Week 50 - Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan

Guest Listener - Samuel West

Who’s Samuel West when he’s at home?

He’s an actor and sometimes a director. He’s played Hamlet and Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Jeffrey Skilling in Enron in the West End and the voice of Pongo in Disney’s 101 Dalmations II. This autumn he played Ivanov and Trigorin in Chichester Festival Theatre’s Young Chekhov season. He’s Frank Edwards in all four series of Mr Selfridge on ITV. 

Sam was nominated for a BAFTA for the film Howards End. Recent screen work includes Suffragette, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Frankenstein Chronicles and The Hollow Crown II.

As a reciter he’s appeared with all the major British orchestras, quite a few international ones and at the Last Night of the Proms. He also narrates lots of documentaries and audiobooks.

Sam has directed eleven plays and two operas and was from 2005 to 2007 the artistic director of Sheffield Theatres.  He’s also an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a trustee of Belarus Free Theatre and Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts.

Sam lives in London with the playwright Laura Wade; they have a young daughter. In his spare time he grows chillies and goes birdwatching.

Samuel’s Top 3 albums ever?

Impossible, but three I’d hate to be without are

Super Fly - Curtis Mayfield

Another Green World - Brian Eno

English Settlement - XTC

What great album has he never heard before?

Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan

Released in March 1965

Before we get to Sam, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Bringing It All Back Home

It’s the facts, not the story, that leave you dizzy.

So here we go.

I’m going to skip all that David Copperfield stuff because we don’t have time. All you need to know is that he begins his life in rural Minnesota - miles away from where he should be. With nothing else to do he idolises Hank Williams, then Little Richard, and, finally, Woody Guthrie. You get the picture. It’s the ‘50s - holding hands and going steady. 

Well, that wasn’t for him.

In January of 1961 he emphatically decides he’s had enough and travels to New York to make his mark. He’s changed his name too, signalling his intent in the process. No longer Robert Zimmerman, a name fit for owning hardware stores, he’s now Bob Dylan - a name fit for anything. And I love that he did that. That he was nowhere near famous and still thought “there’s no way I’m coming to New York with my silly actual name. They’ll get what they’re given and I’m giving them Bob Dylan.”

It was the best thing Robert Zimmerman ever did.

On arrival he immerses himself within Greenwich Village - a Bohemia of coffee houses and people with roll-necks singing folk songs. An ideal place for a Woody Guthrie fanatic to get involved. And he does, quickly becoming “the kid” on the scene - a 10 minute support slot here, a lunchtime show there. All the while he’s absorbing influence, making contacts, and graduating to bigger stages.

Everyone who was around at the time now comments on his uncanny ability to learn a song in one listen. They also tell tales of him stealing records - of him crashing on the floor at night and making off with half their collection in the morning. And finally, his love life explodes too - a series of women smitten by his vagabond charm. Joan Baez would later say “he could bring out the mothering instinct in a woman who thought her mothering instinct was dead”

This was his “tentative” migration into Greenwich Village then - he basically ransacked the place.

In October 1961 he comes to the attention of John Hammond - the A&R man at Columbia who had signed Billie Holiday. Hammond sees Dylan perform and is immediately taken in. What he sees is in one sense derivative but in another entirely different. It’s younger, brighter, spun from the past but with polish and attitude. Hammond, trusting his instincts, signs him to Columbia there and then.

And that’s how easy it was. Dylan had come to Greenwich Village a nobody in January. Just 10 months later, he had a record deal.

His first album, brilliantly titled Bob Dylan, takes just 6 hours to record. I know. 6 hours - that’s not even a full shift at work. He’s strolled in late and left early. No one records an album in that amount of time. Most people can’t even record a song in that amount of time. But, in hindsight, maybe it was too early for him, too rushed. He’s still stuck in his Woody Guthrie phase and the album is nothing more than a charming homage - interpretations, like impressions, of the songs he had learnt, alongside just one Dylan original - Song to Woody. 

It sells poorly and, for a while, the executives at Columbia have a nickname for their new signing - “Hammond’s Folly”. 

Not a great start then.

But look, this is Bob Dylan and he’s not about to stand for that. So, smarted by failure, he decides to throw everyone else’s songs in the bin and concentrate on writing his own. The time had come for him to trust his instincts.

What follows is probably the most prolific and concentrated period of song writing ever, a time in his life where Bob Dylan literally couldn’t stop writing songs. I saw an interview with him once where he said that he was even writing songs when he was talking to people. Just imagine that for a second. It’s complete madness -

“I caught up with Bob today”

“How was he?”

“He seemed fine, although he was writing "Masters of War” at the time so it’s hard to tell.“

"Right." 

WHO ON EARTH WRITES SONGS WHEN THEY’RE TALKING TO PEOPLE!!!

1962 Bob Dylan, that’s who. 

For his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he produces a staggering 37 songs that are so good the only difficulty is deciding what to leave out. One of the songs that doesn’t make the cut is Tomorrow is a Long Time - a song so brilliant that, in 2010, it closes the first season of The Walking Dead. That’s how good his off cuts are - 48 years after he’s discarded them they’re the perfect song to close a TV series about the Zombie apocalypse. 

Nothing goes to waste.

But, also, look at the ones that made it - Hard Rain, Blowing in the Wind, Don’t think Twice, Oxford Town, Masters of War etc etc. Just a quick word on Hard Rain because it’s so extraordinary. At just under 7 minutes, it’s a series of opening lines that are majestically put together to create a narrative of impending doom and personal terror. Both Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen are on record as saying it’s the song that made them want to become songwriters. But what’s remarkable is that he was just 21 when he wrote it - when the world was on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

WHO ON EARTH WRITES SONGS DURING THE CUBAN MISS…. 

Look, you get the idea by now.

The album, helped by the best cover ever, is a success. Dylan’s arrived in earnest and people are now covering his songs - notably Peter, Paul, and Mary who have a huge hit with Blowing in the Wind. With success comes the inevitable attempts at ownership and definition. He’s quickly labelled as the "voice of a generation”, he’s quickly asked to clarify his meaning and his message. All that pressure, all those questions. He’s even wheeled out at the historic March on Washington, singing 4 songs prior to Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech - the toughest support slot ever.

Still it’s bewildering. Everything’s happening so fast and he seems unwilling to rest and take stock.

He follows Freewheelin’ with The Times They Are a Changin’, another brilliant collection of finger pointing songs which only serve to increase his popularity. Again, the songs are recorded with the minimum amount of fuss, just a few takes to get them down. Like Freewheelin’ it’s music as still photography, a moment in time from Dylan’s life that’s captured and recorded for us to enjoy - whilst he moves on. 

And move on he does. It’s around this time that he gets less interested in global themes and more interested in Rimbaud and amphetamines. Crucially, he also hears The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand for the first time. Legend has it that he was so excited that he got out of the car, ran around for a bit, and then started to bang his head against the bonnet saying “It’s great!”

Coincidentally, The Beatles were in Paris around the same time and George Harrison returned to their hotel with a copy of Freewheelin’ (En Roue Libre actually) which they played to death.

A mutual appreciation society had begun. 

And now Dylan starts the turn.

His next album Another Side of Bob Dylan is recorded in a single 10 hour session, washed down with a couple of bottles of Beaujolais. Still photography again. And the other side that the title suggests? Well this time it’s more personal, its lyrics more poetic. If any fingers are being pointed, they’re pointed inwards. But, in places, it’s fun too. It’s even got a parody of Hitchcock’s Psycho on it.

The critics hated it. Poe faced and precious, they wondered where THEIR Dylan had gone, always in thrall to THEIR Dylan and no one else’s. They even started to say that he’d lost it.

Shortly after it’s released, stung by the criticism, he meets The Beatles for the first time in a New York Hotel. He turns up looking for his usual drink, cheap wine, but gets offered Champagne and Pills. He turns them both down and, instead, rolls a massive joint – giving The Beatles their first experience of marijuana. Paul McCartney, out of his head, thinks he’s discovered the meaning of life and writes it down on a piece of paper. The next morning he wakes, reaches for the paper and unravels it to see the words - “THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS”.

Some joint that Bob. 

But it’s worth pausing to wonder what may have gone through Dylan’s head as he spent time with them. Could he sense that the Sixties were about to take off? And if he did, then he must have realised that these four were his competition – that he would have to change again if he was going to keep up. 

He then hears what The Animals have done with The House of The Rising Sun, a song from his debut album, and his mind is made up. 

He gets to work on his fifth album. Turning again.

In just 3 days Dylan records Bringing It All Back Home - a mixture of acoustic and electric songs that set him up for the rest of his career. I repeat - in just 3 days. On the last day he recorded the final versions of Maggie’s Farm, On the Road Again, It’s All Alright Ma, Gates of Eden, Mr Tambourine Man, and It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. All that, in one day. 

It’s the facts, not the story, that leave you dizzy.

Musically, it’s a riot. Lyrically, it’s a dream. And this time it isn’t still photography, it’s a blur. It’s Dylan on the half turn - pulling away and taking his chance. 

There’s that line on Tambourine man -

“To dance beneath the diamond sky, 
with one hand waving free, 
silhouetted by the sea.”

I can only imagine his face when he came up with that. One of his greatest images and, as always with Dylan, it’s the detail that does it - the one hand waving free. It makes the song three dimensional, as if he’s stepped outside the verse to acknowledge his own gesture, his own victory. 

The album’s awash with moments like that.

Whilst a lot has been made of the change in direction that Bringing It All Back Home represents, and its subsequent influence, what interests me is what happened to Dylan himself. You can see it most clearly in the promotional video for Subterranean Homesick Blues, filmed in an alley behind The Savoy Hotel in London. 

An impassive Dylan stands on the side of the screen, tossing aside a shorthand version of the song written on cue cards. He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t even open his mouth. That’s how interested he is in performing for us. But look at him, look how resplendent he is - how lean he is. Look at the change, how he’s gone from a Huck Finn character to the coolest person on the planet - to the last person in the world that looks like he needs mothering.

He’s taking his chance, grabbing the '60s by the scruff of the neck, and staring us down.

When he gets to the end, there’s one last card. 

It simply says “What?”

It’s the only card that doesn’t represent a line in the song. He’s ad-libbing, but deliberately, looking at his audience and saying “What?" 

And then he throws that on the floor too and walks off without waiting for an answer.

Dylan on the half turn in 1965 - pulling away and taking his chance.

But honestly, you should see what he does next.

Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)

The Critics on Bringing It All Back Home

Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it the 31^st best album of all time.

So, over to you Samuel. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????

Bringing It All Back Home came out in 1965 and so was conceived just before I was. How have I avoided it this long?

WELL. Every teenager has a singer-songwriter-shaped socket in their head. Mine was plugged by Dory Previn, whose records I stole from my Da. My aural and political landscape was mostly her; I never made it through to whiny male fields beyond.

In the summer of 1980, when my ears were born, I was played three records by a smart looked-up-to friend: Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants, Closer by Joy Division and Propaganda by Sparks (they’d all still be on my top twenty list). He was also into Dylan, which lent Bob an early cachet. He had the collected lyrics in a book. Why didn’t Dylan go onto the turntable then? I wish I knew. Sliding doors.

And why not since? Mystified Bob fans must understand that their mid-60s man can be intimidating to the uninitiated; the albums are dense, and deserving of respect. Like the late Beethoven quartets, you come to them when you’re ready.

Me, I saw Harold and Maude (which knocked a serious teen sideways), and so I got into Cat Stevens, a sort of Diet Dylan, and that was enough. I got my anti-establishment noises from punk and ska and Test Department. US Civil Rights, seen through a vaselined lens, took on a hazy glow. If I’d had my nose pressed more firmly up against the glass of America, I’d have persevered. But I caught the 80s disease of mistrusting most things American (not hard at the time, before US culture was quite so everywhere), and Dylan got tarred with that same brush.

So, sorry.

On the other hand, I get to discover him now, so here goes.

You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?

I wanted to do this properly, so I bought a nice heavy vinyl copy, stuck it on the LP12 and poured myself a whisky. First thoughts: “Is that a chaise longue on the cover? Not very rock ’n roll. Who’s that scarlet woman on it? Looks like Jessica Raine. Know it’s not Joan Baez (did they have a thing?). Is she a muse, or a silent companion, like on the Mastermind box?”

The First Pass: Meeting It All Head On. (Whisky: Ardbeg 10 Year Old)

Brief impressions: deceptively simple 8-bar blues of the sort I struggle through on the piano. 4-bar blues. 5½-bar blues? Wit, wit, wit. Half rhymes! Punchlines! Bob’s got problems. He’s trapped. But in what? Simple recording, the man himself quite central. A tight band that rocks. Sticky tunes so good that the first time you hear them, you know you’ve heard them before.

Impossible to separate form and content. Does Dylan sing like that because he writes like that? Consistently arriving at each word just before the beat, giving the lines a terrible power. An album of two halves – the first electric, the second mostly acoustic. I knew there was a big row about Bob making music with stuff that had to be plugged into the mains. Couldn’t see the problem myself. But the division is obvious, and the order of the tracks unarguably right. The whole inspired but not limited by Kerouac. Whassit all about, Bob? We don’t know. He won’t say.

Child comes in, knocks whisky over. Decide that the second pass two days later should be

For the Words (Whisky: Caol Ila 12 Year Old)

Is it cheating to look up lyrics online? I followed a few songs like that, but oddly found I wasn’t listening as carefully (which Bob maybe knew when he left out a lyric sheet) so I put down the iPad, went back and started again.

Can Subterranean Homesick Bluesreally be by George Formby? I’d met a version on The Young Ones but nothing prepares you for the original 2 mins 17 secs Dylan torrent. Taut, pushy, it’s the song version of the glasses that allow you to see the world as it is in Carpenter’s They Live:

Didn’t The Weathermen, a US revolutionary collective, take their name from the line “Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”? Blimey. Imagine having that sort of penetration – a danceable manifesto giving its name to a Communist pressure group. The times they have a-changed.

SHB is followed by its own B-side, She Belongs to Me. She obviously doesn’t. A portmanteau of Dylan girlfriends, their power anatomised in squirm-inducing detail; he later wished he hadn’t written it. “She can take the dark out of the night time, and paint the daytime black…You wind up peeking though her keyhole down on your knees”. Yup, been there.

Who is this Maggie, who we met in track one? She’s back and she’s got a farm. Dylan couldn’t know that Steve Bell would use Maggie’s Farm as the title of his City Limits strip; maybe her farm isn’t the military industrial complex by another name. I knew this was the track Dylan opened with at the Newport Folk Festival, in a very punchy version with the Butterfield Blues Band; they famously became the Butterfield Booed Band as soon as it ended. Bad manners, I think. Even if you think “going electric” is “going commercial”, you have to allow an artist to do their thing. One of my favourite poets, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, had the same struggle: the tension between the political simplicity activists wanted from his work, and the freedom he felt he owed his poetry. Perhaps Maggie’s Farm is Bob bringing his electric chickens back home to roost. This idea become more important as I went along.

The last three tracks of side one, Outlaw Blues, On The Road Again and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream seemed to form a set, which I called The Funny Ones. They start off mocking the “Woke up this morning/Had all the symptoms of typhoid” school of 60s blues. But despite the Gilliam silliness of Dream with its giggling false start, they quickly turn from funny ha ha to funny peculiar, from on the run through the oddness of in-laws to nightmare surreality. The tale of Captain Arab and the Pope of Eruke (Irooq? Iraq?), listened to only a week after Trump’s anti-Muslim nonsense, now had a flavour of apocalypse prophet. Around the high harmonica scream that begins On the Road Again, it feels like “Where are we going?” becomes “I have to get out of this place”. To which end, Bob Dylan, titling himself in the third person, flips a coin to decide whether to return to a ship and escape, or go back to jail (and perhaps help his imprisoned protest movement friends):

“It came up tails

It rhymed with sails

So I made it back to the ship”

Can’t help noticing that “tails’ is much closer to “jail” than “ship”, Bob. You got the wrong flip, but you contrived to escape anyway. So ends the electric side. Dylan flips, and so do I.

Side Two was all recorded on January 15th 1965, which makes it possibly the greatest day’s work ever. Except it starts with the only stain on this Parthenon of an album, Mr Tambourine Man. Having spent side one saying “I can go where I like”, why go here? I found it foursquare and clumpy. The internal rhymes grated, Bruce Langhorne’s bell-like electric lead guitar seemed over-present in the mix and Dylan’s new Pied Piper muse was an annoyingly jangly little fucker, too close to the Fast Show’s Bob Fleming and the Bavarian excesses of Morris dancing for comfort. And it starts with a chorus, which is ODD.

The irony of the acoustic/electric row is that the electric band setting holds two purely acoustic jewels. Arriving at the Gates of Eden I thought “this is more like it”. First solo song on the album, a relentless nine verses. Listen to the way he sings “No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden” - nothing’s getting in the way of that. Unapologetically ugly at times, bitten and savage, Dylan’s Evidently Chickentown. I took the lyrics as I found them, “with no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”

Eden softened me up for the knockout blow of It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), which is surely one of the most powerful noises ever committed to vinyl. The fancy guitar picking sounded new, forensic and particular. It promised insight, and delivered. Dense, fast, depressed and depressing. And so elegantly concise. Very hard to choose one fridge-magnet line, but “He not busy being born is busy dying” is worth the album price on its own. The tender need to hold and be held by Mother reminded me of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Sonny’s Lettah. The first harmonica sigh, a breath made music, feels like air snatched above the rising sludge. The uneven length of the verses is vicious – each will go on just as long as it needs to, thanks. It’s so boldy based around one note that, like Tomorrow Never Knows, all movement away from the tonic feels like temporary relief. It’s life and life only - a sentence that ends with death.

Then It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, the last song of last songs. A friendly walking bass giving a very false sense of security; Dylan’s yelled, sweetly tired high notes are left undubbed. “That’s yer lot”, he seems to be saying, “Get out there and live”.

At some point before the

Third Pass (Whisky: Lagavulin 16 year old),

having to listen to BIABH became wanting to listen to BIABH. A good sign.

Maybe it was the Lagavulin, but Dylan’s voice had never sounded warmer than on Love Minus Zero, the whiny insistence of Maggie’s Farm and her skiffle friends delighted me, even the annoying tambourine chappy, protected by a harmonica break I hadn’t really heard before, revealed himself in the last verse a gorgeous enchanter, and the weird guitar rush of “Let me forget about today until tomorrow”, where the Pro-Plus kicks in and the disciple realises his Safety Dance can’t last, made Bob sound touchingly human.

The easy, rolling accompaniment of the band now seemed like a velvet glove. The words punched hard, their stream-of-consciousness indulgence alarm silenced. I trusted Dylan the poet now. Again and again, as I examined the luggage of some freighted phrase, it unpacked itself and refused to go back in the box.

In the end, the reason I’d never heard this album before turned out to be the reason I enjoyed hearing it so much. It’s hard.

Would you listen to it again?

I already have.

​​A mark out of 10?

Reader, I loved it. I’m so glad you made me listen. I can’t do the whole “this is the best Dylan album, or the third best” thing, because I don’t know many of the others either, but I did get a big fat kick from it.

So, because nothing is perfect, a very solid 9/10.

RAM Rating – 10

Guest Rating – 9

Overall – 9.5

So that was Week 50 and that was Samuel West. Turns out he’d never listened to Bringing it All Back Home before because he was intimidated by Bob’s oeuvre – a word I don’t get to use much but always enjoy it when I do. So we made him listen to it and he mostly drank whisky and loved it. Top marks to everyone involved.

This is our last edition till January the 8^th so it just remains for us to wish everyone a Happy Christmas and New Year.

We’ll leave you for the aforementioned video for Subterranean Homesick Blues, a song that he recorded in just 3 takes and then didn’t sing again for 23 years.

WHO RECORDS A SONG AS GOOD AS SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES AND THEN DOESN’T SING IT FOR 23 YEARS!!!!!!!

Enjoy.

Ruth and Martin

xx