Subterranean Homesick Blues

I have Bob Dylan on the brain, because my socials are saturated with ads for the Timothee Chalamet movie, and because MusicRadar used the movie as the news hook for a column about Bob. I rewatched Don’t Look Back for the first time in forever. It’s a sign of my advancing age that Bob came across as unnecessarily obnoxious, especially to the poor Time Magazine reporter. But the music still sounds fantastic. “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is a knockout, as is “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The best thing in the film is the proto-video that starts it off.

This was apparently Bob’s idea, and it was a good idea! It was shot in an alley near the Savoy Hotel in London. The two guys talking in the background are Allen Ginsberg and Dylan’s friend and road manager, Bob Neuwirth.

They also shot a couple of alternate versions, which are not nearly as good.

This bonkers tune was Dylan’s first single to make the US top 40, and it even got into the top ten in the UK. I have known this song since I was a teenager, and its familiarity makes me forget how weird it is. It is extremely weird, though! We are all so used to rock songs being incomprehensible, thanks in large part to Bob himself, but when you think about it, it’s not at all obvious why anyone should find this song enjoyable. I’ll explore this question more below.

On the great 500 Songs Podcast, Andrew Hickey points to two sources that Bob drew on for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” One is a Woody Guthrie song, “Taking it Easy”, which Pete Seeger reworked for the Weavers. Listen to the third verse at 1:45.

The other is Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”, more for its general vibe than for any particular lines.

Hickey points out that Dylan’s lyrics are very different from Guthrie, Seeger or Berry, because they come more from Beat poetry than from folklore. Allen Ginsberg is in the video for a reason.

As with all Dylan songs, it’s easy to hyperfocus on the lyrics, but this is a song first and foremost. Western music notation may not be the best medium for Bob’s singing, but I did my best.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

The form grows out of the twelve bar blues. Here’s a simple blues in A:

| A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 |
| D7 | D7 | A7 | A7 |
| E7 | E7 | A7 | A7 |

Here’s the form that Bob uses for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It’s the same idea, but he appends four extra bars of A7 onto the first phrase and two extra bars of A7 onto the second phrase. Between each verse, there’s a four bar harmonica solo on A7. 

| A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 |
| D7 | D7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 |
| E7 | E7 | A7 | A7 |

| A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 |

Bob doesn’t adhere to this form strictly. In the third verse, he adds an extra bar of A7 onto the second phrase, and in the fourth verse he adds an extra bar of A7 onto the first phrase. The break in between these verses is five bars long rather than four. Bob’s willingness to push at the boundaries of folk forms must make it hard to be one of his backing musicians. Fun fact: one of those backing musicians is bassist Bill Lee, father of Spike.

You don’t necessarily think of this song as even having a melody, but it does, and it’s more interesting than it seems. Bob mostly chants on the same pitch throughout, and that pitch is usually C, the flat third in A. When he drops down at the ends of some words, he doesn’t land on the tonic A, like you would think. To me, it sounds like he’s singing G, the flat seventh (listen to the last syllables of “pavement” and “government” in the first verse). When the chord switches to D7, on “Look out kid”, Bob switches the chant pitch to G, which is not a chord tone. When the chord changes to E7 on “man in a coonskin cap by the pig pen”, Bob chants on B, which is a chord tone of E7, but only for a few words. By the word “pig”, he is back to C, which conflicts with the chord. Bob is apparently feeling all of this in the global key of A blues. His melody notes recognize that the chords are changing, but he doesnn’t necessarily match the specific notes to the specific chord.

Another interesting thing that happens is that Bob goes very sharp on some of his chant notes, getting all the way from C up to C-sharp. Listen to the line “Look out kid, it’s something you did”. The word “did” is a clear C-sharp. On the line “God knows when but you’re doin’ it again”, the words “know when” are also up on C-sharp. It’s typical of the blues to mix major and minor thirds on your tonic chord, but Bob is also singing some of those C-sharps over the D7 chord, where they conflict really hard. But again, this presumes that Bob is concerned with matching melody notes to chords, and he isn’t. Having the melody be independent of the chords is well within the conventions of the blues. This all looks weird on paper, but sounds perfectly fine when I hear it.

Let’s have a look at some covers. The Red Hot Chili Peppers version is the most famous one, but it doesn’t do much for me. I like the Lumineers version better; all the drummers are fun.

I also appreciate Sizzla’s dancehall version.

Juelz Santana both samples and interpolates Bob for his song “Mixin’ Up The Medicine”, featuring Yelawolf.

The Wikipedia article on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” describes it as “proto-rap“, and there have been some attempts to connect Bob to hip-hop. I see where this is coming from, but singing on one pitch is not remotely the same thing as rapping. There’s a significant amount of pitch variety in rap flows, even if it isn’t quantized to piano-key pitches. Bob’s mostly single-note melody is more similar to Jamaican dancehall like Sizzla, though I doubt many other dancehall singers are influenced by Bob.

Radiohead’s song “Subterranean Homesick Alien” doesn’t seem to bear any connection to Bob beyond its title.

Weird Al’s song “Bob” is a delight.

The joke here is that any stream of nonsense makes for a plausible Dylan lyric. Is that true? I wrote a lot of terrible Dylan-esque stream of consciousness lyrics in my 20s, and have played a lot of these kinds of songs in various bands. I liked stream-of-consciousness as a young person because it was a way to feel like a songwriter without having to risk revealing any of my personal feelings. I look back at that artistic cowardice with regret. Bob gave me psychological permission to write that way, but it isn’t his fault. He is famously a private person, and no one is bothered by the lack of direct autobiography in his songs. So why is “Subterranean Homesick Blues” such a banger, when all my youthful malarkey was so forgettable?

One answer is, well, maybe Bob’s lyrics are just as empty of deeper meaning as mine were. The difference is that Bob has better melodies, better delivery, better backing musicians, and the power of conviction. But also, I don’t actually think that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is devoid of meaning. The whole second verse sounds like advice on keeping one step ahead of law enforcement. The line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” resonated hard enough in its time that the Weather Underground used it as the title  of their manifesto. But after that relatively direct political messaging, Bob ends the song with a bunch of nonsensical wordplay, like “The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handle.” Does the political stuff elevate the nonsense? Does the nonsense degrade the political stuff, or show its absurdity? I don’t know. Bob may not either.