Tears of Rage

The song was first recorded in rehearsal sessions at the Band's upstate New York residence, Big Pink, in 1967, with Dylan on lead vocal and the Band backing him. These sessions were not officially released until the 1975 double-album The Basement Tapes, although they were widely bootlegged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The first official release of the song was as the first track on the Band's debut, 1968 album Music from Big Pink, with Manuel on vocal. According to Levon Helm, "Richard sang one of the best performances of his life."[1]

In a song review for AllMusic, Bill Janovitz compared the two versions: "The Dylan version is a gentle folk-soul reading; he and the Band are still feeling their way through the phrasing and the arrangement. By the time the Band recorded it, they had slowed it down to a passionate, gospel-informed, New Orleans-style lament."[2]

Andy Gill likens the song to King Lear's soliloquy on the blasted heath in Shakespeare's tragedy: "Wracked with bitterness and regret, its narrator reflects upon promises broken and truths ignored, on how greed has poisoned the well of best intentions, and how even daughters can deny their father's wishes." He suggests that Dylan is linking the anguish of Lear’s soliloquy to the divisions in American society apparent in 1967, as the Vietnam War escalated: "In its narrowest and most contemporaneous interpretation, the song could be the first to register the pain of betrayal felt by many of America’s Vietnam war veterans ... In a wider interpretation [it] harks back to what anti-war protesters and critics of American materialism in general felt was a more fundamental betrayal of the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights."[3]

A strong Biblical theme runs through the song, according to Sid Griffin, who also notes that "life is brief" is a recurrent message in the Old Testament books Psalms and Isaiah. As a father, Dylan realizes now that "no broken heart hurts more than the broken heart of a distraught parent." Griffin calls the four minutes of this song "as representative of community, ageless truths and the unbreakable bonds of family as anything in The Band's canon—or anyone else's canon."[4]

Greil Marcus suggests that the "famous beginning"—"We carried you/In our arms/On Independence Day"—evokes a naming ceremony not just for a child but also for a whole nation. He writes that "in Dylan's singing—an ache from deep in the chest, a voice thick with care in the first recording of the song—the song is from the start a sermon and an elegy, a Kaddish."[5]

• Gill, Andy (1998). Classic Bob Dylan: My Back Pages. Carlton. ISBN 1-85868-599-0.
• Griffin, Sid (2007). Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes. Jawbone. ISBN 978-1-906002-05-3.
• Marcus, Greil (1975). The Basement Tapes (CD booklet). New York: Columbia Records.
• Marcus, Greil (1997). Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. Picador. ISBN 0-330-33624-X.

• "Tears of Rage" at bobdylan.com