No Nobel Prize for Music 38: the song that revolutionised what popular music could do

By Tony Attwood

In this series of articles, 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. In this piece, we have reached the moment where musically, Bob turned the whole concept of what a piece of “popular” music could do, on its head and left everyone with a sense of musical structure and form, utterly stunned and unable to respond. For Bob did something to the concept of popular song that had not been tried for the pas 500 years.

Of course there was a warning of what was to come, for listening to Dylan perform Desolation Row, written part way through 1965, and then listening to the songs he wrote through the rest of that year, it doees seem to me that Bob was trying in his lyrics to extend the message of “Desolation Row” – although perhaps not always with success. For from the opening line, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” through to “Right now I can’t read too good, Don’t send me no more letters no,” there is an overwhelmingly negative view of reality, which he didn’t manage to maintain in other works.

And thus I feel that Bob knew something else was needed – something as extraordinary in a musical sense as “Desolation Row” is in a lyrical sense. Something that took the form of the music and manipulated it, into a completely new place. Something that had never been tried before.

Now of course, the writers of song lyrics are not always talking about themselves – indeed most of the time they are writing lyrics to fit the form. But the song “Desolation Row” went way beyond the norm in terms of length (ten verses, 657 words), and indeed in meaning went way past the expressions of melancholy, depression, sorrow, anguish etc etc, that even the most negative of popular songs offers.

It is very hard for me to imagine that Dylan wrote this song abstractly – as in the sense of “I know, I’ll write a song about how awful everything is,” for to me, everything about “Desolation Row” feels like an expression of his own feelings.

And yet, and yet, the song has a rather beautiful and indeed lilting melody and accompaniment, which are unexpected given the words, but through that unexpectedness add to the poignancy.

After composing “Desolation Row” Bob created eleven more songs through 1965 which dealt with the darker side of life. Not as utterly desperate as “Desolation Row” but still very dark pieces. It is true that he initially tried to lighten the work with a song that in essence says I have a woman who does everything, (From a Buick 6) but thereafter it was fairly negative all the way as in Can you please crawl out your window? and Positively Fourth Street.

Even the occasional attempt to lighten the load with Highway 61 Revisited (which lyrically is not that light since it suggests that only the blues makes any sense) was quickly followed by nightmares (Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues and despair (Queen Jane Approximately) and more disdain (Ballad of a thin man).

My suspicion is that Dylan knew he was in a musical rut and later in the year set out to find a way through it with Jet Pilot before turning back to a seeming desperation because the world either doesn’t make sense (I wanna be your lover) or in which he is descending into panic because he can’t get through on the phone (Long distance operator)

The musical form is strophic all the way, until we get to Ballad of a Thin Man where Bob tries a different approach, for there is a problem. These songs are, as often as not, about negativity and quite often despair. So although the notion of having verse after verse the same in musical terms seems right, (given that the repetition of all that is wrong is a fundamental part of despair) this can lead simply to too much musical repetition. Yes, the verse-verse-verse concept of the strophic song has been used a billion times, but it leaves the music restricted. The result is a poem set to music, rather than a song.

This didn’t matter with “Desolation Row” because the melody is of much interest in the way that many Dylan melodies are not (compare “Thin Man” with “Desolation Row” for example) and so Dylan does add a spot of variation on occasion. True in “Thin Man” it is only there once, with a verse that doesn’t follow the same form as others, and it does break up the musical repetition. But even so, it’s not that exciting.

After “Thin Man” Dylan wrote three songs that he then left in the studio – indeed, one of the three was not even completed. And in Jet Pilot Medicine Sunday and I wanna be your lover and still the message is the same – the world is strange and there is no way out.

But then, finally, in the last composition of the year, Dylan found his way through. The song is one that I previously described as being about “Mystical people in the half light,” with touches of surrealism added, and that is still about as close as I can get. But what is so interesting here is that Dylan, seemingly looking for a new way to construct the music of the song, broke away from the notion of the verse-verse-verse concept that had dominated his work since the success of that ultimate strophic piece, “Desolation Row”.

For what Dylan did here was to take the notion of the verse – verse – verse approcah, but break each verse down into three sections.

We can see this clearly by looking at Verse 1 in this way

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks When you're tryin' to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it

Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

The sections are identified to us as listeners by the rhymes – we don’t necessarily note that the first group has three lines rhyming, the second has four lines rhyming and the final two lines rhyming, but we pick this up as we go. It is a bit the same as looking at a masterpiece of architecture – we get the feeling of the whole building, and then see the individual elements that make up the building. So here the shortness of the lines in the second group give us the sense of continuity – that nothing changes, but the night is indeed playing tricks – but this deetail is not perceived until we’ve got the overall picture.

Dylan repeats the format in verse two

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight Ask himself 
                                  if it's him or them that's insane

Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear 
That Johanna's not here

The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

What is particularly interesting is that the extension and contractions of the lines don’t destroy the pattern of three lines, four lines, two lines.

By verse three, the musical form and approach are clearly embedded in our minds, and so Dylan can play with the length of the lines, for as listeners, we still appreciate the structure even if we have never considered it directly. It now feels right even when line three is pushed to its limits (as indeed happened in line three of verse two, above).

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight 
                         Ask himself if it's him or them that's insane

Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear 
That Johanna's not here

The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Verse four continues with the same format of three sections containing three lines, four lines and two lines. But then, as can happen with Dylan, the final verse makes a change. This didn’t happen with “Desolation Row” because that is a song of quiet acceptance of what has happened, but here, Dylan is taking the energy is much higher.

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', name me someone that's not a parasite 
                  and I'll go out and say a prayer for him
But like Louise always says You can't look at much, 
                  can ya man As she, herself, prepares for him

And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

As we can see, in the middle section has expanded from four lines to seven, which adds to the power that reaches its zenith with “explodes”.

I really have never come across a piece of music written in this musical form before this point, and I am not too sure that many people have tried to use it since.

Further, the structure of the song, containing nine lines, must at most be very rare, although for the moment, I am still hearing this as unique. The notion of putting those nine lines into three groups is perhaps more logical musically, but to make those groups three lines, four lines and two lines is surely unheard of. And yet there is more with that extraordinary addition of lines in the final verse to give us seven lines in section two. (Which is incidentally what the bass player on the studio recording for the album forgot – he makes a slip and for a second plays the final verse as he has the previous verses, but then quickly corrects himself. Why Dylan allowed this to go through as the album version, I don’t know. He must have heard the mistake – maybe he had just had enough of the song. Or maybe he thought it was amusing.)

So basically what we have had is a year of Dylan writing and keeping 29 songs, starting with Farewell Angelina, and ending with Visions of Johanna, taking in Desolation Row along the way, in which he stricks to the pure strophic form of verse-verse-verse with just the occasional use of the technique of having the last line of each verse repeated in “Love is just a four letter word”, “It’s all over now baby blue” and as we see here “Visions”.

Bob has also tried the use of the chorus as with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Can you please”, but now we have something extraordinary – the extension of the last musical line in the last verse through running that same musical line six times.

This is truly the beginning of Bob Dylan taking the two forms of music that he has learned from his youth (strophic, which is verse, verse, verse and the binary form of verse, chorus, verse, chorus) and extending them with enormous effect through simple techniques.

Maybe someone did that before Bob Dylan, but if so, I think I must have missed it. But Dylan has not invented a new form – rather, he has taken the existing musical form of verse and chorus, which has been there for 500 years and stretched it beyond breaking point through the addition of extra lines.

Written like that, this may not seem like much, but the creation of a new musical form of composition is rare indeed. Maybe other composers did it before Dylan, but the power he generated through taking a four line structure and then in the last verse turning itnto a seven line structure is utterly extraordinary.

This was indeed the moment when Bob took popular music into a totally new dimension.

No Nobel Prize for Music 38: the song that revolutionised what popular music could do

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