Like A Rolling Stone part 6: Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 6

by Jochen Markhorst

VI Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal

As Joan Baez sings “Percy’s Song” behind Dylan’s back, with La Faithfull sitting shyly beside him and the cameraman walking around him, zooming in on Baez, swerving back to Dylan and looking over his shoulder, Dylan seems to be in his own tunnel, concentrating on his writing. We get a flash of the paper in the typewriter roll, but frustratingly, the lighting is too dim and the film too grainy; not a word can be discerned. We can see, however, that it is not a lyric: Dylan types the lines all the way through, we also hear the ping when the carriage gets to the end and then see Dylan pushing the carriage back with the lever. Occasionally he consults handwritten notes lying to the right of the typewriter, his upper body moves slightly back and forth and he seems to be mumbling; as if looking for the rhythm of the sentences.

An educated guess would be that Dylan is writing copy to fill his experimental, long prose poem Tarantula. More precisely, he is writing what will later be the final chapter, AI Aaraaf & the Forcing Committee (pp. 129-137). Sometime in the next few weeks (midsummer 1965), the first pirated version of Tarantula will be printed in San Francisco. Well, a fragment anyway – 50 beige A4 sheets containing the 64 words of Aretha Known In Gallup As Number 69, the “aretha portrait” we later find as an interlude on page 135, shortly before the end of the book.

Harry Belafonte – Day-O:

Clues to this assumption, to the idea that Dylan is writing that final chapter here, are the specific idioms we see used in “Tombstone Blues”, “Desolation Row”, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Like A Rolling Stone”, in songs germinating in these same mercurial days in the late spring of 1965. Those same clues, incidentally, suggest that Dylan, here in this hotel room in May ‘65, floating around in his stream-of-consciousness, afterwards divided the fully-typed sheets in two and promoted one half to Chapter 1, Guns, the Falcon’s Mouthhook & Gashcat Unpunished, and the other half to the final chord AI Aaraaf & the Forcing Committee. Apart from the suspiciously compositional intervention of having the work end and begin with “aretha” (it is even the first word of the book), there are remarkably many cross-connections between the first chapter, the last chapter and the songs of Highway 61 Revisited. Similarities transcending the coincidence factor anyway:

– the word “lumberjacks” which Dylan writes, in his 60-plus years of writing, only in two works: four times in Tarantula (three times in the last chapter: “the lumberjacks are coming”) and one time in “Ballad Of A Thin Man” (You have many contacts / Among the lumberjacks);

– in both Thin Man and AI Aaraaf, public order is disrupted by somebody naked;

– the pied piper on page 134 is sent to prison in Tombstone;

– both Gypsy Davy and the pretty things move from Chapter 1 to “Tombstone Blues” as well, as does the striking word reincarnated;

– The Good Samaritan, the ambulance and Nero are all transferred from Chapter 1 to “Desolation Row”, prince hamlet‘s notable supporting role seems to explain Ophelia’s presence over there;

– the housing project, the light rain and the morgue in the first chapter echo in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”;

– and finally, apart from some less remarkable congruences, the reflections in “Like A Rolling Stone”. The one-liner you can make it if you have nothing (p. 136) seems to seep through to When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, unusual words like jugglers, bums, rags, steeple, tramp, clowns, in your prime and alibis we encounter elsewhere in Tarantula, a diamond ring is also worn (in Chapter 7, Prelude to the Flatpick) and after “diplomat” in the first chapter, we can also put the checkmarks at “chrome” and “horse” in this last chapter… by now it should be clear that Dylan is reusing the catch from his wildly churning stream of consciousness, from his subconscious, for Highway 61 Revisited. Fitting too with Dylan’s own, somewhat detached comment on this part of the song (“It all just about got to be too much”), which hints at the same embarrassment as the words with which he dismisses his own Tarantula: “Things were running wild at that point.”

Bizarrely, then, one of the more frenzied images seems to come not so much from his subconscious as rather from his long-term memory. On 6 May 1961, the then 19-year-old Dylan is in Hartford, Connecticut, playing three Woody Guthrie songs at the Indian Neck Folk Festival (“Talking Columbia”, “Hangknot, Slipknot” and “Talking Fish Blues”). It is the festival where he met his sidekick Bob Neuwirth and, judging by the photos, tried to find a place among folkies like Jim Kweskin, Mark Spoelstra and Bob Jones. The most eye-catching photo was taken by Joe Alper and shows a heart-breakingly young and cheerful Dylan, making music in a small circle with Jones, Kweskin and especially with Jack Parmley (mistakenly referred to as ‘Jim Parmaley’ in Eric Von Schmidt’s book Baby Let Me Follow You Down). Perhaps, with some tolerance, we can indeed compare Jack’s appearance and charisma to a “diplomat”, but attention is, of course, mainly drawn to his left shoulder – carrying a Siamese cat¹.

Bob Dylan – Talking Columbia (INFF 1961):

By the way, in Von Schmidt’s book Neuwirth is described – with apparent sympathy – with the words “he had the rare talent to simultaneously participate and observe.” Which is a talent that Neuwirth seems to share with Dylan – as we see Dylan participating, and a small, furry detail from his surroundings shall descend in one of his all-time greatest songs, five years later.

He has the rare talent to simultaneously participate and observe.

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¹ Thanks to Scott Warmuth for his help in tracing the source of the photo

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 7: She’s a real princess

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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

Like A Rolling Stone part 6: Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

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