Dylan and the Beats: Part Three

More than ever before, Dylan pays homage to his Beat family on Bringing It All Back Home - his fifth album (released in March 1965) - like NO BODY'S business from the pictures on the front and back covers to the liner notes - to say nothing of both song cycles (electric and acoustic) - this is the promise of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti writ large!

Let's start with the front cover that is a visual Beat cornucopia laden with clues and insights about what is important and formative. In addition to the hip beauty of Sally Grossman, wife of the main man's manager Albert Grossman, check out the "artifacts scattered around photographer Daniel Kramer's frame..."

+ There are five record albums that point towards Dylan's eclectic influences: The Impressions - a soul/doo-wop gospel band from Chicago that featured the work of Curtis Mayfeild; a recording of Kurt Weill songs by Lotte Lenya; the sitar master from India Ravi Shankar; as well as a collection from both the king of the delta blues - Robert Johnson - as well as Harvard Square's white bluesman Eric Von Schmitt. Dylan not only recorded Von Schmitt's "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" on his first album, he also "goosed it up with electric guitars" backed by the Hawks/the Band a few months later. This was a man defying simple categories and embracing the wild fullness of life.

+ Then there are the visual clues: a Lord Buckley album - one of the rude kings of comedy in the Beat world - as well as a partially hidden copy of his own Another Side of Bob Dylan. There is a sign from a fall out shelter, gossip columnist magazines alongside of a TIME Magazine featuring President Lyndon Johnson. The man is even wearing the "cuff links Joan Baez gave him that she references in 'Diamonds and Rust (1975.)"

+ And before you ever get to the music, there are the liner notes wondering why Ginsberg was not invited to read at the Presidential inauguration, why some people think Norman Mailer is more important than Hank Williams and why there is such a cult of the dead instead of a celebration of the living: it is an anti-war, anti-conformity rant that is totally current while honoring its Beat origins.

I'm standing there watching the parade/
feeling combination of sleepy john estes.
jayne mansfield. humphry bogart/morti-
mer snerd. murph the surf and so forth/
erotic hitchhiker wearing japanese
blanket. gets my attention by asking didn't
he see me at this hootenanny down in
puerto vallarta, mexico/i say no you must
be mistaken. i happen to be one of the
Supremes/then he rips off his blanket
an' suddenly becomes a middle-aged druggist.
up for district attorney. he starts scream-
ing at me you're the one. you're the one
that's been causing all them riots over in
vietnam. immediately turns t' a bunch of
people an' says if elected, he'll have me
electrocuted publicly on the next fourth
of july. i look around an' all these people
he's talking to are carrying blowtorches/
needless t' say, i split fast go back t' the
nice quiet country. am standing there writing
WHAAT? on my favorite wall when who should
pass by in a jet plane but my recording
engineer "i'm here t' pick up you and your
lastest works of art. do you need any help
with anything?''

(pause)

my songs're written with the kettledrum
in mind/a touch of any anxious color. un-
mentionable. obvious. an' people perhaps
like a soft brazilian singer . . . i have
given up at making any attempt at perfection/
the fact that the white house is filled with
leaders that've never been t' the apollo
theater amazes me. why allen ginsberg was
not chosen t' read poetry at the inauguration
boggles my mind/if someone thinks norman
mailer is more important than hank williams
that's fine. i have no arguments an' i
never drink milk. i would rather model har-
monica holders than discuss aztec anthropology/
english literature. or history of the united
nations. i accept chaos. I am not sure whether
it accepts me. i know there're some people terrified
of the bomb. but there are other people terrified
t' be seen carrying a modern screen magazine.
experience teaches that silence terrifies people
the most . . . i am convinced that all souls have
some superior t' deal with/like the school
system, an invisible circle of which no one
can think without consulting someone/in the
face of this, responsibility/security, success
mean absolutely nothing. . . i would not want
t' be bach. mozart. tolstoy. joe hill. gertrude
stein or james dean/they are all dead. the
Great books've been written. the Great sayings
have all been said/I am about t' sketch You
a picture of what goes on around here some-
times. though I don't understand too well
myself what's really happening. i do know
that we're all gonna die someday an' that no
death has ever stopped the world. my poems
are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion/
divided by pierced ears. false eyelashes/sub-
tracted by people constantly torturing each
other. with a melodic purring line of descriptive
hollowness -- seen at times through dark sunglasses
an' other forms of psychic explosion. a song is
anything that can walk by itself/i am called
a songwriter. a poem is a naked person . . . some
people say that i am a poet

(end of pause)

an' so i answer my recording engineer
"yes. well i could use some help in getting
this wall in the plane"

Let there be no doubt, Dylan is stating even before the music ever begins, that while this record picks up where Another Side... left off, it charts new territory with electric guitars, Beat/Zen poets wandering through the entire musical landscape while new ideas and American/Beatles/blues influences shape and restructure the songs of this man beyond limits.

And goddam... the songs! Ginsberg is working with Dylan on the first ever rock video - "Subterranean Homesick Blues" - that is part Chuck Berry and part Ginsberg/Kerouac all thrown into the psycho-blender of Dylan's emerging rock and roll aesthetic. Let's make this "Too Much Monkey Business" reworked through a whole new vision of music - driven by rock and blues - in pursuit of the politics of ecstasy. This is the Declaration of Freakin' Independence for ALL artists - especially in 1965! (Too damn bad the original isn't currently available on You Tube, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers get the spirit JUST right... they make it clear that Dylan and the Beats WERE the precusors of rap - nourished, of course with the other fathers and mothers like Langston Hughes, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald and Zora Neale Hurston...)

The album keeps moving like a train about to wreck with "Maggie's Farm" - THE quintessential anti-conformity song of any age that holds unique importance given the Bard's break with the folkie/PC commissars of art crowd - and keeps on pushing with both "Outlaw Blues" (recorded during the previous album and reworked with more piss and vinegar) and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" - an acid-driven talking blues that throws Jung into a rant about American history and the quest for freedom.

And that's only side one! The first seven songs are totally a new/old, outlaw, Beat, absurdist anti-conformity broadside filled with crazy and troubling images, harsh observations and side-splitting rock and roll attitude. As a recent musical revolutionary - Rage Against the Machine - put it in cover the grandpa: THERE IS NO WAY IN CREATION I'M GONNA WORK ON MAGGIE'S FREAKIN' FARM NO MORE!

(This alBum CHANGED MY WORLD. Tomorrow - or there about's - it will be on to side two... and all of its glory.)