There are many categories of Bob Dylan songs: historical biographies and spiritual devotionals, oddball shaggy-dog stories, love songs and cranky breakup numbers. All of these are great, but my absolute favorite is the travelogue: where our weirdo champion lights out for the road, seeking deliverance, and finds only mayhem, strange fraudulence, and chaos everywhere he sets his suitcase down. At times there seems like no end to the places Dylan can fuck up. Mississippi? Mozambique? Stuck inside of Mobile? The streets of Rome? It gets inexplicable, and that’s why I love it.
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is my favorite travelogue of all. I guess you’d call it Tex-Mex, in the New York way. Recorded at Columbia Studios in Manhattan and produced by Bob Johnston, the song appears on 1965’s epochal Highway 61 Revisited LP, the first time Dylan had worked with the hard-drinking Texan, but not the last by a long shot. They would pair up for every album through New Morning in 1970—a deep and resonant run. Of the album’s nine brain-caving songs, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is the eighth. “Desolation Row” is the showy finale—with all the fake names and the strumming and T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound fighting in a tower. A little too on the nose for the in-waiting inheritor of the mantle of crucial American poet, which he both lusted for and reviled. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a little more bawdy and unsettled, and for that reason I see it as the true conclusion of the action on Highway 61 Revisited. Despite the postcards of the hanging, dare I say that “Desolation Row” is a roadmap for the squares? Which I don’t mean as an insult. It’s just that the real heads are in Juárez.
It’s Easter. We don’t know how or why he crossed the border. On foot? In a bus? To see his “best friend” who is also his “doctor”? We’re not totally clear on these details, because, well, he isn’t clear on them himself. If he called you, to inform you of his situation, ten pesos on a pay phone, you might feel concerned, but you wouldn’t be able to fully understand the scenario. You might say, “Is there a chance of trouble?” And he would say, “Down here? There’s every chance of trouble.” And you would know then that the trouble had already begun.
The major female character in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is Sweet Melinda, who the peasants call the “goddess of gloom.” Sweet Melinda—the devil lady, if you will—appears in some form or fashion in many Dylan songs. She might be known as the “debutante” or “Miss X.” Or “Delilah,” the “philistine.” She might bend down on her knees at a topless bar and tie your shoelaces. She might pass you in a hotel corridor with dark eyes. These women, or his wildly chauvinistic ideas of them, have vexed Dylan from the start, and this is, in some regards, the only psychological and musical puzzle he never fully put together. Just before the run-out grooves of the otherwise revelatory 2001 LP Love and Theft, he stipulates this:
There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring
Love is pleasing, love is teasing, love’s not an evil thing
Great song, that “Sugar Baby”—and Love and Theft is my favorite Dylan album. Nevertheless, can we say that, from the consummate oracle of modern humanity, this is some pretty thin gruel? Pleasing? Teasing? Was he listening to Def Leppard? As for the “trouble women bring”? Tell it to your bucket of tears.
Bad decisions on Rue Morgue Avenue, decisions that would be ill advised even at home, and he’s many miles away from the place in Minnesota they call the Iron Range. Rue Morgue—a reference to Edgar Allen Poe, an underrated influence on Dylan’s work generally—evokes the trapdoors and tell-tale hearts of gothic fiction. This is his milieu. He will crash over his handlebars shortly enough, you can tell. We fear for him, both the narrator and Dylan, who was in his early twenties at the time of the recording and constantly high on amphetamines. It seemed entirely possible that our strange hero would soon be sentenced to the same fate as Hendrix, Hank, and Buddy Holly. What happens next is subject to interpretation, but it arguably involves some combination of well-spoken English, Nero-style eroticism, and lobotomy-level intake of intoxicants. He won’t leave Juárez unchanged.
Prismatic-vision-quest Dylan pairs well with Tex-Mex Dylan. You can argue it’s another underrated influence on his work, dating back sixty years and running through the 2000s. There is “Romance in Durango” on the Desire album. Amid Latin-guitar flourishes we learn of the dust on his face and cape and of “hot chili peppers in the blistering sun.” This a much different figure, eight years removed, from the sad clown who got trapped in Juárez and practically required a chopper to airlift him out. Tough and decisive, the Dylan of Durango is a white-hat villain who hardly follows a rule and fears nothing at all. To his lady paramour, he ecstatically exclaims: “I think this time we shall escape.”
Or think of the gorgeously plaintive “To Ramona” from 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan, one of the least truculent love songs of his early years. Was the half-Mexican Joan Baez “Ramona”? Some say that was her nickname. Her version from the 1997 live album Gone from Danger makes you want to tear your skin off for all the beautiful accompaniment and hard-won experience. On Dylan’s version, there is a mournful, flamenco-adjacent fluency to his playing that feels uniquely unhurried relative to the typical landslide, trucker-speed overdose of his early work. And there is a dry run for the thesis that will soon enough evolve into his animating philosophy. First, though:
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin’ to be a part of
A world that just don’t exist
Sure, maybe that’s just a particularly poetic, boilerplate jealous ex-boyfriend, semi-coherently working the refs. But then this:
It’s all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin’ like this
Now that? That is relevant information. There are only a few short steps from “It’s all just a dream” to “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark.” Young Dylan recognized the tortuous distortions of modernization and the medicine-show false promises in the emerging dominance of free-market capitalism. He felt it in his bones; didn’t and couldn’t possibly have understood the full sweep of it, but pointed it out like a man gesturing at a UFO.
Juárez is an incredibly large city (with a population of roughly 324,000 people at the time he wrote the song and now home to over a million today), and yet by some magic Dylan seems to have seen every colorful vista and terrifying turn of the wheel over four terse verses. He goes to “Housing Project Hill” where “it’s either fortune or fame.” This formulation would elude Dylan too—he always had too much of one and too little of the other. He takes umbrage with the police, who are corrupt at best and dangerous at worst: “They just stand around and boast / How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms / Into leaving his post.” Also: “The cops don’t need you / And man they expect the same.” You could put together a persuasive mixtape that starts with “Tom Thumb’s Blues,” segues into the Kinks’ “Holiday in Waikiki” and ends with the Clash’s “Safe European Home:” a triptych of naive adventurers with romantic ideas of foreign locales, whose experiences go terribly awry and send them packing. The only anomaly is that Dylan goes back.
He’s no nihilist, but nihilism, in all its unacceptable forms, is an area of study. Maybe that was the attraction that led to his involvement with Sam Peckinpah’s pastoral but nasty 1973 retelling of the Old West story Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Uncannily, Dylan’s soundtrack to the film sounds like autumn. (Call the psychiatrist if you like, but some albums sound like seasons to me.) The windswept desert, the cold and vast verandas. The whole thing feels so . . . damned. With its solemn pace and border horns, you could argue that Dylan intuitively understood the material better than Peckinpah. As a thirty-five-minute mood piece, the soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid conjures all the freedoms of the last days of the frontier, and the admission that the individualist, gunslinging days of yore were either a fading memory or a thing that never happened.
The true story of Billy the Kid is convoluted. Not so much a bank robber or a train robber, his major criminal activity seemed to begin in an upstart, anti-monopolist, admittedly murderous retribution group who called themselves the Regulators. He was just twenty-one when he died—still more or less a child—said to be cordial, but who knows? Dylan played an on-screen role as well in Pat Garrett, appearing opposite his buddy Kris Kristofferson and his hero James Coburn, in high-ironic fashion as the mostly nonverbal henchman Alias. I imagine that they imagined this was a funny inside joke intended for what remained of the counterculture.
Stories vary, as they do in Dylan world, about why exactly he decided to employ the Chicano punk band the Plugz—perhaps the LA scene’s most treasured outfit—for his iconic 1984 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. Some say he saw them at a roadhouse during a midnight ramble and just got a good feeling. Others say it was hooked up by managers or road agents or other power brokers who come and go and make decisions. By 1984, Dylan had gotten himself into some kind of pickle. His album Infidels, produced by Mark Knopfler and featuring a band consisting of Sly and Robbie and Mick Taylor, was receiving lukewarm to abusive reviews and sales that followed suit. Now we all know how it turned out—Nobel Prize, blah, blah, blah—but at that moment the accounts of his creative death were hardly exaggerated. Bob Christgau said of the album: “At times I even feel sorry for him, just as he intends. Nevertheless, this man has turned into a hateful crackpot.”
Anyway, the Letterman thing goes down, strange and thrilling. They perform “Jokerman,” so much faster than the album version, a nervous twitch of cosmic New Wave. They perform a version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’,” so wild and offhand that when Dylan was reminded by an interviewer some years after the show, he incredulously responded: “We played that?” Dylan’s relationship to punk is a complicated question. He was surely a fan of the Clash and certainly aware of the Pistols, though he would never leave any “My My, Hey Hey” breadcrumb trail like his complicated cultural twin Neil Young. The Letterman appearance—in the same year as the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime and Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade—is as close as he ever came to putting a thumb on the scale.
The first track on Dylan’s surprise 2009 collaboration with Los Lobos, Together through Life, is called “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.” It’s a nasty noir song with a comic edge backed by a killer band that has long since had nothing to prove. Together through Life was a surprise release of sorts. Led by founder, guitarist, and singer-songwriter David Hidalgo, Los Lobos formed in 1973 and made a name for themselves as the wildest wedding band LA had on offer. Over the years, they played chart-adjacent pop, traditional Tex-Mex, blues, zydeco, and whatever the hell else struck them at a midnight moment. Dylan wanted to jam with them. What does Together through Life sound like? Talented dudes messing around. Some years ago there was a Big Pink house in upstate New York that yielded a casually rendered standard or two. Think of Together through Life as the long-gestating sequel to The Basement Tapes and bask in the regenerative glow of “If You Ever Go to Houston”:
I nearly got killed here
During the Mexican War
Something always keeps me
Coming back for more.
Previous to this, Los Lobos had casually put together arguably the greatest pop song of the entire 1980s. Their catchy and enduring underdog anthem “Will the Wolf Survive?” reimagines the western morality plays of Townes van Zandt through the lens of an escalating war on immigration. Hundreds of thousands trapped—death sentences in one direction and starvation on the other. How many roads must a marked man walk down? How many borders?
“Nothing ever happens in Mexico,” goes Charles Portis’s great 1991 novel Gringos, “until it happens.” There are a million points of cultural contact, but to my knowledge, no account suggests Portis and Dylan conducted anything resembling so much as a mutual admiration society. Still, they had to know about each other, yes? There is too much overlap between my two favorite twentieth-century authors to think otherwise. Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles remains one of the positively astonishing moments in a trajectory that seemed steadily more implausible, so that being surprised could still be a thing. I don’t know what I was expecting—Tarantula, I guess?—but I did not anticipate a rollicking and whimsical yarn full of unprovable tall tales, hilarious anecdotes, and never-can-unsee aphorisms. I wouldn’t have taken the other side of any bet if you told me Portis had ghostwritten Chronicles. All the shared preoccupations: true grit, colonialism, chickens, and yes, far-flung travel.
So, Bob is in Juárez. He starts out on burgundy, but soon hits the harder stuff. His judgment is poor, but maybe that’s the point. Some decades later, free trade agreements will both complicate and expand the relationship between the border nations of North, Central, and South America. Dylan writes a song on Infidels called “Union Sundown,” which in retrospect seems not churlish at all but visionary. I guess this was the business that caused Christgau to call Dylan a crackpot, but the historical ledger tells a different tale.
Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the USA
Sure was a good idea
‘Til greed got in the way
The best Tex-Mex Dylan track to me besides “Tom Thumb’s Blues” is one where he doesn’t sing at all: “Bunkhouse Theme” from the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack is a fully instrumental exercise in grief weirdly foreshortened, only two minutes long but somehow containing a thousand years’ worth of portent. At the end of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the irony is you always get shot to death by your best friend. At the end of “Tom Thumb’s Blues,” the irony is that the protagonist can’t wait to run for the hills even though his only escape hatch is the differently but equally predatory auspices of Manhattan itself. So this is Easter. And what have you done? 
Elizabeth Nelson is the singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Ringer, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other publications. Her latest LP, The Interrogator, is out now on the Bar/None Records label.
Illustration: Michael Eaton.
