Chimes of Freedom (song) - Bob Dylan's Version

Bob Dylan's Version

"Chimes of Freedom" was written shortly after the release of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" album in early 1964 during a road trip that Dylan took across America with musician Paul Clayton, journalist Pete Karman, and road manager Victor Maimudes. It was written at about the same time as "Mr. Tambourine Man", which is similarly influenced by the symbolism of Arthur Rimbaud. There are conflicting stories about exactly when during the trip this song was written. One story is that Dylan wrote the song on a portable typewriter in the back of a car the day after visiting civil rights activists Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon in Atlanta, Georgia. However, a handwritten lyric sheet from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Toronto, Canada that was reproduced in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 indicates that this story cannot be entirely true. Dylan was in Toronto, Canada in late January and early February, before the road trip on which the song was supposedly written. So, although parts of the song may have been written on the road trip, Dylan had started working on the song earlier. The first public performance of the song took place in early 1964, either at the Civic Auditorium in Denver on February 15, or at the Berkley Community Theater in San Francisco on February 22. "Chimes of Freedom" was an important part of Dylan's live concert repertoire throughout most of 1964, although by the latter part of that year he had ceased performing it and would not perform it again until 1987, when he revived the song for concerts with the Grateful Dead and with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

The master take of the song was recorded by Dylan, with Tom Wilson producing, during the recording sessions for the Another Side of Bob Dylan album on June 9, 1964. It took seven takes before Dylan got the song right, even though it was one of only three songs that he recorded during the session that he had already performed in front of a concert audience.

Music critic Paul Williams has described the song as Dylan's Sermon on the Mount. The song is a lyrical expression of feelings evoked while watching a lightning storm. The singer and a companion are caught in a thunderstorm in mid-evening and the pair of them duck into a doorway, where they are both transfixed by one lightning flash after another. The natural phenomena of thunder and lightning appear to take on auditory and ultimately emotional aspects to the singer, with the thunder experienced as the tolling of bells and the lightning bolts appearing as chimes. Eventually, the sights and sounds in the sky become intermixed in the mind of the singer, as evidenced by the lines:

As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds,

Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing.

Over the course of the song the sun slowly rises and the lyrics can be interpreted as a proclamation of the hope that as the sky clears after a difficult night, all the world's people will rise together to proclaim their survival to the sound of the church bells.

In Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art, author Mike Marqusee notes that the song marks a transition between Dylan's earlier protest song style (a litany of the down-trodden and oppressed, in the second half of each verse) and his later more free-flowing poetic style (the fusion of images of lightning, storm and bells in the first half). In this later style, which is influenced by 19th century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, the poetry is more allusive, filled with "chains of flashing images." In this song, rather than support a specific cause as in his earlier protest songs, he finds solidarity with all people who are downtrodden or otherwise treated unjustly, including unwed mothers, the disabled, refugees, outcasts, those unfairly jailed, "the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked," and, in the final verse, "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse" and "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe." By having the chimes of freedom toll for both rebels and rakes, the song is more inclusive in its sympathies than previous protest songs, such as "The Times They Are A-Changin'", written just the prior year. After "Chimes of Freedom", Dylan's protest songs no longer depicted social reality in the black and white terms he renounces in "My Back Pages" but rather use satirical surrealism to make their points.

The assassination of U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, is one possible inspiration for Dylan starting the song. Although Dylan has denied that this is the case, he did draft a number of poems in the fall of 1963 in the aftermath of Kennedy's death and one of those poems in particular, a short six line piece, appears to contain the genesis for "Chimes of Freedom":

the colors of friday were dull

as the cathedral bells were gently burnin'

strikin for the gentle

strikin for the kind

strikin for the crippled ones

and strikin for the blind.

Kennedy was killed on a Friday, and the cathedral bells in the poem would have been the church bells heralding his death. Using a storm as a metaphor for the death of a president is similar to Shakespeare's use of a storm in King Lear. By the time Dylan wrote the first draft of "Chimes of Freedom" the following February, it contained many of the elements of this poem, except that the crippled ones and the blind were changed to "guardians and protectors of the mind." In addition, the cathedral bells had become the "chimes of freedom flashing", as seen by two lovers finding shelter in a cathedral doorway.

Besides Rimbaud's sybolism, the song is also influenced by the alliterative poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poetic vision of William Blake and the violent drama, mixed with compassion and romantic language, of William Shakespeare. In addition, Dylan had used rain as a symbol in earlier songs, such as "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall". In his memoir, folk musician Dave Van Ronk claimed that the song was influenced by an old sentimental ballad, "Chimes of Trinity" by Michael J. Fitzpatrick, which Dave Van Ronk had introduced to Dylan.

Despite the song's appeal to cover artists, it has appeared sparingly on Dylan's compilation and live albums. It was, however, included on the 1967 European compilation album Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits 2. A recording of Dylan performing the song at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival was included on the compilation album, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack. The same performance can also be seen on the 2007 DVD The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965. A version sung by Dylan and Joan Osborne appears on the original television soundtrack album, The 60's.

As of 2009, Dylan continues to perform "Chimes of Freedom" in concert, although he did not play the song live during the 23 years between late 1964 and 1987. In 1993 Dylan played the song in front of the Lincoln Memorial as part of Bill Clinton's inauguration as U.S. president.