I don’t know what is stronger, my love of well-written lyrics or my disgust for poorly-written ones. Either way, lyrics to songs play a big role in my life (too large a role, some might argue). So when I had an interesting experience regarding lyrics recently, I wanted to commemorate that here. Does that sound ok to you? Excellent.
If I learned a song as a kid, I’ve probably never given the lyrics enough serious thought. I tended to accept things much more easily at a young age (like the fact that Sigourney’s an acceptable first name), so revisiting them as an adult can be an interesting experience. Today’s example of that has to do with a song by Bob Dylan. More specifically, a song he penned and sang as part of the first album by Traveling Wilburys. It’s called “Tweeter and the Monkey Man,” and even though my friend Melissa burned the cd for me years ago, I was still stuck in my 1988 mindset as I listened to the familiar tunes…until last week. Where was once a song that I’d written off as “a weird but catchy Bob Dylan ditty” is now a song that I intend to dive into head first.
Before I do that though, let me acknowledge my thoughts on Bob Dylan. He’s not famous for his voice, people. The man can write some unbelievable songs, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and many more. He’s also a strange dude, throwing out some bizarre lines from time to time. In “I Want You,” he finds it appropriate to sing, “Now your dancing child in his Chinese suit/He spoke to me, I took his flute/You know I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?” Oh yeah, that clears it up, Bob. Anyway, the dude’s great and strange, and “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” has elements of both. Here goes…something.
Tweeter and the Monkey Man were hard up for cash.
They stayed up all night selling cocaine and hash
to an undercover cop who had a sister named Jan.
For reasons unexplained, she loved the Monkey Man.
Ok, this is a great start. In four lines, we get a shitload of plot and backstory. We have established “bad guys” in the titular characters, and they are unwittingly dealing with the police. We also get some family history of the cop, though I don’t know why his sister gets a name but he’s just “the undercover cop.” (Oh yeah, something needed to rhyme with “Monkey Man.”) I think that’s some exceptional storytelling to being the song.
Tweeter was a boy scout ’fore she went to Vietnam
and found out the hard way nobody gives a damn.
Ok, what the hell just happened? What do you mean that Tweeter was a female boy scout? Did s/he have a sex change operation in Vietnam or was the war experience just so intense that it could be categorized as “gender-shifting”? Moving on, I guess.
They knew that they’d find freedom just across the Jersey line
so they hopped into a stolen car, took Highway 99.CHORUS:
And the walls came down
all the way to hell.
Never saw them when they’re standing,
never saw them when they fell.
Ok, so apparently they’re either now hip to the fact that they’re dealing with a cop and want to get out of town, or they’re running from other law enforcement. I get it; criminals (especially ones with cool names) often flee their surroundings. The chorus doesn’t really add much for me and is kind of “just there” lyrically. And personally, I’m not a big fan of using “they’re” for “they were,” but I’m getting overly picky. Besides, the chorus is pretty catchy even if it doesn’t advance the plot.
The undercover cop never liked the Monkey Man.
Even back in childhood he wanted to see him in the can.
Jan got married at fourteen to a racketeer named Bill.
She made secret calls to the Monkey Man from a mansion on the hill.
I’m a little confused by the first two of these four lines. I can’t decide whether the Monkey Man is a much older criminal that the cop grew up wanting to apprehend, or if they knew each other as kids. If it’s the latter, then wouldn’t the Monkey Man know that the cop was an undercover cop? If it’s the former, the fact that he “never liked” him strikes me as odd rather than “always tracked him,” or something similar. Meanwhile, Jan gets further character development, and her pedophile husband even gets a name before the undercover cop. One more question: which “bad guy” is the leader of these two? We hear them called “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” and get a confusing snippet of Tweeter’s backstory first, but then the “cop and sister” storyline is focused on the Monkey Man. Tonto and Robin never got that much love.
It was out on Thunder Road, Tweeter at the wheel,
they crashed into paradise, they could hear them tires squeal.
The undercover cop pulled up and said, “Every one of you’s a liar.
If you don’t surrender now, it’s gonna go down to the wire.”CHORUS
I’m cool with a “crashing into paradise” metaphor that I don’t understand, because it’s the type of fancy phrasing and possible symbolism I’m used to with Mr. Dylan. The undercover cop should probably just be “the cop” now since he’s outed himself to the “bad guys,” right? And is his gun drawn? How does it get more “down to the wire” than this attempted arrest? And who uses “every one of you” for two people? Honestly. (I’m trying to let the forced rhyme of “liar” slide, but I just wish it were for a better payoff than “down to the wire.” Like in “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan forces an entire line to get it to end with “rob them” just so it can rhyme with a very strong line of, “Don’t you understand, it’s not my problem.” Forcing it for that particular idiom that doesn’t make enough sense to me, though. I’m just sayin’. Yeah but still.)
An ambulance rolled up, a state trooper close behind.
Tweeter took his gun away and messed up his mind.
The undercover cop was left tied up to a tree
near the souvenir stand by the old abandoned factory.
If I’m reading this right, the cop (who’s still “undercover” somehow) called in backup, but the antagonists foiled the plan and killed a dude in the process. Why didn’t they kill the “overcover cop”? I’m not sure – maybe there were childhood acquaintances after all.
Next day the undercover cop was hot in pursuit.
He was taking the whole thing personal, he didn’t care about the loot.
Jan had told him many times, “It was you to me who taught:
In Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.”CHORUS
Wait a second here. What do you mean that “he didn’t care about the loot”? His whole life, he’s wanted to arrest this criminal, and now it’s personal and not about money? When was he going to get money for this? Is he a crooked cop who was taking a piece of the drug dealing action? I don’t get those two lines at all. In the next two, we see a perfect example of me allowing a very forced line in order to set up an important one. Jan’s line tells us a good deal about her character and about the environment as a whole, so I’m ok with the awkward “you to me who taught” fiasco. (Is ‘fiasco’ too strong? Maybe for you.)
Someplace by Rahway Prison they ran out of gas.
The undercover cop had cornered them, said, “Huh, you didn’t think that this could last?”
Jan jumped out of the bed, said, “There’s someplace I gotta go.”
She took a gun out of the drawer and said, “It’s best if you don’t know.”The undercover cop was found face-down in a field.
The Monkey Man was on the river bridge using Tweeter as a shield.
Jan said to the Monkey Man, “I’m not fooled by Tweeter’s curl.
I knew him long before he ever became a Jersey girl.”CHORUS
Wow, where do I even begin with this chunk of lyrics? I’ll start with the first four lines, which seems like the most logical resolution. The cop (who is so not undercover now that the moniker is laughable) catches up to his nemeses. Back in the mansion, Jan grabs a piece and bolts to wreck shit up. How old is Jan now? If she got married at 14, has enough time passed that Bill wouldn’t be considered an obvious pedophile by now? Either way, I’m still a little upset that he gets a name while our main protagonist just has an incorrect adjective and his profession.
The next line is a doozy: the cop’s dead. Since this is right after Jan grabbed a gun, we have to assume that she offed her bro in support of her secret love, Mr. Monkey Man. Especially since the “bad guys” onlytied him to a tree before, that has to be what happened, right? I ask because of the next line. Who is aiming to shoot at the Monkey Man? The cop on their tail was killed, so as far as we know, only pistol-wielding Jan remains. Why would she hold them at gunpoint after running over there to help their convict asses? Maybe the next two lines will shed light on that for us…NOPE! Instead, we get a very confusing gender-bending line about a previous relationship. I must be missing something here, because here’s how I sum up those lines: “Monkey Man, I came here to save you from my brother because I love you. But now I must kill you. Oh please, don’t hind behind Tweeter. Tweeter’s my homey, and we’ve been in cahoots since before Vietnam changed him to a her. So you’re out of allies.” There’s a crapload of faulty logic and 180 degree motive changes in that, and yet it’s the best I got. What a strange and confusing way to end the song, right? What’s that? There’s another verse? Ooh, maybe that’ll be the missing piece!
Now the town of Jersey City is quieting down again.
I’m sitting in a gambling club called the Lion’s Den.
The TV set was blown up, every bit of it was gone
ever since the nightly news show that the Monkey Man was on.I guess I’ll go to Florida and get myself some sun.
There ain’t no more opportunity here, everything been done.
Sometimes I think of Tweeter, sometimes I think of Jan,
sometimes I don’t think about nothing but the Monkey Man…
What. The. Fuck. None of this – absolutely none of it – makes any sense. The narrator randomly became a character who tells us more details about where he’s sitting than we ever learned about the story’s hero. So a news show reported on the Monkey Man (and not Tweeter?), which for some reason led to someone or something destroying the television. No one is even hinted at as a culprit, nor is anything resembling a motive mentioned. If I’m watching tv and a heinous crime is being reported, I may go as far as, ya know, turning it off. But blowing it up? That’s extreme, man.
It’s this final group of four lines that probably confounds me even more than Tweeter’s fluid sexual identification. First, our suddenly existent narrator tells us of upcoming travel plans to catch some rays. Then he laments the state of Jersey City, and admits that he occasionally gives thought to some of the characters in the story he just told. Why? I have no idea. These last lines add nothing to the story at all, especially the last four. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but ending with, “I knew him long before he ever became a Jersey girl” would’ve made much more sense. Instead, we got…that. And I still don’t know which one’s the main bad guy and which is the sidekick.
(If you for some reason haven’t read enough about a 1988 song from a band that no longer exists, Wikipedia’s entry on the song has an interesting point about Dylan nodding to several Bruce Springsteen songs in it. Some of it I’m sure is 100% right, and other parts…not so much.)
So there you go, readers: so much more than you ever wanted about something you don’t give a crap about. That’s what I’m here for. At the very least, I feel a little better now that I’ve properly over-thought through something from my childhood. Who knows, maybe I’ll dig out another old album and find that my younger self accepted another twisted song at face value. Hmm, I wonder if I still have “Wild Wild West” by The Escape Club somewhere. (On second thought, this post took me parts of 4 days to write and review, so this may be one of a kind. Sorry/you’re welcome.) R.I.P., overcover cop.
Lyrics to songs play a big role in your life (All would argue).
Interesting again.
You’re strange.
How about “People are Strange” by the Doors. I think you could spend at least a couple of days on that.
Tweeter and the Monkeyman:
The undercover cop never liked the Monkey Man.
Even back in childhood he wanted to see him in the can.
Jan got married at fourteen to a racketeer named Bill.
She made secret calls to the Monkey Man from a mansion on the hill.
Who says anywhere that one is older than the other? Apparently,they all either knew or knew of each other their whole lives. The “undercover cop” never liked the monkeyman. About as plain as you can read it. And why would the monkeyman have “known he was an undercover cop”? Why would he know today what profession someone he knew about when he was a kid? If Jan didn’t tell him,why would he ask? Why would he have cared? Do you know all your 3rd grade classmates professions today? Why would you? And,jan,by marryng young a racketeer(and apparently a big one,from his mansion and all) grew up tough as nails,ruthless and well educated about guns-as will come in handy later on in the song.
An ambulance rolled up, a state trooper close behind.
Tweeter took his gun away and messed up his mind.
The undercover cop was left tied up to a tree
near the souvenir stand by the old abandoned factory.
After the 2 crashed their car and were apprehended by the “undercover cop”(who doesnt Need a name,in any case-maybe the undercover bit pertains to the Listeners as well as the 2 dope dealers) The psychoticly murderous and messed up by Viet Nam Tweeter disarms the arriving State Trooper and kills him.(It doesnt say what happened to the ambulance driver) The Monkeyman,out of consideration for his girlfriend Jan doesnt let Tweeter kill the undercover cop but simply ties him up and they leave.
Next day the undercover cop was hot in pursuit.
He was taking the whole thing personal, he didn’t care about the loot.
Jan had told him many times, “It was you to me who taught:
In Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.”
The next day the cop who has gotten free and is outraged at his hated aquaintance is hot on their trail after them. That he didnt care about recovering the undercover money the 2 took from him for the drugs doesnt mean much-he was mad and looking to get them-period.
The undercover cop was found face-down in a field.
The Monkey Man was on the river bridge using Tweeter as a shield.
Jan said to the Monkey Man, “I’m not fooled by Tweeter’s curl.
I knew him long before he ever became a Jersey girl.”
Obviously,the cop caught up to the 2 and this time got himself shot by them-whether it was by the Monkeyman or by the psycho Tweeter,it doesnt say,but apparently Jan arrived too late on the scene to save her brother and is intent on taking them Both out for killing her brother. Tragic,seeing as how Jan was supposed to have been in Love with the Monkeyman and now was vengeance bent enough to Kill him. But,blood is thicker than water,as they say. The Monkeyman tried holding the femme Tweeter in front of him(“You wouldnt shoot a girl,would you?”) to shield himself from Jan when he saw how pissed she was at their killing her brother,but Jan reminded him that she knew Tweeter wasnt really a woman-that she had known him long before he got that way,so he didnt really make much of an effective shield. Adios the 2 dope dealers,as Jan,apparently,does indeed take both of them out and perhaps herself afterwards as well,since the next stanza hints that she is gone too now.
Now the town of Jersey City is quieting down again.
I’m sitting in a gambling club called the Lion’s Den.
The TV set was blown up, every bit of it was gone
ever since the nightly news show that the Monkey Man was on.
It’s simple enough to infer from the fact that it was being reported from a guy who is from the same town as all this happened in and was sitting in a gambling den(presumably full of gamblers,drinkers,dopers,etc) and who most likey all knew the Monkey Man and no doubt got their drugs from him,and in doing so,must have known his sidekick-the psychotic transvestite guy known as Tweeter,and were rooting for their dope dealer to get away and were outraged to see that he was killed and their dope source cut off,so a beer bottle through the TV screen is understandable. As for the “blown up” bit,TV’s had Picture Tubes in them in those days-tubes that went Boom if they were caved in or shattered-not like dynamite,but loud enough to be impressive. The narrator gives thoughts to the stories characters,because he grew up in the same town as they did and,undoubtedly,knew of them all and,as most well known town characters are,he kind of admired them and their notoriety. Picture the neighborhoods in Chicago that,for years,knew of Al Capone and suddenly he was gone for good. It was a culture shock to have them All suddenly gone. And,since the narrator was sitting in the gambling den while telling this,no doubt he Also knew them all from buying dope,etc. and more or less missed his now changed way of life and the now missing infamous people he had once known. All the exciting people in his part of life were gone now,so he’s talking about taking off and going somewhere new.
I agree with William A. Griffith’s assessment except for the ending.
I think it’s pretty clear that the narrator is the Monkeyman. In the final line he admits that he’s a selfish bastard who often only thinks about himself. This seems like the kind of thing one might think about oneself after having used their friend as a human shield and killing a woman who loved him. This also explains the emotional response to seeing the news show covering the story.
When Jan found her brother dead, she shot at them both (Jan knew Tweeter was born a male and so she didn’t have any qualms about firing.). The Monkeyman didn’t want to kill Jan, but didn’t really have a choice anymore after she started firing. The kind of guy who deals drugs and uses their friend as a human shield isn’t the chivalrous type who’s going to not return fire just because the person attacking them is a woman. I’m not much of a gambler, but I’m going to bet on the person who has the human shield. Just saying.
Afterwards he’s left with all of the money and goes gambling, resolving to leave to Florida. He decides this for a number of reasons. The first is that he wishes to avoid further run-ins with the local law enforcement, and the second is because all the other characters, people he grew up with, are now dead, and two of them at least were people whose deaths he feels guilty about being involved in (Tweeter and Jan), and he wants to escape his past.
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Here’s my impressions of the song from when I first heard it in 1988. I hadn’t thought about it much until looking back at it while coincidentally looking up “Dirty World” when someone mentioned the concept of car pr0n and I pulled up the lyrics as an example, and remembered how awesome the Traveling Wilburys were with this first album.
My impressions were from the Chorus, that the “walls came down”, not supernatural walls or an actual afterlife hell, but that if you kill a cop, the SWAT team comes and there’s no way out of that situation alive. Kind of like “Rubber Duck’s” character in Convoy or the events in “Dog Day Afternoon’.
I know the lyrics never mention this but that’s the implication I picked up from the events on the “river bridge”.
CHORUS:
And the walls came down
all the way to hell.
Never saw them when they’re standing,
never saw them when they fell.
I still think Jan was the one that killed off her brother, leaving her “face down in a field”. If she didn’t somehow know what was going on she would have never ‘took a gun out of the drawer and said, “It’s best if you don’t know.”’.
If she didn’t care about the Monkey Man she would have stayed with her rich racketeer husband Bill in a life of luxury on the “mansion on the hill” and let her undercover cop brother blow them away, and not worry about it. The line saying she took the gun and intervened shows that she was the one that took down her brother.
River bridges of course are famous for standoff scenes especially when occupied by both sides, take a look at most of the Indiana Jones movies, especially Temple of Doom. They may have crossed the river bridge to find a blockade on the other side, tried to turn around, and found the blockade closed in behind them. Classic standoff.
It’s implied here they’re trapped because the entire New Jersey State Militia has now turned out and trapped them on the bridge where they’re about to be killed in tons of ways by police on cars and helicopters. At least that’s how I read it listening to the song back then.
It’s evident to me that Jan loves the Monkey Man dearly (the song says it in the first verse) even though the reasons are unexplained. But she probably married Bill the Racketeer because she wanted a stable life rather than being romantically involved to a street drug dealer, but she still secretly calls him from the mansion because she’s still madly in love with the Monkey Man.
“Tweeter was a boy scout ’fore she went to Vietnam
and found out the hard way nobody gives a damn.”
The Monkey Man probably got hooked up with Tweeter after the latter came back messed up from ‘Nam and was questioning everything, including his own sexual identity. I didn’t pick it up back in 1988, but Tweeter was a boy scout that turned out to be a she after finding out the hard way nobody gives a damn. Tweeter’s relationship with the Monkey Man is unclear in the song, whether a lover or simply a partner in crime, but there’s no question they are both living in a crime-ridden world just trying to get by and escape to “freedom just across the Jersey line / so they hopped into a stolen car, took Highway 99.”.
Two thing about Highway 99. There’s no Highway 99 in New Jersey. And this is Bob’s oblique reference to “Highway 61” but making it rhyme with “Jersey Line”.
And I can understand wanting to escape out of Jersey, everyone I know from there says they “Ain’t going back to Jersey”. I’ve never been there myself, but I can get an idea from George Carlin’s album, “What The Hell Am I Doing in New Jersey?”
“The Monkey Man was on the river bridge using Tweeter as a shield.
Jan said to the Monkey Man, “I’m not fooled by Tweeter’s curl.
I knew him long before he ever became a Jersey girl.”
This tells me that the standoff on the bridge is about to go down, as “The walls came down / all the way to hell” and they are all shot despite The Monkey Man’s attempts to get out showing Tweeter as a shield saying, “You wouldn’t shoot a woman, would you?”, and Jan explaining that this isn’t going to work, either way.
“Never saw them when they’re standing,
never saw them when they fell.”
There are no survivors from the river bridge standoff, they fell.
“Now the town of Jersey City is quieting down again.
I’m sitting in a gambling club called the Lion’s Den.
The TV set was blown up, every bit of it was gone
ever since the nightly news show that the Monkey Man was on.”
I don’t think the narrator is the Monkey Man, nobody came away from the river bridge standoff alive. The narrator is definitely someone that has known all three characters personally going back to childhood. From what I’ve heard in small towns in New Jersey everybody knows everybody.
The way that Bob sings the last verse hit me as especially regretful and angry seeing what had gone down. He doesn’t say who blew up the TV set, it might have been him observing it. But people don’t blow up expensive TV sets (would have cost over $400 in 1988, more like $900 in today’s dollars) unless they’re really upset how everything went down. They wouldn’t have destroyed the TV if they were rooting for the cops taking down a drug dealer and her sister and accomplice.
Either way it’s an incredibly enigmatic song that made me so curious about its meaning and this “Bob Dylan” guy that later in college and the decades that followed I went on a journey to understand who he was and what the hell he was saying. I had only seen him on the “We Are the World” music video in ’86 before then. It wasn’t an easy journey, as we couldn’t look up lyrics on the Internet back then, but eventually I ended up going down Highway 61 and visiting Maggie’s Farm and would up Tangled up in Blue. It was a journey over 25 years as much of self-discovery as discovering Dylan, and through him, his progenitor Woody Guthrie, and the roots of folk and rock.
So I have to thank this song for that, before then I was only listening to ’80s Top-40 meaninglessly bubblegum hits and the Traveling Wilburys woke me up. Most of them kind of shook you by the shoulders to try to wake you up, Bob used a shovel upside the head to wake me up, using this song.
“Tweeter and the MonkeyMan” would make for an awesome Quentin Tarantino film, I’m surprised he hasn’t made this already. The song came out 4 years before his first film, “Reservoir Dogs” and would be an instant Rock-and-Roll classic using the Wilburys song and the Bruce Springsteen songs it makes reference to. There are so many of them in this one song that it would provide the film’s entire soundtrack, and the 5-minute song is packed with so much story that he could easily make a 90-120 minute film from the source material.
Has anyone considered “Bill” is the narrator?
The one verses clearly states “She took a gun out of the drawer and said it’s best if YOU don’t know. This to me implies the narrator is Bill?
I was born in 1987 and I have been a huge Tom Petty fan since the days my father would play Damn the Torpedoes, Full Moon Fever, Into the Great Wide Open and Wildflowers on cassette tape during our trips from San Diego to Lake Tahoe. Enough about me..
The truth is I had never heard this song until today. I never really followed Traveling Wilburys or Mudcrutch much but now I have decided to listen to both in an attempt to listen to some “new (old) stuff” I haven’t heard before.
My take is simple – Monkey Man and Tweeter are just partners in crime but not in a love relationship. The undercover cop doesn’t really need a name because first he is undercover so his appearance may be altered and impossible for T & MM to know who he really is. Also, this is set many years after the three “knew each other”. Tweeter has had a sex change so would also possibly be unrecognizable. Jan obviously loves the Monkey Man. I believe that the undercover cop was left tied to a tree because T & MM found out who he truly was, and would have felt guilty killing him.
This is where it gets tricky. Was Jan intent on killing T & MM because she realized that they would kill her brother? or is it the other way around!! Does Jan go to kill her brother because she knows he will kill T & MM? I personally think these lines are obscure on purpose. Basically Dylan and Petty saying – let the listener decide!
Also tricky is who is the narrator? It could be Bill, MM or another character? My initial thought was it has to be the MM because the next few lines talk about him getting out of Jersey (where he went to hide) and finding a spot in the sun in Florida. Or it could be Bill who’s wife is now dead? or maybe she divorced him after he found out that she loved the MM? My bet is still that the narrator is the Monkey Man.
It could be a damn good song if they simplified the lyrics into an actual storyline instead of fucking most of them up with acid trip babble that no one will ever figure out , not even the writer . Sometimes simpler is better or the whole song becomes a meaningless piece of shit , I like songs that make you think and eventually come to have meaning but if they rewrote the lyrics to this song it could be great, if not you might as well enjoy the music and ignore the lyrics.
Different interpretation- namely the Monkey Man was metaphorically heroin & that’s what the “reason unexplained” was why Jan loved him & made secret calls….Also, well explains the chorus!
Also, the term Monkey Man AKA Monkey on your Back or heroin addiction, No???
Tweeter was a Veitnam war conscript who successfully got discharged (a la Corporal Klinger from MASH), returned to the states expecting to be ridiculed and despised, but found out nobody thought worse of him than they already did about every other returning soldier. So s/he decided to just stick with the cross dressing thing. S/he met up with the Monkey Man and they got into drug trafficking to make ends meet.
Jan being “married at 14” implies abuse and/or human trafficking, and in any case makes it pretty likely she had developed (either voluntarily or forcibly) a serious addiction to drugs, and she was probably getting them from the Monkey Man, which is why she “loved” him. The reasons being “unexplained” likely because people often just didn’t talk about such things back in the day.
The cop eventually catches Tweeter and Monkey Man, but Jan shows up and kills him to save her dealer. Such is the power of addiction. The three then try to flee together, but are met on the bridge by the main law enforcement group, shootout ensues, and the 3 are slain. The story is covered by the media (as such things are), and when broadcast, incites rioting (as such things do).
When everything eventually calms down again, the narrator returns to his usual club for a drink and a card game, and notices the rioters wrecked the TV in there and it hasn’t been replaced. This makes him think about the whole story of Tweeter and the Monkey Man and Jan and the subsequent rioting, and he decides to relocate to somewhere nicer. The End.
That’s the story I hear listening to this song, anyway.
This is the first decent discussion of the lyrics I’ve been able to find on the internet. A lot of you have given a lot of great takes and I’m way late to this party, but I just wanted to add my thoughts:
So, in my mind, there’s 2 big questions the song does not answer or is very ambiguous about. (And no, none of them have to do with Tweeter, the lyrics are pretty clear she is a Trans woman. Pointing this out now because I see a lot of confusion/denial in other discussions).
1. Who is the narrator? One of the characters mentioned in the song, or just someone who was from their neighborhood or traveled in the same social/criminal circles?
My opinion: I think the most likely answer is, as others have mentioned, The Monkeyman. But I want to put forth a possible, fascinating alternative: It’s Bill. He wasn’t involved in any of the fire fights. He’s a racketeer so maybe he owned the Lion’s Den, and shot it to shit when he saw the Monkeyman and his wife on the news, pissed about her infidelity or possible death. I think this is also supported by the lyric saying, “Jan jumped up out of bed…” All the rest of the info about events and characters in the song would have been on the news, or known to people in that hood… except that line. Only Bill would have been present for that bit. However, this can be disregarded by assuming the narrator is just omniscient, or also learned that from talking to Bill somehow but, it’s an interesting thought.
2. Who killed the Undercover cop?
My Opinion: I had always assumed it was Jan. She leaves in the middle of the night to shoot her brother/undercover cop to protect her secret lover. This is also supported by the lyric where Jan, speaking to her brother, reminds him “It was you to me who taught, in Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught”. On the other hand, immediately after telling us the cop is dead in a field, we get Jan confronting Tweeter and the Monkeyman, and basically telling Tweeter (who is currently preventing Monkeyman from being shot by cops/Jan because she’s presenting as an innocent woman), that “I knew you before your transition, I’ve got no qualms about shooting you”. And then the walls come down. Which in this song basically means, civility has crumbled, a gun fight ensues. And that heavily implies she shoots Tweeter and wants to kill the Monkeyman to avenge her brother.
Ultimately, I think Dzintars has the most plausible summary in their earlier comment. Jan shoots at Tweeter and the Monkeyman to avenge her brother, and the Monkeyman is forced to kill her to protect himself. Then he decides to leave for Florida after shooting up the gambling joint either out of guilt, or because his arrival immediately instigated conflict lol.
But there’s one very interesting alternative explanation I want to put forth, that I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
Tweeter and the Monkeyman are the same person. Jan fell in love with The Monkeyman when they were young, he went off to Nam, came back with trauma and questioning their identity. Ultimately they decide to present female and engage in a life of crime… while still occasionally calling their first love, Jan on the phone, speaking in the voice she’d recognize (masculine/Monkeyman).
So, in this scenario, Jan does go to protect the Monkeyman from her brother, kills her brother, and then sees Tweeter (and only Tweeter) on the bridge cornered by law enforcement. She basically reveals, I know it’s you Monkeyman, I’m not fooled by the wig, I still love you. And then they shoot their way to freedom, or maybe are both killed in the firefight. Who knows…
There is some serious mental gymnastics in the comments with interesting ideas. I’d like to offer a few different takes.
Where do I start? Get your axes grinding, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The lyrics are sloppy and ambiguous. The story changes narrators too many times, the characters are not clear, and the transgender aspect has nothing to do with the crime story. It’s not even a macguffin. It’s just Bob doing what he does, grinding out stream of consciousness (unconsciousness?) rhyming lines with vague themes and mysterious hints and clues of what the song is really about, running madly off in all directions with malice aforethought. What is the story? Who are the bad guys? Who are the good guys, if any? What do they actually do. What do they say? Or, if it’s not clear, what might they be saying? Does it have anything to do with the story? Turn your exam sheets over, you have 1 hour and 59 minutes.
I too, got sucked into the poetic mysticism of the ragged woman-hating prophet shouting his pain to the thundering heavens for what is now a cool 2.5 to 6 mil per appearance. In the ’60’s I was also weak and fell under his…magnetism? His bus? I too tried to do Bob songs, and fortunately I soon realised that my life wasn’t going to be long enough to memorise and sing songs that could have been easily edited to 3 or 4 minutes. I would need coffee and a snack by the time I finished Hard Rain. Murder Most Foul is 16 minutes and 56 seconds long, although what it is after harmonica solos, and making up new lyrics to replace the ones he forgot is anybody’s guess. I’ll save you the pain of listening to it by saying that it’s about RFK’s murder. Hint, he dies at the end.
Bob has spent 60 odd years pummelling his listeners and sycophants into zombified fugue states spewing out so many words that surrender is the only option. FYI. My opinion is that he writes in the ballad style of the early British traditions of having songs that were 50 verses long.
But, they had an excuse. The reason they were so long was because people back then had nothing much else to do beside listen to one hour long ballad or saga after another until the beer and wine were gone and everybody was passed out drunk and asleep in the great hall among spilled flagons, broken crockery, spoiled food, and vomit. It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times (in German castles, anyway).
Bod did some good ones, I totally agree. You could sing them in less time than it took to roast a chicken, the choruses were catchy, they encouraged the peasants to be even more revolting, and they worked for union rallies, folk music festivals, human rights activism, and the ’68 Democratic Convention in Detroit, at least until the cops started gassing, water-hosing, and clubbing everyone.
My opinion (and bus fare gets you downtown) draws on about 50 years of some writing, composing, recording, arranging, and composing experience. Nothing I’ve written here is gospel, but I hope it gave someone a chuckle.
Tweeter and the Monkeyman is just another bad song that rhymes and goes on for way too long. I’ve written songs that have been way too long and some of them have not even been bad enough to be good. Bob and I are not alone. Everybody writes bad songs sooner or later. This just happens to be one of his. I think it’s dreck. He’s done better, but when you’re famous enough to crap on a sheet of paper and sign it, somebody will pay a million for it. What do I know? I know that you will never go broke underestimating popular taste in art. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And as the whole saying goes, “The customer is always right in matters of taste.” Oh yes, sir. That is a lovely coat. No it doesn’t make you look at all like a wildebeest.
Humbly yours,
She who arrives with the dawn, and thankfully vanishes with wind.
Thanks, Dzintars, for believing like me that the first person narrator at the end is in fact the monkey Man. I’ve been looking and looking for somebody to agree with me on this. I first listened intently to the song in 1988 and have been believing that interpretation for now going on 30 years.