FEATURE:
On the Road Again
Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home at Sixty
_________
ON 22nd March…
PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Adams/Redferns
it will be sixty years since Bob Dylan’s fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home, was released. It was the first of a trio of album that shifted the perception of Dylan as a Folk artist. One of the most important releases of his career. It is my favourite of all of his albums. I wanted to explore Bringing It All Back Home ahead of its sixtieth anniversary. Last year, MOJO revisited Bringing It All Back Home. An artist very much in the spotlight now – because of the film, A Complete Unknown -, we look back sixty years to the release of a seminal release from one of the all-time great songwriters:
“SO hallowed in the pantheon is the first of what turned out to be Dylan’s mid-’60s holy trinity of ‘electric’ albums that hindsight confers upon it a sense of awesome inevitability. At the time, of course, not so.
Though Dylan’s two 1964 albums had not sold quite as well as 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, that year he was spinning in a vortex of fame whipped even faster by his association with the British Invasion. In August, he’d turned The Beatles onto weed in a New York hotel room – while The Animals, whose House Of The Rising Sun was a US Number 1 in September, both nodded to Dylan’s 1962 debut album version and rocked it up a few notches. This mutual admiration further inflamed the controversy surrounding Dylan as a folk-protest apostate, forsaking civil rights and peace for creative self-exploration and supercool celebrity. No American musician was more divisive.
His folk-protest movement detractors were not wrong. No roundhead, Dylan was a footloose 23-year-old surrounded by acolytes and juggling girlfriends – publicly folk-protest queen Joan Baez and behind the scenes Sara Lownds, whom he’d marry in November 1965. Plus, there was a flirty friendship with his manager Albert Grossman’s wife Sally, to be pictured chic and mysterious on Bringing It All Back Home’s cover. Dylan was also hanging out with Allen Ginsberg and his fellow Beats [pictured above with Robbie Robertson and Michael McClure], his own poetic ambition further fired when John Lennon’s book of verse, In His Own Write, became an instant bestseller.
On January 13, 1965, Dylan returned to New York’s Columbia Studios with 18 songs written from within the whirlwind, energised by media overload and lubricated by red wine, weed, speed and acid, then still legal. What would become perhaps his most famous and beloved song, Mr Tambourine Man, had been awaiting its moment for 10 months. That moment was, for Dylan, the decision to change gears and light out for new territory. Here and throughout the album, images of movement (“swirling”, “wandering”, “dancing”, “spinning”, “swinging”, “skipping”, “waving”) contrast favourably with images of stasis (“weariness”, “fences”, “frozen”, “haunted”).
That personal moment exactly harmonised with a socio-cultural moment, a radical new mood being born where a critical mass of young Americans – now facing the draft to fight in Vietnam, while at home Southern reactionaries fought on to deny Black Americans equal rights – began to challenge the status quo of their parents’ flag-waving conservativism and materialism. As Dylan sang on Subterranean Homesick Blues, the album’s hilariously paranoid single and opening number inspired by Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business and foreshadowing rap, “You don’t need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows.”
Rock’n’roll, as radically rebooted by the British Invasion and soul explosion, soundtracked this generational change in appearance, lifestyle and attitude. Though the just-murdered Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come and Martha And The Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street came close, no record had quite yet crystallised this moment as a clarion call; it just needed someone to hit the nail head-on.
For months his shrewd and savvy producer Tom Wilson had been coaxing Dylan to rock – with “some background,” he told Grossman, “you might have a white Ray Charles with a message” – and that summer of ’64 the bard had rented an electric guitar, as if still not quite yet decided to relive his teenage ambition to rock’n’roll. His friend John Hammond Jr’s album of Chicago electric blues covers So Many Roads nudged him further, and the leap finally came, after a day recording solo in Columbia’s New York Studios in January 1965, when Wilson recruits including guitarist Bruce Langhorne, pianist Paul Griffin and drummer Bobby Gregg – possessing, in Wilson’s words, “the skill of session musicians and the outlook of young rock’n’rollers” – set up and plugged in.
“Bob would launch into a song. No warning, no explanation, no nothing. We’d just leap in and try to keep up,” Langhorne remembered. “He didn’t try to arrange people’s performances. It was spontaneous, almost telepathic. We had to catch the moment.”
It worked, the moment often caught on the first take, and even the solo acoustic songs bunched on Side 2 ring with fierce conviction, particularly It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), machine-gunning us with a critique of societal phoniness of such epigrammatic invention and intensity that its writer counts it among his supreme tours de force.
Elsewhere the songs are comic, romantic and, in the last song It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, anti-romantic, its prettily bittersweet melody and manifest influence of such French Symbolist poets as Rimbaud and Verlaine perfuming a conclusive dumping.
Side 1 hosts the romances – She Belongs To Me, Love Minus Zero/No Limit (a cryptic conceit in the form of a mathematical equation where ‘no limit’ is ∞) – and, in addition to Subterranean Homesick Blues, the comedies Maggie’s Farm, Outlaw Blues, On The Road Again and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, picaresques that tumble our jester-minstrel through the preposterous grotesqueries of exploitative dead-end jobs, in-laws and, finally, mythic America itself.
In even the least quotable song, Outlaw Blues – the beautiful I’ll Keep It With Mine was one of several better songs he decided to hold back “for next time”, as Dylan told photographer Daniel Kramer, worrying, “How do I know I can do it again?” – there are ringing lines, and the whole album boasts zingers still funny after six decades and verse upon verse of poetic resonance and beauty; there can be few more gem-encrusted artefacts in the English language since Shakespeare. Plus, it rocks. Finding its moment, Bringing It All Back Home was not just a must-hear hit but an utter game-changer”.
I want to move to a 2020 feature from Albumism. They marked fifty-five years of a classic. Many consider Bringing It Back Home to be Bob Dylan’s greatest album. Whilst there is stiff competition, there is so much to admire on the album. I do hope there are sixtieth anniversry celebrations for Bob Dylan’s majestic fifth studio album:
“Dylan opens Bringing It All Back Home moving hard, fast, and uncompromising with “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The song was not only unlike anything that Dylan or anyone else had released before, it’s also lyrically as densely packed as any rock song released before or since, as Dylan says more in two-and-a-half minutes than most artists say in songs triple the length.
Dylan’s staccato delivery sticks out on “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” sounding very much like a proto-rap song even 55 years later, though apparently it was influenced by Chuck Berry’s “No More Monkey Business.” He uses it to provide nuggets of pure wisdom, like “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift” and “Don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters.” Other lines from the song inspired political movements and revolutionaries (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows).
Dylan continues to incorporate a few love songs into his repertoire, with “She Belongs To Me” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” The former is a song of reverence, with Dylan describing how he has placed himself under the thrall of his true love. During the latter, he envisions what he seeks in an ideal partner, putting together a portrait of a woman with freedom of spirit and a deep well of wisdom and understanding.
“On the Road Again” is one of Dylan’s patented absurdist entries, at home on albums like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and Another Side of Bob Dylan. Dylan finds himself in the midst of violently disgruntled monkeys, derby-wearing milkmen, and thieving uncles, pondering why he bothers hanging around. The song was apparently a commentary on the often too cute by half Greenwich Village neighborhood of which he was a frequent visitor and resident.
Dylan veers into the even more absurd with “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” The song is a warped, satirical take on Chris Columbus’ “discovery” of America, but with Dylan playing first mate Kidd to “Captain Arab” and his crew. Here, the America he “discovers” looks a lot like contemporary society, with over-zealous police officers and Guernsey cows. I still think that funny Dylan is underrated, and this song has some flashes of brilliance. There’s some painfully labored puns (involving both Crêpes Suzette and the Beatles), but there’s also some of Dylan’s wry wit and solid observational humor.
The album’s second side shifts focus and approach. For one, it’s largely acoustic, giving longtime Dylan fans some semblance of familiarity, at least in terms of sound. It begins with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” one of the Dylan’s most iconic songs. “Mr. Tambourine Man” was originally intended to appear of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Dylan had recorded a version of the song and subsequently scrapped it (the take apparently wasn’t very good). He revisited the composition during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions months later, emerging with a piece of transformative music.
Like many of Dylan’s greatest songs, the “meaning” of “Mr. Tambourine Man” continues to be a source of debate. Because it was the mid 1960s, many interpreted it as Dylan’s dedication to the power of LSD. For what it’s worth, Dylan has always maintained that it’s just about Bruce Langhorne, one of his longtime collaborators, and an impossibly large tambourine that he used during one studio session. “It was like, really big,” Dylan said in the liner notes of his Biograph boxset. “It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind.”
“Gates of Eden” seems to defy this analysis. Dylan fills the song with surreal religious allusions, which makes the epic extremely difficult to decipher. Occasionally “Gates of Eden” seems to evoke the mood behind something like “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall,” as Dylan, with great gravity and seriousness, expounds upon grey flannel dwarves and Aladdin on his lamp. It’s one of the first instances where what Dylan is singing about isn’t as important as it makes the listener feel.
“It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is one of Dylan’s most perfect compositions, and, in my personal opinion, likely the best song that he ever recorded. Though much has been said about what some consider Dylan’s move away from protest music, “It’s Alright, Ma” is as politically charged and angry as anything that Dylan recorded during the ’60s. Armed with just his acoustic guitar, Dylan rages against the machine, fiercely admonishing consumer culture and meaningless glorification of wealth.
Dylan utilizes his unique, internal rhyme scheme that underscores the potency of his lyrics. He relentlessly sends verses crashing forth, washing over the listener in continuous waves. He mocks a society that hocks “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark” while proclaiming “money doesn’t talk, it swears.” In the midst of this, he slips in one of his most perfect poetic phrases in “he not busy being born is busy dying.”
Another Side of Bob Dylan may have signaled the beginnings of Dylan’s transition to becoming what he’s known as today, but Bringing It All Back Home is him finally unlocking his full potential. The album is as complex and contradictory as all great works of art, while possessing a clarity of vision that is staggeringly impressive.
Though Bringing It All Back Home may be Dylan’s high water mark (at least in my opinion), it did signal the end of his innovation as an artist. Mere months later, he released Highway 61 Revisited, which would again change how songs were written and what could be considered a pop hit. It’s a similarly great album, and one that’s completely electric. The artistic and critical success of Bringing It All Back Home reinforced his commitment to keep on pushing boundaries. Rarely has so much been accomplished in so little time”.
One reason why Bringing It All Back Home is so revolutionary is because it was Dylan moving into Rock and electric realms. An artist who many pigeonholed as an acoustic Folk act was getting a lot of heat for seemingly betraying his roots. The electric Judas was moving in a new direction and expanding his palette. I think that Bringing It All Back Home is this bold and brilliant album that has this incredible legacy. Often cited as one of the best albums ever release. I want to end with a 2016 feature from Ultimate Classic Rock:
“Bringing It All Back Home was an entirely different shift, one that would culminate four months later on July 25, 1965, when Dylan and his band plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival and played a brief set fueled by distorted electric instruments. According to legend, the folk audience was shocked and appalled, and probably just a bit miffed at the short set and the atrocious sound coming from the stage, which was equipped for acoustic music, not electric. Whatever the reason, Dylan was booed.
Anyone who had heard Bringing It All Back Home, which was released in March 1965, knew this was coming. From the opening "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to the side-one closer "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," the first half of Dylan's fifth LP is mostly contempt, rage and rock 'n' roll fury. There's absolutely nothing Newport Folk Festival about it.
Turn it over, and things are closer to more familiar territory for fans who thought they had been betrayed by Dylan. "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" bookended the album's four-song second side with sprawling acoustic numbers filled with the clever wordplay and engaging melodies that the young singer-songwriter was expanding with each LP. But this time they were bigger and grander, and had way more in view than Dylan's core folk audience.
Together, Bringing It All Back Home's 11 songs represent Dylan's first true artistic statement (though the same can be argued for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, to a point), an album partly made for fans, partly made for Dylan himself. Electric achievements like "She Belongs to Me" and "Maggie's Farm" cut with the other two acoustic songs sandwiched on side two ("Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)") strike a balanced and conciliatory tone that Dylan wouldn't revisit for decades. From this stage onward, Dylan's compromises would be his own.
But more than all of this, Bringing It All Back Home kicked off one of music's greatest triple plays. Within the next 15 months, Dylan would release two more classic albums -- Highway 61 Revisited, which followed in August, and Blonde on Blonde from mid-1966 -- that pretty much sealed his legend. Few artists in rock history have matched that scale and influence in such a short period. In a way, all these years later, Dylan is still trying to live it down”.
One of the most important albums in music history, Bringing It All Back Home still sounds thrilling after all of these years. From the rush and brilliance of Subterranean Homesick Blues to the epic closer, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, it is a faultless album that pushed Dylan sound forward. Whilst many objected, there was so much respect and admiration from large sections of the press. This increased as years passed. It is a stunning work from…
A music genius.