Bob Dylan (14 page)

For Joan Baez, this was a step in the wrong direction, as too was what she viewed as his negative, “death-trip” lifestyle at the time. “He criticizes society and I criticize it,” she explained to Robert Shelton, “but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite. I am afraid the message that comes through from
Dylan in 1965 and 1966 is: ‘Let's all go home and smoke pot, because there's nothing else to do… we might as well go down smoking.'” But what Baez viewed as defeatist actually proved inspirational for a much wider audience than the one to which she and Dylan had previously been preaching: faced with the apparent absurdity of modern life and its institutions, an entire generation recognized the zeitgeist in the verbal whirlwind of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues'.

The track made a fitting opening to
Don't Look Back
, in a classic sequence where Dylan, standing in an alleyway alongside London's Savoy Hotel, drops cards bearing words and phrases from the song, trying to keep pace as the declamatory deluge pours forth. (The cards had been marked up the previous evening, by Dylan, Donovan—who crashed on the floor of Bob's suite for a few nights during his stay—Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth. At the song's conclusion, the latter pair stroll across the alley, following Dylan out of the frame.)

Written at the apartment of John Court, an associate of Albert Grossman's, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues' was recorded on January 14, 1965, after Dylan had done a solo acoustic run-through the day before. Though he was working with a band for the first time, he seems remarkably at ease—indeed, compared with the nagging, monotonous delivery of the previous day, when Dylan (like so many since) experienced some difficulty making all the lines scan, he sounds audibly freed up by the band, effortlessly riding the R&B bounce of Bobby Gregg's drums while Kenny Rankin pierces the song's fabric with little exclamation-mark stabs of electric guitar. Amazingly, it was done in one take.

The two love songs on
Bringing It All Back Home
are decidedly different in character from Dylan's earlier romantic compositions. Just as the wistful longing of early songs like ‘Girl From The North Country' had been replaced by the bitter recrimination and melancholy of ‘It Ain't Me Babe' and ‘To Ramona' on
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
, so that is in turn supplanted here by an ambivalent tribute that veers between acquiescent devotion and subliminally mild contempt, the latter cunningly concealed by the gentleness of Dylan's delivery and the sensitivity of the backing. The key to the song is the bluntly possessive title, which runs so counter to Dylan's anti-materialist attitude that it can only be intended ironically, suggesting that the song's
apparent affection should likewise be taken with a pinch of salt.

The references in ‘She Belongs To Me' to the subject's status as an artist and her ownership of an Egyptian ring suggest that it was written for Joan Baez, to whom Bob had once given just such a ring. The song pays due tribute to her self-assertiveness and unbreakable moral conviction (“She never stumbles/She's got no place to fall”), but characterizes her interest in the narrator as that of a dilettante art collector whose gaze effectively transforms the object of her affections into an antique—presumably a reference to Baez's patronage of Dylan, her desire to keep him as her pet protest singer, rather than let him develop according to his own desires. Even the apparently obsequious devotion of the final verse masks a condemnation of a lover whose obsessive demands for compliments and attention have fatally wearied the relationship.

Bob and Joan's relationship had been eroding for the past year, but as with the earlier situation between Bob and Suze, he had not been able to call it quits. Instead, he allowed the relationship to deteriorate slowly, until she could stand no more and was forced to break things off. Joan had had misgivings for some time about the divergent direction their careers appeared to be taking, which were crystallized when he suggested to her that they play at Madison Square Garden. “I'm scared,” she told him. “I think what it means is that you'll be the rock'n'roll king, and I'll be the peace queen.” Dylan scoffed at her fear, but she was right: while her sense of liberal concern expanded to accommodate the diverse needs of her audience, he had come to the realization that to accept responsibility for “those kids” would stifle his muse, that he would become a walking antique unless he cast off all responsibilities except for those he had for his art.

Baez dates the watershed point of their relationship to a bi-coastal telephone conversation they had in 1964 during which, while they were joking about getting married, she had demurred, saying it would never work out. From that point, she claims, Dylan's attitude toward her changed, eventually coming to a head on the 1965 tour of England covered in
Don't Look Back
. She had accepted his invitation to accompany him to Europe, believing it would be a reciprocation of her American shows, at which she had introduced him to her audience. But Dylan never invited her up on stage
with him, leaving her forlornly in the wings as he basked in adulation. In the film, the distance between the two of them is plain to see in the hotel-room scenes where Joan vainly serenades Bob while he, oblivious, continues working on his book.

Worse still, the vicious banter that Dylan and Bob Neuwirth dealt in was increasingly aimed in her direction. In one of the film's cruelest scenes, after the three of them have traded Hank Williams songs in a backstage dressing-room, she admits to feeling tired. “I'm fagging out,” she explains. “Let me tell you, sister,” ripostes Neuwirth, quick as a flash, “you fagged out a long time ago!” Then, stepping further over the mark of propriety, he says to Dylan, “Hey, she's got one of those see-through blouses that you don't even wanna!” Unable to keep up with such insults, Joan flounces out of the room. Shortly afterward, things came to a head between Joan and Bob and, distraught, she left the tour and flew on to her parents' place in Paris.

At the final day of the
Bringing It All Back Home
recording sessions, according to photographer Daniel Kramer, Bob and his musicians were elated when they managed to kick off proceedings with a storming version of ‘Maggie's Farm'. This, combined with the simplicity of its blues structure, may explain why Dylan chose the song to open his ill-fated performance with the Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

‘Maggie's Farm' was probably inspired by ‘Penny's Farm', a song from Pete Seeger's first album which criticized the meanness of a landlord, George Penny. In Dylan's song, the criticism is less specific and, crucially, less earnest: the eponymous farm has expanded to take in the entire country's system of labor relations, which are ridiculed through the three-fold impact of the song's imagery, Dylan's bitingly sardonic delivery, and the rebellious ebullience of the backing. The song is virtually a shorthand précis of the Marxist analysis of the alienating condition of capitalism upon the workers—indeed, so alienated from the fruits of his labor is the narrator that we never learn exactly what kind of work it is that he's involved in. What we do learn about, in a series of cartoonish vignettes, is the small-minded nepotism and petty officialdom of most company organizations; the old ties between capital, the institutions of government and the church; and the grinding boredom of manual labor, especially when inflicted upon those workers who still retain a little imagination and a few ideas of their own.

The final verse concludes with a damning indictment of the way that, post-Henry Ford, modern assembly-line manufacturing methods impose uniformity on the labor force just as much as on the goods manufactured. Of course, Dylan is not fool enough to believe he is exempt from such forces, and so the last verse also becomes an explicit condemnation of all those folk fans and commentators who criticized his various changes of lyrical style—including, ironically, Pete Seeger himself, who had to be restrained from taking an ax to the power-cables that fed Dylan's electric band at the Newport Folk Festival that year.

The second of the album's love songs is more straightforwardly devotional than ‘She Belongs To Me', despite the dark, looming energy of much of its imagery. The first verse is as close as Dylan gets to amorous infatuation, marveling at a lover of elemental constancy and rock-like imperturbability, one whose emotional strength is not dependent on overt displays of emotion, but on some deeper, inner fortitude. The three remaining verses then offer a parade of the inauthentic chaos which routinely assaults the narrator's sensibilities, from which his lover's devotion provides him with necessary refuge: critics dissect, rich girls presume, bridges tremble, statues crumble—but through it all, she remains untouched, unaffected, smiling with the knowing, Zen-like calm of the Mona Lisa. By the song's conclusion, she occupies his thoughts as completely as the eponymous bird obsesses the hapless protagonist of Poe's
The Raven
—although the closing image of the bird with the broken wing tapping at the narrator's window could simply be an expression of her essential vulnerability, despite that inner strength he so admires.

In its admiration for a lover who “knows too much to argue or to judge,” the song is surely inspired by Sara Lowndes, the former model and
Playboy
bunny with whom Bob had become involved some time in late 1964, and whom he would marry in a secret wedding ceremony in November 1965. A divorcee friend of
Bringing It All Back Home
cover star Sally Grossman, Sara was a frequent visitor to the Grossmans' Woodstock spread, but lived with her young daughter Maria in New York's Chelsea Hotel, where Bob took an apartment in order to be close to her. It was
Sara, through her work connections at Drew Associates, a film-production company, who introduced Bob and his manager to the young cinema-verité filmmaker Donn Pennebaker, who would go on to make the
Don't Look Back
documentary.

Apart from her great natural beauty, what probably attracted Bob to Sara was her Zen-like equanimity: unlike most of the women he met, she wasn't out to impress him, or to interrogate him about his lyrics. An adherent of Eastern mysticism, she possessed a certain ego-less quality which dovetailed neatly with Bob's more pronounced sense of ambition. Indeed, so self-effacing was she that for a long time their relationship remained a secret even to Dylan's friends, most of whom learned about their marriage several months after it had occurred.

Encouraged by his Buddhist friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, Dylan was at this time becoming increasingly interested in Eastern mysticism himself, particularly the
I Ching
, the ancient oriental Oracle Of Change. “You gotta read the
I Ching,”
he told friends. “I don't wanna talk about it, except to say it's the only thing that's fantastically true. You read it, and you gotta know it's true. It's something to believe in. Of course,” he added with a Zen-like touch of self-contradiction, “I don't believe in anything.”

Originally rehearsed in acoustic form as ‘California'—under which title it appeared on several bootlegs—‘Outlaw Blues' is the most raw and basic of Dylan's early electric outings, a churning twelve-bar blues grind of rhythm guitars that just chugs onward, over and over, like a runaway sixteen-wheeler truck barreling down a highway, leaving gusts of harmonica and slivers of lead guitar trailing like leaves in its wake. As a performance, it could have been designed specifically to raise the hackles of his discomfited folkie fans, while the studied absurdity of the lyrics might also have been devised to annoy those who demanded meaning from his songs—and, increasingly, from Dylan himself. Hardly an interview or press conference would pass without Bob being asked to explain his songs, which is probably why the second verse finds Dylan watching his back, refusing to hang any specific opinions out in public view for fear of being shot down, the way Jesse James was shot in the back by Robert Ford while putting up a picture.

Two verses later, he returns to the same theme, with a damning vernacular finality that cuts both ways, through both his own oracular ability and his
interrogators' motives: “Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'/I just might tell you the truth.” And that, he implies, would be the last thing anyone would want.

As the first side approaches its end, Dylan slips into the parade of comic grotesques that would increasingly populate his songs over the course of the next few albums. A paranoid, nightmarish version of the in-law dread that affects every courting couple, ‘On The Road Again' opens with the most standard of blues beginnings—the narrator waking up in the morning—but instead of the string of clichés that are usually on a bluesman's mind, he's plunged here into a surreal netherworld where the mother-in-law lives in the refrigerator, father-in-law wears a mask of Napoleon, grandfather-in-law carries a sword-stick, and frogs inhabit his socks. Even the simplest tasks—eating, stroking a pet—become laden with pitfalls, while the most mundane and innocent of delivery-men and servants are imbued with a sinister, premonitory presence. No wonder, then, that Bob refuses to move in on a permanent basis.

The mutant rock'n'roll offspring of his various humorous talking blues, ‘Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' bears no relation at all to the wistful reverie of the original ‘Bob Dylan's Dream'. Over the course of the intervening 113 dreams, Dylan's dream-world has presumably become less personal but much more frantic, judging by the pace of this recording and the vitality of its imagery.

The song is a satiric dream vision of the discovery of America in which images, scenes and references dissolve into each other, so that the
Mayflower
can be captained by a cartoon version of
Moby Dick's
Captain Ahab—here re-named “Arab” for dumb comic effect—who, upon sighting America, abandons his quest for the whale in favor of buying up the land with beads and imposing the principles of property ownership upon a people for whom it has no meaning. Jailed alongside the rest of the crew for carrying harpoons, the narrator breaks out and goes in search of help for his shipmates, who remain unaccountably imprisoned.