Excerpt – Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics – Paperback 

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   Bob wasn’t new to rock music. In High School, performing as Robert Zimmerman, his bands were rock bands. Robert Zimmerman was a rocker. He idolised Little Richard. As a teenager, he even appeared in Bobby Vee’s backing group playing piano. One of his earliest songs was an ode to Little Richard. It was only when he left home and moved to Minnesota that he traded his electric guitar in to purchase an acoustic model and came under the thrall of folk music in order to busk in the local clubs. Back in those days, his early muses were Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Hank Williams. He absorbed their influences, both musical and lyrical, to create the incarnation that, when he moved to Greenwich Village, became Bob Dylan.

   By the time he arrived in New York as a 19-year-old in the freezing winter of January 1961, he was already performing a range of folk and blues and had begun songwriting. But the love of rock music hadn’t died. His first single, ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, recorded on 14 November 1962, featured a full electric band.

   He wasn’t going to have another shot at rock music until December 1964, when, together with his adventurous record producer Tom Wilson, they had a first attempt at a folk rock fusion. They conspired to overdub a Fats Domino-style piano rock sound onto Bob’s earlier acoustic recording of the traditional folk song ‘House Of The Rising Sun’. Bob wasn’t happy about the result and the track did not see the light of day until much later (finally making an appearance on an interactive CD-ROM in 1995 – Highway 61 Interactive).

   Tom Wilson was enamoured enough with this dubbing experiment to apply it to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound Of Silence’, which sparked their career into the stratosphere. Bob, meanwhile, had turned his attention to the sound created by fellow folkie John P. Hammond (son of the great blues folklorist John H. Hammond). John had created an electric blues album featuring three members of Ronnie Hawkin’s backing band – The Hawks. The music was raw, blues-based rock with a folk base. That was the sound that Bob favoured.

Excerpt – Bringing It All Back Home – Bob Dylan Book

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Excerpt- New things do not come out of nowhere. They ferment out of various sources, slowly bubbling and fuming in nascent juices until they burst forth in naked inspiration. Thus, it was with Dylan’s new baby. He gathered the ingredients, allowed them to stew and marinade until they were ripe, then boldly, gleefully and even recklessly, thrust this new progeny into the spotlight.

Into the gumbo soup of Dylan’s electric storm, the various ingredients had been brewing for years. All that was required was the spark of genius to ignite the inferno. Like Shakespeare’s witches, he threw in the ingredients: the eye of rock ‘n’ roll, the newt of folk, the heart of Beat poetry and the glands of social comment. Hubble bubble toil and trouble, rhythms click and poems double. Out of this cauldron of fusion, something vital and highly original emerged to send rock music, and youth culture, reeling into the latter years of the sixties revolution. Dylan was the catalyst and Bringing It All Back Home was the vehicle.

Everything came together in one glorious burst of sublime energy. Dylan rose like a nascent rock god out of the drab folk costume of previous incarnations. Coupled with this new glistening image was a rampant new sound. To understand how this came about, we have to appreciate the history and forces that were at work.

Excerpt – Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics – Paperback 

Posted on by Opher

The new, polka-dotted, shade-wearing, long, curly-haired, skinny-trousered, booted pop star, with a white strat hanging around his neck, cut a mean figure. Just like James Dean or Marlon Brando, he oozed charisma – confident, articulate and uncompromising. Rock music had a new rebel, and this time, he had a cause.

   This wasn’t just a new sound; it was a new genre, a new style, a new vibe and a new culture. Bob Dylan was matchless. He put poetic lyrics to a novel kind of rock music and coupled that with style and attitude. The result was devastating. In the process, he blew both worlds apart, sent the music media into a spin and broke through into the world of serious academic consideration. The sober world of the adult mainstream media was beginning to take note. What had been considered a juvenile entertainment of no intrinsic worth was now being written about, reviewed and discussed in pillars of the establishment, such as The Times. Rock music had come of age. His poetry was analysed in universities. His views were taken seriously.

   Where Robert Johnson was fabled to have stood at the crossroads at midnight, selling his soul to the devil in exchange for becoming the best blues musician on the planet, Bob Dylan chose to stand on a motorway intersection in the stark noon sun daring all the gods and devils in the universe to take him on. He required no divine intervention.

Richard and Mimi Farina -Hard Lovin’ Loser

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A rival to Dylan who died in a motorbike crash before he got going. Mimi was Joan Baez’s sister.

Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics Paperback 

Posted on by Opher

One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism. But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries. After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.

Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics: Amazon.co.uk: Opher Goodwin: 9781789523140: Books

Bob Dylan Bringing It All Back Home: Rock Classics Paperback 

Posted on by Opher

One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism. But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries. After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.