'Chimes of Freedom' Meets Its Moment

Another Look at "Another Side of Bob Dylan"

Well, it was summer of 1964, someone unlocked the cellar door. Hitch-hiked from Texarkana, hopped a freight to Omaha. Jumped a hay truck somewhere in South Jersey, it dropped me off in a field. Roosevelt Field, in Long Island. It was a shopping mall. The island didn't look that long to me. Just flat, filled far as the eye could see with stores. They called it a mall. A shopping mall.

It had a store called Record World, and it was true. Records were the world. I bought an album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It was August, I'd just flunked out of sleepaway camp first time I went, age 14, and sent home. Earlier in the year, in February 1964, Columbia Records had released Bob Dylan's third studio album, The Times They Are a Changin'.

I sure hoped they were, because I was in ninth grade, my first year at a new high school. I talked to nobody and nobody talked to me, except possibly someone who owned The Times They Are a Changin' and let me listen to it. I know it had protest songs because I protested everything, and so it seemed did the guy singing it. Twenty years ago, my financial adviser sent out an alert beginning with the phrase, "The Times They Are a Changin'." It was about stocks and bonds.

The first thing I remember about Another Side of Bob Dylan was the album cover, the plain photo on the front cover and the poems on the back. One of the poems I still remember: "Jack o' Diamonds." I thought it was an old folk song or something. "Jack o' diamonds is a hard card I play." In poker, you play it if you have an appetite for risk. It looks enticing, this "one-eyed knave": it's a picture card, but the lowest of the royals. I'd go broke playing nickel-ante poker with my junior high friends, because a Jack in an otherwise desultory hand looks good, but pointless unless you've got three or four, or better, five of them. Dylan knew this, but he always seemed to have an ace up his sleeve.

On that bus home from Record World, I took the album out of the bag, as if to say, "Hey, people, got a Bob Dylan album here!" I read those poems, listed as "Some other kinds of songs . . . poems by Bob Dylan." All written in lower case, like e.e. cummings. The album burned my fingers, and I hadn't even listened to it get.

When I got home to the cul de sac to which I had been sentenced but found hope in poetry and music, I put Another Side of Bob Dylan on the Victrola. My first reaction was: Who is this guy? I think it was the correct response, since most of us are still asking the same question 61 years later.

Looking back, it was a bridge for Dylan, between the topical songs that had given him such fame, and the mercurial rock and folk-rock of his next album. That flag he planted was called Bringing It All Back Home, in which he let loose with the rap-beat poetry fusion of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," the first of the trilogy still unmatched that also consisted of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde in lightning-strike succession.

Another Side of Bob Dylan is well recorded and produced by his regular Columbia producer, Tom Wilson. The "band" is mostly ready, though the singer seems to laugh a few times, and sometimes seems to be making up lines on the spot. The "band" consists of Bob Dylan, vocals; Bob Dylan, guitar; Bob Dylan, piano; and Bob Dylan, harmonica. It is truly a solo album.

He kind of cracks up on the opening song, "All I Really Want to Do," on which he also yodels on some verses. The song sometimes dips into the beatnik language of psychoanalysis, then very much in vogue through the 1950s and early 1960s. You've heard the Byrds' version, their follow up to their No. 1 Dylan cover of the summer of 1965, "Mr. Tambourine Man."

Surprisingly to me, "All I Really Want to Do" wasn't the ubiquitous hit I remembered: It peaked at No. 40 on the national charts. It's a charming song, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn's Rickenbacker chiming, the Byrds' lovely harmonies utilized effectively. Whether speeding up the tempos and cutting some verses changes the meaning of the song also doesn't matter much: Everything was moving so fast, for Dylan and his song catalog.

The Byrds also covered "Spanish Harlem Incident," and "My Back Pages," sentimental but lasting, from Another Side, as well as "Chimes of Freedom," perhaps the last, and most lasting, of Dylan's topical songs. It was a bit of an afterthought then, but remained suspended in time until it was needed. Which is today, right now. But we'll get there soon.

"It Ain't Me Babe," the closing track on the album, was also a hit in the summer of 1965 by an L.A. group called the Turtles. Led by Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, these guys later became known as the Florescent Leech and Eddie, aka Flo & Eddie, and were part of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.

Whether "It Ain't Me Babe" was about Joan Baez or Irwin Silber or someone I've never heard of doesn't interest me much. Silber wrote and published an "open letter" to Dylan in his folk music magazine Sing Out! in late 1964, about Bob's summer 1964 performance at the Newport Folk Festival--not plugged in yet, just lacking topical songs:

Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, innerprobing, self- conscious -- maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. And it's happening on stage, too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now -- rather than to the rest of us out front. (c) Sing Out! 1965.

Some of the songs seem made up on the spot: "Black Crow Blues" is nice to listen to again, Dylan on the piano, but it's not a song he has ever performed live, as far as I am aware. "Ballad in Plain D" is about as inspired as its title. And "I Don't Believe You," shows a flash of the anger building that would eventually express itself in "Positively Fourth Street," a perfect answer to that online question "What's the nastiest opening line of a song?" that Substack social media visitors like to play.

I've always loved "Spanish Harlem Incident," though, because it's so believable, Dylan going to a palm reader to get his fortune told. It could have been instigated by Benny Spellman's 1962 New Orleans B-side and rock classic "Fortune Teller," which was written by Allen Toussaint under the name Naomi Neville. The "A-side" was "Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette)."

"Motorpsycho Nightmare" is a musical farmer's daughter joke, which used to be the set-up line of thousands of comedy routines, or two-liners. In Dylan's version, the farmer has a beautiful daughter named Rita who at first is gorgeous (like she stepped out of "La Dolce Vita"). Later, when she comes to him and suggests a shower, she looks like Tony Perkins: It's a riff on Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," which continues through the end of the song.

Some of the jokes in "I Shall Be Free--No. 10" would also have to be explained to a new audience. It's a talkin' blues in which a now-hammy sounding Dylan uses the example of conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964 Republican presidential candidate, to make a point about the stupidest rationalization for segregated neighborhoods: That if a black person moved in next door, they'd want to marry your daughter. In this song, Dylan wouldn't let Barry Goldwater move in next door to him, "for all the farms in Cuba." Dylan also goofs on "Cassius Clay," not yet Muhammed Ali, who had the brash young habit of announcing in rhyme the round in which he would knockout his opponent.

Dylan's early topical songs were driven by the Cold War: the 1961 showdown between President John F. Kennedy and Russian premier Nikita Khruschev over JFK's insistence that Soviet missiles be removed from Cuba, or else, you know, a hard rain of nuclear radiation was gonna fall.

So "Chimes of Freedom" from Another Side of Bob Dylan is what I call Dylan's last protest song, and since he had moved on musically and lyrically, it was overlooked for decades until around 1986.

That's when Amnesty International, the human rights organization that supports prisoners of conscience around the world, began a series of consciousness raising concerts. In 1986, there were six benefit concerts featuring featuring Sting, U2, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Adams and many others.

In 1988, Bruce Springsteen lent his support to the Human Rights Now tour for Amnesty, releasing what was called a four-song mini-LP with live versions of "Tougher Than the Rest" and "Be True" on one side, "Chimes of Freedom" and "Born to Run" on the other. "Chimes," recorded in Stockholm, was low-key, as was the version of "Born to Run." Team Springsteen hedged a little here: The record sleeve states "some proceeds" from the sale of the disc would go to Amnesty International.

In 2012, a four record set of 37 Dylan songs called Chimes of Freedom was released as a benefit for Amnesty International celebrating its 50 anniversary was released. Dylan's original closes the album.

Amnesty International's original job was simple: It consisted of writing letters to foreign governments asking for relief and release of those imprisoned for exercising free speech and other basic human rights. It chose to not advocate for such unfortunates in their own countries to avoid the appearance of partisanship. So Amnesty International USA did not, as far as I am aware, advocate for those imprisoned in this country.

When Springsteen began his "Land of Hope and Dreams" 2025 tour in May 14, Manchester, England, he stepped into the ring and challenged the quick slide to authoritarianism the United States is undergoing in the second Trump administration. He closed his show with "Chimes of Freedom," saying, "take this home with you."

Today Donald Trump is having a dictatorship-style military parade in his own honor in Washington, D.C. He usurped the authority of the governor of California and called out that state's National Guard, and in an unprecedented act, sent United States Marines to Los Angeles on the trumped-up falsehood that the local police authorities could not handle the peaceful protests and first amendment-protected gatherings of those marching against his misuse of power. Today, people are marching against those human rights violations throughout the United States.

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

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

"Chimes of Freedom" has finally achieved its moment.