Ballad of a Thin Nowhere Man

I was thinking about a couple of old songs the other day and something occurred to me! It seems to me that we might regard "Nowhere Man" as John Lennon's version of "Ballad of a Thin Man." 

The two songs were of course written and recorded at very nearly the same time - "Ballad of a Thin Man" was recorded in August 1965, and released at the end of that month on Highway 61 Revisited; "Nowhere Man" was recorded two months later, in October, and issued that December on Rubber Soul. 

They're two songs that each single out some person who simply doesn't get it. While Lennon was certainly familiar with Dylan's song (he actually quotes it in "Yer Blues") I don't suspect it had any direct influence on "Nowhere Man," making any similarities coincidental. Anyway, it's the differences between the two pieces that are as interesting to me as the similarities. 

Lennon's song achieves its ends with about a dozen lines of lyric and lasts less than three minutes. Dylan, in his usual early-mid 60s mode, spews eight verses of invective and goes on for nearly six minutes. This is quite typical of both artists at the time. One might think also of "Norwegian Wood" on the one hand and "Fourth Time Around" on the other - another pair of songs doing a similar thing in a similar way. As always, Lennon's sheer efficiency, his brevity and concision, is remarkable. 

Dylan's song is one long accusation, mostly of the crime of not being very cool. Dylan wrote a lot of those J'accuse songs when he was young, many of them in 1965 ("Like a Rolling Stone," "Positively Fourth Street.") They do tend to go on and on to a quite disturbing degree. (I think it was Dave Marsh who noted that it doesn't work like that in real life, "someone always interrupts." To which I would add "and punches you in the face.") 

Lennon makes a similar accusation, but there's a degree of compassion and sympathy for the nowhere man that is completely absent in Dylan's diatribe about Mr Jones. The nowhere man is being encouraged by the song, it's an attempt to cheer him up, to help him see a better way. Those gorgeous three part harmonies are part of the pitch. 

Compassion and sympathy is generally not something we expect to get from Bob Dylan at any time, and especially not in 1965. But it's not very characteristic of John Lennon either, whose interest in the rest of humanity normally applied only to the human race in general, not any of the actual people in it. Understanding of and interest in real individual human beings was always Paul McCartney's department. There's a simple enough explanation for that, of course. The nowhere man was always John Lennon, he was more than willing to admit. He was never thinking of anyone else, which explains the sympathy and understanding. But even the way the melody in the opening line jumps from B to E ("He's a real") sounds to me much more characteristic of McCartney's work than Lennon's, whose melodies generally don't leap around but rather go up and down one step at a time. But both men always described the song as entirely a Lennon creation. 

Well, it's nice to have a new thought about songs you've been listening to for sixty years! "Nowhere Man" was the first song I learned to play on guitar (in the wrong key, but what the hell.) Everyone's got to have one, and that's mine.