Skinny Bitch

Song: "Ballad of a Thin Man"

Artist: Bob Dylan

Album: Highway 61 Revisited

Year: 1965

From: Duluth, Minnesota

Highway 61 Revisited made a seismic crack in the continent of folk music, decoded routes of unwilling fans and initiated parkways of electric usage.  Initial brooding chords remind me of a carnival freak show: "You walk into the room"- immediately unleashes a loner.  A person who's being stared at and staring.  I see ferris wheels and tents in black and white, wavering with southern heat.  A secret is hiding in the mind of Mr. Jones.  Dylan partners "lepers and crooks" in the same line.  Two scarred souls are family to one another; though in the everyday scheme they are people unwanted, hated, feared, unsteady.  A "one-eyed midget" welcomes hitchhikers and family strays stinky as dogs to the tent where all oddities become one.

Can Dylan justify these unfair qualities into some translatable mood? The answer is, well yes. He portrays these characters not within a story line, but like puppets on a stage of mean machinery. One for each string. The geek is a freak. Dylan may be associating his self as one of those puppets, trying to pull the string of record tyrants off his back- ultimately he becomes the freak who stands out, musically. We like this freak. This song has always reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Dylan has a "sword swallower" and so does the book of traveling outsiders. Dylan is alone on the desert plains, spinning Mr. Jones with his windmill of questions. Desolate sunsets and dark alleys loop brilliantly morphing shadowy rhythms with words, creating patterns of fear. Should we be scared?  You decide.  Think about it, have you ever been willing to enter the freak tent at a carnival, knowing you would be the freak because you're the only "normal" person standing and staring?  Staring is rude, you know.  Or maybe you weren't scared to enter the tent because you retorted you're own fear to fake abnormalities.  Shunning the possibility of a fifth limb or mermaids tail, not being able to admit they or it might actually be real.  I think it would be pretty cool if evolution slickly fooled us.  Quiet on the nomad horizon, hush your judgements.

In Rolling Stone issue 937, it's says "[Ballad of a Thin Man] delivered the definitive sixties comment on the splintering hip/straight fault line: 'Something is happening here, but you don't what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?' ".  Dylan could be referring to the "Joneses", a prototypical American family.  He's might be questioning average American standards, values, cores, and traditions.  This, in retrospect, would be living up to his counterculture attitude that all 1960s musicians carried like a chip on their shoulders.  It has been said "Mr. Jones" could also reference various journalists who could not or refused to understand Dylan's songs and ideas.  In this song, Mr. Jones doesn't know what's happening "here", can't make sense of the situation he's seeing/hearing/feeling.  He's lost, a panoramic aloofness but somehow has to procure results because it's his job.  Tough life.  

It's hard to tell because Dylan was so frustratingly obscure when it came to his music, yet responded with simple banter, pushing the machinery away unsuccessfully because he was only answering annoying questions with annoyed fragmented bullet points.  "Ballad of a Thin Man" has been covered over twenty times, and most recently appeared in the epic film I'm Not There, covered by Stephen Malkmus.  So in these modern times, who's more of a freak show?  Britney The Tasmanian Spears- blonde, toned, a Jones?  Or Robert Zimmerman, tortured rock god who just notes what he sees?