But when you take all of the metaphors used in the song into account, it really is difficult to deny the imagery. I was a fixture of the San Francisco, Santa Cruz, & Carmel areas during the time when all of that was going on (60's), and if you have ever been to The Sur, I guarantee that it will change your life in some way.
"With your Mercury mouth in the missionary times" - The "mouth", or beginning of Big Sur, is located on Hwy 1, about 30 miles below one of the original California missions, The Mission Carmel, in the town of Carmel. There is "nothing" between The Mission and the mouth of the Sur except mile after mile of the most beautiful and breathtaking coastal scenery.
"and your street car visions that you place on the grass". - Right next to Carmel, the city of Monterey is located. Yes, the same Monterey where Jack London used to live and write his stories about the sea. Another big part of the heritage of Monterey has to do with the street cars, which were a major source of transportation in the early history of that city. To this day, you will still find some of those old street cars still being used as part of the appealing charm of that city.
"With your silhouette when the sunlight dims, into your eyes where the moonlight swims." Carved into the side of a mountain, and about 1000' above the Pacific Ocean, somewhere in about the middle of The Sur, is a decades old venerable restaurant/bar called The Nepenthe. In the past, and on different occasions, I have been seated at many of the tables there and gazed out in a non-alcoholic stupor (I don't drink - acid maybe - but never alcohol) out over the Pacific Ocean as the sun set in one quadrant of the sky while the moon rose at the same time in another.
"The farmers and the business men, they all did decide." "To show you where the dead angles are, that they used to hide." - During the 60's for a time, The Sur was home to a chapter of The Hells Angles motorcycle gang. At one point, those fine boys got into a little cutlery-fu with some of their own, and ended up hiding their bodies at some location in The Sur, before riding off into the morning mist. This event was legend to the locals who were into "the scene" there, while I imagine largely unknown to the rest of the planet. All of that happened about the time that Dylan was into his motorcycle fetish.
These are just some of the metaphors used in that song that come immediately to mind, however the theory I have postulated upon is not original to me. There are plenty of "Dylanologists" all over the planet who came up with this idea long before it first entered my mind. But like I say, it's really difficult to pin Dylan down to anything.
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