Bringing IT All Back Home - The Songs

The Songs

The album opens with "Subterranean Homesick Blues", a romp through the difficulties and absurdities of anti-establishment politics that was heavily inspired by Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business." Often cited as a precursor to rap and music videos (the cue-card scene in Dont Look Back), "Subterranean Homesick Blues" became a Top 20 hit for Dylan.

"Snagged by a sour, pinched guitar riff, the song has an acerbic tinge...and Dylan sings the title rejoinders in mock self-pity," writes music critic Tim Riley. "It's less an indictment of the system than a coil of imagery that spells out how the system hangs itself with the rope it's so proud of."

"She Belongs to Me" extols the bohemian virtues of an artistic lover whose creativity must be constantly fed ("Bow down to her on Sunday / Salute her when her birthday comes. / For Halloween buy her a trumpet / And for Christmas, give her a drum.")

"Maggie's Farm" is Dylan's declaration of independence from the protest folk movement. Punning on Silas McGee's Farm, where he had performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a civil rights protest in 1962 (featured in the film Dont Look Back), Maggie's Farm recasts Dylan as the pawn and the folk music scene as the oppressor. Rejecting the expectations of that scene as he turns towards loud rock'n'roll, self-exploration, and surrealism, Dylan swoons: "They say sing while you slave / I just get bored."

"Love Minus Zero/No Limit" is a low-key love song, described by Riley as a "hallucinatory allegiance, a poetic turn that exposes the paradoxes of love ('She knows there's no success like failure / And that failure's no success at all')... points toward the dual vulnerabilities that steer 'Just Like A Woman.' In both cases, a woman's susceptibility is linked to the singer's defenseless infatuation."

"Outlaw Blues" explores Dylan's desire to leave behind the pieties of political folk and explore a bohemian, "outlaw" lifestyle. Straining at his identity as a protest singer, Dylan knows he "might look like Robert Ford" (who assassinated Jesse James), but he feels "just like a Jesse James."

"On the Road Again" catalogs the absurd affectations and degenerate living conditions of bohemia. The song concludes, "Then you ask why I don't live here / Honey, how come you don't move?".

"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" narrates a surreal experience involving the discovery of America, the cast of Moby Dick and numerous bizarre encounters. It is the longest song in the electric section of the album, starting out as an acoustic ballad before being interrupted by laughter, and then starting back up again with an electric blues rhythm. The music is so similar in places to Another Side of Bob Dylan's "Motorpsycho Nitemare" as to be indistinguishable from it but for the electric instrumentation. The song can be best read as a highly sardonic, non-linear (historically) dreamscape parallel cataloguing of the discovery, creation and merits of the United States.

Written sometime in February 1964, "Mr. Tambourine Man" was originally recorded for Another Side of Bob Dylan; a rough performance with several mistakes, the recording was rejected, but a polished version has often been attributed to Dylan's early use of LSD, although eyewitness accounts of both the song's composition and of Dylan's first use of LSD suggest that "Mr. Tambourine Man" was actually written weeks before. Instead, Dylan said the song was inspired by a large tambourine owned by Bruce Langhorne. "On one session, Tom Wilson had asked to play tambourine," Dylan recalled in 1985. "And he had this gigantic tambourine...It was as big as a wagonwheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind." Langhorne confirmed that he "used to play this giant Turkish tambourine. It was about deep, and it was very light and it had a sheepskin head and it had jingle bells around the edge—just one layer of bells all the way around...I bought it 'cause I liked the sound...I used to play it all the time." In addition to inspiring the title, Langhorne also played the electric guitar countermelody in the song, the only musician to play on the song besides Dylan.

A surrealist work heavily influenced by Rimbaud (most notably for the "magic swirlin' ship" evoked in the lyrics), Heylin hailed it as a leap "beyond the boundaries of folk song once and for all, with one of most inventive and original melodies." Riley describes "Mr. Tambourine Man" as "Dylan's pied-piper anthem of creative living and open-mindedness...a lot of these lines are evocative without holding up to logic, even though they ring worldly." Salon.com critic Bill Wyman calls it "rock's most feeling paean to psychedelia, all the more compelling in that it's done acoustically."

Almost simultaneously with Dylan's release, the newly-formed Byrds recorded and released an electrified, abbreviated treatment of the song which would be the band's breakthrough hit, and would be a powerful force in launching the folk rock genre.

"Gates of Eden" builds on the developments made with "Chimes of Freedom" and "Mr. Tambourine Man."

"Of all the songs about sixties self-consciousness and generation-bound identity, none forecasts the lost innocence of an entire generation better than 'Gates of Eden,'" writes Riley. "Sung with ever-forward motion, as though the words were carving their own quixotic phrasings, these images seem to tumble out of Dylan with a will all their own; he often chops off phrases to get to the next line."

One of Dylan's most celebrated and ambitious compositions, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" is arguably one of Dylan's finest songs. Clinton Heylin wrote that it "opened up a whole new genre of finger-pointing song, not just for Dylan but for the entire panoply of pop," and one critic said it is to capitalism what Darkness at Noon is to communism. A fair number of Dylan's most famous lyrics can be found in this song: "He not busy being born is busy dying"; "It's easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred"; "Even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked"; "Money doesn't talk, it swears"; "If my thought-dreams could be seen / They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." In the song Dylan is again giving his audience a road map to decode his confounding shift away from politics. Amidst a number of laments about the expectations of his audience ("I got nothing, Ma, to live up to") and the futility of politics ("There is no sense in trying"; "You feel to moan but unlike before / You discover / That you'd just be / One more person crying"; "It's easy to see without looking too far / That not much / Is really sacred", Dylan tells his audience how to take his new direction:

"So don't fear if you hear / A foreign sound to your ear / It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing."

The album closes with "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", described by Riley as "one of those saddened good-bye songs a lover sings when the separation happens long after the relationship is really over, when lovers know each other too well to bother hiding the truth from each other any longer...What shines through "Baby Blue" is a sadness that blots out past fondness, and a frustration at articulating that sadness at the expense of the leftover affection it springs from." Heylin has a different interpretation, comparing it with "To Ramona" from Another Side of Bob Dylan: " less conciliatory, the tone crueler, more demanding. If Paul Clayton is indeed the Baby Blue he had in mind, as has been suggested, Dylan was digging away at the very foundation of Clayton's self-esteem." However, the lyric easily fits in with the main theme of the album, Dylan's rejection of political folk, taking the form of a good-bye to his former, protest-folk self, according to the Rough Guide to Bob Dylan. According to this reading, Dylan sings to himself to "Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you...Strike another match, go start anew." The only musician besides Dylan to play on the song is Bill Lee on bass guitar.

Van Morrison and his band, Them, released their own version of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" in 1966; a dramatic re-arrangement featuring a repeating, low-key Mellotron pattern, it's often hailed as one of the best Dylan covers ever recorded. Later, Beck used a sample of this version of the song as the basis for his single "Jack-Ass" which appeared on his critically acclaimed Odelay album in 1996. Another underground version was famously done by Roky Erikson's 13th Floor Elevators on their 1967 album Easter Everywhere.