On Bringing It All Back Home's 50th Anniversary

Dylan goes electric is one of the most famous musical controversies and it still doesn’t make sense 50 years later.  It would be one thing if he turned on an electric guitar and started making bad or derivative pop music, but that didn’t happen in the spring of 1965.  For fans and some critics to call his electric/ folk-rock music a complete sellout says to me that they simply weren’t listening.  How could anyone listening to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” consider that a selling out of style?  Even the lyrics to the more romantic songs (“Love minus Zero/ No Limit” and “She Belongs to Me”) sound like nothing that had ever been recorded.  Where has anything similar to the phrase "She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all” ever been uttered in a love song?  Doesn’t sound much like “she loves you yeah” does it?  The language used on these songs just never existed in popular music. 

For an album regarded as the epicenter of the Dylan goes electric firestorm, I find it ironic that the best songs on his sellout album are the acoustic numbers.  Songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m only Bleeding)”, and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (a contender for my favorite song of all time) are so good that I actually considered that the folkies had a point in booing electric Dylan.  Then I went back to Side 1 and quickly cleansed my mind of such a blasphemous notion (what a drag it must have been for Dylan to see them).  It’s funny to see how music controversies have changed over the years.  We’ve moved from the sellout of musicians changing from acoustic to electric styles to the sellout of musicians going from playing instruments to creating music on computers.  I would venture that this is my generation’s Dylan goes electric controversy, but it seems to press harder on the minds of those from the generation prior to mine.  I guess ours might be making sure that a musician’s lyrics and song styles perfectly match up with our ideology and whether they challenge us in ways that we deem acceptable.  Still Dylan goes electric just seem so crazy 50 years later.  This album brought forth the greatest year and a half in musical history and for people to be mad at such genius just sounds insane.  Oh to have attended all his concerts from 1965-66 where people would booing, run around on stage, and antagonize their former hero would have been a sight to behold.  Funny that in around 4 years’ time these same rabble rousers would be wildly applauding the very same songs at the Isle of Wright, and 10 years later would be requesting them from the rafters.  It just goes to show how far ahead some people can be over the rest of us.

So on this March 22^nd, listen to at least one of the songs off “Bringing It All Back Home”.  Gaze at its intoxicating cover and get lost in the magnificent wordplay of “Gates of Eden” and “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream”.  This album brought to the public the image of Bob Dylan as the coolest motherfucker on the planet.  Type Bob Dylan 1965 into Google images and try to disagree with me.  It is a foolish exercise indeed.  Sit back, turn on this masterpiece of pop music and always remember that the pump don’t work because the vandals took the handles.