Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Given the extraordinary speed with which Dylan conceived, wrote, and recorded the song, it is no great surprise that the typescript he tapped out (hurriedly, hence typos like "the dark doe die" for "the dark does die"), varies in only minor details from the take he released. In the second verse, he sacrifices sense on the recording for the sake of an internal rhyme, changing, "But t remain as friends yuh need the time / t make amends and stay behind" into something a lot more convoluted: "But to remain as friends and make amends / You need the time and stay behind."

  The clearest expression of Dylan’s anger in the typescript comes not with an actual word change but in the fact that its final line ends with a "DAMN!"—capitalized and exclaimed—even though this is one piece of writing he is not planning to show to "unknowin’ eyes." Also, at the top of the page is a couplet that does not appear in the song but acts as a commentary on it: "The time cant be found t fit / all the things that i want t do." Perhaps he thought the song should have a spoken introduction, à la "Bob Dylan’s Blues." Or maybe this was just a note to himself. Either way, the song proper begins with the singer disowning all wealth and property:

  Of all the money in my whole life i did spend

  Be it mine right or wrongfully

  I let it slip gladly t the hands of my friends

  T tie up the time most forcefully.

  It had been a while since Dylan had overtly "adapted" both content and structure from his ostensible tune-source, but he was a man in a hurry. And "Restless Farewell" couldn’t help but be a self-conscious attempt to update the old Irish drinking song, "The Parting Glass"[1] (this time surely acquired from the Clancys, whose own rendition had just been released on In Person at Carnegie Hall). The generic nature of its original leave-taking occupies just three verses, of which these are first and last:

  Of all the money e’er I had, I spent it in good company;

  And all the harm I’ve ever done, alas was done to none but me;

  And all I’ve done for want of wit, to memory now I can’t recall,

  So fill me to the parting glass, goodnight and joy be with you all . . .

  If I had money enough to spend and leisure time to sit awhile,

  There is a fair maid in this town who sorely has my heart beguiled.

  Her rosy cheeks and ruby lips, I own she has my heart in thrall,

  So fill me to the parting glass, goodnight and joy be with you all.

  Dylan, on the other hand, needs a full five verses to confess his sins, redeem himself, and "head on down the road." "Restless Farewell" may well share the same pretense (of a carefree soul) as "The Parting Glass." But, whereas the original’s final couplet shows just how heartbroken our Irish traveler is, Dylan pulls back from revealing himself, even though the original title has made it clear that this is one instance where narrator and writer are one and the same. Instead, we get the litany of familiar regrets, such as having acquired money "wrongfully," remorse for "every girl that ever i hurt," and an inability to "remain as friends" with those he has left behind. Only in the final verse do we find out what triggered such self-analysis. When that moment finally comes, he blasts Andrea and her ilk to kingdom come:

  Oh a false clock tries t tick out my time

  T disgrace distract and t bother me

  And the dirt of gossip blows into my face

  And the dust of rumors covers me.

  It is a memorable declaration of independence from "unknowin eyes," signaling a desire to write only "for myself" from this point forward. Never again would he knowingly expose himself to anyone looking to bury him in a "dust of rumors." As he told critic Robert Hilburn twenty years later, "It was right to be vague [in those early interviews] because they were trying to dig a hole for you. . . . You had to respond in a way that wouldn’t hurt you." His guard was now up. As for "Restless Farewell," it served its purpose the minute he got it out of his system.

  Thankfully, the song did enjoy an unexpected resurrection three decades later at the request of a most unlikely fellow singer, Frank Sinatra. As far as Ol’ Blue Eyes was concerned, it had always been one of his favorite Dylan songs, and he personally asked the songwriter to perform it at his eightieth-birthday bash at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. in 1995. Dylan agreed, giving it a stately semi-acoustic arrangement, and transforming the song’s whole meaning by the simple act of performing it for someone else who did it "his way." When the fifty-something singer bade "farewell in the night," it was the dark night of the soul he was singing about. That November night the pertinence of the performance was not lost on singer or recipient. Dylan would play the song just one more time—the following spring, after hearing the sad news that the king of crooners had died.

  [1] "The Parting Glass" is itself probably an updated version of a well-known Scottish drinking song, collected (and rewritten) by Robert Burns in the eighteenth century, "Here’s to Thy Health."

  { 1964: Another Side of Bob Dylan }

  A troubled year, professionally and personally, resulted in some of Dylan’s most important songs, even if quality control remained an issue. After writing a couple of songs in February that opened up a whole new approach to songwriting—"Chimes of Freedom" and "Mr. Tambourine Man"—he was distracted by a traumatic (and irreconcilable) breakup with girlfriend Suze. As a result he poured his feelings into songs of heartbreak ("Mama You Been on My Mind"), paranoia ("Ballad in Plain D"), and a yearning for lost intimacy ("To Ramona"). Only after he had got these "kind of songs" out of his system did he return to those "chains of flashing images," writing the unexpectedly pastoral "Gates of Eden" and the utterly urban "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)" at summer’s end, debuting them at his fall 1964 shows, when the ghost of electricity crackled in the air . . .

  {115} GUESS I’M DOING FINE

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

  Known studio recordings: Witmark demo, January 1964.

  "Guess I’m Doing Fine," a slight but not insignificant song in the canon, has no obvious folk source, melodically or structurally, and its real "inspiration" is probably not traditional. But it does resemble Hank Williams’s "Everything’s Okay," a jokey ditty based on a well-known comedy routine that relies on understating the various hardships

  piling on top of one another for Uncle Bill, who manages at the end of every catastrophe/verse to suggest that, all things considered, everything’s OK.

  Any significance rests with its expression of an ongoing dissatisfaction couched in a begrudging joie de vivre, as well as its unique position as neither one of those songs Dylan bid a restless farewell to, nor the new kind of song heralded by major compositions come February. A second cousin to "Restless Farewell," it relies on its punch line at each verse’s end—"Hey, hey, so I guess I’m doin’ fine"—to command sympathy from the listener. There is the usual litany of things he never had—"much money," "armies / to jump at my command"—or once had, but lost (that increasingly mythical childhood). He even lifts a line—"my road might be rocky"—from an earlier, more succesful attempt to count his blessings: "Paths of Victory."

  Though its one recording (a Witmark demo) postdates The Times . . . sessions by a couple of months, when it came time to compile Writings and Drawings, Dylan put "Guess I’m Doing Fine" with the third-album songs. If it can be placed in a definable period, it is from a time when he occasionally tried too hard. As he told Nat Hentoff, when about to record his fourth album: "From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I’m going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally."

  {116} CHIMES OF FREEDOM

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004; The Bob Dylan Scrapbook [manuscript].

  First known performance: [Denver Civic Auditorium, February 15, 1964] Newport Folk Festival, July 26, 1964 [NDH].

&nb
sp; Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—7 takes [AS—tk.7].

  Just about the only genuinely revealing lyric draft included in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook (2004), an ill-conceived "companion" coffee-table volume published in tandem with No Direction Home, was "Chimes of Freedom," written on both sides of some headed paper from The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 80–88 Charles St., Toronto. This fascinating document, initially written in pencil with additions in pen, directly refutes the account of the song’s composition given in Scaduto’s biography, derived from Pete Karman’s notes, made during a February 1964 road trip Dylan and friends took from New York to Berkeley, via New Orleans. According to Scaduto/Karman, "As Victor [Maimudes] drove away from Hazard, Dylan climbed into the back of his station wagon, put the portable typewriter on his lap, and began to write. Later, [Peter] Karman got a look at the page: ‘Chimes of Freedom’ was the title, a poem that would later become a song."

  This couldn’t have been the moment he began "Chimes of Freedom." Dylan was in Toronto at the end of January doing interviews and preparing to film his contribution to CBC’s Quest TV series on February 1. While there he evidently started "Chimes." Even if he was still working on the song during said road trip—and the two additional verses and various amendments added in pen to the draft could have been written "on the road"—he clearly did not write the song at a "portable typewriter." Typescripts of songs from 1963–4 are invariably "clean" copies culled from handwritten drafts like the one for "Chimes of Freedom."

  The so-called Margolis and Moss manuscripts—composed in the weeks leading up to this road trip—comprise only free-form poems, outlined epitaphs and others, plus the odd play. But there are no song drafts.[1] Among these attempts at being a poet is one representing a genesis of sorts for "Chimes of Freedom." Dating from the fall—specifically the immediate aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy—the poem shows that Dylan was as traumatized as most folk by this catastrophic intervention from an assassin’s bullet (or three). The poem in question is just six lines. It reads: "the colors of friday were dull / as cathedral bells were gently burnin’ / strikin for the gentle / strikin for the kind / strikin for the crippled ones / an strikin for the blind." The Friday in question, in the context of the other poems surrounding it, is unquestionably November 22, the day JFK got caught in a Texas shooting gallery.

  Of equal significance is Dylan’s reference to the "cathedral bells," which suggests he already planned to utilize the image of tolling church bells to herald Kennedy’s death (as they once foretold the death of Barbara Allen, in one of Dylan’s favorite Child ballads). The storm becomes both a physical manifestation of "the chimes of freedom flashing" and a metaphor for the storm surrounding the death of a president—a trick he could have copped from King Lear. Or not. Dylan denies that the assassination triggered his pen, telling Scaduto, "If I was more sensitive about [JFK’s death] than anyone else, I would have written a song about it. . . . The whole thing about my reactions to the assassination is overplayed." Pages and pages of poems on the subject in the Margolis and Moss manuscripts belie this assertion.

  By the beginning of February, when Dylan had completed the first, four-verse draft of "Chimes of Freedom," he had integrated all the important elements from that six-line fragment. But the cripples and the blind had been replaced by "guardians an protectors of the mind," lessening any comparison between JFK and another martyr from long ago and far away. Everything coalesces around two lovers finding shelter from a storm in the doorway of a church/cathedral, where they "see the chimes of freedom flashing."

  There is a possibility that Dylan consciously drew the title from a 1948 song he may have heard: Tom Glazer’s "Because All Men Are Brothers." Its second verse reads:

  My brothers are all others, forever hand in hand,

  Where chimes the bell of freedom, there is my native land.

  My brothers’ fears are my fears, yellow, white or brown,

  My brothers’ tears are my tears, the whole world around.

  But it is just as likely that Dylan independently struck on the phrase and liked how it sounded. "The bells of freedom" was already a phrase in common use, having been the title of a patriotic standard in the thirties. And it is quite clear that Dylan had begun to transcend those right-on sources he had previously relied on for parts of his philosophy. "Chimes of Freedom" represents an entirely new kind of song, its litany of life’s losers resembling the work of the Beats. Perhaps it was no coincidence he had first met Allen Ginsberg five weeks earlier. By the following year, in conversation with a friend, he was self-consciously distancing himself from those earlier albums: "The [Guthrie] influence has all been on the first, second, third record. The fourth one, it was kinda wearing off a little bit."

  Determined to signpost this significant, daring shift with a typically ambitious statement, Dylan sought something with the scale and sweep of "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall." Even after he penciled in those first four verses, Dylan had already written "5.," indicating a song not yet done. Sure enough, he returned to it with pen in hand, the final two verses spilling across both sides of the sheet, the lines jumping around the page as inspiration struck.

  A line like "The twisted sidewalk’s mist was lifting" ultimately resolves into something more satisfactory: "As the splattered mist was slowly lifting." Likewise, though initially unable to improve on the opening line of verse four—"In the wild cathedral nite the rain beat out its tales"—he brackets the latter phrase in pen, knowing it needs to be replaced, which it is by the mnemonically memorable "the rain unravelled tales."

  Another line would plague the man long after the song was supposedly finished. In the draft, he envisages the chimes striking "for the poet an the painter who reflect their given time." And though he leaves the line unchanged on the page, by the time it was recorded in June, the poet and the painter are "far behind their rightful time." Still not right. Unveiling the song at the Newport Folk Festival in late July, he changed this line again, deciding that such an artist "lights up his rightful time." Better. Dylan, though, had not finished with it. When he came to Writings and Drawings, nine years after last performing the song, he could not resist tinkering, coming up with the worst of the lot: "An the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time." Ghastly. (And resolutely unchanged in subsequent editions of Lyrics.)

  But perhaps the most curious discarded line in the Toronto manuscript is written upside down, in pen, and is not something that obviously pertains to the song. It reads, "You just can’t satisfy everybody." (Dylan provided a corollary to this on the dedication page to Writings and Drawings: "If I can’t please everybody / I might as well not please nobody at all." He subsequently qualified this by writing in one journalist’s copy of the book, "DO NOT TAKE THIS STATEMENT AT WHITEFACE VALUE—IT MIGHT GO LIKE THIS, ‘If I can’t please everybody, I only might as well please myself.’") But it does pertain, expressing dissatisfaction with the audience accrued to date, a feeling expressed the same day he probably penned this sentiment to a Toronto journalist: "If the kids say I speak for them, that’s beautiful but I haven’t reached the masses one little bit. . . . I don’t want to be known as a folk singer." "Chimes of Freedom" was a clear attempt to reach a wider constituency than the one for "Restless Farewell." Three months earlier he claimed it was only for himself and his friends that he sang his stories. Now it was "for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe."

  By the time he pulled his portable typewriter out of the back of his station wagon and began typing up a clean copy—his usual modus operandi when a lyric needed no more than cosmetic changes—he had a song he felt he could sing to his old constituency. When he arrived in Denver on February 15, four days after visiting New Orleans, he decided to debut the song at that night’s Civic Auditorium concert. For the next few months, "Chimes of Freedom" would constitute the centerpiece of live performances and, as of June 9, his fourth album, Another Si
de of Bob Dylan.

  Oddly enough, though, when it came time to record it in the studio, Dylan couldn’t get the song straight in his head, stumbling through six false starts before getting the entire song, and largely right. Given that "Chimes of Freedom" was one of just three songs recorded that evening which he had previously played live—and the only one he had performed more than once—he was either trying too hard, or was already starting to feel disconnected from a song that, just four months earlier, provided a new summit to his songwriting. The straining-at-the-edge performance at Newport in late July—now available on DVD—sees him forcing the words out. By the time he performed his autumnal New York showcase at the Philharmonic Hall, the "Chimes of Freedom" had ceased to ring. It would be twenty-three years before they pealed again.

  When they did ring anew, it was as a duet with Roger McGuinn—who had already "rogered" the song on the Byrds’ debut LP, shearing it of two of its better verses (the third and fourth). Yet an even more incongruous setting awaited the former anthem. In January 1993 Dylan rushed through the song solo, at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. I find it hard to believe the born-again Bob thought Clinton had the mark of Kennedy on him. The fifty-one-year-old Dylan certainly evinced precious little connection to these words of hope, written when "the cathedral bells were gently burnin."

  {117} MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

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

  First known performance: Royal Festival Hall, London, May 17, 1964.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, June 9, 1964—2 takes [NDH—tk.2]; January 15, 1965—6 takes [BIABH—tk.6].