Dylan sang the song in public a little more than three weeks after recording it—two days before the song and the album it sealed were to be released—on August 28, at Forest Hills in New York. It was his first show since the Newport Folk Festival. For the opening half of the concert he would appear solo, with his acoustic guitar; then he would come back with a band and, as he knew, the trouble would start. People were primed, for and against; in fact, it would be the meanest, most outraged crowd Dylan would ever face in the United States. But for the time being, listening to familiar songs played in a familiar way, those in the crowd who have come to protest the former protest singer are reassured—at the least, they have dropped their guard of suspicion.
Dylan’s tone for the new song is cool, and his style of emphasis, the way he comes down on this word or that, is hilarious. The whole performance is entrancing, as if full of confidence that everyone will get the joke. No one present has heard the song before, but the crowd is with it instantly, laughing with wonderful good humor at every other line, cracking up completely at the words “Everyone is either making love, or else expecting rain,” as if “expecting rain” is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. The feeling is that of liberation, of people absolutely at home in their own skins; there’s also a sense of privilege. It’s a sense of people being in the right place—here, where the tribune of a new culture is speaking a secret language that, for the moment, needs no translators—at the right time—now, when the world seems to be changing and you can feel yourself one step ahead, already looking back.
“Did you ever have the standard boyhood dream of growing up to be president?” Nat Hentoff asked Dylan for
Playboy.
“No,” he said. “When I was a boy, Harry Truman was president; who’d want to be Harry Truman?” “Well,” Hentoff said, “let’s suppose you were president. What would you accomplish during your first thousand days”—a weird slip, referring not to Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days, the traditional standard for presidential accomplishment, but to the thousand days of John F. Kennedy, assassinated barely two years before—as if President Dylan might have more time. “Well,” Dylan said, “just for laughs, since you insist, the first thing I’d do is probably move the White House. Instead of being in Texas”—not a slip at all, but Dylan’s way of saying what he thought of Kennedy’s replacement, President Lyndon B. Johnson—“it’d be on the East Side in New York. McGeorge Bundy would definitely have to change his name, and General McNamara would be forced to wear a coonskin cap and shades. I would immediately rewrite ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and little schoolchildren, instead of memorizing ‘America the Beautiful,’ would have to memorize ‘Desolation Row.’”
As Dylan made his way back and forth across the country, all through the fall of 1965 “Desolation Row” remained a comedy, or people continued to hear it that way, to hear it as something to see from a distance, as if they were not in it. But in the spring of 1966, when the tour reached England and the furor over Dylan’s entry into the pop arena reached a pitch of hatred beyond anything Dylan had seen in his own country, the number changed.
On May 10, in Bristol, Dylan seems to be seeking the smile in the melody, the song a boat to sail. “Puts her hands in her back pockets / Bette Davis style”—when he sings those lines it’s as if the whole story is a regret, a tale of sorrow, its only subject all that has been lost. On May 27, at the Royal Albert Hall—“Desolation Row” would not be sung again for eight years, until Dylan’s barnstorming comeback tour of 1974, and then only once—the performance is a house of mirrors, now sardonic, now funny, now not so funny.
The characters in the song are dramatized; they seem physically present, because for the first time, perhaps, they are: the people in the audience are in the song, and there is no obvious way out. The song is presented as a vision, as gnosis, as secret knowledge—as something that might be accessible to those who are listening, and might not be.
In Manchester, ten days before, the song perhaps found its true body; the performance is emotionally complete in a way that others are not. At first Dylan clips his words, cutting himself off from them, putting himself at a distance from the action, making himself as much an observer as anyone in the crowd. But as the song goes on, even as the actual cadence holds, the song seems to go into slow motion. There is a flatness, a lack of dramatic effect, which, given the stories being told—Cinderella making her own Desolation Row, Casanova punished for visiting it, Ophelia not being allowed in—is itself dramatic. This is the feeling: someone is telling a very old story, or, more closely, acting out a ritual, a mystery everyone knows and no one has ever solved. The song ceases to be Bob Dylan’s at all; in tone, manner, diction, in his lack of fear, he could be singing “Barbara Allen.”
Listening to “Desolation Row” when it appeared—drawn toward its scrap heap of Western civilization—you could almost hear an answer-record to Richard Huelsenbeck’s 1920 memoir
En Avant Dada,
where he raised the serious question, “What is German culture?” and replied peremptorily, with a colon in a parenthesis, as if the answer was too plain to really bother with: “(Answer: Shit).” Huelsenbeck and the rest of the dadaists were trying to get the world to look in the same mirror James Ensor had raised almost thirty years before they set up their Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The dadaists’ wordless poems and crazy dances, their denunciations of whoever paid to hear them, were their answer-record to
Christ’s Entry into Brussels.
Like them, Dylan is saying in “Desolation Row” that culture is decay at best, betrayal at worst. As his characters move through the song he follows them, only to learn that almost no one keeps what they have, their essential humanity, their
“special gift”—to learn that almost everyone sells a birthright for a mess of pottage. So that scrap heap gives off a sickening but intoxicating smell of missed chances, of folly, error, narcissism, sin. In this atmosphere—and the song truly does make its own atmosphere, its own weather—everything seems worthless. “Desolation Row”: the words seem merely to give the scrap heap a name. But as a friend said with shock after listening to the song twenty times in a row, that wasn’t it at all: “He likes it on Desolation Row!”
Al Kooper played organ and piano with Dylan on
Highway 61 Revisited,
at Forest Hills and at the Hollywood Bowl; Desolation Row, he says in a tossed-off aside in
Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards,
his autobiography, is Eighth Avenue in New York City. At the time it was the kind of place where they tell you to walk down the middle of the street if you want to be safe at night; you’re better off with the drivers who don’t see you than with the people on the sidewalk who do. You get a picture of life from the inside of Desolation Row, a map of it, in “Visions of Johanna,” released in May 1966 on Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde,
though he had been performing the song, as “Seems Like a Freeze-Out,” since the previous fall. You could very well be in an apartment on Eighth Avenue, looking out the window.
The song makes a dank room where a draft blows balls of dust across the floor. In the corners some people are having sex; others are shooting up or nodding out. It’s the perfect bohemian utopia, a place of withdrawal, isolation, and gloom. It’s fourth-hand Poe, third-hand Baudelaire, handed down by the countless people who’ve bought into the myth of the artist who cannot be understood, the visionary whom society must exile for its own protection—must exile within itself, so that his or her humiliation is complete, is final, but that’s the danger. That’s the one card left to the artist, and with that card the artist can change the game. The artist will return society’s vitriol with mockery and scorn of his or her own. The difference is that while society speaks only in shibboleths and clichés—as a banner hoisted up in
Christ’s Entry into Brussels
reads, “The Standard Fanfares Are Always Appropriate”—the
artist invents a new language, to speak as strangely, with such power. That’s the idea.
The dank room where this magic is made is its own cliché, of course, but is there anywhere else you’d rather be? Nowhere else the singer in “Desolation Row” would rather be—or Cinderella, Casanova, Einstein back when he still played the electric violin, or the Good Samaritan, who in
Christ’s Entry into Brussels
is just part of the crowd. They stick their heads out the window to call to those few they might judge worthy of joining them, laughing at the crowds rushing through the street, at all those who don’t even know enough to beg to be let in. This voice in “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” is Jack Kerouac’s voice, his narration for Robert Frank and Albert Leslie’s 1960 life-among-the-beatniks movie
Pull My Daisy.
“Look at all those cars out there,” he says. “Nothing out there but a million screaming ninety-year-old men being run over by gasoline trucks. So throw a match on it.” From inside the room in “Visions of Johanna,” that’s the feeling, except that there’s also a kind of lassitude that suggests you could throw matches all day and nothing would catch fire.
From the mid-1880s through the rest of the nineteenth century, James Ensor went much farther than Bob Dylan did in 1965, or in the years since; he also lived much less of a life. As a prophet, he issued his prophesies and let the world suffer them. Ensor’s 1891
Skeletons Fighting Over a Herring
contains not only the meanness of the new petit bourgeois but the Battle of the Somme; as Luc Sante has written, this horrible picture, of “two skeletons in hussars’ uniforms each tugging with its teeth at the end of a kippered herring, is an eloquently encapsulated summary of his century and prediction of the one to come.” Ensor’s 1880s Christ etchings—where, for
Cavalry,
the letters INRI over the middle cross are replaced by ENSOR—culminate with
Christ in Agony,
on the cross, his flesh being eaten by devils, apes, people. The tangles of the picture, the unnatural postures its protagonists assume as they twist in the air, call up fifteenth-century Central European woodcuts of the Antichrist, held in the air by demons, to prove that he
can fly, that he is God. The 1888 etching
Combat of Demons
is an explosion of scatology, sadism, and terror, as crowded and as unstable as one of Sue Williams’s contemporary orgy pictures: no matter what detail you focus on—the sword plunged into the anus, the crab with the human face, the vomiting bat—there is something worse happening right next to it. George Grosz’s most powerful painting, the 1918
Funeral Procession,
with Berlin a cauldron of corruption lit by reds that look black and blacks that look red, is only a confirmation of Ensor’s 1896 prophecy
Death Pursuing the People,
where a giant skeleton wields his scythe from the rooftops as the fleeing crowds seem to wave in the streets like wheat.
There is no piety in these pictures, as there is none in
Christ’s Entry into Brussels,
and there is something beyond blasphemy. Ensor was anticlerical, his biographers will tell you, but like many who hated the church he loved the idea of Jesus: pure, innocent, truthful, the first martyr and the last. Some even say that
Christ’s Entry into Brussels
was made not to condemn, but to call the wicked to the path of righteousness. But Ensor’s Christ pictures, where before he puts his name on the cross he substitutes his face for the Savior’s, do not open the path of righteousness; they make their own kind of black mass, just like Ensor’s quiet, unassuming 1885 painting
Scandalized Masks.
A man sits in a room at a desk, a bottle before him, hat on his head and a pig-snout mask on his face. A woman stands in the doorway, holding a staff, a pointed hat on her head, black glasses over her eyes. Her nose is huge and bulbous, her chin sticks out like a growth; you can’t tell if she’s wearing a mask or if you’re looking at her real features. Yes, they’re going to Mardi Gras—but at the same time, in this sadistically prosaic scene, you know something unspeakable is going to happen as soon as the two leave the room. You know that the carnival they’re going to is not in the public streets but on Desolation Row, that place where the old heretics, the witches, the ancestors of the bohemians of the modern world perform their ceremonies.
Ensor may have seen his own rejection in Christ’s, or wished for one to sanctify the other, but his work gives its own testimony,
which is not all that different than testimony cited by Wilhelm Fränger in his study
The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch:
testimony given by one Konrad Kannler, who in 1351, in a court of heresies, declared himself to be not only “the Brother of Christ,” and “The New Adam,” but also the “Anti-Christ in a good sense,” and, into the bargain, felt himself called, in his capacity as “the image of the innocent Lamb,” to be the supreme judge at the Last Judgment.
Luckily for Bob Dylan, he had one foot in the heretic’s chamber, the bohemian’s garret, the privileged space of Desolation Row, but as a pop musician, which, in 1965 he had so glamorously become, his other foot was in the street, where he could not pretend he was all that different from anyone else. As time moved on, then, “Desolation Row” became more and more a picture, fixed in time, a story that could be heard as if for the first time in its original voice. It also became a place that could not really be revisited, unlike the highway for which the album that carries “Desolation Row” is named. When Dylan performed the song on MTV in 1995, for his
Unplugged
show, with his inspired 1990s band, the song was not a thing in itself, but a reference to something else.
By then, as Bob Dylan would make clear in 1997, when he closed his album
Time Out of Mind
with the long, meandering “Highlands,” the borders between Desolation Row and the outside world had long since collapsed. Dylan’s highlands, like the fields of his fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald’s old American republic, recede as they are pursued, so they stay in the air as an image of the good: an image, the singer says as he walks through a world where he can hardly bring himself to speak, where no one hears him if he does, that he can bring down into his mind if he must. If he does that, though, it will no longer hang in the air, as a picture of the world as it ought to be, so he leaves it there.