Bob Dylan will celebrate Record Store Day on Black Friday with a reissue of his classic 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan retitled The Original Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, since it features four songs that were omitted from the release of the singer-songwriter’s acclaimed second album.
Among those songs is “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a controversial track that Dylan hoped to perform during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Showon May 12, 1963, just prior to the release of his second album.
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In a Saturday rehearsal, Dylan performed the song to the delight of the legendary TV host and the show’s producer. However, during a dress rehearsal the following day, Dylan was informed he couldn’t play the song on the show because a CBS executive feared the John Birch Society would sue the network for defamation.
Rather than performing another song, Dylan walked off the show that helped launch Elvis Presley, and later the Beatles, to superstardom. The controversy prompted Columbia Records to pull the song from the album, making the first copies of the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan instant collector’s items.
In the lyrics of the iconic protest song, the narrator worries that “Reds,” or communists, are taking over the United States, so he joins the anti-communist organization known as the John Birch Society.
In the song, Dylan’s narrator implies Betsy Ross is a communist for adding red stripes to the American flag and later claims that President Eisenhower is “a Russian spy,” as are “Lincoln, and Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.”
What Other Changes Were Made to the Album?
After Dylan was forced to pull “Talkin’ John Birch Society Paranoid Blues” from the album, he also reconsidered some other songs, "Let Me Die in My Footsteps", "Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie" and "Rocks and Gravel,” which he considered too “old fashioned,” in more in line with his earlier material than his current style. In their place, the songs "Masters of War", "Girl from the North Country", "Bob Dylan's Dream" and "Talkin' World War III Blues" were added to the album.
The Record Store Day Black Friday release of The Original Freewheelin' Bob Dylan restores the album’s tracklisting as it was originally intended. As the announcement about the release states, the RSD release “celebrates the album as Bob Dylan intended, before the suits at Columbia Records censored some of the tracks. Today we are less paranoid about offending members of the John Birch Society.”
That’s not the only Dylan-related gem set for RSD Black Friday. A 7-inch of Dylan’s “Master of War,” recorded at famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s apartment in 1962, will also be released. The B-side features audio of a conversation Dylan and Lomax had following the recording of the classic song.
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