by Andy Gill
Realizing their artist’s true potential, Columbia belatedly rushed out a single of Dylan’s version in August 1963, a month after Peter, Paul & Mary’s had been released. It failed to chart, leaving Dylan tagged for some time primarily as a songwriter, rather than a performer. The song was, however, used as the theme for Madhouse On Castle Street, a BBC television play in which Dylan played his first dramatic role, appearing as an American protest singer—hardly a stretch, one would have thought.
GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Though some commentators, most notably Dylan biographer Robert Shelton, claim that the girl from the North Country is actually Bonnie Beecher—a bohemian actress Bob fell in love with during his time in Minneapolis, and at whose apartment Tony Glover recorded several of the early Dylan tapes—most agree it is more likely to be Echo Helstrom, his first serious girlfriend from his schooldays back in Hibbing.
Bob met Echo in October 1957, when he was just 17, and she 16. At the time, Bob Zimmerman was a nice enough middle-class boy, clean-cut and round-faced, while Echo was from a poorer working-class family, definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. They discovered a shared interest in R&B music, which both would listen to late at night on the radio, on the DJ Gatemouth Page’s program, or on stations in Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas, which had particularly powerful transmitters. Nobody else in Hibbing, it seemed, was interested in this music, but they were obsessed with it: the first time they met, Bob used his pocket-knife to break into the Moose Lodge where he had earlier been practicing with his band, in order to play her his Little Richard piano licks.
Already, Bob knew what he was going to do with his life. “By the time I met him,” recalled Echo later, “it was just understood that music was his future. All along we knew there was no other way for him to get out of there, to leave Hibbing.” His ambition sometimes led him to playful fantasy pranks, as when he played Bobby Freeman’s ‘Do You Want To Dance?’ down the phone to Echo, claiming it was him and his band; but she and her mother recognized, even at this early stage, Bob’s intrinsic empathy with the underdog. His later interest in country music may have stemmed from his association with Echo, too: he and his friend John Buckland would trawl through Echo’s mother’s large collection of Country & Western 78s, trying out the songs on their guitars, particularly the sad songs about prison fires, dying children and similar depressing subjects.
For a while, Bob and Echo were sweethearts, swapping identity bracelets and even attending the prom together, albeit as outsiders somewhat cut off from the school mainstream. The 1958 Hibbing High yearbook records Bob’s feelings for Echo: “Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none, but I think I told you that before… Love to the most beautiful girl in school.” By that summer, however, they were growing apart. Increasingly restless and pinched by the confines of Hibbing, Bob’s boot heels had taken to wandering, and his weekends would be spent out of town, in Duluth or Minneapolis, while Echo pined away miserably at home. She realized he was probably seeing other girls and so, one Monday morning, she handed his ID bracelet back in the school corridor. “Don’t do this in the hall,” pleaded Bob, “let’s talk about it later.” But it was already too late.
Bob Dylan finished writing the song on his brief trip to Italy in the first week of 1963, where he had hoped to meet up with Suze Rotolo again. Alas, she had left to return to New York mere days before. He had, he later claimed, been carrying the song around in his head for a year, and it seems as though the manic swing from anticipation to disappointment caused it to burst out of him. Equally important in its eventual appearance was his sojourn in England on the same European trip, where Dylan went to appear in the BBC play Madhouse On Castle Street. In the company of old chums Richard Fariña and Ric Von Schmidt—over there to record an album on which Dylan, credited as Blind Boy Grunt, would play impromptu harmonica—he did the rounds of the London folk clubs, where he picked up some old English folk songs from traditional singers such as Martin Carthy. Like another expatriate American folkie, Paul Simon, Dylan seems to have been particularly attracted to the old English folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’, and adapted it to fit his own ends.
MASTERS OF WAR
This diatribe against the arms industry is the bluntest condemnation in Dylan’s songbook, a torrent of plain-speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand, with no poetic touches to obscure its message. It would seem to have had scant effect: even today, armaments manufacturers are virtually the only companies that governments are prepared to prop up and subsidize, whatever the cost, despite the often flagrant incompetence and fraudulent misuse of public funds exhibited by these companies in cahoots with the military establishment.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final advice to the incoming President John F. Kennedy in January 1961 was to beware of this military-industrial complex, which he belatedly realized had effectively dictated much of American foreign and economic policy in the postwar years, encouraging the Cold War arms race and reckless military adventurism in order to serve their own vested interests, rather than the interests of the country as a whole. Their influence spread into other areas, particularly science and education, which became heavily dependent on Defense Department funding, and which in turn became more tightly focused on military research, at the expense of other areas. By 1960, the Federal Government was subsidizing research in universities to the tune of over a billion dollars a year; thanks to Federal funds, a single institution like the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (M.I.T.) could spend more money on scientific research than all the universities of the British Isles combined.
Kennedy either ignored Eisenhower’s advice or found himself over a Cold War barrel rolled under him by his hawkish Chiefs Of Staff. He had been in office only a few months when he authorized a massive arms procurement program worth an $3 billion on top of the already substantial arms budget, with an additional $207 million earmarked for civil defense. The money pouring into the arms companies’ coffers has grown even greater since, as armaments have become more technologically complex, like Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles, or more fanciful, like Reagan’s comic-book “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative.
First debuted by Dylan at Gerdes Folk City on January 21, 1963, ‘Masters Of War’ remains as pertinent almost four decades later. Its lyrics were published in the 20th issue of Broadside magazine in February 1963, accompanied by a couple of drawings by Suze Rotolo—one of a man carving up the world with a knife and fork while a family watches forlornly, and another of a baby-carriage kitted out with a gun and tank-tracks. The tune is an adaptation of the traditional melody to the English folk song ‘Nottamun Town’, probably learnt from Martin Carthy on one of Dylan’s English trips.
DOWN THE HIGHWAY
The closest Dylan comes on Freewheelin’ to the dark soul of country blues as practiced by performers such as Robert Johnson or Son House, ‘Down The Highway’ is a bare, basic blues format, worked around a 12-bar scheme. A single strummed guitar chord teeters through the verses, collapsing into a flat-picked resolution at the end of each couplet, the evocative musical equivalent of the piteous sinking of shoulders after an impassioned cri du coeur. The subject matter, a girlfriend who has abandoned him for some “far-off land” which proves, in the penultimate verse, to be a desolate “Italy, Italy,” is clearly about the pain caused by the absence of Suze Rotolo, who was pursuing her own life on an extended trip to that country.
The narrator is stranded, lovelorn, on some endless highway, lugging his suitcase to nowhere special: wherever he goes, she won’t be there, so what does it matter? It’s possible that Dylan came up with the song as he was returning to see old friends in Minnesota: the same day, June 8, that he saw Suze’s ship off at the docks in New York, he himself set off for Minneapolis. Shortly after, back in New York, Dave and Terri Van Ronk were surprised to receive a phone call at four in the morning from Bob, who was standing in a Minneapolis phone box in sub-zero temperatures,
crying for Suze. Upon his return to Greenwich Village, all his friends were surprised at how listless and melancholy he had become, and how he had changed physically as well as emotionally—the puppy-fat apparent on his first album cover had disappeared, leaving him looking gaunt and weary, like Woody Guthrie. “He was falling apart at the seams,” said Mikki Isaacson, a Village friend. “He was so depressed we were afraid he was going to do something to himself.” Time did little to ease his pain. On a tape made by his old friend Tony Glover on another trip back to the twin cities a couple of months later, Dylan can be heard pining for Suze: “My girl, she’s in Europe right now. She sailed on a boat over there. She’ll be back September 1, and till she’s back, I’ll never go home. It gets kind of bad sometimes.”
The mention of gambling in the third verse could be a reference to the Greenwich Village folkies’ back-room poker games, but in the context of Dylan’s life is far more likely to refer to his perilous hand-to-mouth existence in his time in New York. Since dropping out of college in Minneapolis a year before, he had bummed around a bit, to nearby Madison and Chicago, and as far afield as Colorado and New Mexico, before heading East to eke out a virtual hobo existence on peoples’ floors in New York, heavily reliant on the compassion of strangers while he tried to develop a career in music. It had all been a huge gamble, and just as it seemed he might be set for the big jackpot pay-off, with a beautiful girlfriend, a record deal, burgeoning acclaim and the imminent prospect of both fame and fortune, his girl had gone and left him “without much more to lose.”
BOB DYLAN’S BLUES
Despite providing the original working title for Freewheelin’, the trifling ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’ is probably more important for its position in the album’s running-order than for any intrinsic merit. Coming after the intensely emotional opening sequence of four songs, it offers a moment of light relief before the testing blizzard of imagery in ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, the LP’s centerpiece. At the recording session on July 9, it perhaps served a similar purpose, immediately preceding the taping of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. An example of how blues expression can lighten the spirit, its attitude of cheeky irrelevance punctures the self-pity at its heart. Nevertheless, it’s interesting for a couple of reasons: the line “Go away from my door and my window too” is a premonitory echo of the shorter, snappier opening line of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’; and the presence of the Lone Ranger and Tonto in its opening line marks the first appearance in Dylan’s recorded work of the gallery of pop-culture icons that would populate much of his later work.
A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL
Blowin’ In The Wind’ may have established Bob Dylan as the principal anthemist of the Civil Rights movement, but it was ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, written later that same year, which established him as the folk-poet of a new generation. Its strings of surreal, apocalyptic imagery were unlike anything that had been sung before, and the song’s rejection of narrative progression in favor of accumulative power lent a chilling depth to its warning. It was the closest folk music had come to the Revelation of St. John, and every bit as scary.
The root inspiration for the song came from the Cuban Missile Crisis—the moment at which, it’s commonly agreed, the Cold War came closest to boiling over into all-out nuclear catastrophe. The crisis came about in the wake of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 1959 transformation of Cuba into a communist state. In 1961, the young new American President, John F. Kennedy, revealed his inexperience and immaturity by supporting a CIA plot to overthrow Castro, to which end many of the anti-Castro Cuban refugees pouring into America were enlisted in an insurrectionary force of 1,500 men, who were trained in Guatemala for a counter-revolutionary invasion of Cuba.
Despite widespread antipathy towards the plot from the British government—who warned that the invasion would breach international law—and such weighty American political advisors as Dean Acheson, Arthur Schlesinger and Senator J. William Fulbright, who counseled that “the Castro regime is a thorn in the flesh, but it is not yet a dagger in our heart,” Kennedy proceeded with the plan. It was a disaster: when the invasion force attempted to establish a beach-head at the Bay Of Pigs on April 17, 1961, it was summarily wiped out by Castro’s waiting defenders.
Kennedy’s reputation was badly damaged by the abortive mission, which led his Soviet opposite number, the bombastic Nikita Khruschev, to adopt a fiercely aggressive stance at the Vienna summit negotiations that June over the future of Berlin. The summit went badly, ending with Khruschev asserting, “I want peace—but if you want war, that is your problem.” The outcome of the failed negotiations was the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and the deepening of mistrust on both sides.
Meanwhile, stung by the Bay Of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy had authorized further covert measures against the Castro regime, under the code name Operation Mongoose, ranging from the absurd (slipping El Presidente a poisoned cigar) to the effective, most notably the crippling of the Cuban economy through fifth-columnist saboteurs. So when, in the summer of 1962, the US Navy held intimidatory military maneuvers just outside Cuban territorial waters, Castro sought an alliance with the Soviet Union, who in return for economic subsidies were secretly granted permission to install nuclear missile bases on the island, on the justifiable pretext of defending Cuba’s independence against any further invasion. To the Soviets, forced to tolerate American nuclear missiles in Turkey, right on its own southern border, this was simply a tit-for-tat retaliation in the USA’s backyard—“Nothing more,” Khruschev claimed in his memoirs, “than giving them a little taste of their own medicine.” But to an America emotionally sore from years of red-baiting paranoia, it was as if the country had, for the first time, suffered an invasion of its own.
By the middle of October, the world was at the brink of nuclear war, while Kennedy and Khruschev walked a perilous tightrope of political brinkmanship. Rejecting the foolish suggestions of his bellicose military chiefs that he should bomb or invade Cuba (or both), which would surely have caused an escalation of hostilities leading to all-out war, Kennedy decided to call Khruschev’s bluff by opting for a policy of blockading the island, prevent it receiving any further Soviet supplies. On Monday October 22, the seventh day of the crisis, he appeared on television to announce his decision. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards,” he explained, “as all paths are… [but] one path we shall never choose… is the path of surrender or submission.”
Two fraught, nervous days later, the policy bore fruit: Soviet vessels delivering further arms supplies turned back. “We are eyeball to eyeball,” said Kennedy advisor Dean Rusk, “and the other fellow just blinked.” But this still left some missiles already installed on the island, which the Soviets were rushing toward preparedness. The situation was apparently not helped when an American U2 spy-plane was shot down over Cuba the following Saturday, October 27, though in retrospect this seems to have decided both leaders to settle the issue quickly, before it got out of hand. Khruschev had been hoping to secure the removal of the US missiles in Turkey in exchange for dismantling the Cuban missiles, but all he received publicly was a promise that the USA would not invade Cuba; secretly, however, Kennedy agreed to remove the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which were obsolete anyway. The crisis was over, though the proximity to imminent catastrophe left lingering ripples in the American consciousness, poetically addressed in Dylan’s song.
“I wrote that,” said Dylan, in his most famous commentary on any of his songs, “when I didn’t figure I’d have enough time left in life, didn’t know how many other songs I could write, during the Cuban thing. I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song, the most that I possibly could, and I wrote it like that. Every line in that is actually a complete song, could be used as a whole song. It’s worth a song, every single line.”
The “hard rain” of the song is not, however, nuclear fallout. “It’s not atomic rain,” explained Dylan. “It’s just a hard rain, not the
fallout rain, it isn’t that at all. The hard rain that’s gonna fall is in the last verse, where I say ‘the pellets of poison are flooding us all’—I mean all the lies that are told on the radio and in the newspapers, trying to take peoples’ brains away, all the lies I consider poison.”
The song, which Dylan wrote in late September in his friend Chip Monck’s apartment below the Gaslight club, began as a long, free verse poem, a French Symbolist-style extension of the opening lines of the epic ballad Lord Randal. That night, he showed it to the folk singer Tom Paxton at the club. “It was a wild, wacky thing, the likes of which I’d never seen before,” recalled Paxton. “As a poem it totally eluded me, so I suggested he put a melody to it. A few days later I heard him perform it as ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.” Within days, the song was being acclaimed by friends as Dylan’s greatest work. “We all thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” said Dave Van Ronk. “I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution.”