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By Tony Attwood
I find it interesting that some people who write about Bob Dylan’s work, try to link his compositions with events that happen or happened around him – particularly in terms of his personal life, and his relationships.
However as I have been trying to show in recent articles Bob has, through much of his career, has focussed on a theme and written a whole series of songs around that theme, before then moving on to something else. His personal life doesn’t always seem to have too much to do with it.
Yes of course, when he suddenly moved over to writing songs with a Christian theme, that was different, but if we look at his whole song writing career from the early 1960s onward, it is the sudden interest in particular themes that seems to influence the compositions, rather than the world around him.
So while picking out one particular issue in his life (most commonly the break up with his wife) and discover elements of that being dealt with in Bob’s songs, may well be interesting and an accurate reflection of how Bob chose his lyrics, in my view, that can’t be used as a way of understanding Bob’s work very far beyond that immediate event.
Indeed, although it is difficult to trace the exact order in which Bob wrote his songs in 1959/60, once we get to 1961 we can see a series of songs each of which have a humorous element within them. And indeed the links between the songs are not hard to see since we find, for example, four songs written in a sequence were all humorous talking blues composed (as far as we can tell) one after the other…
- Talkin New York
- Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.
- Talkin Folk Lore Centre Blues
- Talkin Hava Negeilah blues
But I think we can also understand that Bob himself felt the need to move his music along after those four, because he didn’t just bring in a different style of lyrics and music for his next song, he changed his approach totally. For after “Talking Hava Negeilah” we get a series of songs that between them lead Bob to his first great “classic” composition, “Blowing in the Wind”.
Bob had in fact managed to move from the humour that can be portrayed in the talking blues, into songs of urban life. And there was no gentle transition here – the music and lyrics jumped from a sequence of humorous talking blues into a much more serious set of songs about how tough it was being in a big city with no one to look after you. Songs such as…
And indeed as he entered the new year (1962) Bob continued the theme with two more such songs: Ballad for a friend which really does focus on the sadness of losing a friend, and Poor Boy Blues.
But then just as suddenly Bob changed subjects again with Rambling Gambling Willie and Standing on the highway both of which have elements of the previous themes along with explorations of the notion of moving on.
So my view is that Bob has written sets of songs on certain themes, and he has done this since his earliest days as a songwriter. Many of these songs never made it onto the earlier LPs – quite possibly because of ideas from the record companies as to what was suitable and “what people wanted to hear” (as if they knew!)
But what does stay, as I feel I have shown in recent articles, is the fact that Bob would try out lyrics relating to a specific topic across several songs – as in fact we find with the songs that followed “Standing on the highway”:
- Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues
- Death of Emmett Till
- The Ballad of Donald White
- Let me die in my footsteps
As it happened, however, “Let me die in my footsteps” marked the end of a series of songs which very roughly could be described as social protest, for at that moment Bob’s lyrics took a most dramatic turn. Indeed the next song he wrote was “Blowing in the Wind”.
Given that this was something like the 24th song that Bob had written in the series that began two years before, with songs such as Hey Little Richard and When I got troubles, it is utterly remarkable to see how the composer could suddenly change directions and yet create such an utter masterpiece. There is no build up to “Blowing in the Wind” – no songs that could be considered “dry runs” for the song that eventually emerged. It just appears.
“Donald White” one of the predecessors, in fact was not even a totally original as a Dylan song, but an adaptation.
Now this recording has been ignored by many, across the years, probably because of what I consider to be the lunatic commentary about the song written by Heylin in “Revolution in the Air.” I dealt with that years ago, but if you want to return to the issue the original article is still here).
But my point is that this was the first, or one of the first, Dylan songs about social ills, and he was still finding his way with the subject. In fact I think Dylan fully recognised this as he wrote three social commentary songs of note, one after the other:
and then as we find so often through his long career, without warning, he suddenly changed direction and wrote…
Listening to this song by first playing those three compositions noted above, gives a totally different view of this masterpiece – at least it does, in my opinion. To me, “Blowing in the Wind” becomes a Dylan commentary on his own view of the world as expressed in those earlier compositions. He is in fact commenting on his own writing – something that very few creative people ever manage to do with any success.
Of course we don’t generally think of it this way simply because most of us are so used to thinking of it as the first track on one side of Dylan’s second album. That is certainly how I first heard it as a teenager, and how I always remember it. I can even remember the record store from which I bought the album.
In short the message in the song has become (for me) confused with myself as a teenager at the moment I bought the album, which is a shame for me. But by looking at the songs Dylan wrote immediately before “Blowing in the Wind” we can see the huge step forward he took when he created this utter masterpiece, and that I certainly did manage to recognise. And I really did start to think: how much of Freewheelin relates to Bob’s life? Or put another way, if I wanted to be a songwriter, should I abandon my studies and just set out on the road? (The answer was no).