Like A Rolling Stone part 7: She’s a real princess

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 7

by Jochen Markhorst

VII She’s a real princess

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe

In Chapter 36 of Tarantula, invitingly titled “Sacred Cracked Voice & the Jingle Jangle Morning”, Dylan presents a whole string of loaded names: Lord Randall, Sir James, Fanny Blair, Matty Groves, Edward, Willie Moore and Barbara Allen… all protagonists from age-old ballads, murder ballads at that. With alienating stage directions, though. So Edward, the fratricidal murderer with the bloody knife, now “cuts hedges for his wages”, has become a professional gardener in Tarantula; Lord Randall doesn’t die a miserable poisoning death but has a nice beer; the vindictive Barbara Allen smuggles Moroccan cinders into Brooklyn, whatever that may be; and only the devilish child Fanny Blair remains somewhat close to her roots. After all, Fanny is originally the 11-year-old “perjuring little whore” whose false testimony puts innocent young Henry Higgins to the gallows. During the trial, she lies glibly, to which the judge Squire Vernon says admiringly, “You’ve told it so well.” With Dylan, she remains fairly in character: “Fanny Blair [is] dragging a judge.”

One way or another we do see reflections of all those legendary figures and blood-soaked songs invading Dylan’s sixty-years oeuvre, some more subtly than others. Like from this chapter an unusual choice of setting: “Matty Groves, who secretly at midnight tries to chop down the church steeple.” And even more remarkably, on the next page: “Houdini & the rest of the ordinary people taking down puckered Jesus posters out there on 61 highway – Midas putting them back up”… there we have it, the glorious Highway 61, a few months before Dylan will name his glorious album after it.

“Princess on the steeple”, the opening salvo of this last verse, is a somewhat quirky paraphrase of the usual “princess in the tower”, but at first you suspect it was chosen for its rhyme with “all the pretty people”. More interesting than that technical solution is the source. Fairy tales have been a growing purveyor of sidekicks, sets, props and one-liners since the last album Bringing It All Back Home. And this Tarantula chapter more or less officially does acknowledge that. In the opening line:

the jugglers who call you by the wrong name & title you wounded kitten 
- it is that easy for they know no fairy tales

… in which the naming of jugglers, who will also reappear in “Like A Rolling Stone”, is of course notable as well, but from which we can mostly infer that not knowing fairy tales apparently is considered a sign of being uncultured.

Dylan is well-educated though, and knows his classics. On the previous album we saw Aladdin drop by (in “Gates Of Eden”) and a wishing well (“Motorpsycho Nitemare”), and here on Highway 61 Revisited they are all over the place. Cinderella, pied pipers, Tom Thumb, lumberjacks, mermaids and dwarfs… and of course the tone is already set with the very first words of the album, the opening line of “Like A Rolling Stone”: once upon a time. Hereafter fairy tales will no longer be so lavishly honoured on Dylan’s albums, but they won’t disappear completely either. Blood On The Tracks is a Cinderella quote, in “Soon After Midnight’ a fairy queen swirls by, from the stage Dylan reveals that Shane MacGowan’s “Fairy Tale of New York” is one of his favourite songs, and “Key West” is the enchanted land, and there are more half references and whole homages.

But of all the fairy tales, Rapunzel still seems to impress him the most. Demonstrably twice, at least; He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks Dylan sings in 1978, in “Changing Of The Guards”, about a dame born on midsummer’s eve, near the tower; on that same album Street-Legal, Rapunzel returns again in the finale, in “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”: She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair; and here in “Like A Rolling Stone” seemingly more explicitly – the princess on the steeple. However some doubt as to whether Dylan actually meant to refer to the fairy tale is justified. After all, it’s not too conclusive. Or Dylan is accidentally rehashing two fairy tales, which is at least as likely.

Character-wise, Rapunzel is not at all like Miss Lonely, of course. Rapunzel is naive and innocent, modest and submissive, living a lonely and unenviable life for eighteen years until her rescue, locked in the tower with no entrance and no stairs, in the service of that false, hypocritical witch Frau Gothel. No, Miss Lonely is much more like Hans Christian Andersen’s Princess On The Pea, the thoroughly spoilt princess who has gone from riches to rags, knocks on the door of a castle and has a sleepless night there because the queen wants to test whether she is rigtig, whether she is a real princess. The pea she places under the twenty mattresses of the guest bed then does, in fact, keep the brat from sleeping – yep, hun er en rigtig prinsesse, she is a real princess.

Paula Cole – Hard To Be Soft:

Dylan might then reject Princess on the Pea because of the somewhat unfortunate homophone pea/pee in English, which indeed does lead the associations to unintended side roads. In this scenario, the alternative princess on the steeple seems mainly motivated by the idea that it expresses something like living in an ivory tower. A blasé gal with a rich daddy who feels elevated above the riff-raff – the step to the metaphor “princess on a steeple” really is not too big or far-fetched. So he deliberately does not write “princess in the tower” precisely to avoid the link with Grimm’s Rapunzel. Which doesn’t quite succeed, in the end – the image is simply too firmly entrenched in our collective consciousness, and is refreshed fairly regularly, too; the princess-in-the-tower motif keeps reappearing in poems, novels and films. Since 1965 alone, since “Like A Rolling Stone”, there have been more than a dozen film adaptations and re-workings, Disney’s animation Tangled (2010) being the biggest commercial success.

Director Todd Hayes avoids that pitfall, the Grimm association. He eschews the fairy tale connection but still borrows this setting from the last verse of “Like A Rolling Stone” for the party scene in the Jude segment of I’m Not There (the part in which Cate Blanchett plays the jacked-up, vile 1965 Dylan so chillingly well). We are at a Warholesque Sixties party in a white, sterile environment among pretty people drinkin‘, thinkin’ that they got it made and the swaggering, neurotic Jude/Dylan has just heard from his manager “Norman” that he is now a millionaire. The airy-fairy princess “Coco Rivington” (Michelle Williams in an Edie Sedgwick-like role) makes a grande, inebriated entrance and is verbally torn to shreds by Jude. Enraged and humiliated, Coco leaves the tower room down the spiral staircase. Pityingly, Jude watches her from above. “I tell you, love and sex are two things that really hang people up. Why that is…I’Il… I’ll never fully understand.”

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 8: Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

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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:

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