“Maggie’s Farm” is a protest song against protesting folksingers, comfortable in their homes watching the world, and perhaps against Dylan himself: “I got a head full of ideas / That are drivin’ me insane.” “Maggie’s Farm” is also an indictment of capitalism, the capitalist imposing his infernal load of work on the workers, the one who “hands you a nickel,” who “hands you a dime,” and who “asks you with a grin / If you’re havin’ a good time.” It is against the one whose “bedroom window /… is made out of bricks,” and whose door is monitored by “the National Guard.” In a word, the song condemns the social alienation of one man from another and the scientific management of work, or Taylorism.
Another interpretation of “Maggie’s Farm” is that it is a reaction against the elevation of mass consumption as the supreme value of society—a call for America to return to the core values of the Gospels and the Declaration of Independence.
Music critic Tim Riley describes the song as “counter-culture’s war cry.”22 “Maggie’s Farm” returned to the spotlight in 1980 when, at the initiative of the Blues Band and the Specials, the song was widely adopted as an anthem by opponents of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Production
“Maggie’s Farm” bears some similarity to “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: virtually the same introduction on acoustic guitar (just one step below), a very similar tempo, and a harmonic grid based on three chords. It also has the same group of musicians: Dylan at the acoustics, Langhorne solo at guitar, rhythm guitar and another guitar supporting the bass, both played by Rankin and Gorgoni, Owens replacing Griffin on piano, certainly Macho Jr. at the bass (apparently played with a pick) and Gregg on drums and tambourine (probably mounted on the hi-hat). “Maggie’s Farm” also has a strong Chuck Berry influence. Bob plays harmonica (in C) to give some color to the piece. Most likely the band had rehearsed a few times before recording, since only one take was needed to record it on January 15.
“Maggie’s Farm” was released as a single (with “On the Road Again” on the B-side) in the UK and peaked at number 22 on the chart on June 17, 1965. One month later, the song was the center of the Newport Folk Festival scandal.
SCANDAL IN NEWPORT!
In July 1965, “Maggie’s Farm” was the song played during the Newport Folk Festival that marked Dylan’s move from acoustic folk to electric rock.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
“Maggie’s Farm” is not the first Dylan song inspired by the Bently Boys’ “Down on Penny’s Farm,” released by Columbia Records in 1929. “Penny’s Farm” had already influenced Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town” on the Minnesota Hotel Tape of December 22, 1961.
Newport 1965:
The Electric Scandal
At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival on July 24, 1965, Dylan performed three acoustic guitar songs, “All I Really Want to Do,” “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” and “Love Minus Zero, No Limit.” Later in the day, the songwriter was profoundly irritated by festival organizer Alan Lomax’s condescending introduction to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which dared to play electric instruments. Dylan decided to challenge the festival by performing with an “electric” group at his next stage appearance scheduled for the following day.
On Sunday night, July 25, Dylan went onstage backed by musicians with whom he had played a month earlier in the recording session for “Like a Rolling Stone”: guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper on organ. Two other musicians from the Butterfield Blues Band, Jerome Arnold on the bass and Sam Lay on the drums, along with Barry Goldberg on piano, also appeared with Dylan, who played a Fender Stratocaster Sunburst.
Peter Yarrow, of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, as master of ceremonies introduced Dylan: “Ladies and gentlemen, the person that’s going to come up now has a limited amount of time… His name is Bob Dylan.”6 Immediately Dylan and his band emerged onstage and kicked off with “Maggie’s Farm.” Within minutes the crowd was booing. Dylan and his band continued their performance, ignoring the disapproval of the audience. They then performed “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Phantom Engineer” (the first version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”), but were then forced to leave the stage because of the booing. Dylan recalled, “I was thinkin’ that someone was shouting, ‘Are you with us? Are you with us?’ And, uh, you know, I don’t know, what’s that supposed to mean?”6
Part of the crowd was upset by Dylan’s new move from folk to rock; others were upset by the PA system and the amplification. Pete Seeger: “You could not understand the words. I was frantic. I said, ‘Get that distortion out.’ It was so raspy, you could not understand a word. And I ran over to the sound system. ‘Get that distortion out of Bob’s voice.’ ‘No, this is the way they want to have it.’ I said, ‘Goddamn it, it’s terrible, you can’t understand it, if I had an axe I’d chop the mic cable right now.’”6 Bruce Langhorne, who attended the concert, also testified to the poor sound quality. “Yeah, the sound was bad. They did not know how to deal with amplified electric instruments and drums [at the festival].”39
The folksinger Maria Muldaur said, “We ran backstage, and there was mayhem going on. Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel, and all the old guard, the old leftist protest-singing factions were horrified and thought, ‘This is pop music, this isn’t folk music,’ and there was just a big battle raging backstage.”8 Peter Yarrow tried to calm the situation. He pleaded with Dylan to reappear onstage. This time alone, without his band, with only his acoustic guitar and harmonica, offering “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
Dylan’s own comments on the Newport public’s reaction, in particular those from 1978, minimized the situation: “But don’t forget that when I played ‘Maggie’s Farm’ electric at Newport, that was something I would have done years before. They thought I didn’t know what I was doing and that I’d slipped over the edge, but the truth is… Kooper and Michael Bloomfield remember that scene very well. And what the newspapers say happened didn’t actually happen that way. There wasn’t a whole lot of resistance in the crowd. Don’t forget they weren’t equipped for what we were doing with the sound. But I had a legitimate right to do that.”20 According to Bruce Langhorne the impression of the audience reaction was “mixed. It was mixed. Some people were going, ‘What the hell’s that?!’ And some people were going, ‘Oh wow!’ But my overall impression was that more people were offended than were enchanted. That was my overall impression.”39 Al Kooper, a direct witness to the event, thinks that the public was upset by the short presentation, which did not exceed a quarter of an hour, instead of the forty-five minutes expected. After the summer 1965, Newport remains forever a symbol of Dylan’s irreversible transition to electric music and his betrayal of folk music.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
When Dylan performed “Maggie’s Farm” in Newport, he played a Fender Stratocaster Sunburst 1964 guitar. Bob later left this guitar in a private jet, and the pilot who recovered it kept the guitar in his family for nearly fifty years. Dawn Peterson, the pilot’s daughter, asked Christie’s to auction the guitar. It was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $965,000 in New York on December 6, 2013. This sale beats the record held by Eric Clapton’s “Blackie” Stratocaster that sold for $959,500 in 2004!
Love Minus Zero, No Limit
Bob Dylan / 2:50
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Bruce Langhorne: guitar
Al Gorgoni: guitar
Kenny Rankin: guitar
John Hammond Jr.: guitar (?)
Joseph Macho Jr.: bass (?)
William E. Lee: bass (?)
Bobby Gregg: drums, tambourine
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: January 13 and 14, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
“Love Minus Zero,
No Limit” is the second love song on Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. The literary references are varied. Dylan uses the languid atmosphere of the poem “The Sick Rose” by William Blake, the “thing of evil” that follows the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative poem “The Raven” on his slow descent into madness, and the biblical book of Daniel with its reference to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II’s statue built of precious metals, which is destroyed by a single stone. This song, especially the lyrics, confirms the psychedelic turn taken by Dylan. “The bridge at midnight trembles / The country doctor rambles / Bankers’ nieces seek perfection / Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.” Robert Hilburn from the Los Angeles Times highlights the ease with which Dylan produces punchy aphorisms such as, “She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all.” The singer said in 2004, “I didn’t invent this, you know… Robert Johnson would sing some song and out of nowhere there would be some kind of Confucius saying that would make you go, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’”20
“Love Minus Zero, No Limit” is a poetic evocation of a loved one, or, to be more precise, the fragility of love as the last stanza reveals: “My love she’s like some raven / At my window with a broken wing.”
Who is this woman he’s singing about, “My love she speaks like silence / Without ideals or violence”? Sara, Dylan’s future wife, for sure. She was sensitive to Eastern philosophies and Zen, while Dylan himself discovered the I Ching and Buddhism under the influence of Allen Ginsberg. When Dylan met Sara, she lived with her daughter (Maria) in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, a hotel famous for the number of artists who lived there, among them Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. The songwriter moved into Room 221 in early 1965 and wrote some of his finest songs there. While living in the hotel, Bob and Sara decided to get married. The wedding ceremony took place on November 22, 1965, in Mineola, Long Island.
Production
Once again, it is ironic that Dylan did not hesitate, consciously or unconsciously, to find sources of inspiration in Musicians some of his own melodies when writing others. This is the case for “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,” which is close to “If Not for You,” released on his album New Morning in 1970. The similarity between the two songs is apparent, without one being a copy of the other. Dylan apparently loves this kind of coincidence.
The original working title of the song “Love Minus Zero, No Limit” was “Dime Store,” which originates in a reference in the first line of the second stanza, “In the dime stores and bus stations.” At the first recording session on January 13, Dylan worked alone on this title, playing acoustic guitar. The following day he resumed recording with his band and began the second session with “Love Minus Zero, No Limit.” As usual, he played acoustic guitar and harmonica (A) and his vocal had a light delay “slap back” effect. Bruce Langhorne played guitar solo, and Kenny Rankin and Al Gorgoni provided other guitar parts, one responding harmonically to Langhorne’s performance and the other adding rhythm with a clearly pronounced vibrato. Joe Macho Jr. probably played bass with a pick, with Bobby Gregg on drums and tambourine. The group made two recordings of the song, but it seems that an insert was recorded after the second take and added at 2:38 at the end of the last verse, causing a harmonic anomaly. Thus completed, the second take was used as the master tape.
Bob Dylan performed “Love Minus Zero, No Limit” for the first time on February 12, 1965, in concert at the Armory in Troy, New York, but it only became a repertory standard after the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975 and 1976.
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
By paying attention to the guitar solo, you can hear a false note at 2:04 at the beginning of the last verse (left channel of the stereo)!
Outlaw Blues
Bob Dylan / 3:04
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Bruce Langhorne: guitar
Al Gorgoni: guitar
Kenny Rankin: guitar
John Hammond Jr.: guitar (?)
Paul L. Griffin: piano
Joseph Macho Jr.: bass (?) William E. Lee: bass (?)
Bobby Gregg: drums, tambourine (?)
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: January 13 and 14, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
On this tune, the spiritual son of Robert Johnson has become the younger brother of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, possibly just a way to tell the Rolling Stones that the blues is purely American. The lyrics of “Outlaw Blues” are an enigmatic parody of this type of music. Jesse James and Robert Ford, the outlaw who killed James, are mentioned in the text to justify the title and “black tooth” and “dark sunglasses” appear instead of “mojo” and “Blackbone.” The song is satirical. The first verse stands out, and the press has made much of the songwriter’s clever phrase, “Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’ / I just might tell you the truth.” The lyrics are obscure, the music bright. However, Dylan seems to have hesitated about the title. He had several working titles before deciding on “Outlaw Blues”: “California,” “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence,” “Tune X,” or “Key to the Highway.”
Production
“Outlaw Blues” is definitely Dylan’s first electric song. He set aside his Gibson Nick Lucas Special for a Fender Stratocaster Sunburst, the one he later played at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. This rock song with a lot of R&B beats is far from the acoustic sound in Dylan’s four previous albums. Bob rallied his band behind the riffs of his “Strato.” Langhorne led with his accurate solos as usual; Rankin and Gorgoni played the rhythm with a strong vibrato; Macho Jr. was on bass (often not present), and Gregg played drums and tambourine, ensuring a steady rhythmic pattern with the cymbal ride. Griffin’s piano part is barely audible, covered by the flood of decibels from the others. Dylan’s voice sounds rocklike and hits the pitch in treble without problems. Tom Wilson took care to wrap the song up in a rather long reverb, doubled with a slight delay. Finally, for the first time, Dylan recorded his harmonica as an overdub. This gave him more flexibility in improvising the excellent bluesy parts.
Dylan recorded several acoustic parts on January 13, but the final take was taped the following day after two false starts. To date the songwriter has performed “Outlaw Blues” live in concert only once. This was at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, on September 20, 2007, when he played electric keyboard, not guitar. He was joined onstage by the White Stripes’ Jack White.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
“Outlaw Blues” was the name of a 1977 film directed by Richard T. Heffron and staring Peter Fonda as a country singer named Bobby. The music was partially composed by Bruce Langhorne.
On The Road Again
Bob Dylan / 2:36
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica (?)
Bruce Langhorne: guitar
Al Gorgoni: guitar
Kenny Rankin: guitar
Frank Owens: piano
Joseph Macho Jr.: bass (?)
William E. Lee: bass (?)
Bobby Gregg: drums, tambourine (?)
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: January 13 and 15, 1965
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: Roy Halee and Pete Dauria
Genesis and Lyrics
“On the Road Again” begins with one of the most common lines in the history of the blues: “I woke up in the morning.” But in the second line, the clichés of the African-American idiom disappear, and the curtain rises on Dylan’s world of the absurd. A father-in-law wearing a Napoleon Bonaparte mask disfigured by a monkey, Santa Claus hidden in the fireplace, and an uncle-in-law stealing from the narrator’s pockets. This, the surreal family of the narrator’s girlfriend and the narrator himself living wi
th frogs in his socks. But beyond the comic and grotesque images, the song reflects a critique of the mass-consumption society that has forgotten its founding ideals—when the milkman comes in, “he’s wearing a derby hat,” the mailman comes in, “he’s gotta take a side,” and the butler, “he’s got something to prove.” It seems that instability—or rather the need to run away—is a recurring theme for Dylan: in “Restless Farewell” (The Times They Are A-Changin’), which evokes the need to cut his ties, and “Maggie’s Farm,” where all constraints are rejected. It is reaffirmed once again in “On the Road Again,” where the narrator jokingly rejects his unusual in-laws’ family.
The title of this song refers not only to Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece On the Road, which was the founding text of the Beat generation, but also to a traditional blues song from 1928 by the Memphis Jug Band concerning an unfaithful woman. Note also that in 1968, Canned Heat recorded the boogie song “On the Road Again” (an adaptation of “Big Road Blues,” recorded in 1928 by Tommy Johnson), which reached numbers 8 and 16 on the UK and US charts, respectively.
Bob Dylan All the Songs Page 21