No Nobel Prize for Music: from Queen Jane to the Thin Man. Structure and form.

Posted on July 31, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

By Tony Attwood

In this series, at the moment, we are looking at the songs Bob Dylan wrote in 1965, specifically in the order that he wrote them, looking specifically at the way Bob composed the music songs.  The list of previous episodes is at the end.

Now, from the lyrics of the songs, we can conclude that either the world that Bob saw was pretty awful, or he had fallen into the habit of writing negative lyrics about the world around him.   But if we do take that second option one of the things we hvae to admit and then admire is the way that even with a song of total negativity such as “Desolation Row” Bob was able to create a really interesting, and indeed relaxed sound, which when we consider it abstracly seems totally out of sync with the message of the lyrics.  And this is particularly unusual in Dylan’s work.

Desolation Row 1992

 

Looking at the most recent songs we have considered (and remember this is the order in which Bob wrote the songs,) “Desolation Row” tells us much of what we can take to be his attitude towards people and society, from the title.  He and the lady are looking out at Desolation Row – it is not a prediction, it is now, and it is awful.  It is, we must conclude, only the fact that the two of them are there together that keeps each of them both alive and sane.

True the lady he is with has everything (From a Buick 6) but either that relationship fails, or it was just a fictional relationship created for the song, because in the next composition, Bob is then really giving us the negativity full on with such works as Can you please crawl out your window?,  Positively Fourth Street, and then Highway 61 Revisited.    The first two tell us the horrors of the world he sees and the people he knows, while the last takes the negativity of the world a step further and suggests that the world makes no sense – but somehow cope with this by bouncing along to rock and the blues.   They are our drugs that stop us from seeing how awful everything has become.  In short, if we can sing about it, it doesn’t hurt so much, which is the essence of the blues.

But after that moment of hope, we have an even further descent into total despair with “Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Queen Jane” (mother sends back invitations, the lady wants the presents she gave back, the clowns have died… no one is helpful, no one is as they seem.  And finally, the singer is asked, “How does it feel to be such a freak?” to which of course, there is no reply.  How does one even know that one is a freak?

What is noticeable is that generally these songs are strophic – verse, verse, verse, without any change.   Only with “Thin Man” do we get one sudden break from that rigid format, with, after three verses,

You have many contacts among the lumberjacksTo get you facts when someone attacks your imaginationBut nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect you 
to all give a check toTax-deductible charity organizations

But then, just in case we were getting carried away, it is back to the verses – five more of them, and no return to that middle section.

This is indeed a sudden break musically from the other songs with their relentless drive of negativity and repetition, as if the music is saying, “the world is awful, it just goes on in the same way.  And worse, there is nothing we can do.

Except that this explanation, from a musical point of view, it won’t do, because the lyrics of “Desolation Row” are, really curiously, set to a lilting, gentle ballad, with a soft, flowing accompaniment.   So gentle is the melody and the accompaniment, maybe it could be called a “lilting ballad” although of course the lyrics tell us this is not so.   In short, the combination of lyrics and music tell us that, yes, as shown elsewhere, everything is awful, but we have a way of coping with it.   We sing ballads with beautiful melodies

But as it stands, the music tells us that everything is fine – and it just goes on and on being fine as one verse follows another without any musical change through ten sung verses with musically one identical interlude before the end, each verse musically identical from the point of view of both the accompaniment and melody.

What Dylan is telling us musically, through all these songs, is that nothing changes.  While the lyrics make the point (again) very clearly and forcibly of what is wrong, the musical accompaniment and the melody, through being an unchanging background to the lyrics, insist that this situation goes on and on and on.  There is no way out.  There is nothing else.   This is not an invite to a revolution, the music tells us this ia a real life portrayal of a world gone wrong.

And again we have a musical technique cropping up which forces us even further into an awareness of that situation, for we have that descending bass

Am
You walk into the room
G#
With your pencil in your hand
G
You see somebody naked
F#
And you say, "Who is that man?"
F
You try so hard....

This is an interesting use of the descending bass in that it descends by semitones, which is to say that if you played this on a keyboard, you would be playing one note then on to the one below it – irrespective of whether it is a white note or a black note on the keyboard.

Indeed, only once with Mr Jones do we get a break from the ceaselessly repeated verses, as with

You have many contacts among the lumberjacksTo get you facts when someone attacks your imaginationBut nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect 
     you to all give a check toTax-deductible charity organizations

It is almost as if it is an aside saying, “and just in case you are arguing against this worldview, don’t bother”.  For there are now four more verses to come, just like the first three.

          F      Em         Dm           C       Csus4 C
When your mother sends back all your invitations
         F              Em     Dm   G        /f /e /d
And your father to your sister he explains
            C            F                    C        
That you're tired of yourself and all of your creations
C                F     C       F
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?
C              F            C
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

It is in short a strophic song.  There are no variations, no interludes; the message is consistent.  Come and see me.   Indeed in a clever twist, Dylan even makes the lyrics make fun of the song they are in…

And you're sick of all this repetition

for this song has a straight line of repetition at the end of each verse.

When else has Dylan done this?  One can think of “I want you, I want you, I want you so bad” and of course the use of the title line in some song at the end of every verse (as with “Blowing in the Wind”, “Don’t think twice”, “Times they are a changing” etc but here I am not sure.  Has he actually criticised his own song-writing technique of repetition by using repetition?

Thus very simple line such as “Won’t you come see me Queen Jane?” can seem very un-Dylan (not least because the melody in the chorus is just one note throughout), but also challenging; is the singer really so dependent on a visit from this woman?   Why doesn’t he get up and visit her?   Musically, the chord beneath the melodic line changes to suggest movement, but even that change is a very obvious, rotating chord I to chord IV and back.  Is the song turning into a self-parody concerning movement and change?

It is as if Dylan is himself desperately tired.  And indeed, this tiredness comes across even more deeply with Ballad of a Thin Man.

The Thin Man has always seemed to me to be not just the journalists who didn’t really understand Dylan and his writing, but also the politicians, the clergy, those non-musicians working in the music industry, and indeed virtually everyone who represented the mainstream in music and in society.  So that would take in religious leaders, politicians, school teachers, lawyers, record company executives….

In this sense the “thinness” is of course a mental attribute, and it seems to be widespread.  In fact maybe omnipresent.

And yet here again Dylan has moved away from the strophic verse, verse, verse format, by introducing the “middle 8” (although that name, originating as it does from the fact that the middle 8 originally was just eight bars long, seems increasingly inappropriate in Dylan’s hands.)  This “middle 8” neither comes in the middle nor is eight bars long.

But this is not all, for there is another interesting musical issue here as well – the use of the descending bass, which runs F , E, D, C in “Queen Jane” and A, G#, G, F# F in “Thin Man”

So what we have got with Queen Jane and the Thin Man is a technique which while not unknown in Dylan’s work, hasn’t been used for a while – the descending bass   Quite why this compositional technique suddenly popped up at this moment we can really say – it could have been that in each case it felt like the right thing to do (even though the technique had not been used for many songs previously).   But the fact that the two songs were composed one after the other is indicative of the notion that Dylan was thinking about ways to be able to expand his songs beyond writing just strophic pieces.

“Desolation Row” is  a stunning, successful strophic work, and it works because the melody is so interesting and so variable, and so are the lyrics.   But with these later songs, which seem to have taken us into even darker territory, the middle 8 in each case seems to have another function.

There is almost a suggestion that Dylan is looking for ways to provide some variation – variation that most certainly was not needed on Desolation Row.  There, the melody is in such contrast to the message of the music that we are entranced and gripped.  Where there is not such a beautiful, stunning melody, with such a relaxed accompaniment offering a counterpoint to the end-of-the-world lyrics, nothing more is needed.   But not every song can be as beautiful musically as “Desolation Row” while portraying such a horrific landscape.

The conclusion has to be that Dylan was looking for ways to make songs which musically were not as beautiful as “Desoltation Row” but which had the same horror lyrics, work in a musical sense.   Hence the return to the ternary form.

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