What was Bob Dylan doing when he moved into rock music in mid-career? His first albums were in a folk-protest idiom. His later albums tended to return to a folk-country idiom close to his first albums. But the latter were markedly different because of three central albums that intervened: Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61, Revisited; and Blonde on Blonde. Perhaps now, knowing where his music went, we can begin to look back and try to understand what were the underlying motives for that excursion. There are certain songs on these three albums that stand out from the rest as highly individualistic even within Dylan's own canon. They establish a continuity and developing attitude that seems to underlie Dylan's work in this period, an attitude which proved untenable and which finally forced him out of rock altogether.

The common interpretation of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is that it describes a drug high, the Tambourine Man being the dealer, his song being a hint of the visions he will give the poet through drugs. The imagery of the song would tend to back this up. In the first verse the poet states his readiness to begin to trip out. In the second verse the actual high begins to take effect: the singer's hands and feet grow numb and "lose their grip," and he loses his hold on reality. In the third verse he is "laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun," and in the fourth verse he travels down through his mind, seeing the various things buried deep beneath the "waves" of his subconscious. Such specific imagery can be compounded and the song becomes simply the description of a drug high, but this does not explain everything in the lyric…. Throughout the song there is imagery referring to music and dancing and singing. In both verse one and three another obvious mood is that of wandering, searching. The entire song is operating in the imperative form of the verb: the poet asks the Tambourine Man to play his song, he demands "take me on a trip"—he is ready to go, and in the second verse he promises to go. In the last verse he says "take me disappearing," and "let me forget about today." The song ends with the repetition of the chorus, which is quite clearly calling on the Tambourine Man to play him a song, which he will follow, the spell of which he will go under…. This point of view of the singer in relation to the Tambourine Man is the key to the song. The imagery points to the feelings evoked by the singer's realization of his place and its implications and consequences for him.

Dylan begins the song, and presents his basic attitude, in the chorus. He is awake, waiting for somewhere to go. The first verse specifies his position—"evening's empire" has turned to sand that has slipped through his fingers, and he is blind, weary, stranded, alone on an empty street "too dead for dreaming." Evening's empire is the realm of dreams. (pp. 135-36)

In the second verse he points out his readiness to begin his trip, to fade "into my own parade." On the one hand this implies fading into his own mind, his own world. He also recognizes that what he needs is an idiom of his own, a "parade" moving down his own road, to replace the dead form he has worked in. Again the chorus, and he calls on the Tambourine Man for inspiration, to help him find his way.

The narrative point of view then shifts from the first person to an ironic second person. The point of view becomes that of the Tambourine Man as the poet conceives of him, and the third verse considers what the Tambourine Man must think of this poet and his songs. (pp. 136-37)

The singer then looks into himself to find what he will see, given the inspiration of the Tambourine Man. He wishes to delve into his mind to escape his consciousness and his subconscious fears, the "haunted frightened trees," the "foggy ruins of time," and the world he lives in, to realize a fresh elemental vision, represented by the setting of sea, sand, and sky. On the beach, confronting the sea, the primordial element of nature, he would drown memory, time, fate and its consequences, and experience a pure poetic vision….

The poet is on a street "too dead for dreaming." But with no dreaming there can be no new vision. There is no one on the street to lead him, and so he called on the Tambourine Man to help him. But the Tambourine Man exists in another world and either cannot or will not help him, and the poet on his own cannot make the leap into that world. Thus the cry at the end of the song is a cry of futility. (p. 137)

And so what is he to do now? He chooses to take a closer look around, both at the street and at the world just off of the street. The results are not edifying, for the remainder of this album and much of the next detail a catalog of grotesquery and nightmares almost unparalleled in contemporary poetry. A good example of this, and perhaps Dylan's most powerful single lyric, is "Desolation Row" on the Highway 61, Revisited album. (pp. 137-38)

In "Desolation Row" Dylan turns his back on drug visions and visionary hopes to face reality as he sees it, and he sees the world in the aspect of a carnival, specifically a freak show, with all the grotesques on prominent display. The lyric tells of the parade of grotesques that pass before the poet, a stream of images generated by a letter full of gossip he has just received from an old acquaintance.

The opening is primarily an impressionistic panoramic overview of the world around his street, setting the scene for the specific and deeper probings to follow. The first three phrases present three spot images, one of them grotesque postcards of a hanged man, reminiscent of the hanged god of The Waste Land, another failed symbol of fertility and redemption. The fourth phrase gives us the setting of the lyric: "The circus is in town." (p. 138)

There are two important women on the Row, Cinderella and Ophelia. Cinderella is a prostitute, confronting Romeo, the idealistic lover, who is told to leave. On this street there is no place for such a ridiculous adolescent. An ambulance carries away the dead Romeo, leaving Cinderella to her perennial task of sweeping up. There will be no Prince Charming here. Ophelia is just the opposite of Cinerella, a professional virgin. Although only twenty-two, she is already an old maid because she has sacrificed love and affection for her career, armored herself, and become one of the iron maidens of modern business. The iron vest she wears is a likely metaphor for the way she has armored her mind and body against love and sexuality.

Science and medicine fare about as well as sentimental love and affection here. Albert Einstein, the symbol of modern science and technology, is presented in the guise of Robin Hood, perhaps representing his symbolic position today as the bringer of the riches (and horrors) of modern living to the everyday man. For Dylan, all he can ultimately do is bum cigarettes, sniff drainpipes, recite the alphabet—absurd activities. Science and technology and all they involve, represented in this man, have become a meaningless and occasionally grotesque parody of humanity. (p. 139)

There is no hope even in the stars. The third verse, the first "Eliotesque" verse, so called because of allusions to The Waste Land in the figure of the fortune-teller, the mechanical lovemaking, and the motif of waiting for rain, begins with the blacking out of the stars and moon, standard symbols of romance and the aspirations of men. The fortuneteller has given up the ghost and gone inside—there is no fortune to tell without the stars. The only ones left who aren't waiting for release from their lives are Cain and Abel and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the first an image of death and hate where there should be love, the second an image of ignorant and deformed love. The Good Samaritan is also dressing for the show—he too is now a freak, to go on display in the modern carnival freak show.

And so the stage is set for the presentation in verse seven of the main show of the carnival. The central figure is Casanova, standard representative of sexual energy, and the occasion is his punishment. His crime? Not his dissolute life, which in its essential sterility is in keeping with modern life, but rather his trip to Desolation Row. Casanova has been to the Row and as a result has lost his assurance, his potency. On Desolation Row he has experienced the nothingness of his life—the end of the road, the absolute nihilism, the knowledge of his irrelevance, which comes when he must face the fact of his own ultimate impotence. The result of this experience is that he must be spoon-fed if his illusions are to be revived and he is to become again one of the carnival's proper functionaries. He is not being killed and poisoned literally; rather his experience on Desolation Row, where he lost his self-confidence, must be purged by means of false self-confidence and the superficiality of words. This, to Dylan, is as good as death, because the loss of assurance is implicitly the beginning of true insight. (pp. 139-40)

The larger world is not pleasant looking. Verse eight is a Kafkaesque verse, with its dominating image of the castles. It is midnight, but instead of witches and werewolves, it is the agents, crew, and insurance men from the castles who sweep down to scour the land…. Their prey is anyone who rises above the common lot, anyone who has greater knowledge than they.

Carnival imagery is now of less importance. The song has expanded in its significance by positing a dark and mysterious power at the center of the world, the castles. What these castles are is not explicit, as was also true in the Kafka novel. The important thing is that they exist out there and threaten all aspects of contemporary life.

One escape route is posited by Dylan, however—the Titanic. In verse nine, the Titanic is to sail at dawn. In "Tambourine Man" dawn and the ship were to bring a new vision. Here they bring death and destruction to one of man's great creations. From this point on this can be seen as the second "Eliotesque" verse, with specific references to Eliot and Pound and to the calling mermaids of "Prufrock." The central image again refers to the dissolution of the poet's idiom or inspiration. One of Dylan's major influences is the poetry of these two men, but they are doomed without even realizing it, so caught up are they in their own petty arguments. With the sinking of the Titanic comes the death of the meaningfulness of Eliot's and Pound's poetic idiom. Fishermen and calypso singers laugh at the two men for their irrelevance to real life…. All of these people have ignored, in fact never really recognize, Desolation Row, and therefore are destined to irrelevance forever. (p. 141)

Since he was forced to give up the dream of the Tambourine Man, Dylan has forced himself to see the place where he stands for what it is, has moved toward the nadir point of his existence where old values, institutions, and aspirations are obliterated or distorted in an absolute negativity. He is surviving. The experience of all this is recounted in "Desolation Row," and this experience he has resolved into a tremendously powerful lyric. But he is not yet free. The experience has not been weighed, balanced, judged. Indeed it seems as though, given the poet's detached place in the song, it has not even been fully absorbed yet. It remains to be seen at this point whether he will find any resolution. He takes up this problem in "Visions of Johanna."

"Visions of Johanna" is probably Dylan's most difficult lyric, made up of a series of highly personal and shifting images and references. It is also filled with sexual and drug imagery, important vehicles in establishing the theme and motif of the song, the only song on the Blonde on Blonde album that uses this imagery in such concentration and profusion.

The motif of the song is the unstructured stream-of-consciousness thoughts of a young man (the poet) sitting in a room with a girl named Louie and her lover. The basic theme of the lyric would seem to be the poet's feelings of being abandoned, left alone to face the Visions of Johanna. The definition of these Visions is developed slowly through the poem. They are not the inspiration Dylan has been seeking since "Tambourine Man," for the world of this song is a bizarre one derived directly from "Desolation Row," even to the position of the poet in a room above a street of grotesques. They are visions of love prostituted, and of the negation of life and vitality this prostitution implies, all of which contrasts violently with an idealized love the poet recognizes he cannot have. The conflict throughout the lyric between visions of negation and of an idealized love lost and prostituted sets up a tension that leads to the final dissolution of the song. The ideal and the real are irreconcilable, and end by destroying each other.

This duality in "Visions of Johanna" is the result of the combination of two image patterns that have developed in previous songs. The idealized vision of the Tambourine Man, the poet's vision of an energizing relationship, is now conceived of in terms of a lost love relationship. The visions of the nihilism of life in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and "Desolation Row," also included here, imply the complete breakdown of the poet's world and by implication of his own mind. (pp. 142-43)

With this song, it would seem that Dylan was unable to pull out of the situation he found himself in on Desolation Row and in "Tambourine Man." He found no saving grace to reinject hope and vitality into his poetry. Negativity (as he saw in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues") has resulted in a superabundance of grotesqueries, pornography, deviation. There has been no vision, and negativity did not see him through.

Dylan has sung his rock-song, and there is no Madonna waiting for him. And so he picks up his folk guitar and begins to sing again. The John Wesley Harding album is a reversion to a country-folk idiom, changed significantly because of his experiences through three albums, but still basically a return to a previous idiom. Yet before he steps back into folk music he has a few final remarks to make on it all.

In "All Along the Watchtower," the I-persona is abandoned for a third person narrative, but the concerns and theme follow directly from the songs I have been considering. It is constructed in three verses that continue one story straight through. The third verse suddenly cuts off the narrative, and the song is left unfinished. I believe this is so because Dylan was reviewing the same conflict he couldn't resolve previously, and dropped it in favor of his new-old idiom.

The setting and characters have an almost mythic quality. The place is a medieval castle, so distant from our time that it can take on an otherworldly aspect. The two main characters are a joker and a thief, both the disinherited of their society. The joker as a character in, for example, Shakespearean drama, always knew what was going on around him, in fact was frequently the only one who knew this, but was unable to act on his knowledge. (p. 145)

"'There must be some way out of there,' said the joker to the thief. / 'There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.'" The fragmented world and chaotic life his previous poetry dealt with is too much for him; he can't support it. None of the common people (plowmen or businessmen) can understand his problem. Wine is a conventional symbol of blood, and the businessmen drinking his wine are sucking his life, his creativity, out of him. Thus these common people actually become oppressors. And of course, as in previous lyrics, none of them know the real value of any of his work. At the end of the first verse Dylan's whole situation, running through all his rock lyrics, has been defined. He has been pushed around, drained, and wasted, turned into some kind of freak in his own freak show, and no one realizes what has been happening.

The thief replies to the joker. He understands the joker's position, and also sees life as a cruel joke (reminiscent of verse four of "Visions of Johanna"). But as he points out, the two of them are through all that confusion now, and there is another destiny awaiting them. Perhaps this is the thief that hung beside Christ, as some like to speculate. The joker then becomes a version of the hanged god (as in verse one of "Desolation Row") who brings fertility to the land through his death, and salvation to those who drink his blood. The late hour would be the hour of their death. Thus a hint of possible redemption enters the poem. (pp. 145-46)

What did it all mean? Dylan seems to have overthrown the question, and in the bedlam escaped the trials of it all with his drifter and headed for the tall timber ("The Drifter's Escape"). In John Wesley Harding, the rock medium was highly modified for the same reason the rock lyrics were modified—he found the less structured nature of his idiom insupportable just as he found the "real" world grotesque and unacceptable. The results of this clash in both music and lyrics was a return to a simpler, clearer, "cleaner" world, a return to a "primitivist" idiom, accompanied by a self-imposed exile. Dylan seems to have come to the conclusion that the ultimate truths were to be found in those things that "whisper a few simple things eternally."… Dylan's songs at this point seem to imply that the ultimate way a man should be is to have a simple humane concern for his fellow men, and that such basic human emotions are the sources of peace and order. (pp. 146-47)

Thomas S. Johnson, "Desolation Row Revisited: Bob Dylan's Rock Poetry," in Southwest Review (© 1977 by Southern Methodist University Press), Spring, 1977, pp. 135-47.