“That blows me away”: the Bob Dylan song that impressed even him
No one was really ready for someone like Bob Dylan when the 1960s got underway.
The rock and roll scene didn’t really need to concern itself with having the greatest lyrics in the world, but whereas Chuck Berry wanted kids to party all night to his music, Dylan was the one reminding everyone that the world was a lot more dangerous and complicated than any of them realised when he strapped on his acoustic guitar. Every one of his tunes was like a mini parable, but even with his track record, there were some tunes that went well above what he was originally shooting for.
But if you were to ask Dylan about his work, there’s a good chance that even he would be a little bit self-depricating towards his own work. He was still one of the greatest songwriters that the world had ever known, but he didn’t sign up to be the voice of the people whenever he made a record, and he wasn’t about to claim that he had all the answers. There was a lot of passion in his voice, but he wanted to ask questions to the rest of the world rather than give everyone a cause to rally behind.
That said, it’s not like he didn’t give everyone food for thought every once in a while. ‘Masters of War’ was a stark look at the people who throw the world into warfare without really thinking, and even if ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ has a lot of questions that are still unanswered to this day, it’s better for someone to at least keep those questions in mind whenever they see their generation favouring violence over peace.
All that was well and good when he had an acoustic guitar in his hands, but Dylan didn’t want to be a folkie forever. His songs had a lot of power behind them, but if he wanted to enact real change in the world, he wanted to take the same audience that the rock and rollers had. There was a lot of potential for him to change the culture with his music, and Bringing It All Back Home was the first time that he actually broke out the full band for a record.
A lot of fans may have been turned off to see him with an electric guitar in his hands, but the second half of the record was still the folk-based Dylan that everyone knew and loved. And while ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is a better indication of where Dylan was going, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ was a better look at the kind of toll that was being put on his generation by the rest of the world.
There were a lot of ugly sides to the Vietnam era, and while Dylan had made more pointed songs before, he felt that ‘It’s Alright Ma’ was the first time he seemed genuinely impressed with his own work, saying, “I’ve written some songs that I look at, and they just give me a sense of awe. Stuff like, ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ just the alliteration in [it] that blows me away. And I can also look back and know where I was tricky and where I was really saying something that just happened to have a spark of poetry to it.”
But even if Dylan was a master of wordplay at the time, he was the first to say that he could never get to that same place again. It was almost as if that was a completely different person singing those songs, and while records like Time Out of Mind were also fantastic works of art, you could tell that he was a lot more weathered as a songwriter, having gone through more shakeups than any other writer of his generation ever had.
Because while Dylan wasn’t necessarily the best musical chameleon, his writing style has changed so many times that songs like ‘It’s Alright Ma’ feel like an entirely different lifetime ago. There were many artists who were willing to push the boundaries as he did, but no one was able to tap into the collective zeitgeist quite like he could whenever he had a guitar in his hand and a harmonica in his mouth.
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