Bob Dylan Song #67: Desolation Row

In my senior year of high school, I shared a class with my Dylan-loving friend (yes, the same friend whose life I apparently ruined in the "LARS" entry), a class on art history. This dovetailed nicely with both of our interests, as we were/are both huge art fans. I tend to run more towards modern art, in all its thought-provoking, silly, and occasionally frightening forms, while her tastes run more towards guys like Goya and Gauguin. At any rate, one of the assignments for that class was to tape an oral presentation matching a piece of art to a piece of music, in terms of how the tones and themes match up with each other. All I can remember about my choices was that I picked Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase No.2", but the song I'd paired with it escapes my memory. However, I still perfectly remember the choice that my friend made: Vincent Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters", and "Desolation Row".

I remember when she played me her presentation, and being blown away - I mean, they really fit well together. For those that have never seen "The Potato Eaters", it's one of Van Gogh's first major paintings and not what you'd expect from anybody who's seen "Starry Night" or one of his more famous paintings. Far from the kaleidoscopically bright works we all know and love, "The Potato Eaters" is a dour affair, all browns and greens, depicting a traditional Dutch scene of peasants having a meal of potatoes. Van Gogh stated that he used uglier models in order to keep things as realistic as possible, and he succeeded in spades - the lumpen and downcast faces hammer home the weariness Van Gogh wanted to convey. You can see flashes of his later genius in the painting, but in this case the emotion comes less of the famous thick-paint trademarks and more from the poignant subject matter.

This will probably sound hack and I'm cringing writing it, but here goes: you could probably see a scene like that in the world Dylan created in "Desolation Row". This is the only acoustic song on the album, and it's a damn good thing as well - not only would the song not have worked with the aesthetic the rest of the album created, but the two acoustics working together help set the mood for the song, a combination of dreamlike and world-weary. And that mood perfectly matches the mood of the painting, where the peasants sit by candlelight, their gnarled hands and dark eyes haunting us long after we're done looking at the tableau. And all throughout "Desolation Row" are images of heartache and woe, of once-famous violin players sniffing drainpipes, famous poets duking it out on the Titanic, and Hamlet's Ophelia romanticizing her own death (not to mention the song's title, itself - it's not like the song's called "Sunshine and Lollipops Row"). Dylan noted in 1965 that "Desolation Row" was somewhere in Mexico, which actually might make sense; it ties in to "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", like the first song is an episode from Desolation Row that sets us up for the grand finale.

Or maybe not. I'm a big fan of Alan Moore's Watchmen*, and to me there's something kind of perfect about the fact that a quote from "Desolation Row" (the "all the agents and the superhuman crew" - a perfect quote for the story) is used in the story, along with Nietzsche's famous "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you". I wouldn't go so far as to call "Desolation Row" an abyss; there's so much to the song and its staggering wordplay that it's kind of like gazing into a Bosch painting or "The Waste Land" (supposedly an influence on "Desolation Row", although "Desolation Row" stays within a traditional lyrical structure, instead of tearing it apart like "The Waste Land" does). But "Desolation Row", like so many great Dylan songs, acts like a Rorschach test for the prejudices and intellectual theories that the listener wants to bring to the table. You see literary influence? There it is. Or do you see a big jumble of words? That's just as correct. Maybe you see Dylan's reaction to what he perceived as a cultural wasteland, or a nightmarish carnival vision he had one day when he couldn't sleep. All of that is in there, waiting to be found by those that want to look.

And by that same token, the flipside of the Nietzsche quote is just as true. What you take out of "Desolation Row", one of Dylan's most challenging songs from a lyrical standpoint, says a lot about what you feel about Dylan, and specifically about his most famous period of songwriting. I take it for granted that anybody that's a fan of his will most likely enjoy the song, so we'll leave that aside. But you can still see different sides of Dylan in this song - the poet, the storyteller, the visionary, the drug addict, a man in love with the English language, a man bound by no sense of pretentiousness (I mean, honestly, you could make a case for calling this song "pretentious" if you so choose), or just a man who knows how to write a good tune. And it's not an accident which side you see in the song, because that's the side you want to see. Dylan was all of these things, and he made no bones about that fact, even when reporters or critics or his audience wanted to pigeonhole him into one little box to make things easier for them. Nothing in the real world is easy, and nothing that really matters can be defined in one solitary way. If that were true, the world would be a lot less interesting than it actually is.

When you get down to it, "Desolation Row"'s greatness lies both in those majestic lyrics, lyrics that have teased generations of listeners, and in the many faces that those lyrics wear. We all can agree that Dylan's disconnected phrases, strung together the way he did, create something full of sadness and gloom, and yet never fail to be stunning or emotionally powerful. And yet, for many of us, that is where the agreement ends. Many songs are cut-and-dried intellectually and emotionally, even the great ones, and there are precious few that can reflect in different ways when you take the time to shine some light on them. "Desolation Row", the finale to one of Dylan's very best albums, is one of those songs. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to it again - I'm just this close to figuring what all that moaning Romeo business is all about.

Thank you all so much for reading! We've come to the end of the line on Highway 61 Revisited, and in the next post I'll take the plunge into the wonderful and frightening world of Blonde on Blonde. Join me, won't you?