It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ by Bob Dylan
May 26, 1965
Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan
#1 on the Record Retailer Albums Chart (UK), May 23-29, 1965
One of the most mythologized moments in rock ‘n’ roll is when Dylan “went electric” on July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival. Legend tells of a crowd of folk faithful so fervent that they couldn’t endure to witness their sacred music being defiled by dirty, soulless rock ‘n’ roll. The new folk god had revealed himself a heretic; too genteel to stone him to death, the audience instead hurled a chorus of boos. History vindicated Dylan as the messiah of a new style of music, while those who jeered are merely Pharisees who criticize what they don’t understand.
If the story is true (alternative reports point to bad sound quality and a too-short set as instigating the negative reaction), then the crowd of so-called fans must not have been paying much attention. Dylan’s very first single, 1962’s “Mixed-Up Confusion,” was backed by a full rock ‘n’ roll band, and he continued experimenting with electric instrumentation during the sessions for his sophomore album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). More blatantly, just four months before the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, an entire side of which was made up of rock and roll arrangements — and even the “acoustic” side featured hints of electric guitar. The album had already proven to be his most commercially successful yet, giving Dylan his debut entry into the Top 10 of the Billboard Top LPs chart. The lead single, the Chuck Berry-indebted “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” even managed to crack the Top 40, another first for the prodigal folksinger.
The folkies out on that Newport field may not have gotten it, but the Brits certainly did. As popular as Dylan was becoming in America, it was a relatively slow ascent, his fanbase gradually expanding from Greenwich Village hipsters, to collegiate folksters, to the pop-mad public. In the UK, however, Dylan burst onto the scene fully formed, with a back catalogue ripe for new Dylan fans to gobble up. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan topped the British album charts in April 1965, two years after its US release, while “The Times They are a-Changin'” became a Top 10 hit just shortly before “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Dylan’s brief but whirlwind tour of England that spring, famously documented in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back, found him swamped by fans and journalists in a sort of reverse British Invasion. By the tour’s end, Freewheelin’ had returned to the top of the charts, to be replaced a week later by Bringing It All Back Home.
Even on this UK tour, however, Dylan stuck to acoustic performances. (The infamous cry of “Judas!” — the British counterpart to the Newport boo fest — wouldn’t happen until his 1966 tour.) The six songs on the set list drawn from Bringing It All Back Home consisted of the album’s entire acoustic side, plus two ballads from the electric side, “She Belongs to Me” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” that could easily be adapted for a solo performance. But while the arrangement of the songs may have been familiar, their style and content diverged as radically from traditional folk as the rock sounds he’d begun exploring. “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” in particular feature dreamlike, highly allusive (and elusive) imagery that forsakes folk’s purposely plainspoken, direct calls to action. “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” represents an even more extreme repudiation of his protest singer past, marrying the fragmentary style that had begun infiltrating his lyrics with a rapidfire condemnation of seemingly everything. He bids farewell to the protest song by constructing the ultimate example of it, in turn making its indiscriminate ranting as ridiculous as its bleakly funny title.
In fact, the recurring theme throughout Bringing It All Back Home is Dylan’s dissatisfaction with the staid, doggedly traditional folk scene, and in particular his position as its figurehead. Dylan started his musical career playing Little Richard-inspired rock ‘n’ roll as a teenager in Minnesota, at one point even backing Bobby Vee on piano for some live performances. He turned to folk music in part because it seemed more mature than rock. Now, he sought to wed folk’s capacity for thoughtful lyrics with rock’s rawness, sense of fun, and gut-level (rather than cerebral) potency. Dylan often slipped a wry or even silly sense of humor into his songs (as with “Bob Dylan’s Blues” or “I Shall Be Free No. 10“), but seldom had he quite seemed free to turn in performances as loose, funny, and abstract as “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Outlaw Blues,” and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” (The title of the latter also appears to be a jab at his similarly named “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from two years earlier, replacing the original’s sincere nostalgia with jokey nonsense.) The title Bringing It All Back Home seemingly refers to both this return to his youthful musical roots, as well as a shift in his lyrical concerns from universal issues regarding the world’s injustices to smaller, more personal conflicts.
But while songs like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,”and “On the Road Again” on the surface address relationships between men and women, they can also be read as Dylan bidding farewell to his folk persona, outlining his new style, and describing his artistic restlessness. (Even the mysterious, mercurial free spirit of “She Belongs to Me” has been interpreted as being less about an actual woman than about Dylan’s need to follow his muse wherever it leads him.) The clearest example of his claustrophobia in the grips of the folk music establishment is “Maggie’s Farm,” where he complains that “I have a head full of ideas that are driving me insane,” but that he’s commanded to “‘sing while you slave,’ but I just get bored.”
Bringing It All Back Home may have seemed like a confident manifesto for a new style of music, but even Dylan wasn’t entirely convinced. “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing,” he told Playboy magazine in 1966. “It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.” His breakthrough came in June 1965, when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone“; it was released as a single five days before his Newport performance. Any hesitancy that could be read into Bringing It All Back Home‘s electric/acoustic split was completely wiped away by the new song’s defiant attitude and wholly original sound — not folk, but not quite like any other rock music either. “Like a Rolling Stone” was a runaway hit, climbing to #4 on the UK Singles Chart and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Dylan may have lost his position as the hero of the folk revival, but he had become the nasal, snarling voice of rock’s future.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
