Notes on Times They Are A-Changin'

This album and the title track are considered emblematic of the '60s: its sense of social upheaval, of things getting better, of hippies and young and black people fighting in the streets for a better day. But this album is anything but an anthem to these things. Just listen to Dylan's voice as the soon as the opening lyrics arise: come gather round people wherever you roam. He sounds just as old as the mothers and fathers throughout the land- don't criticise what you can't understand. Young wise, old naive. Never did Dylan sound so weary, so fucking tired and battered by the circus of being a folk musician, by the circus of American society than in the Times They Are A-Changin album.

The album, having opened with the claim that the tables are surely turning, then goes on to cough up the blood and infected guts of America, tales of forgotten Americans going mad in communities where the work has dried up, where the red iron pits ran a-plenty, but the cardboard-filled windows and old men on the benches, tell you now that the whole town is empty. Anyone who has ever lived in any post-industrial community knows exactly what Dylan means when he sings of miners being turfed out of work by South American towns where the miners work almost for nothing, of whole cities full of nothing but sadness and drink, where the children must go as soon as they grow, for there ain't nothin' here now to hold them. There's the incredible Only a Pawn in their Game, a song written in tribute to Medger Evers and in empathy for the racist South, the chewed-off fingernails of America, the people told in their schools that the laws are with them to protect their white skin, to keep up their hate so they never think straight bout the shape that their in, stressing that it ain't them to blame - they are only ever pawns in a game (and fucking hell how things don't change).

Nowhere does Dylan suggest that all of this trouble is about to end. There is the rambling trainsong, When the Ships Come-In that is a furious tirade against anyone whoever exploited anyone, promising that one day the chains will be cut-off and thrown to the bottom of the ocean. But even this is curbed by the proceeding story of Hattie Carroll, a Black woman brutally beaten to death on the drunken whim of a drunk White slaveowner.

Every song on the album is a instant great, a powerful tune of suffering and hardship. Nowhere is this expressed better than in Dylan's personal songs. Boots of Spanish Leather has to be one of the saddest love songs ever written. One Too Many Mornings suggests a mind that can no longer bare to try and observe and rally against the Establishment anymore - the madness it has seen has coloured its vision forever, and Dylan will never be so young, so hopeful ever again.

Down the streets the dogs are barkin, and the day is a gettin' dark. When the night comes in a fallin', the dogs'll lose their bark. And the silent night'll shatter from the sounds inside my mind. I'm just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind. 

The final song, Restless Farewell is a fitting, croaking end to an album soaked in brutality and the pain of defeat. The final verse, counts a false clock trying to tick out my time, to disgrace distract and bother me, but at the same time promises to keep his arrows slick and his powder dry, to retreat in order to work out how to make my own stand and remain as I am. There could be no more fitting album or song to chorus Dylan's departure from the folk scene, and no more apt precursor to the renewed, fighting energies of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61.