The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bob Dylan · produced by Bob Johnston, and by Tom Wilson on “Like a Rolling Stone” · Columbia · 51 minutes
Mode
Symbolist collage on an electric blues band; the protest song turned into an indictment without a cause
Mythos
The fall from place, the sacrifice sited on a highway, the underworld street of the displaced
Phase
Nine songs over two sides, from a fall to a refuge, with the one acoustic song placed last
Presentation
Album; nine songs, about fifty-one minutes, eight with an electric band and the last with two acoustic guitars
Register
Derision, vaudeville and elegy in one voice; the sneer and the sudden tenderness
Scale
An American carnival in the summer of 1965, from Abraham to Pound and Eliot
Governing Proposition
A singer the folk revival had made its spokesman turns an electric band on the structures that told Americans who they were, and finds them a costume party. Whoever is thrown out of it is not ruined but freed, and the album ends on a street of the thrown-out that it takes for a refuge.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The album opens on a snare hit, an organ climbing over the band, and a six-minute song in a year when a single ran about three. It had been released as a single some six weeks earlier, and it reached No. 2 in the United States. Its subject is a woman who once had everything, the schooling, the company, the place in a guarded world, and has fallen out of all of it. The verses inventory what she had and what it turned out to be worth. The chorus asks her “How does it feel”, four times over, and each time the band lurches forward under the question as if it might not hold together.
The question changes as the song goes. At first it is a taunt. By the last verse the woman has nothing, and so nothing left to lose, and the pretence has gone with the possessions. That reversal is the album’s thesis, stated in its first six minutes: the structures that told people who they were have become a costume party, and whoever is thrown out of it finds the place was never theirs. The voice carries both halves at once. The drawl, the sneer and the sudden tenderness are what the words withhold, and the song cannot be read from the page without losing the half of it that is a welcome.
The record was cut at Columbia’s Studio A in New York on 15 and 16 June 1965, with Tom Wilson producing; Bob Johnston produced the other eight tracks. The organ that climbs over the band was improvised by Al Kooper, who was not an organist, and in his own account Dylan had it turned up in the mix over the producer’s doubt. The band found the song as it played it. What survives on the record is a structure coming loose and holding, which is also what the song describes.
Movement II
Side one closes on the other half of the argument. “Ballad of a Thin Man” is built on a slow piano figure with an organ underneath, and its subject is the educated spectator, Mister Jones, at a show he cannot read. Each verse is a scene and another humiliation, and the voice that grows more menacing as it goes. The refrain returns each time to what he cannot see. The woman of the opener has lost her place. Mister Jones still has his, and that is his trouble.
The contempt is real, and the album pays for it. The divide between those who see and those who do not can sound, sixty years on, like a period pose. But the derision is not the disclosure, and it does not exempt the singer. Two songs on the second side end with him in retreat, one back to New York and one behind a refusal to answer letters. Who, or what, Mister Jones is has been argued for six decades and has not been settled, which is part of why the song still holds the room.
Between the opener and this song, side one is at its loosest. “Tombstone Blues” runs on accumulation, a delirium of Galileo, Paul Revere’s horse and a household at labour, with a mother at factory work and a father scavenging. “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” is a slow, worn blues and a tender one. “From a Buick 6” is a serviceable blues and little more. Here the record is most nearly a set of songs, and its energy is not yet elevation.
Movement III
Side two opens with “Queen Jane Approximately”, the album’s tenderness: an invitation, not a taunt, to someone worn out by the same costume world. Then comes the title track, with a siren whistle over the band, and the album’s mockery at its most open. Each of its five verses ends on the highway’s name. In the first, God tells Abraham “Kill me a son”, Abraham answers with an American shrug, and the killing is sited on Route 61.
The later verses bring other trades and other troubles to the same road, and the last stages the next world war there as a promoter’s show. The archetype is not cited. It is moved, and fixed to a particular place. The road is real: it runs from Minnesota, where Dylan grew up, down the Mississippi through the blues country of the Delta. Three of the album’s songs are built on blues forms, the title track among them, and the music comes down the same road the sacrifice is sited on.
The road runs through the whole album. The woman of the opener has no home to go to. A train carries the third track and a car the fourth. In “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” a stranger is stranded in Juárez at Easter and decides at last to go back to New York. The album ends on a street. Its figures are always in transit, and none of them arrives anywhere the songs would call home, except the last.
Movement IV
At the Newport Folk Festival on 25 July 1965, five days after the single, Dylan played an electric set with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and it was met with booing and dispute. A month later at Forest Hills, a concert half acoustic and half electric was booed in part. The audience that turned on him was the one that had made his name, the folk revival that had taken him for its spokesman. Whatever the album would become, it was made in the middle of that quarrel, and its stake was paid in public.
The turn was taken along Dylan’s own path. Bringing It All Back Home, in March, had gone electric on its first side and had already found the collage lyric, and the Byrds’ electric “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a hit that summer. What this album added was the whole of the sound: eight of nine tracks with a band, the topical protest song dropped for symbolist collage, the long, accusing song put on the radio, and an eleven-minute track to end it. A swerve along one’s own path is still a swerve.
The band was a Chicago blues guitarist, Mike Bloomfield, with a New York session group: Al Kooper and Paul Griffin on organ and piano, Bobby Gregg on drums, Harvey Brooks on bass at the later sessions. They learned the songs in the studio, and it shows, in fluffed changes and a muddy “Tombstone Blues”, as well as in a lurch that sounds like the disorder the songs describe. Within months folk rock filled the charts, and that December the Beatles’ Rubber Soul turned toward the oblique first-person lyric.
Movement V
The last track is the only acoustic one: two guitars, Dylan’s and Charlie McCoy’s, with voice and harmonica and no drums. It runs eleven minutes, more than a fifth of the album and more than two-fifths of its second side, and it comes after eight tracks of the electric carnival, solitude after the crowd. It opens on “postcards of the hanging” and a circus come to town. Critics have connected the hanging with the lynching in Duluth in 1920; that is an association, not a known intention, and the song leaves it open.
Then the procession. Cinderella, Cain and Abel, Ophelia, Einstein, the Phantom of the Opera, the riot squad and a blind commissioner pass along the street, and Pound and Eliot brawl high on a doomed ship while musicians below laugh at them. Each verse ends on the street’s name. The street has its own curfew and its own agents, and it is not a hell. It is where the people of the costume party go when they have been thrown out of it, and the harmonica between the verses lifts the procession instead of mourning it.
The last verse turns from the carnival to a single correspondent. A letter has arrived, and the singer asks for no more, unless they are sent from the street itself. The derision of the album ends by including the man who sang it. The woman of the opener, with nothing left to lose, has somewhere to go after all, and so does the singer, and it is the same place. Sixty-one years on, the question the album opened with is still being asked of it, and it has not been closed.
Act III · The Twelve
Nine tracks in about fifty-one minutes, and the subtractive test finds four that cannot go. “Like a Rolling Stone” opens the argument, a woman cast out of a guarded world; “Desolation Row” closes it, a whole street of the cast out; “Ballad of a Thin Man” gives it from the other side, from the man who cannot see; the title track gives it a place. The eleven minutes of the closer are compelled by its procession, and length is not charged. The give is small and specific. “From a Buick 6” is a serviceable blues the rest does not need, and “Tombstone Blues” and “Desolation Row” each carry a verse that could go, so the slack sits inside songs as well as between them.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in mid-century America the structures that told people who they were, class, church, family, the canon of culture, the state, have become a costume party, and whoever loses a place in it finds the place was never theirs. “Like a Rolling Stone” carries it in its reversal. The woman fallen from privilege has nothing left to lose, and so is free of the pretence, and the question “How does it feel” is half taunt and half welcome. “Ballad of a Thin Man” shows the same thing from the spectator’s seat. Held back on two counts: much of the album renders a mood of derision rather than a meaning, and “Tombstone Blues” is more delirium than diagnosis.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height and frequency are both high, and elevation comes on five of nine tracks. The opening snare hit of “Like a Rolling Stone” and its chorus, the organ climbing over the band, are among the highest moments the popular song had reached. “Ballad of a Thin Man” reaches the dreadful sublime: a slow piano figure over organ, and a voice that grows more menacing with each verse. “Queen Jane Approximately” rises by tenderness, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by a worn, late-night beauty, and “Desolation Row” by sheer extent, its harmonica breaks lifting between verses. Held off the top because three of those heights sit well under the first, and the middle of side one is energy, not elevation.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth is built in two songs and carried by one pattern across the rest. The title track moves the binding of Isaac onto a United States highway: God’s command, “Kill me a son”, meets an American shrug, and the killing is sited on Route 61, where a later verse stages the next world war as a promoter’s show. The road is real, running down the Mississippi through the blues country of the Delta. “Desolation Row” builds an underworld street with its own curfew and agents. And the road and exile bear load throughout: a fallen woman with no home to go to, a train, a car, a highway, a stranger stranded at the border, a street. “Tombstone Blues” only summons a crowd, which holds it off the top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance was the folk revival that had made Dylan its spokesman, the twelve-bar blues and the pop single of about three minutes. The departures were four: a six-minute single built on a long, accusing lyric, which reached No. 2 in the United States; symbolist collage in place of the topical protest song; a Chicago blues guitarist and a loose New York session band behind a folk singer; and an eleven-minute closing track. The stake was paid in public, with the audience that had made his name: the electric set at Newport came five days after the single, and booing followed at Forest Hills. Held below the top because Bringing It All Back Home, in March, had already taken part of the turn.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the album loses much of what it knows. The instrument is the long song whose verses parade figures while a returning line passes judgment: in “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Queen Jane Approximately” and “Desolation Row”, each new verse becomes another count of one indictment. Print the words and the voice goes, and the voice is the knowledge: the drawl, the sneer and the sudden tenderness carry what the words withhold. Strip the band and its lurch goes, the organ arriving a half-beat late like the disorder the songs describe. Held below the top: the sequence is shaped once, by the acoustic closer placed last, and the blues numbers are containers.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and sixty-one years supply it: Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003), Greil Marcus’s book on a single track (2005), Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man in successive editions, the Nobel Prize of 2016 as one dated instance of return, and decades of rearrangement, by Dylan in performance and by others, the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing “Like a Rolling Stone” at Monterey in 1967 among them. The basic questions stay open: who Mister Jones is, whether the woman of the opener is pitied, mocked or envied, why the street of the closer is a refuge and not a hell. The musical material is plain and yields less on formal return; the depth is mostly semantic.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The album reorganised what a song could carry. Its force joined a long, literary, accusing lyric to an electric blues band, made the voice a dramatic instrument, and set the single free of its time limit. Some of the redirection belongs to Dylan’s 1965 as a whole, the album before this one included, and it is discounted for that. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: folk rock filled the charts within months; the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, that December, turned toward the oblique first-person lyric; long singles followed; the singer-songwriter who writes as a poet became a standard figure; and rock lyrics became an object of criticism, a turn that publications such as Crawdaddy! (1966) were founded to take, with Springsteen’s account of hearing the opening snare one testimony among many.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-one years, and the axis is scored on the demonstration. The album has been in print continuously, its songs are in the working repertoire of other musicians, and Dylan has kept them in performance for decades in changed arrangements. It has outlived the folk revival it left, the mono LP, the hip-and-square quarrel of its moment, and the topical protest songs of 1963, which have dated faster; this lyric names no politician, war or event. The surface fixed to its moment is the production, and it still costs something: the thin drum sound, the mono-era mix, a session band finding the songs as it played them. The words are less of their year than the sound.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of the recorded medium: voice, band, arrangement and recording. The vocal performance is load-bearing. It phrases against the beat, and changes the meaning of a line by where it lands. Mike Bloomfield plays lead guitar, Charlie McCoy the second acoustic guitar of “Desolation Row”, and on “Like a Rolling Stone” the organ part was improvised by Al Kooper, who was not an organist; in Kooper’s own account, Dylan had it pushed up in the mix over the producer’s doubt. The costs are in the making: plain composition, fluffed changes, a muddy mix on “Tombstone Blues”, a band learning the songs on tape. Some of the roughness is the point. Some is roughness, and a full command would not need the luck.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the whole, and the two most distant elements obey it: the siren-whistle comedy of the title track and the acoustic stillness of “Desolation Row”. In each, figures out of the Bible, history and popular culture are displaced into an American landscape of carnivals, highways, circuses and police, and judged by a refrain that names a place. The tender songs obey it too. “Queen Jane Approximately” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” address someone worn out by the same costume world, with an offer in place of a taunt. The range is wide: vaudeville to elegy, Chicago blues to Spanish-tinged guitar. “From a Buick 6” follows its genre’s law instead, and the law is a stance more than a structure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The form is short, and a low mark on a short form describes the form. Within it the album names more orders than most: consciousness after a fall, in “Like a Rolling Stone”; the family and labour, in the household of “Tombstone Blues”, the mother at factory work and the father scavenging; class, from the fallen heiress to the diplomat and the tramps; the state, war and the police, on the highway and the street; history and culture, from Galileo and Paul Revere to Pound and Eliot; the sacred, from Abraham to the Good Samaritan. One law holds them, the carnival. What holds the axis here is integration: the orders pass through the album side by side and do not bear on one another.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Bottomless Well at 9.1. A record that changed what a song could carry, sixty-one years of demonstrated survival, and six decades of return that have left its basic questions open.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: the family, labour, class, the state, history and the sacred are each present in a named song, but they pass through the album side by side and are not integrated. Below the rest, The Inevitable and The Living Form at 8.5: a few verses and one blues the album does not need, and a sequence shaped once.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Every summit condition is met, and the work is held in the fourth tier by its standing alone.
Basis · the complete album as released, nine tracks over two sides in sequence, about 51:31, judged from knowledge of the recording, its lyrics and its reception. Running times are as commonly listed and differ by a few seconds between pressings. No lyric is quoted beyond a title or four words.