A little late with this edition to the irregular “Song on Sunday” series, but who’s watching the clock?

Just about any attentive and fair listener to Dylan’s music would probably agree that his songs have generally been more about asking questions, as opposed to providing answers. Yet, merely by the act of asking certain questions (if you’re sincerely asking the question in question) you are in effect arriving at an answer sometimes. Or, as Dylan himself said in one of his album-back-cover poems:

every question
if it’s a truthful question
can be answered by askin’ it

The song Whatcha Gonna Do (commonly characterized as an outtake of Dylan’s 1963 Freewheelin’ album) is basically nothing but a series of questions. As with a lot of the questions that were flowing from the young songwriter’s pen at that stage of his life, they have a timeless resonance, even if this song doesn’t scale the heights of Blowin’ in the Wind and isn’t heard today other than on collectors’ recordings (like this one).

When you consider that Dylan was the 22 year old from Hibbing, Minnesota that he was—and a young Jewish kid in the seething Greenwich Village scene of that day—the questions he was asking at the time are all the more striking, I think.

Tell me what you’re gonna do
When the devil calls your cards.
Tell me what you’re gonna do
When the devil calls your cards.
Tell me what you’re gonna do
When the devil calls your cards.
O Lord, O Lord,
What shall you do?

Tell me what you’re gonna do
When your water turns to wine.
Tell me what you’re gonna do
When your water turns to wine.
Tell me what you’re gonna do
When your water turns to wine.
O Lord, O Lord,
What should you do?

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