Bringing It All back Home
Fifty-nine years ago John Kennedy was less than two years dead. Fifty-eight thousand Americans were alive who later died in Vietnam. The social consciousness that arose from the folk music of the decades early years was transitioning to an electric sound. Someone, certainly not himself, had anointed a funny-haired guy from the upper mid-west as the spokesman for a generation. In the year 2024, when music is about money and marketing contacts, it’s hard to imagine that once there really were artists releasing recordings of poetry set to music.
Last year, Bob Dylan turned 80. Purposefully cryptic, he seems content to march to the beat of no one’s drummer. Go to a Bob Dylan concert and you will get your money’s worth of entertainment, but you won’t get a glimpse of the man’s soul. Once upon a time, Bob Dylan had a sense of humor. Really. Once upon a time, Bob Dylan could change the face of popular music just by changing his own style. In 1965, when music still came on vinyl, Dylan released a schizophrenic album, half acoustic, and half electric. Bringing It All Back Home ushered in the folk-rock era. Dylan laughed for perhaps the last time.
1. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Dylan) - 2:21
Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten
I’m not even going to pretend that I know what in the hell Dylan was thinking when he wrote every line in this one. I do know that somewhere within he attacks pop culture, militarism, mammon, the establishment (whatever that is), education, and just about everything else that mattered in the 60’s.
2. She Belongs to Me (Dylan) - 2:47
She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black.
If I wrote my wife a love song like this one, she’d probably ask me if I’ve been taking my medicine. Dylan, however, paints an evocative picture of a woman whose aloofness suggests mystery and an impossible perfection. She has a touch of Helen of Troy, Eve, and Cleopatra. Remember, Dylan’s girlfriend while he was writing the songs for this album was Joan Baez.
3. Maggie's Farm (Dylan) - 3:54
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more
When I’m feeling my oats, I’m like Man, sometimes I get the feeling that everyone in the world wants to tell me what to do. Even in silence, the demands of a suburban home, a workaday job, family, and my own expectations make me a slave to something that I don’t want to be a slave to. The cruel world exists just to cramp my style. One day I’ll tell the world, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’ farm no more.”
4. Love Minus Zero/No Limit (Dylan) - 2:51
In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
I think that Dylan included a few internal rhymes here just to show the other poets that he could cook. While writing this review, I spent some time just reading the lyrics to the songs. Take away the music and you have poetry that reminds you of Rimbaud and Keats. Perhaps one day Rimbaud and Keats will remind folks of Dylan.
5. Outlaw Blues (Dylan) - 3:05
I got a woman in Jackson,
I ain't gonna say her name.
I got a woman in Jackson,
I ain't gonna say her name.
She's a brown-skin woman,
But I Love her just the same.
Yeah, Bob Dylan used to get in your face. Here he is in 1965, a white Jew singing about loving a black woman in Mississippi. The slayers of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were getting ready to go to trial. If I had been their jailer, I would have played this album 24/7.
6. On the Road Again (Dylan) - 2:35
Your grandpa's cane
It turns into a sword
Your grandma prays to pictures
That are pasted on a board
Everything inside my pockets
Your uncle steals
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, I can't believe that you're for real.
Don’t get confused. This is not a cover of a Willie Nelson song from some confused time warp. It’s a wailing harmonica, attitude, and lyrics that cut to the bone. This song asks more questions than it answers. Most of it is still as applicable to 2024 as it was to 1965. The human condition doesn’t change much does it?
7. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream (Dylan) - 6:30
I went into a restaurant
Lookin' for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
The waitress he was handsome
He wore a powder blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said
"Could you please make that crepe"
Just then the whole kitchen exploded
From boilin' fat
Food was flying everywhere
And I left without my hat
Ok, the band is in the studio and the bard starts to sing. Suddenly he realizes that he’s just muffed the lyrics. He starts to laugh hysterically. The producer laughs with him. They leave the whole sequence on the album so that all the Dylan fans would have verifiable proof that man laughed at least once in his life. This is an electric ballad like no other.
8. Mr. Tambourine Man (Dylan) - 5:30
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you
Archeologists believe that this may be the first folk-rock song. Just as Dylan made himself famous by giving “Blowing In the Wind” to Peter, Paul and Mary, he gave this one to the Byrds. Boom a new genre was born and it ran from the beginning.
9. Gates of Eden (Dylan) - 5:40
The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
Take your pick. “Gates of Eden” is either about religion, sex, or politics. It’s about all the things you aren’t supposed to talk about. Dylan doesn’t talk. He just sings.
10. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Dylan) - 7:29
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.
The chances of a song like this being played on the radio in modern America used to be exactly zero. Then Bob Dylan made a Victoria’s Secret commercial. I don’t think if there is even a dialog between generations today. One is wrapped up in making money and the other is busy spending it.
11. It's All over Now, Baby Blue (Dylan) - 4:12
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue
Ah, finally there is a song that the world seems to understand. Although Dylan never like officially announced it a news conference or anything, it’s universally accepted that this tune is kiss off to the hard-core folkies. He seems to be saying, “I’m going to do my own thing baby. All you nonconformists are the same.”
Some saw him as a Judas. Some saw a genius.