Go lightly from the ledge, babe
Bob Dylan - 'It Ain't Me Babe' (Another Side of Bob Dylan - 1964)
Another Side of Bob Dylan is likely not many people’s favourite Bob Dylan album.1 For many, it is not even his best album of 1964 (With The Times They Are A-Changin' more favoured.) I’ve always enjoyed it; I have a lot of time for ‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ and ‘My Back Pages’ and the concluding track from this album, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe.’ It would be overselling to say it draws a line in the sand if you view Dylan’s career and trajectory from 20,000 feet up, but you can hear him leaning in just a little bit more to not just starling world play and imagery but connecting those to real feelings and emotions.
The whole album was recorded over a mere couple of days in June 1964 at Columbia Recording Studio in New York; it finds The Spokesperson For A Generation starting to mark a pivotal shift from the socio-political tapestries Dylan had woven up until that point, and this tension reached breaking point on the closer. With just his vocals, guitar, and harmonium, Dylan crafted a piece that was both an intimately personal reflection and a broader commentary on the expectations the folk movement and his audience placed upon him.
Dylan, amidst a whirlwind of fame, found himself in Italy in 1963, ostensibly in pursuit of Suze Rotolo2, who, if you didn’t know, is the woman arm-in-arm with him on the cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Having departed for Italy in late 1962, Rotolo left a void that Dylan sought to fill, perhaps understand, through his music. Dylan wrote in 1985’s Biograph collection that the process of writing ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ began around this time, even if it wasn’t completed until the spring of 1964 after Dylan and Rotolo had parted ways. The song is imbued with a palpable sense of loss – not just of love but of the innocence and simplicity that characterised Dylan's earlier work.
Dylan's foray into more personal, introspective themes with ‘It Ain't Me Babe’, and the rest of Another Side of Bob Dylan may not have felt like that bold departure from the protest songs that had defined his early career. There’s an element of the boiling frog to this. If you listen to Freewheelin’ and then Blonde On Blonde back to back3 as a Greenwich village folkie, you would hear the change in an instant - clearly, it would take the Going Electric saga of 1965 for it to jump out - but the signs of evolution are there in 1964 even if they are not the revolution due to come.
When the song was first played live - later in Spring 1964 in shows in London. The song, with its refrain of "no, no, no," was even interpreted by some critics as a type of indirect rebuke to the Beatles' "yeah, yeah, yeah," that was blowing up Stateside.
The melody, with its minor descent, perfectly complements the song's themes of disillusionment and refusal. Dylan's rejection of the romanticised ideals of love and heroism is evident in these lyrics, which dismiss the notion of the gallant knight in favour of a more grounded, realistic portrayal of human relationships. This was Dylan asserting his artistic and personal autonomy, refusing to be the idealised figure that others sought him to be. The others here are more than just Rotolo, of course.
‘It Ain't Me Babe’ also serves as a metaphor for Dylan's relationship with the folk movement, his audience and the general public. The expectations for him to be a spokesperson for a generation weighed heavily, and this song was one way of asserting that he would not be pigeonholed or idolised. He was not the infallible hero many wanted him to be; he was an artist and a human, flawed and searching like anyone else.
The release of Another Side of Bob Dylan, culminating in ‘It Ain't Me Babe’, can viewed as a minor watershed moment in Dylan's career. It was a declaration of his evolving artistic vision, one that the expectations of others would not constrain. This album set the stage for the monumental year of 1965, a year that would see Dylan further push the boundaries of his music with the electric dynamism of Bringing It All Back Home and the poetic profundity of Highway 61 Revisited.
The song's enduring appeal saw it covered by various artists from Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra to The Turtles - who would reach the US top ten in 1965 with a version.
It’s straightforward to pinpoint any given moment of Dylan’s output as standing at the precipice of an enormous crossroads. Still, I do genuinely think that like many other songs we have covered here, this showed us where he would take his songwriting and lyricism. I doubt anyone knew where his music was going next.
You can never say a Dylan album is no one’s favourite; people will say he never bettered his debut or will come out to bat for Dylan and The Dead or Under The Red Sky in the comments otherwise.
After performing in the UK in early 1963, Dylan hightailed to Perugia to look for Rotolo. Rotolo had already jumped on a boat back to New York in December 1962, looking for Dylan.
Incidentally, the gap between these two records, Dylan’s 2nd and 7th, is 1120 days. That is the same time between this post and the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
I wasn't aware that "Another Side Of Bob Dylan" isn't a favored album. My first listen to it floored me. The piano of "Black Crow Blues", the lyricism of "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona", the humor of "Motorpsycho Nitemare" and of course the greatness of "It Ain't Me Babe" and "My Back Pages". I learned to perform on guitar "All I Really Want To Do" and "I Don't Believe You" 40 years ago.
I consider this an important Dylan album, not just because it's a transition and a lead-up to "Bringing It All Back Home", but for all the reasons you cited.
Thank you.