11 dollar bills and you only got 10

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” was, in fact, an extraordinary three-way amalgam of Jack Kerouac, the Guthrie/Pete Seeger song “Taking It Easy” (‘mom was in the kitchen preparing to eat/sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast’) and the riffed-up rock’n'roll poetry of Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”.

Dylan was not a member of the original Beat circles of the 1950s, Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, a novel published in 1958 about the Beats, has been cited as a possible inspiration for the song’s title.  Stretching further back, the title alludes to Notes from Underground, a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose works were popular with Beat writers such as Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

The song’s first line is a reference to the production of LSD and the politics of the era: “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement thinkin’ about the Government”. The song also depicts some of the growing conflicts between “straight” or “square” (40-hour workers) and the emerging 1960s counterculture.  The widespread use of recreational drugs, and turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War were both starting to take hold of the nation, and Dylan’s hyperkinetic lyrics were dense with up-to-the-minute allusions to important emerging elements in the 1960s youth culture.  According to rock journalist Andy Gill, “an entire generation recognized the zeitgeist in the verbal whirlwind of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

~ by musicboxpress on December 6, 2007.