Watch The Grateful Dead cover Bob Dylan song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’
In the mid-1960s, after drawing global attention to the blossoming American folk scene with politically-charged classics like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Masters of War’, Bob Dylan returned to his rock ‘n’ roll roots. In arguably his most daring and vital career choice, Dylan “went electric” in 1965, famously alienating a congregation of folk purists at the Newport Folk Festival that year.
Although this unthinkable decision to plug in made the headlines, 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 began to show in the more experimentally poetic material on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.
Bringing It All Back Home served as a bridge of sorts between Dylan’s earlier material and his folk-rock chapter. The first side of the record consisted of tracks recorded with an electric backing band, while the second side returned to his acoustic roots for a final hurrah.
“He had a lot of balls,” Kenny Rankin, a guitarist who played on Bringing It All Back Home, once said. “[It was] quite a thing just for Dylan to pick up an electric guitar.”
This fifth album of Dylan’s is packed with immortal essentials, including ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. For many, however, its highlight moment arrives at the very end of side two, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.
The closing ballad is an enigmatic tale full of hopeless characters embracing change as “Baby Blue” must, too. But who is Baby Blue? Sadly, Dylan has never divulged the character’s identity, but as a lover of poetic ambiguity, the character could resemble several different real people. Some suggest that, since Dylan’s eyes are blue, the song is a self-portrait addressing a change in his career or love life.
Among the song’s many famous admirers is the ‘Godfather of Punk’, Iggy Pop. “When this album got released, I listened to it over and over and over again,” Iggy wrote of Bringing It All Back Home as one of his all-time favourite albums in a 2022 feature for Vinyl Writers. “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,” he added. “[Van Morrison’s formative group] Them have once done a very atmospheric cover of that song.”
Indeed, the 1966 cover by Them is likely the most famous, but The Byrds, Joan Baez, The 13th Floor Elevators and Marianne Faithfull are also responsible for some fantastic covers. The American psych-rock legends The Grateful Dead also adored the song and covered it onstage nearly 150 times between 1965 and 1995.
Watch The Grateful Dead perform ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ live in 1990 below.
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