Subterranean Homesick Blues

Based on Wikipedia: Subterranean Homesick Blues

The Song That Changed Everything in Two Minutes and Eighteen Seconds

On a cold January day in 1965, Bob Dylan walked into a Columbia Records studio and recorded something that would crack open the future of popular music. It wasn't a ballad. It wasn't a protest song in any traditional sense. It was a machine gun burst of words set to an electric beat—a torrent of imagery, paranoia, and dark humor that seemed to arrive from some dimension where Chuck Berry had been reading beat poetry while watching the evening news.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" became Dylan's first Top 40 hit in America, reaching number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the United Kingdom, it climbed into the Top 10. But the chart positions don't tell you what the song actually did. It rewired expectations about what a pop single could contain.

Where It Came From

Dylan himself has been refreshingly candid about his sources. In 2004, he traced the song back to Chuck Berry—specifically Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business," a 1956 track that similarly piled complaint upon complaint in rapid-fire succession. Dylan also credited the scat songs of the 1940s, those jazz vocal performances where singers would improvise nonsense syllables with rhythmic precision.

But there's a third ingredient. When Dylan attended the University of Minnesota in 1959, he fell hard for the Beat writers. "It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti," he later recalled. The song's title may have come from Kerouac's 1958 novel "The Subterraneans," which chronicled the romantic misadventures of Beat characters in San Francisco's underground scene.

So picture it: Chuck Berry's verbal velocity, jazz scat's rhythmic freedom, and Beat poetry's stream of consciousness. Blend them together, electrify the guitar, and you get something that didn't quite exist before.

A Snapshot of 1965

The lyrics function like a time capsule that's been shaken violently.

The song opens with someone mixing medicine in a basement while the narrator stands on the pavement thinking about the government. That medicine reference has been interpreted as a nod to the manufacturing of recreational drugs—a practice that was moving from the margins to something approaching mainstream among young people in the mid-1960s.

There are warnings about fire hoses. This wasn't abstract imagery. During the civil rights movement, peaceful protesters in the American South were attacked with high-pressure water from fire hoses. The force was strong enough to knock people off their feet, strip bark from trees, and become one of the most shameful visual documents of the era. Dylan's warning to stay away from those carrying fire hoses was grim practical advice disguised as surrealism.

The Vietnam War was escalating. The draft loomed over young men. Trust in institutions was beginning its long erosion. As rock journalist Andy Gill observed, an entire generation recognized the zeitgeist—the spirit of their particular historical moment—in Dylan's verbal whirlwind.

The Line That Named a Revolution

One line from the song achieved a strange second life. Dylan's observation about not needing a weatherman to know wind direction became the namesake for one of the most radical political organizations in American history.

The Weather Underground—originally called the Weathermen—formed in 1969 after splitting from Students for a Democratic Society, a large left-wing student organization. They took Dylan's lyric as their identity and proceeded to conduct a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and banks throughout the early 1970s. The group's founders interpreted the line as a call to direct action, arguing that anyone could see which way history was blowing without waiting for official permission.

Dylan himself never endorsed this interpretation, and the appropriation of his lyrics by bombers remains one of the stranger episodes in rock music's entanglement with politics.

That same line has also become the most frequently quoted song lyric in American legal proceedings. A 2007 study found that judges and lawyers cited Dylan more than any other songwriter, with this particular meteorological observation appearing most often. Apparently, when attorneys want to argue that something is obvious, they reach for Dylan.

The Musicians Who Couldn't Shake It

John Lennon reportedly found "Subterranean Homesick Blues" so overwhelming that he didn't know how he could write anything to compete with it. This was John Lennon—one half of the most successful songwriting partnership in popular music history—admitting defeat before a single track.

The influence rippled outward for decades. The band Firehose named themselves after a lyric warning about fire hoses. The Australian rock group Jet titled their debut album "Get Born" after another line. When Radiohead released "OK Computer" in 1997, they included a track called "Subterranean Homesick Alien"—not hiding their source, just acknowledging the debt.

R.E.M.'s 1987 hit "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" is essentially a descendant of Dylan's approach: rapid-fire lyrical accumulation, cultural references piling up faster than you can process them, sung with breathless intensity. Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" from 1978 works similar territory.

The covers span nearly every genre you can name. Reggae legend Gregory Isaacs recorded a version with Toots Hibbert. The Red Hot Chili Peppers tackled it in 1987. Harry Nilsson recorded it for his 1974 album "Pussy Cats," which was produced by John Lennon—the same Lennon who had once despaired of competing with the original.

The Birth of the Music Video

The promotional clip for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is sometimes called the first modern music video. That's an oversimplification—promotional films for songs existed before—but what Dylan created was genuinely different.

The clip was filmed in an alley near the Savoy Hotel in London during Dylan's 1965 English tour. The concept was simple but had never been executed quite this way: Dylan stands before the camera, holding a stack of cue cards. As the song plays, he flips through cards showing selected words and phrases from the lyrics, then drops each card to the ground.

There's no lip-syncing. No dancing. No narrative. Just Dylan, the cards, and the relentless song. In the background, you can spot Allen Ginsberg—the great Beat poet—talking with Bob Neuwirth, Dylan's road manager. The cards themselves were handwritten by Ginsberg, Donovan (the Scottish folk singer who was on the same tour), Neuwirth, and Dylan himself.

The clip is full of deliberate errors. When the song mentions eleven dollar bills, the card reads twenty. Misspellings and puns appear throughout. It's the opposite of slick—it feels improvised, slightly chaotic, like something that might have been dreamed up five minutes before filming. Which it might have been.

Rolling Stone later ranked it seventh on their list of the hundred greatest music videos. The filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker used it as the opening sequence for "Dont Look Back," his documentary about that 1965 tour. (The missing apostrophe in the title is intentional—Pennebaker's choice.)

Imitation as Flattery

The cue card concept proved irresistible to other artists.

In 1987, the Australian band INXS created a shot-for-shot homage with their song "Mediate." German band Wir sind Helden did the same in 2005 for "Nur ein Wort." The format's appeal is its apparent simplicity: just you, some cards, and the camera. Of course, making it look that effortless requires Dylan's particular combination of charisma and indifference to whether you're impressed.

Tim Robbins borrowed the concept for his 1992 satirical film "Bob Roberts," in which he plays a right-wing folk singer who uses the cue card approach for a song called "Wall Street Rap." The joke works precisely because the original was so associated with countercultural politics.

"Weird Al" Yankovic, the musical parodist who has made a career of affectionate mockery, created a video for his 2003 song "Bob." The song consists entirely of palindromes—sentences that read the same forward and backward—delivered in Dylan's nasal mumble while Yankovic, dressed in early-Dylan costume, flips through cue cards. It's a tribute disguised as a joke, or possibly a joke disguised as a tribute.

Forty Years of Echoes

Songs don't usually stay this alive for this long. Most hits from 1965 are museum pieces now—respected, occasionally played on oldies stations, but no longer generating new creative responses.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" keeps producing offspring. In 2009, rapper Juelz Santana released "Mixin' Up the Medicine," which samples the original and features alternative rapper Yelawolf performing lyrics drawn from Dylan's song. The Jesus and Mary Chain borrowed a line for their 1989 single "Blues from a Gun." Chumbawamba's 2004 song "The Wizard of Menlo Park" references the basement medicine mixer.

Even Google got in on the action. In September 2010, the company used Dylan's clip to promote Google Instant, a feature that showed search results as you typed. As lyrics appeared on the cue cards, corresponding search results generated on screen. It was a corporate appropriation of countercultural art, which is what happens to countercultural art that survives long enough.

The Recording Itself

The single version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was recorded on January 14, 1965, released on March 8, and appeared as the opening track on the album "Bringing It All Back Home" two weeks later. Columbia Records gave it catalogue number 43242—a bureaucratic detail that somehow makes the revolutionary nature of the music funnier.

The backing musicians included John Hammond Jr. and Bruce Langhorne on electric guitars, Bill Lee on bass, and Bobby Gregg on drums. This was Dylan's first significant foray into electric recording, a move that would famously get him booed at the Newport Folk Festival later that year when audiences expecting acoustic protest songs found themselves confronted with amplified rock and roll.

An acoustic version, recorded just one day before the electric single, eventually surfaced on "The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3" in 1991. Hearing the two versions back to back reveals how much the electrification changed the song. The acoustic version is urgent; the electric version is frantic. The acoustic demands attention; the electric demands surrender.

Why It Still Matters

The song works as a kind of instruction manual for living in confusing times—though the instructions are themselves confusing. Don't follow leaders. Watch your parking meters. The pump don't work because the vandals took the handles. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.

None of this is particularly actionable advice. But that's part of the point. The world Dylan was describing—full of surveillance, institutional failure, and arbitrary authority—didn't offer clear solutions. It offered survival strategies at best, and gallows humor when those failed.

Contemporary reviews caught some of this. Cash Box magazine, in its assessment from early 1965, called it "a rockin'-country folk blueser with a solid beat and catchy lyrics" featuring "wild" guitar and harmonica work. That description is accurate without being adequate. It's like describing a tornado as "weather."

Rolling Stone eventually placed "Subterranean Homesick Blues" at number 187 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Rankings like that are inherently silly, but the song's inclusion in every serious attempt to catalog rock history tells you something about its persistence.

The Alley Today

The Savoy Hotel in London still stands, looking much as it did in 1965. The alley where Dylan flipped those cue cards has been identified as the Savoy Steps. If you visit, you can stand roughly where Allen Ginsberg stood, watching Bob Dylan invent a new form of self-promotion while pretending not to care about self-promotion at all.

Whether Dylan knew what he was doing—whether any of it was planned or whether it just happened—is a question that applies to most of his career. He tends to do things that turn out to be revolutionary while insisting they were obvious and anyone could have done them. The song is like that. The video is like that. The entire approach to merging high and low culture, Beat poetry and pop music, social commentary and nonsense—it all looks effortless in retrospect.

It wasn't effortless. It just looks that way when a genius does it.