But still. This second Dylan album to me sounds enormously matured since the first one. Starting off with 'Blowin' in the Wind', that anthem, at the age of 21 of course is incredible. But the second song is 'Girl From the North Country' - Scarborough Fair, yes; it shows how Dylan uses existing songs and tunes to make new repertoire, standing in a folk song tradition which makes ideas of copyright and plagiarism simply ridiculous (and, by the way, is a very living phenomenon if only you think of the birthday parties where new texts are sung to existing melodies). But also a simply beautiful song. Followed by 'Masters of War', about which I wrote earlier about it, in connection to 'Don't Think Twice, It's alright', also appearing on this album.
You see how tempting it is to write about all the songs on the album. I am not going to do that. But I want to point out a couple of things. For example that the guitar still is very untuned, occasionally - check out 'Down the Highway' or 'Oxford Town'. As I wrote before, I like that untuned guitar. Or that there is a quasi-'unbalance' in many of his songs; it is often unpredictable how many bars a sentence exactly is going to have, and within a song the same line my be fluid in that respect in different verses. I imagine playing with him, and the flexibility you would need to stay 'in form' with him. The same for 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall', where you never know how many sentences there will be in each verse. In that song, he daringly writes verses without rhyme; that is to say: there are no rhyming syllables at the end of sentences (or halfway, for that matter), but rhyme is there in alliteration and especially in the (sometimes very biblical) images and metaphors he uses:
"I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded in hatred"
Would you dare to write song lyrics like this? I wouldn't.
And that is another thing to point out: the anger and fear in this album, connected to war, to violence, to the threat of nuclear disaster. To me that is still very imaginable, to the point of re-feeling what I felt a long time ago; having nightmare-ish dreams about nuclear explosions in the 1970s and participating in anti-atomic warcraft demonstrations in the 1980s, all part of a very palpable anger and fear of this lovely but also monstrous world we live in. And although later my connection to those kinds of pacifism dwindled so much that I only really became aware of the horror of the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when I started to visit Sarajevo around 2010 (shame on me), in the days we live in now, with wars and violence raging in the middle east, Ukraine, and many many other places, anger and fear are as present, I guess, as they were in the early 1960s when Dylan wished for the death of the 'Masters of War'.
There are two songs I particularly love, probably because I am basically a romantic-emotional old sod. The first one is 'Bob Dylan's Dream', about his friends of past times and the innocence of all that:
"And our choices there was few
so the thought never hit
that the one road we traveled
would ever shatter or split."
The other one is the lovely 'Corinna, Corinna'. The first song with a band, I believe. A cover. And a real beauty.
