A review of a Dylan record that is not new is basically pointless at this point, for two reasons. First, the music industry is vastly populated with Dylan fans, so he gets a lot of public praise. I mean a lot! Dylan fans has access to an incredibly large Shakespeare-esque body of secondary research on the work and life of Bob Dylan written by smarter people than you or me. So why add more?
Second, people who are not Dylan fans may not have read much of this secondary literature, but they also are very likely disinclined to do so. Recommending a Dylan record to the uninitiated is like recommending “Citizen Kane” to a casual movie fan. Every erudite and self-important critic in the country will recommend Bob Dylan from a sense of requirement, and if there is ever a list published of great American Musicians/albums, you are basically duty-bound to include Bob Dylan near the top of the list, even if you don’t really like him. File Dylan under “With some things, you don’t judge them, they judge you.”
And yet, I am going to do this anyway. The reason? Not only is Dylan in general worth every bit of the hype in my opinion, but also this record is so good you should buy it an play it until you wear out the record / break you CD player / grow ill from malnutrition.
And as much as this may be both obligatory and unnecessary, it is my blog and this is what I want to do.
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Bob Dyaln’s eponymous debut album was released in March 1962. The record was mostly covers, including, in fact, only two original compositions. Although the record was released on a major label (
Roughly a month after the release of the first record, Dylan went to the studio with his producer John Hammond. At this point they probably did not know that both of their careers were on the line. They started slow, and it was not until July they they finally recorded something worth keeping, Dylan’s signature “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Over the next ten or so months Dylan wrote and recorded thirty or more songs—an astonishing number of songs really, especially considering that until this point his catalogue of music was almost entirely traditionals and covers.
During this same period there was a trip to
A few months later in May of 1963, the first of many perfect albums* by Bob Dylan was released: “The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.”
(*Note: Bob Dylan may well be the winner of the “Most Perfect Albums in a Lifetime” award.)
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You do not have to look very far to find seemingly hyperbolic praise for this simple little record. For example, not that I especially respect them, mind you, “Rolling Stone” Magazine (among many others) listed it as one of the top 100 albums of all time. And how about this one: the Library of Congress chose it as one of only 50 albums ever recorded to add to a recorded-music-time-capsule-thingy that supposedly was to represent the sum of American culture. The greatest praise for the album though is the dictionary-length collection of quotes you could find of legendary musicians talking about the impact of this record on their own personal souls and careers. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Donovan, Van Morrison, Joan Baez, etc etc. Also, the songs on this record have been covered (I estimate—but do not exaggerate) 6,000 times by major recording artists and notable indies.
So what makes this album so good?
At the time of the release this record was like a Whole New Thing. Folk music was so far outside the mainstream at the time, so the idea of a fella just strumming a guitar and singing was sort of novel and interesting. Plus the harmonica thing. We take for granted the acoustic-guitar-plus-harmonica folk cliché now, but this was actually somewhat of an innovation at the time.
But what you read over and over if you begin to look into this at all is that people were captivated by the lyrics. To give you a “for instance”: in one of the final recording sessions, they brought in Tom Wilson, an African America producer who had worked mostly with Jazz musicians. He was all, "I didn't even particularly like folk music. 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."
You see folk music at the time was essentially anachronistic, sentimentally tied to the Great Depression and a life that just no longer existed. It was quaint and fundamentally silly. But Rock and Roll was even worse. The Beatles are geniuses and can give Dylan a run for his money in terms of total perfect albums ever recorded. But look at their music in 1963: “Love Me Do”? I ask you this: WTF? And it doesn’t really get better in Motown. Little Richard? The Big Bopper? Roy Orbison? What about Elvis? This is all fine music… maybe even great in its way. But no one on the radio had anything to say; or at least they were not saying it in their songwriting.
Few songwriters truly stand up to close scrutiny as poets. Even when they are terrific and write top-notch lyrics, if you take away the music… well there is no music. You see, good poet’s are essentially musical. But they must create the music with their words alone. Musicians on the other hand make music with music. The words may be clever and captivating, but they are also basically the thing that you can hang the melody and rhythm of the song on. Real poets (again this is not a judgment against songwriters) create melody and rhythm with the language itself. Paul Simon is in my opinion an example of a phenomenal song writer, whose lyrics just absolutely make the music work, but whose lyrics simply do not work without the music.
In my arrogant opinion, Bob Dylan is a great poet, and that is never as true for him as it is on this album. Before long, Dylan learns to be more evasive in his writing. He resists clear interpretation more and more, especially through his breathtaking troika of perfect rock albums (“Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Blonde on Blonde”). This is a reasonable response to the violent attempts of various cultural groups to “own” Dylan or to misapprehend his work. In “Freewheelin” Dylan’s voice and vision are very clear and reverberate with an unmistakable earnestness and integrity. Plus he is clever as all get-out.
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Decontextualized Quotes:
“I’m looking for a woman / Needs a worried man”
“’I will let you be in my dreams if I can be in your dreams’ / I said that.”
“As easy ass it was to tell black from white / It was all that easy to tell wrong from right. / And our choices were few and the thought never hit / That the one road we traveled would ever split.”
“I was feelin’ kinda lonesome and blue, / I needed somebody to talk to. / So I called up the operator of time / Just to hear a voice of some kind. / ‘When you hear the beep / It will be
“You wanna be like me / Pull out your six-shooter / And rob every bank you see / Tell the judge I said it was alright”
“I’ve been looking all over for a gal like you / Can’t find nobody / So you’ll have to do”
“Everybody sees themselves walking around with no one else”
“I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind / You could have done better but I don’t mind / You just sort of wasted my precious time / But don’t think twice it’s alright”
“We longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied”
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Songs:
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”
For my money, this may be the best Dylan song of them all. It is simply heart breaking. As a song writer myself, I find that writing a good song about love is nearly impossible. It is so hard to not come off as emo and sentimental. Yet love is so important, and so is heart break. We need good songs about these topics that give us the linguistic and emotional tools to sort out our love and heart-break in a sophisticated manner.
Basically what we get in this song is this very conflicted guy who is leaving a woman. He can tell its over, but he also really wants to find a reason to stay. And he is trying to be a grown up about how everything turned out, but he hurts, you can just tell. The self-deception is thick and incomplete. It is like the stuff you say to yourself to try to convince yourself.
And the English teacher in me is keen to notice the light v. dark opposition and the time motif.
Incidentally, Dylan gives another gorgeous love-themed song with “Girl of the North Country” which is an adaptation from the traditional “Scarborough Fair,” and which I once had to pull over on the side of the freeway because my insides had spilled all out, and I could not drive with my guts all deliquescing around the floor of my car, metaphorically speaking.
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“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”
This is a great song that has perhaps become somewhat banal through excessive repetition (the same is true of “Blowin’ in the Wind”). But I invite you to listen to this thing with new ears. Take this stanza:
“Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony,
I met a white man who walked a black dog,
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow,
I met one man who was wounded with love,
I met another man who was wounded with hatred,
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”
The next stanza the “blue-eyed boy” is asked what he will do now. “I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest” where he will face the ugly stuff, the “pellets of poison filling the waters,” the hungry and forgotten souls etc. Then he will “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.”
What is this hard rain that is coming? Should we feel hopeful? Is it the crops-bringing rain of spring? Is it the flood-bringing rain of judgment? And if it is that, should we fear or beg for this judgment? Should look forward to the coming justice? Or will we also be left off the ark to drown?
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“Master of War”
One of the very few polemics in all of Dylan’s work. The guitar work is repetitive and haunting that keeps a kind of angry tension throughout. The lyrics are about all the injustices and deceptions of the American war machine, basically. The lyrics are so scathing and directed at the persons responsible. My favorite part is the ending:
“Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy back you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
“And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while your lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Till I’m sure that you’re dead”
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This was one of Bob Dylan’s self-described “finger pointing” songs. Basically that means it was topical, inspired by real events going on at the time. This was a major genre in Dylan’s early work, but something he did less and less of as time when on. This particular song was inspired by James Meredith, the first black student at U of Mississippi. September 1962, Kennedy ordered the
Dylan resented the way the “hippies” eventually co-opted his work, but one value that endured all his Madonna-like style and personality makeovers was his outrage about racial injustice.
Also of note: the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” was adopted by the Civil Rights Movement and was probably the most well known of any early B.D. songs.
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Final thoughts:
When I came back to this album some months ago, the thing that struck me most was the quality of Dylan’s guitar work. Also the vocals are really, really great.
“Corina, Corina” is a traditional song, and he plays it beautifully on this record.