Bob Dylan - Desolation Row Lyrics

y’all should listen to My Chemical Romance’s cover, they really put a punk spin on it and it’s pretty rad

I LOVE IT SM

And a short poem with a long title
On A Night With No Music
And Less Inspiration

Sweet gutter flower,
Blue petals above the grate, So much beauty
In a world gone wrong.
O tepid intelligentsia,
Vapid friend of misconception,
Rooted in what we see.
Cornflower in the grate,
Blue in the sun,
On my way to a dull
Task of nothing really.
I face it's singleness,
Pure in a way
We can never be.
A blessing in which I'm
Not worthy,
Yet I take anyway.
On a night when truth
Seems elusive.
A dream on
The edge of fever.
I can feel the question forming, And the answer
So far away.
*
BY TJ STRUSKA

I poem about middle age and a failing marriage
113

I barely made it out I
Of the shadows,
These symbols etched
In eternity.
I look at the water,
I see a ghost vision,
I walk in a field at dusk,
I feel the leaves beneath
My boots. Alone, by the
Torn tree in the prairie,
You walked one day,
9 miles of turning road.

And you walk out of
You're home of brick
And cedar shake,
Down to Main
By the junction, Along
Past the hospital
On the outskirts of town.

You walked and you don't know why. Partly out
If boredom, and she's working, And you were on call to nowhere that day.
And you walked and you forgot about that
Six-pack you were going to buy. And you walked
The turn as cars blew by,
At first they were surprised
And then they were annoyed, as a thirty
Something, slightly overweight man Walked
Alone down Route 113.

I finally got there,
To the torn, barren tree.
And somehow the tree
Reminded me of my life.
And my feet hurt,
And my marriage was
Not so good, And I walked
Back to town,
Stopped for coffee
In the afternoon.
And the waitress looked bored, And I was just
Another nobody drinking
Coffee at 2 in the afternoon.
And I walked home,
I turned on the news,cut up some vegetables,
Starting the oven,
I wanted to jump in.
*
BY TJ STRUSKA

I lost my poetry website to write. I figure people who dig Dylan may dig poetry-here goes... TJ S

Desolation Row & Blowin in the Wind are my favorites

Hello? Is anyone in there? Just nod if you can hear me...

So what you are saying is that my level of desolation and poverty just isn't quite low enough and you want to see me live in a tent down along in the freeway? Would I have money for all the postage that would take or have an internet connection still so I could make a call out from prison here? That's like saying, "Well, why don't we just wait until you are dead so we can have a little chat?" Are you sure your preconditions didn't just negate all possibility of it?

My mind follows Charlie McCoy’s guitar through the song like a child chasing a butterfly across a meadow.

Hey guys this is a masterpiece.

so easy. it takes one to know one

I got a cassette tape player for my car in 1971. For about 3 months Highway 61 was the only cassette I had. I played it every day. During that same time, While in high school, I worked at a youth center where the county fair was held every year. This was when they still had the “Freak Show” at the fair. I would see them in the daytime before the fair opened, lobster boy, bearded lady, Siamese twins etc. Even as a kid, I knew it was a rough existence and it brought Desolation Row to mind.

Meant to say eight track tape player

This one`s always been my favorite song. The only omission is the fact of beeng so short. I`d listen to it for hours and hours

Great graphics awesome lyrics.

Dylan’s greatest masterpiece. Imagine if Michelangelo could have painted all these words and scenes in Dylan’s mind.

I'm here because I read watchmen. Just a nerd hunting for good musics. (Sorry about my english kkkk)

killed it!

Stunning poetry. Each time I hear this song, I'm floored by how Dylan created one line after another of original descriptive images.

Be good mama said. Remember who you are.

Telling Tales out of school for the party. I just heard that finally our government took care of soldiers of Vietnam. People see what they want to see a control. We all do. Ancient Orange from Vietnam. Fitting. I like it because it's control.

Going hungry at 14 years old

She told me in the bank E-Town telling Tales.

It was Allen Collins. That dude new how to shoot from the hip you come from the heart.

Where lovely mermaids flow/Till human voices wake us, and we drown

in a catalog spanning hundreds of songs and 7decades, this song remains near or at the top of the pile of His Bobness' greats..no? name 1 other songwriter who could/would have written this. There's Bob...then there's all the rest of the songwriters trying & failing to be him.

love it!!!

rewriting it all back home

Desolation Row where the down trodden are imprisoned and used up.

Worst moment of my life, the knob on the foyer door broke and I didn’t receive any letter...

9 minutes of repetitive torture

I used to live on
Desolation Row

Inefável.

I can remember back in the early 70s, I was sitting in a coffee house in Houston with Lucinda Williams and asked her what her favorite album was. She said, "Highway 61 is the greatest album ever made." No woman had EVER said that to me. I felt like she was my soul mate. Of course ... she wasn't. This was right after my drunk roommate threatened to go onstage and sing every verse of "Desolation Row" and they told him to sit down and shut up.

This song made me fall in love with Dylan, despite liking his two previous solo albums. I can't believe he's still alive...he met Woody Guthrie, my biggest hero ever <3 <3. Meeting Woody Guthrie is my wish in the next lifetime. His guitar killed fascists!!

Your soul is doomed Bob

Really?

Not famous

Sweeping up..
Cain & able..he is going to the carnival tonight on desalation row..next

Beautiful..no way!

No way!

Request Dylan-fans to pay attention to Indian politics - witnessing the NEAR DEATH of Secularism and Rational Policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desolation_Row


"Desolation Row" is a 1965 song written and sung by Bob Dylan. It was recorded on August 4, 1965, and released as the closing track of Dylan's sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited. It has been noted for its length (11:21) and surreal lyrics in which Dylan weaves characters from history, fiction, the Bible and his own invention into a series of vignettes that suggest entropy and urban chaos.

"Desolation Row" is often ranked as one of Dylan's greatest compositions.[2]

A lot of these Bob Dylan YouTube only play on one side when you're listening to the headphones.

I memorized this song in 1965, like cowboys memorize Shakespeare

Watchmen ✊

great. It seems a bit anti-American though. Sometime that dates it a bit for me. I am a bit tired of people trashing America. It was good back in the day, protests and anti-war 60s and so on.

Here in Brazil, listening to the master of folk n' rock ever!!

"The fortune-telling lady has even taken all her things inside". A very significant scene in 'The Wolfman' while there is a werewolf attack going on.

Music and lyrics are genius but it's the vocal performance that always gets me with this one. What a singer.

Listening again a few days later. Yes. Not bad. Not bad at all....

Why was Dylan never our poet laureate?!

This song deserves so many more views than it has. A true lyrical genius Dylan was. A masterpiece of a song.

This song is at least 50 years old and yet it puts me in mind of the homeless people in California. I guess Dylan's lyrics are so obscure we can all make our own associations. Merry Christmas Bob. You will always be relevant.

Even a poem this perfect couldn't hold it's audience for 11+ minutes w/o McCoy's beautiful guitar adornment.

I have listened to this song thousand of times.

i first heard this 54 years ago. jeez where did that time go?

yeah, so you got some fancy words you keep saying, but you still ain't blown on that harmonica......

Note Nashville Cat Charlie McCoy on lead guitar...amazing.

The acoustic guitar is PERFECTION

Played before Trump's electioin...it is now his only erection song. Does anyone have a postcard yet? I want one of the first hundred please! Whatever the price...I hope we can agree on a worthwhile charity! Syrian homeless perhaps...?

The night Spanish Eddie cashed it in, they were playing "Desolation Row" on the radio...

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
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row


heart blowingly beautiful

SurelyBeatles too

Damn, this song is like a prophecy of the coming of Trump. The lines about Cinderella...oh man.

Mike Bloomfield Rules!

not my favorite song, but to me these are the best lyrics I've ever heard. Absolutely masterful

Fantástico, espetacular, TKS Mr Bob Dylan

Lyrics:

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

Cinderella, she seems so easy, "It takes one to know one, " she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pocket Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning. "You Belong to Me I Believe"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend, you'd better leave"
And the only sound that's left after the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row

Now the moon is almost hidden, the stars are beginning to hide
The fortune telling lady has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing, he's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window for her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday she already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic- she wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion, her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood with his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago with his friend, a jealous monk
Now he looked so immaculately frightful as he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients, they're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser, she's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read, "Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on the penny whistle, you can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row

Across the street they've nailed the curtains, they're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera in a perfect image of a priest
They are spoon feeding Casanova to get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls, "Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going to Desolation Row"

At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row

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
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row

Yes, I received your letter yesterday, about the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing- was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name
Right now, I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row

Read Moby Dick...

Dylan is one of those Foreigners one of the unique one of a kind etc.--a simile unto himself--he is like no-one else--never be another...

my chem anyone?








No? Ok

If it gets you to give Dylan a chance then more the better. No doubt Bob loves it too. He loved Hendrix, the Byrds, Nina Simone. Hell Elvis Presley covered Bobs songs.

@viviandarkbloom100 for me, Never Shout Never got me into Dylan some years ago. Got me into the Beatles too. My music taste completely changed when I got into NSN

WATCHMEN

Looking at Bob's t-shirt, I keep wondering if he ever rode any motorcycles after his accident...

And the kerosene JP4/7 jet A

Strapped the heart attack machine on my back for years.

Top man been a fan since I heard times they are a changing this is my all time favorite god bless you Bob x

I am at Taunton State Hospital, sent here about 4 months ago from a 9 month section at Abour fuller Jamaica Plains, where I was strangled twice and forced to take so many medications not for me I put my entire fist through the wall 4 times and my head completely through the weak spots in the wall twice. Paul Bedard. With a different stamp of people my real personality would come back. But not here.

What an incredible song, the lyrics are profound.

Why are there no jojo comments?

I thought all the Sailors were in Barcelona. They were when I was there! Not a Whore in town could be found, buy you knew they were at the the other end of those lines..........................

No one can touch the GENIUS OF DYLAN!!

The greatest words ever laid to paper.

To me, this song is about death row. When I hear it I envision many inmates in the prison court yard completely still, with tears in their eyes, staring at the loud speakers of which this great song is coming out of.

if you dont get it now...you never will

At midnight all the agents...

I have been searching this song on YouTube since ages

Desolation Row? California did fall into Hell not the Pacific. It was them lying Angels, of Los Angeles. .

.HAPPY THANKSGIVING 11/28/19

Ngl i came here from mcr

I discovered depression with this song and my brother’s departure to VIETNAM, I would wait 4 years to take my anger out on Charlie, and when I got home I purchased this album, the first of 10,000 and I discovered how to drink...... that was then, this is now, had my first open heart, now I just wait for my own
DESOLATION ROW ! THANK YOU GOD, for such a productive life !!!

Fuck the millionaire Robert Zimmerman! I can't even pay my rent.

i'm always trying to escape to desolation row

justgeorgeous all of us are.

Eztupido farzanteh le copia$te a mai chemichal romans

😢😭😭😭😭😭😭

The lyrics are, of course, Nobel grade. but then so is Bloomberg's lead. Try tuning everything else out for just one listen.

who else is here because of MCR?

I find this song tiresome....He must have been reading too much modernist literature ( proust , etc) ..yes the world is falling apart and corrupt and you need a new consciousness to see the world the way it really is..science and religion won't help you ( a gross generalization) Dylan came to these conclusions from books..while other people such as gay people who are thrown outside of society from the day they are born without role models. they have tp construct an objective map of the world naked..by the time they finish high school or college, they lived through everything he got from books..through six or seven didactic verses he slogs through clumsy metaphors trying to communicate something profound that only he as the teacher/preacher can give you....nothing new here

shut yo bitch ass up nigga

Are you trying to impress yourself with your post? Because you sure as fuck didn't impress anyone here.