Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home is an album of original songs by American musician Bob Dylan, released on March 22, 1965. It has often been described as the first "folk rock" album. The first side of the LP features Dylan backed by an electified band, while side two features four solo acoustic songs.

The Songs

The album opens with "Subterranean Homesick Blues," an anti-establishment diatribe that was heavily inspired by Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business." Often cited as a precursor to rap and music videos (a famous promotional film was shot for the song), "Subterranean Homesick Blues" became a Top 40 hit for Dylan.

Related Topics:
Chuck Berry - Rap

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One of Dylan's most celebrated and ambitious compositions, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" is arguably one of Dylan's finest songs. At fifteen verses long, it is also one of his most verbose. Clinton Heylin wrote that it "opened up a whole new genre of finger-pointing song, not just for Dylan but for the entire panoply of pop," and one critic said it is to capitalism what Darkness at Noon is to communism. A fair number of Dylan's most famous lyrics can be found in this song: "He not busy being born is busy dying"; "It's easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred"; "Even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked"; "Money doesn't talk, it swears"; "If my thought-dreams could be seen / They'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

Related Topics:
Capitalism - Darkness at Noon - Communism

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"Snagged by a sour, pinched guitar riff, the song has an acerbic tinge...and Dylan sings the title rejoinders in mock self-pity," writes NPR's Tim Riley. "It's less an indictment of the system than a coil of imagery that spells out how the system hangs itself with the rope it's so proud of."

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Written sometime in February of 1964, "Mr. Tambourine Man" was originally recorded for Another Side of Bob Dylan; a rough performance with several mistakes, that recording was rejected, but a polished has often been attributed to Dylan's early use of LSD, but eyewitness accounts of both the song's composition and Dylan's first use of LSD suggests that "Mr. Tambourine Man" was actually written weeks before. Instead, Dylan said the song was inspired by a large tambourine owned by Bruce Langhorne. "On one session, Tom Wilson had asked to play tambourine," Dylan recalled in 1985. "And he had this gigantic tambourine...It was as big as a wagonwheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind." Langhorne confirmed that he "used to play this giant Turkish tambourine. It was about deep, and it was very light and it had a sheepskin head and it had jingle bells around the edge - just one layer of bells all the way around...I bought it 'cause I liked the sound...I used to play it all the time."

Related Topics:
Another Side of Bob Dylan - Tom Wilson

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A surrealist work heavily influenced by Rimbaud (most notably for the "magic swirlin' ship" evoked in the lyrics), Heylin hailed it as a leap "beyond the boundaries of folk song once and for all, with one of most inventive and original melodies." Riley describes "Mr. Tambourine Man" as "Dylan's pied-piper anthem of creative living and open-mindedness...a lot of these lines are evocative without holding up to logic, even though they ring worldly." Salon.com critic Bill Wyman calls it "rock's most feeling paean to psychedelia, all the more compelling in that it's done acoustically."

Related Topics:
Rimbaud - Salon.com

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Five days after recording of Bringing It All Back Home was completed, The Byrds recorded their own version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" in Los Angeles. It became the title track of their debut album, a celebrated milestone in folk-rock, and it would also become a major hit single, hitting the streets weeks after Dylan's version was already made available in stores.

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"Maggie's Farm" is described by Wyman as "a loping, laconic ook at the service industry." Riley describes it as the "counterculture's war cry," but he also notes that the song has been interpreted as "a rock star's gripe to his record company, a songwriter's gripe to his publisher, and a singer-as-commodity's gripe to his audience-as-market."

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"Gates of Eden" builds on the developments made with "Chimes of Freedom" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." As Heylin describes it, "it was a song of vivid experience, constructed in the form of a dream, that came to in 'a house that is not mine.'"

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"Of all the songs about sixties self-consciousness and generation-bound identity, none forecasts the lost innocence of an entire generation better than 'Gates of Eden,'" writes Riley. "Sung with ever-forward motion, as though the words were carving their own quixotic phrasings, these images seem to tumble out of Dylan with a will all their own; he often chops off phrases to get to the next line."

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"Love Minus Zero/No Limit" is a low-key love song, described by Riley as a "hallucinatory allegiance, a poetic turn that exposes the paradoxes of love ('She knows there's no success like failure / And that failure's no success at all')... points toward the dual vulnerabilities that steer 'Just Like A Woman.' In both cases, a woman's susceptibility is linked to the singer's defenseless infatuation."

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The album closes with "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," described by Riley as "one of those saddened good-bye songs a lover sings when the separation happens long after the relationship is really over, when lovers know each other too well to bother hiding the truth from each other any longer...What shines through "Baby Blue" is a sadness that blots out past fondness, and a frustration at articulating that sadness at the expense of the leftover affection it springs from." Heylin has a different interpretation, comparing it with "To Ramona" from Another Side of Bob Dylan: " less conciliatory, the tone crueler, more demanding. If Paul Clayton is indeed the Baby Blue he had in mind, as has been suggested, Dylan was digging away at the very foundation of Clayton's self-esteem." Van Morrison and his band, Them, released their own version of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" in 1966; a dramatic re-arrangement featuring a repeating, low-key Mellotron pattern, it's often hailed as one of the best Dylan covers ever recorded, and possibly the definitive version of the song.

Related Topics:
Another Side of Bob Dylan - Van Morrison - Them

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