#The byrds my back pages plus

Ever the artist, he expressed his disenchantment in one of the last songs he recorded for his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan: “My Back Pages.”Ī lovely but mournful tune, “My Back Pages” is a coming of age song that expressed doubts about the songwriter’s earlier zeal. You know-be a spokesman.”ĭylan didn’t stop there, however. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know-pointing to all the things that are wrong. “Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. “Those records I’ve already made, I’ll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn’t see anybody else doing that kind of thing,” Dylan told Hentoff. The following year, in a wide-ranging interview with Nat Hentoff published in The New Yorker, Dylan explained that he was done with “finger-pointing” songs. Whatever intent lay behind his words, the award speech is generally seen as the first signs of Dylan’s disillusionment with the 1960s folk protest movement. Many have written about Dylan’s speech that night-including Dylan himself, who days later penned a poetic explanation attempting to explain his thought process and the tumult of feelings he was experiencing. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax.” “Because you people should be at the beach. And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren't here,” said Dylan. Dylan even suggested that the young people in the audience would be better off somewhere else. In a short, rambling, unscripted monologue, the young folk singer touched on Woody Guthrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, race, baldness, and the strange gifts he received from fans. It was a period of change, and Dylan had risen to fame in large part because of his protest songs of the period-such as the 1962 hit 'Blowin' in the Wind'-that touched on themes related to the civil rights and anti-war movements.ĭylan’s address that night was not what America was expecting, however. It was about two weeks before Christmas, and Dylan was on hand to receive the Tom Paine Award, bestowed annually by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee to honor individuals for service in the fight for civil liberty. A notable use is the music journalism collection Rock’s Backpages.In 1963, Bob Dylan was a fresh-faced kid probably unrecognizable to most Americans, but he showed he was already an old soul when he delivered a speech in the Grand Ballroom of New York City’s American Hotel that December. The phrase “back pages” never shows up in the lyrics, but it became a favorite saying amongst music writers, who used the term to describe an archive, either literal or figurative. He doesn’t do that, and to do that, you spoil it for people who have a different meaning of the song.” In his Songfacts interview, Roger McGuinn of The Byrds said: “I don’t try to interpret what Bob meant when he wrote the song.

As a single it stalled at #30 in 1967, but its reputation as a rock classic has grown through the years. McGuinn also does a classic 12-string Rickenbacker solo and Van Dyke Parks fills things out with a soft but essential organ part. Leader Roger McGuinn cut out two of the more abstract verses and fashioned a chorus where there really wasn’t one, utilizing David Crosby’s harmony singing. The song peaked at #30 in the Billboard 100 in 1967.Īlready skilled at turning acoustic Dylan folk tunes into melodic, electric folk-rockers, the Byrds struck gold when they decided to take this somewhat nondescript Dylan tune from 1964 and electrify it for their fourth album. On the countless Dylan songs that are covered, I will usually like Dylan’s version better…on this one I prefer the Byrds. I fell for the song because of the line, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. Dylan recorded his version in 1964 on his Another Side of Bob Dylan album.

#The byrds my back pages plus

Roger McGuinn’s voice plus Rickenbacker is always a winning combination. I like the Byrds arrangement of this great Bob Dylan song.