Bob Dylan

by Andy Gill

  DON’T THINK TWICE, IT’S ALL RIGHT

  The most explicit of the songs reflecting Dylan’s feelings toward the absent Suze Rotolo, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was one of the most popular of his earlier compositions, being widely recorded, though usually more blithely than in Dylan’s original version, which has an understated air of resigned rancor quite unlike any other love songs of the period. Noel “Paul” Stookey, who would sing the song with Peter, Paul & Mary, recognized its magical quality as soon as he heard it: “I thought it was beautiful, a masterful statement… It was obvious that Dylan was stretching the folk idiom, [that] a new spirit had come.” He was right. For a folk song, it was unusually modern in attitude, with a daring balance struck between affection and bitterness. Dylan would later become an expert at all-out vindictiveness, so much so that friends became wary of approaching him for fear of being subjected to his acid tongue or poison pen; but here, his obvious disappointment is tinged more with simmering regret, only boiling over into mild spite in the penultimate line of each verse, where Suze is variously castigated for being immature, uncommunicative, wanting his soul when he offered his heart and, in the most dismissive of put-downs, wasting his “precious” time. Ironically, though it was Suze who had actually left Bob, the song salvages his pride by claiming it is he who is “trav’lin’ on.”

  Some of his friends were embarrassed by the song. “Bobby was rolling it out like a soap opera,” said Dave Van Ronk. “It was pathetic. The song was so damn self-pitying—but brilliant.” Upon her return from Italy, Suze at first found it strange, if flattering, to hear others singing this song written about her, but it eventually contributed to her split from Bob when, at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival that July, Joan Baez introduced the song as being “…about a love affair that has lasted too long.” For Suze, this confirmed the rumors she had heard about Bobby and Joanie, the new “King and Queen of Folk,” and she stormed away from the festival.

  While the song’s lyric was revolutionary in form, the melody was again purloined from a traditional source, an Appalachian tune called ‘Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone’, which Dylan’s friend, the folk singer Paul Clayton, had discovered and adapted for his own song ‘Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbon Saw’. Many of their friends were angered by the way Dylan brazenly neglected to credit either the traditional source or (especially) Clayton, who was notoriously short of cash due to his drug problems. “The honorable thing would have been for Bobby to cut him in on the copyright,” believed Dave Van Ronk, “but that wasn’t Bobby’s way.” Instead, after a mild legal tussle, Dylan ensured that his publishers gave Clayton “a substantial sum,” and the two remained friends, Clayton accompanying Bob on his cross-country drive in February 1964.

  The liner-notes to Freewheelin’ mistakenly claim that the song was recorded with the band that played on ‘Corrina, Corrina’ and ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, but while it was certainly recorded at the same session, it is clearly a solo performance. Some commentators have speculated that it may have originally been recorded with a band accompaniment that was subsequently wiped, but the limitations of early-Sixties recording technology mean that it would have been virtually impossible to have erased the extra guitar, drums, bass and piano completely without leaving a certain amount of audio spillage which would have been captured on Dylan’s own microphone. It’s feasible that the band backing may have been added later on another track, and then erased, but the actual song as heard on the album is by Dylan alone.

  BOB DYLAN’S DREAM

  The last song recorded for the Freewheelin’ album, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ offers the most telling indication of just how fast Bob Dylan was maturing as a person, and of how rapidly his attitudes were changing. A wistful reverie of lost youth, the song finds Dylan, not yet 22, looking back on the innocent idealism of his teenage years with the world-weary sadness of one apparently much older.

  Like Dickens in A Christmas Carol, Dylan uses a dream to observe his former self and his friends “talkin’ and a-jokin’,” having fun, chewing the fat and putting the world to rights with the blithe certitude of youth. His loss, he realizes, is twofold: not only has the easy-going innocence of those days passed, but the convictions once held so firmly—“It was all that easy to tell wrong from right”—as issues of simple black and white clarity have blurred into infinite shades of gray complexity.

  Dylan claims, in the liner-notes, that the inspiration for the song came from a conversation he had with the singer Oscar Brown Jr. one night in Greenwich Village, though he carried the idea around in his head for some while before it took on a more concrete form. Dylan’s several return journeys to Minnesota before and after the release of his first album undoubtedly helped crystallize the theme of the song, as he realized the disparate paths taken by himself and his old friends from Hibbing and the Dinkytown campus neighborhood of Minneapolis.

  “It was obvious he’d grown,” recalled his country-blues chum Spider John Koerner after one such visit. “He was friendly and all that, but it was obvious he was into something stronger than we got into. You could see it, something forceful, something coming off.” By summer of 1962, old folkie friends like Tony Glover, Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake, who published the Minneapolis folk magazine Little Sandy Review, were chiding Dylan about his new protest-song direction, suggesting he should try and strike a balance between his new style and his older, traditional style, and though he was already feeling used by certain civil rights organizations, Dylan clearly felt his Minnesota friends were being left behind.

  A year later, the gap was growing wider still, as he made clear in a promotional appearance for his forthcoming album on April 26 on Chicago’s WFMT radio station where he was interviewed by Studs Terkel about his life and work. Asked about childhood friends, Dylan replied: “They still seem to be the same old way… I can just tell by conversation that they still have a feeling that isn’t really free… They still have a feeling that’s… tied up in the town, with their parents, in the newspapers that they read which go out to maybe 5,000 people. They don’t have to go out of town. Their world’s really small.”

  Dylan’s world, by contrast, was growing larger all the time, as demonstrated by the melody he appropriated for ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ from the traditional British folk ballad ‘The Franklin’, which Dylan had heard performed by the English folk singer Martin Carthy while visiting London in December 1962.

  OXFORD TOWN

  After the serious, sometimes angry tone taken on social matters earlier on the album, ‘Oxford Town’ is shorter and sweeter in style, if not in subject matter, offering a jaunty, hootenanny singalong treatment of a specific civil rights issue: the violent struggle for the registration of the first black person at the University Of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) in September 1962.

  After winning a Federal court ruling allowing him to register at the university, James Meredith was denied entry to the university registrar’s building by demagogic state governor Ross Barnett, who was attempting to ride the tide of resentment rolling through the South at the imposition of what Southerners saw as Yankee directives aimed at breaking their spirit. Attorney General Robert Kennedy inquired whether Barnett would make a deal to allow Meredith to register, and was informed, “I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.” Mississippi, Kennedy pointed out, had to obey, being part of the United States, to which Barnett responded, “We have been a part of the United States, but I don’t know whether we are or not.” “Oh,” asked Kennedy, “are you getting out of the Union?”

  He wasn’t, but the idea clearly appealed to Barnett, who made a strident speech in defense of the principle of segregation on the pitch at half-time of the Ole Miss–Kentucky football game on September 29, as he announced to roars of appreciation that he loved Mississippi, her people and her “customs”—a veiled reference to racism. At the same time, he was indeed cutting a deal with the Kennedys, who had threatened to make the negotiations pub
lic on national Television. Meredith, he suggested, could be registered late on Sunday night, September 30; and so, while 300 federal marshals acted as decoys, surrounding the administration building, that evening the black would-be student was smuggled into a campus dormitory. The double-crossing Barnett then announced that the defenders of the Southern way of life had been overpowered, triggering the build-up of an angry mob.

  That night, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech urging the students to comply with the law: “The honor of your university and state are in the balance,” he said. “Let us preserve both the law and the peace and then, healing those wounds that are within, we can turn to the greater crises that are without, and stand united as one people in our pledge to man’s freedom.”

  Stirring words these may have been, they made little impression on the white students who were, even as he spoke, pelting stones at the federal marshals, who responded with tear-gas. Reluctantly, Kennedy called out the National Guard, but not before the racist students had been joined by older rioters who brought guns, with which they shot 30 marshals and bystanders, killing two people. In all, 300 people were wounded. The battle raged all night but by dawn it was, literally, academic: James Meredith had been registered as a student at Ole Miss. Not, of course, that deeply ingrained racist attitudes were changed overnight: the troops remained in Oxford until Meredith graduated in the summer of 1963.

  The stand-off became one of the emblematic events of the civil rights struggle, and Dylan’s rapid response to it—the song was first published in the November 1962 issue of Broadside magazine—illustrates the journalistic efficacy of the topical protest song. As he was recording it in early December, John Hammond was trying to persuade Don Law, head of Columbia’s Nashville operation, that Dylan ought to be recording with the hot musicians down in Nashville. “You have to come up and hear this Dylan kid,” he told Law, who dropped by the studio just as Dylan was doing ‘Oxford Town’. After listening a while, Law turned to Hammond and said, “My God, John, you can never do this kind of thing in Nashville. You’re crazy!”

  TALKIN’ WORLD WAR III BLUES

  One of the last songs to be recorded for the Freewheelin’ album, it seems likely that this talking blues was written to replace the ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ which had so frightened the Columbia executives. If this is true, the result is very much a net gain: partly improvised in the studio, this is a far superior piece to its bigot-baiting predecessor, whose narrow-focus concerns lay more in the past of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts than the more pressing problems of the Sixties. ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’, by comparison, zeroed in on a couple of more pertinent contemporary issues: America’s growing fascination with psychoanalysis that had enabled Alfred Hitchcock to have a hit movie (Psycho) based on a specious psychoanalytic theme; and the looming specter of nuclear annihilation, which would soon be coming to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was also room left in the song for a few offhand side-swipes at things like the gratuitous materialism of automobile adverts (“Cadillac… good car to drive after a war”), and the pitiful state of Tin Pan Alley pop, which was rapidly approaching its nadir at the time (between January and April 1963, when this track was recorded, such giants as Steve Lawrence, Paul & Paula, The Rooftop Singers and Little Peggy March had topped the American charts). The communist witch-hunt theme of ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ was telescoped into a one-line aside, which is just about what it deserved.

  CORRINA, CORRINA

  First registered as ‘Corrine Corrina’ by Bo Chatman, Mitchell Parish and J.M.Williams in 1932, this lilting blues had been recorded several times by such artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson and most notably on several occasions by Big Joe Turner, before its revival in the early Sixties.

  Dylan’s version is of a completely different stripe from Turner’s good-natured R&B swing, not least through the addition of a verse about having “a bird that whistles… a bird that sings,” adapted from Robert Johnson’s ‘Stones In My Passway’. Dylan was at the time clearly fascinated by the mercurial Johnson—an earlier, unreleased solo take of the same song also featured fragments from the legendary bluesman’s ‘Me And The Devil Blues’ and ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, too. Subsequently, he attributed the song’s style to another, more mellifluous blues legend, Lonnie Johnson (no relation to Robert), who shares with T-Bone Walker the pioneer status of “inventor of the electric blues.”

  “I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working and I must say he greatly influenced me,” Bob admitted later. “You can hear it in ‘Corrina, Corrina’—that’s pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him and sometimes he’d let me play with him.”

  The song features one of Dylan’s more beguiling vocal performances, a wistful lamentation in which the depths of his heartbreak are signaled by the gentle falsetto catch in the throat that recurs in the last line of each verse. The inspiration is obviously Suze’s absence. The album version is all that resulted from three otherwise largely unproductive sessions with a full backing band, although another take, marked by a wheeze of harmonica on the intro and a more strident harmonica solo in the break, was released prior to the album, as the B-side of ‘Mixed Up Confusion’.

  HONEY, JUST ALLOW ME ONE MORE CHANCE

  Coming toward the end of a largely downbeat album of protest songs and lovelorn blues, this jaunty adaptation of a song originally written by the Texan country bluesman Henry Thomas offers a more light-hearted, breezy expression of Dylan’s pain over his absent woman. It’s a swaggering performance, which best exemplifies Dylan’s understanding of the blues as a means of cathartic healing, as explained in the sleevenote to Freewheelin’: “What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat.”

  I SHALL BE FREE

  First recorded for the November 1962 issue of Broadside magazine, this comic talking blues trifle closes the album almost as an afterthought, as if the stage performer in Dylan realizes how intense the album is as a whole, and wants to “leave ’em laughing.” He wouldn’t be so concerned to do this on later records, but here he goofs around with a cast that includes Yul Brynner, Charles De Gaulle, President Kennedy and several of the world’s most beautiful women, to no particular end. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, this light-hearted account of Dylan’s womanizing does, however, prefigure some of his later work in its tone of blithe nonsense: for one who was being increasingly painted as the serious young spokesman of a generation, Dylan seems determined in this song to keep open his options on different modes of meaning. Or in this case, meaninglessness.

  THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

  In the few short months between the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in May 1963 and The Times They Are A-Changin’ in January of 1964, Bob Dylan became the hottest property in American music, stretching the boundaries of what had previously been viewed as a largely collegiate folk music audience. His third album would establish him as the undisputed king of protest music, even if as he was being crowned, Dylan was beginning to experience grave misgivings about both that type of song, fame in general and his own position as reluctant leader of a movement—misgivings which grew when, as he was recording The Times They Are A-Changin’ that November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. From this point onwards, he would be harder to pin down, both in his songs and in person. “Being noticed can be a burden,” he explained later. “Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”

  There would be significant changes on the personal front, too. Following his first liaison with Joan Baez following the Monterey Folk Festival, rumors quickly spread about the nature of their relationship, placing further stress on his already strained relations with Suze, though she initially doubted that his ego would cope with Baez’s fame. “Bobby couldn’t lo
ve Joan Baez,” she told friends. “He couldn’t love anybody that big!”

  For both parties, this new affiliation was probably motivated as much by career considerations as anything more romantic, blossoming later into a more emotional or sexual connection. For Dylan, the advantages of teaming up with the Queen of Folk were obvious, given that her reputation and audience were both bigger than his; for her part, Baez recognized songwriting genius when she heard it, and she had heard it when her manager sat her down and made her listen to an acetate of demos Dylan had recorded for his publishers, Witmark. This, she realized, was a talent that far outstripped all his contemporaries. “He wrote songs that hadn’t been written yet,” she said later. “There aren’t very many good protest songs. They’re usually overdone. The beauty of Bobby’s stuff is its understatement.”

  The Newport Folk Festival, held over the weekend of July 26-28, 1963, was effectively Bob Dylan’s coronation. He dominated the gathering, being name-checked constantly as performers covered his songs, and made several appearances of his own—a solo slot on the Friday night, followed by a group encore of ‘We Shall Overcome’; a topical-song workshop event on the Saturday; and a guest slot during Joan’s Sunday performance to duet on ‘With God On Our Side’, followed by another group encore, this time of ‘This Land Is Your Land’. Every mention of his name was applauded by the audience, eager to acclaim the new star. Meanwhile, backstage and back at the Victory Motel where a coterie of young performers were staying, Dylan had begun to take on the character of a star, strolling around playing with a bullwhip which his rowdy friend Geno Foreman had brought him. It was as if he were assuming command of the genre, cracking the whip on the old guard.