(1965) Bringing It All Back Home

Bob Dylan

ReleasedMarch 22, 1965

LabelColumbia Records

RecordedJanuary 13–15, 1965

ProducerTom Wilson

StudioColumbia Studio A, New York City

Genres

Primary

Folk rockSinger-songwriterContemporary folk

Secondary

Electric bluesBlues rock

Scene

Greenwich Village

ListenRYM·Apple Music·Spotify

Tracks46:54

Side one24:03

1	Subterranean Homesick Blues	2:21
2	She Belongs to Me	2:47
3	Maggie's Farm	3:54
4	Love Minus Zero/No Limit	2:51
5	Outlaw Blues	3:05
6	On the Road Again	2:35
7	Bob Dylan's 115th Dream	6:30

Side two22:51

1	Mr. Tambourine Man	5:30
2	Gates of Eden	5:40
3	It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)	7:29
4	It's All Over Now, Baby Blue	4:12

The first sound on Bringing It All Back Home is a guitar figure lifted almost whole from Chuck Berry, and over it Bob Dylan starts talking faster than anyone in folk music had dared. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is a sprint, a torrent of internal rhyme and surreal newsreel imagery built on the chassis of Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”, a debt Dylan later named outright.¹ It is the sound of a folk singer turning into something the language had no word for yet. The album’s cover frames the same moment as a photograph: Dylan in his manager’s house, ringed by the records that fed him, from Robert Johnson and the Impressions to Ravi Shankar and a Kurt Weill collection, a fallout-shelter sign on the floor and an issue of Time on the table.² The record is that picture in sound. Cut in three days in January 1965, electric on one side and acoustic on the other, it gathers everything Dylan had absorbed — Delta blues and Chicago R&B, the broadside ballad and Beat poetry — and fuses it into a form that did not exist before he made it: the literary rock song. It is the pivot of his career, and one of the hinges of the decade.

Musical and production context

The making was fast to the point of recklessness. Dylan booked three days at Columbia’s Studio A: the first, January 13, was a solo session — he ran through some ten songs at the piano and guitar and threw almost all of them out.³ The next afternoon, producer Tom Wilson — who had quietly turned Dylan electric a year earlier and was producing him for the last time — brought a band into the room: three guitarists around the blues player Bruce Langhorne, two bassists (one of them Bill Lee, the father of the filmmaker Spike Lee), Paul Griffin on piano, and Bobby Gregg on drums.⁴ They mostly cut first takes. “We just did first takes,” Langhorne remembered, “and it was amazingly intuitive.”⁵ By the third day the method had hardened into nerve, much of the record caught in a single take and taped almost as fast as he could play it.⁶

That looseness is left audible. “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” opens with a blown take: Dylan starts the song alone, the band misses its entrance, Tom Wilson breaks up laughing, and the false start was kept, spliced onto the full-band take, at the head of the finished track.⁷ No folk record had ever shipped its own mistake as a feature. Side one runs on that energy: electric blues and Chuck Berry drive under “Maggie’s Farm”, “Outlaw Blues”, and “On the Road Again”, Griffin’s piano rolling beneath the guitars, the whole side moving with a snap Dylan’s acoustic records had never had.

Side two sets the band down, and the air changes completely. These are the longest and densest songs Dylan had written — symbolist visions owing as much to Arthur Rimbaud and the Beats as to any folk source, carried on voice, guitar, and harmonica alone.⁸ Langhorne’s one electric guitar threads quietly through “Mr. Tambourine Man” — fittingly, since it was Langhorne’s huge Turkish frame drum, a tambourine Dylan remembered as big as a wagon wheel, that gave him the title and the figure of the tambourine man in the first place.⁹ What the two sides share is the writing. The voice is the same wherever the band is or isn’t; the language is doing the same work, loud or quiet.

The songs

The album’s argument is made song by song, and the marquee tracks are where the new form announces itself. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” compresses paranoia, drugs, and authority into two minutes of near-rapped patter; its warning that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” was literal enough that a faction of the radical left would name itself the Weathermen after it.¹⁰ “Maggie’s Farm” takes the old protest impulse and turns it inward and electric: built on the traditional “Penny’s Farm” from the Anthology of American Folk Music, its refusal — “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” — reads as a man quitting every farm at once, the folk movement’s included.¹¹ It would be the song he opened with, electric, at Newport that July. Not everything points outward: “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” is a still, balanced love song for Sara Lownds, whom Dylan would marry that November.¹²

The summit is on side two. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” runs more than seven minutes and never lets up, a hard, scanning indictment of commerce, war, and obedience that holds some of the most-quoted lines he ever wrote — “money doesn’t talk, it swears,” and, at its dark center, “he not busy being born is busy dying,” a line durable enough that Jimmy Carter would quote it accepting the 1976 Democratic nomination.¹³ “Gates of Eden” is its visionary twin, a procession of symbolist images with no chorus to relieve them. The record closes on “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, a farewell so open-ended it has been read ever since as Dylan saying goodbye at once to a lover, to the folk movement, and to the singer he had been — “strike another match, go start anew” the last instruction on the album.¹⁴

What it inherits and what it introduces

The cover is the key to what the record is doing. The photographer Daniel Kramer shot Dylan in Albert Grossman’s Woodstock house, Sally Grossman reclining behind him in a red dress, and arranged around them the artifacts of Dylan’s intake: Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers, the Impressions’ Keep On Pushing, Ravi Shankar, Lotte Lenya singing Weill, his own Another Side of Bob Dylan, a Beat poetry magazine, the I Ching, the Time with Lyndon Johnson on the cover.¹⁵ It is a self-portrait as a record collection — the whole map of where the music came from, laid out at his feet. The sleeve carried the same message in words: for a liner note, Dylan printed a lowercase, stream-of-consciousness prose poem, mock-Beat and barely parsable, the folk troubadour announcing himself a modernist.

The album plays that map. It inherits the entirety of what Dylan had taken in over four years in Greenwich Village (the blues, the topical ballad, the literary ambition of his last two acoustic records), and the rock and roll he had set aside as a teenager to become a folk singer — rock and roll that had just come roaring back from England, where the Animals had turned “House of the Rising Sun” (a song off Dylan’s own 1962 debut) into a number-one electric single. The title says so twice over: bringing it all back home is rock and roll coming home to Dylan, and every one of his sources coming home into one record. What it introduces is the fusion itself — the discovery that a literate, allusive, book-length lyric and an electric band belonged together, that the verbal density he had built on side two could ride a backbeat as easily as a fingerpicked guitar. That was the new thing, and within a year half of Anglo-American pop was built on it.

Reception

The record broke Dylan commercially for the first time. It reached number six on the American albums chart, his first to crack the top ten, and number one in Britain, and “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” released as a single, became his first record to reach the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number thirty-nine in the United States and number nine in Britain.¹⁶ For the single Dylan made a short promotional film — standing in a London alley, flipping away hand-lettered cue cards of the lyrics while Allen Ginsberg loitered in the background — that D. A. Pennebaker used to open his documentary Dont Look Back, and that is routinely cited as a forerunner of the music video.¹⁷

Among folk purists, the electric side landed as a betrayal. The movement that had crowned Dylan its laureate heard the band on side one as a defection to the enemy, and the alarm that ran through the folk press that spring was the overture to the booing that would greet him at the Newport Folk Festival in July, when he opened a short electric set with “Maggie’s Farm.”¹⁸ The reach of the album, though, dwarfed the grumbling: it announced that the most celebrated songwriter in folk had walked out of the genre and taken his audience with him.

Influence and legacy

The album’s largest consequence arrived through other hands, and fast. Two months after it appeared, the Byrds released a jangling, twelve-string electric version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and took it to number one on both sides of the Atlantic; by the time Billboard printed the phrase “folk rock” that June, the thing already had a sound and a hit.¹⁹ The current ran straight out of these sessions. That June, fresh from producing Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, Tom Wilson took two of these players, guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg, and overdubbed electric instruments onto a dead acoustic single by Simon & Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence”, which went to number one at the start of 1966 and revived a duo that had already broken up.²⁰ By the end of 1965 the model was everywhere — Sonny and Cher, the Turtles charting with Dylan’s own “It Ain’t Me Babe”, the whole folk rock wave — and across the ocean it fed the British bands, surfacing on The Beatles’ Rubber Soul that December.

For Dylan himself, side one was the door. The electric set at Newport, and the run of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde that followed within fifteen months, all came straight out of it. Critics have ranked it among the essential records of its era ever since — the album that pulled rock and roll up to the level of its lyrics, and pulled the literary lyric down into the body of a rock band. Bringing It All Back Home is where the folk singer ended and the rock artist began — and where, on side two, he proved he was surrendering nothing he could not replace.

MAP

Explorer

Bringing It All Back Home

Musical and production context

The songs

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

MAP

Explorer

Bringing It All Back Home

Musical and production context

The songs

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

Footnotes