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FREEWHEELIN' BY BOB DYLAN
by Johnny Black
Dylan’s second album, Freewheelin’, brought protest lyrics into the mainstream of popular music consciousness. Blues and folk artists had always used songs to comment on the injustices of politics, war and society, but for most record buyers, Dylan’s angry invective was a revelation.
In 1958, against a background of bobbysoxers and rock’n’rollers, a huge folk boom had swept America after the Kingston Trio’s ground-breaking No1 single Tom Dooley. Many of the hits generated in its wake, however, were sanitised and bowdlerised before they reached the mass market. Dylan’s vision of folk music had little truck with this comfortably commercial niche.
On 29 September 1961, New York Times music critic Robert Shelton raved over a Dylan gig at Gerdes Folk City, describing him as "a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik" who was "bursting at the seams with talent".
Shortly afterwards, he was signed to Columbia by revered A&R man John Hammond, who had previously discovered Billie Holiday and would subsequently nurture Bruce Springsteen. Dylan was quickly tagged ‘Hammond’s folly’ because few Columbia executives could see much commercial potential in this raspy voiced troubadour, whose eponymous 1962 debut album consisted largely of folk-blues covers, giving little indication of what was to come.
Recording for Freewheelin’ started in April 1962 at Columbia’s Studio A in New York City, and carried on sporadically for a year, during which dozens of tracks were recorded and discarded while Dylan was finding his own voice as a writer.
Musically, Freewheelin’ remained firmly in the same style as the debut, one man and his finger-pickin’ guitar, but the youth of America had never heard anything resembling the lyrics of tracks like A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall – a vision of impending apocalypse conjured through metaphorical images of trees dripping blood, dead oceans and empty diamond-studded highways.
It’s indicative of just how far Dylan’s lyrics stood apart from mainstream pop that, on the same day as the final Freewheelin’ session, Jan & Dean recorded Surf City in Los Angeles, a vibrant teen anthem celebrating the joys of the Californian lifestyle with “two girls for every boy”.
Significantly, Dylan referred sarcastically to this yawning gulf at the start of Bob Dylan’s Blues, observing, “Tin Pan Alley – that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays”. Freewheelin’ also included the achingly beautiful lament for love gone wrong that is Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, but it was the uncompromising protests - Masters Of War and Blowin’ In The Wind - that spoke loudest to Americans terrified by the cold war and disgusted by the treatment of racial minorities in their land of the free.
Freewheelin’ stalled at No22 in the Billboard album chart because, for the moment, Dylan’s audience consisted largely of young radical intellectuals. This was a relatively small but disproportionately influential cohort, some of whom – Phil Ochs, Tim Rose and Barry McGuire to name a few - would themselves become protest songwriters and spread the word. By 1965, when The Byrds turned his Mr Tambourine Man into an international pop hit, Dylan would be regarded as the spokesman of his generation.
(Source : by Johnny Black, in the book Albums from Backbeat Press, 2007)
Bruce Johnston (Beach Boys) : Jack Nitzsche's wife Grazia, was very excited by the Freewheelin' album and I remember going to Jack's house after a session with Terry Melcher – this is before Terry produced Tambourine Man – and Grazia said, 'You gotta listen to this album."
The lyrics, if you think about what we were hearing on the radio, stuff like Go Away Little Girl by Steve Lawrence, the Goffin-King kind of songs, that stuff was all over the radio and it was good songwriting, but Grazia insisted we had to listen to Freewheelin', and that was my introduction to Dylan.
I can clearly remember seeing the cover, with Dylan walking down the street and he has this kind of cute girl on his arm, great cover.
It wasn't his voice, it was his songs. I've always been a song guy and I thought how remarkable it was that a songwriter could see the world the way he saw it. Blowin' In The Wind was such a remarkable, positive take on the world. He moved songwriting away from the traditional 'moon-June' rhymes.
Then Dylan started to have pop hits via people like Peter, Paul And Mary covering his songs. It's strange now to think of Peter, Paul And Mary as pop, because they were just doing what they do, but it was a pop hit.
(Source : not known)
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by Johnny Black
Dylan’s second album, Freewheelin’, brought protest lyrics into the mainstream of popular music consciousness. Blues and folk artists had always used songs to comment on the injustices of politics, war and society, but for most record buyers, Dylan’s angry invective was a revelation.
In 1958, against a background of bobbysoxers and rock’n’rollers, a huge folk boom had swept America after the Kingston Trio’s ground-breaking No1 single Tom Dooley. Many of the hits generated in its wake, however, were sanitised and bowdlerised before they reached the mass market. Dylan’s vision of folk music had little truck with this comfortably commercial niche.
On 29 September 1961, New York Times music critic Robert Shelton raved over a Dylan gig at Gerdes Folk City, describing him as "a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik" who was "bursting at the seams with talent".
Shortly afterwards, he was signed to Columbia by revered A&R man John Hammond, who had previously discovered Billie Holiday and would subsequently nurture Bruce Springsteen. Dylan was quickly tagged ‘Hammond’s folly’ because few Columbia executives could see much commercial potential in this raspy voiced troubadour, whose eponymous 1962 debut album consisted largely of folk-blues covers, giving little indication of what was to come.
Recording for Freewheelin’ started in April 1962 at Columbia’s Studio A in New York City, and carried on sporadically for a year, during which dozens of tracks were recorded and discarded while Dylan was finding his own voice as a writer.
Musically, Freewheelin’ remained firmly in the same style as the debut, one man and his finger-pickin’ guitar, but the youth of America had never heard anything resembling the lyrics of tracks like A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall – a vision of impending apocalypse conjured through metaphorical images of trees dripping blood, dead oceans and empty diamond-studded highways.
It’s indicative of just how far Dylan’s lyrics stood apart from mainstream pop that, on the same day as the final Freewheelin’ session, Jan & Dean recorded Surf City in Los Angeles, a vibrant teen anthem celebrating the joys of the Californian lifestyle with “two girls for every boy”.
Significantly, Dylan referred sarcastically to this yawning gulf at the start of Bob Dylan’s Blues, observing, “Tin Pan Alley – that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays”. Freewheelin’ also included the achingly beautiful lament for love gone wrong that is Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, but it was the uncompromising protests - Masters Of War and Blowin’ In The Wind - that spoke loudest to Americans terrified by the cold war and disgusted by the treatment of racial minorities in their land of the free.
Freewheelin’ stalled at No22 in the Billboard album chart because, for the moment, Dylan’s audience consisted largely of young radical intellectuals. This was a relatively small but disproportionately influential cohort, some of whom – Phil Ochs, Tim Rose and Barry McGuire to name a few - would themselves become protest songwriters and spread the word. By 1965, when The Byrds turned his Mr Tambourine Man into an international pop hit, Dylan would be regarded as the spokesman of his generation.
(Source : by Johnny Black, in the book Albums from Backbeat Press, 2007)
Bruce Johnston (Beach Boys) : Jack Nitzsche's wife Grazia, was very excited by the Freewheelin' album and I remember going to Jack's house after a session with Terry Melcher – this is before Terry produced Tambourine Man – and Grazia said, 'You gotta listen to this album."
The lyrics, if you think about what we were hearing on the radio, stuff like Go Away Little Girl by Steve Lawrence, the Goffin-King kind of songs, that stuff was all over the radio and it was good songwriting, but Grazia insisted we had to listen to Freewheelin', and that was my introduction to Dylan.
I can clearly remember seeing the cover, with Dylan walking down the street and he has this kind of cute girl on his arm, great cover.
It wasn't his voice, it was his songs. I've always been a song guy and I thought how remarkable it was that a songwriter could see the world the way he saw it. Blowin' In The Wind was such a remarkable, positive take on the world. He moved songwriting away from the traditional 'moon-June' rhymes.
Then Dylan started to have pop hits via people like Peter, Paul And Mary covering his songs. It's strange now to think of Peter, Paul And Mary as pop, because they were just doing what they do, but it was a pop hit.
(Source : not known)