Although he appears as an heir of the founding fathers of blues and country music (from the Appalachian tradition), Bob Dylan modernized both styles, both musically and through their themes, which often reflect current events (the civil rights movement, the Cold War). His intellectual approach surprises people because it was based on the Bible, the French symbolists, and the writers of the Beat generation, while being inspired by total contempt for political correctness and an innate sense of the absurd. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan? The work of a true romantic!
Three songs on the album are ballads that relate to the ups and downs of a love affair: probably “Girl from the North Country,” definitely “Down the Highway,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which is a chronicle of the predicted breakup.
Contrary to the preceding album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan quickly became successful. In barely four weeks, it sold ten thousand copies before reaching twenty-second place on the Billboard charts in 1963, and in 1964, first place in the United Kingdom!
The Cover
Once again, Don Hunstein, along with Bill James, photographed Dylan for the album. After trying portraits in the apartment where he lived with Suze Rotolo at 161 West Fourth Street in New York, Don suggested taking pictures outdoors. Despite the cold winter weather, Bob, who was very concerned about his appearance, chose a buckskin jacket that was totally inappropriate for the weather. This is how, at the corner of Jones Street and West Fourth Street, Dylan, frozen stiff, was immortalized holding Suze. “In some outtakes it’s obvious that we were freezing,” she said. “Certainly Bob was, in that thin jacket. But image was all.”14 This record cover was a turning point in the early sixties, an era that would go through real social upheavals. “It is one of those cultural markers that influenced the look of album covers precisely because of its casual down-home spontaneity and sensibility,” she explained. “Most album covers were carefully staged and controlled, to terrific effect on the Blue Note jazz album covers… and to not-so-great-effect on the perfectly posed and clean-cut pop and folk albums.”14
The Recording
Barely five months went by between the last session of the first album (November 22, 1961) and the first session of the second (April 24, 1962). But this time around, there were eight sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, spread over nearly a year (April 1962 to April 1963). Dylan recorded no less than thirty-six songs altogether, but only kept thirteen for this album, and one for his first single (“Mixed Up Confusion”). On July 13, he signed a contract with Witmark Music. Artie Mogull, who had to greet him, remembered, “What I am proud of is that unlike my colleague, I was listening to the lyrics. When Dylan started singing ‘How many roads…’ I was moved. I do not recall what other songs he sang that day, but I said, OK, I am in.”5
The production of this second work brought to light the conflict between John Hammond and Albert Grossman. As soon as Grossman became a manager (in May 1962), he took charge of Dylan’s career and tried everything to separate him from Columbia and from John Hammond specifically. He believed he had found his loophole when he discovered his “protégé” was a minor when he signed his contract with the record company, but Columbia’s lawyers soon pointed out to him that the songwriter had returned to the studio several times since May 1962, the month when he turned twenty-one, and that the contract therefore could not be canceled. Howard Sounes, Dylan’s biographer, wrote, “The two men could not have been more different. Hammond was a WASP aesthete, so relaxed during recording sessions that he sat with feet up, reading the New Yorker. Grossman was a Jewish entrepreneur with a shady background, hustling to become a millionaire.”15
Once Dylan returned from England, Grossman did, however, get the executives of the record company to fire John Hammond. Columbia then turned over Bob Dylan to a young African-American jazz producer named Tom Wilson. “I didn’t even particularly like folk music,” Wilson admitted to Michael Watts. “I’d been recording Sun Ra and Coltrane… I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. [Dylan] played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted.”15 Apart from this new producer, two other sound engineers also appeared: Stanley Tonkel and Fred Catero.
As The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was almost ready, the album included four songs that did not appear in the final version: “Gamblin’ Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand (Rambling Gambling Willie),” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Rocks and Gravel,” and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” This last song, which mocked the members of the John Birch Society by making them look like idiotic anticommunists, caused problems for Columbia. It was also the song that Dylan wished to perform when he appeared on the famous Ed Sullivan Show, but CBS balked. Furious, Dylan then refused to appear on the TV show. Suze Rotolo remembered, “He called me from the rehearsal studio in a fit. With remnants of McCarthy-era political censorship still in place in 1963, Bob Dylan refused to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. That was that.”14 Albert Grossman, being an expert negotiator, then forged a compromise that satisfied everybody: the controversial song was pulled from the album, but, on the other hand, Dylan could replace “Rambling Gambling Willie,” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” and “Rocks and Gravel” with new songs he had just recorded and with which he was more satisfied: “Masters of War,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”
Technical Details
The recording material was basically the same as for the first album, but the voice microphone—the famous RCA Type-77 DX—was replaced by the equally good Neumann U67, and a Beyer M160 was sometimes used for the guitar.
Instruments
Forever faithful to his Gibson J-50, Dylan used it in the sessions of his second album. It finally “disappeared” during 1963 and was replaced by the famous Gibson Nick Lucas Special (but not for this record). His guitar playing improved, and from then on he used finger-picking techniques on songs such as “Girl from the North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” As for the harmonicas, he played four different keys: D, G, A, and B flat.
The instruments used by the studio musicians accompanying Dylan on “Mixed Up Confusion” and “Corrina, Corrina” are not detailed but nevertheless guitarist Bruce Langhorne used a Martin acoustic connected to a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
The original pressing of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan included the four songs pulled from the official version. This record is extremely rare today.
A Note
During the recording sessions for his second album, on August 2, 1962, Robert Allen Zimmerman officially changed his name to Bob Dylan.
Blowin’ In The Wind
Bob Dylan / 2:46
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: July 9, 1962
Technical Team
Producer: John Hammond
Sound Engineers: George Knuerr and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
As surprising as it may seem, Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in just ten minutes on April 16, 1962. He was in a coffee shop, the Commons, opposite the Gaslight, the mythical center of the folk scene in the heart of Greenwich Village, where not only Dylan but also Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano, and Bruce Springsteen, among others, got their start. In 2004, when CBS newsman Ed Bradley asked Dylan about the speed with which he wrote, Dylan replied honestly: “It came from… that wellspring of creativity.”6 To Scorsese, he also said that regardless of where he was—in the subway, a coffee shop, “sometimes talking to someone”—he could be hit by inspiration. It was an exceptional period, and many years later he tried in vain to re-create it.
David Blue, a musician who also spent some time in Greenwich Village, gives his version of that day, April 16, 1962: “Dylan and I had been killing the latter part of a Monday afternoon drinking coffee… About five o’clock, Bob pulled out his guitar and a paper
and pencil. He began to strum some chords and fool with some lines he had written for a new song. Time passed and he asked me to play the guitar for him so he could figure out the rhymes with greater ease. We did this for an hour or so until he was satisfied. The song was “Blowin’ in the Wind.”16 They immediately decided to perform the new song for Gil Turner who was at Gerde’s Folk City. Turner was one of the MCs for folk evenings in Greenwich Village clubs—what were then called “hootenannies.” During the intermission, Turner met Dylan in the basement to hear Dylan’s new song. “Bob sang it out with great passion,” said David Blue. “When he finished there was silence all around. Gil Turner was stunned.”16 Immediately, he wanted to sing the melody to his audience and asked Dylan to show him the chords and the song. He went back onstage to perform it for the public at Gerde’s. “‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I’d like to sing a new song by one of our great songwriters. It’s hot off the pencil and here it goes.’”16 At the end of the performance, the audience stood and applauded wildly. David Blue: “Bob was leaning against the bar near the back smiling and laughing.”16 This title became an anthem of hope and peace, and marked a huge leap in Dylan’s songwriting career.
Listening to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” there is a profound spirituality—a philosophical spirituality, since with Dylan the power of the spirit will always be more important than material or religious spirituality. The songwriter seems to have been inspired by images in the book of Ezekiel to create this message: “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? Yes, n’how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?” Dylan explicitly refers to the Old Testament: “The word of the LORD came to me: Oh mortal, you dwell among the rebellious breed. They have eyes to see but see not; ears to hear, but hear not.”
The melody, as Dylan admitted, was musically based on “No More Auction Block,” a spiritual that he heard Delores Dixon sing every night with the New World Singers at Gerde’s Folk City. “I didn’t really know if that song was good or bad,” he told Scorsese. “It just felt right… I needed to sing it in that language, which is a language that I hadn’t heard before.”6 And the power of this language was such that he would shine in future protest events, such as on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington, when “Blowin’ in the Wind” was sung by Peter, Paul and Mary on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Mary Travers recalls: “If you could imagine the March on Washington with Martin Luther King and singing that song in front of a quarter of a million people, black and white, who believed they could make America more generous and compassionate in a nonviolent way, you begin to know how incredible that belief was.”17 This song continues to carry his message of hope beyond the sixties. Thus, in 1985 at the end of the Live Aid festival, Dylan, along with Keith Richards and Ron Wood, performed it once again for the youth of the world, their words carried by the wind.
“But I didn’t really know that it had any kind of anthemic quality or anything,” said Dylan to Scorsese.6 Early in his career, he refused the label of a “prophet,” even though people wanted him to be one. Already in June 1962, in the magazine Sing Out!, he says, “There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind.” “Blowin’ in the Wind” poses a series of rhetorical questions: three stanzas of eight lines each, each line asking a question for which the answer (always the same) is contained in the chorus. Dylan discusses the archetypal images of protest songs: equality, persecution, racism, violence, indifference, selfishness—universal themes that resonated in 1962 amid the Cold War and the struggle for the recognition of civil rights. But he only asks questions and gives no answers. As an artist, his mission is to raise awareness, not to reassure his audience by serving them ready-made truths on a silver platter. This is precisely what gives the song its timeless character.
Long before the song became the unavoidable anthem, a number of artists covered “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The New World Singers were first. But it was Albert Grossman who brought the song to the vocal group Peter, Paul and Mary, whom he also managed. Peter Yarrow, one of the singers and the guitarist of the group, said: “Albert thought that the big song was ‘Don’t Think Twice’ [which eventually ended up on the B-side of the single]. That, he said, was the hit. We went crazy over ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’17 Thus the song became world famous when Peter, Paul and Mary’s version came out as a single—and what a success! Released in June 1962, “Blowin’ in the Wind” (with the B-side “Flora” from the 1963 album Moving) sold over 320,000 copies in just the first week of release, one of the fastest Warner successes. On July 13, it reached number 2 on the Billboard charts.
“Blowin’ in the Wind” is also the first song on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which went on sale on May 27, 1963, three days after the songwriter’s twenty-second birthday and the day after his triumphant performance at the Newport Folk Festival. In August, the song came out as a single, with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” as the B-side. However, it never made the Billboard charts. It was not until 1994 that “Blowin’ in the Wind” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2004, it was listed as fourteenth among the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” according to Rolling Stone magazine.
Production
“I’ve always seen it and heard it that way, it’s just taken me… I just did it on my acoustical guitar when I recorded it, which didn’t really make it sound spiritual. But the feeling, the idea, was always, you know, that’s where it was coming from, so now I’m doing it in full like a spiritual,” said Dylan to Marc Rowland in an interview in 1978.18 This song immediately captivates the listener by the memories it creates and the attention that it requires. The work done on the arrangement bore results, as no reverb is heard in the voice or even the guitar part. Dylan had mastered his Gibson J-50; his beat is regular; there is no more approximation. Similarly, all nervousness and aggressiveness have disappeared, and a communicative calm prevails. The voice is soft. With his harmonica (in D) and three chords, this recording is an exemplar of simplicity and efficiency. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was recorded in three takes between 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. during the third recording session for the album. The last take served as the master.
PLAGIARISM OR NOT PLAGIARISM?
During the months following its release, “Blowin’ in the Wind” was at the heart of a controversy that had nothing to do with music. A high school student from Millburn, New Jersey, named Lorre Wyatt claimed to be the real composer of the song, which he said he sold for a thousand dollars. Several students even stated they heard Wyatt singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” before the singles by Peter, Paul and Mary and Dylan came out. This claim was taken very seriously, and Newsweek magazine repeated it in November 1963. It was only in 1974 that Lorre Wyatt admitted having lied to impress the other members of his group, the Millburnaires.
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
If you have the stereo version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” you can notice that in the right channel there is a “hole” in the sound of the guitar that appears at exactly 1:37. It may be a defect in the band, an overload on the compressor/limiter, or even an inadvertent bump to the microphone. Or is it the wind?
COVERS
Starting with the New World Singers and Peter, Paul and Mary, hundreds of artists inserted “Blowin’ in the Wind” into their repertoire. These include Marlene Dietrich (1963), Joan Baez (1963), Marianne Faithfull (1964), Sam Cooke (1964), and Stevie Wonder (who reached tenth place on the charts), as well as Judy Collins, Elvis Presley, Neil Young, and Ziggy Marley.
Girl From The North Country
Bob Dylan / 3:21
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: April 23, 1963
Technical Team
Producer: John Hammond
Sound Engineers: George Knuerr and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
The song “
Girl from the North Country” was written after Bob Dylan’s trip to London in December 1962. There he met several artists from the folk renaissance, including Bob Davenport and Martin Carthy. Carthy greatly expanded the musical knowledge of the American songwriter by teaching him various traditional British ballads for which he had written new arrangements. One of these was “Scarborough Fair,” a song that was covered four years later by Simon & Garfunkel.
Taking inspiration from Martin Carthy’s arrangement of “Scarborough Fair,” Bob Dylan returned to the United States and wrote this superb love poem. It follows the structure and interrogative beginning of the medieval ballad, but only retains a few words: “Remember me to one who lives there / For she once was a true love of mine,” and it replaces the good town of Scarborough with “If you’re traveling the north country fair / Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline.” Dylan also does not retain the refrain “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,” four aromatic plants with strong symbolism in the Middle Ages, which brought Simon & Garfunkel to fame in October 1966 with their eponymous album.
Who was Bob Dylan thinking of when he wrote and then recorded “Girl from the North Country”? Maybe Echo Helstrom, who had been his girlfriend when he lived in Hibbing. Or perhaps Bonnie Beecher, whom he had also met in Minneapolis, and whom he kept on seeing after he settled in Greenwich Village. But it is more likely his erstwhile girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. Suze had gone to Italy to pursue her studies, leaving Dylan in deep distress. Dylan put the final touches on this superb ballad during his trip to Perugia.
Bob Dylan All the Songs Page 6