Blowin’ In the Wind (Bob Dylan, of course)

There are some songs I’ve known forever but never performed or posted because the world doesn’t need my version of, say… “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

But now there’s a major motion picture on the way, loosely based on my book, Dylan Goes Electric!, and I was recently booked to do a Dylan-centered concert at the Dylan-branded distillery venue in Louisville, and I ended up playing this and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” along with obscure items like “The Old Man,” “He Was a Friend of Mine,” “Freight Train Blues,” and “If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You…” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” and “Girl From the North Country…”

…and it was fun, because I’ve been singing those songs since I was a kid, and I used to play a lot of half-assed, dylanesque harmonica, which turns out to be like riding a bicycle, and the audience clearly enjoyed the familiar favorites, and I’m not going to make this a regular feature of my performances, but it’s a decent piece of writing and a significant political artifact…

…though I have mixed feelings about that last part. On the one hand, I agree with all the sentiments expressed in the lyric; on the other had, so does pretty much everybody, which accounts for its overwhelming success as a pop hit — covered not only by the New World Singers, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, but by Lena Horne, Eddy Arnold, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Marlene Dietrich, and dozens of other performers within a year of the PP&M version — and my mixed feelings.

As I wrote in the book, the appearance of Broadside magazine provided a forum for topical compositions and Dylan responded by writing a bunch of political songs, but he was also writing all sorts of other songs and never expected to be hailed as a “protest singer,” much less “the voice of a generation.” He rejected the “protest” label, over and over, and the halting introduction he gave to an early performance of the song was typical:

“This is here, this is just a—it’s a— It ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. I try to make ’em, uh, I mean, I, I’m just writing it as something sort o’—that’s something to be said, for somebody—by somebody.”

As I wrote:

Dylan had a gut sense that the world was a mess and admired the idealism of Guthrie and Seeger, but his politics were a matter of feelings and personal observation rather than study or theory. “He was a populist,” [Dave] Van Ronk said. “He was tuned in to what was going on—and much more than most of the Village crowd, he was tuned in not just to what was going on around the campuses, but also to what was going on around the roadhouses—but it was a case of sharing the same mood, not of having an organized political point of view.” Contrasting him with Phil Ochs, who had been a journalism major before taking up guitar, [Suze] Rotolo noted, “Dylan was perceptive. He felt. He didn’t read or clip the papers… It was all intuitive, on an emotional level.”

Dylan’s more activist peers were often frustrated by his lack of ideological commitment, but that was what gave songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” such universal appeal. Instead of hectoring, he was expressing pervasive fears and hopes.

Speaking of fears and hopes… I’m interested in what the movie will get right and wrong about the Dylan story and the world around him, and worried about how it will portray Suze Rotolo, who — unlike all the other real-life characters — has been given a pseudonym, suggesting she may have been replaced with a fictional girlfriend, rather than portrayed in her complex reality. I knew her, to the extent of spending a couple of long evenings with her at Dave’s place and running into her here and there over the years, and I don’t think she has ever gotten the credit she deserves for shaping Dylan and his work. The politics, in particular, were hers — she was a full-time volunteer with CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) — and she also worked on a production of songs by Bertolt Brecht, which made an obvious and lasting impact on Dylan’s writing. So I hope they don’t turn her into a Hollywood stock character, the nice, supportive “girl next door” he leaves for the thrilling Joan Baez.

Anyway… I’m expecting to get pulled into more Dylan-related events in the coming months, so figured I might as well post the remaining bits of my Dylan repertoire, and I’ll try to put my own twist on some of the songs, but this one feels to me like a period piece — whether representing the period it was written or my twelve-year-old memories — so I’m doing it like I always did it.