ANNIVERSARY ALBUM REVIEW

Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’ at 60

9½

By David Rea

12th January, 2024

Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

THE DAY OF John F. Kennedy's assassination, Bob Dylan likely watched the news reports come in on television — the grainy images from Dallas, Texas flickering across the 22-year-old’s crestfallen face. In his civil rights address to the nation of 1963, Kennedy had given hope to the civil rights movement: ‘we preach freedom around the world,’ he said, ‘…but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes?’ Dylan watched the news reports at his first great love Suze Rotolo’s sister’s apartment. From a cultured and bookish Italian-American family, Suze had introduced him to a good deal of literature, including the plays of Brecht. A left-leaning teenage volunteer at the Congress of Racial Equality’s headquarters, she had also influenced his politics. Biographer Clinton Heylin has pointed out that their moving into a tiny two-room apartment on West 4th Street together had marked a significant creative shift for the singer-songwriter, beginning a sustained period of topical songwriting. Passers-by strolling below their first-floor rear window late at night would have heard Dylan playing songs like ‘Blowing in the Wind’ for his girlfriend’s approval.

According to authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, Dylan gave a concert in New York the day after JFK's assassination. What was the voice of his generation going to sing now that a gunshot in Texas had brought the times to a silent halt? The ragamuffin prodigy came onstage, his shoes banging on the boards. There was often a silence before Dylan began to sing. He would turn away from his audience to tune his guitar, or change his harmonica. The anticipation must have been extraordinary. Finally, lit by spotlight, he turned to the audience. A hush descended. Just three months earlier, Dylan had performed in front of an estimated quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the March on Washington. He hadn't then yet written his countercultural anthem, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’; its rendition on that hot and sunny day of hope would surely have been one of its defining moments. But now, the day after JFK's assassination, Dylan launched into the song. ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call,’ he sang in the penultimate verse, ‘… the times they are a-changin’’. As he finished, an applause started up, everyone got to their feet and there was a huge standing ovation. The missed opportunity at the Lincoln Memorial became a masterstroke of historical timing now. Context changes everything in music. When Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock during the Vietnam War, his wailing guitar sounded like falling bombs. In the shadow of Kennedy’s death, Dylan’s song became an enraged cry of defiance: the times would continue to change, society would continue to move forward, even if they had shot America’s progressive president. It is that angry political resistance which pervades the atmosphere of Dylan's third studio album.

LABEL: Columbia Records RELEASE DATE: 13th January, 1964 (USA)

“To take us on his panoramic tour through a contemporary America of teargas and gunshots, iron ore ghost towns and impoverished shacks, Dylan employs a range of idioms, from Irish and British ballads to 12-bar blues.”

Like a giant billboard overlooking America, Dylan’s dramatically pained face on the album cover captures something of its mood following JFK’s assassination. On first listening it is a collection of songs as emotionally monochrome as Barry Feinstein’s cover photo. Gone is the wit, humour and warmth of his previous album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, leaving only sadness, desolation and that anger. To take us on his panoramic tour through a contemporary America of teargas and gunshots, iron ore ghost towns and impoverished shacks, Dylan employs a range of idioms, from Irish and British ballads to 12-bar blues; he borrows from the English folk tradition, the melody of the ‘Patriot Game’ by Dominic Behan and something of the melody of ‘Scarborough Fair’. The lyrics range from the introspective reflections of ‘Restless Farewell’ to the historical panorama of ‘With God on Our Side’. The images and turns of phrase sear themselves into your memory. In his topical song, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, Dylan delivers the news of Carroll’s death with all the journalistic directness of a New York Times clipping made verse, before the soaring emotion of the inscrutable chorus. Another of the album’s lyrical standouts, ‘When the Ship Comes in’, is ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ recast as an hallucinogenic vision of the world in transformation, registering the influence of Brecht.

On rare occasions the lines of these songs are a little bumpy. Dylan always worked quickly. At certain spots one senses an unwillingness to craft and hone, as these lines from ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ illustrate: ‘Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane / That sailed through the air and came down through the room’. Sometimes the syntax is awkwardly shuffled in order to clinch a rhyme. This is, to say the least, being picky. Perhaps such small syntactical wrinkles have appeared magnified, beneath the lens cast over them by Dylan controversially winning the Nobel Prize for Literature; it suggested songwriters were poets and their words should be read from the page. But to read lyrics without melody is akin to dancing in silence. These are great poems, but they are truly remarkable songs, and any tiny rough edges in the words are rendered almost invisible in the irreducible alchemy of their combination with music.

“Of the many iterations of Dylan's voice across his six-decade discography, this album’s is one of the most compelling. His smoky timbre contains continents of world weariness. To judge it by a singer’s metrics of pitch and range is to forget the great careworn voices of American popular music.”

Tracklist

Side one

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Ballad of Hollis Brown

With God on Our Side

One Too Many Mornings

North Country Blues

Side two

Only a Pawn in Their Game

Boots of Spanish Leather

When the Ship Comes In

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

Restless Farewell

Dylan’s solemn face on the album’s cover also reflected his wounded heart. His relationship with Suze Rotolo had been under strain for some time and she had sailed for Italy in the late spring of 1962 for several months. Their struggles probably contributed to the album’s lonesome atmosphere, and yielded the eloquent ‘One Too Many Mornings’. Accompanied by a plaintively picked guitar in open A tuning, Dylan conveys his desolation through a series of home movie vignettes of Greenwich Village, his voice as quiet as the streets he describes. For an artist who has been much criticised for the lack of finesse in his guitar and harmonica playing, it is a performance which demands you hold your breath to fully experience the fine grains of emotion. Few songwriters have conveyed the exhausting discordance of a relationship’s end with such compassion: ‘You’re right from your side / I’m right from mine / We’re both just one too many mornings / An’ a thousand miles behind’.

Of the many iterations of Dylan's voice across his six-decade discography, this album’s is one of the most compelling. His smoky timbre contains continents of world weariness. To judge it by a singer’s metrics of pitch and range is to forget the great careworn voices of American popular music, from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to Son House and Lead Belly. Another highlight, the transatlantic epistolary ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ missed an opportunity by not including a second voice. The lyrics consist of an exchange of letters between parting lovers, who we presume are Dylan and Suze. Delivered by Dylan alone, the turn-taking transitions can become muddled. Having sung live together many times but never recorded a duet, Dylan’s voice of what David Bowie called ‘sand and glue’ woven together with Joan Baez’s of purity and light would have better served the song, rendering the whole picture with greater clarity and fully drawing out the song’s emotions. Just as he famously failed to invite her on stage with him during his 1965 tour of England, however, so he failed to invite her into the studio here.

This is Dylan's most powerful and visceral political album, containing his greatest protest song (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’), his culturally most significant song (‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’) and two of his most poignant love songs (‘One Too Many Mornings’ and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’). It ranks amongst his very best. As it did in 1964, it simply demands our attention. It would be more than a decade before Dylan wrote another explicitly political song in the form of ‘Hurricane’ on 1976’s Desire. When his relationship with Suze Rotolo finally ended, he left behind the woman who had at least partway inspired his interest in left-wing politics. In her absence perhaps some of Bob Dylan's politics began to drain from him as he increasingly turned towards rock 'n' roll and folk rock.

The end of his relationship with Suze Rotolo also led to a marked increase in his drug intake, and there is an argument to be made that, just as their cohabitation had been, the break-up was another forking path in his creative journey. In addition to the wine, marijuana and amphetamine he added LSD, and the hallucinogen probably kicked open his doors of perception enough to write the likes of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’. It wasn't long before he turned away from the social and political panorama of his times into the disenchanted landscape of his imagination, a place as surreal and unforgettable as Alice’s Wonderland or Hieronymus Bosch’s hellscape. The ride was about to get a lot wilder.

NOTES ON SOURCES

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