‘Bringing It All Back Home’: The most important Bob Dylan album in the words of those it inspired
In the mid-1960s, after bringing worldwide attention to the American folk scene with politically probing anthems like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Masters of War’, Bob Dylan set about covering his tracks and turning a new leaf. In perhaps his most brazen and pivotal move, Dylan “went electric” in 1965, famously alienating a host of folk purists at the Newport Folk Festival that year.
“He had a lot of balls,” Kenny Rankin, a guitarist who played on Bringing It All Back Home, once said, per Rolling Stone. “[It was] quite a thing just for Dylan to pick up an electric guitar.” Beyond the jaw-dropping decision to plug in, Dylan’s songwriting also began to undergo profound changes in the mid-1960s. The influence of his newly kindled friendship with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was particularly palpable during this period.
Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s fifth studio album, immortalised this crucial transition in sonic history, and hence, there is a strong case for this being Dylan’s greatest, or at least most important album. With the first side of the record comprised of tracks recorded with an electric backing band and the second returning to his acoustic roots, the album highlighted Dylan’s very deliberate instrumental transition and marked the beginning of his defining work as a folk-rock pioneer.
Meanwhile, the lyrics displayed in Bringing It All Back Home introduced some notable changes. The very first track, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, was one of the album’s most memorable and important moments. The name was partly inspired by Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, a novel about the Beat Generation writers published in 1958. The choppy lyrical composition was also inspired by the progressive generation of pop writers to which Dylan’s new friend Ginsberg was party.
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was unlike anything people had heard before. John Lennon was among the song’s keen admirers and was inspired to channel Dylan’s style in The Beatles’ 1965 album, Rubber Soul. More than three decades later, Radiohead would give the song a nod by titling one of their OK Computer cuts ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’.
Alongside side two’s ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ has also been cited as one of the very first rap songs, thanks to the fast-paced word delivery. In a conversation with WatchMojo.com in 2011, Ed Sheeran compared rap star Eminem to Dylan.
“You might look at [them] and say they’re two totally different acts, but all you have to do with Eminem is put a guitar behind his words and it’s a very similar thing,” Sheeran opined. “Folk music tells stories, and hip hop tells stories; there’s just a beat that separates it. […] Bob Dylan [raps] his tunes, if you listen to [‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’], that’s not a million miles away from an Eminem tune.″
The first track on Bringing It All Back Home’s second side, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, also became one of Dylan’s most beloved hits in the mid-60s. However, it was the cover released by The Byrds a month after Dylan’s version that made it to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart.
After hearing one of Dylan’s early raw outtakes, The Byrds decided to cover the track. “It was pretty awful,” David Crosby once told Rolling Stone of the original Dylan outtake. “We were able to take it and make a really great rock and roll record out of it.”
“He came to hear us in the studio when we were building the Byrds,” Crosby added. “After the word got out that we were gonna do ‘Tambourine Man’ and we were probably gonna be good, he came there, and he heard us playing his song electric, and you could see the gears grinding in his head. It was as plain as day. It was like watching a slow-motion lightning bolt.”
“The thing about Bringing It All Back Home was his words,” Crosby said, reflecting on the album as a whole. “That’s what Bob stunned the world with. Up until then, we had ‘oooh, baby’ and ‘I love you, baby.’ Bob changed the map. He gave us really, really good words.”
Indeed, Dylan’s material was so infectious in the lyrical department that he inspired Ginsberg to take the stage and sing some of his more lyrical poems with musical backing. Elsewhere, the pioneering journalist and novelist Hunter S. Thompson famously dedicated his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to a familiar Dylan song: “To Bob Dylan for ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.”
While Dylan was enjoying his most impactful phase through the mid-1960s, another progressive rock act by the name of The Velvet Underground were gaining attention in the New York scene. Early on, the founding members Lou Reed and John Cale established an artistic relationship with Andy Warhol, who later became their manager and mentor.
During his 2004 appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Cale picked out the Bringing It All Back Home track ‘She Belongs To Me’ as his ultimate (Castaway’s) favourite. He remembered the period as the first time he truly got on board with Dylan. This song, in particular, resonated with the Velvets because it was seemingly written about their early collaborator, Nico. “Everybody was looking sideways at Bob because they were astonished at all this power that was coming out of his lyrics,” Cale said. “We knew that Nico had just come down to be a member of the band, and she used to hang out with Bob in Woodstock. So when this song came along, everybody looked at each other and said, ‘Wait a minute, this is about somebody we know.'”
The godfather of punk, Iggy Pop, is also among the admirers of Bringing It All Back Home. “When this album got released, I listened to it over and over and over again,” Iggy wrote of the album in a feature for Vinyl Writers in 2022. “I can still sing along to songs like ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Back then, I sat in front of the turntable and learned them word by word. ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ is such a beautiful ballad, [Van Morrison’s formative group] Them have once done a very atmospheric cover of that song.”
“While ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ never has been my favourite song,” he admitted, “even if you love an artist, from time to time you can say with good conscience: that’s not for me. ‘Outlaw Blues’ was another song that always sounded to me like Dylan had to fill another three minutes on the album. But the other stuff – simply awesome! This nonchalance! Dylan didn’t polish his tracks too much.”
When picking out his 12 favourite albums of all time for a prior feature for Entertainment Weekly, Iggy elaborated on his love for Bringing It All Back Home. “I spent the summer of my 18th year studying this and a Stones album,” he said. “Great cover, amazing songwriting. The inspiring lack of vocal skills gave me hope.”
These artists are just the tip of an enormous iceberg of influence that Bringing It All Back Home and its neighbouring releases had on western culture over the late 20th century and beyond. As Bruce Springsteen wrote in his autobiography, Born To Run, “Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived.”
These two albums from 1965 were followed in 1966 by Blonde on Blonde, and together mark Dylan’s most artistically vital period. Dylan’s sound has continued to evolve ever since, with lyrics worthy of a Nobel Prize in Literature being the only constant.
In his 2004 book Chronicles, Dylan reflected on the songs from this period of his career. “[They] were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs [anymore]. To do it, you’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once, and once was enough.”
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