Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  He breaks out but kills a guard in the process and is duly "condemned to die," at which point it turns out that society is in fact to blame. "Dope Fiend Robber," though hopelessly trite, is a revealing precursor to "The Ballad of Donald White," written less than six months later, which also shall suggest that the murderer is the true victim. At least we now know why Dylan loved songwriter John Prine’s "Sam Stone," a far superior ballad on morphine addiction, when he heard it in September 1972.

  {35} MAN ON THE STREET

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Gaslight Cafe, New York, September 6, 1961.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 22, 1961—6 takes

  [TBS—tk.2].

  Dylan told Cameron Crowe, for the Biograph notes: "I was only doing a few of my own songs back then. . . . You’d just try to sneak them in. The first bunch of songs I wrote, I never would say I wrote them." A song he did "sneak in" to club sets was "Man on the Street," one of just three originals he recorded for his eponymous debut LP. Though it went unused, the idea stuck around long enough to be recast as 1963’s "Only a Hobo."

  "Man on the Street" was not its original title. The working title Dylan gave to the best of his summer songs was "Old Man (John Doe)," an overt admission that the source of his own song was that old Almanac Singers standard, "Strange Death of John Doe," written by Millard Lampbell in 1941. Lampbell’s song begins thus:

  I’ll sing you a song and it’s not very long,

  It’s about a young man who never did wrong.

  Suddenly he died one day

  The reason why no one could say.

  In this Second World War "original," the punch line was an apposite one: "Only one clue to why he died / A bayonet sticking in his side." So it was an antiwar song. And Dylan elects to maintain the mystery underlying the man’s death to the end (without telling us how he knew all about this "old man who never done wrong"). In just four verses he tells the story of a dead man on the sidewalk, ignored by passersby until a policeman arrives and takes the body away. For now, Dylan is content to refrain from the kind of moralizing last-verse that balladeers—ancient and modern—generally can’t resist, simply repeating the conventional "listen to my story" opening, but now in the past tense.

  "Man on the Street" suggests that Dylan’s eyes and ears were now open to all the world might throw at him. As Sybil Weinberger, best friend to Suze Rotolo (Dylan’s then-new girlfriend), told Robert Shelton, "When we walked down the street, he saw things that absolutely nobody else saw. He was so aware of his surroundings, in every situation, it was almost like he couldn’t write fast enough. He would get thoughts and reactions and stop on a street corner and write things down."

  {36} OVER THE ROAD = SALLY GAL

  "Over the Road" extant in manuscript form only, the MacKenzie-Krown papers, circa summer 1961.

  First known performance ("Sally Gal"): [Gerde’s Folk City, NY, September 26, 1961] Oscar Brand’s Folksong Fest, WNYC radio, October 29, 1961.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 24, 1962—3 takes [NDH—tk.1]; April 25, 1962—2 takes.

  Thanks to a single sheet from the MacKenzie papers—containing a five-verse draft to "Over the Road" and the first draft of Dylan’s September song list—we have both the genesis of "Sally Gal" and a date for when this song was written—sometime in September 1961 (it was debuted at Gerde’s at month’s end). Discographer Michael Krogsgaard has suggested that "Sally Gal" is an adaptation of Woody Guthrie’s "Sally Don’t You Grieve." It is in fact an adaptation of "Over the Road," which opens with the only verse either song shares with Guthrie’s original: "I am one of them rambling men / Traveling since I don’t know when / Here I come and then gone again. . . ."

  In the case of "Over the Road," though, the song proceeds to pile high examples of the man’s rambling inclinations, from "Whistlin’ train running down the track" to "A ramblin man’s his own boss." The chorus—"Over the road I’m bound to go / Where I stop nobody knows"—would end up part of two other Dylan constructs in the next couple of months, "Sally Gal" itself ("Sally says I’m bound to go") and "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie" ("Where he’s gamblin’ now, nobody knows"). But the song itself was forgotten.

  "Sally Gal" fits its milieu perfectly. Neither a straight copy of a traditional original nor a bona fide Dylan original, it was never copyrighted by either Leeds Music or Witmark. In fact it had to await inclusion on the No Direction Home soundtrack to warrant even "Trad. arr." Dylan status. But this is no mere rearrangement. Rather, it is an early attempt to write a "gonna get you now" song, with some whooping "look at me ma" harmonica bursts. Another go at emulating Guthrie, it was introduced on Oscar Brand’s radio show as something written while traveling with the carnival in New Mexico. Well, not unless he nipped down there between meeting John Hammond and playing Gerde’s.

  {37} HARD TIMES IN NEW YORK TOWN

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  {38} I WAS YOUNG WHEN I LEFT HOME

  Both tracks recorded by Tony Glover at Bonnie Beecher’s Minneapolis apartment, December 22, 1961 [track 38—[TBS]; track 39—[L&T ver.1] + [NDH]].

  One might expect a contract with Columbia to have induced Dylan to use the eight weeks that separated John Hammond Sr.’s (possibly apocryphal) audition from his first Columbia session—on Monday, November 20—to decide which of his own songs made the grade. Still naive about the niceties of music publishing, the young ’un didn’t even push Hammond to include any songs he wrote (perhaps because Hammond had already suggested they weren’t generally up to scratch).

  As Dylan pointed out, the producer "didn’t ask me what I wrote and what I didn’t write." And anyway, Dylan preferred to spend hours trawling through the archive of America’s self-styled premier folklorist, Alan Lomax, for whom Suze Rotolo’s sister Carla worked, or listening to records at the Van Ronks. And, as he went on to observe, "The people whose floors I was sleeping on were all into the Country Gentlemen, Uncle Dave Macon, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe. So I heard all that, too."

  Having located a new set of songs he could try out at his first-ever concert (at the Carnegie Recital Hall on November 4), he set about paring them down to the seventeen that were recorded at Columbia a fortnight later.[1] The process, though, wasn’t quite so clinical. At the same time, he was introduced to a number of folk melodies and themes he would store away for a rainy day, one of which was the traditional folksong "Down on Penny’s Farm," which forms the basis for another "New York is a mean ol’ town" song.

  Such was Dylan’s concentration on the task/s at hand that he did not resume his transformation of tradition until the process of selection was complete. In conversation with Billy James at the end of his second Columbia session, he admitted, "I just wrote a new song last week—about New York. I wish I would have recorded it." The song in question was "Hard Times in New York Town." The night after that second session, Dylan was at the MacKenzies for Thanksgiving with new "fortune teller of my soul," Suze, at his side. In keeping with long-standing folk tradition, the guitars came out after dinner, as did the tape recorder, and Dylan played Eve, Mac, their son Peter, Suze, and old friend Kevin Krown his latest composition. Four weeks later he did the same for his Dinkytown buddies (this version opens The Bootleg Series vols. 1–3).

  "Hard Times in New York Town" allowed Dylan to take yet more potshots at the city he had made his own, using the "Down on Penny’s Farm" template. Instead of "the trials and hardships of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and agricultural workers" (Sing Out!, 1963), Dylan inverts the original country/city dichotomy to produce his own urban folk song. That he took a tad more than just the tune from his source is evident from the original’s first verse, which runs thus:

  Come you ladies and you gentlemen, listen to my song,

  I’ll s
ing it to you right but you may think it’s wrong,

  It may make you mad, but I mean no harm,

  It’s all about the renters on Penny’s farm.

  It’s hard times in the country,

  Down on Penny’s farm.

  And "Penny’s Farm" was in Lomax’s collection, f’sure. Alan himself, in his notes to Pete Seeger’s Darling Corey, describes how he "found this song not at some secret meeting of sharecroppers’ union in Arkansas, but in the files of unreleased masters of the Columbia Phonograph Corporation." Given that it also appears on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled entirely from commercial 78s, it goes without saying that the Bentley Boys’ recording was released. Indeed Dylan could just as easily have heard it from the Van Ronks’ copy of Smith’s seminal set.

  The song would certainly have made an interesting counterpoint to "Talkin’ New York." But it had missed the boat when it came to his debut offering. And though he would record "Hard Times in New York Town" for his music publisher in January and for Cynthia Gooding’s radio show the following month, by the time he returned to Columbia in April, the song had been forgotten—as apparently had "I Was Young When I Left Home," a more important song, and one he didn’t even choose to demo.

  Dylan may have heard "500 Miles"—Hedy West’s adaptation of the terribly traditional "900 Miles"—at Gerde’s, or at one of the many parties the older folkies flung. West herself, who was married to John Henry Faulk, was part of the Greenwich Village milieu and well known to Dylan. Since she did not copyright "500 Miles" until 1961, it seems likely that her fellow folkie heard the song "in person." But Dylan’s song is not just a composite of West’s adaptation and their shared traditional source, "900 Miles"—itself a song Dylan featured in his repertoire back in Minneapolis. "I Was Young When I Left Home" displays glimpses of the song-poet to come. Presumably it was written in the weeks after that first album was hurriedly assembled, probably as he prepared to go back home. The only known recording is from Bonnie Beecher’s Minneapolis apartment just before Christmas.[2]

  Recently given entry to the authorized canon after decades as a mainstay of the Dylan bootleg industry, "I Was Young When I left Home" has received not one, but two official outings since 2001, having been first released as a "bonus" track on a limited-edition version of Love and Theft and then as a bona fide track on the so-called soundtrack CD to Scorcese’s No Direction Home. This recent recognition has not, however, ensured the song sufficient status to gain entry into Lyrics, and it remains absent from the 2004 edition (despite being credited on the No Direction Home CD as a Dylan original).

  So does it deserve to be designated a Dylan original? He evidently thought so, prefacing its one known performance with the claim that he "made it up on a train" (this spoken introduction, such an integral part of his early persona, has been edited from both official releases). The story as it stands—meeting an old friend who informs him that his "mother’s dead and gone / sister’s all gone wrong / and your father needs you home right away"—is neither Dylan’s nor West’s. It is the story in "900 Miles." Dylan, though, should take any plaudits for the song’s most evocative lines: "I used to tell mama some time, when I’d see them ridin’ blinds / Gonna make me a home out in the wind," which in a single couplet encapsulate everything that drove him to New York in the first place. Equally powerful and original is "When I played on the track / My ma’d come and whip me back," which doesn’t sound like Beattie Zimmerman, but absolutely puts the listener there.

  The trip to Minneapolis seems to have reminded young Bob of the home he left behind. On the (admittedly slim) evidence of two masterful ballads written either side of Christmas—"I Was Young When I Left Home" and "Ballad for a Friend"—the trip infused him with a deep nostalgia for "home." And yet he wasn’t quite ready to embrace such persuasive material. Neither song became part of his regular live set or Columbia currency. By the end of January both songs would be left in their North Country locker, even as their author continued to make his home "out in the wind."

  {39} BALLAD OF THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

  {40} WON’T YOU BUY MY POSTCARD?

  {41} STRANGE RAIN

  All songs rumored to have been written circa December 1961 / January 1962.

  Even with the half a dozen home tapes, studio sessions, and live tapes that document the rake’s progress from his Columbia signing on October 26, 1961, to demo-ing songs for music publisher Leeds in mid- to late January, Dylan was writing and discarding songs at such a rate that some fell entirely by the wayside. During a December interview with Robert Shelton—who had his sleeve writer Stacy Williams’s hat on—Dylan informed the New York Times correspondent that he was writing a ballad on The Ox-Bow Incident, presumably after having seen the 1942 film about a cowboy who is unable to stop three innocent travelers from being lynched for murder. Assuming he finished it, this would be the first Dylan song directly inspired by a film, but this is the last we hear of it.

  Two other "lost" songs from this fertile period he mentioned that winter in conversations with Izzy Young and Cynthia Gooding. In February 1962 Dylan informed Gooding on her Folksinger’s Choice radio show that he had "once" written a song about a carnival freak, but that he could no longer remember it. Evidently he was still asserting that he traveled with the carnivals:

  I wrote a song once . . . about this lady I knew in the carnival. . . . They had a freak show in it, and all the midgets and all that kind of stuff. And there was one lady in there in really bad shape. Like her skin had been all burned when she was a little baby, and it didn’t grow right, and so she was like a freak. And all these people would pay money to come and see [her], and that really got to me. . . . I wrote a song about her a long time ago. And I lost it some place. It’s just speaking from first person, like here am I . . . talking to you. It was called "Won’t You Buy Me a Postcard" [sic].

  "Won’t You Buy My Postcard" (surely the correct title) was possibly another song inspired by a film he’d recently seen—in this case Tod Browning’s infamous Freaks (1932), a Times Square perennial. This would have been about as close as Dylan ever got to the kind of circus performers described above. The song, if it indeed existed, would have been the first time he had written from a female perspective in the first person, though the fragrant "Dink’s Blues," another song culled from the Lomax archive, was an early favorite in his live set. Eighteen months later, he would utilize the same technique for the fiercely personal "North Country Blues."

  "Strange Rain" is another oft-rumored song, evidence of its existence relying on two separate comments made to Izzy Young in February 1962. What is apparent is that the song dealt with atomic rain and fall-out shelters, two subjects Dylan would return to in the ensuing months, first with "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" and then with "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall."

  On February 7, 1962, he first described the song to Young, using it as a way to condemn the quality of modern protest songs: "‘Strange Rain’ written while Gil [Turner] and I were in Toronto in December 1961. I set out to say something about fallout and bomb-testing but I didn’t want it to be a slogan song. Too many of the protest songs are bad music. Exceptions being ‘Which Side Are You On?’, [and] most of the mining songs are good."

  Evidently the songwriter was using "strange rain"—as opposed to hard rain—as a metaphor for nuclear fallout. Two weeks later Dylan was again talking about bomb testing with Young and referred to a song written by Tom Paxton (which Young apparently confused with "Strange Rain?" in the margin of his notebook). Dylan told him, "You ought to go to Nevada where all the stuff [i.e., bomb testing] is going on. Go out there, you’ll find some strange rain."

  So, a matter of weeks before he penned "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," Dylan was looking to say "something" about "the bomb" (probably to impress an old activist like Young). Young may already have been talking about compiling an anthology of antibomb polemics. Later in the year he
would persuade Dylan to write about the subject in a free-form poem, "Go ’Way Bomb." By then, two later songs had crystallized what he wanted to say "about fallout and bomb-testing," leaving "Strange Rain" to be blown away by the ensuing wind.

  Another song written at around the same time was untitled, though he performed it on film in circumstances Joel Agee outlined in a 1996 essay:

  In the spring [sic] of 1962, a friend of my mother’s introduced me to the folksinger and photographer John Cohen, who was planning to make a documentary film about Kentucky country musicians and needed an assistant. . . . We borrowed a 16mm camera from a friend of his. . . . The trial run took place on top of a second friend’s house. We were going to film the roofs of the Village, the sky, the pigeons, each other. But a third friend of John’s dropped by, a folksinger named Bob Dylan who was all excited about some new songs he had written and we ended up making a fifteen-minute film of him. . . . He sang one of his new songs, something involving a request for a pillow from a woman who had locked him out of her room.

  The film still exists, as its appearance in the recent No Direction Home documentary confirms; but it was shot "silent," and so this intriguing song is now lost. The fact that Dylan appears to have stepped off the front cover of his debut album suggests the film was shot around January/February 1962, when photographer Don Hunstein’s iconic cover was taken.