So from the start you walk into the room, and the bass is just descending under your feet, and everything has that sad bleak minor feel (“ The World that Jones Made” is a dystopia novel, and fits this notion exactly, and certainly relates to the “who is that man?” line – so my early thoughts weren’t that whacky).Īnd I suppose it was that first line that gave me the feeling of Jones as Mr Middle Class, who has utterly lost touch with his children, to whom he has nothing to say when he gets home.
But I don’t recall John being a Dylan fan particularly so I am not sure we got very far.Īnyway, musically the song is interesting as one of the few songs by Dylan in a minor key, and with chords totally built around the harmonic minor – by which I mean there is no deviation into flattened 7ths or anything like that. Indeed I do remember talking to John about this song as we were trying to get him established on the BBC at that time (something against which there was much resistance). They also most certainly were not playing our music – at least until John Peel came along on the pirate station “Radio London”. I think we were calling it the counter-culture by then, and in England the counter culture most certainly portrayed the feeling that the largely state controlled media of the era was utterly out of touch with what we were thinking. This was, after all, the mid-60s when there was a real feeling that the old political and social ways could be swept aside for ever, and I think many young people of the era had this feeling that those running the system (by which I mean government, the media, education and the like) were simply out of their depth. (That actually is the opposite of Jones in the novel, who ultimately very much knows exactly what is happening). I also pondered whether Mr Jones was your average middle class American, seemingly in control, running the company, keeping the family together, but with no idea of the revolution that is going on around him.
He was an influential in sci-fi as Dylan in contemporary music, and delved into imagery as spooky as Dylan’s. (I don’t think it does).ĭick, incidentally also wrote “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the year after the release of Highway 61, which is the novel behind Blade Runner, and many other significant works. I won’t bore you with all the details of that novel, for the meaning of the song doesn’t quite fit with the essence of the book, but it does have links to the song and I could imagine Dylan being interested – if sci-fi turned him on that is. I thought, rather bizarrely I must admit, that maybe Dylan was a sci-fi fan for just before the album’s release, I’d read “The World that Jones Made” written by Philip K Dick nine years before Highway 61 was released. While I should have been studying TS Eliot for my England A level I sat and puzzled and puzzled.Īnd I came up with some rather odd ideas of my own. It certainly was a song of disdain – and that plodding descending bass is just so perfect for the contempt that is in the song, symbolising the disdain of the slow walk away. Thin man ends the first side of Highway 61 LP, and when it was released in 1965 I really did wonder about it.
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