May 27, 1963: "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" Is Released

May 27, 1963: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is released. It is the 2nd album by Bob Dylan. It did not remain his best, but it was his most important.

Dylan had been born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, but found life there dissatisfying on multiple levels. Early early rock and roll stars of the mid-1950s appealed to him, and so anyone who had studied his entire life from 1941 to 1965 should have seen this coming. But most people didn't know about that when they became fans of his in the early 1960s. 

In 1961, having dropped out of the University of Minnesota, he came to New York, renamed himself for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and started singing folk music in the clubs of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where Thomas had lived and performed for the last few years of his life, dying there in 1953. (I have an entry for his death.)

Bob had adopted a persona like that of earlier folk singer Woody Guthrie, with scraggly clothes and a nasal twang. He combined traditional folk songs with his own new compositions, and it didn't seem to matter that he couldn't sing in the traditional sense, or that he wasn't an especially good-looking guy. People were mesmerized by his performances. Soon, men wanted to be him, and women just wanted him.

On April 16, 1962, at Gerde's Folk City at 11 West 4th Street, he first performed "Blowin' in the Wind," and it was a sensation, with its 3 short verses citing the civil rights and antiwar movements. This was less than a year after the Freedom Rides, but a year before American TV viewers saw the firehoses and police dogs of Birmingham, and most hadn't yet heard of Vietnam, let alone realized that we already had troops fighting, killing and dying there. To them, "war" still meant World War II, a "just war," or maybe the Korean War, which didn't seem worth it.

Bob's self-titled debut album had been released on Columbia Records the preceding March 19. Shortly after the Gerde's premiere, he began recording The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Released on May 27, 1963, it included "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" -- the latter the first in a long line of great breakup songs he would write. 

Any 1 of those 4 songs would have been a great triumph for any writer. Dylan had all 4 on 1 album. He was 3 days past his 22nd birthday, and he was already a musical legend.

The cover was shot in front of 5 Jones Street, site of the Record Runner record store, with Dylan and Suze Rotolo then 19, an artist, and his girlfriend. She once told an interviewer:

Bob was charismatic. He was a beacon, a lighthouse. He was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself...

I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed. I was unable to find solid ground. I was on quicksand, and very vulnerable.

In other words, the young Bob Dylan was what we would now call "high-maintenance."

That July, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival for the first time, along with the biggest active legend of folksinging, Pete Seeger. Guthrie, to whom Seeger had introduced Dylan, was still alive, but sidelined by Huntington's disease, the nervous-system condition that would kill him 4 years later.

Also there were Peter, Paul and Mary (Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers), the folksinging trio who recorded what remain the biggest hit versions of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Don't Think Twice." So was Joan Baez, the leading female soloist of "the folk revolution," who helped make Bob famous, then became his girlfriend. Together, these and others closed the show by joining hands and singing a song Seeger, though he didn't write it, made the anthem of civil rights: "We Shall Overcome."

Dylan then began recording his next album, finishing it before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but not released until afterward, on January 13, 1964: The Times They Are A-Changin'. It included the title track, "Ballad of Hollis Brown," "With God On Our Side," "Only a Pawn In Their Game," "When the Ship Comes In," and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." His previous burst of creativity was thus proven to be no fluke.

Just 25 days after that album's release, The Beatles arrived in America. They and Dylan each influenced the other tremendously, and it may have been The Beatles who influenced Dylan to switch to electric instruments.

Suze Rotolo later married and had a son, and kept up her art until her death in 2011.

*

May 27, 1963 was a Monday. According to Baseball-Reference.com, no games were played that day. Memorial Day was traditionally a day for baseball doubleheaders, but, until 1970, it was always May 30. It was only the next year that it became the last Monday in May.