“They’re selling postcards of the hanging”: The one lyric that defines Bob Dylan’s songwriting
Myth and mystery might abound profoundly in Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, but so too does truth. Above all, within the confines of pop, he revealed an America that people could recognise.
These elements were instilled in him from an early age. His own upbringing was woven into the chronicles of the past. Aside from being the birthplace of Bob Dylan, Duluth, Minnesota, isn’t famous for all that much. However, there is one unfortunate chapter in its history books that shouldn’t be glossed over.
On a balmy June 15th back in 1920, three African American circus workers were arrested. Early that morning, a call from a local resident had come through alleging that his son and his girlfriend had been held up at gunpoint, and the 18-year-old girlfriend had been raped.
Soon, the police descended on the circus where the supposed offenders apparently worked, and they got the victims to pick out the culprits from the lined-up staff. No evidence was obtained, but by the time that the alleged trio had been transported back to the station, stories were already sweeping through the town.
Before justice could be served, a mob of 6,000 or 10,000, depending on differing reports, descended on the jail. With little or no resistance from the authorities, the three men were torn from their cells and dragged out onto the street, where they were beaten and hung from the lampposts.
This bloody and brutal miscarriage of justice would soon curiously become a curio of the town. The whole welter of the tragic chronicle, from the protestations of the local priest to bewildered policemen, baying mobs, and old women with babes in arms just watching, would soon be distilled down to a photographic postcard sold at the local market.
Dylan’s dad, Abe Zimmerman, was only an eight-year-old child at the time of the lynching, but he knew enough about the world to understand that far from a mere queer fracas, as some of the prejudice folks in the community would have it remembered, it was, in fact, an indicative incident of a moment in time. So, when it came to be distilled as a tablue, Abe decided to keep the postcard safe.
At a certain point in Dylan’s upbringing, his father showed him the unfortunate image and told him about the important story behind it. In almost every song Dylan has written, there is a sense of this moment – of what it represented – the injustice, the oddity of the human comedy, how a community can be capable of the most callous, inhuman upheaval, and return to work the next day.
‘Desolation Row’ puts this tableau in timeless motion, and it begins with the simple line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.”
The sagacious social justice in Dylan’s songwriting is never unaware of the capricious source of this ugliness in society. ‘Desolation Row’, like many of his other songs, is rife with smatterings of nonsense and absurdity alongside clear eyed wit. This feels apt for a world that is often unfathomable.
Tales of “the circus” being in town also abound in ‘Desolation Row’ and throughout Dylan’s discography to such an extent that when he first broke onto the scene, he pretended that he was raised in one. Something about the tented clash of people getting their kicks and the inherent darkness linked to these travelling funfairs strikes at the heart of the human comedy that he has mused over for many magnificent decades.
Then there are “blind commissioners” that earmark his constant unveiling of corruption, even when it comes to the rather more personal corruption of duplicity that he laid bare in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. There are “Good Samaritans“ protesting, clinging to the voice of reason. And there are questions of whether it is all “some kind of joke“ littered throughout ‘Desolation Row’, but it all comes back to that opening line about postcards of hangings and all that entails.
With one line, Dylan delves back into his own past like an archivist, but presents it in a very forward-facing manner as a schizophrenic depiction of the core of the American spectacle. The seamless merging of atrocity and entertainment has seen plenty of clowns elected for the shits and giggles, lives torn apart for fleeting highs, of mass grave sights with visitor centres that give Dylan’s work its unique blend of murky mysticism barbed with the sore truth of how weird social realism really is.
With creaking chords but prescient wit, the past and future flicker throughout his work in a way that makes it uncanny. His songs remember what most care to forget… just like his father before them.
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