AYD Weekly | Bob Dylan, Harvard Square, 1963
The true story of "Talkin' World War III Blues" and how the past gets saved
Sometime around the start of the gig, that Sunday evening in 1963, someone went downstairs at Club 47, in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and performed a typical before-show task. They turned on a reel-to-reel recorder.
Upstairs, a microphone — probably suspended from the ceiling, according to Betsy Siggins, who helped manage the club at the time — began to pipe the sounds of that evening's hootenanny down to the equipment in the cellar. Under the mic, that April 21, 1963: Eric Von Schmidt, Jack Elliott, and others. The others happened to include Bob Dylan.
I’ve just come back from the room that holds this part of Bob Dylan’s legacy, the room’s own legacy. It’s a room I’ve known for most of my adult life, once called Club 47 back in ’63 (and other years as well), but now known as Passim. It’s moved once, and where it stands now is about a street and a half from where Dylan showed up that evening. I’ve been to that spot too, one night in 2003 when I led a room of people from the new spot to the old spot, led them through the snow to finish a show in the very footprint of the old Club 47. But that’s another story.
This is a Bob Dylan story, and it will stay in the past. But what it tells us is something important about holding onto things, about keeping them safe, so that we can open little windows like this into a world that might seem far away, but it’s never that far, really, if we have a recording and some electricity to play it.
Hi, I’m James O’Brien, and this is my newsletter. This is ‘All Your Days.’
Dylan was in the Boston area, having just completed a two-day run of performances at Café Yana, a club outside Kenmore Square in the city. It was a crucial month in his career; he was an artist amid massive changes. Other than playing his first concert at Town Hall in New York, nine days earlier, Dylan had agreed to bring on Tom Wilson as his new producer, and he was about to go into Columbia's Studio A to address a problem with his newly pressed album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The label was recalling early copies of it from promotional outlets and shop shelves. The issue revolved around one song: "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues."
Coming weeks before the collapse of Dylan's May 12 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which would fall apart in connection with the singer-songwriter's desire to perform "John Birch" on air, Columbia foresaw legal problems with the song's inclusion on the second LP: lawyers worried that it could prompt a libel suit from the John Birch Society. And so, Dylan was to return to the soundboard on April 24 — the idea being that he would record something else to replace "John Birch" on the now-withdrawn platters. On April 21, with that session still some seventy-two hours away, he arrived at Club 47 with a lyric in his head: "Talkin' World War III Blues."
When Dylan performed the song that day, the reel-to-reel in the basement of Club 47 captured it all. And though the tape has never been available to the public, about ten years ago, it was restored and transferred to digital by audio experts at Harvard University. As Betsy shared it with me, a decade ago, for an article I was writing for a Dylan fanzine called ISIS, a new understanding of how "Talkin' World War III" emerged.
Since at least 1986, critics have said that Dylan wrote "Talkin' World War III Blues" in the studio, or mainly in the studio and that it represents an on-the-spot or improvisatory feat. Listening to the tape of his April 21 performance in 1963, it becomes clear that that is not the case.
“Talkin’ World War III” was not halfway done, on April 21, as Robert Shelton describes it, in No Direction Home. It was neither spontaneously written in the studio, nor some partially worked out idea, as Clinton Heylin writes about it in Behind the Shades Revisited and also Revolution in the Air, and as William McKeen puts it, in Bob Dylan: A Bio-Bibliography. And if it was composed specifically for the studio sessions, as Todd Harvey suggests in The Formative Dylan, it was so fully formed by April 24, 1963, that Dylan would sing essentially the same words on the Columbia take as he did at the Cambridge club, at Club 47, several days before.
The mythology surrounding the song's “improvisatory” genesis has crept into the history of Dylan’s music of the time; it can be found in books about artists other than Dylan. For example, Tim Riley's Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, published in 2002, refers to "the improvised narrative of Bob Dylan's ‘Talkin' World War III'." These are examples of the nasty tendency that biographical and historical misinformation can exhibit: once in print, it keeps showing up in new places.
But the discovered and restored Club 47 tape reveals that Dylan possessed a finished version of the song as early as three days before Wilson flipped any switches in New York City. And while the song, musically and lyrically, would turn out to be a somewhat fluid piece as time went on, the looser and more improvisatory elements that critics have attributed to its creation on April 24 only manifest, if one judges by the bootlegs, months after the song was pressed and released on vinyl. Further details about the history of the tape itself come at the end of this article, but first, the matter of the song.
If the Club 47 tape starts at the beginning of his performance that night, then Dylan's set on Sunday, April 21, 1963, began with a harmonica. Its opening blast doubles with Eric Von Schmidt's own harp, and the two start a kind of musical sparring, good-humored like their playful teasing of each other during Von Schmidt's introduction of Dylan to the room.
Von Schmidt plays and sings the lead. The lyric is in part that of "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah (Lay My Burden Down)," an American spiritual, but the pair sings some different words from those typically associated with it. Von Schmidt and Dylan sing "body" rather than “burden" — “lay my body down” — incorporating it into lines other than the song's regular refrain. Dylan shout-sings, echoing Von Schmidt’s words, his voice just behind in the mix. Their harps tangle in the air. It's an aggressive rendition, loud, and a bit chaotic. The recorder in the basement registers the crowd's response: they love what they hear.
The tape doesn't quite tell what happens next, but something changes — there's a jump from applause to quiet. Dylan is apparently alone before the same audience, presumably in the same room on the same date — it sounds like the same room and show, and Siggins says that it is and that she was there, so she can confirm it — and Dylan is talking to this audience about what he should play next. He begs off a request, saying he doesn't remember the song. A chair scoots across the wood or tile floor. Dylan tries out a bit of harmonica; he plucks a string.
To the ear, what is initially different from the album Freewheelin's "Talkin' World War III Blues" in this recording, from April 21, 1963, made a few days before that studio session, has to do with the music coming from Dylan's strings.
On the album, Dylan picks his way into the song along a descending melodic motif and then comes back up along a series of ascending notes, accenting almost every following chord with syncopated attention to the low notes, descending and ascending. Richard J. Scott writes that the structure of this song is a C-F-G7 chord progression and that the "alternate bass notes" augmenting its three-cord structure are common to many talking blues. The bass notes are particularly individuated throughout Dylan's performance on April 24 — the version that makes the record — and it sounds almost like a second guitar playing along.
Live, on April 21, up in Harvard Square, Dylan plays "Talkin' World War III" another way. There is no initial descending run of notes but a flat-picked part that starts and then continues in a workmanlike movement from chord to chord. There is an emphasis on the bass strings in some places but very little in the way of the more complex descending motif, except once, at the 3'58" mark in the recording, when Dylan comes out of a harmonica break by playing roughly half of the purely picked section that is heard at the beginning of the April 24 rendition that would end up on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
As for what he sings, on April 21, the song starts like this:
One time ago the craziest dream came to me
I dreamt I was walkin' in World War Three
I went to the doctor very next day
To see what he had to say
He said it was a bad dream
[harmonica]
I wouldn't worry about it none, though
Them dreams are only in your head [harmonica: partial] he said
When it comes to variants found by comparing the April 21 and April 24 recordings, there are several minor changes to words, mostly the kind you’d expect between performances but not speaking to rewrites necessarily or intention.
The structure changes a bit. From the first known to the second known performance, Verse 7 becomes Verse 9, Verse 8 becomes Verse 7, and Verse 9 becomes Verse 8. This kind of variant is not confined to these two recordings — April 21 in Harvard Square, April 24 down at the studio in New York — Dylan changes the verse sequencing and varies the number of verses entirely in several subsequent live performances. For example, on July 26, 1963, Dylan drops all of the lines from "I wouldn't worry about it none" to the end of Verse 3. He also eliminates Verse 7 and swaps the ordering of verses 8 and 9. Even in the studio, across five studio takes of "Talkin' World War III," there are not only variant sequencings, but he changes details like the kind of food requested in the line "Gimme a string bean, I'm a hungry man". In February 1964, the string bean becomes a TV dinner before a live audience. It stays that way through 1964, but by 1965, bootlegs reveal that the entirety of the fifth verse is gone from Dylan's live performances of the song.
Another detail that changes is that of "Fabian." In the seventh verse of the Club 47 iteration — the ninth verse of The Freewheelin’ album track — this wanderer of the song's post-apocalyptic city turns on his record player. "It was Fabian," sings Dylan on April 21, "singing, 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa / Our Love's A-gonna Grow, Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah'". But three days later, in the studio, Dylan changes the name in the line. It’s not Fabian anymore; it’s "Rock-a-day Johnny".
One way to think about this change is to note that "Rock-a-day Johnny" is a less topical choice than that of the real-world singer. Fabian was, especially around 1963, associated with studio trickery and some industry misdoings. In or about 1959, Fabian testified before Congress during the government's radio payola scandal hearings, revealing that his voice had been electronically altered to sound better on his albums. The incident represented a turning point in Fabian's career (or perhaps it only coincided with a downturn already underway). The point is, Dylan was probably not singing the name with reverence come April 1963. But then, why change it to something else on Freewheelin'? Perhaps the already litigation-sensitive lawyers at Columbia wanted to avoid replacing one potential enemy — the John Birch Society attorneys — with another, in the form of a controversial pop star.
"Fabian" soon returns, however. Dylan sings the name on April 25, 1963, at The Bear in Chicago; on July 26 at the Newport Folk Festival; and also on October 26, at Carnegie Hall (where the title of the song referenced also transforms, becoming: "Ah, You Love Me and I Love You / Our Love's A-gonna Grow, Shoo-be-doo, Shoo-be-doo").
By Halloween, at Philharmonic Hall in New York, 1964, Dylan jettisons "Fabian" for Motown's Martha and the Vandellas: "talkin' about 'Leader of the Pack'". But then, on or about November 25 of that year, it changes again, this time to The Shangri-Las — the group that actually made a number-one hit recording of "Leader of the Pack" in 1964. On April 7, 1965, the line had morphed again, and it is Donovan about whom Dylan sings. The record player no longer works, and the English songwriter can be found hiding in a closet.
Another noteworthy and flexible section of "Talkin' World War III Blues," as early as the April 21 and April 24 recordings, comes at the song's end, where Dylan is working out a concluding equation.
"Well, half the people can be part right all of the time," he sings on April 21. "All the people can be half right some of the time / But all the people can't be all right all of the time / Abraham Lincoln said that."
On April 24, he puts it this way: "Half the people can be part right all of the time / And some of the people can be all right part of the time / But all the people can't be all right all of the time / I think Abraham Lincoln said that."
Sometimes, in later performances, he adds a fourth line to the section — one more permutation of how many can be how right, how much of the time — and he persists in playing with the names he checks. Halloween, 1964: Carl Sandburg replaces Lincoln, and there he remains until April 7, 1965, when, in England, Dylan brings T.S. Eliot into the song. On May 9, 1965, the last time Dylan is known to have played "Talkin' World War III Blues" to an audience, he sings: "But all of the people can't be all right all of the time / T.S. Eliot said that." He goes out on a poet rather than a politician.
None of this is to say the lines of "Talkin' World War III" were not at all in flux back on April 21, 1963; it’s just to say that the structure and concepts of the song were essentially there. They were intact as early as that date, at least. Given these details, taken together with what can now be heard on the Club 47 reel-to-reel, critics should be able to construct a fresh understanding of the genesis and the subsequent variations of "Talkin' World War III Blues." As early as April 21, the lyric was a twelve-verse structure close to what Dylan would record on April 24. It wasn't until months later, live on stage, on the road, that he introduced anything like significant — and then, perhaps spontaneous — changes to its words.
And now, the story of the tape.
The history of the reel-to-reel itself is marked by good fortune. Club 47 closed in 1968. Before Betsy Siggins left, at the very end, she was savvy enough to gather up those basement tapes from the shelves of the venue's office. By that time, there were more than two dozen of the recordings.
"I didn't know the value of them," said Siggins. "Did I know what was on them?"
For a time, she said, she didn't give it much consideration; these tapes were more or less a footnote for her, a piece of the past that moved along with her from place to place.
The tapes went with Betsy from Cambridge to her next home in Washington, D.C., where she lived from 1968 until about 1973. They were then stored in a closet at her Manhattan apartment, wrapped in plastic bags while she ran food pantries and homeless shelters in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Eventually, hoping to have the music on the tapes transferred to a more stable format, she handed the reel-to-reels to Rounder Records, a Massachusetts-based folk music label. There they stayed until about 2001. None of the intended work on the tapes was completed at that time.
Betsy moved back to the Boston area in 1996. First, she took on the directorship of Club 47's rebirth as a nonprofit version, Passim, a venue that had operated since 1968 as a for-profit on the very spot of the old club. Then, in 2009, Betsy left Passim and separately founded the New England Folk Music Archives. Having gathered the reel-to-reels back from Rounder and with a Grammy grant to fuel what happened next, she brought the tapes to Harvard University's Audio Preservation Studio for the long-wanted cleanup and cataloging process.
"I decided that that would be a good way to take the music that was the soundtrack to my life and see if we could get them into a format so that we could use them both academically and in a public way," she said.
Betsy has worked with the university and other experts to identify and preserve the music on the Club 47 tapes. Not only does the reel-to-reel that includes "Talkin' World War III Blues” contain Dylan's duet with Von Schmidt on "Glory, Glory," but there is also a partial recording of Dylan singing "With God on Our Side.” The history of that song's performance starts, as far as it is known, on April 12, 1963. "With God" cuts off just before the last line of the sixth verse on that Club 47 tape. Still, there are some variant lyrics already evident before it does — not radical differences, but of the kind probably related to the incidentals of performance. Dylan refers to the piece as "With God on My Side" before he starts singing. So, he knew the song’s title.
A recording and some electricity to play it. That’s the recipe that saves us. When time washes almost everything else away, the medium is the time machine. We have this newsletter because of it.
As far as we know, we cannot go back in time, but we can hold onto it. We hold our lives in our hands if we are musical, verbal, performative, as a stack of vinyl, a stack of plastic, a stack of reel-to-reel tapes, an electrical box full of signals. And with this, we can present ourselves — we can project ourselves — to the future. Or someone can. And if we do, or someone does, we can hope the future will listen.
This installment is yet another way this ongoing chronicle can tell a story. Subscribe to the ‘All Your Days’ podcast to hear clips from the tapes themselves. I hope our trip into the past — sixty years back to a spring evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts — has unlocked something for you. It’s a space and a time to which I feel somehow tied. Thanks for taking the trip. A version of this story first appeared in 2014 in the Dylan fanzine ISIS. Thanks for the space and time back then, Mr. Derek Barker and for your fine publication.
I thank you for reading, as always. Save your past. Stay strong. Share what you do. Until next week, I’m James O’Brien, and this is my newsletter. This is ‘All Your Days.’