Bob Dylan: The Songs They Are A-Changin’
A 60th anniversary look at the Bard’s third album through the lens of live performance
It seems almost unfair that Bob Dylan, among the greatest songwriters to bestride the earth since the dawn of humankind, can also be such a dynamic, intense, and connected live performer.
I say “can” because Dylan’s ability to turn in confusing or even lackluster performances is as much a part of his legend as anything else. As someone who has experienced both the sublime (United Palace Theater, 2008) and the shrug-worthy (MSG, 1986) I can say that both are illuminating in their way – but that I far prefer the sublime, which is what I’ll focus on here.
Of course, playing for people in person is how Dylan started his career and has been a thread that’s continued throughout it, at least all the way up to March 30th 2024, when the current leg of his Rough And Rowdy Ways tour comes to an end in Memphis. Rather than recount the oft-chronicled making of his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, which turns 60 on February 10th, or sing of its undeniable significance, here’s a look at some notable performances — and facts and figures — relating to the onstage life of the ten songs that make up the record. In some cases the songs went on to have many performances over a long stretch of time. In others, there were only a few, the timespan of which potentially spoke volumes about the depth of Dylan’s own regard for the song.
“The Times They Are A-Changin’” (Plays: 633 First: 10/26/1963 – Last 8/14/2009)
As a self-conscious attempt to write an anthem (“…it seems to be what the people like to hear,” Dylan reportedly said), the title track seems to have worked for both author and audience, its waltz rhythm propelling it through more performances than any other song on the album. When I heard him play it at United Palace Theater, it was only weeks after Barack Obama had been elected and there was a note of righteous triumph: We did it. Times had changed and despite claiming “I used to care” in “Times Have Changed,” his Oscar-winning song from 2000, it seemed he still cared a lot. But maybe that, too, eventually changed, as he stopped playing the song with any regularity in August 2009. But while that Chukchansi Park show is the last date listed on his website, two later performances demonstrate the extraordinary flexibility of the song.
On February 10th, 2010, Dylan took an elegiac approach when he played the song at a White House concert celebrating the music of the civil rights movement. His singing is a bit square on the beat, however, almost as if he’s saying, yes, I’m “exhibit A” here and I know it. But in another latter-day recording appended to the Hamburg 2011 bootleg I have, he spits and snarls out the words, blurring the waltz, almost seeming bitter that he still has to sing this damned song. Perhaps it says more about me than the song, but I actually prefer this nearly enraged version to the statelier approach he took for the dignitaries at the White House. While we don’t know if he’ll ever play it again as we move through this fraught election year, maybe he’ll be compelled to bring it back.
“The Ballad of Hollis Brown” (Plays: 211 First: 9/22/1962 – Last: 10/20/2012)
It’s slightly surprising that Dylan has trotted out this grim, haunting dustbowl tale as many times as he has. Not exactly singalong material. Perhaps it found its truest expression on the 1974 tour with The Band, when playing stadiums forced Dylan to blow everything up to epic, widescreen proportions and Hollis Brown became a ferocious rocker, with Robbie Robertson ripping off fiery, strangled lead lines between the verses. The version played in Seattle on February 9th, 1974 – a decade after the album’s release, almost to the day – is a perfect example of this approach.
“With God On Our Side” (Plays: 29 First: 4/12/1963 – Last: 9/23/1995)
Over half of the performances of this took place in the 1960s and it was only played once in the 70s. Then Dylan brought it back in 1984 at a renowned performance at Slane Castle in Ireland but he futzed the guitar part a couple of times and his harmonica was badly out of tune. After a few plays in 1988, it was retired again until 1994 when he recorded his uneven entry in the Unplugged series in New York City. While the released version is a thoughtful rendering, perhaps even better is the rehearsal, which seems to make the song’s elemental questions even more present, with Dylan’s dynamic vocal range giving it an introspective flavor. When he sings “Through many a dark hour/I’ve been thinking about this,” it feels absolutely convincing. The arrangement of bowed upright bass, pedal steel, organ, and two guitars is exactly right, embellishing but not overwhelming the song. He only played it once more, in 1995 at a concert in Fort Lauderdale.
“One Too Many Mornings” (Plays: 237 First: 2/26/1966 – Last: 7/21/2005)
It’s remarkable that a callow youth of 22 or 23 wrote this song – but the version on The Times…, while good as far as it goes, only shows he was not quite ready to inhabit its emotional universe. It’s interesting to note that he waited until his 1966 electric tour with The Hawks (later The Band) to try it out on stage. The arrangement is sort of “Like A Rolling Stone” lite and not enhanced by whoever bellows “BEHIND” at the end of every verse. But a decade later, on the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan laid down the definitive take. With a brilliant stop-start arrangement by Rob Stoner, whose backing vocals also provides a necessary sense of brotherhood, Dylan laces the lyrics with all the pain he’d since experienced. Just the strangled way he phrases the word “street” in the first verse, almost making it two syllables, tells you all you need to know about this approach, not to mention when he sings, “Where my love and I have lai-ai-ee-d”! Recorded in Fort Collins, CO, in May 1976, it became track two on the incendiary Hard Rain album – and you can watch it here. In the 90s, he rejigged it again, turning it into a country weeper – a valid idea and nicely executed, but not a patch on the 1976 take.
“North Country Blues” (Plays: 2 First: 2/26/1963 – Last: 10/26/1963)
This slightly less-convincing dustbowl blues was played live only twice – and only before the album was released. Both were notable shows, however, with the first in July 1963 at Dylan’s inaugural appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, and the second at Carnegie Hall in October 1963. The first is a knockout. But in the second, played a couple of months after the recording session for the album, he’s stilted and tentative, either overawed by the setting or just realizing he needs to let the song go.
“Only A Pawn In Their Game” (Plays: 8 First: 7/6/1963 – Last: 10/10/1964)
This tribute to Medgar Evers and a complex look at power relations in America was never more relevant than when Dylan played it on August 28th, 1963 at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in front of 250,000 people. He played it four more times in 1964, but maybe he felt it was better to let it rest, knowing it would never have that impact again.
“Boots Of Spanish Leather” (Plays: 300 First: 4/12/1963 Last: 7/6/2019)
This song of missed connections and farewells had an interesting journey of its own, being retired for almost a quarter of a century, from its inclusion at the Carnegie Hall concert in October 1963 to its return in June 1988. In those 80s performances, however, Dylan’s phrasing could be mannered, with hiccuped words and inapt elongations. But he kept at it, playing it 296 times until retiring it again in 2019. Based on the penultimate performance, in Oslo on June 26, 2019, a spectral arrangement and nuanced vocal, both presaging the sound world of Rough And Rowdy Ways, brought the richly evocative ballad to a new apotheosis. If at first you don’t succeed…
“When The Ship Comes In” (Plays: 3 First: 10/26/1963 – Last: 7/13/1985)
This bitter kick against the pricks was an odd choice to haul out at Live Aid after a 21-year hiatus. The performance, with Keith Richards and Ron Wood assisting, is surprisingly lighthearted, however – and famously underrehearsed. Perhaps we’re meant to take something from the fact that it followed the off-the-cuff statement that led to the founding of Farm Aid: “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can take just a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it to pay the mortgages that some of the farmers here owe to the banks.” He had certainly seen charity money go awry before. After his good friend George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh, for example, the IRS put millions of dollars in escrow for a decade while Bangladeshi citizens starved. Or it could have just been a drunken lark. One never knows with Dylan, but at least his pronunciation of “Goliath” in the last line was less awkward than in the recorded version.
“The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” (Plays: 296 First: 10/26/1963 – Last: 10/20/2012)
This paradigmatic protest song, literally ripped from the headlines Dylan read as he rode the train home from the March on Washington, is the third most played song from The Times They Are A-Changin’. Similarly to “One Too Many Mornings,” it was retired after less than a dozen performances in the 60s and then revived in 1974. He went on to play it every night on the Rolling Thunder Revue’s first leg, in an arrangement that touched both on reggae and Mexican corrido. Having listened to all of the officially available versions – and they’re all fantastic – my pick would be the one recorded in Montreal in December 1975, both for Mick Ronson’s howling guitar and the way Dylan lays into the third verse, giving an incantatory rhythm to the key lines, “Got killed by a BLOW, lay SLAIN by a CANE/That SAILED through the AIR and came DOWN through the ROOM/DOOMED and DETERMINED to destroy all the gentle…” It’s unreal how he can continue to connect to white-fire emotion stirred by the injustice behind the song, which in turn connects it to us, allowing it to hurt anew as we “bury the rag deep in our face.”
“Restless Farewell” (Plays: 2 First: 5/17/1964 – Last: 5/21/1998)
Although not counted as live performances on Dylan’s official website, two televised renderings of this most final of final tracks tell the tale of his relationship to this song and how he sang it. In the first, recorded in Toronto for the CBC on February 1st, 1964, a few days before the album came out, Dylan seems to be feeling his way through the song, leaning on the word “fareWELL” to convey the emotion.
In the second, famously requested by Frank Sinatra for his 80th birthday celebration, which was aired on ABC in 1995, his singing is rhythmically incisive throughout, finding a way to propel the song through its five verses. The way he emphasizes the fifth (“but the dark DOES die..”) and sixth lines of each verse gives them a sturdy architecture that holds up the whole song. He also adapts the lyrics slightly for a more organic, almost conversational feel – note the additions in italics in these key lines from the fourth verse:
It’s for myself and my friends that my stories are sung
But the time ain’t tall, yet on time you must depend
The arrangement is gorgeous, too, complete with weeping pedal steel and restrained strings. And if the song feels older than its years in the album version, that could be due to the 200-year-old melody, taken from “The Parting Glass,” an Irish folk tune Dylan heard played by The Clancy Brothers and others. Dylan ends the performance with a lighthearted “Happy Birthday, Mr. Frank,” and would only perform the song once more, dedicating it to Sinatra at a concert in L.A. a week after the legend’s death in May 1998.
The future is yet unwritten and Dylan may one day return to the songs of The Times They Are A-Changin’. On that happy occasion, we’ll be able to see what he adds to the already incredible legacy I’ve limned above.
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