The song that made David Byrne become a musician: “I have to get out of here”
“I have to get out of here, because there are people in other places. There’s a whole world out there that I don’t know anything about.”
This was the lightbulb moment for David Byrne, sitting in his small hometown in Baltimore as a teen, with no real clue what lay beyond the familiar streets or where life might take him. Then, out of nowhere, everything shifted – Bob Dylan’s gritty voice came crackling through the airwaves, and just like that, the world opened up.
The song ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, taken from Dylan’s iconic 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, captivated a young Byrne in ways he didn’t know was possible at the time. It “was like a psychedelic version of a Woody Guthrie song,” he later recalled to Pitchfork. In itself, that was enough to capture an imagination, but merely a month after the track’s original release, something else came along that completely upended it, sending Byrne’s sense of psychedelia well and truly spinning.
Put it this way, if a band decided to cover a freshly released song by another artist and frame it in an entirely different way these days, there would be absolute unbridled outrage. But things were much calmer and more easy-going in the 1960s, so much so that when The Byrds followed straight up Dylan’s coattails with their own version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, everyone was in awe.
Byrne was perhaps one of the most inspired among them. “The Byrds turned it into something unlike anything my young ears had heard before,” he enthused. “The song is like a little telegraph from someplace else. Hearing that, I realised, ‘I have to get out of here, because there are people in other places. There’s a whole world out there that I don’t know anything about.’”
Although it may not have been an instant transition, the memories of that newfound spiralling, visionary world that ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ granted Byrne evidently became a major life mantra for Byrne as he ventured out on his kaleidoscopic trails, forming The Talking Heads just ten years after the song’s first release. Of course, it almost goes without saying that the manifestations created within his own band went on to heighten psychedelia to a whole different spectre, but the genesis of the tambourine was where its roots always lay.
It’s difficult to know what either Dylan or The Byrds would really make of that, given that their music constituted something so different to Byrne’s in many ways. But in certain respects, it is almost equally the perfect metaphor for psychedelia in itself – the fact that a legacy so sprawling and occasionally nonsensical could be spurned out of one single song and a reimagined vision.
That speaks volumes about the endless possibilities that used to exist in music, away from formulas, commercial consciousness, and audience chasing. Just make something that you love, and the audience will be sure to follow in time. That’s the message that ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ bestowed on Byrne, and fundamentally changed the rest of his life.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.