50 years ago, Bob Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home. Side two of the album featured the acoustic sound that most of the singer/songwriter’s fans may have expected — Dylan’s previous release, Another Side of Bob Dylan, found the artist abandoning the topical subjects that marked his earlier releases in favor of increasingly hypnotic personal explorations, and the songs on side two of Bringing It‘ could have been a continuation of the songs from Another Side‘. However, the album’s first side and its opening song heralded the revolutionary change of direction that Dylan detonated like a bomb when he plugged-in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival four months after this 1965 release. Here’s the breakdown from the Ultimate Classic Rock site…
But anyone who had heard Bringing It All Back Home, which was released in March 1965, knew this was coming. From the opening “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to the side-one closer “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” the first half of Dylan’s fifth LP is mostly contempt, rage and rock ‘n’ roll fury. There’s absolutely nothing Newport Folk Festival about it.
Turn it over, and things are closer to more familiar territory for the fans who thought they had been betrayed by Dylan. “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” bookended the album’s four-song second side with sprawling acoustic numbers filled with the clever wordplay and engaging melodies that the young singer-songwriter was expanding with each LP. But this time they were bigger and grander, and had way more in view than Dylan’s core folk audience.
Together, Bringing It All Back Home‘s 11 songs represent Dylan’s first true artistic statement (though the same can be argued for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, to a point), an album partly made for fans, partly made for Dylan himself. Electric achievements like “She Belongs to Me” and “Maggie’s Farm” cut with the other two acoustic songs sandwiched on side two (“Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”) strike a balanced and conciliatory tone that Dylan wouldn’t revisit for decades. From this stage onward, Dylan’s compromises would be his own.
But more than all of this, Bringing It All Back Home kicked off one of music’s greatest triple plays. Within the next 15 months, Dylan would release two more classic albums — Highway 61 Revisited, which followed in August, and Blonde on Blonde from mid-1966 — that pretty much sealed his legend. Few artists in rock history have matched that scale and influence in such a short period. In a way, all these years later, Dylan is still trying to live it down.
When VH1 broke down their top 100 albums of all time they placed Bringing It All Back Home at 78. In 2003, the album was ranked number 31 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Here’s VH1′s take on the groundbreaking record…
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