Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  [1] Of the eighteen songs Dylan recorded at the sessions on the 20th and 22nd, some nine were previously performed at the Recital Hall.

  [2] The so-called Minneapolis Hotel Tape was recorded at Bonnie Beecher’s apartment, euphemistically referred to as the Beecher Hotel.

  { 1962: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan }

  Based solely on sheer quantity of songs, 1962 still remains Dylan’s most prolific year as a songwriter—he wrote around fifty songs in this twelve-month period, including songs as enduring as "Blowin’ in the Wind," "Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright," "Ballad of Hollis Brown," and "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall." It was the year when a lyrical gift only occasionally evident in 1961 blossomed into a veritable garden of earthly delights.

  The year saw his craftsmanship undergo at least four transformations, each marked by a breakthrough song of its own. It began with half a dozen demos cut for Leeds Music, in the midst of which resides the remarkable "Ballad for a Friend," evidence that he was starting to tap into some real roots. This was followed in early April by "Blowin’ in the Wind," a song he was initially uncertain about, but which quickly acquired a momentum of its own. In August came his most personal song to date—"Tomorrow Is a Long Time"—his first serious attempt to address heartbreak from an adult perspective.

  And in late September he shattered the template for popular song forever with the startlingly ambitious "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall." The following month he appeared on the front cover of Sing Out! magazine, heralded as the finest young songwriter to have emerged since Guthrie. But he still had yet to complete his second, all-original album. To do that he would need to soak up almost as much from a single month immersed in the London folk scene as he had from two years in New York.

  {42} BALLAD FOR A FRIEND

  {43} POOR BOY BLUES

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Both recorded for Leeds Music, New York, January 1962.

  In Chronicles, Dylan gives his own account of the circumstances surrounding the six songs he recorded for music publisher Leeds Music, applying the usual modicum of veracity, liberally sprinkled with disingenuous salt. As he writes in this memoir:

  I didn’t have many songs, [so] I was making up some compositions on the spot, rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind—slapping a title on it. . . . I rattled off lines and verses based on the stuff I knew. . . . [I’d] start out with something, some kind of line written in stone and then turn it with another line—make it add up to something else than it originally did.

  It may be a fair description of Love and Theft, but not of the Leeds Music demos. Half the songs he demoed were drawn from his fall 1961 set, while just a single song, "Standing on the Highway," can be applied to the above description.

  They may not have been made up "on the spot," but of the four[1] Leeds Music demos not part of his 1961 repertoire, just one would be recorded at second-album sessions in April, which does rather suggest he hardly lived with the songs he gave to Levy’s little company. Yet there is some gold in them thar hills. "Ballad for a Friend" and "Poor Boy Blues" both demonstrate a heightened craftsmanship, even while Dylan consciously reverted to that most restrictive of templates—the twelve-bar blues. Neither song is symptomatic of someone who "rattled off lines and verses based on stuff I knew," a description that does fit the songs left at the MacKenzies the summer before.

  On "Ballad for a Friend," perhaps for the first time, every line is weighed in the balance. The story builds incrementally, offset by the kind of accomplished bottleneck Dylan was now threatening to make a personal trademark. Its tragic conclusion reveals that this former friend has been found dead on a Utah road. Originally called "Reminiscence Blues," the references to "watching trains roll through the town" and days spent among "lakes and streams and mines so free" suggest that a real nostalgia for the North Country has been fueled by his recent trip home. Though we know of no "friend" found dead on a Utah road, shortly after Dylan left Hibbing his lifelong friend, Larry Kegan, had an accident in Florida that left him permanently wheelchair-bound. According to Dylan’s mother, "This was a real tragedy in Bobby’s life."

  "Poor Boy Blues" is another three-line whiff of the blues. Dylan is learning to rely on the listener’s imagination to fill in the gaps, each of the nine verses ending with the narrator querying, "Can’t you hear me cryin’, Hm, hm, hm." What has reduced the po’ boy to tears is never elucidated, but there is no doubting Dylan’s commitment to the song, or the blues. If this represents rattling "off lines and verses based on the stuff I knew," it was a necessary part of the ongoing reinvention of Robert Zimmerman.

  Over a six-month period, he would become as comfortable with the blues’ own concordance of commonplaces and conventions as he was already with its folk counterpart. For now, he wanted to make the blues the focal point of the second album—hence its working title, Bob Dylan’s Blues (before he had a song of the same name). As he began to try on assorted blues personae for size, one figure loomed as large as Guthrie had in the folk-troubadour realm: the late, great Robert Johnson.

  Note: The transcript of "Ballad for a Friend" used in the 1965 songbook Bob Dylan Himself and all subsequent collections of lyrics has the final line as "Listenin’ to them church bells tone." Dylan mumbles the last word—probably because, although tone does rhyme with moan, the word should surely be toll, à la "Barbara Allen," that stalwart of his 1962 repertoire.

  {44} DEATH OF ROBERT JOHNSON

  {45} STANDING ON THE HIGHWAY

  #45—Published lyric: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Recorded for Leeds Music, New York, January 1962.

  The last song recorded that January afternoon at the Leeds offices also qualifies as Dylan’s "Song to Robert." "Standing on the Highway" was a homage that relied heavily on the dead man’s modus operandi. Dylan had been introduced to his latest hero by producer John Hammond. Robert Johnson provided the last piece in a mosaic of folk and blues that would serve as a perennial backdrop to all Dylan would build, brick by lyrical brick. Everything he had been writing in the lead-up to the November 1961 sessions became straws in the wind, as he was swept up by a new enthusiasm. The Dylan of Chronicles again defies any true chronicler to call him a liar when recounting his introduction to The King of the Delta Blues:

  John Hammond put a contract down in front of me—the standard one they gave to any new artist. . . . Before leaving that day, he’d [also] given me a couple of records that were not yet available. . . . [One] was called King of the Delta Blues by a singer named Robert Johnson. . . . Hammond said I should listen to it, that this guy could "whip anybody." . . . From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. . . . I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren’t customary blues songs. They were perfected pieces—each song contained four or five verses, every couplet intertwined with the next but in no obvious way. They were so utterly fluid. . . . If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down.

  One would love to buy into Dylan’s account, which manages to convey Johnson’s impact with a vivid immediacy. He is clearly suggesting he heard Johnson in September 1961, when he first talked turkey with Hammond. But the absence of even the slightest hint of Johnson’s influence at the Carnegie Recital Hall gig, the November sessions, or on the Minneapolis Hotel Tape raises a big question mark about the timing of his epiphany—though not its impact.

  Given the way the influence of Johnson became omnipresent by the turn of the year, the end of the Bob Dylan sessions is a much more likely date for when Hammond gave Dylan his first "promo" LP. On February 1, 1962, the wonder boy informed Izzy Young he was writing a song about the death of Robert Johnson, a demise
shrouded in more mystery than Christ’s. He probably begged Hammond for more details about the man, but even the esteemed producer knew only the myth—and the few records. Dylan immediately latched onto the legend via Frank Drigg’s sleeve notes. Yet it is unclear whether he ever completed the song. It does not appear on any known recording that winter.

  By the time he mentioned it, Dylan had already written "Standing on the Highway," a self-conscious attempt to rework Johnson’s "Crossroad Blues." Emulating Johnson did not come as easily as emulating Woody. He could play a fine burst of bottleneck, as the December 1961 Hotel Tape avers, but he was no Johnson. And never would be. When performing "Standing on the Highway" on a February radio show with Cynthia Gooding he comes across, rather, as the sorcerer’s apprentice.

  Another key difference between the fledgling folksinger and the mythic persona of Johnson is that the young Dylan who was "Standing on the Highway" was not awaiting the devil or planning to exchange his soul for the unearthly gift with which Johnson was not so much blessed as damned. Underneath he was still Guthrie’s man, prone to imagining he’d "been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too." As he asserted in "My Life in a Stolen Moment," "I made my own depression / rode freight trains for kicks, got beat up for laughs." There he was, wholly steeped in the romance of suffering, continuing to play the poor boy crying down the phone, nine hundred miles from home.

  At this tender age, the idea of suffering for his art held great allure. The reality proved less appealing. As for living the blues, Dylan confessed to Nat Hentoff in 1965: "I just drifted round. I’ve been up a lot of times . . . with no places to go and it’s been very early in the morning and it never fazed me. It was never like, here I am stuck on the highway, bumming down the railroad line, hell and I feel sad." But just hearing Johnson made him feel connected to something still buried in his songwriting soul. Hence that revelatory comment to Cameron Crowe: "Robert Johnson, for me . . . is a deep reality, someone who’s telling me where he’s been, that I haven’t, and what it’s like there—somebody whose life I can feel."

  Commensurate feelings would come, but only with the white heat of experience. When they did he would mine them to the core. For now, he was obliged to confine himself to an inferior rewrite of "Crossroads" and leave it at that. Within months, entire verses from Johnson’s concise canon were popping up in Dylan’s set. Meanwhile Dylan gave his arrangement of "Man of Constant Sorrow," scheduled to be published by his erstwhile music publisher, its own Johnsonesque finale: "It’s a hard, hard road to travel, when you can’t be satisfied / I’ve got a rope that’s hanging o’er me, and the devil’s at my side." Now that is a case of Dylan "rearranging verses to old blues ballads"!

  {46} RAMBLIN’ GAMBLIN’ WILLIE

  Published lyric: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Leeds Music, New York, January 1962; Studio A, NY, April 24, 1962—4 takes [FR ver.1] [TBS—tk.4].

  Robert Johnson was hardly the only romantic figure to loom large in the young Dylan’s psyche. He felt all his heroes should fit one of two criteria: an early death or, in Guthrie’s—and later Rimbaud’s—case, a prolonged disintegration that left one creatively dead. Along with Hank Williams, Lead Belly, James Dean, and Johnny Ace, Johnson lived in a mythopoeic past of Dylan’s own making, where he could be relied on to remain till summoned at will. Dylan now cast around for song characters who could inhabit much the same mythological plain.

  "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie" was Dylan’s first crack at writing an outlaw blues along similar lines to Guthrie’s "Pretty Boy Floyd" or "Jesse James," themselves modeled on the ponderous morality tales-in-verse printed by the British broadside press in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dylan certainly loved his outlaws. As he opines in Chronicles, "Pretty Boy Floyd . . . stirs up an adventurous spirit. Even his name has something to say . . . yet he’s the stuff of real flesh and blood."

  There was another real-life figure that gave Dylan the kind of framework he needed—the Irish highwayman, Willie Brennan. Immortalized in a number of English nineteenth-century broadsides, "Brennan on the Moor" was a figure nightly invoked by those Irish rabble-rousers and Village drinking buddies, the Clancy Brothers. (In fact the song seems to have been far better known in England than in Ireland, its tune being a variant of "The Painful Plough.") Dylan later told Derek Bailey for his TV documentary on the Clancys: "All the legendary people they used to sing about . . . it was as if they’d just existed yesterday.

  . . . I would think of Brennan on the Moor the same way as I would think of Jesse James, you know. They just became very real to me."

  "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie" aims to invoke the same "adventurous spirit" as Brennan. He is a rambler and a gambler, the uncle Dylan hoped he’d had. (He liked to tell people he had an uncle who was a gambler in Vegas. And he did have an uncle living in Vegas, Vernon Stone, but there is no evidence he was a career gambler.) Willie is cast as an American Robin Hood, someone who likes to "spread his money far and wide, to help the sick and poor." There is no question that Dylan sought to idealize such men. He admitted as much to Dave Herman, twenty years later: "I grew up admiring those type of heroes, Robin Hood, Jesse James . . . the person who always kicked against the oppression and had high moral standards. I don’t know if these people I write about have high moral standards, I don’t know if Robin Hood did, but you always assumed they did."

  "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie" also gave Dylan an excuse to play the "dead man’s hand." Back in October 1961 he had told Izzy Young, "Dead man’s hand and Aces and Eights—believe in them. Believe in cards. Plays a lot of cards. It’s time to cash in when you get Aces and Eights." And by December he had added the following verse to Big Joe Williams’s "Baby Please Don’t Go": "Lookin’ down at two cards. . . . One looks like it’s the eight of diamonds / The other looks like it is the ace of spades." The following month the same verse was transposed to "Standing on the Highway," before being introduced to signal Willie’s death. On being gunned down, the gambler drops his cards, displaying this "dead man’s hand," an early manifestation of an enduring belief in the forces of fate. The song became one of just two songs demo-ed for Leeds that Dylan then recorded for his second album. Indeed, up until the recall of that album’s initial pressing, it was destined to appear on Freewheelin’ (the full story of the original Freewheelin’ and the substitution of four tracks by new recordings can be found in Behind The Shades—Take Two).

  {47} TALKIN’ JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY BLUES

  Published lyric: Broadside #1; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;

  Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 24, 1962—3 takes [FR ver.1].

  First known performance: Carnegie Hall Hootenanny, New York, September 22, 1962.

  The most significant song Dylan wrote in January 1962 would prove to be "Talkin’ John Birch," simply because of its appearance in the first issue of a mimeographed magazine produced in New York by Gil Turner and "Sis" Cunningham, concentrating on "topical songs." The goal of Broadside was to create the same kind of political ferment in folk circles that they fondly remembered from the forties. At the time, it was a goal the impressionable Minnesotan shared.

  Written in the now-familiar talkin’ blues idiom, the song picked on a tangible target, the John Birch Society, a right-wing organization that had supported McCarthy’s modern-day witch hunt. The John Birchers were an easy target for potshots from a progressive pen, and Dylan didn’t spare them, suggesting at one point, "We all agree with Hitler’s views / Though he killed six million Jews." Fifteen months later this couplet would get the song yanked from his second album and get him yanked from the Ed Sullivan Show. That, though, was still a lifetime away. Broadside had no such concerns, and gave the song pride of place in its premier issue.

  Dylan, however, did not live with the song long. It does not appear on any of the club tapes from 1962. But when
the song was censored by the producer of the Ed Sullivan Show in May 1963, it became a one-song cause célèbre in folk circles, confirming the capricious nature of corporate America. Dylan thus felt obliged to champion the song in concert. For the next eighteen months it generated whoops of recognition. These latter-day variants tarred the censors with the same brush as "the rest of the Birchnuts." The verses also got a little slicker. The version Dylan gave Izzy Young to mimeograph in May 1963, as part of a protest of the banning of the song, concentrated more on the humor of a one-man "commie" witch hunt and less on the organization, greatly improving at least that aspect:

  I looked high an’ low, under the rug

  Looked in the ol’ bathtub

  Looked in the cracks an’ the radiator

  Even inside the refrigerator.

  You can’t tell nowadays . . .

  But the song was already a relic, and Dylan knew he’d gotta travel on.

  {48} THE DEATH OF EMMETT TILL

  Published lyric: Broadside #16; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;

  Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Cynthia Gooding’s Folksingers Choice, New York, February 11, 1962.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY 24/4/62—1 take; Broadside session, June 1962 [BR].

  For the next eighteen months Dylan proved ever willing to cater to Broadside’s ongoing demands for new songs in a "topical vein," the mimeographed zine receiving the first opportunity to publish such memorable Dylan originals as "Blowin’ in the Wind," "Masters of War," and "Ballad of Hollis Brown." After he left the genre far behind, Dylan would go so far as to claim that he "never wanted to write topical songs . . . [but] in the Village there was a little publication called Broadside, and with a topical song you could get in there. I wasn’t getting far with the things I was doing . . . [and] Broadside gave me a start," an outlandish distortion of the true position.