Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released on May 27, 1963, would have been one of the all-time great debut albums if Dylan only hadn’t released the self-titled album a year earlier. Featuring thirteen songs, eleven that he wrote, it was the inverse of Bob Dylan, which contained only two originals. While his actual debut finds him still trying to find his performing voice – singing a variety of the songs in styles that he has borrowed from other recordings or from other performers – Freewheelin’ is an extremely accomplished piece of work for a twenty-two year old. The album reached number 22 in the US, and produced one single (Blowin’ In the Wind), but it also featured a number of his best songs (and I hope to write about each this week).

Apparently, the album was almost much worse than it ended up being. Dylan’s biographers agree that on May 12, 1963, two weeks and a day before the album was to be released, Dylan was scheduled to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Dylan told the producers that he would be singing Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues, he was asked to perform something else. Talkin’ John Birch is an anti-anti-communist song (and only a mildly funny one, at least to today’s ears) and it is possible that the censors thought anti-anti-communist was the same as pro-communist. Anyway, Dylan refused to play another number, and he didn’t appear at all. Our loss.

The C in CBS, of course, stands for Columbia, which was Dylan’s label. Biographers differ on the exact chain of events, but Freewheelin’  was definitely the subject of a last minute shake-up. Whether he was ordered to change them or not, the fact is that four songs disappeared from Freewheelin’ and were replaced. To my mind, this improved the album considerably.

Gone were John Birch; Let Me Die in My Footsteps; Rambling Gambling Wille; and Rocks and Gravel. Dylan played all of these many times in 1962 and into 1963, and the first three are on the Witmark Demos. None of them is very good. Rambling Gambling Willie may actually be bad. The best of them is Let Me Die in My Footsteps, another early death song that would have fit better on Bob Dylan.

The four songs that were added were Girl from the North Country, Masters of War, Talkin’ World War III Blues, and Bob Dylan’s Dream. The first two of these are among the best songs that he did, and Girl would be a top contender for absolutely the best thing he ever wrote. The other two are no better – and no worse – than the songs that he replaced. Still, this was a significant upgrade.

Freewheelin’ is by no means a perfect album. Of the final two songs Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance is a dud (he played it live only three times in his career according to the excellent index at BobDylan.com) and I Shall Be Free is even worse. It’s a disappointing ending to an album that opens with the a great trio – Blowin’ in the Wind, Girl from the North Country, and Masters of War. On CD (or MP3) the album has another nice run in the middle with A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, Bob Dylan’s Dream and Oxford Town, although these were split onto two sides on vinyl.

CBS recalled all of the copies of the album with the original sequence of songs, though, of course, some still exist. It is reported that they are among the most valuable albums in the world on the collector market. I checked: mine is just the regular one. Alas.

When I started thinking about this project I anticipated that it would lead in some unexpected directions, and this is the first of them.

In 1962 Dylan was recruited by Philip Savile to star in a BBC tele-drama, Madhouse on Castle Street. Dylan, along with his manager, Albert Grossman, flew to London to film the show, but Dylan backed out because he couldn’t act. The play was quickly rewritten, with Dylan re-cast as Bobby the Hobo, who wandered about singing, but not performing lines. Dylan performed four songs: The Swan on the River, I Been All Around This World, The Coocoo Bird, and, before it was a hit, Blowin’ In The Wind. The play was recorded at the very end of December and broadcast on January 13, 1963.

While it is unusual that Dylan’s first televised appearance would be on the BBC, it is more unusual that the BBC would have destroyed the only known copy in 1968, at the height of his fame. What survives are television listings, memories, and some poor quality recordings made by placing tape recorders in front of televisions on that Sunday evening in 1963.

I listened to these recordings, as I must, and could hardly recommend them. Swan on the River is a nice, catchy tune, but essentially it’s a few minutes of singing with dialogue over it, recorded as through a door.

When I went to look up some details, however, it turned out that BBC4 did an hour long documentary about the show and the blizzard of 1962. Further, Walrus Video has it streaming on the internet. It’s a bizarre film – about twenty minutes worth of material stretched to an hour. Get past the opening, which ludicrously equates the destruction of the tape with the assassinations of King and Kennedy and the events in Prague, and you’ll get a nice history. One of the highlights is Peggy Seeger recalling meeting Dylan for the first time. There’s not much to the anecdote, but they do show her wonderful banjo picking.

One interesting factoid is that the filming was interrupted by a union dispute so Dylan accompanied Grossman to Rome over the New Years to see Odetta, one of Grossman’s other clients. During that trip he apparently wrote Girl From the North County, based on Scarborough Fair, which he had learned from the London folkies. Maybe it’s even true!

A bizarre excursion to end 1962, and what could’ve been a major piece of Dylanalia lost to history by a BBC cull of old tapes.

The thing that has most surprised me about listening to nothing but Bob Dylan’s 1962 recordings this week is that he invented folk rock several years before he invented folk rock.

Folk rock is understood as the combination of folk song traditions and electrified instruments and amplification. It also is indicative of the presence of a band – particularly a drummer. Obviously lots of folk groups existed before folk rock – The Weavers, The Kingston Trio, and so on. Performing as a “band” wasn’t the shift, it was playing with a “band”. This is what Dylan would do in 1965 at Newport that would lead to his excommunication. But then how do we explain “Mixed Up Confusion”?

In fall 1962 Dylan had begun recording his second album, Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. This would be his breakthrough in 1963. Before the end of the year, however, Columbia Records released his first single: Mixed Up Confusion (with Corrina, Corrina as the b-side). Corrina, Corrina made it onto Freewheelin’, and it is the only non-solo acoustic song on that album (it even has a, very subtle, drummer).

Mixed Up Confusion was totally at odds with the rest of the album and it doesn’t appear on it. Allegedly written in a cab on the way to the session, it featured George Barnes and Bruce Langhorne on guitar (one electrified), Dick Wellstood on a prominent, driving piano part, and a rhythm section of Gene Ramsey on bass and Herb Lovelle on drums. Band. Electric guitar. Hard driving rhythm. This was a rock song. A folk rock song three years early.

The single went nowhere. Researching it, I came across this site that breaks down various versions and takes and issues of it. This is too much for me, though I appreciate that there are people out there in the world who do this kind if analysis.

Mixed Up Confusion is an incredible selection for a first Bob Dylan single – almost unbelievable given how he was understood at the time by fans, peers, and media. When I first heard it, on Biograph, as a teenager, I must have placed it much later in his career. I’ve always liked it, and even when I didn’t listen to it for years and years I would still occasionally break out into its memorable opening whine – “I’ve got mixed up confusion, aaaaaand it’s a-killin’ me!”. It was really only this week that I comprehended its place in his development, and it still seems out of place.

A premonition of what was to come, Mixed Up Confusion has a title that seems to define its position in Dylan’s evolution across 1962.

Mixed Up Confusion on YouTube

The flight from Calgary to Chicago that brought me to the MLA meetings yesterday is about two and a half hours in the air, which, as luck would have it, is the length of The Witmark Demos. I listened to them in their entirety, which meant that it was the first time I skipped ahead in this project – the collection covers 1962 to 1964. Without the liner notes I wasn’t sure where to stop. It’s just as well – the demos play like the great early-Dylan album that Dylan didn’t release.

Dylan initially contracted his song publishing to Leeds Music (hence the bootlegs of that material) but switched later in the year to Witmark. Some of what he recorded in their offices were songs he had no interest in for himself, and which he hoped others would record. Others are him getting down the lyrics and tunes for rights purposes. The recordings are rife with false starts, verses and lines sung multiple times for the sake of clarity, and spoken asides where Dylan says “I’ll write this out for you later”. It’s a very intimate recording, perfect for a plane trip.

Listening to it all, I found myself wondering why I preferred it so strongly to Bob Dylan, the self-titled debut album. I’ve now listened to that album once per day for five days and I like about half of it. Actually, I’d keep exactly seven of the thirteen songs. Not a terrible ratio, but not fantastic.

According to Robert Shelton, Dylan sort of agreed. The five month gap between recording the album and its release meant that he semi-disavowed it by the time it came out – he’d moved on, essentially. So I asked myself, based on his recorded demos and the tapes made after the Bob Dylan sessions and before the album came out, could he have made a stronger debut?

The songs that I’d keep are Talkin’ New York, Man of Constant Sorrow, Pretty Peggy-o, Highway 51, Gospel Plow, Song to Woody, and Baby Let Me Follow You Down. I would put House of the Risin’ Sun on the maybe list – I don’t really care for it, but given Dylan’s debt to Dave Van Ronk it probably should be there.

So what would I have added? More songs by Dylan. The album has only two, but I think he should’ve considered I Was Young When I Left Home, Baby Please Don’t Go, Man on the Street, and Standin’ on the Highway. I’ve already written about I Was Young, which is great and beautiful, and the others are all good. None are overlooked classics, but they’re more interesting than his version of See That My Grave is Kept Clean.

The omission from the debut album that seems strangest in retrospect is Hard Times in New York Town, a very witty and charming song that pops up on a lot of Dylan’s live recordings during the year, but which doesn’t make it onto the album. There was a lot of strong material that fell through the cracks between Bob Dylan and Freewheelin’, some of it sort of mystifying in its lack of release, but none so much as that.

A few explanations seem to suggest themselves for the choices he made: timidity – Dylan, who was incredibly young, may have been reluctant to expose himself to that much scrutiny; traditionalism – other folk artists, like Joan Baez, released albums of standards, so why shouldn’t he?; and, I think most importantly, the fact that the singer-songwriter tradition was not yet so much fixed. It would take Freewheelin’ to make that happen.

I’ve happily spent a good amount of time this week immersed in old issues of Broadside (the entire run can be found on the website of Sing Out!), reading about this history of topical songs in the United States and trying to come to terms with the development of Bob Dylan’s song-writing in 1962.

A word about Broadside. While topical songs had a long tradition in the United States (listen to anything by the Almanac Singers from the 1940s, for example), Pete Seeger was apparently of the idea by 1960 that the tradition had been allowed to die out. On tour in the UK in 1961, he was reportedly struck by the number of topical songs (many about the threat of nuclear war) that he was hearing, and he hopes to put some life into the movement in the US. Working with Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Broadside was born as a mimeographed pamphlet collected contemporary topical songs by folksingers from Greenwich Village, including Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton, Len Chandler, Bonnie Dobson, Pete Seeger, and, of course, Bob Dylan. The musicians would gather in the apartment of Cunningham and Friesen where they would be recorded on a reel to reel provided by Seeger and then the songs would be transcribed and printed. Many of the songs, including those by Dylan (like “Emmett Till” and “Blowin’ In the Wind”) were based on the melodies of older songs, while others were entirely original.

About two years ago I decided that I no longer needed music CDs in my life, so I burned everything that I wanted to hard drives and sold them all to a used record store (for a truly pathetic sum). I kept only two CDs. One of them was the five disc collection The Best of Broadside (1962-1988), a truly remarkable collection of material with a tremendously informative book about the magazine, the singers, and the songs. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Dylan was involved with Broadside for its first two years, regularly contributing and recording songs for them (since he was exclusive to Columbia, and since Broadside’s records were released by Folkways, Dylan used the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt). He was initially listed as a contributor, and his song “Talking John Birch” was included in the first issue. In 1962, with which we are concerned here, he contributed seven songs to the magazine, including “Blowin’ in the Wind” (issue six), and he would place nine more there in 1963 (including “Masters of War” and “Fare Thee Well”, which is used at the end of Inside Llewyn Davis) before his increasing fame made his contributions more sporadic. In the January 1964 issue (#38) he contributed a letter to Sis and Gordon, and then gradually drifted away.

The topical song is not necessarily the same thing as the protest song. A song like “Oxford Town”, about James Meredith attempting to enrol at the University of Mississippi, is inspired by those events, but deals with the topic only indirectly and obliquely, while “Masters of War” is much more directly a scathing indictment of militarism and war-profiteering. Dylan’s earliest songwriting was almost all based on existing tunes and on the Talking Blues, and he continues that for a while in 1962, before segueing strongly towards writing his own tunes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddB7x8F7yGI

Dylan is commonly credited with making protest music – or topical music – mainstream, but when you read Broadside it is clear that he was only one (strong) voice of many. Certainly things broke for Dylan in a way that they never did for a more militant songwriter like Phil Ochs (who never had a top forty hit), but it would be simply wrong to suggest that others were following his lead. In topical songs, Dylan found a way to transition away from the Guthrie covers and traditional music, while still staying faithful to the Guthrie tradition (who was more topical than Woody? No one, that’s who). In retrospect, of course, the movement seems entirely natural and inevitable, but reading the history of Broadside makes it abundantly clear how much work was involved.

Dylan’s recordings for Broadside, which include more than a dozen songs done at the apartment, plus an appearance on WBAI-FM in May 1962, are a great record of the development of his songwriting over a very short, but extremely productive, period in 1962. While the Leeds and Witmark Demos include a wider range of material – including blues numbers – the Broadside tapes are much more socially engaged, such as the great anti-war song “John Brown”.

Bob Dylan’s live performance at the Finjan Club in Montreal from 2 July 1962 is named a “must have” by a number of bootleg sites. One of Dylan’s earliest post-debut album concerts, the sound quality is exceptional – you can actually hear a stage assistant rummaging through his guitar case looking for a capo. (Here’s a sample of Emmett Till from a German website that illustrates the outstanding sound quality). The show itself? A bit of a mixed bag. There seemed to have been about a dozen people there, and Dylan spends half his time tuning his guitar and starting and restarting songs. Sound quality can only take you so far…

For me, listening to a playlist set to present everything chronologically it has the remarkable moment of hearing Dylan introduce a song he wrote that he calls “How Many Roads Must A Man Walk Down?”  Wikipedia says that there is an earlier recording of “Blowin’ In The Wind” known to collectors, but I haven’t heard it. This version differs a bit from his mega-hit, and not just in title, but I want to save that for 1963, since I’m trying not to skip ahead. I should note, though, that Dylan recorded the version of “Blowin'” that appears on Freewheelin’ exactly one week after he played it in Montreal.

For me, listening to this set, I was interested in the Finjan Club. I did my graduate work at McGill University in Montreal from 1993 to 1999, a time when the Finjan was long gone. Apparently it was on Victoria Street, a small street just immediately south of McGill. When I was a student there I certainly never knew Dylan had played so close to campus thirty years earlier.

Indeed, according to the records on BobDylan.com, Dylan performed twice in Montreal while I lived there. In 1996 he played at the Verdun Auditorium and the next year he had a show at DuMaurier Stadium. I attended neither of these. I don’t remember hearing about them, or wanting to go. I asked Rebecca if she recalled us considering them, and she didn’t. I don’t think I thought about Dylan at all during that entire six years I lived there.

What I recall about music in Montreal is that it wasn’t that important to me. I had all my vinyl but my record player was broken and I don’t think I ever got it fixed. I was pretty anti-CD at the time, and, besides, living on a student stipend I had no money for them. I certainly wasn’t willing to rebuy things I had on vinyl, so I just didn’t listen to Dylan.  I think I owned Biograph on CD and so that I probably played on occasion, but that was it. For the most part, Dylan became something I had listened to in high school, and, to a lesser degree, during my undergrad years. I maintained a residual interest in folk – I bought the O Brother soundtrack when everyone else did – but Dylan was not part of my Montreal experience any more than the Finjan Club was.

My parents lived in Montreal in 1962, with my mother at nursing school just up the hill from the Finjan. Neither of them claim to like Dylan though (Elvis fans), so I doubt they were there. From the thin applause I think few people were there to see the man with the poor selling debut album offering an early take on a song that would help transform popular music.