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Bringing It All Back Home – Sixty Years On

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Released on 22 May 1965, my bobdylan.com email tells me

I was 9 years old so I kind of missed it, although I’m pretty sure The Byrds’ Mr Tambourine Man was on the radio. I remember we’d be waiting in line at the tennis court to have a turn and kids would start singing it, but they’d sing one of the harmonies as the melody. I’ve often noticed that, how people’s ears hear different melody lines more prominently. But I digress

I would have bought the album in my student days, 1971-72. Remarkably I still have it. I did a big catchup with all the early albums around that time. I listened to it again the other day after seeing A Complete Unknown. Apart from a couple of duff tracks it’s still quite brilliant. Bob was 23, it was his fourth album or something.

Anyone got anything more intelligent to say?

1

Comments

  3. Yes March 22 1965. Recorded over 2 days (!) just 2 months earlier.

    Obviously one of the greatest, most important albums ever made. And he made 4 LPs worth in about 15 months, with probably also about another album’s worth with standalone singles and unreleased stuff.

    I probably place it 3rd of that famous trilogy, but the other 2 are often rated in the top 20 or so albums ever made, so nothing really to it’s detriment.

    Maybe one or two weaker songs on the electric side. I find it interesting that it is classified as his first electric album but the acoustic side is pretty faultless and up there with the greatest sides of music he very made.

    I think Mr Tambourine man could be my favourite lyric by anybody. I just couldn’t fathom it or believe it when I first heard it, aged about 15, especially this verse:

    “Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind

    Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves

    The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach

    Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

    Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

    Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

    With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves

    Let me forget about today until tomorrow”

    That’s beautiful poetry, man ….

    • For the record I go:

      1 Blonde on Blonde
      2 Highway 61 Revisited
      3 Blood on the Tracks
      4 The Times They Are a Changin’
      5 Bringing it all Back Home

      Will give my original UK mono vinyl of BIABH a spin later.

      • I’ve never “got” the greatness Blonde On Blonde … my loss
        Highway 61 Revisited for me, closely followed by Blood On The Tracks.
        Bringing It All Back Home takes 3rd spot

        • Say it aint so… me and Dai agree on something.
          The Times They Are a-Changin’ they most certainly are, at no 4!

          I’ll go…
          5. Pat Garrett (Yeah… going for the ho-hum, dreary 1970s… Dylan’s last ‘good-looking’ bit, no wonder Sara got rid… I reckon it’s that picture on New Morning that severed that relationship)
          4. Times They Are A-Changin’
          3. John Wesley Harding
          2. Nashville Skyline
          1. Another Side of Bob Dylan (although the only Dylan album I only ever listen to is actually Nashville Skyline… it’s a Beatles’ Red/Blue scenario… only ever admit to what girls prefer… it makes for a better record collection!)

      • I’ll go

        1. Blood on the Tracks
        2. Highway 61 Revisited
        3. Blonde on Blonde
        4. John Wesley Harding
        5. Bringing it All Back Home

        My bad, but Bringing it All Back Home has just never been a favourite album. 4 or 5 astonishing songs but some not so good as well.

  4. I don’t think it has any duff tracks at all, and it flows well. This isn’t my favourite album of his (that’s Another Side, tied with Blood on the Tracks) but it’s close.

  5. This was my first Dylan album (Greatest Hits was my second). I say ‘my’ – it was actually borrowed from a mate up the road in 1966, and…er…I really must get round to returning it some time. I was 16 years old.

    It is probably still my favourite Dylan album. It is an incredible collection of songs and turned me onto Dylan. Another friend had Freewheelin’ and those three LPs were played and played played in our respective houses.

    For the record, my next album of his was John Wesley Harding which I got for my 18th birthday (coincidentally the 22nd March) which seems to be almost ignored now and rarely mentioned, but one I also love and play a lot to this day.

  6. With this record he shows what rock lyrics can be, what rock music can be and what a rockstar can be. That pop records can be ambitious and sophisticated, something grown up. Ahead of his time in that sense. A profound influence, changing music, which you can’t deny even if you don’t care for all of it or any of it. Some of the extended verbal recitals are testing. It’s All Over Now Baby Blue and Love Minus Zero are pretty stunning though. Classics.

  7. Anyone do a one side electric the other side acoustic album before this?
    The cover just great.

    I have trouble ranking records from that thin wild mercury period – they were all so magnificent.

  8. Wikipedia says that ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is considered ‘to have been instrumental in the birth of folk rock’. Which explains the release last week of a three-CD Cherry Red compilation called ‘Jingle Jangle Morning: The 1960s US Folk-Rock Explosion’. The 74-track compilation begins with the Byrds’ version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and then follows with Dylan and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

    I’m a sucker for US folk rock of this period but there were still some nice surprises in the boxset, among them Judy Henske’s version of ‘High Flying Bird’, Judy Collins’ ‘Hard Lovin’ Loser’ and We Five’s ‘You Were On My Mind’ (just on the first CD alone). The knowledgeable sleeve notes are by Richie Unterberger (formerly of Rolling Stone). Perhaps I would have chosen ‘That’s The Bag I’m In’ instead of ‘The Drifter’ for H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Someone To Love’ as The Great Society’s offering, rather than ‘Didn’t Think So’, and there must be many other songs than ‘Today’ to represent Jefferson Airplane. But overall the song selections are spot on.

  9. Whether it’s up there with his best is open to debate (as seen above). However 5 albums in at the age of 23 he changed “things” which changed/enhanced his audience and acclaim. This may be the pint that “defined” Bob and allowed him to continue exploring/experimenting and producing the music he damn well wanted to – although I’m still not convinced by Self Portrait …

    • At the time I thought it was absolute shite, but the bootleg series ‘Another Self Portrait’ changed my mind and revealed its charms. It’s one of those records that has definitely improved with age as it no longer just has the records that came before it for comparison. Similarly with Nashville Skyline, which I never got at the time and considered it a weak follow up the JWH, but I now appreciate much more.

  10. I think Another Self-Portrait is so great that it is narrative altering. I think its the equal to anything he has done though of course it is different to the mind-blowing self-creation of what was once called his mid-period with early Dylan being the folkie records and then late dylan etc. It would be interesting poll the weak songs on BIABH. I don’t really hear them; but Dylan is so subjective. I think Modern Times is in its own way as good as those records – just not surprising in the same way.

  11. I first heard BIBH in around 1989, when I would have been 20. It’s easy to forget that, back in the late 80s, unless you listened to John Peel regularly (and I didn’t), then you wouldn’t hear Bob Dylan. There were no big hit singles to be played on the radio, no songs on TV soundtracks. Before I heard BIBH, the only Dylan I had previously heard, was at school when my Music teacher played the title track from The Times They Are A-Changin’.

    One of my best friends had become a big Dylan fan, and I had become a big Rolling Stones fan, so we did the logical thing at that time: we exchanged a bunch of C90s. I recorded him the albums from Beggars Banquet to Goats Head Soup, and he recorded me the Dylan albums from Times to Nashville. Killing music was rarely as much fun.

    The first tape, with Times and Another Side was pleasant enough, but I still remember the feeling of hearing Subterranean Homesick Blues for the first time, sitting in that student flat in Edinburgh. One of the few times when I’ve loved a song by the time I’d finished hearing it the first time. It was 25 years old at the time. I loved the rest of the album, and was amazed when the one of the other side of the C90* was even better. I played those tapes to death over the next couple of years (I still think he made his best albums on Memorex).

    The sting in the tail is that I think I’ve listened to it once in this century. I still think it’s a great record, but perhaps albums you love have a certain mileage, after which you don’t need to listen to them again.

    *In case you’re wondering neither BIBH or Highway 61 will fit on one side of a C90. My friend took out Outlaw Blues from BIBH, which is fair enough, but I still haven’t forgiven him for taking out Queen Jane Approximately from Highway 61, when the gentleman’s choice would surely have been Ballad of a Thin Man.

  12. I think I was too young to understand BOATM when I heard it at 15/16 and I thought it was a little hysterical. I can’t say I listen to it for enjoyment ever: “can’t wait to bang that on when I get home.” But I think that is the shopworn nature of it and Maggie’s Farm etc. I think there’s an interesting list of what were once iconic songs that perhaps have fallen by the wayside. I think of Maggie like that. Maybe My Back Pages also.

  13. I started listening to my Dad’s stash of Dylan albums in the 80s when I was a teenager and there was no one else at school at that point I could share it with: it felt like discovering an occult text. AlthoughI have never managed to become a serious Dylan disciple, BIABH remains my favourite largely because of the strange, uneasy lyrical brilliance of the songs on side 2. Happy anniversary!

    • I remember school mate Michael Evans walking through my home town with a copy of The Times They Are a Changin’ under his arm ca. 1978. Was about the coolest thing I had ever seen. While I knew he was still active (and he had a hit single that year), it seemed to come from some ancient bygone era. Of course today that would be a school mate carrying an album from 2011!

  14. BIABH was a big favourite of the jocks on Yorkshire pirate station Radio 270, with tracks like It’s Alright Ma regularly played, even during daylight hours.

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