On Bob Dylan

Why "Desolation Row" and "Like A Rolling Stone" Are and Are Not Protest Songs

With all the excitement about the new Bob Dylan movie, here are a few remarks on, well, Bob Dylan. (Note: I draw here on a chapter in my 2024 book, How To Become Famous, which has plenty of footnotes.)

In 1957, Jack Kerouac wrote a sentence that, for a time, was placed on posters in high schools and colleges all across the United States: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars . . ."

Over forty years later, Bob Dylan quoted that passage nearly verbatim in an interview, when speaking of his time in Greenwich Village:

“I fell into that atmosphere of everything Kerouac was saying about the world being completely mad, and the only people for him that were interesting were the mad people, ‘the mad ones, the ones who [were] mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn,’ all of those mad ones, and I felt like I fit right into that bunch.”

Kerouac’s sentence opposes people who yawn and say commonplace things to those who are “desirous of everything at the same time” and “burn burn burn.”

Here is something that Bob Dylan said in an interview with Nat Hentoff:

“There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. It's all those paranoid people who think that someone's going to come and take away their toilet paper - they're going to die. Songs like "Which Side Are You On?" and "I Love You, Porgy" - they're not folk-music songs; they're political songs. They're already dead.”

Note the distinction here. On the one hand, we find “songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese.” Those songs revolve around “vegetables and death” (and so they are alive). On the other hand, we find “political songs.” Traditional music is immortal. Political songs are written by people who are afraid that someone is going to take away their toilet paper. (Pause over that.) They’re already dead. Dylan said, “museums are vulgar. They’re all against sex.”

Consider this exchange:

Interviewer: Are you in love at the moment?
Dylan: I’m always in love.

By its very nature, being in love is a state of dishabituation; your nerve endings are on fire. In an interview, Dylan once said, “I don’t consider myself happy and I don’t consider myself unhappy. I’ve just never thought of life in terms of happiness and unhappiness. It just never occurred to me.” From Maggie’s Farm: “They sing while they slave/And they just get bored.”

Turn in this light to Desolation Row, and in particular to the last stanza, which is the big reveal, the clue to all that comes before. Dylan refers to a letter he received yesterday, “about the time the door knob broke.” He adds: “When you asked how I was doing/Was that some kind of joke?” He refers to people that the same “you” mentioned, who he sees as “quite lame,” which meant that he “had to rearrange their faces/And give them all another name.” He asks for “no more letters” unless they are mailed “from Desolation Row.”

What is this stanza about?