Category: Dylan

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Freewheelin

This, Dylan's second album, and one of my favorites, was released in May of 1963 by Columbia Records. Here are my favorites from the album. 

Blowin' in the Wind, with its understated topicality, enjoys an assured place in the Great American Songbook.  London Ed uploaded this Alanis Morissette version which is one of the better covers.  Thanks, Ed!

Girl from the North Country Ah! it's even better than I remember it as being.

Understated topicality also characterizes A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, lending it a timeless quality absent in a blatant 'finger-pointing' song such as Masters of War.  The Baez version is probably the best of the covers.

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right in the outstanding PP & M version.  Another permanent addition to musical Americana.  Said to be inspired by Suze Rotolo, the girl on the album cover.

Bob Dylan's Dream in the PP & M rendition.

Oxford Town.  About James Meredith's battle for admission to the University of Mississippi.

In her memoir, A Frewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008, p. 277-8), Suze Rotolo says this about her mother Mary Rotolo:

I remember her informing me that the career army man an older cousin was married to had lost out on a promotion that involved security clearance because of my appearance on the cover of Bob's album.  I was astounded.

True, the times they were troubled.  Protest against the escalating war in Vietnam was on the rise, draft cards were being burned, and colleges were erupting with discontent.  Blues, bluegrass, and ballads no longer defined folk music, since so many folksingers were now writing songs that spoke to current events.  Bob Dylan was labeled a "protest singer."  But the absurdity of my mother, Marxist Mary, trying to make me feel responsible for a military man's losing a security clearance because I am on an album cover with Bob Dylan, a rebel with a cause, left me speechless.  And that was all she said to me about the cover or the album in general. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Literary Allusions

Linda Ronstadt, 1967, Different Drum.  Cf. Henry David Thoreau: "“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Byrds, Turn, Turn, Turn, 1965.  Lyrics almost verbatim from the Book Of Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8.  Pete Seeger did it first.

Bob Dylan, 1965, Highway 61 Revisited.  Genesis 22.

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises.  A great song  by a great but forgotten '60s psychedelic  band. The title alludes to Hemingway's 1926 novel and to Ecclesiastes 1: 1-5:

1The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. 3What profit has a man of all his labor which he takes under the sun? 4One generation passes away, and another generation comes: but the earth stays for ever. 5The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to his place where he arose. 6

Jaynettes, 1963, Sally Go Round the Roses.  Based on the nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o' Roses (British)or "Ring Around the Rosie" (Stateside).

Inez and Charlie Foxx, 1963, Mockingbird.  An R & B version of the eponymous nursery rhyme.

Serendipity Singers, 1964, Don't Let the Rain Come Down.  Based on ther nursery rhyme, There Was a Crooked Man

Exercise for the reader.  Identify the Biblical references in the following Dylan songs: The Times They Are a'Changin', All Along the Watchtower, When the Ship Comes In, The Gates of Eden. 

Three Days Before the Music Died Dylan was Born

Patrick Kurp sends this:

On this Day in Duluth in 1959, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Richie Valens, Jiles Perry “the Big Bopper” Richardson, Dion and the Bellmonts [sic], and others played to a sell-out crowd at the Duluth Armory for a “Winter Dance Party” promoted by Duluth’s Lew Latto—three days before Holly, Valens, and Richardson perished in a plane crash. In the audience, as the famous story goes, was a young Robert Zimmerman, who became so inspired he picked up a guitar and changed his name to Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s New Album

In lieu of oldies this Saturday night, a taste of  Bob Dylan's latest, Tempest.  Duquesne Whistle.  Sampler. 1962 version of "Roll on, John"  50 years of  assimilation  and creative  reworking of musical Americana by the unlikely Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota.

Jody Rosen's New Yorker review. Insightful:

The hunt for Dylan in Dylan songs is a mug’s game. Dylan is a genius; he’s also  the greatest bullshitter and jive-talker in popular-music history. He began  laying boobytraps for his exegetes before he even had any, and they—we—have  never stopped taking the bait. Today Dylanology is a midrashic enterprise  rivaling Talmudism and Shakespeare Studies, and it’s worth remembering its  origins: it started with the hippie gadfly A .J. Weberman, who took to “reading” toothbrushes recovered from garbage bins outside of Dylan’s MacDougal Street  townhouse.

[. . .]

The original Dylanological sin is to focus too much on the words, and too little  on the sound: to treat Dylan like he’s a poet, a writer of verse, when of course  he’s a musician—a songwriter and, supremely, a singer. “Tempest” reminds us what  a thrilling and eccentric vocalist he is.

All Along the Watchtower

The Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9:

     Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye
     princes, and prepare the shield. For thus hath the Lord said unto
     me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. And he saw a
     chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a
     chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with such heed. . .
     . And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of
     horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen,
     and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the
     ground.

Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower:

     "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
     "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
     Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
     None of them along the line know what any of it is worth." 

     "No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
     "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
     But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
     So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

     All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
     While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
     Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
     Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

The absurdist sensibility of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde gave way, after the July 1966 motorcycle accident, to a renewed seriousness. Life is no joke. We've been  through that. No more talking falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Robert Paul Wolff: “The Left Has Had All the Good Songs”

Anarchist philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, over at The Philosopher's Stone, writes,

While I was making dinner, Susie put on a CD of Pete Seegar [sic] songs. I was struck once again by the oft-remarked fact that for half a century, the left has had all the good songs. That cannot be irrelevant.

By the way, the old commie's name is 'Seeger' not 'Seegar.'  In the ComBox, some guy confuses him with Bob Seger! The Left has had all the good songs over the last 50 years?  Nonsense.  Here are 50 counterexamples.

The really interesting case is Bob Dylan.  The Left can of course claim the early topical songs such as Only a Pawn in Their Game and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.  (Not that we contemporary conservatives don't take on board all that was good in these critiques of racism and Jim Crow.)  But it wasn't long before Dylan distanced himself from politics and leftist ideology, a distancing documented in My Back Pages.  And then came the absurdist-existentialist-surrealist phase represented by the three mid-'sixties albums, Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After that, the motorcycle accident and another attitude adjustment culminating in a couple of masterful albums, John Wesley Harding and New Morning, in which religious and conservative themes come to the fore.

I'll give just one example, Sign on a Window, from the October 1970 album, New Morning.  The song concludes:

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch  rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me 'Pa'
That must be what it's all about
That must be what it's all about.

To appreciate the full conservative flavor of this song, listen to it in the context of  "Masters of War" from the protest period and It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) from the absurdist-existentialist-surrealist period.

Bob Dylan Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

He deserves it for the hundreds of unforgettable songs ineliminable from the soundtrack of so many of our lives over the past 50 years: 1962-2012.

"Blowin' in the Wind" is the most famous of his anthems.  You may be surprised to learn that London Ed uploaded this outstanding rendition by Alanis Morissette.  Another of Dylan's great anthems is "Chimes of Freedom" here sung by the Byrds, and here by Dylan and Baez, or is it Dylan and Osbourne? (I say it's Baez)

And speaking of Baez, here she is singing Daddy, You've Been on My Mind. 

The man himself, She Belongs to Me.  I Want You.  I could go on, and on, and on.

Bob Dylan Albums Ranked From Worst to Best

A plausible ranking!  Blonde on Blonde is numero uno as it should be.  Bob's debut album, Bob Dylan (1962), comes in at only 26th place.  Admittedly, this album was Dylan before he was Dylan, but I would have ranked it higher. 

In the '60s I argued that there was and could be no such thing as a bad Dylan album.  Then I was a fanatic, now I am but a fan. 

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Music = Dylan?

Jan cover Purdue  philosopher Jan Cover appears to maintain a Music = Dylan Identity Thesis. I wouldn't have gone that far even in the '60s. (Though I was a bit of a fanatic. I wrote for a high school 'underground' newspaper under the pen name 'Dylan's Disciple.') Cover's Dylan page is short but well worth a look.

RightWingBob and RightWingJack

One difference between these two websites is that the first exists while the second doesn't.  It borders on a paradox: two major countercultural influences, Kerouac and Dylan, display significant conservative tendencies in their art.  I recommend RWB's post Times Changin'  with its links to First Things articles and to a very nice Dylan performance in which 'another side' of his vocal styling is made manifest.  This bard's one protean cat.