Bob Dylan Posts

Bob Dylan moved to New York City (lived there for the first 21 years of my life) in January 1961, at the age of 19. He was inspired by his idol Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalized across the river in New Jersey (live here in NJ now). Dylan wanted to visit Guthrie and also pursue his musical career in the folk scene swirling then in Greenwich Village (born there).  New York City played a crucial role in Dylan’s artistic development and recognition.  He performed at various clubs and cafes there, such as Cafe Wha? (been there), The Bitter End (been there), and Gerde’s Folk City (not been there).  He also met many influential figures in the folk world, such as Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, and John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records.  Bob Dylan's eponymous debut album was released in March 1962. The album features folk standards,  such as "Man of Constant Sorrow"  and "Peggy-O" plus two original compositions, “Talkin’ New York” [link here] and "Song to Woody", an ode to his idol Woody Guthrie [left].  

"I’m out here a thousand miles from my home

Walking a road other men have gone down

I’m seeing your world of people and things

Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings"

Six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" was released.  The album has plenty of references to the Cold War Era (during which we school kids prepared for a nuclear strike by practicing going under our desks).   Bob Dylan expresses his thoughts and feelings on the times in the rage-filled "Masters of War", the imagery-filled-nuclear-war-premonition "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall", and the sardonic "Talkin' World War III Blues".   The Civil Rights Movement was also reaching an apex in 1963, and Dylan penned one of his most well-known songs - the  pensive, much-covered "Blowin' in the Wind"- as well as one of his less-well known - "Oxford Town" about the integration of the University of Mississippi in September/October 1962. 

The remaining cuts on the album are more personal as Dylan reflects, sometimes humorously, sometimes touchingly about the people in his life past and present.  The most beautiful of these, "Girl from the North Country" [left], is about "a true love of mine" still in Minnesota as he makes his way and name in New York City.  His concern for her ("please see that she has a coat so warm"), his memories of her ("please see if her hair hangs long") and his wondering "if she remembers me at all" are addressed to anyone who may be "travelin' in the north country fair".

The Times They Are A-Changin' was released in January 1964.  The title track and "With God on Our Side" were prophetic in each sense of the word.  More than any other songs, they cemented my admiration for Bob Dylan.  

As the Old Testament prophets warned the people, Bob Dylan in "The Times They Are a-Changin' " warns writers and critics "who prophesy with your pen", senators and congressmen, fathers and mothers, in fact, all of us to be ready for the changes about to come and to not resist the flow of history.  

January 1964 was still 7 months away from the Gulf of Tonkin incident that catalyzed the massive US escalation in the Vietnam War.  In "With God on Our Side", Dylan relates the massacre of Native Americans, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, and the nuclear-era Cold War.  The  combatants on both sides of these conflicts believed they had God on their side.  In closing, he writes that "Jesus Christ was betrayed with a kiss" - self-styled patriots supporting unjust wars do more harm than good to their country, and he finishes with "If God's on our side, he'll stop the next war."  Nearly 60 years on, the war machine grinds away.  In my lifetime, the United States has not ever engaged in what might be termed a just war.  Never.

The album cut that I've linked, "When the Ship Comes In", is optimistic, hopeful that good things will in time come about.  In MLK's words, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

Released in August 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylan, gives us exactly what it promises... no protest songs but rather love songs and personal reflections of the now 23-year-old songwriter.  

I played the album often at a college girl friend's apartment, a block or so from the Dyckman Street station in the Washington Heights section of New York City.  Two cuts, "All I Really Want To Do" and "It Ain't Me, Babe", went on to greater renown after they were covered by The Byrds.  "My Back Pages", also covered by The Byrds, was played by a panoply of rock and roll superstars at Dylan's 30th Anniversary Concert. [link below]

The best of the love songs on this album are "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona". In the latter he is attempting to comfort a friend and the song has two phrases I've remembered all my life:

"I've heard you say many times that you're better than no one, and no one is better than you...If you really believe that, you know you have nothing to win and nothing to lose"

"Everything passes,  Everything changes, Just do what you think you should do"

Re-listening to these songs, sung in Dylan's nasal voice and which, for the most part, are in a minor key, it's no wonder that my Washington Heights girl friend and I eventually parted ways.  

The cut I've linked, "Chimes of Freedom", is not a love song, but it's my favorite from the album.  In it Bob Dylan wishes freedom for everyone from "the gentle and the kind" to  the "mistreated mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute", and for "each and every underdog soldier in the night"..."for every hung up person in the whole wide universe."

Bringing It All Back Home was released in March 1965.  It was the first Bob Dylan album that I ever owned.  I'm pretty sure it was monoaural because monoaural albums were a dollar or so less expensive than stereo. It was Dylan's first album to incorporate electric instrumentation.  The album also differs in another significant way from his previous records.  It abandons the protest music for which he was renowned in favor of more surreal, complex lyrics.  

Dylan's move to electric instruments caused controversy and divided many in the contemporary folk scene.  Famously, Dylan was booed at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 when he played an "electric set."  The audience's reaction was instantaneous, with boos and yelling filling the venue. The booing that continued throughout the set was precipitated by a sense of betrayal.  He was not the first performer to go electric at Newport, but his move was significant at the time because fans felt he was an icon, their spokesman of the Folk and Protest movement.  I didn't attend my first Newport folk festival until the following year so I missed the uproar. But I had no problem with his switch to electric.  I enjoyed rock music even more than I enjoyed folk. 

The album itself is split into two distinct halves.  The first half of the album features electric instrumentation with Dylan backed by an electric rock and roll band, featuring songs such as "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and the beautiful love song, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" - two of my favorite cuts on the album. [left]The second half features mainly acoustic songs such as the oft-covered "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the poignant ballad "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". [left]

From the first cut to the last, the album is a poetic gem.  I'll just briefly note three of the other songs on the album.

"Maggie's Farm" contains themes of social and economic criticism, with lines such as "Well I try my best to be just like I am/But everybody wants you to be just like them" and "They sing while they slave And they just get bored...I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm, no more."  Part of Dylan's Newport "electric set", a restored version of that performance is linked here. 

"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" is a surrealistic, ironic song about the discovery of America by Captain A-rab (an obvious reference to Ahab of Moby Dick) and his crew. The song is filled with numerous bizarre encounters - a cop "crazy as a loon", a talking Guernsey cow, a funeral director, and a flag-waving redneck to name a few.

"Gates of Eden" is one of Dylan's most surreal songs.  He plays the song solo, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica.  The first verse warns you of what's ahead for searchers of truth in what is not a paradise but a decaying society: "Of war and peace the truth just twists, Its curfew gull just glides, Upon four-legged forest clouds, The cowboy angel rides, With his candle lit into the sun, Though its glow is waxed in black, All except when 'neath the trees of Eden."

The album opens with Dylan's biggest hit single, "Like a Rolling Stone", described by Michael Gray, a pioneer in Dylan studies, as revolutionary in its combination of electric guitar licks, organ chords, and Dylan's voice, "at once so young and so snarling ... and so cynical."   

The album closes with "Desolation Row", an 11-minute acoustic ballad.  The song opens with "they're selling postcards of the hanging", "the circus is in town" and then proceeds to introduce  a parade of oddities along with a huge cast of iconic characters including Albert Einstein, Cain and Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ophelia, Romeo, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Between these two cuts are seven songs that make the album among the most highly acclaimed of Dylan's works.  Picking my favorite was tough.  I settled on "Queen Jane Approximately" [left] with "Ballad of a Thin Man" a very close second, described as one of "the purest songs of protest ever sung"