Desolation Row

great

we should note that it's uh it was noted at the time that some of the lines seemed like there was a thing like the village voice or somebody said what did bob know and when did he know it there was another one about just all the all the weird obsessions that had come up that mentioned some uh obsess over cryptic lines in the new bob dylan album I think it just speaks to, like, last fall when I was first on Anti-Ice Whistle Patrol, every line in Desolation Row suddenly sounded like exactly what was going on.

Right.

Last spring when he sang, every time he sang Gulf of Mexico, there'd be cheers in Key West.

Maybe I've heard that one before.

Positively Fourth Street, Simple Twist of Fate, Highway 61 Revisited, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Desolation Row.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.

So that's 25 through 11.

Darkness on the edge of...

What is it? Desolation Row.

Blown in the wind.

What is it? Queen Jade, approximately.

Zach is a very naughty boy and will be going to bed with soap in his mouth.

Ahead of that was My Chemical Romance's cover of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, which is significantly better than the original, not least because it's literally twice the tempo.

Because the original is eight minutes long, that one is three minutes long.

That was taken from the 2009 soundtrack to Watchmen, which I really liked that movie.

Although he was giving up the acoustic guitar, he did leave one song in, and it's actually a huge one.

It was Desolation Row, which is an 11-minute acoustic epic and is the only non-electric track on the actual album.

As far as how the album did, well, it hit number three on the Billboard albums chart, and it had those songs mentioned earlier, Ballad of a Thin Man, Desolation Row, Like a Rolling Stone.

The album itself was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

In 1966, The Mamas & The Papas released their self-titled studio album.

Carnivals and circuses have always fascinated Dylan.

The first line of Desolation Row announces that the circus is in town, and in one sense, all the characters in that song may be seen as circus performers.

Years before, in his earliest interviews, Dylan had constructed many fabrications about his life, claiming to have run away from home at a very tender age and to have spent much of his youth travelling around the country working in carnivals and circuses.

This completely fictional backstory has been heavily romanticised in his unreleased autobiographical 1963 composition Dusty Old Fairgrounds.

In 1965, during a performance at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York, Bob Dylan faced intense booing from folk purists who were really upset at the fact that he transitioned from acoustic guitar to electric guitar music.

Despite the hostility, he defiantly powered through his set, which notably included the live debut of his masterpiece, Desolation Row.

In 1965, The Rolling Stones officially signed a major record contract, keeping them with Decca Records for five years while hiring the notoriously aggressive Allen Klein as their co-manager.

This deal vastly increased their cash flow, but it did spark a decades-long legal war over their royalties and master copies.

Those guys are awesome.

Donald O'Connor, singer, dancer, actor, was born in 1925, part of the golden era of the Hollywood movies and musicals.

He performed the song Make 'Em Laugh in the 1952 musical masterpiece, Singin' in the Rain, with Gene Kelly.

Kim Appleby was born in 1961.

We've been listening to Bob Dylan recorded live at various venues between 1962 and 1966.

That last song, Desolation Row, was recorded at Channel 9 in Sydney in April 1966.

I'll put up a full list of the songs and locations when I upload the podcast later tonight.

You're tuned to Indigo FM, your local independent radio station.

Not to mention, I mean, I think the obvious appeal to somebody who teaches literature, the fact that his lyrics broke through that divide between popular music and poetry for a lot of people.

And he's one of the first songwriters that English professors wanted to bring into the classroom and who were willing to say, yeah, this is worthy of analysis, this Desolation Row, Gates of Eden.

So a lot of reasons that I was drawn to Dylan.

But probably the most fundamental one is that I've always been a Dylan fan my whole life.

But also just culturally, thinking about Dylan as more than a popular musician, but as a sort of leader... or symbol for what a lot of people were looking for and remember about now, the second half of the 60s.

It stands out as a moment of defiance, but it's also important to remember it coincides with Dylan's growth as a lyricist.

If we just think about him plugging in as a symbol, We might lose sight of the fact that he was also writing songs like Desolation Row and Visions of Johanna.

There's these groundbreaking songs around that same time.