Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 81: Gates of Eden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsYyC...

7 months ago | [YT] | 6

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 80: Mr Tambourine Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flHyG...

7 months ago | [YT] | 12

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 79: Bob Dylan's 115th Dream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MQJL...

7 months ago | [YT] | 11

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 78: On the Road Again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99UdL...

7 months ago | [YT] | 6

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 77: Outlaw Blues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C8Vt...

7 months ago | [YT] | 10

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 76: Love Minus Zero, No Limit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN9MF...

7 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 15

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 75: Maggie's Farm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65059...

7 months ago | [YT] | 16

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 74: She Belongs To Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXaZb...

7 months ago | [YT] | 15

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

TONIGHTS UPLOAD Episode 73: Subterranean Homesick Blues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRQXA...

8 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 18

Bob Dylan * Only Stories

HAPPY NEW YEAR– wherever you’re listening from. A new year is usually when we look ahead, but for this episode I’d like to look back at a moment when someone else decided to start over. While the calendar was still in the mid-sixties, Bob Dylan was already doing what we all try to do in January: shedding an old skin and stepping, a little nervously, into something new. That “something new” is his fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home.

The story really starts in early 1964, somewhere between hotel rooms and car rides, when he keeps hearing the Beatles on the radio. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” isn’t just a catchy pop song to him; it’s a sign. The sound is tight, loud, full of energy, and most importantly, it’s a band. Dylan realises that if you want to push songs into the future, maybe you can’t always do it alone with an acoustic guitar. You need drums, electricity, and other people in the room.

A few months later he finally meets the Beatles in person at the Delmonico Hotel in New York. They talk, laugh, stay up late, and according to legend he’s the one who introduces them to marijuana. Out of that night grows a kind of friendly rivalry: four guys from Liverpool watching the mysterious American poet, and the American poet watching them blow up the pop charts. Each side hears the other and thinks, “I’ve got to raise my game.”

But Dylan’s break with his past isn’t just musical. During the Another Side of Bob Dylan period, he’s already drifting away from the strict folk world and from Joan Baez, who had been both partner and political ally. He’s tired of being “the protest singer,” tired of having every line weighed for its purity. When Baez asks him to back her new institute for nonviolence, he shrugs it off. Later he’ll say, almost brutally, that she just didn’t fit into his music anymore. Their emotional and artistic breakup is caught painfully on film in Dont Look Back. Around the same time another figure appears in the frame: Sara Lownds, who seems, in Allen Ginsberg’s words, almost hypnotised by him. Old love, new love, old causes, new desires – everything is in motion.

All that turbulence ends up in the songs. Late summer 1964, at his manager Albert Grossman’s house near Woodstock, he works like a man possessed. Joan Baez remembers nights where he sleeps only in short bursts, then drags himself back to the typewriter and the wine bottle. In that intense stretch he sketches most of the material for Bringing It All Back Home: half of it meant for a roaring electric band, half of it still rooted in the solitary acoustic world he’s about to leave behind.

When he walks into Columbia’s Studio A in January 1965, the change finally gets plugged in. For the first time since his early experiment with “Mixed Up Confusion,” he records with a full electric lineup: multiple guitars, piano, bass, drums. Producer Tom Wilson is thrilled; the musicians are studio pros; and Dylan, though still feeling his way, knows what he wants. Witnesses remember him moving from player to player, showing parts at the piano, adjusting rhythms, rearranging on the spot until a song suddenly locks into place. The first day he mostly warms up on acoustic takes, but by the second and third sessions the new sound is here to stay.

When the album comes out, it lands like a small explosion. Side one is all electricity and attitude; side two sinks back into longer, more mysterious acoustic pieces. Looking back, people say this is the record where he fuses Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll beat and the British Invasion’s energy with the language and politics of the folk revival. The public seems to agree: it becomes his first US Top 10 album, hits number one in the UK, and eventually goes platinum.

Even the cover tells you something has changed. Photographer Daniel Kramer shoots Dylan in Grossman’s living room, cat in his lap, a calm woman in a red dress – Grossman’s wife Sally – behind him, surrounded by LPs, books and magazines. You can spot Ravi Shankar and Robert Johnson, Lotte Lenya and a Time cover with President Johnson, a portrait of comedian Lord Buckley… it’s like a collage of all the worlds he’s stealing from and speaking to at once. Some people even wonder if the woman is Dylan himself in disguise; the image is that strange, that self-conscious.

Around the edges there are little curiosities – European pressings that rename the album, misprints and odd translations – but the essence is simple: with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan drags rock back to its American roots and, at the same time, pushes it toward a more poetic, more dangerous future. It’s a reinvention, the kind many of us secretly hope for when a new year begins. And with that, we can flip the switch on track one: “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

8 months ago | [YT] | 19