After a shameful break, I’m back with “Project Dylan”, my sequential overview of my favorite Bob Dylan albums. So far I’ve covered Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A’ Changin, and Another Side of Bob Dylan. Now on to Bringing It All Back Home…

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In standard Dylan exegesis, Bringing It All Back Home is where Dylan breaks with the folkie/protest singer identity of his earlier work. Not only is he already turning electric here, well before he gets to “Like a Rolling Stone”, but his artistic focus turns to an inner symbolic world where his vision reaches the surreal new levels that mark him as the poet of his generation. I suppose that’s all true as far as it goes, but what I hear throughout this album is seething protest. The protest is now bigger, and more fundamental, than civil rights or the anti-war movement. It’s nothing less than a repudiation of the way things are, the entire way society is organized.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” kicks in to it with full tilt electrified blues, rock and roll by any other name, that in just over two minutes flat of rapid-fire verse paints a picture of a society that one can only hide out from in basements as it seeks to put you on the day shift. And what else is it but the whole system of expectations itself that he doesn’t want to labor for anymore in “Maggie’s Farm”: Well, I try my best/ To be just like I am/ But everybody wants you/ To be just like them/ They sing while you slave and I just get bored/ I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more? The pervasive rebellion reaches a high point on “Outlaw Blues”, an echoing steely blues song that warns off all comers: Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’/ I just might tell you the truth.

The whole argument comes to a conclusion in the masterful incisive poetic stream of consciousness that is “It’s Alright Ma’ (I’m Only Bleeding)”. I won’t go into its rich detail here except to note that the poet, even while admitting: If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They’d probably put my head in a guillotine, still asserts: Although the masters make the rules/ For the wise men and the fools/ I got nothing, Ma, to live up to. Read the rest when you have a chance, and see if it doesn’t ring even more true in the aftermath of financial and consumer collapse in 2009 than it did in 1965.

Even a song that is clearly comedic, like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, where Dylan actually busts up laughing at the beginning, uses absurdism and rhyme to lay bare the genocide and thievery at the heart of the founding of the country. The joking “On the Road Again” similarly insists on opting out of the great big out-of-control American nightmare: You ask why I don’t live here?/ Honey how come you don’t move? So too with the seemingly abstract poetry of “Mister Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” which nonetheless seek out realms beyond the straightjacket of everyday life.

There are more personal moments too, including what I think is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. My heart aches every time I hear the lines: My love she speaks like silence/ Without ideals or violence/ She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful/ Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire, not least because I know nothing I write will ever touch it. “She Belongs to Me” shimmers with line after line of beautiful poetry subtly undercut by the servitude to the woman it portrays. Words also fail to describe the bitter beauty of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, a breakup song that assigns longing and melancholy regret for the breakup to the other party, surely a neat trick if there every was one. It also seems a kind of bridge to the albums larger theme of protest, the bereft woman as American society itself, told to leave failed excess behind and begin again:

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

For a long time I thought Bringing it All Back Home was the next album after The Times They Are A-Changin’. I knew the title of Another Side, but I thought it was from somewhere in the uneven early 70s stretch of Dylan output and so avoided it.

When I finally got it sorted out, not only did I repent of my earlier avoidance, it answered many questions I had about classic songs that I knew were from Dylan’s prime but that I couldn’t place on any of the albums I knew about. “My Back Pages” would be chief among these. That song, and this whole album in general, seems like a repudiation of the topical political tone of the album that preceded it: Good and bad, I define these terms/Quite clear, no doubt, somehow./Ah, but I was so much older then,/I’m younger than that now. Dylan isn’t disavowing his positions here, but instead signaling a turn into a realm of inner exploration.

And indeed, political commentary does show up in the songs here, but shot through with humor and satire. In fact, there are three tracks on the album that would qualify for my fantasy “Dylan cracks up” play list, songs in which he can’t quite deliver a line straight and ends up laughing.

Overall, the sense the album conveys is one of restless rambling through his range, from an “I Shall be Free No. 10” that could have fit on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to the surreal “Motorpsycho Nitemare” that’s like a preview of the next three albums. Along the way, we get the poetic blues of “Black Crow Blues”, the folk ballad “Ramona”, one of the classic bitter breakup songs (and is he breaking up with just Joan Baez here, or the folk scene in general?) “It Ain’t Me Babe” and one of my all-time favorites, the aching romantic searching of the “Spanish Harlem Incident”: I am homeless, come and take me/Into reach of your rattling drums./Let me know, babe, about my fortune/Down along my restless palms.

It’s almost like Dylan is surveying the ground he built up in his first three albums, and trying to spy the direction for a bold new breakout. Which will bring us to our next review…

This was my favorite Dylan album when I was 20. It’s easy now for me to see why- the album is full of anthems, stirring statements about the issues of the day, with good and evil clearly drawn in black and white. Granted the day was more than twenty-five years old by the time I got to it, but in the era of Rodney King and the first Gulf War it rang just as true. You never doubt who’s side you’re supposed to be on in “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, “With God On Our Side” or “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and I needed that conviction, along with the certainty that right will eventually prevail that the title track conveys.

Listening to it now, I’m stuck by the poignancy of that song. The times had changed after he wrote it, and then changed back by the time I first listened to it. And since then they changed and changed back and may now be changing back again. The song itself hints at the humility that comes form a long historical view: “don’t speak too soon/ For the wheel’s still in spin/ And there’s no tellin’ who/That it’s namin’/ For the loser now/ Will be later to win” And then win and lose again.

Which is not to say, even now, that I’m immune to the prophetic notion that the time is at hand and the order is about to be fundamentally recast. And anyone who has ever burned with the sense that their time will come can’t help but respond to the bitter defiance of “When the Ship Comes In” (which Dylan himself wrote after being snubbed by a hotel clerk while touring with the then much more famous Joan Baez). But it’s the more personal moments of this album that endure for me now.

Whereas the relationship songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan have a kind of pro-forma quality, the real feeling behind “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “One Too Many Mornings” is obvious and moving. As is the sound of the man beginning to struggle against the constrictions of his own public image in “Restless Farewell”. On “North Country Blues” the politics is still there, but subsumed by the personal in the story of the bleak lives of those left behind in a small mining town when the business moves south of the border. And then there’s the “Ballad of Hollis Brown”. The spareness, poetry and driving power of the song that ends with seven shots ringing out “like the ocean’s pounding roar” wowed me when I was twenty and continues to do so today.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan occupies roughly the same place in my development as a music fan that the first nervous teenage toke of a joint does in the life of a future heroin addict. Every day after grade school I’d be alone all afternoon until my parents got home from work. My companions, in reverse order of influence, were cats, television, and mom and dad’s dusty old records. Over many an afternoon, my musical teeth were cut on repeated playing of the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Janis Joplin, CSNY, Simon & Garfunkle, and Bob Dylan. In particular this album by Dylan. Years later, when I finally forayed into the world of CDs, this was one of the first CDs I got as well, carting it off to college with me.

One of the chief problems with having put in more than a quarter century of listening to it is that I can hardly hear it anymore. I mean really hear it, beyond all the accretions of its place in my life, and history and indeed music history in general. Having tried to do that just now, I observe mostly how young an album it is. It’s the first one where Dylan is Dylan- in exact reverse of his debut Bob Dylan, it’s almost all originals, with only two covers. He’s stretching out and finding his voice here, and as a result his voice is all over the place- both literally and lyrically.

In traveling from the rough-hewn and timeless “Blowin in the Wind”, to the out and out absurd horsing around of “I Shall Be Free”, the overall sense I get is of a powerful car being taken for a test drive by a kid who doesn’t quite know how to drive it yet. So, for example, on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” we find him in the emotional territory of the bitterness of failed relationship that he’ll mine extensively later, but he plays it too consciously jokey to really turn the knife. Or hear him having fun with the mythology of the Western plains on “Bob Dylan’s Blues” (Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto/ They are ridin’ down the line/ Fixin’ ev’rybody’s troubles/ Ev’rybody’s ‘cept mine/ Somebody musta tol’ ’em/ That I was doin’ fine) but not yet able to tap its genuine power as he later will with the Band.

On the tight corners that really matter though, he pulls out the bitter, poetic and razor-sharp focused “Masters of War”, the surging symbolic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and the Swiftian satire of “Talking World War III Blues”. If he’d never recorded anything beyond these three songs, he’d already have surpassed the lifetime achievement of many another songwriter.

For some time I’ve toyed with the notion of doing a thorough sequential review of all my Bob Dylan albums. I initially pictured it as a day-long project, possibly on my birthday, and definitely involving several cases of beer. That vision lost its luster when I stopped drinking (21 months last week, by the by!), but it never quite went away. It’s occurred to me recently that I don’t have to do it all in one day, and instead of involving drinking maybe it can involve the compulsive activity I still merrily engage in, writing. I could listen to all the albums sequentially, record my ruminations, and post them here. And instead of all in one day, maybe over a month or two. Why? I’m not sure exactly. Maybe reengaging with one of my four muses (the other three being Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cobain) will kick-start my poetic voice, which has been stalled of late. At the very least, it will exorcise the years-long idea from my head. So here, without further ado, launches Project Dylan…

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For a long time, I didn’t consider his first album, the eponymous Bob Dylan, to even be in the canon, properly speaking. After all, it’s mostly interpretations of traditional songs, with only two originals. Over the years though, I got older, which means that I got less snooty, more appreciative of the influence of blues, folk and country on rock, and more hip in particular to their influence on the development of Dylan’s vision. The real final straw though, was when the Sci-Fi Channel’s multi-generational alien abduction miniseries, Taken, made excellent use of a Dylan song I’d never heard before being played in the background on a record player in a scene in which some nasty shit was going down.

Said song turned out to be Dylan’s haunting version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” from this album. On this song and many others here you’ll hear Dylan’s voice come across with a rawness and power that he rarely matches later. I think he was just too young to know any better- this is the sound of a young musician in his first recording laying it all on the line for the music that he loves. So, while his compositions here are interesting glimpses into proto-Dylan, it is definitely the covers that he pours his heart into. He got to a great “In My Time of Dyin'” thirteen years before Led Zeppelin, and “Man of Constant Sorrow” 38 years before the Cohen Brothers and George Clooney resurrected it. Another particular standout is “House of the Risin’ Sun”, which is made all the more arresting by the fact that Dylan sings it from the point of view of the young female prostitute who works there, rather than the dissolute young man who frequents it that Eric Burdon came at it from in the Animals’ version.

All in all, if you’re in the mood for a powerful, spare tour of Americana a la Dylan, Bob Dylan is a ride worth taking.