Bob Dylan’s First-Ever Top 40 Hit Served as a Test Balloon for His Controversial New Style

We hear all the time that Bob Dylan upset a lot of people when he went electric in the mid-60s. But people also forget that Dylan’s move away from acoustic folk music also coincided with his acceptance by pop radio.

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His first single to hit the Top 40 of the pop charts in the US was by no means a runaway smash. But it established Dylan on the airwaves right alongside the pop and rock acts who ended up being majorly influenced by this new style of his.

Fleeing from Folk

You can trace Bob Dylan’s move to electric music to a number of factors. He was starting to feel constrained by the folk music scene. Also, he wanted to more accurately honor the blues influences who meant so much to him. And, when he heard what The Beatles were doing, the competitor in him wanted to see what he could do in this arena.

Many people don’t realize that the first single that Dylan ever released in 1962 was rock-oriented. When “Mixed-Up Confusion” failed to draw an audience, Dylan went back to the acoustic folk music that was his bread and butter.

Dylan’s 1964 album Another Side Of Bob Dylan, while still mostly acoustic, found him subtly transitioning away from topical material. But those songs at least sounded enough like folk music that the purists who loved that genre could still abide it. His next single would test their loyalty in a big way.

Plugging In

Dylan, influenced by the work of not only The Beatles but also by an album by blues artist John P. Hammond called So Many Roads, decided he’d start to incorporate electric instrumentation on his next album. Initially, he thought he might just overdub the instrumentation onto songs he’d already recorded in acoustic form.

But he quickly moved off that idea and chose to record new songs with a live band in the studio. It was a half-measure. His 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home featured one side of electric songs and another of acoustic, as if he were hedging his bets.

He spent the first day of recording the album in January 1965 on acoustic stuff. That included a stab at a song that Dylan patterned after both the scat records of the first half of the 20^th century and Chuck Berry’s song “Too Much Monkey Business”.

The following day, he assembled a full band that included guitarists Hammond and Bruce Langhorne, Bill Lee on bass, and Bobby Gregg. They took a crack at the aforementioned song that Dylan had tried the day before. It was called “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

Subversive and “Subterranean”

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” featured Dylan indulging in a fast-talking, stream-of-consciousness rant over jangling guitars and a rumbling rhythm. He decided that this song would be the test balloon for his new sound. It was released as a single in March 1965, a few weeks ahead of Bringing It All Back Home.

While most folk music fans threw up their hands in frustrated disbelief at this new direction, young pop music fans, many of whom had likely never heard of Dylan before, enjoyed this rebellious, somewhat anarchic take on pop music. The song made it to No. 39 on the pop charts.

A few months after the single was released, Dylan solidified his commitment to his new style with his controversial appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. So it was that Dylan went the pop-star route, with “Subterranean Homesick Blues” acting as the cacophonous catalyst.

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