Bob Dylan takes Henry Rollins through "Mississippi"

"Mississippi" is one of the key songs of interest when taking a look at how Bob Dylan seems to have taken inspiration from the prose and poems of Henry Rollins. "Mississippi" was initially recorded during the sessions for the 1997 album Time Out of Mind and some of those versions turn up on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006. Dylan revisited the song a few years later and included it on "Love and Theft" in 2001. A careful look at all three of those releases helps to shine a bit of light on Dylan's writing process, showing how different lines from Rollins were worked and reworked, and how Dylan moved many of those lines from song to song in the course of the process.

In a Rolling Stone interview in 2001, regarding Time Out of Mind, Dylan said, "People say the record deals with mortality — my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn't deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn't it? But I didn't see any one critic say: 'It deals with my mortality' — you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way – like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn't. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that."

If Henry Rollins were to write a review of Time Out of Mind he might be the one critic who could accurately say, "It deals with my mortality." If you take a look at one of the passages from Rollins that I included in my initial post on this subject you'll see that it includes, "I wallow in my mortality." I read an interview with Rollins from a couple of years back where he said, "I think the last two Dylan records have just been incredible - Time Out of Mind and 'Love and Theft'. Those were just amazing." There are some good reasons why he might have related to those records, ones that he most likely did not recognize.

On Time Out of Mind I believe that eight of the eleven songs have traces of Rollins:
"Dirt Road Blues"
"Standing in the Doorway"
"Million Miles"
"Tryin' to Get To Heaven"
"'Til I Fell in Love with You"
"Cold Irons Bound"
"Can't Wait"
"Highlands"

"Mississippi" would have been a ninth entry on an album that I think is, in part, a song cycle based on Dylan's impressions of the themes of alienation, depression and mortality that Rollins expresses in his early books. "Mississippi" does tie in thematically with what Dylan is doing on "Love and Theft" as well, in that it is an album where many lyrics are constructed out of quotations, with Rollins being just one of many people that Dylan is quoting. Five of the songs on "Love and Theft" seem to include quotes from Rollins.

There are two poems by Rollins that appear on the same page of his book See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 that bear very strong parallels to the opening verses of "Mississippi."

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p.156:

Welcome to this pure example of perfect human sadness
Your life in the finite ghetto
Yes your life is short
Yes your days are numbered
No you'll never escape
Touch the invisible wall of the ghetto
Man made
Run wild and get your wings singed
Find yourself in my arms
Your blood maniacally racing
Not even it can escape the ghetto

"Mississippi":

Every step of the way we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape
We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p.156:

I don't want to know you
I have nothing for you
I don't even have a self for myself anymore
People pick at your body like crows
You want a friend, go hang out with a big rock
It's not me you want
No matter what you think

"Mississippi":

Got nothin' for you, I had nothin' before
Don't even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I'll see you around

The final line in this next poem by Rollins seems to be the inspiration for the best line in "Mississippi" and perhaps the entire album, one that people quote frequently. This poem appears at the end of a section of the book and the bottom half of the page following it is blank. When one flips through the book the eye is naturally drawn to this line of text.

Now Watch Him Die by Henry Rollins, pp. 77 - 78:

1993 go
I will continue to pull the muscle from the bone
I will find out more
I will grow stronger
There's nothing else to do
No other place to go
I am in Detroit
Getting ready to go out and see the Beastie Boys play
1993 is a few hours away
I can't wait to put this year and its fake, hollow glory behind me
All the facts, stats, numbers
Want to dump it
Too heavy to carry
4 trips to Europe
2 to Australia
Japan
Singapore
182 shows
400 + interviews
I shook 1992 by the neck
The road shot into me
Now there's only 1993
Don't attach
Hit hard
Disappear into the treeline
Keep moving
It gets harder to get up in the morning
Lines on my face
It should start getting interesting right about now

"Mississippi":

Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interestin' right about now

Here's the final element from one of Rollins' books that parallels "Mississippi."

Art To Choke Hearts & Pissing In The Gene Pool by Henry Rollins, p. 26:

I just got back from the trip. The mission. It's impossible to come all the way back. I just don't ever seem to get there. Now I'm sitting alone in my cell, thinking about the whole thing. All my memories come to me in nightmarish form. Rearing their ugly heads, forcing me to remember the whole thing. You can't come back. Smoke slowly rises from the burnt villages I left back there. You can't come back, not all the way. Never.

"Mississippi":

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back,
but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

"Mississippi" could have been a key part of the Time Out of Mind song cycle, instead it is a ghost of the album. Additional ghosts appear, take form and change shape when examining The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 and I'll explore these in future posts.