was famous, lonnnnnnng ago,' the word long stretched out just as long as it will go, all the way back to the time when the Einstein the man was then wouldn't even recognize the Einstein he is now."

Dylan seems to believe that if the people of Desolation Row continue to grow, the world will become entirely the same, full of sad, lonely losers. This is Dylan's pessimistic vision of the future; where everyone, even Bette Davis, Cinderella, Casanova, and Albert Einstein, is tragic and pained, living in a scrap of a town.

The lyrics to the song are often thought to refer to the Holocaust and that "Desolation Row" is a concentration camp. There are many references to Biblical characters, all of them from the Old Testament. There are also many references to notable Jews and anti-Semites. Also, the song seems to indicate that Desolation Row is a place that people want to escape to, and that people want to avoid simultaneously. Perhaps this is due to the perspective of that particular person. Those who are not in the camp do not want to go there, and those ready to be killed wish they could escape back into the waiting station known as Desolation Row.

The lyrics to "Desolation Row" are delivered in a laconic tone and sound like a description of a surrealist or symbolist painting or a film by Federico Fellini. The place described is having abnormal morality, where they sell "postcards of the hanging", and the social status quo is not followed: "beauty parlor (is) filled with sailors" and the "blind commissioner", who has "one hand tied to the tight-rope walker" while he masturbates with "the other (hand) in his pants". All these strange characters "need somewhere to go" and the place turns out to be Desolation Row.

The second verse concerns Cinderella and Romeo, who has apparently wants to woo Cinderella; she "seems so easy". However, due to him being in "the wrong place",(Desolation Row), he is unable to woo her. Cinderella is left "sweeping up/on Desolation Row" after the ambulances leave. Perhaps Romeo and Cinderella are in Desolation Row because they do not fit into their assigned roles. Cinderella is perhaps a Nazi worker who is supposed to fall in love with a prince, and Romeo is meant to love Juliet.

The next verse mentions Cain, Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Good Samaritan as being inhabitants of Desolation Row. At night, the sky is becoming cloudy and threatening a storm ("the moon is almost hidden/the stars are beginning to hide") and everybody, except for Cain, Abel (two brothers arguing) and the Hunchback (someone who is physically or mentally handicapped, everyone is either making love are "expecting rain" (expecting their death). Note: "Everybody is making love/Or else expecting rain" is a popular, oft-quoted line from this song), all except for the Good Samaritan, who is obliviously getting ready for a show at a carnival. That he is a carnie is perhaps notable, implying that possessing the quality of goodness (as the Good Samaritan does) makes one a carnival freak.

The fourth verse is about "Ophelia" (see Hamlet), who does not live on Desolation Row, though she does spend "her time peeking" into it. She does not live there because she has bought into the dominant status quo. As a result of her pending doom, Ophelia is already an "old maid" "on her twenty-second birthday." She spends her day steeped in her "profession" which is her religion. She believes that God will save her people as "her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow". It is worth noting that Ophelia, in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, commits suicide.

The next verse describes a washed-up Albert Einstein (who is "disguised as Robin Hood"). Einstein was not always taken seriously in his time, and he was a noted iconoclast, and a Jew from Germany, so his presence on Desolation Row is not surprising. He is not an illustrious physicist, though, but a bum who sniffs drainpipes and bums cigarettes off strangers as he recites the alphabet (e = mc squared). Things used to be different for Einstein, though, as he used to be famous "for playing the electric violin/on Desolation Row". (This evokes the famous black and white picture of the middle-aged Einstein playing his violin). Another interpretation has this as Dylan himself, a Jewish intellectual in the costume of an outlaw ("Einstein disguised as Robin Hood") playing the "electric violin" at Newport.


The next verse possibly refers to Josef Mengele, who performed experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz. The nurse keeps "the cards that read 'Have mercy on his soul'", indicating that he is conflicted yet feels that mercy should be extended towards him.

The seventh verse seems to be about a concentration camp worker (Casanova) who has to be spoonfed with confidence in order for him to do his job. The skinny girls refer to those on Desolation Row who are observing Casanova.

The eighth verse focuses on the actual death chamber which is slightly off of Desolation Row. The agents (Schutzstaffel), and the "superhuman crew" round up all of the prisoners and take them to the "factory". There they are executed while insurance men make sure that "no one is escaping to Desolation Row".

The ninth verse focuses on life far from Desolation Row where the modernist poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are arguing and the RMS Titanic sails from Britain to the United States. Nobody has to think (or "sink" according to one variation of the song) too much about Desolation Row.

The final verse is separated by a harmonica solo, thematically dividing it from the rest of the song. Dylan has received an apparently banal letter from an acquaintance or relative. He scornfully asks if it is some kind of joke to be talking about mundane trivialities in a world gone mad. Something akin to Nero fiddling while Rome burns. His contempt for the complacency and banality of middle America of the 1960's is obvious when he says "All these people that you mention, yes I know them, they're all quite lame. I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name."

Ultimately, Dylan identifies with Desolation Row as the place in which dwells. He does not want to hear what you have to say unless you have managed to cut through the complacency to see the world in a more realistic light. "Right now, I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no. Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row." It is apparently inhabited by freaks, misfits and victims, yet like Joseph Heller's hero Yossarian in Catch 22, when the whole world is insane, and you are the only sane person left, they will simply declare you to be the insane one, and by consensus so you are. The inhabitants of Desolation Row might very well have included Yossarian.

The lyrical power of Desolation Row lies in its summing up of the insanity of the Cold War and its foundation of Multually Assured Destruction (MAD), while drawing heavily on historical parallels that perhaps suggest that if America does not learn from the lessons of history, it will be doomed to repeat them. Empires rise and fall, the folly of man will see to that.

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Cultural references

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External links

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