The Story and Meaning Behind “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” was such a trailblazing work it almost feels underappreciated. Not only was this the song with which a scruffy East Greenwich folky hitched his caboose to rock’s throttle, delivering his first electric performance, but it’s associated with what’s generally accepted as the world’s first rock video. 

Folkie Goes Electric

Bob Dylan spent three days in New York in January 1965 recording songs for his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan ruled the folk world at that moment, but at 23 years old felt increasingly frustrated and limned in by this niche. He couldn’t have helped but notice the success of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones or how The Animals had rearranged a song from his first album House of the Rising Sun and taken it to the top of both the American and British charts the year before.

The man who brought the troubadour to label executive Clive Davis for Columbia Records to sign, John Hammond Jr., had produced Dylan’s early albums and in November 1962 brought some jazz-trained musicians to accompany Dylan on some songs as part of the sessions for the 1963 release The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. One track, “Mixed-Up Confusion,” features Dylan blowing his harmonica over a chugging blues backbeat and soulful R&B organ fills. It was his first single but failed to chart and discouraged further experimentation in that direction for a while. 

On the second of the three recording days, Dylan cut what would be the electric side of Bringing It All Back Home. The band featured Hammond and Bruce Langhorne on guitar, frequent Dylan drummer Bobby Gregg (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “Maggie’s Farm”), and bassist Bill Lee (Aretha Franklin, Max Roach), who fathered filmmaker Spike Lee.

The song itself was knocked out in a single take, which is a recurring part of Dylan’s aesthetic—he likes to catch things fresh, when the musicians have just (or not quite in Lee’s case) learned the songs.

The Music and Its Influences

Lee slips up a couple times on the recording. Nowadays they would certainly have overdubbed those mistakes or retracked his accompaniment in isolation, but that was back when performances were captured live, warts and all. Lee’s a skilled musician, but the song itself is a bit funky. Where most blues songs are eight or 12 bars, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” features 18 to accommodate all the language in the verses.  

Dylan cops a bit of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” for the style of this song, as well as a similar rapid-fire, rhyming pattern. One of the lines, Look out kid, they keep it all hid, is lifted wholesale as homage or reference to Woody Guthrie’s “Ludlow Massacre.”

Dylan modeled the rich symbolism of his lyrics after Guthrie. “To me, Woody Guthrie was the be-all and end-all,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. “Woody’s songs were about everything at the same time. They were about rich and poor, black and white, the highs and lows of life—the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening.” 

Dylan was also deeply influenced by the beat poets and the way they used repetition, rhyme, and everyday language to achieve their effects. The song is presumed to take its title from The Subterraneans, a novel Jack Kerouac published about his Beat Generation friends in 1958. It’s also been noted that with its rapid-fire lyricism, preference for interior rhyme, and rich metaphorical, slang-laden language, the song’s quite similar to rap.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” went to to No. 9 in England and No. 39 on the U.S. charts, Dylan’s first track to crack the Top 40.

The Video

The song was released while Dylan was touring Europe, and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker filmed the tour for his 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back. The title comes from a quote by African American baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.” 

Dylan has always maintained a high level of mindfulness, saying in that 2004 story, “I’m always trying to stay right square in the moment. I don’t want to get nostalgic or narcissistic as a writer or a person. I think successful people don’t dwell in the past. I think only losers do.”

Pennebaker filmed the scene with Dylan turning over notecards with (some fake) lyrics in a couple different locales around London, with beat poet Allen Ginsburg and road manager/musician Bob Neuwirth talking in the background. The notecards were penned by Neuwirth, Ginsburg, Dylan and the singer Donovan (“Sunshine Superman”). Pennebaker actually filmed the scene last, later moving it to lead off the film. 

The Song

The song is about the sorry state of the world, and can be seen as a commencement speech of sorts, or a welcoming address to the world as it really is. The opening line suggests while some kids are cooking up drugs, he’s thinking about this system of ours, and he’s going to give us the scoop.

First thing you need to know is the cops are crooked, but it’s not even just that. The establishment wants to squelch you, pretty much just because you’re young: It’s something you did / God knows when / But you’re doing it again. When he sneaks down the alley to make a “new friend,” probably with a drug dealer, it costs more than he has. This could be construed as a lesson on inflation. 

The scene with Maggie and the tapped phone was just the earliest chapter in the surveillance state escalation. There’s no telling who’s informing on whom in such a situation, and it’s not even a question of justice—which is administered like an assembly line, hence the strict deadlines. It suggests to be wary of plainsclothes cops, firehose sporting cops (referencing the firehosing of protestors during civil rights marches in the South during early ’60s), and drug busts (keep a clean nose). 

It concludes by suggesting you shouldn’t need expert advice (a weatherman) to know what’s happening around you, a sort of encouragement to keep your head up because you’re responsible for yourself in this crazy time.

The next verse concerns the Communism trials led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and how one can become a writer, which is a hard enough life (hard to tell if anything is going to sell) without suddenly finding yourself the target of McCarthyism (Try hard, get barred). He imagines a downward spiral from writer to hobo to getting busted riding the rails. 

The point is we’re always on the defensive from losers, cheaters, six-time users. The reference to hanging around the theaters might reference the dirty-movie houses, and the fact there’s a girl by the whirlpool seems to promise a quick ride down. Don’t follow leaders, no telling where they’ll lead you, and make sure you don’t run afoul the government’s petty, fee-taking policies (watch the parkin’ meters).

Birth, School, Work, Death

The last verse imagines the person who does everything right and by the book in such an open-ended way that it mimics a second-person narrative or point-of-view video. But even getting married (please her, please him, buy gifts) and following the rules toward your employer and others (don’t steal, don’t lift), doesn’t prevent the grave injustice of going to college and winding up in a mundane job.

When he says they keep it all hid, it implies not just the rules, but the way things really work, such that you commit yourself to a certain life without realizing all it entails. He returns to this because it’s the essential thrust of the song—it’s like the warnings one hears or perhaps offers in a commencement speech about how the real world operates. 

Dylan’s advice is to stay in the underground (jump down a manhole) and light your own way, with a candle if necessary. Don’t wear sandals (which suggests an informality that’s easily spotted), because people won’t trust or believe you and take you seriously. 

Originally Dylan wrote “You can’t have fun, unless you chew gum,” a premium value dating tip, but perhaps he didn’t want to divert a narrative mostly about money and circumstances down the well of relationships. Instead it has more the implication that you better conform to the prevailing fashions if you want to be accepted, echoing the larger theme better.

The last line about the pump not working because vandals took the handle invokes an idea related to economic policy. When the economy is in the dumps, the government will often make more money available to people (such as with the Child Tax Credit during the pandemic) so they have more in their pockets available to spend, temporarily boosting the economy. This greasing of the economy’s gears is known as “priming the pump.” 

When the government doesn’t maintain order, then vandals can destroy the very mechanism by which the government provides the relief. If it once wasn’t trickling in, now it really isn’t forthcoming. An example of this would be the riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts later in 1965, which caused $40 million in property damages to areas with both the greatest grievance and need.

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Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images