Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home
Studio album by Bob Dylan
Publication (s)	March 22, 1965
Label (s)	Columbia Records
Format (s)	LP, CD
Genre (s)	Folk rock
Title (number)	11
running time	47 min 23 s
occupation	Bob Dylan - voc , g , harm , p , John Hammond, Jr. -g John Sebastian - bg Kenny Rankin - g Bobby Gregg - dr John Boone - bg Al Gorgoni - g Paul Griffin - p, org Bruce Langhorn - g Bill Lee - bg Joseph Macho Jr. - bg Frank Owens - p
production	Tom Wilson
Studio (s)	13-15 January 1965 Columbia Recording Studio, New York
chronology Another Side of Bob Dylan ( 1964 ) Bringing It All Back Home Highway 61 Revisited ( 1965 )

Bringing It All Back Home is the fifth studio album by American songwriter Bob Dylan , released in March 1965 . It is considered to be one of the first folk rock albums. In Europe it was sold under the title Subterranean Homesick Blues .

On the first page of the long-playing record, Dylan is accompanied by a band with electrically amplified instruments. The second side was recorded acoustically and contains the songs Mr. Tambourine Man and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue , which also became known through the versions of The Byrds and Them, respectively .

Style and concept

Bringing It All Back Home , especially the first side of the LP, stands in clear contrast to Dylan's previous albums and is the prelude to his switch from traditional folk to rock, which then finally takes place on his following albums.

On the A-side, electrically amplified instruments are used for the first time and almost exclusively, and Dylan is accompanied by a band. This change from a protest singer and from a figurehead of the counterculture to a self-confident and independent artist, who was largely viewed by his fan base as a betrayal and a scandal, is also noticeable in terms of content. Even on the second side of the LP, which Dylan plays mostly solo in the old manner, accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and harmonica, the lyrics are poetically complex and surreal, which will become Dylan's trademark with this album at the latest.

Even the title of the album is ambiguous: "Bringing it all back home" can mean a return to the roots (Dylan played in a rock band at college) or "to make it very clear". More recent research also suggests that Dylan literally wanted to bring the blues, which had been seized by British bands (especially the Rolling Stones ) back to America in the first half of the 1960s .

success

Bringing It All Back Home reached # 1 on the UK Albums Chart and # 6 on the Billboard 200 in the US. The single Subterranean Homesick Blues reached No. 9 in the UK Top 40 and No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 , Maggie's Farm was No. 22 in the UK Singles Chart. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland neither album nor singles could place in the charts .

The music magazine Rolling Stone voted in its list of the 500 best albums of all time published in 2003 Bringing It All Back Home at number 31, Subterranean Homesick Blues at number 332 of the 500 best songs of all time (2004).

Despite the commercial success and the sold out world tour, the album and especially Dylan's "electrification" caused divided reactions from his audience. At the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 he was partially booed by the audience when he played his new material with the Butterfield Blues Band for the first time. This split reaction, marked by boos and demonstrative disruptive applause, continued on his tour, which began in August 1965. Dylan played the first half solo with acoustic guitar and harmonica, the second half with electric guitar and accompanied by the band The Hawks , from which The Band later emerged. This second part regularly caused violent audience reactions, for example Dylan had to be insulted as "Judas" at his concert in Manchester.

Dylan released the album Highway 61 Revisited in August 1965 and the album Blonde on Blonde in May of the following year . He recorded three of the most influential albums in rock history within a very short time, starting with Bringing It All Back Home .

Cover picture

The record cover shows a photograph taken by Daniel Kramer. In the photo you can see Dylan sitting on a couch, a magazine and a Persian cat on his lap, records lying on the couch next to him. In the background a lady in a red dress lolls lasciviously; it is Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman , in whose house the picture was taken. The records alongside Dylan include Eric Von Schmidt - The Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt, Lotte Lenya - Sings Berlin Theater Songs by Kurt Weill, Robert Johnson - King of the Delta Blues Singers and The Impressions - Keep on Pushing . In addition, the album Another Side of Bob Dylan can be clearly seen a bit apart, albeit hidden behind the woman in red. You can also see an issue of Time Magazine from January 1, 1965 with Lyndon B. Johnson on the cover and a yellow Fallout Shelter sign. Furthermore, photography uses an effect that places a bright ring of light around the image in the middle, outside of which the image is blurred, which can give the impression that one is viewing the scene as an outsider. Heinrich Detering describes the picture as a "luxurious, decadent inner world of intimate privacy [...], filled with fragments of a work's history and threatened by apocalyptic annihilation".

It is also noteworthy that this is the first Dylan album where the track list is not on the record cover. The cufflinks Dylan wears in the photo are said to be the ones that Joan Baez referred to in her song "Diamonds & Rust" (1975) ("ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks").

The back of the record cover and the booklet of the CD show more pictures of Dylan, among others with Joan Baez and Allen Ginsberg . There is also a prose text by Dylan, which is also a novelty. The rapid, associative writing style of this text can be found later in the book Tarantula, which was mostly written around this time.

Aftermath in popular culture

The cover design of Christiane Rösinger's album Songs of L. and Hate (2010) is based on that of Bringing It All Back Home ; the album title, however, is a reminiscence of Leonard Cohen's album Songs of Love and Hate .

Track list

Original track distribution on the LP

1. page
   1. Subterranean Homesick Blues - 2:21
   2. She Belongs to Me - 2:47
   3. Maggie's Farm - 3:54
   4. Love Minus Zero / No Limit - 2:51
   5. Outlaw Blues - 3:05
   6. On the Road Again - 2:35
   7. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream - 6:30 am
2. page
   1. Mr. Tambourine Man - 5:30
   2. Gates of Eden - 5:40
   3. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) - 7:29
   4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - 4:12

literature

• Heinrich Detering: Bob Dylan. Chapter Outlaw Blues. ISBN 978-3-15-018662-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bob Dylan: Lyrics 1962-2001. German by Gisbert Haefs
2. ↑ Klaus Staib: "Rock Music and the 1968 Movement - A Historical-Musicological Analysis"
3. ↑ Levy, Joe (Ed.): Rolling Stone. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (Original Edition: Rolling Stone. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time . Wenner Media 2005). Translation: Karin Hofmann. Wiesbaden: White Star Verlag, 2011, p. 51
4. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ^ Heinrich Detering: Bob Dylan. P. 70