Bringing It All Back Home: 60 Years of Dylan's most genre-inspiring work

"You burst onto the scene, already a legend." - Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust (1975)

Bob Dylan was never really given a chance to be mediocre until the early 1970s. Everything he did was not only analyzed far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams but everything he did was to be replicated by the million and a half Dylan want-to-be’s that started to plague the folk scene. Even if he did something objectively weird it was suddenly one of the great hallmarks of a genius. 

This was never truer than in the mid-1960s. When he made Highway 61 Revisited and scored a hit with Like a Rolling Stone he reinvented what a pop song could be. Doing Blonde on Blonde was him creating rock and roll’s first double album, and it would be impossible to forget that when he released All Along the Watchtower in 1967 he was setting the groundwork for one of the greatest covers of any song to be recorded. His influence stretched miles with each release, but that started with Bringing It All Back Home. 

Bringing It All Back Home is almost a forgotten middle child of the Dylan sixties catalog. Not being a modern folk standard like his work from the first half of the decade and not the outwardly experimental and transformative pop music of the second half, the album is often overlooked for just how good it is at branching both those parts of Dylan together so seamlessly. Many mark this albums follow up, Highway 61, to be the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of Dylan’s goodwill between him and those who loved the folky vagabond that blew onto the scene in 1962, but it could be very well argued that Bringing It All Back Home was the wolf in sheep's clothing of that change. Pushing the needle so far forward while masking it all within an acoustic styling that’s more off kilter moment’s could be labeled as Dylan only losing one or two marbles compared to the whole bag. Regardless of the electric v. acoustic, these songs seemed to be written with the idea of auditory revolution in mind. Subterranean Homesick Blues opens the album with a riff in the vein of George Harrison’s on A Hard Day’s Night, a move that was already differentiating The Beatles from the other pop acts of the day. For an artist like Dylan to adopt that is huge, but that would be only scraping the surface of the songwriting and genre shifts helmed within this project. 

Maggie’s Farm found new life from the best band of the 1990s, Rage Against the Machine.

In 2000 they did a phenomenal album of cover songs, putting their signature sound on 60s and 70s protest songs in a particularly powerful statement on how certain words and messages transcend their time periods as the world is stuck in a cycle of never changing for the better. Maggie’s Farm lent itself to Rage’s rap-rock, metal-adjacent sound just as well as it did to Dylan’s less-electrically performed originally - it set groundwork for the songs Rage would become famous for long before they were even a flash in the pan. Where Dylan’s rigorous strumming was once pushing the limits of how punk an artist could be (before punk), Tom Morello’s feedback, alarm-like riff now finds a home. Of course the most famous versions of Maggie’s Farm of Dylan's were plugged in, but there’s something about the extreme Rage takes the song too. At it’s time, Maggie’s Farm was some of the first punk music to be released to the mainstream, an electric blues song that no one else has written anything remotely similar too, and by 2000 it sounded as fresh as the day it was recorded, injected with a new life by a band that may have never existed without the groundwork originally laid by Dylan in 1965.

Dylan performing Maggie's Farm at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival

Outlaw Blues was put back on the map by Timothee Chalamet’s Saturday Night Live performance during his January 2025 appearance. He performed the song in a more alternative style, giving it a resurgence it had never quite seen. The original was a bit of a deep-cut in the greater Dylan catalog (it’s only been performed by the man once - in 2007 with Jack White), but it had all the hallmarks of what would become staples of his work for the rest of the decade: the short, punchy verses and an almost comically loud harmonica overdubbed into the mix. It’s styled in such a way that it can be taken in a few different ways creatively, the slight country twang on the original lends it to a song that can be taken into a very rough and heavy southern rock style, or the brevity and nonsense lend it to grunge very well. You can hear how well it would be with the crunchy, distortion heavy guitars, a voice choking out these nothing lyrics in an attempt to free their soul from the trappings of youth. Chalamet, doing an absolutely God-tier promotional run for his role as Dylan in A Complete Unknown, performed the song in not a style remotely similar to the man himself but with his own flair mixed in, a more Dylan move than it’s given credit for. It pays homage to Jack White’s impact with the song as well, falling more in line with his blues, grunge-y sound than the slow and melodic original. Of course, like punk and Maggie’s Farm, grunge didn’t exist yet and Dylan was once more marking stepping stones. 

Chalamet performing Outlaw Blues and Three Angels on SNL, 2025

It’s Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) is one of the greatest songs ever written. If we weren’t discussing Bob Dylan, this would be an artist's masterpiece, but since we are we have to accept it’s not even the best or most influential on the album. The song throws the idea of pop-structure out the window, it’s not easy to follow, there’s no story, there’s barely even instrumentation in the background, more-so Dylan speaking over a heavy strumming, catching his breath between the long and winding verses. There’s parts of the song's structure that draw a strong resemblance to hip-hop - speaking over music as opposed to singing with it, a social commentary within the lyric. It ends the album on an unsettling note, And if my thought-dreams could be seen they’d probably put my head in a guillotine / But it’s alright, ma, it’s life, and life only. There were no words for a song like this at the time of release, the eight-minute epic codeming war, politics, consumerism, corporate greed, the commercialization of religion and the desensitization of violence. There was no genre that fit what was happening here, no one knew what was happening. It wasn’t obscure references or made up lines, there was no caking on words to soften the blow of his meaning, it was a biting critique of the world. You listen to it, and it makes you think, you can’t ignore it, you can’t get lost in the music. There’s nowhere to run. Blowing in the Wind had been taken by older generations, a song to showcase they were hip with the kids and in for change, but it took much longer for It’s Alright Ma to join it's ranks. Jimmy Carter used it in his speech to accept the nomination for presidential candidate, by inverting Dylan’s phrasing but still acknowledging the critiques of the culture he offered. There’s a certain cultural consciousness that comes with Dylan suddenly being quotable by presidential candidates - that he was transcending folk stardom, pop stardom, or even the realm of musician. He was suddenly a figure like Shakesphere, someone whose words proceeded them and tranceded their orginal context.

“My vision of this nation and its future has been deepened and matured during the nineteen months that I have campaigned among you for President. I have never had more faith in America than I do today. We have an America that, in Bob Dylan's phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying.” - Jimmy Carter, 1976

---

Bringing It All Back Home was ahead of it's time in ways that feel hard to wrap one's mind around. As I found myself re-spinning the album, I was shocked to hear how "unplugged" the record was. Each soing lends itself to genres that are so loud and audacious, but this album predated all of that. Predated Dylan becoming Judas as well. The writing on the album was also leaps and bounds before the rest, but that's given for this man. Even yet, the idea that something like Mr. Tambourine Man was years ahead of Sgt. Pepper, or Pinball Wizard, or any other hippie-dippy, drug-infused fiction is shocking. The fact that the song doesn't come across as the complere mutterings of a mad-man is also it's own level of shocking. While the album would be overshadowed by everything left, right, and center within Dylan's catalog, it can't be understated that it made ginormous leaps forward in terms of an musical revolution. Inventing a few genres, inspiring a few writing styles, it becomes increasingly obvious that he was laying down the groundwork for so much of popular music today.

Bob Dylan was almost always ahead of pack, but whether that was because he was genuinely on the pulse of what was possible of music or because everyone just followed his lead is a question I fear has no answer. But what I can answer is this: popular music and song wouldn't exist today without Bob Dylan. Their structure, look, sounds, ideas, feel. All of that determined by Dylan with the release of this album in March of 1965.

Bob Dylan performing Mr. Tambourine Man at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964: