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Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
(6 votes)
Album Info
Produced by Tom Wilson
Photography by Daniel Kramer
i'm standing there watching the parade/
feeling combination of sleepy john estes.
jayne mansfield. humphry bogart/morti-
mer snerd. murph the surf and so forth/
erotic hitchhiker wearing japanese
blanket. gets my attention by asking didn't
he see me at this hootenanny down in
puerto vallarta, mexico/i say no you must
be mistaken. i happen to be one of the
Supremes/then he rips off his blanket
an' suddenly becomes a middle-aged druggist.
up for district attorney. he starts scream-
ing at me you're the one. you're the one
that's been causing all them riots over in
vietnam. immediately turns t' a bunch of
people an' says if elected, he'll have me
electrocuted publicly on the next fourth
of july. i look around an' all these people
he's talking to are carrying blowtorches/
needless t' say, i split fast go back t' the
nice quiet country. am standing there writing
WHAAT? on my favorite wall when who should
pass by in a jet plane but my recording
engineer "i'm here t' pick up you and your
lastest works of art. do you need any help
with anything?''
(pause)
my songs're written with the kettledrum
in mind/a touch of any anxious color. un-
mentionable. obvious. an' people perhaps
like a soft brazilian singer . . . i have
given up at making any attempt at perfection/
the fact that the white house is filled with
leaders that've never been t' the apollo
theater amazes me. why allen ginsberg was
not chosen t' read poetry at the inauguration
boggles my mind/if someone thinks norman
mailer is more important than hank williams
that's fine. i have no arguments an' i
never drink milk. i would rather model har-
monica holders than discuss aztec anthropology/
english literature. or history of the united
nations. i accept chaos. I am not sure whether
it accepts me. i know there're some people terrified
of the bomb. but there are other people terrified
t' be seen carrying a modern screen magazine.
experience teaches that silence terrifies people
the most . . . i am convinced that all souls have
some superior t' deal with/like the school
system, an invisible circle of which no one
can think without consulting someone/in the
face of this, responsibility/security, success
mean absolutely nothing. . . i would not want
t' be bach. mozart. tolstoy. joe hill. gertrude
stein or james dean/they are all dead. the
Great books've been written. the Great sayings
have all been said/I am about t' sketch You
a picture of what goes on around here some-
times. though I don't understand too well
myself what's really happening. i do know
that we're all gonna die someday an' that no
death has ever stopped the world. my poems
are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion/
divided by pierced ears. false eyelashes/sub-
tracted by people constantly torturing each
other. with a melodic purring line of descriptive
hollowness -- seen at times through dark sunglasses
an' other forms of psychic explosion. a song is
anything that can walk by itself/i am called
a songwriter. a poem is a naked person . . . some
people say that i am a poet
(end of pause)
an' so i answer my recording engineer
"yes. well i could use some help in getting
this wall in the plane"
-- By Bob Dylan
Comments
Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Love Minus Zero is my personal favorite on this one along with It's Alright Ma. When one looks back at these albums it just amazes: great song after great song after great song.
Dave
Revolutionary
It may not be his #1 album, but it is the most important. It turned the music scene on it's head, and signaled the direction that Dylan was heading.
This album has two of my favorite Dylan tracks on it, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." Not to mention, about five other tracks that are absolutely amazing.
arguably his best
No Rating
"Side 2" of this album is where it all began for me in terms of Dylan. It is arguably his pinnacle.
The whole album is great, and I really think On The Road Again is one of his best "comical" songs.
Moving ahead...
Again, Dylan takes another leap forward with songs out on a limb. Never one to look back, it's amazing to hear and see what he was doing in very short amounts of creative time. Each song here is a delight and a little classic in its own way.
The album of change
This is the album of change from acoustic to electric, with one side of each style. I think nowadays it sounds a little old fashioned probably be cause of the recording thecniques and it makes it less interesting to me. There is some great songs anyway and the change is the most important thing of it.
Bringing It All Back Home
It’s kind of disappointing that Bob hedged his bets and didn’t make this album all-electric. Although the fact that he chose to put the acoustic songs on side 2 rather than first side or mixing them together sort of undercuts whatever kind of compromise he was trying to make with the die-hard folkies he was leaving. Who knows? This is one of my all-time favorite Dylan albums. Bob’s idea of rock’n’roll is certainly just loud, slightly sped up 12-bar blues with some strange words on top. There’s “Maggie’s Farm”, “Outlaw Blues”, “On The Road Again”. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” takes the 12-bars and stretches it into 24 or so to fit in all of his fun (if not terribly meaningful) words. Clearly the rest of band – who play enthusiastically and with great talent, don’t have any idea when the next chord is coming. Listening to all of the attempt to keep up (or at least catch up) with Bob makes this some great rough-hewed risky rock that demands as many repeated listenings as something as exquisite and intricately constructed as say Pet Sounds. And not that side 2 is just a bone thrown to his old audience. “Gates Of Eden” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” are two of Bob’s best songs ever. And both featuring single solitary one-note blasts from the harmonica at the end of each verse to remind of you of what Bob used to do – and to let you know how much different this is. Not that Bringing It All Back Home is perfect. (No Dylan album is perfect. Each has a couple of stinkers and at least one or two moments of genius. The only question is how much of each – and how good are the rest.) Neither “She Belongs To Me” nor “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (which is a great title) do much for me. Maybe I’ve just heard it too many times from the Byrds – and William Shatner – to really appreciate it, but I always thought that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is overrated. And is it just me, or is the second guitar that is noodling around in the background of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” completely unrelated to what’s going on in the rest of the song and slightly out of tune? Whatever it is, it ruined “It’s All Over Now” for me forever. Still, a great album.
Driving Rhythm Outta Eden's Engine & the Kingdom of Swords
No Rating
One of the three great symbolist song-poems of Bringing It All Back Home, "Gates of Eden" remains the most enigmatic to my ear. It certainly has some fantastic imagery (might as well be hosts of Martian invaders, those sidewalk-cracking lampposts) and lines (carrying candles to the sun like coals to Newcastle; paupers exchanging pathetic possessions; royalty debating reality, etc., etc.). But of more concern to me is the song's driving rhythmic cadence, which clearly and unmistakably connects it to "To Ramona" and even, say, to the recurrent painful wail howling Ginsbergesque in every stanza of "Simple Twist of Fate" and "You're a Big Girl Now."
What's common to Bob's best works? Swirling organ countered by strident harp. Symbolist poetics. Velour voice (think: Blonde on Blonde). And phrasing. Take two or more of these ingredients in various amounts, shake and bake, and there's a good chance a tasty treat will emerge.
Bob's phrasing as a controllable element is most often overlooked by those new to his music (meaning probably children, mostly). Some speak of the phenomenon in terms of breath control. Remember that impossibly extended note from "Freight Train Blues"? Who could care how raggedy it sounds? Better than Caruso, indeed. Let us now celebrate primitive men.
Some of that spice was sprinkled around the edges of "Mixed Up Confusion," too, and he was really experimenting with bending his notes when making Freewheelin', although much of that never made the final release. It's probably safe to say that his limited range has pushed him into these other experiments in vocal modulation that more polished sounding singers never are compelled to explore. Who else is going to release a sound like we get on "All I Really Want to Do," or "Pledging My Time," or "One of Us Must Know"? Doesn't your heart soar into your throat like driving fast over a dreamy series of dips when you hear those two certain inflections from "Tryin' to Get to Heaven"?
I can hear their hearts a-beatin'
Like pendulums swinging on chains
When you think that you lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
(Hey: tryin' to get to Heaven before they close the gates of Eden?)
This willingness, or eagerness, to place unexpected emphasize is, of course, the reason Bob's so easy to parody. But one should never think those novel phrasing exercises don't succeed, because of course they do. The fantastic lyrics of "To Ramona" are easy to miss because you're suspended in the pulse, and the same kind of interference goes on in "Gates of Eden."
And in "The Wicked Messenger." And "No Time to Think." And. . . .But you get it.
The sound of "Eden" is a bouncy new pony ride (in the guise of a forest cloud, natch). I think here maybe we have a metaphysical realm that's sealed off from even the bard himself, although hints and bank shot images sometimes leak through. It's interesting to think about Angelina (the yellow-haired narrator returns from destruction in the ditches where he bore long golden locks; she's grown her hair back, too, from the time when Eden was burning, the smoke drifting down like an inverted tree to the Kingdom of Swords; Angelina with her eyes in blindfold always makes me think of the Eight of Swords) climbing up a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk vine to assail these very Gates. . . .Yeah, these are all connected, but I'm not exactly sure how. . . .
It's Alright, Ma. They'll clap you in shackles.
No Rating
George Carlin showed us why we should be leery about believing in dirty words. Minds can be dirty: your mind is your temple; keep it beautiful and free. Particularly in Bob's first decade as a troubadour he sets up the dynamic pretty explicitly with freedom at one pole and imprisoning, controlling socialization at the other. Nowhere is the point driven home as in the virile verse of "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."
His most lyrically pithy and popular sermon, "It's Alright, Ma" sometimes demonstrates clearly the possible distinctiveness between inscribed poem and song. When you hear his delivery of this piece live or on vinyl or in digital bits, you know precisely the meaning of every line, trenchant enlightenment bursting through the emotion. But when you read the lyrics, the song sheds its skin in your hands and escapes up the steps into the nearest bus outta town. It gets away, it's gone.
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?
Those graveyards are surely stuffed with the fallen, the unenlightened, with those abused and transformed by society into accepting the false testimony that you've got to be just like them, with one-time children who have sacrificed their God-given freedom for the chains of socialization and the responsibilities that come with growed-up life in the "real world." Such is the menace of the false gods waiting to ensnare us with their fountain pens. They're thieves of the very freedom celebrated in "Rambling, Gambling Willie" an' "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" an' its first cousin, "Talkin' World War III Blues" an' "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" an' "Walkin' Down the Line" an' "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" an' "Bob Dylan's Dream" an' "I Shall Be Free" an' "Walls of Red Wing" an' "Only a Pawn in Their Game" an' "When the Ship Comes In" an' "Paths of Victory" an' "Percy's Song" an' "Chimes of Freedom" an' "I Shall Be Free No. 10" an' "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (they're comin' for ya: look out!) an' "Maggie's Farm" an' "On the Road Again" an' an' an'.
But: "Kick my legs to crash it off?" Would you write that as poetry? He's resisting socializing pressures, but it's a line that loses some of its ethereality on the printed page. Which is fine, because this is not poetry to be read but sung.
My point is that "It's Alright, Ma," while to some degree being a multidimensional symbolist revisitation of the list poem-songs "Masters of War" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," also reveals a poet who by 1965 has evolved sufficiently to claim the English language for his own invention. There's the breakthrough begun with "Mr. Tambourine Man"; there's where poetry begins, and the songs swell to multidimensionality. Once you own a language, the words and syntax can mean anything you want them to mean simply because they're yours.
That's why "It's Alright, Ma" is transcendent: it assaults our senses as a new language that we already know, a meta-language that was always lying in wait, underlying the rigid, grammatical English that formalist, unimaginative old lady socializers with their chalkboards and desk rows and pliers and hammers twist into our bleeding brains in school. Resist those false limits that would corral your mind into compliance. Run from society's cold irons that so many are so eager to don as costume jewelry.
The verse construction is sometimes peculiar, but the danger is palpable enough. Freedom's valuable; in fact, nothing's more precious. Hang on.
"Mr. Tambourine Man": A Symbolist Masterpiece
Bob's symbolist masterpiece, "Mr. Tambourine Man," was written alongside its fraternal twin, "Chimes of Freedom," during the famous THC-soaked, Kerouac-echoing cross-country California-bound road trip and tour during the fall of 1963.
Maybe the first hint of what was to be came a year earlier when he wrote "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" in Chip Monck's apartment. Further evidence of the deluge of imagery that was to wash out topical one-dimensionalism is also obvious, at least in retrospect, in "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," delivered in April 1963 at the Town Hall show in New York. By late summer Bob was downplaying the role of Guthrie as a personal influence and mentioning Bertolt Brecht. In his mind he already imagined the poetic transformation he intended to seek in his future work. The symbolist influences are obvious enough in lyrics from several of the songs from the August 1964 release of Another Side of Bob Dylan, although the musical and sonic uniformity of the album, recorded in a marathon six-hour studio session, tends to obscure that fact even now.
During the 1963 tour, Joan Baez fans often grew restless listening to the long and unfamiliar "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" which, with its reportage of a world structured on a musical cosmology, is a clear progenitor of the more refined "Chimes of Freedom." "Chimes" is also peopled with Bob's very human characters, which the pastoral "Weary Tune" lacks.
Which makes "Mr. Tambourine Man" all the more remarkable, since it also lacks vividly portrayed characters. Even the eponymous musician is named but not described: there is only the exuberance of the first-person narrator on his fantastic trip through a hyper-imaginative landscape; more an illuminated painting, perhaps, than a song. Many have expressed doubt that such a song could be written while sober, a view that I doubt, although the charged psychoactive journey to California certainly facilitated its creation in this case, and we're the better for it.
"Mr. Tambourine Man" may find Bob's symbolist poetry at its most pure, although that in no way disparages later, more elaborate works, including the two cuts immediately following this one on Bringing It All Back Home, as well as many songs found on his next two albums.