You may recall that in “Rolling Stone” we have that aggressive rising chord line while the melody stays in the same place “Once upon a time you looked so fine…” Here the music and the message is gentler, less vindictive, but still clear. OK he is not totally vindictive, because he wants her to “Strike another match, go start anew” and get on with the rest of her life but then that is what we would expect with such a gentle lilting song. He is even pulling the carpet away from her. Yet we only have to consider the lyrics for a moment and forget the music, and the similarities are overwhelming.Īnd just in case she ain’t got the message, he’s not messing. He’s saying (on side one of the original album) hello to rock.īut Dylan here does say farewell in no uncertain terms, for the song starts “You must leave now”, just as in the previous ending song on an album he said “Go away from my window.” It seems that when Dylan tells you to go, you are told in no uncertain terms.īut the symbols, similes and metaphors are so rich from the start that this is not just “get out.” The images exist alongside those of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but the tone is softer yet the rejection is as strong. ‘When first I met my baby, she said how do you do, she looked into my eyes and said,my name is Baby Blue.’ It is a statement that has made some commentators feel that Dylan is saying farewell to folk, and moving into rock. Acoustic guitar, harmonica and bass.ĭylan himself cites Gene Vincent’s Baby Blue as a source of inspiration… The accompaniment is faultless and exquisite.
In traditional folk it would be a minor chord. But the sequence, like the melody is conventional throughout save that the sub-mediant is heard as a major. The song is unusual for Dylan, with the lyrics starting on the dominant (V) chord, and descending both in the melody and the sequence. Not enough that one side of one album should contain four astonishing, magnificent songs of this magnitude, but that they should all be recorded on one day is just beyond belief. Utterly amazingly it seems that Baby Blue, Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden and It’s Alright Ma, were all recorded on the same day. Restless Farewell, It Ain’t Me Babe, and now It’s all over, written early in 1965. This is Bob Dylan’s third farewell ending, in as many albums. You can’t go round doing this sort of thing – at least not here. It still seems about right:Īll these people you have messed about with, everyone you have played with, they are all lost too. In the end I took a line from this review that I wrote in 2013. This review updated July 2018, with a few changed comments, a copy of the song that Dylan cited as his source, and a performance of the song found by Pat Sludden, which really takes into somewhere completely different.Īnd I wanted to add something to the review anyway, as I was asked to come up with a simple summary of this song.
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