The Times They Are A-Changin'

Aftermath

On October 26, 1963, three days after recording the final song for The Times They Are A-Changin' , Dylan held a concert at New York's Carnegie Hall. That night, he performed eight songs from his upcoming third album, as well as several outtakes from the same album sessions (including "Percy's Song," "Seven Curses," and "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"). Columbia recorded the entire concert, but it would be decades before a substantial portion of it would be officially released. (To date, the concert in its entirety has not been released.) Nevertheless, the performance was well-received by the press and audience alike, but its success would later be overshadowed by the events of November 22nd, 1963.

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On that day, at 12:30 p.m. CST, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Dylan's friend, Bob Fass, was sitting with Dylan in Carla Rotolo's apartment the day of the shooting. According to Fass, Dylan was deeply affected by it and said, "What it means is that they are trying to tell you 'Don't even hope to change things.'"

Related Topics:
John F. Kennedy - Dallas - Texas

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Dylan would later claim that Kennedy's death did not directly inspire any of his songs, but in a manuscript written shortly after the assassination, Dylan wrote, "it is useless t' recall the day once more." In another, he repeatedly wrote, "there is no right or left there is only up an down."

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Three weeks, to the day, after Kennedy's assassination, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee gave Dylan their annual Tom Paine award for his contribution to the civil rights movement. Dylan gave a disastrous acceptance speech at the awards ceremony held at Hotel Americana in New York, at one point claiming he saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin. After the ceremony, a number of eyewitnesses reported that Dylan seemed very nervous and was drinking quite heavily before giving his speech.

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As Clinton Heylin wrote, "in less than six months had turned full circle from the protest singer who baited Paul Nelson into someone determined to write only songs that 'speak for me'...Dylan's ambitions as a writer for the page...may have been further fed at the end of December when he met renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl and Kaddish." Dylan was already familiar with Ginsberg's work since growing up in Minneapolis. By now, beat poetry and French symbolists had become an enormous influence on Dylan's work, as Dylan "passed from immediate folk sources to a polychrome of literary styles." In an interview taken in 1985, Dylan said that he didn't start writing poetry until he was out of high school. "I was eighteen or so when I discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Frank O'Hara and those guys. Then I went back and started reading the French guys, Rimbaud and Francois Villon."

Related Topics:
Allen Ginsberg - Howl - Kaddish

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Many critics took note of the stark pessimism on The Times They Are A-Changin', which NPR's Tim Riley would later describe as "'Masters of War' stretched out into a concept album" due to its "social preening and black-and-white moralism." Critical reception for The Times They Are A-Changin' would weaken as the years would pass, but the overall consensus would continue to be positive.

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Nevertheless, by the time it was released on January 13th, 1964, Dylan was already entering a new phase in his career, pulling further away from his popular image as a protest singer.

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