Remember a Day

Tag: folk

  • Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

    Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

    Studio Album | Released August 30th 1965 | Recorded between June 16 and August 4 1965 at Columbia Studios, New York City | Columbia Records | Produced by Bob Johnston and Tom Wilson

    “Philosophy can’t give me anything I don’t already have.”

    And we return to Bob. For me, it is the Triumph motorcycle shirt and the look on his face. That face is so unapologetically unique. It isn’t a smirk. On the surface it is barely a smile. And still, a smile lives underneath it. It is him knowing how good he has it as a musician, and how confident he is in the record he is making. This is peak rock of the 60s. This is peak Bob of the 60s. This is iconic music, iconic sounds, and an iconic time. Bob’s rocket was on autopilot. He was revolving around success, locked in its orbit. We don’t have to get bogged down analyzing the lyrics. If you do, you’ll find all sorts of nooks and crannies, nuggets of wisdom, nuggets of pure beauty and poetry, and nuggets that are simply meant to drop a little confusion into the old noggin. Live a life that likes music and you’ll hear this album. Or at least one song from it.

    I’ll say this: I’m a simple blogger, trying to get at the feeling this music creates in me. I can’t untangle all of Bob’s words here. Many have tried, and many will keep trying. The true understanding of a lot of Bob’s most complex songs comes through a suspension of disbelief. You won’t understand it all. You might come close. Listen to “Desolation Row,” for example, and let your brain create the images Bob conjures. Enjoy the magic. Let it mean whatever you want it to mean. Take a ride on the mystery. You don’t have to walk around claiming to know who Dr. Filth is. He exists only in a brief glance. It’s just music. It’s art at its finest. But really, it’s just rock and roll. We have to recognize that. Fully organic.

    Don’t Look Back, the amazing documentary by D.A. Pennebaker, follows the UK tour Bob made not long after Bringing It All Back Home. It revealed the astonishing scale of his success, maybe even more so in the UK than in the United States. The film explores his touring life, his interactions with the media, and his backstage character and behavior. It is as pure and simple as a rock documentary can be, essential viewing for anyone wanting to understand Bob at the time and the transition between these two great albums. Pennebaker would say of his film and of Bob, “what you see is what you get.”

    Work on Highway 61 Revisited began once the touring behind the documentary had ended. Back in the studio, Bob started building on the electric sound of his previous album. The Byrds were riding their own success with a purely electric, California-pop version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The Beatles were beginning their folk-rock exploration. Everything was starting to culminate. Bob opened the album by cutting “Like a Rolling Stone.” Not long after, he shocked the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival, plugging in an electric guitar and blasting out a live set backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. All of it was a recipe for drastic change. Vietnam was on the horizon. Social change was moving through politics and the civil rights movement. The birth control pill was being introduced. The country was on a tear toward a paradigm shift.

    Bob had opened new pathways with Bringing It All Back Home, and this record takes that concept and expands on it. The band builds the full world for him. On a few tracks, Bob’s words take a back seat to the brilliant sidemen and their performances. Think of Al Kooper’s impromptu organ part on the opening track, the first he ever played.

    The record’s title: a highway. The highway. Number 61. It runs past the country where Bob grew up, the same road he was traveling in 1959 when he went to see Buddy Holly play, just days before the singer died in a plane crash. The whole album carries a traveling theme. Bob crossed this highway at different points in his life, and here he is revisiting those trips. Each track emotes that feeling of traveling, and of traveling alone. Stopping and learning. Stopping for no reason at all, just to take in the scenery. Snapping a picture, writing a verse down, getting back in the vehicle and moving on. I feel it in the strumming of the guitar on “Tombstone Blues,” and in the blues electric twang running through so many of these songs. Be exhilarated. Roll the window down, hop in, and take to the road on this record.

    The sessions for Highway 61 have been described as pretty rough. They happened over a handful of days across July and August 1965. The players were a mix of studio hands and outsiders, so there is an edge to the music, an edge Bob loved, as Al Kooper would tell it.

    The Object

    I’ve had a couple of copies of this record over the years. The first needed replacing because it was pretty scratchy. That’s fine for some collectors, but give me the best music in recorded history without any pops, please. I think a clean pressing gives the music its due diligence. My current copy is a simple reissue, nothing collectible, nothing limited edition. I bought it at a store known for pumping out common reissues in their shrink wrap: Siren Records in Monterey, California. Some diligent Discogs users will know their online selling machine, Recordmule. I’ve been buying from the store and from Recordmule for some time now. They come in handy when the originals are demanding high prices and the reissues sound great for a decent price.

    The cover, though. It echoes the previous album. The photo is bordered in white, with the name of the record and the artist landing right on the top edge of the frame. Bob Neuwirth is cut off, shown here only from the torso down. Still, he has enough style to get the point across: striped shirt, thumb hooked in his pants, holding the strap of a beautiful SLR camera. Bob fills most of the frame with that enigmatic look. The goofy colored jacket, the killer Triumph shirt, the hair all a mess. He is sitting on the steps of a building, sunglasses in hand. I think that if he had been wearing those glasses, this artwork would not have the effect it had then and still has now. It is one of the most iconic record photos of the 60s, and of all time.

    It was always a cover that drew me in, the way the best record covers should. They give you a feeling of what the record holds. This photo, purely as it is, hints at a life being lived. Bob’s pose and his look are enough. It’s just a glance, and you can gather a lot about someone from a single glance. At the very least, it was inspiring to a lot of “fuck the whole world” hipster crews.

    The Music

    Side One

    Like a Rolling Stone

    Bruce Springsteen said the opening snap and crack of the snare drum, Bobby Gregg’s snare drum, was like someone kicking in the door to your mind.

    Generation-defining song. Genre-defining song. For many it’s the song of their life. For some it’s the song of their youth. For me, it’s the song of my mid-20s into my mid-30s. Every time I hear it I hear something new. It’s one of those tracks that takes on a bigger meaning as it grows with you. Some say the best art is the art that changes as you come back to it, like a movie you can watch over and over while the life inside it keeps growing outward. “Like a Rolling Stone” has lived that life for me, and it’s still living it.

    It doesn’t sound like most other songs from the time. Placed in its context, it’s a massive blast of sound, brilliant from that first drum crack, a whole world of wonder living inside it. Then comes a guitar riff that gives the wonder its color. Hearing this track can leave you questioning the greatest works. At the time, it was unlike anything else, a six-minute rock single full of insults, wild imagery, and characters. This was all abandon. Rock was now changed. The song was staggering in its appeal, reaching #4 in the UK and #2 in America, and it made everyone across both lands aware that Bob’s greatness had reached a new height.

    First, Bob’s tone in the vocal. It’s pleading, promising, preaching. Desperation is in there, and so is conviction. He makes a stand with each word, and each line ends on a lean shout. Listen to the track and focus on his eyes on the cover, and you can feel where Bob’s at here. It’s all bravado and all sensitivity. It moves you on the strength of the genuine fun in his voice alone. “You’ve got no secrets to conceal” hits the top of the wavelength. That’s what I’m talking about. If you’re a five-year-old kid barely learning the English language, you’ll feel it too.

    Paired beautifully with Bob’s voice, creating a lovely interchange, is the organ. Without it, this song loses its emotional effect. Al Kooper absolutely nailed his work here, and it was pure improvisation. Kooper had never really played organ before, and yet what you hear sounds fully worked out. He must have been deeply tuned into what was happening in the studio to produce a part this good. You can hear the controlled chaos in how he plays.

    Who does the song address? I’ve always taken it as self-reference, like a lot of Bob’s work at the time. He is the rolling stone, drifting further and further from home. He is also drifting into the business, sinking into the quicksand of show business, with a lot to answer for to himself. He was facing the world alone. No direction home. It’s a song about learning who you are and making your own reality.

    Bob himself has called it one of his best-written and favorite songs. And it sits neatly at the top of Highway 61 Revisited. So you rest the needle down, anticipate it coming, and dive right in. If you had never heard this record before, doing that for the first time must have been mind-blowing and life-changing all at once. The power of music, the power of vinyl, the power of Bob. Rock and roll, man.

    Mark Polizzotti, in his book about the record, notes that this was the first time rock and roll started to sound dangerous. It had been building to a point. This was rock and roll’s assault on the other, on “Miss Lonely,” on the other person. Jerry Lee Lewis had assaulted the other. Bob was building on that verbal style, but with greater aplomb, a greater presence of voice, and a deeper wealth of wordplay.

    Tombstone Blues

    “Tombstone Blues” sits in the same realm and universe as the Depression-era blues that Woody Guthrie inspired, the same territory as “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” This entry into that realm is longer, a slog of words, a dense forest full of characters real and imaginary. Mom and dad are struggling. The narrator is in the kitchen or out in the streets with the tombstone blues. Is he dead? Is he imagining his death? Is he in jail?

    The guitar work by Mike Bloomfield is truly great. Flourishes run all the way through, and his signature is felt more here than on any other track. He must have had a great time with this take. You can feel the enjoyment every time you listen.

    Again the song has real movement, and it carries more energy than you’d expect from something inspired by Dust Bowl-era traditional folk and blues. Much of the imagery and the characters conjure up old America, or the American West. Soothsayers. Medicine men. Drifters. Penny arcades. Dust on the shoes and in the saloons. Each verse ends somewhere with the tombstone blues.

    Holes in the ground, circus performers, people questioning the earth’s movement and shape and the idea of God and the planets. This is another song you can get lost inside, and each time you come back you’ll hear new things and reap the rewards. Who was Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch? Watch the film La Strada. Maybe he’s in there somewhere. Maybe he was out in Vietnam.

    It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

    Dylan dusted off one of his older tracks and reworked it for this reinvention. Track three slows the pace to a jaunt, and the piano turns a little more ragtime, a little less rock. A little less rock. A little more sweet lady swaying on top of the bar, flashing her ankles. Essentially it’s a feel-good song about what it feels like to have a fling, or to love a woman.

    It’s worth noting the Bob Johnston influence here. Johnston was a new producer on the album, and he had a country touch. After working for Columbia in New York, he would go on to Nashville, working alongside the session players who provided the studio skill behind some great recordings. He injects a knack for good country sound into this track with ease.

    The track shows how Bob took his older influences and molded them into something new. There were earlier versions with the same lyrics and a different mood. This version brings the piano in at full force, and Al Kooper again shines on the instrument. A great song, and a break from the fast-paced whirlwinds of the previous two tracks.

    From a Buick 6

    Another blues assault on the auditory senses. This time the travel metaphor gets its own vehicle, and the vehicle is not exactly a car despite what the title suggests. Here we have a woman, the woman, who will look after Bob in his time of need. When he’s at his lowest, she’ll be there to take care of him. This simple, loose track features a great bass line, a great harmonica solo, and a rolling organ part that keeps the fun pace going throughout. It’s a rock and roll song if there ever was one, and it puts the listener in a good mood, ready for what comes next.

    Ballad of a Thin Man

    The opening piano chords, played by Bob, are a sign of what’s coming. This song is relentless in scope, in sound, and in the vituperation spat through the lyrics. Mr. Jones. Who is Mr. Jones? When Al Kooper first heard it, he called it a “nasty” song. What an apt description.

    As with many of Bob’s lyrically dense songs built around a main character, people make an effort to figure out who he’s pointing at. Mr. Jones could be, in my opinion, the happy wanderer, the bystander to the circus. He’s someone who isn’t hip. He’s been duped, taken advantage of. He knows something is happening, but he doesn’t know what it is. He lacks the key thing: an open mind. Mr. Jones. It’s fitting that his name is male, and as easy and common a surname as Jones.

    The likeliest occupation for this Jones is journalist. He’s me, essentially. He’s the stand-in for the person trying to derive meaning from art and claiming that ability as some kind of gift. Bob was assaulted by reporters in this period, much of it a waste of time, and he developed a knack for handling these people. He may have sat down to write this track right after one of those interviews.

    The piano is the core of the track, and it gives the lyrics their dramatic backing. It’s really a piano-and-words song, and that helps Bob get his points across, even steeped as they are in odd imagery and symbolism. The sensation of condescension runs throughout. Whoever Mr. Jones was, he should be happy, and a little watchful, that Bob made such a great song about him.

    Side Two

    Queen Jane Approximately

    Queen Jane? A relative of Mr. Jones? Possibly. Again Bob is laying out the situation of someone’s life, holding a mirror up to them. This is essentially a simple song, the simplest on the album. What draws my ears to it is the melody, and the piano and organ working in tandem. There’s also some great electric rhythm riding underneath all of it. As the opener of the second side, it’s a register change, sweeter and kinder than “Ballad of a Thin Man” was. The rest of the side won’t let up, though. After the track ends on a beauty of a harmonica solo, wishing you hope on your way, the title track awaits.

    Many followers of Bob liken Queen Jane to Joan Baez. The narrator has a closeness to the title character, much like Bob and Joan shared the spotlight together. Their breakup, both in career terms and in emotional attachment, was happening around the time this record was being put together. In the song you can sense compassion.

    Highway 61 Revisited

    Of “Highway 61 Revisited,” Bob would later say he was writing songs meant to be played with a band. He was thinking about the band performance, and probably about the fun too. Nowhere does that fun shine through more than on this title track. It starts right in the intro, with a novelty police whistle, presumably picked up by one of the band members, or by Bob himself, somewhere along the way and brought into the studio.

    The song’s title comes from one of America’s great highways, the one Bob spent a young adolescence traversing north and south. Through Mississippi, through the South, through the great heartland of the country. You can feel that travel across the whole record, and the heart of it lives in this title track.

    The Bible opens the lines, the story of Abraham and God’s demand that he sacrifice his first son. A test of faith. Getting out on that road, flinging your want or need for a normal life into the universal divide of the highway, that’s what this song is about. Get on a motorcycle, pack your bags, sleep on the side of the road, take your faith and shove it deep down. What runs through the track are quick allusions, character studies drawn in a couple of lines. Accusations. References to figures from Bob’s life and from fiction, Albert Grossman chief among them.

    That little whistle brings the fantasy, keeping any sense of groundedness at bay.

    Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

    The sweet guitar chords that appear throughout the verses of this great song are something to focus on. Add the great piano, heard mostly on the right channel if your record is a stereo pressing, and this becomes one of the best-sounding songs on the album.

    The traveling theme continues, and this time we’re down in Mexico, in Juárez. Dropped out of the bottom, washed out of America and American life itself.

    The two pianos and the slow drawl of the guitar chords really enhance Bob’s tone here. It’s the hangover song, if the album has one.

    Desolation Row

    You’ve made it this far on this brilliant album, and now you’re thrust into an epic eleven-minute poem, matched by a flamenco-style guitar. This is Bob’s Dante’s Inferno. It spirals downward, or maybe outward. The track lives in its own dimension. It’s not a joke.

    Musically, the song is set apart from the rest of the record. It’s just two guitars, Bob and no rhythm section. As if it were meant to bookend the album, it’s the knockout punch, the ten count. It makes you a jealous wanderer for the rest of your life. The images come like a firehose. We don’t know who they all are. It’s like a box of baseball cards, dusty and left in the attic. That’s what listening to this song is like. Picking a card from the deck. What’s your fortune?

    Bob gives a fantastic vocal here. It’s classic for him, Bob at his most pure. One of his most uniquely Bob tracks. You just have to listen. It leaves you bludgeoned, bruised by the beauty of his wordplay. Or you think it’s all gobbledygook and you never listen again. Try it on, pay the ticket, take a look at the museum.

    Closing

    Highway 61 Revisited earned Bob a place in history. The record was received well at the time and rode a wave of success driven mainly by the anthemic greatness of “Like a Rolling Stone.” It’s a powerful song, emotive even today. Every time I hear it, it just sounds important. It’s of its time. It’s of a person. It has character and wit and happiness living inside it. It means different things to different people, as all the best art does. Many people acquainted with Bob call this record, alongside that song, his best. In some ways I recognize it as his best work, but there are two others that mean more to me: Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home.

    With this record, the boundary was pushed for good. Even after pouring all his heart into the music, Bob was still calling his previous work into question, and maybe even reaching toward work he had not yet made. You can hear Desire in here. You can hear Blood on the Tracks. The album took nine days to make, some of it improvised on the spot. The complexity of this record was born of a mind pushed inward, and of an art form in its genesis. Rock had passed its crawl-and-walk phase and was starting to hit the first strides of an all-out run. The rest of the 60s, the rock movement and the hippies, all seem born from that first snare snap. Put it on your turntable, turn the volume all the way up, and you can hear it.

    Thanks for reading.
    RTR

  • Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

    Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

    Studio Album | Released May 27, 1963

    Recorded July 9, 1962 – April 24, 1963 at Columbia Studio A, New York City | Label: Columbia | Producers: John Hammond & Tom Wilson

    My copy: 2025 Mono Reissue | Purchased in March 2026 | Discogs

    “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem. Anything I can’t sing or anything that’s too long to be a poem, I call a novel. But my novels don’t have the usual story-lines. They’re about my feelings at a certain place at a certain time.”

    Bob Dylan. Lots of words written about the man. Should I add to this litany of myth and speculation? He currently lives inside of an ironic public persona, a continuation of what he’s always done. His internal argument, I suspect is that we as a society just don’t know what’s going on. He’s doing AI things now, apparently. I’m not entirely sure. What I find massively appealing is his anti-social, anti-establishment persona, cultivated carefully over decades. I think it’s a product of his uniqueness and his genuine struggle with accepting fame. He writes for himself and for his own myth. The constant “what does your song mean” onslaught must have gotten to him early on, and the rest is a long, deliberate, magnificent evasion.

    It started with Freewheelin’, his second album and the first record made up almost entirely of original tracks. This album is still a monument. The obelisk in the folk swamp. It reached a lot of people. The songs inspired people, gave them hope in a genuinely strange and frightening time. 1963. Things were getting real weird in America. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy shot. The Civil Rights Movement in full boil. Nuclear destruction a real and present possibility, and a fervent anti-communist government dragging the country toward a ground war in Vietnam.

    In 1962 Bob released his first album, simply titled Bob Dylan. It was a piecemealed collection of mostly folk standards previously recorded by other artists, with only two original songs: “Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York.” The second record was a massive jump in terms of songwriting ability, recording acumen, and vocal performance. A genuine career maker. You can sense with this album the good feelings Bob had writing and recording his own material. He was only 22 while making it.

    When the first record came out, it was largely a byproduct of the late 1950s and early 1960s New York City folk scene. On a small scale, a group of thrift shop clothes-wearing hipsters sitting around drinking coffee, listening to music of the vagabond. The guitar case and a few dollars in your pocket. Everyone dropping in to the club to see what new acts are trying to break out into show business. A real scene, and a conscious rejection of the corporate nature of rock and roll at the time. Rock radio, music industry moguls trying desperately to manufacture hits and cash in. It was a rejection of political trends as well. Youth moving toward new directions, thinking big ideas, and imagining the changes required to achieve them.

    Bob Dylan fell into this scene, but in his own way and with his own set of inspirations. His efforts to meet Woody Guthrie, the folk icon, were what brought him to New York City in the first place. His natural tendencies toward rock, blues, and Guthrie’s styles shaped his early sound. The first record was a transmuting of that blend, his songwriting and vocal delivery something between blues tradition and Woody Guthrie. You see this clearly on the debut, and the transformation into the second record was quick, because Bob had always understood the first album as something that just needed to get done so he could get on with what he actually wanted to say.

    Between the two records, behind the scenes, there was an uproar among the money men over the poor sales of the debut. John Hammond, Dylan’s benefactor and producer, possibly with some help from Johnny Cash, secured the contract for Bob to make another record. This next one would be a huge leap forward creatively. A money maker for the ones who cared about that, and possibly for Bob too, who was living place to place and shacking up with his girlfriend. This record would change the face of folk music and the rock music that followed in its wake.

    The Album Cover

    Bob and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, walking in Greenwich Village. Such innocence. Such youth. Honestly, for Bob, this is probably his best cover. A perfect representation of the vibe, the scene, and his life at that moment. That embrace against the cold is everything you need to know about the relationship. You can see the warmth, the appreciation. I also particularly enjoy the old VW bus in the background. Very cool, very of the time. Living in California, I find it quietly amusing that one of those was parked in New York City. But that’s just me.

    Suze was an important piece of the cover and of Dylan’s life. She was deep into the whole equality-freedom thing long before Bob got seriously involved in it. She was possibly the editor, or the litmus test for the content of these songs. Bob said he checked out the songs with her. She had strong left-wing political views and shared them openly with Bob, helping drive his interest in the disenfranchised. Her departure to Italy spurred a period of intensive songwriting, Bob relegated to a pad, a typewriter, a guitar, and a pack of smokes. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalled that he was writing at a feverish pace, missing Suze immensely, working on four songs at a time and flipping pages between a spiral notebook, getting one line down at a time.

    The songs were coming quickly. Often it only took a few moments to get a song finished and qualified as poetry. The melodies came from his spongy brain, his ability to pick up on nuance from the vast pool of musical influences around him. He would adopt an old folk tune and suddenly have his song complete. The recording sessions at Columbia’s New York studio started in April 1962 and got seriously productive in July, where the most distinctive material began getting laid down.

    The Object

    I used to own this record, but it was in very rough shape. Unable to be played. Resurrected here with this reissue, I’m finally happy to have a copy that does the music justice. This is where Bob broke out as a songwriter and artist. The songs are ripe with political commentary and imagery. The scene is Greenwich Village, the girlfriend on the cover, young Bob taking on the world and his own artistry.

    My copy is a 2025 RSD reissue, Mono, an MPO pressing. The album cover and rear cover are original, maintains the original liner notes, and retains the pre-controversial tracks. A very important note: it holds the original track listing from before certain songs were eliminated, which I’ll get into below.

    Call RSD what you will. I often regard it as a cash grab for most of those involved, but if it keeps local record stores alive I’m fine with it. There are a few RSD releases worth tracking down, and this is one of them. For collectors, this pressing offers a real alternative to hunting for an original Freewheelin’ with the pre-removal tracks, copies of which have become extremely rare and expensive.

    I bought it on Discogs in March 2026, still filling out the collection with greats from pre-1965.

    This copy sounds really good. Some of these tracks I’ve never heard this clean. The beauty of vinyl. Bob’s voice is front and center where it needs to be, right in the middle of the channel. Super flat and quiet. Perfect.

    I like this track listing. Not sure I’ll ever need the official, most recognized release with the standard tracks, though at some point it might make sense to have both. The familiar songs sound great here, but the new favorite for me is “Down the Highway.”

    It’s a happy time, owning this record. We all should own it. Bask in the greatness of early 1960s Bob and the world gets a little better.

    The Music

    Blowin’ in the Wind

    Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963)

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    “The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence, that all of us in America who didn’t speak out were betrayed by our silence, betrayed by the silence of the people in power. They refuse to look at what’s happening.”

    Unofficial anthem of the 1960s? This song was already a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary before this record even came out. Apparently written in ten minutes while sitting in a café. The theme of world peace. The question song. The tonal metronome of what was happening in the world at that moment.

    Dylan may have understood the immensity this song carried, or worried about it. More likely he put the thing out there and watched it begin to live a life of its own. It was his first real attempt at moving from reporting specific events to examining the general, and the vagueness was the whole strategy. Scholars have noted that the reason this song works is precisely because it doesn’t connect to any specific territory. There is no specific event, no villain, no proper name. The argument is exterritorial, and by being untethered it could attach itself to any freedom struggle anywhere.

    The life this song has lived is beyond anything Bob could have imagined when he wrote it. It’s anthemic at this point, embedded in the zeitgeist. We make each other feel something when we talk about what this song is about. Whether it’s stirring or inspiring or bittersweet, by 2026 the things this song helped set in motion have lived through generations, seen their ups and downs. When it really comes down to it, we’re still pondering the same questions Bob was asking when he wrote it.

    I love a song that asks questions, and this one along with “A Hard Rain” asks many, repeatedly. Maybe that’s the real subject. A song that made people question themselves, the institutions that govern them, and their place within those institutions. There’s a comment in No Direction Home noting that this song feels simultaneously brand new and two hundred years old. “Blowin’ in the Wind” became a cliché, and what a profitable one.

    A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

    A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    Dave Van Ronk recognized this song as a pivot point, the beginning of a new artistic revolution. The proof that poetry could be fully infused into folk music at this scale. That hadn’t been done before.

    Born out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A period of intense paranoia, genuine talk of mutually assured destruction, nuclear catastrophe on a real timetable. A song like this could only come from that moment, from a mind ripe with dread about the end of the world and eager enough to put one of his best songs ever to paper. More poem than song, a string of imagery inspired by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, one of Suze and Bob’s favorite writers.

    Epic. Seriously. Personally, this song has taken on different connotations for me over the years. After watching the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary and visiting the wall memorial in DC, hearing those first lines is enough to make the tears well up. For me this song is a collage that lives somewhere in the quiet grey between optimism and pessimism. A request. It wants to know something.

    Probably the best thing I’ve read about it is where Bob makes clear that every line in this song could be a song in itself. Every line starts and ends its own image.

    “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son” shifts to “What did you see”, then “What did you hear”, then “Who did you meet.” That’s the only narrative shift. The blue-eyed son: the wide-eyed youth, the wayward soul, the witness to the prosecution. The fundamental newness of childhood bearing witness to the evidence of the horrors and the beauties of life. Or just, you know, the good old-fashioned end of the world.

    It’s the sincerity, the soft-spoken cry for action in Bob’s voice on the question pieces that gets me. The subtle question is the more urgent one.

    Down the Highway

    Spooky blues, right up my alley. Or highway, as it were. It’s bare and basic, working within the twelve-bar scheme, but those single guitar strums that linger throughout are just maddening. Scary and menacing. Hear that at a crossroads at night and you’ll be looking over both shoulders, seeing things in the cornfields.

    The song is about Bob living in the void of Suze Rotolo’s absence. She’s gone to the far-off land of Italy, leaving the narrator poor and lonely, stripped down, nervous, and afraid. Left to gamble and booze it away. Bob had also been getting real thin and loose around this period of songwriting. Losing weight, appearing gaunt. The relationship with Suze had taken its toll, and this song sits in the middle of that toll.

    Bob Dylan’s Blues

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    A moment of respite in the sequencing. Recorded during the same session as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it makes for a little breather between the heaviness of what comes before it and the second side. During the actual recording session it probably served the same purpose.

    “Bob Dylan’s Blues” was originally the working title for Freewheelin’ before the final title came along.

    The Lone Ranger and Tonto: the first characters in Bob Dylan’s menagerie, the kind that would multiply and populate his later albums. Welcome to the carnival.

    Let Me Die in My Footsteps

    One of the four tracks replaced after the John Birch situation.

    Side 2

    Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

    Recorded November 14, 1962

    A breakup song, directed at and inspired by the deterioration of Bob and Suze’s relationship. Bob shoots accusations across the table: “You just kind of wasted my precious time.” He’s the one traveling on. In reality, though, it was Suze who left Bob, not the other way around.

    A song with a lot of charisma for me. Bewitching. Just Bob and his guitar, a real knack for dynamic picking, and a voice he’d been sharpening during his New York years. One of those songs that sounds effortless and reveals itself as anything but over time.

    Rambling, Gambling Willie

    One of the four tracks replaced after the John Birch situation.

    Oxford Town

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    Another song written for and published in Broadside magazine, in response to a call for songs about topical events. Bob is making direct reference to one of the key moments in the Civil Rights Movement. James Meredith, a Black man who won a federal court ruling allowing him to register at the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss.

    The governor of Mississippi took extreme conflict with the situation. The whole episode is insane to read about even now, though we have to remind ourselves how far we’ve come. Meredith registered amid a mob of rioters, the National Guard, and an armed conflict that resulted in two deaths and roughly three hundred wounded.

    The final line remains relevant today: “Somebody better investigate soon.” A sarcastic tone. Somebody ought to do something about this. Well, we’ve been waiting and will continue to be waiting.

    Corrina, Corrina

    Recorded October 26, 1962

    The only song on the record not originally composed by Dylan. This composition dates back to 1918, a traditional blues tune about a lost love. Bob most likely knew it through Blind Lemon Jefferson, or possibly Robert Johnson’s version.

    The song is indicative of Bob’s deep connection to the original blues legends, and this adaptation is a direct byproduct of his loneliness in Suze’s absence. He wore that loneliness across most of the album, and here it takes on an older, rawer form.

    Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

    Deemed too controversial for the original release. Several of the protest songs on this record were published in Broadside, the folk and protest magazine. The first issue of that publication, of which Bob was a contributor, carried the lyrics of this talking blues. The alt-right gets picked apart in the song, with a great punch at the end: the narrator searches for communists everywhere, and eventually finds one looking back at him in the mirror.

    Dylan had planned to perform this on the Ed Sullivan Show, at the time the single most important platform for any musician wanting to get known or stay known. The censors got hold of it during rehearsal and immediately questioned the song, fearing libel against the John Birch Society. Bob made it clear without much deliberation: no song, no show. He walked out. Further down the line this helped his street cred with the anti-establishment Greenwich Village crowd, but that same fear of libel made it to the desks of the Columbia executives, who pulled the song from the album. Bob had to comply under contract. This led to the other songs being pulled as well. “Rocks and Gravel,” “Rambling Gambling Willie,” and “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” went with it.

    Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    Another cover, this time drawing from Henry Thomas, an old Texas country bluesman. A pretty different mood from the rest of the album, more upbeat, though the subject matter still circles back to Suze’s absence and Dylan’s loneliness. A little lightness before the end.

    I Shall Be Free

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    The album ends on a comic note. Lots of nonsensical remarks in this track, almost a politically incorrect comedy routine. A loose, funny, deliberate exhale after everything that came before it. Bob letting the air out of the balloon before he sends you home.

    Closing

    Freewheelin’ contains some of my favorite Bob tunes ever. For that it will always hold a happy place in the collection. I probably heard Bob Dylan songs in my toddler years, maybe even earlier. I genuinely cannot remember the first time I heard him. But sometimes I listen to “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and it’s new again. Every single time. That is the sign of great music.

    He was in a unique creative period here. You can tug on a lot of different threads and they all lead to the same place: a spot of intense creativity, a spot of inspired songwriting, a young man taking on the world with a guitar and a typewriter and a burning need to say something. This was the start of Bob’s rise. The best records were still to come, but this one gave us proof of what was possible. An all-time classic if there ever was one.

    Thanks be to the Dylan.

    “If you told the truth, that was all well and good, and if you told the un-truth, well that was still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.”

    -RTR