Bob Dylan performed the song “Highway 61 Revisited” with the Band on August 31, 1969, during the Isle of Wight Festival. Since then, he has performed it nearly two thousand times.
Covers
The most famous cover of “Highway 61 Revisited” was by Johnny Winter (Second Winter, 1969). There are other versions by Terry Reid (The Hand Don’t Fit the Glove, 1985), PJ Harvey (Jungle Queen, 1996), Pat Travers (P.T. Power Trio, 2003), Billy Joel (My Lives, 2005), as well as a live version by Bruce Springsteen with Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
In 1963, Dylan wrote and recorded “Walls of Red Wing” (The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3). Did you know that Highway 61 goes through Red Wing, the town where the reform school that is the subject of this song is located?
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Bob Dylan / 5:12
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Mike Bloomfield: guitar
Al Kooper: electric piano
Paul Griffin (or Frank Owens?): piano
Harvey Brooks: bass
Bobby Gregg: drums, tambourine
Bruce Langhorne: maracas
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: August 2, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Larry Keyes
Genesis and Lyrics
In February 1966, Bob Dylan introduced this song at a concert in Melbourne, Australia, by saying, “This [song] is about a painter—down in Mexico City, who traveled from North Mexico up to Del Rio, Texas, all the time, his name’s Tom Thumb, and uh, right now he’s about 125 years old but he’s still going, and uh, everybody likes him a lot down there, he’s got lots of friends, and uh, this is when he was going through his BLUE period, of painting, and uh, he’s made COUNTLESS amount of paintings, you couldn’t think of ’em all. This is his blue period painting I just dedicate this song to him, it’s called ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.’”55
With this song, Bob Dylan continues his journey beyond Highway 61. Now he is in Mexico at Ciudad Juarez, on the right bank of the Rio Bravo, just across from El Paso, Texas. Andy Gill wrote that this is “the kind of place Americans go to let their hair down and their morals slide.”24 The singer finds himself in Ciudad Juarez on Easter Sunday in the pouring rain. He encounters whores, corrupt police officers, and characters named “Saint Annie” and “sweet Melinda.” He also experiments with drugs and alcohol before heading back to New York City.
The lyrics have some reference to the novel Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry and to the film Touch of Evil (1958) by Orson Welles. The song has the same black and murky atmosphere. It also integrates some literary references to Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Murders in the Rue Morgue and to Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel Desolation Angels, which deals with loneliness and madness and from which the line “Up on Housing Project Hill” is drawn. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is also powerfully influenced by Arthur Rimbaud’s “My Bohemian Life”: “My only pair of trousers had a big hole. / Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes / As I went along. My inn was at the Big Dipper. / My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound.” A century later, Rimbaud’s “Tom Thumb in a daze” became Dylan’s “Tom Thumb’s blues.”
Production
Contrary to what the title suggests, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is not a blues song, but Latin blues with a Mexican flavor. To reinforce this impression, maracas are played by Bruce Langhorne in a very “Mariachi” style. The harmony, based on three chords, allows Dylan to create a gap between the darkness of the text and the nostalgic tone of the melody. He plays his Fender Stratocaster and is discreetly, but still subtly and effectively, backed by Mike Bloomfield on his Telecaster. The song is accompanied by keyboards with Al Kooper at the electric piano (Wurlitzer and Hohner Pianet) and Paul Griffin playing honky-tonk piano. Harvey Brooks plays bass and Bobby Gregg is on drums. The band needed sixteen takes, with the last take used for the master.
Bob Dylan performed this song live for the first time on August 28, 1965, at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York. Two live versions were recorded. The first was at a concert in Liverpool on May 14, 1966, featuring Dylan backed by the Band. It was released as the B-side of the single “I Want You” in 1966. The second live version was recorded at a concert in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966, and released on The Bootleg Series Volume 4 (1998). Mojo magazine listed “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as number 13 of the best songs by Bob Dylan.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
An alternate version of this song on The Bootleg Series Volume 7 (2005), probably has Sam Lay on drums instead of Bobby Gregg.
Desolation Row
Bob Dylan / 11:20
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Charlie McCoy: guitar
Russ Savakus: bass (?)
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: August 4, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston
Sound Engineers: Frank Laico and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
In 1969, Dylan told Jann Wenner that he wrote “Desolation Row” in the back seat of a New York taxi. This surrealistic and horrific satire drew its name from the Jack Kerouac novel Desolation Angels, which had already been referred to in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Al Kooper believed this “alley of desolation” was a section of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, “an area infested with whore houses, sleazy bars and porno supermarkets totally beyond renovation or redemption…”45 In any case, Bob Dylan casts a raw light on a decomposing world that went way beyond New York City. This world was Sodom and Gomorrah carried over into the twentieth century. One journalist asked the songwriter where Desolation Row was located and he replied, “Oh, that’s some place in Mexico, it’s across the border. It’s noted for its Coke factory…”20
This trip through the apocalypse, which Robert Shelton compared to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” was divided into ten sketches peopled with real or fictitious characters. The first verse, in which “They’re selling postcards of the hanging…,” was taken from a real event that took place in Duluth (where Dylan was born) in June 1920: the inhabitants of the city lynched seven black men working for an itinerant circus who were accused of raping a white woman and forcing her husband to watch. In Dylan’s version, Cinderella enters, sweeping the desolation alley; Cain and Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame, who didn’t have the right to be loved; the Shakespearean heroine Ophelia, who at her twenty-second birthday “already is an old maid”; then there was “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood…,” and “They’re spoonfeeding Casanova,” and finally, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who were aboard the Titanic, “Fighting in the captain’s tower.” These characters “are laughable, but our smiles freeze,” to quote the appropriate comment of Robert Shelton.7
Mark Polizzotti wrote, “‘Desolation Row’ might be considered the ultimate cowboy song, the ‘Home on the Range’ of the frightening territory that was mid-sixties America, a distillation of all the frontier ballads, cowpoke’s laments, tales of murder and gamblers on the run that help frame the most enduring of all our national myths.”45 Behind the typically American Western movie genre, Bob Dylan used untouchable irony as he found equally to blame the industrialists who built assembly lines and the critics who replied with ridiculously simplistic slogans.
Production
This long journey in the middle of nowhere was all the more captivating because both guitars were lively and close to the Appalachian tradition and created a remarkable contrast with this ultimate ode to despair. A first version was produced on Friday, July 30, with the whole group. Unfortunately, there remains no official record of this session. Tony Glover, who attended the recording, stated that Dylan’s guitar was out of tune
and that he complained afterward because he was not notified. After spending the weekend fine-tuning his songs, he joined the musicians in the studio once again on Monday, August 2. This session was productive, as they recorded as many as thirty-seven takes of four songs. At the end of the session, they tackled “Desolation Row.” Bob decided to try it differently, with bare arrangements. He surrounded himself with only Al Kooper on electric lead guitar and Harvey Brooks on bass, while he played acoustic. Five takes were recorded. One of them was found in The Bootleg Series Volume 7 (2005). Here, Dylan sang, “They’re spoonfeeding Casanova / The boiled guts of birds” instead of “They’re spoonfeeding Casanova / To get him to feel more assured.”
Musically, this version expressed serenity, but lacked conviction. Dylan, who now thought he had the entire album ready to go, asked that a tape be recorded for him so he could assess the results. But upon listening to it, he was not satisfied with “Desolation Row.” He wanted to redo it. So Bob Johnston assumed the responsibility of reserving a new studio date. He invited Charlie McCoy to the sessions because he admired the extraordinary Nashville musician. He happened to be in New York for the World’s Fair. Bob Johnston said, “I thought Charlie McCoy was one of the major talents of the world, but nobody knew it.” Dylan proposed he participate in the final session scheduled for August 4. “They just told me to go out and pick up a guitar and play what I felt like playing. I finished and I went in and asked Dylan if it suited him. And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine’… We just did one song. The only one I played was eleven minutes long… We just did two takes and… [I] left.”45
It was odd that McCoy only mentioned two takes, since seven were recorded on that day. Who was playing on the five others? We don’t know. The studio sheets refer to two false starts, one interrupted take, and two complete takes. Whatever happened, the Nashville guitar player performed a great Spanish-style improvisation on acoustic steel guitar. The playing was inspired and alternated solos and rhythm parts during the harmonica parts. Some people thought Bruce Langhorne played guitar, but his phrasing was totally different. It was McCoy who played.
The second musician was most likely bass player Russ Savakus. Although Mike Bloomfield’s presence was never confirmed in this song, he said he felt nervous at the beginning of the session because it was supposedly the first time he played an electric bass (Clinton Heylin stated that Bloomfield performed on “Like a Rolling Stone”). This great musician had crossed the path of Chet Baker and some big names of the folk scene, such as Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. As for Dylan, he accompanied himself on his Gibson Nick Lucas and repeated constantly the same three chords during the eleven minutes. Except for two harmonica parts in E, he managed to sing the longest text he had ever written so far while maintaining remarkable intensity. “Songs shouldn’t seem long, y’know,” he said in 1965, “it just so happens that it looks that way on paper.”20 The final results came from the arrangements of the last two takes (6 and 7). But when you listen to it, it is hard to find the point where they join. Maybe it is at 0:24 before the word town in the line “The circus is in town.” “Desolation Row” was the only song on the record to end without a fade.
Bob Dylan sang “Desolation Row” onstage on August 28, 1965, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York. There are two live versions: the one from MTV Unplugged (1995) and the other from the Manchester concert on May 17, 1966 (on The Bootleg Series Volume 4).
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
With its 11:20 run time, Dylan wrote not only the longest song on the album, but was miles ahead of his contemporaries. Here are a few of the longest songs written by some of them in 1965: The Beatles, “Ticket to Ride” (3:10); The Rolling Stones, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (3:43); The Beach Boys, “Help Me, Rhonda” (3:08); Donovan, “The Ballad of Geraldine” (4:38); Paul Simon, “Kathy’s Song” (3:42). There is no comparison…
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
In the distance we can hear someone laughing in the very last second of the song. Is it Dylan?
Highway 61 Revisited Outtakes
“Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence” went back to the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on the organ. This rock song, which was dismissed during the final selection, is found on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3.
Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence
Bob Dylan / 3:54
Musicians: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar; Mike Bloomfield: guitar; Al Kooper: organ; Frank Owens: piano (?); Paul Griffin: piano (?); Harvey Brooks: bass (?); Joseph Macho Jr.: bass (?); Bobby Gregg: drums / Recording Studio: Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 15, 1965 / Producer: Tom Wilson / Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria / Set Box: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991 (CD 2) / Release Date: March 26, 1991
“Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence” was not so much a structured song as a riff built on a 12-bar blues song with rock ’n’ roll accents. The lyrics were improvised at the time of the recording, although Dylan used the idea of the doctor that he had already applied to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
This song was also known under two working titles: “Killing Me Alive” and “Over the Cliffs Part 1.” It was recorded in one take on January 13, 1965, with Bob on solo during the first session of his fifth LP, Bringing It All Back Home, then in six other takes on June 15, accompanied this time by his band. The last of these six takes was kept for The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence” was a joyful song; the musicians felt it, which gave it a very efficient groove. Bob provided rhythmic parts on his Stratocaster, while Mike Bloomfield’s provocative phrasing on his Telecaster raised the bar. The rest of the group also provided powerful support. Although it was considered for the B-side to the single “Like a Rolling Stone (“Gates of Eden” was used finally), “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence” was first and foremost a song for Dylan and his musicians to warm up to prepare for very long recording sessions. It was quite similar to “From a Buick 6,” which made Highway 61 Revisited.
Positively 4th Street
Bob Dylan / 3:53
SINGLE
RELEASE DATE
Positively 4th Street / From a Buick 6
September 7, 1965
(REFERENCE COLUMBIA 4-43346)
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar
Mike Bloomfield: guitar
Frank Owens: piano
Al Kooper: organ
Russ Savakus: bass
Bobby Gregg: drums
Bruce Langhorne: finger cymbals
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: July 29, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston
Sound Engineers: Frank Laico and Ted Brosnan
Genesis and Lyrics
Fourth Street is located in the middle of Greenwich Village. Bob Dylan rented an apartment there, at number 161 (second floor), a little less than a year after moving to New York. “You got a lotta nerve / To say you are my friend / When I was down / You just stood there grinning.” So who was hiding behind the “you” who caused all the narrator’s troubles? The title of the song left little doubt as to his or her location. The song, which was recorded four days after the scandal in Newport, targeted the entire folk movement and, more specifically, a few major figures: Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out! magazine who never accepted the explosive entrance of the creator of “Blowin’ in the Wind” into the world of rock; folksinger Tom Paxton, who in Sing Out! wrote an article entitled “Folk Rot”; even ex-girlfriends Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez. This explained the lines that went, “I used to be among the crowd / You’re in with.” But Dylan remained enigmatic and in 1985 denied having written this text against his critics: “I couldn’t write a song about something like that. I don’t write songs to critics.”54
“Positively 4th Street” was an example of the development of Dylan’s writing in the mid-sixties. The pe
rsonal attacks, for instance, in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (on The Times They Are A-Changin’) were now a thing of the past: from now on, the songwriter raises his speech to another level by using allusions. Because behind this diatribe against an intellectual movement that he found corrupt, Dylan expressed a universal resentment that he felt bitterly: friendship betrayed (by self-interest)—basically human baseness. This was the source of the grievances throughout the song: “You say I let you down / You know it’s not like that,” “You say you lost your faith / But that’s not where it’s at / You had no faith to lose / And you know it,” “And now I know you’re dissatisfied / With your position and your place.” Johnny Echols, the guitar player of the group Love, said, “I immediately connected with Dylan’s take on humanity and the nature of hypocrisy. He spoke to me. It’s a very New York song, but it made perfect sense out on the West Coast. After Dylan went over big you could feel the style of music changing everywhere…”56
In 1965, Dylan answered a journalist who asked him what was the meaning of this angry attack—was it to change the lives of the people involved or to point out their errors? “I want to needle them.”20
Production
Frank Laico, one of the album’s engineers, remembered the special way the songwriter recorded: “I would talk to the musicians themselves and see how they want things set up. Dylan wanted everyone close together—in fact, he wanted to be on the top of the drums, which was unique!”57
Bob Dylan All the Songs Page 27