Another Side of Bob Dylan

Another Side of Bob Dylan being Dylan's 1964 release and his 4th studio album is a very good album and at the time it was a departure from his overt issue oriented folk music which had dominated his previous records. Instead he started to write introspective lyrics which was not appreciated by the folkpress They felt like he was getting tempted by the allures of fame and in a way selling out. To Ramona, All I really want to do are some of the gems on this album. Ballad in plain D is a very personal track which deals with a breakup with a former girlfriend. The book-let is very nice with amazing pictures of Dylan doing different things. There are no lyrics included and instead we get a poem from Dylan which is quite odd but typical 60's material. 5/5.

Yes folks, this is indeed a pivotal work by perhaps the greatest songwriter of the post war "baby-boomer" generation. Here is where the cute folky Bobby Dylan, who sang of cannon balls firing and hard rain's fallin' came to extol the virtues of being "oh so much older then" and being "younger than that now". Just listen to the older more world weary 23 year old Bob Dylan singing about La Dolce Vita and a "Motocycle Nightmare" tale. "No No No It Ain't Me Babe"....But who exactly is this troubador spinning yarns about a "Spanish Harlem Incident" and gazing upon the "Chimes of Freedom" flashing.

Dylan was merely reaching his stride when he recorded "Another Side of Bob Dylan". Sure Highway 61, Blonde On Blonde and Blood On The Tracks would further reveal the depths of his unfathomable songwriting talents. Yes commercially and some will argue artisically Dylan was still asending toward his zenith, but I will always hold dear the exquisite sound of Ramona's "magnetic movements" and that Gypsy Gal with "pearly eyes" and the "flashing diamond teeth"....."The night is pitch black. Come and make my pale face....You know the rest. Bob Dylan has been analyzed six ways from next Tuesday. And yes this has never been cited as one of his greatest works. But after forty years I still find so much within this album that astounds. If heaven forbid Bob Dylan had perished in that awful motorcycle accident and had never lived to record Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home and John Wesley Harding, Another Side Of Bob Dylan might be regarded as his greatest achievement. Obviously we can all rejoice in his post "Another Side Of" acomplishments. But never the less this is a powerful statement by a young artist, who even today still seems to have so much more to say. One thing's for sure don't ever try to pin him down, chain him down or bring him down....All he really wants to doooooooooooh...Is baby be friends with you.

In reviewing Bob Dylan's 1965 classic album Bringing All Back Home (you know, the one where he went electric) I noted that it seemed hard to believe now that both as to the performer as well as to what was being attempted that anyone would take umbrage at a performer using an electric guitar to tell a folk story (or any story for that matter). I further pointed out that it is not necessary to go into all the details of what or what did not happen with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 to know that one should be glad, glad as hell, that Bob Dylan continued to listen to his own drummer and carry on a career based on electronic music.

Others have, endlessly, gone on about Bob Dylan's role as the voice of his generation (and mine), his lyrics and what they do or do not mean and his place in the rock or folk pantheons, or both. Here we are going back to the early days when there was no dispute that he had earned a place in the folk pantheon. The only real difference between the early stuff and the later electric stuff though is- the electricity. Dylan's extraordinary sense of words, language and word play has been a constant throughout his career. If much later (in the 1990's) he gets a bit repetitious and a little gimmicky in order to stay "relevant" that is only much later after he had done more than his share to add to the language of music.

Here the selections reflect more on Dylan's `talking blues' period and his tendency to work the topical side of the folk genre although mixed in are the songs that will inevitably form the basis of classic Dylan- It Ain't Me Babe and My Back Pages. As I have pointed out elsewhere no early Dylan is complete with a song of lost love, longing or perfidy. As an adjunct the question of who has lost love or been perfidious is open to question. Certainly It Ain't Me, Babe calls that premise into play. To Ramona steps the other way as Mr. Dylan is hurt- what a great line at the end- "someday maybe, someday baby you'll come and be crying to me"- haven't we all thought that when we have been thwarted in love. To round thing out a very nice Chimes of Freedom expresses his lingering commitment to reflect the political winds of the times. As does I Shall Be Free.

By this point everything Bob Dylan touched turned to gold, but he weren't no kind of protest singer no more. He wasn't even going to record another acoustic album after this one. Hence the title: this isn't the second coming of Woody Guthrie you might have expected after Freewheelin' and Times. This other side of Dylan is that he's by turns playful and romantic, but if you want someone to tell you what ails the world and what to do about it then it most emphatically ain't him babe. He's running away from The Times The Are A-Changin' (on a live recording from around this time he makes the title track sound like an obligation to be gotten quickly out of the way), and on the way he's tossing off splendidly crafted songs about girls, songs with lines that keep coming back to my mind long after I've listened to them:

"Your pearly eyes so fast and slashing, and your flashing diamond teeth"

"There's no use in trying to deal with the dying though I cannot explain that in lines"

"Though her skirt it swayed as the guitar played, her mouth was watery and wet. But now something has changed, for she ain't the same: she just acts like we never have met."

"Go lightly from the ledge babe; go lightly on the ground."

So hmm, I said he was playful, and advice about surviving suicide is certainly not that, but the album does have several funny parts. He makes an entire song out of listing all the things he doesn't want to do a girl whose friend he merely wants to be, and then he puts a silly yodel in the chorus. After several disconnected, jokey and nonsensical verses of "I Shall Be Free No. 10" he says "Well you're probably wondering by now just what this song is all about. What's probably gotcha baffled more is what this thing here is for," and then he goes doink doink on the guitar. It's pretty easy to hear the strange, funny little farmer's daughter story of "Motorpsycho Nightmare" as the first draft of the even stranger and funnier "115th Dream" from his next album.

Basically on this album he's alternately thinking about girls and messing around with his lyrical virtuosity to see what it can do, almost like a young man who inherits a powerful sports car and then finds an unpatrolled stretch of highway. There's two exceptions though. This is the one that has "Chimes of Freedom" on it, concerning which I'll just say that Dylan's performance of that song at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, which you can get on the No Direction Home soundtrack, is in my opinion the single best thing he ever recorded. Except maybe for "Tambourine Man." And then there's "My Back Pages," in which the genius turns his back on the movement and piles barbed ridicule on everything he stood for a few months earlier. "Romantic facts of musketeers, foundationed deep somehow. Aw but I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now." Can't say I agree with it, but it is very, very well done, the best song on a flawless album.

Song by song:

A1 All I Really Want to Do ***
A2 Black Crow Blues ***
A3 Spanish Harlem Incident ***
A4 Chimes of Freedom ***
A5 I Shall Be Free No. 10 ***
A6 To Ramona ***
B1 Motorpsycho Nitemare ***
B2 My Back Pages ****
B3 I Don't Believe You ***
B4 Ballad in Plain D ***
B5 It Ain't Me Babe ****

I really wanted this record as soon as it came out, however I was in Uncle Sam's clutches during the month of August in 1964, in the middle of boot camp. It wouldn't be until advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton a few months later that I'd be able to get my hands on it and give it a listen. I had a month's liberty before going to Pendleton, but frankly, as much as I liked Dylan back then, I had more important things to do.

My first listen disappointed me, because I really liked the earlier records, wanted more of his protest stuff. I was in the military, didn't like it and Vietnam was looming large. But when I got to "Chimes of Freedom" I fell in love, not only with the song, but with the whole record. To me, at the time anyway, it seemed like the whole record led up to and surrounded that song. Now years later I listen to a whole gang of songs on that record. Now I know, if I didn't back then, that every song on "Another Side" is a masterpiece, well all of them except the opener, which is better left to Sonny and Cher. Maybe it's the way he does it, I don't, but I've never been able to get behind "All I Really Want to Do."

However the imagery in the rest of the songs on this record is truly mind blowing. Can you just picture a "dirty rotten, doctor, commie rat." Not only can I, but I've been using that phrase for almost four decades. Lord has it been that long.

"Ramona" is a song I never tire of. "My Back Pages" could a been a story about me and my dad. "Ballad in Plain D" is so good, so poetic, so hard to describe. I love this record, can't praise it enough.