Bob Dylan (4 page)

The most frequently used word to describe Dylan at the time was “sponge”—he would listen quietly to friends' conversations, making notes, and later on they would find phrases, stories and nuggets of information from their conversation appearing in his songs. He was omnivorously open to influences, but unlike most of his contemporaries, he had the drive and application to build something of his own out of the accumulated fragments. During a radio interview with Pete Seeger, Dylan explained his working methods. “I don't even consider it writing songs,” he claimed. “When I've written [a song] I don't even consider that I wrote it when I got done… I just figure that I made it up or I got it some place. The song was there before I came along, I just sort of took it down with a pencil…”

Having written a song effectively as a poem, he would then try and find a melody for it, often borrowing or adapting an old folk tune, some of which he learned from English folk singers on a trip he made to Europe in December 1962 through January 1963. Ironically, just as he rushed over to Italy to see Suze, she was sailing back to New York, where she managed to settle in before Bob returned a few weeks later, hoping to pick up their relationship where it had left off six months before. Suze was reluctant—she had matured considerably in her time away, and did not want to become just “Bob's girl” again—but Dylan was persuasive, and after a short time staying with her sister, she moved back into the 4th Street apartment.

Things had changed radically, however. Bob's fame had grown rapidly while she was away, and it seemed that everyone was trying to get to him through her, that nobody was interested in her for her own sake and that the process of objectification was growing even stronger than it had been before—particularly since songs like “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” in effect made their relationship public. Furthermore, Bob himself, encouraged by his new manager Albert Grossman, was becoming reclusive and aloof, and she found it more difficult than before to communicate with him. Before long, the old stresses and strains began to pull them apart all over again.

Besides several songs, such as ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather' and ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time', which were written specifically about Suze during her absence, Dylan also continued maturing as a protest songwriter, with songs like ‘Oxford Town' and particularly ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', whose strings of imagery reflected the influence of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, a favorite of Bob and Suze's. With John Hammond again at the helm, recording for the new album began with a couple of sessions in April
1962, but it was not until July that Dylan started laying down the more distinctive material that would set this new album firmly apart from his debut and establish him as a songwriter of great power and individuality.

Several of the protest songs that would appear on
Freewheelin'
, such as ‘Blowin' In The Wind' and ‘Masters Of War', were originally published in the folk/protest magazine
Broadside
, a small but influential disseminator of new views for whom Dylan served as a contributing editor. (Later on, in

1963, he would also contribute to an album of
Broadside Ballads
using the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt so as not to infringe his contract with Columbia Records.) The first issue of
Broadside
included the lyrics to one of his earliest songs, an amusing talking blues called ‘Talkin'
John Birch Paranoid Blues', which took a satiric swipe at the right-wing anti-communist organization: in the song, the narrator searches for communists so avidly he finds them everywhere, eventually spotting one in his mirror.

The song, which had been slated for inclusion on
Freewheelin'
, caused a problem when Dylan tried to perform it on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, the country's premier television variety showcase. He had been booked on the May 12 show by Sullivan's son-in-law, Bob Precht, a folk fan who had managed to smooth over the obvious absurdity of having Dylan share a bill with Teresa Brewer, Irving Berlin, Al Hirt and the mouse puppet Topo Gigio. But when Stowe Phillips, the network censor, heard the song in rehearsal, he had cold feet and refused to let Dylan perform it on the show, fearing that it might libel members of the John Birch Society. Would Bob, he wondered, care to sing something else instead?

He would not. “If I can't play my song, I'd rather not appear on the show,” he said, and walked out, hours before curtain time. In one way, it was a fortuitous refusal: Dylan had already come in for criticism from some of the Greenwich Village folkies for selling out when he told them he was due to appear, and his walk-out stopped that flak and generated some more favorable publicity besides. But there were further repercussions:
The Ed Sullivan Show
was on the CBS network, Columbia Records' parent company, and the same fears of libel brought pressure to remove the song from
Freewheelin'
as well, on the eve of its release. Since his contract gave them the right to censor such material, Dylan had no option but to comply, particularly since his first album had been a commercial failure.

Though he was angry at first, Dylan quickly got over his frustration, and took the opportunity to replace several of the songs which were scheduled to be on the album, which he felt were too old-fashioned, with more contemporary, “finger-pointing” songs. Out went ‘Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues', ‘Rocks And Gravel', ‘Rambling Gambling Willie' and ‘Let Me Die In My Footsteps', and in came ‘Bob Dylan's Dream', ‘Masters Of War', ‘Talkin' World War III Blues' and ‘Girl From The North Country'—but not before a few hundred copies of the album with the original running-order had been pressed up and released. (The rarest items in Dylan's back catalog, they now command thousands of dollars on the infrequent occasions they appear for sale.)

These four substitute tracks had been recorded at a late session in April 1963, four months after the rest of the album had been completed. They marked the debut of Dylan's new producer, a young black man called Tom Wilson, who had previously worked on jazz recordings by performers such as Sun Ra's Arkestra, and who would later go on to produce early efforts by such seminal Sixties groups as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention. Wilson had taken over production duties from John Hammond when Albert Grossman, alarmed at Hammond's casual approach to recording, threatened to walk away from the Columbia contract on the grounds that Dylan had been a minor when he signed it, thus rendering it null and void.

Since Dylan had recorded several times since turning 21, however, Grossman could not extricate him from the contract, although he could still cause enough of a fuss to get Hammond replaced. But Columbia had a policy which dictated that Columbia artists must only use Columbia's in-house producers, and there were no exceptions to the rule—certainly not unproven talents like Dylan. “We don't want anything to do with any producer at Columbia,” Grossman told David Kapralik, “because you don't have a producer that understands Bob Dylan.” Realizing that because Wilson was black, Dylan and Grossman would not dismiss him out of hand, Kapralik suggested Dylan chat with Wilson awhile. His ploy worked: the next day, Wilson was accepted as Bob's new producer and, shortly after, they recorded the songs which completed
Freewheelin'.

The album was released on May 27, 1963, with a cover photo of Bob and Suze strolling happily down a slush-covered 4th Street. As
Freewheelin'
picked up airplay, acclaim and sales of around 10,000 a month (particularly when Peter, Paul & Mary scored a huge hit with ‘Blowin' In The Wind' that July), Suze was the envy of every folk singer's girlfriend and female college
student. But even as the record was being released, Dylan was on the far side of the country, following his May 18 appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival by spending a fortnight—unknown to Suze—at the Carmel pad of his new friend, Joan Baez.

The second official Bob Dylan record released by Columbia, the single of ‘Mixed Up Confusion' sold even more poorly than his debut album. A rollicking rockabilly rave-up, it's a complete anomaly set against what preceded and succeeded it.

Shortly after the November 1962 sessions at which it was recorded, Dylan told folk historian Israel Young that he'd written the song in the taxi
en route
to the studio, and it sounds like it. An impromptu burst of disaffection, the song perhaps reflects the pressures that Dylan's growing reputation was bringing to bear upon him, with “too many people” wanting a piece of him, either to do some promotional work, or give them advice on songwriting (as his old Greenwich Village colleague Mark Spoelstra had requested, embarrassingly for all concerned), or to make an appearance in support of some cause or other. “They're all too hard to please,” fumes Dylan, desperately.

In one of his trips back West to Minneapolis that August, his chum Tony Glover had taped Dylan singing some songs and moaning about the demands made upon his time by people like the activists from the Congress Of Racial Equality. “CORE is a white organization for Negro people,” he sneered. “I am sick of writing songs for everybody.” He went on to sing a satiric talking blues which asked, “What kind of hippo is a hypocrite?” before returning to his theme of self-sacrifice. “I figure I've been writing too many songs for other people,” he said. “I finally got to the point where I said to myself: ‘Jesus, Dylan, you ain't written no songs about you. You've got to get somebody to write a song about you.' Then I said to myself, ‘I can write songs about me as well as anybody else can.'” With ‘Mixed Up
Confusion', he certainly expresses one side of himself clearly, blurting out a cathartic torrent of frustration.

Even the recording of the song, as it happens, left him angry and frustrated, probably due to the interference of his managers Albert Grossman and John Court at the sessions. Perturbed at what he saw as John Hammond's lackadaisical approach to recording, Grossman had begun to stick his oar in, and while his eye for business was without peer, his ear for music was less reliable. “Albert had the brilliant idea that Bobby ought to be recorded with a Dixieland band on ‘Mixed Up Confusion',” Hammond would recall. “It was a disaster.”

Whether the version released on the single is what Hammond (or Grossman) considered to be “Dixieland”, it's not really that great a disaster. Indeed, as a historical document, it marks the very first folk-rock recording, a good three years before
Bringing It All Back Home
. Herbie Lovelle's rattling-train snare drum licks and Gene Ramey's bass drive along an arrangement that leans heavily on Dick Wellstood's Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock-a-boogie piano, with the guitars of Bruce Langhorne and George Barnes dancing around the riff. Something of a throwback to the teenage Robert Zimmerman's Little Richard-influenced high-school bands, it was released as a single in December 1962, with ‘Corrina, Corrina' on the B-side, but was felt to be at such variance with Dylan's emergent reputation as a serious young commentator that it was swiftly withdrawn.

Three years later, it was reissued by the Dutch arm of CBS in a sleeve featuring one of the Daniel Kramer photographs of Dylan seated at an upright piano, taken at the
Bringing It All Back Home sessions
. Some copies were imported into the UK, where it was widely believed to be a recent recording, so congruent was it with Dylan's then contemporary folk-rock material. It was never included on an album until the 1985 retrospective collection
Biograph
—and even then, with typical Dylanesque inscrutability, a different version of the song was chosen. That wasn't Dixieland, either.

Blowin' In The Wind' marked a huge jump in Bob Dylan's songwriting. Prior to this, efforts like ‘The Ballad Of Donald White' and ‘The Death Of Emmett Till' had been fairly simplistic bouts of reportage songwriting, taking news stories—in these cases, about the disparity of the American legal system's treatment of, respectively, a Negro murderer and a Negro murder victim—and turning them into narrative dramas of social conscience.

‘Blowin' In The Wind' was different: for the first time, Dylan discovered the effectiveness of moving from the particular to the general. Whereas ‘The Ballad Of Donald White' would become completely redundant as soon as the eponymous criminal was executed, a song as vague and all-encompassing as ‘Blowin' In The Wind' could be applied to just about any freedom issue, at any time. It remains the song with which Dylan's name is most inextricably linked, and safeguarded his reputation as civil libertarian through any number of subsequent changes in style and attitude.

Sometimes derided for its lack of substance, the song features a particularly clever piece of poetic sleight-of-hand, hiding its string of unanswerable, rhetorical queries behind a strong, specific opening image (of a man walking down a road) which connects to both the Woody Guthrie road-song tradition of Dylan's immediate past and to the civil rights marchers who were then altering the course of their country's history. From there, the song offers less specific questions couched in more abstruse images, repeatedly dissolving into the wistful uncertainty of the chorus in a way that struck a strong chord with the youthful protest movement, validating their concern while absolving them from the obligation to come up with absolute answers to the problems about which they protested. There are no hard and fast answers, the song says, the only obligation is to care. “The first way to answer these questions,” said Dylan, “is by asking them. But lots of people have to first find the wind.”

The inspiration for the song came to him one afternoon in April 1962, during a long political discussion with friends in the Commons, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse across MacDougal Street from the Gaslight Club. As the conversation petered out into silence, an idea struck him. “The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence,” he told friends, “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. And the others, they ride the subways and read the Times, but they don't
understand. They don't know. They don't even care, that's the worst of it.” With his friend David Cohen (who became the folk singer David Blue) strumming the chords for him, Dylan quickly wrote down the words, and then the pair dashed over to Gerde's Folk City to play the new song for the club's singing MC, Gil Turner. Deeply impressed, Turner got Dylan to teach him the song and that very night he gave ‘Blowin' In The Wind' its first public recital, to great acclaim.