During Bob Dylan’s tour for his third LP, The Times They Are a-Changin’, released in January 1964, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered him a half-hour special in which to promote the album. The program, Quest, was a free-form show regularly featuring different types of artists that began in 1961 under the name Q for Quest and in 1964 was in its final year.
Dylan would have certainly been amenable to the format: for his program, they proposed no interviews or talk, just him performing in a Guthriesque, log cabin setting. His “audience” consisted of stage actors in character who listened, worked, or wrote letters as he played. The program was filmed in Toronto on February 1, 1964, predating his Times tour which began later that month. The songs performed on the Quest appearance were as follows:
1. The Times They Are a-Changin’
Dylan employed this song as set opener for his live act between 1964 and 1965. Consciously written for the civil rights movement, the song garnered immense popularity through innumerable covers and cemented his reputation as a “voice of the generation,” a title he later spent years attempting to shake. However, some critics sensed some insincerity in the words.
“What is this shit, man?” friend Tony Glover asked Dylan after first reading the line, “Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call,” perhaps aware of Dylan’s contempt for these institutions. “Well, you know, it seems to be what the people like to hear,” Dylan replied (Heylin, p. 156). Dylan stopped playing the song live after 1965, having renounced the topical folk movement. He later resurrected the song with new arrangements beginning in 1978.
2. Talkin’ World War III Blues
A cut from his previous Freewheelin’ LP, this talking blues number was composed in short order largely to replace potentially libelous “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” (still, Dylan did not know what the fuss was about: “There ain't nothing wrong with this song,” he remarked to an audience in 1963).
“Talkin’ World War III Blues” has Dylan dreaming in a humorous way of the end of the world, and manages to throw in a sly dig at red baiters, earning a smile from one of the Quest actors as Dylan plays to them.
3. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
One of Dylan’s last topical songs in the purest sense, “Hattie Carroll” concerned one William Zantzinger, who was convicted of manslaughter in the death of an African-American hotel worker. As with most of his topical songs, Dylan failed in a journalistic sense to get all of the facts in the case correct, but successfully conveyed a sense of injustice at the six-month sentence and the benefits that wealth and privilege bring in the legal system.
Fellow folk singer Phil Ochs wrote of the song, “In line after poetic line Dylan brings out all the pathos and irony of a tragic crime.” The song was featured prominently by Dylan in his appearances in the next two years. “I listened to Bob’s third record with him before it was released,” Ochs wrote, “and the song that moved him most was ‘Hattie Carroll’” (Ochs 1964).
4. Girl from the North Country
A tribute to the “first girl [he] ever loved,” Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” was based on “Scarborough Fair,” a traditional ballad he learned from English folk singer Martin Carthy (Heylin, p. 120). Quest features an excellent, understated performance that was included in its entirety on the DVD release of the Martin Scorsese documentary film on Dylan, No Direction Home.
5. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall
Written as a long poem before the Cuban missile crisis, Dylan committed to paper what became “a song of terror…trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.” Amidst the lyrical imagery of an end soon to come is what Dylan noted as an allusion to “all the lies that people get told on their radios and their newspapers” in the line “When the pellets of poison are flooding the waters” (Heylin, p. 98).
An epic song, with a structural form borrowed from the traditional ballad “Lord Randall,” “Hard Rain” cemented Dylan’s reputation as a songwriter and poet. It also proved captivating to audiences even with a runtime of seven minutes (sped up by Dylan on Quest to six).
6. Restless Farewell
Dylan’s farewell ode to his former self was originally titled “Bob Dylan’s Restless Epitaph” and inspired by an encounter with a Newsweek reporter that only served to only increase his disdain for the interview process. “You’d be honest with that person,” he later said. “Then you’d see the article and it would all be changed around…You really felt like you were suckered or something” (Heylin, p. 170).
Using the traditional Irish song, “The Parting Glass,” as a basis, Dylan quickly recorded “Restless Farewell” soon after writing it. His Quest performance marked the first time it had been played outside of the studio, showcasing a more thoughtful mood and little of the rage that had accompanied its composition.
Dylan’s appearance on Quest provides the closest approximation available of what his early performances in Greenwich Village would have looked and sounded like, sampling in equal number songs from The Times They Are a-Changin’ as well as his highly influential second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
In venues such as Gerde’s Folk City and the Gaslight, Dylan perfected his craft and wrote several of the songs for which he is best remembered. His performances on Quest are nearly flawless, capturing a moment in which playing these songs were as natural to him as breathing. The footage has proved indispensable for documentaries presenting early Dylan, such as The Beatles Anthology and No Direction Home, both of which have sampled from Quest.
Further Reading
Heylin, Clinton. Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 (Chicago Review Press, 2009).
Ochs, Phil. “The Art of Bob Dylan’s ‘Hattie Carroll.’” Broadside magazine (#48). July 20, 1964.
TVArchive.ca, “Quest.”
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