After the poor sales of his debut album, there was talk at Columbia of Dylan’s contract being dropped before he could make a second record. John Hammond, however, would have none of it, and blocked David Kapralik’s move to offload ‘Hammond’s Folly’ by appealing over his head to Columbia president Goddard Lieberson, an old friend whom he had been responsible for bringing into the company years before. Helped by the support of Johnny Cash, one of the label’s leading country stars, who made no secret of his admiration for the youngster, Hammond was able to secure an extension of Dylan’s contract—for which Columbia was presumably eternally grateful. A giant leap beyond his raw debut, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was the first of a string of Dylan masterpieces that changed the face of first folk, then rock music.
There are two basic driving forces behind the Freewheelin’ album: Dylan’s involvement in the civil rights movement; and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s absence in Italy, which spurred him into a prolific fever of songwriting. Since Suze was the person who drew Dylan into the civil rights arena in the first place, her position alongside the singer on the album cover was more than justified. Bob and Suze had bumped into each other a few times before through her sister Carla—who worked for folk archivist Alan Lomax and was an early supporter of Dylan—but the two became a couple following a benefit concert he played on July 29, 1961, for the Riverside Church’s radio station WRVR-FM. The youngest daughter of politically active Italian immigrant parents, Suze was already involved in de-segregation and anti-nuclear campaigns, working as a secretary for the Congress On Racial Equality. She helped Bob bring his general concern for the underdog and dislike of injustice into sharper, more specific focus.
The pair began an intense, if problematic, two-year affair. At first, Suze had the effect of smoothing out Bob’s spikier side, sweetening his demeanor and encouraging him to smarten up a little. But after the couple took a tiny apartment at 161 West 4th Street, the demands of his ego began to encroach upon her own ego-space, and she started to feel smothered by his attention. She was an intelligent young woman with interests of her own in the theater and visual arts—she introduced Bob to the work of Bertolt Brecht, who would be a big influence on his work—but Dylan seemed to require nothing more of her than that she be “Bob’s girl”. As early as November 1961, before Dylan had released any records, she confided in a letter to a friend, Sue Zuckerman, “I don’t want to get sucked under by Bob Dylan and his fame. I really don’t. It sort of scares me… It really changes a person when they become well known by all and sundry. They develop this uncontrollable egomania… Something snaps somewhere, and suddenly the person can’t see anything at all except himself… I can see it happening to Bobby…”
Besides which, Dylan was, even then, not the most forthcoming of people. “It’s so hard to talk to him,” Suze told another friend. “Sometimes he doesn’t talk. He has to be drinking to open up.” She sensed a pervasive air of despair about Dylan, a pessimism about people which bordered on paranoia and made him reluctant to leave the flat. Suze’s mother, Mary, disapproved of her relationship with this scruffy 19-year-old kid who had dubious personal hygiene and a cavalier way with the truth, particularly concerning his own past. She persuaded her daughter to travel with her in the summer of 1962 to Italy, where Suze took a course at the University of Perugia. The trip, which was meant to be for a few months, was ultimately extended to a total of six months, during which time Dylan pined terribly for her.
Like many an artist before him, however, Dylan learned successfully how to transmute his pain into creative energy: the period of Suze’s absence marks the first full flowering of his poetic talent, with songs of high quality pouring out of him at a phenomenal rate. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalls going on a car trip with him at the time, and being amazed at his industry: “He had a small spiral notebook, and must have had four different songs going at once. He would write a line in one and flip a couple of pages back and write a line in another one. A word here and a line there, just writing away.” Another friend, the singer Tom Paxton, recalled strolling late at night through Greenwich Village with Dylan as he scribbled away on scraps of paper. “His mind was on fire. Between the club and wherever he was heading, he’d start as many as five songs—and finish them!”
The most frequently used word to describe Dylan at the time was “sponge”—he would listen quietly to friends’ conversations, making notes, and later on they would find phrases, stories and nuggets of information from their conversation appearing in his songs. He was omnivorously open to influences, but unlike most of his contemporaries, he had the drive and application to build something of his own out of the accumulated fragments. During a radio interview with Pete Seeger, Dylan explained his working methods. “I don’t even consider it writing songs,” he claimed. “When I’ve written [a song] I don’t even consider that I wrote it when I got done… I just figure that I made it up or I got it some place. The song was there before I came along, I just sort of took it down with a pencil…”
Having written a song effectively as a poem, he would then try and find a melody for it, often borrowing or adapting an old folk tune, some of which he learned from English folk singers on a trip he made to Europe in December 1962 through January 1963. Ironically, just as he rushed over to Italy to see Suze, she was sailing back to New York, where she managed to settle in before Bob returned a few weeks later, hoping to pick up their relationship where it had left off six months before. Suze was reluctant—she had matured considerably in her time away, and did not want to become just “Bob’s girl” again—but Dylan was persuasive, and after a short time staying with her sister, she moved back into the 4th Street apartment.
Things had changed radically, however. Bob’s fame had grown rapidly while she was away, and it seemed that everyone was trying to get to him through her, that nobody was interested in her for her own sake and that the process of objectification was growing even stronger than it had been before—particularly since songs like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in effect made their relationship public. Furthermore, Bob himself, encouraged by his new manager Albert Grossman, was becoming reclusive and aloof, and she found it more difficult than before to communicate with him. Before long, the old stresses and strains began to pull them apart all over again.
Besides several songs, such as ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ and ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’, which were written specifically about Suze during her absence, Dylan also continued maturing as a protest songwriter, with songs like ‘Oxford Town’ and particularly ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, whose strings of imagery reflected the influence of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, a favorite of Bob and Suze’s. With John Hammond again at the helm, recording for the new album began with a couple of sessions in April 1962, but it was not until July that Dylan started laying down the more distinctive material that would set this new album firmly apart from his debut and establish him as a songwriter of great power and individuality.
Several of the protest songs that would appear on Freewheelin’, such as ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘Masters Of War’, were originally published in the folk/protest magazine Broadside, a small but influential disseminator of new views for whom Dylan served as a contributing editor. (Later on, in
1963, he would also contribute to an album of Broadside Ballads using the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt so as not to infringe his contract with Columbia Records.) The first issue of Broadside included the lyrics to one of his earliest songs, an amusing talking blues called ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’, which took a satiric swipe at the right-wing anti-communist organization: in the song, the narrator searches for communists so avidly he finds them everywhere, eventually spotting one in his mirror.
The song, which had been slated for inclusion on Freewheelin’, caused a problem when Dylan tried to perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show, the country’s premier television variety showcase. He had been booked on the May 12 show by Sullivan’s son-in-law, Bob Precht, a folk fan who had managed to smooth over the obvious absurdity of having Dylan share a bill with Teresa Brewer, Irving Berlin, Al Hirt and the mouse puppet Topo Gigio. But when Stowe Phillips, the network censor, heard the song in rehearsal, he had cold feet and refused to let Dylan perform it on the show, fearing that it might libel members of the John Birch Society. Would Bob, he wondered, care to sing something else instead?
He would not. “If I can’t play my song, I’d rather not appear on the show,” he said, and walked out, hours before curtain time. In one way, it was a fortuitous refusal: Dylan had already come in for criticism from some of the Greenwich Village folkies for selling out when he told them he was due to appear, and his walk-out stopped that flak and generated some more favorable publicity besides. But there were further repercussions: The Ed Sullivan Show was on the CBS network, Columbia Records’ parent company, and the same fears of libel brought pressure to remove the song from Freewheelin’ as well, on the eve of its release. Since his contract gave them the right to censor such material, Dylan had no option but to comply, particularly since his first album had been a commercial failure.
Though he was angry at first, Dylan quickly got over his frustration, and took the opportunity to replace several of the songs which were scheduled to be on the album, which he felt were too old-fashioned, with more contemporary, “finger-pointing” songs. Out went ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’, ‘Rocks And Gravel’, ‘Rambling Gambling Willie’ and ‘Let Me Die In My Footsteps’, and in came ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, ‘Masters Of War’, ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ and ‘Girl From The North Country’—but not before a few hundred copies of the album with the original running-order had been pressed up and released. (The rarest items in Dylan’s back catalog, they now command thousands of dollars on the infrequent occasions they appear for sale.)
These four substitute tracks had been recorded at a late session in April 1963, four months after the rest of the album had been completed. They marked the debut of Dylan’s new producer, a young black man called Tom Wilson, who had previously worked on jazz recordings by performers such as Sun Ra’s Arkestra, and who would later go on to produce early efforts by such seminal Sixties groups as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention. Wilson had taken over production duties from John Hammond when Albert Grossman, alarmed at Hammond’s casual approach to recording, threatened to walk away from the Columbia contract on the grounds that Dylan had been a minor when he signed it, thus rendering it null and void.
Since Dylan had recorded several times since turning 21, however, Grossman could not extricate him from the contract, although he could still cause enough of a fuss to get Hammond replaced. But Columbia had a policy which dictated that Columbia artists must only use Columbia’s in-house producers, and there were no exceptions to the rule—certainly not unproven talents like Dylan. “We don’t want anything to do with any producer at Columbia,” Grossman told David Kapralik, “because you don’t have a producer that understands Bob Dylan.” Realizing that because Wilson was black, Dylan and Grossman would not dismiss him out of hand, Kapralik suggested Dylan chat with Wilson awhile. His ploy worked: the next day, Wilson was accepted as Bob’s new producer and, shortly after, they recorded the songs which completed Freewheelin’.
The album was released on May 27, 1963, with a cover photo of Bob and Suze strolling happily down a slush-covered 4th Street. As Freewheelin’ picked up airplay, acclaim and sales of around 10,000 a month (particularly when Peter, Paul & Mary scored a huge hit with ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ that July), Suze was the envy of every folk singer’s girlfriend and female college student. But even as the record was being released, Dylan was on the far side of the country, following his May 18 appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival by spending a fortnight—unknown to Suze—at the Carmel pad of his new friend, Joan Baez.
The second official Bob Dylan record released by Columbia, the single of ‘Mixed Up Confusion’ sold even more poorly than his debut album. A rollicking rockabilly rave-up, it’s a complete anomaly set against what preceded and succeeded it.
Shortly after the November 1962 sessions at which it was recorded, Dylan told folk historian Israel Young that he’d written the song in the taxi en route to the studio, and it sounds like it. An impromptu burst of disaffection, the song perhaps reflects the pressures that Dylan’s growing reputation was bringing to bear upon him, with “too many people” wanting a piece of him, either to do some promotional work, or give them advice on songwriting (as his old Greenwich Village colleague Mark Spoelstra had requested, embarrassingly for all concerned), or to make an appearance in support of some cause or other. “They’re all too hard to please,” fumes Dylan, desperately.
In one of his trips back West to Minneapolis that August, his chum Tony Glover had taped Dylan singing some songs and moaning about the demands made upon his time by people like the activists from the Congress Of Racial Equality. “CORE is a white organization for Negro people,” he sneered. “I am sick of writing songs for everybody.” He went on to sing a satiric talking blues which asked, “What kind of hippo is a hypocrite?” before returning to his theme of self-sacrifice. “I figure I’ve been writing too many songs for other people,” he said. “I finally got to the point where I said to myself: ‘Jesus, Dylan, you ain’t written no songs about you. You’ve got to get somebody to write a song about you.’ Then I said to myself, ‘I can write songs about me as well as anybody else can.’” With ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, he certainly expresses one side of himself clearly, blurting out a cathartic torrent of frustration.
Even the recording of the song, as it happens, left him angry and frustrated, probably due to the interference of his managers Albert Grossman and John Court at the sessions. Perturbed at what he saw as John Hammond’s lackadaisical approach to recording, Grossman had begun to stick his oar in, and while his eye for business was without peer, his ear for music was less reliable. “Albert had the brilliant idea that Bobby ought to be recorded with a Dixieland band on ‘Mixed Up Confusion’,” Hammond would recall. “It was a disaster.”
Whether the version released on the single is what Hammond (or Grossman) considered to be “Dixieland”, it’s not really that great a disaster. Indeed, as a historical document, it marks the very first folk-rock recording, a good three years before Bringing It All Back Home. Herbie Lovelle’s rattling-train snare drum licks and Gene Ramey’s bass drive along an arrangement that leans heavily on Dick Wellstood’s Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock-a-boogie piano, with the guitars of Bruce Langhorne and George Barnes dancing around the riff. Something of a throwback to the teenage Robert Zimmerman’s Little Richard-influenced high-school bands, it was released as a single in December 1962, with ‘Corrina, Corrina’ on the B-side, but was felt to be at such variance with Dylan’s emergent reputation as a serious young commentator that it was swiftly withdrawn.
Three years later, it was reissued by the Dutch arm of CBS in a sleeve featuring one of the Daniel Kramer photographs of Dylan seated at an upright piano, taken at the Bringing It All Back Home sessions. Some copies were imported into the UK, where it was widely believed to be a recent recording, so congruent was it with Dylan’s then contemporary folk-rock material. It was never included on an album until the 1985 retrospective collection Biograph—and even then, with typical Dylanesque inscrutability, a different version of the song was chosen. That wasn’t Dixieland, either.
Blowin’ In The Wind’ marked a huge jump in Bob Dylan’s songwriting. Prior to this, efforts like ‘The Ballad Of Donald White’ and ‘The Death Of Emmett Till’ had been fairly simplistic bouts of reportage songwriting, taking news stories—in these cases, about the disparity of the American legal system’s treatment of, respectively, a Negro murderer and a Negro murder victim—and turning them into narrative dramas of social conscience.
‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ was different: for the first time, Dylan discovered the effectiveness of moving from the particular to the general. Whereas ‘The Ballad Of Donald White’ would become completely redundant as soon as the eponymous criminal was executed, a song as vague and all-encompassing as ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ could be applied to just about any freedom issue, at any time. It remains the song with which Dylan’s name is most inextricably linked, and safeguarded his reputation as civil libertarian through any number of subsequent changes in style and attitude.
Sometimes derided for its lack of substance, the song features a particularly clever piece of poetic sleight-of-hand, hiding its string of unanswerable, rhetorical queries behind a strong, specific opening image (of a man walking down a road) which connects to both the Woody Guthrie road-song tradition of Dylan’s immediate past and to the civil rights marchers who were then altering the course of their country’s history. From there, the song offers less specific questions couched in more abstruse images, repeatedly dissolving into the wistful uncertainty of the chorus in a way that struck a strong chord with the youthful protest movement, validating their concern while absolving them from the obligation to come up with absolute answers to the problems about which they protested. There are no hard and fast answers, the song says, the only obligation is to care. “The first way to answer these questions,” said Dylan, “is by asking them. But lots of people have to first find the wind.”
The inspiration for the song came to him one afternoon in April 1962, during a long political discussion with friends in the Commons, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse across MacDougal Street from the Gaslight Club. As the conversation petered out into silence, an idea struck him. “The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence,” he told friends, “that all of us in America who didn’t speak out were betrayed by our silence, betrayed by the silence of the people in power. They refuse to look at what’s happening. And the others, they ride the subways and read the Times, but they don’t understand. They don’t know. They don’t even care, that’s the worst of it.” With his friend David Cohen (who became the folk singer David Blue) strumming the chords for him, Dylan quickly wrote down the words, and then the pair dashed over to Gerde’s Folk City to play the new song for the club’s singing MC, Gil Turner. Deeply impressed, Turner got Dylan to teach him the song and that very night he gave ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ its first public recital, to great acclaim.
After the song was featured that May on the cover of the sixth issue of Broadside magazine—a small, mimeographed bulletin set up by Pete Seeger, Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen for the dissemination of new topical songs and analysis, and largely run by Gil Turner—it became part of every folkie’s repertoire, the new lingua franca of folk protest. Pete Seeger was especially impressed, and became one of Dylan’s most fervent supporters, convinced the kid was a genius, even if he had borrowed the tune from the old folk song ‘No More Auction Block’ for ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. If anything, that just authenticated it for him, anchoring the new song in the grand old folk tradition of adaptation and interpretation. Not that it prevented Dylan copyrighting the tune as his own, of course. (More sinister, however, was the later rumor, reported in Newsweek, that the lyrics had been written by a student in New Jersey, Lorre Wyatt, from whom Dylan had purchased them. Wyatt himself first tried to explain away the situation by saying “some kids” had confused Dylan’s song with another which he himself had written, called ‘Freedom Is Blowing In The Wind’, and that only the titles were similar, before finally admitting, in a 1974 magazine article, that it was all bullshit and that there was no truth in the rumor. “The coat of fakelore I stitched years ago is threadbare now —it never fit me very well,” he wrote. “I’m just sorry it’s taken me 11 years to say ‘I’m sorry.’”)
Dylan’s friend Dave Van Ronk, still rankling from the way Bob appropriated his arrangement of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, was less complimentary than Turner and Seeger when the song was played for him the day after Turner had debuted it at Gerde’s. “What an incredibly dumb song!” he spluttered with typical bluffness. “I mean, what the hell is blowing in the wind?” But a few weeks later, after hearing someone parodying the song in Washington Square Park, he realized that Dylan had come up with an enduring cliché. So did Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, who also knew the commercial value of such a cliché. In a masterstroke of managerial synthesis, he earmarked the song for his other main act, Peter, Paul & Mary, the folk group he had created the previous year, who were establishing themselves as the commercial folk heirs to The Kingston Trio with hit versions of folk standards like ‘Lemon Tree’ and ‘If I Had A Hammer’. The following summer, a few months after the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, their version of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ went to number two on the American pop charts, becoming Warner Brothers’ fastest-selling single ever and cementing Dylan’s position as the crown prince of folk-protest.
Realizing their artist’s true potential, Columbia belatedly rushed out a single of Dylan’s version in August 1963, a month after Peter, Paul & Mary’s had been released. It failed to chart, leaving Dylan tagged for some time primarily as a songwriter, rather than a performer. The song was, however, used as the theme for Madhouse On Castle Street, a BBC television play in which Dylan played his first dramatic role, appearing as an American protest singer—hardly a stretch, one would have thought.
Though some commentators, most notably Dylan biographer Robert Shelton, claim that the girl from the North Country is actually Bonnie Beecher—a bohemian actress Bob fell in love with during his time in Minneapolis, and at whose apartment Tony Glover recorded several of the early Dylan tapes—most agree it is more likely to be Echo Helstrom, his first serious girlfriend from his schooldays back in Hibbing.
Bob met Echo in October 1957, when he was just 17, and she 16. At the time, Bob Zimmerman was a nice enough middle-class boy, clean-cut and round-faced, while Echo was from a poorer working-class family, definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. They discovered a shared interest in R&B music, which both would listen to late at night on the radio, on the DJ Gatemouth Page’s program, or on stations in Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas, which had particularly powerful transmitters. Nobody else in Hibbing, it seemed, was interested in this music, but they were obsessed with it: the first time they met, Bob used his pocket-knife to break into the Moose Lodge where he had earlier been practicing with his band, in order to play her his Little Richard piano licks.
Already, Bob knew what he was going to do with his life. “By the time I met him,” recalled Echo later, “it was just understood that music was his future. All along we knew there was no other way for him to get out of there, to leave Hibbing.” His ambition sometimes led him to playful fantasy pranks, as when he played Bobby Freeman’s ‘Do You Want To Dance?’ down the phone to Echo, claiming it was him and his band; but she and her mother recognized, even at this early stage, Bob’s intrinsic empathy with the underdog. His later interest in country music may have stemmed from his association with Echo, too: he and his friend John Buckland would trawl through Echo’s mother’s large collection of Country & Western 78s, trying out the songs on their guitars, particularly the sad songs about prison fires, dying children and similar depressing subjects.
For a while, Bob and Echo were sweethearts, swapping identity bracelets and even attending the prom together, albeit as outsiders somewhat cut off from the school mainstream. The 1958 Hibbing High yearbook records Bob’s feelings for Echo: “Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none, but I think I told you that before… Love to the most beautiful girl in school.” By that summer, however, they were growing apart. Increasingly restless and pinched by the confines of Hibbing, Bob’s boot heels had taken to wandering, and his weekends would be spent out of town, in Duluth or Minneapolis, while Echo pined away miserably at home. She realized he was probably seeing other girls and so, one Monday morning, she handed his ID bracelet back in the school corridor. “Don’t do this in the hall,” pleaded Bob, “let’s talk about it later.” But it was already too late.
Bob Dylan finished writing the song on his brief trip to Italy in the first week of 1963, where he had hoped to meet up with Suze Rotolo again. Alas, she had left to return to New York mere days before. He had, he later claimed, been carrying the song around in his head for a year, and it seems as though the manic swing from anticipation to disappointment caused it to burst out of him. Equally important in its eventual appearance was his sojourn in England on the same European trip, where Dylan went to appear in the BBC play Madhouse On Castle Street. In the company of old chums Richard Fariña and Ric Von Schmidt—over there to record an album on which Dylan, credited as Blind Boy Grunt, would play impromptu harmonica—he did the rounds of the London folk clubs, where he picked up some old English folk songs from traditional singers such as Martin Carthy. Like another expatriate American folkie, Paul Simon, Dylan seems to have been particularly attracted to the old English folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’, and adapted it to fit his own ends.
This diatribe against the arms industry is the bluntest condemnation in Dylan’s songbook, a torrent of plain-speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand, with no poetic touches to obscure its message. It would seem to have had scant effect: even today, armaments manufacturers are virtually the only companies that governments are prepared to prop up and subsidize, whatever the cost, despite the often flagrant incompetence and fraudulent misuse of public funds exhibited by these companies in cahoots with the military establishment.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final advice to the incoming President John F. Kennedy in January 1961 was to beware of this military-industrial complex, which he belatedly realized had effectively dictated much of American foreign and economic policy in the postwar years, encouraging the Cold War arms race and reckless military adventurism in order to serve their own vested interests, rather than the interests of the country as a whole. Their influence spread into other areas, particularly science and education, which became heavily dependent on Defense Department funding, and which in turn became more tightly focused on military research, at the expense of other areas. By 1960, the Federal Government was subsidizing research in universities to the tune of over a billion dollars a year; thanks to Federal funds, a single institution like the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (M.I.T.) could spend more money on scientific research than all the universities of the British Isles combined.
Kennedy either ignored Eisenhower’s advice or found himself over a Cold War barrel rolled under him by his hawkish Chiefs Of Staff. He had been in office only a few months when he authorized a massive arms procurement program worth an $3 billion on top of the already substantial arms budget, with an additional $207 million earmarked for civil defense. The money pouring into the arms companies’ coffers has grown even greater since, as armaments have become more technologically complex, like Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles, or more fanciful, like Reagan’s comic-book “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative.
First debuted by Dylan at Gerdes Folk City on January 21, 1963, ‘Masters Of War’ remains as pertinent almost four decades later. Its lyrics were published in the 20th issue of Broadside magazine in February 1963, accompanied by a couple of drawings by Suze Rotolo—one of a man carving up the world with a knife and fork while a family watches forlornly, and another of a baby-carriage kitted out with a gun and tank-tracks. The tune is an adaptation of the traditional melody to the English folk song ‘Nottamun Town’, probably learnt from Martin Carthy on one of Dylan’s English trips.
The closest Dylan comes on Freewheelin’ to the dark soul of country blues as practiced by performers such as Robert Johnson or Son House, ‘Down The Highway’ is a bare, basic blues format, worked around a 12-bar scheme. A single strummed guitar chord teeters through the verses, collapsing into a flat-picked resolution at the end of each couplet, the evocative musical equivalent of the piteous sinking of shoulders after an impassioned cri du coeur. The subject matter, a girlfriend who has abandoned him for some “far-off land” which proves, in the penultimate verse, to be a desolate “Italy, Italy,” is clearly about the pain caused by the absence of Suze Rotolo, who was pursuing her own life on an extended trip to that country.
The narrator is stranded, lovelorn, on some endless highway, lugging his suitcase to nowhere special: wherever he goes, she won’t be there, so what does it matter? It’s possible that Dylan came up with the song as he was returning to see old friends in Minnesota: the same day, June 8, that he saw Suze’s ship off at the docks in New York, he himself set off for Minneapolis. Shortly after, back in New York, Dave and Terri Van Ronk were surprised to receive a phone call at four in the morning from Bob, who was standing in a Minneapolis phone box in sub-zero temperatures, crying for Suze. Upon his return to Greenwich Village, all his friends were surprised at how listless and melancholy he had become, and how he had changed physically as well as emotionally—the puppy-fat apparent on his first album cover had disappeared, leaving him looking gaunt and weary, like Woody Guthrie. “He was falling apart at the seams,” said Mikki Isaacson, a Village friend. “He was so depressed we were afraid he was going to do something to himself.” Time did little to ease his pain. On a tape made by his old friend Tony Glover on another trip back to the twin cities a couple of months later, Dylan can be heard pining for Suze: “My girl, she’s in Europe right now. She sailed on a boat over there. She’ll be back September 1, and till she’s back, I’ll never go home. It gets kind of bad sometimes.”
The mention of gambling in the third verse could be a reference to the Greenwich Village folkies’ back-room poker games, but in the context of Dylan’s life is far more likely to refer to his perilous hand-to-mouth existence in his time in New York. Since dropping out of college in Minneapolis a year before, he had bummed around a bit, to nearby Madison and Chicago, and as far afield as Colorado and New Mexico, before heading East to eke out a virtual hobo existence on peoples’ floors in New York, heavily reliant on the compassion of strangers while he tried to develop a career in music. It had all been a huge gamble, and just as it seemed he might be set for the big jackpot pay-off, with a beautiful girlfriend, a record deal, burgeoning acclaim and the imminent prospect of both fame and fortune, his girl had gone and left him “without much more to lose.”
Despite providing the original working title for Freewheelin’, the trifling ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’ is probably more important for its position in the album’s running-order than for any intrinsic merit. Coming after the intensely emotional opening sequence of four songs, it offers a moment of light relief before the testing blizzard of imagery in ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, the LP’s centerpiece. At the recording session on July 9, it perhaps served a similar purpose, immediately preceding the taping of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. An example of how blues expression can lighten the spirit, its attitude of cheeky irrelevance punctures the self-pity at its heart. Nevertheless, it’s interesting for a couple of reasons: the line “Go away from my door and my window too” is a premonitory echo of the shorter, snappier opening line of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’; and the presence of the Lone Ranger and Tonto in its opening line marks the first appearance in Dylan’s recorded work of the gallery of pop-culture icons that would populate much of his later work.
Blowin’ In The Wind’ may have established Bob Dylan as the principal anthemist of the Civil Rights movement, but it was ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, written later that same year, which established him as the folk-poet of a new generation. Its strings of surreal, apocalyptic imagery were unlike anything that had been sung before, and the song’s rejection of narrative progression in favor of accumulative power lent a chilling depth to its warning. It was the closest folk music had come to the Revelation of St. John, and every bit as scary.
The root inspiration for the song came from the Cuban Missile Crisis—the moment at which, it’s commonly agreed, the Cold War came closest to boiling over into all-out nuclear catastrophe. The crisis came about in the wake of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 1959 transformation of Cuba into a communist state. In 1961, the young new American President, John F. Kennedy, revealed his inexperience and immaturity by supporting a CIA plot to overthrow Castro, to which end many of the anti-Castro Cuban refugees pouring into America were enlisted in an insurrectionary force of 1,500 men, who were trained in Guatemala for a counter-revolutionary invasion of Cuba.
Despite widespread antipathy towards the plot from the British government—who warned that the invasion would breach international law—and such weighty American political advisors as Dean Acheson, Arthur Schlesinger and Senator J. William Fulbright, who counseled that “the Castro regime is a thorn in the flesh, but it is not yet a dagger in our heart,” Kennedy proceeded with the plan. It was a disaster: when the invasion force attempted to establish a beach-head at the Bay Of Pigs on April 17, 1961, it was summarily wiped out by Castro’s waiting defenders.
Kennedy’s reputation was badly damaged by the abortive mission, which led his Soviet opposite number, the bombastic Nikita Khruschev, to adopt a fiercely aggressive stance at the Vienna summit negotiations that June over the future of Berlin. The summit went badly, ending with Khruschev asserting, “I want peace—but if you want war, that is your problem.” The outcome of the failed negotiations was the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and the deepening of mistrust on both sides.
Meanwhile, stung by the Bay Of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy had authorized further covert measures against the Castro regime, under the code name Operation Mongoose, ranging from the absurd (slipping El Presidente a poisoned cigar) to the effective, most notably the crippling of the Cuban economy through fifth-columnist saboteurs. So when, in the summer of 1962, the US Navy held intimidatory military maneuvers just outside Cuban territorial waters, Castro sought an alliance with the Soviet Union, who in return for economic subsidies were secretly granted permission to install nuclear missile bases on the island, on the justifiable pretext of defending Cuba’s independence against any further invasion. To the Soviets, forced to tolerate American nuclear missiles in Turkey, right on its own southern border, this was simply a tit-for-tat retaliation in the USA’s backyard—“Nothing more,” Khruschev claimed in his memoirs, “than giving them a little taste of their own medicine.” But to an America emotionally sore from years of red-baiting paranoia, it was as if the country had, for the first time, suffered an invasion of its own.
By the middle of October, the world was at the brink of nuclear war, while Kennedy and Khruschev walked a perilous tightrope of political brinkmanship. Rejecting the foolish suggestions of his bellicose military chiefs that he should bomb or invade Cuba (or both), which would surely have caused an escalation of hostilities leading to all-out war, Kennedy decided to call Khruschev’s bluff by opting for a policy of blockading the island, prevent it receiving any further Soviet supplies. On Monday October 22, the seventh day of the crisis, he appeared on television to announce his decision. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards,” he explained, “as all paths are… [but] one path we shall never choose… is the path of surrender or submission.”
Two fraught, nervous days later, the policy bore fruit: Soviet vessels delivering further arms supplies turned back. “We are eyeball to eyeball,” said Kennedy advisor Dean Rusk, “and the other fellow just blinked.” But this still left some missiles already installed on the island, which the Soviets were rushing toward preparedness. The situation was apparently not helped when an American U2 spy-plane was shot down over Cuba the following Saturday, October 27, though in retrospect this seems to have decided both leaders to settle the issue quickly, before it got out of hand. Khruschev had been hoping to secure the removal of the US missiles in Turkey in exchange for dismantling the Cuban missiles, but all he received publicly was a promise that the USA would not invade Cuba; secretly, however, Kennedy agreed to remove the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which were obsolete anyway. The crisis was over, though the proximity to imminent catastrophe left lingering ripples in the American consciousness, poetically addressed in Dylan’s song.
“I wrote that,” said Dylan, in his most famous commentary on any of his songs, “when I didn’t figure I’d have enough time left in life, didn’t know how many other songs I could write, during the Cuban thing. I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song, the most that I possibly could, and I wrote it like that. Every line in that is actually a complete song, could be used as a whole song. It’s worth a song, every single line.”
The “hard rain” of the song is not, however, nuclear fallout. “It’s not atomic rain,” explained Dylan. “It’s just a hard rain, not the fallout rain, it isn’t that at all. The hard rain that’s gonna fall is in the last verse, where I say ‘the pellets of poison are flooding us all’—I mean all the lies that are told on the radio and in the newspapers, trying to take peoples’ brains away, all the lies I consider poison.”
The song, which Dylan wrote in late September in his friend Chip Monck’s apartment below the Gaslight club, began as a long, free verse poem, a French Symbolist-style extension of the opening lines of the epic ballad Lord Randal. That night, he showed it to the folk singer Tom Paxton at the club. “It was a wild, wacky thing, the likes of which I’d never seen before,” recalled Paxton. “As a poem it totally eluded me, so I suggested he put a melody to it. A few days later I heard him perform it as ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.” Within days, the song was being acclaimed by friends as Dylan’s greatest work. “We all thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” said Dave Van Ronk. “I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution.”
The most explicit of the songs reflecting Dylan’s feelings toward the absent Suze Rotolo, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was one of the most popular of his earlier compositions, being widely recorded, though usually more blithely than in Dylan’s original version, which has an understated air of resigned rancor quite unlike any other love songs of the period. Noel “Paul” Stookey, who would sing the song with Peter, Paul & Mary, recognized its magical quality as soon as he heard it: “I thought it was beautiful, a masterful statement… It was obvious that Dylan was stretching the folk idiom, [that] a new spirit had come.” He was right. For a folk song, it was unusually modern in attitude, with a daring balance struck between affection and bitterness. Dylan would later become an expert at all-out vindictiveness, so much so that friends became wary of approaching him for fear of being subjected to his acid tongue or poison pen; but here, his obvious disappointment is tinged more with simmering regret, only boiling over into mild spite in the penultimate line of each verse, where Suze is variously castigated for being immature, uncommunicative, wanting his soul when he offered his heart and, in the most dismissive of put-downs, wasting his “precious” time. Ironically, though it was Suze who had actually left Bob, the song salvages his pride by claiming it is he who is “trav’lin’ on.”
Some of his friends were embarrassed by the song. “Bobby was rolling it out like a soap opera,” said Dave Van Ronk. “It was pathetic. The song was so damn self-pitying—but brilliant.” Upon her return from Italy, Suze at first found it strange, if flattering, to hear others singing this song written about her, but it eventually contributed to her split from Bob when, at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival that July, Joan Baez introduced the song as being “…about a love affair that has lasted too long.” For Suze, this confirmed the rumors she had heard about Bobby and Joanie, the new “King and Queen of Folk,” and she stormed away from the festival.
While the song’s lyric was revolutionary in form, the melody was again purloined from a traditional source, an Appalachian tune called ‘Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone’, which Dylan’s friend, the folk singer Paul Clayton, had discovered and adapted for his own song ‘Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbon Saw’. Many of their friends were angered by the way Dylan brazenly neglected to credit either the traditional source or (especially) Clayton, who was notoriously short of cash due to his drug problems. “The honorable thing would have been for Bobby to cut him in on the copyright,” believed Dave Van Ronk, “but that wasn’t Bobby’s way.” Instead, after a mild legal tussle, Dylan ensured that his publishers gave Clayton “a substantial sum,” and the two remained friends, Clayton accompanying Bob on his cross-country drive in February 1964.
The liner-notes to Freewheelin’ mistakenly claim that the song was recorded with the band that played on ‘Corrina, Corrina’ and ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, but while it was certainly recorded at the same session, it is clearly a solo performance. Some commentators have speculated that it may have originally been recorded with a band accompaniment that was subsequently wiped, but the limitations of early-Sixties recording technology mean that it would have been virtually impossible to have erased the extra guitar, drums, bass and piano completely without leaving a certain amount of audio spillage which would have been captured on Dylan’s own microphone. It’s feasible that the band backing may have been added later on another track, and then erased, but the actual song as heard on the album is by Dylan alone.
The last song recorded for the Freewheelin’ album, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ offers the most telling indication of just how fast Bob Dylan was maturing as a person, and of how rapidly his attitudes were changing. A wistful reverie of lost youth, the song finds Dylan, not yet 22, looking back on the innocent idealism of his teenage years with the world-weary sadness of one apparently much older.
Like Dickens in A Christmas Carol, Dylan uses a dream to observe his former self and his friends “talkin’ and a-jokin’,” having fun, chewing the fat and putting the world to rights with the blithe certitude of youth. His loss, he realizes, is twofold: not only has the easy-going innocence of those days passed, but the convictions once held so firmly—“It was all that easy to tell wrong from right”—as issues of simple black and white clarity have blurred into infinite shades of gray complexity.
Dylan claims, in the liner-notes, that the inspiration for the song came from a conversation he had with the singer Oscar Brown Jr. one night in Greenwich Village, though he carried the idea around in his head for some while before it took on a more concrete form. Dylan’s several return journeys to Minnesota before and after the release of his first album undoubtedly helped crystallize the theme of the song, as he realized the disparate paths taken by himself and his old friends from Hibbing and the Dinkytown campus neighborhood of Minneapolis.
“It was obvious he’d grown,” recalled his country-blues chum Spider John Koerner after one such visit. “He was friendly and all that, but it was obvious he was into something stronger than we got into. You could see it, something forceful, something coming off.” By summer of 1962, old folkie friends like Tony Glover, Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake, who published the Minneapolis folk magazine Little Sandy Review, were chiding Dylan about his new protest-song direction, suggesting he should try and strike a balance between his new style and his older, traditional style, and though he was already feeling used by certain civil rights organizations, Dylan clearly felt his Minnesota friends were being left behind.
A year later, the gap was growing wider still, as he made clear in a promotional appearance for his forthcoming album on April 26 on Chicago’s WFMT radio station where he was interviewed by Studs Terkel about his life and work. Asked about childhood friends, Dylan replied: “They still seem to be the same old way… I can just tell by conversation that they still have a feeling that isn’t really free… They still have a feeling that’s… tied up in the town, with their parents, in the newspapers that they read which go out to maybe 5,000 people. They don’t have to go out of town. Their world’s really small.”
Dylan’s world, by contrast, was growing larger all the time, as demonstrated by the melody he appropriated for ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ from the traditional British folk ballad ‘The Franklin’, which Dylan had heard performed by the English folk singer Martin Carthy while visiting London in December 1962.
After the serious, sometimes angry tone taken on social matters earlier on the album, ‘Oxford Town’ is shorter and sweeter in style, if not in subject matter, offering a jaunty, hootenanny singalong treatment of a specific civil rights issue: the violent struggle for the registration of the first black person at the University Of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) in September 1962.
After winning a Federal court ruling allowing him to register at the university, James Meredith was denied entry to the university registrar’s building by demagogic state governor Ross Barnett, who was attempting to ride the tide of resentment rolling through the South at the imposition of what Southerners saw as Yankee directives aimed at breaking their spirit. Attorney General Robert Kennedy inquired whether Barnett would make a deal to allow Meredith to register, and was informed, “I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.” Mississippi, Kennedy pointed out, had to obey, being part of the United States, to which Barnett responded, “We have been a part of the United States, but I don’t know whether we are or not.” “Oh,” asked Kennedy, “are you getting out of the Union?”
He wasn’t, but the idea clearly appealed to Barnett, who made a strident speech in defense of the principle of segregation on the pitch at half-time of the Ole Miss–Kentucky football game on September 29, as he announced to roars of appreciation that he loved Mississippi, her people and her “customs”—a veiled reference to racism. At the same time, he was indeed cutting a deal with the Kennedys, who had threatened to make the negotiations public on national Television. Meredith, he suggested, could be registered late on Sunday night, September 30; and so, while 300 federal marshals acted as decoys, surrounding the administration building, that evening the black would-be student was smuggled into a campus dormitory. The double-crossing Barnett then announced that the defenders of the Southern way of life had been overpowered, triggering the build-up of an angry mob.
That night, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech urging the students to comply with the law: “The honor of your university and state are in the balance,” he said. “Let us preserve both the law and the peace and then, healing those wounds that are within, we can turn to the greater crises that are without, and stand united as one people in our pledge to man’s freedom.”
Stirring words these may have been, they made little impression on the white students who were, even as he spoke, pelting stones at the federal marshals, who responded with tear-gas. Reluctantly, Kennedy called out the National Guard, but not before the racist students had been joined by older rioters who brought guns, with which they shot 30 marshals and bystanders, killing two people. In all, 300 people were wounded. The battle raged all night but by dawn it was, literally, academic: James Meredith had been registered as a student at Ole Miss. Not, of course, that deeply ingrained racist attitudes were changed overnight: the troops remained in Oxford until Meredith graduated in the summer of 1963.
The stand-off became one of the emblematic events of the civil rights struggle, and Dylan’s rapid response to it—the song was first published in the November 1962 issue of Broadside magazine—illustrates the journalistic efficacy of the topical protest song. As he was recording it in early December, John Hammond was trying to persuade Don Law, head of Columbia’s Nashville operation, that Dylan ought to be recording with the hot musicians down in Nashville. “You have to come up and hear this Dylan kid,” he told Law, who dropped by the studio just as Dylan was doing ‘Oxford Town’. After listening a while, Law turned to Hammond and said, “My God, John, you can never do this kind of thing in Nashville. You’re crazy!”
One of the last songs to be recorded for the Freewheelin’ album, it seems likely that this talking blues was written to replace the ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ which had so frightened the Columbia executives. If this is true, the result is very much a net gain: partly improvised in the studio, this is a far superior piece to its bigot-baiting predecessor, whose narrow-focus concerns lay more in the past of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts than the more pressing problems of the Sixties. ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’, by comparison, zeroed in on a couple of more pertinent contemporary issues: America’s growing fascination with psychoanalysis that had enabled Alfred Hitchcock to have a hit movie (Psycho) based on a specious psychoanalytic theme; and the looming specter of nuclear annihilation, which would soon be coming to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was also room left in the song for a few offhand side-swipes at things like the gratuitous materialism of automobile adverts (“Cadillac… good car to drive after a war”), and the pitiful state of Tin Pan Alley pop, which was rapidly approaching its nadir at the time (between January and April 1963, when this track was recorded, such giants as Steve Lawrence, Paul & Paula, The Rooftop Singers and Little Peggy March had topped the American charts). The communist witch-hunt theme of ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ was telescoped into a one-line aside, which is just about what it deserved.
First registered as ‘Corrine Corrina’ by Bo Chatman, Mitchell Parish and J.M.Williams in 1932, this lilting blues had been recorded several times by such artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson and most notably on several occasions by Big Joe Turner, before its revival in the early Sixties.
Dylan’s version is of a completely different stripe from Turner’s good-natured R&B swing, not least through the addition of a verse about having “a bird that whistles… a bird that sings,” adapted from Robert Johnson’s ‘Stones In My Passway’. Dylan was at the time clearly fascinated by the mercurial Johnson—an earlier, unreleased solo take of the same song also featured fragments from the legendary bluesman’s ‘Me And The Devil Blues’ and ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, too. Subsequently, he attributed the song’s style to another, more mellifluous blues legend, Lonnie Johnson (no relation to Robert), who shares with T-Bone Walker the pioneer status of “inventor of the electric blues.”
“I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working and I must say he greatly influenced me,” Bob admitted later. “You can hear it in ‘Corrina, Corrina’—that’s pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him and sometimes he’d let me play with him.”
The song features one of Dylan’s more beguiling vocal performances, a wistful lamentation in which the depths of his heartbreak are signaled by the gentle falsetto catch in the throat that recurs in the last line of each verse. The inspiration is obviously Suze’s absence. The album version is all that resulted from three otherwise largely unproductive sessions with a full backing band, although another take, marked by a wheeze of harmonica on the intro and a more strident harmonica solo in the break, was released prior to the album, as the B-side of ‘Mixed Up Confusion’.
Coming toward the end of a largely downbeat album of protest songs and lovelorn blues, this jaunty adaptation of a song originally written by the Texan country bluesman Henry Thomas offers a more light-hearted, breezy expression of Dylan’s pain over his absent woman. It’s a swaggering performance, which best exemplifies Dylan’s understanding of the blues as a means of cathartic healing, as explained in the sleevenote to Freewheelin’: “What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat.”
First recorded for the November 1962 issue of Broadside magazine, this comic talking blues trifle closes the album almost as an afterthought, as if the stage performer in Dylan realizes how intense the album is as a whole, and wants to “leave ’em laughing.” He wouldn’t be so concerned to do this on later records, but here he goofs around with a cast that includes Yul Brynner, Charles De Gaulle, President Kennedy and several of the world’s most beautiful women, to no particular end. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, this light-hearted account of Dylan’s womanizing does, however, prefigure some of his later work in its tone of blithe nonsense: for one who was being increasingly painted as the serious young spokesman of a generation, Dylan seems determined in this song to keep open his options on different modes of meaning. Or in this case, meaninglessness.