What does “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine” mean?
“Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government” – Bob Dylan
So go the opening lyrics to one of the most iconic Bob Dylan songs of all time, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, and thus, the opening lyrics on one of the most iconic Bob Dylan albums of all time, Bringing It All Back Home.
Almost as soon as he hit the scene, scholars, critics, fans and detractors alike were trying to decode Dylan’s songs and all of the hidden meanings buried beneath his lyrics. We’re now over 60 years into his artistic journey, and they’re all still at it, and what’s worse is that we’re still so often none the wiser as to what it all means, anyway.
Of all his songs from that mid-1960s supernova that gave us Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde within a dizzying 18-month spell, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is one of the most mystifying, perplexing, and confounding. It is a rapid-fire, staccato machine-gun spray of lyrics and images that relentlessly build and explode all around you.
There is so much to take in over the course of just over two whirlwind minutes that from the first second to the last, it can feel impossible to keep up with everything that Dylan is singing, but pay enough attention and you’ll hear the coded messages to keep an eye out for the cops. You stay out of their business, and you keep them out of yours. You’ve got drugs to pedal, a new world to build, and the cops can’t have any place in it. They can’t be trusted to help the man on the street. They take their orders from higher up, and the higher up you go, the less you can remember what it’s like to have your feet on the ground.
Through the song, you catch flashes and snatches of words here and there, images of tapped phones, candles and scandals, alleyways and armies. You can’t escape the feeling of speed, physical and medicinal, or of paranoia and conspiracy. There’s an almost schizophrenic, and absolutely a narcotic, propulsion from one racing idea to the next. Whatever Johnny was mixing up, it almost certainly wasn’t legal. He almost certainly has been mixing with the wrong people, as well. Why else do you think you can see him ducking down the alley with an ex-cop who is wants more money than you’ve even got to keep quiet about things? Maybe in order to figure out what’s been mixed up, we first need to figure out who’s doing the mixing.
Having just finished singing his 1966 single ‘Positively 4th Street’, one of his most vicious and cutting songs, at a recent show on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Tour, Dylan told the audience that “I didn’t write that song about anybody. I just wrote it to write it.” But Dylan is so often the least reliable source when it comes to the meanings of his own songs, even less so than all those professors and scholars who so love to pore over and parse the meaning of his lyrics.
So, with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ in mind, to quote a 1986 El DeBarge pop hit, “Who is Johnny?”
Well, it could be John Lennon. Dylan and Lennon were friendly rivals and would occasionally spar with each other through their lyrics (just listen to The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’ and then Dylan’s ‘Fourth Time Around’, which ends with the less-than-subtle lines “I never took much, I never asked for your crutch, now don’t ask for mine”). Lennon was no stranger to mixing up a little medicine of his own, whether it was weed, LSD or even heroin, and had a fraught relationship with the wider establishment, from the British government to the FBI. It could be ‘Johnny B. Goode’, Chuck Berry’s legendary songster who could “play the guitar just like ringing a bell”. Dylan’s song itself owes more than a little bit melodically and rhythmically to another one of Berry’s songs, ‘Too Much Monkey Business”. It could be one of Dylan’s heroes, Johnny Cash or it could be crying Johnnie Ray.
Most likely, though, Johnny is one John Doe. To be more precise, he’s everyone and he’s anyone or he’s nobody at all. Someone unknown and someone unnamed. You’re Johnny, and I’m Johnny, and Dylan is Johnny, too. ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is an us-against-them song through and through.
It’s a song about making a new world, climbing out of the underground and climbing up the social ladder until the tables have been turned. You’re either Johnny or you’re not. You’re either mixing up the medicine or you’re out there following leaders. And Dylan doesn’t advise you to do such a thing.
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