Bob Dylan / 5:31
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: October 31, 1963
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: George Knuerr and Levine
The recording sessions for the album The Times They Are A-Changin’ ended on October 24, 1963, two days before Bob Dylan’s concert at Carnegie Hall. The following day, Andrea Svedberg wrote a scathing article about Dylan in Newsweek magazine, uncovering a number of inconsistencies about his past. The songwriter was unjustly accused of having plagiarized Blowin’ in the Wind from a New Jersey high school student named Lorre Wyatt. He told the media that “I’ve lost contact with them [my parents] for years,” while he had flown them in to see the Carnegie Hall concert.
Bob Dylan did not like the attempt by a Newsweek reporter to discredit his work, and, most importantly, that she had also investigated his past. Thus, he added a ninth stanza to the short text on his life that he had printed in the booklet of the finished recorded album under the name “11 Outlined Epitaphs.”
In the process, he also wrote a new song in reaction to his trouble with the press and decided to include it on the album, probably in place of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.” Thus, on October 31, Dylan returned to the studio to record “Restless Farewell.”
“Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time / To disgrace, distract, and bother me / And the dirt of gossip blows into my face / And the dust of rumors covers me,” wrote Dylan. But at the same time, as the title “Restless Farewell” indicates, Bob Dylan realized that years have passed and times have changed. “Oh all the money that in my whole life I did spend / Be it mine right or wrongfully / I let it slip gladly past the hands of my friends / To tie up the time most forcefully,” he sings in the first verse. Then, in the second part of the first chorus: “And the corner sign / Says it’s closing time / So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road.” In other words, a page is being turned—the one on which the folksinger emulated Woody Guthrie. Another page opens and remains to be written…
In the last session on Thursday, October 31, the final song of the album, “Restless Farewell,” was recorded in two hours and nine takes, the last one being the master. Dylan took inspiration from the seventeenth-century traditional Scotch-Irish song “The Parting Glass,” both for the musical approach and the literary form. But his creative force always makes the difference, and he created an original work of his own. To reinforce this traditional spirit, Tom Wilson chooses a sound similar to “North Country Blues.” The guitar part is excellent, the tempo totally free. For the first time, his harmonica playing (in A) has a true blues tone and enhances the ambience of its “roots.” His voice, supported by a fairly strong reverb, surprises by the impression of weariness that comes out. Dylan, an artist with a heightened sensitivity, has probably exaggerated the effect of the Newsweek article, which nevertheless led to a kind of introspection. On the version made in 1995 for 80 Years My Way, a television special celebrating American crooner Frank Sinatra’s eightieth birthday, Dylan sings it softly as a lullaby. This song has a real resonance for him, and the melody “Restless Farewell” opens for him the way to a different perception of reality.