TAKING IT ALL TO THE WORLD

A few days ago we escaped a summer scorcher by retreating to the coolth of an air-conditioned cinema. The film was James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, the newly released biopic of the early career of Bob Dylan. Featuring a riveting performance by Timothée Chalamet, the film tracks Dylan’s career from his arrival in New York in 1961 to his game-changing performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In discography terms, this covers his first six albums: Bob Dylan to Highway 61 Revisited. 

Many music fans know (or have at least heard of) the last of these, the LP where Dylan "plugged in" and produced a truly electrifying album of blues-infused folk-rock. What is less well known is how that direction was clearly signposted—and indeed, initiated—on the previous record, Bringing It All Back Home.

Bob Dylan’s fifth studio album was released in April 1965, a mere five months before Highway 61. He was restless and driven. Dylan was bursting with ideas, flashing images, sounds and a unique vision; the young singer/poet may not have had a destination in mind but he sure as hell knew that he wasn’t gonna stand still. 

Bringing It All Back Home is an album of two distinct sides, rather like a crossroad sign that points Forward and Back. The first side has a fully amplified band who rocket out of the gate with the rollicking "Subterranean Homesick Blues", Dylan spitting out the dense lyric like a proto-rapper. (In passing, the film clip was also hugely influential and is still most entertaining.) The pace eases for "She belongs to me", a somewhat caustic portrait of an artistic and egotistic woman. The artist may have been Suze Rotolo but the ego is certainly Dylan’s.

"Maggie’s Farm" became a live staple for the ever-touring troubadour. It was part of the contentious electric set at the ’65 Newport festival where its loping blues seemed like a very direct message to fans and record company alike. Bob ain’t gonna work for anyone except himself, right?

"Love minus zero/No limit" offers a poetic love song that deploys electric instruments yet could scarcely be described as rock and roll. But there is still plenty to come on the powered up side, including the blues-rock of "Outlaw blues," the absurdist "On the road again" (no relation to Canned Heat’s later hit) and the crazy trip that is "Bob Dylan’s 115th dream."

An all time Dylan classic opens the second side of Bringing It All Back Home. "Mr Tambourine Man" has been analysed so often that we don’t need to agonise over  whether it is about LSD or just a musician colleague who had an oversized tambourine (or both). Eschewing forensic examination, the song remains mesmerising and shows Dylan settling comfortably back into acoustic folk mode. 

While the instrumentation and general musical palette might have been folk friendly, the lyrics and song structures were most certainly not. Lyrically, Dylan was smashing the folk mould with almost every song. As he wrote in Chronicles, his memoir, “What I did to break away, was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before.” This approach is seen in one of Dylan’s most potent songs, "It’s alright, Ma (I’m only bleeding)" a song writhing with indignation and pithy observation that includes one of his best lines: "He not busy being born is busy dying."

The album closes with "It’s all over now, Baby Blue." There’s a melancholy tone of goodbye; a parting, a closing. It could be heard as an end-of-relationship farewell or a message to fans of Dylan’s early songs and albums. By taking folk forms and twisting them into his own unique shapes, Dylan was moving onwards, restlessly, compulsively. The crossroad sign actually says Forward and Forward, and both are there on Bringing It All Back Home.

 © Bruce Jenkins—February 2025