The Dylan Album Project: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)

Whereas Dylan only wrote two of Bob Dylan’s 13 songs, on Freewheelin’ there were only two songs he didn’t write, “Corrina, Corrina” and “Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance.” His growth as an artist is apparent all over. This album oozes personality. While I love the performances on Bob Dylan, I realize that is a very personal opinion, but nearly everyone finds something to love on Freewheelin’. It is by turns funny, sweet, angsty, visionary….. everything. You have love songs (“Corrina, Corrina”), break up songs (“Girl From the North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”), and political songs (“Blowin’ In the Wind,” “Masters of War”). You have deadly serious songs (“Oxford Town,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream”), and seriously funny songs (“Talkin’ World War III Blues”). A very well rounded album, expertly written and performed with a wink.

Best song: Talkin’ World War III Blues – This is almost undoubtedly my parents favorite song on the album. Dylan’s surreal sense of humor at its best. Live, Abraham Lincoln would often become T.S. Eliot.

Worst song: Down the Highway – It was between this and “Honey, Just Allow me One More Chance.” I think critics often look at “Honey” and “Corrina” as slight because Bob didn’t write them. The lyricism of the performance of “Corrina” is just heartbreaking, though, and the fervor of “Honey” gets me. “Down the Highway” may be a Dylan composition, but it sounds like a generic blues rehearsal. The only good parts are some mentions to a girl in a foreign land who goes away to Italy. Those specific references to Suze Rotolo don’t make this any better, they just make it any inferior prequel to “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Especially following this with “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” a jaunt, off-the-cuff comedic version of “Down the Highway,” serves to point out “Down the Highway”’s own inability to stand as a strong song on its own merits.

Best outtake: Death of Emmett Till – It would be obvious to pick one of the four outtakes – “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoia Blues,” “Let Me Die In My Footsteps,” “Rocks and Gravel (Solid Road)” and “Rambling, Gambling Willie” – that were pulled off this just prior to release (it had already been pressed and delivered when the records were recalled), but instead I went with “Emmett Till” because, even though it is one of his more obvious and less nuanced political rants, it includes one of his most powerful images for me – “Emmet’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow Southern sea.”

Best live rendition: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – Dylan tore through this in 1975 on the first half of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan’s vaudeville tour. A lot of people assume this is about nuclear fallout, specifically related to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was written several months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, though, and I think it is more about a Biblical rain. Dylan said it was just about “a hard rain,” but the most important thing he said is that every line in here is really the first line of another song, and he just never thought he’d live long enough to write all those songs so he crammed all the first lines together. A damning and jarring series of first impressions it gives us. The form is stolen out of the old folk ballad “Lord Randall.” This would have been my top song on the album, except that this blistering version makes it sound like acid rain. A third great version is a bluegrass version from 2008 done for the Zaragoza Expo on clean water in the third world.

Rhymes: desks/masks, destroy/toy, turn/unlearned (1-3 from “Masters of War”), thumpin’/somethin’, ad/Conelrad (4-5 from “Talkin’ World War III Blues”)

Images: “snowflakes storm” (“Girl From the North Country”); “blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud” (“Masters of War”); “ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard;” “pellets of poison are flooding their waters” (3-4 from “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”); “I lit a cigarette on a parking meter” (“Talkin’ World War III Blues”)

Axioms: “All the money you made will never buy back your soul” (“Masters of War”); “You wanna be like me? Grab yourself a six-shooter and rob every bank you see. Tell the judge I said it was alright” (“Bob Dylan’s Blues”); “I’ll know my song well before I start singin’” (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”); “Cadillac…. Good car to drive, after a war;” “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours” (4-5 “Talkin’ World War III Blues”)