It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – A History in Performance, Part 1: 1965 –
Crying like a fire in the sun
By Mike Johnson
[I read somewhere that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date).
This is the first article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series at the end of this article: ]
Compared to ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ with, to date, 903 performances, and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ with 772 performances, ‘Baby Blue’ lags behind with only 595 performances (Gates of Eden has the least at 217 performances). But ‘Baby Blue’ has done something none of the other songs from Bringing It All Back Home have done, namely, crashed through the 2019 barrier to be one of the few older songs performed on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.
In fact, as I was starting to work on this article Dylan performed the song again at Tulsa, the first concert of 2025 on March 25th. The song is still alive, first appearing in the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour in 2024, being played multiple times in that year.
So I decided to break with my previous tradition and start with this Tulsa performance before tracking back to the origins of the song’s life in 1965.
2025 Tulsa
It has been slowed right down, surrounded by clusters of piano notes, and sung in a hushed, sepulchral voice. Perhaps inevitably, it sounds more like a farewell to a lifetime on the road than to a particular relationship. It drips with mortality, as the eighty-three-year-old faces a slow but inevitable decline. And it’s as heart-rending as it’s ever been, perhaps more so with the accumulation of the years as evidenced in the world-weariness of Dylan’s voice, the sad, soaring notes, the dark troughs on the low notes, the elegiac and haunting piano still stabbing at grief. None of us want it to be over.
Time and time again Dylan has warned us against reading autobiographical significance into his songs, but fans and writers go on doing it regardless, convincing themselves that this song written for, say, Joan Baez, as if that really matters. As if that explains everything. It doesn’t.
Such explanations serve to limit the song, put shackles on what is a powerful ballad of farewell, what I have called love’s last song. As such it transcends any particular situation to become a more general, more universal heartbreak – an evocation of the death of love. An evocation that can speak to us, in our own lives, if we don’t relativise it as yet another episode in the Bob & Joan soap opera. It speaks most powerfully to me when I strip it of those associations, and I realise that I am the one ‘crying like a fire in the sun.’
‘Baby Blue’ belongs to a cluster of songs written around this time that may be called farewell, or break-up songs. This cluster includes, ‘Don’t Think Twice,’ ‘Boots of Spanish Leather,’ ‘Restless Farewell,’ ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe,’ ‘Ramona,’ ‘Farewell Angelina,’ ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine,’ and probably others that haven’t sprung to mind. Of course, this kind of song is deeply rooted in the country, blues, cowboy, and pop traditions. Somebody is always leaving while somebody else is crying into their cups.
Rather than trying to trace these songs to some relationship or other, I would trace it to a particular feeling, a feeling evident in these lines from ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’:
With hungry hearts through the heat and cold We never much thought we could get very old We thought we could sit forever in fun And our chances really was a million to one
And:
How many a year has passed and gone? Many a gamble has been lost and won And many a road taken by many a first friend And each one I've never seen again
In other words, everything is transitory, especially youth; loss is inescapable, change inevitable, innocence fleeting. Those lines were written before most of the farewell songs, but prefigure them. As he sings in Ramona another early ‘challenge’ song:
Everything passes Everything changes Just do what you think you should do
A sentiment very much in harmony with ‘Baby Blue.’
It’s to do with rootlessness, homelessness, lonesome whistles blowin’, the seductions of nostalgia, the furiously precarious nature of existence (‘he not busy being born…’) and love. All things pass. Even love. What you don’t lose will be ripped from you. That is a condition of our mortality.
The lover who just walked out your door Has taken all his blankets from the floor
If you want to salvage anything out of the hectic, hurdy-gurdy swirl of life ‘you’d better grab it fast.’ He’s laying down a challenge, but the real challenge is what life brings.
These are the dimensions of feeling opened up in this cluster of farewell songs, and, for my ear, none does it quite so well as ‘Baby Blue’ with its undiluted poignancy. These feelings don’t go away in later songs, like ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Sooner or Later,’ and ‘Just Like a Woman,’ but these later songs morph the farewell genre into more confrontational, ‘attack’ songs with other threads running through them, like glee, self-justification, hurt, and a magnificent condemnation of falsity.
I have written at length on Baby Blue in my NET series, most particularly, 1995 Part 2: The Prague Revelation – Salt for salt, Peak Prague and I would invite you to check out my comments there.
As you’d expect, Baby Blue started out sounding very different from the contemplative 2025 version. More brash and confident. It was first performed in February 1965, so we can assume it was written in that year of great flowering:1964. These early performances have been pretty well covered, so I don’t intend to linger over them. I expect you may well be familiar with them.
For 1965, we have a couple of absolutely essential performances. Perhaps the best of these is from the Newport Folk Festival in July of that year. Passions were running high because of Dylan’s electric set; his first ever. Focus on those electric sounds shouldn’t distract us from the forthright and authoritative acoustic set that followed. Dylan was well riled up when he came to perform Baby Blue, a performance that misses nothing of the song’s challenge, or its heartbreak.
Because of the context, you can read this performance as a challenge to his audience: I’m not who I was. I’m striking another match. I’m starting anew. Can you do the same, baby blue?
1965 Newport Folk Festival
Dylan didn’t vary his delivery of the song much in 1965. It’s worth, however, checking one more outstanding performance, this one from Liverpool in May.
1965 Liverpool
Before leaving 1965, I would be remiss if I left out this house party performance during Dylan’s UK tour. This is footage from the film Don’t Look Back, so you will probably know it. Donovan sings ‘Catch the Wind’ then Dylan sings ‘Baby Blue.’ He has a triumphant grin on his face as he delivers the song. He is revelling in his genius. He knows perfectly well that he is knocking their socks off. ‘Catch the Wind’ is a pretty song, but has none of the bite of ‘Baby Blue.’ Some think he’s putting Donovan down. I don’t think so. He’s just so much better. ‘Look out! the saints are coming through.’
1965 – House party with Donovan (Dylan starts at 2’50”)
The shift in tone from 1965 to 1966 is subtle yet profound. The tempo’s the same, the chords are the same, the words are the same, even some of the intonations are the same, but the tone is darker. It’s still a challenge laid down to a former love, but it’s more introspective, less steady on its feet (a touch of syncopation), and more final. Dylan’s voice is softer, silkier, more insinuating than confrontational.
For performances, I don’t think we can go beyond the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, May 17th performance captured in The Bootleg Series Vol 4. The near miraculous harmonica solo alone puts this as one of Dylan’s finest-ever performances (I can’t seem to quit this ‘best ever’ hunt that dogged me while writing the NET series). I think, brilliant as some coming performances are, we have to wait until 1995 until we get such a blistering emotional statement and soaring harp.
And how the two harmonica solos toy with our feelings, raising us up to the sharpest highs and swooping us down into the anguished, bluesy lows. That harp pulls on us and buries us.
1966 : Manchester
We could leave it there, but I’m drawn to the Sydney performance (April). These Australian concerts are particularly bleak and unadorned. We don’t find the perfection of the Manchester performance of the following month, but for raw feeling this one is unmatched.
1966, Sydney
I should leave 1966 right there, and quit while I’m still ahead, but I can’t resist Dylan’s zonked-out intro to the Paris performance. One of the comments says, ‘You don’t have to smoke the whole bag, Bob.’ I dunno. Sure goes down well with a bottle of wine. A birthday performance. The song starts at 1’25”
1966 Paris
Now we face the big jump from 1966 to 1974 when Dylan did no touring. But he sure came back with a roar, with the Band and a new, mature voice to go with the old songs. A vibrant, quivering voice as Dylan discovers vibrato.
‘Baby Blue’ was only performed half a dozen times in 1974. He speeds up the song, knocking a whole minute off its performance time. Does he race through it too fast? You can decide. I find it a bit disconcerting, but on the other hand he’s in such good voice! Somehow it doesn’t feel too rushed. (Inglewood, February 14th,)
1974
Good as that is, it’s not to conclude that Dylan was starting to lose contact with the song. In 1975, the first year of the Rolling Thunder Tour, he would perform the song only twice. It had to make way for new material from Blood on the Tracks and Desire.
It’s to 1975 we will return in the next article in the series on Untold Dylan. I’ve some great sounds lined up for that one.
In the meantime
Kia Ora
Tambourine Man
- Part 1: A masterpiece is born
- Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
- Part 3 – Chasing Shadows
- Part 4. 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach
- Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire
- Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me
- Part 7: 2000 – 2010: the jingle jangle.
Gates of Eden
- Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war
- Part 2: 1974 – 1991 A crashing but meaningless blow
- Part 3: 1991 – 2001. Where Babies Wail: A Spooky Grandeur
It’s alright ma
- Part 1 1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
- Part 2: 1975/81 – Stuffed graveyards and false gods.
- Part 3: 1984 – One who sings with his tongue on fire.
- Part 4: 1988 – The darkness at the break of noon
- Part 5: 1999 – 2004. Stuffed graveyards, false goals.