1. Subterranean Homesick Blues
2. She Belongs to Me
3. Maggie’s Farm
4. Love Minus Zero
5. Outlaw Blues
6. On the Road Again
7. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
8. Mr Tambourine Man
9. Gates of Eden
10. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
11. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
He’s an actor and sometimes a director. He’s played Hamlet and Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Jeffrey Skilling in Enron in the West End and the voice of Pongo in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians II. He’s also Frank Edwards in all four series of Mr Selfridge on ITV.
Impossible, but three I’d hate to be without are:
Superfly – Curtis Mayfield
Another Green World – Brian Eno
English Settlement – XTC
It’s the facts, not the story, that leave you dizzy.
So here we go.
I’m going to skip all that David Copperfield stuff because we don’t have time. All you need to know is that he begins his life in rural Minnesota – miles away from where he should be. With nothing else to do he idolises Hank Williams, then Little Richard, and, finally, Woody Guthrie. You get the picture. It’s the fifties – holding hands and going steady.
Well, that wasn’t for him.
In January of 1961 he emphatically decides he’s had enough and travels to New York to make his mark. He’s changed his name too, signalling his intent in the process. No longer Robert Zimmerman, a name fit for owning hardware stores, he’s now Bob Dylan – a name fit for anything. And I love that he did that. That he was nowhere near famous and still thought ‘there’s no way I’m coming to New York with my silly actual name. They’ll get what they’re given and I’m giving them Bob Dylan.’
It was the best thing Robert Zimmerman ever did.
On arrival he immerses himself in Greenwich Village – a bohemia of coffee houses and people with roll-necks singing folk songs. An ideal place for a Woody Guthrie fanatic to get involved. And he does, quickly becoming ‘the kid’ on the scene – a ten-minute support slot here, a lunchtime show there. All the while he’s absorbing influence, making contacts and graduating to bigger stages.
Everyone who was around at the time now comments on his uncanny ability to learn a song in one listen. They also tell tales of him stealing records – of him crashing on the floor at night and making off with half their collection in the morning. And finally, his love life explodes too – a series of women smitten by his vagabond charm. Joan Baez would later say ‘He could bring out the mothering instinct in a woman who thought her mothering instinct was dead.’
This is his ‘tentative’ migration into Greenwich Village then – he basically ransacks the place.
In October 1961 he comes to the attention of John Hammond – the A&R man at Columbia who had signed Billie Holiday. Hammond sees Dylan perform and is immediately taken in. What he sees is in one sense derivative but in another entirely different. It’s younger, brighter, spun from the past but with polish and attitude. Hammond, trusting his instincts, signs him to Columbia there and then.
And that’s how easy it was. Dylan had come to Greenwich Village in January as a nobody. Just ten months later, he had a record deal.
His first album, brilliantly titled Bob Dylan, takes just six hours to record. I know. Six hours – that’s not even a full shift at work. He strolled in late and left early. No one records an album in that amount of time. Most people can’t even record a song in that amount of time. But, in hindsight, maybe it was too early for him, too rushed. He’s still stuck in his Woody Guthrie phase and the album is nothing more than a charming homage – interpretations, like impressions, of the songs he had learnt, alongside just one Dylan original – ‘Song to Woody’.
It sells poorly and, for a while, the executives at Columbia have a nickname for their new signing – ‘Hammond’s Folly’.
Not a great start then.
But look, this is Bob Dylan and he’s not about to stand for that. So, smarted by failure, he decides to throw everyone else’s songs in the bin and concentrate on writing his own. The time has come for him to trust his instincts.
What follows is probably the most prolific and concentrated period of songwriting ever, a time in his life where Bob Dylan literally couldn’t stop writing songs. I read an interview with him once where he said that he was even writing songs when he was talking to people. Just imagine that for a second. It’s complete madness.
‘I caught up with Bob today.’
‘How was he?’
‘He seemed fine, although he was writing “Masters of War” at the time so it’s hard to tell.’
‘Right.’
WHO ON EARTH WRITES SONGS WHEN THEY’RE TALKING TO PEOPLE?!
1962 Bob Dylan, that’s who.
For his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he produces a staggering thirty-seven songs that are so good the only difficulty is deciding what to leave out. One of the songs that doesn’t make the cut is ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ – a song so brilliant that, in 2010, it closes the first season of The Walking Dead. That’s how good his off-cuts are – forty-eight years after he’s discarded them they’re the perfect song to close a TV series about the zombie apocalypse.
Nothing goes to waste.
But, also, look at the ones that made it – ‘Hard Rain’, ‘Blowing in the Wind’, ‘Don’t Think Twice’, ‘Oxford Town’, ‘Masters of War’ etc. etc. Just a quick word on ‘Hard Rain’ because it’s so extraordinary. At just under seven minutes, it’s a series of opening lines that are majestically put together to create a narrative of impending doom and personal terror. Both Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen are on record as saying it’s the song that made them want to become songwriters. But what’s remarkable is that he was just twenty-one when he wrote it – when the world was on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
WHO ON EARTH WRITES SONGS DURING THE CUBAN MISS…
Look, you get the idea by now.
The album, helped by the best cover ever, is a success. Dylan’s arrived in earnest and people are now covering his songs – notably Peter, Paul and Mary who have a huge hit with ‘Blowing in the Wind’. With success come the inevitable attempts at ownership and definition from, not just the media, but also his fans. He’s quickly labelled as the ‘voice of a generation’, he’s quickly asked to clarify his meaning and his message. All that pressure, all those questions. He’s even wheeled out at the historic March on Washington, singing four songs prior to Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech – the toughest support slot ever.
Still it’s bewildering. Everything’s happening so fast and he seems unwilling to rest and take stock.
He follows Freewheelin’ with The Times They Are a-Changin’, another brilliant collection of finger-pointing songs which only serve to increase his popularity. Again, the songs are recorded with the minimum amount of fuss, just a few takes to get them down. Like Freewheelin’ it’s music as still photography, a moment in time from Dylan’s life that’s captured and recorded for us to enjoy – while he moves on.
And move on he does. It’s around this time that he gets less interested in global themes and more interested in Rimbaud and amphetamines. Crucially, he also hears The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ for the first time. Legend has it that he was so excited that he got out of the car, ran around for a bit, and then started to bang his head against the bonnet saying ‘It’s great!’
Coincidentally, The Beatles were in Paris around the same time and George Harrison returned to their hotel with a copy of Freewheelin’ (En Roue Libre actually) which they played to death.
A mutual appreciation society had begun.
And now Dylan starts the turn.
His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, is recorded in a single ten-hour session, washed down with a couple of bottles of Beaujolais. Still photography again. And the other side that the title suggests? Well this time it’s more personal, its lyrics more poetic. If any fingers are being pointed, they’re pointed inwards. But, in places, it’s fun too. It’s even got a parody of Hitchcock’s Psycho on it.
The critics hate it. Po-faced and precious, they wonder where their Dylan has gone, always in thrall to their Dylan and no one else’s. They even start to say that he’s lost it.
Shortly after it’s released, stung by the criticism, he meets The Beatles for the first time in a New York hotel. He turns up looking for his usual drink, cheap wine, but gets offered champagne and pills. He turns them both down and, instead, rolls a massive joint – giving The Beatles their first experience of marijuana. Paul McCartney, out of his head, thinks he’s discovered the meaning of life and writes it down on a piece of paper. The next morning he wakes, reaches for the paper and unravels it to see the words – ‘THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS’.
Some joint that, Bob.
But it’s worth pausing to wonder what may have gone through Dylan’s head as he spent time with them. Could he sense that the sixties were about to take off? And if he did, then he must have realised that these four were his competition – that he would have to change again if he was going to keep up.
He then hears what The Animals have done with ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, a song from his debut album, and his mind is made up.
He gets to work on his fifth album. Turning again.
In just three days Dylan records Bringing It All Back Home – a mixture of acoustic and electric songs that set him up for the rest of his career. I repeat – in just three days. On the last day he recorded the final versions of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘On the Road Again’, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, ‘Gates of Eden’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. All that, in one day.
It’s the facts, not the story, that leave you dizzy.
Musically, it’s a riot. Lyrically, it’s a dream. And this time it isn’t still photography, it’s a blur. It’s Dylan on the half turn – pulling away and taking his chance.
There’s that line on ‘Tambourine Man’: ‘To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea.’
I can only imagine his face when he came up with that. One of his greatest images and, as always with Dylan, it’s the detail that does it – the one hand waving free. It makes the song three-dimensional, as if he’s stepped outside the verse to acknowledge his own gesture, his own victory.
The album’s awash with moments like that.
While a lot has been made of the change in direction that Bringing It All Back Home represents, and its subsequent influence, what interests me is what happened to Dylan himself. You can see it most clearly in the promotional video for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, filmed in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London.
An impassive Dylan stands on the side of the screen, tossing aside a shorthand version of the song written on cue cards. He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t even open his mouth. That’s how interested he is in performing for us. But look at him, look how resplendent he is – how lean he is. Look at the change, how he’s gone from a Huck Finn character to the coolest person on the planet – to the last person in the world that looks like he needs mothering.
He’s taking his chance, grabbing the sixties by the scruff of the neck, and staring us down.
When he gets to the end, there’s one last card.
It simply says ‘WHAT?’
It’s the only card that doesn’t represent a line in the song. He’s ad-libbing, but deliberately, looking at his audience and saying ‘WHAT?’And then he throws that on the floor too and walks off without waiting for an answer.
Dylan on the half turn in 1965 – pulling away and taking his chance.
But honestly, you should see what he does next.
Bringing It All Back Home came out in 1965 and so was conceived just before I was. How have I avoided it this long?
WELL. Every teenager has a singer-songwriter-shaped socket in their head. Mine was plugged by Dory Previn, whose records I stole from my da. My aural and political landscape was mostly her; I never reached the whiny male fields beyond.
In the summer of 1980, when my ears were born, I was played three records by a smart looked-up-to friend: Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants, Closer by Joy Division and Propaganda by Sparks (they’d all still be on my top twenty list). He was also into Dylan, which lent Bob an early cachet. He had the collected lyrics in a book. Why didn’t Dylan go onto the turntable then? I wish I knew. Sliding doors.
And why not since? Mystified Bob fans must understand that their mid-sixties man can be intimidating to the uninitiated; the albums are dense, and deserving of respect. Like the late Beethoven quartets, you come to them when you’re ready.
Me, I saw Harold and Maude (which knocked a serious teen sideways), and so I got into Cat Stevens, a sort of Diet Dylan, and that was enough. I got my anti-establishment noises from punk and ska and Test Dept. US Civil Rights, seen through a Vaselined lens, took on a hazy glow. If I’d had my nose pressed more firmly up against the glass of America, I’d have persevered. But I caught the eighties disease of mistrusting most things American (which wasn’t hard at the time, before US culture was quite so everywhere), and Dylan got tarred with that same brush.
So, sorry.
On the other hand, I get to discover him now, so here goes.
I wanted to do this properly, so I bought a nice heavy vinyl copy, stuck it on the turntable and poured myself a whisky. First thoughts: ‘Is that a chaise longue on the cover? Not very rock ‘n’ roll. Who’s that scarlet woman on it? Looks like Jessica Raine. I know it’s not Joan Baez (did they have a thing?). Is she a muse, or a silent companion, like on the Mastermind box?’
The First Pass: Meeting It All Head On. (Whisky: Ardbeg ten-year-old.)
Brief impressions: deceptively simple 8-bar blues of the sort I struggle through on the piano. Four-bar blues. Five-and-a-half-bar blues? Wit, wit, wit. Half rhymes! Punchlines! Bob’s got problems. He’s trapped. But in what? Simple recording, the man himself quite central. A tight band that rocks. Sticky tunes so good that the first time you hear them, you think you’ve heard them before.
Impossible to separate form and content. Does Dylan sing like that because he writes like that? Consistently arriving at each word just before the beat, giving the lines a terrible power. Listening on LP emphasises how much this is an album of two halves – the first electric, the second mostly acoustic. I knew there was a big row about Bob making music with stuff that had to be plugged into the mains. Couldn’t see the problem myself. But the division is obvious, and the order of the tracks unarguably right. The whole inspired but not limited by Kerouac. Whassit all about, Bob? We don’t know. He won’t say.
Child comes in, knocks whisky over. Decide that the second pass two days later should be For the Words (Whisky: Caol Ila twelve-year-old.)
Is it cheating to look up lyrics online? I tried following a few songs like that, but oddly found I wasn’t listening as carefully (which Bob maybe knew when he left out a lyric sheet) so I put down the iPad, went back and started again.
Could ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ really be by George Formby, as The Day Today once suggested? I remembered a jolly version from The Young Ones but nothing prepares you for the original two-minute-seventeen-second Dylan torrent. Taut, pushy, it’s the song version of the glasses that allow you to see the world as it is in Carpenter’s They Live.
Didn’t the Weathermen, a US revolutionary collective, take their name from the line ‘Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’? Blimey. Imagine having that sort of penetration – a danceable manifesto giving its name to a radical Communist movement. The times they have a-changed.
‘SHB’ is followed by its own B-side, ‘She Belongs to Me’. She obviously doesn’t. A portmanteau of Dylan girlfriends, their power anatomised in squirm-inducing detail; he later wished he hadn’t written it. ‘She can take the dark out of nighttime, and paint the daytime black… But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole down on your knees.’ Yup, been there.
Who is this Maggie, who we met in track one? She’s back and she’s got a farm. Dylan couldn’t know that Steve Bell would use ‘Maggie’s Farm’ as the title of his City Limits cartoon strip, so maybe her farm isn’t the military industrial complex by another name. I knew this was the track Dylan opened with at the Newport Folk Festival, in a very punchy electric version with the Butterfield Blues Band; they famously became the Butterfield Booed Band as soon as it ended. Bad manners, I think. Even if you think ‘going electric’ is ‘going commercial’, you have to allow an artist to do their thing. One of my favourite poets, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, had the same struggle: activists wanted useful slogans they could chalk on buildings, he sometimes just wanted to write. Perhaps ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is Bob bringing his electric chickens back home to roost. This idea became more important as I went along.
The last three tracks of side one, ‘Outlaw Blues’, ‘On the Road Again’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ seemed to form a set, which I called The Funny Ones. They start off mocking the ‘Woke up this morning/Had all the symptoms of typhoid’ school of sixties blues. But despite the Gilliam silliness of ‘Dream’ with its giggling false start, they quickly turn from funny ha ha to funny peculiar, from on the run through the oddness of in-laws to nightmare surreality. The tale of Captain Arab and the Pope of Eruke (Irooq? Iraq?), listened to only a week after Trump’s anti-Muslim nonsense, now had a prophetic flavour. Around the high harmonica scream that begins ‘On the Road Again’, it feels like ‘where are we going?’ becomes ‘I have to get out of this place’. To which end, Bob Dylan, titling himself in the third person, flips a coin to decide whether to return to a ship and escape, or go back to jail (and perhaps help his imprisoned protest movement friends):
It came up tails
It rhymed with sails
So I made it back to the ship
Can’t help noticing that ‘tails’ is much closer to ‘jail’ than ‘ship’, Bob. You got the wrong flip, but you contrived to escape anyway. So ends the electric side. Dylan flips, and so do I.
Side Two was all recorded on 15 January 1965, which makes it possibly the greatest day’s work ever. Except it starts with the only stain on this Parthenon of an album, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Having spent side one saying ‘I can go where I like’, why go here? At first I found it foursquare and clumpy. The internal rhymes grated, Bruce Langhorne’s bell-like electric lead guitar seemed over-present in the mix and Dylan’s new Pied Piper muse was an annoyingly jangly little fucker, too close to The Fast Show’s Bob Fleming and the Bavarian excesses of Morris dancing for comfort. And it starts with a chorus, which is ODD.
The irony of the acoustic/electric row is that the electric band setting holds two purely acoustic jewels. Arriving at ‘Gates of Eden’, I thought, ‘This is more like it.’ First solo song on the album, a relentless nine verses. Listen to the way he sings ‘No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden’ – nothing’s getting in the way of that. Unapologetically ugly at times, bitten and savage, Dylan’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’. I took the lyrics as I found them, with no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.
‘Eden’ softened me up for the knockout blow of ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, which is surely one of the most powerful noises ever committed to vinyl. The fancy guitar-picking sounded new, forensic and particular. It promised insight, and delivered. Dense, fast, depressed and depressing. And so elegantly concise. Very hard to choose one fridge-magnet line, but ‘He not busy being born is busy dying’ is worth the album price on its own. The tender need to hold and be held by Mother reminded me of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Sonny’s Lettah’. That first harmonica sigh, a breath-made music, feels like air snatched above the rising sludge. The uneven length of the verses is vicious – each will go on just as long as it needs to, thanks. It’s so boldly based around one note that, like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, all movement away from the tonic feels like only temporary relief. It’s life and life only – a sentence that ends with death.
Then ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, the last song of last songs. A friendly walking bass giving a very false sense of security. Dylan’s yelled, sweetly tired high notes are left undubbed. ‘That’s yer lot,’ he seems to be saying. ‘Get out there and live.’
At some point before the Third Pass (whisky: Lagavulin sixteen-year-old), having to listen to BIABH became wanting to listen to BIABH. A good sign.
Maybe it was the Lagavulin, but Dylan’s voice had never sounded warmer than on ‘Love Minus Zero’, the whiny insistence of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and her skiffle friends delighted me, even the annoying tambourine chappy, protected by a harmonica break I hadn’t really heard before, revealed himself in the last verse to be a gorgeous enchanter, and the weird guitar rush of ‘Let me forget about today until tomorrow’, where the Pro Plus kicks in and the disciple realises his safety dance can’t last, made Bob sound touchingly human.
The easy, rolling accompaniment of the band now seemed like a velvet glove. The words punched hard, their stream-of-consciousness indulgence alarm silenced. I trusted Dylan the poet now. Again and again, as I examined the luggage of some freighted phrase, it unpacked itself and refused to go back in the box.
In the end, the reason I’d never heard this album before turned out to be the reason I enjoyed hearing it so much. It’s hard.
I already have.
Reader, I loved it. I’m so glad you made me listen. I can’t do the whole ‘this is the best Dylan album, or the third best’ thing, because I don’t know many of the others either, but I did get a big fat kick from it.
So, because nothing is perfect, a very solid 9/10.