It’s one of the recognizable music movies ever made – and it was additionally, arguably, the primary. The 2-minute and 15-seconds promo clip for Bob Dylan’s 1965 single “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was filmed on Might 8, 1965, and set an ordinary nonetheless being copied by musicians and filmmakers almost 60 years later.
Exhibiting an emotionless Dylan tossing away cue playing cards that (roughly) correspond to lyrics within the music, it was shot in an alleyway by the aspect of the Savoy Lodge in London, and was initially supposed because the opening phase of D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary movie Don’t Look Again, concerning the singer’s 1965 tour of England. The playing cards (supposedly borrowed from a close-by launderette) have been written by Dylan, street supervisor Bob Neuwirth, British singer Donovan, and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Neuwirth and Ginsberg can be seen within the background, engaged in apparently earnest dialog.
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As a visible spectacle it’s arresting – and as a illustration of the music itself it’s a piece of near-genius. Dylan’s lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” are a breathless whirlwind of jumbled photos and rapid-fire aphorisms spilling out one after one other virtually too quickly to course of – and right here within the video was the singer actually throwing down his truths earlier than our eyes… on the pavement, thinkin’ concerning the authorities.
The inference was so simple as it was good: neglect about all the pieces else, concentrate on the phrases. It’s the phrases that matter. And with phrases you possibly can change the world: you don’t want a weatherman to know which approach the wind blows.
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The video was initially shot because the opening sequence for ‘Don’t Look Again’, about Dylan’s 1965 tour of England.
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Dylan’s razor-sharp, scattergun dissection of the zeitgeist had been recorded in New York in January 1965 as a part of the classes for his fifth studio album Bringing It All Again Dwelling, now acknowledged because the second he “went electrical”.
Talking to the NME on the time of its launch, Chas Chandler of The Animals described Dylan enjoying an early composition to his band once they toured America. Staying at Dylan’s New York condo, he debuted “These Previous Subterranean Blues” as they “acquired smashed on some enormous casks of wine he had”.
Dylan additionally defined that he had drawn inspiration from the Beat poets for the stream-of-consciousness lyrics, citing “Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti” as muses. The music’s title was taken from Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans.
Dylan drew inspiration from the Beat poets’ freewheeling stream of consciousness fashion.
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Simply because the Beat poets had written in a freewheeling, jazz-influenced fashion, so Dylan created in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” a wild mashup of allusions and metaphors that put collectively made a skewed, surreal, state-of-the-nation diatribe. From the opening lyric, “Johnny’s within the basement mixing up the medication,” to the closing line, “The pump don’t work cos the vandals took the handles”, we’re taken on a breathless trip by means of medication, politics, protest, poverty, social discontent, civil rights, police brutality and simmering revolutionary intent… and all in lower than two and a half minutes.
The music itself was recorded in a single take, with errors left in, and the movie that accompanied it was made with the identical spontaneous freedom. As Dylan fidgets with the playing cards, principally preserving in time with the lyrics however sometimes leaping forward or slipping behind the cues, a number of of the written lyrics are intentionally flawed. “Eleven greenback payments” is written as “20 greenback payments”, “parking meters” is misspelled as “pawking metaws”, and “success” and “suckcess”. The general impact is as unusual and good because the music itself… and even comes with a payoff: the ultimate card Dylan holds says merely, “What??” earlier than he walks ahead, previous the digital camera and out of shot.
Sixty years later, questions stay over what the video’s closing card meant.
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It is the right punchline. Simply as Dylan’s clean, somewhat bored expression all through the video solely heightened the mental ferocity and barreling rhythm of the music itself, in order that closing query and informal exit go away the viewer questioning simply what it was they’d witnessed. Was the “What??” a problem? Or was it an admission that not one of the earlier two minutes had actually made any sense in any respect? Was he asking what we intend to do concerning the state of the world, or was he questioning his personal capacity to make sense of it?
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” would give Dylan his first Billboard Sizzling 100 High 40 entry, and peak at No. 9 within the British chart, in addition to reportedly prompting John Lennon to comment that he didn’t know the way he would ever be capable of write a music that might compete with it.
And the brief, unusual, one-take movie that accompanied it continues to captivate (and be copied) at present – in motion pictures like Love Really and Bob Roberts, and in music movies by artists as numerous because the Flaming Lips, Proof and INXS. In 1993, Rolling Stone ranked the clip seventh in its listing of the 100 High Music Movies… regardless of it having a case for additionally being the very first music video ever made.
