Charlie Bowen remembers a conversation he once had with his old buddy Jim Strother. It was decades ago and the two of them were reminiscing about a time even earlier.
“Remember,” Jim said, “when you’d see a fella ramblin’ along carrying a guitar case, and he’d have his coat collar turned up against the wind and a cap pulled down over his eyes.
“Just one look and you knew everything you needed to know about that guy.” You know, it probably wasn’t always spitting snow, but it certainly is in today’s fanciful memory of that scene. And the soundtrack? Then and now? Why, it was always an early Bob Dylan tune, wasn’t it? Like this one.
Those memories came roaring back at last week’s rehearsal when the first tune that popped into the guys’ heads that evening was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song that Charlie loved from 1963’s Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album.
Learning
To this day Bowen still remembers Strother using the same song to patiently try to teach him the “Merle Travis pick” whose alternating bass characterized so much of 1960s folkdom.
Curiously, the young Dylan said he himself was still learning his composition. “It’s a hard song to sing,” he told journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote the liner notes for the album. “I can sing it sometimes, but I ain’t that good yet.”
Bob noted that he didn’t yet know how to “carry myself” the way veteran musicians like Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins did.
“With those older singers,” Dylan told Hentoff, “music was a tool, a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points. As for me, I can make myself feel better sometimes, but at other times, it’s still hard to go to sleep at night.”
As repored here earlier, Bob said of “Don’t Think Twice” that a lot of city singer “make it sort of a love song — slow and easygoing — but it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It’s as if you were talking to yourself.”
For more about the song’s history, click here for an earlier Flood Watch article.
More Music? Step Right Up!
If all this ramblin’ down the foggy ruins of time has you in the mood for more Dylan tunes, boy, do we have you covered! Our free Radio Floodango music steaming feature has an entire “Bob Dylan Birthday” playlist with more than an hour’s worth of Flooderiffic Bobby bits. Click below to check it out.
Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan!
The richest, deepest vein of music we have ever mined has been the extraordinary work of Bob Dylan. From The Flood’s earliest days — nearly a half century ago now — to just last week, we have faithfully tapped into tunes from darn-near every era in Dylan’s long career.
And if you’d like to put even more Floodified folk in your Friday, tune into the band’s free Folk Channel:
About a hundred tracks from decades of jam sessions, rehearsals and gigs are waiting for you there. Click here to turn us on.
Public Floodify
Finally, in case the heat wave breaks next week and you feel like stepping out again, mark Thursday, July 23, on your calendar.
That’s when the band rolls back into good ol’ Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, 745 7th Avenue. Come on down for good food, good tunes and a great jump on your weekend! We play from 6:30 to 8.
