“Subterranean Homesick Blues” was immediately provocative. From the riff’s overt homage to Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business,” to the pastiche of drug references, slang, deliberate nonsense, and jeers at the establishment, the eruption of Dylan’s electric debut at the beginning of Bringing It All Back Home defied every expectation and solidified the former folk hero’s status as a leader of the emergent counterculture.

The manuscript opens with the now-famous first lines—“Johnny’s in the basement / Mixing up the medicine,” a reference to Woody Guthrie’s and Pete Seeger’s “Taking It Easy”—though a marginal notation reveals another possibility Dylan was toying with: “Johny in a fist fight / Woke up appetite.” While the draft, on the whole, closely conforms to the final state of the lyrics, one can clearly see that the singer was still deep in process. The following two lines also present an alternative in the margins (“I’m on the platform / Heading to the Fat Farm”) and several other earlier attempts at lines are crossed out and replaced with their final version: “Look out Joe” replaced with “Kid”; “Keep it down low” replaced with “Something you did”; “Listen to the Horn blow” replaced with “God knows when”; “Look up at the moon” replaced with “But you’re doin’ it again”; the “man in the coonskin cap” was originally the “man in the moustache”; “See how the horn blows” re-appears, but is again replaced—this time for “Better stay away from those,” which is written before the line “Don’t try No Doze,” but has been marked to be transposed to its place in the final version; among numerous other slight end-rhyme changes, as Dylan searches for the final form of the lyrics.

At the bottom of the first page is a constellation of several intriguing notes. Underneath the lyrics Dylan has drawn a line horizontally across the page and scrawled, “Ballard Chief Jug Band / ‘Under the Chicken Tree’”—a song recorded by Earl McDonald’s Original Louisville Jug Band, the lyrics of which notably feature couplets with end-rhymes, and perhaps their form was an inspiration to the poet-songwriter. Below this is also a crossed-out attempt at a second stanza, suggesting that the full arc of the song was not yet clear to Dylan. Numbered two, it reads, “Sir Barton & Pink Star / Mr Freud—” and below this appear to be two other ideas he was drafting—“‘tu n’pas langua danse sa poche’ / I said no ‘not in my songs’” and “keepin’ it close / with lemon soda / and cocacola”—as well as an address and a recipe for “Lemon Flavored Gelatin.”

The second page conforms more closely with what would end up as the final lyrics, though here too Dylan is toying with the order of lines and possible rhymes. He has also drawn a line down the middle of the page, keeping the lyrics contained to the left, where on the right he’s listed several other songs. Interestingly, given this moment of stylistic shift in his career, the majority of these are folk songs: Thomas Fraser’s “Prisoner’s Song” off of For the Sake of Days Gone By, the Carter Family’s “Broken Down Tramp,” and the Tar Heel Rattlers’ “Don’t Get Trouble In Your Mind.” The latter band’s name clearly served as a moment of inspiration, as Dylan dashed off another potential couplet for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” underneath it: “pallin’ around with Vipers / Gonna bury him down to his diapers.” But perhaps the most notable among these are a note which reads, “Horse Trader Song—Lomax,” suggesting that Dylan was reading Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America, and another which reads, “Link Wray—Rumble / Papa Chubby.” Wray’s “Rumble,” an instrumental guitar track, was one of the first rock songs to explore tremolo and distortion, and its presence here clearly points to Dylan’s interest in going beyond the solo acoustic guitar and embracing the electric. The driving beat of “Subterranean” is a prelude to the startling change he brought with his next album—playing with a full electric band backing him, complete with the Chicago blues guitar of Michael Bloomfield—proving Dylan’s commitment to his new sound.

Also present on the second page is a significant marginal note, with the header “Exit 12,” followed by a quotation from Psalm 1:1 (“Standing in the path of sinners”), under which Dylan has written “Paths of Victory / Riding Down / the streets of Hell.” Some have argued that his song “Paths of Victory” was a precursor to “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” as a demo was recorded during those sessions for his third album and the two possess some compositional similarities. Though he recorded the demo, the song did not appear on an album until The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 was released in 1991. Its presence here suggests that Dylan may have still been trying to work out a version of the song for Bringing It All Back Home, and perhaps he was turning to the folk songs listed on the right column of the page for inspiration.

That this manuscript survived at all is remarkable. Of this period, Clinton Heylin notes, "As a result of Dylan's failure to keep tabs on his own work, for the uniquely fecund fifteen-month period in which Dylan essentially wrote and recorded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, we are reliant on scraps ... rescued from the fire of Dylan's imagination. So focused was he on moving forward, he simply would not allow himself time to collect the detritus that could connect the dots on surely the greatest creative burst in the history of popular song. And on those rare occasions when he did, he duly lost what he had gathered" (289). Indeed, Heylin further claims that Dylan "misplaced all but one of the notebooks from this era, though he used them frequently" (290). Given that so much of the material that led to these recording sessions was lost, the present manuscript is a truly rare and spectacular record of Dylan's process at this time.

While there is a known typescript of the lyrics, its form is far from the song as we know it. That rough draft is, more likely, one of the scraps that “he seemingly scooped up … before turning them into fair drafts he took to the sessions” (Heylin 290). Though he had clearly worked over the lyrics multiple times, as was his practice, Dylan was at this time becoming increasingly influenced by the Beats’ methods of spontaneous composition and stream-of-consciousness. Given that shift, this present working draft may well represent the genesis of the definitive version of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” as recorded. The presence of the abandoned attempt at a second stanza—of which none of the lyrics appear in the typescript version—may imply that he was writing these lyrics as they arrived to him and making editorial adjustments along the way, rather than this being a final scrupulous revision.

In "Subterranean," Dylan wasn't just going electric—he was electrified. At the time, many of his fans could not grasp how the man singing, "Ah, get born, keep warm / Short pants, romance," over loud, jangling guitar and pounding drums could be the same as their anthemic folk hero. But even if Dylan eschewed the label of protest singer, it is clear in the song that, if anything, it was not only his guitar that had been boldly amplified—but the spirit of his protest, too. In order to articulate his bitterness, his rage, and his disenchantment with the system, Dylan had to turn to a new form of both lyric and sound that could express the revolutionary power of the moment. While rock and roll was beginning its ascendancy as a docile, popular music, the genre's origins were still threatening to the white American status quo. In order to rebel against the systemic failures of the United States and to give voice to the rising distrust of the state apparatus among youth culture, Dylan turned to the those origins—a musical form that was in fact less safe than the dulcet, peaceful tones of folk music that were then associated with the protest movement. Indeed, Dylan takes an earlier lyric, "blowing in the wind," puts it to this new sound, and turns it on its head: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Through the sound of Dylan's rebellion and his relentless, spitfire lyrics, the song has, as with all of his greatest achievements, transcended its immediate context and continues to speak to the present. As the song gave voice to the spirit of the time, its lyrics have shaped how we imagine American disenchantment. As the poet Claudia Rankine said of Dylan in a radio interview on the day that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, "His words are in all our mouths."

Indeed, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was enormously influential—it both transformed Dylan’s career and altered the landscape of American popular music. His first Top 40 hit in the United States, the song propelled Dylan into the role of an enigmatic and mercurial traveling poet. This was only driven home by the now-iconic video at the beginning of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back—effectively the first music video—in which Dylan held up placards of the lyrics’ seeming-nonsense, while standing in an alleyway with Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth slyly off to the side. John Lennon reportedly said that, after hearing the song, he did not know how he could ever compete with it. It is a pure distillation of Dylan at that time—it mixes his frenetic Beat influences, his past role as a folk hero and traveling troubadour, and his participation in the burgeoning counterculture through the frenzied collisions of its lines. But even more, with its collage of references to civil unrest, drug use, politics, and conflict with the establishment, the song gave voice to the zeitgeist of 1965 in all of its psychological and social turbulence, and set it to a beat. The song was not only a new horizon for Dylan, but arguably the birth of rock and roll as a form of social protest—a genre which would transform the politics of rock music throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

REFERENCE:
Heylin, Clinton. The Double Life of Bob Dylan. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021

PROVENANCE:
Prior to the acquisition of the archive by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, ten examples of authentic manuscript lyrics were sold privately by Bob Dylan’s management. This is one of those examples, and it is accompanied by a typed letter signed by Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen, attesting that this came directly from their archives.