RangerSteve - Gotta disagree with your assessment of "Stuck Inside of Mobile.."

"Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again". Maybe there's a deep, meaningful message here, but I'd prefer to know that Dylan purposely wrote it as pure nonsense, and is getting a real kick out of listening to people try to find a meaning to it all.

Message? Dylan was not writing songs with messages in them in 1965-66. What he was writing, as he pointed out to Phil Ochs at the time, was songs about personal feelings. Of course there is no message in "Stuck Inside of Mobile...". What there is...is a great deal of satirical comment on various games people play...a train of images and vignettes...an exposure of various forms of social hypocrisy and alienation (Dylan's). Bob was feeling very alienated at the time. This kind of song is not too hard to write or to relate to if you just let the images flow, and go with the feeling. That does not rate it as meaningless, although it is unconventional to most people.

Besides which, it sounds great musically.

It's not an A + B - D = C kind of song, but it's definitely meaningful. You don't have to engage in linear logic to establish meaning.

That's my take on this one. Each verse is a song in itself. Dylan didn't premeditate this stuff, he wrote it instinctively, and it wasn't nonsense, although that doesn't mean he knew consciously what it meant at the time either...but he knew how it FELT. That's what made it work.

I've heard attempted parodies of this period of Dylan's writing, and they don't work...cos they don't have the feeling, just a mental game of quasi-imitation.

- LH