Desolation Row by Bob Dylan --Final Verse

When putting together the 100 Songs That Made Me project, I grouped the songs into ten categories. Over the decades, Desolation Row has become a foundational song for me, one of my top five favorites of all time. I placed Desolation Row at the beginning of a category I called Fabled Momentum. This category includes songs that move like novels because of their accumulating character, consequence, and meaning throughout their length. Literary comparisons include Leo Tolstoy, whose novels argue that history is made not by great men but by the accumulated weight of ordinary lives in motion, as well as Scheherazade, who survives One Thousand and One Nights by keeping her narrative alive one night at a time.

Desolation Row by Bob Dylan has been researched, discussed, and dissected since it was first released on Highway 61 Revisited in 1965. I have researched, discussed, and dissected it on my own, and to anyone who will listen since I first got the CD from Columbia House in 1994 for one penny (plus hundreds of dollars several months later).

I have been circling how to do my own essay about Desolation Row for a couple of months. To me, this is the greatest song of the 20th century. The DNA of this song goes back thousands of years. Despite the lyrics reading like refrigerator word magnets after a literary fraternity party, each line, phrase, word, and inflection has meaning. I have decided it is probably easier to do a series of essays. One for each verse in reverse chronological order.

Whenever I give my backyard thesis on Desolation Row to family and friends, I focus on the allusions and references scattered throughout the song. There are approximately 30-35 direct references and another 10-15 nods and allusions to other works of art. The most obvious is The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, an expansive 433-line poem in which Eliot created his own Desolation Row. With The Waste Land as the template, Dylan was able to incorporate many of the people, places, and things Eliot wrote about over a century ago.

The final verse is preceded by Dylan’s mournful harmonica solo, which wanders without resolution like a spirit trying to reconnect with its corporeal form. The solo acts as a gateway to the core of the narrator’s emotional state. The meaning of Desolation Row truly comes into focus on the other side of that threshold. The song is an ode to loss, pain, heartbreak, grief. The final verse is a letter to someone loved and lost. The distant, third-person narrator becomes Bob Dylan in the first-person perspective. The first and third persons ‘always did feel the same, they just saw it from a different point of view.’

Dylan begins by letting this person know that he received their letter. The letter seems to be from a former lover who is politely keeping in touch. Her letter opens with an icebreaker, an anecdote about an incident involving a broken doorknob when they were together. One of those shorthand phrases that all couples and friends have, an inside joke, meaningful to them but elusive and nonsensical to others. The writer of the letter continues making small talk, asking how he is doing. Dylan takes offense to this. She should know the state he was left in and still lives in. He feels made fun of, hurt by her callousness. She moves on to catch him up on the circle of friends they kept together. Dylan has moved on and distanced himself from that life however he could. When thinking of them, he intentionally mixes their faces up: Billy is now Jim, Sally is now Lisa. Fred is now Carrie. The only way Dylan can move on and recover is by destroying the memories of everything that reminds him of their life together. He doesn’t consider them friends anymore or worthy of his affection. To him, “they’re quite lame.”

Taking into account everything that has come before in this song, the final four lines are the most devastating. The narrator tells his former love not to send any more letters. His ability to read and speak is disintegrating before our very ears. Right now I can’t read too good. Don’t send me no more letters, no. A double negative with a third resounding negative at the end of the line. If this person does decide to send him any more letters, he only wants them if they are sent from Desolation Row, the alley inside the soul where everything is bleak and the only thing anyone understands is emotional pain and isolation. For over nine and a half minutes, Bob Dylan gives us a personal tour of the western world’s great work of emotionally raw art with nothing but his words, a guitar, and a harmonica.

Bob Dylan has worn many masks throughout his career. His chameleon skin has been drenched by every hue in Noah’s great rainbow. For 11 minutes and 19 seconds in 1965, “the song and dance man” may have worn his most important costume, that of the smallest Matryoshka Doll. Dylan nested inside T. S. Eliot, Eliot inside the artistic philosophers who came before him, all of them inside the deepest recesses of the human condition.