It’s 1964 and Another Side of — the Dylan album with the most beautiful melodies

It was the beginning of something else, a match lit, a flame burning, all roads taken and all heading through the white light of pure inspiration. It’s 1964, and another side.

My friends, from the prison, they ask unto me, “how good, how good does it feel to be free?”, and I answer them most mysteriously, “are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

Ballad in Plain D, Side B, Track 4

I was thinking about this one night, that of all the Bob Dylan albums, the one with the best and most memorable melodies is probably Another Side of Bob Dylan — recorded June 9th, 1964, on a relatively humid New York Summer night.

Another Side of is no mere bridge album between two historic albums (Times They Are-A-Changin’ and Bringing It All Back Home) but something with its own distinct vibe and conquering purpose. A historic album in its own right. The title is maybe too on the nose and Dylan didn’t like it.

There’s groundbreaking stuff here. He wrote a love song about how he wasn’t the one you wanted, babe. He wrote maybe the first confessional relationship song (Ballad in Plain D). He expanded the possibilities of what a song could do and the symbolic, euphoric and intellectual heights it could reach into (Mr Tambourine Man, Chimes of Freedom, My Back Pages). He wrote a joyous shit-eating-grin piece of bubble-gum-pop, word play on a whole other level (All I Really Wanna Do) with added falsetto and laughter, just begging to be a soul song. He gave Harlem hands to hold his gypsy girl (Spanish Harlem Incident) but she was just too hot. She read his restless palms, her rattling drums (later Arabian drums?) — could she possibly be our first glimpse of Sara? An album built on 3 muses perhaps? part-written in a station wagon, part in Ancient Greece, part in some mystical place, with Joanie (Baez) in ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and Suze in ‘Ballad in Plain D’ and traces of Sara in the joyful rhymes of ‘All I Really Wanna Do’. But something of Ramona feels very Joan “you’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand“. There’s hints of Nico in a song that didn’t end up on the album or at the session (I’ll Keep It With Mine) — Dylan recorded a vocal-and-piano demo of the song for publishing company Witmark & Sons in June 1964 — but we know he was with her in Paris in late May and and through Europe and on to Vouliagmeni, Greece. Eventually she’d record it with her then lover Jackson Browne. Memories of Greece bleed into these tracks too. More on that later.

Les Trois Grâces, the Louvre, Paris (Suze, Sara and Joanie?) Did Dylan visit the Louvre with Nico during his trip to Paris? Quite possibly

He jumped into the world of sliding chord inversions (I Don’t Believe You) and melodies seemed to spill out of him so inspiringly and restlessly, that they were unable to settle into strict patterns (the interchanging chords from verse to verse of many of the songs, as if he was creating as he sang).

“I Don’t Believe you” has always held mysterious dreamlike vibrations for me. He once sang the shit out of it in the pouring rain in 1994, and he once stood at a piano with Bette Midler, while Moogy Klingmam, a real sophisti-cat connoisseur guy who dug Dylan, would pull I Don’t Believe You out of his hat, by way of Musical Theatre, a sprinkle of Donald Fagen, Gospel and with near Juilliard chops, but certainly the hippest approach to the song ever. Who knew that song could work as R&B near jazz. Dylan wasn’t afraid to go from 4th to 5th with such pop force, but not before dropping to relative minor, “if anybody asks me, is it easy to forget”. There’s even splashes of Motown soul in some of these songs.

I think of Another Side of as his first jazz album. No wonder Keith Jarrett would take My Back Pages (the centrepiece of the album) spinning through the sunset streets and into the smoky air of Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood, heat intense, the beauty of the dark ballad truth-lyric hung on piano stabs, pounced like fire, double bass guiding us through the minefields of change, the changes Dylan was going through that can’t even be used. Ideas as maps, mighty traps, fearing not to become one’s enemy in the instant that one preaches. Mind altering truth. New passions. We’ll meet on edges. This is one of Dylan’s most exquisite melodies. It descends and rises, there’s sorrow and triumph walking hand in hand. Unforgettable.

Think of it, this was June (August 8th it was released), Tambourine Man was born in May, by October he already had Gates of Eden, It’s Alright Ma, later Farewell Angelina. These songs were fully baked and tested live inside the column of air before they even hit the the tapes in 1965. Even the chords changes in Gates of Eden! The guy was the first psychedelic performing artist too, the first goth, sitting there higher than high with the utopian hermit monks.

Between The Times They Are-Changin’ and Another Side Of, he’d found chord combinations a-new, and lyrics to match the thought-dreams that leaking from his melting-pot-brain. Imagine the minds being blown at Philharmonic about what was real and what was not. Bob Dylan is not for those who see, think and live in black and white.

Echoes of the old remain though, the humorous Talkin’ Blues (if put together could be like one long Homeric epic monologue song), something that started on Freewheelin’ (skipping The Times They Are A-Changin’) continuing on Another Side of before disappearing forever after Bringing It All Back Home.

From Bob Dylan’s Blues, I Shall Be Free, Talkin’ World War III Blues to Black Crow Blues, I Shall Be Free No. 10, Motorpsycho Nitemare, Outlaw Blues, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, On The Road Again, with only the slightest hint of similarity there in From A Buick Six, Highway 61 Revisited, hints in trippy voyeurism of Fourth Time Around.

You could sing the lyrics of Highway 61 Revisited to Bob Dylan’s Blues, that’s a fact.

A lot of the mood and humour of the Talkin’ Blues songs would morph lyrically and melodically over the course of albums and blend with the ballads into more complex songs like Stuck Inside of Mobile, Desolation Row. Either way he was moving and the songs were morphing into new beings. If you gotta go, you better go now. The man was funny, something often forgotten in all the re-readings and myths.

Maybe it’s the French wine he was drinking, but there’s just something about that album. It’s off the cuff, it’s loose, it’s in the moment, in the pocket, careless, carefree, intense, angry, funny, profound. It’s beat-jazz-pop and like jazz Dylan plays with melodic phrases like a jazz player rather than a strict set melody for each verse. Each verse, especially in My Back Pages and Ballad in Plain D, has variations of the same melody, but it’s as if each new chance to hit the verse with a different swing allows the beauty of the new, to play with the melody, to conduct the meaning, like Bernstein’s hands flashing at each pass. After all it’s a Dylan forté. He’s taken it to new extremes in this new age we live in, everything from rearranging songs to taking the harmonic structure of another song and transplanting lyrics over it. All combinations are legitimate, all forms of expression must breathe.

Chimes of Freedom feels like a continuation of When The Ship Comes In. He jumped boats at sundowns finish. There’s many quotable lines from this album, maybe more than the previous and subsequent. It’s also his least amount of filler to classic ratio of any album, and even the filler isn’t really filler. It is possibly his most ballad heavy album. Ballad in Plain D, My Back Pages, It Ain’t Me Babe, Spanish Harlem Incident, I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met), Chimes of Freedom, All I Really Wanna Do, To Ramona. That’s 8 songs of 11 and then if you factor in Mr Tambourine Man, Mama You’ve Been on My Mind you’re talking 10 ballads from those sessions and that’s without considering what else he would have written by October.

This album is unique for being his first to feature piano: California (Take 1) / Black Crow Blues. Two albums later his piano playing would reach the sophistication of Ballad of a Thin Man, far removed from jumpy, jaunty, tangled blues riff of the 12 bar Black Crow Blues.

Many of these songs are the station wagon songs. A poet in movement, writing songs that flow and meander and dance. But lyrically things will be coming more interesting more abstract yet simultaneously on point. Everywhere there was freedom here even if societies pliers were twisting at the fabric of reality outside of the recording studio, even if the stuffy spindle like hands of the folk movement were clutching yet scratching at him, Johnny said let him sing. He was singing the shit out of these songs, his guitar playing was free, virtuoso, he might have dropped the fingerpicking but he was redefining acoustic playing with a pick. The lyrics were free, the melodies were free, frenzied, escaping from the corners of his mouth, It’s quite clear. He was moved by the music of the time as much as the crackle of old folk, blues and country and splicing it in with the poetry and literature that he’d been absorbing over the last five years. He was the first inner-visual songwriter, a filmmaker of song, dialogue too. The pot helped obviously, but the mind was sharp, the station wagon was rolling along, the radio loud, the substances sometimes illicit. Riding into the new frontier.

His voice was lightening up as well. The harsh smoke hokey blues rasp of first album and the second album had faded. The diction was different. The timbre was different The approach to singing was different. The way he punctuated the verse and chorus was different. The mask was morphing, the man was emerging, the master artist was arising from the ashes of the past.

End of part I