Waiting For Judas: Bob Dylan’s 'Bringing It All Back Home' at 60

Scrolling through a Google image search of its cover, Steven told me that Bringing It All Back Home is the greatest album of all time. In the same computer lab, classmates surfed through Funbrain and Cool Math Games, playing copious rounds of Bloons TD 5 and Papa’s Pizzeria, but he snuck past the firewall, downloaded an MP3 of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and threw a pair of headphones over my ears. “I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade into my own parade,” a familiar voice sang into me, but I could hear Steven’s tattered tennis shoes anxiously tapping the carpet. “Cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.”

I liked “Mr. Tambourine” immediately, because its language felt magical to me. On my 16th birthday, I posted a car selfie on Instagram with this caption: “Let me forget about today until tomorrow.” I didn’t know what that phrase meant but, for so long, I had been the fringe kid spiking their hair up like a troll doll and wearing a plastic fang necklace swiped from a Hard Rock Cafe gift shop; listening to Bringing It All Back Home for the first time, I felt like I was finally in on the joke. It was as if the music said, “The sky, too, is folding under you” but meant to say, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I do not listen to Bringing It All Back Home as often as I once did, if at all. And I’ve seen Steven twice in the last eight years. I spend more time now with New Morning and Vol. 5 of The Bootleg Series and the two Traveling Wilburys LPs. But I do return to those 11 songs, recorded across three days in January 1965, when I want to think of Steven and remember him in his living room, after school, strumming “Mr. Tambourine Man” on an acoustic guitar with one foot up on the sofa and a harmonica rack around his neck. After seeing A Complete Unknown in theaters on Christmas weekend last December, I thought to text him about “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which he once passionately, if not obtusely called “the first rap song ever” in one of his long-winded arguments about Bob Dylan’s rock and roll omnipotence. I settled for liking one of his random Instagram stories featuring a song from Desire instead.

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Bringing It All Back Home was a then-controversial, career-altering release for Dylan. It was his first pivot towards the electric arena, albeit just halfway. His fifth record with Columbia featured a full rock and roll band—Steve Boone, Al Gorgoni, Bobby Gregg, John P. Hammond, Bill Lee, John Sebastian, Paul Griffin, Bruce Langhorne, Joseph Macho Jr., Frank Owens and Kenny Rankin—and had Tom Wilson behind the boards. Gone were the protest overtures of Dylan’s earliest bastion; his songwriting leaned, instead, into surreal, gonzo and romantic imagery and poetry. It became obvious, quickly, that Bringing It All Back Home was never gonna be your mother’s folk record.

While crashing at Albert Grossman’s spot in Woodstock during the summer of 1964, Dylan went through a month-long period of drinking red wine, chain-smoking and slumping over his typewriter. He’d already written “Mr. Tambourine Man” (at the same time he wrote “Chimes of Freedom”) by then but kept it off Another Side of Bob Dylan, despite performing it at Newport Folk Festival that summer. The word is that he’d written “Garden of Eden” around that time, too, and it was included in the first drafts of the Another Side manuscripts but left behind. At Grossman’s, he penned “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” the former ending up shelved until an eventual Europe-only single release in 1967 (after Manfred Mann had a #2 hit with it two years earlier). “It’s Alright, Ma” proved to be the first bonafide example of Dylan’s newfound embrace of stream-of-consciousness writing, thanks to his images of “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark” and “social clubs in drag disguise.”

After a copy of 1 wound up in my Christmas day stocking in 2002, the Beatles were my band. Even after going through my corniest phases of taste, which included stumping as a zealot for the likes of Drake, Nirvana and Def Leppard, the Fab Four lingered in higher regard than them all, especially Paul McCartney. There came a point where, as a teenager, I had at least 10 Beatles shirts in my wardrobe. Again, it wasn’t unique to feel that way in the mid-2000s, and I’m sure there were dozens of kids like me raiding the Trumbull County Hot Topic’s graphic tee wall.

But Steven and I used to butt heads over them and Bob Dylan for a long time. He oft-pointed to Dylan’s obvious influence on John Lennon on a Rubber Soul song like “Norwegian Wood,” or brought up the folkstar introducing the British Invasion heartthrobs to weed in August 1964, as evidence of cultural superiority. Back then, it got under my skin, especially when Steven salted the rim of his barbs with “George was better than Paul.” He was right, of course, but retrospect has paid its dividends to my side of the conversation since; you can look at side one of Bringing It All Back Home and see the Beatles’ influence all over it, namely in Dylan’s embrace of a louder, heavier rock sound.

Dylan and Wilson worked hard to establish a palette that bridged the gap between the producer’s overdubbed electric backings that decorated Simon & Garfunkel’s catalog and the buzzing, gruff blues Dylan heard on John P. Hammond’s So Many Roads, which featured the Hawks’ Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. Before landing on the volume and style that would color Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan and Wilson tried to do a Fats Domino-style re-working of “House of the Rising Sun,” but quickly scrapped it. Ditching the experimentation, the two went into Columbia’s Studio A on January 13th, 1965 and recorded 10 songs (and nearly as many unfinished drafts) performed by Dylan solo on a piano and acoustic guitar—namely, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” the first take of which would wind up in the crack-up intro on the completed edition of Bringing It All Back Home, and “Farewell Angelina” and a stripped-down version of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

That January 13th session proved fruitful, as Dylan tracked the earliest ideas for “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “She Belongs to Me,” “On the Road Again” and “Outlaw Blues,” all of which would wind up on the album, and cutting room floor excerpts of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” “You Don’t Have to Do That” and “California.” Gorgoni, Rankin, Langhorne, Griffin, Macho, Lee and Gregg joined the next day’s session. They did first takes exclusively without any rehearsal and finished nearly half of the album in just three-and-a-half hours. Supposedly, after finishing his dinner, Dylan returned to Studio A with Hammond, Sebastian, Langhorne and others, recorded six tracks and abandoned them all.

January 15th was the final day of recording for Bringing It All Back Home. The core group of session players returned, though Griffin was replaced by Owens, and they nailed “Maggie’s Farm” in one take and polished off master takes of “On the Road Again,” “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Gates of Eden,” “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” All 11 cuts that wound up on the final version were, at some point, tracked with electric backing, but Dylan had always planned for half of Bringing It All Back Home to include electric band arrangements. That wound up being side one, while side two was mostly Dylan solo but with the occasional countermelody, electric guitar embellishment from Langhorne, which you can best hear wince and weep in the asides of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

The separation of Bringing It All Back Home’s two sides, though not as severe a gap in volume as history suggests, does make the lore of Dylan’s “going electric” fiasco at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 all the more puzzling. The night before, he performed three acoustic songs, including “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” at a Newport workshop. One of the festival roadies, Jonathan Taplin, claims that Dylan wanted to challenge the organizers and attendees by playing a rock set the next day. At the behest of Dylan’s impulses, he, Barry Goldberg, members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the great Al Kooper gathered at Newport Folk co-founder George Wein’s rented mansion and rehearsed what would become a three-song set of “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Phantom Engineer” (later retitled “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”).

By the time Dylan and his band took the stage in Rhode Island on July 25th, Bringing It All Back Home was already four months old and had yielded a Top 40 hit from the record’s electric side one (“Subterranean Homesick Blues” peaked at #39). Just two weeks before, the #1 spot on the Hot 100 was taken over by one of the heaviest hit songs up until that point, the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Though the British Invasion-influenced tilt towards bigger and rowdier music had not fully acquiesced in American popular culture, the hunky dory placidity of guitar-and-a-microphone music began to wane once the war in Vietnam insurmountably swelled and men were dying in droves; telling the people buying your records everything they’re doing wrong wasn’t going to make anyone money forever.

Bringing It All Back Home, instead, became a crucifixion of the protest singer—an angry, radical, ego-driven portrayal of anti-celebrity; a grim, riffing hex on the consumerism and commercialism that propelled Bob Dylan’s once-empathetic, say-it-like-you-see-it storytelling into hypocrisy and money-making. And, as he eyed what new epoch encroached upon him, Dylan left his greatest collaborator, Joan Baez, behind. The existential violence of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is, perhaps, the greatest statement he ever made—one that pisses on the longevity of optimism and, as author Paul Williams once put it, exposed a “false picture of reality.” So, maybe it wasn’t the entropy of Dylan’s evolving sound that turned Newport Folk Festival inside out 60 years ago; maybe it was, instead, Dylan cocking the pistol in the direction of those who alienated and martyred him, many of whom were in Rhode Island that night.

Because even the balm of Dylan’s encore set, which included acoustic performances of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” after he promptly asked the audience for an E harmonica and watched the stage get pelted with harmonicas in various keys, couldn’t stop his integrity from quickly going into question—as folk movement heroes Irwin Silber and Ewan MacColl’s chided their so-called “spokesman of a generation” for his abandonment of political songwriting in favor of blues-fueled, fully-amplified rock and roll barbarity.

Just look at Bringing It All Back Home’s cover, shot by Daniel Kramer: Grossman’s wife Sally lounges behind a cat-clutching Dylan, with a copy of Another Side tucked beside her. Scattered elsewhere around the room are LPs by Robert Johnson, the Impressions, Ravi Shankar, Eric Von Schmidt and Lotte Lenya. Out of frame, the late Françoise Hardy’s J’suis D’accord sits at Dylan’s feet. There’s a copy of Time with Lyndon B. Johnson on it; a harmonica and a fallout shelter sign are paired together. Look at those artifacts propped up like innocent contrasts. Bob Dylan was never laughing with us. He was Judas Iscariot in a leather jacket; his workaholic insurgence became a blemish on the neat-and-tidy, politely dissenting stratum of singer-songwriter purpose just by picking up a sunburst Stratocaster.

And you can’t simply pull the plug on a revolution. Where Dylan’s sixth and seventh records, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, would go on to form a heavier template for bands like Buffalo Springfield and the Grateful Dead in the ensuing, subversive era of American rock music, Bringing It All Back Home (a Top 10-charting album, mind you) immediately burrowed itself into the framework of the Who’s “My Generation,” the ensuing debut album from the Byrds and virtually all of the Beatles’ Help! and most of Rubber Soul. Dylan woke up millions and put decades of antiquated reactionists plum out of work in just seven months.

Dylan’s greatest folk-rock marriage came warped by pinched, sharp-toothed riffs and sour doggerel on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm,” while songs like “Love Minus/Zero Limit” and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” summoned the darlings of Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake and Herman Melville before promptly killing them in non-linear, bizarre and acerbic blazes. The enchanting “She Belongs to Me” is a Bohemian reverie of enrichment and spoils, while the beachy paradise of “Gates of Eden” is a wretched land of savage soldiers, hound dogs, deaf and shoeless hunters, a “motorcycle black Madonna and two-wheeled gypsy queen,” princes and princesses, gray-flannel dwarves and bread crumb sins.

Call Bringing It All Back Home whatever you want—call it Merseybeat washed in leftist folk revivalism; call it a slaughter of tradition; call it anti-American sardonicism—but it is maybe the greatest “fuck you” in the rock and roll pantheon and the most significant career pivot in the history of art altogether. But, more than anything, it’s abandonment by disobedience and transformation. The title suggests something domestic lies within; the songs kick the door clean off its hinges and pull down the ceiling. I like what filmmaker John Hughes said about the album 39 years ago: “Thursday I was one person, and Friday I was another.” If Highway 61 Revisited was Bob Dylan rising up to meet the moment, then Bringing It All Back Home was the moment in question. Like he sings near the record’s end: “Leave your stepping stones behind, there’s something that calls for you.”

In the last decade, I have called no less than nine Bob Dylan albums the “greatest of all time,” but I’ve never not considered Bringing It All Back Home to be one of them. Because I believed Steven then, after hearing “Mr. Tambourine Man” during that study hall period, even though he’d change his own answer to Desire by graduation. That weekend, Mom let me borrow her Pontiac and I hotfooted to the FYE at a nearby mall, picked up a CD copy of Bringing It All Back Home, brought it home and found God and a fool’s gold mouthpiece in the disc. Sometimes, things are objectively great. Sometimes, things are great because someone told you so. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, something is great because both parts are true. It was 2014 and Steven still didn’t have a cell phone, but I rang his folks’ landline and told him the news. He chuckled, in the beautiful way a person you love always does.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Waiting For Judas: Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home at 60

In March 1965, Dylan released his then-controversial, career-altering fifth album with Columbia, welcoming an electric rock and roll band into his workaholic world and crafting one of the most significant career pivots in the history of art altogether.