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The bridge was dismantled to be analyzed by physicists and mathematicians, but when they tried to re-build it they had to resort to nails, nuts and bolts. Take Bob’s songs apart and you can never put them back together; he’s the Humpty Dumpty of songwriters.
“How many seas must a white dove sail?”
Doves don’t sail, they fly.
“How many times must the cannonballs fly?”
Why cannonballs, why not rockets or ICBMs? But it sounded right and went on sounding right.
In some ways, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is quintessential Bob, it’s an interrogative song in which you have to answer the questions for yourself because he’s not going to tell you.
This is a reproduction of Dylan’s hand written lyrics from early ’62.
In 1968, the BBC erased the tape of “The Madhouse on Castle St.”, which in my mind is akin to melting down a Rodin sculpture or painting over a Van Gogh. But Dylan won’t go away, and in an attempt to rectify their blunder this year the BBC put out a worldwide appeal to find if anyone recorded the show. Somebody did, the mother of a teenage boy in Essex knew her son liked folk music and put a microphone and reel to reel tape recorder in front of the speaker of her TV set to record it for him.
Her tape survived and 42 years later I heard the young Dylan, with his old man’s voice singing ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ It was one little moment of perfection; something that seemed lost forever had merely been hidden in a closet. In a new Dylan encyclopedia titled “Keys to the Rain” Oliver Trager writes:
“With a simple melody and subtle, questioning lyrics, “Blowin’ in the Wind” struck chords deep within both the civil rights and nascent antiwar movements of the early 1960s, giving widespread voice to the sentiments that until then had rarely before been explicitly articulated in popular music. Even now, more than 40 years since the song’s composition and after millions of renditions by innumerable singers around the world, the queries Dylan raises in it don’t appear as if they are going to be answered anytime soon. Each verse includes three rhetorical questions that cut to the marrow of injustice and ends with a Taoist koan presenting the clarity of the only true answer. Perhaps they can never be answered properly – and therein lies their brilliance and the secret of the song’s effectiveness.
In the October-November 1962 issue of Sing Out!, Dylan wrote, “There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowin’ in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind—and it’s blowin’ in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is, but oh, I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper, it’s got to come down some time... I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many wars... You people over 21 should know better.”
 Perhaps his most famous rendition of the song was in 1963 when he stood on the platform with Martin Luther King at the March on Washington.  Dr. King delivered his speech, “I have a dream”, Bob sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”, not a bad double bill.
Within a couple of years Bob distanced himself from the protesters and angry rhetoric to write more personal songs. He said his farewell to the movement in his 4th album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan”.
 In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
The song, “It Ain’t Me Babe” is not so much the breakup with a lover, but a goodbye to all the people who wanted him as a spokesperson for their generation.
 Someone to open each and every door,
But it ain't me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe,
It ain't me you're lookin' for.
Later in ‘Wedding Song’ Bob was quite specific.
It's never been my duty to remake the world at large,
Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge.
Afterword
I was disappointed that 2005 was not Bob’s year to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It went to Harold Pinter, who was a rank outsider according to the British bookies, who make a living predicting the outcome of everything from dog racing to the Nobel Awards. However, it’s been a good year for Dylan aficionados, with major Dylan exhibitions in Seattle and London, Martin Scorsese’s brilliant documentary on PBS, separate film and photography retrospectives in London, 2 historical Dylan CDs in Starbuck’s, the release of the first book of his autobiography, ‘Chronicles Volume One’, a new Dylan Encyclopedia and his 2nd ever visit to Victoria, where three generations of male Collis’s enjoyed the show. Maybe he’ll get the Nobel next year and it doesn’t matter, because prizes and awards have never interested Bob, whose acceptance speeches are legendary for their incoherence.
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never know what curious chemistry enabled the song of a kid from Hibbing, Minnesota to resonate in the mind of a kid living among the bricks and Michelmas daisies of a London suburb.
fall back
speakwell