Bob Dylan All the Songs
Page 15
The Album Cover
The cover photo was taken by Sandy Speiser, a photographer from Columbia Records, who took another photo that illustrated in 2004 The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Live 1964. It seemed the snapshot was taken on the northeast corner of Fifty-Second Street and Broadway, at Times Square in New York. Why there? Simply because Dylan was recording at Studio A of Columbia Records, located two buildings away at 799 Seventh Avenue, in the area of the music editors.
Technical Details
Same recording material as for the preceding two albums.
The Instruments
After his Gibson J-50 disappeared mysteriously, Dylan acquired a new acoustic guitar, probably the famous Gibson Nick Lucas, toward the end of 1963. This rosewood model with thirteen frets and blond varnish was bought from Marc Silber, the owner of Fretted Instruments, a New York store in Greenwich Village. Marc Silber: “That 1930s Gibson Nick Lucas Special he played in Dont Look Back had belonged to my sister. It was in mint condition when I sold it to him, but it got a little wrecked.”31 Dylan played it on this album and the next one, and he used it in concerts until 1966, namely during the 1964 and 1965 Newport Folk Festivals. As for the harmonicas, he only used three in different keys: C, G, and A. Also, he played an upright piano for the first time in “Black Crow Blues.”
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
Was Dylan faster than the Beatles? While the Fab Four managed to record eleven songs on February 11, 1963, for their first album, Please Please Me, in little over twelve hours (including one song that was not published), Bob Dylan accomplished the feat of also recording eleven, plus four others that did not appear on the record, in just six and a half hours!
MYSTERY SOLVED
Suze Rotolo left a clue concerning the mysterious disappearance of Dylan’s Gibson J-50. In her memoirs, she explained that after the fire that broke out in October 1963 in the apartment where she had moved a few months before with her sister, “Bob’s old Gibson guitar was nowhere to be found.”3 So it seems he had given it to her…
All I Really Want To Do
Bob Dylan / 4:04
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
Like any creator, Dylan has his share of contradictions. Despite the album’s thematic rupture with his previous sources of inspiration, the first song of the album was inspired by his breakup with Suze Rotolo. According to Patrick Humphries, “All I Really Want to Do” is a “bitter and anguished version”32 of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” from the previous album. But if there is anguish and bitterness, there is also a lot of derision toward this just-ended relationship. And perhaps this is where Dylan offers something new, a different perspective on the subject.
Throughout the six verses, Dylan lists things that he does not want to do to avoid upsetting his partner, to compete with her, beat or cheat or mistreat her, simplify her, classify her, deny, defy, or crucify her. All that in just the first verse! Or frighten her, tighten her, drag her down, drain her, chain her, bring her down… In the chorus he confesses, “All I really want to do, baby, is be friends with you.”
Production
“All I Really Want to Do” opens the new album immediately in a different atmosphere than Dylan’s previous album by providing a light touch. Dylan has fun, laughs, and clearly favors the feeling rather than the rigors of studio. The voice is slightly pinched, the bass tones gone, possibly as a consequence of fatigue. “All I Really Want to Do” is the thirty-sixth take of the recording session! Despite the precautions taken by Tom Wilson, Bob accumulates technical errors: he repeatedly hits the mic stand or the ground with his foot (0:36, 1:43, 3:53), the choruses are inept, there are plosives, the rhythm is confused (3:12 through 3:14), there is sniffing (0:41)… Dylan does not want to write protest songs anymore and he lets us know: mission accomplished!
This friendly ballad in triple time allows him to mimic a pastiche of Jimmie Rodgers’s rhythmic yodeling in the chorus. Rodgers was among the first American country music pioneers. This is also a chance to hear his brand-new guitar, the famous Gibson Nick Lucas Special 1930. On it he plays a harmony mainly at the bass in E along with harmonica (A) and his voice wrapped in a relatively long reverb. Dylan sang and recorded this song in one take on Tuesday, June 9, 1964.
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
You can hear, at exactly twenty-one seconds, a small “error” in the sound: it is very likely a moderately successful editing of the master track. This is the first time that this studio technique shows up in Dylan’s music.
COVERS
The most famous version of “All I Really Want to Do” is credited to the Byrds and appears on their first album, Mr. Tambourine Man (1965). It is also their second single, released on June 14, 1965, and is a completely different take than the version found on their Mr. Tambourine Man album. Backed by Roger McGuinn on a Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar and heavenly vocal harmonies, this adaptation reached number 40 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and fourth place on the UK singles chart. Cher also recorded “All I Really Want to Do” (after listening to the Byrds at Ciro’s nightclub). Her version of the song reached number 15 in the United States (August 7, 1965) and number 9 in the United Kingdom (August 19, 1965).
Black Crow Blues
Bob Dylan / 3:33
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, piano, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
“Black Crow Blues” could also be called “How to Return Repeatedly to a Relationship Now Belonging in the Past.” Suze Rotolo still haunts Dylan, as each of his verses lets us know. When Suze recalled the album, she confirmed the effect on her when listening to these songs. “Bob sure knew how to maul me with crazy sorrow, but I loved the sound in his voice.”14 In this piano blues tune, he uses a different tone from the previous song. The last verse could even have been penned by Charley Patton or Robert Johnson. After singing like Bukka White and Blind Lemon Jefferson on his first album, Dylan sings his first blues song, and ends up in line with the wave of the British blues boom, which swept both sides of the Atlantic a few months later.
Production
Recorded in three takes, the last being the master, “Black Crow Blues” is considered a minor work in Dylan’s repertoire, but still a milestone in his career. It is the first song that he recorded in which he played the piano, showing his ability to move past the image of a Woody Guthrie–style troubadour, a nickname given to him in Greenwich Village clubs.
Dylan’s familiarity with the piano is evident by listening to the demos of the previous album The Times They Are A-Changin’ or even “When the Ship Comes In” (The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964). What is new here is the style, which announced his future conversion, with more blues, more rock, more electric. In the piano “honky-tonk” that sounds slightly out of tune and is reminiscent of the “Ballad of a Thin Man” (from Highway 61 Revisited, 1965), Dylan engages in a highly perilous exercise. It is the only accompaniment for his voice, as he recorded everything together: piano, harmonica, and voice all at once. The result lacks rigor, the implementation is poor, and the tempos are not always respected (as at 2:36), but the recording is full of feeling, and Dylan records the piece with a vocal delivery and an inspired harmonica part (in C) that are absolutely convincing. “Black Crow Blues” is rarely heard because he almost never performs it onstage.
Spanish Harlem Incident
Bob Dylan / 2:24
Musician
Bob
Dylan: vocals, guitar
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
After the recording of “Spanish Harlem Incident,” Dylan asked one of his friends in the studio if he understood the song. The friend nodded in affirmation. Dylan said, “Well, I didn’t.” At first smiling, then suddenly more serious, Dylan explained, “It’s hard being free in a song—getting it all in. Songs are so confining… I’ve been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That’s why I write a lot of poetry—if that’s the word. Poetry can make its own form.”20
“Spanish Harlem Incident” is the only song on the album where Dylan looks at love and women without cynicism and bitterness. Did he just fall in love with this young gypsy girl? Or is it a simple poetic dimension? Certainly, on the literary level, “Spanish Harlem Incident” is the first sign of Dylan’s aesthetics, which reached their height in the subsequent albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited—a flood of words, at first with little relation between them, but after digging through this multilayered dimension some striking imagery appears: “I am homeless, come and take me / Into reach of your rattling drums,” “On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding / I know I’m ’round you but I don’t know where,” or “pearly eyes” against “pale face.” Phonetics and antithesis are two components of an alchemy that opens new worlds. With this song, Dylan is in the same intellectual mode that the Beat writers used to highlight the emptiness of the mind of the American middle class: the gypsy girl could be a symbol of Jack Kerouac’s heavenly hobos.
Production
At 2:24, “Spanish Harlem Incident” is the shortest song on the album. It is also a piece that is completely different from Dylan’s previous writing. The harmony is innovative, and the melodic line is amazing, especially in the chorus. A new musical style seems to emerge from these chords. Listen to the harmonic dissonance that he does not hesitate to use in the third verse. His vocal delivery, wrapped in an obvious reverb, is excellent, and Dylan masters the highest notes of the chorus. The sound of his Gibson Nick Lucas is particularly striking, and he replaces his usual harmonica interventions with two riffs on guitar, announcing strangely the tone of the future Byrds, who made a very good cover version on their 1965 debut album Mr. Tambourine Man. After two false starts and two unsuccessful takes, the fifth take became the master. Dylan performed this song only once onstage during a concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York on October 31, 1964.
Chimes Of Freedom
Bob Dylan / 7:09
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Lyrics
“Chimes of Freedom” was written shortly after the release of The Times They Are A-Changin’ album. There are several stories about where and when Dylan wrote the song. It is likely that he began writing during his short stay in Toronto between January 31 and February 2, 1964, as evidenced by handwritten lyrics from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Toronto. He finished working on the song during his road trip across America from New York to Los Angeles. Perhaps he wrote “Chimes of Freedom” after his visit to the composer and singer Bernice Johnson and the singer Cordell Reagon; both were involved in the civil rights movement. According to Clinton Heylin, Dylan wrote the song on February 9 on a portable typewriter in the back of the car that took him and his companions Peter Karman, Paul Clayton, and Victor Maymudes across the United States.
On “Chimes of Freedom” Bob Dylan is no longer the mere chronicler of American society in the early 1960s; he is already becoming the new American poet. In this song, the songwriter and a friend are caught in a thunderstorm, forcing the pair to take refuge in a doorway: one lightning flash after another appears to them as “chimes of freedom.” Music critic Paul Williams drew a parallel between “Chimes of Freedom” and the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus Christ established basic Christian teachings: nonviolence (“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”) and respect of disciples (“Ye are the salt of the earth”). You can also see an analogy to the hallucinatory poetic vision of William Blake, populated with biblical images, or a transposition of Shakespeare’s King Lear—the tempest and the storm on land that shakes the world order. From a poetic point of view, “Chimes of Freedom” was influenced by nineteenth-century French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, especially the poem “Vowels.” This harmony between words created “startling visions,” especially when it came to exalting the humanity of the innocent, people who were treated unjustly: “Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked / Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake” or “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse / An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.” The assassination of John F. Kennedy could have inspired “Chimes of Freedom.” Immediately after the tragedy in Dallas, Dylan composed a poem in six verses. The song contains many elements of this poem; the “cathedral bells” in the poem become the “chimes of freedom” in the song.
This is a major song in Dylan’s repertoire. “Chimes of Freedom” does not leave anyone indifferent. One of his friends who attended the recording session said to the journalist from the New Yorker, Nat Hentoff, who was also present, “Bobby’s talking for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.”20 It is true that “Chimes of Freedom” maintains a solemn tone, close to the hymns that characterized his previous albums. But the imagery and the poetic force of his text stand out radically from his earlier prose.
Production
Musically, the rupture is not as obvious, especially since Dylan is once again suspected of plagiarism. Indeed, the folk musician Dave Van Ronk, Dylan’s friend from Greenwich Village, claimed in his memoir that the song was influenced by “The Chimes of Trinity,” a ballad his grandmother loved. “He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into the ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ Her version was better.”21 But although one can hardly deny the similarity between the structure of the words and the melody of the chorus, Dylan, as always, goes beyond what he takes from others to create an original work.
Harmonically, he mainly plays three chords that he strums on his Nick Lucas. Some originality comes from his manner of playing these chords by switching them. He almost plays in some places “palm mute” (4:37). His first harmonica part (in G) seems aborted (4:25), but he really develops it at 5:36. After four false starts and two unsuccessful takes, it is with the seventh take that he immortalized “Chimes of Freedom.”
The song was played on February 15, 1964, onstage at the Civic Auditorium Theater, Denver, Colorado, four months before being recorded; “Chimes of Freedom” was curiously abandoned afterward. Although Dylan did not perform the song between 1964 and 1987, he played it on January 17, 1993, in front of the Lincoln Memorial for Bill Clinton’s first inauguration as US president.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
For Dylan, the use of a rhythmic signature in triple meter (3/4), appears to correspond with the writing of deep songs, which is the case for “Chimes of Freedom,” but also for “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
I Shall Be Free No. 10
Bob Dylan / 4:46
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: June 9 and 10, 1964
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Fred Catero
Genesis and Ly
rics
At first glance, “I Shall Be Free No. 10” is an unpretentious song, a kind of return to calm after the epic flight of “Chimes of Freedom.” Yet it seems that Bob Dylan had already settled the score with those who would like to place him in a box. “Now they asked me to read a poem / At the sorority sisters’ home / I got knocked down and my head was swimmin’ / I wound up with the Dean of Women / Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it / Hope I don’t blow it.” With this talking blues, popularized by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan mocks himself before mocking intellectuals who, since “Blowin’ in the Wind,” have dubbed him king of the protest song.
The distance that he wants to take vis-à-vis progressive intellectuals is also seen in his almost systematic recourse to nonsense, such as when he wants to provoke Cassius Clay in the ring and when he talks about the rivalry between the Americans and Soviets. Nonsense, yet again, when he talks about his marital troubles. Nonsense, finally, when he turns friendship into derision.
Production
The first version of “I Shall Be Free” is on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. This time, it is version number 10, which we could simply call “I Shall Be Free: The Return.” With the even tone, almost the same tempo, the same length (within two seconds), and the same ending with a fade-out, the similarities between the two songs are obvious. Only the sound of the Gibson is clearer and fuller, and Bob’s voice has more reverb. Nat Hentoff reports that during the recording, Tom Wilson and the sound engineers laughed at Dylan’s lyrics. But he fails twice in an ending that he cannot master. Later, Wilson proposed that he play only that part and attach it the previous take. Dylan’s friend got involved: “Let him start from the beginning, man.” “Why?” asks Wilson. “You don’t start telling a story with chapter 8,” replies the friend. “Oh man,” replies the producer. “What kind of philosophy is that? We’re recording, not writing a biography.”20 Finally the editing is adopted, and we can hear it in the middle of the harmonica part before the last verse at 4:13 precisely. Consequently, it is the fifth take edited onto the fourth take that created the master for “I Shall Be Free No. 10.”