Exit Planet Folkie (Summer of Dylan part two)

In 1964 Bob Dylan stopped being a folk singer. It took a year or so for his audience to catch up with this fact. Sure, he still strummed a guitar and blew his harmonica and had that Woody rasp in his voice, but he was no longer writing songs ripped from the headlines. The title and cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan couldn't make anything more explicit. This is not the Dylan you know, but "another side." And instead of his Dust Bowl by way of Minnesota folkie garb, he's dressed like a hipster. That would be Dylan's persona in the mid-60s: an often mean, sneering hipster who still backed up his arrogance with some of the greatest music ever made. 

Don't Look Back, the doc of his 1965 UK tour, perfectly captures this moment. He spends a lot of his time putting other people down with the assistance of Bobby Neuwirth. When the latter meanly teases Joan Baez, Dylan just laughs along. Knowing that they were recently romantically connected just makes it harder to watch. Some of the targets did deserve it though, like the pretentious high class British journalists who talk to him with such condescension. 

This installment in the Summer of Dylan will delve into the albums from this short moment of transition from folk to what he called "the wild thin mercury sound" that started with Highway 61 Revisited. At that point Dylan is definitively a rock artist playing with a rock band. My periodization might be contentious, since Bringing It All Back Home is often grouped with Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde as a trilogy, but Bringing It All Back Home came out when Dylan was still performing by himself. I think taking the stage with a band, a la the famous Newport performance, is what really and truly marked the break he was hinting towards in the year leading up to it. 

Another Side of Bob Dylan (August 1964)

As I mentioned, this album's title is a statement of purpose. The topical songs are gone, the themes are romance, bitterness, and poetry. It gets a bit raw, and Dylan himself said he regretted releasing "Ballad in Plain D." "It Ain't Me Babe" is a better bitter relationship song but just as acidic. Here he still plays his material solo, but the material is completely different. "It Ain't Me Babe" could perhaps be read less as a song about rejecting a lover because of her demands and more as Dylan's statement to elements of his own audience. They wanted him to be Woody Junior forever, and he wanted to branch out. At this point it's undercover, like a child of a religiously devout family questioning their faith but still making the sign of the cross with them at supper out of obligation but not conviction. 

I've never found this to be a completely successful album because Dylan hasn't yet fully taken the plunge into his new musical territory. At the same time, there are several fine songs and some great weirdness on numbers like "Motorpsycho Nightmare." 

Rating: Four Bobs

Bootleg Series Volume 6 Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (Recorded October 1964)

This is one of the most interesting entries in the Bootleg Series because it is maybe the best document of Dylan's changing direction. This performance comes after Another Side of Bob Dylan, but some of the revolutionary songs from his next album like "Mr Tambourine Man" are included too, as well as topical numbers like "Who Killed Davey Moore?" He sounds like a man trying to cross a stream, one foot on one bank and one on the other bank. Listening to it again I noticed that the crowd seemed to be most engaged when he was doing his most "relevant" songs, like "Talking World War III Blues." 

Joan Baez duets on several songs in the latter part of the set. Dylan is famously improvisational onstage and he seems to be deliberately sabotaging Baez's ability to keep up. This almost completely torpedos "Mama You've Been On My Mind," a normally tender song that sounds rushed here. During his UK tour the next year he stopped having her going on stage to sing with him, another (and more cruel sign) of his exiting planet folkie for uncharted territory. 

The mixing of elements makes this a fascinating document, and I keep coming back to it. 

Rating: Five Bobs

Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965)

The cover of this album shows Dylan's transformation from folkie to arty hipster. No more denim and corduroy. Instead there's surrealism in the imagery and Dylan showing off his taste in music in the albums visible in the photo. The first song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," lays the gauntlet down with an up-tempo electric band and bon mots flying like mosquitos in June. Listening to it I can't understand why anyone was surprised by what Dylan pulled later that year at Newport.

That song and this album also point to shift where Dylan is most certainly commenting on American society, but is not doing so with specific stories of the tribulations of Hattie Carroll and Hollis Brown. He relies on language and metaphor, oblique references and allegories. Young people hearing him say "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" in 1965 heard a cry for change but one far less direct that the threats issued in "The Times They Are A Changin'." 

Dylan's foray into drugs is also made explicitly obvious on this album beyond the trippy cover. When his false start on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" ends with him giggling uncontrollably it's obvious that he's high AF. On "Mr Tambourine Man" (rumored to be inspired by LSD) he has become totally untethered from the usual folk song lyrics even if he's still strumming his acoustic guitar.  

This is most revolutionary with "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," which has to be a top five Dylan song. Like "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," this is Dylan as angry Jeremiah, pointing his finger at an inhumane postwar America still believing it represents some kind of city on the hill. I happened to see him live the day after the 2004 election and when he sang "Sometimes the president of the United States must have to stand naked" the whole crowd went absolutely nuts. That's a sign of the power of his songs from this era that are commenting about modern society but not through specific references. It gives them a kind of timelessness. 

At two points the album also makes Dylan's new artistic direction explicit. "Maggie's Farm" is one of the best quitting songs of all time, one I blasted myself when I quit an especially rotten job. It can easily be read as angry rejection of the whole folk scene. (It was hardly a mistake that he started his electric set at Newport with it.) He ends the album with "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," a song of love's end that could also be a metaphor for his relationship with artistic milieu in Greenwich Village that had once nurtured him. At Newport to appease the fans upset by either the loud electric set or the shortness of his appearance (accounts vary), he came back with an acoustic guitar and played this song. If you watch the great documentary Festival it feels like the funeral of the folkie ragamuffin he used to be.

While the difference in musical styles on this album can be a bit jarring, it is just packed with amazing songs, and is one of the greatest musical leaps forward by any artist in history.

Rating: Five Bobs

Bootleg Series Odds and Ends

There aren't nearly as many songs from this brief period of Dylan's career (which amounts to only about a year) on the various Bootleg Series compilations, so this time I am not going to separate them out. Volume 2 has a smattering of songs, including an alternate acoustic take on "Subterranean Homesick Blues." The surreal "Farewell Angelina" deserved to be on the cutting room floor, but is still worth a listen. 

Volume 7 of the series, the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home has a bunch of goodies, including the infamous blast of "Maggie's Farm" at Newport in 1965. This alone is worth the price of admission. There's also a few alternate takes of songs from his albums of the period that give insight into Dylan's process.