The Times They Are A-Changin' ... Again
How Bob Dylan's generational anthem sounds at the outset of 2025
At the 1963 March on Washington, the 22-year-old Bob Dylan sang before the largest crowd he had ever seen.
A quarter of a million civil rights protesters gathered on the Washington Mall, where they would hear Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.
Dylan’s songs that day in August included A Pawn in Their Game, about the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and, with Joan Baez, When the Ship Comes In, a ballad that prophesies a day when the chains of bondage will be broken.
Civil rights marches and anti-war protests were the backdrop for one of Dylan’s most famous early songs, written a few months after the Washington march. It became a generational anthem and the title of his third album: The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Its lyrics about the rise of a new order and the coming extinction of old ways make it seem endlessly relevant to each generation that finds its voice and makes its impact: Gen Z could adopt it, just as the Boomers did. But ultimately it is a song that is so rooted in its time and place that it resists reinvention.
The times are indeed changing in January, 2025, but not in a way that anyone could possibly have envisioned way back then.
Early Dylan
As a teenager in Minnesota, Dylan had been inspired by the songs of social-justice crusader Woody Guthrie. In early-1960s Greenwich Village, he soaked up other influences. His girlfriend, the artist and activist Suze Rotolo, took him to a production of The Threepenny Opera, from which the song Pirate Jenny, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, made a lasting impression.
So did record producer John Hammond’s suggestion that he listen to Robert Johnson’s album King of the Delta Blues and Rotolo’s mention of French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
The poetry “went right along with Johnson’s dark night of the soul and Woody’s hopped-up union meeting sermons and the ‘Pirate Jenny’ framework,” Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles. “Everything was in transition and I was standing in the gateway. Soon I’d step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up.”
In a period of “less than three years,” Peter Dreier noted, “Dylan wrote about two dozen politically oriented songs whose creative lyrics and imagery reflected the changing mood of the postwar baby-boom generation and the urgency of the civil rights and antiwar movements. … Yet Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the ‘protest’ label. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent an entire generation.”
Dylan’s attitude disappointed Baez, who toured and had a romantic relationship with him.
“I was feeling this political pull very, very strongly and I was thinking what the two of us could do together,” Baez recalled in the documentary No Direction Home. “He wanted to do his music and I wanted to do all this other stuff.”
She credited Dylan for writing “the greatest songs in our anti-war, civil rights arsenals” but noted that he would always disappoint the activists. For “30 some years, whenever I would go to a march or a sit-in or a lie-in or a be-in or a jail-in, people would say, ‘is Bob coming?’” He never showed up.
The order is rapidly fadin’
Yet, for a while after the Washington march, Dylan came back to political themes. That fall, he noodled around with a new song that directly confronted the authority figures in Washington and at home.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ is performed by Timothée Chalamet, playing Dylan, in the new movie A Complete Unknown.
Dylan didn’t sing it at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, as the movie would have us believe, but he did perform it frequently. It is one of his topical early songs that seems perennially fresh, particularly when major political and social changes are blowing in the wind, as they are at the start of 2025.
The ending of Joe Biden’s presidency, the impending inauguration of Donald Trump for a second term, the passing of former President Jimmy Carter, all evoke Dylan’s line, As the present now / Will later be past / The order is rapidly fadin'.
When he wrote the song, Jimmy Carter was 39, Biden was 20 and Trump was 17. Remarkably, they remained active public figures into the 2020s. But they are losing their grasp of power.
Even though Trump will be one of the oldest presidents in American history, his administration is “historically young,” according to Gabe Fleisher. “At 40, JD Vance is set to become the third-youngest vice president in history.” And Trump’s top Cabinet picks, including controversial choices like Pete Hegseth are younger than recent picks for those jobs.
Rachel Janfaza, an astute observer of Gen Z, included “gerontocracy” on her list of things that are “out” for 2025, along with celebrity endorsements and “refusing to talk with people with a different (or controversial) opinion.” What will be “in” this year? Campus free speech clubs, digital cameras, “positive masculinity,” women’s sports, Pokémon cards and more.
The fifth time around
To the “senators, congressmen,” Dylan declared:
“Don’t stand in the doorway / Don’t block up the hall / For he that gets hurt / Will be he who has stalled”
To the “mothers and fathers”:
“And don't criticize / What you can't understand / Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command / Your old road is rapidly agin' / Please get out of the new one / If you can't lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin' “
The literary scholar Christopher Ricks has pointed out that “children of the sixties still thrill to The Times They Are A-Changin’, kidding themselves that what the song proclaimed was that at last the times were about to cease to change…Was not enlightenment dawning, once and for all?”
“For decades now when Dylan sings, ‘Your sons and your daughters / are beyond your command,’” Ricks wrote, “he sings this inescapably with the accents not of a son, no longer perhaps mostly of a parent, but with grandparental amplitude….
Later, the song could be interpreted as telling “"ex-hippie parents” to “accept that their children looked like becoming yuppies,” or eventually, Republicans, Ricks wrote in his 2004 book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin. As Ricks added, “The Fourth Times Around Are A-Changin’.”
And by now it’s the fifth time.
Awkward
Dylan himself has alluded to the time-sensitivity and potential awkwardness of the song.
He told Cameron Crowe, “I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.”
Then President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22. The next day, Dylan opened his concert with The Times They Are A-Changin’.
He would later tell his biographer, Anthony Scaduto, “I thought, ‘Wow, how can I open with that song? I’ll get rocks thrown at me.’ But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. I know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country and they were applauding the song. And I couldn’t understand why they were clapping, or why I wrote the song. I couldn’t understand anything. For me, it was just insane.”
Newport
The climax of A Complete Unknown is a depiction of the much-disputed 1965 Newport Jazz Festival performance where Dylan went electric with Maggie’s Farm, and some audience members objected.
From eyewitness accounts it’s not clear that it was primarily the singer’s abrupt shift away from acoustic instruments rather than the volume level and sound reproduction, or the brevity of Dylan’s set, that really riled up the crowd.
Of course, 60 years on, the controversy over Dylan opting to change things up in a bid for rock-and-roll stardom seems quaint. Faced with a choice between pursuing a modest and even lonely coffeehouse career as a traditional folksinger or playing to huge crowds while surrounded by a supportive band, Dylan made the unsurprising call.
“The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles.
He also made the conventional (and commercially rewarding) decision to mostly veer away from writing protest songs.
Bob Dylan’s political comments might have been missed in the 1970s, but he’s hardly the political commentator we want to hear from in 2025.
“The old road is rapidly agin’” — and there is always a new generation that has a right (and a need) to be heard.
My wife, Wink, and I, saw Dylan and Baez in New Haven, 1964. Group of dopey -- and well-oiled -- Yalies in back of us made a ruckus all the way through. The two skinny kids on stage prevailed, however, and we (skinny kids, ourselves, at that point) were fortunate to have been among members of an otherwise appreciative audience. Thanks for impressive piece, Rich. "Complete Unknown" next on our list.
Thank you for sharing, Richard!