Bob Dylan by Andy Gill

prevent it receiving any further Soviet supplies. On Monday October 22, the seventh day of the crisis, he appeared on television to announce his decision. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards,” he explained, “as all paths are… [but] one path we shall never choose… is the path of surrender or submission.”
    Two fraught, nervous days later, the policy bore fruit: Soviet vessels delivering further arms supplies turned back. “We are eyeball to eyeball,” said Kennedy advisor Dean Rusk, “and the other fellow just blinked.” But this still left some missiles already installed on the island, which the Soviets were rushing toward preparedness. The situation was apparently not helped when an American U2 spy-plane was shot down over Cuba the following Saturday, October 27, though in retrospect this seems to have decided both leaders to settle the issue quickly, before it got out of hand. Khruschev had been hoping to secure the removal of the US missiles in Turkey in exchange for dismantling the Cuban missiles, but all he received publicly was a promise that the USA would not invade Cuba; secretly, however, Kennedy agreed to remove the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which were obsolete anyway. The crisis was over, though the proximity to imminent catastrophe left lingering ripples in the American consciousness, poetically addressed in Dylan’s song.
    â€œI wrote that,” said Dylan, in his most famous commentary on any of his songs, “when I didn’t figure I’d have enough time left in life, didn’t know how many other songs I could write, during the Cuban thing. I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song, the most that I possibly could, and I wrote it like that. Every line in that is actually a complete song, could be used as a whole song. It’s worth a song, every single line.”
    The “hard rain” of the song is not, however, nuclear fallout. “It’s not atomic rain,” explained Dylan. “It’s just a hard rain, not the fallout rain, it isn’t that at all. The hard rain that’s gonna fall is in the last verse, where I say ‘the pellets of poison are flooding us all’—I mean all the lies that are told on the radio and in the newspapers, trying to take peoples’ brains away, all the lies I consider poison.”
    The song, which Dylan wrote in late September in his friend Chip Monck’s apartment below the Gaslight club, began as a long, free verse poem, a French Symbolist-style extension of the opening lines of the epic ballad Lord Randal . That night, he showed it to the folk singer Tom Paxton at the club. “It was a wild, wacky thing, the likes of which I’d never seen before,” recalled Paxton. “As a poem it totally eluded me, so I suggested he put a melody to it. A few days later I heard him perform it as ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.” Within days, the song was being acclaimed by friends as Dylan’s greatest work. “We all thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” said Dave Van Ronk. “I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution.”

DON’T THINK TWICE, IT’S ALL RIGHT
    The most explicit of the songs reflecting Dylan’s feelings toward the absent Suze Rotolo, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was one of the most popular of his earlier compositions, being widely recorded, though usually more blithely than in Dylan’s original version, which has an understated air of resigned rancor quite unlike any other love songs of the period. Noel “Paul” Stookey, who would sing the song with Peter, Paul & Mary, recognized its magical quality as soon as he heard it: “I thought it was beautiful, a masterful statement… It was obvious that Dylan was stretching the folk idiom, [that] a new spirit had come.” He was