Bob Dylan
Bringing It All Back Home

Technical rehearsals for a revolution, before "Highway 61 Revisited" (just a few months away): Dylan plugged in and folk-rock was born. Dylan went to the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar and Pete Seeger vowed he would cut his head off. Dylan had granted "Mr. Tambourine Man" to the Byrds and it was a huge success. Dylan records an album half electric (soft, for Diana) and half acoustic and becomes a legend. Dylan records "Bringing It All Back Home" bringing home all the ideas swirling in his mind. Dylan sings "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and it's even more bewildering than anything he had done in the previous three years: Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government... the man wants an eleven dollar bill and you only got ten. But this blues tells us, well, "Blowin’ In The Wind" I've already written, it's time to change: you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, shouts Bob Dylan with his cocky young voice. Same thing for "Maggie’s Farm": I did my best to be just like I am but everybody wants you to be just like them, they say sing while you're breaking your back and I broke. Clear, right?

The love songs are there and they are spectacular, masterpieces such as "She Belongs To Me", "Love Minus Zero" and "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue". This last piece would have made anyone who wrote it immortal: Bob Dylan wrote it and he was already immortal, the problem is he didn't want to be.
Side B is simply visionary. There is the endless litany of man's baseness and self-destruction in "It’s All Right, Ma": the rhythm of the words, the rhymes make it sound like a rap. No one had ever done anything like it, three chords, eight minutes, twelve verses twelve, four bridges, and hundreds of shouted words (the live version of "Before The Flood" is even more monstrous). This song cannot be liked. You must have a trained ear, forget the concepts of melody and harmony, of beautiful singing, of catchiness, of average duration. It might not even be a song. It would be easy to say: well, why doesn't he write books, this guy, instead of making records? Because this is invention. He could have made it sound like a song, a beautiful song with a nice melody, well-paced, and well-sung ("Love Minus Zero", for example). Instead, he broke through a barrier and created something new, and, by golly, extraordinarily fascinating. A dizzying text, then:

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards, False gods, I scuff, At pettiness which plays so rough, Walk upside-down inside handcuffs, Kick my legs to crash it off, Say okay, I have had enough, What else can you show me?

If my thoughts could be seen, they’d put my head in a guillotine, but it’s all right, ma, it’s life, and life only.

The same goes for the enchanting "Gates Of Eden". I will not discuss "Mr. Tambourine Man". The three minor pieces, "Outlaw Blues", "On the Road Again", and "Bob Dylan 115th Dream" (amusing) do not manage to undermine the scope of the album in the slightest.

I make a comparison and do not fear exaggeration: "Bringing It All Back Home", along with "Freewheeling" and "Highway 61 Revisited", has the same revolutionary impact (both poetically and in the very conception of song) on music that "Les Fleurs du mal" by Baudelaire had on world poetry. Let "Mr. Tambourine Man" prove it.