Another Side
Another Side of Bob Dylan — This album is "another side" of Dylan as compared to the previous album, The Times They Are A-Changin', but I didn't feel like it was completely new. Freewheelin' was a combination of both sides: the political/social/"topical" side and the other side, including everything from personal lamentations to carefree improvisational storytelling. The fact that these two sides were so clearly divided in the next two albums makes me wonder if there was label pressure to put out the "political" album that people were expecting before doing anything else. In any case, it sounds like he's back to having fun on this album, at least on a few tracks. The song that explained this entire album for me is "My Back Pages", in which he regrets the overly simplistic and idealistic moments of his youth (which ended, as far as I can tell, about eight months prior). The chorus says it all: "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." He flips the familiar regret of immaturity around to show that he's become wiser by acknowledging that he knows less than he thought. To me this says that the Times days are over and that we're not likely to see anything like that again. I am not discouraged by this; I think he's more effective when operating on a lower, more human level anyway.
In another extraordinary coincidence, so regular in my life, I found a parallel in my latest reading, Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky had been a radical in his day and nearly put to death for it, but in writing this he was attempting to reveal the true implications of the convictions of the radical movement, which Dylan also attempts to get at, albeit through a personal message, in "To Ramona". Both men are dealing with the radical, simplistic urges of their youth by writing to encourage others to avoid the same fate. Granted, Fyodor's work may be a little more nuanced and developed but he had an extra twenty years, including four in a labor camp in Siberia, to think about it.