Bob Dylan's Desolation Row - A Masterful Masterpiece Of Misery and Misadventure

'Highway 61 Revisited' was the first Dylan album I owned. The first side began with 'Like A Rolling Stone' and ended with 'Ballad of A Thin Man.' Breathlessly, I flipped the vinyl over to listen to the second side. I thought to  myself, how can we top that first side?
'Queen Jane Approximately' starts the second side off well. Then it just kept getting better. When the acoustic guitars launched into Desolation Row, I was exhausted. I just laid back and listened, already treated to the most amazing musical experience of my young life.
'They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown.'
Wow, that's how the song started. After a blind commissioner and a restless riot squad, we get to the refrain 'as Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row.'
Cinderella and Romeo inhabit the second verse, ending with Cinderella 'sweeping up on Desolation Row.' The song continues with a cast of characters culled from the Bible, Shakespeare and Classic Literature. The penultimate verse begins with a nod to Roman/Greek Mythology 'Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn.' The Poets Pound and Eliot are invoked and 'nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.'
The last verse lets us in on the joke 'I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name.' The weariness and depression sets in as the writer states 'right now I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.'

I had forgotten about this song for years until I watched the brilliant, dystopic movie 'Watchmen.' The soundtrack featured a version of Desolation Row by the band My Chemical Romance. The song did not feel out of a place in a movie that reminds us that the American dream is really a nightmare.
I gravitate toward the dark and the deep. Pop mainstream Top 40 music makes me ill. Cotton candy for the brain. I need music that feeds the soul and stimulates the gray matter. I can't tell you what 'Desolation Row' means. But it seems to capture some basic elements of the human condition, hopelessness and helplessness.
Rather than sugarcoat how awful life can be, this song stares into the abyss and triumphs through sheer will power. Listening to it allows us to do the same.