by Andy Gill
Bob and Joan’s relationship had been eroding for the past year, but as with the earlier situation between Bob and Suze, he had not been able to call it quits. Instead, he allowed the relationship to deteriorate slowly, until she could stand no more and was forced to break things off. Joan had had misgivings for some time about the divergent direction their careers appeared to be taking, which were crystallized when he suggested to her that they play at Madison Square Garden. “I’m scared,” she told him. “I think what it means is that you’ll be the rock’n’roll king, and I’ll be the peace queen.” Dylan scoffed at her fear, but she was right: while her sense of liberal concern expanded to accommodate the diverse needs of her audience, he had come to the realization that to accept responsibility for “those kids” would stifle his muse, that he would become a walking antique unless he cast off all responsibilities except for those he had for his art.
Baez dates the watershed point of their relationship to a bi-coastal telephone conversation they had in 1964 during which, while they were joking about getting married, she had demurred, saying it would never work out. From that point, she claims, Dylan’s attitude toward her changed, eventually coming to a head on the 1965 tour of England covered in Don’t Look Back. She had accepted his invitation to accompany him to Europe, believing it would be a reciprocation of her American shows, at which she had introduced him to her audience. But Dylan never invited her up on stage with him, leaving her forlornly in the wings as he basked in adulation. In the film, the distance between the two of them is plain to see in the hotel-room scenes where Joan vainly serenades Bob while he, oblivious, continues working on his book.
Worse still, the vicious banter that Dylan and Bob Neuwirth dealt in was increasingly aimed in her direction. In one of the film’s cruelest scenes, after the three of them have traded Hank Williams songs in a backstage dressing-room, she admits to feeling tired. “I’m fagging out,” she explains. “Let me tell you, sister,” ripostes Neuwirth, quick as a flash, “you fagged out a long time ago!” Then, stepping further over the mark of propriety, he says to Dylan, “Hey, she’s got one of those see-through blouses that you don’t even wanna!” Unable to keep up with such insults, Joan flounces out of the room. Shortly afterward, things came to a head between Joan and Bob and, distraught, she left the tour and flew on to her parents’ place in Paris.
MAGGIE’S FARM
At the final day of the Bringing It All Back Home recording sessions, according to photographer Daniel Kramer, Bob and his musicians were elated when they managed to kick off proceedings with a storming version of ‘Maggie’s Farm’. This, combined with the simplicity of its blues structure, may explain why Dylan chose the song to open his ill-fated performance with the Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
‘Maggie’s Farm’ was probably inspired by ‘Penny’s Farm’, a song from Pete Seeger’s first album which criticized the meanness of a landlord, George Penny. In Dylan’s song, the criticism is less specific and, crucially, less earnest: the eponymous farm has expanded to take in the entire country’s system of labor relations, which are ridiculed through the three-fold impact of the song’s imagery, Dylan’s bitingly sardonic delivery, and the rebellious ebullience of the backing. The song is virtually a shorthand précis of the Marxist analysis of the alienating condition of capitalism upon the workers—indeed, so alienated from the fruits of his labor is the narrator that we never learn exactly what kind of work it is that he’s involved in. What we do learn about, in a series of cartoonish vignettes, is the small-minded nepotism and petty officialdom of most company organizations; the old ties between capital, the institutions of government and the church; and the grinding boredom of manual labor, especially when inflicted upon those workers who still retain a little imagination and a few ideas of their own.
The final verse concludes with a damning indictment of the way that, post-Henry Ford, modern assembly-line manufacturing methods impose uniformity on the labor force just as much as on the goods manufactured. Of course, Dylan is not fool enough to believe he is exempt from such forces, and so the last verse also becomes an explicit condemnation of all those folk fans and commentators who criticized his various changes of lyrical style—including, ironically, Pete Seeger himself, who had to be restrained from taking an ax to the power-cables that fed Dylan’s electric band at the Newport Folk Festival that year.
LOVE MINUS ZERO/NO LIMIT
The second of the album’s love songs is more straightforwardly devotional than ‘She Belongs To Me’, despite the dark, looming energy of much of its imagery. The first verse is as close as Dylan gets to amorous infatuation, marveling at a lover of elemental constancy and rock-like imperturbability, one whose emotional strength is not dependent on overt displays of emotion, but on some deeper, inner fortitude. The three remaining verses then offer a parade of the inauthentic chaos which routinely assaults the narrator’s sensibilities, from which his lover’s devotion provides him with necessary refuge: critics dissect, rich girls presume, bridges tremble, statues crumble—but through it all, she remains untouched, unaffected, smiling with the knowing, Zen-like calm of the Mona Lisa. By the song’s conclusion, she occupies his thoughts as completely as the eponymous bird obsesses the hapless protagonist of Poe’s The Raven—although the closing image of the bird with the broken wing tapping at the narrator’s window could simply be an expression of her essential vulnerability, despite that inner strength he so admires.
In its admiration for a lover who “knows too much to argue or to judge,” the song is surely inspired by Sara Lowndes, the former model and Playboy bunny with whom Bob had become involved some time in late 1964, and whom he would marry in a secret wedding ceremony in November 1965. A divorcee friend of Bringing It All Back Home cover star Sally Grossman, Sara was a frequent visitor to the Grossmans’ Woodstock spread, but lived with her young daughter Maria in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where Bob took an apartment in order to be close to her. It was Sara, through her work connections at Drew Associates, a film-production company, who introduced Bob and his manager to the young cinema-verité filmmaker Donn Pennebaker, who would go on to make the Don’t Look Back documentary.
Apart from her great natural beauty, what probably attracted Bob to Sara was her Zen-like equanimity: unlike most of the women he met, she wasn’t out to impress him, or to interrogate him about his lyrics. An adherent of Eastern mysticism, she possessed a certain ego-less quality which dovetailed neatly with Bob’s more pronounced sense of ambition. Indeed, so self-effacing was she that for a long time their relationship remained a secret even to Dylan’s friends, most of whom learned about their marriage several months after it had occurred.
Encouraged by his Buddhist friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, Dylan was at this time becoming increasingly interested in Eastern mysticism himself, particularly the I Ching, the ancient oriental Oracle Of Change. “You gotta read the I Ching,” he told friends. “I don’t wanna talk about it, except to say it’s the only thing that’s fantastically true. You read it, and you gotta know it’s true. It’s something to believe in. Of course,” he added with a Zen-like touch of self-contradiction, “I don’t believe in anything.”
OUTLAW BLUES
Originally rehearsed in acoustic form as ‘California’—under which title it appeared on several bootlegs—‘Outlaw Blues’ is the most raw and basic of Dylan’s early electric outings, a churning twelve-bar blues grind of rhythm guitars that just chugs onward, over and over, like a runaway sixteen-wheeler truck barreling down a highway, leaving gusts of harmonica and slivers of lead guitar trailing like leaves in its wake. As a performance, it could have been designed specifically to raise the hackles of his discomfited folkie fans, while the studied absurdity of the lyrics might also have been devised to annoy those who demanded meaning from his songs—and, increasingly, from Dylan himself. Hardly an interview or press conference would pass without Bob being asked to explain his songs, which is probably why the second verse finds Dyl
an watching his back, refusing to hang any specific opinions out in public view for fear of being shot down, the way Jesse James was shot in the back by Robert Ford while putting up a picture.
Two verses later, he returns to the same theme, with a damning vernacular finality that cuts both ways, through both his own oracular ability and his interrogators’ motives: “Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’/I just might tell you the truth.” And that, he implies, would be the last thing anyone would want.
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
As the first side approaches its end, Dylan slips into the parade of comic grotesques that would increasingly populate his songs over the course of the next few albums. A paranoid, nightmarish version of the in-law dread that affects every courting couple, ‘On The Road Again’ opens with the most standard of blues beginnings—the narrator waking up in the morning—but instead of the string of clichés that are usually on a bluesman’s mind, he’s plunged here into a surreal netherworld where the mother-in-law lives in the refrigerator, father-in-law wears a mask of Napoleon, grandfather-in-law carries a sword-stick, and frogs inhabit his socks. Even the simplest tasks—eating, stroking a pet—become laden with pitfalls, while the most mundane and innocent of delivery-men and servants are imbued with a sinister, premonitory presence. No wonder, then, that Bob refuses to move in on a permanent basis.
BOB DYLAN’S 115TH DREAM
The mutant rock’n’roll offspring of his various humorous talking blues, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ bears no relation at all to the wistful reverie of the original ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’. Over the course of the intervening 113 dreams, Dylan’s dream-world has presumably become less personal but much more frantic, judging by the pace of this recording and the vitality of its imagery.
The song is a satiric dream vision of the discovery of America in which images, scenes and references dissolve into each other, so that the Mayflower can be captained by a cartoon version of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab—here re-named “Arab” for dumb comic effect—who, upon sighting America, abandons his quest for the whale in favor of buying up the land with beads and imposing the principles of property ownership upon a people for whom it has no meaning. Jailed alongside the rest of the crew for carrying harpoons, the narrator breaks out and goes in search of help for his shipmates, who remain unaccountably imprisoned.
From there, the narrative rattles along with the berserk logic of dreams (at one point, a foot bursts out of a telephone), while riding roughshod over such sacred establishment cows as the flag, police, religion and capitalism. Like the dysfunctional family of ‘On The Road Again’, this dream-America is fraught with ludicrous dangers and inexplicable sights: exploding desserts, runaway bowling-balls, talking cows, predatory French girls, paranoid coast guards and, of course, naval traffic wardens, all of whom exert their influence on our hero. Eventually tiring of his ordeal, the narrator returns to the ship and sets off back across the ocean, passing en route a ship bearing a certain Christopher Columbus, to whom he offers, more in sympathy than hope, “Good luck.”
The surreal imagery of ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ led many to suppose that this was one of the first “drug songs” for which Dylan and his peers would become notorious. There were, however, precedents for the song’s loopy, extempore style in Bob’s youth, according to his teenage buddy John Bucklen, who recalled that the pair of them would pass many evenings ad-libbing nonsense songs. “We’d get a guitar and sing verses we made up as we went along,” he told Robert Shelton. “It came out strange and weird. We thought we’d send them in somewhere, but we never did.”
The song’s false start came about when the backing musicians missed their cue, but Bob kept on singing, cracking up with laughter a line or two into the song, along with producer Tom Wilson and everyone else—though only Dylan’s hilarity was caught on tape. He insisted the mistake should be retained on the album, telling Wilson he would even be prepared to pay for its inclusion. Edited on to the beginning of a bona-fide band take, the laughter sets up the tenor of the song, and makes the band’s entrance all the more dynamic.
MR TAMBOURINE MAN
After the sardonic absurdity of ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, Dylan chose to start the second side of the album with his most luminous, meditative song yet. Begun on the 1964 cross-country trip, as his station-wagon left New Orleans for Texas on February 12 and completed a month or two later at the New Jersey home of his journalist friend Al Aronowitz (who claims to have rescued Bob’s discarded false starts from the wastebasket), ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ had been considered for inclusion on Another Side Of Bob Dylan. It had been recorded, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott providing harmonies on the choruses, at the June 9 session which produced that entire album, but was ultimately left off the record because Dylan “felt too close to it to put it on.”
While there’s no doubt that it would have sat well within Another Side Of Bob Dylan’s prevailing mood of ruminative melancholy, the song has an added strength and power on Bringing It All Back Home, where its plea for artistic liberation underlines the first side’s break with tradition. Not for nothing did Dylan choose to play this song and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ when he was called back to perform solo for a crowd who’d just booed his backing band offstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival: but what the audience, relieved at the sight of Dylan toting an acoustic guitar again, took as a mea culpa recanting of his rock experiment, was actually an implicit statement that, whatever they desired of him, he must follow his muse wherever it led him.
At the time, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was widely considered to be a drug song, its exultant imagery and urge for transcendence seen as analogizing the psychedelic experience. What, such interpreters demanded, could “smoke rings of my mind” refer to, if not marijuana? And that request to “Take me on a trip…”—an LSD trip, surely? For most listeners, their first encounter with the song came via The Byrds’ hit single, and it’s easy to understand how the sleek, euphoric rush of their version might lead one to such a conclusion. But to impose such a narrow interpretation on the song is to miss its wider meaning, which has more to do with the artist’s invocation of his/her muse (here confusingly cast as a male figure, rather than the more usual female). That much is clear from Dylan’s own more haunted delivery, in which the desired transcendence is always slightly out of reach, an aim and an ideal, rather than an indulgence. It’s one of Dylan’s most mesmerizing performances, burnished with a wistful, gently swaying harmonica break which perfectly evokes the sense of lonely aesthetic reverie.
The first verse finds the writer, late at night, tired but unable to sleep, facing the blank page again. (The Clancy Brothers’ Liam Clancy, a folk-singing friend of Dylan’s from his early years in New York, told journalist Patrick Humphries that when he first heard Dylan sing the line about the “ancient empty street [that’s] too dead for dreaming,” he knew Bob was referring to “Sullivan Street on a Sunday”). In the second verse, the writer appeals for inspiration, “ready to go anywhere” his muse might lead, if (s)he should only “cast your dancing spell” his way. The third verse offers a reassurance that any “vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme” the muse might hear echoing his tambourine would merely be a “ragged clown” (the writer himself) chasing the elusive shadow of poetic perfection cast by the muse. Finally, in the fourth verse, the writer appeals again for an artistic experience outside the realms of memory and fate, beyond the bounds of time and place: a visionary experience in which the overwhelming immediacy of the aesthetic now obliterates more mundane, ego-directed notions of past, present and future.
Several sources have been claimed as the inspiration for the central pied-piper image of the tambourine man, though Dylan himself cites guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who attended an earlier recording session with a gigantic tambourine, “big as a wagon-wheel.” Fittingly, it’s Langhorne who provides the floating droplets of electric guitar which are the only accompaniment to Dylan’s own voice and rhythm guitar here.
GAT
ES OF EDEN
Dylan admitted to Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston that his writing style was influenced by William Burroughs (“a great man”) and claimed that, like the beat author, he too collected photographs which illustrated his songs. “I have photographs of ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’,” he said. “I saw them after I wrote the songs. People send me a lot of things and a lot of the things are pictures, so other people must have that idea too.”
It’s hardly surprising that ‘Gates Of Eden’ should inspire visual responses, as the song contains some of Dylan’s most vivid, unsettling dream imagery, and may itself have been inspired by William Blake’s pictorial sequence The Gates Of Paradise. Like ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, each verse—virtually each couplet—stands on its own as a discrete tableau, combining to offer a devastating evocation of societal entropy. The song sets up hopeful expectations with the title ‘Gates Of Eden’, but it’s actually about an Eden from which paradise has been eroded: there is a terrible stench of decay and corruption about the imagery, and Dylan’s portentous delivery of each verse’s closing line offers a warning rather than a welcome. This Eden is a place to be avoided, where the best that can be expected is oblivion.
When he debuted the song at his New York Philharmonic Hall concert on October 31, 1964, Dylan introduced the song as “a sacrilegious lullaby in G minor,” a light-hearted description nevertheless borne out by the depiction of “Utopian hermit monks” sharing a saddle on the Golden Calf with “Aladdin and his lamp.” Religion, he seems to be suggesting, is composed of equal parts piety and magic, an unhealthy combination of morality, smoke and mirrors, whose protagonists’ “promises of paradise” raise only hollow laughter from Eden’s inhabitants.