Early 1965 found me in the small town of Lompoc, California, where I was beginning an extended operations review assignment at AFWTR (the Air Force Western Test Range headquarters, in the nearby mountains). I had driven up from L.A. in my 1959 Chevy El Camino, packing a suitcase of clothing, another of vinyl LPs and a portable collapsible integrated record player/amplifier/speakers affair. For a week or two I lived out of a local motel while seeking a more permanent apartment. Bob Dylan’s first electric (partially, at least) album had just been released, so I found it at a local Lompoc store soon after unpacking and settling into my new temporary motel quarters. That would be Bringing It All Back Home.
(Dylan and his previous four albums had almost immediately struck a nerve with me over the previous year or two, and I was not unaware that I was born within three weeks and 400-odd midwest miles of him.)
For the next week, I played the album on my small stereo, in the morning before work and late into the night after returning, mostly eating takeout in my motel room so that I could concentrate on the music at hand.
While Bringing It All Back Home was not the first Dylan music I had heard (toward the end of my college stint in 1963, I think, my girl friend had returned from a vacation in her native New Jersey to tell me about this incredible person — Bob Dylan — she had discovered in her Greenwich Village music scene wanderings), but it was the first album that I listened to so thoroughly that at one time I knew all the lyrics. It was the first album Dylan released just before his famous/infamous “coming out” with an electric band at the Newport Jazz Festival. And its cover, photographed by Daniel Kramer, displayed an intriguing range of visual elements that led to careful study by myself and many others; I hung the cover on my wall for a time in my Los Angeles home. The tracks on Bringing It … were especially memorable, perhaps the most enduring for me being “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, “Outlaw Blues”, “Maggie’s Farm” and of course “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, noted a couple of days ago. Take a look and listen.
So mention Bob Dylan to me and one of the first images I see in my mind will be that album cover.
Many years ago, a Los Angeles radio station I frequented had a special weekly program in which a musician or music industry person was invited to act as DJ for an hour and play music that they would select to have with them if they were marooned on an imagined desert island. I sometimes played that game for myself, and almost always would find the music of J.S. Bach, Nina Simone and Tom Waits on the list … and always Bob Dylan. And it would be Dylan if the choice were restricted to one. The choice of which albums and which tracks would be more difficult. And maybe there will be more to choose from in the future.