Mick Hartley

At American Songwriter Evan Schlansky's writing about his 30 Greatest Bob Dylan songs. There's a list here, though I've only looked at one or two of them, via Expecting Rain. So, we're up to #6, and it's Desolation Row. 

What he says is unremarkable, though he does include some of Dylan's interview with Bob Flanagan, which I posted a couple of weeks back, as relevant to the song:

BF: Does that mean you create outsider art? Do you
think of yourself as a cult figure?

BD: A cult figure, that's got religious connotations. It
sounds cliquish and clannish. People have different emotional levels. Especially
when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of
as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the
traveling performers passing through. The side show performers – bluegrass
singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss
Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and
the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the
blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these
people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human
rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the
tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the
giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make
sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was.
At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn't change.

I think he's right: all that stuff about side show performers does bring Desolation Row inevitably to mind. [Had Dylan watched Tod Browning's Freaks, I wonder?]

Then he links to this Australian website, which, apparently, "breaks down the meanings behind each verse, offering some hard-thought interpretations". Some of these interpretations are excerpted. This, unfortunately, is where I'd differ. It's not unhelpful, but seems to me to be wrong-headed in so many ways.

In Desolation Row, Dylan is warning people that society is heading for destruction, an apocalype, if it continues in its then direction.

Is he? This comes in an introduction which has all the familiar stuff about the young iconoclast who "challenged the conventional values of the day"; who was seen as "a leader of the civil rights movement", as well as a "dangerous subversive who was trying to corrupt the youth of America with his deviate ideas", and so on and so forth. But the song isn't so much some kind of condemnation of contemporary consumerist capitalist Amerika as a kind of Beat response to Eliot's Waste Land, a wry take on a world where the cultural leaders are writing their books and pamphlets from their libraries, while outside, in Desolation Row, the side show performers - bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers – represent the real, the true, the grit and dust of lives being lived. "The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was."

The main part of the song analysis has interpretations placed alongside the lyrics. I suppose it's inevitable when you get these kind of "help notes" but really, the detailed explanations seem to me to squeeze all the life out of the song. I could pick any verse, but let's just take this:

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.

Here's the commentary:

The Roman Emperor Nero and the privileged group that surrounded him the way Dylan saw America being run by right-wing imperialists. Pursuing their indulgences while all around the empire burned with social injustice.

 RMS Titanic is a potent symbol of how suddenly the mighty can be struck down. It was claimed to be unsinkable, and yet it sank on it’s maiden voyage. Such hubris. The apparent might and power of America at the time might also be hubris.

The poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were both thought to hold anti-Semitic, pro-fascist views, based on various public statements at the time. For example, during a lecture at the University of Virginia, a few weeks after Hitler came to power, Eliot is reported to have said that in a well-ordered society “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” In similar vein, Ezra Pound was known to have done pro-fascist radio broadcasts from Italy. 

Meanwhile, true left-wing performers like Harry Belafonte, with whom Dylan was acquainted, considered the pretentions of Pound and Eliot ridiculous.

 Fishermen’s flowers may be a reference to honest artists offering their works to the world. The sea may be a metaphor of the working class, and mermaids are committed members of the social justice movement.

Well yes, the Titanic's a potent-enough symbol: but is this really about America being run by right-wing imperialists, and a critique of Eliot's and Pound's anti-semitism? Isn't it rather just a dig at the pretensions of the cultural elite, "fighting in the captain's tower", while the people on the road, the street people, the calypso singers, laugh at them? There's just too much interpretative effort there. Yes, Harry Belafonte did some calypso covers, but does that mean it has to be about him in particular? And "mermaids are committed members of the social justice movement"? Eh?

For me it's that same old Dylan theme: the side show performers, the circus freaks, the hobos, the blues singers. They're not some amusing diversion: they're the rawness of life itself. 

That was, I think, what Dylan picked up from the Beats, from Jack Kerouac and his Desolation Angels: the poetry of the open road, of the vast American spaces and the men and women who lived the hard lives chronicled by Woody Guthrie. It was a whole new specifically American sensibility which may have owed something to the Romantics, but owed more to the blues, and to bluegrass, and to folk music – to the side show performers. It was always Dylan's inspiration, and, with his Theme Time Radio show, he's done a pretty good job of chronicling it too. Irresistible to the post-war generation here in the UK, via rock music and soul music and jazz it's pretty much conquered the world now, however much it may have been transformed on the way.

It's very much a young man's song, I think, Desolation Row. I don't know how much of it Dylan would still be happy with. As far as I know it's not a song he performs nowadays, but that may be more because of its length. In an interview in 2001 he claimed, helpfully, that it's "a minstrel song through and through. I saw some ragtag minstrel show in blackface at the carnivals when I was growing up, and it had an effect on me, just as much as seeing the lady with four legs." Probably as good an interpretation as any other.