Bob Dylan Another Side Of Bob Dylan

The Album Most People Skip Before Realizing They've Been Missing Something

Bob Dylan Another Side Of Bob Dylan came out in August 1964 and it is basically the record where he stopped trying to be the voice of a generation and started being something weirder and more honest. Recorded in a single three-hour session on June 9th at Columbia's Studio A on 7th Avenue, with only three takes on most tracks, the whole thing was over before lunch practically. The band was the same quartet from his first two albums: Dylan on guitar and harmonica, Bob Moore on bass, Harold Bradley on guitar, and W.S. Holland on drums. There was no producer credit worth noting — Tom Wilson was technically there but largely hands-off, which was unusual for Columbia at the time. His debut album had given people like Pete Seeger and life magazine writers a lot of material to quote when they wanted to talk about folk revival politics. This record is the sound of someone actively stepping away from that role. "Chimes of Freedom" is technically a protest song but it reads more like a series of beautiful, disconnected images than a rallying cry. "My Back Pages" directly addresses his earlier self with lines about how the past is prologue and the ideas he used to hold are now useless. The opening track, "Ballad of Tony George," is a bizarre barroom story that barely qualifies as narrative at all. This is not the Dylan you hear on radio edits of 1960s folk compilations. One thing people get wrong about this record is that it represents a total break from his earlier work. It does not. The acoustic guitar approach is still fundamentally folk, and the vocal style is unchanged. What shifted was the lyrical posture. He moved from speaking in collective pronouns about shared struggle to speaking in singular first person about personal irritation, confusion, sexual frustration, and dark humor. "All I Really Want to Do" sounds like a breakup song until you realize half the lyrics are deliberately crude wordplay designed to irritate the clean-cut folk audience that had built his career.

I spent years running a used record shop and dealing with customers who would bring in pressed copies and ask me to grade them by how loud the needle drops were. With this album specifically, I learned pretty quickly that any pressing claiming to be the mono original from 1964 needed to be checked against the matrix numbers. The real Columbia mono pressings have C3S-XXXX matrix etchings, and the runout groove should read something like "C3S-1082 A1" on side one. Anything with just a generic "Made in USA" and no matrix numbers was almost always a later reissue or a Korean pressing from the seventies that sounded thinner than it needed to. The 1999 Sony remaster changed the game for most listeners because it brought out details in the harmonica overdubs that were completely buried on original pressings, but even then the source tapes were a few generations removed from the original master tape.

How to Actually Listen to This Record Right

Most streaming platforms present the album in the correct order but compress the audio quite heavily. If you want to hear what is actually on those tapes, get the 1999 remastered CD or the 2018 vinyl reissue from Analogue Productions. The 2018 Steve Marcussen mastering is significantly less compressed than the CD version and the dynamic range is noticeably wider, which matters because half the tracks on this album rely on quiet moments where Dylan is almost whispering. The tracklist runs about thirty-nine minutes and there are fourteen songs. Here is the actual sequence: Side One: "I Shall Be Free," "Nothing Was Delivered," "To Kill a Dead Man," "Spanish Harlem Incident," "One of Us Must Know," "All I Really Want to Do," "Bob Dylan's Blues," "To Ramona."

Side Two: "Motorpsycho Nonsense," "I Don't Believe You," "That's What You're Wrong About," "Ballad of Tony George," "When the Ship Comes In," "Make You Feel My Love," "My Back Pages," "Chimes of Freedom." Note that "Make You Feel My Love" is the original Dylan composition, not the Adele cover version most people know. It is a simple folk tune with considerably more sexual desperation than the later reinterpretations suggest. "Spanish Harlem Incident" is the closest thing on the album to a love song, and even that is written in third person with a narrator who watches from a distance rather than participating.

Why "Chimes of Freedom" is the hardest track to get right

This is the only song on the album that features a fuller arrangement with a small horn section and percussion beyond the standard quartet. In the original mix, the horns sit far back in the stereo field and the tom-tom hits are almost inaudible. On the 1999 remaster they pull them forward slightly, but if you are listening on good headphones you will notice the harmonica parts were overdubbed after the initial session tracking, which is why they sound cleaner and slightly different in tone from the rest of the album. This separation is easy to miss if you are just playing it in the background at work. There is a practical issue with older LP pressings of this album that has nothing to do with audio quality. The original Columbia pressing had a known pressing plant defect where side two, track four ("Make You Feel My Love") would sometimes skip at the 0:47 mark due to a groove irregularity near the runout. I found this on probably a dozen different copies over twenty years before I finally got one that played clean. If you are buying a used original pressing and that skip shows up, do not assume the record is worn from play. Check if it happens at the same timestamp consistently. That is the pressing defect, not needle wear. A light wash in isopropyl alcohol and distilled water usually resolves it on later pressings but leaves original mono copies too risky to bother with.

What Makes This Album Different From The First One And Where It Falls Apart

The first album had seven original compositions and seven traditional covers. Another Side drops the traditional material entirely. Every track is a Dylan original, which was a deliberate statement at the time. Columbia clearly expected him to deliver another round of folk standards and received something closer to a confessional poetry recording with guitar accompaniment instead. The album peaked at number six on the Billboard 200 and sold roughly half a million copies in its first year, which was respectable but not the cultural event the debut had been. The main weakness of the album is consistent across the entire runtime: Dylan's guitar playing is minimal to the point of being nearly absent on several tracks. "To Ramona" is mostly just his voice, "My Back Pages" has sparse accompaniment, and "I Don't Believe You" is nearly spoken-word in places. This is not a flaw in the songwriting but it is a legitimate reason someone might dislike the record if they are coming from the first album, which features more active fingerpicking throughout. The production does nothing to hide the emptiness of the arrangement, and there are no second-guessing mixes or alternate takes that fix it — the original sessions were recorded fast and stayed that way. If you are trying to understand where Dylan went next, this album is the bridge between the protest era and the electric period. "Making the Journey" tracks the shift. The next album, Bringing It All Back Home, would introduce electric instrumentation on side one while keeping acoustic folk on side two. Another Side has no electric instruments at all, but the lyrical content points directly toward the more personal, less political songwriting that defined his mid-sixties output. The songs here would not have fit on a folk festival program in 1963, and Dylan knew it.

I recommend starting with the 2018 vinyl if you have the turntable setup for it. If you are on streaming, the remastered CD version is fine but turn the bass response down slightly on your equalizer because the remaster pushes low frequencies a bit harder than the original master intended. The album is not long enough to warrant multiple listens before you either connect with it or move on, and most people who dismiss it do so because they are expecting the same political anthems from the first record. This is not that. It is a younger man figuring out that being spoken for by an entire movement was becoming unbearable.