The understated brilliance of Bob Dylan album ‘The Times they are Changin”
In Clinton Heylin’s biography, Behind the Shades, Bob Dylan was described as having a mind like a sponge during his rise to fame. The young R&B fanatic turned folkie soaked up all he could from as many live gigs as he could attend and records he could beg, steal and borrow. All the while, a filing cabinet packed with the chord patterns and lyrical structures of beloved folk forebears would manifest in the hardwiring of his genius mind.
As with any genius, Dylan stood on the shoulders of giants. In his early pure-folk phase, the crucial giant was Woody Guthrie, the fascist killer-wielding troubadour responsible for the timeless folk standard, ‘This Land is My Land’, among many others. In a physical passing of the baton, Dylan made it a priority to meet his idol when he moved from Minnesota to New York in the early 1960s. Sadly, he would encounter a frail Guthrie in the hospital, where he was suffering from terminal and congenital Huntington’s disease.
Dylan and Guthrie got on like a house on fire, with the youngster showing his luminary some early compositions, including ‘Song to Woody’, which was written to the tune of Guthrie’s classic, ‘1913 Massacre’. The song appeared on Dylan’s eponymous 1962 debut album alongside a mixture of folk covers and highly derivative compositions.
Dylan’s debut LP was successful, but nothing on the level of its follow-up, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which saw him step into full stride with a mixture of comedic and observatory lyrics commended for their political connotations. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, especially, became an anthem for the times.
Before Dylan migrated to a more electrified folk-rock sound in the mid-60s, he released one of his most underappreciated gems, The Times They Are a-Changin’. The release marked Dylan’s first record to comprise solely original material; he was now ostensibly comfortable to take a step from the giants’ shoulders.
The album showed the artist turn from the light-hearted and jocular tone of his previous work toward unbound melancholy; it seemed the world was impending doom upon Dylan a little more at this stage of his young life. While the album had lost all signs of direct covers, traces of his folk influences could still be heard.
In ‘With God On Our Side’, Dylan deftly chronicled several gloomy historical events, including the World Wars, the Holocaust and the contemporary Cold War. For the instrumental section, he used the structure of the traditional Irish folk song ‘The Merry Month of May’, which was also replicated by Dominic Behan in ‘The Patriot Game’.
The 1964 album’s most obvious highlight was its eponymous single, which took stock of current affairs with glimmers of hope while maintaining the grave essence of the record. “This was definitely a song with a purpose,” Dylan told Cameron Crow in 1985. “It was influenced, of course, by the Irish and Scottish ballads …’Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’. I wanted to write a big song with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.”
In perhaps the album’s most depressing and morose moment, Dylan brought us the sobering ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’. The song runs with a simple but effective guitar run, rocking between two chords as Dylan tells the story of a South Dakota farmer who, under the immense pressures of poverty, shoots his wife, children and then himself. On second thoughts, this is perhaps the most depressing song in Dylan’s entire oeuvre.
“Oh, but you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears/ Bury the rag deep in your face/ For now’s the time for your tears,” Dylan sang in ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. The song flows to the tune of an old folk standard called ‘Mary Hamilton’, while Dylan spins another dark yarn; this time the racially aggravated murder of an African American barmaid in 1963.
“The story I took out of the newspaper, and I only changed the words,” Dylan told Steve Allen of the song in February 1964.
Elsewhere on the album, Dylan pours his heart out in some of his most poignant, lovelorn ballads, including ‘One Too Many Mornings’ and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, the latter borrowing its melody from ‘Girl from the North Country’ of the previous album, which in turn was derived from traditional English folk ‘Scarborough Fair’.
All things considered, The Times They Are a-Changin’ is a powerhouse album and arguably the greatest of Dylan’s four original pure-folk records between 1962 and 1964. Upon its release, the album was seemingly eclipsed by Freewheelin’, which better captured the zeitgeist with its more direct protest leanings. The morose tone may also have alienated some listeners.
In retrospect, The Times They Are a-Changin’ stands among Dylan’s greatest work, but these early folk exploits were soon superseded by the unquestionably bulletproof trilogy of the mid-60s: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.
Listen to ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, Bob Dylan’s most beautifully depressing song, below.
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