50. Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

1. Subterranean Homesick Blues*

2. She Belongs to Me

3. Maggie's Farm

4. Love Minus Zero / No Limit

5. Outlaw Blues

6. On the Road Again

7. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream

8. Mr. Tambourine Man*

9. Gates of Eden

10. It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)*

11. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

A+

Here we are. The big Five-Oh. I didn't think I'd last this long, honestly. I think this might even have been the final album I reviewed before giving up last time. Maybe I should start linking this blog. I could be the next Nitsuh Abebe.

Anyway (boy I segue with "anyway" a lot), here we are with a pretty great album to ring in number 50. This is the album where Dylan went electric, and the results are astonishing.

Honestly, I'm pretty glad I'm doing this project if only because it's forcing me to listen to Bob Dylan. I've been a fan of the odd song of his for years but I've never really gotten around to listening to his albums properly. So hearing Bringing It All Back Home was pretty great.

It's easy to forget just how odd Bob Dylan was (and, I suppose, is). But then what do you expect of the only musician to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature? And Bringing It All Back Home is a deeply odd album. It's another one of those "two for one" deals - the first half is all electric rock, while the second half is mostly acoustic material. The result is an album that really showcases the many sides of Mr Dylan, and his range and strength as a songwriter.

The album is mostly composed of great songs, so it's easier to just point out the ones I didn't quite like as much. Honestly, "Outlaw Blues" is simplistic and repetitive. It's an OK song but can't compare to the highlights on this album. And "On the Road Again" is a fun putdown of Bohemia, but not particularly deep or interesting. They're both good songs but more interesting for their novelty at the time then as lasting artistic statements.

Every other song on this album, however, is brilliant. Things kick off with "Subterranean Homesick Blues", one of the strangest songs on the album and still a deeply peculiar work 60 years later. A deranged, stream-of-consciousness description of the counterculture and all its highs and lows, it really captures the paranoid, overwhelming nature of the scene. Then you have "She Belongs to Me", an elegant blues-based love song full of lovely poetic imagery, and perfectly capturing the mixture of possessiveness and submission that characterises love. "Maggie's Farm" is a hilarious outburst, a rollicking blues number that could be about being fed up with any number of things, but is probably about the strain put on Dylan by his fame and his desire to break out of the constraints of being spokesman for his generation. Then "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" is another heartfelt love song, and a truly beautiful one (favourite lyric: "My love, she's like some raven, at my window with a broken wing"). Then you have the two weak tracks, and then "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", which is a hilarious parody of the conquest of America that no words can do justice to.

Flip the record, and you have some of the strangest and most beautiful music ever recorded. "Mr. Tambourine Man" could be about anything, but I think it's about music - both the joy of making it and the joy of listening to it. But then it might just be about getting high. In any case, it has one of the most gorgeous melodies ever recorded, and it's my favourite song on the album.

Then you have "Gates of Eden". What the hell is this song about? Eden is the point of origin for mankind, but everyone in the song is trying to return there. But then Eden was never destroyed - God placed an angel outside with a burning sword. So I guess this song, which describes all sorts of chaos and despair, each verse closing with a contrasting comment about what's going on inside the gates of Eden, is about the corrupt nature of the world and the impossibility of ever going back to a prelapsarian state. Everyone is trying to reach Paradise, but it's impossible. The world is what it is, and until we stop trying to regain Eden and deal with the world on its own terms, were just going to keep making things worse. I think that's what the song is about.

"It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" is a far more straightforward political song, and often ranked as the best on the album. It's filled with venom and vitriol but it's pretty self-explanatory - everything is going to hell.

Finally, we have "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". Literally every slow, bitter rock ballad owes a debt to this song. It's gorgeous and poignant, and musically it prefigures so many songs. 

Anyway, it's odd for me to go through an album song by song, but this album really deserves that kind of in depth (ish) treatment. It's a truly great album with some truly great songs on it. And this isn't even Dylan's creative peak! The songs on this album are strange and rambunctious and sonically confrontational (side one) and beautiful and cryptic and deeply moving (side two). I've listened to it like five or six times and I'm still not sick of it. It's really great.