Links to Song: Chimes of Freedom
What you should know about this song: This six-verse “masterpiece”, as some have called it, supposedly evolved from a short poem Dylan had written about John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It was recorded a year later for the album Another Side of Bob Dylan. Apparently, it took Dylan six different tries to record this song right in the studio. I guess all of those lines proved hard to keep straight (Rolling Stone Magazine, Issue 1131).
“Great tunes like ‘Chimes of Freedom’ taught me a whole lot of what songwriting essentially is about: a three-way marriage of melody, harmonic progression and lyrics.” – Bob Weir, Grateful Dead
