Let’s not forget that Bob Dylan had been inspired by Elvis before he had even heard of Woody Guthrie.

This is why I think ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is one of Bob Dylan’s most inspirational albums.  This is Dylan finally doing what he wants, bursting free from the expectations of the folk contingent and plugging in for the first time.

The fact that Dylan had already been labelled as a prophet and the ‘voice’ of his generation must have been a heavy mantle for such a young man to bear and it had brought with it a profound amount of jealousy from his contemporaries.  The prophet tag was not accidental; Dylan’s songs early songs were chock-full of biblical imagery and this combined with his declamatory vocal style almost invited it.  On BIABH those biblical references are still present but they are not so overbearing and joined with flashes of psychedelic lyricism.  This is a Bob Dylan who has added the Beats, French symbolist poetry and the newspapers to his library.

The title of the album alone sums up what this album is really about.  Bob Dylan had seen the British invade his country with their reheated version of rock ‘n’ roll and he was not about to let that stand.  Much as Dylan admired The Beatles’ world-beating formula he also resented the hell out of it.  Rock ‘n’ roll was a product of the USA but all the home-grown talent had now been supplanted by the Brits with their jangly electric guitars and mop-tops.  Dylan realised that it was time to get with the programme or end up side-lined, and knew that he had the chops to do it.  Bob Dylan wanted to instrumental in proving that rock ‘n’ roll belonged to America.

By doing this Bob Dylan accidentally released his most subversive album to date.  BIABH straddles genres in a way that no previous album ever had.  This is not rock ‘n’ roll, pop or folk, this is something different.  In many respects this is the album that would lead to popular music being divided into separate entities; pop and rock, the latter being made by serious, ‘authentic’ artists.  Whether this is a good or bad thing is a different debate.

He was still hedging his bets at this point though.  This is one of his first transitional albums and an extreme example at that.  As everybody knows one side of the album is electric while the other is predominantly acoustic.  The acoustic side provides us with one of Dylan’s most celebrated songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (which had been written and performed in 1964) and although it is dressed up in relatively conservative arrangement and would prove to be very commercial, it has little in common with his ‘Freewheelin’’output.  The lyrics are druggy and shamelessly self-indulgent, the verses are uneven and delight in beguiling the listener’s expectations.  Bob Dylan has stopped being literal and has begun using words for the way they sound.  There is no political message here unless it is one of free expression.

Side One opens with the album’s other most famous song, the electric ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.  A very real argument can be made that this is the first punk song.  In some ways it’s a very logical progression from the ‘talking blues’ he’d been doing album-on-album, but this is different.  This is rock ‘n’ roll at its most primitive; minimal chord changes, little harmonic variation, just a snarling, droning complaint made against practically everything modern urban existence has to offer, pitted against a pounding band.  One of the earliest musical inspirations Dylan ever had was Little Richard and here it shows.  Nothing this raw would be seen again until The Velvet Underground, who – let’s face it – were far more self-consciously arty than Dylan.  That is, unless you count garage bands (I always do).

BIABH is rare in Bob Dylan’s catalogue for a number of ways, not least because it shows him in one of his more romantic moods.  His misogyny has been well documented but on this album there is less of it.  Judging by books I’ve read about Dylan this album was written during the time he was living with Joan Baez and it shows.  The love songs (for want of a better description) on BIABH are among the most beautiful he’s ever written; Love Minus Zero (No Limit) being a classic example.  The song has a poise and elegance that stands up against anything written in the 1960s, its musical simplicity compliments the lyrics perfectly.  She Belongs To Me is wonderful too, if a little less profound.

The ‘heaviest’ song on the album is ‘Don’t Worry Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, which is an incredibly courageous song to record in 1965.  The song, although obviously inspired by the blues, doesn’t seem to have any real contemporary parallel – Phil Ochs’ ‘Crucifixion’ springs to mind, but that didn’t come out until 1966.  It is slow, deliberately repetitive and chilling.  For all the criticism directed at Bob Dylan as a vocalist, it is difficult to imagine anybody else being able to perform this song as effectively as him.  This is alienation put to music, solitary harmonica notes are played like moans of despair against a stark solo acoustic guitar.  This song is an accurate portrayal of human-kind in the second half of the twentieth century, overshadowed by nuclear annihilation, religious hypocrisy, political betrayal and relentless consumerism.  Faith revealed as little but delusion.

The album finishes with ‘It’s All Over No, Baby Blue’, a song that like Mr Tambourine Man has been covered many times, but like MTM, here you have all the verses.  This is one of his classic ‘kiss off’ songs.  Since this is Dylan loads of people have their own theories about who this one was directed at but personally I think that it is no accident that this song closes the album’s acoustic side (Side Two).  This serves to inform his fans that his acoustic ‘folkie’ phase was now over for good and that they could either like it or lump it.  Typically for this style of Dylan song, sentiment is not only absent here but treated with contempt.  His next album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, would be wholly electric as would the one that followed it.  All of them would be recorded within 1965 and appear in Best Album lists for decades to follow.

Isn’t that a staggering achievement and also inspirational?