Perhaps the singer sees himself moving on from them. These forays into rock & roll and pop music alienated a vocal segment of his fan base. On Bringing It All Back Home (1965) alone, half of the songs feature - for the first time - a band of accompanying musicians and the album is a roughly half electric/half acoustic affair. Of course, there may be a good amount of Bob Dylan himself in Baby Blue, the singer certainly undergoing great artistic and personal change in the mid-'60s. He was a friend or possibly just a hanger-on of Dylan's (and Leonard Cohen's as well) from the early days in New York's Greenwich Village folk scene, and is pictured in the cover photo of Dylan and the Band's Basement Tapes (in the trench coat), appears in the Dylan film Renaldo and Clara (1978), and is speculated to have been the subject of Joni Mitchell's "Blue." Another person mentioned when fans discuss "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" is Paul Clayton, a folksinger who had a fair amount of influence on Dylan. But some speculation places the focus sharply on a heavily Dylan-influenced singer/songwriter named David Blue, who pops up, Zelig-like, in name or visage in a variety of pop music moments. So who is Baby Blue? Well, like most of Dylan's subjects, the character is probably an amalgam of personalities in his orbit. Either way, Baby Blue seems as out of touch as Dylan's other subjects. But unlike "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall" and the songs alluded to above, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" seems to be about change on a more personal level. Jones, Baby Blue better stand aside while the "carpet, too, is moving under" him/her. Dylan seemed to be continuing his general observation that the "times they are a-changin'," and, like Mr. But if Dylan was playing with Symbolism with a capital "S," he was also utilizing symbolism with a lower-case "s" "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" features a wide cast of characters: "your orphan with his gun," "the empty-handed painter," "your seasick sailors," etc. And there is something simply heartbreaking, allusively so, about the chorus line "And it's all over now, Baby Blue." What is all over? Who is the singer singing to, as if to a child? Is it meant as a lullaby or as a wake-up call? Bob Dylan seems under the influence of Symbolist poets here, as if Rimbaud was being channeled through Woody Guthrie - which was quite a remarkable accomplishment in pop music in 1965 at the end of the day, the poem/song is self-justifying and its meaning self-contained, and ultimately as fleeting as the complex emotions evoked by music. The folk guitar chord changes and somber melody alone make listeners prick up their ears to listen. If "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" had no other lyrics of worth besides the chorus, it would still be a beautiful song.
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