Do You, Mr. Jones?

When Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for literature several days ago (an act that sparked many controversies), the first thing that came to my mind was his song “Ballad of a Thin Man.” It’s a story about a Mr. Jones, who keeps blundering into strange situations, and the more questions he asks, the less the world makes sense to him. When asked about the identity of Mr. Jones, Dylan was deadpan: "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." At a press conference in San Francisco in December 1965, Dylan supplied more information about Mr. Jones: "He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders." Dylan biographer Robert Shelton describes the song's central character, Mr. Jones, as "one of Dylan's greatest archetypes," characterizing him as "a Philistine, a person who does not see... superficially educated and well bred but not very smart about the things that count."

I fell in love with the song when I first heard it on the “Live at Budokan” album from 1979. The original studio version was released as the final track on Side One of his seminal album “Highway 61 Revisited” in 1965.