Bob Dylan

by Andy Gill

  In itself, that would not have been terribly damaging; indeed, a competent PR person could easily have put a different spin on the story, to make it appear as though kindly Bob was simply trying to protect his family from the corrosive effect of fame (which was probably partly true anyway). But the article also included the rumor—since utterly disproved—about how Dylan had either stolen or bought his most famous song, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, from a New Jersey high school student (see the entry for ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’). Understandably furious, Dylan raged at everyone around him, castigating his parents for talking to Svedburg, and Columbia press officer Billy James (to whom he would not speak for two years) for setting up the interview. He raged about journalists in general, who would henceforth be given as rough and unrevealing a ride as possible whenever he was forced to communicate with them. “Man, they’re out to kill me,” he complained bitterly. “What’ve they got against me?”

  His immediate response, though, was to seek vengeance the only way he knew how: through words. He wrote the ninth of the album’s “11 Outlined Epitaphs” liner-note poems, in which he set out to ridicule magazines in general—“I do not care t’ be made an oddball/bouncin’ past reporters’ pens”—and pointedly describes an interview exchange in which the inquisitor sinisterly threatens unspecified rumor as punishment if he refuses to cooperate.

  He also wrote ‘Restless Farewell’, in which he set his face against the “false clock” trying to “tick out [his] time” and obscure his purpose with the “dirt of gossip” and the “dust of rumors”—a clear reference to the Newsweek article—as all the misgivings he was currently experiencing about the direction of his life, his work and his career brimmed over into a wistful adieu to his former friends and foes.

  Five days after the Carnegie Hall concert, on October 31, 1963, another recording session was scheduled specifically to record ‘Restless Farewell’, which was added as the album’s final track—probably at the expense of the vastly superior ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’, which had been recorded the previous week, and which shares its album-closing air of reflective resignation. (If so, it would not be the last time his judgment in such matters would prove fallible, as anyone who has heard his ‘Blind Willie McTell’ would attest.) Nevertheless, it provides a fitting epilogue to Dylan’s protest period, even though he would continue to be viewed predominantly in that light for another year or two. There would be no “finger-pointing” songs on the next album, other than ones aimed at himself.

  ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN

  Dylan’s words were coming home to roost, considerably faster than he had anticipated. By the time The Times They Are A-Changin’ was released in January 1964, he was already feeling estranged from his former self, and the people and events which had influenced him.

  He was becoming increasingly convinced that the quick and easy answers demanded by the protest movement were not answers at all, merely slogans, and that the search for real answers lay within oneself. It was a search, moreover, which raised the possibility that what was needed was not actually answers, but a whole new set of questions. Simply by answering the old questions, he believed, one was already playing on somebody else’s pitch. “Nobody in power,” he told a friend, “has to worry about anybody from the outside… because he’s not in it anyway, and he’s not gonna make a dent. You can’t go around criticizing something you’re not a part of, and hope to make it better.” Accordingly, one could either opt in and criticize, or opt out and keep one’s counsel.

  In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, Dylan had every reason to keep his own counsel. “If somebody really had something to say to help somebody out,” he told friends, “well, obviously, they’re gonna be done away with.” Already scared by the impact of his own mounting fame, Dylan had now found the horrifying justification that rendered his paranoia more than just an egotistical indulgence, that brought the fear on to a very real plane indeed. He needed to get away, he told friends, needed to see more of the world. He had already taken refuge from the public pressures of New York City by spending more and more time at the Woodstock home of his manager Albert Grossman, but now he wanted to travel further afield. “I wanna get out and ramble around,” he told Pete Karman, a journalist friend of Suze’s. “Stop in bars and poolhalls and talk to real people. Talk to farmers, talk to miners. That’s where it’s at. That’s real.”

  Accordingly, a cross-country road trip was set up for February, on which Dylan was accompanied in his new Ford station-wagon by Karman, folk singer Paul Clayton—the one from whom Bob had “borrowed” the melody for ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’—and his new road manager Victor Maimudes, who did the bulk of the driving. Ostensibly underwritten as a promotional tour for Dylan’s new album, the trip quickly turned into a drunken, drugged debauch, Bob’s very own On The Road and Bound For Glory combined, as he was able to compare, first-hand, the virtues of Guthrie’s ethical activism with the thrills of Kerouac’s experientialism.

  From New York, the gang headed to Hazard, Kentucky, where they delivered a stack of donated secondhand clothing to striking miners. They also picked up a package of marijuana that had been mailed ahead to the local post office, the first of several such deliveries; at a cafe, Dylan bought a spice-jar humorously labeled “marijuana,” which, full of dope, was proudly displayed on the car’s dashboard as they sped through the South. The next stop was Flat Rock, outside of Hendersonville, North Carolina, where they visited the poet Carl Sandburg. Though he was difficult to track down—the locals knew Sandburg primarily as a goat farmer, not a poet—they eventually made it to his farm, where Dylan gave him a copy of his new record and spent a short while trying to converse with Sandburg, poet-to-poet, before departing, apparently slightly peeved that the older poet had not heard of him.

  Without the secondhand clothing taking up space, Dylan was able to move into the rear of the station-wagon, which he used as a study, pecking out lyrics on a portable typewriter. Punctuating the trip with occasional performances at places like Emory College, they eventually arrived in New Orleans in the middle of the Mardi Gras celebrations, into which they threw themselves with gusto. Dylan seemed determined to make gestures against the city’s separatist social policies, visiting a black bar, Baby Green’s—where the bartender, not needing trouble with the local police, threw them out—and incurring the wrath of sailors by sharing his bottle of wine with a black performer in the carnival procession. After two nights, they headed off for Denver, where Bob had a concert scheduled, by way of Dallas. As they pulled away from New Orleans, Dylan sat in the back, transforming the magic swirlin’ ship of the carnival procession into ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.

  In Dallas, they wanted to see for themselves the site of Kennedy’s assassination, and were shocked when, while asking for directions to Dealey Plaza, a local said, “You mean where they shot that sonofabitch Kennedy?” Continuing on to Denver, they stopped off to pay respects at Ludlow, Colorado, scene of a legendary labor massacre in 1914 when over 30 striking miners were shot by strike-breaking National Guardsmen. After the Denver gig, they headed across the Rockies, in a hurry to get to California. At one point, Victor gunned the station-wagon past a funeral cortege on a narrow mountain road, only to find a police car at the head of the procession; the resulting confrontation, which they survived by claiming to be a group “like The Kingston Trio” en route to a show, sobered them up quickly.

  After the initial euphoria of the trip had worn off, however, the road took its toll on their nerves. By the time they hauled into the Bay Area for a show at the Berkeley Community Theater, a rift had developed between the non-doper Karman, who increasingly felt as if he was trapped with a trio of lunatics, and the others, who had grown tired of his nit-picking straightness and his habit of sneering at Bob’s poetic imagery, which he thought was meaningless jive-talk. “I was beginning to feel crazy when they were crazy,” he recalled later. “Victor, a freaky nut, and Dylan very weird, and Clayton always high on p
ills—I just had to break away from them.” He was replaced for the final leg of the trip by Bob Neuwirth, an extrovert artist/musician who would become one of Dylan’s closest confidantes over the next few years.

  After the Berkeley show, the portable party moved on to Joan Baez’s place in Carmel, then to Los Angeles, where Bob made a late February appearance on The Steve Allen Show. When he eventually got back to New York, relations between Bob and Suze deteriorated further until, following a furious row one night in March (see entry for ‘Ballad In Plain D’), they finally broke up for keeps. Bob was devastated, but had plenty to occupy his time and thoughts: after a short April concert tour of the North-East, he flew to England in early May, where he played at London’s Royal Festival Hall to a sellout audience that included the Beatles, the Stones and various other members of the new British pop aristocracy, before moving on, via Paris and Berlin, to the Greek village of Vernilya. During his brief holiday there, he wrote many of the songs he would record on Another Side Of Bob Dylan, boiling down his experiences of the last six to nine months into his most personal album yet, a mixture of reactions to his split from Suze and reflections upon his art and position, leavened with a few moments of sharp humor. “There ain’t any finger-pointing songs in here,” he told journalist Nat Hentoff as he was recording the album. “I don’t want to write for people any more—you know, be a spokesman. From now on I want to write from inside of me…”

  Another Side Of Bob Dylan was recorded with remarkable efficiency, in a single session on the evening of June 9, 1964, in order to be ready for the record company’s fall sales conference. Attending the session, besides Dylan, Nat Hentoff and producer Tom Wilson, were a handful of Bob’s buddies, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, with whom he recorded an (unused) early version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Working his way steadily through a couple of bottles of Beaujolais, Dylan got seven songs down between 7.30 and 10.30, and had completed the entire album by 1.30 in the morning, finishing up with the song most indicative of his new mood—‘My Back Pages’.

  Wilson, who had tried to drum some microphone technique into Bob—to get him to stop moving around so much—knew that he had to capture as much as he could as early as he could, and was reluctant to press Dylan beyond three takes of any song. Though he had not known exactly what Bob was going to record that evening, Wilson was aware of the changes that were occurring in Dylan’s writing. “Those early albums gave people the wrong idea,” he told Hentoff. “Basically, he’s in the tradition of all lasting folk music… he’s not a singer of protest so much as he is a singer of concern about people.” And the people concerned here, the songs suggested, were rather closer to home than on his previous releases. “The songs are insanely honest,” Dylan later admitted, “not meanin’ to twist any head, and written only for the reason that I myself, me alone, wanted and needed to write them. I’ve conceded the fact that there is no understanding of anything—at best, just winks of the eye—and that is all I’m looking for now, I guess.”

  The album title, much against Bob’s better judgment, was Wilson’s idea. Dylan felt it was over-stating the obvious, placing too great an emphasis on its implied negation of the ideals of his protest songs. That is certainly how a lot of his old supporters felt when the album was released early in August, a mere seven months after The Times They Are A-Changin’. Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out! magazine, was moved to write an open letter to Bob in the magazine, in which he denigrated Dylan’s new songs as “all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious—maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion.” All, of course, completely true: but what Silber failed to realize was that, years before the notion became common currency, Dylan had effectively made the personal political, too.

  ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO

  Opening the album on a relatively light note, ‘All I Really Want To Do’ provides the listener with the most overt suggestion that there were to be no “finger-pointing” songs this time around: not only is the song about a personal relationship, rather than protesting a more political issue; it’s also downright funny, from the hilariously busy rhyme scheme to the ludicrous falsetto yodel with which Dylan transforms the final word of the title in each chorus. This last effect may have started as a light-hearted parody of Jimmie “Singing Brakeman” Rodgers, a favorite of Bob’s, and taken on a more flamboyant life of its own as the session progressed and the bottles got emptier.

  Compared with most of the other songs on the album that were inspired by the break-up with Suze Rotolo, this is a relatively generous expression of Dylan’s mood, as he tries to convince his girl that there are no ulterior motives to his desire, that he has no intention of attempting to alter or confine her. Yet even as he gives these fulsome assurances, the sheer clutter of disavowed intentions in each verse suggests the over-bearing, domineering side of Dylan which Suze found so restricting. It’s almost as if he’s trying to preempt her complaints, rattling off up to nine examples in each verse of things he knows she might object to, before she can voice those objections. Ultimately, the song denies itself.

  Nevertheless, the following year ‘All I Really Want To Do’ would furnish a sleek, albeit less successful, follow-up to The Byrds’ massive cover of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, and the same year it also provided a winsome enough start to Cher’s solo career.

  BLACK CROW BLUES

  A moody, stalking number, ‘Black Crow Blues’ represents the first time that Dylan played piano on one of his records—quite a surprise for those who considered him a guitar troubadour, pure and simple. Performing on an old upright piano, Dylan’s technique is shaky in places, particularly in the third verse, as he offers a simplified version of the stride piano style of such boogie giants as Cow Cow Davenport and Meade “Lux” Lewis. What makes the track all the more unusual are the punctuating stabs of harmonica which he inserts into the second and third verses and between the penultimate and final verses, stressing the already heavily-accented syncopation.

  It seems second nature now, but up until this point in time Dylan’s audience had regarded his use of “blues” as referring more to his lyric modes than to the music itself, and this sudden outbreak of R&B rhythms in the folk arena came as something of a shock in 1964, and provided dyed-in-the-wool folkies and committed protesters alike with further misgivings to set alongside their more general complaints about Dylan’s new direction. Lyrically, it’s the most basic of responses to his emotional situation following the split with Suze, the first verse’s reference to a “long-lost lover” he wishes would tell him “what it’s all about” being followed in subsequent verses by further non-specific expressions of his resultant distraction.

  SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT

  The shortest song on the record, ‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ offers a slight counterbalance to the album’s generally bitter tone as regards love. Where songs like ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, ‘All I Really Want To Do’ and ‘To Ramona’ find Dylan struggling with women whose responses and demands are fatally mediated by modern neuroses and external pressures, here he is exultant, completely fulfilled, swept off his feet by the “wildcat charms” of an earthier, more primal female force who, the imagery suggests, responds with physical immediacy and a rather welcome absence of psychological debate.

  After singing the song at the recording session, he asked a friend if he understood it. The friend nodded enthusiastically, whereupon Dylan responded with a laugh, “Well, I didn’t!” It doesn’t look as though the song became any clearer for him, either: in the version published in Lyrics 1962–1985, the penultimate lines of both the second and last verses are mysteriously altered from those sung, the turbulent (and clearly superior) “I’m nearly drowning” and “where you surround me” replaced by the more prosaic “I got to know, babe” and “will I be touching you”—surely a mistake?

  CHIMES OF FREEDOM

  A pivotal moment in Dylan’s songwriting, ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ is the song which first signals his intention to move away from
straight protest songs to more allusive “chains of flashing images.” It’s his own Tempest, a compelling account of a visionary epiphany experienced during an electric storm, rendered in a hyper-vivid poetic style heavily influenced by the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. As Dylan and his companion dive into a doorway to avoid the thunderous downpour, a church bell begins tolling, and the synaesthetic combination of these two elemental forces—the sound and the fury—inspires in him a vision of universal redemption.

  The song is Dylan’s Sermon On The Mount: having spent the last couple of years supporting this or that specific cause, his chimes of freedom here toll for all of life’s downtrodden and unjustly treated folk—unmarried mothers, refugees, outcasts, the disabled, conscientious objectors, the unfairly jailed and “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse/And for every hung-up person in the whole wide Universe.” It’s a veritable army of underdogs and peaceniks in uplifting collusion, an anthem as generous and inclusive as ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ was divisive and exclusive.

  ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ was written during the cross-country road trip of February 1964. Another song begun on that same trip was ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, a version of which was also recorded (though not used) at the Another Side… session, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott adding backing vocals on the choruses; it’s not difficult to see, in both songs, vivid echoes of the Mardi Gras festival which Dylan and his pals had entered into with such drunken gusto a few days before, transmuted into images of dynamic salvation through a process analogous to the prolonged disordering of the senses which Rimbaud recommended as the means whereby a poet might become a seer.