'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 p…