While watching Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, i was reminded of how much i like Dylan’s “Desolation Row”, and decided that i wanted to add it to my repertoire of songs that i sing with my guitar. I prepared the lyrics file with my usual double-column format that puts the chords in the second column so that they match up with the appropriate lyrics line. In doing so, i noticed two obvious traits — (1) the song is very long (three pages using a 12 pt font and compressed line spacing, comprising 10 verses of 10 lines each), and (2) the song is filled with images and words and lines that don’t seem to make much sense.
That night, somewhere in my dreams i started thinking of parodying the song. I woke up in the very early morning thinking about it. Since i couldn’t (or didn’t want to) go back to sleep, i got up to write a parodylan based on it. It made its public debut at BobFest 2023.
Nearly all of the second verse comprise Dylan’s words, though i scrambled them up somewhat. The other three verses are mostly my words.