Bob Dylan by Andy Gill Page A

right. For a folk song, it was unusually modern in attitude, with a daring balance struck between affection and bitterness. Dylan would later become an expert at all-out vindictiveness, so much so that friends became wary of approaching him for fear of being subjected to his acid tongue or poison pen; but here, his obvious disappointment is tinged more with simmering regret, only boiling over into mild spite in the penultimate line of each verse, where Suze is variously castigated for being immature, uncommunicative, wanting his soul when he offered his heart and,in the most dismissive of put-downs, wasting his “precious” time. Ironically, though it was Suze who had actually left Bob, the song salvages his pride by claiming it is he who is “trav’lin’ on.”
    Some of his friends were embarrassed by the song. “Bobby was rolling it out like a soap opera,” said Dave Van Ronk. “It was pathetic. The song was so damn self-pitying—but brilliant.” Upon her return from Italy, Suze at first found it strange, if flattering, to hear others singing this song written about her, but it eventually contributed to her split from Bob when, at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival that July, Joan Baez introduced the song as being “…about a love affair that has lasted too long.” For Suze, this confirmed the rumors she had heard about Bobby and Joanie, the new “King and Queen of Folk,” and she stormed away from the festival.
    While the song’s lyric was revolutionary in form, the melody was again purloined from a traditional source, an Appalachian tune called ‘Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone’, which Dylan’s friend, the folk singer Paul Clayton, had discovered and adapted for his own song ‘Who’sGonna Buy Your Ribbon Saw’. Many of their friends were angered by the way Dylan brazenly neglected to credit either the traditional source or (especially) Clayton, who was notoriously short of cash due to his drug problems. “The honorable thing would have been for Bobby to cut him in on the copyright,” believed Dave Van Ronk, “but that wasn’t Bobby’s way.” Instead, after a mild legal tussle, Dylan ensured that his publishers gave Clayton “a substantial sum,” and the two remained friends, Clayton accompanying Bob on his cross-country drive in February 1964.
    The liner-notes to Freewheelin’ mistakenly claim that the song was recorded with the band that played on ‘Corrina, Corrina’ and ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, but while it was certainly recorded at the same session, it is clearly a solo performance. Some commentators have speculated that it may have originally been recorded with a band accompaniment that was subsequently wiped, but the limitations of early-Sixties recording technology mean that it would have been virtually impossible to have erased the extra guitar, drums, bass and piano completely without leaving a certain amount of audio spillage which would have been captured on Dylan’s own microphone. It’s feasible that the band backing may have been added later on another track, and then erased, but the actual song as heard on the album is by Dylan alone.

BOB DYLAN’S DREAM
    The last song recorded for the Freewheelin’ album, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ offers the most telling indication of just how fast Bob Dylan was maturing as a person, and of how rapidly his attitudes were changing. A wistful reverie of lost youth, the song finds Dylan, not yet 22, looking back on the innocent idealism of his teenage years with the world-weary sadness of one apparently much older.
    Like Dickens in A Christmas Carol , Dylan uses a dream to observe his former self and his friends “talkin’ and a-jokin’,” having fun, chewing the fat and putting the world to rights with the blithe certitude of youth. His loss, he realizes, is twofold: not only