Rest in Peace, Bob Johnston

I listened to Blonde on Blonde today without knowing that its legendary producer had passed away. 

Farewell Bob Johnston. 

   
                               

Them's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

There are songs that swell up inside of me with their simple graceful beauty and melodious majesty and I listen and I listen and when it reaches their brilliant conclusion, I'm left to declare, I must write about this song. 

Such is the case with Them's gorgeous version of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."

I was a junior in high school, 1996, the first time I heard the ringing interplay of organ and guitar notes that form the hallmark of this version of the classic Dylan song. Only, it wasn't Them I was listening to. It was a song by Beck. Jackass, off of his seminal album, Odelay (possibly one of the greatest albums of the 1990s). I became instantly infatuated with this sound. A sample, I learned from investigating the tiny congested liner notes inside of Odelay. It read something to point that Jackass contained a sample from "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," by Bob Dylan. I did not yet know of this Dylan song. I was not the Dylanphile I am now. But the sample, used so prominently and effectively throughout "Jackass" sent me to the record store to buy Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home. I had to hear his original. I had to hear this sample in its natural form.

I arrived at the album's ultimate song, track 11, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" but there were no organ notes, no delicately plucked electric guitar. It was sparse, classic acoustic Dylan (I would fully realize a few year's later)with his perfect annunciation of each devastatingly beautiful line like, "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun," which all lead to his somber, repeated, declaration - that it is indeed all over now, Baby Blue. As heavenly as the original is, is it blasphemous to say that I like the cover more?* I mean, just listen to the Them version. The aforementioned organ, the guitar, the waltzing bass line, and the power of Van Morrison's voice, the way he plays those vocal chords like Coltrane played the tenor sax. He's got a vocal range that frolics from raspy desperation to howling back to tender resignation.

No. I did not find the delicious sample from "Jackass" on the Dylan original. I was left to wonder, back in those days before every answer was just a Google search away, where did this sample come from?!

Years later, much after I had forgotten about this silly quest, I was watching Julian Schnabel's biopic of Basquiat. In a scene with the actor-version Basquita and his girlfriend, played by one of all-time favorite actress crushes, Claire Forlani, are in her apartment painting, THERE IT WAS!. The organ and guitar sample I had been waiting to discover. In its original version.

White Whale! Dr. Livingston, I have found you!

*On a similar note, could anyone say that Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower is superior to the Jimi Hendrix Experience's cover? Nay.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

"Come gather 'round people wherever you roam..."

Dylan welcomed the world into his song with the ancient archetypical greeting laid down by minstrels and folksters and voices of protest that had echoed down the wind for years and years.

The anthem begins. If there ever was a song to capture the moment of the early 1960s, it would be this song. Dylan's "The Times They Are-A Changin'" is a song that can both fit perfect into a spot, say 1964, and then transcend beyond that spot so that when some teenager in 1998 stumbles across it, it still sounds present.

It's the opening track for Dylan's third album, also called The Times They Are-A Changin'. Released in January of 1964, this collection would be the both the climax and the conclusion of his protest song period. His next albums would find him experimenting with ever-encrytping personal symbolist poetry, and soon sonically with electric instruments (with infamous and world shattering results). This is the last album where Dylan would wear they storyteller of society hat. His last Woody Guthrie pose. By 1963, Dylan was the undisputed king of protest music. One mask he would soon tear off and set into the fire.

Come gather 'round... The storyteller has a message for you. One last time. Admit that things are changing, and that you should change too. An anthem call to get on board the train of change or else by left behind in its coal-burning dust.

But I'm no child of the 1960s. I came of age in the 1990s. I cannot relate to those who staged sit-ins amidst the fists and spit of centuries of hatred. I can try and protest, but I usually stay home instead and read. or listen to Dylan. For me, as with anyone with memories of being a rebellious teenager, I can still relate to one specific golden line aimed at parents, "Don't criticize what you can't understand, your sons and daughters are beyond your command, your old road is rapidly aging..."

Why does this song still grab me? I am a history teacher. It might be the history teacher in me that has always been drawn to this song. I see with ease the context this song sits in. The Civil Rights movement. The bifrth of the anti-war movement. The free speech college protests. The transformational years before 1968 exploded.

Is this song about the inevitability of change happening on it sown, or is it an invitation to ride a wave and join the movement? To affect change?

When did Dylan record it? October 1963. One month later, John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Texas. What does that do to the dreamer? To the agent of change. Dylan would say that "they are trying to tell you Don't even hope to change things."

Could JFK's assassination have killed the change agent in Dylan? Could it be what pushed Dylan out of protest and into poetry? Something I've been wondering lately...