It's Bob Dylan's 83rd birthday [as of May 24]. I'm sure someone on social media is posting 83 favorite Bob Dylan songs in honor of the occasion. It's not hard for a devotee to do, if you're inclined towards lists (I'm not) and you can trust that No. 83 would not be too shabby an example of his work.
Dylan's 83rd best would still be a sterling sample of songwriting and performance from the undisputed master, a song about which many very good songwriters would say: wow, if I wrote that, it would be my best by miles!
But to choose one Bob Dylan song and performance? It's too reductive, so radioactive that it would melt cities. You'd have to be a fool to find that hill, much less make a stand on it. But as the Main Ingredient sang back in 1972: Everybody plays the fool, sometime. So I am going to tell you that my favorite Bob Dylan song among a thousand possibilities is "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."
Why not "Like A Rolling Stone"? After all, "Like a Rolling Stone" opens Highway 61 Revisited, the 1965 album that many, including myself, would consider his best. It's his sixth studio album for Columbia Records, so clearly no "sixth album curse" for Dylan. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is the eighth of the nine songs, side two of the album.
It is sandwiched between the title song, a ditty with an opening verse about the Old Testament Biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham; and "Desolation Row," a rather longer song about the casual terror of the universe and the banality of banality, or of ordinariness: sort of the same thing. In fact, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is an excellent lead-in to "Desolation Row," except "Tom Thumb" offers the solace of going home. Nobody goes home from "Desolation Row."
The lyrics to the six verses of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" are clear enough. There have been many times in my life that I have misheard Dylan lyrics that had no effect on the meaning. In "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" Dylan refers to "a bloodhound that kneels," which I often heard as the name of a dog being the same as the nickname of one of my cousins: "a bloodhound, Fat Neil."
In "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," I don't mishear words as much as I misplace them. Literally, geographically, the words Dylan sings for some reason I filter into a story that unspools like a movie that has me in different streets in different cities that even this song, surreal but with a consistent internal logic, likely did not intend.
For that reason, every time I listen to "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" I hear something different, I wander streets, I experience new sensations, and it can be disorienting if Dylan had not been so clear how the movie, or the song ends. After nearly 60 years, it's still a new song every time I hear it, though I know that "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" ends with a definitive statement, a surrender to unclear and unpleasant circumstances that tells the listener that you can indeed go back home again. The final line is, "I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough."
Of all of the Dylan lyric memes we marched by in the 1960s, this is the most moving and reassuring, especially for those of us from New York and its suburbs. Until then comes the pain and joy of getting lost, as so many of us did, at various times and places of our youth. The unstable drugs and the tawdry lovers, and the unfathomable friends whom you knew you shouldn't trust, the intoxication of seeking new experiences far from home, only to realize, at times, that the Emerald City or that search for enlightenment was the City of Disaster, and we did not know where we were or how we would get out until it struck us that we'd had enough.
You're hooked just by the rolling musical intro, a seductive cluster of piano, then bass, then guitar and drum. The Highway 61 Revisited session players may have been the greatest studio band every assembled: Mike Bloomfield, guitar; Al (on the LP he's still called "Alan") Kooper on organ and piano, as opposed to Paul Griffin, who plays piano and organ. Bobby Gregg, bass; Nashville session star Charley McCoy on drums; and a fellow named here at Harvey Goldstein, better known soon-after as Harvey Brooks, on bass. Frank Owens (piano) and Russ Savakus (bass) are also listed on the LP cover. Dylan plays guitar, piano, harmonica, piano, and police car, the latter presumably the siren/whistle that is heard on the title song. They weren't just electric, they were electrifying, and if you listen to this album now, turn it up, you'll hear the World's Greatest Rock-Blues Band.
The singing begins, and you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The time, location, weather, and calendar is precise: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too." It's so detailed, so specific, that I always immediately lose direction. In my mind, these "facts" are just misdirection.
"Juarez" is a highly singable word, it flows off the tongue, has a lovely mouth feel. But in my mind movie, it's not Ciudad Juarez, once a lively city that shares a border with El Paso, Texas. I'm not hearing, or seeing, that part of Mexico at all: I'm visualizing Tijuana, across the border from San Diego.
Why? I guess I've heard more stories, seen more movies (Welles' Touch of Evil, amigos?) where one could, if staying out of trouble, and in the right drugstore, with the doctor, and the right señorita, hole up, take drugs, have a romantic entanglement with a kind-hearted prostitute: the Yankee dollar goes a long way towards melting hard hearts, as long as one is discreet.
And this woman is very discreet, but she has no heart of gold: "Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of gloom/She speaks good English..." Despite the narrator's politeness, caring – he's "kind and careful" – the result is a singer's nightmare: "She takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon."
I've already drifted from Juarez to Tijuana, and I've skipped over the third line of the first verse. "Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue..."
"Murders in the Rue Morgue" was a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1841, set in Paris. The first modern detective story, it has been said. But "Rue Morgue Avenue," a wonderful invention, transports me immediately to New Orleans. In my mind, it's at the far north fringe of the French Quarter, where the tourists disappear and Treme begins. The fourth verse begins with a reference to "Housing Project Hill," which could be located in one of the poorer Wards of New Orleans.
This vision of New Orleans as the site of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is further enhanced in the canyons of my mind with the final verse. "I started out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff." For about 50 years I've thought of it not as Almaden Red Burgundy, the hippie wine of choice in the 1960s, cheap and plentiful, and red, went down well with a few tokes of Panama red or Acapulco gold.
To me, it was the New Orleans street, Burgundy (pronounced "burr-gundy").
Who was Tom Thumb? There were two known to me. One was a quintessential Dylan character yet a real person: a midget, or person of short stature if we're going Randy Newman-"Short People" about it." Tom Thumb, about 3'6", was promoted by P.T. Barnum. He appeared in 19th-century circuses where one, no doubt, would go watch the geek, referred to on the same album in "Ballad of a Thin Man." The real carnival geeks, as portrayed in the metaphysical noir films Nightmare Alley. Tyrone Power starred in the 1947 original; Bradley Cooper leads in the 2022 remake. Despite great displays of mental power, these men become debilitated by the descent into drugs and booze, and end up as geeks: locked in a cage, biting the heads of chickens for your entertainment.
The other Tom Thumb was a fairytale character from a 1958 Disney movie featuring bumbling bad guys Peter Sellers and Terry-Thomas, who trick tiny Tom Thumb into stealing some gold for his poor family. The direction is by George Pal, Hollywood master of special effects, which is how Disney star Russ Tamblyn (later in West Side Story) gets to look so small and everything else so gigantic.
There are times you think this song would be so impossible to cover. It's like a whispered secret to the person in the next hammock in an opium den. Fortunately, at least one person understood the delirium the protagonist of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" was experiencing. Nina Simone is the only person who would or could get it right. She'd already been there, done that.
The drug is wearing off, though: "My best friend my doctor won't tell me what it is I've got." Almost all doctors named in pop songs are peddling one drug or another: The Beatles' "Doctor Robert" wrote pill prescriptions; Steely Dan's "Doctor Wu" was, I am certain, a smack dealer specializing in very pure Vietnamese black tar heroin. Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood" was undoubtedly just some jerk with dope and a nickname. Only Aretha Franklin's "Dr. Feelgood" offered something more rewarding than drugs: "Don't send me no doctor/fillin'me up with all those pills. Got a man named Dr. Feelgood and ..." It's pretty clear from the moans and shouts that follow, that "Dr. Feelgood" supplied Aretha with orgasms.
It's possible that the teenage Bob Dylan saw "Tom Thumb" playing at a Hibbing, Minn., movie theater and that...I'm sorry, I'm not a Dylanologist, it would be futile to really take a stab at why "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is the name of this particular song, since Tom Thumb is never mentioned. All I know is that I have drawn faith from the final line, and followed its instructions: having decided to do so has never let me down.
"I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough." We’re back where we started. Might as well play it again, see where we go.
© All lyrics Special Rider Music, Universal Tunes
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins teaches at St. John’s University in Queens, and writes the Critical Conditions Substack, https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Alberto Cabello from Victoria Gasteiz.
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