Category Archives: dylan weekends

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Song of the Day #594: ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ – Bob Dylan

In late August of 1965, five months after the release of Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan unleashed Highway 61 Revisited upon the world. Let me repeat that… five months after Bringing It All Back Home. Two of the finest albums not just in this man’s discography but in all of recorded musical history were released within a half year of each other.

That’s like if Steven Spielberg has released Jaws in July and Raiders of the Lost Ark in December. It almost doesn’t seem fair (and it gets even crazier, as I’ll point out next week).

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Song of the Day #588: ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ – Bob Dylan

Bringing It All Back Home is, of course, another of those six albums I consider Bob Dylan’s absolute finest. Not only did it signal a groundbreaking, eye-opening new direction for Dylan, folk music, rock music, music in general… it’s also chock full of some of the most amazing songs ever committed to tape.

Yesterday’s track, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ kicks everything off in classic style but look at some of what follows: ‘She Belongs To Me,’ ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ ‘Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ to name just a few. I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again… Bob Dylan could have ended his career five years after it started and he’d still go down as one of the greatest musical artists in history.

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Song of the Day #587: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – Bob Dylan

Volumes have been written about the shock waves created when Bob Dylan “went electric.” My favorite depiction of the occasion comes in Todd Hayne’s extraordinary Dylan biopic I’m Not There, in which Dylan and his band take the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, open their guitar cases, pull out machine guns and begin firing on the crowd. Then a quick cut to them tearing into ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ with about the same effect on the audience.

As an aside, if you’re any sort of Dylan fan (or movie fan) you should make a point to watch I’m Not There. It’s an “art film,” no doubt — it does, after all, include portrayals of Dylan by both a young black boy and Cate Blanchett, among others — but it comes closer to capturing the spirit and wonder of Bob Dylan than anything else I’ve ever seen.

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Song of the Day #577: ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s third album of original material, Another Side of Bob Dylan, was very appropriately titled (even though Dylan himself later said he disliked the title for being so obvious). After making his name as a singer and writer of political protest songs, Dylan’s new record was a far more intimate affair.

Dylan caused outrage when he later “went electric” (and we’ll get to that on future weekends) but he received a whole lot of grief before that just for trading issue songs for introspective songs. Folkies bashed him for navel-gazing when he should have been saving the world. It’s fascinating exactly how rigid the confines of genres were back then, or at least the genre into which Dylan originally exploded.

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Song of the Day #576: ‘I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)’ – Bob Dylan

Yesterday’s Dar Williams post is a nice segue into another Bob Dylan weekend, because Dylan is certainly another example — perhaps the best example — of an artist whose lyrics are just as effective on paper as in song. Some people would argue that his voice actually detracts from the power of his words, though I strongly disagree.

I’m pretty certain Dylan writes the lyrics of his songs before the music. He also goes off text quite a bit when performing, as you’ll see over the course of these weekends. All of the lyrics I post here are from Dylan’s own Web site — they are the official lyrics of his songs. And yet if you follow along as he sings them, you’ll find he mixes and matched verses, changes phrasing, adds and drops words on the fly.

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