Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home

Bob Dylan’s 1965 album marked the controversial transition from acoustic folk to electric rock. The controversy is a little hard to grasp if you weren’t there at the time, personally. Of the electric tracks, about half of which are still straight folk and would not have been out of place on any of the earlier records and were frequently performed by Dylan by himself. The most prominent example of the controversy is the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Dylan was booed by outraged fans. There are two sides to this; one is that they didn’t want Dylan to ‘go rock’. The other, which I agree with is the show didn’t actually sound very good at all, due to the equipment being set up for an acoustic set.

The album is arranged into two sides, electric and acoustic. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the album. The songs themselves are kind of a mixed bag, really. The electric side is, understandably, not as polished as it would be on Highway 61 Revisited and the acoustic tracks have a tendency to be overlong. What is really cool to listen to is how much fun he’s having with the electric band. Dylan’s humour was presented in I Shall Be Free No. 10 and Motopsycho Nitemare from the previous LP, and Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream is kind of like Motopsycho’s sequel. In my view 115^th Dream is the better of the two due to its inclusion of social commentary.

Best tracks are Subterranean Homesick Blues, Love Minus Zero/No Limit and It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), the last of which is probably the best developed hypnotic, overlong, stream-of-consciousness styled Dylan track by this point of his career. Gates of Eden would have been great but is killed by its over length.

As far as mixes go... there are too many. The original stereo mix has only been released on vinyl, there are two stereo remixes for CD, a 5.1 mix for SACD and the original mono. I probably prefer the punchier mono for the electric side and stereo for the acoustic (which is pretty narrow anyway).

Bob Dylan’s been kind of a dick lately in regards to videos and bootlegs, the latter of which never seemed to be a problem before. Who knows? No videos today though.