Subterranean Homesick Blues

Instructions for life:
Nothing but fine print designed
To keep you guessing.

This opening song from the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home" is one of the great rock songs. It's a proto rap from a time when people didn't talk their way through songs like Dylan does. It's also a grim road map for the middle-class American man as he struggles to find his road to prosperity, house, wife, kids, dog, car and on and on until he dies. Here are the lyrics. There's no point in interpreting what's already clear.

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone’s tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D.A.
Look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tiptoes
Don’t try “No-Doz”
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows

Get sick, get well
Hang around a ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin’ to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the army, if you fail
Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters

Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles

She Belongs to Me

I love an artist.
I'm also her servant. I'm
Not sure she loves me.

"She Belongs to Me" is one way of looking at it. This song, from the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home," is about a woman who belongs to no one, but she's the singer's girlfriend or lover or something, all the same. Dylan sings her praises while making it clear that it's he who belongs to her. This is another one of those songs that Dylan scholars have thought could apply to a number of women from Nico to Suze Rotolo to Joan Baez. I would just take it as a song about someone or anyone.

1. She's an artist, she has all she needs, she has no sense of nostalgia. She is a master at day for night.
2. You'll be a proud fellow when you meet her, but once she tosses you out for someone else, you'll be mad with jealousy and unable to escape her.
3. She wears an Egyptian ring. It sparkles. She collects hypnotists, but now you're just an antique.
4. Demands: bow to her on Sunday and salute her on her birthday. By her a trumpet on halloween and a drum on Christmas.

Outlaw Blues

Bob needs some good luck.
He feels like Jesse James, but
Looks like Robert Ford.

This is a hard-rocking song from the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home." Considering the big hits on this album, this song and "On the Road Again" tend to be forgotten. It's hard to measure up to songs like "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "She Belongs to Me" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." Still, it deserves a little more attention. This song has some terrific, raucous, noisy playing, and it produced that great line, "Especially when it's nine below zero and three o'clock in the afternoon." That's when it is, as Dylan says, "hard to stumble and land in some funny lagoon." I wasn't quite sure what to do about that lyric, as well as the other verses about wishing he were on some Australian mountain range just for the change, and wearing his dark sunglasses and lucky black tooth, not to mention the brown-skinned woman who he's keeping anonymously in Jackson. I focused on the second verse:

Ain’t gonna hang no picture
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Ain’t gonna hang no picture
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Well, I might look like Robert Ford
But I feel just like a Jesse James

The picture frame, I would guess, refers to the picture that James decided to dust as it hung over his mantle in the living room of his home. It was while he was doing this that Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head, killing him. Ford already was in cahoots with the governor of Minnesota to betray his fellow outlaw, so was immediately pardoned after he and his brother Charley were sentenced to death by hanging for first-degree murder.

On the Road Again

Your crazy family
Is unbearable, and you,
How do you stand it?

I've always appreciated this weird little song from "Bringing It All Back Home", which came out in 1965. Dylan describes the miserable state of affairs in a woman's house, most of which are brought on by her eccentric and intolerable family. Here's a brief rundown:

1. Bob wakes up, sees frogs in his socks. Mom's hiding in the refrigerator. Dad's wearing a Napoleon Bonaparte mask.
2. He pets her monkey and gets clawed. He spots someone in the fireplace. She says it's Santa Claus. A milkman appears in a derby hat.
3. He's hungry, asks for food, gets brown rice, seaweed and a dirty hotdog.
4. Granddad's cane is a sword. Grandma's praying to pictures on a board. Bob's sweetheart's uncle picks Bob's pockets.
5. Fistfights in the kitchen, a mailman who gets too involved in the refereeing. Even the butler has a stake in the outcome.

Here is how each verse ends:

1. Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?
2. Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you have to ask me that?
3. Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, I gotta think you’re really weird
4. Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, I can’t believe that you’re for real
5. Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you don’t move?

Mr. Tambourine Man

Tambourine man's song
Leads sleepy songwriter toward
New inspiration.

Attempts to analyze "Mr. Tambourine Man" are grating exercises in making something beautiful and light into something ponderous and heavy. The song was released in 1965 as the first track on side 2 of the album "Bringing It All Back Home." It is a crystal, the brightest star in the sky; it sparkles from every angle. I think it's perfect. I don't listen to it all the time because it's one of those songs that you hear once and it's committed to memory. I didn't enjoy writing the haiku because I thought that there was nothing I could say. Since that wasn't an option for a haiku project about Dylan, I took the straight course.

Here's one interpreter, who seems to have written a high school book report on the song:

"The time seems to be early morning following a night when the narrator has not slept. Still unable to sleep, though amazed by his weariness, he is available and open to Mr. Tambourine Man's song, and says he will follow him. In the course of four verses studded with internal rhymes, he expounds on this situation, his meaning often heavily embroidered with imagery, though the desire to be freed by the tambourine man's song remains clear."

Other say it's about drugs. OK, sure. As you wish.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

Here's the oddly smug-sounding vocals of the Byrds as they perform it on TV. Check out the byrd houses.

It would be wrong to not include William Shatner's version:

Maggie's Farm

Bob hates his farm job.
He's tired of pleasing his fans.
He has other chores.

There are many interpretations of the lyrics of "Maggie's Farm," which Bob Dylan released in 1965 on the album "Bringing It All Back Home." The one that seems to carry the most weight is that it is Dylan's protest against the protest song business. Dylan spent his first few years achieving his lasting reputation as a folk and protest singer, but found it a bigger burden than he wanted to bear. Some say that "Maggie's Farm" is a pun on "McGee's Farm," a place where he performed a memorable version of his protest song, "Only a Pawn in Their Game." I would also note that "farm" meant "prison" to a lot of old-time blues singers and prisoners in southern jails. Seen through that lens, we have:

1. Not going to work on Maggie's farm anymore. Got lots of ideas struggling to get out, but I'm stuck on this menial floor-scrubbing duty.
2. Maggie's brother is no good either. He pays tiny wages, sarcastically asks if you're enjoying yourself, and then fines you for minor offenses.
3. Speaking of Maggie, her father is a pain. He sticks his cigar in your face for fun. His window is bricked up and the National Guard stands around his door (paranoid).
4. Maggie's mother thinks she's so philosophical and with it, but she's really just operating her husband and lying about her age.
5. I'm trying to be the person I want to be, but everybody else wants me to be someone else. "They sing while you slave and I just get bored."

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Girlfriend with an edge:
She's above petty concerns
And she's very smart.

"Love Minus Zero/No Limit" is a lovely song done to death by interpretation and sugared cover versions. Bob Dylan's original, released on the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home," has just enough vinegar to save it from being just a pretty song. Still, I don't know anyone who wants to listen to a jot more about how someone else's girlfriend is the bomb. Having said that, I don't mind hearing David Byrne do it in the Talking Heads song, "Girlfriend Is Better," but that's another project for another day.

The qualities of Bob Dylan's girlfriend:
- Speaks like silence, without ideals and violence.
- She's faithful, but doesn't have to make a big thing of it.
- Unlke people with roses and false promises, she laughs like flowers and doesn't respond to Valentines.
- She knows failure is the biggest success -- AND YET -- the biggest failure.
- She speaks softly whereas other people (small people in small places) babble about what they read and come to their own conclusions (I highly doubt that this is a reference to Nebuchadnezzar and the writing on the wall)
- Departure from the song for the sake of adding some imagery to trip up college students and their professors: dangling cloak and dagger, madames with candles, ceremonies of the horsemen and grudge-holding pawns, matchstick statues crumbling together.
- Back to the point: His girlfriend is too smart to argue or judge.
- Again a departure: trembling bridge at midnight, rambling country doctor, bankers' nieces looking for Mr. Right as well as expecting unique and valuable gifts. Howling wind, rainy night, cold... and there she is again, at the window like a raven with a broken wing. (Some say it's about how she's vulnerable despite how cool she is. Sure. That's fine.)

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Everything you hear
Is a lie, including this.
You are a target.

"It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" is the song that precedes "It's All Over Now Baby Blue," the closer on the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home." The song is seven and a half minutes of electrifying bile and scorn heaped upon the entire world. I used to think that as I grew older, I would begin to find the aggression and the hatred of "the way things are" growing to sound immature. I was wrong. The song has become sharper over the years, and I think how precocious a 24-year-old person would have to be to choose where to direct rage. Dylan radiates in all directions on this song, but he hits each target right at the center. The message is that life is a lie, that we're aiming for the wrong ends, we've been conned, and in fact we've conned ourselves and been a party to our own futility. But, as he says at the end of every verse, it's all right.

Despair:
1. "There is no sense in trying."

Common destiny:
2. "He not busy being born is busy dying."

Your emotions are nothing:
3. "Watch waterfalls of pity roar, You feel to moan, but unlike before, You discover that you'd just be one more person crying."

Hatred is hatred, no matter what:
4. Kill what's crawling, or "don't hate nothing at all except hatred."

Reality:
5. "It's easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred."

Equality:
6. "But even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."

Lies and the false sense that your travails will make the headlines:
7. "Advertising signs they con you into thinking you're the one that can win what's never been won, Meantime life outside goes on all around you."

Isolation:
8. "Alone you stand with nobody near when a trembling distant voice unclear startles your sleeping ears to hear that somebody thinks they really found you."

Who are you?
9. "(to) not forget that it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to."

Mediocrity, cynicism, inability to live:
10. "For them that must obey authority that they do not respect in any degree, Who despise their jobs, their destinies, speak jealously of them that are free, cultivate their flowers to be nothing more than something they invest in."

Misery loves company:
11. "While one who sings with his tongue on fire, gargles in the rat race choir, bent out of shape from society's pliers, cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the whole that he's in."

Lies and the profit motive:
12. "Money doesn't talk it swears obscenity, who really cares, propaganda, all is phony."

You're not exceptional:
13. "It blows their minds most bitterly for them that think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally, life sometimes must get lonely."

Only a hint of self pity appears at the end, though it's an ironic ending, given all the honest thoughts he's just shared: "And if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine."

It's All Over Now Baby Blue

Guy leaves a lover
Who can't face reality.
He takes his carpet.

Speculate about the identity of "Baby Blue" all you want. Others have. Joan Baez? Dylan's fans? Bob Dylan himself? Paul Clayton? Who cares? This song, which ends the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home," offers its own advice about meaning in the first two lines:

"You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast."

I like to look at the words of this song in total rather than piece by piece. What do these people mean?
- The gun-toting orphan crying like a fire in the sun. (A powerful image since a fire in the sun remains dangerous, hot and bright, though nearly invisible)
- The saints who are marching in (Saints. Angels. Who knows.)
- Gamblers on the highway (implication: stay away from them. Be sensible)
- Empty-handed street painter drawing patterns on your sheets
- Seasick sailors rowing home (They've had enough)
- Reindeer armies going home (Reindeer? Don't know.)

More significant are the lover who took his blankets and the carpet as he left you, and the vagabond at your door who's looking for you while dressed in your clothes. This speaks more to me about a kind of life that the subject of the song must abandon for some reason, but has been unwilling to leave. Sooner or later, the signs become more than signs -- we all must be forced from our old lives into something new, and usually at a point where we would rather stay still. Whoever "Baby Blue" is, the clock's run out and it's time to move ahead in life, even with no help or sign that you're going the right way. The vagabond says to me that there's always someone who will take what you've been forced to lose, and it's shameful to see things that don't belong to you anymore in the hands of others. As for the line, "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you," it's grim, but it should appear on every coffee mug and greeting card.

Gates of Eden

Nothing is good here.
The only hope lies beyond,
Where it's unlikely.

"Gates of Eden" is the second song on side two of the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home." It's one of a series of surreal Fleurs du Mal-style songs, describing inner landscapes wracked by fever and populated by obscene or absurd characters, and illuminated by Dylan's cantankerous misanthropy. See below:

Dramatis personae:
Curfew gull
Four-legged forest clouds
Cowboy angel
Lamppost
Wailing babies
Savage soldier
Shoeless deaf hunter
Hound dogs
Aladdin
Utopian hermit monks
Golden calf
Kings
Bob
Lonesome sparrow
Motorcycle Black Madonna
Two-Wheeled Gypsy Queen
Silver-studded phantom
Gray flannel dwarf
Birds of prey
Paupers
Princess 
Prince
Friends and other strangers
Free men
Bob's lover

Eden:
1. Truth twisting and the cowboy angel ride happen except when beneath the trees of...
2. No sound from the gates of...
3. Ships sail toward the...
4. Laughter from the gates of... (despite no sound coming from the...)
5. No kings inside the gates of...
6. No sins inside the gates of...
7. What's real doesn't matter inside the gates of...
8. There are no trials inside the gates of...
9. There are no truths outside the gates of... (implying that everything inside the gates is true)

As for the haiku:
There are many bad things happening outside the gates of Eden.
- Twisting truth, a candle waxed in black and lit into the sun, the wailing babies in holes, the crash of "all in all," the complaining soldier, the barking dogs, Aladdin and the monks on the golden calf (idolators), promises of paradise (which must be false), people condemned to suffer succeeding kings, the screaming dwarf, wicked birds of prey who snap up the dwarf's tiny sins, rotting kingdoms, jealous poor people, the royalty taken up with the discussion of what's real (they are wasting their time), Bob's inability to ever find a home (he's always in a hot foreign place in someone else's room), and finally Bob's lover, who doesn't bother to analyze her dreams. This is all what's outside the gates of Eden. Inside sounds like it should be a paradise, but if you check it out, it doesn't sound like Bob is giving you a very hard sell.

Bob Dylan's 115th Dream

Bob’s friends in New York:

Jailed for harpoon possession.

That’s the least of it.

"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which appeared as the last song on side one of "Bringing It All Back Home" in 1965, is a long, ridiculous saga that can scarcely be stuffed into 17 sounds. I wrote this one about 10 times before producing the present defensive maneuver that you see here. Here's the longer story, which involves Bob discovering the New World with a gang of lusty sailors aboard the Mayflower. They're promptly jailed, though Bob breaks out and encounters a variety of freaks and geeks all over lower Manhattan while trying to spring his crew. As he passes Christopher Columbus on his three ships on the way out of town, he wishes them a cynical "good luck."

1. Bob and Captain Arab sail the Mayflower and take a break from hunting Moby Dick after espying land.

2. They name the place America and buy it from the natives, paying beads as the Dutch did for New Amsterdam/Manhattan. A cop arrests them for carrying harpoons.

3. Bob gets directions to a Bowery-area protest from a cow. He joins in, then realizes he's hungry.

4. He orders crepes suzette from a bewigged etiquette book writer doubling as a chef. Bad moonlight option, no doubt, as the kitchen explodes from boiling fat.

5. Bob goes to the bank to borrow money to make bail for his crewmates. He drops his pants when asked for collateral. He ends up in an alley, meets a French girl, goes to her place, gets beaten up by her boyfriend.

6. He asks a guy for help. Guy says, get off my property. Dylan compares himself to Jesus. The guy knows better than to buy that.

7. After a cameo encounter by one of the Beatles, he visits a funeral parlor. The funeral director can't help his crewmates unless they're dead.

8. He decides to abandon his quest and finds a parking ticket on the mast of the ship. The coast guard interrogates him, but lets him go.

9. He hears that Arab is stuck on a whale married to the jail's deputy sheriff. Christopher Columbus and his crew shows up. Bob exits.

Bob Dylan's 115th Dream

Mad Captain Arab
Chases Bob through the Bowery
Like he's Moby Dick.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Edited, version 2)

Bob leaves a lover
Who can't face reality.
He takes his carpet.

She Belongs to Me

This chick is the best
So you'll do nice things for her,
But she doesn't care

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Bob leaves a lover
Who can't face reality.
So it goes, baby.