A History in Performance: Bringing It All Back Home, Side B. Afterthoughts and favourites.

 

Links to the articles that appeared in this series are published at the foot of this article

By Mike Johnson

It may be a little too easy to say that Bringing It All Back Home is a transitional album. You could say the same of the previous album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, or the following album, Highway 61 Revisited, which seems to prepare the ground for Blonde On Blonde. Arguably, Dylan is always in transition. However, with his new electric sound on Side A, and the acoustic sound on Side B, Bringing It All Back Home does feel like a deliberately transitional album. It ushers in the new and ushers out the old.

But there is a finality about the four songs on Side B, whose history in performance I have traced in this series. They are the end of the line for Dylan the folk singer. It’s all over now for that Dylan. I have argued that these four songs represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. Not an afterthought but a summation, not a continuation but a conclusion. We have reached the pinnacle – ‘what else can you show me?’

The answer to that lies in the next album.

The desire to escape the constrictions of the past, the ‘ancient empty streets’ and move onto a new freedom is encapsulated in the first track, ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’ The bright, expansive melody of the song heralds new possibilities for the ‘ragged clown’ who can take us past the ‘foggy ruins of time’ and into a new world where we can ‘dance beneath the diamond sky’ and ‘forget about today until tomorrow.’ In doing so we seem to be following the instruction of the great LSD guru Timothy Leary to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out.’

The song could be read as a renunciation of the world, preparing us for the third song, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ which takes us from renunciation to denunciation.

For my money, the 1960’s performances of the song remain the best, particularly the 1966 tour versions.  The freshness and innocence of the 1964/65 performances have given way to a mood darker and more world weary. I trace the subsequent performances of the song until it lumbers to the rather stilted final performances of 2010.

Since I bade the song farewell however, Dylan revived it for a single performance (so far) in Phoenix, May 13^th, 2025, fifteen years after abandoning it.

For the Phoenix performance, he uses the same strategy he successfully used to revive ‘Baby Blue’ in 2005, slowing the tempo right down, filling the musical line up with clusters of piano notes and half singing, half reciting in his distinctive late style. To me this revival doesn’t feel as successful as ‘Baby Blue’ perhaps without the same emotional investment – and no harp break – but I’ll leave my reader to be the judge of that.

2025 Mr.Tambourine Man – Phoenix

The second song on Side B, ‘Gates of Eden,’ is one of Dylan’s most mysterious and evocative songs as he attempts to evoke the mysteriousness of the ‘gates’, what might lie behind them. The song contains some of his most extraordinary and surreal lines. It was a favourite of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. This is what he has to say when questioned in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats.

‘Do you think that your poetry helped to make the work of songwriters like Dylan possible?’

‘Among others. I think that, between Kerouac and myself and Burroughs, there was quite an impact. Dylan told me that – I know Kerouac was a major inspiration for him as a poet. I think it’s those chains of flashing images: “the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver-studded phantom love” come out of Kerouac’s rhetoric … that was a genre drawn from Whitman, from Surrealism, from European poetry of the Twentieth Century, from the Dadaist poets, from the Russian poets, from Lorca … When I heard Dylan’s records, I heard that instantly, and I was knocked out. I thought, Well, at least we’re not a dead end.’

Of the four songs, ‘Gates of Eden’ was played the least number of times and abandoned much earlier than the others in 2001. Unlike ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Mr T Man’ it did not splutter to an uninspired end (before the 2025 revivals), and the performances in 2000 were among the most successful of all (see the Köln performance, May 11^th). That recording is a must. I would also recommend the only rock version of the song in 1988, what I call the angry version. (See: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/29447)

Which brings us to the centrepiece of Side B and the longest song on the album, ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, a first among equals, perhaps. A dazzling array of images. Dylan bids farewell to protest by writing his greatest protest song which combines a wholesale condemnation of modern materialism with a message of resilience and resistance. There is something spookily miraculous about the song.

Dylan thought so too. This is from Wikipedia (I have left their references intact): ‘Dylan has cited “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” as one of his songs that means the most to him.[³] In 1980 he said, “I don’t think I could sit down now and write ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ again. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but I can still sing it.”[³] In 1997, Dylan told The New York Times, “I’ve written some songs that I look at, and they just give me a sense of awe. Stuff like, ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ just the alliteration in that blows me away.”[²⁰]

And again: ‘“I used to. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written’. Then Dylan goes on to quote the first lines of ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, and goes on to say: ‘Try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time’’.

And again: “You can’t do something forever and I did it once. I can do other things now but I can’t do that.”

Sometimes the artist can be just as stunned by their creation as anyone else. Poet William Blake claimed an angel dictated his poems to him. Perhaps it was Blake’s angel who visited Dylan. Sometimes work can emerge from so deep in the psyche, our conscious minds hardly know what to make of it. Behind the idea that ‘not much is really sacred,’ the sentiment that drives the song – there lurks the idea that everything is sacred, if we weren’t too blind to see. And that’s our tragedy.

Dylan revisits this theme in ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ written an astonishing fifty-five years later:

What are these dark days I see?
In this world so badly bent
I cannot redeem the time
The time so idly spent

To be contrasted with this, later in the song:
I feel the holy spirit inside
See the light that freedom gives
I believe it's in the reach of
Every man who lives

I came upon this comment recently on an article about which Dylan songs are favourites for Generation Z: ‘Most songs don’t come with a philosophical workout, but if a song has almost 16 million streams, there’s definitely something special about it. This one’s like a crash course in Dylan’s worldview—bleak, sprawling, and invigorating. Despite its density, it’s pulled in millions of streams, suggesting that, yes, Gen Z is here for the existential dread if it comes with killer lyrics and a steady acoustic groove.’

Long live ‘It’s Alright, Ma’!

‘It’s Alright, Ma’ has a long and complex history of performance I have traced in this series. Dylan finally left the song behind in 2013, the song that is one of his greatest gifts to us. I notice that the wonderful video of a 1965 Liverpool performance I included in part 1 is no longer active, which a puzzle because it is easily found on YouTube. Here it is again:

My favourite more recent performance is from 2007  , which, for simplicity’s sake, I’m re-inserting here:

And so to the final song on the album, the song that bids farewell to the album and an era, a song that springs directly from the heartbreak of separation. You still love, but know you have to go your separate ways. ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’

The following is a quote from Wikipedia: ‘The song was described by Q magazine as, “The most toxic of strummed kiss-offs, with not a snowball’s chance in hell of reconciliation.” Dylan, later describing the song, said that “I had carried that song around in my head for a long time and I remember that when I was writing it, I’d remembered a Gene Vincent song. It had always been one of my favourites, Baby Blue… ‘When first I met my baby/she said how do you do/she looked into my eyes and said/my name is Baby Blue.’ It was one of the songs I used to sing back in high school. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”[⁷]

If you are interested in hearing Gene Vincent’s bluesy ‘Baby Blue’ can find it here:

Commentary on this emotionally complex song has been blighted by speculation as to who Baby Blue might be. I came across this comment recently in a piece written about the metal band Sleep Token: ‘Whatever you make of all this, it’s at least an intriguing corrective to the idea that 21st-century music fans want artists to be relatable – as like themselves as possible – and that they essentially view music itself as a gossipy extension of artists’ lives, always scanning lyrics for clues to feuds with fellow stars or coded vitriol aimed at former partners. Instead, Sleep Token’s success seems to key into a supposedly old-fashioned, rather Bowie-esque idea that pop stars should be distant, remote, fantastical figures, their music a portal into a world very different from your own.’   (The Guardian).

To view Dylan’s ‘Baby Blue’ as a ‘gossipy extension’ of Dylan’s life is to do the song a disservice. Throughout this series, I have argued that the song is much, much more than this, and if we replace ‘Bowie-esque’ in the above quote with ‘Dylan-esque’ we may come close to Dylan’s own strategy with regard to how he both reveals and hides himself in his songs.

My own favourite is the 1995 Prague performance but his emotionally wrenching 1980’s Portland performance comes a seriously close second.

So, it’s all over now for this History in Performance series. I hope you have enjoyed it, and the performances I’ve highlighted.

I hope to be back soon with a new series. Until then, don’t let this crazy, topsy-turvy world get you down. Remember, it’s just ‘life and life only.’

Until then

Kia ora

Mr Tambourine Man

• Part 1: A masterpiece is born
• Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
• Part 3: Chasing Shadows
• Part 4: 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach
• Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire
• Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me
• Part 7: 2000-2010: the Jingle Jangle

Gates of Eden

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends

It’s alright ma I’m only bleeding

• Part 1 1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
• Part 2: 1975/81 – Stuffed graveyards and false gods.
• Part 3: 1984 –  One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• Part 4: 1988 –  The darkness at the break of noon
• Part 5: 1999 –  2004. Stuffed graveyards, false goals.  
• Part 6 2004-13: It blows the mind most bitterly

It’s all over now Baby Blue

• Part 1: 1965. 
• Part 2: 1975.
• Part 3: 1984 – 1989
• Part 4: 1990 – 1995
• Part 5: 1996 – 2001 
• Part 6: 2002 – 2010
• Part 7: 2011 – 2025.