“Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan cut "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" on August 2, 1965, and a few weeks later it turned up on Highway 61 Revisited: six verses, no chorus, one long hungover ramble. The narrator is stranded in Juarez, Mexico, wading through poverty, sickness and despair, easy women, lawmen who couldn't care less, booze and drugs, until he's had enough and heads back to New York City. Dylan salts it with his reading, too: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Kerouac's Desolation Angels, with a title that tips its hat to Rimbaud's "My Bohemian Life (Fantasy)".

He kept it in the set in 1966. A live take from Liverpool went out as the B-side of "I Want You", and Dave Marsh later ranked that one at 243 among the greatest singles ever made; another surfaced on The Bootleg Series Vol. 4. Toby Creswell put the song on his list of the 1001 greatest.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.