In the few short months between the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in May 1963 and The Times They Are A-Changin’ in January of 1964, Bob Dylan became the hottest property in American music, stretching the boundaries of what had previously been viewed as a largely collegiate folk music audience. His third album would establish him as the undisputed king of protest music, even if as he was being crowned, Dylan was beginning to experience grave misgivings about both that type of song, fame in general and his own position as reluctant leader of a movement—misgivings which grew when, as he was recording The Times They Are A-Changin’ that November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. From this point onwards, he would be harder to pin down, both in his songs and in person. “Being noticed can be a burden,” he explained later. “Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”
There would be significant changes on the personal front, too. Following his first liaison with Joan Baez following the Monterey Folk Festival, rumors quickly spread about the nature of their relationship, placing further stress on his already strained relations with Suze, though she initially doubted that his ego would cope with Baez’s fame. “Bobby couldn’t love Joan Baez,” she told friends. “He couldn’t love anybody that big!”
For both parties, this new affiliation was probably motivated as much by career considerations as anything more romantic, blossoming later into a more emotional or sexual connection. For Dylan, the advantages of teaming up with the Queen of Folk were obvious, given that her reputation and audience were both bigger than his; for her part, Baez recognized songwriting genius when she heard it, and she had heard it when her manager sat her down and made her listen to an acetate of demos Dylan had recorded for his publishers, Witmark. This, she realized, was a talent that far outstripped all his contemporaries. “He wrote songs that hadn’t been written yet,” she said later. “There aren’t very many good protest songs. They’re usually overdone. The beauty of Bobby’s stuff is its understatement.”
The Newport Folk Festival, held over the weekend of July 26-28, 1963, was effectively Bob Dylan’s coronation. He dominated the gathering, being name-checked constantly as performers covered his songs, and made several appearances of his own—a solo slot on the Friday night, followed by a group encore of ‘We Shall Overcome’; a topical-song workshop event on the Saturday; and a guest slot during Joan’s Sunday performance to duet on ‘With God On Our Side’, followed by another group encore, this time of ‘This Land Is Your Land’. Every mention of his name was applauded by the audience, eager to acclaim the new star. Meanwhile, backstage and back at the Victory Motel where a coterie of young performers were staying, Dylan had begun to take on the character of a star, strolling around playing with a bullwhip which his rowdy friend Geno Foreman had brought him. It was as if he were assuming command of the genre, cracking the whip on the old guard.
Much to Suze’s chagrin, following the festival Dylan accepted an offer of a guest slot on Joan Baez’s summer tour, for which Grossman ensured he was paid more than the headline star. After recurring arguments about the state of their relationship, Suze finally moved out of the 4th Street apartment, shortly before Joan and Bob appeared at the August 28 March On Washington, at which Martin Luther King made his celebrated “I Have A Dream” speech. Bob took solace by making visits to Albert Grossman’s place near Woodstock in upstate New York. A few weeks later, he took some more time out at Joan’s place in Carmel, where he spent his days reading, writing and swimming. It may have seemed idyllic but, he later revealed, they never really talked that much. And though they remained in relatively close contact for a few more years, before too long they both realized they were too different to be together: to Bob, Joan was just too much of a clean-cut, straight-arrow goody-goody; and she, for her part, couldn’t bear the nasty, spiteful tone that began to creep into his songs through 1964 and 1965. “Unlike other people, about whom I think I have some kind of sense,” Joan explained three decades later, “I never understood him at all. Not a tweak.”
Joan, however, wasn’t the only one mistaken in her view of Dylan. The “spokesman of a generation” began to realize that this new position, foisted upon him by one magazine article after another, was actually more of an imposition, as assorted political groups attempted to make claims on his time. In July, his friend Theodore Bikel had persuaded him to fly down to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter-registration drive organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or “Snick”) to increase the black vote in the state. Dylan was pleased to help out a cause he believed in, and he got on well enough with the local farm workers, but not for the first time, he found himself surrounded by activists who seemed to want to lecture him about his responsibilities to the civil rights movement—as if he hadn’t shown his commitment by going down there in the first place! And after Joan Baez’s concert at Forest Hills, New York, he had been buttonholed at the post-gig party by Clark Foreman, head of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), who had made him listen to a recording of some screenwriter’s speech about the social responsibility of writers! Who needed that?
What he wanted to do most in the world—write and sing songs—was increasingly being viewed as something in which other people felt they had a say. Plus, Dylan had started to be regarded as some kind of oracle, as if he had all the answers—which was flattering, certainly, but also worrying. Besides which, he was beginning to hate being typecast as just a “protest singer.” “Man, I don’t write protest songs,” he claimed. “I just react. I got all these thoughts inside me and I gotta say ‘em.” And not all of these thoughts were exclusively about injustice. Some of them were about himself. “Because Dickens and Dostoevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could,” he told one newspaper, “I decided to stick to my own mind.”
His mind could be a lonely place, however, particularly for one with such a natural aversion to crowds. Even at Newport, Dylan had seemed scared by his growing fame, telling friends, “The attention is too much commotion for my body and head.” He had long since realized the value of autobiographical fictions in protecting his real self from unwelcome attention, spreading all kinds of misinformation about himself ever since his earliest days in New York. None of his friends was unduly bothered by this, but they saw a streak of paranoia developing in Dylan around this time, possibly inculcated by Grossman, who assiduously stoked the notion of the “Dylan mystique” and encouraged Bob to think of himself as someone special, apart from the general run of performers. As if he needed any evidence that this was the case, there was an edge of adulatory hysteria about Dylan’s triumphant Carnegie Hall solo concert on October 12, which concluded with him having to be whisked away from a crowd of screaming teenagers who thronged the stage door. By the end of the year, he would write, in a poetic letter to Broadside magazine explaining the pressures of his life: “I am now famous by the rules of public famiousity… it snuck up on me an’ pulverized me… I never knew what was happenin’.”
Things all came to a ghastly head in December, when Dylan was invited to accept the ECLC’s Tom Paine Award at a gala dinner at the Americana Hotel in New York. It was a great honor, the kind he couldn’t really refuse—the previous year’s recipient had been Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner—but Dylan’s discomfiture was apparent from the start. “I looked down from the platform and saw a bunch of people who had nothing to do with my kind of politics,” he told Nat Hentoff later. “They were supposed to be on my side but I didn’t feel any connection with them.” The audience was substantially made up of older liberals, balding veterans of the Thirties left-wing struggles and victims of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts of the Forties and Fifties, but for the occasion, they had dressed up to the nines in furs and jewels. Dylan drank heavily and, when the time came for him to accept his award, he had to be collected from the men’s room, somewhat the worse for wear.
His acceptance speech was disastrous, a nightmarish ramble which managed to offend just about everybody. He thanked them for the award on behalf of “everybody that went down to Cuba” because they were, like him, young people. “I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here tonight weren’t here and I could see all kind of faces with hair on their head and everything like that,” he burbled, “because you people should be at the beach.” That drew a few laughs, so he warmed to his theme of hair, or lack of it: “Old people, when their hair grows out, they should go out. And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules, and they haven’t got any hair on their head. I get very uptight about it.”
From there, he drifted on to the subject of race—“There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics”—and his Negro friends, and then back to Cuba and then, in a classic faux pas, arrived by a roundabout route at the subject of Kennedy’s assassination. “I have to be honest, I just have to be,” he assured his audience, “as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly… what he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too, I saw some of myself in him… I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me. Not to go that far and shoot…” By this time, the appalled silence had turned to a chorus of boos and hisses, which Dylan tried to counter by garbled recourse to the Bill Of Rights and free speech, before he was hustled off the stage and out of the place.
The audience was outraged. Was this youth really saying that he sympathized with the assassin? Why had he, of all people, been given the prestigious Tom Paine Award? Was this what the ECLC had sunk to? After the speech, the customary donations for the organization were taken from the audience. The depth of the crowd’s anger can be gauged by the $6,000 drop on the previous year’s donations.
When he sobered up, Dylan was torn between remorse and a desire to explain, and so composed a poem, entitled A Message, which he sent to the ECLC. In it, he outlined the circumstances surrounding the speech, and offered to make up to the organization any losses it may have sustained. His reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, he implied, was as a metaphor for the times, not a direct reference to the assassination: “…if there’s violence in the times then/there must be violence in me/I am not a perfect mute/I hear the thunder an I can’t avoid hearin’ it…” It was some way short of an apology, and left intact his unflattering comparisons of the complacent old liberal audience with his young activist friends. A benefit concert was subsequently agreed, then postponed as Dylan’s commitments snowballed over the ensuing years. Despite Clark Foreman’s several attempts to collect on the offer of remuneration, Dylan never made up for the lost donations.
It was against a background of personal and public upheaval that Dylan went into the studio in August and October 1963 to record his aptly-titled third album. Where Freewheelin’ had changed shape between its early sessions, which featured predominantly traditionally-influenced material, and its later sessions, as Dylan’s songwriting matured, he was determined to record all original material, and mostly “finger-pointing” protest songs that reflected the social tenor of the times.
The same problems that he had experienced with John Hammond’s production, however, recurred with Tom Wilson. Primarily a jazz producer, Wilson was uncertain about the qualities that made for a good folk performance. As a company man he was under pressure not to let the sessions take too long. Dylan felt that he wasn’t getting the feedback he needed and that Wilson was settling for inadequate takes. There was no chance of replacing him: the record company dictated that the job be done by a company producer.
Bob invited his friend Paul A. Rothchild, who produced Elektra’s folk artists (and who would go on to produce many of The Doors’ albums), to visit the studio and sit in front of the console where, unseen by Wilson, he would signal through the control-room window to Dylan if another take was required. With the weight of Rothchild’s experience behind him, Dylan felt more secure when challenging his producer’s opinions. Notwithstanding the problems, the sessions passed quickly, just three days in August and another two in October furnishing the bulk of the tracks, with another, final session hastily scheduled to record ‘Restless Farewell’ at the end of the month.
The album was released on January 13, 1964, in a sleeve with a rear taken up with a sequence of “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” a series of poems in which Dylan dealt with his past, poetry, politics, accusations of plagiarism, the opinions of critics and the position in which he now found himself. The front cover, featuring Barry Feinstein’s photo of a frowning Dylan in an open-necked shirt, told no lies about the album’s contents. Compared to the smiling lovers of the Freewheelin’ sleeve, this one spoke of grit and integrity, pain and hardship, injustice and truth. The intervening nine months, it said, had brought little to laugh about.
The reviews of the album were, to use a critical euphemism, “mixed,” with some critics put off by its incessant gloom, while others applauded the artistry and concern—but Dylan’s work had by now assumed a power and momentum of its own that rendered any criticisms redundant. The album cemented his reputation as the era’s pre-eminent voice of protest, even as he was turning his back on that arena.
The title-song of his third album effectively restated the message of Dylan’s disastrous Tom Paine Award speech—that the old should get out of the way and let the young have their say—but in a manner that caused less offense to his audience, which was, in any case, rather younger than that at the award dinner.
The most explicit of what Dylan called his “finger-pointing” songs, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ is a deliberate anthem, in both intention and execution. It is steeped in a self-conscious gravitas, from the earnest sanctimony of Dylan’s delivery to the archaic cast of the introductory lines, which carry the same air of impending declamatory moralism as Mark Anthony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and which Dylan claimed were influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads such as ‘Come All Ye Bold Highwaymen’ and ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’.
It’s the battle-hymn of the new republic of youth, bursting with images of overturned order. The lines about the loser winning, and the slow becoming fast, echo the air of patient inevitability in such biblical promises of revolution as the Sermon on the Mount’s suggestion that the meek would inherit the earth, and the lines from the Book Of Ecclesiastes which Pete Seeger adapted for ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ (also echoed in the chorus of Dylan’s ‘Percy’s Song’, which was recorded at the same session and originally intended for inclusion on The Times They Are A-Changin’). The climactic line about the first later being last, likewise, is a direct scriptural reference, to Mark 10:31: “But many that are first shall be last, and the last first.”
The hypnotic delivery, and the references to curses being cast and wheels (of fate) still spinning, reinforce the sense of irrevocable historical momentum, as it applied to the changes then sweeping through the consciousness of Western youth. It would be five years before the student protest movement that grew out of the civil rights struggles of the early Sixties would make its presence felt abroad, with riots in Paris and demonstrations in London, but the song’s few specifically American references, to senators and congressmen, didn’t prevent it from becoming the pre-eminent international anthem of the emergent youth culture.
The song’s effectiveness resides in its dialectical union of personal and collective drives: each individual, it suggests, must make his or her own choice—but that choice could only be to join the rising tide of change, or be “drenched to the bone” by it. Conversely, aligning oneself with a tide of change should only be done through personal deliberation, not through herd instinct. Collectivity, Dylan implies, does not absolve one from individual responsibility.
For Dylan himself, the song’s central message was brought into frighteningly sharp, yet confusing, focus by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963. The next night, Dylan began a concert in upstate New York with the song. “I thought, ‘Wow, how can I open with that song? I’ll get rocks thrown at me,’” he later told biographer Anthony Scaduto. “But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. I know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country, and they were applauding that song. And I couldn’t understand why they were clapping or why I wrote that song, even. I couldn’t understand anything. For me, it was just insane.”
In 1994, Dylan demonstrated just how much the times had changed when he allowed the accountants Coopers Lybrand to use a version of the song in a commercial.
In its attempt to raise sympathy for the plight of poor farm-workers, the windblown fatalism of ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ represents perhaps the last gust of Woody Guthrie’s direct influence on Dylan’s songwriting. It’s a vivid enough portrait of desperate rural poverty, with dark, looming portents in the images of dry wells, blackened grass, diseased horses and encroaching rats, but the intimations of pre-determined destiny in the final two verses’ “seven breezes,” “seven shots,” “seven dead” and “seven new people born” undercut the song’s impact as a social statement: is Dylan suggesting the farmer’s awful plight was completely foredoomed in some way? And if so, doesn’t that downgrade the tragedy?
The song is one of the least effective of Dylan’s protest vignettes, not least for its weakness regarding causation: though the South Dakota farmer may have had a run of bad luck, it’s ultimately hard to feel that much sympathy for someone reckless enough to have five children—one, we learn, a baby—which he clearly cannot support. In the end, Hollis Brown appears not just dirt-poor and tragic, but stupid, feckless (in letting his farm deteriorate in such a manner), ruthless and spiteful (in shooting his family, making them pay the price of his incompetence). As a heart-tugger on behalf of country folk, the song failed.
‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ did, however, come into its own later in Dylan’s career, when it was one of the songs he performed at Live Aid, July 13, 1985, where he explained, “I thought that was a fitting song for this important social occasion… I’d just like to say that I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they could take just a little bit of it—maybe one or two million maybe—and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms, that the farmers owe to the banks.” It was a typically contrary Dylan gesture, cutting through the event’s overpowering air of smug self-satisfaction with a reminder that capitalism was quite happy to chew up its own heartland as well as the Third World.
This elegiac anti-war ballad was one of the most popular and widely-performed of Dylan’s protest pieces in the early Sixties. Its mournful tune—taken from Irish writer Dominic Behan’s rebel song ‘The Patriot Game’—sounds like a funeral march for national integrity, which is in effect what the song comprises.
Adopting the persona of a nameless everyman from the American midwest, the narrator considers his country’s military history, as he was taught in school—from the conquest of the native Indians, then the Mexicans and Confederates, on through two World Wars, up to the point where his country trembles on the brink of nuclear war with Russia—and realizes that on each occasion, the war-mongers have claimed they were fighting on God’s behalf. The song concludes with him hoping that if God is indeed on our side, he’ll stop the next war. It’s an elegant, neatly-turned piece, complete with a sly, sardonic reference to how, despite the Holocaust, the forgiven Germans now have God (in the form of the US) on their side; but the penultimate verse, in which he wonders whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side too, disrupts the flow, a too-cute conceit which Dylan couldn’t bring himself to leave out.
Dylan’s attitude toward God—or at least toward organized religion—had been ambivalent, to say the least. Only in his later career did he make overt statements of specific religious belief, and for many fans and observers they didn’t gel too well with earlier statements on the subject, such as those in the interview he gave to Izzy Young of Sing Out! magazine around the time he was recording his first album: “Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can’t make up their minds, and neither can I. Never saw a god; can’t say until I see one.”
He has, however, always been keenly aware of biblical discourse as a useful storehouse of mythopoeic folk imagery, littering his songs with references to parables and prophets; and as he got involved with the civil rights movement, Dylan surely recognized the commitment of church leaders like Martin Luther King, and the strength King’s followers drew from their faith. Indeed, many of his own songs from this period suggest his acknowledgment that protest anthems are, in effect, secular hymns, and his delivery frequently takes on a sermonizing cast.
Set against this understanding, however, was a deeply-rooted belief that God, in his role as publicity agent for the organized churches, was not on the side of the angels, but working for the system against the interests of the underdog. ‘With God On Our Side’ manages to articulate all these complex conflicts of interpretation, mocking the notion of a god that can be manipulated by politicians into justifying war, yet ultimately appealing to that same god to stop the next war. By comparison, the bullying fundamentalism of his later born-again Christian songs seems simplistic and small-minded, and more than a little mean-spirited.
This calm, reflective mood piece is clearly indicative of Dylan’s increasingly problematic relationship with Suze Rotolo. There is a resignation that the protagonists are drifting slowly but irrevocably apart, and that it’s Dylan’s fault, just as much as Suze’s—“You’re right from your side, I’m right from mine.”
While Suze had been away in Italy, Bob had used her absence as a creative spur, letting his muse feed off the emotional pain, while preserving her as an idealized memory. When she returned, it became apparent that they had both done a lot of growing-up in the intervening seven months, and, they slowly realized (Bob more reluctantly than Suze), a lot of growing apart, too. Bob had become something of a star, and Suze had become a more assertive young woman, but Bob still craved the attentions of the more supportive, “Bob-centric” girl who had left for Italy.
Though Suze moved back into the 4th Street apartment shortly after returning from Italy, the old magic had gone—friends reported that they didn’t seem to talk as much and that they spent a lot of time just watching television. As the summer of 1963 wore on, with Dylan’s star increasingly in the ascendant, the incessant rumors of a liaison between him and Joan Baez took their toll on Suze. “What kind of rumors do you hear about Bobby and Joanie?” she asked Terri Van Ronk at the Newport Folk Festival that July. “The same kind of rumors you hear,” replied her friend.
In September, Suze moved in to her sister Carla’s apartment in the East Village, where Bob followed her, eventually moving in with the sisters—a situation which placed an intolerable burden on all three of them. A miserable Christmas with Suze’s mother in New Jersey was followed by the embarrassment of a party at Carla’s apartment during which Bob’s outlandish friend Geno Foreman—son of the celebrated liberal activist Clark Foreman—burst in shouting, “Hey Bobby! Heard you’re makin’ it with Baez, man! She any good?” Bob’s six-week road trip brought things to head: as the trip wound on, he phoned Suze less and less, and when he got back to New York, he seemed meaner and more sarcastic than before. The final break-up came shortly after his return in March 1964, following a storming row at Carla’s apartment (see entry for ‘Ballad In Plain D’).
‘One Too Many Mornings’ seems poised on the cusp of self-knowledge, a moment of contemplative stillness in the eye of an emotional hurricane. Some fans of Dylan’s protest anthems found the song’s introspective tone and personal subject-matter a betrayal of the “finger-pointing” principles underlying nearly all the rest of the album’s songs. It is, however, more of a breakthrough than a betrayal, marking one of the earliest realizations in his work that simple black and white answers may not be applicable to more complex emotional issues.
For the second time in the space of five tracks, listeners are invited to “Come gather round” the storyteller—a miner’s wife in this instance—as she relates her mournful ballad of hard times in the iron-ore mining district of Minnesota. As with so many of Dylan’s protest songs, there is a resonance that goes beyond the immediate situation, returning to haunt subsequent similar events. Here the narrator, having already lost a brother and father to mining disasters, suffers again when the mine is closed: her husband turns to drink and eventually disappears, leaving her alone to bring up their three children. In the recession years of the late Eighties and early Nineties, particularly as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began to bite, the succinct seventh-verse explanation of free-trade economics—basically, that there’s always some poor foreigner who can undercut your labor wage—took on a starkly premonitory tone, suggesting that the ravages of capitalism are both cyclical and inescapable.
The song is undoubtedly one of the more personal of Dylan’s protest offerings, set as it is on the Iron Ranges where he lived as a child, among the endless acreage of spoil tips and strip-mines that made up the Eastern Mesabi Range. The town of Hibbing, where he grew up, started off in the 1890s as an iron-ore version of one of the Klondike gold-rush boom-towns of California. Following a slump in the early years of this century, John D. Rockefeller was able to buy up the entire range cheap and sell it on at a huge profit to US Steel, who pillaged the earth at an unprecedented rate, supplying a quarter of America’s iron from vast open-cast mines. One such mine, the Hull-Rust Pit, measured almost four miles long and one mile across by the time young Robert Zimmerman was around to peer into it. More earth was dug from this hole, it’s said, than was excavated for the entire Panama Canal.
By the early 1950s, most of the ore had been mined, and the area slipped into another localized depression. Dylan himself didn’t come from a poor mining family —as he explains in the second of the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” which comprise the album’s liner-notes, “my parents were not rich… an’ my parents were not poor”—but it was impossible not to notice the effect of the mining slump in this “dyin’ town.” Bob’s dad, Abe, ran a store, Zimmerman’s Furniture & Electric, selling appliances and furniture to the town’s 18,000 inhabitants. As soon as Bob was old enough, Abe would make him go out collecting hire-purchase payments in the poorer sections of town, even though he knew his customers wouldn’t be able to pay. “I just wanted to show him another side of life,” explained Abe. “He’d come back and say, ‘Dad, these people haven’t got any money.’ And I’d say, ‘Some of those people out there make just as much money as I do, Bobby. They just don’t know how to manage it.’’
“Bob hated it most of all when he had to repossess stuff from people who couldn’t pay,” recalled his first girlfriend, Echo Helstrom. “I think that’s where he started feeling sorry for poor people.” Certainly, it’s easy to imagine how the combination of, on the one hand, the heart-breaking poverty of redundant miners’ families, and on the other, the huge gaping holes left by the earth-raping multinational mining companies, might have stirred the first sore flutterings of a sense of injustice in the young Bob Dylan’s heart: these faceless corporations simply tore holes in everything, the human spirit just as easily as the ground. Hardly surprising, then, that he did exactly as the miner’s wife advises in the song, barely waiting till he was grown before he fled the town, there being nothing left there to hold him.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s chief organizer in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was murdered in his front yard in June 1963, possibly an enraged racist’s response to the enrollment of two black students at the University of Alabama (where Governor George Wallace made a token attempt at obstructing their entry to the premises) earlier that day.
Ironically, as Evers was being shot that evening, President John F. Kennedy was celebrating the successful demolition of another bastion of segregation in a televised speech which claimed, “This is one country; it has become one country because all of us and all of the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that… the only way they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate.” He was, of course, wrong: further racist outrages stained that year, culminating in the murder of four young girls at worship when Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Avenue Baptist Church was bombed at the end of the summer.
Evers’ death baffled and infuriated Kennedy, who had previously tried to compromise with the segregationists. He admitted to Arthur Schlesinger, “I don’t understand the South… when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.” To show solidarity, Kennedy had his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, attended Evers’ funeral, and he invited Evers’ family to the White House; his policy of appeasement, meanwhile, was consigned to the garbage, as he sought to impose desegregation on the South.
Protest singers were quick to respond to the murder, in drearily didactic songs like Phil Ochs’ ‘The Ballad Of Medgar Evers’, a typically quotidian account of Evers’ life and death which did little to rouse spirits, rally energies or inspire thought. ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’, which Dylan first performed at a voter-registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, on July 6, 1963 (captured in footage included in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back), was a more telling, elegant work, establishing Evers’ death in the very first line and then, rather than just condemning the killer, considering the underlying causes—institutionalized poverty, the divide-and-conquer policies of demagogic Southern politicians—which had led a pathetic white man to commit such a cowardly act.
This method, of moving from the detail to the larger picture, was one that Dylan had recently used in another song, ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’, debuted in April 1963 but never recorded. Both works take specific events as the central core of songs which quickly spin out to more generalized conclusions, the first implicating fight officials, promoters and audiences in the death of boxer Davey Moore, and the second consigning Evers’ killer to a marginal role as a tiny cog in the huge machine of institutionalized racism. While Evers was buried “as a king,” Dylan concludes, his killer’s epitaph will state that he was “only a pawn in their game.”
The song’s intelligence and deft design set standards none of Dylan’s contemporaries could match, marking him out as not simply a journalistic protest singer, but a political philosopher too. But, ironically, the increased depth at which Dylan was now beginning to work, both technically and imaginatively, would soon lead to a style of composition which effectively reversed this process of deriving general conclusions from particular events: in his later Sixties work, the turbulent, multifarious characteristics of an entire cultural zeitgeist would be boiled down into some of the most inscrutably personal songs ever written.
Dylan himself has described ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ succinctly as “This is girl leaves boy,” and that just about covers it, though not quite as tenderly and elegantly as the song itself. It’s yet another song inspired directly by the absence of Suze Rotolo on her Italian trip, though here Dylan transposes the location to Spain in order to accommodate the punchline. A girl, about to depart for Spain, asks her lover what sort of gift he’d like her to send back to him; nothing, he answers, but her safe return. When, shortly after, she sends a letter from the ship telling him she may be gone for longer than planned, he realizes she doesn’t feel for him as he does for her, and decides that, yes, she can send him something: a pair of boots —the suggestion being that even if she does return, he will likely have traveled on himself, rambling off down the road that figures in so many of his songs.
‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ was written while Dylan was on a visit to Italy in the first week of 1963 with the black folk singer Odetta. Bob had hoped to meet with Suze in Italy, but his expectations were dashed when he learned that she had left for New York a few weeks earlier. Like another song he wrote in Italy, ‘Girl From The North Country’, the tune to ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ leans heavily on the traditional folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’, which he had recently learned from the English folk singer Martin Carthy.
This was the earliest and most explicit example of the religious imagery that would continue in Dylan songs through the Eighties. Though ‘With God On Our Side’ mentions the deity, it is not built of religious images, the way that ‘When The Ship Comes In’ is. The ship referred to here is the Ship Of God, or Noah’s Ark—a vessel of salvation created to protect its passengers from the storms which would wreak God’s vengeance upon unbelievers and the wicked. The opening lines echo Revelations 7:1, where “no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree,” though Dylan’s Judgment Day contains the spookily surreal additions of laughing fishes and smiling seagulls.
It’s a hymn of victory over the immoral and iniquitous, to lift hearts saddened by the roll-call of injustice that makes up most of The Times They Are A-Changin’. It’s as close as folk protest gets to happy-clappy Christianity, with a vindictiveness to its self-righteous apocalyptism, notably in the final verse, where the drowning of the foes is greeted with distasteful triumphalism. The bitter tone arises from the circumstances of the song’s birth. According to Joan Baez, the pair arrived at a hotel where the desk clerk snubbed Bob, but when Joan went in to check, the staff responded, “Hello Miss Baez, we’ve been waiting for you.” Bob poured his anger into the song. “He wrote it that night,” she recalled to Anthony Scaduto, “took him exactly one evening to write it, he was so pissed… I couldn’t believe it, to get back at those idiots so fast.”
William Zantzinger, a Maryland socialite and scion of a wealthy farming family, did indeed kill poor Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old barmaid, at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, early in the morning of Saturday February 8, 1963. Zantzinger hit the mother of 11 children around the head and shoulders with a cane when she was too slow in delivering a drink. “When I order a drink,” he is reported as saying, “I want it now, you black bitch.” She collapsed and was taken to Baltimore Mercy Hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage shortly after 9 o’clock that morning.
Zantzinger, who had tried to dispose of the cane by snapping it into several pieces, resisted arrest when policemen tried to charge him with assault, and was accordingly also charged with disorderly conduct and held overnight. Released on $600 bail, he was re-arrested and charged with homicide when police learned of Hattie Carroll’s death—the first white man in Maryland ever to be accused of murdering a black woman. In June 1963, three judges found Zantzinger guilty only of manslaughter and, adding insult to injury, in August he was sentenced to six months imprisonment.
The shameful inequity of such “justice” stung Dylan into a swift response and—either in Joan Baez’s Carmel home (according to Baez) or in a 7th Street cafe in New York (according to Dylan’s own annotations to the Biograph box set)—he composed this epic of deferred outrage, using a verse pattern based on Brecht’s The Black Freighter. As with ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’ and ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’, Dylan tries to broaden the issue to reflect upon a system that enables such an act to occur, rather than the act itself. Here, he does it by referring repeatedly to the violent act through three verses (the second and third compare the relative social positions of the two protagonists), ending each verse with a request that the liberal listener should save their tears, before revealing the injustice which truly merits those tears in a devastating final verse, with what the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris splendidly described as “…the strange intensity of Bob Dylan’s climbing up the meter of his song-poem as if he were on all-fours, wailing at the world he never made but understood too well.”
The rhyme scheme shows how Dylan was maturing technically as a poet: apart from repeating “table” in three consecutive lines of the third verse to evoke the tedium of Hattie Carroll’s servility, the only rhyming lines are the “fears” and “tears” of the chorus—until the last verse. This opens with the quasi-assonance of “gavel” and “level” to suggest subtly the imbalance in the scales of justice, and concludes with the sucker-punch of “repentance” and an understated “six-month sentence,” which finally bursts the dam of tears. According to Phil Ochs, the song was one of Dylan’s favorites.
The last of the album’s songs to be recorded, ‘Restless Farewell’ bears out the message of the title-track, but not in a way most fans would have expected. A weary mea culpa fittingly set to a melody reminiscent of the traditional song ‘The Parting Glass’, it features Dylan effectively walking away from his past, apologizing to those he may have harmed, admitting his frustration at others’ claims upon his time and muse, and fretting at the distorting-mirror effect of fame. In its apparent rejection of commitment, and its stress on personal over public values, it seems to go against all that the rest of the album stands for.
Two days after what he had thought was the final recording session for the new album, Dylan played an October 26, 1963 concert at Carnegie Hall, which demonstrated how far his fan-base had grown beyond the narrow confines of the folk audience, taking in a less sophisticated but equally enthusiastic teenage crowd. Following the concert, he had been frightened by the intensity of the mob of screaming fans around the stage door, but he recovered his buoyancy at an after-show party held at the 96th Street apartment of Woody Guthrie’s manager Harold Leventhal.
The very next day, however, his parade was rained upon by Newsweek magazine, which ran an exposé, by journalist Andrea Svedburg, of Dylan’s middle-class Jewish roots. When a promised interview had failed to materialize, Svedburg had rooted around in Hibbing and Minneapolis and dug up the truth about his childhood. Faced with the prospect of his client’s carefully-nurtured image being cracked, Albert Grossman relented and the interview finally went ahead. But not for long: Dylan quickly became riled and terminated the interview, and Svedburg went ahead and wrote a sharply iconoclastic profile, featuring the embarrassing juxtaposition of Dylan’s claim to have lost contact with his parents with an account of how Abe and Beatty Zimmerman had, at their son’s expense, actually attended the Carnegie Hall concert to see him perform.
In itself, that would not have been terribly damaging; indeed, a competent PR person could easily have put a different spin on the story, to make it appear as though kindly Bob was simply trying to protect his family from the corrosive effect of fame (which was probably partly true anyway). But the article also included the rumor—since utterly disproved—about how Dylan had either stolen or bought his most famous song, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, from a New Jersey high school student (see the entry for ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’). Understandably furious, Dylan raged at everyone around him, castigating his parents for talking to Svedburg, and Columbia press officer Billy James (to whom he would not speak for two years) for setting up the interview. He raged about journalists in general, who would henceforth be given as rough and unrevealing a ride as possible whenever he was forced to communicate with them. “Man, they’re out to kill me,” he complained bitterly. “What’ve they got against me?”
His immediate response, though, was to seek vengeance the only way he knew how: through words. He wrote the ninth of the album’s “11 Outlined Epitaphs” liner-note poems, in which he set out to ridicule magazines in general—“I do not care t’ be made an oddball/bouncin’ past reporters’ pens”—and pointedly describes an interview exchange in which the inquisitor sinisterly threatens unspecified rumor as punishment if he refuses to cooperate.
He also wrote ‘Restless Farewell’, in which he set his face against the “false clock” trying to “tick out [his] time” and obscure his purpose with the “dirt of gossip” and the “dust of rumors”—a clear reference to the Newsweek article—as all the misgivings he was currently experiencing about the direction of his life, his work and his career brimmed over into a wistful adieu to his former friends and foes.
Five days after the Carnegie Hall concert, on October 31, 1963, another recording session was scheduled specifically to record ‘Restless Farewell’, which was added as the album’s final track—probably at the expense of the vastly superior ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’, which had been recorded the previous week, and which shares its album-closing air of reflective resignation. (If so, it would not be the last time his judgment in such matters would prove fallible, as anyone who has heard his ‘Blind Willie McTell’ would attest.) Nevertheless, it provides a fitting epilogue to Dylan’s protest period, even though he would continue to be viewed predominantly in that light for another year or two. There would be no “finger-pointing” songs on the next album, other than ones aimed at himself.