A close look at some of the ways the president is growing desperate and acting out because of it, – using Bob Dylan’s song, Desolation Row, as an inspiration. Lyrics by David Cohen and Video and Music by Don Caron
Executive Producers Don Caron and Jerry Pender
Sign up for our mailing list below (never shared)
and we’ll notify you when we post a new parody:
If you’d like to become a patron of Parody Project
just click the button below:
LYRICS for Desperation Grows
by David Cohen
He’s telling falsehoods and haranguing
He’s tearing the “White House” down
His empty pages are lined with failures
The pool is turning brown
There go his blind parishioners
He had them in a trance
One ear was glued to the gripe-prone talker
The other on circumstance
And the ones who fawned, got restless
Now think it’s time he go
Please, let him know we’re in the fight as desperation grows
He could tell ya, it seemed so easy
To make fun of those whom he riled
Then place a ban on his court dockets
Never mind a trial
And here comes “Socio”, he’s fuming
“I’ll pay no tax”, he decrees
Then someone says, “You’ve got a good case, my friend.”
And they agree
Now the only thing that’s left
Knowing how consequences flow
Is “Multi-Felon” going down as desperation grows
Now his crimes will not be forgiven
He’s taking us for a ride
His fortune swelling daily
He’s been stealing everything in sight
No, he won’t heed Aesop’s Fables
Or any blowback that may cause shame
Everybody’s hoping he will leave or else expect more pain
And the good Americans, keep stressing
Their getting tired of his show
He’s gonna to cheat on Melania tonight as desperation grows
Salvation, now hangs in limbo
He continues to feel more afraid
On his 82nd birthday
His protections will soon fade
With him, life is quite bombastic
He boasts that he knows best
His possessions his religion
His sins are his selfishness
And though his lies are trained upon the voters who’ll say no
He spends the daytime sleeping while his desperation grows
Epstein reprised has got him shook
Though his memory must have shrunk
Redacting “pervs” so we don’t know
Of the fiends, whose morals sunk
Now, he acts so dramatically insightful
But he will never show regret
Then he’ll pop off taking new swipes
While demanding more respect
We must not hide or let him win
He should have been gone long ago
For playing a defective manikin whose desperation grows
Mr. “Filch”, can’t see a world
Outside of his golden cup
While all his reckless statements
They are trying to shut us up
So, we curse this broken loser
Who’s “at large” with a preservation goal
And he also slams the news that reads
He’s losing in the polls
They all say he will often bristle; we could watch him blow
If we’re in his head and hang in tough as desperation grows
Around the world we know for certain
They’re getting tired of being fleeced
This bantam is no “Chopra”
And a perfect day includes a feast
They are spoon-feeding him ambrosia
As he states things that ring more absurd
Then he’ll bill us for his pompousness
After braying, “That’s what I heard.”
As this madman’s spewing two-bit words
He’ll never learn what he don’t know
We’re all being punished watching his desperation grow
In hindsight, it’s been so blatant
That his sub-par human crew
Swarm in to round up anyone
Who has less than they do
And they take them with alacrity
While “the Boss” pretends he’s clean
And place their names in folders
Never to be seen
As they’re brought in from the fields or anywhere, they might go
He checks to see that nobody has been taping as desperation grows
Please let there be a new moon
This fanatic’s rails are gone
Everybody’s asking
“Where did we go wrong?”
Then a sound from “B.S. Hypocrite”
Fighting to retain his power
While falsetto singers stand by him
And yes, men fear his glower
Between the future that he fears and the truth that is his foe
It’s really all he has to think about as desperation grows
Well, he deceived us again just yesterday
About the last thing that he broke
When you ask him what he’s doing
He thinks it’s all a joke
All those people that he jettisoned
Yes, they think he’s gone quite insane
He had to fabricate their cases
And set them up to take the blame
Right now he cannot feel too good, don’t ask him no questions, no
Unless it helps put him away as desperation grows
ABOUT THE SOURCE MATERIAL
Desolation Row by Bob Dylan
“Desolation Row” is a song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was recorded on August 4, 1965, and released as the closing track of Dylan’s sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited. The song has been noted for its length (11:21) and surreal lyrics in which Dylan weaves characters into a series of vignettes that suggest entropy and urban chaos.
Recording
Although the album version of “Desolation Row” is acoustic, the song was initially recorded in an electric version. The first take was recorded during an evening session on July 29, 1965, with Harvey Brooks on electric bass and Al Kooper on electric guitar. This version was eventually released in 2005 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack.
On August 2, Dylan recorded five further takes of “Desolation Row”. The Highway 61 Revisited version was recorded at an overdub session on August 4, 1965, in Columbia’s Studio A in New York City. Nashville-based guitarist Charlie McCoy, who happened to be in New York, was invited by producer Bob Johnston to contribute an improvised acoustic guitar part and Russ Savakus played bass guitar. Author Mark Polizzotti credits some of the success of the song to McCoy’s contribution: “While Dylan’s panoramic lyrics and hypnotic melody sketch out the vast canvas, it is McCoy’s fills that give it their shading.” Outtakes from the August sessions were released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 in 2015.
Interpretation
When asked where “Desolation Row” was located, at a TV press conference in San Francisco on December 3, 1965, Dylan replied: “Oh, that’s some place in Mexico, it’s across the border. It’s noted for its Coke factory.” Al Kooper, who played electric guitar on the first recordings of “Desolation Row”, suggested that it was located on a stretch of Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, “an area infested with whore houses, sleazy bars and porno supermarkets totally beyond renovation or redemption”. Polizzotti suggests that both the inspiration and title of the song may have come from Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.
When Jann Wenner asked Dylan in 1969 whether Allen Ginsberg had influenced his songs, Dylan replied: “I think he did at a certain period. That period of… ‘Desolation Row,’ that kind of New York type period, when all the songs were just city songs. His poetry is city poetry. Sounds like the city.”
The southwestern-flavored acoustic guitar backing and eclecticism of the imagery led Polizzotti to describe “Desolation Row” as the “ultimate cowboy song, the ‘Home On The Range’ of the frightening territory that was mid-sixties America”. In the penultimate verse, the passengers on the Titanic are “shouting ‘Which Side Are You On?'”. What difference does it make which side you’re on if you’re sailing on the Titanic?” In an interview with USA Today on September 10, 2001, the day before the release of his album Love and Theft, Dylan claimed that the song is “a minstrel song through and through. I saw some ragtag minstrel show in blackface at the carnivals when I was growing up, and it had an effect on me, just as much as seeing the lady with four legs.”
The song opens with a report that “they’re selling postcards of the hanging”, and notes “the circus is in town”. Polizzotti and other critics have connected this song with the lynching of three black men in Duluth. The men were employed by a traveling circus and had been accused of raping a white woman. On the night of June 15, 1920, they were removed from custody and hanged on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. Photo postcards of the lynchings were sold. Duluth was Bob Dylan’s birthplace. Dylan’s father, Abram Zimmerman, was eight years old at the time of the lynchings and lived two blocks from the scene. Abram Zimmerman passed the story on to his son.