Mr Tambourine Man: on Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson and The Tipping Point

The bolt of lightning was called Bob Dylan, and it struck me around 2005. I was at secondary school and was captivated by two writers. One was Martin Bril, a columnist for De Volkskrant and a regular guest on the daily talk show De Wereld Draait Door. There, he would speak regularly and passionately about his love for Dylan. It was a contagious enthusiasm that I could only truly share once I heard Mr. Tambourine Man.

A few years after Bril’s death, I sent a letter to the editor to De Volkskrant, entitled The Most Beautiful Voice in the World, in which I could publicly give him the credit for my later Dylan fandom. He himself had written many columns in that newspaper about Dylan. It seemed only fitting.

The other writer I was idolising at the time was called Hunter S. Thompson. He wrote the bizarre drug-fuelled trip Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and was the sort of eccentric figure who can make quite an impression on a young adult.

In the 1978 BBC film Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood (also known as Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision), we see how Thompson makes wild plans for his future funeral. The idea was to fire his ashes from a giant cannon, whilst Mr. Tambourine Man blared from the speakers. And that is exactly what happened after he died in early 2005 from ‘a self-inflicted gunshot wound’.

Mr. Tambourine Man, then. It is a somewhat atypical track within Dylan’s oeuvre, due to its dreamlike and surrealistic theme. But it is also one of his most popular songs. It features on Bringing It All Back Home, an album that, emotionally speaking, already sounds a fair bit more modern than its predecessors. Earlier albums featured the protest songs that made him famous, such as Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, The Times They Are A-Changin’ and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. To me, a 15-year-old teenager who had resolved to become a Dylan fan, those songs sometimes sounded dusty and dry. (I wouldn’t dare say that now that I’m 33.)

From the album Bringing It All Back Home, Mr. Tambourine Man is by far the most streamed track on Spotify. Almost 93 million times. Subterranean Homesick Blues on the same album has nearly 40 million plays. That’s not even close.

Still mysterious

Mr. Tambourine Man sounds fresher, more surreal and more hypnotic than Dylan’s earlier recorded work. The older songs were mostly straightforward stories, almost plain and simple, despite the double meanings and metaphors here and there. Sixty years on, the lyrics of Mr. Tambourine Man are still being debated.

> Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
> I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
> Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
> In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you

Who is this mysterious Mr. Tambourine Man? It is often thought that he was Dylan’s drug dealer. There are certainly a few lines in the lyrics that could be interpreted that way. I mean:

> Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship
> My senses have been stripped
> My hands can’t feel to grip
> My toes too numb to step
> Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering
> I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready to fade
> Into my own parade
> Cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it

A magically swaying ship, no feeling left in your toes and sinking into your own world. A drug dealer can certainly help you with that. Other interpretations claim that ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ is about God. Or about Dylan’s muse. That might well be God. Or simply about the concept of ‘inspiration’.

I’m more inclined to believe that ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ is about (the search for or escape to) freedom. In whatever way. It’s just escaping on the run / And but for the sky there are no fences facing.

There’s a lovely live recording of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ on YouTube from the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 (viewed over 50 million times). Folk singer and presenter Pete Seeger calls Dylan onto the stage. “He said he’d run away from home seventeen times and been brought back sixteen,” he says. So Dylan’s freedom was preceded by a few attempts.

In the song, Dylan sings that he has come to a standstill. He is rooted to the spot, perhaps being held back, but he is keen to move on. He asks Mr. Tambourine Man and says he is ready to go anywhere. In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you. He stands still, but is ready to leave. There is an interesting contradiction in this. And then there is that melody, which is repeated over and over but keeps moving.

## A wave breaking

It is plausible that with Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan is describing a certain tipping point in the mid-1960s. The moment when the fun had pretty much run out in the United States. Dylan recorded the song in 1964, a year after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. You can extend the interpretation above to the whole of the US. A country comes to a standstill; how do you pick up the thread again?

Hunter S. Thompson sees Mr. Tambourine Man as an epitaph and a swan song for hippie culture. “Intended for everyone who was part of the post-beat scene,” he writes in his collection Fear and Loathing in America. It came at a time when the term ‘hippie’ still had real meaning, he writes, just before it was hijacked by commerce and the word became an empty shell.

Dylan’s song is mentioned in the dedication of Thompson’s best-known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “To Bob Geiger, for reasons that need not be explained here, and to Bob Dylan, for Mister Tambourine Man.” It is striking, however, that ‘Mister’ is written out in full, though that may mean nothing.

In correspondence with a Rolling Stone editor, Thompson mirrors his story—which, on the surface, is about a ridiculous drug-fuelled trip to Las Vegas—with Mr. Tambourine Man. “The problem is that you have to work your fingers to the bone to treat this text as straightforward or at least responsible journalism,” he writes. “It would be easier for you to give an objective and chronological meaning to Mister Tambourine Man.”

In a sense, the book and Mr. Tambourine Man go hand in hand. Thompson’s story was not published until 1971, but it looks back on the culture of the 1960s in the US. In the finest passages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he describes a turning point in American history. From the Dutch translation by Guido Golüke, published by De Bezige Bij in 1980:

> Strange memories during this tense night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a whole lifetime, or at least a whole era – such a high point that will never return. It was a very special experience to be involved in all that in San Francisco in the 1960s. Perhaps it meant something. Perhaps not, in the long run… but no explanation, no combination of words or music or memories can match that feeling of being part of it in that city and in that era. Whatever it may mean…
> […]
> There was always something crazy going on, everywhere. If not across the Bay, you’d drive over the Golden Gate or take the 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… you could go for a spin anywhere. There was that fantastic, universal feeling that everything we were doing was right, that we were on the winning side…
> […]
> We had all the energy; we were riding the crest of a high, magnificent wave…
> And now, less than five years later, you can climb a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and if you have good eyesight you can almost see the high-water mark – the spot where the wave finally broke and began to roll back.

The American Dream

In 1975, there was another such turning point. President Richard Nixon, incidentally a frequent subject of Thompson’s articles, had just resigned over the Watergate scandal. Saigon had just fallen. The United States had been driven out of Vietnam. “Two people tried to assassinate the president in one month,” says Dylan in a retrospective in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 fictional documentary The Rolling Thunder Revue.

“Let’s set a goal for 1976 to carry on in the American spirit,” we see Nixon saying to an audience of policymakers. “The opportunity that everyone in this company has had is an attainable dream for everyone born in this country or who has come here.”

The American dream, then. An ideal of freedom and equality that began to falter in the late 1960s. It is surely no coincidence that the sounds of Mr. Tambourine Man have been edited into this footage.

Analysing and interpreting lyrics is fun, but also a bit naive. “I do know what some of my songs are about,” Dylan told Playboy Magazine in 1966. “Some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.”

So fill in the blanks yourself. There is a Dylan for everyone. For every moment, there is a different Dylan. But that doesn’t mean it’s about nothing. “Even a song like Mr. Tambourine Man isn’t really fantasy,” Dylan told journalist Bill Flanagan in 1985. “The dream has substance. But you have to have experienced something to be able to dream it.”

For Dylan himself, too, Mr. Tambourine Man is an exceptional song. He told the magazine Sing-Out! in 1968 that he once tried to “write another Mr. Tambourine Man”. He didn’t succeed.

## I followed Mr. Tambourine Man and found Bob Dylan

On 10 April 2009, I saw Bob Dylan live for the first time. He performed for three days at the Heineken Music Hall, now AFAS Live. Back then, there was no fixed setlist. Had I gone a day later, I would have heard Mr. Tambourine Man live. During that concert series in Amsterdam, the song was only played on the second night. The recording is on YouTube, not a bad version, by the way.

Dylan played Mr. Tambourine Man a total of three times during that same tour in 2009. A year later, it appeared in the setlist another five times. Dylan hasn’t played it since.

And so I narrowly missed a live version of the song that got me ‘into Bob Dylan’, as Martin Bril once described. “That’s how it is with Bob. You’re in him. And then out of him again.”

Since the album Rough and Rowdy Ways was released, and I was lucky enough to see Dylan perform in 2022, I’ve been completely back into Bob. But it all started with Mr. Tambourine Man.

The fascinating thing, I realise as I write this, is that for me, Bob Dylan is ultimately the Mr. Tambourine Man he sings about. The song became a turning point: a life before and after Mr. Tambourine Man. The gateway to the rest of his music. The bolt of lightning that struck me.