The Only Thing We Knew about Henry Porter Was That His Name Wasn't Henry Porter

435. BROWNSVILLE GIRL, Bob Dylan
Produced by, written by Bob Dylan & Sam Shepard
1986 Did not make pop charts

Even before I’m Not There, people frequently asked “Which Dylan do you like?” For me, it’s always been the yarn spinner: not the earnest folk singer of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (although I like that song too) but the retailer of whoppers who would be wholly at home with Zora Neale Hurston and her compatriots at an Eatonville toe party. “Brownsville Girl” is a great example of my kind of Dylan, a shaggy dog story that just won’t quit, in which Dylan never quite makes the connection between Henry King’s The Gunfighter and the mystery surrounding Henry Porter clear. The song is more than double the length of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but somehow it’s still a “single.” It’s certainly not an album track, if for no other reason than Knocked Out Loaded never really pretended to be an album.

The thing that separates the real Dylan from the ersatz Dylans—even from the real Dylan in what most people would regard as a fallow period—is that the semantic opacities of his lyrics are neither blatantly allegorical nor glibly superficial. They just are. You can follow them down a road, but don’t expect to ever get back from where they take you. Even Porter’s name is a fascinating semiotic cul de sac to run down: was it chosen because it’s the last name of the first great American film director (the director of The Great Train Robbery, the first great American western), or because it rhymes with “French Quarter” (the birthplace of so much that is American in music)? Both? Neither? Probably Dylan doesn’t even know, nor does playwright Sam Shepard who collaborated with him on the song. I bet it was Bobby who wanted the mariachi band, though.