Jeffrey Owen Jones, the man who has been commonly identified as the primary inspiration for the character of "Mr. Jones" in Bob Dylan's scathing 'Ballad of a Thin Man,' died of lung cancer in early November, according to a report in the NME. The 63-year-old Jones, who had interviewed Dylan for Time magazine in 1965, was most recently a film professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

In Dylan's incisive putdown, which appeared on the 1965 album 'Highway 61 Revisited,' the singer-songwriter accuses Mr. Jones of being clueless and out of his league, with its chorus of "Because something is happening here/But you don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?" It is also theorized that Dylan's protagonist may have been Melody Maker critic Max Jones, or perhaps an amalgam of several pop pundits with whom Dylan had differences of opinion.