Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  "When the Ship Comes In" may feel like an Old Testament prophet railing at his foes, but it does not rely on any direct biblical parallels—unlike its immediate successor and sister song, "The Times They Are A-Changin’." Penned barely a couple of weeks later, it was altogether more self-conscious, even paraphrasing a line from the gospel according to Matthew ("The many that are first will be last, and the last first"). Though the lesser work, it threatened to be an anthem for the ages—or at least until Dylan decided to allow its message to be appropriated by a Canadian merchant bank for one of their TV ads in the nineties.

  Where "The Times . . ." differs from "When the Ship Comes In" is in its declamatory tone, established with that famous opening couplet, "Come gather ’round people / wherever you roam." Using a commonplace of the folk idiom dating back to medieval times—"the come all ye . . ." incipit—he has not come to entertain but to berate. Like a lay preacher, Dylan lays into those whom he has asked to gather ’round, informing them that they are in danger of drowning in the tide just foretold on "When the Ship Comes In."

  One can’t help but think he might be singing, in part, to the stoic throng at the Washington March who, on the basis of the film footage, remained wholly unmoved by that song’s stark warning. "The Times . . .,"

  written in the immediate aftermath of that auspicious day, qualifies as a summation of things left unsaid. And yet in conversation with Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman eighteen months later—when "The Times . . ." was still riding high in the UK singles chart—Dylan insisted a different epiphany sparked the song:

  I was on 42nd street. People were moving. There was a bitterness about at that time. People were getting the wrong idea. It was nothing to do with age or parents. . . . This is what it was [about], maybe—a bitterness towards authority—the type of person who sticks his nose down and doesn’t take you seriously, but expects YOU to take HIM seriously. . . . I wanted to say . . . that if you have something that you don’t want to lose, and people threaten you, you are not really free. . . . I don’t know if the song is true, but the feeling’s true. . . . It’s nothing to do with a political party or religion.

  This remains Dylan’s longest and most lucid "explanation" of the feeling for which he was reaching when writing such an overt anthem. But it is directly contradicted by the testimony of a close friend who stumbled on the typescript of the song just after Dylan completed it. Tony Glover was in town to play on a "supergroup session" of young blues players at the instigation of Elektra Records (The Blues Project being the end product).

  As he later told Marcus Whitman, Glover called at Dylan’s Fourth Street apartment, perhaps just to say hello, but probably to ask if he’d like to play at the session/s (which he did, under the alias Bob Landy). Glover says he saw the typed lyrics lying on Dylan’s table. Picking up the paper, he read one of the more quotable lines—"Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call." Turning to Dylan he said, "What is this shit, man?" (a line unconsciously echoed by critic Greil Marcus in his Rolling Stone review of Self Portrait). Dylan simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, you know, it seems to be what the people like to hear."

  Describing an occasion barely six weeks after that evening with Paul Nelson, when Nelson dismissed the entire protest-song genre, Dylan may have felt a need to get all defensive with Glover about the kind of topical song he still felt compelled to write. But that’s not what he would say in the years after he scratched the song from his repertoire (1965–74). At such times he simply suggested that all those early topical songs were "written in the New York atmosphere. I’d never have written any of them—or sung them the way I did—if I hadn’t been sitting around listening to performers in New York cafes and the talk in all the dingy parlors. . . . I suppose there was some ambition in what I did. But I tried to make the songs genuine." It is of "Times . . ." de facto that he is speaking.

  Having laid some kind of gauntlet down to his elders, "The Times . . ." would come in for a lot of stick in the immediate aftermath of its release, affirming as it did Dylan’s role as "spokesman for a generation"—just as its author sought to break free of that burdensome moniker. Middle-aged journalists, in particular, wanted to know if he was preaching revolution when he sang lines like, "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command." Dylan now began to backpedal somewhat, telling one Midwesterner, "Maybe those were the only words I could find to separate aliveness from deadness. It has nothing to do with age." When that didn’t work, he claimed the lyrics contained several layers of meaning not readily apparent on cursory examination: "I can’t really say that adults don’t understand young people any more than you can say big fishes don’t understand little fishes. I didn’t mean [‘Times . . .’] as a statement. . . . It’s a feeling, just a feeling."

  That inchoate feeling, bound up with a new order he felt was just around the corner, dissipated with the dawn of a particularly fateful Friday. As of the third weekend in November—with the song less than a month in the can, and still two months away from a Columbia release—he ceased to recognize the song’s relevance in a world that no longer contained its most potent symbol of change, president John F. Kennedy. He told Scaduto:

  [The day after Kennedy was shot] I had a concert upstate, in Ithaca or Buffalo. There was a really down feeling in the air. I had to go on the stage, I couldn’t cancel. I went to the hall and to my amazement the hall was filled. . . . The song I was opening with was "The Times They Are A-Changin’." . . . That song was just too much for the day after the assassination. But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. . . . I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country and they were applauding that song. And I couldn’t understand why they were clapping or why I wrote that song, even.

  But Dylan was now tied to the song, for better or for worse. As he says, his whole show at the time was predicated around opening with this song (and closing with "When the Ship Comes In"). These circle songs, reflecting his latest persona, were inseparable for a while. Both were demo-ed at a single session for Witmark in September (on piano, for a change). Both were also recorded at the first of three sessions in late October designed to complete his second album of 1963.

  Yet "Times . . ." was hardly the first call to arms written by the young evangelist. Its most obvious predecessor, "Paths of Victory," possibly provided the basis for its tune, another derivative from the "Palms of Victory" family of tunes. (Another candidate previously suggested in print is "Farewell to the Creek," a pipe tune adapted by Hamish Henderson for his own "Banks o’ Sicily," which itself may be a variant of this hymnal source.) Dylan proves typically unhelpful in the Biograph liner notes, suggesting that the song was influenced "by the Irish and Scottish ballads," a statement akin to suggesting Shakespeare’s sonnets were influenced by Sidney.

  After being dropped from the live set in spring 1965, it would take Dylan another twenty years to provide interviewer Charles Kaiser with his most pithy explanation of what generated "The Times They Are A-Changin’": "I wanted to write a big song in a simple way." By then, it was fully restored to the repertoire in its most apocalyptic guise. In 1978 a revamped electric arrangement with electric violin and wailing girls had injected life back into the old chestnut. At the same time, he responded to a question about the song’s meaning by complaining, "I get tired of having to explain my songs. I got tired of that years ago. Take a line that you read someplace, or something you see that means something to you. I mean, everybody sees something different. . . . I know what it means to me and I know what it meant to me when I was writing it—where the inspiration came from."

  Even pre-Svedburg, he was tired of being continually misrepresented in print. Nor did he ever change his mind about the validity of that second verse about critics "who prophesize with your pen," telling interviewer Matt Damsker fifteen years later, "These critics . . . unless they’re educated in that type of music, or have lived where that art
ist has lived, [or] felt what that artist has felt, then they really have no right to criticize in a negative way anything which they themselves don’t quite understand."

  If he hoped a song like "The Times . . ." might get sympathetic folk off his back, he would be sorely disabused. The editors of The Little Sandy Review, who were amply "educated in that type of music," opined on its release that the song "seems to exist merely as a sop for the parent-

  defying teenage ego." Nor were they the only critics to focus on this single aspect of the lyrics, or suggest that it was the whole message. For Dylan the criticism served as an important lesson. Future declamations on society’s ills would be a whole lot more kaleidoscopic and harder to define.

  {110} PERCY’S SONG

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 23, 1963—1 take; October 24, 1963—3 takes [BIO].

  First known performance: Carnegie Hall, NY, October 26, 1963.

  By October 1963 the royalties must have started rolling in from the many traditional tunes to which Dylan had attached his own words. And inevitably, he was starting to get grief from the green-eyed for the casual way he appropriated the arrangements of fellow folkies, almost all of whom were struggling to make ends meet—unlike Grossman’s protégé.

  Before the end of the year, Dylan would devote one of the "outlined epitaphs" included with his third album to a confession: "I am a thief of thoughts. . . . I have built an rebuilt / upon what is waitin." Before this he had gone to great pains, in his introduction of "Percy’s Song" at his Carnegie Hall show, to attribute the melody and arrangement to his old friend, Paul Clayton. In the Biograph notes, he also admits, "‘Don’t Think Twice’ was a riff that Paul had. And so was ‘Percy’s Song.’ . . . A song like ‘Percy’s Song,’ you’d just assume another character’s point of view. I did a few like that."

  As just one more inheritor of the folk process, Clayton had no actual claim on this variant of the ancient ballad "The Two Sisters," which had first been collected by a lady called Mrs. Buchanan from a reverend in Pageton, West Virginia, in 1937. But it was Clayton who highlighted the song’s convoluted melodic history during a ballad workshop at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival on July 27, at which he had played three variants of "The Two Sisters," concluding with a four-verse fragment, "The Wind and the Rain," originally collected by Fletcher Collins in Fancy Gap, Virginia.

  Todd Harvey suggests that this is where Dylan first heard the song. He presumably means the latter, not the former. "The Two Sisters" was one of the earliest traditional ballads Dylan ever learned, performing it for Karen Moynihan’s tape recorder in May 1960. In the original ballad, one sister, jealous of the other, flings her into a rushing river. Swept downstream, the drowned girl’s body is pulled out by a miller/carpenter, who proceeds to make a harp from her bones and strings from her hair. The harp is then carried by a minstrel to the sister’s wedding, but when the harpist attempts to play, "the only tune the harp would play" is the story of the two sisters, during which the murderer is duly named and shamed.

  The version Dylan sang for Moynihan (née Wallace) is the one usually found in American tradition—"There was an old lady lived by the sea-shore"—a rationalized variant from England that made the miller who pulled the drowned girl from the river put on trial for her murder. The whole fantastical finale has been dropped as too incredible even for your average folksinger. Any residue of that original element remains extremely rare in American tradition, but it is there in "The Wind and the Rain." And we know Dylan did attend the same Newport workshop as Clayton, hosted by Jean Ritchie (he wisely did not play "Masters of War," which he reserved for the following day’s topical song workshop). "The Wind and the Rain," as originally collected, was slightly longer than the version Clayton played:

  Two little girls in a boat one day,

  Oh the wind and the rain (refrain)

  Two little girls in a boat one day,

  Crying, of the wind and the rain. (refrain)

  They floated down on the old mill dam, &c.

  Charles Miller came out with his long hook and line, &c.

  He hooked her out by the long yellow hair, &c.

  He made fiddle strings of her long yellow hair, &c.

  He made fiddle screws of her long finger bones, &c.

  And the only tune the fiddle would play, &c.

  The composition of "Percy’s Song" appears to date from a few weeks after Newport, Dylan further rationalizing this hopelessly corrupt variant of the ancient story. He does, however, retain most of its original power, as he suggests that "The only tune my guitar would play / Was ‘Oh the Cruel Rain and the Wind.’" But this time the instrument plays the song because the narrator has failed to get justice, not as a means of getting justice.

  "Percy’s Song" tells the tale of a friend who has been sentenced to ninety-nine years in Joliet Prison for "manslaughter / in the highest of degree," after he is held responsible for a car crash in which four people have died. The singer confronts the judge in person and pleas for mercy, but the judge is as unforgiving as the one in "Seven Curses" and the singer is left "with no other choice / except for to go." The ballad, thanks to two internal refrains—"turn, turn, turn again" and "turn, turn, turn to the rain and the wind"—maintains the air of inevitability throughout (and the Carnegie performance is almost nine minutes long).

  Paul Cable, in his Unreleased Recordings, suggests it is the length of "Percy’s Song" that might have been responsible for its omission from Dylan’s third album. Yet the song was recorded twice in the studio in late October and played live at the Carnegie showcase, which all points to a song he was planning to include. But in the end he simply had too much material for one album to contain. This left it to electric folk band Fairport Convention to give the song some retrospective recognition, courtesy of their marvelous 1969 recording, which was made just weeks before their own roadie, Harvey Bramham, fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the band’s van, killing their drummer and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. He served just six months for his deed.

  {111} THE LONESOME DEATH OF HATTIE CARROLL

  Published lyrics: Broadside #43; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 23, 1963—4 takes [TIMES—tk.4].

  First known performance: Carnegie Hall, NY, October 26, 1963.

  By all accounts, [Jesse] James was a bloodthirsty killer who was anything but the Robin Hood sung about in the song. But [the balladmaker] has the last word and he spins it around. —Chronicles

  While events soon taught Dylan to steer clear of message songs like "The Times They Are A-Changin’," his next composition would (temporarily) close the lid on the topical song genre he had made his own in just eighteen months. Like "When the Ship Comes In," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was a subject he’d been thinking about since the spring. But when the song finally demanded that he write it, in early October, it came fast. Dylan associating the song with "Who Killed Davey Moore?," composed in early April, suggests he had been brooding about Hattie Carroll’s demise since the first topical song about the lady’s death appeared in his favorite bedtime read, Broadside, in March. "The Ballad of Hattie Carroll," nine verses of doggerel from songwriter and poet Don West, displays the usual disregard for any facts at odds with his polemic:

  The big man pounded on the table

  She hardly heard what he did say

  When Hattie went to get his order

  He took his cane and flailed away.

  West’s ballad barely registered with the prince of protest, but the article the Broadside editors reproduced beneath it, from a local Baltimore paper, clearly caught his eye. Its headline was stark and unambiguous: "Rich Brute Slays Negro Mother of Ten." Gordon Friesen, coeditor of Broadside, later claimed he would
sometimes point out potential subject matter to Dylan. This may have been one such instance. The article by Roy H. Wood, from a February feature (Carroll died on February 9), painted a picture of unbridled brutality:

  Mrs Hattie Carroll, 51, Negro waitress at the Emerson Hotel, died last week as the result of a brutal beating by a wealthy socialite during the exclusive Spinsters’ Ball at that hotel. Mrs Carroll, mother of ten children, was the deacon of the Gillis Memorial Church. She died in the hospital where she had been taken after being felled from blows inflicted by William Devereux Zantzinger, 24, owner of a 600-acre tobacco farm. . . . Zantzinger’s father is a member of the state planning commission in Maryland. Others of his relatives in the Devereux family are prominent in politics here. The judge who released Zantzinger on bond has already permitted his attorney to claim that Mrs Carroll died indirectly as a result of the attack rather than directly. There is speculation here that attempts will be made to get Zantzinger off with a slap of the wrist.

  Reading this article made Dylan’s blood boil with so much righteous fury that six months later he got around to lashing out at those parties "who philosophize disgrace," wrapping his personal philosophy in a parable about the murder of a "negro mother of ten [sic]." A month before he actually wrote Hattie’s song, William Zantzinger (the t in his name about to become one of the more celebrated consonants dropped in a Dylan lyric) had been sentenced to six months for involuntary manslaughter.

  One thing is certain—Dylan hadn’t spent the intervening months researching the case or even keeping abreast of developments. Every so-called fact he presents in the initial three verses of his ballad stems from Wood’s February article. Unfortunately for the cause of truth, Wood got just about every important fact wrong. Had the events of the night of February 8 really been as Wood portrayed them, Zantzinger would have more than warranted Dylan’s disdain. But Wood was the kind of journalist wont to criticize first and establish facts second—and the only journalist who ever suggested that Carroll died "as the result of a brutal beating" from Zantzinger.