Loaded Couch Potatoes

Bob Dylan made a major break from the protest-song scene with his fourth album , 1964′s Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Thanks to his last couple of albums — and to songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” — Bob Dylan was, in 1964, considered by practically everyone to be at the forefront of the popular protest movement … everyone, that is, except for one: Bob Dylan.

Dylan began almost immediately to try leaving this image behind, and one of the first major salvos fired in the war between Dylan the Image and Dylan the Man was Another Side of Bob Dylan, an album focused almost entirely on relationships and more personal — and decidedly not socially conscious — songs.

(1) “All I Really Want to Do”:  The album starts with one of the more playful songs in Dylan’s discography … but it’s playful in the same way a cat leaping at a window to get at the bird it sees flitting about on the ground outside is playful.  It might not seem so playful if you were a bird.  (It might not have seemed so playful, also, if you were one of the fans of Dylan the Protest Singer.  After all, this song is entirely about Dylan not wanting to do the things it’s been intimated that he wants to do.)

Another Side of Bob Dylan was recorded in a single day, and there is a rawness, a lack of polish, that serves some of the songs poorly and some of them well.  I think it serves “All I Really Want to Do” pretty well.  With the song presumably fresh for him, it comes off as having more of his personality than might be present on some of his other records, and as such, I think it’s possible to argue that this one of the most “Dylan” of all Dylan albums.

That said, “All I Really Want to Do” has never been one of my favorite Dylan songs.  It’s kinda vapid, and mean in a way.  This is what passes for bubblegum music in Dylan’s canon, though, and as far as bubblegum music goes, it’s not too bad.

(2)  “Black Crow Blues”:  This is probably one of my least favorite Dylan songs, at least amongst his output from the ‘60s.  It sounds like what it probably is: a song Dylan came up with five minutes before he recorded it.  However, it’s always fun to hear Dylan doing the blues, and it’s also always fun to hear him playing the piano.  In some ways, I think the song points the way toward Highway 61 Revisited, but that point of interest isn’t enough to make me interested in this song.

(3)  “Spanish Harlem Incident”:  This one is a good case-in-point to show how recording an entire album in a single day might not be the best idea in the world.  Just listen to this song, and pay attention to how Dylan’s energy level seem to simply disintegrate by the time he finishes the third and final verse.  At several points, it seems as if the whole endeavor is simply going to fall apart.  As such, what could have been a solid entry in the Dylan canon is reduced to being a merely decent recording.

It’s probably worth noting that the song does offer more evidence of where Dylan’s songwriting was going.  This, despite being played only on a single acoustic guitar, is blatantly a rock song, and I think it would have been much better in that guise.  Imagine a good anchoring rhythm section, and maybe a nice Al Kooper organ section … that might have been something slightly magical.

Still, there are some decent lyrics here – “On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding; I know I’m ‘round you, but I don’t know where” – so it’s not a waste of time by any means.

(4)  “Chimes of Freedom”:  Lyrically, this is a complex, complicated, and possibly even confusing song, and it’s unquestionably one of the high points of the album.  From a narrative standpoint, what seems to be going on in the song is that the singer and a friend have been caught out in the open by a thunderstorm, and have sought shelter in the doorway of a building (possibly a church).  From there, the pair of friends are awed by the sight of the lightning and the sound of the thunder, and of hail, and this summons in the singer’s mind sympathetic connections with various members of society, such as pacifists (“warriors whose strength is not to fight”), refugees, rebels and rakes, “mistreated mateless mothers” and “mistitled prostitutes,” and so forth.

Look, I’ll be honest here: apart from that, I really have no fucking clue what this song is about.  And that kinda bothers me, but only kinda.  Really, this is a song that’s entirely about how well-performed it is (Dylan’s voice gets dangerously close to giving out at a couple of points, but by and large it is a tour de force), and also about the not-so-simple thrill of the way the words sound in relation to that performance.  There are some lovely images, such as these:  “Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail, the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder”; “In the wild cathedral evening, the rain unraveled tales for the disrobed faceless forms of no position”; and so forth.  I don’t necessarily understand a lot of this, and I’m about halfway convinced that there no understanding to be had, not really.

But sometimes, abstraction is okay, and it’s pretty damned okay here.

(5)  “I Shall Be Free No. 10”:  Not by any means one of Dylan’s better-known songs, this is another seeming example of the musician just farting around in the studio.  However, it is clear that he was in high spirits – possibly literally – when he recorded it, and it practically drips with Dylan’s weirdo sense of humor; as a song, it’s not entirely dissimilar to some of those infamous press conferences he would give a few years later.  The song is filled with hilarity (“Well, I set my monkey on the log/and ordered him to do the dog/He wagged his tail and shook his head/and he went and did the cat instead/He’s a weird monkey; very funky”), and it seems to be a bit of a head-scratcher until you think about what the song’s first verse means.

Here’s how it starts: “Well, I’m just average, common too/I’m just like him and the same as you/I’m everybody’s brother and son/I ain’t different from anyone.”  Dylan goes on then to say that “It ain’t no use talking to me/It’s just the same as talking to you.”  Given the album’s title and intent – to distance Dylan from the protest movements of the time – I think it’s hard to interpret this as anything except the singer saying, Seriously people, don’t look to me for any sort of wisdom.  After this first verse, the song launches into a series of bizarre bits involving Dylan challenging Cassius Clay to a fistfight, the aforementioned monkey episode, Dylan imagining himself in the guise of a tennis player at a country club (and later as a golfer), and so forth.  Each verse is self-contained, and seems to have no larger significance, unless being confusing is Dylan’s goal (which it almost certainly was).

Dylan performs all of this with an invisible smile on his face and with laughter constantly threatening to erupt from the weirdness.  I’m especially fond of the line in which Dylan rhymes “home” with “poem” by pronouncing it “hoem,” and I also love the final verse, which contains a musical joke I don’t have the vocabulary to articulate.  So I’ll just leave it to you to go and have a listen.

(6)  “To Ramona”:  Another of the album’s highlights, “To Ramona” is a terrific song that addresses a woman who, evidently distressed (by the state of the world,?) has come to the singer for solace, which he gives for a time, until finally counseling Ramona to go and do what she thinks is best — with the knowledge that whatever she does, she’ll have to do it without him.

It seems entirely likely that “Ramona” is in fact none other than Joan Baez, with whom Dylan had a famously troubled relationship.  I always resist applying any sort of strict biographical reading of songs, but with this particular song, the temptation proves to be do much for me to overcome.  If the album represents Dylan trying to break with the protest movement – which his sometime-lover Baez was very much a part of – then it also, in some ways, has to represent Dylan trying to break at least some part of his relationship with Baez herself.  And indeed, the final verse of “To Ramona” seems to take that, or some fictional version of it, into consideration: “I’d forever talk to you,” the singer seems to sigh to his distressed lover, “but soon my words would turn into a meaningless ring.”  This is a thought that is both gentle and cruel, and if you know much about Dylan’s marital life during the next decade, it’s impossible not to feel some serious pangs for the younger 1964 version of the man … and to wonder if maybe he ought not to have given “Ramona” a bit more of an opportunity.

“Everything passes, everything changes; just do what you think you should do.  And someday, maybe – who knows, baby? – I’ll come and be crying to you.”

Great stuff.

(7)  “Motorpsycho Nitemare”:  Another comedic song, this one tells the story of the singer spending the night – part of it, at least – at a country farmhouse, where he has run-ins with the farmer and the farmer’s daughter.  The whole thing seems to be a lead-up to a punchline about freedom of speech, but frankly, it’s a bit tiresome as a song.  There are a couple of amusing line-readings, but that’s about all there is to recommend here.

(8)  “My Back Pages”:  Here’s something you won’t often hear me say: I think I might actually like this song if not for the lyrics.  Remember earlier, when I was expressing slight concerns over “Chimes of Freedom” not entirely making sense to me?  Well, “My Back Pages” makes almost no sense at all, up to and including the refrain “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”  Basically, the song is a long series of images that occasionally come close to having some sort of concrete meaning, but never quite get there even individually, much less as a whole.  But Dylan sings the song with conviction, so if you do the listening equivalent of letting your eyes go crossed, you might enjoy it.

(9)  “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”:  It’s got its problems, I guess (some of the lyrics are fairly crap if you just read them on the page), but Dylan plays the piss out of this song, and I just like the conceit of it.  It’s bitter, confused, and slightly jaunty in a righteously belligerent way.  I’d guess this is a good example of a fairly mediocre song being elevated by being recorded at precisely the right moment in time and thereby somehow becoming better than it has any right to be.

(10)  “Ballad in Plain D”:  The best thing I can say about this song is that Dylan sings it with utter conviction.  Here, however, is a song so blatantly autobiographical that there’s no need to wonder how to interpret it.  The song is about Dylan’s breakup with Suze Rotolo (she’s the woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), which – depending on who you talk to – was exacerbated by Suze’s sister Carla.  Dylan and Carla didn’t get along too well, and at one point had a shouting match so violent that it literally put Suze into a catatonic stupor.  Dylan seems to have felt the need to write a song about it, and it’s probably one of his least successful compositions – both musically and lyrically – from this era of his career.

It does have a nice final verse, however, which makes reference to Dylan’s feelings about being “free” from his relationship and single again: “Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me, ‘How good, how good does it feel to be free?’, and I answer them most mysteriously: Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

(11)  “It Ain’t Me Babe”:  A piercingly sad song, Dylan here is singing about how he’s simply not the person his lover needs him to be … and maybe I’m hearing what I want to hear, but he sounds like he’s pretty damn bummed out about it.  The only other song on this album with the same tone is “To Ramona,” and that leads me draw the conclusion that this song, too, is about Joan Baez.

Dylan gets a bit nasty toward the end this time, though: “Go melt back into the night, babe; everything inside is made of stone, there’s nothing in here moving … and anyways, I’m not alone.”  But his voice is sad, and clearly wishful that he wasn’t having to break the heart of whoever he is addressing in this fashion.

Even long before I knew enough of the biography to know that Dylan and Baez had been a couple, I was struck by Baez’s cover of “It Ain’t Me Babe,” but with the biographical details – rightfully or wrongfully – in mind, it kinda hurts a bit to hear Baez sing the song.  In more than a few of her Dylan covers, it almost sounds as if she’s using his songs – which may or may not be about her – both as an attempt to reconcile herself to the facts and to bring herself closer to Dylan.  Baez’s singing voice, on these occasions, becomes positively angelic with distressed beauty.

Apropos of perhaps only a little, I’m also a big fan of the Johnny Cash/June Carter version of the song.  Knowing what we know about their biography, the song becomes something else entirely: a song in which two people are desperately, and with blithely unconvincing cheerfulness, trying to convince each other that they don’t need each other at all, not really.  But, of course, we know better.

FINAL THOUGHTS:  By no means a great album, Another Side is nevertheless an interesting piece of work that has several extremely worthy songs on it.

Several of this album’s songs are about breakups of one type or another, and it’s interesting to compare the tone Dylan takes in dealing with each scenario.  In “To Ramona” (and “It Ain’t Me Babe”) it is wistful, regretful, but resigned; in “I Don’t Believe You” it is peeved but curiously detached; in “Ballad in Plain D” it is genuinely heartbroken.

Dylan here is also breaking up – or, at least, trying to (he wouldn’t be successful until his next album) – with a large portion of his fanbase.  It’s interesting to note that as far as attempted breakups go, Another Side of Bob Dylan is fairly gentle and understanding.  But it was also unsuccessful, and perhaps that accounts for the steps Dylan would take to make sure that the next time out, nobody could possibly misinterpret his meanings.

Honk’s rating: 3.5/5 spuds