Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  And, boy, does it show in "Hard Rain." Here was a song that needed every one of its seven minutes to tell its unrelenting tale, even if Dylan took at least one former standard-bearer by surprise when he chose a multiartist bill at Carnegie Hall on September 22 to debut it. As Pete Seeger recalls, "Once again they had too many people on the program and I had to announce to all the singers, ‘Folks, you’re gonna be limited to three songs. No more. ’Cause we each have ten minutes apiece.’ . . .

  Bob raised his hand and said, ‘What am I supposed to do? One of my songs is ten minutes long.’"

  What separates "Hard Rain" from the likes of "Barbara Allen"—performed in the same Gaslight set as the new epic within a fortnight of Carnegie Hall—"Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender," "Lord Lovell," and "Little Musgrave," which he never performed, is the relentless rivulet of images, pouring down on one another in a stream so unending that in the final verse he cannot stop himself from breaking the very bounds of song form itself in order to "tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it" like it is. Such a freewheelin’ verse structure was not something he acquired from either Woody Guthrie or Robert Johnson. It smacked more of Ginsberg’s Howl or the speed-rapping of Kerouac—and it transformed Dylan into a folk modernist. As he told Cohen in 1968 during their discussion of this epochal composition:

  The language which [the Beats] were writing, you could read off the paper, and somehow it would begin some kind of tune in your mind. . . .

  You could see it was possible to do . . . something different than what Woody and people like Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland did. The subject matter of all their songs wasn’t really accurate for me. . . . When that subject matter wasn’t there anymore for me, the only thing that was there was the style. [And] the idea of this type of song which you can live with in some kind of way, which you don’t feel embarrassed twenty minutes after you’ve sung it.

  Though the world crisis that precipitated it soon passed away, he had discovered he could tap into a general need for songs of desperation and fear. That fear was as personal as it was universal. As he told Shelton in 1966, "I was actually most afraid of death in those first years around New York . . . because I still hadn’t written what I wanted to. I had written ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ but I wasn’t satisfied with that." Now, afraid he would only to get to write one more song, he decided he had better summarize his unique worldview. The feeling he was reaching for was later conveyed to Studs Terkel during an April 1963 radio show appearance:

  [When] I wrote ["Hard Rain"]—every line in that is really another song. . . . I wrote that when I didn’t know how many other songs I could write. That was during October of last year and I remember sitting up all night with some people, some place, and I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song as I possibly could. . . . It’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain. It’s not the fall-out rain. It isn’t that at all. I just mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen. . . . In the last verse, when I say ‘When the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, I mean all the lies that people get told on their radios and [in] their newspapers.

  His comment to Terkel was just the start of Dylan disassociating the song from its specific apocalyptic backdrop, giving it a wider relevance not mired in some little spat between JFK and Kruschev. When he gave it a full-bodied electric rearrangement in 1980, as part of a set teeming with righteous millennial fury, it reacquired that apocalyptic intent, one fully imbued with the spirit of St. John the Divine. By then Dylan was convinced that "hard rain" did not mean hard rain. Or even strange rain. It meant something genuinely apocalyptic: Judgment Day. And, as he told writer and actor Antoine de Caunes in 1984, when the song again reverted to its acoustic self, he felt like it had already started to fall.

  Continuing to mean new things to its author and audience, it retained its acoustic identity, save for a special series of concerts in Nara City, Japan, in May 1994, when Dylan was accompanied by the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra, and the song acquired a symphonic sweep worthy of its nebulous narrative. Needless to say, Sony saw fit to bury this majestic arrangement on the European-only CD single, "Dignity."

  {68} BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN

  Published lyrics: Broadside #21; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Carnegie Hall, New York, September 22, 1962.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 14, 1962—1 take; August 6, 1963—4 takes; August 7, 1963—1 take [TIMES—tk.1].

  "The Rise and Fall of Hollis Brown"—as it was originally called—sees Dylan reiterating the "hard times come again no more" genre that Guthrie had previously made his own. About a poor man who has run out of options and can’t see beyond the well at the bottom of his "garden"—down which he proceeds to fling his seven children and wife—"Hollis Brown" even shares the same relentlessness as "Hard Rain."

  Dylan set his tale to the tune of another ill-starred murder ballad. "Pretty Polly," which related the murder of Polly by a capricious lover, was a song he’d featured in his early New York set and on the Minneapolis Party Tape. In all likelihood, he was directly influenced by the version recorded by B. F. Shelton at the 1927 Bristol sessions, on which Shelton accompanied himself with a driving banjo.

  "Hollis Brown" was darker still. When Dylan recorded it for Freewheelin’ in November, offset by Bruce Langhorne’s electric guitar, it belabored Brown’s suffering with a graphic verse about the gangrene eating away at the man: "There’s bedbugs on your babies, and there’s chinches on your wife, [x2] / Gangrene snuck in your side, it’s cutting you like a knife." This verse was subsequently cut, perhaps because it implied that Brown was already dying, making the murder of his family an essentially selfish act.

  Dylan wanted to retain this sense of a man driven to an unspeakable crime by the indifference of the world. Even in death the Browns are destined to remain just "seven more people." Though the song was not short-listed for Freewheelin’, it stayed a part of Dylan’s live set, appearing at the Town Hall in April (where he introduced it as "a true story") and constituting one of the three songs performed on his TV debut, on the special Folk Songs and More Folk Songs in May, when its melody had a counterpoint provided by a banjo, in the style of B. F. Shelton.

  In early August, still exercising a hold on Dylan’s imagination, it was given two tryouts for what was now his third album. The one recorded on August 6 failed to frame it right. A single take the following day did the trick, making it one of just two songs that Dylan recorded for consecutive albums prior to the mid-eighties. It also survived a general cull of protest songs in 1964, featuring in Dylan’s so-called BBC Broadcast in June 1965, his last all-acoustic set for a long, long time.

  Twenty years on, it would be given another airing at the global charity-fest Live Aid, where it was a discordant adjunct to Dylan’s speech about the plight of American farmers. However, it took till the Never Ending Tour for a full resurrection to live duties, in both electric and acoustic guises, most notably in June 1989, when G. E. Smith’s electric guitar accompaniment at a show in Den Haag drove the song relentlessly forward, conveying the inevitability of the outcome as compulsively as the old words.

  {69} JOHN BROWN

  Published lyrics: Broadside #22; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Gaslight Café, New York, early October 1962.

  Known studio recordings: Broadside session, New York, February 1963 [BB].

  "John Brown," another protest song Dylan couldn’t be bothered to record for Columbia, has been restored to favor in recent years. Any blame for this state of affairs should be directed at the fulsome frame (for worms) of Jerry Garcia. The song was first exhumed in 1987 at the request of the guitarist for a disastrous series of shows with the Grateful Dead. In keeping with the majority of songs in these sets, Dylan could barely remember the order of the verses, let alone the
point the song was trying to make (though in fairness, on this one, he stumbled over the words at the Broadside session, as well as at the Town Hall in 1963). Unfortunately a narrative with a moral, such as "John Brown," stands or falls on its delivery.

  Given his difficulties with the Dead, few expected the attention with which Dylan dished out the song with the Heartbreakers barely three months later. Indeed, it seems to have become one of Dylan’s favorite early songs, given the gusto with which he has continued to perform it in the past decade and a half. It even got a Sony release, on 1995’s Unplugged. And yet, in its day, it never warranted a Columbia CO number, though it had been written shortly before four Freewheelin’ sessions in late fall. When he did get around to recording a rendition, within the woolly walls of Broadside in winter 1963, he struggled to remember how it went. Yet he allowed this rather imperfect rendition to appear on the Broadside Ballads LP (for which he adopted the alias Blind Boy Grunt to bypass his contractual obligations to Columbia).

  As to the song’s source, it has been suggested that an Irish street ballad, "Mrs. McGrath"—recently given a "hey diddle diddle" arrangement by Bruce Springsteen on The Seeger Sessions—probably provided Dylan with the idea. And there is at least one couplet in the street ballad that confirms a direct association. When the returning soldier appears before his mother, Mrs. McGrath, minus both his legs, she asks him if he was drunk or blind, because he’s left "two fine legs behind." The son replies:

  Oh I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t blind

  But I left my two fine legs behind

  For a cannonball on the fifth of May

  Took my two fine legs from my knees away.

  In "John Brown," the line "a cannonball blew my eyes away" is a clear allusion to the Irish original. But Dylan has now got the hang of this rewriting lark, and the description Brown gives of his experiences to his mother packs a greater punch than "Mrs. McGrath," as does his discovery that "when my enemy came close / I could see that his face looked just like mine." "John Brown" also sets up the dramatic denouement from the outset, detailing just how proud Mrs. Brown was when her son "went off to war / to fight on a foreign shore," whereas "Mrs. McGrath" passes quickly from the boy’s recruitment to his return, battered and bruised. Dylan has begun to let such songs speak for themselves. So, whereas Mrs. McGrath rails at everyone from the King of Spain to "Don John" for her son’s fate, in "John Brown" the returning soldier simply "drops his medals down into her hands" and leaves it at that.

  {70} DON’T THINK TWICE, IT’S ALL RIGHT

  Published lyrics: Broadside #20; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Gaslight Café, New York, early October 1962.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, November 14, 1962—1 take

  [FR—tk.1]; Studio B, May 1, 1970.

  Dylan’s studio recording of "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right" represents one of the most perfect fusions of tune, lyric, vocal, and musical performance in the man’s forty-five years as a recording artist. And he achieved it all in a single take. As perfect in its own, concise way as more ostentatious classics from more mature albums, "Don’t Think Twice" also stands as one of his more contentious works. The song owes interrelated debts to Paul Clayton and Bruce Langhorne (for its tune and accompaniment, respectively), neither readily acknowledged at the time. Only when those pesky biographers began picking at Bob’s biographical bones did a suspicion grow that this sublime song should perhaps have credits that read, "Dylan, arr. Clayton-Langhorne."

  The tune is unquestionably another traditional melody appropriated by that most casual of credit-givers. But it is more than that. Like the version of "House of the Rising Sun" he included on his debut LP, it utilizes a unique arrangement that a close friend had already adopted as his own. And this time the arrangement in question had already appeared on disc, and was incontrovertibly the source of Dylan’s melody (and some of the song’s nuance).

  Paul Clayton, a friend and sidekick, had spent his teenage years as a fastidious field collector, part of a team of students from the University of Virginia under the tutelage of Professor A. K. Davis. It was on one of his scouting missions that Clayton came upon "Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)," a bastardized variant drawn from the "Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Horse" family of songs. In 1960 he recorded a syrupy version on Home-Made Songs and Ballads. Yet beneath the strong strings it is clearly the template for Dylan’s tune, though it would take Dylan twenty-five years to own up to the debt, via Biograph note-taker Cameron Crowe.

  Though the tune was a real winner, it presented another intractable problem to the man—it was not an easy piece to play for a guitarist who rarely fingerpicked. One listen to the Witmark version—also fingerpicked—explains why. The rhythm veers all over the place. Whenever he has played the song live—even at the Gaslight, a matter of days before the official recording—Dylan flatpicked the melody. But played this way, it is notably less effective. And Dylan knew it.

  On the day he recorded it for Columbia, "he" apparently managed both an effortless fingerpicked accompaniment and a word-perfect vocal in a single take. Also in attendance at that session was Bruce Langhorne, the masterful guitarist who would subsequently play those effortless, picked leads on the Bringing It version of "Mr Tambourine Man." And according to Langhorne, it is his playing on the Freewheelin’ version of "Don’t Think Twice." Dylan’s (presumably less accomplished) guitar part was probably wiped—though it could still be on the multitrack. I suspect it might resemble what one hears on the Witmark version.

  At least the lyrics are all Dylan—the Dylan who would later turn, turn, turn on old friends with songs like "Ballad in Plain D," "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "Positively Fourth Street." This time he wields his wordplay at his muse and dream lover for deserting him. Tired of awaiting her return, he writes what he later described in the Freewheelin’ notes as "not a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It’s as if you were talking to yourself."

  Probably a direct response to the phone call from Suze, informing him that she would not be coming back around Labor Day as originally planned, "Don’t Think Twice" does a (deliberately) lousy job of disguising the very real hurt underlying those verbal put-downs—a Dylan trademark since his student days. (When Gretel Hoffman told him she’d married his best friend, Dave Whitaker, he apparently span off down the street with the immortal one-liner, "Call me when you get divorced.") For the first time the "verbal bayonet" comes out in song, where he could be sure to hit the target. He tells her, "Goodbye is too good a word, babe / So I’ll just say fare thee well," only to reveal himself in the verbal aside, "I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul." Even the title is designed to pierce to the quick. Unfortunately for its author, his target remained three thousand miles away, enjoying her freedom from a rather possessive man.

  {71} MIXED-UP CONFUSION

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

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 26, 1962—5 takes;

  November 1, 1962—6 takes; November 14—5 takes [45] [BIO].

  "Mixed-Up Confusion," surely the oddest song Dylan recorded with John Hammond, provides a fleeting glimpse of the rock & roller who renounced the music of his youth after hearing Odetta in 1959, trading in his electric guitar for an acoustic Martin. Thankfully for a burgeoning career, nothing was revealed. The single—issued at the turn of the year—disappeared without a trace, becoming the man’s first serious collectible (it was so unsuccessful that "stock" copies are rarer than "promos"). Dylan was still embarrassed by it in 1985, claiming in the Biograph notes that the song was his producer’s idea. It was not. Hammond did not stint from naming the true culprit in a 1969 Fusion interview: "Grossman’s first idea was to combine Dylan with a Dixie band." (It’s more honky-tonk than Dixieland, but we ar
e definitely talking about the same song).

  The young apprentice, who had previously gone to great lengths to hide his rock & roll past, went along with his manager. But when Cynthia

  Gooding began to mention his rockier roots on her radio show the previous February, Dylan quickly changed the subject. Only close friends were allowed to know about his rock & roll apostasy. In the fullness of time, Dylan was able to use this vinyl oddity as evidence that he was always a rocker. It even enjoyed a second life as a Dutch-only single, post-"Rolling Stone"—and at least the Europeans put out the right version. The full effect was lost when an alternate version, verging on folkabilly, was used for two multivolume anthologies in 1978 and 1985, Masterpieces and Biograph. Mixed-up confusion, indeed.

  {72} I’D HATE TO BE YOU ON THAT DREADFUL DAY

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

  Known studio recordings: Broadside session, November 1962 [BR].

  "Dreadful Day" is a dry run for "When the Ship Comes In," which sails through the mist ten months later. Another song of vengeful judgment, it predicts a purgatory of pain for those not willing to hasten the Great Day Coming, whenever it may be. Fans and critics in 1979—when Dylan had an actual timetable, courtesy of Hal Late Great Planet Earth Lindsey—cited the song as evidence that even the young bard had it in him to become a Bible-thumping zealot. And unlike the earlier "I Hear a Train A-Rolling," this one he recorded.