Threepenny Review
Spring 2000
James Ensor’s 1888 panorama Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 is a picture of what you see when you look out from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” It’s worth remembering that both works are screamingly funny—or at least Ensor’s picture today looks funny before it looks like anything else, and when people first heard Dylan performing “Desolation Row,” they couldn’t stop laughing.
Nobody laughed at Christ’s Entry into Brussels when Ensor first presented it. Almost nobody saw it. The Twenty, the supposedly avant-garde Brussels artists’ group which had first shown his work in 1884, rejected it. They’d rejected his paintings before; he was sure his enemies in the group were keeping his work from the public so they could steal his ideas. He was only twenty-eight, but for the previous three years the themes of his best work had been rejection, humiliation, mockery, torture, crucifixion, with Christ at the center of the pictures, until Ensor replaced Christ with himself. But the Twenty wouldn’t give Ensor the satisfaction of recognizing him for who he was, nailing him up in the center of town; then everyone might have had to look him in the eye.
They simply froze him out. The year before, Ensor’s father, an outcast in a family of female shopkeepers, a useless man who lived for music and alcohol, had died drunk on the street; on a greater stage, his life was now Ensor’s to live. Ensor had fantasized himself crucified, but now his great painting was his own cross, bending him under its weight as he and his picture were banished from the city. Thus was he confirmed, the art historian Libby Tannenbaum wrote in 1951, just two years after Ensor’s death, as an artist of “resentment and hatred of mankind,” not to put too fine a point on it—or, as the Belgian-American critic Luc Sante put it just last year, as “the most deadly cynic in the entire history of art.”
Just by its enormous size, its overwhelming visual noise, its thousands and thousands of citizens crowding into Brussels to celebrate Mardi Gras and the incredible coup the city fathers have pulled off with this year’s parade master—LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YES, STRAIGHT OUTTA JERUSALEM, HERE HE IS, JESUS CHRIST!—the picture was meant as an unanswerable last word. In its way it was: nobody answered. If nobody hears you, did you even speak? The whole city, the whole world was present in the painting: businessmen, soldiers, the government, art critics, the bishop, the devil, people in masks, people whose faces looked made out of dough, all caught up in a frenzy of joy over the chance to get close to a really big celebrity—a forlorn, confused-looking Jesus, riding on an ass in the middle of it all—and, at the end of the parade, to crucify him. What a fantastic allegory of the utter bankruptcy of modern society, of the entire history of mankind! And none of it mattered.
Ensor took the huge thing back to his rooms over his mother’s souvenir shop in the seaside tourist town of Ostend, hung it up on his own wall, and for the next sixty years sat gazing at the vortex he’d made, that he’d seen, that had been made for him: all the hypocrites and liars and frauds and fools in Brussels, in Belgium, in Europe, for that matter everyone on earth, everyone who didn’t understand his genius, who didn’t even try—everyone, everyone, everyone in the picture, everyone who would ever look at it.
Everyone: those who saw it when it was finally shown in public for the first time, in Brussels in 1929, at an Ensor retrospective where the king made him a baron—when, in Libby Tannenbaum’s cutting words, he was celebrated for his post-Impressionist, pre-Expressionist, early 1880s experiments with definition and color, and his blasphemous, threatening work of the late 1880s and 1890s was written of “as the unfortunate result of some extraordinary disease which had enfeebled the artist in his early twenties.” Everyone: those who in later years came to his rooms to pay him compliments, to gaze at his pictures while the old man himself sat in a corner, playing his own songs on a harmonium, just like Allen Ginsberg. Everyone: those who come to see it at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles now. The picture was a giant, final insult, and nobody at the Twenty had trouble figuring that out. One look would do it. The face with cheeks like sausages, that rotting white monstrosity that looks more like a maggot than a man, those people with noses as long as arms—is that supposed to be me? Nobody thought that was funny.
Bob Dylan has made a career out of dropping hints no one picks up. As he frankly admitted as “Desolation Row” spun to its close, you can recognize everyone in the tune without recognizing yourself: everyone knows Einstein, Ophelia, Romeo, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Casanova, the Good Samaritan, Cinderella, Cain and Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, and everybody knows they’re somebody else. So the lines just slip by: “I had to rearrange their faces, and give them all”—the word “all” expanding, “aaaaaaaalllllllll,” until it swallows the words that precede it—“and give them all another name.” Well, you could reply from the audience, that still couldn’t be me: Bob Dylan doesn’t even know my name. Which is like the late Robert Shelton, in the 1960s a Dylan chronicler and confidant, insisting that the clueless reporter in “Ballad of a Thin Man” couldn’t possibly be based on him: “I’m fat,” he said.
As in Ensor’s picture, in “Desolation Row” the listener’s eye is directed toward a circus of grotesques: a beauty parlor filled with sailors, a commissioner masturbating as he caresses a tightrope walker, a whole city in disguise. But whoever they are, nearly all of the characters in the song share one attribute: they’re not free. They are prisoners of judges, doctors, torturers, an entire secret police, and the worst part is they may have recruited its troops from their own hearts. If they are not free it is because they are prisoners of their own ignorance, their own vanity, their own compromises, their own cowardice. By the way they are sung, the saddest lines in the song echo with all that one man used to be, could have been, will never be again: “You would not think, to look at him, but he was famous, long ago,” the “long” stretched out just as long as it will go, lonnnnnng, all the way back to the time when the Einstein the man was then wouldn’t even recognize the Einstein he is now.
Dylan recorded first “Desolation Row” in New York, on 2 August 1965—which was also probably the first time he ever sang it. He recorded it again, for the version that would end his album Highway 61 Revisited, on August 4. Little more than a week had gone by since his performance at the Newport Folk Festival had brought boos, catcalls, rage, confusion, and silence. It was the first time the troubadour known for his folk guitar and proletarian harmonica had performed with a rock ’n’ roll band since high school. If one of his first original songs, written in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1958, was called “Little Richard,” Little Richard wasn’t Woody Guthrie, voice of the dispossessed, poet of the Great Depression, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust. Little Richard was not Of The People; Little Richard was a freak, a foot of pomade, a pound of makeup, and purple clothes. Rock ’n’ roll was pandering to the crowd, cheapening everything that was good in yourself by selling yourself to the highest bidder, putting advertising slogans on your back if that’s what it took, just as one of the banners in earlier and later versions of Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels, a banner right up there with the painting’s “Hail Jesus King of Brussels” reads “Colman’s Mustard.”
“What about the charge that you vulgarized your natural gifts?” the critic Nat Hentoff asked Dylan in his famous Playboy interview; it was early 1966, when the fury over Dylan’s heresies had yet to reach its climax. “I’m only twenty-four,” Dylan answered. “These people that said this—were they Americans?” They were; to many in the world of folk music—people who had heard their own voices in Bob Dylan’s, who had found their own righteousness confirmed when they responded to his songs against racism and war, his calls to replace a society of lies with a community of truth—to many who felt these songs as their own, an electric guitar and a loud band were nothing more than a version of the Colman’s Mustard ad. At Newport, a prophet they had trusted with their own best selves had turned his back on them, and on his back was not the blue denim of the worker, the costume he had always worn, but a black leather jacket.
Four days after his performance at Newport, Dylan recorded “Positively Fourth Street,” his bitter, sardonic reply to the Greenwich Village folkies who had fawned and gossiped over him for years, who were at that very moment trying to decide which side to take. It was probably the most complete putdown ever committed to tape—though in Minnesota, where Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing first became Bob Dylan, people have always been sure the song was about Fourth Street in Minneapolis. Filled with heroes and villains from all across Western culture, “Desolation Row” was less specific, less local, because it was a whole world—and for that matter the song was not always easy for even the singer to find.
At first Dylan tried to record it with bass, played by Harvey Brooks, his own acoustic guitar, and electric guitar played by Charlie McCoy, up from Nashville and the most versatile musician in Music City U.S.A. But there is no groove; again and again McCoy tries to focus the hodgepodge of people Dylan is singing about with a jangling, needling guitar sound, tries to wrap up the verses with a scratching, treble-heavy rhythm, but Dylan seems to fall back from the story, and you never see more than a bunch of people dressed up in costumes. A month later, at the Hollywood Bowl, singing the song in front of an audience for only the second time, Dylan retreats to a strident, humorless voice, and makes this then-shockingly long song, eleven minutes long, into something much smaller: a protest song, though as Dylan finishes it you can hear an ecstatic young girl shouting, “It’s so groovy!” It was the second time through the tune in New York, with Charlie McCoy now playing lead acoustic guitar, that the song took its shape.
The guitars are not electric, there are no drums, but the song is rock ’n’ roll in what it asks for, in the way that it asks. McCoy’s playing is florid as the performance opens, very decorative, and it relaxes the listener, and maybe the singer too. Catching the south-of-the-border feeling that would hover over so much of Highway 61 Revisited, McCoy relies most strongly on Marty Robbins’s 1959 bordertown hit “El Paso,” just as Dylan had drawn on a 1958 Ritchie Valens hit for “Like a Rolling Stone,” the number that would begin the album—as Phil Spector put it a few years later, “It’s always very satisfying to rewrite the chord changes to ‘La Bamba.’” But McCoy presses harder as the tune goes on. He looks more for rhythm than for melody. In the instrumental passage after the verse in which, as in so many American folk songs of the century, the Titanic sails, McCoy hammers back at Dylan’s steaming harmonica playing until they seem to be driving the ship down as one man. There is nothing discreet about Dylan’s performance. He sings—sometimes he shouts—as if he’s fronting an entire band, as if he has to fight to make himself heard. He’s hoarse but holding nothing back, rushing some verses, slowing others, dramatizing the song’s right to take its characters from any land and any era, dressing himself as Scheherazade for the Einstein verse, and he sweeps you up. The song doesn’t come off as funny, but as a sad, broken allegory, not as if the song’s tale is a mystery, but as if it’s obvious, as obvious as the last war, or the next one.
Dylan sang the song in public a little more than three weeks after recording it—two days before the song and the album it sealed were to be released—on August 28, at Forest Hills in New York. It was his first show since the Newport Folk Festival. For the opening half of the concert he would appear solo, with his acoustic guitar; then he would come back with a band and, as he knew, the trouble would start. People were primed, for and against; in fact, it would be the meanest, most outraged crowd Dylan would ever face in the United States. But for the time being, listening to familiar songs played in a familiar way, those in the crowd who have come to protest the former protest singer are reassured—at the least, they have dropped their guard of suspicion.
Dylan’s tone for the new song is cool, and his style of emphasis, the way he comes down on this word or that, is hilarious. The whole performance is entrancing, as if full of confidence that everyone will get the joke. No one present has heard the song before, but the crowd is with it instantly, laughing with wonderful good humor at every other line, cracking up completely at the words “Everyone is either making love, or else expecting rain,” as if “expecting rain” is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. The feeling is that of liberation, of people absolutely at home in their own skins; there’s also a sense of privilege. It’s a sense of people being in the right place—here, where the tribune of a new culture is speaking a secret language that, for the moment, needs no translators—at the right time—now, when the world seems to be changing and you can feel yourself one step ahead, already looking back.
“Did you ever have the standard boyhood dream of growing up to be president?” Nat Hentoff asked Dylan for Playboy. “No,” he said. “When I was a boy, Harry Truman was president; who’d want to be Harry Truman?” “Well,” Hentoff said, “let’s suppose you were president. What would you accomplish during your first thousand days”—a weird slip, referring not to Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days, the traditional standard for presidential accomplishment, but to the thousand days of John F. Kennedy, assassinated barely two years before—as if President Dylan might have more time. “Well,” Dylan said, “just for laughs, since you insist, the first thing I’d do is probably move the White House. Instead of being in Texas”—not a slip at all, but Dylan’s way of saying what he thought of Kennedy’s replacement, President Lyndon B. Johnson—“it’d be on the East Side in New York. McGeorge Bundy would definitely have to change his name, and General McNamara would be forced to wear a coonskin cap and shades. I would immediately rewrite ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and little schoolchildren, instead of memorizing ‘America the Beautiful,’ would have to memorize ‘Desolation Row.’”
As Dylan made his way back and forth across the country, all through the fall of 1965 “Desolation Row” remained a comedy, or people continued to hear it that way, to hear it as something to see from a distance, as if they were not in it. But in the spring of 1966, when the tour reached England and the furor over Dylan’s entry into the pop arena reached a pitch of hatred beyond anything Dylan had seen in his own country, the number changed.
On May 10, in Bristol, Dylan seems to be seeking the smile in the melody, the song a boat to sail. “Puts her hands in her back pockets / Bette Davis style”—when he sings those lines it’s as if the whole story is a regret, a tale of sorrow, its only subject all that has been lost. On May 27, at the Royal Albert Hall—“Desolation Row” would not be sung again for eight years, until Dylan’s barnstorming comeback tour of 1974, and then only once—the performance is a house of mirrors, now sardonic, now funny, now not so funny.
The characters in the song are dramatized; they seem physically present, because for the first time, perhaps, they are: the people in the audience are in the song, and there is no obvious way out. The song is presented as a vision, as gnosis, as secret knowledge—as something that might be accessible to those who are listening, and might not be.
In Manchester, ten days before, the song perhaps found its true body; the performance is emotionally complete in a way that others are not. At first Dylan clips his words, cutting himself off from them, putting himself at a distance from the action, making himself as much an observer as anyone in the crowd. But as the song goes on, even as the actual cadence holds, the song seems to go into slow motion. There is a flatness, a lack of dramatic effect, which, given the stories being told—Cinderella making her own Desolation Row, Casanova punished for visiting it, Ophelia not being allowed in—is itself dramatic. This is the feeling: someone is telling a very old story, or, more closely, acting out a ritual, a mystery everyone knows and no one has ever solved. The song ceases to be Bob Dylan’s at all; in tone, manner, diction, in his lack of fear, he could be singing “Barbara Allen.”
Listening to “Desolation Row” when it appeared—drawn toward its scrap heap of Western civilization—you could almost hear an answer-record to Richard Huelsenbeck’s 1920 memoir En Avant Dada, where he raised the serious question, “What is German culture?” and replied peremptorily, with a colon in a parenthesis, as if the answer was too plain to really bother with: “(Answer: Shit).” Huelsenbeck and the rest of the dadaists were trying to get the world to look in the same mirror James Ensor had raised almost thirty years before they set up their Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The dadaists’ wordless poems and crazy dances, their denunciations of whoever paid to hear them, were their answer-record to Christ’s Entry into Brussels. Like them, Dylan is saying in “Desolation Row” that culture is decay at best, betrayal at worst. As his characters move through the song he follows them, only to learn that almost no one keeps what they have, their essential humanity, their “special gift”—to learn that almost everyone sells a birthright for a mess of pottage. So that scrap heap gives off a sickening but intoxicating smell of missed chances, of folly, error, narcissism, sin. In this atmosphere—and the song truly does make its own atmosphere, its own weather—everything seems worthless. “Desolation Row”: the words seem merely to give the scrap heap a name. But as a friend said with shock after listening to the song twenty times in a row, that wasn’t it at all: “He likes it on Desolation Row!”
Al Kooper played organ and piano with Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited, at Forest Hills and at the Hollywood Bowl; Desolation Row, he says in a tossed-off aside in Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, his autobiography, is Eighth Avenue in New York City. At the time it was the kind of place where they tell you to walk down the middle of the street if you want to be safe at night; you’re better off with the drivers who don’t see you than with the people on the sidewalk who do. You get a picture of life from the inside of Desolation Row, a map of it, in “Visions of Johanna,” released in May 1966 on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, though he had been performing the song, as “Seems Like a Freeze-Out,” since the previous fall. You could very well be in an apartment on Eighth Avenue, looking out the window.
The song makes a dank room where a draft blows balls of dust across the floor. In the corners some people are having sex; others are shooting up or nodding out. It’s the perfect bohemian utopia, a place of withdrawal, isolation, and gloom. It’s fourth-hand Poe, third-hand Baudelaire, handed down by the countless people who’ve bought into the myth of the artist who cannot be understood, the visionary whom society must exile for its own protection—must exile within itself, so that his or her humiliation is complete, is final, but that’s the danger. That’s the one card left to the artist, and with that card the artist can change the game. The artist will return society’s vitriol with mockery and scorn of his or her own. The difference is that while society speaks only in shibboleths and clichés—as a banner hoisted up in Christ’s Entry into Brussels reads, “The Standard Fanfares Are Always Appropriate”—the artist invents a new language, to speak as strangely, with such power. That’s the idea.
The dank room where this magic is made is its own cliché, of course, but is there anywhere else you’d rather be? Nowhere else the singer in “Desolation Row” would rather be—or Cinderella, Casanova, Einstein back when he still played the electric violin, or the Good Samaritan, who in Christ’s Entry into Brussels is just part of the crowd. They stick their heads out the window to call to those few they might judge worthy of joining them, laughing at the crowds rushing through the street, at all those who don’t even know enough to beg to be let in. This voice in “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” is Jack Kerouac’s voice, his narration for Robert Frank and Albert Leslie’s 1960 life-among-the-beatniks movie Pull My Daisy. “Look at all those cars out there,” he says. “Nothing out there but a million screaming ninety-year-old men being run over by gasoline trucks. So throw a match on it.” From inside the room in “Visions of Johanna,” that’s the feeling, except that there’s also a kind of lassitude that suggests you could throw matches all day and nothing would catch fire.
From the mid-1880s through the rest of the nineteenth century, James Ensor went much farther than Bob Dylan did in 1965, or in the years since; he also lived much less of a life. As a prophet, he issued his prophesies and let the world suffer them. Ensor’s 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Herring contains not only the meanness of the new petit bourgeois but the Battle of the Somme; as Luc Sante has written, this horrible picture, of “two skeletons in hussars’ uniforms each tugging with its teeth at the end of a kippered herring, is an eloquently encapsulated summary of his century and prediction of the one to come.” Ensor’s 1880s Christ etchings—where, for Cavalry, the letters INRI over the middle cross are replaced by ENSOR—culminate with Christ in Agony, on the cross, his flesh being eaten by devils, apes, people. The tangles of the picture, the unnatural postures its protagonists assume as they twist in the air, call up fifteenth-century Central European woodcuts of the Antichrist, held in the air by demons, to prove that he can fly, that he is God. The 1888 etching Combat of Demons is an explosion of scatology, sadism, and terror, as crowded and as unstable as one of Sue Williams’s contemporary orgy pictures: no matter what detail you focus on—the sword plunged into the anus, the crab with the human face, the vomiting bat—there is something worse happening right next to it. George Grosz’s most powerful painting, the 1918 Funeral Procession, with Berlin a cauldron of corruption lit by reds that look black and blacks that look red, is only a confirmation of Ensor’s 1896 prophecy Death Pursuing the People, where a giant skeleton wields his scythe from the rooftops as the fleeing crowds seem to wave in the streets like wheat.
There is no piety in these pictures, as there is none in Christ’s Entry into Brussels, and there is something beyond blasphemy. Ensor was anticlerical, his biographers will tell you, but like many who hated the church he loved the idea of Jesus: pure, innocent, truthful, the first martyr and the last. Some even say that Christ’s Entry into Brussels was made not to condemn, but to call the wicked to the path of righteousness. But Ensor’s Christ pictures, where before he puts his name on the cross he substitutes his face for the Savior’s, do not open the path of righteousness; they make their own kind of black mass, just like Ensor’s quiet, unassuming 1885 painting Scandalized Masks. A man sits in a room at a desk, a bottle before him, hat on his head and a pig-snout mask on his face. A woman stands in the doorway, holding a staff, a pointed hat on her head, black glasses over her eyes. Her nose is huge and bulbous, her chin sticks out like a growth; you can’t tell if she’s wearing a mask or if you’re looking at her real features. Yes, they’re going to Mardi Gras—but at the same time, in this sadistically prosaic scene, you know something unspeakable is going to happen as soon as the two leave the room. You know that the carnival they’re going to is not in the public streets but on Desolation Row, that place where the old heretics, the witches, the ancestors of the bohemians of the modern world perform their ceremonies.
Ensor may have seen his own rejection in Christ’s, or wished for one to sanctify the other, but his work gives its own testimony, which is not all that different than testimony cited by Wilhelm Fränger in his study The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: testimony given by one Konrad Kannler, who in 1351, in a court of heresies, declared himself to be not only “the Brother of Christ,” and “The New Adam,” but also the “Anti-Christ in a good sense,” and, into the bargain, felt himself called, in his capacity as “the image of the innocent Lamb,” to be the supreme judge at the Last Judgment.
Luckily for Bob Dylan, he had one foot in the heretic’s chamber, the bohemian’s garret, the privileged space of Desolation Row, but as a pop musician, which, in 1965 he had so glamorously become, his other foot was in the street, where he could not pretend he was all that different from anyone else. As time moved on, then, “Desolation Row” became more and more a picture, fixed in time, a story that could be heard as if for the first time in its original voice. It also became a place that could not really be revisited, unlike the highway for which the album that carries “Desolation Row” is named. When Dylan performed the song on MTV in 1995, for his Unplugged show, with his inspired 1990s band, the song was not a thing in itself, but a reference to something else.
By then, as Bob Dylan would make clear in 1997, when he closed his album Time Out of Mind with the long, meandering “Highlands,” the borders between Desolation Row and the outside world had long since collapsed. Dylan’s highlands, like the fields of his fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald’s old American republic, recede as they are pursued, so they stay in the air as an image of the good: an image, the singer says as he walks through a world where he can hardly bring himself to speak, where no one hears him if he does, that he can bring down into his mind if he must. If he does that, though, it will no longer hang in the air, as a picture of the world as it ought to be, so he leaves it there.
That old dank room is still there too, but no one else has been there for years; the singer would like company, but he can live without it. As Dylan told Richard Avedon’s collaborator Doon Arbus around the time “Highlands” was first being heard, “One of the feelings” of the old folk milieu “was that you were a part of a very elite, special group of people that was outside and downtrodden. You felt like you were part of a different community, a more secretive one . . . That’s been destroyed. I don’t know what destroyed it. Some people say that it’s still there. I hope it is . . . I hope it is. I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community. I might be the only one, you know?”
Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” recorded 30 July 1965, with Harvey Brooks, bass, and Charlie McCoy, electric guitar. Included on The Genuine Bootleg Series (bootleg).
———. “Desolation Row,” with Charlie McCoy, acoustic guitar. From Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia, 1965).
———. “Desolation Row,” Los Angeles, 3 September 1965. Included on We Had Seen a Lion (VigOTone bootleg). With a fabulous concert review by Shirley Poston.
———. “Desolation Row,” Bristol, UK, 10 May 1966. Included on Away from the Past (Wild Wolf bootleg).
———. “Desolation Row,” recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, London, 27 May 1966. Included on Genuine Live 1966 (Wild Wolf bootleg).
———. “Desolation Row,” recorded at Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May 1966. From The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4—Bob Dylan Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall Concert” (Columbia, 1998).
———. “Desolation Row.” MTV Unplugged (Columbia, 1995).
Al Kooper, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards (1998). New York: Hal Leonard, updated edition, 2008.
Wilhelm Fränger, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951. On the triptych better known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500), 30.
Doon Arbus, in Richard Avedon and Arbus, The Sixties. New York: Random House, 1999, 210.
The Superhuman Crew: Painting by James Ensor, Lyric by Bob Dylan, edited by John Harris. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999. Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 orchestrated by the words to “Desolation Row.” The piece here was originally given as a talk at the Getty Museum on 14 October 1999 to mark the publication of Harris’s book.