Excerpt – Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics
Introduction
I can confidently state that Bringing It All Back Home was without doubt one of the most important albums in the entire history of rock music. I will explain why.
Not only was it ground-breaking in the way it fused elements of blues, folk, rock and poetry, but it was also incredibly influential on the sound and writing of the major acts of the time. Without Bob Dylan and the album Bringing It All Back Home there would not have been the later albums of hugely important bands such as the Beatles, Stones or Beach Boys, or, at least, they would not have been as experimental and adventurous. Neither would we have had the incredible bodies of work of major singer-songwriters like Neil Young, Roy Harper or Bruce Springsteen. The sixties underground scene would not have happened with its explosion of styles from psychedelic and heavy metal to prog rock, country and blues, its anti-war and civil rights protest and complex poetic songs. This album changed the face of rock music.
The album came out at a crucial point in time. This was 1965; the midpoint of the sixties, a turning point, and Bob Dylan was the fulcrum on which rock music turned. Before Bringing It All Back Home we had rock, r&b and blues-based beat music (as with the Beatles and Stones) and lyrically more sophisticated folk music. After Bringing It All Back Home we had a new world of possibilities.
Bringing It All Back Home opened up a theatre of opportunity by melding together the two distinctly different genres and in the process creating an entirely unique style of music, a different way of song writing, a different structure to popular music. New sounds, new ideas, new attitude; nothing would ever be the same.