by Jochen Markhorst
XXV There’s a code in the lyrics
Key West is the place to be
If you’re lookin’ for immortality
Key West is paradise divine
Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind you’ll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line
With the return of radio in the final verse, with 
“Pickin’ up that pirate radio signal”, Dylan not only brings the lyrics full circle (following Heard it on the wireless radio in the opening verse and that pirate radio station in the second), but also leads his lyrics back from the physical world to the metaphysical. After the real streets, hibiscus blossoms, sunlight on the skin and Truman’s White House, “Key West” concludes with the promise of redemption; having transcended the earthly – Mallory Square, Bay View Park and the boondocks – immortality awaits us in a divine paradise, fine and fair.
“There’s a code in the lyrics and also there’s no sense of time,” Dylan said at the time about his album Blood On The Tracks, speaking to Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone in 1978. “No sense of time” was certainly evident, particularly in “Tangled Up In Blue”. And it is a breach of Aristotle’s dictate of unity of time, a dictate Dylan has continued to violate in the fifty years since. On Rough And Rowdy Ways, it is a recurring theme right from the very first words of the opening song “I Contain Multitudes” (Today and tomorrow and yesterday too), which fit suspiciously well with the rest of Dylan’s 1978 lecture:
“There’s a code in the lyrics and also there’s no sense of time. There’s no respect for it: you’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t imagine not happening.”
But the other part of Dylan’s self-analysis is more cryptic. The final part, “there’s very little that you can’t imagine not happening”, we can link to the bizarre I shot a man named Gray segment from “Idiot Wind” or to the wedding of an underage lad and the trollop here in “Key West”, but we haven’t yet found the “code”, let alone cracked it – presumably because there isn’t one; Dylan may well create “new poetic expressions” according to the Nobel Prize Committee, and descriptions such as “misty”, “cryptic” and “ambiguous” all surely have some accuracy, but we have actually never been able to catch the song and dance man “encoding” his lyrics.
Except perhaps here. A “code” does seem to be hidden here in “Key West”. Earlier, we saw the all-too-coincidental “twelve” as the first word of the twelfth verse. And the choice of Key West seems triggered by the K and the W; the call signs of all radio stations west of the Mississippi begin with a K, those east of it with a W. That would make the word combination “Key West” a “code”, a metaphor for “radioland”, which does fit with the poet’s biography; in interviews we have heard Dylan profess his deep love and respect for radio dozens of times. As at the press conference in London, 1997: “What connected America was the radio. I can’t stress the importance of that enough. In the 50s, especially.” Or romanticise it, as in the fascinating interview with Sam Shepard in 1987:
“You know how, when you’re a kid, you stay up late in bed, listening to the radio, and you sort of dream off the radio into sleep. That’s how you used to fall to sleep. […] . Just sorta dream off into the radio. Like you were inside the radio kinda.”
In the final verse of the song “Shooting Star” (1989), Dylan comes very close to the mystification found in “Key West”:
Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing
… and in his fictionalised autobiography Chronicles (2004), the word radio appears 44 times. Dylan calls it “part of the soundtrack of my life”, he extols its magic, and he emphasises its influence on his creativity: “They gave me clues to how the world worked and they fuelled my daydreams, made my imagination work overtime. Radio shows were a strange craft.” (Ch. 2, The Lost Land). In chapter 4, Oh Mercy, we read a long declaration of love for the New Orleans radio station WWOZ and, above all, for “my favourite DJ, hands down, Brown Sugar, the female disc jockey.” And shortly afterwards, we read the words whose spirit we hear echoing here in the closing lines of “Key West”:
“WWOZ was the kind of station I used to listen to late at night, growing up, and it brought me back to the trials of my youth and touched the spirit of it. Back then when something was wrong, the radio could lay hands on you and you’d be all right.”
In later years, Dylan, the grumpy old man, laments the decline of radio. “Now nobody even knows what radio is anymore,” he complains to Paul Zollo in 1991, saying that what he hears on the radio these days is “weak and hopeless – and disposable”;
“The radio connected everybody like Orpheus or something. That’s not so any more. I don’t know when that disappeared, but now it’s a homogenised sound everywhere you go.”
His own radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour (2006–2009), was his home-brewed antidote, his attempt to revive some of the radio’s old magic, and “Key West” seems to be his elegy, his misty lament for the demise of the radio he loved so much. More mysterious than Van Morrison’s bittersweet “In The Days Before Rock ‘N’ Roll”, more melancholic than The Buggles’ infectious “Video Killed The Radio Star” (I heard you on the wireless back in ’52 / Lying awake, intently tuning in on you) and gentler than Costello’s neurotic, irresistible “Radio Radio” (Those late-night stations playing songs, bringing tears to my eyes), more intimate than Queen’s pompous “Radio Ga Ga” (My only friend through teenage nights / And everything I had to know / I heard it on my radio), more dreamy than The Carpenters’ lovely “Yesterday Once More” and more comforting than Tom Petty’s cynical “The Last DJ”, the Nobel Prize winner pours his wistfulness and nostalgia into the closing track of Rough And Rowdy Ways, in the heart-rending, tender “Key West”:
If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line
To be continued. Next up Key West part 26: La Mer
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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: 
- 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
