Another Side Of Bob Dylan

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Early into <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i>, the suddenly iconic protest singer diagnoses his condition: “I woke in the mornin’, wanderin’,” he begins “Black Crow Blue,” his fingers riffling a peppy boogie-woogie piano riff. “Weary and worn-out.” Indeed, by the time Dylan returned to Columbia’s New York studio with steadfast producer Tom Wilson in the summer of 1964, the singer was a lightning rod. Dylan’s sociopolitical song, and the civil unrest they’d helped nurture, had made him not only the voice of the rising counterculture, but also the enemy of those who opposed it. Dylan wa, by and large, over it. He wasn’t washing his hands of the movement altogether, but he <i>was</i> trying to live his life—and, well, write about it. That weary young troubadour who had released the mighty <i>The Times They Are A-Changin’</i> in early 1964 had other things on his mind—women, wearine, wild adventures—by the summer of that year, when he offered up his aptly named <i>Another Side</i>. Dylan’s verboten socialist association, for instance, are the punchline of “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” a surrealist portrait of a man asking for help from a farmer—only to be seduced by his daughter (to escape, he pledges his allegiance to Fidel Castro and scampers off). “My Back Pages” finds the singer holding his own know-it-all zeal up to the light, wondering if he’s left behind a little life in the rush to be a generational bard. “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” meanwhile, is a playful talking blues number, in which the blues is the pedestal upon which he’s been put. And if the title “Chimes of Freedom” suggests some grand call for liberation, the song is actually a seven-minute fever dream of urban dystopia, the promise of hope flashing and fading like lightning. The song was an essential breakthrough for Dylan the poet, not the polemicist. .

via Apple Music

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