Bob Dylan: Where the lyrics find new lands, keep the music simple

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

“Positively 4th Street” – the last song reviewed in this series – was composed within a sequence of songs of which the prime essence within the lyrics was that nothing made sense.  The series started with “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, and continued through a range of songs including “Maggie’s Farm”, “Why do you have to be so frantic”, “Tombstone Blues”, and, among others, “Can you please crawl out your window”.

But even then Bob was not finished with the joint themes of the world not making sense, and a feeling of disdain for those around him, with the totally negative “4th Street”  for the next song he composed, “Highway 61 Revisited” once more contains the notion that the world really is disjointed and out of phase with itself and the people within it.  One might perhaps say that the world has become so complex and so diverse, while at the same time trying to be unified (in that most of the realities Bob describes are clearly within the United States)

Dylan is quoted as saying that “It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

The lyrics of the opening verse leave us in no doubt that we are still in this universe of contradictions and no sense being made

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

Perhaps the simplest thing to say is that this is a world in which reality and non-reality combine to such a degree, one can’t tell them apart.  Thus, each verse suddenly leaps into the world of another character who seems to have no connection with the person sung about in the previous verse.  We can get a real sense of this through the opening line of each verse wherein a new character or two comes on the scene….

  • Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
  • Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
  • Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
  • Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
  • Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored

… and then disappears from the song.

It is as if, in fact, there is no connection – and thus onec again Dylan has used the strophic form of composition, writing five musically identical verses but with ever changing and seeingly disconnected lyrics, save for the fact that everyone is connected with Highway 61.  The notion of the chorus which we found in “Rolling Stone” has not been used apart from Buick Six having a repeated final line (“If I go down dying…”), similar to a degree with the repeated words at the end of each verse in “Desolation Row”

So with the lyrics of “Highway 61” what holds the song together are the facts that each verse is about a character or two (God and Abraham in verse one, Georgia Sam and Howard in verse two, Mack the Finger and Louis the King in verse three, the fifth daughter and the first father (and variants) in verse four, and the gambler and promoter in the final verse) are all somehow (we never really know how) connected with Highway 61.

Now this approach of songs about multiple characters, with each character having one verse to him/herself and then vanishing from the script, is very unusual lyrically.  Did someone do this before Dylan?   I can’t think of anyone, but if you can, please let me know!

This approach is the reverse of “Rolling Stone” and “Fourth Street” by way of examples, where the song is about one person – and this in fact is the convention of popular music.  However, this level of complexity and confusion could easily cause listeners to lose track of the coherence of the whole song – hence the use of the strophic form of music, in which each verse, although lyrically different, is musically the same.

Indeed the song is so complex lyrically, taking a street name from Edgar Allan Poe, “Housing Project Hill” from Kerouac, “Tom Thumb” from Rimbaud, “Howling at the Moon” from Frank Williams, etc, that once again the stophic form is needed to hold the piece together.  Put another way, even the introduction of a “middle 8” to vary the music, could have been confusing with this level of quotations and references within the lyrics.

But more than that, the music  is based on the construction of the extended 12 bar blues.

Indeed as the Dylan Chords website agrees the only change made to the music during performances of the song is that Dylan changes the key slightly (the website suggests adding a capo to take the song up a semitone or two), but otherwise he leaves everything as is.

And this really makes the point.   As the lyrics get more and more complex and one might even say more and more convoluted, the music gets simpler and less varied.  Undoubtedly. Bob’s feeling is just that: you can’t have complex music and complex lyrics at once.

Even “Rolling Stone” with its ascending bass line counters by having the melody virtually all on one note for the first two bars of each line.  So at this stage in his life he’s taken to working hard on new forms of song lyrics, but left the music pretty much in the standard place.

The story so far

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