The Bob Dylan masterpiece written in the back of a taxi
In the early to mid-1960s, there was no stopping Bob Dylan. After breaking out onto the folk scene as the new political voice of the era, he was prolific to an extreme. It wasn’t just a case of quantity either; the quality stayed at a gold standard as he penned some of his most enduring hits with seeming ease. One such song is a perfect example: scribbled down in the back of a taxi.
It’s a cliché thrown around a lot to compare artists to God. It’s often suggested that some musicians serve as merely a mouthpiece as if messages are sent through them by some higher power that rules over creativity. Especially when people seem able to write timeless or incredible, intricate tracks without so much strife, it can often feel like they didn’t so much craft the song but stumbled upon it like a mirage.
Dylan is one artist whose talent seems so miraculous that he’s hit a level of status akin to something holy, held up like a true musical God. But while Moses went up a mountain to find the commandments, Dylan merely had to hail a New York City cab to find ‘Desolation Row’, his epic poem on the state of America.
As the finale track to his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, ‘Desolation Row’ is an 11-minute long meander through the social and political climate of the country. Weaving together a series of metaphors and images from either recent world news, classic literature or cinematic history, it’s a busy track. Its various meanings and messages have been picked over ever since its release, but through its ever-changing faces and images, Dylan seems to be commenting on the chaos of modern life.
Reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the song is another vital piece of literature that attempted to summarise the carnage that was the 1960s with all of its political happenings, social activism and shifts in morals. Both artists borrow from their surroundings and merge them with other art, religious iconography and metaphors to paint a surreal landscape. It seemed that in the confusion of the times, the only way to even attempt to capture it was through strange, twisted images.
Dylan himself commented on the ways Ginsberg inspired the track. He said of the era, “That period of … ‘Desolation Row,’ that kind of New York–type period when all the songs were just ‘city songs’. His poetry is city poetry. Sounds like the city.” But unlike Howl, which was worked away at and perfected over a few years, ‘Desolation Row’ seemed to strike Dylan like lightning and be written in a moment.
During an interview with Playboy, he was asked about the song’s conception. “Where did you write ‘Desolation Row’? Where were you when you wrote that?” they asked, perhaps expecting an answer as grand as the song itself. Instead, Dylan said simply, “I was in the back of a taxi cab.”
Fitting the connection between his work and his impression of Ginsberg’s “city poetry”, it suddenly seems to make sense that ‘Desolation Row’ would be written while driving around the streets of New York. As the city was home to a vibrant new artistic scene and all those artists were facing the poverty and social injustice of modern living, it seems like Dylan found all the inspiration he needed just outside of a taxi window. Maybe the message came from God, or maybe it came from Ginsberg, but either way, a miracle of artistry hit Bob Dylan that day as a cab ride gave the world a timeless feat of poetry and music.
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