2. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

I must have listened to 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' over a twenty times now. Is that much? I remember playing the white and the black Queen LPs every other day when I was 15 or 16, I must have heard them at least a hundred times, all in all.

But still. This second Dylan album to me sounds enormously matured since the first one. Starting off with 'Blowin' in the Wind', that anthem, at the age of 21 of course is incredible. But the second song is 'Girl From the North Country' - Scarborough Fair, yes; it shows how Dylan uses existing songs and tunes to make new repertoire, standing in a folk song tradition which makes ideas of copyright and plagiarism simply ridiculous (and, by the way, is a very living phenomenon if only you think of the birthday parties where new texts are sung to existing melodies). But also a simply beautiful song. Followed by 'Masters of War', about which I wrote earlier about it, in connection to 'Don't Think Twice, It's alright', also appearing on this album.

You see how tempting it is to write about all the songs on the album. I am not going to do that. But I want to point out a couple of things. For example that the guitar still is very untuned, occasionally - check out 'Down the Highway' or 'Oxford Town'. As I wrote before, I like that untuned guitar. Or that there is a quasi-'unbalance' in many of his songs; it is often unpredictable how many bars a sentence exactly is going to have, and within a song the same line my be fluid in that respect in different verses. I imagine playing with him, and the flexibility you would need to stay 'in form' with him. The same for 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall', where you never know how many sentences there will be in each verse. In that song, he daringly writes verses without rhyme; that is to say: there are no rhyming syllables at the end of sentences (or halfway, for that matter), but rhyme is there in alliteration and especially in the (sometimes very biblical) images and metaphors he uses:

"I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded in hatred"

Would you dare to write song lyrics like this? I wouldn't.

And that is another thing to point out: the anger and fear in this album, connected to war, to violence, to the threat of nuclear disaster. To me that is still very imaginable, to the point of re-feeling what I felt a long time ago; having nightmare-ish dreams about nuclear explosions in the 1970s and participating in anti-atomic warcraft demonstrations in the 1980s, all part of a very palpable anger and fear of this lovely but also monstrous world we live in. And although later my connection to those kinds of pacifism dwindled so much that I only really became aware of the horror of the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when I started to visit Sarajevo around 2010 (shame on me), in the days we live in now, with wars and violence raging in the middle east, Ukraine, and many many other places, anger and fear are as present, I guess, as they were in the early 1960s when Dylan wished for the death of the 'Masters of War'.

There are two songs I particularly love, probably because I am basically a romantic-emotional old sod. The first one is 'Bob Dylan's Dream', about his friends of past times and the innocence of all that:

"And our choices there was few

so the thought never hit 

that the one road we traveled 

would ever shatter or split."

The other one is the lovely 'Corinna, Corinna'. The first song with a band, I believe. A cover. And a real beauty.

1b. Bob Dylan - part two

I am looking forward to hear the second CD in the collection, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan with the iconic record sleeve and the even more iconic 'Blowin' in the Wind' as its first song. But I have forbidden myself to listen to a new CD when I have not yet finished writing about the old one, so I have to wait a bit. A waiting that, as always in such cases, reminds me of the verdict (was it Norbert Elias?) that culture basically is the postponement of satisfying one's needs - something I guess children need to be trained in: not only do they, aged nine, want to become a DJ once they have discovered there exists something like a DJ mix set, they also want to buy the set tomorrow.

But anyway.

I find myself also becoming a  bit tired with listening to the first album. I don't know why - it is nice enough, inspiring enough, with enough variation to keep listening to it every now and again, I guess. But still, I feel I want to listen to the next record. Is it because of that deeply human (or western?) need for progress - the trait of not being satisfied with playing three chords on the guitar if it would also be possible to play four? And then wanting to learn the fifth chord too? One of my dreams is to live in a simple house and sit on a simple chair and be satisfied with that, rather than longing for another kind of chair or fantasizing about another place where the simple house could stand. I am not sure if I will ever reach even a tenth of this Buddhist level of satisfaction. But I promise I'll keep trying (a true Buddhist would tell me that it is exactly the trying that stands in my way, of course).

But anyway.

What I wanted to write about Bob Dylan. That I like Dylan's guitar playing here, which is very functional, even when the guitar is slightly out of tune or when there is an occasional mistake (great to hear a mistake on a record - Sounes' biography learned me that Dylan usually did not rehearse with his bands but just wanted them to play along as he went and often was satisfied with the first take of a new song). That I hear some of Dylan's later voice foreshadowed in this album - the way he pronounces "dove" in the sentence "a lady like a dove" in 'Pretty Peggy-O' (a song which is very much an English ballad - I even know one or two Dutch equivalents to the song, content-wise).  That I hear the famous 'Beatle-chord' in 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down'. That Dylan's control of voice in his version of 'House of the Rising Sun' (the version that has become the standard - listen to the very different version of Woody Guthrie here - it reminds me slightly of the famous song John Henry, which I know from a very old recording (not available on YouTube, I guess) I used when I was teaching music in a secondary school) is stunning to me, as is his control of voice (falsetto!) in 'Freight Train Blues'. That 'Man of Constant Sorrow' reminds me, of course, of the Coen-movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou (receiving a Grammy for its soundtrack -check out 'Man of Constant Sorrow' live by Alison Krauss and Unions Station here from 2.40, but also look at the start of the clip and check out Krauss with Emmylou Harris and my favorite female American singer Gillian Welch in the middle - and if you like it, check out the Down from the Mountain-concert with live performances of the music from the movie; which then might lead me to refer you to Dolly Parton's  the Grass is Blue album, et cetera). That the title of 'Fixin' To Die' reminds me of the 'Fixin' to Die Rag' - in my mind is the idea that the 'Fixin' to Die Rag' was played on the Woodstock Festival (where Dylan was very absent) but I am too lazy to check this idea or to listen to the song. And so on, and so forth (a saying which reminds me of Wilco's Dawned on me again because they use it in a song...).

And what comes to mind also: that Dylan, a Jewish boy, sings a traditional repertoire in which religion, God and Jesus are present in every song, sometimes in every verse, in an often very moving way. It's the same with the Cash repertoire, maybe with American repertoire in general - maybe the very fact of singing this repertoire for decades eventually ripens the soul for a conversion to Christianity?

And now I can finally start listening to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

1. Bob Dylan - part one

So I read Dylan's biography by Howard Sounes, and have been hesitant to start this little piece about Dylan's first LP, simply called Bob Dylan. I am not sure if both are related. From Sounes' biography I learned that Dylan is a not-always-nice and intriguing person. From listening to Dylan's first album I learned he was, at age 20-or-so, already an intriguing singer.

It is tempting to listen to this first recording in the light of his later biography. It is also tempting for me not wanting to do that; wanting to write a review as if I was living in 1962. Trying to relive the 'authentic experience' of 1962. Nót taking into account (my knowledge of) his later work.

But I am not going to strive for such an 'authentic' review, ignoring what I have learned from 1962 onwards (I was born in 1964, by the way). In the first place because that is, of course, impossible anyway. When I write, I write now. But also because the point of this blog is not to write 'authentic' reviews - if you want them authentic, search the web for reviews written in 1962 (but be aware that you will not be able to read them in 1962...). The point of this blog is to trace what listening to Dylan, here and now, brings me. The fact that I listen chronologically to Dylan's albums is not very meaningful - I could have chosen listening alphabetically (starting with his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan) or by color (starting with his 1988 Down in the Groove with a nearly all-black sleeve).

Dylan 0: Rationale

I can't remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan. He must have been on the radio since I was a baby - he started recording in 1961 at the age of 20. I was born in 1964.

I must have learned to play simple Dylan songs (which don't exist, really) when I was learning the guitar at age 12 or 13. I remember my guitar teacher not only taught me classical guitar (Emilio Pujol, Matteo Carcassi) but also liked to teach me playing chords. I remember one of the first songs I learned was the Stones' "My Sweet Lady Jane", but I guess "Blowing in the Wind" was part of the package too. I should look it up in the old guitar lessons notebooks I may still have in a box somewhere. I remember the teacher often used a red pencil to write with.

I am quite sure some of Dylan's songs were part and parcel of the alternative youth 'gang' I was part of at secondary school, from age 15 to 18. At the same time I was playing in the folk music scene, and Dylan's songs were played (as covers, sometimes in translation) often. I have heard many of his songs at that time without realizing they were written by him, actually.