1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (6 page)

Dylan recorded the entire second side that same day. Langhorne played electric guitar for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and Lee joined Dylan on bass for “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Dylan recorded “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Gates of Eden” by himself on guitar. (Electric versions of the songs of side two were recorded but never released.)

The album’s single “Subterranean Homesick Blues” synthesizes the Beat Generation, Chuck Berry, and Woody Guthrie. The title is a reference to Jack Kerouac’s
The Subterraneans.
The rhythm comes from Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” The opening lines come from “Taking It Easy,” written by Guthrie and recorded by Pete Seeger’s Weavers. The latter song features a father in the basement mixing up the hops while the brother watches out for the cops. In “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Dylan’s associate mixes up a different sort of (unnamed) medicine, but the cops are shaking them down nonetheless, and planting bugs in preparation for a bust. The protagonist realizes it’s time to go straight: get sick (street slang for giving up heroin), get clean, join society, and try to be a success. Soon, however, he’s homesick for the underground lifestyle and jumps back down the manhole. But even there, he’s screwed—there’s no water because vandals have stolen the pump handles. The song prophesizes the journey of the hippies, who would soon begin to drop out of mainstream society and into the drug culture, only to find that lifestyle to be equally stressful. Some credit the song with being one of the first proto-hip-hop tracks, more than twenty years ahead of white rappers such as the Beastie Boys, Beck, and Anthony Kiedis (whose group, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, would cover the tune).

Dylan was regarded as the king of the topical song but had become disinterested in writing solemn political tracts. “Maggie’s Farm” was a new kind of protest song, one he could write without being bored. He sings the darkly hilarious portrait of a plantation with such hipper-than-thou confidence that it’s amazing to think the band had been working together for only a few hours. As the song’s sharecropper refuses to go along with the program anymore, Bill Lee booms wryly along on bass; twenty-five years later, his son, Spike Lee, would grow up to embody black dissent.

Dylan’s euphoria at finally living his rock-and-roll dream infuses side one, epitomized by the spontaneous laughter opening “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” The song itself is a near remake of his aborted rock single “Mixed Up Confusion,” almost as if he were resuming where he left off two years before. Set to a piano that evokes Chaplin’s silent comedies, the song is an endless cartoon about pirates let loose in an anarchic New York where bowling balls come rolling down the road to knock you off your feet and where feet pop out of telephones to kick you in the head. It’s the moment when rock lyrics go psychedelic.

Most of the songs of side one are variations on the same basic blues-rock groove, but two are mellow tributes to Dylan’s muses, Joan Baez and Sara Lownds. (Like the heroine of “She Belongs to Me,” Baez wore an Egyptian ring.) Baez visited the studio during the sessions.
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She had been the much bigger star when she and Dylan first met, almost two years before, and took Dylan on tour with her, giving him a solo spot during her shows. They were now perceived by many to be the “first couple” of folk.

But within the last few months, Dylan had secretly begun seeing Sara Lownds, a former model and bunny from the New York Playboy Club who was friends with his manager’s wife (Sally Grossman, the woman on the cover of
Bringing It All Back Home
).
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Lownds lived in an apartment at New York’s Chelsea Hotel with her young daughter, whom she’d had with a fashion photographer, and Dylan rented a room there to be near her. She was the more likely inspiration for “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” as the song concerns a woman who has no ideals and speaks like silence—the opposite of Baez, who’d founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and constantly pushed Dylan to use his fame for political good. In a year and a half, Dylan would retreat into silence with Lownds as his wife.

The remaining two tracks on the side (“Outlaw Blues” and “On the Road Again”) are comparatively weak retreads of the other rock numbers. Their inclusion is baffling, considering the band had captured “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” a far superior song and already a regular part of Dylan’s act; but perhaps he was sick of it or felt it was too straightforward. He set it aside, allowing Manfred Mann to take it all the way to No. 2 in the United Kingdom. He also demo’d “I’ll Keep It with Mine” and “Farewell, Angelina,” but they were ballads in the vein of his previous album, and Dylan was eager to show off his own blues band (which the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman noted in his memoir sounded much like theirs).
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After all, the title of the album,
Bringing It All Back Home
, essentially proclaims that Dylan is taking the rock-and-roll crown back from the Brits.

After six tries, Dylan and Langhorne finally got the perfect take of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It opens the acoustic side two, which completes Dylan’s transformation from protest singer to full-time surrealist. For the transition, he had found another role model along with Rimbaud, and this one was alive.

Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg lived on the fault line between social hero and exhibitionist loony, as might be expected from his upbringing. His father was a poet–high school teacher, and his mother was a schizophrenic nudist Communist; Ginsberg authorized her lobotomy in 1947. He was expelled from Columbia University for writing dirty words on his window, and in his poems he boasted that he was everything that repressed postwar America hated: gay, druggie, a Communist when he was a kid. But he maintained that he wasn’t a bad person: he deserved love as everyone deserved love. When Ginsberg went to trial for obscenity in 1957 but was not convicted, it gave courage to outsiders and helped loosen things up, paving the way for the counterculture to follow.

Dylan absorbed the stream-of-consciousness style that Ginsberg and his fellow Beat Jack Kerouac developed together, a musical hipster patois that transformed gritty reality into incandescent wordplay. They found beauty in the modern urban landscape and expressed it in a cadence influenced by their beloved bebop, informed by their quest for spiritual transcendence. Ginsberg cried the first time he heard Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” because he felt the torch had been passed to a new generation.
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The two artists quickly struck up a friendship.

Ginsberg saw himself in the prophetic tradition, confronting America with its soul-sucking dark side in order to heal it. In “Gates of Eden” on
Bringing It All Back Home
, Dylan chants stridently as if he were a biblical prophet. What exactly he is prophesizing is unclear, though, as he deliberately replaces the easy interpretation of his earlier morality tracts with Zen koan-like images that veer into the bizarre. Perhaps Eden was the state of enlightenment, the only thing real in a hopelessly twisted world, or perhaps the song was designed to be impenetrable.

The main message of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” seems to be that society will exploit you if you don’t get hip (a theme that especially resonated as the Vietnam draft kicked in that spring). But what blew people’s minds more than any individual aphorism or cinematic image was Dylan’s ability to endlessly play folk-blues riffs while reeling off stanza after spellbinding stanza in enigmatic emotionless delivery, leaving his live audiences stunned and unsure if he was a mystic oracle channeling divinations, a genius, a charlatan, or all the above.

The album’s final track, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”—with the sky folding under you and orphans crying like a fire in the sun—showed that he had surpassed Rimbaud, just one of many spirits in his magpie synthesis of ancient folk bards, Ginsberg, Guthrie, Berry, Johnny Cash, and the Stones. With
Bringing It All Back Home
, he had created the first rock album that sucked the art of poetry into its bloodstream, the moment in which LPs became not just collections of pop songs but works to stand alongside masterpieces in any form, from Picasso’s
Guernica
to James Joyce’s
Ulysses.
But unlike those pièces de résistance, Dylan’s would soon be heard by youth across the planet, listening, as Ginsberg put it, “to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.”

*   *   *

The Byrds’ first single
had failed to chart after its release the October before, and their manager, Jim Dickson, knew they needed something special to break through. He’d heard Dylan sing “Mr. Tambourine Man” live, but the song hadn’t been released yet, so Dickson got a copy of the acetate and pushed the Byrds to record it. None of them really liked it at first. Vocalist Gene Clark gave it a shot, but rhythm guitarist–vocalist David Crosby convinced him it wasn’t worth pursuing.
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Lead guitarist Jim McGuinn resisted initially as well. Back when he was a folk singer in Greenwich Village, he knew Dylan, “but he was my enemy … I felt competitive. He had like twenty little girl fans and I didn’t so I was mad at him. I didn’t particularly dig his imitation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot or Woody Guthrie. I thought, okay, anybody could get up there and do that. But he was sincere about it so he carried it. That’s why he made it, because he was sincere about everything he tried. And he used to play these trust games with all his friends back then. Like he’d tell me confidentially that he was really down and out and hooked on heroin—you know, a complete lie—just to see if it would get back to him. He was pretty weird.”
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But McGuinn gave “Mr. Tambourine Man” a shot. He cut down the lyrics, focusing on the line about boot heels wandering because it made him think of the Beatles’ Cuban-heeled boots and Jack Kerouac wandering across America.
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They set it to the beat of Beatles and Phil Spector songs. The track needed some kind of intro, so McGuinn took eight notes from Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

On January 20, five days after Dylan recorded his official version, the Byrds went into Columbia Records’ Los Angeles studio to record “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Their producer was Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day. Melcher decided that no one in the band except McGuinn was technically good enough to play their instruments on record yet, so he hired LA’s top session musicians to accompany McGuinn on guitar and lead vocals: Hal Blaine on drums, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Larry Knechtel on bass. (Along with other musicians such as guitarist Glen Campbell and bassist Carol Kaye, these three formed the core of a loose-knit band of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew, which played on countless hits, including those by the Beach Boys and Phil Spector.) Clark and Crosby added their harmonies. Melcher tweaked the beat to imitate “Don’t Worry Baby,” the Beach Boys’ take on the Spector drums.
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They wanted the guitar sound the Beatles had gotten on the
Beatles for Sale
cuts “What You’re Doing” and “Words of Love.” But Columbia’s engineers had not worked with rock musicians before and were afraid McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar would blow out their expensive equipment. So engineer Ray Gerhardt ran the guitar through a compressor, a mixing tool that lowered the loud audio signals but left the quieter ones untouched. Then to be safe, he double-compressed it—which ended up making the guitar sound especially trebly and bright, and allowed each note to sustain a few extra seconds. At the mixing board, they tweaked McGuinn’s vocals to sound like a cross between Lennon and Dylan.
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*   *   *

Now it was
just a matter of waiting for these three records’ release dates: February 26 for the Stones, March 27 for Dylan, April 12 for the Byrds.

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Hitsville USA and the Sovereigns of Soul

The Supremes enjoy their first No. 1 of the year with “Come See about Me” on January 16, while Smokey Robinson’s songs help the Temptations and Marvin Gaye unlock their potential. Also in January, the Impressions release one of the greatest civil rights anthems, “People Get Ready,” while Solomon Burke records his ode to the slain Sam Cooke. Martin Luther King Jr. turns to gospel greats the Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson when he needs solace.

Detroit, Michigan, was
the nation’s fourth-biggest city, an integrated promised land for countless workers bustling round the clock at General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. Department stores and nightclubs teemed in the evenings. Women of either color could walk by themselves most hours through the metropolis of marble, sandstone, and granite.

Berry Gordy named his record label after the nickname for the Motor City, a combination of the words
motor
and
town
. Headquarters was a two-story house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, with a sign reading “Hitsville, USA” above the front window. The ground floor housed the office, tape library, and Studio A, a.k.a. “the Snake Pit,” where the session men known as the Funk Brothers recorded the backing tracks. After sessions, musicians such as bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin played jazz all night at the 20 Grand club or the Chit Chat Lounge, coming up with ideas for tomorrow’s cuts, then hung out on the corner of John R. and E. Canfield Streets, where a guy sold sausages and tamales, telling dirty jokes till dawn.
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Gordy’s production method was inspired by his time served on the Ford Motors assembly line. He wrote in his memoir, “At the plant, cars started out as just a frame, pulled along on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of the line—brand spanking new cars rolling off the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records.”
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The songwriters wrote the track, the Funk Brothers laid down the music, and then the singers overdubbed their vocals.

Gordy instituted his own form of quality control in production evaluation meetings. Every Friday morning, Motown staffers would gather in his office to listen to twenty new recordings and decide which should be released, rating each cut on a scale of one to ten. The big question was: if you had only a buck and you were hungry, would you buy the record or a hot dog? Staffers would usually pick the hot dog, but the time they took to decide indicated how good the record was. Sometimes records got shot down only to be reworked and brought back. Gordy promised the staff that they would never be punished for being honest; in turn, he was ruthless in his own dissections. The end result was that 75 percent of the 537 singles Motown released during the decade made the charts, and 79 were Top 10
Billboard
pop hits.
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