One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home.
In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism.
But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries.
After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.
Opher Goodwin is the author of many books on rock music and ran the UK's first ‘History of Rock Music’ courses. Fortunate to spend the sixties in London, where the underground explosion of rock music and culture happened, Opher was in the right place at the right time. He was regularly out at the gigs of Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Cream, Doors, Captain Beefheart, Country Joe and the Fish and many other exciting bands. Among his favourite songwriters are Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Jackson C Frank, Leonard Cohen and Roy Harper. Opher now lives and writes at home in Yorkshire, UK but can still be found at the front of gigs. Where else?
