What I mean is, what references to the drug culture? Also, what is he getting at with the lyrics? Obviously there are some references to drugs and cops with keep your nose clean and watch out for plain clothes, but; what does he mean?
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/subterranean.html
Subterranean = underground. The street scene in the 60s. Things were in ferment. The country was starting to undergo cultural, political, and social upheaval. The Man was starting to put surveillance on the counterculture. There was going to be opposition to the Vietnam war, rebellion against the Establishment. To live outside the law you must be honest.
The first verse throws up several disconnected images that establish the song’s mood: restless, nervous, anxious.
Look out, kid.
The third and fourth verses are a taut ChuckBerryesque summary of modern existence, in all its emptiness, prodding you to wonder where does it all lead? What’s the point of pleasing her, pleasing him? Makes you understand why the underground people have dropped out.
Maggie is one of those people, the people your parents warned you about. She’s starting to turn paranoid because of her underground activities.
Those that carry around a fire hose are “The Man” again. You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. Means you can figure out for yourself what kind of shit is about to go down. You don’t need professional predicters to tell you. You’re better off figuring it out for yourself. (Of course, Dylan had nothing to do with the violent fringe of the SDS appropriating this line of his song—but he was singing about people just like them.)
“Watch the parking meters … Don’t wear sandals, try to avoid a scandal.” In other words, be smart, don’t screw up, don’t stand out because the Man will bust you more easily. To live outside the law you must be honest. Dylan was warning the hippies, Yippies, and other dropouts about the COINTELPRO busts that were about to go down. Dylan himself thought his advice “Don’t follow leaders” was the most important line in this song, he meant it seriously but folks didn’t take his advice. He was thinking that once the Movement set up leaders, the Man could take them down all the more easily. Dylan himself could have been such a leader but he rejected the possibility. Dylan was advising the counterculture to be discreet and blend in with the background because the heat was about to come down.
Hard to believe this song was made back in 1965! It was at least 3 or 4 years ahead of its time.
Thanks Jomo, appreciated.
Or, maybe the “don’t stand out” message is intended ironically…
Was “don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowing” a reference to the Weathermen, or did they name themselves after that song? Or was it just a big coinicdence?
The Weather Underground split off from the SDS in 1969. At least one source claims they took their name from the Dylan song:
http://pub129.ezboard.com/fportlandfrm1.showMessage?topicID=97.topic
Another, more direct reference:
http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/49thparallel/backissues/issue3/jacobs.htm
According to that source, the Weather was named for an article about the Columbia University protests, which in turn took its title from the Dylan song.
Posted by Jomo Mojo: “Hard to believe this song was made back in 1965! It was at least 3 or 4 years ahead of its time.”
I’m not so sure that Dylan wrote with the times that were coming in mind. I tend to think that he was referencing back to his own times of a few years earlier.
Ya’ know, there’s that old thing about “You Can’t Go Back Home”. This is because “home” as intended, is not only a place, but also a time. One can’t really turn back the clock.
However, listening to Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues brings back all the feel of “home” to me. Not because I heard the song back in the day (I’m speaking of a few years before the song was written), but because listening to that song now, these many years later, brings back the feel of how things were. The song recaptures those times better than old photos or any tour through the old places does. Anybody that was an urban kid in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s instantly recognizes Dylan’s references.
In later years, the SDS and Weathermen may have adopted lines from that song for their own uses, but I think the song was intended to address the darker side of late 50’s things; things that the movie American Graffiti didn’t get into.
Bob Dylan has a gift for catching the feel of a moment in the time/space continuum in his music that exceeds what others can do.
By the way, my intention was not to quarrel with your excellent post, Jomo Mojo. Your points “work” too. It’s just that I’m only about a year younger than Dylan, and his song speaks right to street happenings in the late '50s. Maybe it’s a song that adapts well to many different scenes, which would be another indication of Dylan’s genius.
IMHO, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is the first rap-song. I’m surprised nobody has done a hip-hop version of it yet.
John Carter of Mars, please elaborate on what was happening in the 50s that this song describes. The Beat scene? I was a kid in the 60s, so I can just remember how anxious those times were, and how exciting at the same time. Maybe Dylan had a premonition that energy from the Beats was about to be re-energized, and brought back, amplified, to a previously unimaginable degree. That’s what this song says to me.
This could be considered the first rap song, sure, but it built upon an earlier folk music tradition called the “talking blues” performed by Woody Guthrie, where the singer strums rhythm chords on his guitar while making rhymed, rhythmic, spoken social commentary, generally with acerbic, satiric wit. Dylan copied this style as an homage to Guthrie on his own “Talkin’ New York” from his first album. That was preparation for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” (John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” was a later spinoff of this style.) “Subterranean” also shares its lyric style with Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” in lampooning the manic pace of modern existence.
Is it just me, or does Maggie’s “face full of black soot” remind you of a cartoon character after something blows up in their face? In “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” he picked up a ringing telephone and “this foot came through the line.” His songs at their surrealist best can have these vivid cartoony images.
I’m planning to write a book about my medical residency called Twenty Years of Schoolin’ and They Put You On the Night Shift.
Dr. J
Sorta. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is, however, a clear departure from the likes of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” in terms of its urban imagery, its cadences, its alliteration, and its verbal meter. In my mind it stands alone as the first real “rap” on record.
Posted by Jomo Mojo: “John Carter of Mars, please elaborate on what was happening in the 50s that this song describes. The Beat scene? I was a kid in the 60s, so I can just remember how anxious those times were, and how exciting at the same time. Maybe Dylan had a premonition that energy from the Beats was about to be re-energized, and brought back, amplified, to a previously unimaginable degree. That’s what this song says to me.”
It’s kinda’ hard to describe the late ‘50s street scene without writing a small book. The song has the feel of jamming parking meters and Coke machines for the nickels. Sittin’ in somebody’s cellar with the lights out, passin’ a reefer and a bottle of cheap wine while one of the group watches the door for a cop. Gettin’ stopped and searched when trying to get into a movie theater to see The Girl Can’t Help It; because “all them crazy kids that like rock ‘n’ roll smoke dope and carry knives”. Shootin’ out streetlights with a BB gun. A weirdo on the corner that wants to pay you for something; that something varying with the respective weirdo. Getting canned from school and not caring. Everybody tellin’ you that you’re screwin’ up but it turns out that you really weren’t. Motorcycles and Youth Hall.
Not the beat generation, no. The times they were a’ changin’, but the street scene of the late '50s lacked the righteous indignation and causes of the '60s. It also lacked the slowed down atmosphere of the beat people’s coffee houses and their hero, Kerouac.
The “homesick” part of the song’s title always led me to believe that Dylan was looking back on his own teen years, with some mixed feelings.
“The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles”? Maybe Bob himself still keeps one of those handles as a souvenir.
PS: Jomo; you have now mentioned my all time favorite main man, Chuck Berry, twice in one thread. Kudos, Dude!
Thanks a lot guys, this has turned into a pretty good thread.
I’ve been teaching for years as a very late form of Skeltonic poetry, which was a very early form of rap.
teaching “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” that is.
Elvis Costello’s Pump it Up is based on the Dylan song (…pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handle…"
Interesting tidbit.