The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bob Dylan · produced by Tom Wilson · Columbia · about 47 minutes
Mode
Folk song set to an electric band on one side, and long visionary songs for voice, guitar and harmonica on the other
Mythos
The founding of America run backwards as a comic dream; a fallen world outside a garden; the piper, the bondman and the vagabond at the door
Phase
Eleven tracks on two sides of near-equal length: seven short band songs, then four long songs sung largely alone, ending in a farewell
Presentation
Album; eleven tracks, about forty-seven minutes, on a stereo LP; sleeve photograph by Daniel Kramer, liner notes in Dylan’s own prose
Register
A Chicago blues and rock and roll band on side one; one voice, an acoustic guitar and a harmonica on side two, with a second electric guitar on Mr. Tambourine Man
Scale
One self that sees through an inherited order, set against the state, commerce, labour, the church and the founding of a nation
Governing Proposition
The voice of the topical folk song puts its words over an electric band on one side and leaves protest for long visionary songs on the other, so that a society’s language of advertising, law, politics and the church is heard as a machinery of compliance, met first with laughter and then with departure, and the rock song is shown able to carry a lyric of the density of poetry.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens at a run. Subterranean Homesick Blues is a breathless patter of warnings, police, leaders and advice over an electric band, set to a frame borrowed from Chuck Berry. The voice that had sung the topical folk song of the early 1960s is heard in its first seconds over drums, bass and electric guitar, and it is laughing. That is the first of the record’s two arguments, and the side that follows keeps to it: a world of instruction and compliance met with mockery and noise.
Columbia released the album in March 1965, produced by Tom Wilson: eleven tracks on two sides of an LP, about forty-seven minutes. The unit is the original stereo LP in its original order; later mono and remastered issues are evidence for its survival, not the object. The sleeve photograph is Daniel Kramer’s and the liner notes are Dylan’s own prose, and neither is scored. Bruce Langhorne plays guitar on side one and the countermelody on Mr. Tambourine Man.
The architecture is two sides of near-equal length and opposite construction. Side one holds seven songs with a full band, about three and a half minutes each on average: Subterranean Homesick Blues, She Belongs to Me, Maggie’s Farm, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Outlaw Blues, On the Road Again and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream. Side two holds four long songs sung largely alone, to the singer’s own guitar and harmonica: Mr. Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Four tracks of five minutes or more take more than half the record’s time. A band for laughing at the world, a guitar for leaving it: the split is what the record knows.
Movement II
The last song of side one begins with a false start and laughter, and then the take begins again; both are kept on the record. Then comes Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, the founding of America told as a comic dream. A sailor “riding on the Mayflower” under “Captain Arab”, a corrupted Ahab, lands on the new continent, is jailed, swindled and refused, and sails away just as Columbus arrives. The discovery is reversed, and the myth of the new world is turned on itself.
It is one of two places where the record builds its myth rather than evoking it, and the pattern is load-bearing: the dreamer’s flight from a continent that robs him is the record’s whole law told as farce. Around it, side one evokes its archetypes more lightly. Maggie’s Farm is the bondman who refuses his labour, the refusal stamped out over a band. Subterranean Homesick Blues sets the same condition as a farce of police, leaders and advice. The patterns are carried song by song, not across the record, and the farce states its finding in the same terms more than once.
Against the refusal the side sets two love songs, and they are its quiet centre. She Belongs to Me describes a woman who keeps her own counsel (“she don’t look back”); Love Minus Zero/No Limit is a private faith set against the noise, a lover who “speaks like silence”, and it reaches the side’s one height, a quiet beauty. Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again are slighter, blues in one comic mode, and either could go with little lost. The side is required at its ends and at its centre, and soft at two points between.
Movement III
Side two begins without the band. Mr. Tambourine Man is a long sung wish for release, addressed to a piper who might lead the singer away on a “jingle jangle morning”, and it rises each time the chorus returns. Under the voice Bruce Langhorne plays a second electric guitar, a countermelody that answers the singer’s line without crowding it, the best playing on the record. The song is transport, and it is the first of four long songs in which the record leaves the world it mocked on the other side.
Within months the Byrds had made it a different record, and with it opened folk rock as a form. That is the plainest evidence of what a song gives on return, and the record has given it again and again: Baby Blue and It’s Alright, Ma are reported to have been recast many times since. The words have kept their readers as well. Whether Mr. Tambourine Man is a song of drugs, of the muse or of art itself is still argued sixty-one years on, and Gates of Eden and It’s Alright, Ma have been read as allegory, as prophecy and as private vision without any reading closing them.
Gates of Eden follows, visionary and cold. It builds an allegory of a fallen world, with kings and a “motorcycle black Madonna” and a world of things, set against a garden outside time where there are no sins. It is the record’s second built myth, and its hardest song: partly opaque, its figures emblems more than persons, its meaning nearer mood than statement. What the record discloses most precisely it discloses next.
Movement IV
It’s Alright, Ma is a litany, sung over one guitar figure for about seven and a half minutes. Strophe after strophe it names the machinery: advertising that flatters, money that does not talk, false preachers, courts, the president himself made to “stand naked”. Its claim can be stated, and it holds: a society’s language, of commerce, law, politics and the church, is a machinery of compliance, and a self that sees it can only refuse. Its best known line, on the one who is not “busy being born”, is a claim about life, not a slogan. Popular song had not attempted a statement of this precision.
The form carries it. The strophes pile indictment on indictment while the guitar figure holds still, so that the listener feels the weight accumulate; the refrain’s quiet assent, “only bleeding”, lands each time as endurance. The voice grows harder at each return, and the song turns indictment into a kind of terror: it is the record’s summit of height as well as of disclosure. The phrasing is a performance of real control, the stresses set so the long line drives, and the guitar figure is exact. On this side the making is load-bearing.
The turn that made the song possible had a price. The inheritance was the topical folk song of the Greenwich Village revival, which Dylan had led; side one had put his words over an electric band, and side two left protest for songs whose images resolve into no cause. The folk audience held the electric guitar as the mark of commerce, and the summer that followed showed what the turn cost. Others had joined folk to the rock band before him; none had put a lyric of this kind over it, or risked a constituency to do so. The record makes the turn in halves, and the next record, Highway 61 Revisited, would complete it in the long electric song.
Movement V
The record ends in a farewell. Baby Blue tells someone to leave everything behind, the “stepping stones behind”, the orphan, the “vagabond who’s rapping” at the door, and it is sung high and plain, as elegy. It is the compelled end of the sequence: comic refusal on the first side, vision and indictment on the second, and then departure. It can be heard as a farewell to an audience as much as to a person, and the record does not choose between them.
One law governs the whole: an inherited order seen as a fraud, and a self that refuses it by laughing or by leaving. The two most distant songs obey it. The 115th Dream, farce over a band, and Baby Blue, elegy over a guitar, tell the same departure. Maggie’s Farm’s refusal of labour and It’s Alright, Ma’s refusal of a society are one refusal at two scales. The halves meet in argument more than in sound, and the record’s reach was wide: the songwriter as the author of whole albums descends in large part from this record and the two that followed it, and the Byrds opened a form with its song.
Sixty-one years have tested it. It has stayed in print, several of its songs are among the most covered of their decade, and side two, a voice, a guitar and a harmonica, carries almost no date; side one’s band is of its year and loosely recorded. What it holds is a self that sees through and departs, the state, commerce, labour and the church, the founding of a nation, love as a refuge and a glimpse of sea and sky, joined by one voice. The family is a caricature and no place is particular. What it leaves is the knowledge that the rock song could carry this much, and a door left open at the end.
Act III · The Twelve
Eleven tracks in about forty-seven minutes, and the subtractive test parts the sides. Side two resists it entirely: four long songs, each a station of one leave-taking, Mr. Tambourine Man’s surrender, Gates of Eden’s vision, It’s Alright, Ma’s indictment and Baby Blue’s farewell, and none could go without a gap. On side one Subterranean Homesick Blues and Maggie’s Farm set the refusal, and the two love songs set a private faith against it (“speaks like silence”); all four are required, and so is the 115th Dream, the record’s one built myth. The test bites at Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again, slight blues in one comic mode, and at the Dream’s joke, which runs past its turn.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a society’s language, of advertising, law, politics and the church, is a machinery of compliance, and a self that sees it can only refuse and leave. It’s Alright, Ma states it with a precision popular song had not attempted, in particulars: “money doesn’t talk”, the president himself made to “stand naked”, and the line on the one “busy being born”, a claim about life and not a slogan. Subterranean Homesick Blues sets the same condition as farce, Maggie’s Farm as labour refused, and the love songs add a quieter truth, a woman who keeps her own counsel (“she don’t look back”). Held off the top by Gates of Eden, which is partly opaque, its meaning nearer mood than statement.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height is concentrated on side two and comes in more than one temperature. Mr. Tambourine Man is transport, a long sung wish for release (“jingle jangle morning”) over Bruce Langhorne’s countermelody, rising each time the chorus returns. Gates of Eden is visionary and cold. It’s Alright, Ma is the summit, a guitar figure and a voice that turn indictment into a kind of terror, harder at each refrain. Baby Blue is elegy, high and plain. On side one Love Minus Zero/No Limit reaches a quiet beauty; the rest has force, wit and momentum but not elevation, and Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again stay on the ground. Five of eleven tracks rise, four very high: that frequency holds the figure below The Dark Side of the Moon at 9.0.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth is built in two places and evoked everywhere else. The 115th Dream rebuilds the founding of America as a comic dream: a sailor “riding on the Mayflower” under “Captain Arab”, a corrupted Ahab, lands on a continent that jails and swindles him and sails away as Columbus arrives, so that the discovery is reversed and the myth of the new world turned on itself. Gates of Eden builds an allegory of a fallen world outside a garden where there are no sins, with kings and a “motorcycle black Madonna”. Around them stand the piper of Mr. Tambourine Man, the bondman of Maggie’s Farm, and the “vagabond who’s rapping” at the door in Baby Blue. Held at the bar because the patterns are carried song by song, and Eden’s figures are emblems more than persons.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the topical folk song of the Greenwich Village revival, which Dylan had led, and the acoustic records that had made him its voice. The turn is double. Side one puts the folk singer’s words over an electric band playing Chuck Berry and Chicago blues; side two leaves protest for long visionary songs whose images do not resolve into a cause. The stake was real and was the singer’s own constituency: the folk audience held the electric guitar as the mark of commerce, and the summer that followed showed what the turn cost. Held below Highway 61 Revisited at 9.2 because the Beatles and the Animals had joined folk material to the rock band, Berry supplied Subterranean’s frame, and the record makes its turn in halves.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The split of electric and acoustic sides is the record’s argument made audible: the first side meets the world with a band and laughs at it, the second leaves it alone with a guitar. The forms inside the songs carry meaning too. It’s Alright, Ma is a litany, its strophes piling indictment on indictment over one guitar figure until the refrain’s quiet assent (“only bleeding”) lands as endurance; Subterranean’s breathless list enacts the noise it mocks; the 115th Dream’s false start and laughter frame the dream as a take. The sequence is counted here, once: comic refusal, then vision, then farewell, with Baby Blue the compelled end. Held where it is because most songs would stand alone unchanged, and side one’s order could be shuffled without loss.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over sixty-one years. The words have sustained continuous exegesis: Gates of Eden and It’s Alright, Ma have been read as allegory, as social prophecy and as private vision without exhausting any reading, and whether Mr. Tambourine Man is a song of drugs, of the muse or of art itself is still argued. The songs have been reopened by other musicians, the plainest evidence a song can give: the Byrds made Mr. Tambourine Man a different record within months, and Baby Blue and It’s Alright, Ma are reported to have been recast many times since. The Nobel Prize of 2016 honoured the body of songs, not this record. Held where it is because the yield is semantic far more than formal: the recorded sound gives little on return.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is the popular music of the mid 1960s, folk and rock together, and the intrinsic force is large: the record showed that the rock song could carry a lyric of the density and ambition of poetry, and that a songwriter’s words need not serve a cause or a romance to hold a public. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man opened folk rock as a form within months; the Beatles and others turned toward words of this kind in the records that followed; and the singer-songwriter as the author of whole albums descends in large part from this record and its two successors. Held below Highway 61 Revisited at 9.3, where the long electric song made the decisive break, and because part of what moved the field was the career and the singles.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty-one years. The form is whole: the recording as released is the record still sold and played. Presence is wide and continuous: in print throughout, several of its songs among the most covered of their decade, and the record ranked high whenever its years are counted. It is not quite of the widest presence, since the album is heard less than its songs and less than the best known records of its age, and that holds it a tenth from the top of its span. The fabric is mixed. Side two, voice, guitar and harmonica, carries almost no date; side one’s band is of its year and loosely recorded, the false start kept. Little is topical. A survival of decades, far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The voice is the main instrument and it is commanded: the phrasing of It’s Alright, Ma, holding a long line over one guitar figure and placing the stresses so that the litany drives, is a performance of real control, and the guitar figure itself is exact. Langhorne’s countermelody on Mr. Tambourine Man is the best playing on the record. Against that, the making is plain and in places careless. Tom Wilson’s production records the band rather than shapes it; side one was made fast, its arrangements frames, its drummer and pianists following, and the Dream’s false start kept as a joke. The harmonica is functional. Load-bearing on side two, adequate on side one: well below Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0.
Score: 8.2 / 10
One law governs the record: an inherited order, of state, commerce, church and the folk movement itself, seen as a fraud, and a self that refuses it by laughing or by leaving. The two most distant elements obey it. The 115th Dream, farce over a band, and Baby Blue, elegy over a guitar, are the same departure: a man who leaves a continent that robs him, and a voice telling another to leave everything behind (“stepping stones behind”). Maggie’s Farm’s refusal of labour and It’s Alright, Ma’s refusal of a whole society are one refusal at two scales, and the love songs belong as the private counter-law, a woman beyond the order. What holds it: the halves meet in argument more than in sound, and Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again obey in attitude only.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as the self that sees through and departs. The state and the law are held, in It’s Alright, Ma’s president and courts and in Subterranean’s police and leaders; commerce and advertising are held, labour in Maggie’s Farm, the sacred in Gates of Eden and in the indictment’s false preachers. History enters as the founding of America in the 115th Dream, love in two songs as a refuge, the natural order in Mr. Tambourine Man’s sea and sky. One voice joins them, and It’s Alright, Ma holds more of them at once than most single songs attempt. What holds the figure lowest: the family is a caricature in Maggie’s Farm, the orders are named in lists more than inhabited by persons, and no place is particular.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 9.0, The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.9. A record that showed the rock song could carry a lyric of the density of poetry and gave folk rock its first song; a turn from the topical folk song to an electric band and to visionary song that cost the singer his constituency; words still argued and songs still recast after sixty-one years; a disclosure stated in particulars, in It’s Alright, Ma above all; and a presence wide and continuous, its acoustic side hardly dated.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.1: the state, commerce, labour, the church and a nation’s founding are held by one voice, but named in lists more than inhabited, the family a caricature and no place particular. Below the rest, The Made at 8.2, a commanded voice over a plain and quickly made production, and The Inevitable at 8.3, two slight blues and an overlong joke on a side of seven.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the original stereo LP as released by Columbia in March 1965, eleven tracks in their original order on two sides, about forty-seven minutes, produced by Tom Wilson; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. Later mono and remastered issues, the Byrds’ recording of Mr. Tambourine Man and other musicians’ versions are evidence for return, reach and survival, not the object; Daniel Kramer’s sleeve photograph and Dylan’s liner notes are not scored. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. The sequel, Highway 61 Revisited, has its own page. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the studio and the days of recording, whether the British and American editions differ, the session players other than Bruce Langhorne, the accompaniment on Baby Blue, and the particular later versions of its songs, are not given or are given as reported.