Playlist: Desolation Row
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row
This is how “Desolation Row,” an 11 minute song recorded on August 5, 1965, opens. It’s arguably Dylan’s greatest song. Mostly unprecedented as a lyrical epic to come out of the jukebox or radio of pop music. I say mostly, but not absolutely unprecedented. T.S. Eliot died in January of the same year. Many listeners and critics, myself included, have seen The Waste Land and Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a template for the mood, imagery and overall impact of the song. I had been listening to this song for decades until I realized the opening line is not only about lynching, but a very paritcular lynching that took place in 1920, when Dylan’s father, Abraham Zimmerman, was nine years old, and lived but a few blocks away. So the line is about family memory and Minnesota as well as and anti-Blackness in a uniquely horrifying 20th century form: turning gratuitous murder scenes into a widespread sellable postcard format. But essentially the line is about slavery. “Desolation Row” opens through a hidden/explicit reference to racial slavery. And this fact makes me rethink my relationship to the song, and Dylan’s work. It is not the dominant theme or note of the song, but it is the entranceway, how it/Amerikka originates.
Interestingly, none of the named figures in “Desolation Row” code as people of color: whether those with more generic handles, like Lady, the blind commissioner, the riot squad, the fortune teller, or those with proper nouns: Bette Davis, Robin Hood, Einstein, the Phantom of the Opera, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. The one exception comes towards the very end of the song with the mention of “calypso singers,” a kind of Caribbean Greek chorus:
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting, “Which side are you on?!”
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
From Wikipedia:
On June 14, 1920, the John Robinson Circus arrived in Duluth for a free parade and a one-night performance. Two local white teenagers, Irene Tusken, age 19, and James (“Jimmie”) Sullivan, 18, met at the circus and ended up behind the big top, watching the black workers dismantle the menagerie tent, load wagons and generally get the circus ready to move on. It is unknown what took place between Tusken, Sullivan and the workers. Later that night Sullivan claimed to his father that he and Tusken were assaulted, and that Tusken was raped and robbed by five or six black circus workers, who were part of the crew. In the early morning of June 15, Duluth Police Chief John Murphy received a call from James Sullivan’s father saying six black circus workers had held his son and girlfriend at gunpoint and then raped and robbed Irene Tusken. Chief Murphy lined up all 150 or so roustabouts, food service workers, and props-men on the side of the tracks, and asked Sullivan and Tusken to identify their attackers. The police arrested six black men as suspects in connection with the rape and robbery and held them in custody in the city jail. Sullivan’s claim that Tusken was raped has been questioned. When she was examined by her physician, Dr. David Graham, on the morning of June 15, he found no physical evidence of rape or assault. But newspapers printed articles about the alleged rape; rumors spread in the white community about it, including that Tusken was dying from her injuries. That evening a mob of men estimated between 1,000 and 10,000 formed outside the Duluth city jail. The Duluth Commissioner of Public Safety, William F. Murnian, ordered the police not to use their guns to protect the prisoners. The mob used heavy timbers, bricks and rails to break down doors and windows, pulling the six black men from their cells. The mob seized Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie. They took them out and convicted them of Tusken’s rape in a sham trial. The mob took the three men one block to 1st Street and 2nd Avenue East, where they beat them and hanged them.
Below is a playlist inspired by some of the song’s many references and contexts.
Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (May 3, 1965)
Happy, happy, the little gasoline fumes on the lake—happy, the cowboy book he has, which I glance at, the first rough dusty chapter with sneering hombres in dust hats pow-wowing murders in a canyon crack—hatred steeling in their faces all blue—woe, gaunt, worn, weathered horses and rough chaparral—And I think “O pooey it’s all a dream, who care? Come on, that which passes through everything, pass through everything, I’m with you”—“Pass through dear Fred, make him feel the ecstasy of you, God”—“Pass through it all”—How can the universe be anything but a Womb? And the Womb of God or the Womb of Tathagata, it’s two languages not two Gods— And anyway the truth is relative, the world is relative—Everything is relative—Fire is fire and isnt fire—“Dont disturb the sleeping Einstein in his bliss”—“So it’s only a dream so shut up and enjoy—lake of the mind”—
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