The Bob Dylan album he called fully realised: “I felt really accomplished on that”
For most artists who write songs day in and day out, work is never really done on a composition. There are certainly deadlines in the music business that make things more difficult, but even when turning in a finished product, there will always be those few musicians who feel they could have played a track better or gotten their point across more accurately. Bob Dylan doesn’t ever try to claim that he had the best streak on his albums, but he knew that The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was one of his greatest projects looking back.
Despite being his second time making a record, Dylan’s sophomore release marks a turning point in his career. Before this, his debut saw him be the Woody Guthrie transplant he had always dreamed of becoming, usually only playing acoustic guitar and singing traditional tunes with the occasional harmonica blast thrown in for good measure.
You would think that nothing much had changed when listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan for the first time, but the original material he came through with was bound to change the entire music world on its head. Instead of traditional folk tunes, Dylan wrote songs reflecting his own time period, either through hopeful messages like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ or indictments like ‘Masters of War’.
That’s not to say that he didn’t have his sentimental side. Any album can be more than a little bit much when it’s just one political song after another, and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’ was when people started to see the real human being underneath that folkie cap and harmonica strap.
When taking inventory of his albums, Dylan singled out his sophomore effort when discussing his most accomplished work, telling Rolling Stone, “I think the second one. I felt real good about doing an album with my own material. I felt real accomplished on that. Got a chance to play in opening tuning. I got a chance to do talking blues. I got a chance to do ballads like ‘Girl From the North Country’. It’s just because it had more variety. I felt good at that.”
But the important part of the album didn’t even have anything to do with what Dylan said or did. It was what the rest of the rock scene would do afterwards, and as soon as acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones heard it, they knew they wanted to dream bigger than just writing teenybopper songs.
There were more serious songs in the rock canon, like The Animals’ cover of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, but someone like John Lennon thought that he deserved to be on the same level as Dylan with his writing, eventually going deeper inside himself to make his own classics. Even though not every Beatles song sounded like Dylan, writing lines like ‘Revolution’ wouldn’t have happened if not for the folkie.
But that influence also became a bit of a crutch for Dylan, with everyone from The Byrds to Crosby, Stills, and Nash pulling from his model when writing their material. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, though, and when someone makes a record this potent, it is bound to reach beyond the conventional rock format.
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