Who was “Mr Jones” from the Bob Dylan song ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’?
Between 1965 and 1966, Bob Dylan clearly had a bone to pick with a few people in the world of entertainment, particularly those with whom he shared the same social circles. If fellow artists weren’t careful, they could easily find themselves on the receiving end of his razor-sharp lyrics.
Take ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and its savaging of Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, for example. Or the skewering of Greenwich Village intellectuals in ‘Positively 4th Street’. And let’s not forget ‘Fourth Time Around’, Dylan’s parody of ‘Norwegian Wood’ that lived rent-free inside John Lennon’s head for months.
There’s one desultory philippic that hits its target harder than any other Dylan composition during this period, though. It’s the stunning ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ from his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited.
No wonder this song was used for the finale of the crime drama Peaky Blinders. It perfectly encapsulates the schadenfreude of watching an arrogant egotist having the rug pulled from under them, as happens to protagonist Tommy Shelby in the show’s last episode.
It’s difficult to think of another song in popular music that is at once bitter, frightening and poignant. “There oughtta be a law against you coming around,” Dylan snarls in its final verse before repeating the refrain one more time.
Something is happening in the room that the thin man of the song’s title has just walked into. But he doesn’t know what it is. “Do you, Mr Jones?” Dylan sneers to finish, half venomous spite and condescension, half pity. A deadly cocktail.
But was Mr Jones a real person?
When Dylan was interviewed by future When Harry Met Sally writer Nora Ephron and Glamour editor Susan Edmiston in the months after the song’s release, he was unequivocal. Mr Jones was a specific person. “You know him,” he said, “but not by that name.”
Did this statement rule out Rolling Stone Brian Jones, an acquaintance of Dylan who allegedly inspired the title of his subsequent album Blonde on Blonde? He’d met Jones along with the rest of the Rolling Stones in London earlier in 1965. But that was on Jones’ own turf.
As much as the Stones guitarist and founder would have looked up to Dylan’s music at the time, he wouldn’t have acted in the way Dylan describes Mr Jones in the song. Besides, the two were pictured together and on great terms a few months later, in November 1965, along with Dylan’s soon-to-be wife.
And David Bowie, who at that time went by his birth name David Jones? Conspiracy theorists have pointed to Bowie as the song’s inspiration since his heyday in the 1970s, but it’s unlikely Dylan had heard of him when he was a teenager who’d never had a hit record or been to the United States.
Who was Mr Jones, then?
More likely, the ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ is about a journalist. Dylan suggests as much in the song’s first verse, describing Mr Jones “with a pencil in [his] hand”.
Specifically, a Time magazine intern who interviewed Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he went electric, has claimed the song is about him. Jeffrey Owen Jones apparently irked Dylan, who had previously had a spat with a Time journalist during his previous US tour, by asking a set of questions irrelevant to his music and the event.
Others have speculated that the journalist in question is Max Jones, a writer for Britain’s Melody Maker magazine at the time.
But, as is his wont, Dylan has since contradicted his initial statement on the identity of Mr Jones. In a 1990 interview with Bill Flanagan, he explained, “There were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time.” So rather than referring to any one person in particular, the song may actually be referring more generally to the type of out-of-touch music journalist Dylan felt he was repeatedly coming across in 1965.
Where there’s a Dylan story, there’s usually an unsolved mystery involved. We may never know whether there was an actual Mr Jones, either going by that name or another one as Dylan originally intimated. Or if, in fact, Mr Jones was a general caricature of all the reporters Dylan felt antagonism towards at the time he wrote the song.
Perhaps the real point of the song is that Mr Jones is whoever we picture when we’re listening to it. In the case of the 2007 experimental biopic I’m Not There, for instance, we see Mr Jones as none other than Dylan himself.
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