Comments for Dylan, Bob, Bringing It All Back Home

How this album is not a 10 is beyond me. Side 1 has great rockers & nice ballads. & the humor!!!!! Listen to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" - a hysterical masterpiece - one of his best songs. Side 2 has 4 great acoustic numbers: the great "Mr. Tambourine Man" and 3 lyrically powerful & complex songs. Nobody else ever wrote songs like these.

This is the point at which "folk" became "folk-rock"

if there is a point in dylan's career where he left every other artist far behind, awestruck, this album is it. mind blowingly original yet steeped in antiquity, biabh provides the blueprint for revolutinary music. even the lovesongs transcend boundaries, revealing a new sense of feeling. how many new genres of music were spun off from this one album? folk-rock(tambourine man),blues-rock(maggies farm),rap(subterranean homesick blues), epic songs(it's alright ma) etc...

side two of the album makes me cry.

I know I''ll get some argument with this, but I still hear Bringing It All Back Home as a transition album, both in style and in realization. I think he was still trying to work out his chops with the hyper, surreal, almost abstract style of writing he would perfect on his masterpieces Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. That is not to say that this is not a strong album. It certainly is that, but I have always founf "Gates of Eden", for example compelling but ultimately too obscure. Too many wild images don''t quite hit their mark in this album. The best songs include the jaunty, humorous, paranoid rocker "Subterranean Homesick Blues" with its foreshadowing of the Weathermen, Panthers, druggie underground existence. It is also uproriously funny. Then there is the intriguing love song, "Love Minus 0-No Limit" with its mystical imagery and compassionate understanding of vulnerability. "Maggie''s Farm", though not terribly melodic, is a great frontal attack on institutional enslavement, be it by corporation, school, or consumer America. "Mr. Tambourine Man" is a wonderful song of release whether it champions release though drugs, Dylan''s music, or some other means- I can''t say. There are many other good songs. There is not really a bad song, though I can do without "Outlaw Blues". It was a breakthrough album, but the next true were the full flowering of this stage of Dylan''s career.

Dylan`s real transitional album. Side one is all electric, no holds barred rock. Side two is all acoustic, seemingly a return to his previous style, but it really isn`t. He has returned to folk, but on his own terms. The lyrics are charged with a new feeling of liberty and experimentation that wasn`t there on previous albums. Maggie`s Farm, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, and It`s All Over Now, Baby Blue are fabulous songs, though overshadowed in public by Subterranean Homesick Blues and Mr Tambourine Man. If Dylan is allowed to die without explaining what HE thinks Gates Of Eden means, the lyrics will be something for humanity to ponder for centuries.