Happy Birthday Bob
I wanted to post a link to Desolation Row but Dylan’s YouTube presence is very minimal. But here is something to watch/listen to and here are the lyrics to Desolation Row – which work (though don’t ask me what they mean) even without the music.
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing
He’s getting ready for the show
He’s going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession’s her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They’re trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains
They’re getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get outa here if you don’t know”
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
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.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke ?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can’t read too good
Dont send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
Comments
| 24 May, 2011, 8:14 pm |
Unfortunately the line about selling postcards of the hanging is not a product of Dylan’s wild imagination. Producing and selling postcards of lynchings in the US was a common practice in the early part of the 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_Duluth_lynchings#Popular_culture
| 28 May, 2011, 6:37 pm |
@ Gene
The Nazis also distributed postcards of Jews – and others, usually Russian and Ukrainian civilians – being hung, shot, thrown into mass graves, etc, to the Wehrmacht as propaganda, not so early in the 20th century.
| 29 May, 2011, 8:34 am |
I hadn’t really thought about the historical/political aspects of the song – more on the way he brings both real and fictional figures into this kind of strange phantasmagoria – it reminds me of other moments in poetry where different writers are brought together in a dream landscape or building – like Chaucer’s House of Fame or (something I’ve just been reading) Michele Roberts’ Mrs Noah – The Waste Land too. I particularly like the bit about Pound and Eliot. I think of Desolation Row as a kind of textual limbo – and the lines:
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
remind me of Eliot’s account of the ‘familiar compound ghost’ in the Four Quartets.
(Possibly this says more about me than it does about Dylan or Desolation Row though!)
| 29 May, 2011, 10:36 pm |
Thanks Gene for that link. It is good that Duluth is has built a public memorial to the three victims of that horrible lynching. Important to remember that this happened in a northern state that has a tradition for being liberal as far as blacks were concerned.
The first four lines of the next to last verse of “Desolution Row” was printed at the end of the first chapter of “Watchmen”
| 31 May, 2011, 6:53 pm |
The song is about hypocrisy! It could easily be about life today in Camden with the clowns in housing with their new computers!The lyrics really only come to life when matched with Dylan’s sneering vocals. one live version of this song is superlative. Some would say they need to hang lots of Blacks in the new South Africa where rape is so commonplace. If only life was so simple for you lot in the moral maze. The US. is one of the few countries that has brought the near impossibility of universal justice to everyone. Even rich leftist liberals can be arrested in the USA. unlike in the UK. and France.
| 31 May, 2011, 11:22 pm |
@ Abu Jester
Quite right. Kissinger was not only shown up to be the charlatan on foreign policy issues he is, he was prosecuted for war crimes over Laos, and his reputation as a respectable academic ruined.
‘Cept it wasn’t.
Wealthy former NFL star and actor, O J Simpsonm, was sucessfully prosecuted and sentenced for the murder of his wife, or which he was clearly guilty.
Cept he wasn’t.
Mega-rich rock Star, Michael Jackson, was sucessfully prosecuted for abusing young boys.
‘Cept he wasn’t.
Seems William Ansinger, white plantation owner, was sucessfully, and rightly, tried and sentenced for quite clearly murdering black serving-maid, Hattie Carroll.
‘Cept he wasn’t.
Hmm, seems ‘universal justice’ still has a way to go in the USA.
| 1 June, 2011, 6:57 pm |
Hmmm..
The first four lines of the next to last verse of “Desolution Row” was printed at the end of the first chapter of “Watchmen”
Important to remember that this happened in a northern state that has a tradition for being liberal as far as blacks were concerned.
Thanks…
| 19 August, 2011, 10:13 am |
@m lai, et al
you crazy gringos! I repeat the lyrics do not have much or even any impact without the Dylans vocals! You really need taken to a black area anywhere in Africa where the mobs chase the thieves or even adulterers and beat them en masse. The mob ignores white bystanders! I still have the sound of a baton on a kidney in my brain from last year in Mozambique. How do I live with this, well it is like seeing a group of chimps eating and chasing lesser monkeys!
The thing is the liberals do not make catchy songs and tunes about blackness in the heart of darkness?
| 9 October, 2011, 11:35 pm |
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors,
the circus is in town.
Some classic surrealist picture making, a flow of rather meaningless scenes with recognizable names.
I find it amusing that some folks on this forum have taken this song to be a protest of hangings. When the use of hangings is as important as the juxtaposition of sailors and a beauty parlor.
Dylan was a master of saying nothing, yet allowing people to read whatever message they liked into his lyrics. Desolation row is but another example of his mastery. He was a great poet, who left enough holes for people to invent their own fantasies.
If somebody would like to read the lyrics of a Dylan song that actually makes a political statement they should take a peek at Neighborhood Bully an unabashedly pro-Israel tune.
| 29 December, 2011, 7:36 pm |
How do I live with this, well it is like seeing a group of chimps eating and chasing lesser monkeys!
The thing is the liberals do not make catchy songs and tunes about blackness in the heart of darkness?
| 3 January, 2012, 7:06 am |
I’m a big fan of Bob Dylan and until now, some of his songs are too deep for me to understand. My favorite Dylan song is Blowing in the Wind and its message about what to do in life really struck me. Thanks for this.
| 22 January, 2012, 4:49 pm |
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