by Jochen Markhorst
I Andorra
“Andorra – this does not, of course, refer to the actual microstate of that name, nor to the people in the Pyrenees whom I do not know, nor to any other small real country that I do know,’ writes Nobel Prize winner Max Frisch in the notes preceding the book version of his successful play Andorra (1961), with, as usual, a slight dig at his home country of Switzerland. And to be on the safe side, he explains it even more clearly: “Andorra is the name of a model.”
The explanation is not superfluous. It is an alienating choice of name, alright. We have, of course, been familiar with model or fantasy lands for centuries, including in songwriting. Xanadu, Atlantis, the Land of Make Believe, Tir na nÓg, Wonderland, Eldorado… usually idealised, idyllic, mystical lands in which bubblegum songs let their main characters frolic around in high spirits, or in which symphonic-inspired dinosaurs such as Yes, Rush and Caravan let their often somewhat medievalish heroes meet their doom. The difference with “Andorra” is obvious: when encountering a geolocation such as “Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor” (Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On”) or “Everyone is so kind on the road to Shambala” (Three Dog Night), the reader and listener do not reach for the atlas, but understand that it is a fictional name for a fictional country.
Existing countries are, of course, often enough sung about – and are just the real countries, not “models” as in Frisch’s case. Usually embellished or simplified, as a song is, after all, a song. So something like “Just got back from Paris France / All they do is sing and dance” (Dean Martin’s “The Poor People Of Paris”) or “I can remember standing by the Wall” (Bowie’s Berlin in “Heroes”); simplifications, but real still. Even Andorra is sung about once, by the way, and remains more or less realistic – in one of the many breathtaking songs on the first two solo albums from ex-Zombie Colin Blunstone:
The nearer we got to Andorra The sun set on the left The rounded mountains pointed To the black clouds in the West
… is how Colin opens “Andorra” (Ennismore, 1972), stating topographically logically that he is travelling from London to Barcelona, drinking Spanish wine and musing on the rains that linger in the Pyrenees (although the sun does not “set on the left” when travelling from London to Barcelona, unless you are driving backwards – let’s just classify that one as poetic licence).
Dylan’s “Key West” hovers somewhere between both setting options. Key West really exists. Topographical details such as “Down by the Gulf of Mexico” and “Amelia Street” and “Truman had his White House there” underline that, unlike Frisch’s Andorra, the setting really refers to the actual Key West, the southernmost island in the Florida Straits. But poetic descriptions such as “Key West is the enchanted land,” “Key West is paradise divine,” “Mystery Street,” and the magical natural phenomena Dylan sings about pull Dylan’s Key West away from reality, pushing the setting towards utopian distant places such as Shangri-La or Xanadu. Since the nineteenth century, we have called this “poetic realism”, the beautification of the bleak truth, “poeticization” if you will. A somewhat simplistic, but nevertheless reasonably accurate characterisation of Dylan’s song indeed, as for his entire oeuvre, for that matter.
The choice of Key West, then, seems to be motivated by the theme that runs throughout the album Rough And Rowdy Ways: the glorification of songwriting. In this case, through Dylan’s admiration for:
BF: Who are some of your favorite songwriters?
BD: Buffett I guess. Lightfoot. Warren Zevon. Randy. John Prine. Guy Clark. Those kinds of writers.
BF: What songs do you like of Buffett’s?
BD: “Death of an Unpopular Poet”. There’s another one called “He Went to Paris”.
… for Jimmy Buffett, the colleague Dylan mentions first when interviewed by Bill Flanagan in 2009 (in the interview published on bobdylan.com and in the Huffington Post).
At least, it seems obvious. Though, admittedly, in Liverpool, on 3 November 2024, Dylan says after performing the song, halfway through the concert: “I wrote that song at Hemingway’s house. I think there’s a lot of him in it. I don’t know for sure. I suspect it.” Still, that too seems like poeticisation of reality. True, we know that Dylan has been to Key West, and it is also likely that he visited the so-called Hemingway House at 907 Whitehead Street, where, incidentally, six-toed descendants of Hemingway’s polydactyl cat Snow White still roam. Plus, in Key West it is almost impossible not to be confronted with Hemingway’s ode:
“It’s the best place I’ve ever been anytime, anywhere, flowers, tamarind trees, guava trees, coconut palms…Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.”
… from a 1928 letter to a friend, which does indeed seem to echo vaguely in Dylan’s song (Hibiscus flowers grow everywhere here, Bougainvillea bloomin’ in the summer and spring), but still: Dylan never mentions the name “Hemingway”, not even indirectly, which is very unusual… whenever Dylan refers to a writer, we hear an explicit quote or simply the name (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Ezra Pound, Mr. Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erica Jong, TS Eliot, James Joyce, and more). Which doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s possible indeed to find “a lot of him in it” – though that, as Dylan himself seems to be doing in 2024, is hineininterpretieren, as our German friends describe it with a beautiful, very German verb (“to interpret into”).
No, Jimmy Buffett really seems more obvious, the “Pirate Laureate of Key West”, the award-winning author in both fiction and non-fiction, one of the most successful musicians of the past fifty years and spiritual father of Margaritaville, Jimmy’s own realistic poeticisation of Key West;
“There was no such place as Margaritaville. It was a made-up place in my mind, basically made up about my experiences in Key West and having to leave Key West and go on the road to work and then come back and spend time by the beach.”
(interview Arizona Republic, 13 September 2021)
All in all, the standard-bearer of the Gulf & Western sound is a more plausible trigger for Dylan’s receptiveness to the setting than the home or the oeuvre of fellow Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway. As the song’s subtitle, “Philosopher Pirate”, makes a much more explicit reference to the man who was semi-officially awarded the honorary title of “pirate laureate” and who spent the last fifty years of his life propagating and living his philosophy of “island escapism”:
“I think it’s really a part of the human condition that you’ve got to have some fun. You’ve got to get away from whatever you do to make a living or other parts of life that stress you out. I try to make it at least 50/50 fun to work and so far it’s worked out.”
But perhaps, in hindsight, it would have been smarter to simply call that enchanted land, that paradise divine “Eldorado” or, if necessary, something like “Key Arcadia”. In any case, Max Frisch regretted giving a fictional country the name of an existing country:
„”Andorra ist kein guter Titel. Der bessere fiel mir nicht ein. Schade! Was den Kleinstaat Andorra betrifft, tröste ich mich mit dem Gedanken, daß er kein Heer hat, um die Länder, die das Stück spielen, aus Mißverständnis überfallen zu können.“
“Andorra is not a good title. I couldn’t think of a better one. Shame! As far as the tiny state of Andorra is concerned, I console myself with the thought that it has no army to invade out of misunderstanding the countries where the play is performed.”
Horst Bienek: Werkstattgespräche mit Schriftstellern, 1962
… which, incidentally, is a thought Dylan can take comfort in as well.
To be continued. Next up Key West part 2: The lyrics kinda float from person to person
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: 
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs