A Pilgrim’s Digression

I am very much a late-comer to the music of Bob Dylan, having only discovered the richness of his music over the course of the past twelve months. But I am making up for lost time. For me, it began with the 1964 live album, which I told myself I did not like, but which nevertheless I found myself listening to again and again.

In particular the song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” entered my dreams and for a long time haunted me throughout the day, until I had to start listening to another song in order to shake it. Then I watched Masked and Anonymous, where for the first time I heard “The Times They Are A-Changing” as sung by a little girl, as well as an aged Dylan himself singing such oddities as “Dixie” and a new version of “Diamond Joe.”

From there, Dylan became a steadily mounting obsession. I watched the Scorsese film, No Direction Home, and decided I even liked this guy, Bob Dylan, as well as his music. He is an unlikely star, an ugly poet without any of what most people would term “beauty” to his voice. His ordinariness appealed to me, and he seemed genuine in all respects. In one song on the album Slow Train Coming, he even says “You may call me Bobby, / Or you may call me Zimmy.”

Almost 20 purchased and illegally downloaded albums later, the obsession is nearly total.

For awhile, I have been meaning to write a little about what some Dylan songs mean to me. These interpretations will be entirely personal. In keeping with the anti-critical method I have been developing here, I won’t refer to any outside authorities or works of Dylan criticism. For one thing, I haven’t read any, and I could give a shit what professional critics have written about him, anyway. Nor will I apply any specialized theories to the interpretation of Dylan’s work. My method is close reading; that’s all the method a person needs: one person, one song, one personalized interpretation.

I want to begin this series on Dylan with a favorite song I’ve listened to dozens of time from the Highway 61 album, “The Ballad of a Thin Man.” One line occurs as a refrain throughout the song, “…something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is.” For many people, that line just about sums up their interaction with Dylan. Something is happening, but they just don’t know what it is. Maybe they like him, maybe they don’t, but something is happening. That is undeniable.

So what is happening in “The Ballad of a Thin Man?” At the risk of living up to my reputation as a former English teacher who could interpret the most innocuous of symbols as either a penis or vagina, I would contend that what is happening here is sex, specifically gay sex.

Taking only the first stanza of the song as our text, let’s read together.

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say
When you get home

Even the most resistant reader must recognize the pencil as a symbol for the penis. The pencil is also the tool of accountants and office clerks everywhere, so with one deft symbol Dylan has identified the protagonist of his song as a certain kind of professional male walking into a room, penis in hand, where there is another naked man.

The protagonist is probably in the closet, maybe even married to a woman, otherwise there would be no question of what he will say when he gets home.

In the next stanza, which forms the refrain of the song, our protagonist is given a name.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Jones, of course, is probably the second-most common name in the English-speaking world. Later in the song, he is identified as being “very well-read indeed” and a friend of professors and lawyers. He writes checks to “tax-deductible charity organizations.” Thus Jones has a distinct white, middle-class subtext to it, and in my mind I picture a nominally straight, financially comfortable white guy in a sexual situation with another man or men, maybe in an underground sex club.

The fact that Jones seems shocked, that he can’t figure out what’s going on, only supports this image. A person who thinks of himself as straight, but who is drawn to this kind of activity by his impulses, is going to be shocked, is going to vehemently deny what is happening to him. In the third stanza, when “the geek” (a carnival performer known for a bizarre appearance or performance) asks Jones, “How does it feel to be such a freak?” Jones replies, “Impossible.”

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you?

Laying aside the sexual implications of the song, Dylan may also be suggesting that for a man such as Jones, life in the wildly open 1960’s might seem a little like walking into a freak show. Yet the reader can’t ignore Jones’s implication in the events of the song. He stands apart from the sexual activity, yet desiring to participate.

In the most explicit verse of the song, the sword swallower “kneels” in front of Jones, crosses himself, clicks his high heels (suggestive of transvestism) “and without further notice / He asks you how it feels? / And he says, “Here is your throat back / Thanks for the loan.” The oral sexual connotation of “here is your throat back” should be apparent without any comment from me.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you?

The song ends on much the same note of denial that has been struck throughout. Jones has walked in, putting his eyes in his pocket and his nose on the ground. “There ought to be a law / ‘gainst you comin’ round,” the singer says. In other words, Jones wishes some outside force, The Law, could prevent what is happening, whatever it is. “You should be made to wear earphones,” the singer says. The loss of eyesight, smell, and hearing all combine to suggest a man in utmost denial.

Something has happened. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we can guess. The song is in part a commentary on the abrupt shock of the 1960’s on a conservative culture unprepared for the forces unleashed by sexual revolution. Jones, as representative of that culture, is caught between desire and taboo. The desire is to experience the sexual subversion taking place while maintaining his position as outsider, as observer who is not corrupted by the forbidden acts taking place in front of him.

It is an untenable position, as Dylan suggests, but one that people, even whole generations, find themselves confronted with from time to time. In our present era of resurgent conservatism, we ought to ask if there is a similar process of extreme denial taking place, a forceful marginalization of the “freaks and geeks” who make us uncomfortable, but whom we love to watch on TV.

Dylan suggests that Mr. Jones is us, living our comfortable lives, watching the freak show and (occasionally) dabbling in the underside of life, such as porn and kinky sex and other perversity. All the while, we demand there be a law to prevent us from indulging our baser nature. Maybe the freaks (not us, of course) ought to even be prosecuted in some way, or denied certain basic rights, or otherwise marginalized. So long as we can still buy our ticket and watch them, occasionally.

Now, something has happened, and I think I know what it is. How about you, Mr. Jones?