Customer Reviews

Times They Are A-Changin

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This CD is so pure. Every song has such amazing lyrics and meaning to it. Next to Dylans Greatests Hits, this has got to be the best Bob Dylan CD.

Here Dylan's starting to sound like himself and less like his greatest vocal influence Rambln' Jack Elliot.

Dylan's first three albums: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and The Times They Are A-Changin' immediately established him as a songwriter of great distinction. If you like Bob Dylan these three albums are a must for your collection.

May I also recommend a book that is available on this web site: "The Bob Dylan Albums" by Anthony Varesi. The book by Varesi is a fair and honest review of the albums by Dylan.

There's a lot to say about this album, personally i think is much better than the Frewhellin', why? Don't know. This bug hit me harder.
This is the LAST album by bobby featuring "finger-pointing" songs, so in my humble opinion the best of this record are the pesonal ballads, with a lot of intimicy and with a great tecnique of smooth "fingerpickin'" (for those who say that bobby can't play the guitar) like "One too many Mornings" which is great (you should listen to the one live at the RAH'66 with the back-vocals), i don't consider "When the Ship Comes In" a protest song, it's a beatiful song which shows bobby with certain hope for a better world (but he ain't protesting...).
"Restless farewell" is said that is another song by bobby saying goodbye to folk or lefty music, he was going to do it in the next two albums with "It ain't me babe" and "It's all over now baby blue", always as the final cut.
But THE song here is "Boot of Spanish Leather", with the has the same chords from "Girl from north country" and the same temathic of lost love of "Don't think twice", just a beatiful piece that's worth the album.

This is the album that introduced me to Bob Dylan. It takes alot of effort to get into, but after several listens, each song succeeds to grab your attention. A few of the songs could even be taken as "catchy", especially The Times They Are A-Changin' and When the Ship Comes In. With God on Our Side is too long, but if you get bored by the melody, you can always listen to the lyrics, so the song is saved from the hubris. In a way, the album resembles a cubist painting (a school of art which Dylan's own paintings take their cue from), with each song being a "fractle," to borrow a word from Robert Fripp. The songs are uniformly discouraging, and totally bleak. The statement of purpose hands down is When the Ship Comes In,which shows no lightening up in its hatred. The theme is revenge, when the Old Testement imagry seeks a vengeful, studied catharsis. As with this song, the entire album gives no respite, anywhere. This album shows absolutely no sign of redemption. Dylan shows no sign of giving the nemesises even a crack of sunlight. One can only guess how much endurance and suffering a man of twenty-two years could have survived to come up with an album so dreadfully powerful. Out of Dylan's first five albums, this is by far my favorite. One obvious reason is that (can you believe it?) his voice is way superior to his first album, where the vocals are so slip-shod as to beg the question if Dylan had swallowed living frogs at the recording session. But the real answer is that the songwriting has hit a high water mark. The only song that consistently annoys is With God on Our Side, and although his voice/guitar/harmonica sound collage might lack interest with people who need to hear drum beats and a thumping rhythmical bass to keep their interest, each song is carefully written with solid, memorable melodies and the scathing anger of the lyrics give this album an almost unique quality. I qualify my review with the addage "almost unique" because two other artists have tried this hard to be negative, Lou Reed (on Berlin)and Bruce Springsteen (the new Dylan) on Nebraska. It is worth noting that Bruce Springsteen's album is titled "Nebraska" because the bleakest song on The Times They Are A'Changin' is "Ballad of Hollis Brown," about a destitute South Dakota farmer who kills himself, his wife, and his five children simply because he can't feed them(I doubt even Dylan could tell the difference between the bad lands of Nebraska from the bad lands of the Dakotas.) So the state is different, but the people and their despiration are all the same. The theme is repeated in North Country Blues, where the characters in the song show a total disability to show any emotion or feeling, except for a stupified acceptance for the futility of their plight. That's the way this album goes, from one bleak resignation to another, leaving the listener to wonder what the album would be like if Dylan had been able to shriek.
By the way, my review is based on the vinyl copy, so I don't know about the packaging of the CD. At least in the vinyl version though, there is the companion to the record with the "11 Outlined Epitaphs", which are 11 attempts by Dylan to write beat poetry. When you consider his age, he succeeds, occasionally grandly. My favorite is the first, which is transcribed verbatim:
"when will he open up his eyes"
"who him ? Doncha know? he's a crazy man
he never opens his eyes"

"but he'll surely miss the world go by"
"nah! he lives in his own world"
"my my then he really must be a crazy man"
"yeah he's a crazy man"

A few listens to this album will make you wake up, but you might never want to open your eyes again.

If you really want to give your teenage kid angst, get him the album for his eleventh birthday. That's what my parents did for me.

This album looks and feels like a John Steinbeck novel. I get somewhat depressed just looking at the cover, and the effect increases when actually listening to the album. Dylan writes some solid folk/protest tunes here. It's nowhere near Freewheelin' but it's enjoyabie, although it's my least favorite folky Dylan album. Get this if you already have Freewheelin' and Another Side Of.

Bob Dylan's third album, The Times They Are A'Changin', is probably his most openly cynical album every recorded. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Dylan's second album, features downbeat songs, as well ["Masters of War," "Hard Rain's A' Gonna Fall," "Talkin' World War III Blues," along with others], but featured some upbeat love songs, as well. The Times They Are A'Changin' is the next logical evolution upward from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan--as Freewheelin' was a haphazard folk album--serious and pessimistic but also light and funny--The Times They Are A'Changin' is focused and has a distinct purpose--illuminating the political and social problems of "the times" in an open and straightforward manner. Though there are a few love ballads on the album ["One Too Many Mornings" and "Restless Farewell"], mostly there is nothing but derisive political statements. On "With God On Our Side," Dylan sings, "Now we got weapons of the chemical dust. If fire them we're forced to, then fire them we must. One push of the button, and a shot the world wide. But you never ask questions when God's on your side." Though "With God On Our Side" is a direct shot, he's never been more upfront with his disdain than on "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." Throughout the album, Dylan says many painfully honest assertions about the United States, and I really can't believe he got away with it. He was walking on the edge, as anyone who has heard the album can attest, and it isn't surprising that he toned down his cultural antipathy on his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, though does not do away with it completely [see "My Back Pages"]. Though there are many sarcastic and negative songs on The Times, there are also a couple nice songs. For instance, "When The Ship Comes In," is one of the nicest songs he's ever recorded--lyrically the best of the album: "A song will lift as the mainsail shifts and the boat drifts on to the shoreline. And the sun will respect every face on the deck, the hour that the ship comes in." It is, in fact, the most important song this time around--actually prophesying of the hour when the times, indeed, will have changed.

I really like Dylan's music, lyrics, how he plays the guitar and harmonica, he's a great artist. This is one of the first Dylan's records i bought and still one of my favorites. His not-so-good voice sounds perfect for this songs. Hear "Only a pawn in their game" and "One too many mornings" and enjoy.

Geesh. Enough talk, already. This is a great album by a great artist finding his voice. Protest album? Why the distinction? "The Times They Are A'Changing" and the other songs are music that helped to shape a generation.

Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' sternly rejected the romance and optimism of most popular albums of the sixties. On this disc, Dylan all but put aside his streaks of wittiness and tenderness and his knack for rallying the crowds ("When the Ship Comes In" and the title anthem being exceptions) and focused his peerless song-writing skills on spiteful confrontation. Times is an album of bleak social commentary ("With God on Our Side," "Only a Pawn in their Game"), accounts of romance gone bitter ("Boots of Spanish Leather," "Restless Farewell") and tragic story-songs ("The Ballad of Hollis Brown," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol"). The album, like its more varied predecessor, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, presents a catalogue of endlessly covered classics. Times surely continued to cement Dylan's place as the best songwriter of his generation, but, take as a whole, it can be one bitter pill to swallow.