FEATURE:
With God on Our Side
Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ at Sixty
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ONE of the most important album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images/Douglas R. Gilbert/Redferns
of the 1960s, Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ turns sixty on 13th January. Forgive me if the date is wrong but, like nearly all classic albums, different sites have different dates – which is extremely annoying (why can’t there be a website that has the correct release date for every album?!). In any case, it seems like 13th January, 1964 was the official release date for Bob Dylan’s third studio album. Whilst his eponymous debut and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan featured mainly covers, The Times They Are A-Changin’ was original compositions. Produced by Tom Wilson, and recorded between August and October, 1963, there is an urgency to Dylan’s third studio album. At a time of unrest and change – including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 -, it was only natural that a conscientious and political songwriter like Bob Dylan would react to the turbulence and tension around him. Dylan tackles poverty, racism and political upheaval that was in the air in the 1960s. As a documentation of the time, it is one of the most powerful and poetic. I also think that The Times They Are A-Changin’ holds power today. Not only because the songs sound fresh and powerful. There is also a relevance to the lyrics now. Another time period where there is racism, social change and upheaval. I think we can learn a lot from what Bob Dylan is singing through his 1964 album. How much have we learned and changed since then?! Sixty years after this hugely important album was released, its words should act as warning and lesson to everyone.
I want to bring in a couple of reviews/features about The Times They Are A-Changin’. Albumism celebrated the album’s fifty-fifth anniversary in 2019. It is evident that a lot of what was discussed and covered can apply to modern-day events. Because The Times They Are A-Changin’ is so relevant, it is going to be one people will play and explore for decades more:
“Happy 55th Anniversary to Bob Dylan’s third studio album The Times They Are A-Changin’, originally released January 13, 1964.
Possibly one of Bob Dylan’s most overlooked records as a whole, The Times They Are A-Changin’ is his most overtly political. Released 55 years ago this week, the songs and ballads were timely then and the topics resonate in our climate today.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ takes Dylan’s political beliefs many steps further than The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released the previous year. For The Times it’s plainly recorded: Dylan is on acoustic guitar, harmonica, and vocals. The only other personnel listed is his longtime producer Tom Wilson. This record has a stripped-down nature, which makes the stories feel close and the emotion raw.
The album cover matches the traditional sounds: a black and white portrait of a scowling Bob. The Times They Are A-Changin’ has no vanity. Dylan would grow into his own brand of narcissism later in the ‘60s, but he was still a folk hero in 1964 because of this LP. The Times They Are A-Changin’ tackles racism, poverty, and social changes: the America brand.
It goes without saying that this record opens with the title track, one of Dylan’s most famous songs covered by dozens of artists across genres in every decade since its release. No song is born popular. This one became so because of its content.
For me to discuss it here is to assume you’ve never heard it before, which is ridiculous. Most people in the English-speaking world have come across “The Times They Are A-Changin’” at one point or another. To call it an anthem of change is cliché, but it’s exactly that. It’s one of Dylan’s most deliberate moves as a songwriter. It matches the phrasing and pacing of others on the record reminiscent of Irish and Scottish ballads that build up one verse at a time. Only “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is chorus-heavy compared to the others. Consider it an American hymn written by one of America’s finest religious fanatics.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ is one of the few Dylan records full of songs written for and about other people. On the seven-minute “With God On Our Side” he dissects God’s role in everything from the genocide of Native Americans to World War II to Vietnam. “North Country Blues” is, simply, a song of tragedy. “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is a fictionalized song about a South Dakota farmer who murders his family and then kills himself because of poverty. There isn’t much sunshine here.
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” pays real tribute. Carroll was a 51-year-old black woman killed by rich, white 24-year-old William Zantzinger. It’s a monotone chronicle of Carroll’s life as a mother of ten and “Billy’s” initial booking for murder. Zantzinger’s connections to Maryland politics through his family’s tobacco farms helped him get a slap on the wrist and only spend six months in jail, the charge changed to assault. Truthfully, this story sounds like it could happen in 2019.
“Only A Pawn in Their Game” is about the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. It opens side two. Dylan’s lyrics suggest his murderer, the poor, white Byron De La Beckwith, was a pawn to rich white elites planning Evers’ murder. Beckwith was a Klansman and active on a “White Citizens Council” that opposed racial integration in southern schools. Today, Dylan’s lyrics here are worth a closer listen. Both Evers and Beckwith are pawns in Dylan’s eyes, but with 55 years of retrospect, it feels hard to believe and painful to sympathize with a White Supremacist. (Beckwith spent life in prison and died there at age 80.)
We should be celebrating Medgar Evers who was a champion of integration and protested to successfully integrate the University of Mississippi. He boycotted and protested across his home state of Mississippi, organizing for civil and voting rights in the early 1960s. The street I live on in Brooklyn shares a name with him, “Medgar Evers Way.” My apartment building is two avenues from CUNY Medgar Evers. Luckily his legend lives on. For some reason, Dylan didn’t name him in the title and I wonder if he still believes in both men’s innocence.
The songs on The Times They Are A-Changin’ are somber. Listening to the LP now provides a clear image of Dylan as a Folk Singer. Recorded a year before its release, by the time it came out Dylan was distancing himself from the image the LP created. It’s his earliest face: a fingerpicking everyman telling stories of love (“Boots of Spanish Leather”) and hate. What he chose to write about is why so many fell in love.
A lot of Dylan’s history surrounds this LP before it was even released. Just a month after it was recorded in 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Three weeks after that the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee awarded Dylan the Tom Paine award for his contributions to the civil rights movement. Dylan’s acceptance speech is a diatribe against the display of rich whites and capitalism he faced in that Washington, D.C. ballroom. Notably drunk, he told the crowd among many things that he “saw himself in Lee Harvey Oswald.” After a forced apology he retreated and, my theory is, never spoke openly and honestly again.
Two years later he was still getting booed. In 1965 he plugged in at Newport and nearly cut himself on the edge he created with Bringin’ It All Back Home. Recorded and released by the time his electric show at Newport happened, the crowd was not ready. Expecting his infamous acoustic ballads from his previous records, including 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan (featuring “Chimes of Freedom,” “Ballad in Plain D,” and “It Ain’t Me Babe”), they were met with “Like A Rolling Stone,” and that’s that. Information (and sound) traveled a lot slower back then.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ is a rigid stance of a record. Listening to it now is all the more sobering. Our political landscape is much wider than it was 55 years ago. Now the lies are bigger and while the information is still free, it’s hard to know who to trust. These songs are an inspiring, genuine act of a Dylan long gone. When the Nobel committee awarded Dylan the prize for literature in 2017, I believe they were honoring him for this trilogy of records: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and Another Side of Bob Dylan”.
The Guardian reacted to fifty years of The Times They Are A-Changin’. In 2014, the potency and importance of the album was still very much clear. Bob Dylan managed to combine the political and personal. As a songwriter in his twenties, it is an amazingly matured and accomplished album! Even if fans think he released better albums, there were few as important as The Times They Are A-Changin’. As The Guardian called it, (the album) was “Bob Dylan's stark challenge to liberal complacency”:
“As a collection, the album is one of the high watermarks of political songwriting in any musical genre. These are beautifully crafted, tightly focused mini-masterpieces. And they have a radical edge, a political toughness, that one rarely finds in the folk music of the period. Abstract paeans to peace and brotherhood were not for Dylan; the songs are uncompromising in their anger and unsparing in their analysis.
The album includes the two songs Dylan had sung at the March on Washington, six months earlier. But while Martin Luther King appealed to an inclusive future, Dylan struck a very different note: When the Ship Comes In was a revenge fantasy whose joyously vindictive climax is a vision of the total destruction of the oppressors; the other song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, was written in response to the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, in June 1963.
The subject of this song, however, is not the martyred activist, but the man who killed him. And rather than a villain or psychopath, Dylan portrayed him as the product of a system: a system that set poor white against poor black for the benefit of an elite. A South politician preaches to the poor white man / "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. / You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.It was a class analysis of white supremacy, made at a time when this was a fringe idea even within the civil rights movement – though that would soon change.
In The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll Dylan again situates an act of racist violence within a larger system of social hierarchy. It's a story told with the deliberation of constrained outrage, leading to a devastating payoff in the final verse, which reveals the complicity of the state, and society at large, in the crime. "Now," Dylan scolds us, "is the time for your tears." Unusually for the time, Dylan does not allow his audience to wallow in moral superiority. At every turn, he challenges liberal complacency.
The album's treatment of the cruelties of class is stark. In Ballad of Hollis Brown, a farmer is driven to the destruction of his family and himself by the relentless pressure of poverty. North Country Blues chronicles the fate of an iron-mining town in Minnesota when the owners shift production to "the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing". It's a story of de-industrialisation and globalisation, written long before those terms entered the lexicon.
With God on Our Side, a sweeping survey of American warfare from the genocide of the native population to the nuclear standoff of the cold war, is a radical revision of the authorised version of American history (decades before Howard Zinn). In this centennial year, the verse on the first world war stands out: The reason for fighting / I never got straight / But I learned to accept it / Accept it with pride / For you don't count the dead / When God's on your side.
Where did the politics come from? Woody Guthrie had been Dylan's first connection to the radicalism of the 30s, and in New York he met other veterans of the half-forgotten Popular Front era, including Pete Seeger. In the Greenwich Village folk scene he mingled with socialists, anarchists and pacifists. You wouldn't know it from the film Inside Llewyn Davis, but this was a milieu buzzing with political argument and radical ideas. But the spark was surely the upsurge in youth activism, most notably in the sit-ins in the south, where young people had engaged in a direct challenge to power and succeeded in redefining the boundaries of the politically possible. Their boldness supplied Dylan and others with the self-confidence to "speak truth to power".
The album also includes three intimate, enigmatically personal songs. Boots of Spanish Leather and One Too Many Mornings are both evocatively equivocal. Restless Farewell, the album's finale, is mainly of interest in hinting at Dylan's imminent departure from what he'd come to see as the protest-song straight-jacket. "So I'll make my stand / And remain as I am / And bid farewell and not give a damn."
As for the anthemic title song, even in its day many found its naivety and generational self-righteousness irritating. And yet, in articulating in such broad rhetorical strokes the belief that epochal change was possible and imminent, Dylan left us with a precious distillation of a historical moment. Over the decades the song has acquired an elegiac patina as the millennial hopes that produced it recede into a distant past. But just as the injustices challenged by Dylan's songs are still very much with us, so too is the need for the all-embracing emancipatory aspiration of The Times They Are a-Changin'”.
On 13th January – forgive any error with that date in terms of the official release! -, we mark sixty years of Bob Dylan’s masterpiece. After a couple of album with cover versions on, this was his first where his extraordinary lyrical voice was laid bare. Something that would grow and evolve through the years. One of the greatest lyricists ever, the public got the first real glimpse of that with The Times They Are a-Changin'. I think that it is one of the most important albums ever released. Capturing a particular mood that was in the air in the early-1960s, there is this gravity to The Times They Are a-Changin' that is hard to ignore. Sixty years later, the album acts both as this glimpse of a the time in which it was written. It is also strangely powerful and relatable now! That is testament to the…
POWER of Bob Dylan’s songwriting.