Bob Dylan
Bringing It All Back Home

After the successful "Another side of Bob Dylan," the rocking minstrel, officially known as Mr. Zimmermann, delivers the remarkable knockout punch.

"Bringing it all back home" (1965), distributed by Columbia, is one of the essential albums to understand the mystifying evolution of Bob Dylan (note: the term mystifying is not used pejoratively). Some might argue that the true rock turn will only completely occur with the release of "Highway 61 Revisited," but, in fact, that's only half-true: "Highway 61 Revisited" is the meticulous perfection of rock, "Bringing it all back home" is the root on which rock is based.

Dylan is a monster of skill, extremely adept at mixing, in one stroke, some of the most known and loved musical genres. Not even twenty-five, Dylan merges, in a singular admirable language, the tradition of folk and blues, the profound superficiality of rock, and the poetic suffering of Rimbaud and Ginsberg. Dylan dismantles the rules of music, creates a new and incredibly original language, breaks the puritanical barriers of Bill Haley's rock'n roll, and takes possession, albeit in a polite and respectful manner, of the stylistic features and musical rules typical of Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley, creates almost mystical atmospheres, and completely overturns the austere rules of folk and blues. An extremely risky, almost impossible operation, yet perfectly successful.

"Gates of Eden," "It's alright," "It's all over now Baby Blue": these masterpieces alone would be enough to understand the importance of this mid-Sixties gem. But Dylan is a habitual sinner; he wants us to enjoy it to exhaustion: here is the definitive pearl, "Mr. Tambourine Man", five delightful minutes, a perfect union of guitar, voice, and harmonica, something wonderful and admirable, a sort of not-yet-posthumous testament that, honestly, cannot fail to send at least a shiver to anyone with a heart and conscience. The strength, and thus the skill, of Bob Dylan is having been able to capture the moods and musical connotations typical of the America of the early Sixties. He took the risk and was criticized, he knew how to renew himself and was booed: one cannot say that Dylan doesn't know the word courage.

"Bringing it all back home" exudes pain and suffering, delicately mixes light topics (the desire to live) with hot topics (drugs, widespread malaise, slavery) but never slips into arrogance or indecency. Dylan's voice (beautiful, very beautiful) never falters even when, in the epic "Subterranean Homesick Blues", it seems to want to transport us to a pitiable and, frankly, embarrassing world. But Dylan, as already stated, is a habitual sinner: when it seems he has given (and said) everything, here comes the very amusing "Bob Dylan 115th Dream", a curiously angular and tender divertissement. Thus comes a suspicion (and it is legitimate): but wasn't "Another side of Bob Dylan" the antechamber of rock? The answer is yes, but there, it was a moderate rock and, all things considered, a bit raw. "Bringing it all back home" is hard and deadly rock, perhaps not perfect, maybe too daring, yet extremely delightful. It is incredibly difficult to create almost ethereal atmospheres and suggestions without (or better, not wanting to) affect the musical department in the least: Dylan succeeded, and he succeeded thanks to a deadly combination of music and words, between carefreeness and suffering, youth and audacity, courage and cunning.

The cover photo (very beautiful, by the way) featuring Dylan next to Sally Grossman, the wife of his manager, is a perfect tribute to the best American musical tradition. Dylan, sly as always, holds some famous early Sixties records: the Impressions, Robert Johnson, Eric Von Schmidt, and Lotte Lenya stand out. To realize the album in the best way, Dylan was helped by his guitarist friend Bruce Langhorne.