ROCKS AND GRAVELS
The main reason I got the John Birch Society Blues album is due to the history of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Early pressings of the album included “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” and three other wonderful songs that I got to know on bootleg albums as I bought them: “Gambling Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand”, “Rocks and Gravels” and “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”. The fact that the latter song is omitted was even mentioned on the album’s liner notes. When the John Birch Society song became controversial, Columbia Records pulled back the albums and reissued them with the familiar song set that we know today. Those first few albums with the alternate songs are worth a fortune today: A 1998 record pricing catalogue that I have called Records values them at $10,000 to $15,000 in mono and $15,000 to $20,000 in stereo (though the catalogue recommends actually playing the album before ponying up that kind of cash).
(April 2012)
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Some of the very early pressings of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that are now extremely rare included four sterling Bob Dylan songs that were later left off the album: “Rocks and Gravels”, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”, “Gambling Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand”, and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”. Two of these four songs, under the names “Ride Willie Ride” and “John Birch Society Blues” are included on John Birch Society Blues. The latter song is an hilarious but quite harsh take on the anti-communist group called the John Birch Society that has nice things to say about Adolf Hitler and neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. One verse goes: “Well, I investigated all the books in the library / Ninety percent of them have gotta be thrown away / I investigated all the people that I knowed / Ninety-eight percent of them have gotta go / The other two percent are fellow Birchers / Just like me.”
“Ride Willie Ride” is an entertaining if outlandish tale of the adventures of a superman gambler who is eventually shot dead while holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights – the “dead man’s hand” made famous when Wild Bill Hickok was killed while holding those cards.
(September 2017)
