BEST OF THE BAND

Music / Songs / Tears of Rage

Tears of Rage

Opening track on Music from Big Pink, and the first song Bob Dylan ever properly co-wrote with someone else. In the summer of 1967, Dylan came downstairs at Big Pink with a typed page of lyrics and asked Richard Manuel, who was noodling at the piano, if he had any music that might fit. Manuel worked out the chords and melody on the spot, by his own account not entirely sure what the words meant, and played it back for Dylan, who thought it sounded right.

The lyric is a father's lament, addressed to a daughter who has rejected everything he raised her to value: "We carried you in our arms on Independence Day," it begins, "and now you'd throw us all aside." Dylan has offered more than one account of where it came from, at one point citing China's first hydrogen bomb test as an impetus, elsewhere describing the songs from that summer as pulled from whatever was on television rather than anything autobiographical. Critics have read it as generational betrayal, a commentary on Vietnam, even a kind of Kaddish for a nation. Dylan himself has never settled the question.

Dylan and the Band recorded it first that summer in the Big Pink basement, with Dylan on lead vocal, a version that stayed unreleased and bootlegged for years until the official Basement Tapes album in 1975. A year earlier, the Band had already cut their own version for their debut, slowing the tempo down and moving Manuel to lead vocal, with Danko's harmonies underneath. Levon Helm later said Manuel gave one of the best vocal performances of his life on the track. Rather than bury a song this heavy in the middle of a side, the Band chose to open their entire debut album with it, a statement of intent from a group that had spent two years being introduced as somebody else's backing band.

Notable versions