Back when MTV was first going great guns around 1982, some of the more uh . . . mature scribes complained that having a particular song identified with the official video would cause rigid interpretations of the song’s scenario. Supposedly listeners wouldn’t have room to compose esoteric videos in their own minds any longer. I didn’t worry about that, as watching MTV was actually fun early on, besides which, I’d already filed a number of likely scenarios to earlier songs in my head, permanently available for retrieval.
I thought about that this afternoon when I happened to catch Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on my car radio. I’ve never once racked my brain trying to figure out who the real “Mr. Jones” was, as I’ve always (well, maybe since 1968 or so) known in my mind’s eye that he looks exactly like poet Robert Lowell. That image initially registered with me when I read Norman Mailer’s account of the October 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night. In all the photos of that day’s events, would-be demonstrator Lowell looks like a classically academic nerd, with no idea what’s going on or why he’s there, unlike the engaged countenances of Mailer and his other comrades. I didn’t know until reading a biography of Lowell years later that he actually was a bit looney around that time, which could account for his blank affect in the photos. Unfair to the chapbook-era poet, perhaps, but as soon as I heard punk poet Dylan snarl “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?!?” this afternoon, I saw Robert Lowell’s tweedy befuddlement over the shock of the new once more. And I don’t owe any pixel of that image to evil MTV . . .
