I realize there are tons of young/younger/youngish or even oldish people out there who are still a bit mystified by the reverence so many of us boomer types have for Bob Dylan, even as some of us find his recordings of the past 40 years rather mixed, at times baffling.
It's understandable, if you have mainly been exposed to Geezer Bob, who is hard to get a handle on musically and politically. You may not "get" Dylan but I do "get" your confusion about him. And there's always "the voice" -- certainly a bit hard for many to get past these past decades, if not before.
Anyway, just spend 7 minutes checking out the video I have linked to below -- when Bob was very young himself -- and the lyric excerpts. Perhaps you might "get" him, or at least the special place he held/holds, a little better.
"Chimes of Freedom" is not Dylan's most famous song but is, my view, his greatest from the pre-electric period. Yes, he was often and is often called a "poet" but that was always stretching things (unlike with, say, Leonard Cohen who really WAS a poet before he took to songwriting). But "Chimes of Freedom" really works as poetry, and one of the great such works of the postwar era.
I heard the song when it came out on his Another Side album in 1964, which was poorly recorded. It later turned up on the first Byrds album in rocking (if not exactly haunting) form.
I first saw a snippet of the Newport 1964 performance captured in the Martin Scorcese documentary and downloaded it off the soundtrack, feeling it was his greatest live solo performance ever. Later it turned up in toto in the new film about Dylan at Newport over the years, and of course is now on YouTube in numerous forms.
Here are just a few of the lyrics with perhaps special meaning today. Link to video follows.
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight...
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin constantly at stake
An we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing....
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind....
Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf and blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased and cheated by pursuit
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing...
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
And for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing....
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an worse
An for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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Greg Mitchell was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest book is "Why Obama Won."
