Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues

Album: Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

With the release of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” in 1964, Dylan bade farewell to folk music. The following year’s strident Bringing It All Back Home was so iconoclastic that rock ’n’ roll would not be so completely turned on its head again until the invention of the Sex Pistols in 1975. “Outlaw Blues” and “On the Road Again” set the pace, but the most live-wire moment on Bringing It All Back Home was “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—a nutty retooling of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”

Dylan was hardly shy about stealing stuff from his idol Woody Guthrie. He duly looted lines from Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s “Taking It Easy,” putting "Mom was in the kitchen preparing to eat Sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast" through the οl' mental blender. As is mandatory with Dylan lyrics, the song has been scoured for meaning. Key lines emerge from a jumble of jargon, notably the oft-quoted “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The end result arguably didn’t signify anything more profound than Chuck Berry’s original lyric, “I don’t want your botheration, get away, leave me!” However, thanks to Dylan’s gigantic talent and influence, and an iconic film clip of him holding up cue cards of key lyrics from the song, it became his first Billboard chart hit—and a fire under the ass of rock ’n’ roll.