Yearlong Bob-A-Thon, Update 2/11/25

Bob Dylan released his epic Bringing It All Back Home on March 22, 1965. It was the last Dylan album released before I was born. This is not relevant to any other articles about Dylan ever, but within the context of my yearlong Bob-A-Thon, it is worth noting.

I have spun this album numerous times this week and make no mistake: Bringing It All Back Home is epic. Epochal, even. It’s got an electric side and an acoustic side, each filled up with as many ideas and as much energy as the other. It’s surreal and funny (“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”); it’s surreal and deadly serious (“Gates of Eden”); and it’s one blast of songwriting brilliance after another from beginning to end.

The two most famous songs on Bringing It All Back Home are side 1 opener, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and side 2 lead track, “Mr. Tambourine Man”. As much as I’d like to write about these two songs, which are foundational to my development as a music lover—hell, they’re foundational to my development as a human being—I think I’m going to hold off on commenting on them for now.

I experienced both “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” further back in my past than I even realize. I do not remember a time in my life that I was not aware of these songs, but I knew them from Dad’s copy of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits not from Bringing It All Back Home, which Dad did not own. So when I get around to the Greatest Hits, I’ll have more to say about these two songs.

The Bringing It All Back Home I’m spinning at this moment belonged to my friend and fellow cemetery tour guide Joe Lex, who gave it, along with a large chunk of his record collection, to me last September.

(Dad apparently thought he owned Bringing It All Back Home. Once, when he was extolling the virtues of “Maggie’s Farm”, he claimed he had it on an album in his collection. He did not, or at least if he did, it had disappeared from my parents’ record collection before I ever saw it. I tried to tell Dad he didn’t have the album with “Maggie’s Farm” on it, but I don’t think he believed me.)

Speaking of Dad and the albums he had and didn’t have: if your parents are alive now, ask them whatever questions pop into your mind about their lives, pre-you. You’ll be glad you did.

The problem with that piece of advice though, is that you don’t always think of the questions until it was too late. Take my dad, for example: I have no idea how Dad first got into Bob Dylan, and it’s now been 23 years since I could have found out. This is true of my mom and Willie Nelson, as well. I haven’t got a clue how she first encountered Willie and subsequently fell in love with him.

I can make some educated guesses about Dad and Dylan. I know Dad was an early adopter of FM rock stations in Philadelphia, so he was probably hearing Dylan there. He probably saw Dylan on TV as well.

But I’ll never know exactly what it was the flipped the Dylan light on for Dad. I wish I did.

While Dad probably politely appreciated Dylan’s early folk work, I have to think that it was probably the Chicago blues-flecked, rock’n’roll songs on side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home that would have fully turned Dad on to Dylan. Even though Dad didn’t own the album, listening to side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home on this snowy evening decades since he’s been gone, I feel Dad here with me.

Essentially, if somebody asked me to describe my dad as the side of a classic rock album, I’d say he was side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home, if that makes any sense at all.

There is more I could say about Bringing It All Back Home, but at least for now, that’s all I need to say.