9 tracks
Side one "Like a Rolling Stone" "Tombstone Blues" "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" "From a Buick 6" "Ballad of a Thin Man" Side two "Queen Jane Approximately" "Highway 61 Revisited" "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" "Desolation Row"

9 tracks
Side one "Like a Rolling Stone" "Tombstone Blues" "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" "From a Buick 6" "Ballad of a Thin Man" Side two "Queen Jane Approximately" "Highway 61 Revisited" "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" "Desolation Row"

"Ballad of a Thin Man" is a dirge song written and recorded by Bob Dylan, and released as the final track on Side One of his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited, in 1965.

Dylan recorded "Ballad of a Thin Man" in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City, located at 799 Seventh Avenue, just north of West 52nd Street on August 2, 1965. Record producer Bob Johnston was in charge of the session, and the backing musicians were Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar, Bobby Gregg on drums, Harvey Goldstein on bass, Al Kooper on organ, and Dylan himself playing piano. Driven by Dylan's sombre piano chords, which contrast with a horror movie organ part played by Al Kooper, this track was described by Kooper as "musically more sophisticated than anything else on the Highway 61 Revisited album."

Kooper has recalled that at the end of the session, when the musicians listened to the playback of the song, drummer Bobby Gregg said, "That is a nasty song, Bob." Kooper adds, "Dylan was the King of the Nasty Song at that time."

Dylan's song revolves around the mishaps of a Mr. Jones, who keeps blundering into strange situations, and the more questions he asks, the less the world makes sense to him. Critic Andy Gill called the song "one of Dylan's most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited."

In August 1965, soon after recording the song, when questioned by Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston about the identity of Mr. Jones, Dylan was deadpan: "He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, 'That's Mr. Jones.' Then I asked this cat, 'Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?' And he told me, 'He puts his nose on the ground.' It's all there, it's a true story." At a press conference in San Francisco in December 1965, Dylan supplied more information about Mr. Jones: "He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders."

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Wikipedia