Happy 55th Anniversary to Bob Dylan’s fifth studio album Bringing It All Back Home, originally released March 22, 1965.
How long does it take to change the course of contemporary music? It’s hard to gauge in this attention economy that’s pervaded the late 2010s and has carried over into the first quarter of 2020. Things happen fast, as we often jump from one “viral” cultural moment to the next, with very little having any lasting impact. But there was a time when an artist could release a song or an album and completely revolutionize how music was recorded and perceived.
Bob Dylan is one of those artists. He’s one of the few artists to really change the game a few times over the course of his musical career. And 55 years ago, he did it with Bringing It All Back Home, which he recorded over a period of three days.
Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s fifth album, was groundbreaking in a way that we don’t think albums can really be anymore. “[Dylan] conjured performances that would completely reimagine how pop music communicated,” Will Hermes wrote in a 2016 Rolling Stone article about the album, “not just what it could say, but how it could say it.” The changes it brought forth are now so ingrained into the fabric of music that we assume that they’ve always existed.
Dylan first became a household name in the beginning of his career by fashioning a “man and guitar” folk hero persona that carried him through the early 1960s. He began transitioning from an artist who recorded “folk songs that matter” to an “extremely gifted songwriter” with Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), seen by some as a sharp rebuke of his earlier efforts.
With Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan continued his evolution, both in his songwriting and in the way he recorded music. For one, Dylan’s lyrics were a great advance towards popular music as poetry. Dylan had been using poetic language to express himself since some of his earliest albums, but he really began to commit to the approach with this album. The songs contained therein are filled with metaphoric language and abstract, surreal imagery.
In 2020, we look at folk rock as a permanent part of the musical landscape, but Dylan pretty much gave birth to the genre with Bringing It All Back Home. In this case, the first entry is also its best. Dylan was entering his prime as an artist, and this is arguably the greatest album of his career. Even over half a century later, it has an undeniable power and resonance.
Bringing It All Back Home is also the first of Dylan’s album to incorporate electric instrumentation. Specifically, Side A of the album is recorded with a full electric backing band. To say that this was perceived as a great betrayal by some of his most devoted fans is an understatement. More accomplished musical scholars than I have written extensively about his infamous performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which would occur only a few months after the album’s release. Despite the audience receiving this pivot so poorly, in the context of the album, Dylan’s new musical method was successful.
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).
“Maggie’s Farm” is also emblematic of Dylan’s shift on Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan opened the Newport Folk Festival set with this song, which may be appropriate, considering that the song seems to be a rejection his audience’s perception of him. Though it’s not nearly as bitter as “My Back Pages” or “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Dylan still channels his frustrations about being pigeonholed as one specific type of artist. However, this time he does so with wit rather than bile and bitterness.
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.
Dylan includes a pair of blues-influenced recordings on Bringing It All Back Home. “Outlaw Blues” is an oft-overlooked jewel. It features Dylan aggressively belting out declarations of love towards a “brown-skinned woman” from Jackson, Mississippi, a state where interracial relationships were much very illegal at the time of the recording.
“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.”
Langhorne is the only other musician who accompanies Dylan on the song, playing electric guitar subtly as Dylan muses about, well, music. He testifies to its power and his search and desire to create something transformative. His words and vocal inflections are charged with longing and melancholy, as he really does transform himself into a weary traveler, creating panoramic views of a not quite real world.
Dylan settles back into “singer with a guitar” mode for the rest of Bringing It All Back Home, and sounds extremely comfortable while doing so. Much attention has been given to Dylan’s apparent rejection of the “socially conscious” and folk singing portion of his career, but it doesn’t really hold up on analysis.
“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.
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