Bob Dylan has released an unused track from Rough and Rowdy Ways, about neighborhood kids cutting through his yard. The song, Trespassing Most Foul, crystallizes Dylan’s rage against the injustice of pre-adolescents who show no respect for private property and delicate gardens. The thirty-minute epic, croaked in Dylan’s inimitable style, contains references to Bart Simpson, Eddie Haskell, Maynard G. Krebs, and Nick Sandmann.
“Twas a dark day in my yard, November ’19
A day that will live on in infamy
I was a-ridin’ high
Good day to be livin’ and I was feeling spry.
But I was disturbed by a neighborhood scam.
I said, ‘Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?’
‘Of course we do, we know who you are’
Then they cut through my yard, and scratched the paint on my car…”
The ballad, in which Dylan’s hoarse speaking voice is accompanied only by a tinkling toy piano, contains dozens of references to disrespectful cultural icons:
“Holden Caulfield, he’s speaking in tongues
He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
Get out of my yard, Mr. Holden
Leave before you get told on.
Play me that ‘God Save the Queen.’
Take me to the place Johnny Rotten could preen.”
The Nobel Prize winner was seething over a continuing pattern of young punks failing to respect his meticulous yard work. He is currently rumored to be writing a forty-five minute chronicle about his battle to keep squirrels out of his bird feeder.
By Fred Gailey