Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 … the beginning of a 65-year career that has touched many generations and even succeeded in convincing the Swedish Academy to give him the only Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to a popular music icon. There is, indeed, something timeless in his best work … probably not everything he’s written, but much of it over the last six plus decades. He is not only a real songwriter, philosopher, poet for the ages (after some hesitation, I, too, came to accept the merit of that 2016 Nobel Prize), but he is also a complex person, as the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown illustrates. Documentary films and books have also abounded over the years – both critical and analytical (D. A. Pennebaker, Martin Scorsese, most notably … also his original girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s memoir).
By 1966, Dylan had re-invented himself in his audience’s eye. He had abandoned the “folkie” world by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, having already introduced his two amplified albums featuring a backing band of rock musicians (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited). It was time for his masterwork in this new (for him) genre – Blonde on Blonde, a two-record set. Dylan was peaking in his global popularity. Some might say he was becoming more introspective during this period – his motorcycle accident that year may have had some impact. At any rate, it was in 1966 that I, a college freshman at a small midwestern liberal arts institution, really discovered Dylan in a big way. Apparently, my view, including tears of joy, was shared by many in the arts community. This was a new world! To my generation, Dylan had become king – like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
One song from Blonde on Blonde has, over the ensuing decades, impinged more on my consciousness (and unconsciousness?) than any of the other classic cuts on that two-record set: “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Not to take anything away from the acknowledged critical favorites, “Just Like a Woman” or “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” but Stuck Inside of Mobile has always spoken to ME in a special way. I tend to see Mobile as Flint, Michigan in the 1960s – and the Memphis Blues, and Beale Street, as the embodiment of the world I wanted to explore, the world I felt, as in the chorus: “Oh Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.” Dylan may not have been contrasting two cities at all. To me, the song represents origins and striving – perhaps striving for the unreachable. Dylan’s cast of characters and bizarre surrealistic episodes can be interpreted in a number of ways – the song took 20 takes before Dylan decided on an album-ready version, not an unusual precedent for him. The lyrics probably changed from one take to another. Let me offer my interpretation here of the final lyrics:
Verse 1: “The ragman draws circles” – circles lead nowhere new but always return to their start – in any case, “I know I can’t escape” despite the ladies’ kindness and help (via “tape”).
Verse 2: Shakespeare and the French girl probably represent intellectual authority – the French girl may be Suze Rotolo, who introduced Dylan to European (especially Italian Renaissance) art and literature. But he can’t communicate with her now, because the “post office has been stolen, and the mailbox is locked.” Dylan and Rotolo split up in 1964, according to A Complete Unknown because of his Joan Baez affair.
Verses 3 – 5: These seem to have themes of power and violence – railroad men who “drink up your blood like wine,” Grandpa losing control, the senator with his gun, implicitly intimidating him for not having “a ticket.”
Verse 6: The tea preacher has “twenty pounds of headlines” stapled to his chest. This is uncomfortable but shows how he’s “just like me.” Those headlines probably represent facts as portrayed by media – but doubts about reality are universally shared by all, even the tea preacher.
Verse 7: perhaps about drug abuse – mixing “Texas medicine” and “railroad gin” was cause for a bad trip, as from psychedelics. But seeing everybody as uglier and losing his sense of time may be a sign of the threatening deeper reality beneath the surrealistic dream language.
Verse 8: Ruthie and the debutante are classic Dylan portrayals of women in his past – again reminding me of A Complete Unknown (which, admittedly, I have just recently seen). Ruthie, “’Neath her Panamanian moon” allows Dylan to “waltz for free” much as Baez did for him a few years earlier. The key line for the basic theme of the song: “Your debutante knows what you need/But I know what you want” – referencing those two women from Dylan’s recent past.
Verse 9: Desperation sets in to get out of Mobile (including the bricks on Grand Street); he’ll pay any price to “get out of going through all these things twice.” This may be the perfect finale for the main tension of the song. Then, naturally, comes that chorus …
Whenever I hear the song, I think of my own struggles in life – not the women, but the tension between power and truth, the liminal state between dreams and wakefulness. All told, it is just one more reason why Dylan deserved that Nobel Prize in 2016! There are so many other examples, though. What are your favorites?
— William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 