Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

With Dylan, I think often attempts at understanding misfires because one does not look at the context of the song within the album, the period of time Dylan was writing, the issues that were important to him, and the arc of his career. Thus there attempts to make Desolation Row about the Holocaust, which it is not. It is about contemporary America, which is almost all he wrote about beyond relationships. On Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan reached his zenith in his scathing assault on the American shadow and the corruption of society. This was non personal (Tombstone Blues, Highway 61, Desolation Row, Ballad of a Thin Man) and semi personal (Like a Rolling Stone). This critique was withering and all out. However the album ends with the astonishing and exceptional Desolation Row, which is acoustic, not electric. In Desolation Row, the fury Dylan has mounted, not only in this album, but in the previous one (Bringing it All Back Home-where is "home"?-good old USA), and the three albums before it, is now finally dying down. like a fire that is becoming embers. Dylan is weary and he retreats to sanctuary where he can spin his vision in broad, still stark, but gentler terms (in tone) of a world gone mad and off the rails. What I find interesting is Blonde on Blonde is the next stage in this transition of weariness. The artist has little more to say in his previous incendiary manner. However these issues are still with him but he chooses to frame them differently. The political becomes far more personal. With a difference. The weariness of Desolation Row has turned into a semi exhaustion and despair. Where there is wit, it is sardonic and muted ("To live outside the law you must be honest. I know that you would say that you agree.") If one listens closely, almost the entire album is from a frame of reference of bleakness and dispossession. "Just Like a Woman" is a wail of betrayal. "I Want You" is a song of pleading. "Sooner or Later" is in the same vein.

So we come to Stuck of Mobile-a truly exceptional major work. I don't think deconstructing the individual verses is so important. The tone is terribly bleak and the constant refrain is of one who is trapped and literally cannot escape. There may be some truth that his relationship to his audience was a trigger, but these are themes Dylan had been wrestling with all his adult life. And the presence of the great Visions of Johanna is almost the same song philosophically raised to another octave.

Everywhere Dylan turns in this song, in every verse, there is a dead end, everywhere. As the song says, "I know I can't escape". The refrain , as a wail (Ohhh, Mamma" or Ahhh, Mama") becomes deeper and more pronounced as the song nears its conclusion of " "What price- you have to pay to get out of, going through all these things twice" (or more-he was in his 20's when he wrote it-surprise.) Therefore I don't think it is necessary to try and deconstruct each verse as a particular thing, the tone, mood and references generally speak for themselves, whether it be the railroad men, the girls in the alley, the rain man's cures, Ruthie, the preacher, the Senator. As in Desolation Row, they are the mosaic of a landscape, but now not of corruption but of dead ends, of being trapped.

However, there is one linkage people do not see in this song and it shows the shift I mentioned from previous work. The song it inverts is "Like a Rolling Stone". In that song, and in almost all Dylan's previous work, he is in control, he is the caustic observer, casting wisdom to the landscape, to the culture with what feels like a fiery prophet's vision. Now the roles are changed. In Stuck Inside of Mobile it is DYLAN who is now the the dispossessed, the outcast. He feels powerless now before the forces of the society that he has condemned. This does not mean he agrees with its distortions, only that he feels overcome by them How else to explain the 5th verse and the Senator. Dylan is not invited to the party, is oblivious to those in power, and now it is HE who is"Out on the streets wit no direction home" and fears he will be "discovered beneath a truck" As with Desolation Row, Dylan hides this terrible nihilism within a beautiful musical score, that becomes haunting and compelling.

When I first heard this song, I was in college. I had not heard Blonde on Blonde and I listened to the jaunty but yearning "I Want You." Then this came on. I was with some younger college kids, a couple, and the song began to draw me in. At the end of the 5th verse (the Senator) I burst into tears. The young guy looked at me and said "Wow, you look like you really know what he was talking about." All I could do was nod. It was 1970 and for a generation that was assaulted and displaced by the War, and was in terrible conflict with its parental generation, the song reflected exactly how I felt at the time. The personal was deeply political. A great, great song, on a great album by the greatest Rock-Folk lyricist who ever lived