Bob Dylan Part II: On The Road Again

"…I really was never any more than what I was – a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad." -Chronicles Volume One (116)

Which footprint was most salient; the Fab Four stepping onto U.S soil in 1964, thrusting the British Invasion in motion. Or was it a foot print that leapt mankind into space exploration in1969? Each print left an everlasting mark in history that signified both the beginning and end of the sixties decade. It seemed liked the 1960s allowed everyone to walk with a new stride, including Bob Dylan.
As the decade moved forward, history found the acoustic crooner branching out of his short curled hair and into a mane of dark brown mania. His height a half inch taller in slick, black shoes that complimented the dark shades adding to the mystery of the man that came from nowheresville Minnesota.
 But what happened with his sound? This article will  be the start of this series exploration into Dylan through the mid-1960s. Looking at how imagery, pop, the swirling tints of neon and earthy tones in fabric and the paranoia of genre, drugs, and identity would play a part in his songwriting. Starting with one of the biggest steps in his music career.

Much like the previous album's title Another Side of Dylan,  Bob Dylan's next album showcased another side or course in which Dylan would charter.  Another Side of Dylan would be the last folk album Bob Dylan would release, as 1965 now represented Bob as a spokesman in a different voice, not one of political injustice- although take it as you'd like. His voice was now for those who had an abstract mind. His next album, Bringing It All Back Home, pawed on ideas of rock and roll and electric mayhem, mashed up with words that could move glaciers or act like paint; strong and vivid.
 The political, freedom fighting, folk singer from the middle of the country who provided four sheltering albums over the past two years, was now polluting speakers with a left-field, electric, picturesque tracks.   If to compare it to anything, one could say it was like the comfortable feeling an innocent child would have while listening to the music of a Jack-In-The-Box.
 The handle spins round and round. The child adapting to sounds, catching the weasel around the mulberry bush. Then BAM! Jack pops out of nowhere. BAM! Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine...*
Bringing It All Back Home kick started with an electric track of slamming the government with verses that flirted on the lines of rap, which wouldn't become a recognized, popular genre till decades later (although, Chuck Berry). The album continues on this quest of anti-folk sounds with "On The Road Again", "Its Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" while the top hits at the time were The Beatles "Eight Days A Week", The Supremes "Stop! In The Name of Love" and Petula Clarks "Downtown".    It makes one question "How could he have such a title as 'Bringing It All Back Home'" When the album was so far from the home they knew Bob Dylan of (In a previous article of mine I mentioned the following, "You can't bring this home to anyone who pinned Dylan as just a freedom singer. No you need a new tac or nail to pin him on a new bulletin board- one with new agendas on the horizon.").

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" via Youtube. The song would be the opening to Bringing It All Back Home

However, the album took a turn with the second half focusing with Dylan on an acoustic guitar, where two of his most iconic songs can be heard; "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now Baby Blue".

"Mr. Tambourine Man" is a perfect example of how Dylan began to paint pictures in a listeners mind through words and melody. The song is meditative trance, webbing a listener into their own reflective state of being. Now compare "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Clark's "Downtown" both songs have a whimsical, light hearted melody to it, perhaps you'd find a Tambourine Man Downtown. However, this comparison shows how poetic and prophetic Bob Dylan was, and where he was going. Not only, comparing Dylan to the current top hits, but compare Dylan to Dylan. "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" versus "Blowin' In The Wind". Both slow, simple songs that hold complicated ideas  or ideas to mettle over.  

Next came Highway 61 Revisted. The album came at a time where Bob Dylan began struggling with internal thoughts himself. Just coming back from a draining tour in England, unsatisfied with the product he was creating. Upon returning he had written twenty pages of verse, a "long piece of vomit", that would soon after revisions and shortened into only four verses and chorus, would add helium to his songwriting stove. This new revised song was described by Bob Dylan in 2004 to Roberty Hilburn as,

"It's like a ghost is writing a song like that ... You don't know what it means except the ghost picked me to write that song." 

That song was "Like A Rolling Stone", the opening track to the new album. 

"It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further." - Paul McCartney

Much like, "Mr. Tambourine Man","Like A Rolling Stone" had changed the way mainstream music was being listened to. It had the wistfulness of "Mr. Tambourine Man" while pouncing on the lines of modern times of sounds outside of the Greenwich folk scene (and featuring a Siamese cat adorning Andy Warhol with his other pet, Edie Sedjwick, whom have had rumors swirled that the song is written about).  The lyrics proposed Dylan as a story teller, where his words painted a storyboard as they left his lips.  At age twenty-three, Bob Dylan had found his new voice, a literary poet of illusions.
 "Like A Rolling Stone" would cause controversy a month prior to the albums release at Newport Folk Fest ( more on this later).
The album continues on Dylan's surrealist period, and like other great surrealist, Bob had a way of skewing the reality, often through dreamscape stories, filled with characters like Miss, Lonely or Mr. Jones. Sometimes it's a juxtaposition, others times Bob Dylan had created a piece that to understand it we have to surrender to the disbelief or wrestle, playfully with harsh realities marrying cosmic realms.

During this time Dylan began aligning himself with musicians like Al Kooper, a musician who would go on to shake music in his own rights with Blood, Sweat and Tears, for now he sat assisting Dylan on organ and piano - occasionally guitar. Dylan had aligned his backup guitarist to be none other than Mike Bloomfield, of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Their biggest session can arguably be July 25, 1965.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more  

No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more 

Well, I wake up in the morning 

Fold my hands and pray for rain  

I got a head full of ideas 

That are drivin' me insane

It's a shame The way she makes me Scrub the floor

I ain't gonna work on, nah 

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.  

-Maggie's Farm, Bringing It All Home  (march 22 1965) by Bob Dylan

In July 1965 Bob Dylan was invited back to headline at the Newport Folk Festival . In July 1965 Bob Dylan ended his residency at Newport Folk Festival. It was here, on July 25, 1965 that the once referred to as "theirs" Dylan traded in his acoustic guitar and plugged in a sunburst, Stratocaster for a historic event that would fork folk folks.
The music had started and there was no turning back. Bob had his mind already made up; and his head was full of ideas that were driving him insane. He wasn't going to work on Maggie's Farm no more and in a quick instant Newport Folk Fest had rattled into amplified new heights of electric mayhem and toxic cheers - rather jeers. As booing and betrayal reeked through the bodies of audience members as they shuffled through their pockets trying to find the receipt to return this phony folk artist that they thought they knew.

"A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of the Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, 'And here he is . . . take him, you know him, he’s yours.' I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never been introduced like that. 'Take him, he’s yours!' What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now. " -Chronicles Volume One (115-116)

If telling a crowd of folk staunched members that you're not going to be working for them anymore wasn't enough, what came next was just as interesting. The boos wouldn't shake him. It wasn't all of the crowd anyways. He rolled into what would become  a Top Ten hit,  “Like a Rolling Stone”. A song crying “How does it feel?”.