Monday's Long Song

'They're selling postcards of the hanging/ They're painting the passports brown/ The beauty parlour is filled with sailors/ The circus is in town...'

So begins Desolation Row, the final song on Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, an album that has a claim to be Dylan's greatest (it opens with Like A Rolling Stone and each song that fellows matches that song for songwriting). It was the second album Dylan released in '65. The second! He put out Bringing It All Back Home in March which was recorded in a few days in January. Highway 61 Revisited took a little longer to record- a few weeks from the middle of June before an end of August release. In a world where bands/ artists take years to write, record, release and then promote and tour an album the fact that Dylan put out these two within six months of each other is staggering. To prove he was on a roll, he recorded the songs for Blonde On Blonde in January 1966 and released that one, a double, in June. 

Desolation Row is eleven minutes long and eleven verses  and packs an entire world of characters and scenarios into it, a portrait of a world on the brink and breaking down. Dylan responded to an interviewer by saying Desolation Row was in Mexico, 'just across the border', but this was at a 1965 press conference and we shouldn't take anything he said at a 1965 press conference at face value. Al Kooper reckoned it was in Manhattan, a rundown stretch of Eighth Avenue. Kerouac's lonely mountain top fire watching hut that inspired Desolation Angles may have been in there too. The cast of characters in the song includes a blind commissioner, Cinderella, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Noah, Einstein (disguised as Robin Hood), a jealous monk, Dr. Filth and his nurse, the Phantom of the Opera, the hunchback of Notre Dame, Casanova, Nero, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, the agents and the superhuman crew, and the passengers on the Titanic. There are riot squads, people making love or expecting rain, electric violins, heart attack machines, insurance men, broken doorknobs, kerosene, people being killed with self confidence, people's faces being re- arranged and new names given to them... it's a vast song, panoramic and kaleidoscopic, Dylan's mid- 60s urban poetics that may mean everything and may mean nothing. 

Desolation Row

Charlie McCoy's guitar parts add so much to Dylan's acoustic strumming, a pretty addition that seems deliberately at odds with the roll call of horrors in the lyrics.

Cat Power, never one to shy away from an ambitious cover version, covered Desolation Row in 2022 and released it a year ago, December 2023, extending Dylan's eleven minutes into twelve. 

Desolation Row

Cat didn't just cover Desolation Row. She covered the entire 1966 Dylan concert (long thought to be the Royal Albert Hall but actually Manchester's Free Trade Hall, the famous gig where Dylan goes electric in the second half and an audience member shouted 'Judas' at Dylan). 

As a bonus, sort tying the two artists together, this is a fan made video of footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucian Carr and others on the streets of New York in 1959, with Cat Power's Good Woman as the soundtrack, a song that packs an emotional punch in the vocal performance, the words and the guitar playing.