"...something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?"
A
song, a goofy, mock-dramatic
ballad, from
Bob Dylan's
Highway 61 Revisted,
1965. Allegedly, "
Mr. Jones", the target of Zimmy's venom, was a
reporter from
Time Magazine, who, in his quest to get an
interview, was given a hard time (
You try so hard but you just don't understand) by Dylan; this may be the person featured in
D.A. Pennebaker's
Eat the Document proto-
rockumentary. The reporter would, in later years, wear it proudly - "I'm Mr. Jones!"
Yeah, there were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time. There obviously must have been a tremendous amount of them for me to write that particular song. It wasn't just one person. It was like, "Oh, man, here's the thousandth
Mister Jones."
-- Dylan, interviewed by Bill Flanagan in 1985, for Written in My Soul.