I hope your week has been great thus far and would like to welcome you to the latest installment of my Wednesday feature taking a closer look at songs I’ve only mentioned in passing or haven’t covered at all to date. Today’s pick falls into the first category: Ballad of a Thin Man by Bob Dylan.
“This is a song I wrote a while back in response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don’t want to answer no more questions.” (Bob Dylan, March 1986)
“That is a nasty song, Bob” (drummer Bobby Gregg after listening to the playback of the recorded song, August 1965)
“Dylan was the King of the Nasty Song at that time.” (organ player Al Kooper)
So who is Mr. Jones? First things first. Bob Dylan recorded Ballad of a Thin Man on August 2, 1965 in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City. The recording session was managed by record producer Bob Johnston and in addition to Dylan (lead vocals, piano) featured Mike Bloomfield (lead guitar), Al Kooper (organ), Harvey Brooks (bass) and Bobby Gregg (drums).
Ballad of a Thin Man first appeared on Dylan’s sixth studio album Highway 61 Revisited released on August 30, 1965. At least in the U.S., the song was an album track only, but on Discogs I found it also came out separately as a single in France in March 1966, as the B-side to Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, another album-only track in the U.S.
In the song Dylan tells the tale of Mr. Jones who encounters one strange situation after another. As an inquisitive person, he keeps asking questions to understand what is happening, but the more questions he asks, the less anything around him makes sense to him. Wikipedia notes music critic Andy Gill called Ballad of a Thin Man “one of Dylan’s most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited.”
Here’s what the maestro has said about the mysterious Mr. Jones at different times:
“He’s a real person. You know him, but not by that name… I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘That’s Mr. Jones.’ Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn’t he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?’ And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground.’ It’s all there, it’s a true story.” (August 1965)
“I’m not going to tell you his first name. I’d get sued…He’s a pinboy. He also wears suspenders.” (December 1965)
“I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So, every once in a while you got to do this kind of thing, you got to put somebody in their place… So this is my response to something that happened over in England. I think it was about ’63, ’64. [sic] Anyway the song still holds up. Seems to be people around still like that. So I still sing it. It’s called ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’.” (March 1986)
“There were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time. Obviously there must have been a tremendous amount of them for me to write that particular song. It was like, ‘Oh man, here’s the thousandth Mister Jones’.” (1990)
Ballad of a Thin Man has been covered by a number of other artists. Among others, SecondHandSongs lists Golden Earring (Love Sweat, 1995), Grateful Dead (Postcards of the Hanging, 2002 – first recorded 1988) and Kula Shaker (Kollected [The Best of], 2002). One version they don’t include is the first rendition of the song I ever heard, by my longtime favorite German-singing rock band BAP who recorded it as Wat Ess? (what’s up?) for their second studio album Affjetaut (defrosted), which appeared in 1980. The only YouTube clip I could find is this live version captured in Dortmund in 1982, but it’s fun. Songwriter and band leader Wolfgang Niedecken kept the song’s theme and wrote his own lyrics, as he oftentimes does when covering songs.
Following are some additional insights from Songfacts:
Of the many references to “Ballad of a Thin Man” found throughout media are the lines “feel so suicidal, just like Dylan’s Mr. Jones” from the Beatles’ 1968 White Album track “Yer Blues.” Here are some others:
1967: “Mr. Jones won’t lend me a hand” from Country Joe And The Fish’ “Flying High.”
1981: “Mr. Jones is all of you who live inside a plan” from Mr. Jones” by The Psychedelic Furs.
1993: “I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky” from “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows.
1998: “Mr. Jones is a man who doesn’t know who Mr. Jones is” from “Who Is Mr. Jones?” by Momus.
While we cannot speculate on the true identity of Mr. Jones, it can be said that the name “Mr. Jones” has come to symbolize for the music world the kind of old-guard “square” who “doesn’t get it,” similar to our modern usage of the mythical “Joe Sixpack.”
There was a famous Mr. Jones in Dylan’s life at the time: Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones. During the New York City blackout on November 9, 1965, they played music together at the Warwick Hotel, with Jones on harmonica.
This is the song Bob Dylan and his band played at the Forest Hills concert of 1965 in an attempt to soothe the unruly crowd. As Al Kooper recounts in Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, “It had a quiet intro, and the kids persisted in yelling and booing all the way through it. Dylan shouted to us to ‘keep playing the intro over and over again until they shut up!’ We played it for a good five minutes – doo do da da, do da de da – over and over until they did, in fact, chill. A great piece of theater. When they were finally quiet, Dylan sang the lyrics to them.”
Sources: Wikipedia; Songfacts; Discogs; SecondHandSongs; YouTube
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