Bob Dylan – ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’
Before the Big Bang, there was a soup of mayfly particles in the drab old universe, just as before Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ effort pop culture was happily fizzing about aimlessly until he expanded it with untold meaning. His second album seemingly comes from nowhere and proves difficult to comprehend… in the best possible way. That’s declared from the get-go with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’—a song of such mystic magnitude that it can make you feel dumb.
At times its brilliance is almost draining; you have to squint the psyche to keep the whole thing in clear focus—a zen act necessary to ensure that you’re savouring the words and wisdom in the way that they deserve. It’s an album as humble as a rustic stew that requires the fine-dining treatment; you can’t just greedily scoff it. It is as though you’re one of those kids denied sweets by strict parents, and suddenly you find yourself on a sleepover at a more liberal household, and you’ve sickened yourself on a bounty of goodness—Dylan dazzles and overwhelms with sonic sugar that the world had previously forgone.
However, in the moments when you require a holiday from the onslaught of poetic meaning – in this case, merely after the opening epic – Dylan obliges with a simple song of love lost in the dainty shape of ‘Girl from the North County’. Oddly, it is here where you can appraise him more, freed from the burden of trying to wrestle with shrouded wisdom. In this moment of reflective quietude, the rugged prettiness of Dylan’s songwriting shines through.
However, it’s a world away from the typical prettiness that occupies mainstream airways. Joyously introspective, ‘Girl from the North County’ is the sort of song reminiscent of a spot of window gazing. It has no audience in mind beyond Dylan himself. Its lonesome plucking is left unpolished and personal. It proves to be a soulful sigh that happily invites you to share in Dylan’s cathartic exorcise, shedding some of the weight of the heap of your encumbrance.
Then comes the bluntest bludgeon in the history of music, almost shaking the needle off the groove as Dylan growls on ‘Masters of War’: “And I hope that you die.” This unflinching line encompasses him as an artist. Wholly uncompromised, the blunderbuss line blasts in where every other artist has feared to tread. The lyric is neither screamed nor hysterical; it’s just a thing of unflinching fury that lands with the sound of a bowling ball being dropped on the hollow heads of power. He’s rightfully indignant about warmongering bastards, and he pulls no punches with this sobering line.
What’s clear from this opening trio is that Dylan’s muse is almost manically kicking up songs from a puddle of ether. There is nothing overarching, no overthinking or meddling intent interfering, each song simply dictates itself with autonomy and you’re left with perfectly crafted tunes that standalone as anthems that will last eternities. Somehow all are coming thick and fast as though he’s time-travelled and plagiarised a numen from the future, sharpening the spear of their prescient poems with his own beauteous little plucked melodies, scratchily fired off by nimble eager fingers from a clever, confident and quirky young lad with a literary eye.
Yeah, he’s freewheeling alright. In fact, he’s seemingly just coasting through unbridled creative flow, thinking, ‘I’ve coded the meaning of life and inspired the Civil Rights movement with a simple folk song, I’ve written a ditty about a lover from a past life, I’ve spat out the greatest anti-war finger wag, now I figure I’ll go post-modern and offer up the ultimate passive-aggressive love song in the ironic style of an unreliable narrator with ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’.’
That same speeding creativity might crash into minor potholes like the curious country bumpkin ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’, but that simply has to be accepted as part of the ride. If anything, this little mishap and the few other moments of clumsiness on the album serve only to illuminate the swirling guizer of depth that paints everything else with a level of profundity never before paired with punchy melodious pop and such charming individualism.
In the end, you are left with the same second-hand sense of wonder that rendered Hoagy Carmichael agog when he mused about songwriting miracles: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.”
That act of lassoing music from the timeless empyrean of folk at its humble yet human best is a mystery beholding to even beloved Bob himself. We’re just glad to be able to bask in the beauty of it—beauty that, on this occasion, he tightly ties together into perhaps the greatest album of all time.