Desolation Row: perhaps the most amazing piece of popular music ever written

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

Two themes dominated Bob Dylan’s song writing in 1965, a disdain for the world he saw around him, and a desire to be moving on physically and emotionally.   Combined with this, I find in the songs of that year a sense of Dada, in that Dylan seems not to see or value progress or reform, but instead sees a world of chaos; a world with a lack of any value in the norms of society.

Except that although Dylan comments on the abandonment of reason within the racism described in some of the songs, he does so using a traditional musical approach.  The “postcards of the hanging” are so appalling, they represent in one lyrical line, the chaos and insanity of the world.   To this (and this explains the magic of “Desolation Row”) Dylan responds not with shock and challenge, but rather with a performance that is musically gentle and lilting.  It moves on through ten musically identical verses, telling us of the atrociousness of human behaviour through the style of a lilting, unchanging ballad. He could have been talking about having a picnic on a spring afternoon.  Instead he is talking about a racist murder and it is the most brilliant summation of all of Dylan’s work (which is to say at least 119 songs – although there may have been more) up to this point. 

The approach to composing “Desolation Row” is thus of much interest in thta the musical sequence begins with Farewell Angelina – a genuine and gentle song of farewell, which in compositional terms was followed by a song that questioned if love can ever be truly real Love is just a four letter word, which in turn was followed by a song that took us into the world of dada, a world beyond any thought of making sense (Subterranean Homesick Blues – itself followed by Outlaw Blues

Of course the “love” and “lost love” songs which dominated popular music at the time, and at the composing of which Bob had already shown himself to be the absolute master, were still there and certainly righly seen as great works of a master songwriter. Love Minus Zero, She Belongs to Me and It’s all over now baby blue all told us that love can exist, but also suggested (with that last song) the fragility of all human emotions.

But it was at this point that the notion of the world as being, if not meaningless, then certainly a place in which all one can do is move on.  Indeed song after song incorporated the “moving on” theme at this time, such as On the Road Again, Maggie’s Farm,  and It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry – which were written one after the other.

Of this new world through which and away from which one feels the need to move, Bob Dylan also seemed to feel a growing sense of disdain, alongside the view that things don’t make sense.    Sitting on a barbed wire fence, Like a Rolling Stone, Why do you have to be so frantic followed one after the other each posing questions and anxieties, but rarely giving answers or resolutions.

For in many of the songs of this time, everything is a jumble, as in Tombstone Blues or things are falling apart as we find in Desolation Row.  And the feeling grows that Bob has had enough of it all, and is moving toward despair, as in Can you please crawl out your window? and Positively Fourth Street

At the heart of this, is the vision that nothing makes sense and the world is hurtling out of control as in Tombstone Blues.

Where Ba Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedrollTuba players now, rehearse around the flagpoleAnd the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soulTo the old folks home and the collegeI wish I could write you a melody so plainThat could hold you dear lady from going insaneThat can ease you, cool you, and cease the painOf your useless and pointless knowledge

What is particularly interesting here is the way Bob uses music – in this case, taking us charging through the reams of references without any clear explanation or exposition of what on earth is going on.  It is indeed all useless and pointless knowledge. By 2005 the song had become much scarier and frightening, with the emphasis on the beat and Bob’s singing so much of the lyrics on one note.   This is a bleak world on the edge of the end.  (This version comes from the Never Ending Tour series on this site).  This really is an end of the world sound, while using the basic three chords of the blues.

But what is especially interesting is what Bob wrote next: it was Desolation Row.   And although the message is the same, Bob has moved on.  Tombstone Blues ends with the comment…

I wish I could write you a melody so plainThat could hold you dear lady from going insaneThat can ease you, cool you, and cease the painOf your useless and pointless knowledge

And indeed the melody is so plain that it hardly exists – especially by this version from 2005.

But what he wrote next most certainly incorporated a melody – and not one that was “so plain” but a melody to remember for all time.  The melody that was plain but beautiful, and could hold us all from growing insane.

You will undoubtedly recall how it sounded at first in 1965 with Bob at the age of 24.   The lady and Bob were looking out onto Desolation Row, but not facing their end.  Bob was simply describing how it was.

And consider also the accompaniment.   The normal thought when creating a piece of music about the end of all things, is to give it lots of noise.   But all we get is two guitars and a bass.  No electrics, no percussion.

Lyrically we have ten six-line verses taking us through 661 words, and of course the lyrics are so wonderfully crafted that they hold us all the way through, and need no musical variation.  Instruments don’t come and go; the music just continues over 11 minutes.  We are held in its trance.

This really is a magical achievement to keep us engaged with the song, with each verse the same and only three chords.   Of course, it is the lyrics that engage our interest, but melody is something remarkable, and I have sought to make the point before on this site that the meaning of the song comes not just from the lyrics, but from the gentle, constant nature of the music.  Music as I have suggested in previous articles, “tells us that life goes on, and on, and it can be pretty horrifying, but somehow because it is always there, we get used to it.”

If we look at the lyrics of the last verse…

Yes, I received your letter yesterday(About the time the door knob broke)When you asked how I was doingWas that some kind of joke?

we know we have reached the end of hope, and yet the music continues, if not exactly in a jaunty mood then most certainly not in a feeling of utter despair.

And this to me is the absolute point of the song, and the absolute genius of Dylan’s approach.  The song is about the hopelessness and horror of life in our civilisation (just consider the opening line of lyrics) and yet the music in this original recording is not that at all.  It has a spot of swing to it, the lead part is played on an acoustic guitar and meanders happily around the chord sequence, there is no rise or fall in tempo or volume.  Everything is gentle and calm, and yet this is a piece that starts, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”.  This is our world of contradiction.

Thus it is that by the end, the line that “No one has to think too much about Desolation Row” takes on a powerful central meaning, when the music is taken into account with the lyrics.

And so as the characters slip in and out, yet there is a constancy within the song, while the horror show slips by.  We are made immune to what is happening out there because it is out there every day.  Indeed, it is still there, but much of the time we pretend it is not.  

In this view of the song, there is no point shouting about the life that Dylan describes, any more than it is worth my while shouting out about the three giant trees at the end of my garden that I watch swaying in the wind, day after day, as I sit and write.  The sun, the snow, the rain,  it all comes and goes and everything is pretty much the same.  In such a world one begins to accept everything that is present, and everything that happens.  Emotions and energy drift away.  The sun rises, the sun sets.  It rains, it snows.  We don’t particularly notice, because this is how it is.

Change the music however and the song becomes something quite different.   Which is to say that the meanings and emotions carried within the lyrics and not just based on the lyrics themselves but are also determined by the music that accompanies them.  And indeed it can be argued that the song is thus 11 minutes long in order to express the constancy of a world of horrors which exist all around us and the way we come to terms with those horrors.

For me, the recording above is superb because the music does give us this contrast between the acceptance of life around, and the life itself.  The original album version does the same.    Being gentle and pretty much unchanging, these two versions say, “there’s the horror show out there, it never changes, we have to live with it.”

Which is rather a profound thought, given that Dylan was seen as a protest singer, which, as I have often argued before, he wasn’t.   Indeed as I’ve noted so often, “Times they are a changin’” is not a protest song, but a song that actually says, the world changes, it happens, it has nothing to do with what people do – it just happens.   “Desolation Row” says life is awful, but somehow we just carry on.

Put the two messages together and we have a vision of humans meandering through a world, letting everything just happen around them.  It gets better it gets worse, it’s not much to do with us.

All such meanings however are lost when the song is transformed and the original music is lost.  In 1990 for example it sounded like this – and it gives us a feeling of rushing to the final end.

Listening to this 1990 version still makes me feel almost breathless,  and brings forth an image of being in a truck hurtling towards the edge of a cliff – and I’m really not very happy about it.

By 2017 we were still utterly sure the end was coming, but there was perhaps that slight feeling that maybe we could all sit in our favourite armchairs in front of the fire and watch civilisation collapse on TV.  There was nothing we could do to stop it, but we didn’t have to be there.

Bob of course does play with the melody somewhat but it is the rhythm that Bob changes which makes all the difference.   In this last version, there is a swing to the movement of the song.  So when we are “getting ready for the show” we know it is the end, but we, like Bob have aged, and we know we all have to go sometime.   As I have said to many friends in the same age group as me (ie almost but not quite as old as Bob) with this version, stop listening to the lyrics, and take in the music.    It says, yes the end of it all is coming soon, but rather amazingly we made it to this point.

So my thought is with these last two recordings, both are telling us of the end, but in the former, I feel pushed onward when I don’t want to be.  With the 2017 version, Bob manages to make me feel it’s ok – it is all coming to an end, and that’s all right.

To appreciate just how radical, and one might say “unlikely,” the music of “Desolation Row” is, just consider the opening about selling postcards of the hanging.  This is a horror story of a racist incident of the first degree, and yet it is a gentle, lilting ballad.   Now consider the ending:

Right now I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters noNot unless you mail them from Desolation Row

And still, that gentle lilting ballad music continues, as if saying, yes, this is normal, this is all right.

This is the most appalling horror story, but somehow we just treat it as our history, as part of how things have been, and maybe in some places still are.   And that brings home the horror of the story far more than any heavy drum beat and crashing of cymbals could ever do.

Previously in this series….

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