Bob Dylan, The #29 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Two

 

(Continued from Part One)

 

The following year, Dylan included electronic instruments on the album Bringing It All Back Home, which has sold over one million copies.  The first single touches on drug busts, bad policing and social unrest.

The famous music video is of course one of the first of its kind and is part of the 1965 documentary Don't Look Back, which shows Dylan on his tour of England.  In the video, Bob is in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London flipping through cue cards as the song continues.  The cue cards were written by Dylan, Donovan, Bob Neuwirthand and poet Allen Ginsberg.  The latter two are seen in the video standing behind Dylan.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" again made the Top 10 in Great Britain but stalled at #39 in the U.S.

 

"Mr. Tambourine Man" is the only song that Dylan wrote that went to #1, though it is of course the Byrds who turned it into a classic.

 

Dylan generally liked to play his songs live before recording them to get a feel for them.  With "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", he wanted to get it recorded before getting comfortable with it in concerts.

 

Dylan's talent as a lyricist produced several great lines in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)".  The most famous is "He who is not busy being born is busy dying" has been quoted by several politicians, including president Jimmy Carter in his acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic National convention and vice president Al Gore, who told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that it was his favorite quote.  The opening line, "Darkness at the break of noon" refers to a nuclear explosion.  

 

The Newport Folk Festival of 1965 was famous for being the first time that Dylan played an electric guitar since high school.  Other Folk artists did not react well to the change.  Dylan recorded "Positively 4th Street" to address the criticism.

Dylan released the album Highway 61 Revisted in 1965.  Bob toured North America in support of the album, which has since gone Platinum.  The first single was the only one on the album produced by Tom Wilson, who produced Dylan's legendary album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.  Wilson brought in keyboardist Al Kooper, who played the famous organ riff.   "Like A Rolling Stone" gave Dylan his first Top 10 hit at #2.  

 

Bob wrote about fellow musicians in Greenwich Village who he believed were jealous of his success.  Dylan released the single "Positively 4th Street", a #7 song.  

 

In "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry", Dylan mixes original lyrics with those from old Blues songs by Charlie Patton, Brownie McGhee and Leroy Carr.  Bob hints that life (at least his) is fundamentally sad.  He writes that an ordinary train can make us cry (such as when a lost love leaves town), but it is not easy to laugh.

 "From A Buick 6" was the flip side to "Positively 4th Street".  It is based on the 1930 song "Milk Cow Blues" by Sleepy John Estes, even taking some of the lyrics from the song. 

 There is much speculation among Dylan fans about who Mr. Jones is in "Ballad Of A Thin Man".  The Counting Crows refer to the song in their classic 1993 song "Mr. Jones" ("I wanna' be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky").

 

The road that is the subject of "Highway 61 Revisited" runs from Minnesota to New Orleans.  For Dylan, it runs directly to the Blues music that he loved and influenced him so much.  "Highway 61 begins about where I came from, Duluth, to be exact," Bob said in his book Chronicles.  "I always felt like I'd started on it, always been on it, and could go anywhere from it."

 

In "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", Dylan refers to Tom Thumb, an English folklore character who starred in the first fairytale ever published in English in 1621.  Rue Morgue Avenue refers to Edgar Allen Poe while the Housing Project Hill is from the Jack Kerouac book Desolation Angels.

 

The opening lines of "Desolation Row" ("They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown..." refer to three men in town for the Duluth circus were accused of raping a girl.  On June 15, 1920, a town mob broke them out of jail and lynched the men.  Dylan rarely performed the song live, but when he did, it could sometimes stretch to be 45 minutes long.

 "Queen Jane Approximately" finds Dylan once again criticizing a woman and telling her she is getting ready for a fall.

The song eventually found its way onto Dylan's Greatest Hits album in 1967, which has sold over five million copies in the U.S. alone. 

Be sure to catch Bob Dylan, Part Three!