Bob Dylan (11 page)

After the Berkeley show, the portable party moved on to Joan Baez's place in Carmel, then to Los Angeles, where Bob made a late February appearance on
The Steve Allen Show
. When he eventually got back to New York, relations between Bob and Suze deteriorated further until, following a furious row one night in March (see entry for ‘Ballad In Plain D'), they finally broke up for keeps. Bob was devastated, but had plenty to occupy his time and thoughts: after a short April concert tour of the North-East, he flew to England in early May, where he played at London's Royal Festival Hall to a sellout audience that included the Beatles, the Stones and various
other members of the new British pop aristocracy, before moving on, via Paris and Berlin, to the Greek village of Vernilya. During his brief holiday there, he wrote many of the songs he would record on
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
, boiling down his experiences of the last six to nine months into his most personal album yet, a mixture of reactions to his split from Suze and reflections upon his art and position, leavened with a few moments of sharp humor. “There ain't any finger-pointing songs in here,” he told journalist Nat Hentoff as he was recording the album. “I don't want to write
for
people any more—you know, be a spokesman. From now on I want to write from inside of me…”

Another Side Of Bob Dylan
was recorded with remarkable efficiency, in a single session on the evening of June 9, 1964, in order to be ready for the record company's fall sales conference. Attending the session, besides Dylan, Nat Hentoff and producer Tom Wilson, were a handful of Bob's buddies, including Ramblin' Jack Elliott, with whom he recorded an (unused) early version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man'. Working his way steadily through a couple of bottles of Beaujolais, Dylan got seven songs down between 7.30 and 10.30, and had completed the entire album by 1.30 in the morning, finishing up with the song most indicative of his new mood—‘My Back Pages'.

Wilson, who had tried to drum some microphone technique into Bob—to get him to stop moving around so much—knew that he had to capture as much as he could as early as he could, and was reluctant to press Dylan beyond three takes of any song. Though he had not known exactly what Bob was going to record that evening, Wilson was aware of the changes that were occurring in Dylan's writing. “Those early albums gave people the wrong idea,” he told Hentoff. “Basically, he's in the tradition of all lasting folk music… he's not a singer of protest so much as he is a singer of
concern
about people.” And the people concerned here, the songs suggested, were rather closer to home than on his previous releases. “The songs are insanely honest,” Dylan later admitted, “not meanin' to twist any head, and written only for the reason that I myself, me alone, wanted and needed to write them. I've conceded the fact that there is no understanding of anything—at best, just winks of the eye—and that is all I'm looking for now, I guess.”

The album title, much against Bob's better judgment, was Wilson's idea. Dylan felt it was over-stating the obvious, placing too great an emphasis on its implied negation of the ideals of his protest songs. That is certainly how a lot of his old supporters felt when the album was released early in August, a mere seven months after
The Times They Are A-Changin'
. Irwin Silber, editor of
Sing Out!
magazine, was moved to write an open letter to Bob in the magazine, in which he denigrated Dylan's new songs as “all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious—maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion.” All, of course, completely true: but what Silber failed to realize was that, years before the notion became common currency, Dylan had effectively made the personal political, too.

Opening the album on a relatively light note, ‘All I Really Want To Do' provides the listener with the most overt suggestion that there were to be no “finger-pointing” songs this time around: not only is the song about a personal relationship, rather than protesting a more political issue; it's also downright funny, from the hilariously busy rhyme scheme to the ludicrous falsetto yodel with which Dylan transforms the final word of the title in each chorus. This last effect may have started as a light-hearted parody of Jimmie “Singing Brakeman” Rodgers, a favorite of Bob's, and taken on a more flamboyant life of its own as the session progressed and the bottles got emptier.

Compared with most of the other songs on the album that were inspired by the break-up with Suze Rotolo, this is a relatively generous expression of Dylan's mood, as he tries to convince his girl that there are no ulterior motives to his desire, that he has no intention of attempting to alter or confine her. Yet even as he gives these fulsome assurances, the sheer clutter of disavowed intentions in each verse suggests the over-bearing, domineering side of Dylan which Suze found so restricting. It's almost as if he's trying to preempt her complaints, rattling off up to nine examples in each verse of things he knows she might object to, before she can voice those objections. Ultimately, the song denies itself.

Nevertheless, the following year ‘All I Really Want To Do' would furnish a sleek, albeit less successful, follow-up to The Byrds' massive cover of ‘Mr Tambourine Man', and the same year it also provided a winsome enough start to Cher's solo career.

A moody, stalking number, ‘Black Crow Blues' represents the first time that Dylan played piano on one of his records—quite a surprise for those who considered him a guitar troubadour, pure and simple. Performing on an old upright piano, Dylan's technique is shaky in places, particularly in the third verse, as he offers a simplified version of the stride piano style of such boogie giants as Cow Cow Davenport and Meade “Lux” Lewis. What makes the track all the more unusual are the punctuating stabs of harmonica which he inserts into the second and third verses and between the penultimate and final verses, stressing the already heavily-accented syncopation.

It seems second nature now, but up until this point in time Dylan's audience had regarded his use of “blues” as referring more to his lyric modes than to the music itself, and this sudden outbreak of R&B rhythms in the folk arena came as something of a shock in 1964, and provided dyed-in-the-wool folkies and committed protesters alike with further misgivings to set alongside their more general complaints about Dylan's new direction. Lyrically, it's the most basic of responses to his emotional situation following the split with Suze, the first verse's reference to a “long-lost lover” he wishes would tell him “what it's all about” being followed in subsequent verses by further non-specific expressions of his resultant distraction.

The shortest song on the record, ‘Spanish Harlem Incident' offers a slight counterbalance to the album's generally bitter tone as regards love. Where songs like ‘It Ain't Me Babe', ‘All I Really Want To Do' and ‘To Ramona' find Dylan struggling with women whose responses and demands are fatally mediated by modern neuroses and external pressures, here he is exultant, completely fulfilled, swept off his feet by the “wildcat charms” of an earthier, more primal female force who, the imagery suggests, responds with physical immediacy and a rather welcome absence of psychological debate.

After singing the song at the recording session, he asked a friend if he understood it. The friend nodded enthusiastically, whereupon Dylan responded with a laugh, “Well, I didn't!” It doesn't look as though the song became any clearer for him, either: in the version published in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, the penultimate lines of both the second and last verses are mysteriously altered from those sung, the turbulent (and clearly superior) “I'm nearly drowning” and “where you surround me” replaced by the more prosaic “I got to know, babe” and “will I be touching you”—surely a mistake?

A pivotal moment in Dylan's songwriting, ‘Chimes Of Freedom' is the song which first signals his intention to move away from straight protest songs to more allusive “chains of flashing images.” It's his own
Tempest
, a compelling account of a visionary epiphany experienced during an electric storm, rendered in a hyper-vivid poetic style heavily influenced by the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. As Dylan and his companion dive into a doorway to avoid the thunderous downpour, a church bell begins tolling, and the synaesthetic combination of
these two elemental forces—the sound and the fury—inspires in him a vision of universal redemption.

The song is Dylan's Sermon On The Mount: having spent the last couple of years supporting this or that specific cause, his chimes of freedom here toll for all of life's downtrodden and unjustly treated folk—unmarried mothers, refugees, outcasts, the disabled, conscientious objectors, the unfairly jailed and “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse/And for every hung-up person in the whole wide Universe.” It's a veritable army of underdogs and peaceniks in uplifting collusion, an anthem as generous and inclusive as ‘The Times They Are A-Changin'' was divisive and exclusive.

‘Chimes Of Freedom' was written during the cross-country road trip of February 1964. Another song begun on that same trip was ‘Mr Tambourine Man', a version of which was also recorded (though not used) at the
Another Side…
session, with Ramblin' Jack Elliott adding backing vocals on the choruses; it's not difficult to see, in both songs, vivid echoes of the Mardi Gras festival which Dylan and his pals had entered into with such drunken gusto a few days before, transmuted into images of dynamic salvation through a process analogous to the prolonged disordering of the senses which Rimbaud recommended as the means whereby a poet might become a seer.

From this point on, social reality would not be carved up into strictly black and white issues in Dylan's songs, but transformed by a razor-sharp satirical surrealism into a parallel universe in which the underlying forces were more subtly revealed.

Amid the unremitting doom and gloom of
The Times They Are A-Changin'
, Dylan presumably felt it might be prudent to lighten things up with a comedy number after the
sturm und drang
of ‘Chimes Of Freedom', especially since the main creative spur for this new album—his break-up with Suze—left a melancholy, bitter edge to several of the remaining songs.

‘I Shall Be Free No. 10' is pure play, a burst of intellectual hillbilly humor whose light sparring with conservative values echoes the fancy footwork of Cassius Clay—who finds his own poetic efforts satirized in the second verse. The humorous punchline status accorded to contemporary bogeymen like the Russians and hawkish right-winger Senator Barry Goldwater
demonstrates how determined Dylan was to change the way he was expected to deal with such subjects. Derision, he's suggesting, has just as much a place in his work as debate and declamation.

Dylan had some trouble recording the song, stumbling over some of the later verses. He wanted to leave it for a while and record something else, but Tom Wilson insisted he finish it, suggesting Dylan simply record an insert of the last section—less common practice then than now, but no great problem. To Wilson's annoyance, one of Dylan's friends in the control-room advised him to let Bob start again from the beginning, on the grounds that “you don't start telling a story with Chapter Eight.” “Oh man,” said Wilson, “what kind of philosophy is that? We're recording, not writing a biography.” Dylan did the insert, as requested.

In Dylan's collected
Lyrics 1962-1985
, ‘I Shall Be Free No. 10' is printed in pale gray text, a format used mainly for liner-notes and additional prose poems—suggesting perhaps that the author wouldn't try to defend it as a sterling example of the songwriter's art. Even the original ‘I Shall Be Free' from
Freewheelin'
is given full black text, though this comic doggerel is no less deserving of it.

To Ramona' is part of the extended canon of Dylan songs—including ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' and ‘It's All Over Now, Baby Blue'—in which departure or severance accompanies some momentous sea-change in the narrator's attitude. It's fundamentally a break-up song in which the singer reluctantly takes his leave of a girl ensnared by the phoney aims and pointless opinions of her acquaintances, the “worthless foam” pumped out by “fixtures, forces and friends.” Though not quite as blunt as ‘Ballad In Plain D', it deals fairly directly with the basic issues behind Bob and Suze's split, softened by the wistful lilt of the melody and reaching a moving resolution in which he comes to accept the inevitability of the change, while refusing to shut the door completely on any future possibility of reunion.

It's by far the most elegant of the many songs on the album that were inspired by the split, and it offers, by extension, an insight into Dylan's changing attitude toward his old finger-pointing, protesting self. The key lines are those in which he equates the eponymous Ramona's belief that she is “…better 'n no one/And no-one is better than you” with having “…nothing to win, and nothing to lose,” a characterless position
of stagnant ambition and minimal risk quite at odds with his own recent lifestyle. Always convinced that he was a special talent (and encouraged to think that way by a manager who deliberately fostered the Dylan “mystique”), Dylan was starting to consider more deeply those notions of “equality” and “freedom” he had recently espoused with such assurance, a subject to which he returned in ‘My Back Pages'.

Another slice of nonsense to sweeten the record's predominantly bitter tang, ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare' takes the talkin' blues form which Dylan learned from Woody Guthrie into areas his one-time idol might find unrecognizable—although he'd doubtless appreciate the humor. The main difference is that, in his day, Guthrie would have made up the song, performed it a time or two, then forgotten it, while Dylan has to live alongside his for posterity. The forerunner of ‘Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' on
Bringing It All Back Home
, ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare' is an absurdist development of the old joke about the traveling salesman, the farmer and the farmer's daughter, filtered through a sensibility informed in roughly equal parts by leftist sympathies, movies and jive-talk—a perfectly-gauged summation, in other words, of his collegiate audience's interests. In Dylan's version of the joke, the farmer's daughter, Rita, a pulchritudinous sort who “looked like she stepped out of
La Dolce Vita,”
takes on the sinister character of Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
, necessitating the salesman—who's actually a doctor, born at the bottom of a wishing well (go figure!)—to make a pro-Castro statement in order to get out of milking the farmer's cows, as he'd promised. Or something like that. It could, at a stretch, perhaps be read as a broad satire
on the antagonism between bohemian urban cool and reactionary rural conservatism, but why bother? The track's little more than a throwaway, a means of injecting some light-hearted pace into an otherwise more than usually lugubrious album. Dylan's laconic delivery here, however, offers the record's most marked change from the tone of earnest profundity which characterized
The Times They Are A-Changin'
, prefiguring the air of sardonic, offhand genius that would dominate his next few albums.