Fine Rhyme Time

Song 243: Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan (who also wrote the song) comes into the playlist this week at number 243. I knew, and really liked, a bunch of Dylan songs during high school, but I only knew them as covers. Yes, Dylan wrote that amazing Hendrix single All Along the Watchtower, that magical Byrds track Mr. Tambourine Man, that cool Turtles hit It Ain't Me Babe, that Peter Paul and Mary heavy-hitter Blowin' in the Wind, and a lot of other really good songs, but I had never heard his versions of them until I got to Northwestern in September of 1969. There, a guy named Smiley Collins, who had a room near mine in Bobb Hall, played the John Wesley Hardin album for me one day, and my first reaction to hearing Bob's voice at Bobb was, "Oh, that's why everybody covers his songs -- his own voice isn't that great." I heard a bit more of Bob around Bobb over the next few months, and then in January, after the winter break, I had a new roommate, who was himself a big Dylan fan, and so a certain Greatest Hits record starting spinning on the player quite a bit. Soon I started to notice that Bob's voice no longer bothered me, and that I'd actually started to like the sound of it. Not only that, but I'd also got to liking every track on that LP, and really liking 2 or 3 of them, this song being one. Within a year I would go from Dylan novice to major Dylan fan, scouting the record stores for Bob bootlegs, weighing the true meaning of Newport '65 and discussing lyric interpretations with other Dylan faniacs. This track remained a favorite, although I didn't even catch the sly drug references until a Rolling Stone piece happened to mention them. The revelation didn't affect my affection for the lyrics in any way. A few years later, when I happened into a situation as an occasional caregiver for someone a few years older than me who suffered from autism so severe that he could barely speak, I would regularly sing this song to him, and his face would beam with pleasure, which made me feel good to think that I could offer him some small measure of joy to counter his pain. Whether or not you pick up the sly references between the lines on this song, the rhymes will surely catch your ear and likely put a smile on your face. On a side note, D.A. Pennebaker created one of the first rock song videos with this track so that it could act as the trailer for his Don't Look Back film of Bob's 1965 tour, and when I was putting together a song video for But But But, the drummer who played on that track suggested doing a segment to parody Dylan's trailer, so on a very cold November afternoon, my good friend Ed Campbell set up his VHS camera and filmed the scene that makes up most of verse 3. You can see the But video here.