Talking Another Side of Bob Dylan

So, you may recall a couple months ago I got this book with all of Bob Dylan's songs. It's got like 600 pages worth of songs. Pretty amazing. And what I like about it is it's got the chords, the lyrics. You can see at a glance the entire song. You don't have to turn the page to play the song. And, yeah, the font is a little bit small, a little bit on the small side, but I can still see it just fine when it's sitting in front of me on my music stand. So I've been using this book to play these songs from [the album] Another Side of Bob Dylan. And the songs are kind of deceivingly simple. The chords are actually a little bit more complicated than they seem to be at first. So it's good to have the chords and the lyrics all laid out in front of you when you're singing these songs. So if you want to sing the songs in the way and play them in the way that Bob Dylan did, maybe not exactly, but at least getting the chords right and matching the chords with the lyrics, then it's really useful to have this book in front of you.

Otherwise, usually what I do is I just have song lyrics on my iPad. If I haven't memorized the song, I have memorized maybe 30 or 40 Bob Dylan songs, but that's still less than 10% of Bob Dylan's output. And it's pretty much impossible to memorize all his lyrics. Even he, I don't think, has done that. But I want to talk about Another Side of Bob Dylan, which I just finished recording. All the songs, there are 11 songs on this album from 1964.

I feel in a way this is kind of an underrated album of Bob Dylan's. It's not sort of the go-to album from that era. The next one that we're going to cover, Bringing It All Back Home, is definitely one of his, I think one of his best. Certainly it has some of the most remarkable songs on it. But Another Side of Bob Dylan is sort of, maybe I would say it's like kind of the pinnacle, maybe not the pinnacle, but it's still in the mode of what he was doing in his previous albums. So he's, before he really broke through with his stream-of-consciousness lyrics and just kind of created a new style of music on the next album.

So I think this album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, has been, you could say it's been overshadowed in a way by his subsequent albums, the next three albums, which are considered among the best that Bob Dylan ever made. But this one has some really good songs. And some of them were actually covered by The Byrds. And I think it was The Byrds who kind of recognized the beauty of these songs and took them to another level, or at least made them more palatable for a larger audience.

So one of them is All I Really Want to Do, which I originally was familiar with The Byrds’ version. And that's a great [song], it's got great lyrics. That's the one that's, I ain't looking to compete with you, beat or cheat or mistreat you, simplify you, classify you, defy, deny, defy or crucify you. All I really want to do is baby be friends with you. And it's got six verses.

So it's all like, I don't want to do this to you. I just want to be friends with you. So it's almost like a thesaurus of negative words that, you know, negative things that you could do to a person. I don't want to straight face you, race or chase you, track or trace you, or disgrace you or displace you or define you or confine you. So it actually is quite a fun song to sing. Bob Dylan sings it in 3-4 time. And I think The Byrds did it in 4-4 time, which is more the rock and roll beat. So that's a great song.

And then Black Crow Blues is back to a kind of a standard blues arrangement. And I think Bob Dylan just shows his mastery of this folk music form, this African American folk music tradition that is so quintessentially American. He really shows his mastery of this tradition throughout his entire career. There are blues songs that are in kind of the standard arrangement with a little bit of tweaking here and there.Black Crow Blues, I wake in the morning wandering, wasted and worn out. I was standing at the side of the road listening to the billboard knock. If I got anything you need, babe, let me tell you in front. Sometimes I'm thinking I'm too high to fall. Black Crow's in the middle across a broad highway. Don't feel much like a scarecrow today. So it's kind of blues standard with a line and then the line is repeated and then kind of a punch line all in 1-4-5 basically. So Black Crow Blues is a good one.

Spanish Harlem Incident. It's interesting how many times gypsy women appear in Bob Dylan's songs. He has some kind of strange obsession with gypsy women. I don't know where that comes from exactly. Maybe somebody who's watching this video knows the answer and can put it in the comments. I still need to read through my Bob Dylan biographies. I bought a whole bunch last year and I was planning to read them, but lately I've been reading a lot of Rolling Stones literature, trying to get into their story, do a deeper dive into their story. So I will get back to the Bob Dylan story. So Gypsy Gal, the hands of Harlem cannot hold you to its heat. That's a really nice song and I'd say kind of an underrated song, a hidden gem in this album.

The next one is To Ramona, which is a song about a woman. Your cracked country lips I still wish to kiss. So it's obviously, it's kind of a cowboy song. It's got that flavor of a cowboy song. It kind of evokes sort of a little bit of a Wild West theme. And again, it just shows his mastery of the idiom of American music that he had mastered so many different styles and forms and traditions of folk music by this time. And he's really just showing, showcasing his mastery of kind of Americana, the American folk tradition. So it's kind of a love lost song about a woman. And it's a nice one, too. I'd say it's another hidden gem on this album, To Ramona.

And then Chimes of Freedom, which is one of the more well-known songs from this album. And again, this was a song that the Byrds made famous. And I can't remember if they, I think oftentimes because Bob Dylan had so many verses in his lyrics, they would usually cut a few of them off and maybe do three verses instead of six because they're trying to keep it in that radio friendly, like three minute format. But this is an epic song. I feel like this is up there with his best lyrics. Far between sundown's finish and midnight's broken toil, we ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing. This has a very poetic feel. It shows that he had absorbed the poetry of the modernist poets. I think Rimbaud was one of his, he definitely names Rimbaud in a song or two. And it's a beautifully evocative song. And the way that the lyrics are crafted, there's a lot of alliteration, a lot of, I don't know if you could call it onomatopoeia, where the sound of the word suggests what he's singing about. So the chimes of freedom flashing, the majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds. I mean, he's really showing his mastery of the English language here. There's a reason why he won the Nobel Prize.I mean, this is, you know, this is a Nobel Prize winning song, if any. So that's a great song. And again, he sings it in, plays it in 3-4 time, whereas the Byrds did it in 4-4 time. And yeah, so there, if you listen to his original version and then compare and contrast it against the Byrds version, you can find a lot of interesting contrasts.

And then there's, I Shall Be Free No. 10. This is one of his kind of just humorous songs.

It's a bit of another ode to Woody Guthrie. You know, I Shall Be Free No. 10. And it just shows that he could just spin out these songs. He had so many lyrical ideas and story ideas. This one is a ramble. It doesn't really have a coherent story. He has one, there's one verse all about Cassius Clay, who, of course, is Muhammad Ali, the great boxer, the great fighter. So here he's kind of ripping on Cassius Clay and saying that he's going to knock him out. Obviously, it's a joke. And I think he and Muhammad Ali had some kind of meeting together and did a little bit of, you know, fake sparring and stuff. So they obviously respected each other a great deal. So, yeah, it's just it's full of a few cliches. Well, I don't know, but I've been told the streets in heaven are lined with gold. I asked how things could get much worse if the Russians happen to get up there first. So now he's just, you know, kind of making a dark joke about the Cold War era and this, you know, our demonization of the Russians from the USA perspective during that time. So he's kind of taking the piss. If you don't know that [term], that's a kind of more of a British slang for just making fun of of all these different types of people, maybe in American society, liberals and conservatives and the McCarthy era, all this, all this stuff that's kind of embedded. He's he's riffing on the upper upper class society. There's one verse about playing tennis in the noonday sun. And so it's just it's just a hodgepodge, not one of his best tunes, not one of his best songs lyrically and kind of very conventional in terms of the in terms of the music itself. I Shall Be Free No. 10.

And then there's Motor Psycho Nightmare, one of the more unusual and memorable of Bob Dylan's song titles, Motor Psycho Nightmare, which is kind of a riff on Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock film, because the story that he tells in this song is about he he's riding his motorcycle. He comes upon a farm. It's kind of a cliche story. Comes upon a farm. He needs a he needs a place to stay for the night. So he asked the farmer if he can stay. And the farmer says, OK, but just don't touch my daughter. And of course, his daughter. It's hard to tell if she's trying to seduce him or trying to murder him because he says that she looks like Tony Perkins and she's asking him to come up and take a shower. So obvious allusion to the Psycho movie. And he says, I've been in that scene before. You know, so, yeah, I've been through this before. So it's a funny song. And and then he figures out a way to kind of get out of this mess by yelling out that he loves Fidel Castro and his beard. Of course, the farmer farmer goes after him with a shotgun. So again, he's kind of riffing on current politics and the the American fear of communism and so on and so forth. So this is a fun, good time song. And then there is another another set of famous songs from this from this album.

It Ain't Me, Babe, which is sung in the film A Complete Unknown. So if you've seen that film, there's a scene where they're at the Newport Festival and he's singing with Joan Baez and the Suze Rotolo character. I forget her name in the film now [Sylvie Russo]. She's kind of watching and in tears because she sees how close those two are. And I don't know. It's one thing that I guess a lot of people didn't quite like about the movie, that it became sort of this love triangle story. But anyway, the song It Ain't Me, Babe, it's a you could say another one of as many kind of cynical songs about women like, don't expect too much from me. If you're looking for somebody to close his eyes for you, someone to close his heart, someone who will die for you and more. It Ain't Me, Babe. So this is this is one thing that people sort of liked about Bob Dylan is that he wasn't overly romantic. He didn't try to romanticize relationships. He kind of he drew a line. He understood the complexity of human relations and that love is often, you know, all of these kind of love songs like the Beatles and all that era of love songs. He was he seems to have been very cynical about that. There's really very, very few songs that Dylan writes that are kind of conventional love songs.

And then there's My Back Pages, which again was, I think, made more famous through the Byrds. And and again, he does this in three, four time, whereas they choose to do it in four, four time. And the original song has six verses. I can't remember if the Byrds song cut cut a few verses, but it's probably likely that they did. But again, this is another real standout in the album. Lyrically, crimson flames tied through my ears, rolling hot, rolling high and mighty traps pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my map. So it's a very --it's, the lyrics are complicated. They are there's no sort of coherent story here. It's he's sort of getting into that stream of consciousness mode that he then that then becomes more dominant in his next albums. But it seems to be about academic knowledge versus sort of the real world, maybe somebody coming out of college or somebody who's, you know, I think of Bob Dylan as somebody who was kind of this perennial outsider in the intellectual world. But he was invited in, you know, the colleges would open their doors to him to to sing and perform. But he's kind of stands back on the outskirts of academia and sort of pokes fun at academics. A self-ordained professor's tongue, too serious to fool, spouted out that liberty is just equality in school. Equality, I spoke the word as if a wedding vow. Ah, but I was so much older than I'm younger than that now. So the punchline just keeps coming. That's like the refrain of the song. And it's a great punchline.So there's that one, My Back Pages.

And then another, I would say this one is kind of another hidden gem as well. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met), another cynical sort of, you know, unrequited love song where he gets ghosted by a girl. So he has a beautiful night with this woman, and then the next morning she sort of disowns him and sort of pretends that nothing happened. So who knows? Is this an autobiographical song? I'm sure it could be. It's the kind of thing that could happen to any guy who gets a lucky night with a lady and then the next day she kind of regrets and maybe just tries to brush off the entire night, whereas he's sort of hung up on her. So I'm sure this is kind of, it's kind of a universal situation for men and women. It could also be seen easily from the woman's point of view. Either, you know, the guy was just, you know, then I realized who he really was and I just didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. Or it could be a girl getting ghosted by a guy. So there's a lot of universal sort of themes in this song. And it's a good song. It's a well-crafted song, I think, lyrically, musically. Definitely not up there with My Back Pages, Chimes of Freedom, or these other songs that just tower above the rest, right, on the album. But a pretty good one.

And then there's Ballad in Plain D. And this one is probably the most controversial, one of the most controversial of Bob Dylan's songs that he ever wrote. Because it's, it is so deeply autobiographical. It is so biting, painful. It's kind of a painful song because it's about, apparently it's about his relationship with Suze Rotolo, how her sister and mother kind of got involved in their relationship. And he had some bad times with her sister and mother and some bad arguments. And that's all in the lyrics of this song. The tragic figure, her sister did shout. Leave her alone. Goddamn you, get out. An eye in my armor turning about and nailing her to the ruins of her pettiness. Beneath a bare lightbulb, the plaster did pound.

 Her sister and I in a screaming battleground. And she in between, the victim of sound, soon shattered as a child beneath her shadow. So it's a real, yeah, devastating song. And I think, you know, a lot of people expressed, I don't know, just anger that he would write such a song. I don't know if he ever performed it later on in his career. Have to look that up. I somehow doubt it. I think this is one of those songs that he kind of had to get out of his system. Maybe later regretted that he had written this song and put it on the album.That's my guess. I mean, I could be totally wrong. And again, if you're a Dylanologist and watching this by any chance and want to make a comment and give us the more accurate picture, please feel free.

I do not pretend to be an expert on Bob Dylan, but I'm trying to become one in a way. I guess part of my journey here is to become an authority on Bob Dylan. I'm definitely not right now at this moment. But I think if I continue this project of recording every album song by song, I've got, I know, 30 plus albums to go. So there's a long journey ahead of me and it's taking a little bit longer than I thought because first, I get distracted with other music and other songs. And secondly, there are times when I just don't have time to sit down in the morning and work on these songs. It actually, I think I said this with The Beatles, and The Beatles, I know left, right, center, up, down, forwards and backwards. I know all their songs so well. And even then it took me on average, maybe 30 minutes of work to get each song down until I could play it smoothly. And with Bob Dylan, I think it's kind of similar because the songs in a way are a little simpler than The Beatles. They don't have all the complex chord changes, but lyrically, they're more complex. There are different chords that come through that you have to pay attention to. It's not as conventional as it might seem. And so I would say, you know, and I listen, I'll listen to the album many times to familiarize myself with all the songs. On this album, I knew maybe 30% of the songs pretty well already, but most of the songs I had to kind of learn from scratch. So again, it might take, you know, 30 minutes to an hour for me to really grasp to each song well enough to be able to perform it in a smooth way. And I'm not trying to replicate all the fancy guitar work on any given song or let alone the harmonica work. I mean, that would be another task entirely to try to nail the harmonica bits because, you know, they are quite unique, I think, in these songs.

So I haven't really, I haven't really bothered to do that. But even so, it might take me like an hour per song just to get the song down. So it does take a while to go through and really get these albums down. But I think it's a worthy effort. I think if there's any singer songwriter who's worth delving into this deeply, it is Bob Dylan. I do plan to read more books on Bob Dylan.

I wish there were better podcasts on Bob Dylan. There's no equivalent to like Something About the Beatles. There's that podcast that I talked about, Robert Rodriguez's podcast. I haven't really found an equivalent. There was a good podcast called Is It Rolling Bob, which I used to listen to. Unfortunately, it seems that they stopped making that podcast, which is a real shame. I really loved that podcast, Is It Rolling Bob. But I haven't really found a good Bob Dylan podcast. I think there's Pod Dylan. A lot of the podcasts seem to kind of focus on one song at a time. I'm not really, that doesn't really interest me as much as kind of more broadly talking about Bob Dylan's career or his, you know, the influences that went into his different songs, different phases of his career. That's what I really liked about Is It Rolling Bob. So I hope those guys somehow get it back together and continue that podcast. So if you're out there and listening, just know that I really appreciated your podcast. So that's it for today.

I just wanted to round up the experience of, you know, making my versions of Another Side of Bob Dylan. And next up is Bringing It All Back Home. I know I've already recorded a few of the songs, so I'm kind of partway there already. But that's also going to be a real challenge for me in the next few weeks to get that one down, especially It's Alright Ma, which is one, I think, one of his best songs. So we'll get to that in the next few weeks. If I can do one album a month, maybe that's a good pace for Bob Dylan. Anyway, over and out. And I hope you enjoyed this podcast, podcast, this YouTube video. I suppose it could be a podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you have any comments to share or you want to share some thoughts about, you know, your own appreciation of these songs or of this album, please feel free to comment and see you next time.