Dylan’s words were coming home to roost, considerably faster than he had anticipated. By the time The Times They Are A-Changin’ was released in January 1964, he was already feeling estranged from his former self, and the people and events which had influenced him.
He was becoming increasingly convinced that the quick and easy answers demanded by the protest movement were not answers at all, merely slogans, and that the search for real answers lay within oneself. It was a search, moreover, which raised the possibility that what was needed was not actually answers, but a whole new set of questions. Simply by answering the old questions, he believed, one was already playing on somebody else’s pitch. “Nobody in power,” he told a friend, “has to worry about anybody from the outside… because he’s not in it anyway, and he’s not gonna make a dent. You can’t go around criticizing something you’re not a part of, and hope to make it better.” Accordingly, one could either opt in and criticize, or opt out and keep one’s counsel.
In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, Dylan had every reason to keep his own counsel. “If somebody really had something to say to help somebody out,” he told friends, “well, obviously, they’re gonna be done away with.” Already scared by the impact of his own mounting fame, Dylan had now found the horrifying justification that rendered his paranoia more than just an egotistical indulgence, that brought the fear on to a very real plane indeed. He needed to get away, he told friends, needed to see more of the world. He had already taken refuge from the public pressures of New York City by spending more and more time at the Woodstock home of his manager Albert Grossman, but now he wanted to travel further afield. “I wanna get out and ramble around,” he told Pete Karman, a journalist friend of Suze’s. “Stop in bars and poolhalls and talk to real people. Talk to farmers, talk to miners. That’s where it’s at. That’s real.”
Accordingly, a cross-country road trip was set up for February, on which Dylan was accompanied in his new Ford station-wagon by Karman, folk singer Paul Clayton—the one from whom Bob had “borrowed” the melody for ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’—and his new road manager Victor Maimudes, who did the bulk of the driving. Ostensibly underwritten as a promotional tour for Dylan’s new album, the trip quickly turned into a drunken, drugged debauch, Bob’s very own On The Road and Bound For Glory combined, as he was able to compare, first-hand, the virtues of Guthrie’s ethical activism with the thrills of Kerouac’s experientialism.
From New York, the gang headed to Hazard, Kentucky, where they delivered a stack of donated secondhand clothing to striking miners. They also picked up a package of marijuana that had been mailed ahead to the local post office, the first of several such deliveries; at a cafe, Dylan bought a spice-jar humorously labeled “marijuana,” which, full of dope, was proudly displayed on the car’s dashboard as they sped through the South. The next stop was Flat Rock, outside of Hendersonville, North Carolina, where they visited the poet Carl Sandburg. Though he was difficult to track down—the locals knew Sandburg primarily as a goat farmer, not a poet—they eventually made it to his farm, where Dylan gave him a copy of his new record and spent a short while trying to converse with Sandburg, poet-to-poet, before departing, apparently slightly peeved that the older poet had not heard of him.
Without the secondhand clothing taking up space, Dylan was able to move into the rear of the station-wagon, which he used as a study, pecking out lyrics on a portable typewriter. Punctuating the trip with occasional performances at places like Emory College, they eventually arrived in New Orleans in the middle of the Mardi Gras celebrations, into which they threw themselves with gusto. Dylan seemed determined to make gestures against the city’s separatist social policies, visiting a black bar, Baby Green’s—where the bartender, not needing trouble with the local police, threw them out—and incurring the wrath of sailors by sharing his bottle of wine with a black performer in the carnival procession. After two nights, they headed off for Denver, where Bob had a concert scheduled, by way of Dallas. As they pulled away from New Orleans, Dylan sat in the back, transforming the magic swirlin’ ship of the carnival procession into ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
In Dallas, they wanted to see for themselves the site of Kennedy’s assassination, and were shocked when, while asking for directions to Dealey Plaza, a local said, “You mean where they shot that sonofabitch Kennedy?” Continuing on to Denver, they stopped off to pay respects at Ludlow, Colorado, scene of a legendary labor massacre in 1914 when over 30 striking miners were shot by strike-breaking National Guardsmen. After the Denver gig, they headed across the Rockies, in a hurry to get to California. At one point, Victor gunned the station-wagon past a funeral cortege on a narrow mountain road, only to find a police car at the head of the procession; the resulting confrontation, which they survived by claiming to be a group “like The Kingston Trio” en route to a show, sobered them up quickly.
After the initial euphoria of the trip had worn off, however, the road took its toll on their nerves. By the time they hauled into the Bay Area for a show at the Berkeley Community Theater, a rift had developed between the non-doper Karman, who increasingly felt as if he was trapped with a trio of lunatics, and the others, who had grown tired of his nit-picking straightness and his habit of sneering at Bob’s poetic imagery, which he thought was meaningless jive-talk. “I was beginning to feel crazy when they were crazy,” he recalled later. “Victor, a freaky nut, and Dylan very weird, and Clayton always high on pills—I just had to break away from them.” He was replaced for the final leg of the trip by Bob Neuwirth, an extrovert artist/musician who would become one of Dylan’s closest confidantes over the next few years.
After the Berkeley show, the portable party moved on to Joan Baez’s place in Carmel, then to Los Angeles, where Bob made a late February appearance on The Steve Allen Show. When he eventually got back to New York, relations between Bob and Suze deteriorated further until, following a furious row one night in March (see entry for ‘Ballad In Plain D’), they finally broke up for keeps. Bob was devastated, but had plenty to occupy his time and thoughts: after a short April concert tour of the North-East, he flew to England in early May, where he played at London’s Royal Festival Hall to a sellout audience that included the Beatles, the Stones and various other members of the new British pop aristocracy, before moving on, via Paris and Berlin, to the Greek village of Vernilya. During his brief holiday there, he wrote many of the songs he would record on Another Side Of Bob Dylan, boiling down his experiences of the last six to nine months into his most personal album yet, a mixture of reactions to his split from Suze and reflections upon his art and position, leavened with a few moments of sharp humor. “There ain’t any finger-pointing songs in here,” he told journalist Nat Hentoff as he was recording the album. “I don’t want to write for people any more—you know, be a spokesman. From now on I want to write from inside of me…”
Another Side Of Bob Dylan was recorded with remarkable efficiency, in a single session on the evening of June 9, 1964, in order to be ready for the record company’s fall sales conference. Attending the session, besides Dylan, Nat Hentoff and producer Tom Wilson, were a handful of Bob’s buddies, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, with whom he recorded an (unused) early version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Working his way steadily through a couple of bottles of Beaujolais, Dylan got seven songs down between 7.30 and 10.30, and had completed the entire album by 1.30 in the morning, finishing up with the song most indicative of his new mood—‘My Back Pages’.
Wilson, who had tried to drum some microphone technique into Bob—to get him to stop moving around so much—knew that he had to capture as much as he could as early as he could, and was reluctant to press Dylan beyond three takes of any song. Though he had not known exactly what Bob was going to record that evening, Wilson was aware of the changes that were occurring in Dylan’s writing. “Those early albums gave people the wrong idea,” he told Hentoff. “Basically, he’s in the tradition of all lasting folk music… he’s not a singer of protest so much as he is a singer of concern about people.” And the people concerned here, the songs suggested, were rather closer to home than on his previous releases. “The songs are insanely honest,” Dylan later admitted, “not meanin’ to twist any head, and written only for the reason that I myself, me alone, wanted and needed to write them. I’ve conceded the fact that there is no understanding of anything—at best, just winks of the eye—and that is all I’m looking for now, I guess.”
The album title, much against Bob’s better judgment, was Wilson’s idea. Dylan felt it was over-stating the obvious, placing too great an emphasis on its implied negation of the ideals of his protest songs. That is certainly how a lot of his old supporters felt when the album was released early in August, a mere seven months after The Times They Are A-Changin’. Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out! magazine, was moved to write an open letter to Bob in the magazine, in which he denigrated Dylan’s new songs as “all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious—maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion.” All, of course, completely true: but what Silber failed to realize was that, years before the notion became common currency, Dylan had effectively made the personal political, too.
Opening the album on a relatively light note, ‘All I Really Want To Do’ provides the listener with the most overt suggestion that there were to be no “finger-pointing” songs this time around: not only is the song about a personal relationship, rather than protesting a more political issue; it’s also downright funny, from the hilariously busy rhyme scheme to the ludicrous falsetto yodel with which Dylan transforms the final word of the title in each chorus. This last effect may have started as a light-hearted parody of Jimmie “Singing Brakeman” Rodgers, a favorite of Bob’s, and taken on a more flamboyant life of its own as the session progressed and the bottles got emptier.
Compared with most of the other songs on the album that were inspired by the break-up with Suze Rotolo, this is a relatively generous expression of Dylan’s mood, as he tries to convince his girl that there are no ulterior motives to his desire, that he has no intention of attempting to alter or confine her. Yet even as he gives these fulsome assurances, the sheer clutter of disavowed intentions in each verse suggests the over-bearing, domineering side of Dylan which Suze found so restricting. It’s almost as if he’s trying to preempt her complaints, rattling off up to nine examples in each verse of things he knows she might object to, before she can voice those objections. Ultimately, the song denies itself.
Nevertheless, the following year ‘All I Really Want To Do’ would furnish a sleek, albeit less successful, follow-up to The Byrds’ massive cover of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, and the same year it also provided a winsome enough start to Cher’s solo career.
A moody, stalking number, ‘Black Crow Blues’ represents the first time that Dylan played piano on one of his records—quite a surprise for those who considered him a guitar troubadour, pure and simple. Performing on an old upright piano, Dylan’s technique is shaky in places, particularly in the third verse, as he offers a simplified version of the stride piano style of such boogie giants as Cow Cow Davenport and Meade “Lux” Lewis. What makes the track all the more unusual are the punctuating stabs of harmonica which he inserts into the second and third verses and between the penultimate and final verses, stressing the already heavily-accented syncopation.
It seems second nature now, but up until this point in time Dylan’s audience had regarded his use of “blues” as referring more to his lyric modes than to the music itself, and this sudden outbreak of R&B rhythms in the folk arena came as something of a shock in 1964, and provided dyed-in-the-wool folkies and committed protesters alike with further misgivings to set alongside their more general complaints about Dylan’s new direction. Lyrically, it’s the most basic of responses to his emotional situation following the split with Suze, the first verse’s reference to a “long-lost lover” he wishes would tell him “what it’s all about” being followed in subsequent verses by further non-specific expressions of his resultant distraction.
The shortest song on the record, ‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ offers a slight counterbalance to the album’s generally bitter tone as regards love. Where songs like ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, ‘All I Really Want To Do’ and ‘To Ramona’ find Dylan struggling with women whose responses and demands are fatally mediated by modern neuroses and external pressures, here he is exultant, completely fulfilled, swept off his feet by the “wildcat charms” of an earthier, more primal female force who, the imagery suggests, responds with physical immediacy and a rather welcome absence of psychological debate.
After singing the song at the recording session, he asked a friend if he understood it. The friend nodded enthusiastically, whereupon Dylan responded with a laugh, “Well, I didn’t!” It doesn’t look as though the song became any clearer for him, either: in the version published in Lyrics 1962–1985, the penultimate lines of both the second and last verses are mysteriously altered from those sung, the turbulent (and clearly superior) “I’m nearly drowning” and “where you surround me” replaced by the more prosaic “I got to know, babe” and “will I be touching you”—surely a mistake?
A pivotal moment in Dylan’s songwriting, ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ is the song which first signals his intention to move away from straight protest songs to more allusive “chains of flashing images.” It’s his own Tempest, a compelling account of a visionary epiphany experienced during an electric storm, rendered in a hyper-vivid poetic style heavily influenced by the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. As Dylan and his companion dive into a doorway to avoid the thunderous downpour, a church bell begins tolling, and the synaesthetic combination of these two elemental forces—the sound and the fury—inspires in him a vision of universal redemption.
The song is Dylan’s Sermon On The Mount: having spent the last couple of years supporting this or that specific cause, his chimes of freedom here toll for all of life’s downtrodden and unjustly treated folk—unmarried mothers, refugees, outcasts, the disabled, conscientious objectors, the unfairly jailed and “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse/And for every hung-up person in the whole wide Universe.” It’s a veritable army of underdogs and peaceniks in uplifting collusion, an anthem as generous and inclusive as ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ was divisive and exclusive.
‘Chimes Of Freedom’ was written during the cross-country road trip of February 1964. Another song begun on that same trip was ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, a version of which was also recorded (though not used) at the Another Side… session, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott adding backing vocals on the choruses; it’s not difficult to see, in both songs, vivid echoes of the Mardi Gras festival which Dylan and his pals had entered into with such drunken gusto a few days before, transmuted into images of dynamic salvation through a process analogous to the prolonged disordering of the senses which Rimbaud recommended as the means whereby a poet might become a seer.
From this point on, social reality would not be carved up into strictly black and white issues in Dylan’s songs, but transformed by a razor-sharp satirical surrealism into a parallel universe in which the underlying forces were more subtly revealed.
Amid the unremitting doom and gloom of The Times They Are A-Changin’, Dylan presumably felt it might be prudent to lighten things up with a comedy number after the sturm und drang of ‘Chimes Of Freedom’, especially since the main creative spur for this new album—his break-up with Suze—left a melancholy, bitter edge to several of the remaining songs.
‘I Shall Be Free No. 10’ is pure play, a burst of intellectual hillbilly humor whose light sparring with conservative values echoes the fancy footwork of Cassius Clay—who finds his own poetic efforts satirized in the second verse. The humorous punchline status accorded to contemporary bogeymen like the Russians and hawkish right-winger Senator Barry Goldwater demonstrates how determined Dylan was to change the way he was expected to deal with such subjects. Derision, he’s suggesting, has just as much a place in his work as debate and declamation.
Dylan had some trouble recording the song, stumbling over some of the later verses. He wanted to leave it for a while and record something else, but Tom Wilson insisted he finish it, suggesting Dylan simply record an insert of the last section—less common practice then than now, but no great problem. To Wilson’s annoyance, one of Dylan’s friends in the control-room advised him to let Bob start again from the beginning, on the grounds that “you don’t start telling a story with Chapter Eight.” “Oh man,” said Wilson, “what kind of philosophy is that? We’re recording, not writing a biography.” Dylan did the insert, as requested.
In Dylan’s collected Lyrics 1962-1985, ‘I Shall Be Free No. 10’ is printed in pale gray text, a format used mainly for liner-notes and additional prose poems—suggesting perhaps that the author wouldn’t try to defend it as a sterling example of the songwriter’s art. Even the original ‘I Shall Be Free’ from Freewheelin’ is given full black text, though this comic doggerel is no less deserving of it.
To Ramona’ is part of the extended canon of Dylan songs—including ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’—in which departure or severance accompanies some momentous sea-change in the narrator’s attitude. It’s fundamentally a break-up song in which the singer reluctantly takes his leave of a girl ensnared by the phoney aims and pointless opinions of her acquaintances, the “worthless foam” pumped out by “fixtures, forces and friends.” Though not quite as blunt as ‘Ballad In Plain D’, it deals fairly directly with the basic issues behind Bob and Suze’s split, softened by the wistful lilt of the melody and reaching a moving resolution in which he comes to accept the inevitability of the change, while refusing to shut the door completely on any future possibility of reunion.
It’s by far the most elegant of the many songs on the album that were inspired by the split, and it offers, by extension, an insight into Dylan’s changing attitude toward his old finger-pointing, protesting self. The key lines are those in which he equates the eponymous Ramona’s belief that she is “…better ’n no one/And no-one is better than you” with having “…nothing to win, and nothing to lose,” a characterless position of stagnant ambition and minimal risk quite at odds with his own recent lifestyle. Always convinced that he was a special talent (and encouraged to think that way by a manager who deliberately fostered the Dylan “mystique”), Dylan was starting to consider more deeply those notions of “equality” and “freedom” he had recently espoused with such assurance, a subject to which he returned in ‘My Back Pages’.
Another slice of nonsense to sweeten the record’s predominantly bitter tang, ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare’ takes the talkin’ blues form which Dylan learned from Woody Guthrie into areas his one-time idol might find unrecognizable—although he’d doubtless appreciate the humor. The main difference is that, in his day, Guthrie would have made up the song, performed it a time or two, then forgotten it, while Dylan has to live alongside his for posterity. The forerunner of ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ on Bringing It All Back Home, ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare’ is an absurdist development of the old joke about the traveling salesman, the farmer and the farmer’s daughter, filtered through a sensibility informed in roughly equal parts by leftist sympathies, movies and jive-talk—a perfectly-gauged summation, in other words, of his collegiate audience’s interests. In Dylan’s version of the joke, the farmer’s daughter, Rita, a pulchritudinous sort who “looked like she stepped out of La Dolce Vita,” takes on the sinister character of Anthony Perkins in Psycho, necessitating the salesman—who’s actually a doctor, born at the bottom of a wishing well (go figure!)—to make a pro-Castro statement in order to get out of milking the farmer’s cows, as he’d promised. Or something like that. It could, at a stretch, perhaps be read as a broad satire on the antagonism between bohemian urban cool and reactionary rural conservatism, but why bother? The track’s little more than a throwaway, a means of injecting some light-hearted pace into an otherwise more than usually lugubrious album. Dylan’s laconic delivery here, however, offers the record’s most marked change from the tone of earnest profundity which characterized The Times They Are A-Changin’, prefiguring the air of sardonic, offhand genius that would dominate his next few albums.
At the recording session, Dylan apparently experienced problems reading his lyrics, and had to do several fresh starts. One of his friends in the control room advised Tom Wilson, “Man, dim the lights—he’ll get more relaxed.” Wilson declined the suggestion. “Atmosphere is not what we need,” he explained, “legibility is what we need.”
The clearest statement of Dylan’s changing attitude—and the single greatest justification of the album’s title—‘My Back Pages’ is his mea culpa, an apology for the stridency of his earlier social proselytizing in which the paradoxical refrain “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now” attests to the rejuvenation of spirit the songwriter feels, having removed the blinkers of protest from his creative urges.
Within the song’s six verses can be found sketched out the essential core of the debate which all left-wing activists inevitably have to confront, concerning the extent to which individual desires and aspirations must be curtailed in pursuit of a more universal social “good.” The youthful certitude of his protest period, Dylan suggests, was indicative of an autocratic conservatism almost as detrimental to the progress of the human spirit as those forces it condemned; having abandoned it, he now felt younger, more open to the sheer variety of possibilities. It was only later, he realized, “that I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach[ed].”
For Dylan, the nub of the matter is as much literary as political: though he would never totally abandon the tradition of social commentary (merely change his mode of address), his disaffection with the direct-address style demanded by the protest-song movement can be gauged by the virulent, dramatic imagery with which he disdains his former self: the “half-wracked prejudice” he felt; the “corpse evangelists” of the left; the “mongrel dogs who teach”; and the “mutiny” his change of attitude entailed. “I’m not really a social critic,” he said to a friend. “I knew where to put the song back then, I knew where the slot was, that’s all. When I wrote those songs, they were written within a small circle of people. I took time out to write those things… stopped to write them consciously. The other stuff I was doing, resembling more what I’m writing today, they came from inside of me and I didn’t have to stop to write them… I was me back then, and now I’m me. I can’t ever be the me from back then, I can only be me, from today. And the me from today is involved in a bigger circle of people.”
This seems a more honest explanation than the bravado with which he greeted Joan Baez’s retrospective query about what he was thinking when he wrote his protest songs. “Hey, news can sell, right?” he claimed, cynically. “You know me. I knew people would buy that kind of shit, right? I was never into that stuff.” Others have claimed that all along, Dylan’s motives were driven more by ambition than empathy, that he was simply using the topical-song movement to achieve stardom.
Ignoring for the moment the obvious fact that, until Dylan had transformed it, the topical song movement was hardly a guaranteed route to success, this view of him does not match that held by friends like Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk and John Hammond, who later stressed, “When he first came here he was thinking and talking about injustice, and about social problems… He was uptight about the whole set-up in America, the alienation of kids from their parents, the false values.” Ochs, a fervently political songwriter who frequently found himself on the receiving end of Bob’s jibes, was generous enough to vouch for Dylan’s integrity during that period: “He was just going on to bigger things when he started denying it, that’s all.” Ochs was right: for Dylan himself, ‘My Back Pages’ would be the auto-da-fé from which would rise, phoenix-like, the rejuvenated modern artist of the electric trilogy. “I used to think I was smart,” he said around this time, “but I don’t know any more. Don’t even know if I’m normal.”
(She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
Reversing the usual sexual roles of the time, ‘I Don’t Believe You’ finds a male lover bewildered by his one-night-stand’s disavowal the morning after. It seems equally as likely to have been written about Joan Baez as about Suze Rotolo—though it could just as easily be about a literal one-night stand. Whichever it is, the theme of emotional bewilderment reflects the increasing complexity of his private life, as it trailed in the slipstream of his accelerating celebrity.
Dylan’s phrasing, and the uptempo swirl of the strummed guitar, expertly evokes the heady abandon of momentary, drunken infatuation, but serves to render each verse’s subsequent deflation less convincing. There’s also a snort of tipsy laughter in verse three—one of the humanizing moments Dylan likes to leave in his songs—which, besides making him sing the wrong lines, also adds to the song’s curiously chipper tone. It’s as if, even as he sings, the bewilderment is being sloughed off, allowing him to conclude the song with one of his better deadpan jokes, responding to a query about whether it’s easy to forget with a sardonic “It’s easily done/You just pick anyone/ And pretend that you never have met.”
The song was written during Bob’s summer 1964 stay in Vernilya, a village outside of Athens, Greece. It also provided him with a sharp riposte, caught for posterity on the legendary 1966 UK concert bootleg: as The Band counts into ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, Dylan responds to an outraged folkie’s cry of “Judas!” with “I don’t believe you—you’re a liar!” This was a clear reference to the fickleness of his folk fans’ affections, so flimsy they might be shocked by mere electricity.
The title is particularly apt: written and recorded at a time when Dylan was leaving behind his straight-shooting protest-song mode in favor of a more allusive lyric style featuring chains of resonant, surreal imagery, this is perhaps the plainest song from his mid-Sixties canon, and one of the least satisfying. For while he could wax lyrical about more abstract philosophical concerns, such as the state of society and the nature of freedom, the specifics of personal trauma proved less permeable to artistic interpretation, as demonstrated by this self-pitying, one-sided account of the final traumatic night of Dylan’s long-standing romance with Suze Rotolo.
The only girl with whom he had experienced any sort of extended relationship, Suze was duly rewarded for her constancy by being pictured with Dylan on the front sleeve of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, although it was, annoyingly for him, a relationship on which Suze’s older sister Carla and her mother Mary seemed to exert unwelcome influence. In Dylan’s maudlin song, Suze is a clumsily idealized figure (“With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn”), the constant scapegoat of her family’s jealousies, while Carla is viciously characterized as a pretentious, social-climbing parasite. Dylan was gaining a reputation for waspish put-downs of friends and acquaintances, and it’s possible that where most of his victims, not wishing to jeopardize their relationship with the rising star, were easily cowed, Carla may have been less ready to accept his acid tongue. He did, after all, live in her apartment. The showdown between Bob and Carla late in March 1964 is rendered here in a portentous, melodramatic manner, full of heavy-handed, violent imagery.
The two of them had had a flaming row the previous summer at a record company sales conference in Puerto Rico, Bob blowing his top when Carla chafed at his rebellious rudeness. Their relations thereafter had become so abrasive that Carla was made to feel a stranger in her own Avenue B home after Bob followed Suze there from the 4th Street apartment. The couple were bound by a sort of fatalistic Catch-22: Bob desperately craved Suze’s attention and support, and Suze desperately wanted to be more than Bob would let her be. Increasingly, their time together became mired in sullen funks, with TV replacing communication. At the conclusion of Dylan’s previous romantic liaisons, he usually preferred to avoid outright confrontation, affecting disinterest until the relationship atrophied and the girl simply left him. Carla, however, was clearly not prepared to let her kid sister be treated this way, demanding resolution when the rumors about Dylan’s perpetual on/off romance with Joan Baez grew too strong to ignore.
In February 1964, Dylan’s stoned cross-country road trip had been scheduled to end up in San Francisco, where Joan would be the “surprise” guest at his Berkeley concert —and, the Rotolos suspected, further insinuate herself into his affections. As the tour progressed, Bob’s phone calls to Suze became more and more infrequent and she suspected the worst. The truth was probably that the hopped-up Dylan was on a creative roll, completely caught up in his work—it was on this trip that he wrote ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘Chimes Of Freedom’—and he simply couldn’t be bothered sustaining the bourgeois pretense of a stable relationship. Ironically, one of the poetic images that Pete Karman had, on the car journey, denigrated as meaningless jive-talk—“No-one’s free, even the birds are chained to the sky”—found its eventual home in the last line of ‘Ballad In Plain D’.
The affair between Suze and Bob finally came to a head in the last week of March 1964, with a major argument. Carla returned home to the apartment late one night to find Bob and Suze rowing loudly. She asked Dylan to leave, but otherwise decided not to get involved, retiring to bed. An hour later, she asked him to leave again, whereupon Dylan turned on her, unleashing a vitriolic outburst. Angry and distracted, Suze threatened suicide, but fainted before she could cut her wrists. Carla tried to push Dylan out of the door and the two ended up brawling, before he eventually left at around four in the morning.
Though he attempted reconciliation later that day, his relationship with Suze was finally over, but its collapse stained several of the songs on Another Side Of Bob Dylan, where it was positioned between ‘I Don’t Believe You’ and the concluding ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, two of his most cynical relationship songs. It remains the only song which Dylan regrets writing—though happily, Bob and Suze later became just friends.
“People have asked how I felt about those songs that were bitter, like ‘Ballad In Plain D’,” Suze later told Victoria Balfour. “I never felt hurt by them. I understood what he was doing. It was the end of something and we both were hurt and bitter… His art was his outlet, his exorcism. It was healthy. That was the way he wrote out his life… the loving songs, the cynical songs, the protest songs… they are all part of the way he saw his world and lived his life, period.”
‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ was reportedly begun in outline form early in 1963 in Italy, while Dylan was on the European trip that would also see him playing a small role in the BBC drama Madhouse On Castle Street, though its tone suggests it may have been completed later.
It’s yet another song inspired by Suze Rotolo, reflecting both the bitterness of Dylan’s feelings in the immediate aftermath of their breakup, and a kind of damage-limitation exercise whereby he might salvage some of his wounded pride. A rebuttal of the notion of true love, it finds the song’s narrator unable to fulfill his beloved’s demands, unwilling to perform the roles of protector, healer, loyal lover and gallant gentleman with which society has saddled the male suitor. Its curt tone—“leave at your own chosen speed,” “everything inside is made of stone”—stood in stark contrast to the gross sentimentality of the contemporary Tin Pan Alley-dominated pop song tradition, which, then as now, trafficked in the illusory bliss of love.
It’s a sharply cynical piece of work—indeed, though essentially an admission of weakness on the singer’s part, it thrusts blame on to the object of his disaffection, implying that her conservative demands are an imposition which could hold him back from some unspecified goal. Accordingly, some have viewed the song as an allegorical reflection of Dylan’s relationship with his audience, against whose restrictive demands he was beginning to kick. Though lacking virtually all the necessary characteristics for mainstream pop success, in the immediate aftermath of The Byrds’ hit with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, it gave close-harmony pop group The Turtles their breakthrough hit in 1965.