There are some people who make great records and are actually really amazing people in real life too; Vic Godard, as is Pete Wylie, Edwyn Collins and the whole line-up of Dodgy (more about them in later blogs). There are others, however, who come across at least as really unpleasant people, even if their music is really inspiring. I have to admit that I haven’t met any of the following people but nor would I want to particularly:
Okay, most of The Smiths’ line-up seemed nice enough, but Morrissey? It’s bad enough hearing the stories about his cavalier behaviour but can you imagine being in a band with him? That sounds like absolute torture. Morrissey is a genuine one-off; his lyrics were unbelievably clever, sometimes downright hilarious and he is a truly original performer, but – hand on heart – who but the most ardent fan would want to hang out with him? I think he would try the patience of Job. I want to carry on enjoying his music and to do that I think it’s best to keep this one at a wide berth (not that I’m likely to run into at the supermarket or anything).
2) ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’ – Jerry Lee Lewis (Single – 1957)
It’s even more unlikely that I would ever encounter Jerry Lee Lewis, but let’s add him to the list anyway. He may be pretty advanced in years now but this is a man who once shot his bass-player for looking at him the wrong way. Not to mention the time he famously married his own 13 year old cousin. I try not to think too much about Jerry Lee’s lifestyle when I listen to his records. He was brilliant though.
3) ‘Bournemouth Runner’ – The Fall (from ‘Bend Sinister’ – 1986)
I’ve admired Mark E Smith’s work with The Fall for many years but I hope I never meet him, mainly because I want to continue to be a fan. The seemingly endless tales of abusive behaviour with band members doesn’t exactly paint the nicest of picture of him as a person. It may all be exaggerated but let’s stay on the safe side.
4) ‘Licking Stick’ – James Brown (Single – 1968)
James Brown was one of the most important musicians of all time. I do realise that he’s been dead for a few years now but he’s certainly another musician I would not like to have met. I’m sure he had numerous good points but the violence against the numerous women in his life would seem to offset all of that. Not to mention the fact that he used to fine musicians every time they made the slightest musical error. What a tyrant. His music was wonderful of course.
5) ‘Cold To The Touch’ – The Brian Jonestown Massacre (Single – 1995)
The leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre is the hugely talented Anton Newcombe. Despite having battled drug addiction throughout his career he is one of the most prolific musicians of his generation. He is the kind of man who could release an album even if was stranded on a uninhabited desert island with no musical equipment whatsoever let alone a post office. Easy going he is not, though. Apparently he makes Mark E Smith seem like the most reasonable man in the business. He’s prone to violent outbursts (some directed at fans in the audience) and is totally self-destructive. I like his records but I think I’ll admire from afar.
6) ‘Public Image’ – PIL (Single – 1978)
I’ve enjoyed John Lydon’s work over the years and sometimes found him entertaining in interviews but I still wouldn’t want to meet the man. Something tells me that he’d find me annoying and the feeling would be mutual. I might be wrong but I wouldn’t want to take the risk. Better to keep enjoying the music I think.
7) ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit (from ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ – 1965)
I’ve admired Bob Dylan’s music for such a long time and am so in awe of his talent that I would hate to meet him. He is famously so difficult. I realise that a lot of years have passed since ‘Don’t Look Back’ but…
8) ‘Waiting For The Man’ – The Velvet Underground (from ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico)
So there’s no chance of me ever meeting Lou Reed now, is there? But I don’t think I’d ever want to bump into him in the afterlife either. I love his records as much as anybody (well with the exception of Metal Machine Music, of course) but Lou was famously a hard man to get along with and meeting the man even put Lester Bangs off his music. Hope you’re having a good time wherever you are, Lou, anyway.
While writing the John Lennon piece yesterday I was reminded of his song ‘Working Class Hero’, which in turn made me think of songs with a political slant. Working Class Hero is an often misunderstood song, I think. Most people assume that it celebrates the idea of being a ‘working class hero’, but closer examination of the lyrics reveals that it was actually a critique of the entire concept. This is often the case with ‘protest songs’ since they are often taken at face-value rather than studied properly.
So does politics actually belong in popular music? Can music really change anything? It could be argued that everything is political and so the very act of making music is a political act. Elvis Presley was famously apolitical; he never recorded an overtly political song, but his very existence changed American society for ever. The fact that Elvis performed rhythm and blues songs ensured that young American teenagers would become aware of Afro-American culture, which in turn helped lead to desegregation. Anything cultural becomes political eventually.
What about political songs though? Do they have a function in themselves or are they really just about egocentric singer-songwriters thinking that their opinions are more important than other people’s? I think there may be some truth in either of these views. We’ve all become a bit tired of rock stars like Bono making grandiose pseudo-political pronouncements but a good protest song can be a strong rallying cry and can help give voice to real life concerns. There are many examples of this; the songs of Woody Guthrie; Gospel songs being adapted for protest marches (We Shall Not Be Moved, for example); early Bob Dylan songs; Billy Bragg songs during the Miner’s Strike; The Special AKA’s ‘Free Nelson Mandela’; the list goes on.
I have made a list here of ten of the political songs I like. They’re not in any particular order and I’ve tried to pick the less obvious ones. If you are reading this and think I’ve left out your favourite, please feel free to add it in the comments section below.
1) ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’ – Woody Guthrie
Wow,, this is a really hard to find Woody Guthrie song. Well certainly I’ve never been able to find it on any collection and we have a lot of his records in our house. I dread to think of what Guthrie would have thought of the world nowadays, with its neoliberal fundamentalism, but then again he might be heartened by the internet and how much free information can be shared on it. Who knows? This is a fine example of Guthrie’s talent for writing simple, optimistic sing-alongs that can serve to unite people to a common purpose. And he was right, there’s still time left to defeat the fascists and we will in the end!
2) ‘Love Me I’m A Liberal’ – Phil Ochs (from ‘In Concert’ – 1966)
Much more than his contemporary Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs followed in the tradition laid down by Woody Guthrie. The occasionally mean-spirited Dylan famously told Ochs that he considered him to a ‘journalist’ rather than a songwriter – he was palpably wrong, of course, but there was a journalistic quality to many of Och’s songs. There was much more than that though and on occasion Ochs could be just as poetic as Dylan, if not quite as blessed in terms of popularity and sixties mystique. Ochs could be extremely witty too and his humour took absolutely no prisoners. On this song he even satirised people who would have made up most of his fan-base in very savage style. Not even his own middle-class, liberal audience were safe from Ochs, he seemingly had no time for weekend activists who took on fashionable causes. Ochs knew the revolution demanded full-time commitment and he lived that way all the way through his tragically short life.
3) ‘Universal Soldier’ – Buffy Sainte Maria (from ‘It’s My Way’ – 1964)
Although Donovan is associated with this song it was Buffy Sainte Maria who wrote and recorded her original version in 1964 for her debut album. The album became a favourite on the British folk music scene and that’s how Donovan heard it. Buffy Sainte Maria’s version is still the best though; there is much more commitment in her performance and her voice gives the lyrics a chilling resonance lacking in Donovan’s. Perhaps it’s because she had some direct experience of the legacy of war, having grown up on the Piapot Cree First Nations Reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley – whatever the case, her version of the song is the most powerful.
4) ‘Fortunate Son’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival (from ‘Willy And The Poor Boys’ – 1969)
Staying on the subject of anti-war songs, this is one of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s best songs. This is different from most of the anti-war songs of the period in that it brings class into the equation; asking the question why a disproportionate number of those being drafted for the Vietnam War were from blue-colour backgrounds. John Fogerty’s vocal performance on this track was particularly passionate and the band were equally hot.
5) ‘Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) – Marvin Gaye (from ‘What’s Going On’ – 1971)
Marvin Gaye had to fight to get ‘What’s Going On’ released and it was testament to his strength of character that it was it came out at all. Tamla Motown had no faith in the album and were put off by the political nature of the songs, but Gaye was right, the album resonated with the public and became the label’s biggest selling album until his next release (the sexed up ‘Let’s Get It On’). The early seventies were a period of political consciousness in soul music and ‘What’s Going On’ is one of the era’s key albums. In fact it is still one of most important records ever recorded. Inner City Blues is the climactic track of ‘What’s Going On’ and the single version made number nine in the Billboard charts. The song has a low-key funk groove and is very dark, listing a litany of the social troubles familiar to Afro-American in the inner-cities of the time (and probably even today). Marvin Gaye’s singing adds huge weight to the lyrics; it is an incredibly moving performance – heartbreaking, in fact.
6) ‘(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go’ – Curtis Mayfield (from ‘Curtis’ – 1970)
Perhaps Gaye was inspired to record ‘What’s Going On’ by hearing the work of Curtis Mayfield, particularly the album this song was from. Mayfield had previously been the main man in The Impressions and his writing had always had an element of social consciousness in it, even the group’s biggest his ‘People Get Ready’ was as political as it was gospel. ‘Curtis’, the album, was released and it was brimming with songs about race relations, Watergate, social unrest, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and much more. This particular track is almost apocalyptic and Mayfield’s keening falsetto in this context is practically chilling.
7) ‘The Bottle’ – Gil Scott Heron (Single – 1974)
Gil Scott Heron was one of the finest lyricists of any genre and this is one of his best and most well-known songs. It may not be political per se but its vivid descriptions of the social deprivation that alcohol addiction can cause are magnificent. This song also highlights some of the causes of such addiction, how people living in difficult circumstances attempt to use alcohol (or other substances) as an attempt to escape. Heron was a man who battled many demons during his life and so he knew all about what he was describing – or at least, came to know.
8) ‘Have You Ever Been Away’ – The Beautiful South (‘Welcome To The Beautiful South’ – 1989)
This is another anti-war song but it’s a rather more nasty than the previous ones I’ve included. In many ways it shares some of sentiments of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, in that it focuses on class and the fact that the poor are usually sent to fight wars for the wealthy and privileged, but this song uses irony to get its point across. Paul Heaton’s lyrics often have this feature and most of The Beautiful South’s songs tend to have a bitter-sweet flavour as a consequence. Even the band’s name is a put-on, since they were famously based in the North of England. ‘Have You Ever Been Away’ targets jingoism, nationalism, classism, Remembrance Day and a whole lot more – nothing is safe. Lyrics like; ‘/ Any last requests / Before you join the dead? / I’ll crap into your Union Jack / And wrap it ’round your head /’ are not exactly subtle.
The Clash were well-known for being a highly political band, even if they were signed to one of the most established labels in the world; CBS/Columbia. This song is from their first album and the lyrics are focussed on not wanting to be tied down to a traditional job – particularly not one in the military or civil service – and wanting to do something more individual instead. Joe Strummer’s vocal performance goes off like a Molotov cocktail and even though the whole track sounds defiant and aggressive there is something amiss. Strummer was a very clever lyric writer; this occasionally gets overlooked partly because of The Clash’s noisy swagger but also owing to Strummer’s hard-to-read voice (apparently this had a lot to do the pitiful state of his teeth, which was not helped by his prodigious intake of cheap speed). Strummer’s lyrics often acknowledged that were most ordinary people were concerned personal rebellion was often doomed to failure and so he wrote this for the final verse; ‘ / They’re gonna have to introduce conscription / They’re gonna have to take away my prescription / If they wanna get me making toys/ If they wanna get me, well I got no choice / ‘ Despite the fact that Strummer was very comfortably middle-class, he had a lot of insight into the reality of working people’s lives.
10) ‘Sound Of Da Police’ – KRS One (from ‘Return Of The Boom Bap’ – 1993)
Being a very politically conscious rapper, KRS One has written a lot of protest songs but this is probably his most famous, since it was practically the law that it was played at every club gathering of the 1990s. The lyrics are extraordinarily clever and KRS One’s flow is magnificently literate, associating the word ‘officer’ (as in police) with ‘over-seer’ (as in overseeing slaves) to point out the similarity of the two occupations in respect to Afro-Americans from the cotton-fields to the ghetto. This is a landmark rap record.
John Lennon was as well-known for his caustic wit as his campaigning for peace, so in his honour I have composed a list of some of the finest insult songs ever written. John’s ‘How Do You Sleep’ comes in at Number One of the first ten insult songs I can think of. If any of you can think of any other great songs that would fit into this category, please feel free to add them in the comments section.
1) How Do you Sleep – John Lennon (on Imagine – 1971)
This is famously John’s riposte to some of the digs Paul made at his expense on a couple of the tracks on Ram. In fairness to Paul, however, they were comparatively mild in comparison to this song, which comes across like a blowtorch of vindictiveness. It culminates in this memorable couplet ‘The sound you make is muzak to my ears / You must have learnt something in all those years…/’ In many respects some of the tracks on Imagine might have quite easily have been included on John’s previous album Plastic Ono Band, and this, along with Gimme Some Truth, is one of them. Plastic Ono Band was a very personal album and most of John’s songs often turn out turn out to be primarily about John (he later claimed that as How Do You Sleep was much about himself as it was about Paul). Indeed, this song could just as easily be an expression of how raw John was feeling after the break-up of The Beatles. Paul has gone on the record about how inconsolable he felt after the band split, indeed he was drugged up and bed-ridden for months and it took him a good few years to get over it. Although John was publicly very aggressive about drawing a line under The Beatles it is not inconceivable to consider that he had some mixed feeling about it. The Beatles had after all been his band and for a long time been the focal point of his life. Bear that in mind and the lyrics to this song take on a very different hue:
2) Positively Fourth Street – Bob Dylan (Single, 1965)
Bob Dylan was always really good at writing vicious put-downs and so there are a number of songs in his canon that could just as easily have been chosen in place of this one – Idiot Wind, for example – but this is still my favourite. As is the case of innumerable Dylan songs there are arguments about who this song was targeted at. However for the purposes of this blog, I personally think that it was probably the folk purists who had turned on him for ‘going electric’. Dylan had only reluctantly been accepted into the Greenwich Village folk community and had often felt patronised by them. When he had initially been signed to Columbia they had been openly sniffy about it and complained that others on the folk circuit would have been more deserving of the record contract. To me the lines that are particularly telling are ‘You say you’ve lost your faith / But that’s not where it’s at / You had no faith to lose / And you know it /.’
3) Say Man – Bo Diddley with Jerome Green (Single – 1959)
Bo Diddley and his legendary maraca player Jerome Green conceived this work of genius while ‘goofing around’ in the Chess Studios (or so Bo claimed about many of his Chess recordings). Whatever the truth is this is regarded as one of the first ever rap records and it was hilariously funny, being a ‘dozens’ style exchange of insults between Bo and Jerome over that famous beat. Apparently the more rude, dirty insults were taken edited out of the recording but it was so professionally done that it wasn’t noticeable and the record became a hit:
4) I Hate You – The Monks (from Black Monk Time – 1966)
The Monks, on the off-chance that you’ve haven’t heard of them, were formed by five American GIs stationed in Germany during the 1960s. They played an extraordinary kind of avant-rock, which was sometimes not well-received by audiences (one member was nearly strangled by a punter at one gig for ‘perceived blasphemy’). They were possibly one of the most original bands in popular music history; their music had nothing to do with the charts at the time and arguably would never have fitted the musical trends of any era. However, The Monks have an irrepressible charm on it own terms and they have been much imitated by alternative bands. I Hate You has to be heard to be believed; it has minimalist lyrics in which the singer exclaims things like, ‘I hate you, oh I hate with a passion, baby, but call me,’ over a stomping militaristic perverted blues beat. The most alarming element and downright bizarre element of The Monks’ sound is the ever present electric banjo which constantly pounds away on the offbeat. I can’t enthuse about this band enough really.
5) Your Feets Too Big – Fats Waller (Single – 1939)
Going even deeper into the midsts of time, I bring you this nugget. Fats was very fond of insult songs and recorded a number of them, but this was the finest of all. Any song that begins with the lines; ‘/ Up in Harlem, table for two / There was four of us, me, your big feet, and you…/’ has my vote anyway. Even The Beatles, who hated jazz, must have loved Fats because they included this song in their early set-lists. This early example of a video is genius too:
6) Short People – Randy Newman (from Little Criminals – 1977)
Like a lot of Randy Newman’s songs, this record was taken far too literally and people took offence. Even now some radio-stations refuse to play it. Not that Newman is perturbed by that, of course, throughout his career he seems to have relished playing some extremely obnoxious characters in his songs. To him this is the most effective way of unmasking the genuine bigots out there in the world and he has always done that most effectively. Short People should have been seen for what it was; an extremely witty song that employs a cartoon-character narrator spouting some nakedly ludicrous ideas about vertically challenged people. It is so much of a caricature how anyone could do anything other than laugh at it is beyond me. The fact that it was taken seriously tells us everything we need to know about real prejudice.
7) You’re The Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly – Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty (Single – 1978)
My reason for picking this is mainly for the title, which has to be one the best lines of all time. Written by L. E. Dean and Lola Jean Dillon this song became more well-known when Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty recorded their version. In fact the whole song has some screamingly funny lines in it, such as ‘/ You’re the reason that my figure is gone / That’s the reason I’ve no hair left to comb /’ Country music isn’t just about misery, there’s lots of laughs along the way too.
8) That’s A Lie – LL Cool J (from Radio – 1985)
This isn’t the most well-known of LL Cool J tracks but it’s a very entertaining one. LL Cool J is generally associated with more slick recordings now but back in the day he was as raw a rapper as anybody out there and his flow was superb. His lyrics were sharp as a knife too. This is just one example of some of the powerful wit that the great MCs can deliver in hip hop.
9) Shit List – L7 (from Bricks Are Heavy – 1992)
L7 were an all-female grunge band that rocked hard and Shit List is a good example of how nasty they could be when crossed. Dorita Sparks absolutely snarls out some extremely venomous venomous lyrics; ‘/When I get mad and I get pissed / I grab my pen and I write out a list / Of all the people that won’t be missed / You’ve made my shitlist /’, while the band thrash out white-hot heavy rock. L7 wrote some impeccably spiteful songs and this is just one excellent example of what they were capable of achieving when somebody had made the mistake of pissing them off.
10) One Way Or Another – Blondie (from Parallel Lines – 1978)
This is one of the those songs that seems so upbeat and catchy as hell that the meaning almost becomes obscured. Almost, but not quite. Debbie Harry actually wrote the lyrics about an ex-boyfriend who was stalking her at the time and a quick look at the lyrics reveals that they are very dark. There are lines that refer to being parked outside somebody’s house in cover of darkness, breaking and entering, and others about ‘rat food’. It’s all pretty nasty and spiteful stuff indeed. Certainly not the innocent pop song we imagined it was.
This is a question I asked on my Facebook account recently and received a number of very intelligent responses from a wide cross-section of people. This in turn is my own opinion.
Some Beatles fans. Note home-made Beatles jumper in the middle.
One person indicated that they felt that in some respects it may have started with the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and their respective fans. In some ways I would agree with that, but only partially. If we look at the difference between the two bands in the early days one thing becomes clear. The Beatles’ hits were all self-penned songs with an undeniable pop slant. Any analysis of those songs would perhaps reveal that they reveal that they were largely influenced by the pop hits of the day; the songwriting of Carole King and Jerry Goffin, girl groups in general, Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and so on. This would seemingly put The Beatles firmly in the pop category then.
The Rolling Stones when they were still blues purists.
A further problem arises when we look at what musical academics call authenticity. The Beatles were in many ways a far more authentic band than The Rolling Stones in those early days. The Beatles had served an apprenticeship in a dangerous German red-light district and had honed their craft there. By the time they returned to the UK they were a self-contained unit, functioning with almost military precision and knew the ins and outs of songwriting intimately, having played hundreds of songs for months on end to keep up with an aggressive audience’s demands. The Rolling Stones hadn’t been playing for anything like as long before they were signed. Furthermore, all of The Beatles hits were written by members of the band, while The Rolling Stones were initially reliant on cover-versions, which caused them to struggle for a while. In fact, it was only at the instigation of their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, that they began writing songs at all.
The intimidating presence Ewan MacColl
So where did this issue about authenticity come from? Did audiences really care whether artists wrote their own songs or not, or even what genre they were in. Perhaps a minority did. In the early sixties the UK still had a jazz scene and some young people were into ‘trad’ and others preferred the more up to date, sharper dressed ‘modern’ jazz. That is what the original ‘mods’ were; fans of modern jazz, and even in the early sixties, the jazz genre had a lot of snobs in it, who would argue about which artist was ‘authentic’ jazz and who wasn’t. There were people arguing that 1962 hit ‘Take Five’ by The Dave Brubeck Quartet wasn’t proper jazz because it was played in the wrong time-signature (5/8).
The Yardbirds featuring the melancholic Eric Clapton on lead guitar.
Bob Dylan began his recording career as a folk artist, of course. He was one of most influential figures in popular music industry and in the mid-60s his songwriting was at its most popular. Both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were caught up in his spell and one only has to listen to their records of 1965/66 to hear evidence of it (John Lennon was showing signs of a Dylan influence as early as 1964). It was Dylan who proved that lyrics could be used to convey something important rather than just throwaway clichés about teen-romance. Of course, Dylan wasn’t the first person to do this – Jerry Goffin’s lyrics were never throwaway – but he was the first young, fashionable person of any prominence to do so and the effect it had on popular music was staggering.
Personally, I’m not a fan of Clapton, but he was perhaps the first pop musician to be afforded ‘god-like’ status for his prowess on the guitar and for what was considered to be his musical integrity. He was considered to be a serious artist because he had forgone the hit-making Yardbirds to join a serious blues band at the height of his talent.
The music press of the early to mid-sixties was far different to what it became. Music magazines were strictly for fans, there was little or no real serious criticism in them, just news about pop-stars. In fact, it was quite common for some of them to just print the lyrics of chart-topping singles, to enable teenagers to sing along with the radio. The heavyweight music magazines didn’t come along until serious ‘rock-bands’ arrived. Remember, this was a time when bands were more commonly described as ‘groups’.
It was people like Clapton and Dylan who began to change this. Both demanded to be taken seriously. It was impossible to write about a record like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in the same way that you’d approach ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. This doesn’t mean one is necessarily better than the other – each has its own merits – but Dylan’s lyrics were complicated and almost invited analysis, and writers wanted to do precisely that.
This is the point where pop and rock divide, I think. However, on the face of it The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ is unashamedly a pop song, but it is just as authentic as the Dylan song. The Beatles were a self-contained band performing just as original material, whereas Dylan’s had only been put together to record. However, the Dylan record has certainly been afforded more value than The Beatles’. One is considered art, whereas the other is merely ‘popular’.
There is another interesting component to all of this. It was male rock critics who decided what the distinctions between rock and pop were. One of the most noticeable things about The Beatles’ career is the way critics talk about ‘early Beatles’ and ‘late Beatles’ almost as if they are different entities entirely; the former being ‘a group’ and the latter being ‘a band’ (that is, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club ‘Band’). The early Beatles – the clean cut ‘pretty’ version – are forever associated with screaming female fans, whilst the latter, drug-taking bearded version are preferred by chin-stroking male intellectuals.
As mentioned earlier The Beatles’ early hits were very influenced by the music of girl groups. Those early Beatles hits will be forever in the rock music canon, whereas only a handful of the girl groups singles that inspired them have joined them there. This again is an example of male rock critics placing more value on one than the other. Rock is a very masculine construct, which is afforded far more importance than ‘pop’, which male rock writers associate with female listeners. The facts are far more complex than that, however, but that seems to be how rock history has been written.
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?
THE PLAY-OUT GROOVE 
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