Tracks: Blowin’ In the Wind//The Girl from North Country//Masters of War//Down the Highway//Bob Dylan’s Blues//A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall//Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright//Bob Dylan’s Dream//Oxford Town//Talking World War III Blues//Corrina, Corrina//Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance//I Shall Be Free
"Unlike most of the songs now days've been written uptown in Tin Pan Alley, that's where most of the folk songs come from now days, this is a song, this wasn't written up there - this was written somewhere down in the United States..."
- "Bob Dylan's Blues"
Oh hey there Bob Dylan, doing your whole bob-dylany thing. You are one the reasons I am doing this list and it is quite nice to have met you at last.
This isn’t actually Dylan’s very first album, but it’s the one everyone pretends was his first since his actual debut is apparently not that great. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, however, is pretty great. It’s simple stuff, really – just Dylan strumming and plucking away at his guitar for the most part, taking breaks from the vocals to let loose with a bit of simple harmonica work. But! Dylan was both quite a fine songwriter and an equally able interpreter of material, and as a consequence manages to overcome his musical limitations and spare backing. The result is a pretty cool mixture of acoustic blues and folk, even stepping over the pond to steal the melody and construction from “Scarborough Fair” for his lovely little love song “The Girl from North Country”. As to the voice he uses to sing it all? Well, a lot of people like to declare Dylan an awful vocalist, but I’d argue that he was really more just a lazy one. Songs like “Visions of Johanna” and the aforementioned “North Country” show that he was capable of summoning something genuinely pretty from his throat, but a lot of the time he goes for emotional more than musical resonance and as a consequence you get the intensely irritating vocals that have become his hallmark. Still, he had character and that makes up for a lot.
Anyway, enough of all that and back to the songs. Most of them are pretty blues, in the whole Jack Elliot way (“Down the Highway” could actually be a left-over track from ...Takes the Floor, judging just by the sound of it). However, Dylan puts his own spin on things, partially I suppose through not being a good enough musician to emulate things perfectly, and creating his own unique sound in the process. Then there’s the fact that he’s a great songwriter, and it’s of course in the lyrics where this whole thing shines. After an age of pop music musing over vague notions of love, here finally is an album with some genuinely great lyrics about genuinely interesting things.
Examples? Well, you want a song about the civil rights movement? How about two! “Blowin’ In the Wind” is a solemn, lyrical mediation on just when exactly equality is going to get its arse into gear and deliver. Not deep, but beautifully phrased and rather moving, and anyway working in the abstract is always more effective when trying to promote a political consciousness. On the opposite end of the scale, “Oxford Town” is a wry bit of reportage about a black guy and his family who get “met with a teargas bomb” in Mississippi, ending with a couple of unfortunates getting lynched. Quite political, yes, but maybe not funny enough. How about “Talking World War III Blues”, a hilarious song where Dylan explains to his doctor a dream he had in which he wakes-up after a nuclear war and wanders around an empty city getting spurned by all the bigoted fools who’ve managed to survive. The best line? How about “I lit a cigarette on a parking meter and walked on down the road... It was a normal day”.
Then you do get some love songs, but these are love songs light years removed from the general vapidity of a Buddy Holly or a Beatle. From the aforementioned “Girl from North Country”, which is a very simple and pretty song with some lovely lyrics, to the bitter and funny break-up number “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, which features the classic line “I ain’t saying you treated me unkind, you could have done better but I don’t mind, you just wasted my precious time – but don’t think twice, it’s alright”.
The two centrepieces of the album, however, are “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. “Masters of War” isn’t really a song I’m especially enamoured of, to be honest. It has a great jangly, sinister guitar part, and it’s full of bitterness and rage at the military industrial complex, but it’s really a rather simple song that succeeds more through pure rage than anything else. It does have a few great lyrics, though: “A world war can be won, you want me to believe – but I see through your eyes, and I see through your brain, like I see through the water that runs down my drain” is pretty neat, I suppose, as is “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled – fear to bring children into this world”. It’s all noble sentiments, but in the end it wears a bit thin – this isn’t the sort of song it’s fun to listen to more than a few times. I guess I just find it a bit dull and preachy.
“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, however, is a stone cold classic from beginning to end, and the song that got me interested in Dylan in the first place. Oh where have you been, my darling young one? “I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard” –“I met a young woman whose body was burning” – “I met a white man who walked a black dog” – “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it” – “I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding”. On and on the brilliant lyrics pile-up, a shopping list of the horrors of the modern world. It’s almost the perfect protest song, with lines applicable to damned near every woe you’d care to name. Dylan reportedly claimed that he was frightened that he wouldn’t live long enough to write all the songs he wanted to, so instead he crammed the first lines of dozens of prospective songs into this one piece. It’s a great, great song in any event, barely dated after forty years (as depressing a fact as that may be, when I think about it). But, you know, there’s hope in the end – the narrator decides to head out into the horrible landscape he’s just delineated and carry the torch, so to speak. It’s fairly obvious Dylan was engaging in a bit of personal myth-making at this point, but it’s also a marvellous and inspiring tune.
The rest of the songs on this album aren’t quite up to the same standards as those I’ve just discussed, but they’re generally pretty good anyway. The main problem is that they tend to suffer from either being novelty numbers (“Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance”, which is stupid fun but nothing more, or “I Shall Be Free”, which tries real hard to be funny but doesn’t manage to be much more than mildly engaging) or not being about much in particular of interest to the listener (“Down the Highway”, which seems to be about Dylan’s troubles with his then-girlfriend, who had vanished off to Italy at the time). “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is a pretty alright I suppose, or at least tries to be. Dylan’s telling this whole story about how he had a dream about how much he wanted to be back with his friends, and how he would give every penny he had, but while it’s lyrically engaging his performance is so dour that it sinks it for me (judging by this and “Masters of War”, Dylan doesn’t always pan-out when he tries to be really serious – the guy is funny, and thankfully he realised that in time). As for “Corrina, Corrina”, it changes things up by going a little “rock” and incorporating drums and stuff, and manages to be pleasant enough – what really sells this is Dylan’s wonderfully tender vocal. Oh and “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is pretty cool too.
So, thirteen songs, none of them what I’d call “bad” and many of them quite good. This isn’t a perfect album(no perfect album would be 1/3 filler, even if the filler is pretty fine) but it is a very good one and I’m looking forward to Dylan’s next a great deal.
8.5/10
Download: Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall Mp3
Download: Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright Mp3
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