A Newborn Baby with Wild Wolves All Around It

The following essay is mostly true, though peppered with mythos. As a long-time lover and collector of stories, I often find it difficult and unrewarding to separate fact from legend. Hence, on occasion, a story I tell in turn will become a bit larger than life, and I hope no other storyteller would have it any other way - specifically the following subject. Any liberties taken with the truth are done with the utmost respect and love.

A warm May morning in 1941 brought Robert Zimmerman into the world. He was born in an unremarkable hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, and found an earnest love in music from an early age. His childhood heroes included Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.

After high school, Robert hopped a cold train East to New York City with his acoustic guitar, harmonica and a few changes of clothes in tow. He befriended boxcar bums and salt-of-the-earth working class Americans along the way, dressed in muted burlap and rough cloth. When he arrived in New York, he joined the blossoming folk music culture and embraced the Do-It-Yourself lifestyle of proto-hippies and hippies’ older siblings, whose interest in Elvis Presley had long since faded.

Robert’s unassuming face and mid-sized figure betrayed his secret of a life without much prior struggle to his independent, often-homeless friends. He sought a job as a folk singer in bars, with a notebook full of cover songs, but his nasal voice – with an almost-hillbilly accent and slurred tone – cost him any worthwhile earnings at many auditions and debut shows. Countless club owners kicked Robert Zimmerman out on his ass, never giving him the chance to show them what he truly had to offer.

In the infancy of the 1960s, along with the frost-bitten winter weather, something inside Robert started to harden. He became more ruthless in his search for work in music, wrote an original song about his hardship in New York, and shed the moniker Robert Zimmerman for his professional name, Bob Dylan.

It’s widely believed that this first original track, “Talkin’ New York,” was a staple at his subsequent auditions and helped secure Dylan’s first nightclub gigs. The listener can’t help but be won over by its comedic tone, laced with hints of sarcasm and cynicism, as Dylan uses his unique wit to describe poverty, hunger and frosty winter weather in the Big Apple.

“Lot of people don’t have much food on their table, but they got a lotta forks and knives / And they gotta cut somethin’,” he sang.

At his first several gigs, Bob Dylan got onstage and sat on a stool, a harmonica hanging on his neck, a worn acoustic guitar sitting on his lap, and started to play. In all probability, the audience didn’t expect much from him, his first couple times onstage. They likely sat with their cigarettes between their first two fingers coiling smoke into the air, and their strong drinks, sweating from condensation and becoming watery from melting ice, the less kind of them elbowing each other in the ribs and making a quip about the Okie who came to the big city, chuckling so loudly they almost drowned him out as he awkwardly strummed his first two bars of “Talkin’ New York” or “Fixin’ to Die.”

Then Bob Dylan opened his mouth and sang into the microphone.

The earliest record of him, really, comes from audiences at these first shows, and those are scattered and conflicting at best. Tales of the clocks on the walls stopping as the barflies froze in stunned silence contradict those of the chaotic rush to throw money at Dylan for his debut LP. On the only note of consistency, most reviews of (and reactions to) him were along the lines of “What we saw onstage didn’t match what we heard.”

The crowds were flabbergasted. In front of their eyes was a kid, fresh from the middle of nowhere, cheeks with traces of baby fat still visible, singing with the wisdom, desolation and sadness of an elderly post-Civil War blues artist. They say he played the guitar like it was his only friend, blew the harmonica like he was born with it attached to him and sang with a level of despondence one would expect from seeing the world change under his feet, the last remnant of an old way of life unable to make heads or tails of the 1960s. The so-called goofy voice that he pokes fun at in “Talkin’ New York” took on a raspier, lonelier tone, and the city started listening.

“A very great man once said some people rob you with a fountain pen / Don’t take too long to find out just what he was talkin’ about.”

Dylan was discovered by the legendary John Hammond while playing harmonica for Carolyn Hester and was brought to the studio to record his self-titled debut album over the course of three sessions over the course of two days. “Talkin’ New York,” along with another Dylan original, “Song to Woody” – a tribute to Woody Guthrie – were accompanied by a dozen covers of folk and blues classics like “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “House of the Rising Sun.”

In “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s poetic lyrics truly begin to shine. “I’m out here 1,000 miles from my home / walkin’ the road other men have gone down / I’m seein’ your world of people and things / your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.”

Dylan continues a letter to the man whose torch he hoped had passed onto him. “Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song / ‘bout a crazy ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along / Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn / It looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born.”

After achieving some success with his first album, Dylan became increasingly aware of the modern-day struggles of the world around him. His 1963 release, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contained many more original songs, several of which were scathing anti-war pieces. By this point, his hair had grown out from merely shaggy to his trademark, a tangled ball of thin brown cotton. Freewheelin’ may be remembered for bringing us “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” but its damning “Masters of War” lingers as a timeless protest piece.

Speaking again to Dylan’s eerily prophetic insight is “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which spends its six-minute duration warning the world that conflict is coming just around the bend. While a pre-Vietnam America was slipping into decadence and trading in careful progress for the limits of its reach, Bob Dylan saw a red flag and sent up his warning.

Nearly every line in “Hard Rain” is ripe with proverb or metaphor. One can picture the endless parade of a Kennedy-era Manhattan, joyous in its victory over Richard Nixon, and Dylan standing watch, leaning on a streetlight with his arms folded, shaking his head in disapproval.

“I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,” he warns, and speaks to the fragile nature of an overindulging country ignorant of the international struggles that would surround it soon enough. While the hippie culture rose at a staggering rate, the consequences of the Bay of Pigs were waiting in earnest to arrest it.

“I saw a white ladder all covered with water” may easily describe the perilous nature of the borderline-racist socioeconomic structure of early 1960s America, before complete desegregation. Of course it could just be a simple image, but with Dylan’s lyrics that was rarely the case. His preternatural x-ray of the world was already showing by this point, and the track had four minutes to go.

“I saw guns ‘n’ sharp swords in the hands of young children.” Is this another cryptic foreshadowing of a world to come, with a government drafting high schoolers for the Vietnam war, or just a cheap graphic image?

“I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter / I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley, and it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” The list goes on as quickly as the words are delivered.

Shortly after its release, and just hours after John F. Kennedy gave a speech on national television about civil rights, civil rights leader and NAACP figure Medgar Evers was shot in the back and killed outside his home by Ku Klux Klan member and White Citizens’ Council affiliate Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith was tried twice in two years, both of which resulted in a deadlocked jury, and walked a free man for three decades.

And less than six months after Evers’ shooting, JFK himself was assassinated.

Subsequently, Dylan was noticeably shaken. The covers for his two albums released at the time speak volumes. If he looked lanky in his picture on the cover of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, then by the time his photo was taken for 1964’s The Times They Are A-Changin, he was positively gaunt. He traded in Freewheelin’s care-free smile, arm-in-arm with a girl, for a sepia-toned, saddened frown for Times in a plain, heavy worker’s shirt.

Dylan’s work on Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan had not only been noticed by the proto-hippies and the DIY folk culture; it had caused a spark of enlightenment for the generation that would later be responsible for Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and the closest the United States has come to revolution since the days of Paul Revere.

The songwriting on Times may be Dylan’s best, as well. Dylan bequeaths all ten songs like eulogies for dying stories he knew along the road to 1964. From the opening title track to its closer, “Restless Farewell,” Dylan’s melancholy Americana paints a portrait of a post-JFK nation lost and looking for answers, or perhaps salvation.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’” recognizes an America in turmoil, in which the bourgeoisie working-class was being forgotten in favor of a strange culture of Baby Boomers fed up with the system their parents had set up for them.

“With God on Our Side” satirizes the popular belief in all sides of a conflict that God defends them and only them. “The cavalries charged; the Indians died / For the country was young with God on its side,” Dylan observes with a loving sarcasm.

“Only a Pawn in their Game” bookends its five verses with the folksy circumstances of the death of Medgar Evers. “A finger fired the trigger to his name / A handle hid out in the dark, a hand set the spark, two eyes took the aim behind a man’s brain / But he can’t be blamed; he’s only a pawn in their game,” preaches Dylan at first, then “He’s taught how to walk in a pack, shoot in the back with his fist in a clench / To hang and to lynch / To hide ‘neath the hood / To kill with no pain, like a dog on a chain, he ain’t a-got no name / But it ain’t him to blame / He’s only a pawn in their game.” At last, Dylan brings it home with “When the shadowy sun sets on the one that fired the gun / He’ll see by his grave on the stone that remains / Carved next to his name, his epitaph plain / ‘Only a Pawn in their Game.’”

Between such gems as these, there is the fable of Hollis Brown, whose Tom Joad-esque existence was so poor with his impoverished family he took his final wages and bought enough shotgun shells to kill them all and himself to prevent fatal starvation; that of Hattie Carroll, a kitchen maid who was killed for no reason by the upper-class William Zanzinger who, in turn, was given six months in jail because the hammer of justice swings softly on the rich; and a doomed couple in “Boots of Spanish Leather,” whose young woman sails off to find adventure and her beau is left with no romantic trace of her to remember her by. All in all, an utterly despondent set of folk tunes – the last by Dylan.

Following the release of this third album, Dylan found himself followed in the streets by young Americans eager to worship him like a god. The deification is said to have shaken him to his core, specifically after a young girl addressed him as “Savior” upon meeting him, and he hung up his folk hat – for the most part – and turned instead to the loud rock ‘n’ roll being embraced by the other half of the urban American youth. He didn’t think he was the right man for the job, which may have been yet another manifestation of his oft-seen humility, and sought to shake the cult following any way he could.

He would return less than two years later with Highway 61 Revisited, featuring the raucous “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” both played by a full band, as was most of the rest of that album. The exception is the 11-minute-plus “Desolation Row,” which is mostly two acoustic guitars and a harmonica, which sounds as though it celebrates the end of times – this could be his fitting eulogy for his folk career, though we may never know for sure.

Dylan’s later work in the ‘60s and ‘70s included Desire, Blonde on Blond, Blood on the Tracks and supposedly getting The Beatles to smoke marijuana and open their eyes to the political conflict around them (“That’s when The Beatles started making good music,” some have quipped), but maybe his most endearing period is from 1961-1965, as the low-key folk poet with an uncanny knowledge of the world.

Lyrics taken from "Talkin' New York," "Song to Woody," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "With God on Our Side" and "Only a Pawn in their Game." All songs written by Bob Dylan and released by Columbia Records. All rights reserved.