Talking Freewheelin' Bob Dylan-MP3
I've decided to give a short summary of what I've been posting on YouTube, maybe make this a weekly habit, and this week I want to talk about the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which is the album that I worked on last week and posted all 12 songs of the album. It's a really landmark album in the history of pop and rock and roll, I guess, early rock and roll. I don't know if you can call it rock and roll, but maybe you can see the first stirrings of Dylan's journey to becoming kind of a rock star.
I have trouble with saying that Dylan was a rock star. I always think of him as more of a roots musician, deeply rooted in the blues, which you can definitely see in this album. There are several songs that are basic blues songs, but also in American folk music, obviously his strong connection to Woody Guthrie is apparent in this album as well as his first album.
So I want to talk a little bit about the album, talk about the process of my recording my own versions of the songs and some of the challenges that I came up with, and why this was such an important and landmark album in the career of Bob Dylan. So this was his second album, came out in 1963, and a very groundbreaking album. It was the first album that he made with entirely his own songs.
So he wrote all the songs for this album, whereas in the previous album, I think he'd only written his first album, he'd only written two of the songs that he performed. So it's an original album in that sense, although, as I said, it's deeply rooted in the blues and in American folk music traditions, which also have their roots in European folk traditions. So he's drawing on a vast and deep wellspring of music to create this album.
It's amazing that he made this album at the age that he was, 22 years old. I mean, it's just unbelievable to think about that. This guy was just an engine, a powerhouse of music, because when you listen to that album, it's a combination of the songwriting skills, which I feel are kind of way beyond that of a typical 22-year-old in terms of their maturity and depth.
Also, his playing. I mean, he had amazing guitar skills. I think sometimes Bob Dylan is a bit underrated as a guitar player.
His guitar playing techniques, his picking and strumming techniques were just unbelievably strong in that time of his life. And also, and I didn't try to replicate this in my own versions because I think it's too difficult, but singing, playing, and playing the blues harp or harmonica, however you want to call it, all at the same time is just an unbelievably amazing skill set that he brought to this second album. I think that's the product of all his years of playing in coffeehouses, playing in Greenwich Village.
I guess if you've seen the movie Complete Unknown, you'll get a sense of that. I haven't seen the movie yet. I'm looking forward to watching it sometime.
I'm sure it'll be incredible in some respects and disappointing in others, as are all music biopics when it comes down to it. But I'm really looking forward to seeing that movie. It's hard to imagine Timothee Chalamet with his five years of training kind of coming anywhere close to what Bob Dylan was like in that time.
But yeah, you got to give him credit for learning the guitar. I think that's a wonderful part of that movie. Anyway, back to the album.
So The Free Will and Bob Dylan, a very significant album in terms of the individual songs that come out, which become iconic songs of the 1960s and are still iconic songs for Bob Dylan today. I don't know how often he plays these songs, probably very little in his concert. I mean, he's written like over 500 songs. So he has a vast repertoire to choose from when he performs. And certainly he doesn't have the guitar chops that he had back in his early 20s. But these are songs that still resonate with people today.
They are songs that have a raw vulnerability to them, but also this emotional power, also the social critique, the critique of politics, the name dropping, all these characteristics that would kind of come to define Bob Dylan's songs over the next generation. They're all in this album. So I think for any Bob Dylan fan, this is an essential album to know and have.
If you collect vinyl or CDs, certainly it's an essential album to listen to in depth. And I think another thing that you can talk about with this album is how did he come up with the songs? How did he challenge, sorry, challenge the times, but also channel? I want to use that word channeling because I think it's such an important word. How did he channel the ideas and the concepts? Where did he draw from to bring out those musical and lyrical ideas that are so well developed in this album? As such a young man, again, quite an amazing thing to think about.
Obviously, he was drawing on his times. It's kind of in some senses, maybe it's like reading newspapers and absorbing all the news that's going on at the times and all the conversations that must have been happening in those coffee houses with all those highly intelligent musicians that surrounded him in that early stage of his career. All the people that frequented those scenes.
I think he's really channeling a much bigger voice. Maybe you could call it the village voice. Oh, that's probably not. Well, maybe. That's kind of a joke, but I'm not saying that the village was the one and only place where he was learning this stuff. He does seem to be kind of tapping into this sort of New York zeitgeist of people reflecting on and critically thinking about the world.
He's also tapping into the Beat generation. It's well known that Bob Dylan was drawing influences from the Beat generation, from Kerouac and Ginsberg and others in his thinking, in his poetry, the poetic aspects of his songwriting. Multiple sources just coming into this young man.
He's just absorbing them like a sponge and producing these amazing songs. Some of the notable tracks on this album are Blowin’ in the Wind. Obviously, that's one of his most iconic songs.
It's a simple song with a simple message, but a very powerful, profound message. It's also a song that I think is easy to kind of replicate, but it's also kind of easy to parody. I seem to remember a song when I was a teenager, something about “your raincoat is flapping in the wind.”
It's kind of like an easy song to take and parody. I could easily see a parody of that whole film, A Complete Unknown, kind of in the style of the parody of the Johnny Cash story that was done years ago [Walk Hard]. But anyway, I'm getting a little off track.
Like I said, this is a little bit of a stream of consciousness, stream of consciousness, sort of thinking about this album and its significance. So Blowin’ in the Wind, obviously a very important song in Bob Dylan's career, one that kind of identified him with the culture of protest movements that were emerging, that were growing in the 1960s, that were such an important part of culture in the 1960s, not just in the US, but all over the world. The 1960s was such a special era.
And then we have A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. I think that's another one of his most iconic songs from this album. A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, it's kind of an apocalyptic vision of the world.
Is the hard rain, is it nuclear war? Is it acid rain? I don't even know if that was a concept back then. I suppose it was among certain circles. But somehow humanity is destroying itself.
I mean, that seems to be a big theme running throughout this whole album, because he's also got Talking World War III Blues. There's obviously an existential crisis going on in this album that he is capturing in his songs, and he's expressing the angst of an entire generation of people, people who had come out of, you know, many of them had come out of the ashes of World War Two. And now we're going into the 60s, the Vietnam War is heating up.
There was the Cuban Missile Crisis around the time that this album was being made. I mean, it was just a very dark time. I think it came out before the Kennedy assassination.
But it's that time period. So he's channeling a lot of dark visions of humanity, which connect to our world today. So I think there's a, you know, a kind of a timeless feeling to this album.
So A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall and then Masters of War. So Masters of War is a more biting and direct critique of the world that we live in, and who is pulling the levers of warfare, right? We live in a world of constant warfare. Who is profiting from that? Whose lives are being sacrificed? This is a really powerful song, and it's a very direct voice that comes out of this song.
It's quite different, I think, to his later music, where he kind of wraps his messages in a different package. You have to kind of unwrap the package to get the message. It's not as crystal clear.
So I think there's something kind of naive about this album, that he's, you know, it's kind of the voice of a young man, of an angry young man, right? Just telling people, this is what the world is like. “This is what I hate about the world. This is what I love about the world.”
Very direct messages. You know, he continues to be direct, in some sense, into his later work, but not quite as aggressive, I would say, as he is in this album. So it's kind of the aggressive voice of a fighting young man.
And, you know, there are a lot of other songs on the album that have a different tone to them, more of a kind of a parody of society, a funny tone to them, kind of, again, drawing on Woody Guthrie, the humor of the folk artist come out in a lot of his other songs. So it's not all just darkness and, you know, and anger. There's so many emotions that come through in this album.
So I think it would be too tedious to go through song by song. I think if you're, you know, a fan of Bob Dylan, you already know this album, you're already familiar, at least with those songs, and maybe some others. I'll mention a couple others.
I think Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is also one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs. It's a much more kind of deeply personal song with the kind of imagery. It's based on the theme of, you know, basically a man leaving his woman, leaving his woman behind, and wandering off for some reason or another.
Either she didn't satisfy him enough, or he had conflicts with her, or he's just a wanderer by nature, and he's got to get on the road again. So it's one of those sort of, I'm going on the road, sorry honey, sorry to leave you, which is kind of a universal theme in folk music as well, and in rock music for that matter. But it's a beautiful song.
Not just the songwriting and the imagery, but also, and the voice, but also the song itself, the way the song is so carefully crafted. It's just got this, it's an archetypal kind of folk song. It's a lot of fun to pick on guitar.
So when I worked on these songs, I'm not trying to you know, I don't have the ability or the interest to try to replicate what Bob Dylan does on guitar. That's just way beyond my capabilities. So I like to simplify the songs and just kind of, you know, bring them down to their essence.
Just try to perform them at a level to which people would recognize that, oh yeah, that's this Bob Dylan song. I'm not interested in singing exactly like Bob Dylan. Again, I think that that kind of imitation just comes across as a little weird.
I think it's better to like sing Bob Dylan songs in your own voice and interpret them through, channel them through your own voice, your own way of playing and singing, rather than try to replicate Bob Dylan. I mean, if you want to hear a song in the style of Bob Dylan, just listen to his albums. Why bother listening to somebody else try to imitate him? So my strategy with, I think, with all kind of the pop and rock music that I perform is to try to play them as simply as I can and directly and in my own voice.
Rather than try to get complicated. There's exceptions, you know, when there are songs that require a certain style of playing like Blackbird, for example. I mean, I think to play that song properly, you really do have to learn how to play it.
But, and that may be true. I mean, people might push back and say, “well, you should really learn this style of picking for this Bob Dylan song. I think that really fits well.”
And maybe I will in the future. But right now, I just don't have the time. If I'm covering an entire album to try to learn one particular song at that level.
So that's the way I've approached this project. For me, it's about, you know, it's about kind of hovering close to the ground of Bob Dylan's legacy and just learning the lyrics, being able to perform the lyrics, maybe not memorize them. Because again, I don't have time to memorize.
These lyrics are long and complicated, a lot of verses. There's no way I can memorize a particular song in such a short amount of time. I do have some down relatively well from memory, like Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.
But mostly, I just rely on a lyric sheet to reproduce the song. So I think that, you know, just to wrap up, because I want to keep this under 20 minutes. I think this album obviously has great resonance and a long lasting influence and is a signature part of the Bob Dylan legacy.
It showed what an incredible performer and songwriter he was and what he was capable of. There's still a lot of kind of maybe you could say young man's naivete in this album. And [over time] he was able to kind of mature and really develop and refine and hone his songwriting skills, his lyrical skills.
I think that you can see the seeds of his poetic powers in this album. You can also sense his humor and his pathos in the album as well. This is a man who has a voice of a much older, much more mature man, even in his early 20s.
So he's really coming out. He's kind of coming out of his chrysalis and the beautiful butterfly of Bob Dylan is emerging in this album, if I may use such a metaphor. And again, these are songs that resonate with the day.
They have an enduring power. And I think they're just a signature and significant part of the Bob Dylan canon. So it's been a great pleasure to try to recreate these songs in my own way.