Random Dude vs. Bob Dylan (You Know, the Musical Artist?)

I was considering doing Dylan (particularly the post Dylan My Parents Listened To era) when I finished with Queen, but it looks like I'm off the hook now. I guess I can do Pink Floyd instead...

After I finish my plants thread, I was planning a thread on music from Scotland. My hypothesis is that Scotland has the highest proportion of good bands per capita of any Western country (and possibly the whole world).

Does Iceland get that distinction by mere virtue of having only like a quarter million people, and being the home of Sigur Ros, The Sugarcubes, and Bjork?  Or is it cheating to list the Sugarcubes and Bjork? 

Also, points against Scotland for the existence of Calvin Harris.

Ah, but were forgetting that Scotland is not a country in the conventional sense!

bis or this project is total garbage.

When is this most ambitious project commencing?

What if he doesn't like The River? I'd have to fuck his shit up.

Monty vs. the Beach Boys is gonna be a thing, isn't it?

Maybe it's because I'm listening to Dylan as I write this, but I'm disappointed this doesn't seem to be happening.

Me too.

I for one am glad that we as a culture moved beyond the whole "One or two originals a side and 10 covers" approach to tracklisting albums, because sweet Jesus did it ever put some garbage in the back catalogues of our most respected musicians.

Plus, it broke up the Wonders!

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)


On May 27, 1963, Bob Dylan released his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.  His first album had not sold very well, and this album would take months and multiple recording sessions to complete, but includes several of Dylan's most famous songs, and marked the beginning of his being considered a great artist by the likes of other famous writers such as Allen Ginsberg.  And not without reason.  The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is major step forward for Dylan in terms of songwriting, as rather than just featuring two original compositions as on his debut, his sophomore release features eleven originals, about four or five of which are truly great.


"Blowin' In the Wind" - The very first track of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan showcases just how much Dylan had grown as a lyricist since his first album.  "Blowin In the Wind", which borrows its tune from the African American spiritual No More Auction Block, explores social issues much more extensively than Dylan did on his previous album, with its focus on war and oppression.  It is beautiful, heartfelt, and melancholy, with the ambiguous "The answer is blowin' in the wind" serving as the response to each of the questions Dylan asks in each verse, implying that he is singing of what should be plainly obvious injustices whose remedies are nonetheless endlessly elusive.  This long-term view of things and the broad focus of injustices lends the song a timelessness that was absent in the Dylan-penned tracks on his debut album, and it gives the song a lasting relevance, which probably speaks to its continued popularity today.  It's also an apt song for this particular moment in history, in the recent aftermath of the 2016 elections.  I don't intend to focus on this album through the lens of an impending Donald Trump presidency, but listening to "Blowin' In the Wind" is certainly cathartic at a time in American history where, once again, an unbroken four-century legacy of racism makes itself manifest, this time by means of American voters electing a President with barely obfuscated white nationalist aspirations.  "Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head / And pretend that he just doesn't see?"  The answer is, indeed, "blowin' in the wind".

"Girl from the North Country" - Personally, I think the love ballads on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan are a bit of a mixed bag.  But the best of the lot, in my opinion, comes first, with "Girl from the North Country".  It's a mournful song, perhaps inspired by what seemed like the end of Dylan's relationship with his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo.  As with "Blowin' In the Wind", I think a lot of the emotional heft of this song comes from the ambiguity of the situation.  We do not know why the relationship between the singer and his erstwhile "true love" ended, nor is there any sense of blame.  There is just a sense of deep sadness at a relationship that seems to be finished, while at the same time the singer genuinely wishes the best for his former partner.  Dylan's performance on the song is also fantastic, with his voice filled with a mournful longing, and his delivery doesn't ever end up feeling cheesy or cliched.

"Masters of War" - There are several anti-war songs on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "Masters of War" certainly being the most direct.  With a tune based off of Jean Ritchie's arrangement of the traditional Nottamun Town, "Masters of War" has a relentless feel to it, amplifying the righteous anger of Dylan's lyrics.  It's a fantastic protest song, and in spite of its fairly specific focus on the growing influence military-industrial complex in American society, like "Blowin' In the Wind", its relevance does not feel confined to the time of its composition.  Lyrically, however, I don't think this song constitutes great literature.  It's too angry and didactic, and its blood motif and religious allusions too simplistic to be great poetry.  But that's OK; there's nothing wrong with a protest song being didactic, and the lyrics certainly aren't inelegant (at the very least, Dylan never rhymes the word masses with the word Masses).  Additionally, while they aren't particularly nuanced Biblical allusions, Dylan's references to Judas and Jesus mark his most extensive references to religion in songs whose lyrics he himself has written up to this point.  And one last noteworthy observation:  in the fifth verse of the song, Dylan sings "You've thrown the worst fear / That can ever be hurled / Fear to bring children / Into the world".  This is a concern which will appear several more times through the course of the album.

"Down the Highway" - I don't have a whole lot to say about this track.  It's a fairly derivative blues number that would appear to be about Dylan's relationship with the aforementioned Suze Rotolo, whose trip to study in Italy for some months inspired several of Dylan's songs on this album.  But there's nothing especially noteworthy about this song.  The lyrics are fine, I suppose, but nothing about them stands out, and Dylan's performance is rote and forgettable, lacking the conviction of something like "Girl from the North Country".

"Bob Dylan's Blues" - This is different from anything else we've seen from Dylan thus far.  "Bob Dylan's Blues" is a lot more lighthearted than any of the first four tracks on the album (or either of his original songs on Bob Dylan), and hence makes for a nice change of pace.  The lyrics are mostly pretty random and humorous, but there is a theme of sorts running through the song, in Dylan's rejection of the materialistic consumerism of post-war America, with the tongue-in-cheek final verse perhaps serving as a sort of hyperbolic expression of the nonconformity inherent in the eschewing of said materialistic consumerism.  It's a fun song, and while certainly not on par with some of the more famous songs that appear on this album, I like it.

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" - This is by far the best song on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, both lyrically and musically, and it's the first time, as I embark on this project of listening to his discography, that I get the sense that Dylan may in fact be a lyricist worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  "Hard Rain" is both lyrically complex and emotionally powerful.  In spite of being released on an album that came out several months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a refrain that suggests the falling of nuclear bombs, the song was in fact written before the crisis and according to Dylan, the "hard rain" is not specifically a reference to nuclear fallout.  And while "Hard Rain" can certainly be interpreted through this lens, the fact that Dylan wasn't specifically focusing on a single contemporary event and the frequently cryptic lyrics give this song the same sort of timelessness that "Blowin' in the Wind" possesses.  As in "Masters of War", "Hard Rain" focuses on parents' concerns about their children's futures in an unjust and dangerous world.  However, in this song, the fate of the child is somewhat more ambiguous than that of a probable future casualty of war.  In particular, my reading up on the song and learning that the "hard rain" is not, in fact, definitely just a metaphor for nuclear fallout, has lent the "hard rain" an ambiguity that enriches the song, and enriches the heroism of the son in his plans to bear witness to the unjust and dangerous world.  The "hard rain" need not apply to certain obliteration of humanity; it may also refer to the obliteration of inequity and war.  Lines like "Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'" show that the son is willing to perish in his attempts to combat the world's myriad injustices, regardless of whether the "hard rain" that falls brings an end to said injustices or an end to his own life or even the lives of millions.  And lines like "I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow", speaks to a certain optimism that even should the son fail, a future generation may yet succeed in combating injustice.

"Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" - Another love song written about Suze Rotolo, Dylan wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" upon learning that Rotolo was planning to possibly stay in Italy permanently.  This is yet another track on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan which is considered to be a masterpiece.  And it's quite good.  There's an affecting wistfulness to the song, and a wishing that things could have been different.  And the refrain of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" is pretty great; it can be seen bitter and angry, or passive-aggressive and sarcastic, or as a genuine attempt by the singer to comfort the subject of the song, which attempt the singer fails to do in spite of himself.  And yet the song is kind of immature.  Apart from what may be an overly charitable reading of the refrain, there's not much in the way of introspection by the singer, just bitterness directed at the other party in the relationship.  As such, "Don't Think Twice" sabotages itself and fails to match the more even-handed "Girl from the North Country".  My ambivalence towards this song probably also isn't helped by the fact that I've been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen in the wake of his recent passing, and when Cohen did bitterness, he did it a lot better than Dylan does on "Don't Think Twice".  There's at least some sense of self-awareness when Cohen is unduly bitter that he's also at least partially to blame for his failed relationships.  One doesn't really get that sense with Dylan on "Don't Think Twice".  Although it probably bears in mind remembering that Dylan was only in his early 20s when he wrote this song, whereas Cohen's was in his 30s when he released his first album, and while Dylan's brilliance as a musical artist frequently shines through on these first couple of albums, so does his youth and immaturity at times.

"Bob Dylan's Dream" - Here again is a certain wistfulness and wishing that things could be different, as we saw on "Girl from the North Country", and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", only this time applied to nostalgia for an irretrievable time before Dylan and some old friends went their separate ways.  And unlike "Don't Think Twice", there seems to be some more introspection to this track, as Dylan looks back at his and his friends' naivety in thinking that their way of life could go on unchanged, and his realization that his dream that things were back to the way they were is just a dream.  As on a number of other Dylan songs that I've listened to so far, Dylan values frugality and rejects materialism, as seen in lines like "How we longed for nothin' and were quite satisfied / Talkin' and a-jokin' about the world outside" or "Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat / I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like [they were]".  It's certainly not a perfect song.  I kind of see here what @billy meant when he said that Dylan was playing a character early in his career.  "How many a year has passed and gone"?  Well, Bob, seeing as you were 21 when you recorded this song, maybe, I dunno, four years, maybe five, have passed and gone, since you'd last seen these old friends.  Still, I like "Bob Dylan's Dream"; it's certainly not one of the album's best songs, but it's far better than the weakest songs.

"Oxford Town" - Bob Dylan wrote this song in response to James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi as the school's first black student, and the subsequent attempt by racists to keep the University segregated.  It's far from Dylan's most powerful Civil Rights-themed or Civil Rights-adjacent song, but it works well enough.  Dylan's pleasant guitar playing and vocal delivery and fairly simple lyrics provide a stark contrast to the subject matter, wherein what, in a just world, would have been a simple matter of a person enrolling at and then attending a college with no problems became instead a part of a struggle for equality wherein people were regularly brutalized by law enforcement or killed by domestic terrorists from white supremacist organizations.

"Talkin' World War III Blues" - Another song about war, but unlike the didactic and angry "Masters of War", "Talkin' World War III Blues" is darkly humorous.  It's not as good as "Masters of War", but it's still pretty good.  There's some pretty funny lines about the singer's dream wherein he explores a society devastated by a nuclear apocalypse, like "And I drove down 42nd Street / In my Cadillac.  Good car to drive after a war", or "Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand / I seen a man / I said, "Howdy friend, I guess there's just us two" / He screamed a bit and away he flew / Thought I was a Communist".  And once again we see a fear for one's children, only whereas in "Masters of War" this manifested itself in anger, and in "Hard Rain" it manifested itself as an unstated concern in the face of a dangerous world, here it manifests itself in dark humor, when a woman with whom Dylan wants to "play Adam and Eve" tells him "'Hey man, you crazy or sumpin' / You see what happened the last time they started"'.  The fear of even attempting to have children in this situation, and the way that the few people left alive have a strong aversion to their fellow survivor in Dylan, and the people going to psychiatrists to deal with their own apocalyptic nightmares (in which Dylan's doctor tells him "I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me"), puts me in mind of a line from a Jorge Luis Borges story: "...mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men".  Borges' stories often have a dream-like quality to them, and like Dylan in "Talkin' World War III Blues", Borges is mostly being facetious in this quote, but both Borges' work and this song deal with understandable reactions to a disorienting alternate reality, and I think that's principally where "Talkin' World War III Blues" manages to transcend it's humorous treatment of its subject matter and be a deceptively insightful exploration of people's responses to that which threatens them.

"Corrina, Corrina" - The first of two covers on the album, Dylan's rendition of the traditional "Corrine, Corrina" is fine, if unspectacular.  It's pleasant, but largely forgettable.  I honestly don't have much more to say about it, other than it kicks off a kind of underwhelming conclusion to the album.

"Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance" - Another cover, originally popularized by Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, this one with lyrics largely reworked by Dylan.  It's OK.  It's also not a particularly memorable song.  It's certainly better than "Down the Highway" at least, I'll give it that.

"I Shall Be Free" - Not a fan of this one.  As with "Bob Dylan's Blues", the song is mostly composed of absurdist lyrics, and replete with pop culture references (is it a bad thing that I didn't know who any of those actresses are, apart from Elizabeth Taylor?), but I just couldn't get into this song.  None of it is especially funny, and the descriptions of the various women he's in relationships with feel kinda sexist.  


Overall, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is a big step up from Dylan's eponymous debut.  I think in retrospect I'd agree with @billy and give his first album a B, but this one's a solid B+.  There's some really great songs on this album ("Blowin' In the Wind", "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna' Fall"), but there's also some weaker material on the album, particularly on the second half.