by Andy Gill
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
Bob Dylan’s annus mirabilis was 1965, the year he would transform popular music with two extraordinary albums that brought a new wit and literacy to rock’n’roll, and an electric immediacy to poetry.
At the time, however, the presence of an amplified rock band on Bringing It All Back Home was widely viewed more as a defection from folk music than a breakthrough to an exciting new mode of expression. Eyebrows were raised and letters were written within a folk-singing community lulled into pessimism by the sort of dreary protest balladry that Bob had grown out of a couple of years before. Rather than acknowledge his ambition, they denounced him as a sell-out.
In one sense, they were right: Bringing It All Back Home would be Dylan’s first million-seller, reaching the US Top Ten and going on to top the LP charts in Britain, where Bob-mania reached such a pitch that in May 1965 he would achieve the rare feat of having three albums in the Top Ten (the others being The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which also reached the top, and The Times They Are A-Changin’). But what old folkies saw as an abject surrender of commitment to commerce, Dylan viewed more in terms of his constituency, which suddenly expanded exponentially, and his own artistic needs, which were being satisfied more completely than before.
Others were able to view the situation from a more revealing perspective than the insular folk community. Through much of 1964/5, the photographer Daniel Kramer had the opportunity to spend time with Dylan, photographing him intermittently over the course of several months—mostly unposed stuff, but including both the recording sessions for Bob’s next album, and its cover photo. As the months passed, he grew astonished at the changes in Dylan. “In just one year, not only his songs but his very appearance changed radically,” Kramer noted. “He was new all the time.”
Most of late 1964 was taken up with Dylan’s Fall Tour—on which Joan Baez appeared frequently as a “surprise” guest—though his burgeoning celebrity increasingly brought him into contact with the era’s glitterati. He attended a party for Robert Kennedy at Miles Davis’s house; and in August, Bob and journalist Al Aronowitz introduced The Beatles to the enigmatic charm of marijuana while the Fab Four were staying at New York’s Delmonico Hotel. The group had had a profound influence on Dylan earlier that year, when they dominated the nation’s airwaves during his cross-country trip. “They were doing things nobody was doing,” he told biographer Anthony Scaduto later. “Their chords were outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians… I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
This conviction grew during the Fall Tour, as Bob grew increasingly bored with the cozy conventions of his acoustic shows. “Out front it was a sure thing,” he explained in a summer 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston. “I knew what the audience was gonna do, how they would react. It was very automatic. Your mind just drifts unless you can find some way to get in there and remain totally there.” To a friend, he admitted his dissatisfaction with what had become a routine: “I play these concerts and I ask myself, ‘Would you come to see me tonight?’—and I’d have to truthfully say, ‘No, I wouldn’t come. I’d rather be doin’ something else, really I would.’ That something else is rock. That’s where it’s at for me. My words are pictures, and the rock’s gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures.”
The future, clearly, was electric. Bob had started to feel the tremors of a new rock approach in the Greenwich Village scene when he played (as “Bob Landy”) on an album of blues covers by old friends like Dave Van Ronk, Ric Von Schmidt and “Spider” John Koerner. Called The Blues Project, it featured an electric backing band which included Al Kooper, Danny Kalb and Steve Katz, who later took the album’s title for their band name. And in June 1964, Dylan had been mightily impressed when he attended some sessions at which John Hammond Jr.—the bluesman son of the legendary Columbia A&R man—recorded his album So Many Roads with a backing band that included guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and several members of a Canadian band, The Hawks, who had once backed rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. The clincher, though, came in August, when the English R&B group The Animals—who had already had a hit in Britain with what was basically a souped-up version of ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ from Bob’s first album—topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with an electrified version of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, too. If they could do it, why not Bob himself?
Tom Wilson felt much the same way, and without Dylan’s knowledge, went into the studios that December to overdub rock backing on to three of Bob’s old songs: ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, the unreleased ‘Rocks And Gravel’, and ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ itself. The results were not as successful as he had hoped, though he would later experience spectacular success when he employed the same approach to modernize Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound Of Silence’, which kick-started the duo’s career after they had all but given up. (Simon only learned of his chart-topping success while on a solo tour of England.) But the sessions undoubtedly helped Wilson get some idea of the dynamics of rock-group recording, which were put to devastatingly effective use when Bob and a band of musicians cut Bringing It All Back Home over three days in mid-January 1965.
Dylan had retired to the relative seclusion of Woodstock to finish writing some new material a few weeks before the sessions, arriving with 18 songs ready to record. Some, though, had been longer in gestation: at his Halloween concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on October 31, 1964, he gave standout performances of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, three of the highlights of the upcoming album.
These new songs were unlike anything he had written before, packed with images which sparked back and forth between anti-authoritarian cynicism, existentialist immediacy and ribald satire, offering up a surrealist distorting mirror to modern life, American history and interpersonal relations. There were stories in some of them, but not the straightforward kind his fans were used to; these stories took absurd twists and turns, and seemed to mock the listener’s desire for strict narrative continuity. And while it was obvious that ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, in particular, were offering considered critiques of society, their “messages” seemed diffuse and poetic, rather than cut-and-dried. As one reviewer wrote of a 1965 Dylan concert: “Dylan used to sound like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant.”
Dylan had devised a new mode of expression which took his primary poetic influences—the Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud and Villon, the folk vernacular of Woody Guthrie, the immediacy of beat writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac, the visionary awareness of William Blake, and the hipster slang of beat comics like Hugh (“Wavy Gravy”) Romney and Lord Buckley—and lashed them to a driving rock beat. Even the songs which didn’t feature the full rock backing seemed somehow informed by it, hovering over their ostensible subjects like ghostly allusions to a more powerful presence. “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word,” he told Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston. “I’m a trapeze artist.” And to Robert Shelton, he said, “What I write is much more concise now than before. It’s not deceiving.”
The first day of the recording sessions featured just Dylan with, on a couple of songs, John Sebastian on bass (later leader of The Lovin’ Spoonful); none of these acoustic takes made it on to the album. The next two days, 14 and 15 January, he re-recorded several of the same tracks, plus the rest of the album, accompanied by a band that comprised Bobby Gregg on drums, Paul Griffin on piano, Bruce Langhorne and Kenny Rankin on guitars, and either Joseph Macho Jr. or William E. Lee on bass. Though Tom Wilson was the producer, the arrangements were very much down to Dylan, who passed from one musician to another, explaining what he wanted, sometimes demonstrating parts on the piano, until the pieces came together as he desired. “Dylan worked like a painter,” reported Daniel Kramer, “covering a hug
e canvas with the colors that the different musicians could supply him, adding depth and dimension to the total work.”
Most of the tracks needed only three or four takes, during which time the song might mutate slightly in terms of tempo or phrasing. Sometimes they got it first time out. Other times, things didn’t go quite that smoothly. At one point, distracted by the “obstacle course” of microphone stands and bits of furniture that Wilson had secretly arranged around the microphone to try and keep him stationary while he was doing his vocals, Dylan blew up in mid-take, storming across the room with a chair, before acknowledging his momentary peevishness with a self-deprecatory smile. ‘Outlaw Blues’, an overnight re-write of the previous day’s acoustic ‘California’, took some time to crystallize into its final form, but that was very much the exception. On the final day of the sessions, Dylan recorded ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ and ‘Gates Of Eden’ in one long take, without stopping to hear a playback between tracks. (Before he started, he instructed the engineers not to make any mistakes, because they were long numbers and he didn’t want to do them more than once.)
With ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ put out as a trailer a few weeks before, Bringing It All Back Home was released in late March 1965, in a sleeve which indicated how far Dylan had moved on from the denim-clad troubadour of his early records, and hinted at the complexity of the new album’s contents. With Daniel Kramer, Bob devised a cover photo featuring himself and an elegant brunette dressed in red (Albert Grossman’s wife Sally) reclining, unsmiling, upon a chaise-longue amid a clutter of bric-a-brac, magazines and long-playing records (by Lotte Lenya, The Impressions, Eric Von Schmidt and Robert Johnson) which Kramer arranged so as to have them “move” around Dylan. Bob’s last album Another Side Of Bob Dylan is toward the back of the shot, almost in the fireplace.
Above the mantelpiece is a colored-glass collage of a clown face which Dylan had made for Bernard Paturel, the owner of Bernard’s Cafe in Woodstock, where Bob played chess and frequently took refuge from the pressures of fame in an upstairs room which the Paturels kept vacant for him. The cute gray kitten Bob is cuddling is his pet, Rollin’ Stone—though there is a pronounced feline grace about all three of the photo’s subjects, who share a disquieting air of luxuriant sensuousness which might at any moment reveal its claws. On the rear sleeve, a spread of Kramer’s photos depicting Dylan with artists such as Baez, Allen Ginsberg (in a top hat), Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) and filmmaker Barbara Rubin (giving Bob a head-massage) hint at the growing hubbub surrounding the singer, while the discursive sleeve-note features his musings upon life, poetry and song in a chunk of beat-styled prose indicative of the book he was working on, which would be published some years later as Tarantula. It all made for a package of great mystique and sophistication, a giant step beyond anything which the pop world had encountered before.
SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES
As the earliest example of Bob Dylan’s new electric sound, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ marks a pivotal moment in his career. Together with the accompanying extract from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary film Don’t Look Back, which served as one of the first (and still the best) pop promo clips, its effect was seismic, gaining Dylan his first American Top 40 entry and his second UK Top-Ten hit (hot on the heels of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, which had belatedly stormed up the charts in March 1965), and securing his reputation as the hottest cat on two continents.
Stylistically, the song is a three-way cross between Chuck Berry, Jack Kerouac and a Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger song called ‘Taking It Easy’, whose repetitive structure (“Mom was in the kitchen, preparing to eat, Sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast…”) Dylan parodies both here and in the next album’s ‘Tombstone Blues’. Injected with R&B energy, the machine-gun patter of words tumbling after each other takes as its closest precedent the rock’n’roll poetry of Chuck Berry, in particular ‘Too Much Monkey Business’—though it’s perhaps the eponymous hero of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ whose hopped-up, streetwise doppelganger we find “mixing up the medicine” at the beginning of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Subsequent references to drug busts and police surveillance, and the generally paranoiac tone of the song, suggest that our Johnny is a drug chemist, synthesizing his wares in the basement.
Dylan was by this time no stranger to drugs. Pot-smoking had been commonplace on the folk scene long before his arrival in Greenwich Village, and was an essential element of that February’s cross-country trip. According to producer Paul Rothchild, he and Victor Maimudes had themselves introduced Dylan to LSD a few months earlier, following a Spring 1964 concert at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “I looked at the sugar cubes and thought, ‘Why not?’” Rothchild told Bob Spitz. “So we dropped acid on Bob. Actually, it was an easy night for Dylan. Everybody had a lot of fun. If you ask me, that was the beginning of the mystical Sixties right there.”
It was certainly the beginning of a new phase of Dylan’s career, although, despite his “pro-chemistry” outlook, he later denied that drugs had that much of an influence on his songwriting, but had simply served to heighten his “awareness of the minute.” Rather than write sermons for tomorrow, he chose to focus on the present, a choice which manifested itself in a restless search for kicks and a refusal to attempt to shoehorn experience into tidy moral platitudes.
Not that he had completely abandoned protest. Far from it: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ remains the most concise compendium of anti-establishment attitude Dylan ever composed, just over two minutes crammed with beat cynicism and drug paranoia, in which virtually every couplet can be abstracted as a slogan. (Most have been.) Indeed, so powerful was its effect that a group of militant underground activists, the Weathermen, chose their name from one such slogan, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” What was different from his earlier message-song style was the cynical, streetwise nihilism of the song, whose third and fourth verses condense a generation’s disquiet with the American Dream lifestyle into a few succinct phrases, while offering only the most nugatory, absurd advice on how to deal with it. There was no specific victim in the song, and no message other than the recurrent “Look out kid” to warn of society’s manifold traps and dead-end diversions.
For Joan Baez, this was a step in the wrong direction, as too was what she viewed as his negative, “death-trip” lifestyle at the time. “He criticizes society and I criticize it,” she explained to Robert Shelton, “but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite. I am afraid the message that comes through from Dylan in 1965 and 1966 is: ‘Let’s all go home and smoke pot, because there’s nothing else to do… we might as well go down smoking.’” But what Baez viewed as defeatist actually proved inspirational for a much wider audience than the one to which she and Dylan had previously been preaching: faced with the apparent absurdity of modern life and its institutions, an entire generation recognized the zeitgeist in the verbal whirlwind of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.
The track made a fitting opening to Don’t Look Back, in a classic sequence where Dylan, standing in an alleyway alongside London’s Savoy Hotel, drops cards bearing words and phrases from the song, trying to keep pace as the declamatory deluge pours forth. (The cards had been marked up the previous evening, by Dylan, Donovan—who crashed on the floor of Bob’s suite for a few nights during his stay—Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth. At the song’s conclusion, the latter pair stroll across the alley, following Dylan out of the frame.)
Written at the apartment of John Court, an associate of Albert Grossman’s, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was recorded on January 14, 1965, after Dylan had done a solo acoustic run-through the day before. Though he was working with a band for the first time, he seems remarkably at ease—indeed, compared with the nagging, monotonous delivery of the previous day, when Dylan (like so many since) experienced some difficulty making all the lines scan, he
sounds audibly freed up by the band, effortlessly riding the R&B bounce of Bobby Gregg’s drums while Kenny Rankin pierces the song’s fabric with little exclamation-mark stabs of electric guitar. Amazingly, it was done in one take.
SHE BELONGS TO ME
The two love songs on Bringing It All Back Home are decidedly different in character from Dylan’s earlier romantic compositions. Just as the wistful longing of early songs like ‘Girl From The North Country’ had been replaced by the bitter recrimination and melancholy of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and ‘To Ramona’ on Another Side Of Bob Dylan, so that is in turn supplanted here by an ambivalent tribute that veers between acquiescent devotion and subliminally mild contempt, the latter cunningly concealed by the gentleness of Dylan’s delivery and the sensitivity of the backing. The key to the song is the bluntly possessive title, which runs so counter to Dylan’s anti-materialist attitude that it can only be intended ironically, suggesting that the song’s apparent affection should likewise be taken with a pinch of salt.
The references in ‘She Belongs To Me’ to the subject’s status as an artist and her ownership of an Egyptian ring suggest that it was written for Joan Baez, to whom Bob had once given just such a ring. The song pays due tribute to her self-assertiveness and unbreakable moral conviction (“She never stumbles/She’s got no place to fall”), but characterizes her interest in the narrator as that of a dilettante art collector whose gaze effectively transforms the object of her affections into an antique—presumably a reference to Baez’s patronage of Dylan, her desire to keep him as her pet protest singer, rather than let him develop according to his own desires. Even the apparently obsequious devotion of the final verse masks a condemnation of a lover whose obsessive demands for compliments and attention have fatally wearied the relationship.