On August 28, 1963, Bob Dylan performed before an estimated crowd of 250,000 people as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That same day, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a dream” speech, expressing the hopes of many persons of color in combating a racially biased status quo that had existed for generations in the United States. The march dramatized the growing number of citizens willing to be vocal about civil rights, and King’s speech put the issue into memorable oratory, making him a spokesperson for what was then called “the advancement of colored peoples.” But why was a young, white, fairly obscure songwriter there, singing his own compositions, at this historic moment?
Bob Dylan was about the age of a college graduate, and had arrived in New York city’s Greenwich Village a mere two and half years before as “a complete unknown,” to become one of the numerous folkies on the scene. Now, after two albums for Columbia Records, he was performing in a remarkable lineup that included famous names of folk and gospel music like Harry Belafonte and Mahalia Jackson, and was performing beside Joan Baez, a contemporary who was already a major figure in the folk music revival and was becoming increasingly influential, particularly with college students. One song Dylan sang that day, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” was a stirring denunciation of an act of racist violence that killed a young black man, Medgar Evers, that summer in Jackson, Mississippi. Dylan was invited to sing because his songs were becoming reference points for a revitalized leftist folk movement in America.
The march, speeches, and performances in Washington marked the largest manifestation to that date of the Civil Rights Movement, which had been increasingly vocal since Rosa Parks’s brave act of civil disobedience in 1955, when Dylan was a teen. After the march, the movement’s demands would be given more attention by the administration of John F. Kennedy and gain more importance in the terms of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The march also marked the high-water mark of Dylan’s involvement in social issues. Not long after the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, Dylan distanced himself from the “conscience of his generation” tag journalists had conferred upon him.
As Dylan recalled to Mikal Gilmore in 2001, the folk song created an identity for people like himself, “an identity which the three-buttoned-suit postwar generation of America really wasn’t offering to kids my age” (424). Identity conferred by a collective purpose was the movement’s touchstone. For Dylan, the period of immersion in folk lasted for about three years, from 1960 to 1963. By 1964 his increased celebrity and the changes in his own vision of himself and of the kinds of music he wanted to make would mark the first of many startling transformations in a long and unpredictable career.
Bob Dylan began life as Robert Allen Zimmerman, born May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, where his father worked as a manager for Standard Oil. In 1946, his parents, Abram and Beatty Zimmerman, moved to Hibbing, Minnesota, after Abe lost his job after contracting polio, which affected his health, and after the birth of their second child, David (Sounes, 23). Robert and his brother grew up in Hibbing, where their father, thirty years old the year Robert was born, worked with his brothers in an appliance store they eventually came to own and run. The Zimmermans were a Jewish American family living in the remote northern Great Lakes area. Hibbing was a mining community on the Mesabi Iron Range made prosperous by the recently ended war’s demand for iron. After the austerity of the war, prosperity was reflected in the growing interest in leisure goods, such as the radios and record players that the Zimmerman brothers serviced and sold. Robert discovered, over the airwaves, an exciting world of music he had few chances to encounter locally.
As a teen, Robert’s heroes, except for James Dean (the charismatic actor famous for Rebel Without a Cause, who died in a car crash in 1955) and some characters in John Steinbeck novels, were almost wholly music makers (Shelton, 28, 45). Young Zimmerman’s major early idols can be summed up quickly: Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley. These were heroes any musically inclined teen might have in those years, each a uniquely gifted artist. Williams and Holly were notable as songwriters; indeed, Bob later named Williams as his favorite, whose songs possessed “the archetype rules of poetic songwriting” (Chronicles, 49, 96). Little Richard and Presley were acclaimed for their electrifying performance styles. Performing as a teen with an ad hoc group for Hibbing High’s Jacket Jamboree, Bobby Zimmerman’s antics at the piano were compared with Little Richard’s flamboyant style, and in his high school yearbook the caption under his picture, complete with pompadour, reads “To join ‘Little Richard’” (Scaduto, 10–11, 25).
Those first appearances with a band, as well as family reminiscences about little Bobby’s performance of “Accentuate the Positive” at four years of age, indicate a joy in performing for people and being the center of attention (Shelton, 32). But enthusiasm for singing and idolizing popular musical entertainers do not necessarily lead to a career in the music industry, much less one as unique and unprecedented as that of Bob Dylan. Even when we add to the mix the old folk, blues, R&B, and more culturally obscure performers—such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—whom young Zimmerman heard on the radio (with DJ Frank “Brother Gatemouth” Page broadcasting all the way from Shreveport, Louisiana) we might still be talking about someone who would only go on to be a minor local talent or a DJ.
Unable to jump-start a performing career locally, Zimmerman chose to at least get out of Hibbing. He accepted his parents’ idea to enroll at the University of Minnesota, located in the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. If Bobby Zimmerman had found a course of study at college that engaged him fully, as Abe and Beatty had hoped, there might never have been a Bob Dylan. But by all accounts Zimmerman was an indifferent student, barely going to class, a misfit at the Jewish fraternity where he initially lodged, and a haunter of Dinkytown, the bohemian enclave near the campus where the nonconformity of the recent Beat movement reigned. The Beats’ enthusiasm for jazz music as the supreme expression of selfhood had been replaced by a love for folk music. Immersing himself in this locally flourishing ethos, Zimmerman gave up on his adolescent love of rock and roll, or, at least, he gave up on the idea of fronting a band. As Dylan describes it, once he discovered Guthrie’s songs he found a calling: “to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple” (Chronicles, 246). Guthrie was the catalyst for the musical persona that Zimmerman would adopt in his transformation into Bob Dylan.
Early on, Bobby Zimmerman adopted stage names for performing. The first, Elston Gunn & The Rock Boppers, suggests an attempt to create a band by naming it. The name he eventually settled on for himself, Bob Dylan, has been analyzed and explained numerous times. For some, it is an obvious reference to Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet noted for his popular and visceral style of performance—he toured the United States in 1950 and 1953, dying suddenly in New York on the latter tour. Like others cited as young Bob’s heroes, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, and James Dean, Thomas died young in the midst of much promise and praise. In Chronicles, Dylan explains how he toyed with other names, such as “Robert Allen” or “Allyn,” variations on his given names. The step from “Allyn” to “Dylan” was inspired by the sound and look of Thomas’s name, requiring, to Zimmerman’s ear, a shift from “Robert” to “Bob” (79).
The key question about an alias is whether or not it works, that is, whether it produces an association in the mind. As Robert Shelton points out, the name “Dylan,” by virtue of Thomas and Sheriff Matt Dillon, on the popular TV series Gunsmoke, had immediate associations, but they did not define the name (44). If the name was apt, it was because it allowed Robert Zimmerman to become a one-name entity—Dylan—much like “Elvis.” Throughout the period when his fame was building, the name Dylan, somewhat mysterious, not easily ascribed to an ethnicity, became a notation for certain unique aspects of the singer’s words, voice, sound, and appearance. To be “dylanesque” became a definable, even an enviable, quality.
As Dylan told Jonathan Cott in an interview in 1978, “I didn’t create Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has always been here . . . always was” (269). If Bob Dylan has “always been here,” then the name is more than a name; it’s a role or a spirit, something Robert Zimmerman could inhabit, enact, become. Adopting a name is not simply a matter of hiding one’s own name, but of becoming a new individual. Zimmerman, in his early years in New York, tried to elaborate a past that belonged to this character “Dylan.” Journalists seeking the facts would often seize upon these fabrications as put-ons, an effort to dupe the public. The more compelling reason for the fanciful biography—which included yarns such as hailing from Colorado or New Mexico, working in a carnival, meeting and playing with legendary figures such as Leadbelly—is that it tells the story of Bob Dylan, not the story of Bobby Zimmerman (Cott, ix). By the time Bob Dylan was accepted as a public figure, Zimmerman had to become Dylan once and for all.
Woody Guthrie had made his mark on history long before Dylan read Bound for Glory in 1960. The world of the Depression found in the book, with its romantic evocations of homeless hobos with no possessions, bears comparison with the ethos of On the Road (1958), a novel by Jack Kerouac that (for those slightly older than Dylan and on down to the future hippies of the counterculture) offered a vision of the fraternity of the Road, a great American myth of a life of self-discovery, free of mundane constraints and ties to a place. The romantic version of Guthrie’s world matched the current romanticism influencing Dylan’s generation, but Dylan’s interest in Guthrie was not simply a college student’s infatuation. “Folk songs transcended the immediate culture,” Dylan would write in Chronicles (27), and so he undertook to master the acoustic guitar in order to play the songs Guthrie wrote and the songs Guthrie knew. For Dylan, Guthrie’s songs of the thirties “were totally in the moment, current and even forecasted things to come” (247). After gaining some proficiency through public performances around Dinkytown, Dylan resolved to go to New York to meet his hero, then in declining health from Huntington’s Disease, in a Veterans Administration Hospital in New Jersey.
Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961, immersed himself in Guthrie’s circle and became, for all intents and purposes, Guthrie’s acolyte. Dylan had found his forte: in performance, he was able to enter imaginatively into the songs, to deliver them with a force and conviction increasingly impressive to those who, like him, were trying to eke out livings as singers of folk songs. Dylan’s power as a performer is what impressed the more experienced folksingers of New York’s Greenwich Village. Had he been simply an imitator he would have been politely dismissed. What convinced his elders—like the Clancey Brothers, especially the youngest, Liam; Dave Van Ronk, “the Mayor of MacDougal Street”; Izzy Young, the local maven of the folk scene; and eventually others like the New York Times music critic Robert Shelton, Columbia Records executive John Hammond, music promoter Albert Grossman, as well as contemporaries like Joan Baez—was the concentration with which Dylan evoked the fond myth of the ramblin’ troubadour, a vagabond in service to music.
In the years since the Great Depression ended, “beat” was no longer applied to the condition of down-and-outers oppressed by a system that had failed them, adrift in an economy in which there was no worthwhile or viable work. The U.S. economy had been rescued by the war effort as well as by social programs, such as the WPA (Work Projects Administration) that Franklin Roosevelt enacted in the period of Guthrie’s heyday. In the late fifties and early sixties, “beat” became a badge of honor, the mark of those espousing a life indifferent to material comforts. Much of that critique of materialism was already present in folk music. Folk performers were not trying to get rich like popular celebrities, but sought to give expression to the music they believed in. Bobby Dylan, with his willingness to sleep on people’s floors and couches, to live on handouts and what he scrounged playing gigs in Greenwich Village, epitomized the ethos. Later, after Dylan landed a recording contract with a major label so quickly and was becoming a celebrated figure, some would suggest it had all been a pose, a way of aligning himself with the most workable myth to achieve his goals. If there is truth to that idea, it derives from the fact that the “beat ethos”—when no longer an actual economic condition as it was in Guthrie’s day—is necessarily something of a pose, using the means of minimal existence, deliberately chosen, to advance a larger cause. For the genuine folkie, the cause is the folk—as opposed to the commercial—tradition or a call to political or social justice or simply to resist the status quo. Such matters occupied Dylan as well for a time, but ultimately the cause he was advancing was his own art.
Dylan spent about six months in Guthrie’s circle, paying homage through visits to the hospital and to the home of Guthrie’s good friends, where he mixed with an older generation that had seen America go from a period of dire poverty to world-power status. He also became familiar with the belief in song as a force for change—a view he would not have encountered by listening only to Hank or Buddy or Elvis. That the words in a song were important, and not simply important as a statement of emotional intent, was a given for Guthrie. Guthrie aimed always to express a view larger than his own, and that example gave much scope to Bob Dylan’s early songs, written somewhat in Guthrie’s shadow.
“Song to Woody,” one of Bob Dylan’s first original compositions in New York, borrows its tune from Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre,” enacting both an homage to his hero—showing how well he could appropriate the master’s work—and a statement of his own status. The song not only acknowledges the debt of the new kid in town, but it also implies that the torch has passed.
In “Song to Woody,” the second-to-last track on Bob Dylan, the singer says this world “looks like it’s dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.” Elsewhere on the album, Dylan sings about death in Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die” and in the standard “In My Time of Dyin’” (both very strong performances) and concludes with Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” The theme of death is notable for such a young man’s album. Part of Dylan’s pose—the aura he wanted most to evoke—was as someone more experienced in the ways of the world than he actually was. The key song on that theme is the traditional tune “Man of Constant Sorrow,” no doubt chosen because its words of long-lived suffering, with thoughts of release in death, so clearly contrast with the baby-faced artist on the album cover, giving us a long stare that dares us to laugh at his pretensions. Posing as something one is not is part of any singer’s birthright: singing the songs as they are meant to be sung, with full identification with the speaker in the song, extends a form of experience to the singer and to the audience as well. When we listen to Dylan, all of nineteen years old and “Fixin’ to Die,” we share in a projected self-image that leaves Robert Zimmerman behind and opens up imaginative possibilities created by the voice and manner of Bob Dylan, a kid with an unusual voice and the guts to use it.
If one wishes, one can dismiss such identification as wishful thinking and insist that Dylan has no right to an old man’s—much less an old black man’s—blues (Bukka White served time in a penitentiary, and Jefferson, a blues sensation of the 1920s, was the son of sharecroppers). Such a view is ultimately reactionary and conservative. For what the Civil Rights Movement was arguing for was the common status of humanity, regardless of race. For a young Jewish boy from the Iron Range to take on the persona of an Okie from the Dust Bowl (his Guthrie incarnation), or of a young girl working as a prostitute in New Orleans (in his version of “House of the Rising Sun,” lifted from his Greenwich Village mentor Dave Van Ronk, to the latter’s consternation), or of a black man in prison, or of a world-weary traveler from Colorado was to make an assertion about shared oppression and about the recognition of shared identity. The lesson learned from hours spent listening to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Music was that songs of the American people could include anyone who chose to sing them or to listen.
If listeners would not identify with Bob Dylan’s youthful bravado, what was the basis of their refusal? In “Talkin’ New York Blues,” the other original composition on the album, Dylan characterizes his initial reception in the folk clubs: “you sound like a hillbilly, we want folksingers here.” Other write-offs that would continue: Dylan is not musically accomplished, his voice is untrained and unpleasant, and his content is derivative if not an outright theft. And when his real antecedents became known (up to the release of his third album no one knew, at least not publically, the true details of Bob Dylan’s background as Robert Zimmerman), he was too middle class for the uneducated vagrant he pretended to be. These were criticisms from those with something to defend. Dylan’s appeal was to those who wanted to see the world remade, the criteria altered, to see a young upstart enliven folk music, which was in danger of resting on its laurels or becoming too commercial.
There was money in folk music, or at least a certain kind of folk music. Pete Seeger
and The Weavers had had a hit with “Goodnight Irene” in the forties, which gave birth
to a folk revival in America, which included popular figures such as Harry Belafonte,
Burl Ives, and Odetta, the opera singer who became one of the most successful folksingers
in the period preceding Dylan. Hearing her records in a store circa 1958, as Dylan
told Ron Rosenbaum in 1978, inspired him to trade his electric guitar for a flat-top
Gibson (204). The Kingston Trio took up where The Weavers left off and scored large
radio hits, as well as several albums in the top ten simultaneously. Their success
may have prompted the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
(NARAS) to found a Grammy award for Best Folk Recording in 1960, for the previous
year. That year Joan Baez debuted on Vanguard Records and became at once the darling
of folk music, singing to large, sold-out halls.
On the one hand, Dylan’s ascendancy in the era of more polished folk acts was radical. On the other hand, the championing of Dylan by Hammond and Shelton over older folksingers was, in terms of the purity of the tradition, something of a travesty. Dylan had been playing folk music for all of two years, and his style was largely adopted from countless performers he imitated. Yet his was a take-no-prisoners approach. People would love his style or hate it—in either case they would talk about it, and that is how a name and a reputation get made.
The political aspects of the earlier folk movement of the thirties and forties had come to be seen, by mainstream American culture, as “anti” or “un” American, due to the highly publicized efforts of anti-Communist McCarthyism to purge all leftist sympathies from Washington and the entertainment industry in the mid-fifties. Pete Seeger himself had to endure a forced hiatus in his career due to the taint of “red” associations. Guthrie, while he never joined the Communist Party, did support some of the same leftist programs to which the communists were dedicated. In the early sixties, when Dylan came to town, those antagonisms were still very much alive in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village where the initial figureheads of the folk movement had sung and played. In assuming the mantle of Guthrie, Dylan might be expected to take on some of the previous generation’s political battles.
While Bob Dylan is apolitical, there is a strong sense of tragic honor in the album. The songs speak of spirits sorely tried, not by political oppression, but by existence itself and by their place in the world. The two original compositions sketch the outlook of Bob Dylan: his wry observations about a hard-scrabble existence in New York and his salute to Woody, a hero for having endured that kind of life for the sake of experience—the vague “not many men have done the things that you’ve done.” What did Woody do? We would never know from the song, only that he rambled around and knew other singers and other ramblers. The point of view of both songs—Dylan’s perspective on folk music we might say—is the value of individualism, using music to remain outside the snares of comfortable conformism. Implied in this is a young man’s dream of remaining free and true to himself or true to the search for himself. Such was the pied piper call that many of Dylan’s contemporaries would hear and follow, at least for much of that decade.
Commentators tend to cite the fact that Bob Dylan only sold 2,500 to 5,000 copies initially, and that Dylan was regarded by some Columbia executives as “Hammond’s folly,” suggesting that John Hammond had erred in taking on Dylan. Hammond, a widely respected A&R (artist and repertoire) executive, signed Dylan on the strength of his playing on an album by Carolyn Hester that Hammond produced, of recommendations from others based on Dylan’s performances at Gerde’s Folk City, and of the impression made on the New York Times critic Robert Shelton. The mockery may have been appropriate if one thinks only in terms of sales, but rarely is it mentioned that Bob Dylan was nominated for Best Folk Recording at the Grammys, along with Baez’s Live in Concert and recordings by Belafonte, The Kingston Trio, and The New Christy Minstrels. If only out of respect to Hammond, the boy wonder’s nomination indicates that Dylan’s debut had not gone unnoticed by the people who count. The album lost to “If I Had a Hammer,” recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, a new folk group formed by Albert Grossman to cash in on the market The Kingston Trio had captured, featuring a female singer to compete with the success of Baez and others. By the time Dylan completed his second album, he too would be represented by Grossman, and although the song that won the 1963 Grammy for Best Folk Recording was again recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, it was written by Bob Dylan. The song was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it reached number 2 on Billboard’s chart.
A line in “Talkin’ New York Blues,” “some people can rob you with a fountain pen,” was prophetic of Dylan’s ultimate feelings about his relation with Grossman and the setting-up of the publishing company Dwarf Music in 1966 (Sounes, 200–201). Yet in this initial period, Grossman’s methods of promotion and his personal financial interest in the songs of Bob Dylan—as recorded by others more radio ready—meant Dylan could not fail to get a hearing. For someone like Dylan, ultimately bound beyond the traditional folk music world, this was of paramount importance. Yet to the people of that world who embraced Dylan as a strong voice and presence in the movement, Grossman’s commercial interests were seen as the driving force behind Dylan eventually “selling out” to rock and pop.
Recording sessions for Dylan’s second album began in April 1962, the month after the release of Bob Dylan, continued in July and October, and concluded in April of 1963 (Heylin 1995, 13–14). The length of time signals the intention to better the showing of the first album, and to do that Dylan had to find songs suited to his talent. And that meant writing the songs himself. In that year, Dylan recorded over twenty original compositions, and the progress he made was extraordinary.
On the first album, the two Dylan-penned songs are both in homage to Woody Guthrie: “Song for Woody” is a direct address to the older singer, and “Talkin’ New York Blues” is in a form called “talkin’ blues,” of which Guthrie was a master. Dylan’s version recreates the off-the-cuff strumming and talking style that permits the singer to make many seemingly improvised asides. Dylan continued to compose in the form for his second album. “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” (a comic tale based on a newspaper story about a fraudulent excursion) and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” (a send-up of the right-wing political organization), with their genially humorous tone and adlibs, went over well in concert. The elastic nature of the talkin’ blues, its capacity for disjointed storytelling and satiric observations, suited Dylan in his earliest period. Neither song made the final cut of the album, but another talking blues, “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” the best of the three, recorded at the final session in April, 1963, was included (Heylin 1995, 14). Two other comic songs debuted on Freewheelin’: “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” an alternately self-deprecating and heroicizing paean to his own persona, initiates the comic blues songs that continue into Dylan’s fifth album, while “I Shall Be Free,” a whimsical picaresque romp, introduces a persona common to most of Dylan’s early albums and ends the album with a light-hearted self-portrait.
As these songs of irreverent and playful doggerel show, Dylan’s closest persona had a common-sense point of view from which to mock hypocrisy. The songs with “a message”—the songs for which Freewheelin’ is best-known—also aim to speak collectively. In this period Dylan moved swiftly from being a mimic of a folk and blues tradition from the 1920s and 1930s to being a conduit for the voices around him, channeling the concerns of the New Left into songs clear in their conviction, if sometimes vague in their critique.
There are three bona fide classics on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” In addition to these, each a significant entry in different song genres that Dylan would continue to develop, there is one other that became a staple of his performing repertoire over the years: “Masters of War.” The quintessential “finger-pointing” song, its intensity is deadly as it excoriates munitions manufacturers and the military for creating an environment—via the atom bomb—that makes one fearful of giving birth to future generations.[1] The song is the closest Dylan ever comes to the persona of “angry young man,” and would be notable if for no other reason. The delivery, and the borrowed tune (from “Fair Nottamun Town,” which Dylan learned while on a visit to London to act in a televised play), combine to give stature to Dylan’s railing. The singer sees clearly that those who promote war also promote a culture of death, which he answers ironically by longing for the moment when he can stand over their graves.
In contrast to his first album, Dylan does not seem obliged to pretend to be an old bluesman but instead advertises his youth—“you may say that I’m young, you may say I’m unlearned,” he challenges in “Masters of War.” Most often, the pose on the second album is one of openness. Several songs employ direct address. He tells us of a dream about his oldest friends in “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” a mournful song about loss of innocence, and he reflects comically, and autobiographically, on his troubles in “Down the Highway” (in which he refers to the extended stay in Italy of his girlfriend—Suze Rotolo, pictured with him on the album cover—while he was making the album). He poses numerous questions to his listener in “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and, in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” asks questions that might be put by Dylan’s own father to his “blue-eyed son”: “where have you been, what did you see, who did you meet?”
While many have referred to “Hard Rain” as “apocalyptic,” the term only fits the song tangentially. The liner notes on the back of the album, written by Nat Hentoff, suggest that the song arose out of the Cuban Missile Crisis—which occurred in October 1962—and Dylan’s quoted comments seem to agree. In fact, the song was written and performed by Dylan a month before President Kennedy made his declaration about the USSR’s missiles in Cuba (Heylin 1996, 33). Granted, that situation made Dylan’s song all the more relevant and made the song feel more topical. The song does not describe a time after a nuclear holocaust—that’s the subject of the witty “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” which is quite effective at skewering those people all-too-ready to jump into their fallout shelters if a nuclear blast would rid the world of communists. Rather, “Hard Rain” offers glimpses of a world distorted by unsettling, almost surreal imagery that conjures up the mood of “last days.” The pageant includes crying clowns, dying poets, a young woman with a burning body, a girl giving away rainbows, a white man walking a black dog, children armed with weapons, and—perhaps one of the more enigmatic images—“a white ladder all covered with water.” The “hard rain” may be the start of a second deluge that will finally clear away the hurt and hurtful souls the song describes. The singer suggests that, no chosen one, he will not escape the fate of this world, but will “stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’,” while testifying to what he has experienced in visions. It is a song at times wry in its associations, at times sad, and also quite beautiful. The song’s poetic images establish a high-water mark for popular song lyrics. As a statement of both dread and defiance, the song accurately captures the feeling of young people facing the post World War II world of nuclear peril.
The most famous song on the album is its opening song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but the delivery here is more subdued and offhand than would be the case once the song became a sing-along anthem at protest rallies. If a “protest song,” the perspective is oddly timeless, affecting a relation to eternal things—the roads a man walks down, the seas a white dove flies before finding land (recalling the dove sent out from Noah’s ark to find dry land after the biblical flood). A dove is a symbol of peace and the next image protests war, asking when cannonballs will be banned. The setting seems older than our era since cannonballs, if never banned, had become obsolete after the nineteenth century—specifically perhaps for Dylan, the Civil War. If a reference to the Civil War, the image is appropriate since each verse contains a line that may refer to the status of blacks in the United States. In that context, the question would be “how many times must we go to war to settle our differences before we find other means and outlaw war?”
The second verse, with its rhyming emphasis on “sky,” “cry,” “died,” questions our relation to our surroundings. To see the sky means in essence to see, for once, what is too obvious to be missed; this sense is seconded by the cries one needs more ears to hear because one is able to ignore them. The statement that “too many people have died” is an understatement since death claims everyone, eventually, but the claim amplifies obvious facts we don’t always see (like the sky) and, coupled with the crying people, points to deaths as casualties related to a cause. To protesters of the Vietnam War, the deaths are the fallen soldiers; to protesters for civil rights, the deaths are killings with no benefit of justice (as, for instance, Medgar Evers). In putting the sky, the cries, and the deaths into relation, the song makes its point. The recurrent question of “how many” gives the song its relentless refrain, but is left to be answered by the wind. Which is to say, not answered at all, since it is clear that one already has looked up enough, possesses enough ears, and should know the death count is too high.
One great talent Dylan developed early is how to end a song. Even if a song contains too many verses, as is sometimes the case, Dylan at his best saves a major statement for the end. In the version of the song on Freewheelin’, the most telling questions are saved for last: how long a man must live before he is “allowed to be free.” The oxymoron of being permitted to be free (is such freedom real freedom?) poses the problem of freedom as something bestowable by laws. The line, sandwiched between a question about a mountain returning to the sea—an image for the vast length of time for natural change—and a line about refusing to see, arrives as the crux of the lyric, with Dylan’s voice giving the question a stirring weight. In the context of political movements, the freedom of the dissident, the protester, the onetime slave, or political prisoner exists as a struggle against those who prevent freedom. The reference to the mountain, then, prefigures Martin Luther King Jr.’s rejoinder in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to those who preach patience, who claim that the improvement of life for blacks must take place gradually, over many generations, as a mountain is worn down by the relentless surge of the sea.
The economy of the song is striking; its simplicity—the tune is adapted from “No More Auction Block,” an old spiritual of the slavery era—is forceful, and its imagery hints at the fatalism of folk poetry in natural symbols, suggesting the wind’s indifference to the lack of freedom, the unjust deaths, and the cries of suffering.
Another distinctive aspect of the album is Dylan’s skill with romantic songs: “Girl from the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance.” In all three, the singer pines for a woman or reminisces about a woman, and in all but the first-named addresses the woman directly. “Honey” is unabashedly playful, suggesting that wooing can be fun, even if one is in ill graces. “Girl” is a stately evocation of a once-upon-a-time love that the singer still feels, hoping the girl he remembers so poignantly remembers him as well. And yet the description is deliberately generic—she had long hair, was a “true love,” and the singer would like her to have a warm coat in the cold north (which he is clearly not returning to any time soon). “Girl” leaves us with the vision of both the girl and her lover when they were young and untried by the dark nights and bright days the singer has lived through since.
Finally, the strongest, “Don’t Think Twice” is the quintessential “it’s time to move on” song of Dylan’s generation, building from the masterful songs of hurt feelings Hank Williams wrote. The lyrics capture a regret “Girl” articulates but, rather than seen from a distance, here it is presented in lines addressed to the lover herself. The singer has made up his mind to go and gives his reasons. The refrain, “don’t think twice, it’s alright,” might be sincere, but it might also be disingenuous. At one point, he admits he wishes she would do something to try and change his mind, but then the refrain cuts that thought off with a feeling of “you won’t anyway and it’s just as well.” The two songs, “Girl” and “Twice,” present us with a lover who leaves, not without regrets and, once he’s safely gone, evoke a memory he hopes to preserve. Both songs suggest a young man more concerned with his “precious time” than with the women he is recalling.
Dylan’s ability to express a nuanced relation to women had a great influence on the songwriters of his generation. At times dismissive, at times seductive, acerbic, chastened, charming, lyrical, even mystical, the attitude toward women and romantic love in Dylan’s songs is complex. In both songs, the theme of “woman versus girl” is sounded. The “true love” in “North Country” was only a girl, while the lover in “Don’t Think Twice” is, to the singer, “a woman,” though he was told by others that she is “a child.” This difference gets reworked further in one of Dylan’s signature songs “Just Like a Woman,” but for now it is enough to note the need for more experience, so that we might say the roads one must walk to become a man—a key question in “Blowin’ in the Wind”—are calling away from any settled relation to a lover. In that context, the question might be: “How many girls must one man have?” There is a touch of the playboy in Dylan’s outlook at times—the men’s magazine Playboy and the empire it founded in which males could be catered to by a bevy of beauties, began in 1953, the year Dylan turned twelve, so that his adolescence, as it was for most men born in the 1940s and 1950s, was marked to some degree by the magazine’s insistence on women as interchangeable figures of pleasure (it’s interesting, in that light, to note that Dylan’s future wife, Sara Lownds, worked for a time at the Playboy Club in New York). In “I Shall Be Free,” Dylan imagines President Kennedy calling him up for advice on spurring growth. Dylan’s answer is a list of foreign movie actresses, all noted for their voluptuous figures: Bridget Bardot, Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg. “Country’ll grow,” Dylan deadpans.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan easily outperformed its predecessor. It cracked Billboard’s Top 25 and reached number 1 in the UK. With this album, Bob Dylan achieved a musical identity he would have a hard time living down.
Around the time of his second album, Dylan became known as a songwriter willing to take on the issues of the day. Freewheelin’ provides an antiwar song, “Masters of War,” and another, “Hard Rain,” that was interpreted as a protest against nuclear armaments, and yet another, “Blowin’ in the Wind” that was seen as both antiwar and pro–civil rights. The album includes “Oxford Town,” a sarcastic treatment of the need for federal troops when the first black student at “Ole Miss,” James Meredith, attempted to attend class. As well, “I Shall Be Free” contains a satiric aside on the Jim Crow South: the singer says a can of black paint fell on his head; he went to wash the paint off, “but had to sit in the back of the tub,” a reference to the segregationist practice of making blacks sit in the back of the bus.
The racist practices of the Jim Crow South were a target for several of Dylan’s songs (though he had not yet traveled to the Deep South). His earliest effort was “The Death of Emmett Till,” recorded April 1962, and based on the trial of two white men accused of killing Till, a black teen visiting Mississippi from Chicago in 1955, for his remarks to a married white woman. The case caused a great outcry when the killers—who admitting kidnapping Till but not killing him—were acquitted, then later admitted the murder in a Look magazine interview. The failure of justice provoked much press and is considered instrumental in the first Civil Rights Act of 1957. Dylan’s song is rather clumsy and heavy-handed, but shows him trying to move from the case—the song is very inexact about the details—to the larger theme of racism and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1963, two further incidents of racial violence spurred Dylan to respond in song: the killing of Medgar Evers, leader of the NAACP, and one of the local black investigators of Till’s death, in Jackson, Mississippi, in June 1963, inspired “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” recorded in August; and a random act of violence by William Zantzinger resulting in the death of a middle-aged maid in Baltimore in February 1963 inspired “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” recorded the following October. Both songs appear on Dylan’s third album, The Times, They Are A-Changin’ (Heylin 1995, 23–24).
Both “Pawn” and “Hattie Carroll” employ the tactic of stepping back from actual incidents to allow the singer to condemn the larger social construct of racism. As the saying goes, “society is to blame”—such is the moral of “Pawn.” The killing of Evers, according to the song, is the result of whites learning from childhood that blacks are inferior and that, if whites use violence against blacks, the law will protect whites from punishment. Dylan’s lyrics indict a nameless “they”—at first, meaning white Southern politicians but eventually including everyone who permits racism to continue. “Their game” is to suppress the fight for equality and to enforce racial privilege legally.
“Hattie Carroll” is very specific about the crime that inspired it: the killer is named (though his surname is altered, intentionally or not, from Zantzinger to Zanzinger), and at each stage of the narration—with details about Carroll’s life of servile labor (“she just cleaned up all the food from the table”) or about her employer’s life of privilege, or about his blow with a cane when she failed to serve him swiftly enough—the singer repeats the refrain that it is not yet time for tears. The tears should fall, the song concludes, only when we learn that Zantzinger received for “penalty and repentance,” a mere six months sentence. The song finds pathos in its rendering of the social injustice of wealth and poverty (the depiction of Carroll’s labor resonates with images of slaves and masters from pre–Civil War Southern plantations), then inflates to an epic inclusiveness in its rendering of the “blow from a cane that sailed through the air and came down through the room, doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.” For all that its heart is in the right place, the suggestion that Carroll’s death itself should not be grieved, but rather the meager punishment the crime received, barely escapes becoming a sanctimonious rhetorical gesture.
Lest we think that economic deprivation was a theme fit only for Woody Guthrie’s Dust-Bowl ballads of the thirties, The Other America, Michael Harrington’s groundbreaking account of poverty in America, published amid much attention in the spring of 1962, demonstrates the relevance of songs like “North Country Blues” and “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.” The first is told by a woman, daughter of a miner, sister of a miner, wife of a miner, who realizes that the mining life is over for her offspring. In the song, the miners’ impoverishment is due to their wages being undermined by cheaper labor in South America, a telling glance at labor practices. “Hollis Brown” is an even more grim story of tragically bad luck befalling a subsistence farmer. Both songs are highly dramatic portrayals of “lives of quiet desperation,” to use Thoreau’s phrase. Harrington’s book argued that prosperity in America is largely an effect of education and that those left behind on the farm or in dwindling communities built upon occupations grown obsolete have not been brought into the same quality of life as their contemporaries. Like Harrington’s book, both of Dylan’s songs focus on the white working poor, with “Hollis Brown” attaining an archetypal status through the song’s relentless repetitions and driving rhythm, and “North Country” achieving a plainspoken portrait, starkly beautiful as the photographs of Walker Evans.
The themes of racist violence and of grinding poverty relate to the very “times” to which the album’s title alludes. In the period when Dylan wrote and recorded these songs, the administration of John Kennedy was beginning to turn—too slowly for some—to domestic issues such as civil rights for nonwhites and the lack of federal support for America’s working poor. With the stand-off over Cuba behind him for the moment, Kennedy seemed ready to enact domestic policies to which Dylan’s third album provides something of a Greek chorus. Two key songs on the album herald the need for change: “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” and “When the Ship Comes In.”
From Freewheelin’ through Blonde on Blonde, Dylan albums begin with a song that could be said to epitomize the theme of the record; released as singles, the lead songs are able to stand for the album in an immediate way. “The Times, They Are A-Changin’,” unlike “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was not covered by other recording artists at the time. The song readily associated Dylan, as its singer, with the theme of political change. The song’s didactic tone—addressing in turn “people,” “mothers and fathers,” “writers and critics,” “senators and congressmen”—and its willingness to sound like a prophet of old, invoking a coming flood and cribbing from the Bible (“the first one now will later be last”), indicate that Dylan was straining for big statements. That said, there are lines in the song that have considerable aphoristic force—“don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin”—while other commands, such as telling members of the older generation to “get out of new [road] if you can’t lend your hand,” have the force of youthful challenge. Many found in the song a voice for what they would like to say, with the assumption that the contemporary moment was changing more rapidly than was true for previous generations. Whether or not this was so, there was certainly a more developed media to capitalize on slogans and million-dollar phrases. Dylan’s song weds a timeless perspective to a youthful outlook. Ancient and modern at once, like the best forms of folk wisdom, the song continues to resonate as “the waters,” in one form or another, continue to rise. Like a prophet raised on the Bible, Dylan seems to see the apocalypse in terms of water and a flood. Indeed, “When the Ship Comes In” also makes emblematic use of the sea, though here the anticipated ship, a sort of Noah’s ark, is sent to rescue those who have kept the faith. Both songs imply or envision punitive ends, possibly apocalyptic events, for indifferent, unhelpful, or malicious behavior.
The powerful indictment of war-mongering on Freewheelin’ is extended and deepened by “With God on Our Side,” apropos of the Kennedy administration’s increase of support to the Vietnamese in their battle with the communist Viet Cong. The singer leads the listener through a history lesson of U.S. military engagements to arrive at the then-current arms’ race with the USSR, as the Cold War provided most of the rationale for U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In the song, each successive war is invoked as a lesson every American school child is taught, even if, as with World War I, “the reason for fightin’ I never did get.” At the close, Dylan proposes the notion that, if God were truly on our side, there would be no more wars. This idea is set up by a surprising verse in which the singer ponders the question of “whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.” The most obvious meaning of the verse is that the United States is being betrayed by those it trusts to defend it, but there is an implication that some acts sanctioned by God—the betrayal of Christ—may be a betrayal of values commonly held. The song was first performed at the Town Hall concert in New York in April 1963, and then twice again at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963, both times with Joan Baez. “With God” is the kind of song for which Dylan was highly praised in the folk movement: somewhat formulaic, the song manages to convey a challenging sense of values, even of insight, while maintaining a plainspoken, “everyman” pose.
Times also continues the more personal songs that marked the second album so strongly. The wistful, nostalgic sentiments found in “Girl from the North Country” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream” are continued, in even more succinct and poetic fashion, in “One Too Many Mornings,” sung with a simple but affecting delivery. The song offers one of Dylan’s first self-conscious comments on his status as a “spokesperson”: “everything I’m sayin’ you could say it just as good.” The song has the tone of one who realizes he has wasted too much time, but here the blame falls on the times themselves moving too fast. There is simply an ache in the world that the singer is trying not to be overwhelmed by. In place of the slightly bitter but shrugging “Don’t Think Twice,” Dylan this time offers “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a song that, like “Girl,” takes its tune from a traditional arrangement, and expresses the pain of realizing, through messages sent from a traveling lover, that a love is over.
What is lacking on Times, as compared to Freewheelin’, are songs of humor and charm. The album is very earnest, at times strident. Dylan’s grasp of detail has greatly improved, but nowhere on Times do we find the imagistic reaches of “Hard Rain.” And in place of the off-the-cuff explorations of his comic persona so well represented on Freewheelin’, we have the somewhat defensive “Restless Farewell” as a send-off.
Dylan wrote the song late in the recording process in response to a smear article in Newsweek that tried to expose him as a phony and a plagiarist (Shelton, 138–39). The article did not do any real damage to Dylan’s career but, as a personal attack, seemed to require a response. Not only did Dylan close the album with “Farewell”—mentioning “the dust of gossip and the dirt of rumor”—but he also included “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” printed on the back of the album and continued as an insert. In this free verse ramble, which begins with Dylan “blindly punchin’ at the blind,” Dylan becomes more cagily autobiographical than in the earlier “My Life in a Stolen Moment,” mentioning the “legacy visions” left by the town he grew up in—“it was a dyin’ town”—and his wish to have “lived / in the hungry thirties” like Guthrie, who is named as “my last idol” because, as the first idol Dylan met face to face, he was able to see him as a man with his own reasons for what he did and said, “an’ every action can be questioned.” In one passage, Dylan specifically expresses his dissatisfaction with magazines and the kinds of “rumor tale” used to coerce an artist’s cooperation. The album and its liner poem indicate a young man beginning to take himself rather seriously.
During the making of Times, Dylan was proclaimed “the crown prince of folk music” at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963. He appeared with Baez, its reigning queen, and performed as her special guest at several of her concerts. Baez was quite smitten by Dylan and also believed strongly in his duty to write the songs they should be singing to their audience. They were a couple to some degree at this time, almost perforce as folk royalty, though Dylan continued his increasingly volatile relationship with Suze Rotolo as well. The importance of Baez and the folk movement for Dylan in this period cannot be overstated. Baez, herself a very irreverent character, was approached in performance with great reverence, her audience hanging on her every word. Dylan’s performances, now lifted from the gritty folk bars of New York and Cambridge and placed in concert halls beside Baez, inspired the same intense listening. Another influence at this time was the senior folk star Pete Seeger who was instrumental in having Dylan take part in political events, such as the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) rally to register black voters in Greenwood, Mississippi, in July 1963. Thus, with these two major folk icons as mentors/collaborators, one a spokesperson for the veritable Old Left, the other a star to the New Left, Dylan found himself dubbed repeatedly “the voice of a generation.”
The third album was finished by October 1963 but not released until January 1964. By that time, Dylan’s comfort with his “folk conscience” mantle was unraveling. On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was assassinated in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The entire country reeled from the surprise of the attack. Those for whom Kennedy’s election in 1960—in a very close and contested race against Richard M. Nixon—was a victory for youthful vigor could not help seeing great hope and energy wasted in a shocking moment of violence. Less than a month later, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee bestowed the Tom Paine Award upon Bob Dylan for his civic-minded songs. In his acceptance speech, Dylan revealed “another side” indeed.
Accepting the Tom Paine Award in December 1963, shortly following the Kennedy assassination and the public mourning it inspired, Dylan went off on a tangent that aimed to be timely but was perceived as an outrageous provocation. In criticizing the assembled members, albeit jokingly, for not being young and not having hair, Dylan seemed out of sorts with the fact that he was not addressing his own generation (some of his friends who came to the event with him were not let in, apparently). If Dylan had ever wanted to appeal to an older generation, here was an opportunity, but he went the other way. It seems as if he strove to offend those honoring him to convince them that he was not what they assumed him to be. In the song “Motorpsycho Nitemare,” recorded in June 1964, a traveler wants to offend a farmer whose hospitality makes him uneasy, so he shouts “I dig Fidel Castro and his beard.” A calculated offense to a patriotic American, the line recalls Dylan’s speech at the awards dinner: to strike a sufficiently “weird” note, Dylan mentioned Cuba and claimed he could see some of Lee Harvey Oswald in himself. Viewed sympathetically, the statement might indicate that, far from a saint, Kennedy represented a political establishment that might cause someone very frustrated to turn to violence.
Whatever his intentions, Dylan’s comments inspired considerable outcry, to say nothing of fewer donations to an organization that would honor someone as confused as Bob Dylan. Frustrated by his inability to make his point, Dylan published a verse statement in Broadside in January 1964, but again failed to get his idea across. The real problem was the idea of himself as a “spokesperson” for anything but his own views, which in all honesty he perceived as being in flux and not resolved even on something so obvious as the view one should take of a presidential assassin. We should not take Dylan’s speech and his letter-poem, and certainly not the award nor the assassination, as causes of his move away from the so-called protest movement. Rather, Dylan was trying to lodge a protest against his assumed role within the movement. In the winter of 1963/1964 the symptoms of Dylan’s restlessness with his public role were manifest—first announced in “Restless Farewell” and its boast to “not give a damn.”
Key to the changes in Dylan’s image, outlook, and output at this time is the fact that he spent time away from Greenwich Village. He took a cross-country road trip with some friends, that great getaway that fuels On the Road as well as countless student odysseys after graduation. Dylan at the time was approaching twenty-three and can be thought of as equivalent to a graduate student. He had “graduated” from his intensive apprenticeship to the folk song movement and its practitioners. In becoming a celebrated figure, he was moving into the “journeyman” phase of acquiring an art. It was time to stop writing the kinds of songs those around him required and to write songs as the artist he was becoming. Already the tag “poet” had been thrown at him, both as a comment on what made his song lyrics different from other writers, and as a means to gain his lyrics more serious attention. Though such claims are always fraught with literary assumptions, Dylan was self-consciously developing a new idiom, both with his lengthy, free-form verse pieces on the back of his albums and with songs more expressionistic in their imagery.
The manner of the songs for the fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, was inspired by the use of marijuana. One aspect of the influence of a poet like Arthur Rimbaud, the visionary French poet of the mid-1800s whose poems impressed Dylan, or Rimbaud’s Beat descendants such as Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all of whom Dylan met in this period, is some acquaintance with “the disregulation of the senses.” This phrase, from an important letter Rimbaud wrote at sixteen, describing the means of becoming the kind of poet he intends to be (“a seer” or voyant), is generally taken as a license for forms of intoxication to induce a visionary state, such as through hashish and absinthe (Rimbaud’s substances of choice) or, in the sixties, marijuana, and hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin.
The changed state of mind produced by such substances can perhaps best be observed by looking at The Other Side of the Mirror, Murray Lerner’s film of Dylan’s appearances at the Newport Folk Festival. In 1963, Dylan is the darling of the folkies, dressed in denim and plain shirt, looking like Woody Jr. In 1964, the month after recording his fourth album in one all-night session, he is dressed in black, looking like the hipster he was becoming. He debuted “Mr. Tambourine Man” at the afternoon workshop session, a song that was a leap well beyond anything he had recorded to that point, suggesting the state of reverie associated with smoking marijuana. Certainly, this was a very different kind of song—implying a different singer and a different kind of audience—than straight-forward tales like “North Country Blues” or soapboxes like “With God on Our Side.” While performing the latter with Baez at Newport in 1964, Dylan seems to have diffculty keeping a straight face, typical of the random hilarity of the stoned.
Meanwhile, the year 1964 saw developments in three themes Dylan had tackled on his second and third albums—increased awareness of poverty, antiwar agitation, and civil rights issues. In January, President Johnson declared his “War on Poverty,” and in March announced that his administration would increase military assistance to South Vietnam, which inspired the first protests against the war by students—marches were held in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Madison, and Boston. Casualties in the undeclared war would top 1,000 by mid-summer. In February, the trial of the killers of Medgar Evers, in Mississippi, ended in a mistrial because of the jury’s inability to pronounce a judgment, and in June three civil rights workers were murdered by Klansmen there. July brought the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and race riots in Harlem. Clearly, Dylan’s early songs remained more timely than ever. But 1964 saw an important event of another kind: The Beatles’ first number one song—“I Want to Hold Your Hand”—topped U.S. charts in February, the same month the band from Liverpool played The Ed Sullivan Show (while Dylan was on his cross-country jaunt), and by April, the height of “Beatlemania,” The Beatles boasted the top five songs on Billboard’s Hot 100. With the cute, quipping personalities of “The Fab Four” a key part of their celebrity, the idea of youth trying to change the world met the idea of youth playing the world for laughs.
The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan, released August 1964, half a year after The Times, They Are A-Changin’, indicate how swiftly Dylan, who wrote most of the new songs while visiting Europe, was changing, removing himself from the New York scene and its associations. The only topical references on the album are challenges to Muhammad Ali (addressed by his given name, Cassius Clay), who had become the Heavyweight Champion of the World by beating Sonny Liston in Feburary, and to Barry Goldwater, a conservative dedicated to taking the country back from the liberals, who became the Republican presidential nominee in July, and a joke about the Russians getting to heaven first, a reference to the current “space race” to the moon. The album’s stand-out tracks show the extent to which Dylan was writing hit songs beyond the confines of folk: “It Ain’t Me Babe,” a signature song for Dylan, was a country hit for Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash in 1964, and a Top Ten pop hit for The Turtles in 1965. “All I Really Want to Do,” the album’s opener, was a hit for Cher in 1965, and The Byrds, who became recurring “folk rock” interpreters of Dylan’s songs, recorded a truncated version of it, as well as “My Back Pages” and “Chimes of Freedom,” two of the new songs that indicate Dylan’s move to a more deliberate poetics.
A notable change from the previous album is Another Side’s return to the off-the-cuff humor of Freewheelin’. Dylan is in good spirits in the opening track, “All I Really Want to Do,” an upbeat tune memorable for the yodeling “doooooo” on the chorus. The song presents a somewhat more genial Dylan, laughing at the idea that anyone would try to “be like me.” Side 2’s first track is even more light-hearted, a sustained comic narrative—a traveling salesman joke—in which the singer runs afoul of a farmer and his daughter, who at first reminds the singer of the glamorous women in La Dolce Vita (such as Anita Ekberg) and then of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (both films date from 1960). With outrageous rhymes—“I heard something jerkin’ and there stood Rita looking just like Tony Perkins”—the song is a combination of an off-color joke and a sketch about a young person’s nonconformity and leftist sympathies, with a witty pop culture hipness.
Other songs on Another Side present somewhat chastened versions of Dylan’s self-image: in the piano-based “Black Crow Blues,” he says he feels “out of touch”; in the rousing “Spanish Harlem Incident”—a good example of the path of excess that Dylan’s lyrics are willing to tread at this point, revelatory in small lyric touches—he wants to know if he’s “really real”; in “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” he mentions a friend who stabs Dylan’s image with a Bowie knife and pretends “to barf” at the mention of Dylan’s name; and in “To Ramona,” a heartfelt offer of psychic advice to a young girl having a hard time dealing with people who make her feel “you must be exactly like them,” he ends with the admission that he might need some help himself, “maybe some day, baby.”
The kind of “help” advocated is belief in one’s own convictions. “My Back Pages” describes a growth toward greater youth. We might infer that, at twenty-three, Dylan had discovered, in youth culture, a feeling of camaraderie based on a shared indifference to the exhortations of “good and bad” professed by the old guard leaders he had mocked at the Paine Award dinner. Any adherence to political slogans is undermined by the singer’s sense that teachings are not to be trusted, and the crusading of his earlier period has come to seem romantic and self-important. The song’s lyrics are not always as graceful as they might be, but there is a strong sense of an individual voice, very much Dylan’s own diction and structure, that makes the song feel genuine despite its somewhat ponderous conceits. Much more nimble is “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” a song so deft in its quick rhymes and bouncy rhythm, it feels like a catchy pop song. It tells of a girl who, though a passionate lover the night before, now acts like she never met the singer; the song registers a common enough experience in the era of fleeting romantic encounters, and its mocking, sing-song quality makes the song a more shrugging dismissal than “Don’t Think Twice.” If “she” can be made to stand for Dylan’s fans, the song also effectively creates the “cold shoulder” his turn to rock and roll will receive in some quarters.
“I Don’t Believe You” can be bookended with “Ballad in Plain D,” an autobiographical song that tells, in an at times naked and at other times overwrought way, of the final breakup with Suze Rotolo. Despite the snipes at Rotolo’s sister, depicted as a “parasite” and a meddler, the song manages at times to be compelling—Dylan candidly admits his own lies and confusion and his continued admiration for the girl he loved. The song’s conclusion, while perhaps self-congratulatory in its imagery (“I’m a poet and I know it,” Dylan quips on “I Shall Be Free No. 10”), captures the odd prison house of Dylan’s career: “Are birds free from the chains of the skyways.” At this point, stars like Dylan and The Beatles were anything but free, becoming figures of intense identification and fascination, increasingly hounded by fans and media, to say nothing of steered by the pressures of management.
The two most important songs on Another Side differ rather drastically from each other. “Chimes of Freedom” is a key transitional song. Rarely performed by Dylan after this period (his performance of the song at the Newport Festival in 1964 can be considered definitive), the song occupies a space between the songs of social ills—such as the antiwar songs “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side”—and songs of poetic, even metaphysical, reverie, such as “Gates of Eden” (recorded for the next album). “Chimes” might be compared to “Hard Rain,” but is not as successful, reaching a bit too earnestly after big statements; at the same time, it provides an inspiring evocation of a storm of thunder and lightning. A bit self-consciously “visionary” (as if Dylan were assigned to “write a visionary poem”), the song has its adherents, though my sense is that, still under Guthrie’s influence, it overreaches in trying to be a consolation for “every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.”
Finally, the last track, “It Ain’t Me Babe” is impressively spare. Its mood takes something of the “fare thee well” of “Don’t Think Twice” and combines it, subtly, with the “don’t ask me for answers” themes of “Restless Farewell,” “One Too Many Mornings,” and others: the woman addressed in the song has to understand that the singer will not dedicate his life to her. This might be insufferably egotistical if it were not for the fact that the song is conjuring something only too common: the “all or nothing” aspect of most romantic attachments—which can include attachments to causes and group projects. The feeling of being stifled, of having to shut down one’s own aspirations and aims for the sake of a false ideal, is what makes the song compelling and the “no, no, no, it ain’t me babe” chorus, which is, in a sense, an honest admission of defeat, so liberating. While the song seems to articulate male detachment from courtship rituals, it can also be sung by a female as a defiance of the role of patient helpmate to masculine self-regard.
On Halloween of 1964, Dylan performed at Carnegie Hall, accompanied on three songs by Joan Baez. The concert, which would eventually be released as volume 6 in the Bootleg Series, demonstrates how strong Dylan’s performing repertoire was at this time. Early signature songs like “Hard Rain” and “Don’t Think Twice” are mixed with songs of social commentary, such as “Hattie Carroll” and “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” a disquisition on the death of a boxer, together with songs not yet released, like the impressionistic “Mr. Tambourine Man” and mind-bending songs more oblique in their critique of contemporary culture like “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” The set also includes the talking blues numbers about the John Birch Society and World War III, as well as some of Dylan’s more recent romantic songs, the passionate “Spanish Harlem Incident” and the playful “I Don’t Believe You.” Baez is on hand for the high-minded “With God on Our Side,” the romantic longing of “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind,” and the go-your-own-way kiss-off “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
The set is much like the shows Dylan would play in England in the spring of 1965, but by then he would have a new record out with an entire side of songs accompanied by electric instruments. On that tour, documented in a film by D. A. Pennebaker released as Don’t Look Back in 1967, Dylan brought along Baez and then never invited her on stage. The neglect was a cheeky slap in the face to the woman who had been a mentor, a muse, a lover, and a collaborator and indicated not only that the romance with Baez was over, but also the romance with the folk movement that still enthralled many of Dylan’s fans. “It Ain’t Me Babe” conjures up all this with the sense that anything that is not “me” at the moment must be dropped. And Dylan’s old friends and fans took the challenge personally. As Irwin Selber wrote in an open letter to “Bob” in Sing Out!: “Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious—maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion” (McGregor, 67). The fear was that Dylan cared now only for himself and a “handful of cronies.”
Bob Dylan was well on his way to ending his folk career, at least for a time. Another Side made it clear that, if Dylan had significance now, it was as an innovator in contemporary song, not as a composer of songs for rallies. The album, released the day after the U.S. Congress passed the Tonkin resolution, permitting the president to conduct military actions against North Vietnam at his own discretion, was toothless in terms of the wider world around it. And Another Side did not sell as well as its predecessor, perhaps indicating that Dylan had moved away from his old fan base without having won a new one. That situation would soon change.
During the making of his fourth album in 1964, Dylan, speaking to Nat Hentoff, characterized such songs as “finger-pointing songs”: “You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong” (Cott 2006, 16).